What sig? I turned off sig's in my Slashdot preferences a long time ago because I got tired of seeing them. Yes, I am an aggressive user of ad blocking, too.

They just changed our policy at my company. We were paid for both on-call and recall. Now we are expected to provide on-call availability for free and they will pay recall only in the case of serious system outages. Unfortunately, I am salaried/exempt in a right-to-work state, so there is not much I can do except quit. Double unfortunately, the economy is depressed and I am over 40 in an area not known for its high-tech job availability.

On the considerable plus side, I will be completely debt free, owning my own house and cars, in a little less than 4 years. So, I will just hold out for a while and wait for the economy to turn around. Then when I don't really need my current job and there are others to be had, well, in the words of a man named Jane, "Won't that be an interesting day."

This list seems to imply that there is a duplicate set of Comcast DNS servers that work correctly for opt-out service: http://dns.comcast.net/dns-ip-addresses.html Maybe just changing DNS to point to your alternate opt-out server(s) will work. Unless they sometimes decide to change the IP addresses around without notice.

The article (and a lot of comments I have read so far) are only talking about casual navigation GPS, as in vehicle GPS units. The current crop of phone GPS solutions is inadequate for backpacking, camping, exploring or basically any outdoor activity that takes you very far away from a cell tower or a charging station.

Most non-dedicated GPS units do not have a compass (the new iPhone 3GS is a notable exception).

Most non-dedicated GPS units have pretty wretched sensitivity and accuracy compared to dedicated GPS units, especially in rough terrain or heavy tree cover. Anybody who does much geocaching will know this. It's no big deal while driving, but it can be very annoying to take the time to claw your way up a steep hillside only to realize you are 100 feet away from where you want to be, on the other side of a deep ravine. Even with driving, inaccuracy can be annoying, which is why TomTom includes another dedicated (more accurate) GPS in the vehicle mount for the new iPhone.

Most phones do not use standard AA or AAA batteries, making it more difficult and expensive to carry spares out away from electrical connections.

Some (most?) phone-based GPS solutions do not even install maps locally on the device, instead relying on cellular communications to download maps live, making them totally useless outside of cell coverage. AT&T's recently announced product for the iPhone is one example.

Rain (or anything else that might get the unit wet). There are many dedicated GPS units available that have various levels of water resistance.

No they didn't. There is no such mythical perfectly peaceful primitive tribal culture.

But if property rights are subordinate to the betterment of society, taking their property to bring them the benefits of modern society should be a good thing, right? Though I do admit the extermination thing is pretty bad.

I wholeheartedly agree with that. I would also add that without individual property rights, personal freedoms are useless. As a trivial example, without property rights, what good would be freedom of the press if you had no right to own the press?

Forgive me if I am misunderstanding you, but you seem to be arguing from extremes. There must be at least some individual property rights, if nothing else, to own the clothes you are wearing. That's what I mean when I say that they are fundamental. I do not believe that property rights are paramount over all other considerations. I believe that reasonable people can disagree over where to draw the line. I tend to fall more towards the individual side of the spectrum, you obviously tend towards the collectivist side. There's plenty of room in the middle to come to an agreement and live amicably.

If I sounded that way, it was truly not intentional. Unlike objectivists, I don't try to build a huge immoral self-justification on top of first principles. I just wanted to recognize and point out something that has been obvious to any retard ever since Ug the caveman made a cool club and whacked the first guy who tried to take it away from him.

Property rights, along with the right to defend one's self, family and property are fundamental, but they must also be tempered by moral consideration. It is the balance and tension between individual and social considerations that make for a well functioning society. Extremes to either side of the equation are unproductive and ultimately self-defeating.

Umm, dude (or dudette), I'm trying really hard not to react: speciesist? speciesism? You have got to be trolling me.

If there's no incentive for people to make productive use of capital, the economy stagnates.

The incentive for people to make productive use of capital is the reward / gain they get from doing so. I'm no rabid objectivist or "big-L" libertarian, but that's just fundamental economics.

it's not fair to society to let him keep it for no/low cost when it might be put to better, more productive use for society by someone else.

Spoken like a true communist. Other than life itself, there is no more fundamental right than the right to property. From your comments I get the impression that you are not a property owner or you would not be so cavalier in taxing it away.

Reallocating property from one person to another based on "productive use of capital" for the benefit of society over the rights of the individual is always going to be a negative incentive to productivity. Why acquire property if it can just be taken away (or taxed away) at the whim of some powerful individual or group? Some property taxes are probably inevitable to pay for necessary social services (fire, police, etc.) but those taxes should never be used to penalize for some imagined lack of relative "productivity".

Unfortunately, there are others who agree with your line of reasoning, most notably some US Supreme Court justices. See Kelo v. City of New London for a real world example of the results.