I see you've fallen for the PR-spin version. The administration loves making it SEEM like they're reformers when they really did very little. What Holder actually did was limit the ability of state and local governments to seize assets under federal law, then later have a federal agency 'adopt' the seizure and take a percent cut under the 'equitable sharing' program. This is bypassed by simply categorizing something as a joint investigation and sticking some feds name on the papers. As if that wasn't a hole big enough to drive a truck through, there's also an exemption where the seizure 'protects public safety' where the feds may still adopt it (this was in the damn headline of the announcement on justice.gov)
The bigger deal is that this is ultimately trivial, as it does nothing to stop seizures under state law. The yet even bigger than that deal is that STILL not a god damn thing has been done about the fact that seizures still require no criminal activity; they can (and do) seize property without ever even filing charges against the owner, who must now go to court and PROVE HE'S INNOCENT to get it back. Nor does it address highway patrols that seize any large amount of cash they find. That's right, when police find you with a lot of money, they'll take it and you'll have to pay for a lawyer to go to court and prove it's NOT drug money. Nothing in Holder's new policy even touches on any of this.
Even with criminal activity... your kid got caught selling a little pot? The car you bought for him and your house are now subject to seizure under state law, and the new federal policy won't help you there either.

Somebody's never heard of a Deflector Shield.

What's the time dilation like at warp? I doubt we'll be worrying about speeds slower than light if we're ever traveling between stars (and the presumption that our knowledge of physics, with our not-even-500-years-of-electric lights infant knowledge, is absolutely correct and 50,000 or 200,000 years from now we won't have found a solution, is laughable on its face).

[citation needed]

I don't know what universe you live in, but unless you're talking about laptops/mobile, very few mass-market systems are being shipped with only an SSD. SSDs won't take over for many many years, unless there's a big change in how fast they catch up on price per GB. Mass market systems will continue to ship with one drive, and that drive will be a spinner for years to come. People into computers will certainly continue to ADD an SSD, but we're a small minority.

Poor people who can't afford an SSD? Being mostly employed, middle class people here, or talking about business instead of home use, you guys still seem to forget that SSDs are still the Lexus' of the HD world (with PCIx ssds being the ferraris).
I can barely meet my storage needs, so on the rare occasion I have $100-200 to spend on drives (maybe once per year), I have to add as much space as I can. Already have 10 different drives between my tower and a 4-bay NAS I got lucky and found in the trash, 250GBx2, 500GBx4, 750GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB because I can't afford to just buy 2-3 huge drives; and they're all almost full. Next time I can scrape together the money, I'd sure love an SSD, but at $150 I can't choose 250GB over 3-4TB no matter how sweet it would be, because I don't want to delete anything to make room for new data.
When people start throwing out their old SSDs like their old 500GB hard drives that I keep getting, then I might be able to add one. The 6TB and 8TB drives are great news because they might finally drive down the price of a 4TB drive, which has only dropped like $10 in a year for the cheapest model on Newegg, while 2-3TB drives dropped significantly more (this was right before xmas; they just dropped more... but still, $100 for 3TB, $140 for 4TB). Even for most regular people, the size of SSDs is just too tiny to justify the expense when they have significant data requirements.

And rotational disks days may be numbered, but it's a fairly large number. SSDs are not even remotely price competitive when you have multi-TB storage needs. A few businesses might feel the speed makes it worth while, but for the vast majority of use cases rotational disks are fast enough for, we're looking at 10+ years, IF SSDs keep dropping continuously, which isn't always the case, before SSDs can compare price-per-GB (rotational disks are dropping too).

Not if you had enough politicians bought and paid for like any respectable industry group, like the [MP,RI]AA.

Well how nice for you. Meanwhile the 99% of people that don't have connections or large sums of money for invites or file lockers have to rely on more public means. I'd love to get on one of the HD tv/movie private sites, but the ones that are good are impossible to access without knowing someone or paying through the nose.
And I'm not quite sure what information TPB lacked. I can't ever recall downloading a mislabeled torrent, and the descriptions always covered source, quality, contents, file names/sizes, and most even have detailed encoding information or scene readmes for software.

It's worse than that; Rightscorp doesn't even verify that your computer is actually capable of sending the file. The one and only notice I ever received was on a torrent that I uploaded 0 bytes on since it was all seeders when I connected, dl'd, and disconnected 5 minutes later. They don't even download a single byte of the file, let alone enough to verify it is in fact their content. I can't say if they connected but didn't download and used that as "verification"; but I strongly suspect the connection was/would have been refused entirely since I run up to date blacklisting. And since the notice specifically claimed I was 'sharing' it I doubt they hosted the material, let me download it from, and want to claim that as infringement.
So my IP was listed in a swarm for 5 minutes and didn't upload a single byte of their content, and my ISP took the time and money to respond their bs and pay to send me a physical letter about it. What I did to that notice is not just not appropriate to talk about here... /b/ would sure appreciate it though.

That's because THEY ARE. Unless you're a mid to upper class white person who's been the victim of a violent crime, you have exactly zero to gain from interacting with the police, and tons to lose since to them, you're the enemy. And if they're the ones approaching you? No one but ultra-sheltered white people who've never had a run in the police before are stupid enough to not fear a situation like that, and they'll only make that mistake once. That's who I was... I thought because I wasn't breaking the law it would be ok to talk to them. Worst fuckup of my life.

Yes because we know everything now and anything that hasn't been discovered or disagrees with our current understanding simply will not ever exist. We haven't even had electricity for half a millennium... who are we to presume that our understanding and ability is absolute and won't change in the next 10,000 years or 100,000 years. Of course we wouldn't ever see it barring something extraordinary, but to say our primitive baby civilization has all the answers.. how sad it must be to think like that.

If you put the search term in quotes google won't make substitutions.

If the only evidence that he knew the use was a guy who was caught dealing and told 'spend 20 years in prison, or say this guy knew and get probation'; sounds like a miscarriage of justice to me. And since anyone not willing to do exactly what the judge instructs is excluded from a jury, combined with the already biased pool of jurors, I find your faith in juries quite naive.

Unfortunate? MORE people like you, who commit actual crimes with actual victims, who get away with it because of power, difficulty to prove, and great lawyers, need to be in prison. Do you have any idea how many people who committed crimes with NO victim are serving sentences vastly longer than 5 years? And people who are factually innocent whose massively overworked public defender talked them into a plea? THAT is unfortunate. And this is coming from a fellow high-IQ privileged white male who has served time, albeit 1 year for being randomly searched and having the wrong 0.01g of an arbitrarily prohibited chemical.

VB6 is a very useful and underrated tool. Not only is it good for programs like that, there's countless other things it's useful for. But the big draw is despite its age, it can take advantage of modern graphical styles, and many other goodies introduced in Vista and 7. Think you need a modern language to put forward and back buttons on the taskbar preview picture? Can be done on VB6. Think you can't use the latest file operation dialogs since SHFileOperation isn't able to? That was true until last week when I brought IFileOperation support to VB6. Using COM like that, class modules, subclassing/hooking/callback support, inline assembly support... it's still extraordinarily useful, and a modernized VB6 app looks identical to any other modern app. It's a shame MS replaced it with a "VB.NET" that has almost no relation and is just like C#.

At some point, it's not "silencing a dissenting view", it's refusing to waste time and lend credibility to idiots. That homeless guy screaming on the corner has some theories about god and the government too, maybe he should also not be silenced and have universities let him use their facilities to promote his agenda? These are not people who respond to facts, logic, and argument. Pretending every factually wrong, impervious to evidence and reason nutjob theory out there is just a "dissenting view" that's worthy of being seriously discussed in an academic forum isn't even just a waste of time, it's actually harmful to give that status. There's plenty of venues where they're free to speak their message, the academic community should not be obligated to provide another.

Hey, it could be worse right? It's not like they'll forcibly rape you in the ass without evidence.

Oh, wait.

Thinking of cops as anything but thugs that view everyone else as the enemy, who they can lie to, kidnap, steal from, and beat/tase/mace with total impunity, is naivete now reserved only for the people who have not yet been unfortunate enough to catch a cops eye (which doesn't require doing anything illegal). These people think that not all cops are bad simply because they see them not abusing someone, and the fact that many targets of the police are criminals who need to be removed from society. That doesn't excuse the fact that any cop who doesn't, at least sometimes, violate peoples rights (the friendly cop who helped you out probably also civilly forfeited his department a new margarita machine/zamboni/trip to disney-all real, btw), is at a minimum covering for his buddies that do. The entire system is rotten to the core: there are no good cops, only cops that are less pure evil and closer to how cops should act (that is, they occasionally arrest someone who deserves it without violating their rights).