The problem with a rocket launcher is that either you are firing at a car beside you or behind you in which case who cares, they're not in your way anymore. And if they're in front of you then there is now a large piece of fiery twisted metal with a bunch of smaller pieces of twisted shrapnel on the road in front of you that you have to maneuver around at high speed.

But shouldn't the true price of gas not only include the price to extract and refine but also all of the ancillary costs associated with consuming gasoiline such as environmental degradation and health care costs due to tailpipe emissions, the costs of maintaining infrastructure for the vehicles that burn gas (the federal highway system), the eventual cost to the economy of global warming from carbon emissions and a host of other externalized costs for the auto and oil industries? And isn't the price of gas in Europe closer to that "true cost"?

So what about your right to be given air? Are you saying that I wouldn't be depriving you of your rights if I took away your right to breathe?

By that logic, why do we have laws against cocaine and heroin? After all, only a weak-willed moron would become addicted to thse substances.

And BTW, if you're giving coffee to children then child services shoulod be knocking on your door just as they would if you were giving cigarettes to your kids.

You're assuming that Surface is supposed to replace a television. Most people don't gather around the television and interact with each other, they sit in front of it and mostly ignore each other. The whole point of the Surface is to get people interacting with each other. That's why the model is a horizontal table and not a vertical television set.

So Apple has come out with a docking station that six to eight people can crowd around? Cool. I think I'll run down to the Apple Store right now and check it out. ...

So the people at the Apple Store haven't heard anything about this Surface like docking station that you're talking about. Can I have some of your drugs?

No.

They're strategy is and always has been we don't mind losing a little bit of money in the short term in order to make a whole buttload of money in the long term.

Of course. Because it's sop much fun to have 6 to 8 of your closest friends crowding around your iPhone all using it at the same time... Oh wait...

Beause the GPL is exactly the sort of bedtime reading that every 4 1/2 year old wants to hear.

But the rise of fundamentalist Islam in an area that was quite liberal up until about 50 years ago is a result of the west's and particularly the United States intervention in the area. Three things in particular have contributed to this rise:

1. The creation and support of the state of Israel: when Israel was created in 1947 it was done with no regard or consultation of the indigineous population of the region. And the fact is that Israel has been quite belligerent with its neighbours knowing that it can depend on the U.S. to protect it no matter what.
2. The imposition and support of oppressive regimes in the rest of the region: the house of Saud in Saudi Arabia, the Pahlavi Dynasty in Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iran, the Muhammad Ali dynasty in Egypt, etc.
3. The direct support of fundamentalist groups during the cold war in the (possibly mistaken) belief that they were required to ensure that the region did not become communist.

Some of them hate us becasue we are free. Most of them hate us becasue we won't leave them alone.

Right.

I had to go to the website's ISP, get the webpage on paper tape, take it back to the computer room, type in the binary codes using only the 1's and 0's on a teletype machine and then read the content from the blinking lights on the front of a PDP-8/E. And when we were finished, the sysadmin would kill us and dance on our graves singing Hallelujah.

They turned to posts which were basically just flamebait, often untrue and contradicting factually the linked sources they gave. I didn't leave, just visited less.

So if you left that site becuase of the above reasons, what are you doing within 100 miles of Slashdot?

Mosaic? Are you kidding?

The only browser that should be allowed is Lynx!!

Do you really want to live in a city designed by a bunch of fifteen year olds whose idea of a great city is lifted from World of Warcraft?

And why should they care about being XHTML compliant? Do you think that if you wrote a competitor to YouTube that would be a good advertising slogan? Like it or not, customers don't really care if a website is standards compliant. They just want to see movies.

In the early 90's, the dominant word processor was not MS-Word, it was WordPerfect. They lost their monopoly in word processors by their own missteps (mostly a really bad port to Windows). Microsoft was able to pick up that market not by being standards compliant but instead by offering a superior upgrade path from WordPerfect.