Except that in this case, their status is a result of their actions.

The problem is that in the US, "sex offender" is a catch-all for many different types of behaviour, not simply pædophelia. Therefore many people who are "registered sex offenders", but who pose absolutely zero threat to minors, are being grossly punished. (And this applies to many things far outside of online gaming, for certain.)

A great example is of a 16-year-old girl who takes a naked picture of herself and sends it to her 16-year-old boyfriend; an authority finds out; and she is charged with felony production and possession of child pornography. It has happened. A lot.

Fortunately, some places are trying to bring common sense thinking to this. But not enough, not yet. (Btw, the douchebag threatening felony charges against the 16-year-old girl was District Attorney George Skumanick, who was thankfully voted out of office in part because of this in 2009.)

My girlfriend had a job at a charity whose President made $500k+ per year. Working for a 503(c) can be very, very lucrative.

Screw the assist. I love to drive, and I'll never want to give up the option of manual control completely, but I would MUCH rather spend my commute reading, playing music, writing, watching movies, or fucking while my car automatically gets me to work. Give me the whole enchilada and not just some driver augmentation.

And a lack of power enables corruption. QED

Any mathematics, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.

I think you missed the point of the pp's question. What "tools"? What is a VM stack controller, and why/when/where would I need one? What is a VM stack? What are REST, XML, AWS, Rackspace, marionette, puppet, etc.?

Should I care about OpenStack if I'm not a developer?

The questions that aren't being answered are a whole lot more fundamental than what you're responding to. Not a critique on what you wrote, just more information - I have the same questions as the pp.

The point of contention for which this was presented is the design patent; the inner workings are irrelevant (cf. here).

Apple is seeking to prevent Samsung (and, by extension, most other tablet manufacturers, if the case succeeds) from selling anything that resembles their design (namely, the rounded corners, form factor, etc.) based on the idea that they came up with an original, non-obvious design for the iPad and should be awarded exclusive rights to it. Samsung's evidence points to the idea that Apple were beaten to the design by almost 20 years, and were exposed to it then, and therefore their idea is neither original nor non-obvious, thus invalidating their patent.

Again, none of this requires "working" hardware. Patents don't require it, except for perpetual motion machines; for those, a working prototype is mandatory.

The surest way to make a club desirable is to restrict its membership.

It was actually Picasso who said that. Jobs stole it from... oooh.

Almost modded you "flamebait" for that one...

...but then I couldn't have written in to say vi, of course.

I have that Top Gear episode. Love that series. The real one.

You mean the one that wasn't copied in another country for 1/10th the price...?

I guess in a way that depends on how you define "drastic". Are we changing the environment? I believe so, but really, who can say? We have a lot of evidence that seems to suggest that we do, but on such a short timescale, we cannot possibly think we have definitive proof. The hole in the ozone layer over the antarctic that people were convinced was a harbinger of the apocalypse 20 years ago? We didn't even start measuring it until 1956. Did CFCs really cause it, or has it existed in various forms for millions of years? We don't know. We've been measuring the world around us consistently for, at most, 500 years. That's like measuring the last ten seconds of the past 2.5 years. And even though our techniques for reading the past are getting better, the readings are getting more complex. So how much are we changing the world? We have absolutely no idea - because we just don't have enough data to compare it against.

If we lived in 17th century London, we'd have thought the Earth wouldn't last in its current state another 50 years.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but your statement uses "wonderfully diverse" and "interesting" - both of which are highly human-centered concepts. I am no stranger to aesthetics, and I would certainly mourn the loss of all the wondrous species that give our planet such rich (in our minds) diversity. But if you take us and our emotional attachment to the status quo out of the equation, it's quickly apparent that the Earth has no sense of aesthetics, nor does it care about biodiversity. Only the creatures that depend on it do. And even with all of our bombs, guns, pesticides, artificial chemicals, and everything else, nature is capable of so much grander scales of catastrophe than we can produce that it dwarfs our efforts in comparison. Volcanoes produce as much as 1/3rd the pollutants humans currently do... and have been doing it for 10,000,000 times as long.

We are stewards of the Earth, but most certainly not masters of it. We have an inflated sense of self, and an inflated sense of our own impact. We should do what we can to preserve what we can, because that is important to us - but we should do it knowing that it is only because it is important to us that it needs to be done, and not because the world around us cares a whit for our meddling.

There's a lot of land to move to EVERYWHERE.

Take a look at this map. Even if you set the sea level rise to sixty meters (100 times the worst-case scenario for the next century), it barely changes the noticeable shape of the continents.

Yes, some places will be affected more than others, which will suck for those people. I'm not saying it will be fun. But it will be survivable, for nearly everyone.

I made no attempt to address these things. I was simply taking issue with the inflammatory and reactionary parent post, which implied that rising sea levels will directly drown people.

Sea level rise will hurt. It will suck for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. But it will happen so slowly that most people won't realize it's happening, and it certainly won't drown the whole Bangladeshi people. The 2004 tsunami killed many times more people than will die as a result of rising sea levels.

I am ignorant of many things, but not of this, in this particular case.

With this, I wholeheartedly agree. We should do everything we can to help ourselves, our species, thrive for as long as possible. The point I was trying to make is that any argument about climate change, etc., is ultimately entirely anthropocentric. The world we see around us was not created by us and will not be destroyed by us, and can only be (in the grand scheme of things) changed by us by miniscule amounts. We care - and should care - about how we treat our world, because we have the capability to make it unsuitable for ourselves, but anything beyond that is vanity and egocentrism.

Why should we care about endangered species? 99%+ of all species that have ever existed are extinct, including at least five (and perhaps up to eleven) mass extinctions which annihilated 30% or more of all known species... and yet our planet resolutely maintains a mind-boggling level of species diversity today.

I'm not espousing a reckless or negligent approach to our stewardship of our home. But I take issue with people who think that we need to preserve the present state of nature for its own sake. 100 million years from now (when Earth is 2.5% older than it is now), nearly every species that exists at this present moment will not exist, and no one will mourn their loss any more than we mourn the dinosaurs, giant insects, or sea monsters.

We cannot prevent nature from changing - no force in the universe can. We need to stop focusing on things we cannot control and begin addressing the things we can - malnourished children, afflicted families, etc., just as you've said.

[Although I must admit great pleasure in killing every mosquito I can find, knowing that I could be preventing the birth of billions^billions more of them over the next several million years, the little fuckers.]