Nobody intelligent believes in full transparency.

Go back and read that again, to let it sink in once you get past the "OMG this guy is just trolling" knee-jerk.

If there can't be secrecy in negotiations, the people we try to persuade to change or deal will instead pack up their toys and go home.

Quite frequently, the entire key to a diplomatic deal is exactly that it doesn't appear as it seems. Hell, that's made clear in these leaked documents. They make it perfectly clear, for example, that the situation with Libya would be much worse if things weren't done in secret. Since they explicitly made concessions in exchange for asking that we say something nice about them in public.... They couldn't have even asked for that if we had total transparency. So what would we have had to give them instead?

Maybe Assange is a tactical genius, and selectively revealed only the documents that he knew wouldn't cause war. Or maybe he's lucky. The stuff he released could easily have sparked World War 3, between the middle-east and korean/chinese revelations. We may never know which (or we might still end up at war in Korea).

So be careful before you lump everybody who stands up and calls for his head together with Sarah Palin. She's not always fundamentally wrong. She's just not sophisticated enough to understand the details, and she sensationalizes stuff 'cause she's a politician. She doesn't understand the consequences or side-effects of "using cyber tools to permanently disable WikiLeaks", but the overall sentiment is sound. Namely, we need to shut Assange up, and we need to shut his sources up, and we need to get control of the information that passes through our embassies. We just need to do it intelligently instead of invoking terms that we don't understand that amount to cries to nuke stuff from orbit.

I hate to say it, but Hillary seems to be handling this very well (and seems to agree with Palin on the basics).

If he uses electric heat for his house anyway, and needs to light the room anyway, the first law of thermodynamics disagrees with you.

You're fooling yourself.

People love Fox.

He's talking about Austin, not about sane parts of Texas.

The chances of you being caught with an illegal lock pick are, for all practical purposes, zero, unless you're using the lockpick to break some other law.

All bets are off if you decide to keep them in your car on a public road though.

So, yes it may be illegal, but no, you won't go to jail.

I also was counting junk mail.

And I don't think 11 to 20 covers "36 gallon trash bag full per week", but it was the highest option, so I picked it.

MLC is sufficiently cheap that it works out better to buy multiple drives and install them with redundancy than it does to buy the more expensive and more reliable drive. It's not about what name is right, it's about achieving your goal for the least outlay possible. The X-25E exists merely to fill a niche. You need some specific constraint in order to justify spending more to buy a more reliable drive than achieving reliability through redundancy with cheaper drives.

Your servers that require frequent writes should be using a storage array anyway.

Professional administrators should care about two things: redundancy, and warranty. Since you seem to be trying to come across as somebody who actually manages a lot of hardware, you should already be aware that your spinning discs fail at a per-year rate relative to their age and operating temperature. Even if you've only got a piddly few hundred drives, you should be able to get a good sense of which models (yes, models. Not brands) fail, and how frequently they fail at a certain age. You should also know that your hard drives will be obsolete and probably replaced due to obsolescence after 5 years.

Pick a model with a sufficient warranty, set up your storage array for redundancy, and let the manufacturer worry about whether the advertised failure rate is correct or not.

Alternatively, you could continue with your holier-than-thou attitude, and be behind the technology curve by a decade.

So your point is.... That you couldn't get lint to let you write bad code?

int main() {
                printf("Hello world!");
                return 0;
}

$ lint helloworld.c
Finished checking --- no warnings

Just because something functions as intended, doesn't mean it's written properly.

Comcast?

Microsoft? (depending on whether you consider their customers to be end-users, or Dell/HP/Developers)

And some of your examples are just silly. Protecting you from bricking your PSP by preventing you from running out of power mid-flash? Yeah.. That's really anti-customer. How DARE they prevent you from breaking your console.

Really, why don't you quit making a fool of yourself on the internet and go play your Xbox 360 that prevented you from doing all this stuff you're complaining about Sony having "taking away" in the first place.

So don't let them have unfettered access to your internet connection.

The federal government shouldn't have to babysit children.

Four out of nine justices just ruled that they don't believe the bill of rights applies to state laws in their ruling on gun control in Chicago.

If the 14th amendment doesn't mean what the people who wrote it intended it to mean, then let's just throw the constitution out the window. States in the south can re-institute segregation, the 1st amendment can be over-ridden on a state by state basis, states can start controlling abortions along with handguns...

This is total bullshit.

The ACLU may pursue only truly libertarian issues, but their left-wing bias is apparent in their case selection. There are plenty of worthy civil liberties cases which need an organization like the ACLU to stand up fight that they ignore because it would help right-wing agendas. Examples: Property rights, Gun rights, various Tax issues...

No. In the context of the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is the analogue.

Sorry, but it can't be summed up in six words.

It's easy to say that the republicans are in the pockets of some big company.

The Republicans and the Democrats are in the same people's pockets. If some big aerospace factories close, thousands of people lose jobs, and the local representative doesn't get re-elected. The difference between the Republican and the Democrat is that the Republican thinks it's the big company's responsibility to give those people a job, and the Democrat thinks it's the government's responsibility to make sure those workers don't need to worry about whether they have a job or not.

Bottom line, it's always about the voters. Except that most of our citizens of voting age are so cynical about the process, and think it's all about the "money/power/big companies/cronyism" that they stay home and dilute the real power base.

Get off your ass and go vote.

Better yet. Understand what the people you're voting for actually stand for before you go vote. Otherwise you'll be surprised when the guy you voted for to change things starts supporting revoking Miranda rights, and sends more troops to the wars you don't support, and keeps an infamous prison open, and supports off-shore drilling, and signs a massive health care welfare bill into law just like the last guy did, and generally acts like a re-incarnation of George W. Bush, even though the writing was on the wall before the election, and everybody who pointed it out was routinely censored by the internet community.