"I'm sorry, but what in the hell did you expect??"

That the "dweeb" at the phone store would (gasp!) behave professionally and not invade a customer's privacy?

The copyright holders are alleging that Pirate Bay, isoHunt, etc., are engaging in illegal activities, right? Then why not get the proper authorities involved to take down the people behind sites like Pirate Bay, especially since that's already worked against Megaupload? Even if this wasn't completely successful, it would make sites like Pirate Bay less of a presence on the Internet and thus show up less prominently on search engines. Why have Google and Bing be the police when you can just let the police be the police?

No, my brain went to about the same place as yours. I was a bit surprised that no one joked about it sooner.

"Once in October 2008 the interrogators stripped me while I was blindfolded and threatened to rape me with a bottle of water."

So the Iranian government is worried about porn, but it's okay for its interrogators to threaten sexual assault? How does this make any sense?

Oh, sure, because Mercola is such a reliable source. Oh wait ...

CMYK is pretty important to people that actually send jobs to printers for flyers, brochures, marketing materials, etc.

True, but if you are doing that, then you are probably, well, making money from Photoshop, like the previous poster said.

There seems to be this strange mindset with the Gimp developer community that RGB is the only game in town

It's not so much that as it is that there are issues with licensing and patents, especially regarding Pantone.

Actually, it isn't America. It's the EU.

I don't remember Metacity being buggy. What I do remember was that with Sawfish, the seams between it and the rest of GNOME still showed. It had its own control center, for example. On the other hand, with Metacity as the default window manager, a user wouldn't even need to know that there was this application called Metacity that provided window titlebars, etc. Configuring Metacity--what little there was--was done through dialogs that just looked like another piece of GNOME. In short, Metacity's integration with GNOME was far more seamless, and for users who didn't want to dick around with configuration and didn't even know that a focus model other than "Click to Focus" even existed, Metacity was perfectly adequate.

"Right-wing Christians seem to be more into Old Testament severity."

But the Old Testament, while often barbaric, had at least as much of an emphasis on helping the poor as the New Testament.

"And for those whom it is a problem, that's the way their life is. They can't watch Netflix, they can't buy TV shows from iTunes or watch Hulu, or buy games on Steam. Even YouTube is a pain."

That's not true. My connection is fast enough that I can handle Netflix streaming, YouTube, and Hulu just fine, but a 4 GB download still takes a few hours.

"I use emacs to write code, and vi to edit config files."

Same here. There's are some obvious reasons why a Unix admin would prefer Vi to Emacs: it's nearly always standard equipment on a Unix box, even if Emacs is not, and it's faster when used in a remote login session. Indeed, for administration, the issue of Vi versus Vim is irrelevant, since one's going to use whatever stock Vi is on the machine, and one doesn't necessarily have control over whether that Vi is really Nvi, Vim, or whatnot.

The code snippet shown in the ZDNET article, the code that Google supposedly ripped off, is GPL.

Ok, the phone can receive text messages, and I think it can send them out as well, but my phone is basically as smart as it needs to be. It handles phone calls, and that's all I really need it to do. It doesn't have a camera, which turns out to be an advantage since I can take it to places where cameras are not allowed. My phone is fairly, simple, straightforward, and gets the job done.

I remember when I was looking into matrix classes for Java and finding that addition, multiplication, etc. were done by things like "A.plus(B.times(C))" rather than the more readable "A + B*C", because Java lacks operator overloading. In an attempt to simplify Java, its designers made a decision that ended up making certain code needlessly harder to maintain.