Obviously, I was referring to the mugger. Did you even read what I was responding to?

Well, if private credit agencies had a tendency to show up at my doorstep, point a gun in my face, and order me to hand over my credit records, then I'd say you had a good point.

From the article:

The key difference is that private credit rating agencies don't have the legal authority to compel you to provide them with any information. They might use some underhanded means to obtain some of that information, but they can't send you to prison for not telling them what they want to know. The government, however, does have that power. It is the powers of compulsion, not the database itself, which has me worried.

But the poor would only have to pay if they LOSE. If they have a legit lawsuit, that wouldn't be an issue.

Changing a registry key in and of itself isn't illegal. But doing so to misrepresent that you paid for something you didn't, and obtaining that something through the Internet violates at least two federal laws: wire fraud and the computer fraud and abuse act. You are gaining access to software hosted on a computer that don't rightfully have access to (computer fraud and abuse act), and you are causing false information to be sent on the Internet for financial gain (wire fraud). Both are federal felonies. In addition, you are probably committing several civil infractions including copyright violation and violation of license agreements. If you want to keep getting updates from Microsoft for XP you can pay for them like everyone else.

True, also mentally ill people often have trouble getting good jobs if any jobs at all. Many live on government assistance and are well below the poverty line. And it is well known that poverty is correlated with a shorter lifespan. Many simply cannot afford healthy lifestyle choices, such as nutritious food or preventive medical care.

It's good if you have the money. R is free, while SPSS is fairly expensive, as is its main competitor SAS. I see R as competing not with general purpose languages like Python, but rather with commercial statistics packages like SPSS and SAS. While it may have more of a learning curve than these packages, it is free software, which makes it very attractive for many users.

Well, that was the subject of an episode of the Big Bang Theory, but to be honest, I think what's going to sell 3D printers is the ability to print sex toys that people are to embarrassed to buy at the store.

There's no reason they can't do both. Things they learn from this experiment may indeed some day be used to improve the human race. (Don't know why you specifically pick on Americans though.)

The First Amendment free speech protections don't cover copyright violation, and it's Blizzard's position that this software is a derivative work of their software, and therefore infringes on their copyright. Whether it is or not is up to the courts to decide, but this isn't a free speech issue.

What "special status" granted to newspapers? Is this a European thing? In America, everyone has the same free speech rights that newspapers do. Newspapers aren't special.

Your last two comments contradict each other. You say it's a search engine if it links to offsite content, but then in the next answer you say newspapers are allowed to link to offsite content without being classed as a search engine.

There are two problems here. First, why should search engines not enjoy the same free speech rights as newspapers? Second, what defines an Internet service as a "search engine" or a "newspaper"? Suppose I run on online newspaper that has a search function, allowing users to search past articles about any topic? Am I now a search engine? Suppose my newspaper becomes so popular it becomes the de facto place where people go to search for news stories? Do different rules apply then? Or does this ruling simply apply to sites that link to content on other sites rather than it's own original content? Now, do online newspapers lose the ability to link to other source material in their articles? The line between newspapers and search engines may become fuzzy, if it isn't already. Do you see the problem?

Can you imagine if you were in jail on drug offenses and there was an illicit drug trade going on in the prison? Oh, wait...