You're thinking of the Articles of Confederacy, which preceded the Constitution. Study your history.

What? No they aren't. This isn't telephone service—it's internet service. There are no regulations requiring them to provide service out in the boondocks. Indeed, Verizon and AT&T received massive government subsidies to expand broadband service to rural customers, and then just decided not to do it and kept the money.

When I lived in rural southeastern Arizona, I got my DSL service from Valley Telecom, a local customer-owned cooperative that provides internet service, telephone and cellular to the poorly served areas of that rather sparsely populated corner of the state. I had 1.5mbps DSL in 2006 10 miles up a dirt road outside of Bowie, Arizona, pop. 300, for a very reasonable price, and VTC was doing just fine financially. It was a bit cheaper than my current service from Comcast, but that's precisely because Comcast only serves the areas where it can make a profit.

Meanwhile, back in Verizon territory, my mom, who is on the selectboard of her town (pop. 1200, small but much more dense than Bowie) could not get any kind of broadband in 2006, and the town wound up having to set up their own municipal broadband wireless service using Motorola Canopy radios and a microwave link to Mt. Tom because that's the only way they could avoid a massive drop in property values due to the lack of this essential service in the town, despite the fact that Verizon had been receiving money to pay for installing broadband to towns just like hers for the previous decade.

So maybe some shill from a cable company told you all about how supporting rural customers is why their service is so expensive, but that's a complete load of bullshit. Local and state governments don't currently have authority to impose regulations of this type on ISPs.

ISTM they are allowing others to be unethical, and profiting from that. I guess you could call that unethical as well, but it's a different form of unethical. Until we have a business model for open source software that works repeatably, I have trouble finding a problem with this. (And yes, I've been burned selling service on open source software in the past.)

Yup, I have the same problem. I think it's because you don't see the cover of the book every time you pick it up. This would be a really easy UI fix.

That wouldn't explain the different results among kindle folks versus paper folks, though.

I suspect that the lack of physical pages does make a difference in terms of knowing where you are in a book. I certainly know that I can often open a physical book to the location of something I remember and come really close, particularly if it's a book I'm studying, but even for novels.

But knowing exactly where you are in a book does not necessarily affect your comprehension of the book. I don't see any reason why it should. So yes, the lack of positional memory may make a difference in some test methodologies, but it doesn't mean people get less out of reading Kindle books. I mean, books on tape give you a completely different experience of the book than a paper book too; in some ways you probably get more, and in some ways less. This is the same sort of thing, I think.

I'm pretty sure they haven't accepted any contributions that didn't include a transfer of copyright. This is standard practice in a lot of open source projects, including traditional GNU projects like gcc and emacs.

That's correct. It's one of the more obvious and beneficial uses of GPLv3: anybody who wants to do open source gets to use it for free, people who want to use closed source have to pay, and the company that supports the software gets paid to make it better. Big win for everybody. The only downside to this model is that it requires Digia to hold the copyright, which makes accepting outside submissions difficult.

Interestingly enough, while 99.9% of the world isn't in jail, quite a few of them are here in the U.S., many for "crimes" that nearly all Americans think aren't crimes. It's a sad irony that crimes that could actually cost people their lives aren't prosecuted, while "crimes" that have no victim fill our jails with "criminals."

Asking fellow geeks what chair they sit in sounds pretty on-topic to me.

I have a chair that my wife refers to as the Wall-E chair. I use it with a reading table to hold my laptop, a bluetooth keyboard, and a trackball that sits on the arm of the chair. Works a treat. The chair is something like this: http://www.la-z-boy.com/Produc...

It's ugly, the construction is pathetically bad, I've had to screw it back together with drywall screws, but it is quite comfortable, and doesn't look _completely_ awful. I'm sure you could come up with something nicer, though.

No, I mean that by any rational standard, deliberately creating a pathogen that can kill millions, whether you release it deliberately or not, is a crime. It may not be on the books, but it should be.

You are correct—this isn't attempted murder. But IMHO it's in the same moral category. I think you are basically right that it's a failure to think outside of the immediate problem space, but what a failure. Imagine if 40-60% of the people you have ever met or heard of, as well as those you don't, died within a month. The 1918 flu left emotional scars that persisted for generations. And that had a 2% mortality rate. The amount of suffering this person could have caused through his narrow thinking is more than has ever been experienced in all of history.

So if I fill a big, weak tank with a poisonous substance and deliberately park it upstream from a public reservoir, but don't actually open a valve to dump the toxin into the reservoir, and there's really only about a 20% chance of the thing bursting and dumping the whole load of toxin into the reservoir, you are saying that I have done nothing wrong, and should not be subject to prosecution, because although I set up a situation with a real probability of poisoning the water supply, I didn't actually poison the water supply.

ISTM that you are really saying that it's only attempted murder if the toxin actually winds up in the water supply; if so, you don't understand what attempted murder is. It's when you try to kill someone, but fail. I suspect that there's no mens rea here, so the charge wouldn't stick, but knowingly manufacturing a pandemic virus ought to be a crime, and the knowingly part would then constitute mens rea.

This wasn't a thought crime. This was an actual crime, knowingly committed with full buy-in from the administration. Actual virus was produces, and had the intended effect.

There is potential benefit. The problem is that the costs appear to outweigh the benefit by many orders of magnitude.