$ First they came for Gnome,
$ but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a n00b.
$ Then they came for X,
$ but I didn't speak out because it kind of sucked.
$ Then they came for apt-get,
$ but I didn't speak out because I didn't have root.
$ Then they came for me, and
-bash: /bin/echo: No such file or directory
$

Despite being killed over and over again, somehow this myth that Fannie and Freddie and the CRA were responsible persists. Here's just one instance of it being killed.

If they're responsible, why, then, did the same housing bubble happen in other countries?

I believe so, as the alternative, "asshare," is read by my internal monologue as "ass-hare" which, while it sounds like "ass hair," is spelled like a cousin of "ass rabbit" and that just seems to me like a couple steps up from a gerbil, and neither of those is something I want to contemplate in the context of smartphones.

Am I the only one imagining 3G gerbils now?

1. That's an awful lot of creationist textbook stickers.
2. Why do we care what CowboyNeal thinks of them?

Which is ironic, since New England is arguably the *least* puritanical area of the country, or perhaps second to the area immediately around San Francisco.

And it would be epic on XBOX Live Arcade. :)

While I agree on principle, there is a problem with this point:

The entire developed world (G8ish, or G20 excluding India and China, for the sake of argument) is in a minority compared to the undeveloped world. This does not imply that the developed world should move backward.

That said, within the developed world, US laws have rarely conformed to what the rest of the world has deemed sensible, and when they have, they've been on a several decade time lag in most cases (e.g., universal healthcare, gay rights, social safety net).

If email is the only requirement, why not suggest a company-provided blackberry for work?

This is slashdot. Our effort is minimized when the car analogy is already in the summary.

I think you a word.

My workstation is an elitebook and I get a couple of bluescreens a day(!). On the other hand, my Dell Precision M70 from 5 years ago runs as good as new... although that may just be the benefit of running Ubuntu at home versus XP at work. But even with XP on my M70, I never had the same kind of issues I have now with the HP.

That's not to say that the EliteBooks (and enterprise-grade systems in general) aren't worlds better than their consumer-grade trash, but still, there are far better options.

Have they tried plugging the hole?

People lose all common sense when they're dealing with something they think they're incapable of understanding.

It's not true, by and large, that people would be incapable of understanding if they sat down to take the time to figure it out, but in the cases of such an unequal informational playing field (you and your doctor, you and your mechanic, grandma and her computer tech) people are paying not just for service but for expertise, and that makes them vulnerable to this kind of exploitation.

Although, as an afterthought, I'm curious about what happens if you include the effects of second-hand smoke. That is to say, if one person smokes in a four-person household and causes, say, two cases of lung cancer, does it change the numbers any? The other people were going to die anyway, but what other costs do they incur that they wouldn't have otherwise?