There is a fairly high bar to get a reply. It would be nice if the President responded to them himself. Take some direct accountability for a response about an issue obviously a lot of people care about.

The article mentions that messages will be sent to the friends. I suppose the theory is that a stranger will just ignore the request while someone with a true connection will participate. It is not just parsing the map of connections among facebookers.

My public library has a great selection of DVDs and they will even ship them to the library branch just a few blocks away from my house. Yes, they are not free (taxes, but I pay for it whether I use it or not so I may as well use it.

I'm not saying I disagree with the decision but I spotted an interesting justification in the pdf. "This country has no tradition of specially restricting chil-dren’s access to depictions of violence."

What about Rated R movies?

Another interesting bit: "...Cali-fornia’s Act does not adjust the boundaries of an existing category of unprotected speech to ensure that a definition designed for adults isnot uncritically applied to children."

So restriction to porn is only OK because it was done before? What about the first ban on porn? Shouldn't that be thrown out and thus the whole history of the ban on porn be thrown out?

Taxing miles is a can of worms. City miles probably cost more in infrastructure repairs so a straight tax per miles would unfairly hit rural communities and highway drivers unless some way of tracking where the miles were accumulated is included. Tearing around corners and hitting potholes at 50 mph is probably more wear than a cautious driver so some way of monitoring how the miles were driven would be needed. This idea easily leads to impinging on individual freedoms.

But tires will wear out more quickly the rougher the vehicle is driven. Seems fair to me. Seems cheap to implement. And seems to keep Uncle Sam's nose out from where it shouldn't be in the first place.

All those songs in itunes are already stored somewhere. And Apple already has a list of songs that a user has purchased. So wouldn't Apple's "music storage cloud" basically be adding a streaming service? No real extra cloud storage required?

I'm sure the RIAA has some cockamamey restriction against a simple implementation though.

Distract that annoying guy in meetings who always asks inane questions with a video of bunnies and kittens playing, while the rest of the group gets the real presentation. Another plus: he'll get reprimanded for smiling and giggling while you are showing revenue is down 20%.

So does this imply that in Brazil anyone who owns a wall is now liable for anything an anonymous kid spray paints on it? Are paper manufacturers liable for anything some kid jots down in class about how big his teacher's ears are?

You are right - companies like those are a bit more aggressive in their investments. Perhaps they saved money having to build out a new power substation or power plant? And don't forget one other thing companies pay huge money for - publicity!

Can't they just copy another school? This seems like a wheel that doesn't need ot be reinvented. They could just go ask the University of Minnesota ... oh, wait, what was I thinking? Badgers can't go asking Gophers for help.

How lazy are we? I never understood how turning or pushing a button is too much work. Maybe we are all just too exhausted after stashing our 96 oz. sodas and super size fries into the cup holders?

This woman chose to address her problem not by calling Verizon for help, not by contacting her school for help, did not contact Dell for help. (She called Dell before she got her laptop trying to change it to Windows but was persuaded against that - that is wrong but for other reasons).

In short, she chose not to solve her problems, but to blame someone else.

I wish some other journalist will investigate this story to find out the real story. This story is not very deep on details why she didn't ask for help. But it does make for a good venting thread :-)

Our current leaders thinking of building more nuclear power plants while telling Iran that they can't also control their own energy destiny with their own nuclear power plants is a little two-faced. We should gain expertise in large-scale wind and solar and then sell that technology to them. Everybody wins - US is off foreign oil, US sells more technology broad, Iran gets clean energy production, the environment is better off, US-Iran relations are better, and there are no nukes hiding out there.