What's there to gain? Killing him doesn't undo the Cuban revolution. Castro's replacement is his brother.

Then weigh the fact that the U.S. has a very favorable agreement for the use of the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base -- it's insanely cheap and the lease can be renewed for infinity as long as one side agrees. Assassinating Castro would cause that arrangement to be terminated.

Oh I forgot to toss in another tidbit. To all those who are saying that sales tax hits the poor much harder than the rich:

- Washington state doesn't charge sales tax on grocery food items, which are a good percentage of spending for someone at the poverty line.
- Washington state citizens are allowed to use their expenditures on sales tax for the year, or a standard value, as a deduction on their federal income tax.

Both of those things reduce the sales tax pain quite a bit.

There's an even more pressing concern. The income tax proponents state it as only taxing the rich (i.e. 200k+ income per year). Just like the AMT in federal law, though, it is not indexed for inflation. So even if the state legislature left it unmodified by some miracle, people would start falling into the tax trap.

Anyone who believes we're not in for some massive inflation is in a fantasy world. The Fed is printing money left and right.

Magic the Gathering Online went live in 2002. You buy "tickets" which you can use to trade, enter tournaments, etc. And you can win stuff playing those tournaments. I'd say that falls under the gambling with virtual currency category.

Many filesystems support uid= and gid= options in their mount command (including HFS). Just add that to a mount script or set it up in fstab.

Addition of 10% ethanol, which is common, does not have a significant impact on gas mileage and it certainly does not "destroy" it. A quick look at Wikipedia on energy density shows that a 90-10 gasoline-ethanol mix produces about 93% of the energy of pure gasoline. Now if you're talking about "flex-fuel" E85, then yeah, you're going to see a noticeable mileage drop. But that is not a common fuel.

Also ethanol acts as an oxygenate, to make the gas burn more completely and reduce carbon monoxide emissions. Pricewise - prior to oxygenating with ethanol, we were using MTBE anyhow, which has health risks and is a ground water contaminant.

So your post is mostly over-hyped nonsense. Now in a general sense, should corn be used to produce ethanol? No, and that's a result of the lobby that you mentioned. But they've affected much more than ethanol usage (see: high-fructose corn syrup and how they essentially killed sugarcane production in Hawaii).

Ethanol production from sugarcane, and to a lesser extent, beets, is much more energy efficient than corn.

Agreed. Also if they're going to arbitrarily change something like this, after many many releases with it on the other side, they should present a dialog to let the user configure it during installation / upgrade.

er sorry, make that :minimize,maximize,close

And then log out/in or restart X or whatever.

gconf-editor
apps->metacity->general
button_layout=:maximize,minimize,close

Actually it does get dissipated periodically. We just haven't had enough damage for it to be a major news event yet. For example, there was the moderate sized Nisqually earthquake in 2001.

Sure another earthquake is likely on the way but who's to say how large it will be?

One of the Rockstar coders was a member of Myth.

(you think I joke, but crack / warez teams are often loaded with industry insiders...)

Except that it was faked, just like the moon landings.

At least people generally follow the intended meaning. Compare that to flammable, which came into use because people misunderstand "inflammable".

Also in reading the details of that patent, one could argue that the CSS standard also applies (separating content from layout). RFC 2318, describing CSS, was written early enough to constitute prior art.

However, IANAL and I have to assume that Microsoft's legal team probably investigated this possibility and ruled it out for some reason.

You can get an HDFury2 (converts HDMI to component) and then you're back in business, even if the component outputs on your cable box go away.