I think you're a bit confused about whose interests the government is fighting for; it's only "our interests above all other countries", if you define "our" as pretty much overlapping with the one percenters. Most of the moves the US government made in the last 20 or more years have been very beneficial to the richest Americans, and neutral or harmful to the rest (just look at the evolution of the inequality index in the USA). The first to be affected were blue collar workers and the really poor, but the process continues, and the impact on the middle class in the USA is growing and I believe will do so for the foreseeable future.

The big losers in this are the middle classes in the developed countries (especially the USA). The US rich are doing great, as they have the US government fighting for them, and, interestingly, workers in other countries have gained quite a bit from the US policies. With the relaxation in trade and regulations, the lot of the average worker in China, Vietnam or some of the Eastern European countries (or even places like Bangladesh) has improved considerably. Of course, long term the economy is not a zero sum game, but short term, the increase of the quality of life for the average Chinese or Vietnamese comes at the expense of stagnant salaries, trade deficits and growing unemployment in the developed world.
 
So most people on Slashdot should expect their income to grow slowly (if not remain stagnant or even go down) during their lifetime, as globalization forces the worldwide equalization of incomes - which equalization will, for basic economic reasons, happen close to the lower end of the income spectrum. I expect the whole global economy will eventually grow enough for middle class incomes to get back to what the developed countries have enjoyed until recently, but i'm afraid for most of us it may be a rather long time.

Well, I tried understanding what you're talking about for more than thirty seconds and I'm sorry, but your post doesn't make sense. MS's decision to set DNT by default does not in any way remove the user's "voice about their preference". Any users who prefer being tracked or find it interferes with their browsing experience can disable the flag, so your argument is completely besides the point.
 
What you should perhaps think instead about for a few seconds (hopefully it won't even require 30) is the real issue: the fact that we were offered such a Catch 22 of a "standard", with no teeth, no way to enforce the user's choice, and not even a way for users to know if their option is honored. *That*'s the issue, and I'd like to understand why such a broken design is even seriously considered for a standard. The only reasonable explanation I could come up with is that the whole thing is just a PR exercise, a snow job whose purpose is to make Google and Mozilla seem user friendly; I'm surprised so many technical people have swallowed this whole, hooks and all - so much so that they complain when the whole thing is proven not to work.

If you stop and think for a minute, this alleged "standard" is nothing more than a promise from the ad companies that they will honor the "do not track" flag as long as we promise to never set it. And you really don't see a problem with that, but blame MS instead? Sheesh, you should be glad MS has called their bluff and exposed the "standard" as the fraud it really is.

Uhh... David Ben-Gurion? He was the first PM of Israel, you know...

Yeah, I think the right question is: what lurks there under the sleeping waters of lake Vostok that ate EVEN the microbes?

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtag'n!

Isn't it effectively a distinction without a difference? Once a politician starts relying on the religious voters, he'll have to support a religion-driven agenda or risk being denounced as a turn-coat and kicked out of office - for a religious voter is a jealous voter. Whether he supports the religious agenda from personal conviction or for political survival is immaterial in the end.

Your argumentum ad verecundiam fails. An obviously bad design remains obviously bad no matter who may have come up with it. Accepting it blindly, without looking at its technical merits, just because it has been blessed by the W3C is silly (not to mention that the authority you appeal to, the W3C, has one of the worst track records in regards to coming up with reasonable and feasible designs).
 
But I think you can reach some interesting conclusions by looking at the originators of the proposed standard - they're Google and Mozilla. And if you really expect Google, whose main source of income is tracking people to put a lot of effort into designing an efficient way for people to avoid being tracked, I got this great opportunity for you to enter the glamorous and fast growing world of bridge owners!

Of course that's true, if you don't have food. But if there was a shortage of food, local farmers wouldn't have a problem. The grand-parent's complaint was precisely the opposite: an abundance of free/low cost food driving the small farmer out of business - as the GP says, free food is a staple. If I were an African leader I'd see this as a chance: the biggest problem, (is providing for the population) is at least partially solved; that gives the country a window of opportunity where the freed resources should be concentrated on improving the education and infrastructure.

Of course not - why pay for something when you can get it free? But what you seem to say is that somehow everybody owes the farmer you mention a living? That the world should not donate or the African people should not choose the free food because the farmer can't compete? That sounds wrong, not to mention borderline patronizing. Why should the African farmer's effort be wasted on low productivity agricultural work? Why not take the opportunity to switch to something more productive which would allow him to build capital and know-how, and later compete directly with the West? Also, how would the lives of non-farming Africans be improved by forcing them to pay a potentially large percentage of their income on food grown expensively on low productivity local farms? And since Africa doesn't have yet the same level of social/governmental control mechanisms the West has painfully developed over centuries, wouldn't extensive local farming have a larger negative impact on the environment than it could?

Duh, and what exactly would you expect? China or Europe, or the US to build Africa's infrastructure as a Christmas gift? Of course they do it to advance their own interests - and that should be a very valuable lesson! It's the responsibility of the Africans to defend their interests - if the Chinese want the resources, the African leaders should make sure they get as good a bargain as possible, and they should plan for the future - use the income from whatever resources they sell now to build the human capital and the infrastructure which will allow them to prosper even after the resources are depleted.

That's particularly silly. A well designed standard isn't "destroyed" by using it. The issue is not with Microsoft using the standard, it's with the fact that the "standard" is (I believe intentionally) badly designed; I think it was intended as nothing more than a PR exercise, to give Google and Mozilla the appearance of caring for users' privacy while the contrary will happen in reality. That you buy into this spin and blame Microsoft for Google's faults is quite funny.

Even funnier is the fact that the solution you suggest in your post (the use of blacklists and browser warnings to users) is almost identical to the standard Microsoft proposed to the W3C (see here. Of course, that solution would have worked, (as opposed to the current one), which is why I think it was blithely ignored by Mozilla and Google.

Hey, man, Czech beer is the best in the world, bar none!

Not for DSLRs, no. You often want to watch the subject and change settings at the same time, in order to catch the perfect moment. Buttons and knobs with mechanical feedback let the experienced photographer change and set things by touch, without having to look at the camera. Taking the camera away from your eye to navigate menus or find the right small icon on the small screen would be a huge distraction.

The same way everybody does, I assume, or perhaps a little easier since for my set the closed oscillation circuit was tuned to the three standard waves at the Marconi factory, which means I can mostly use the aerial ammeter alone.
 
All I have to do is adjust the open and closed circuits to resonance, and locate the proper secondary inductance for the maximum aerial current. After doing that a few times it hardly takes me more than a half an hour anymore. Of course, I use the shortcut of turning the coupling handle on the front of the panel set, thereby mechanically placing the primary winding closer to the secondary, or farther away, also making sure that I obtain two or even three points of coupling for the quenched spark transmitter (which can easily be found by watching for the maximum reading on the aerial ammeter). Once the position of the taps for the secondary winding and the plug aerial tuning inductance are located, no further adjustment is required (unless, obviously, some change in the antenna is made).

It's an instance of a more generic logical fallacy C.S. Lewis named Bulverism. He explained it thus (quote is from Wikipedia):

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

That makes sense - how can anybody complete a new feature with only fifteen years of development?