'establishment' or 'established firm' might be better.

Wealth doesn't correlate strongly with intellect. If anything, it might be slightly negative. Besides, if you really earned that much, you would've probably never heard of slashdot in the first place. You'd be off doing more interesting things.

Exactly.

My 'view', is that he was using fallacious reasoning in order to preach.

I could see how the autodownload might put someone out of serious money and/or waste precious bandwidth. Few people have 'unlimited' plans. By all means, offer the music as a free optional download in the itunes store, where, if purchased (for $0), becomes a part of the user's library, and then autodownloads if the user has that turned on. Don't just force the download.

How would you like it if your phone manufacturer or carrier started 'autodownloading' crap you didn't necessarily ask for? Strip the hype and drama away, and there is still a legit complaint here.

Oh right, this is an apple product. You all must be 'stylish' hipster douchebags who think you're smart.

So anyone with a problem not as bad as someone starving in a 3rd world country has no right to complain or discuss it, ever?

Logic is sorely lacking around here. It's called context. If you want to discuss 3rd world problems, there are plenty of forums to do that in. This is a technology site. You are obviously in the wrong place. Take your social justice somewhere else.

but but that would require people to take responsibility. How dare you suggest they shouldn't be coddled and denied their pity parties!

Well if they know how to drive then they wouldn't need the laws in the first place. Either way the laws are useless.

No. The phone is an interactive distraction which is not the same as a radio etc. If you bothered to read the rest of my post, you would've noticed that I addressed the social problem. I'm sure your bitch-ass has a problem with that, too because it doesn't involve rainbows, ponies and pity parties.

Fines won't stop this just like they don't stop speeding. Fines are just tax revenue for the state. The answer is to remove the incentive to use the damn phone while driving. Maybe just rewrite the software running the towers to pick up relative motion of a node exceeding a certain speed (either from the phone's gps or from triangulation), it disables the interface, or at least disallows certain traffic (like sms).

Perhaps a better solution to idiocy is to let darwin take his course in society a bit more instead of pushing to protect everyone from themselves. Make car insurance optional and only protect those whom the policies list. Remove any other legal liabilities to anyone else and reset the propaganda machine to inform people in blunt language they are NOT safe and that no one gives a shit about their long term survival except themselves. Lets see how quickly EVERYONE realizes their sorry asses depend on their attentive driving and not on the piece of cardboard in the glove box or anything else. Around here, most of the inattentive driving results in 30mph in-a-45 double line weavers. A good honk of the horn 'resets' them, however, some actually go back to it after a few minutes.

A vote for democrats and/or republicans, whose parties increase the state's reach for ideological reasons and to corner the market, is a vote for more of the police state mentality, taxation, and deficit spending required to enforce it all. Don't let the left divide with stupid social justice and single issue shit, because a free country has liberty and justice FOR ALL, not state forced 'privilege' for specific castes at the expense of others (labeled as 'hate groups'), and choosing who 'wins' and who 'loses' in life based on attributes that weren't supposed to matter. Don't let the neo-right tell you that corporates care about steady jobs or lower taxes for the working class either. Ironically, those "he's worse than me" ads are perfect at showing that neither party has an objective or functional solution for what ails the country. Fuck them. The gubernatorial elections are coming up for many states. For those of you advocating 'working within system' style change, here's an opportunity. If you can, vote against both and send a message.

Yeah... hard hitting for 1989 maybe, when bart saying "eat my shorts" was considered crazily rebellious. By the mid 90s, Simpsons political and social content became extremely bland, and the jokes, unfunny. Staying power means having mass appeal, and that means being interesting enough to uninteresting minds, while being bland enough not to offend any of them to the point where there's serious backlash. Shit that that is dull as hell.

God forbid. When I was a kid, we had water guns, pellet guns (without that lame orange plastic shit), and we would get rowdy and roughhouse. By the standards of the time, I was pretty tame, but, by today's, I would be one of those 8yos labeled terrorists for bringing a fork to school or modeling the school building in some FPS. Today's parents are raising their kids kids to be the tame, delicate, and dependent special little snowflakes that today's society wants them to be. Yuck. A little blood splatter in their video games isn't going to turn them into murderers. That shit's been debunked thoroughly since the jack thompson and joe leiberman days.

At least we agree on nerf arena.

This is pure fantasy.

To really cut emissions we need emissionless power generation. The closest thing we get to that in reasonable power density is nuclear.