Reading this I'm more glad than ever that I just did my undergraduate degree and then skipped out to industry.

That makes him nuts?

I was clearly insane. Not so much anymore.

It really isn't.

It really was. To the point that it was an insult. A practical accusation that I don't believe in any sort of personal accountability.

All of your arguments for homeowner bailouts have basically been that borrowers deserve to be bailed out because the government failed to protect borrowers from their own ignorance:

No. That's simplistic. It suggests that I think any borrower who has ever gotten a mortgage he couldn't afford deserves to be bailed out. I don't think anything remotely like that.

The circumstances here are different. What's happened here is abnormal.

This isn't going to Vegas and losing big at blackjack. This is heading to Vegas and having your plane hijacked and crashed... is that a 'risk' you accepted? Sure... to a point: "Bad things can happen when you go outside."

Then, you find out that the airline had been excessively lax about security; their x-ray machines and metal detectors didn't work at all, and that they hid all this from the FAA using creative methods, so that on paper the reports appeared to say everything was just hunky dory.

What would you say? Hey, they accepted this risk. If they couldn't determine whether the airline/plane was really meeting standards, they should have hired their own investigators to ensure the plane was actually safe. Its their own fault for getting on that plane. Nevermind that everyone else totally fucked up their end of the deal. But they are immune, because he fucked up.

I don't agree with that. This passenger is an innocent victim. He may have accepted a risk the airline would be hijacked, but he accepeted that risk based on the fact that the airline was doing due diligence to mitigate that risk with oversight by the FAA.

And if the airline is bankrupted by the hijacking, then yes, the government (ie taxpayers, ie your fellow citizens) should step in and put something of a safety net in to help this guy land on his feet. He is a victim. Have some empathy.

Do you begrudge any assistance the government (ie the taxpayers) rendered to new york after 9/11 too? After all everybody impacted should have known this was a risk of living in the big city. And if they didn't know, hey, they should have hired somebody competent to tell them.

This economic crisis is hitting a lot of truly innocent people like a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

It's not like you are cruising along listening to tunes with no Internet connection and you are suddenly prompted to connect to the Internet to verify your account. It doesn't work that way.

I'm going to my grandparents for a few days over the holidays. I don't know if they have an internet connection, or any way to get one. If I had iTunes music I wanted to listen to on their computer, I would not be able to.

I occasionally go to events that involve a guy with a portable sound system and a laptop in the middle of the woods all night long. If I want to get some of my music played, how do I authorize that on his laptop?

Sometimes you just want to listen to some music, and you don't have an authorized player handy. If I have MP3s, I can keep them on a memory stick and play them on any computer, internet connection or not. iTunes, not so much. Is this so hard to understand?

I'm not so sure we are in as much agreement as you think. Basically I'm saying "take it or leave it"

The fact that you are saying "leave it" at all, means that you agree that the DRM is restrictive enough to be unfit for some uses. That's a big improvement over most apple fanatics, who will fail to understand that the DRM is restrictive at all.

Well they get sympathy in mine.

Speeding is illegal but not immoral. Speed limits are intentionally set much lower than needed with safety as the excuse -- however the real reason is to increase government revenue. Ever wonder why whenever you hear about a budget crisis, all of the sudden 5 people you know have recently been pulled over by The Man for speeding?

Is that 11 miles or kilometers? You still should have fought it. The police know that there are bigger fish to fry out there.

You can't just blindly agree with all parts of the law.

..but where do we get all this water?

I assume it would have to be fresh water- I'm not sure what would happen if you started spraying massive amounts of salt water into the atmosphere, other than cars in Arizona and such places would no longer be free from rusting.

Speaking as a freshwater-rich Canadian, I suspect our natural resources may be on the bleeding edge.
Maybe we could start hurling glacier ice upwards. It would be ground up into ice dust first.
Oh, wait. That's Greenland's resource.

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Her own words of hatred and nauseation about being involved in creating an ornament for a tree in the Bush White House

I must be dense today, I just don't see the connection between hating Christmas and Bush and hating unity.

If I were commissioned to do an ornament for the Obama White House, or something similar, it would be done with the utmost respect for the man and the office.

Yes, I believe you would. But how far would you go for the sake of "unity?" If he decides to raise Donald Trump's taxes and lower mine, are you behind that?

You and I wouldn't. SHE would.

She sounds like an idiot.

No, only the former.

Art and Design was my major. I'm not going to argue with a layman about what I was taught in college. Call any art school and ask -- they'll agree with me.