I'm sure a lot of gun owners do believe that owning a gun will keep them safer in a hostile situation, thus fueling gun sales. Whether or not it's actually true, I have no doubt that is the logic many gun owners use.

Ironically, a lot of pickup/SUV owners aren't necessarily "cowboy posers", but just people who think that if they ever do get in an accident, they'd rather be driving the bigger car when it happens. So smaller cars are more dangerous because there are so many big trucks on the road because so many people are afraid of getting hit by big trucks, thus perpetuating the problem.

Oakland is a pretty poor city, I doubt many of its residents just have spare computers lying around

The problem with the idea that corporations are just "a means for people, a means of personal income" is that it complicates the other idea of taxing corporations. If corporations are not people in and of themselves, but are just extensions of other people, then when you tax the corporation on its profits and tax the shareholders on their dividends, you are essentially taxing the shareholders twice. This is one reason corporations have been relying more on stock buybacks over the last couple decades, in lieu of dividends. Corporate profits are taxed, and then those profits are paid out to shareholders as dividends, which are then taxed again at ordinary income rates (unless the Bush tax cuts are extended). If instead a company uses dividend money to buy back stock, it can (theoretically) boost the stock price and let shareholders decide if and when they want to collect the income (and still be taxed on it a second time, but it can be deferred indefinitely and shifted to the lower long term capital gains rates). If a corporation is a person, it's more like a business owner paying taxes on profits and employees paying taxes on their salary (their share of those profits). Deny a corporation its personhood, though, and income is just passing through and you need a new excuse to tax shareholders twice. Not that a different excuse shouldn't be found, because seriously, corporations aren't goddamn people.

If Apple is going to market their walled garden as a safe alternative to the Mad Max dystopian hellscape of Google Play, with bands of pirates riding around on patchwork motorcycles, hunting down developers trying to make an honest living and unsuspecting users trying to play their "hit thing with bird" games -- then yes, Apple does have some responsibility to carry through on their end of that bargain. However, given the wild exaggeration of Siri's capabilities in their commercials, Apple seems to take its implied marketing promises pretty lightly.

Also, "Area Man Constantly Telling People He Has a Television But Not Cable; Only Hulu, Netflix"

This. If you're worried about America turning into a totalitarian police state a la 1984, it is ridiculous to think that the government would pussyfoot around wiping out a small insurgency by whatever means necessary. If you think the government would treat you with at least as much decency and humanity as it has the Iraqis or the Afghans (which may not be much, but as the parent notes, still isn't on the level of carpet bombs and poisoned water supplies), then you probably don't need to worry about turning into a 1984-style police state, because that kind of restraint is incongruous with that kind of state.

Let's be honest, even if every person in America bought a gun, the government still has tanks, jets, bunker busters, and enough other high tech, high yield weaponry, armor, and other gadgets, a full-on rebellion would be almost impossible to pull off. The Second Amendment may have kept people safe from the government in 1776, but that was when pretty much anyone could arm themselves as well as the military. The handgun you keep in a safe in your closet is not going to protect from the police state you're so worried about, it's just another distraction you've been provided to keep you pacified (rather ironically).

This is absolute nonsense. Vote no on almost every new law? What about when you vote no but the law passes anyway, then later a new law comes up to repeal the old one? Should you vote no on that too? What if a law comes up to cut taxes or ease gun control? Vote no one those too, just to fuck with the system? And always vote for the nobody, never the incumbent? I know this is hard to swallow but whatever your ideology, it's a big country and there's always some incumbent out there who agrees with you and is pushing your agenda, and is running against some incompetent nobody who fiercely disagrees with you. But hey, vote against your own interests anyway because surely if every problem isn't fixed in two years it must mean your representative is corrupt and it's time to try someone new.

This part is good advice.

Because everyone automatically undercutting their competitors by a few cents over and over until everyone is selling at cost and all but a couple players eventually have to shut down because they can't afford to run a profitless business forever, whereupon the few remaining players can finally raise prices ... isn't effectively collusion or a market distortion.

It appears I'm wrong. I signed up when it was first available in the US and at the time you didn't need Facebook, but it looks like you do now. Which is incredibly stupid.

I've been with Facebook since it was only available for individual university campuses and there was never a Hooked Up option for relationship status. There was, however, a way you could specify how you knew someone (i.e. worked with [friend] at [company] in [year], had [class] with [friend] in [year], [friend] is a relative, etc) and "hooked up with [friend] in [year]" was among those options, but it was very buried in a person's friends list and certainly not something that was displayed prominently on their profile. It wouldn't have made sense anyway. A hookup, assuming all goes as it should, is by nature not a relationship status.

Not that I'm a patent lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there was prior art for a "system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data" in 1996. The issue some here are getting worked up about is that Apple and other companies are able to patent wide-reaching and obvious ideas like "a method for performing an action with a computer" and then use said patents to reduce competition, and consequently, innovation.

Actually the police do (other than the going to work part).

Actually they don't. I have Spotify fully disconnected from Facebook.

What? There are two choices. The woman carries the child to term or she doesn't. If a woman is pregnant, the only choice other than abortion is to carry the child to term, unless you count an unintended miscarriage as a choice, which, if unintended, it could not be. ...wait, are you thinking of that DS9 episode where Bashir transplants Keiko's baby into Kira? You know that's not real, right?

I can understand why, but I think you're mistaking the DoJ for the DoE, which, apparently, does have some problems with spelling education it needs to work out.