The professors I had in college must have been truly outstanding at doing, because they sure didn't bother teaching.

You need to stop getting your legal advice from trolls on Slashdot (and people need to stop modding this up), because this is completely wrong.

My initial reaction was also "WTF?", but this isn't as completely insane as you might think. I don't know if they still have them, since I haven't checked in probably 10 years, but I used to go into Hot Topic once in a while because they had a few racks of video game-themed t-shirts. So ThinkGeek isn't too far off from stuff that they at least used to have in the stores.

Clearly you've never been to Boston.

Politicians did things contrary to what they said they would do? Surely, you must be joking.

Seriously, WTF.

First, thank you for bringing up the penalty for striking a pregnant woman. I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers those verses whenever anyone claims that God says abortion is murder.

However, "Thou shall not kill" is definitely wrong. The Hebrew word is "murder", not "kill". There isn't any ambiguity on that one.

Also, you could arguably give half credit for the Sabbath commandment. Up until recently, a lot of states restricted businesses being open on Sundays. Even now, there are quite a few laws about what you can do on Sundays (restrictions on the sale of alcohol is the first one that comes to mind).

I know it's hard to believe, but every once in a while you get someone who's capable of thinking past the end of the quarter.

Depends on where you live. Some states define "Theft of Services" as a crime.

No, but the money that you were already paid does go to your family. Your company will also pay your family for your unused vacation time (at least this is true when you leave or are fired, so I assume it's true if you die unexpectedly). The term is "deferred compensation", and that's what royalties are.

Copyright terms that automatically expire at the death of the artist are what would be completely unfair. In addition to the danger of a young artist dying unexpectedly, as another poster described above, it would provide reduced incentive for older artists to continue producing works. A fair copyright term would be a fixed length, completely regardless of what happens to the creator. Otherwise, the monetary value of the work is directly dependent on the age, health, and, to some extent, luck of the creator.

The beatings^Wlayoffs will continue until morale improves.

I think training someone else to do a job is harder than doing the job, so I'd say they were better than qualified.

How is IM a new trend? AIM, ICQ, and XMPP have been around since the mid to late 1990s. IRC is even older, if you want to count that as IM. AIM and ICQ are only slightly older now than SMTP was when they first appeared (approximately 20 years vs. 15 years), but they were only about 5 years after HTTP and HTML, and IRC was developed before HTTP and HTML.

In other words, it's a scientific hypothesis. That doesn't mean it's wrong. That doesn't mean it's likely to be wrong. It only means that we don't have a bunch of extra Earths lying around with which to conduct repeatable experiments that would confirm the predictions of the hypothesis. The hypothesis might be wrong, even if the likelihood of its being wrong is very low.

By the way, science is never proven. Proofs are for mathematicians.

Uh, no, a sensible, scientifically literate person should consider it a valid scientific hypothesis. Sure, it might be completely wrong, but it probably isn't.

It's almost as if they improved Windows XP over the span of a decade.

Nah, that couldn't be it.