"The cost savings is great, but isn't the biggest driver for me, it's mainly the principle that I don't own the device I paid for, and I'm really tired of having cat litter everything in my home."

So exercise your rights as a consumer to research beforehand and not buy it. Or return it. Or modify it, as you have. Or, for god sakes, ask your vet or friends with cats or reddit for advice on having cat litter everywhere (I believe the most common solution is a covered box with fairly high side.) You can also teach your cat to pee/crap in the toilet, believe it or not. There are little "litter box" inserts that reportedly make it pretty easy; the cat goes "oh, another litter box" and uses it for a week or two, and then you remove the insert, and if the cat notices, they go *shrug* and still use it. No more litter, no more stink.

But for god sakes....I was around on Slashdot when the fist inkjet printer companies started chipping their cartridges. I also learned about Gillette in...either middle school or high school. That was a century ago, if not more. The "handle is free, the blades are disposable and we have a very healthy profit margin on them" model is quite, quite old. Why are people surprised? Especially if you read Slashdot, why didn't you do research on it?

Your robotic, do-everything catbox would've cost substantially more if the company were not figuring on a continuing revenue stream. In fact, it might have cost so much that nobody would've bought it.

You guys are just plain nuts. Here's how it it meant to work. Excuse sir/madam you are not allowed to carry that item onto the aircraft, allow me to check it in for you. Either arrest them for an illegal item or if it is not illegal check it in for them. Why the bloody hell do you just allow them to steal your legal stuff, the items that you are not allowed to carry on should just be checked in. The crap cowardly people are willing to put up with is just amazing.

They will never need an external attack to sink their fantasy floating island, they will inevitably do it to themselves. They all want the freedom to do, what ever they want to do, when ever they want to do it and of course no group of people ever can do that at the same time. So they want their forever teenage libertarian floating island as long as they are the ones in charge. We already have that it's called Freewind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... (never been a more doublespeak title for a ship ever) and the only people free are the fakers at the top ruthlessly taking all the freedoms away from the ones down the bottom. Should they ever be able to build that crazy vessel it will inevitably devolve to an organised crime haven.

Regardless the of the psychopathic nature of North Korea's government and the pathetic egoistic nature of it's leadership and the quisling nature of it's many middle persons who keep that leadership in power, the only acceptable response is cutting the cable. Unhappy with the contribution to the global internet, cut them off. Seriously, fuck off with the escalation, it will just make the whole situation worse.

Computers aren't the only thing networking, people do it as well ;). One of the main things you do when contributing to an open source project is establish social and business relationships with those people most likely to be able to connect you to a job, directly and indirectly. Smart recruitment would have companies employ people to contribute to open source and specifically vet fellow contributors with a view to recruiting future staff. Basically companies can forgo the whole trial period of trial and error when it comes to recruiting essential staff by being able to assess potential employees in a voluntary work place over an extended period of time. FOSS is a public showcase of the efforts and abilities of skilled people and in terms of the relationships of the people involved, how well they work with others in a voluntary environment. Even when you are already employed it still remains the most viable opportunity to showcase all of your skills in a public environment and also to maintain multi-company and multi-national relationships with people that can help you define your future dependent upon of course how well you play with others. For all the three letter et al agencies around the world, it also provides the opportunity to resist the idiotic temptation to break global computer security and instead focus on gathering knowledge on relationships between the people involved and to do their own, ugh, recruiting ;).

Oh look, here come the same "social engineers" that brought us soaring male suicide rates and burgeoning single motherhood with it's associated social outcomes,

The only problem with this statement, is while these theories on raising children are a relatively new thing (last 100 years or so) - it can not be demonstrated that any kids are ACTUALLY being raised this way. Maybe a few, here and there, but by and large, most parents still raise their kids using traditional violence-based methods.

So to blame these new science-backed techniques for the "decline of modern civilization" is just a bunch of bullshit; to justify frustrated parents whose first tool in their parenting toolbox is the paddle.

I am not questioning the concept of lines, I am asking why this line even needs to be drawn.

Don't you think that before drawing lines there should be a reason? I happen to think so. Wht the fuck justifies these laws? I see no more reason to arrest a person with 100 lbs of pot than to arrest a person with a cup of coffee. I see these laws doing little more than creating black markets for no benefit.

Drug laws have not even been shown to reduce drug use, if they don't do that, then what the fuck point do they even have? If they don't reduce use, then isn't having them drive people to worst drugs, to more underground production....bad. If they can't even do the ONE good thing they intended?

I didn't ask if the form of he law was unusual. I asked what supporters of such a law what they expect it would accomplish, and what they imagine they are protecting us from.

It seems pretty clear to me the ONLY effect such a law will have is to continue a policy of allowing gangs to flousrish and creating black markets for them. I see no benefti at all to such a law in the first place and no danger that it protects anyone from.

Demerit points, hmm, who gives a crap when you can afford a driver and we are not talking golf here.

Surely that is dependent upon how you design your shut down. This being a balance of risk and loss versus capital outlay. Generally speaking management cheats like mad on risk and loss where big bonuses are in the offing and minimise capital outlay and blame everything on the new guy. So repeated failures, improper security to save capital expenditure on computer systems, failure to manage and audit security and failure to implement a proper balance to mitigate losses from production risks in the event of failure. What this all really points to is that all executive bonuses should only be paid as an annuity, so that all bonuses are paid over the life of the impact of decisions and where minor short term gain results in major long term losses those bonuses earned under fraudulent circumstance are eliminated and used to pay for remediation of company profitability.

Hint, hint, big goals. Space is big and I mean really, really, really big and to try to explore it is to create a major goal for your society, something to strive for and achieve. Big goals, manned trip to the planets, a permanent moon base with industry and tourism, a major space station. Without goals to drive human imagination we would still be squatting in a cave or up a tree in Africa. What is the current alternate goal, apparently being the winner in mass consumerism and posing about with all your stuff in front of the lessor people, the people who can not buy as much stuff and that with a bit of cheering on for war and conflict. Yeah a space race is far better than an arms race or a mass consumerist race or an personal egoist libertarian race.

So how come the US government has not declared war on every tax haven around the world because those countries know exactly what they are doing. Actively promoting global tax evasion, money laundering, promoting payment systems for major drug trades, government bribes and, arms dealing. Basically acting as the global financial system for organised crime which direct results in death and suffering of citizens from all those economies tax havens derive their parasitical existence.

The primary duty of police officers is to assist the public in upholding the law. Having a police force that can legally lie at will does to do anything to help establish a rapport between the police and the public they are meant to serve and protect. It is all about professionalism versus a cowboy sheriff attitude. If you can not trust your police force to tell you the truth then exactly what the fuck have you really achieved?

I see that the art of satire is lost on you. It really is about corporations routinely bragging about greater ways of generating more profit and always hiding the inevitable criminally negligent short cuts and then using public relations to cover up failures, until final eventual total collapse. This as a matter of modern psychopathic routine.

We could make him so fat he damages his own joints... Damn, he even beat us to that bit of parody.