Sometimes we need specific laws to protect people from the nuanced, less-direct ways to "hurt" people or "steal" from them, like ripping them off or selling products that aren't reasonably safe.

I think that if you examined all of the country's laws (of which I'll agree there are too many), I bet most would fall into one of your three categories.

And there's no problem with that.

Oh, unless you're offering rides under a business permit that specifically restricts you from doing that, like Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar.

"Yes, Sears? I've written my own custom firmware for my new refrigerator, so I'd like to be refunded the built-in cost of the bundled software I've replaced."

For me, "gamer" has always carried the same connotation that "film buff" does: just as I wouldn't consider somebody who occasionally goes to the movies a "film buff", I wouldn't necessarily consider a person who occasionally plays games on their phone to be a "gamer".

At the end of the day, though, my litmus comes down to whether the person considers video games to be an important part of their life and their identity. For me, video games were my entire childhood, and are my primary hobby today. And even though my girlfriend never played the hardcore CRPG's and FPS's of my youth, playing Sonic, Kirby, and Nintendo GameCube with her little sister is an incredibly important part of her childhood and remains important to her in adulthood.

To me, that makes her a "gamer", regardless of whether she's played Baldur's Gate, Half-Life, and Ocarina of Time, or not.

I agree, but the problem with spam is that it is just so goddamn cheap to send.

It's not an economic problem like drugs are, because it doesn't require the massive resources a successful drug empire does: it can be one guy, a huge botnet, and virtually cost-free spam messages. Add to that the difficulty in tracing a message back to an individual computer (let alone a computer running a botnet), and it's almost impossible to keep these guys down.

That's 21 feet, for those of you in the States.

According to TFA, it was the City of Toronto who insisted that the issue of possible copyright infringement be settled before putting up the statue.

Which isn't quite as bad as DC's "no you can't", but is a far cry away from "We've got your back, father of murdered five-year-old."

I love The Week. It's a reasonably objective collection of the best news articles/opinions each week. Each Sunday, I sit down with a cup of coffee for a half hour and get a broad overview of what happened in the world that week, and what people said about it.

It's basically a printed new aggregator, showing only the most insightful and informative opinions (from all sides) each week -- the exact opposite of the Internet news I consume daily.

This is my major sticking point, too. I upgraded to a PS2 for DVD and component video, and I upgraded to a PS3 for BR and HDMI. So I could get a PS4 and have... BR and HDMI?

Not to mention that my PS2 played PS1 games and my PS3 played PS1/PS2 games, meaning that each time I could just swap the console out and keep my current library -- I always had great games to play on them.

Same way you define the center of anything: the thing around which other things rotate.

Occam's Razor rules out the sheer complexity of any model showing our solar system orbiting any body other than the Sun.

I disagree -- New Coke was, in many ways, actually an improvement over Coke Classic according to their taste tests. That was a case of people simply being biased to what they were familiar with, coupled with a very vocal angry minority.

The Slashdot redesign is objectively, and demonstrably, significantly worse than Slashdot Classic.

Sure, that's the first step, but the second is having my coffee pot see that I'm running low and making a new pot for me automatically. Or my refrigerator seeing that I'm out of eggs and having groceries delivered.

All of these sensor-equipped "things" are just infrastructure for a central brain of home automation -- one metallic chassis away from having a robo-butler.

The expensive part isn't the replicator/holodeck, it's the warp core that powers it.

I wish that I had someone to introduce me to the best of the classic games when I was a kid. After starting with their successors, it's almost impossible to try going backwards, so there are some really great titles that I just can't get into because now they're "too old".

Growing up with an SNES, trying to play anything that came before it is just painful for me, meaning entire generations of games I've missed out on. If I grew up today with a Wii U, why would I ever try playing Super Mario World if Super Mario 3D World was my first Mario game?

No, we should definitely leave it to for-profit corporations. Certainly they have our best interest in mind!