Now that I'm in law school, it's clear that my fellow students value intelligence (including technical knowledge) right along with social prowess and appearance.

I won't deny that social skills and appearance are very important. But maybe I'm old fashioned; growing up when the Internet didn't have a facebook. Where we could only judge a person by what they said and how they said it. It the end it shouldn't matter what you look like or your amount of friends. If you say something... something that is True; that is what is most important.

Yeah god forbid.

Look I agree that texting is not making anyone less intelligent but texting is a watered down form of social interaction. A friend on facebook most of the time is not a real friend. The real threat is creating social interaction without the social connection. Where we reduce people to objects that we interact with rather than someone who lives and breathes.

Maybe the government should break out the antitrust laws as well, so when companies do decide to increase prices consumers will have
cheaper alternatives.

Look if you thought Obama was all things to all people you were naive. If you thought sudden dramatic change was possible you were ignorant of US history.

Change can and does happen in the US but it takes a long time. This is somewhat by design as our founding fathers wanted checks and balances which acts as a hindrance to change.

Some examples:

Slavery wasn't made unconstitutional until the ratification of the 13th amendment in 1865. This overturned the Dred Scott case which decided slavery was constitutional in 1857.

Jim Crow wasn't effectively made illegal until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Women were not given the right to vote until 1920 with the ratification of the 19th amendment. This is some 70+ years after the birth of the modern movement for women suffrage in the US at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.

Injustices perpetrated by the US Government against its people can be overturned. But it takes time, blood and persistence. Thinking one man could change it and all you had to do is vote is ignorance and indifference to the sacrifices made by previous generations to defend their rights.

First off Obama wasn't talking about unilateral nuclear disarmament. He was talking about a slow gradual reduction in the world stock pile of nuclear weapons. Also he said it was a long term goal something the might be possible after his lifetime.

Second the recent provocation by NKorea proves that nuclear weapons no longer act as a sufficient deterrent. Actually NKorea is using nuclear proliferation as a market to fund its regime.

Third nuclear weapons are quickly becoming obsolete. Biological weapons which can eliminate the population of a nation without destroying its infrastructure are much more a threat in the near future. The only threat that nuclear weapons currently present is that of nuclear proliferation which increases the probability of nuclear accidents and a terrorist organization obtaining a nuclear weapon. Reducing nuclear weapons over time will decrease the probability of these events occurring.

the graphics are just lol!

I guess you never played Dwarf Fortress... I wish DF's graphics were anywhere close to Wesnoth. (Doesn't stop me from playing it though.)

yet it's going to this political bullshit (like the "traffic monitoring" provisions snuck into the stimulus bill here in the States).

Just to clarify the filtering provisions were left out of the bill.

Well I posted an article in rebuttal to your article. Then I attempted to post the actual part of the bill which we were debating (instead of a pdf file 1000+ pages long). However the current library of congress website does not save searches for an extended period of time.

Anyway..

1. goto http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.+1:
2. click #7
3. search or scroll to TITLE XIII--HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

I'll raise you one biased article for another. Then here's the actual relevant part of the bill so people can read it themselves.

Actually it looks like an up-to-date version of Xegl using DRI2.