> If I wanted to buy a car from somebody, how would I do it?

Transfer money from your bank account directly to theirs ?

Taking it one step further, we could have a piece of paper that says how much to transfer, signed by the transferer to make it legal. Then there'd even be a paper trail that could be checked if there were any problems!

Not sure what to call something like that, maybe "instant signed bank-to-bank transfer guarantee on paper receipt" (or "isbtobtgopr" for short)?

If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.

and if it really was unintentional, then they would've taken less than "new administration plus year+" to find them.

Maybe it was an accident, and they found them on some unlabeled backup tape. Maybe it was an accident, and this is the first time they thought of using low-level disk tools to undelete. Or maybe it was intentional, and someone doing the grunt work "forgot" to "accidently delete" the backup tapes (in a whistle-blower kind of way). But the intense secrecy ethic of Cheney-Rove run administration (c'mon, it's true) combined with a "nothing could be gained by telling exactly what happened" reasoning now, we'll never really know.

Personally, I think its a great way to deal with the dregs of society; eliminate the ones causing problems, and you'll only be left with people who aren't causing problems.

Who gets to decide which are "the ones causing problems"?

And please remember it was the Global War on Terror, not the war on AQ.

"Global war on terror" was a carefully thought-out euphemism, to get away from talking about AQ and why we can't catch UBL. It was "global" in the same sense that baseball's "World series" has the best teams in the world.

After 9/11 it became US policy that anyone who thought terrorism (defined as random attacks on non-military targets and/or deliberate killing of civilians) was a valid tactic was going to get snuffed.

That "random attacks ..." was the starting point for the definition of terrorism, but was in no way was the final answer. Whether the attackers are friendly/indifferent/enemies to the US, are attacking people friendly/indifferent/enemies to the US, what kind of vested interest we have in the area (mineral resources, etc), what kind of government is in the area, what kind of blowback for calling/not-calling them terrorists, etc, etc, all factor heavily into who we call "terrorists". And that doesn't even cover the last election cycle, when people were calling some candidate or other "terrorist" just because they wanted the other people to win.

The population seems to think the automated systems care more about their privacy .. they just want to sell you stuff, not sell the history off to some PI that your ex hired ..

... unless they can find a profitable market doing that.

This doesn't solve the problem of too many cables, but I've been color-coding all the tv/dvd/ad-naseum cords behind the tv stand. Two pieces of tape on each end (say, "red with green") makes it easier to track all those cables around (especially if you write down where each color-coded cord starts and ends).

Packs with 5 colors of vinyl tape (R, G, B, Y, W) can be found in lots of retail stores, and packs with more colors are pretty easy to find over the web (google for "vinyl tape"). Here's the pack I ordered (I don't have a vested interest in this company, I'm just a customer): http://www.identi-tape.com/harness.htm .

Yet, it's still not illegal to be a jerk. You CAN commit crimes WHILE being a jerk, but being a jerk simply isn't a crime.

Yeah, but being a jerk while commiting a crime will probably get your body slammed to the dirt a lot harder than just doing a crime.

> Because I am a fully functioning sentient human being both capable and deserving of the right to determine for myself what course of action is "smart".

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
-Kay

> at least they [CA republicans] are true fiscal conservatives unlike the Republicans in the US congress.

Don't make the mistake of assuming they are fiscally conservative. Every minority party makes this claim, saying "we wouldn't blow our wad on all this spending!" when there's no action needed and no political risk for talking the talk. If they took majority, maybe they'd reign in spending, or maybe they'd do what every party has done in the past- shift spending from all those wasteful projects they complained about to a whole new set of wasteful projects.

Look at the rhetoric from the US congresscritters before+after the last congressional party switch...

Republicans have scr*w*d up the country but on this issue, they have always been a better alternative.

This is blantantly untrue. The republican view (from McCain all the way to the FCC/FTC) is that free-markets should decide the issue, and there's of course the fringeballs that think net-neutrality is code-speak for "forced to give equal time or equal space on their website to opposing views". Why do you think "the Sonny Bono Act" was named after a republican?

Feinstein's problem isn't democrat-vs-republican, it's being elected (or is that "doing what it takes to be elected"?) in a state with a huge vested interest toward making money from media delivered via the set of tubes.