Air will kill people dead [sic] as well if injected instead of inhaled.

The GP said:

Richard Milhous Nixon (who was forced to resign from the presidency of the United States due to his many flagrantly illegal acts) said:

Please don't speak for me and please don't include me in the group "everyone". I don't think the GP was being fucking retarded and counterproductive. Even though this is Slashdot, the GP's wit was not lost to all readers.

Microsoft here. You remember all the nasty, sneaky, dirty tricks we've pulled over the years? Well, our latest trick is to make front groups who claim our competitors are now using those same tricks.

Well I think they meant viral.

I wish I had mod points for you.

Many riddens died ...

If you are talking about the current president (or the previous president) and the endless extra-judicial drone wars and the endless extra-judicial war crimes and the endless extra-judicial incarcerations then I completely agree with you. These actions always create more enemies than they destroy. Without these actions and without the US support of hated dictators around the world, there would be no need for the fictitious war on terror.

OTOH, Bradley Manning was trying to let the American people know about some of these atrocities committed in their name and with their tax dollars. Without disclosures like this, all the bad stuff done by the US government stays secret and will never be stopped. Is that really the path you want to take?

If you have already given up on the Constitution and the rule of law, then sure, Manning needs to be punished in order to maintain the power of the lawless US government in order to "keep us safe". For people who still think Democracy can only live and thrive under the rule of law then Manning acted as a selfless patriot. He put himself in a position of great physical and psychological danger in order to try to protect Democracy in the USA.

The atrocities and abuses he exposed are extremely damaging to the US. The acts themselves are far more damaging than the exposure of the acts to the American people. The people who are on the receiving end of the attrocites, (and/or their loved ones) already know about them. That's why they keep fighting back. If the types of behavior Manning exposed are not curtailed then the so-called war on terror will never end. Even as a society, you are only as sick as your secrets.

From the 2nd fine article:

You actually have to pay money to see what this non-government cabal is accusing you of? It costs them next to nothing to tell you what the exact accusation is. It's just a few more bytes in the warning email or in a web page linked to by the email. I could maybe understand having to pay a fee to contest the charges but it is truly Kafkaesque to have to pay a fee just to find out what the charges are.

The powers of evil are trying to make APIs copyrightable. APIs consist of function declarations.

Their evil plan is to destabilize the entire software industry by making it illegal for people who are not working for large corporations to program. The Armageddon they're striving for with their stupid patent wars against Google will look like small potatoes once they're allowed to copyright APIs. Patents only last 20 years. In the USA copyright is forever. While allowing APIs to be patented may be evil, it is far less evil than letting them be copyrighted.

Of course, in order to destabilization the entire software industry they are trying to trick some stupid judges into believing that Judge Alsup's well reasoned ruling which maintains the status quo would destabilization the entire software industry. Alsup is far from stupid. Let's hope some of his wisdom rubs off on the judges in the higher courts who read his ruling.

Shame on all of the people who are trying to hoodwink the nation with this nonsense. Especially shame on Eugene Spafford who really should know better. I had no idea he turned to the dark side.

Are you fcking serious? They will get royally screwed just like when serfs anywhere try to get a little bit of money back from the rich.

There are plenty of things to worry about in the world but one of the few things we don't have to worry about is the ability of large corporations to put the screws to the little guy. Look at the robo-signing fiasco. Thousands of people (or more) have lost their homes and all the investment they put into them without ever having missed a payment.

The very last thing we need is yet another way for large corporations to screw the average person.

Yes, as long as everyone has perfect foresight of what will happen in the future and how their contract will get changed without their consent then what you say may be true. OTOH, in the real world this makes about as much sense as your concern about giving corporations yet another means of screwing individuals.

"Oh noes! Google is teh evil because they don't take down enough YouTube videos."

Previously on Slashdot:

"Oh noes! Google is teh evil because they take down too many YouTube videos".

Give me a break.

I call bullshit. I helped work on MRI in the early 1980's in a university lab that was government funded. Likewise, I met someone at my university who was working on CAT scans in the 1970's (I asked about his very large stack of punch cards at the computer center). He was also government funded. For both of these innovations, the early work was done with public funding.

Clearly both CAT scans and MRI were invented long before they were patented. The early years of research to bring these inventions to fruition were mainly funded by the taxpayers. Why should one corporation get a monopoly on the fruits of this publicly funded research long after the inventions were actually invented?

You seem to be saying that ordinary laws passed by Congress supersede the Constitution. This is just as disturbing as the OP's observation.

We can do much better than a handful of bits per second with acoustics (yes, IAaUAE) but it is still not enough to watch the Superbowl in real-time.