first porst!

Actually you were second. Betting you wish you had that graphics card now so that the page would have rendered quicker allowing you to post faster :)

I think that now there is so little (excluding read-only optical media) of the "true" ROM (stuff that can never be rewritten). Now, just about all "ROM" (technically, EEPROM) can be flashed (rewritten) for the purpose of updating (or others...). So now the term "ROM" is synonymous with firmware. So, custom ROM=custom firmware. Or in the case of emulators, ROM is the image required for the emulator to ... emulate.

Whenever there's something about CoS it seems like there's a crowd of people who chime in with, "But ALL religions are corrupt, criminal, and commercial." Which inevitably leads to the conclusion that, if you happen to not have a problem with religion in general, you must accept anything which calls itself a religion, or become an atheist.

Here's the problem. We'll put aside my Pollyanna-esque belief that most of the time religions really are about a genuine and sincere effort to understand the metaphysical aspects of existence. Yes, the Catholic church is responsible for suppression of science and learning, set up the "indulgence" system, and a host of other sins. Keep in mind, however, that the Catholic church was the last vestige of Roman-style socio-political organization after the fall of the empire. While the West dissolved, the Catholic church was the closest thing to a stable government that was able to provide legitimacy to regional and local rulers, preserve some measure of learning, and mitigate internal conflict. Not until the Treaty of Westphalia does the modern concept of the state enter into Western thinking, and that was well after the Inquisition's height. So, yes, the Catholic church has done some nasty things, but compare it to any other nation-state if you want an appropriate ethical comparison.

CoS, on the other hand, actively seeks to defraud individuals through a deliberate pyramid-scheme. It is felonious by any legal standards, and does no charitable work to speak of. Churches, synagogues, and mosques routinely collect money from followers as a sign of devotion and as a means of maintaining themselves (literally, as in a "building fund").

Some Slashdotters appear to be confused as to the concept of nonprofit. A nonprofit organization is allowed to raise money through sales and donations in order to pay it's employees and maintain itself; it only has to show that, at the end of the day, it doesn't have any money.

There, fixed that for you. Many Nobles new Latin, not just the Priests. Latin was the educated-man's common language.

Given the huge number of those with names like "medicaltreatment" and "pureacaiberries", I'm not sure what exactly is going on there. I'm thinking some kind of ineffectual retaliation for not publishing their spam (note the slashdot badge on his posts)

That or he's cheesing the system to have all the spammers foe him (so he can treat them as freaks) since we're limited to only 100 foes each.

And what is a profit? If you and I and our friends throw $50 each in the hat to hold a party, have we just made a "profit"? That's what a non-profit organisation is.

This has been a gray area for a long time now. Since taxes are tied to physical locations, the Internet has always been problematic in that it is (more or less) all encompassing.

I do agree that this looks like more of the "rich taking from the poor" again. Most online purchases are small, as in, in the realm of a few hundred dollars or less. In the future I could see taxes being collected on large purchases, say, for those totaling $1000 or more, but getting tied up in taxing micro-transactions is often more trouble than its worth.

I think the primary reason this hasn't been a bigger issue is because e-commerce in general has been a huge cash cow for lots of businesses.

I'm not convinced they're paid only for teaching. I'm not payed only for writing code either, though that is the expected end result of my work. My mom used to teach and at least in this corner of the world the teachers are required to do planning work necessary to teach and are considered to be compensated for that time in their salary. Hence the extra material they create / plans should should be considered public property or at least be shared among colleagues. It's tougher for teachers just starting out with new material and gets easier once you've done planning and extra material, so you can reuse it the next course / year. At least here I would very much frown upon someone trying to profit from something they've done while being paid for it and not sharing it.

Not sure what problems you have experienced with Amarok in the past, but Amarok (versions 1.4 and 2.2) is pure bliss on my 300GB/21000 file collection here. No issues what so ever (apart from v2 not supporting transcoding yet) and although it takes a while to generate the library to begin with, after that it's smooth sailing.

For the same reason investment bankers wreck the entire economy by taking unwarranted risks with massive amounts of money, and still get government bailouts and multi-milion bonuses and call it "retaining talent".

Pay does not correlate with skill, talent, or value.

It's OK, when the shit finally hits the fan, you'll can come here and re-read my "I told you so" rant. PS: I told you so.

The football team captain will get the girls.
This was "demonstrated" on a japanese tv show: they had one of the animators of the show and a stunt actor running for 10min to make them sweat and thus emit more pheromones, before putting them in separate boxes with a hole at chest level and had them removing their shirts. Then, six girls were asked to smell them and designate which was the most sexy (without knowing who was in which box). All six of them chose the stunt actor. Apparently, girls are attracted to "bad guys", because they would have more manly pheromones.
(Note: I am neither a biologist nor a native japanese speaker so I might have missed something...)

Whatever happened to Hypercosm? They weren't a cloud distributed processing engine.. they were high quality rendering via web done efficiently. It seems getting Hypercosm ported to today's mobile devices would be more productive now than streaming pre-rendered images over the tight pipe.

I'll go out on a limb saying that this isn't necessarily a symptom of the lack of freedom of speech. In the Netherlands (where I'm from), politicians are debating whether to ban certain symbols of muslim value, because of practical considerations but, alas, also because certain people experience discomfort seeing other people display these symbols. Would a ban be instated, I'd find it only fair if other such symbols would be banned as well. After all, why only go after muslims? (I'm not exactly in favor of banning religious symbols for other than practical reasons, mind you)

As it is in the Netherlands (for "Mein Kampf" at least). A little nuance though: I'm not sure about Germany or France, but in NL it's forbidden to replicate the book. Government hasn't got anything to do with what I own, so owning the book isn't forbidden. In fact, even the ban on replication is being discussed because of exactly the issue regarding freedom of speech you address.

Also, considering WWII, I don't find it strange that extreme measurements are still in place. That's not to say it isn't about time they're dismissed, though.

blatant fraud such as in this case allows for piercing the corporate veil and going after the personal assets and future earnings of the officers of a company.

That's pretty difficult to do without first winning a criminal case. I've experience of one such case - an outfit called "Starving Students Movers" which passed ex-cons off as "bonded" employees, and when the poor customer's stuff was stolen or just broken through negligence, the company paid for damages at a flat rate per pound of weight divided by the total weight of the shipment, calculated to give those customers a few cents for the dollar of value. All of this came out in testimony, and wasn't under seal. But that happened because a lawyer went after them about his friend's stuff, not for any class action. The lawyer knew he had nothing to make, even though it turned out the owners had Millions in assets.