I see more than a few F-250s that don't have a spec of dirt on them, no equipment near them, wheels and shocks in a configuration completely unsuitable for doing any work. As a matter of fact, most of the trucks that I see that aren't directly used to carry landscaping or construction equipment have never been near any work or towing.

And you're still conflating two things that are not the same: piracy (modern version) and theft. Merely putting an emphasis on your statement does not make it so. Piracy might now mean copyright infringement, but it is still not theft. You sound like a child if you can't differentiate between depriving someone of property and illicitly copying content.

That's your final argument? It's bad because it's against the law? Somehow I suspect that this is only your position because you think it doesn't affect you.

What a tasty and oh so flammable straw man. Care to link to those hordes of slashdotters who professed their love of Chavez? Or is this just the result of one of your fevered political nightmares?

Says a random person on a random site. Let's see your fantastic work that makes Ruiu's body of work nothing more than that of a small-fry amateur who has to resort to lying to make a name for himself. Oh wait, Ruiu is actually a seasoned security researcher, running multiple well-known cons and contests? Who already gets more attention than anything but a handful of other security researchers?

I think the only thing your post does is demonstrate your own thinking: that the only way to make waves in the world is to be an attention whore.

That's becoming my #1 concern: if the end of civilization DOES happen, the preppers are ideally prepped to be looters and bandits. They have a well-fortified homebase in a far-off location, lots of guns, lots of ammo, lots of prepared food, and zero ability, tools and seeds to grow their own food. They will run out of food before they run out of ammo, and then they will most likely become what they feared the most themselves.

I actually do have friends who are preparing for the end of times. Storing guns and ammo for the looters, stashing gold and silver at home.... The wackos on TV are real, and they are among you.

Of course. The next, obvious question though is: what is going to bring about societal collapse? And the answers I get to that range from riots to super storms to earthquakes to hyperinflation to asteroid impact to brand new plague. Most of the answers also mysteriously assume that those events are likely enough to warrant shelling out multiple thousands of dollars immediately.

The reality is that we've been through everything short of an asteroid impact, and civilization has not collapsed. Especially not western civilization. Maybe that's why Europeans are non-plussed by all these possibilities, and look at the US like a family does at its crazy uncle who is raving about government brain scans: they've been through all of it, and they've come out alright. True, there were a few World Wars that came about from some of those events, but it wasn't a collapse of civilization. If anything, it proved that civilization was rebuilt pretty much instantly by citizens working together and sharing their meager means.

Full disclosure: my parents still tell me stories of The War. It's as close as Europe ever came to total collapse, and it didn't.

According to various shows and friends, being prepared for the next major storm/earthquake/tsunami/fire/drought/etc. is to have a large gun and ammo cache, an underground bunker, food and water for a year, off-grid energy generation and the willingness to shoot the roaming hoardes of looters, bandits and otherwise famished and unprepared bleeding-heart hippies that will try kill your dog, rape your mother and steal your food.

In the meantime, past experience indicates that 5 days of food and water is plenty of supplies to wait out the rebuilding effort, along with a house that matches the local building codes. Society is not going to collapse, Mad Max will not come to pass, and I'll be most worried about paranoid neighbors shooting me as I come to check in on them.

So my plan: backup important data across the network, have food and water for a few days and hunker down while the roads are cleared and energy access is restored. If I get bored, I can always hunt turkeys in the backyard.

And replace it with what? Universal health-care, funded by a general healthcare tax? Sign me up! Replace it with something you have to buy yourself on the open market, with funds that for profit companies will demand whether you have a job or not? That's the same thing as what is in place now. Lose your job, and you're looking at a significant amount of outgoing money that you cannot reduce.

Talk about feudalism then. Only it will be to the Healthcare providers.

Initially, the Democrats thought that if they included some Republican compromises, they could pass the bill with a filibuster-proof majority. That was a requirement, because there were enough people in the Senate who were dead-set against it that they could trivially filibuster it. Turns out that essentially presenting a healthcare bill that was part and parcel culled from a Heritage Foundation proposal in the 80s, modeled after Romneycare in Massachusetts and filled with Republican amendments wasn't enough to get it passed. So the Democrats instead decided to be cute with procedure. It came back to bite them.

The Supreme Court already ruled the bill constitutional.

Finally, a clusterfuck was to be expected. The bill itself is over 1000 pages, it involves multiple organizations at the state and the federal level, involves 3rd party for-profit organizations and needed huge amounts of 3rd-party contractors to get done. I've seen projects like this at corporations, and most of them fail. It will be a minor miracle if they ever work out all the kinks in the system.

The jury is still out on whether it's going to cost more or less. Projections from various agencies put it at a net saving over time.

Which ones? The ones the Republican House demanded to get anything done?

Don't know about torture, though at least officially it has stopped. As for civil liberties and transparency; well, there's a reason I said he's not perfect.

Holy crap that's some spin.
The taxes you're talking about have been made permanent by a republican House that decided to shut down the government because it didn't get the entire budget it wanted, just a part of it. Furthermore, to expect that temporary taxes are ever rolled back under a republican Congress or president.... well, there's Reagan, but he'd be run out of his own party today.

The taxes still go on, and Obama finally managed to spin down the wars that Bush started and couldn't. Even though he had more time than the US for WW2. So how does that exactly make him a zero-cost contributor? His tax cuts lived on, and he still never paid for any of his wars.

Merely saying "they're both bad" doesn't mean you're not partisan. It just means you're incapable of doing an actual analysis of the facts.

Iran doesn't use those drugs in capital punishment. As a result, selling those drugs to Iran doesn't help with their capital punishment regime. If anything, it diverts funds to the EU that could otherwise be used for capital punishment.

Our army is constantly killing people. After all, we are at WAR with TERRORISM. That's what you get in a war. Bring it back to a police action against murderous thugs, and we can talk about executions. Otherwise, you're just unhappy that the wrong color team is doing the shooting.

Not during the crucial parts of the Bush administration, where things were radically fucked up the most: the first 3 years or so of his administration, where he lied to the world about the Iraq invasion, let Osama escape in Tora Bora, legitimized torture and set up huge budget-busting tax-cuts and Medicare expansions. It took multiple, world-history-course-changing mistakes for the media to finally start questioning him.

Simply put, the mistakes haven't been as numerous or as significant, and the accomplishments have actually been more significant. We've got a long way to go before we ever get a president as bad as Bush Jr.

Uh, no, there wouldn't have. How do I know? The massive bungling of the Tora Bora offensive was never questioned while he was in office. By anybody. Contrast letting the entire reason we were in Afghanistan get away due to poor decisions by Bush himself with not optimally responding to an attack on an isolated consulate in what was still basically a war zone. Which one had more long-term ramifications? Which one could have been improved, by how much, and at what cost? That's why your comparison needs to be answered with a massive "No."

You can't be serious when you include FOX News. They're basically calling him Hitler, Mao and Stalin on a daily basis, call him a Muslim, and do everything just shy of calling for someone to shoot him. Even if you just average FOX News in, it skews the average so far out that the only way to even it out is if MSNBC sends out journalists to literate fellate him under the podium.

And that's even disregarding just the qualititative differences between the two presidencies. Obama is far from perfect - I'm actually starting to think that Clinton was the better politician and president - but he is still miles above what is the worst president in at least the last 70 years. Comparing the two should lead to a difference in treatment.

Ugh. No. Complete nonsense. See the studies cited here: http://www.cyclehelmets.org/1139.html regarding impacts. Quality helmets that are fully intact offer awesome protection against impacts; both from the perspective of brain deceleration and pure blunt trauma prevention. The biggest mistakes that people make is that they look at a bicycle helmet, don't see any crushed polystyrene, and assume that it is safe to wear the helmet. Instead, the polystyrene is about 10 years old, is starting to lose structural integrity, and has had a few bumps that have further weakened it.

The other problem I see with most epidemiological studies is that they mix a lot of different factors (population growth, vastly different riders, changing usage patterns of bicyclists, etc.) and assume that the only thing that changed was whether people wore helmets or not.

You're making the same exact mistake a lot of the researchers made: you assume that all cyclists behave the same and are exposed to the same risks. Basic cycling, on empty roads and at low speeds with regular pedals, is very safe. High-speed biking on twisty mountain roads with feet securely attached to the bike is significantly more dangerous. The vast majority of cyclists are of the former variety, and will drown out any impacts on people who engage in the more risky version of biking.

Because people are stupid, and most have trouble with the concept of "this type of biking is safe without a helmet, that type of biking is not." As a result, people just said "screw it, everyone has to wear a helmet."

Familiarity an also breed contempt. You're inferring conclusions your data does not support. Furthermore, if people are so concerned about looks that they'd rather drive than bike because they think they look stupid in a helmet.... well, that's a problem with people, not helmets.

Finally, my head survived a fairly significant impact with the ground with no injuries (the rest of the body, not so much), thanks to the rapid compression and fracture of the helmet. I know helmets save lives. Do you?