Stop living in the past.

This was a week ago.

Yeah, and in this case there's an even worse aspect to the problem: This is a law pertaining to the actions not of people, but of software. All the AI dreaming to the contrary, software doesn't act the least bit like a human mind. The chance of any software being written that satisfies this and other laws will differ only infinitesimally from zero. We have a lot of software people here on /., and they should all be a bit nervous about being held responsible for their software that tries to satisfy this and other laws.

The few passages I've seen quoted from this UK law make it pretty clear to me that there's no way I could possibly implement it correctly, in any of the dozen or so programming languages that I know well. This is because it's written in a mixture of legalese and bureaucratese, which are languages that I know well enough to know that I don't stand a chance of interpreting them well enough to do the job correctly. (And having them explained by the typical B-school graduate isn't going to help me do the job correctly, either. ;-)

I've had to work on my own motorcycle from time to time, and my boyfriend kind of refused to help me, knowing that self-sufficiency is better than doing everything for me. However, from time to time, he would call me over with "hey, Japanese hands", because I had the tiny hands to get at/into something that his man hands were just too big to get at.

Couldn't he have just waited until bedtime?

We've been watching the torch being bussed around the country via the BBC's live stream.

Erm, why?

Ahmahdinajad has only titular power.

He's much like the elected mayor of London.

Not USian. But this is the date convention they use domestically, for their "Reichstag Fire".

If I referred to 11/9, no one would follow the reference.

And I wouldn't be able to spell "Rudy Gi911ani" anymore...

If you will concede the point, believing it or not, that a group of people producing a commodity is being exploited, one would ask what has been done in the past over this? What has been done is primarily workers organizing into unions, and perhaps secondarily into political parties representing their interests. Some other things such as co-op movements can come into peripheral play as well.

What has not been done is people individually buying or not buying a commodity due to perceived exploitation. What does that do? Nothing. The closest thing to that coming from these other movements is the boycott. Even that is a weak tactic, and is used sparingly - people are boycotting Coca-Cola because they are killing their workers who are trying to organize unions in Colombia, sometimes even right in the factories. Or they boycotted grapes during the UFW strike. These boycotts are almost always adjunct to the primary campaign, which is almost always a union organizing campaign.

It is difficult to look at a commodity and tell what the history of its production is. Is a diamond a "blood diamond" or was it mined centuries ago? How was an apple in the supermarket picked, or a pair of pants, or so forth? Atomized individuals deciding this do nothing, it's a waste of time.

If you really want to do something, work to get US military bases out of places like Kyrgyzstan, Guantanamo Bay and so forth. The US has been funding the Honduran military, who threw out the elected leader a few years ago, then had another "election" where opposing candidates were killed, as were opposing campaign workers. Being picky about buying electronics makes little sense politically, and why stop at electronics, you have to look at clothes, food - everything. Not that it makes sense to begin with.