Dr. Pei!

I'm surprised nobody else has pointed out yet, the headline for the first-linked article says "Curiosity rover finds organic compounds...", directly refuting the statement in the first sentence of the article: "Curiosity rover hasn't yet confirmed the detection of organic compounds on Mars"... geez, what a flub. Who's editing at cosmiclog.nbcnews.com?

For what it's worth, I am a federal government employee, and I agree with you. Just because we're employees of the government doesn't mean we have to agree with everything the government does, or make us complicit in it's actions on principle.

Plus, it's a p.i.t.a. getting all those ribbons nice and neat on a dress uniform...

to figure that out?

Most of your discussions are missing the big picture, I think. Amazon is a private company and can sell what they want - as a consumer, I have options to procure my erotic incest fiction elsewhere, or just boycott Amazon altogether. *However*, what should be particularly disturbing is that Amazon removed ALREADY-PAID-FOR content from peoples' archives, and refused to provide refunds! How is that in the least excusable? Where is the defense of consumer rights? How is that not outright theft? Amazon should be summarily brought to court. As one previous poster noted, this type of behavior, and the de facto government protections enabling it (via DMCA and DRM), in practice means you don't own any of the DRMed stuff. It's being leased, without even any lease terms - they can just take it whenever they want. And they wonder why people want to crack their DRM b.s....

What does Vinay Deolalikar have to say about this?

haha... yeah I skimmed the article as well... didn't get an inkling what all this "sunshine law" was all about. Far as I can tell, from a poorly written article with an even crappier introduction and non-summarizing first paragraph, is that it's about some guy's battle to get some posting to the Gov't Print Office by the Obama administration.

It's quite ridiculous in the first place that the US gov't would attempt to selectively block access to information available on the WORLD WIDE WEB. It might be an annoyance, but it's not like it's really going to keep anybody from getting it, if they really want it.

..I don't see it.

The answer is plain and simple: the feminists have won. Think about when the feminist movement took off. There are definitely documented cases of psychosomatic coupling. Could it be that the feminisation of America (and who could argue that *that* hasn't happened? Separately from whether that is a good thing or not) has resulted in a populace whose mindset provides negative feedback into the testosterone-producing homunculus?