The same republicans who've repeatedly and explicitly stated that their number one goal is to make Obama a one term president? Yeah, I wonder why it's been hard to get them to meet in the middle.

I think it was less of a case of trying to dodge a beam that was already on its way to and more a case of trying to orient the helicopter to avoid the beam striking the cockpit before the laser's user was able to get it on target. That was my takeaway from the article, anyway.

Not all elections are presidential.

That's not what he was saying. He was saying that Google had no role in developing those phones. They still have the Play store; in fact I've seen titles in the store that are restricted to the Xperia, presumably because of the controller.

At least one of them wasn't a takedown, though. The Hugo award thing was an automatic response during a streaming event. It's a thing Ustream does of its own initiative (probably requested/extorted by content holders, but still) to cut down on copyright infringement on its service. It would be hard to argue against it in court as well, considering this automatic filtering only applies to customers using the free version of Ustream's service. The only reasonable solution I see is for people to let Ustream know that this isn't okay and to stop using their service and anyone else who uses Vobile (justin.tv also does).

The poster I was replying to was talking about those PACs "funding" Obama. I took that to mean spending money. If you want to just discuss money raised, that's fine. It's largely the same groups, but actually skewed more towards Republicans when you consider the warchest American Crossroads is sitting on. From the same ProPublica link:

So 6/10 are Republican supporting, but the funding breakdown is $181,693,858 for Republicans, $53,546,733 for Democrats.

The anti-neutrality folks are apparently trying to explain away that as well. There's an editorial in my newspaper today from some lawyer about how people have on average six different ISPs available to them, including multiple cable companies, fiber and DSL from the phone company, and 4G wireless. I'd like to know where the guy lives, considering around here the two options are the one cable monopoly (which does a pretty decent job, actually) and the phone company's DSL that is half as fast and costs twice as much.

Not sure where you got that from, but it's almost literally the opposite of what's true. From ProPublica:

Those are the top 10 PACs by spending. The Republican/conservative organizations are in bold. Note that the spending of all the Democrat supporting PACs comes to less than half what Restore Our Future alone has spent. Sorting PACs by contributions is similar. Obama has a lot of money behind him, but it's nothing like what Romney's got.

I'm satisfied with mine. Since you were going to buy it already, presumably you've researched the competition enough to decide that it's the phone for you. I'd say go for it. The same reasons that made it a good option are still there, and it's not like Google will stop supporting the thing because Samsung is barred from selling it in the US.

Yes, because there's no way the the US could have extradited him straight from the UK. Nope, that would be ridiculous.

Be careful, your tinfoil hat is showing.

And there are a myriad of ways to do that. If you have one computer, there are tons of software options available. If you want to provide coverage for all devices on your network, you can set up OpenDNS on your router.

I'm sympathetic to the needs of parents to protect their children from unwanted online content, but a legislative solution is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.

Those things can cause hardware failure, but they generally don't cause recalls. Remember that we're talking about device recalls, here. The hardware failures are also likely to "be present in every single instance of the device" if they need to fix all of them.

The DMCA is irrelevant in this case. The state law doesn't say you have the right to circumvent diagnostic code encryption, it says that auto manufacturers have to make their diagnostic codes public. The car companies could legally encrypt the codes, they just wouldn't be able to sell their cars in Massachusetts.

How do you square your idea of an aloof, unknowable god with the personal god of the bible who gives individual people instructions and intervenes in their lives on a regular basis?

The point of screening pilots isn't to catch pilots, it's to catch people dressed as pilots. I'm a staunch opponent of the TSA, but screening pilots is one of the few correct things they're doing.