"[T]hese amendments guarantee a number of personal freedoms, limit the government's power in judicial and other proceedings..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

The U.S. Constitution only limits what the U.S. government is able to (legally) do. It does not place restrictions on citizens or companies. Laws are commonly used to address those issues, such as the laws against murder or theft or assault. The Constitution does not protect you from an individual wearing Google Glass, nor from Google providing such a service.

It doesn't add zero functionality, it adds continued support. When a company decides not to spend additional resources supporting an aging product line, you have two choices: Choose an option that is supported, or continue using the old, now unsupported version. It's not as though MS is introducing a kill-switch for currently running machines. They simply will no longer spend employee hours or company resources to maintain their software. And they are under no obligation to do so, for free, forever, which is what people seem to more-or-less want.

I just assumed that it only repels frozen insects, and not other forms of frozen water or animals in a non-frozen state.

There have been several arguments recently that power in the U.S. has traditionally been divided three ways, with government regulating business power over citizens, and citizens enforcing some form of control over government. Theoretically, this provides the checks and balances necessary in any power struggle, with three major players each exerting control over the others. Since government and corporations have effectively teamed up, citizens have been on the losing end. If the NSA manages to piss off enough corporations, will it be possible to shift the power balance away from a corporate run government and provide a little more balance in the mix? A man can dream..

This is a great point. The economic benefit of killing humans should definitely outweigh the right to life. Oh, except that it costs quite a bit more for us to kill people than to simply incarcerate them with no chance of parole. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty " Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present (death penalty) system to be $137 million per year. The cost of the present system with reforms recommended by the Commission to ensure a fair process would be $232.7 million per year. The cost of a system in which the number of death-eligible crimes was significantly narrowed would be $130 million per year. The cost of a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty would be $11.5 million per year."

Laws can be repealed or ignored. Theoretically, if rules were in place to limit the use of the data, I would agree with you. In practice, as long as the data exists, the risk that it will be used in such a way to subvert dissident behaviour exists. Security is all fine and dandy, but when security means the government fighting to continue its existence at the expense of its citizens, that's a problem. Tools and techniques that allow this to occur or continue should not be allowed.

http://xkcd.com/955/

I've seen a few comments now about being better than 88% by predicting no constantly, but I think that misses the point. You would accurate predict actually being homosexual 0% of the time with that method. Predicting hetrosexuality is easy, predicting homosexuality is arguably more complicated. If they accurately predict homosexuality with an 88% success rate, and attribute all the rest as hetrosexual, that is a real achievement.

From the summary, "It's a free country; people are free to believe stupid things. On the third hand, he is actively advocating his views outside his fiction, and what better way is there for readers to fight back than organizing a boycott and voting with their wallets?" These two ideas are not exclusive, or even different sides of the same coin. These are the same side of the same coin. A writer is free to believe "stupid" things, and we are free not to buy things he is associated with because we believe his views are wrong. Companies are free to disassociate with him because his views are affecting their business, and he is free to change his views. We are all also free to not do those things.

I'm not trying to say that health insurance providers aren't greedy, parasitic bastards, but the comment about how they "[how when someone is] sick they don't want to insure them because they might have to actually pay out some money" seems a bit naive to me. This a problem with an incomplete insurance market (a subtype of asymmetric information failure) where the sick have all the incentive to want insurance, and providers have all incentive to want healthy customers. Basically, if you are allowed to buy insurance after you need it and not before, there is no incentive for any company to provide that insurance. They will obviously lose money. Insurance companies make money by floating risk across a diverse pool of people: The ones that don't have a problem right now are effectively paying for the ones that do. If every customer has a problem, no one is left paying a fair rate as the remaining healthy people have incentive to drop their insurance until they need it.

"Microsoft's has a great relationship with Nokia, which is considered in the industry first among equals when it comes to Microsoft partners, has some vendors reassessing their own support for the operating system." Is this supposed to read that Microsoft and Nokia are considered equals, and Microsoft is giving preferential treatment to that vendor? Or is it supposed to read that Nokia has been withdrawing support, and so other vendors are shying away too? Can someone please review these summaries before they get posted to ensure they make sense?

I wonder what the long term effects of this condition might be. Is it possible to die of old age when you don't age?

If I am reading this correctly, being dead is better than being in jail? I can understand some extreme mutilations being worse than death, but death is definitely one of the more severe consequences of an action.

I've spent the better part of the last five years as a supervisor for a telecommunications company dealing with attendance and administrative records. One of the topics that comes up frequently is FMLA. By federal minimums, an employee has to have been working for a full year, full time, and have a doctor's claim to a long term illness in order to qualify for FMLA. In addition, the doctor sets the guidelines for what the employee can do with the FMLA including how many days can be taken consecutively, per week or month, or other conditions as determined by the condition. For most people, even having a serious illness that might require two or three weeks of downtime would likely not be able to complete the FMLA paperwork in time to have it effective by the time they were terminated for non-attendance. FMLA is great when you have a sick relative, or when you find out you have a long-term illness like AIDs or cancer, but often doesn't work for run-of-the-mill illnesses, even when it seems like it should.