I agree completely. Big props to Bioware (pre-EA) and Namco for making their splash screens skippable. Also, big shits to EA for mandating that their splash screens be un-skippable.

Have you ever seen Richard Dawkins answering questions? I don't think he generally worries about that.

Except that bullets can be traced to the gun that fired them, and are usually destroyed on impact.

If we assume people get to own the cable, then, presumably, each person is responsible for maintaining his or her part of the cable. But what if the same cable also runs through your neighbour's property? What if your Internet cuts out due to your neighbour's negligence? What if your neighbour moves, and your new neighbour decides they don't want a cable on their property? Do you pay for the ISP to run new cable around your neighbour's property? What if no one else wants the cable under their property? Do you get to negotiate with them each individually? Are you just out of luck if they still say no?

Do you feel the same way about power lines? Natural gas pipes? Sewers? Roads? Libertarians say that private enterprise accomplishes things more efficiently than public enterprise, but I really don't think that's the case when it comes to infrastructure.

Has that ever happened? And I don't mean a city charging someone to dig up a road; I mean a city refusing to let someone pay for it.

How do you figure? It was never illegal to start a new ISP. Like all infrastructure, it does naturally become a monopoly. After all, it doesn't make sense to have multiple companies each running cable to your house so you can choose your favourite. In fact, a few local governments have been sued by ISP's for trying to break their monopolies.

Not quite. In fact, the opposite. Granted, Comcast appealed the decision, and won, but it was the FCC that stopped them, not the market.

Ideally, net neutrality legislation wouldn't dictate what goes over a network. It would instead prevent ISP's from dictating what goes over their networks.

What, exactly, do you think will happen without net neutrality laws? Will all the ISP monopolies suddenly start acting like they have competition? Will Comcast just never try to get away with throttling torrents again? Do you realize that if there are no "rules from the government", then ISP's can just do what they want anyway?

While RISUG looks like a great procedure to me, intellectually, I am much more comfortable emotionally with taking a pill than with having a doctor inject a spermicide into my vas deferens.

That's a good point. A lot of math in computer science is used behind-the-scenes, so to speak. It doesn't show up directly in the algorithms, but it's used to show that an algorithm is correct, or that one algorithm is faster than another, or that an algorithm cannot take more than so long, or that an algorithm will take so long on average.

Agreed. Any graphics engine uses a ton of linear algebra under the hood, so you'll need that if you ever want to modify one or write your own. Also, if you want to do any kind of physics simulation (which you probably will, if you're doing games), you may need calculus (but maybe not, since video games fake as much as they can get away with).

Um, didn't US ISP's get billions of dollars in tax breaks to lay down fibre across the country a decade ago? You're getting ripped off with prices, compared to most other first-world countries; you're getting ripped off with service, with unadvertised bandwidth caps and throttled protocols; and you got ripped off by paying taxpayer money for something that was never done. If I lived there, I'd use every bit (pun not intended) of bandwidth I was paying for, all the time, just out of spite. Not that using a service you pay for should be considered a spiteful act.

I don't think it'll be a problem; Harper is probably looking to get rid of them.

Don't we have the word 'sect' that now means what 'cult' did?

Don't forget voting, which you are not allowed to do if you are a convicted felon.

Problem is, the bad guys have more money.

I don't actually know much about headphones, but Koss has a fairly wide variety of them at different price points, and, most importantly, all of them have a lifetime warranty.