Yes, but the corporations don't come and shoot you if you don't choose to give them your money.

Progressives always argue against BIG corporations and they always argue FOR the largest and most powerful organization on the planet being given MORE power. Their blind faith in the state is terrifying.

Well my first guess would be geolocating the images to the proper location on the earth, projecting the data in to a digitized map grid projection and storing the data in a science archival format.

"Solid Social Science"

Wow. That pegged my oxymoron detector!

The year of the Linux Desktop.

When you put it that way it sounds much more sensible, and tint as simple.

I do not disagree that technological advances will save us. I do disagree that carbon taxes and regulations will.

When these things you advocate outperform the old fossil fuel based variants, they will take over completely. Oh and those subsidies won't eventually matter. The new industries will get some of their own, and, this it the key part, if they outcompte fossil fuels on efficiency, there will be no way, subsidy or not, fossil fuels will win.

This just takes patience. Time will march on and in 30 years there will be no more gas automobiles. That process will not be simple, though. It will be a complicated evolution of both the technologies and the marketplaces they operate in.

Your "simple" plan cuts transportation by a huge margin, say hello to large price increases for anything transported further than a trivial distance. The food you eat is not just transported, but planted, and harvested using the energy whose price you massively increased. Increase food prices even more. Your plan for coal breaks the power grid. Brownouts, blackouts and mandatory rationing will be necessary. Oh and the impact on food refrigeration will help increase food costs even more again.

Your "simple" solution would cause massive chaos, social unrest, riots and death. I suppose if thats your simple goal, then you're fine.

You know, sometimes I miss Jon Katz on /.

Then I get over it.

Whenever patent trolls get talked about, it always comes down to how much impact this is having on small businesses and entrepreneurs.

I think the patent trolls naturally tell us that this is "no big deal".

However, I can't shake the feeling that utterly abysmal rate of new small businesses being started these days is directly related to these fucking evil trolls.

I think any estimation of how much economic activity is being stifled by these trolls is quite possibly orders of magnitude off.

It's not in the best interest of those of us who are engineers. So naturally we get kinda snarky when they ask for our help selling these courses.

Exactly. But what I love most about the study is how this ineffective oversight will be solved by ..... MORE oversight!

Yep. Sure this seems to be acceptable to stop someone doing something that is considered REALLY bad, but what happens when Hollywood convinces Congress to make illegally downloading a movie or a song a felony?

Yep.

I'm growing tired of counting all the things that supermajorities of the people want that the government will never ever allow us to have.

There are so many things that could be reformed/improved/eliminated/added in the context of government that the PEOPLE truly want (and want through large majorities) that it boggles the mind.

However, if any of these things have a negative impact on the power of our politicians, or the power of their lobbyists, or the power of their party leaders, or the power of their special interest groups, then screw us.

The problem I see with this is that even if Microsoft is starting to turn things around. "Employees are taking it in the shorts." That is what is really going to hurt. With the number being cut loose in the many thousands, and no clarification as who those thousands are, Microsoft now has pretty much everyone scared of losing their job.

That doesn't translate well into a strong improving company. People are going to spend a good amout of their time trying to find the exit, not making the company better.

Yeah, I mean c'mon. Also, Whats up with all these stories on slashdot about computers and computing devices?

Solid state microprocessors have been around since the 1960's. All these computing devices are just modifications of that basic technology.

Oh, wait, those stories are interesting. Hey, some people may be interested in seeing how satellite technology has changed too. The satellites we have imaging the planet today are not that "same old shit" from the 60's and 70's. Sensors and their sensing capabilities have changed immensely over the span of 40 years.

This story is interesting in detailing how that monitoring technology can identify the sites launching the mortars and the sites being hit.

The problem is this:

There will be a case where a factual based post, possibly with added opinions, will be posted by an American, but the subject of that post, a European, will want it removed from the search results due to the right to be forgotten. If Google removes this result from google.com, the American poster will have standing to sue google for removing their post because of foreign law. Now google being a private company, can do what they want, but what if Google wants to keep the Americans post listed and is only removing it to comply with EU law? Then Google would not challenge the American posters case, they would let it go through the courts. The decision by the courts would be that Google be allowed to list the American's post so as to not violate the posters free speech rights.

Free speech is one of the most important natural rights of man. I don't give a damn about Europe's "right to be forgotten". That right is shit compared to the right of free speech.