Problem with mac is when you want to run windows, you have that annoying single button trackpad. Granted, using an external mouse fixes that problem, sometimes you just want to carry the laptop and nothing else.

Echostar is a much larger company than sonicblue was, so I think they'd have a correspondingly stronger legal muscle.

This is just a giant hand-out -- to some buddy, no doubt. Bush had Haliburton to hand sweet deals to and Obama has... whoever.

Actually Obama frequently gives no-bid contracts to Haliburton, and so did Clinton. In fact there were a few times that Haliburton lost in a bid proposal but Clinton still gave them the contract anyways. In fact, Haliburton is crediting the Obama administration for recently having record breaking revenue last quarter.

The only reason Haliburton got a bad name under Bush is because Dick Cheney happened to own stock in Haliburton (which he sold early on during the Bush years.)

Don't kid yourself, you aren't talking actual economics. Housing has never been a major economic force except during the housing bubble. If no houses were built in the next 20 years the effect to the economy would be trivial.

[citation needed]

One thing to consider is that in the last 20 years, warfare has changed dramatically. The enemy doesn't even have an army so to speak, there's a rather blurry line between what counts as a civilian and an enemy combatant.

Take for example, what do you do with e.g. a mother of three who actively sends a warning to somebody waiting around the corner with an RPG ready to fire at an incoming HMMWV? Yeah technically she had no weapons, but she was obviously taking part in the battle.

But that's not the only problem. A huge number of these so called "enemy combatants" (because again, they don't even wear a uniform) use their children or wives as shields because they know they are less likely to be fired upon or have a grenade lobbed at them.

Worse is that even though they break every geneva convention rule in the book, we still have to treat them as if they were a legitimate enemy army (despite popular leftist opinion, guantanamo IS legal under geneva.)

Get a router compatible with tomato firmware, install tomato, and then install rpcapd on it (no need to compile from source, there are standalone binaries out there compiled for your router's CPU). Then use wireshark to monitor and capture the traffic. After that you can take your pick of software to parse the pcap files.

Probably Vietnam next actually. Vietnam is becoming to China what China is to the US.

Well, guess what? It's funded by taxpayers, so unless there's a damn good reason not to (and no, the circular reason of it being "top-secret" is not a good reason), it should be public domain.

One of the most fundamental military strategies is having advantages over the enemy. How can you have an advantage if they know everything you know? Sorry but you're in serious need of a reality check.

Yes, life is unfair, as your sig indicates.

Nature is anarchy in nature. Civilization is not.

Actually, yes. Contracting IT to the lowest bidder is a big problem with government data security. It really doesn't help that those who discover security vulnerabilities are severely punished for it, though.

The government has had leaks where no private entities were involved in the process at all. No contractors, just pure government projects.

Stolen? NASA is a public entity, and its advances should rightly be part of the public domain.

I'm sure the US military would disagree that it's technological secrets should belong to the public domain.

Lots of things in life are unfair.

That's why we have laws to keep things fair. Would you think its fair if a burglar robbed your house, and you had no legal recourse?

It is often the shoddy security practices of banks (yay deregulation!) that allow massive overseas transfers to happen in the first place.

I'm sure deregulation has a lot to do with the government's own security practices when they have data leaks as well, right?

Oh and by the way, just to clarify one thing with regard to intellectual property: I do actually pirate movies and tv shows, but it's not a matter of getting them for free, rather it's the distribution system sucks. I actually pay for usenet access and pay for a faster broadband connection in order to download from usenet faster (whereas if proper streaming was available I'd probably subscribe to a lower speed tier.)

If the entertainment industry provided a universal (as in one website, rather than going to crackr for sony BMG shows, amazon for others, and then netflix for yet more) and it was DRM free so that I could watch them in my preferred player, XBMC, I'd probably pay for that instead.