So a customer 'bought' a busted phone. Not getting updates is one of the downsides. Buy unlocked or from a different carrier.

PGP/GPG is much easier to use these days than it was in the 90's. Plugins exist for many mail clients that do the heavy lifting in the background.

Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.

I have an old laptop with 4GB but it's running Windows XP 32 bit so I can only use 3GB. Have I also been lied to?

That's hardly surprising. Titanic had 5 times the budget of Serenity and Avatar's was even larger. I was at least as impressed with the visuals in The Avengers as I was with Titanic and Firefly was extremely impressive visually for a TV show of that period.

It's quite hard to separate Cameron's direction of Avatar from his other roles of writer, editor, and producer. When a scene didn't work was it badly directed? Or badly edited? Or just poorly written? It's hard to tell. A perfectly well written scene can be ruined with poor direction and even if well written and directed it can be butchered by poor editing. In the end it doesn't actually matter because ultimately the bad result was the product of the same man's creative failure. As you say Cameron wouldn't simply direct a Star Wars movie. Whedon would probably not stick to directing either but I have rather more confidence in his ability to produce something good.

I think I'm one of the two who bought from Amazon. I don't care if you put it up for free. If it really bugs you that much, take the two bucks and give it to the next homeless person you see, or in the tip jar somewhere, or whatever. (Actually, I thought I said before that you could do that :)

Slower photons in fiber optics means a slower, more relaxed pace for my web browsing.

Here's a link to one of their articles which shows the contents of a cartridge. Hopefully that'll work?

And Cmdr Taco

moot is now free to join Sherrod DeHippo in obscurity.

Well, we know the majority of GOP presidential candidates claim to be creationists, so this one is a no-brainer... It'd be hysterically funny if only we're not all sharing the same planet.

... the oldest goatse in history.

In my state, they have to post a surety bond or have a certain amount of liquid assets or something along those lines in order to offer their services.

I bet starving people would pay more for a meal than a fatted American like myself.

The US government funded Tor development and encourages its use as a way to avoid repressive governments and then considers its use in the US to be a suspcious act.

The irony, it burns!

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

It's a natural result of life, apparently. Go look at some pictures of floppy-eared puppies, or fluffy kittens or fish or trees or algae or fungus: awwww, what cute warlike sociopaths. "You're eating my food, competing for my mate, or claiming my turf? Fuck you. DIE!!" Humanity is the only thing I ever heard of, who sometimes isn't sociopathic.

One can hypothesize a space empire without war, but it would require some extreme creativity. If you have an idea for a warless game, that's awesome, but do you really think war is a far-fetched assumption on someone else's part? I know what planet you grew up on, earthling, so quite pretending you're from some other alien background.