I hear teletype terminals and paper tape are making a come back.

Last I checked Google charges for its advertisements.

On the matter of increasing H-1b visas during a recession, I absolutely guarantee our whores^H^H^H^H^H^Hcongressmen will agree with Vineet Nayar.

I fail to see how fingerprinting people when they leave will stop them from entering in the first place. Although I am opposed to illegal immigration it looks like if I want to cross the border I'll have to do it the way illegal immigrants do - far away from any federales. I was against the creeping facism of Bush and Obama doesn't look any better.

I do have contempt for any government body that tries to hide its deliberations from the public.

Technologically the Kindle makes my vast book collection look terribly old fashioned, if not outright obselete. But DRM has made it a non-starter for me. I'm perfectly willing to pay for content. I buy technical books with prices well north of $100. But once I've bought a book I want to be the one who decides if I'm going to have it read out loud to me, or how I back it up, and when in 5 years a competitor comes out with a reader that makes Amazon's Kindle look like a 1980s PC I want to be able to move all the books I've bought to it.

Arlen Specter has been a Democrat all along. He's finally admitted it.

When I look at my state and federal income taxes each year there's no way in hell are you going to convince me that the government is "starved of resources". When the government employees get the same raise I do in a recession (0%) and get the same pension benefits (nonexistent) I might start to believe they are starved of resources. When the feds finally decide we can't afford to keep troops in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Kyrgystan, Bulgaria, Ecuador, and other countries I might start to believe the government has gone on a diet. When the feds realize that no, we really can't afford a stunt like sending men to Mars then I might start to believe there's a little belt tightening going on. Right now we have a President who sees no limits at all on how much the federal government can and should spend. "Starved of resources" indeed.

With any luck IBM will charge a $100,000,000 royalty for the use of its outsourcing patent. Then nobody else will be able to afford to do it.

We can no longer remember how to make stuff we made 25 years ago. America is indeed getting stupider, not just me.

Until NVIDIA starts supporting the development of open source drivers I'm sticking with ATI, no matter how many Blazing Cores of Might NVIDIA might fit onto their chips. While ATI's closed source drivers have their fair share of bugs, and it will be some time before there are good 3D open source drivers for their more recent cards, at least the development has started and ATI has been aiding it, not hobbling it.

As I already said, I'm not in favor of the government auto industry bail out. The problems GM has are chronic. It will burn through the billions of dollars it just got from the tax payers in a just a few more months. GM will then go back to our government with its begging bowl. It was among the walking dead long before the subprime crisis, and it won't be restored to health when the subprime crisis ends. Our politicians are excellent at making malinvestment with other people's money.

I don't object to my tax dollars being spent on genuine good scientific research, including molecular biology, advanced solar cells, fusion, or even sending cheap robot explorers to Mars. But sending people to Mars is every bit as foolish as bailing out GM. What we will learn is that it's bloody hard to send a man to Mars and keep him alive there, which we already know.

We managed to find $25 billion to fund bailing out a moribund auto industry. It seems to me putting that money into a forward-looking industry rather than a backwards-looking one would have been a much more worthwhile use of the money.

A common logical fallacy -- "We wasted $x on A, so it's okay to waste $y < $x on B.". I am not in favor of the government bail outs. So far as I'm concerned GM should just spin off Corvette to Honda (the only GM car people actually dream about owning) and let the rest of the company die. But at least people actually get some utility out of cars -- they drive them every day. Nobody drives to the moon and we already know what's there -- a big dead rock. The actual scientific work is done far more cheaply with unmanned probes.

By the way, "we" didn't find $25 billion for the car company bailout. Every cent of every bail out is being borrowed.

How is sending people to the moon or Mars a worthwhile activity? Sci fi fantasies about settling Mars and what not are just ridiculous. Antarctica is infinitely more hospitable to human settlement than any other planet or moon in the solar system, yet nobody considers it sensible to build cities in Antarctica. As for technological spin offs, it would be far more efficient to invest the money directly in developing the spin offs rather than waste 90% of it going to Mars.

If those punks had kicked, beaten and threatened that boy with a knife inside the virtual world of Runescape instead of of because of Runescape it would have been perfectly legal and they'd have gotten his stuff from his corpse and leveled up. Some punks have no common sense.