The sound of the TV drowns out the sounds of the refrigerator, the heat/ac, the washer/dryer, the people walking up and down the stairs outside my front door, the cars driving by, and the car doors in the parking lot. These distracting sounds, of course, don't all happen at once, but the general problem is that because they are unpredictable sounds, they almost always catch my attention when the room is otherwise silent. With the TV on, I rarely notice them, and I usually keep the TV volume low enough that it only distracts me when my brain notices something interesting happening. Granted, most of the time I only use the TV as background noise when it's showing something that I've already watched, or when there's a sporting event on that I only partially care about, which helps my brain recognize the interesting parts.

When I get an SSL certificate from my registrar, the fact that I am logged into the account that owns the domain should be enough proof. Since the computer can do this, it could be free. Frankly, any registrar should be able to issue a free normal SSL certificate, and if any of the big ones started this, they would all be pressured to follow suit. They make the big bucks on the EV certificates now anyway.

The fact that things can be copied and transferred into different formats more easily and without loss of accuracy is not a concern for anyone except content peddlers.

It could be a concern because it can be argued that there is no "seizure" involved in perfectly replicating a digital object. Therefore, any digital records can be taken by the government as long as the original is unaltered without violating the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.

Personally, I think that argument is a load of crap, but that doesn't mean courts won't accept it. If the Constitution were fully media-agnostic, it would take into consideration perfect replication of digital objects the same way it does limited-quantity analog objects. The issue isn't necessarily enshrining new digital rights but ensuring that the rights applied to the analog world are still protected when something goes digital.

Well, a cult is where a group of followers attempt to "care for" a god (always one, though one can join multiple cults) in the hope that the god will do things for them. A religion is where a group of followers attempt to follow a set of rules (e.g. 1 2 3 4) in the hope that their god (or gods) will not do things to them (eg. 1 2/3 4. Sure, it's not a pefect distinction, but when one realizes that most modern cults (as opposed to the classical ones that worshiped Jupiter Optimus Maximus and such) set their founder up as the deity, it matches up pretty well.

Well, we have opposable thumbs, an advanced cerebral cortex, and our hyoid bone is descended. These allow us to do things like invent tools and articulate complex sounds.

If the majority of major websites took the "upgrade to a decent browser" approach, everybody (perhaps excluding some IT departments) running IE6 would suddenly find "the whole internet" broken and be forced to upgrade. Sadly, nobody wants to be the first to piss everyone off, so it'll never happen.

That's only because most people only have one kind of facial tissue in their local context, even though Kleenex makes several (e.g. lotion, ultra soft, reguar, aloe, etc). On the other hand, there are currently at least six types of Coke (Coke Classic, Diet Coke, Caffeine Free Coke, Caffeine Free Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Cherry Coke). To make it worse, half of the soft drinks are distributed by Coke, and restaurants will often tell you "we have Coke" or "we have Pepsi" when they mean "we have products distributed by X". Personally, I've lived in the South my entire life and never had anyone ask me what kind of Coke I wanted. I've always treated that as a lame Jeff Foxworthy "Redneck" joke.

To a user, the "magic box" with all the fancy wires running to it and blinkenlights on the front is a central unit that does processing, and if you want to get down to it, the CPU is the computer (i.e. it actually does the computations, and everything else is storage or I/O, even if it's inside the "magic box"), so "computer" isn't even an unambiguous term here. Granted, telling the user that "the CPU is actually a chip inside the case, along with a lot of other things" is nice in theory, but the user isn't going to remember unless you give them a replacement term for what they called "the CPU". Personally, I call it the case and use a grocery store analogy if necessary. The case holds all of the parts of the computer "just like" a case of water holds all of the individual bottles.

I believe that the word you are looking for is "corporatism", which is often a component of--but not fully synonymous with--fascism.

I really hope you typed that backwards. Aside from geography, the defining characteristic of a Southern Democrat is social "conservatism".