Corporations as persons is a very narrow legal standing that simplifies some transactions that corporations are involved in. Are you really trying to argue that anything that pays taxes should get a vote? Because the USA has an estate tax, that is levied on the assets of a dead person. Who gets the vote in that situation, the dead guy, or the actual assets themselves? There is a tax on cigarettes and gasoline, how on earth will we get cigarettes go hold a pen so they can check the box?

At the end of all the figuring, it is an individual who is paying the tax, either the consumer, the beneficiaries of the estate, or the shareholders of the corporation. and these people are represented, as they have been able to vote.

By allowing corporations to have a say in politics, you are actually giving individual shareholders additional say in politics. They get their same original one vote, but now they get an additional vote, and additional influence through the corporation.

We are rightly disgusted when an individual tries to bride a public figure. But we are fine with that individual forming a corporation, and allowing the corporation to do the bribing?

Where did it all go so wrong?

Well, waiting until the rights you have left are similar to the rights they have in china before you complain might not be the best strategy.

I am always amused by the sentiment that Americans still live in the land of the free, because the government does not abuse you as badly as they do in china. Eventually, they will be as bad, and people will still say "yeah, but we are doing it for a good reason... like safety or liberty or protection of democracy"

I too expect armed insurrection in the USA in my lifetime.

Because people wont press for change until armed insurrection is the only solution left available to them.

Sounds like the gateway drug theory, and it has already been proven that the 'gateway' drug is actually tobacco/nicotine. http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=gateway+drug+nicotine

By the same criteria, breathing and eating food is also 'associated with addiction'.

Learn to deal with life without nicotine, to coin a phrase.

University of Alberta aurora watch service:

http://corona-gw.phys.ualberta.ca/AuroraWatch/

You ask the 98 doctors:
"What is the treatment for this illness, what are the side effects, and is the treatment worse than the disease?"
"If I elect to NOT undergo treatment, how will this affect my enjoyment of my life?"
"Is the treatment expensive, and if I can't afford the treatment, what are my options?"

In medical science, you would get a wealth of information about the treatment, likely results, side effects, effects of not treating it, advanced cases, alternative cures, and the 98 doctors would pretty much all agree, referring to the existing case studies and documentation.

In climate science, the 98 doctors would all wring their hands and say that they have never had to treat this before, they have no idea about the efficacy of the proposed treatment, no idea if the treatment would actually make a difference, and no way to manage the treatment to adjust it if it turns out to be flawed. They also will not agree on what the end result of the disease is, and when it will become critical. Some significant precentage will tell you that its already too late. They will all agree that we have to do something, because that has to be better than doing nothing.

Personally, I believe that we have the disease that the 98 doctors have said we have, and that no treatment option given is better than just living with the disease, and many options proposed are far worse. This disease won't kill us, but in 300 years, it will make the average persons life very different. But I also suspect that the average persons life will be very different in 300 years, with or without treatment.

if the judge were to set precedent by deciding that RIAA was right, but that statutory damages should be in the order of 1 penny per infraction, or 0.1 cent, or 0.01 cents per. It would probably still fulfill their goal of bankrupting limewire, and make future lawsuits for infringement far more interesting....

Well, they did get some product placement, It was a DEC rainbow on Janine's desk in Ghostbusters http://www.starringthecomputer.com/feature.php?f=53

Harumph. I've essentially deprived myself of it from puberty to the time I could afford to raise children, and from the time I had the last child I wanted to now.

No great yearning or obsession. The thought of contraceptive failure and an unwanted child have a big chilling effect.

See, I never bought into the bullshit that its necessary for my survival or well-being. And, guess what? It isn't!

Another kid would sure be a damper, though. And, with me being 48, not fair to the kid.

Sex keeps people in abusive relationships, leads to unwanted children, makes one initially be in a "lovestruck fog" with someone new. No, thank you.

Surely a rational person can censor their impulses, no? That's what distinguishes us. There are plenty of people I think should be killed (liberals, mostly, but I digress). I don't go around killing them. A new car would be nice, and I could steal one, but I don't. Rich food tastes good, but a rational person does not overindulge. Sex might feel good, but it requires all these less than perfect mechanisms to avoid its natural consequences.

Crap, few things disgust me more than people living in inner-city squalor who can not support the families they already have, and continuing to breed, producing more children in misery. They lack self-control and do not strike me as human in the rational sense.

My opinions might be different if contracts to abort were legally enforceable, in the event of contraceptive failure, but they aren't.

As for "not normal", I think 99% of the population are little more than sheeple driven by what's pleasant in "the now", rather than using their brains to consider consequences.

The best ways to understand my views is to look at them from the perspective of asceticism: voluntary self-deprivation of comforts to build strength of will and remove the shackles of attraction to the unhealthy. Different ascetics deprive themselves of different things. Crap, if I did not like good food, comfortable surroundings, and technology, I'd likely be a Buddhist monk, though I am actually agnostic.

Only if you think correlation suggests causation.

They took a group of people who spend a lot of time surfing the internet. They took a control group who didn’t. The group who spent a lot of time surfing the internet was also more likely to show signs of depression. They showed correlation. You are the one who assumed it was a causative relationship.

There was a paper some years ago about building the file system in such a manner that smaller files were placed on an SSD ( 1 MB) and large files were placed on a harddisk. At that time, SSDs were a lot smaller than today though.

Generally, it can make sense to discriminate your files because they don't all have the same space and access characteristics. Maybe 100 files is taking up 90% of the space compared to the other 9900 files. Maybe it's similar for the access pattern.

Still, for the idea to fly, you need to a robust algorithm and it needs to be clever about the strengths of the hardware. For instance, SSDs aren't so hot at random writes, sadly. Less than 0.1 msec write time would be neat for an ACID database.

I did some quick googling to be sure, but it's not even SecuROM. Just a plain ol' DVD check.

$72? Where are you getting that figure from? Are you outside the US and have ugly exchange rates or something?

Also, there is the standard edition that is $10 cheaper:
http://www.impulsedriven.com/masseffect2

Ah yes, because watching graphics through a couple Mb/s video stream is just like the real thing.

Yeah, and I use that (or similar) in all my PHP stuff. It's still a bit of a hack. Not as bad as most, but something that really should be just in the language.

They need to double the price, and market it to triathletes. We seem to love having all kinds of data, and a powertap hub is like crack. Once you start getting wattage, you are lost to the world. Imagine what this would do....

Actually, step one is they have to agree it's really a bug. Could be somebody's warped idea of a feature, you know.