I disagree. International politics is analogous to a game of poker. No one wants to give away all information to the others. Now, what WikiLeaks is essentially doing, is they are publicizing not only some of the "cards" that the US holds, but also what they know about the others' "cards".

I'm all for openness and honesty, but it's not just the American voters who are getting the info. It's available to everyone now.

No you don't. That's just bad writing. The less you explain, the better.

A lot of sci-fi suffers from over-explaining things with awful, cringe-worthy, pseudo-scientific crap. It adds nothing to the story. "Midichlorians" is the obvious example, but even explanations somewhat based on real science are often completely unnecessary and just seem self-important.

"I've invented a time-machine" says all that is needed to move the story forward. In fact, I always thought that the whole flux capacitor/88 miles per hour schtick was there just to make fun of all the self-important sci-fi.

That's a stupid argument because the solution is obvious: use wind, hydro, solar or nuclear energy to charge the vehicle.

For gasoline engines, no clean solution exists at all.

Windows has shipped with an adequate firewall for that since XP SP3. If you aren't keeping your Windows system up to date, you are pretty much s-o-l anyways.

Or better yet, disable it by default. A firewall in most home environments does exactly nothing. It's snake oil. It's blocking ports where there aren't any services running anyway. The user is still able to open any email attachment or surf any web page with her IE6...

In fact, in most corporate environments a firewall doesn't do much, either. Funny how sysadmins agonize over which IPs can ssh to an up-to-date Linux box, but then they have VPN, a bunch of IIS, Exchange and a whole host of other stuff open to the whole wide world. I just recently made some development work for a company which required me to open a VPN connection before I could ssh into their Linux/PostgreSQL/Apache server. The sysadmin didn't believe me when I told him that it's less secure that way. He saw the break-in attempts in the sshd log so he didn't want the port open...

Are you trying to say that the people who make the old-hands fold their chips away are less skilled than the them? The game is played differently today than it was in the 70s, and now it's all about balancing bluffs with thin value, weighting the opponents' hand ranges and optimizing bet sizes. The old school players you are talking about play a very narrow range of hands, their betting patterns are robotic and they only take the top of their range to showdown. All this makes it very easy to play against them, if you have done your homework.

The great majority of people don't spend enough time learning the math and thinking about the game, which is what makes the game beatable.

There is a difference from the copyright owner's viewpoint. He's getting paid by the broadcasters.

Can you really not see a difference between spending an hour to two hours to make a single copy with generation loss and sharing a 1:1 digital copy to 100 million people with practically no time spent at all?

Having actually lived in the Middle East, I can testify otherwise. The great majority of muslims are ordinary men, wives and kids. I was astonished that the difference was so small between here and there. They have the exact same goals, dreams and everyday problems as us. They seek to educate themselves, move forward in their careers, find love, get married, get kids, etc... No difference! I certainly wouldn't call them savages nor uncivilized.

A lot of the things that muslims get criticized about are in fact not the severe problems they are made out to be. As an example, even though there are areas in the muslim world where women are badly oppressed, it certainly isn't so in general. There are problems, obviously, but the median is nowhere near the worst examples that are most often heard. In fact, there are several active feminist groups in the Islamic countries.

I feel the only fault you can place on muslims in general is that they aren't doing enough to end the violence of the fundamentalists.

What you are suggesting is essentially the same as if someone were accused of a crime, he should not be heard. Innocent until proven guilty, anyone? Why not listen to what Mann has to say and then decide?

It really seems to me that all that the denialists have one ten-year old email which uses the word "trick" and a handful of scientists, most of whom have proven links to oil, gas and coal industry. On the other side, there is almost 200 years' worth of science, and I believe even at this very moment over 10000 scientists who are basically saying "the evidence is clear, there is really not much debate left". I'd love to be wrong, but I'm afraid I'm not.

Not really the same thing. In the Bookabooka scenario it's always the exact same product, not an alternative.

A better car analogy would be buying a car at a big discount due to an agreement which forbids its rental, and then renting it anyway.

Beging profitable isn't really required to be commercial. If they are selling ad space, they are doing business regardless of where the money is going.

You could say that about anything! Try starting a library of child pornography and see if the justice system thinks you are a neutral carrier of information...

There are huge differences between the Google and TPB, and it's unbelievable how people keep spouting "They are essentially the same" when the only similarity is they both store information about other information! People who think what kind of information it is (info on web pages vs torrents to pirated software etc), how it's gathered (spider vs uploading), how it's intended to be used (duh), how it's displayed, the ratio of legal to illegal content or use etc don't matter are fooling themselves. It's being überpedantic about one small detail while ignoring the blatantly obvious.

Besides, the only reason why there are links to links to illegal torrents in Google is beacuse it indexes sites such as TPB. If the torrent sites were to be taken offline, the problem with Google would get fixed, too.