Famous quote attributed to John Carmack: "The plot in a video game is just like the plot in a porn movie -- merely an excuse to get to the action."

Even if we, for the sake of the argument, ignore the practical and ethical issues of current copyright laws as a matter of principle, and buy the argument that infringing copyright hurts the producers and not just the pockets of *AA execs, still, the fact remains that Canada (as well as China, Russia, and the rest of the world) is under huge influx of American corporations, who profit from out-of-border sales while not offering jobs in foreign countries, paying anywhere near the taxes they pay at the states, contribute to foreign producers or foreign culture in general, or otherwise benefit foreign countries in proportion to the profits they make, or seek to make, from them.

Reciprocal treaties, aka "you respect my copyright, I'll respect yours", really are not appealing to foreign governments because the US, by far, exports more of what they call Intellectual Property than other countries export to the states. So pray tell us, if you want our governments to spend our own taxpayers money to enforce your copyright laws so that YOUR companies can make a profit... What's in it for us?

You are basing your argument on the classical philosophy that a vote, when cast for a person, essentially places trust in that person to serve as he or she sees fit, for the duration of his term.

I call that position bullshit and reject it in principle. I refuse to place unconditional trust in a politician, or be so naive as to believe that he is indeed there to serve his constituency. Politicians will always do what is in their self interest (wow, just like the rest of us). That's why we have the party system, so we have an extra layer of protection. We don't JUST vote for Specter, just like we don't just vote for any Republican. We vote for both. We vote for Specter AS LONG AS he maintains the principles of the party he was running under, in this case, Republican.

Partisanism has lots of problems, but I firmly believe that the extra layer of safeguarding against do-what-I-fuckin-like politicians makes it worthwhile. We don't place unlimited trust in the guy, we only vote for him as long as he maintains integrity to the party under which he ran.

If someone WANTS to run under the platform of "unlimited trust", he should run as Independent. There's a reason why almost nobody gets elected as one.

While I may support Democrats more than the Republicans, I find the general principle of changing parties mid-term a disgusting and cowardly betrayal of trust.

You were elected as a Republican, for better or for worse. You should either finish your term as one, or if you can no longer consider yourself a Republican, resign. At the next election, feel free to run as a Democrat or whoever the hell you want. But for this term, you should act for the people who elected you. That's the principle of representative democracy.

I'd even accept the compromise of, when one leaves or is kicked out of the party, he/she should have the right to stay as an Independent member until the next election. But joining a party different from the one you were elected under, in the middle of your term, should be outright unconstitutional.

Remember that the machine does not have to be 100% correct. Human contestants aren't either. The machine can lose the obfuscated/joke questions if it can make up for it in other questions. Furthermore, given a machine's godly reaction time as compared to humans, it can be programmed to only decide to answer questions that appear clear and simple to answer, since its highly likely to get first dibs on anything it chooses to try and answer.

Or vise versa. Have intelligent answering machines, who understand the type of question the caller asks, and based on that decide whether to alert the human owner or tell them to screw off.

Negligence does not require malicious intent. As long as the party had to provide a certain level of duty of care, and failed to provide that level, they are liable. Analogy: If some gangster was randomly shooting his gun just for fun, and one of the bullets happened to stray and kill someone, he'd still be liable, both civilly and criminally, even though it wasn't his intention to kill anyone. However, unless there were actual damages (which according to the article, weren't), the couple have no standing to sue for money.

That being said, whoever authorized that shelling should be disciplined/fired/charged, depending on their exact role and the level of duty of care they were obliged, and failed, to follow.

"Mandate that open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software"

In other words, their expenditures for proprietary software must equal to $0.00?

1. Make a sad-faced robot carrying a coin jar.
2. Give it a sign saying "Brother, can you spare a quarter so I can buy a new battery?"
3. ???
4. PROFIT!

The whole idea of calling ourselves civilized (in fact, civilized enough to give ourself the moral right to depose a foreign government due to human rights violations) means that we must be prepared to honor the human rights of even those who deny them to others.