Yawn.

Nonsense. There are other ways to purify water that do not involve the ingredients to make meth. So your death toll is zero, and your "useful product" is easily replaceable. Typically well thought-out Libertarian thinking.

Bob Wallace is a drug dealer. Do you think he would have earned 100 thousand a year without those "Beavis and Buttheads" buying his product by the case? Surely not. He profited from the sale of harmful drugs to anyone with cash. No, he wasn't out on the street, but he was only a couple of levels removed. I don't think the law was nearly harsh enough on him.

If you don't agree with me, you may not have seen first hand the damage that meth does. Perhaps you have not lost someone you dearly love to meth, as I have.

Clearly, the law as it stands now is a total failure at controlling meth use. I'm open to trying new approaches. But allowing retirees to line their pockets with the suffering of others is not the way forward.

And we here on /. love to say it, again and again, because it makes us all feel so darned superior. How many stories about the folly of premium cables do we need? Was there one single person who reads this site that wasn't already clued in? I get it already. I got it before the numerous stories were posted here - I'm not a blithering idiot! Congrats on that, me! Ouch... I think I just tore a rotator cuff from patting myself on the back.

I now see the error of my ways! Of course we shouldn't give this Winsock fella any money... if he deserved it, the invisible hand of the market would have bestowed it upon him. And if someone steals my bike, well, I suppose that's the market at work as well! All is as it should be in this, the best of all possible worlds... thanks for the delicious Kool-Aid.

What you "imagine" about my opinions is incorrect. Some people do deserve a million dollar paycheck. And even if I happen to feel that a person is not worth that much, that's not the same as saying they should work for free. Not even close. There are many, many numbers between zero and a million.

If you feel under-valued, then demand more pay. Take action. Making angry and incorrect assumptions about me isn't going to change things.

Obviously the value of labor is not simply measured in hours, which is why I also mentioned the feasibility of someone else doing the work. Software engineers are valuable, doubtless, so he certainly deserved to be paid more than someone who had spent the same amount of time making pizza, which also creates value but is something that far more people are able to do.

A dollar a person is low? Thinking like that is why Bill Gates is so rich.

But why does he deserve millions of dollars? How many hours did he spend working on this software? I suspect not enough to justify a million dollar paycheck. If he hadn't written it, would someone else? Surely. So how big of a payday does he deserve? Obviously, there are a lot of people in this world who contribute little and get millions anyhow, so I would much rather see this guy be rich than some brainless beauty or Wall Street crook. But the best of all possible worlds would be one where people are paid a fair amount for a day's work.

once you consider the fact that it must have been pretty lucrative to have "author of Winsock" on his resume. Not all of the financial rewards of creating something are direct, and not all are financial.

You'll be dead, after all. We are all food for worms. Get over it.

Wow... you have right and left TVs? Nice! What do you use them for? I like to play video games and watch tv at the same time, but I just have a tv connected to htpc, and then a pc and xbox on my coffee table. That's great for me, but the limit of my rig is that I can't play video games with friends and watch tv at the same time (unless the visitor sits on my lap, and I don't rule that out). So is that what you do, or something far more sinister? Please, do tell.

>>Please give me my distinct audio and video cables back, I hate having a bottleneck.

I don't know how your video card works, but mine gives me the option to turn off the audio over hdmi feature. The audio goes through my soundcard if I want... same as it always did. It's just that now I have the *option* of using one cable.

I do agree with you about the weight distribution... it seems like the jack on my monitor bears all the weight of the cable, and having had usb ports go bad on me, I don't want that happening to my new monitor, rendering it less useful, since it only has an hdmi and vga input. It seems like an hdmi cable with a 90 degree turn right at the end would help a lot, but I haven't bothered to look for one yet.

Hey, there are legitimate medicinal uses for dihydrogen monoxide! Plus, it just plain feels good when you drink some before Pink Floyd show! Why shouldn't I have the right to crack open a frosty cold bottle of DHMO after a hard days work? Don't judge me, you insensitive clod!

I'm called on to remove malware frequently (at least once a week), and it's been my experience that ClamWin misses more malware than it catches. Plus, if your flash drive is write-protected, then how can you update to the latest definitions? If you aren't using the latest definitions, again, you're probably going to leave some malware behind. If you're able to update the flash drives frequently, then that second one is not an issue.

VB6? That's nothin! My company's main product is written in VB2. I am not joking! Many of our customers just upgraded to XP, from the Windows 98 machine that had served them well for over 10 years. Windows 7? What does that do for me again?

Agreed. Were things so much better in the days of William Randolph Hearst? Hardly! The whole "kids these days" thing is just tiresome.

What these J-school types never seem to mention is that there is far more real news out there now than ever before, due to the amateurs. For any major news story, there are hundreds and hundreds of photos online for you to puruse, taken by unpaid de facto "journalists", and page after page of blogerific commentary. Who is credible and who is a partisan windbag remains, as ever, for the reader to decide.