By way of reference, I suggest you review the Founding Fathers' thoughts on slavery and women's right to vote and stuff.

I think this is the real point and real problem. The founding fathers were creating a consortium of states with a minimal federal government and were trying to protect the freedoms they felt were important. I am lucky to have benefited from a society built on them, but our people now would never agree with our founding fathers' beliefs.

• The people should be as well armed as the government
  • The right to bear arms was obviously about making sure they would be able to successfully rebel against the government. It wasn't that scary a thought to them because they didn't see the government as being that big or critical. The idea of citizens having the rights to nuclear bombs would be inline with what they were setting up, but nobody (sane) wants that so we (the courts and lawmakers) ignore the intent and interpret arms as guns.
• Women weren't trustworthy and shouldn't be involved in running anything.
  • Giving them a right to vote took 142 years. We prevented that right longer than we've granted it.
• Making someone a slave because of the circumstances they were born into was completely okay.
  • For that matter, as much as we want to treat them as if they were ultimately great men, Jefferson had a child with his slave. Which, since he had the right to beat her, sell her or even kill her without fear of the law, cannot be considered other than rape.

That doesn't even touch on preventing the poor from voting.

The blunt fact is that the Constitution of the US was quite useful and has allowed the formation of a successful society with one of the highest standards of living in the world. And it is flawed since it was written by humans who were also flawed.

We should rewrite the Constitution from scratch around the beliefs we actually care about. We can't because we can't agree about anything and we'd have another civil war if we even tried. We can't even get anywhere near the point of being able to amend it. I for one wouldn't trust either party's representatives currently in power to do something nearly as successful for so long.

The only way we could fix it would be to do the debate and drafting without informing the public. When something is done in secret, you can make deals, agree to give up one thing in order to get something you feel is more important. Maybe we'd see the right to a free press succeed because the right to marry someone of the same sex would get dropped. Can you imagine the uproar if that was a debate in the public eye? There would be riots. Ultimately I think that's why treaties are handled in secret; a public debate would cause so much fighting it would do more harm than good.

Durn. Intended to moderate funny; hit the wrong option, posting to undo.

Rarely do I see someone engage with the AC trolls and maintain their position calmly and rationally. Kudos to you sir.

There are a lot of people who think drunk driving is equivalent to drive-texting, but that's illogical since people can set a phone down and ignore it, but they can't undrunk. I think the comparison is bad because it makes drunk driving seem less dangerous than it is and it makes it sound like you don't understand the difference between being in an diminished state and avoiding a distraction.

That said, making it illegal to operate electronic devices while driving a motor vehicle is a pretty reasonable start. It doesn't matter *why* a person is driving unsafely, what matters is that they are. I find the specification of "electronic" a little silly since that makes any car with a battery (all of them in production) technically illegal, but I like the consistency. Do something that distracts your attention from an inherently dangerous activity (driving) and you break the law? Logical. Even if I don't personally like it. (I like lots of things that aren't logically supported by my long term goals; naps, beer, webcomics and cheetos spring to mind.)

"Ban cheetos! They make people fat!" Fine, I'll switch to pringles and vote against you in the election. "Ban naps and beer!" I'll drink wine and sleep in and vote against you in the election. "Ban snacks!" you say? I'll attend your funeral and eulogize "Here lies Silvrmane, at least his argument was consistent."

Fair enough. I hope you do "buy a dash cam, record these knuckleheads and then post shame videos on youtube," but please don't just limit it to the people you know or suspect are driving badly due to texting. Driving unsafely is and should be against the law. We're in complete agreement on that.

Please don't suggest that texting while driving is "just as dangerous as drunk driving" though, as that's an illogical comparison and it weakens your position. I can set a cheeseburger down, I can leave the radio alone, I can let the obnoxious gps navigator be wrong, I can ignore the fighting children in the backseat, I can ignore the ranting of my passenger and I can choose to give my full attention to the road. I can set a phone down. What I cannot do is undrunk myself because traffic demands it.

If you're convinced that texting while driving should always be illegal everywhere and in every situation, then you have a perfectly logical argument. Don't diminish it by conflating it with driving intoxicated. It makes drunk driving seem less dangerous than it is and it makes it sound like you don't understand the difference between being in an diminished state and avoiding a distraction.

Fair enough. I agree the tone of the reply you're commenting on was silly, so allow me to present a counter argument, hopefully slightly more logical.

It's very hard to put a drunken state down because traffic demands it, while it is easy to put a phone down.

I routinely take calls while driving, and as the evidence indicates, I'm typical in my response of driving much more conservatively when that happens. Personally, I'm probably safer when I'm taking a call than I am normally, because I back way off and try to stay well away from other cars when I'm on a call. If I'm going to reply to a text, I'm going to wait until I'm pretty lonely on the road and start paying a lot of attention to the driving when otherwise I'd normally be pretty much on auto-pilot. If there is heavy traffic and I need to use my phone for some reason, I find an exit and pull off. If I'm averaging 5mph and take a call and traffic picks up, I switch to hands free or if it looks like it is resuming normal speeds, say I'll have to call back.

Contrast that with driving intoxicated. If I'm behind the wheel, there is nothing I can stop doing as a result of my analysis of traffic. I can try to drive slower, but cause a whole set of different problems by impeding normal traffic flow. There is no "set it down" or "I'll have to call you back" option.

None of this means that texting or talking on the phone while driving is as safe as not doing those things. I don't think anyone is suggesting that a driver should do things that decrease the safety of the situation. All I am saying is that there are clear differences between driving intoxicated and engaging in texting while driving.

If I *had* to text while driving, my driving would be significantly impaired, just like it is in a study comparing reaction times. The fatality rates of motorists has actually decreased while mobile phone use has increased. (Look it up. I had to before I believed it.) The corollary is obviously NOT an indication that mobile phone use while driving improves safety, there are a lot of other things offsetting the hazard posed by texting while driving, but the idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they used to be is false. The idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they need to be is fair. There is a difference.

I hate it when people confuse improper and immature behavior with the technology they're using. Bittorrent is a very logical and quite useful protocol and it has a bad name because it is associated with the behavior of many people who use it. Outlawing the bittorrent protocol is just as reasonable as outlawing texting while driving. Unsafe driving should be (and is) against the law, just as copyright infringement is against the law. The technology isn't *ever* the problem, the people making bad decisions are the problem.

Seconded. Do NOT just go with defaults. XFS is really good for serving large files like video, but when I last used it regularly, it wasn't very nice after a power loss. That isn't to say it got corrupted like resiserfs or anything, but the self check and correction process was tedious. Ext4 is pretty fast, has the journaling you'd expect and has been tested pretty well now. Btrfs looks cool, and seems to work well, but I don't know that I'm ready to trust it yet. ZFS is nice too, but I don't think it's native yet (is it?) so I wouldn't want to put it on anything I couldn't do without for a few days.

Just FYI for the purposes of considering how useful Waze is:

If you're a dedicated Waze user, don't worry: Google said it will leave the Waze team in Israel, where they will operate independently "for now." (That caveat implies Waze will be brought to America at some point.)

Maps App Will Remain Independent -- For Now

Are you wanting to compare voluntary spending or involuntary spending?

Some miniscule amount of tax money goes to defending sport franchises' rights, where a very significant percentage of the taxes people pay goes toward education.

Now comparing voluntary spending on education to sports related spending would be a very interesting number indeed. People pay for college and private school but only some of them and generally only for a limited period of their life. The spending on sports is much more prevalent and is generally spread over a lifetime.

Spending on health is another issue entirely, but voluntary verses involuntary numbers would indeed be interesting.

I'd very much like to see MSN or CNN or even Fox offer a $2000 bounty and protection from identification as a source to anyone who shows that they've successfully accessed mass information on healthcare.gov. I've never been there, but I'm a little concerned that some of my records might be accessed through the site and I don't think the people working on it are placing a high enough priority on security. I'd rather it was done by someone to provide to a news agency that gets publicly reported than someone who does it for personal profit, even though both are illegal.

Publishing the results of a successful hack of healthcare.gov, or more likely a dozen successful hacks of it, would serve the public good by providing information to the public about the failures of our government, which is pretty much what freedom of the press is for.

I hope Gawker wins for the same reason I am glad that Larry Flint won: Protecting the rights of scum ensures that my rights are safe as well.

Mod parent up.

Not saying I haven't wanted to bypass the legal system myself from time to time, but given the choice, don't you want to live in a world with laws?

Sure, I'd like to live in a world that doesn't need laws, but since ours does need them, then having people forced to follow them is the best we can hope for.

do we have to go thru a court to get a registrar to do something? that isn't reallllly that good of news.

Registrars can voluntarily do something when asked, so no, you don't have to get a court order to get a registrar to do something. They are absolutely supposed to let people move their domains when people want to also, but some of them weren't following the rules. Having them follow the rules is a good thing.

If, however, you want to force a registrar to do something which isn't part of the rules, then yes, you should have to get a court order.

Did you like the scenario where companies don't have to follow the rules you both agreed to? Most of us don't.

"Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it," said Marvin. "And what happened?" pressed Ford. "It committed suicide," said Marvin and stalked off back to the Heart of Gold.

The advantage of RHEL is being able to call somebody when you have a problem that you can't resolve by reading or need to resolve faster than you can on your own. RHEL generally has patches and improvements quicker than CentOS does which is important if you're running a heavily used server exposed to the internet.

I've been quite happy with CentOS and use it in the majority of systems that I set up. However, if I need somebody to call when it crashes and the boss is standing in my doorway demanding to know what I'm doing about a problem, I want to be able to make that all important call to the experts. I have made that call once or twice and I was quite happy in feeling like my company's money was being well spent when I did.