I'm going to go ahead and reply to my own post... :)

Take the issue that makes you angriest because you're just sure our government is lying to us about it. Doesn't matter what it is. You are probably confident that politicians that vote "the wrong way" are getting paid off by some big money lobbyist representing people you despise.

Now imagine that money was no longer considered, in the words of Antonin Scalia, "impossible to separate from the speech it enables," and therefore speech itself. Imagine if one party was unable to gain unfair advantage by preventing people from voting or altering the districts so the majority lost regardless. Imagine if the only thing that mattered when it came time to get re-elected was a Congressman's record and whether he honestly represented the interests of his constituency.

Yeah, you want it too. You know you do.

The only issue that matters anymore is the restoration of the voting franchise. We need to:

    - eliminate PACs and SuperPACs
    - limit contributions to individual, human contributions only, capped to $1000 per person
    - outlaw gerrymandering and require an immediate redistricting such that, except for districts on state lines, no district has a concave border.
    - functional, tamper-proof, open source voting machines that issue paper records of the votes cast must be in sufficient supply and for a sufficient time period that everyone in the district will be able to vote
    - No ID card is required, but the person voting must be on the roll for the polling station they are assigned to and they must give a thumb print and sign their name.
    - No penalties for honest voter registration drives; heavy penalties for fraudulent practices during voter registration drives.
    - failure to provide adequate access to the voting process is grounds for heavy fines and overturning of the election results.

And don't just pass a set of laws -- pass an Amendment to the Constitution. Because the vote of the people is the most essential part of the foundation of our form of government, and it has been seriously eroded over the last few decades to the point where well-financed parties seriously believe, and rightly so, that they can sway elections and deform our laws and regulations to suit their interests alone.

When the voice of the people is restored, when we are truly once again a government of, by, and for the people rather than the top 0.001%, everything else will fall into line.

Turbo Pascal rocked. Ignoring all the "it's pascal so it must suck" idiocy being posted, Turbo Pascal changed PC programming. The only compilers besides MASM were too expensive for a college student to touch and slower than Christmas to compile, but TP was $99 and screaming fast. I got a copy and that started a 25 year career in programming, almost exclusively using Borland products and building just about everything you can imagine with them. I get it that Photoshop was first written to run on Apple, but TP was more than just a hobby compiler, and really the best choice at the time for doing any serious work on a PC.

Wouldn't it seem risky to broadcast a data stream where the original state is known and the encrypted state can be intercepted?

Does that include the Oracle database? And if you say no, keep in mind that stored procedures can be written in Oracle using Java...

Needless to say, I was very disappointed with the choice Google made with Android... :-(

The fact that you are disappointed with Google over the choice of Java as the development language for Android shows you don't know that much about Android.

I love a good surprise. What desktop apps are you referring to?

excellent point. And the only solution is to fix the election process and take the money out of politics by limiting donations to individual donations only, of 1000 dollars or less. when elections are decided by the will of the people and not by corporate might the government will serve the people again.

This actually started about 40 minutes prior to the OP. Calls to their support line are greeted with a busy signal.

For comparison purposes, I had an HTC Fuze. Liked it at first, although it was a bit slow. Over time I grew to hate it. Had to reboot it every one or two days due to lockups. When it got stolen, I did a little happy dance, put on my sad face, and informed my wife that maybe it was finally time for me to break down and get one of those "Android" phones that all the guys at the office had....

Slowly saps your will to live. Or leaves horrible scars that you can pick at later.

I thought this was about super-hot peppers. When did the topic turn to marriage?

DANG IT! You beat me to it...

I find this enitre report on the study to be highly suspect, for example it says "Previous work has shown that people with more efficient brain connections score higher on tests of intelligence", a statement so profoundly free of any connection to actual science that it goes well beyond religious. I've seen plenty of hard workers sail right past highly intelligent people in academia and employment circles.

They didn't say that efficient brains are more successful in life, only that they are more intelligent. That would be a connection that science could easily establish, with no religion involved. On the other hand, if they said that efficient brains make for better/more successful people, then I would have to agree with you.

How much you wanna bet someone very high up at Samsung, upon seeing this story hit the 'net, snatched up the phone, dialed up a memorized phone number, and feverishly whispered to the high mucky muck at the Department of Homeland Security that the deal was off....