Maybe NhRP shouldn't monkey around with this.

The wage gap is a symptom, not the problem. The problem is self entitled democracies, and the fiat money banks created to accommodate populist demands. It'd be like trying to cover up herion convulsions, with seizure medication. It reminds me of the old south. When the plantation masters beat the fuck out of their slaves, they wanted to micro-regulate the treatment of slaves, instead of getting rid of slavery. In retrospect, the people advocated those regulations, were just prolonging the problem, and head so far up their fucking ass, they were beyond stupid.

Today, our fiat/populist systems create all these credit bubbles, housing bubbles, stock bubbles, excessive government debt, high prices, inflated executive pay. And these retards want to go around regulating everything, instead of attacking the problem at the source. Fuck them, just fuck them. Irrelevant worthless idiots who will accomplish nothing anyhow.

Yes, tick off a community of users whose defining trait is that like to hire hit men, that sounds like a wonderful business plan.

Whitch hunt would that be?

For chrissake, there has never been a day since the birth of humankind where journalism has been impartial. Right now, the powers that be seem to be changing hands, and so all the old partialities are falling to the new ones. Maybe the old minions are whining about impartiality, but in practice they are really just whineing that their partiality is being subbed out for somebody elses.

IMHO, copyright is a manifestation of a severe misunderstanding of why a society even has any property rights at all. Property rights do not exist to help people make profit, that's a consequence property. Property exists to deal with the truth that not everybody can use everything at the same time. We create property so we can resolve disputes over scarce resources without beating the crap out of each other. While it's true that when people stop knocking the crap out of each other, society tends to be prosperous and happy. That is a consequence of property rights, not the reason for them.

Well, with content and information, everybody can use everything at the same time. Copyrights impose a restriction on use, not for the sake of resolving conflicts over scarce resources, but for the sake of controlling how people distribute information for optimum profit. They are an abomination of everything free markets, property rights, and capitalism were ever created for. They are a fraud, and likewise everything we have ever been taught about them is a fraud too.

Ever since childhood, we have all been taught that copyrights are a property right that protects creators and incentives creation. But in the real world copyrights act nothing like normal property rights, they protect cartels, and incentive lawyers. This is a fact, it is impossible to deny. The few creators who do win the copyright game are like people who win the lottery, no mention of the countless others locked out. They don't incentive creation, all they do is force the market to centrer around creation controls instead of creation services. They aid the people who control, far more than they aid the people who create.

All Microsoft problems really indirectly boil down to one problem. They try to be a licensing company, rather than a technology solution company.
This is why google nailed them in both search and phone and now tablet. Even IBM got the message, and moved toward a Linux datacenter strategy.

I just amazes me to see all their "reforms" all their "restructuring" all their products that have been doomed to fail, and they still don't get it.

I'll believe it when the NSA is actually defunded.

The more cynical side of me says this is bullshit politics as usual.

Here's what's really going to happen: the congressman is going to go to the NSA leadership, and say "look, I have hundreds and thousands of constituents who want to shut you down, but if you let me spy on my political opponents, and listen in on their calls, and help me sabotage them, then I can justify and risk continuance of your funding"

The more we petition them, the more they will be able to use shutting them down as a threat to get more political power that is turned against us. I predict it will be a cold day in hell before political leaders in DC give up that kind of power to spy on and blackmail people.

The law seems to love sensationalizing terms relating to weapons.

Semiautomatic rifle with a vaguely military appearance? Assault rifle! (which more properly refers to fully-automatic rifles)
Any fully-automatic weapon? Machine gun! (which more properly refers to big belt-fed weapons and the like)
An explosive device? Weapon of mass destruction! (which more properly refers to a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon)

pick up a bunch of Surface tablets, and put Linux or Android on them

If you have billions in capital, it is extremely hard to move around billions in assets without all the small traders taking notice, and piling on before you can reach your full position. That's why large traders like Buffet absolutely hate day traders, and has never split his stock, causing shares in his company to be valued at over $65000 per share last I checked. Being able to trade freely and quickly is one of the few great equalizers in large capital markets.

I think the problem is that people find themselves going to the licensing zoo, because they need to find a way to undo a lot of the damage caused by the very nature of copyright and patents (and the DMCA, etc ...). A better solution is just to get rid of copyright and patents (at least on things like media and software)

... that way I can hire somebody from India to clean my house, mow the yard, do dishes, and laundry remotely over the internet. At an estimated 70K for this one, I don't think that's going to work out for me anytime soon.

... but does anybody else think the whole world should just move to 24 hr GMT, and get it over with.

So many flaws with this proposal. Why the assumption that no one will need self-defense around "schools, malls and movie theatres"? Who buys a computing device that loses all of its config settings every four hours? Why does your remote disable feature have a loophole for corporate and government owned guns (guns not in the possession of a single owner would seem to be the most likely to get lost and need a remote disable)? How is your friend or foe feature supposed to work?

The most glaring flaw is adding lots of battery-intensive requirements (GPS, broadcasting signals, pinging other devices, and listening for remote disable signals) and adding them to a device used in life-and-death emergencies. When dead battery potentially equals dead user, this doesn't seem like the wisest course of action.