I think it is dangerous to allow for that broad of discretion for the judicial branch.

So maybe conservatives should have stopped their legal challenge to prevent this danger, knowing that they were likely to lose?

For the tl;dr crowd, the South wanted to count them as 5/5ths of a person and the North wanted to count them as 0/5ths of a person.

The problem is that the North came around to the right side of things with respect to rights, while the South only wanted slaves counted - not to give them actual rights.

But the fact is, things change. Things changed between the establishment of the constitution and the Civil War, just as things have changed between the Civil War and now. The time for this symbol is gone. If Southerners are the true patriots they claim to be, they'd throw away this symbol to tyranny and rebellion against their country and pledge allegiance to their real flag instead of worshiping the Confederation's rebellious symbol.

As I said, things change. But the South seems to be too stubborn to change fast enough. We in the North are tired of your social heel-dragging trying to keep us in 1950's America. The bottom line is that the world has changed. Fucking adapt, already. Or secede. Don't care which. Just get out of the way.

Racism goes away one thought, one step, one action, one symbol at a time. It does not go away quickly, nor without struggle. The de-consecration and minimization of this symbol of tyranny and rebellion is a long overdue step in this progress towards the end of racism. Accept that many find this symbol distasteful or offensive and that its time has come and gone long ago. And just as the fact that we have freedom to go about yelling the n-word doesn't mean that corporations have to give everyone a megaphone for their offensive speech, no corporation are required to give racist symbols a platform.

Feel free to sell confederate flags to the rest of the world, if you wish. Americans here at home don't want your Johnny Reb bullshit.

A good abstraction leads a user towards understanding, no matter what his level; a good UI reflects the abstraction, leading the user to use it properly, again, no matter what his or her level.

Git may have good abstractions (I'll take your word for it), but it has no UI to reflect it and so is opaque to many. In my attempts to use git, I've grown tired of wading through shitty web pages all of which give examples of use, but no abstraction description and no description of how these abstractions are to be properly used.

If you could point me to one of these documents that clearly explain git's abstractions and their proper use (actually, I'll take the abstractions only - I can probably work out proper use from that), one hopefully having both Windows and Linux information - professionals sometimes have to use both - I'd appreciate it. Until then, I'll have to be fine with using SVN locally and attempting to avoid git as much as possible.

No, they're having the box checked by default - you have to absolutely ask them to not shit on your floor.

No one denies that one can write bad code in any language, but the accusation still stands - languages can help or hinder understandability with their syntax. C++, and it's desire for backward compatibility with C, led to some really unfortunately syntactic decisions that make the code less legible. Operator overloading isn't very good for understanding of performance characteristics (Is this adding 2 ints or an array?). Memory management has provided code bulk (because not everything can be RAII) and the plethora of pointer idioms one must navigate if one has any sort of sizable codebase that has been maintained by many others over the years. Now add on features and libraries so broad and complex that organizations actually have their own dialects of C++ (or so I am told) that their employees are allowed to use. Need I go on?

Frankly, C++ has advantages in some places, but aiding in making code legible and understandable is not one of C++'s strong suits. And I've worked on (and probably helped generate) enough crappy C++ codebases to know of which I speak.

Bullshit. Mirroring is not the issue. Government data collection, though a problem in its own right, is not the issue. The problem is with the corporations controlling the network space throttling bandwidth to screw over customers. A simple solution would be taking the "free enterprise" out of long-haul communication infrastructure. A government monopoly couldn't do much worse than these deceitful assholes. Or, of course, regulating the shit out of them until they straighten up. But I'm sure I'm just getting tired of their corporate shenanigans.

I'm sorry. This joke was already used. Please find a new one and try again.

Imagine an all-you-can-eat buffet. Within reason, eat all you like... to a point...

Or maybe they could, you know... not lie and not call it unlimited when it isn't? Or in your world is not lying too great a burden on business?

Do you think the Chinese with their Great Firewall and monitoring aren't aware of every packet that goes across their network? You're asking us to believe that the Chinese love to let rogue agents from third parties use their gear and IP space even with all of the countermeasures they have in place? Maybe for cover. Thanks for your "insight"... I'll take Occam's Razor for $2000, Alex.

I don't see how eating my neighbor gets me parts for my Aibo - unless he has one, too.

I think you meant that "cannibalizing" (i.e., removing parts from other currently functional) Aibos might be the only way to get said parts - similar words, two VERY different meanings. Even so, functioning Aibos need not necessarily be cannibalized, as I'm sure there may be one or two broken Aibos lying about for parts, too.

I like to control how my music goes digital and when. That's why I only play my vinyl on my hipster turntable.

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The aliens are just a plot twist. Even with aliens, the story has been, is, and, until we decide otherwise, will be "us against us".