Love it! You want more power than a Camry V6? That makes you an unreasonable person.

The postal service is struggling. Just ask Obama. http://www.breitbart.tv/obama-its-the-post-office-thats-always-having-problems/

Why in the world is the answer to every question: more _federal_ involvement?! Why can't we just let local municipalities or companies lay a piece of fiber to your door, and then let you choose which providers you want to hook to the other end of your line for service? That's the answer I'm looking for.

I suppose it will be just like any other corporate field, though. One of the slightly larger companies will start buying a smaller, struggling one, and the rest will snowball until we get something like Ma Bell. Again.

Alright, maybe the feds should be involved in this. But then we get horrible market distortions that lead to other problems.

Well, I guess it's either Scylla or Charybdis.

So it's all just legal double-speak then. You don't really "own" your comments, except when Geeknet wants to disavow itself from them to avoid being held responsible for them in some sort of litigation.

I've just narrowly averted posting in a couple of other threads here this morning. This thread has got me thinking that I want to just go ahead and delete my Slashdot account. (I deleted my Facebook account a couple months ago.)

I hope the ACLU cleans the government's clock with the lawsuit, and establishes precedent which guarantees there won't be any more of these things.

Further, I agree that the cop drawing his gun was outrageous. However, what everyone seems to be missing is that there was another, marked squad car right behind the unmarked vehicle, making the stop along with the plain-clothed officer. The motorcyclist had no doubt that he was being stopped by a legitimate police action.

And what, pray tell, is "backwater" about the Midwest? We have a Starbucks on every corner, just like you do.

I'm pretty libertarian on these issues, and I think that the courts upholding the idea that you can't film ANYTHING in public view is ridiculous.

However... some people really deserve to be treated much worse than they are. It really makes my blood boil when I see these car chases on cop shows that go on and on and on, at 120+ mph on crowded freeways and city streets. The driver causes several near misses and maybe even some collateral damage, entire police stations have to be mobilized miles ahead of the guy to get helicopters going and spike strips laid, and then the guy finally plows into something or someone else that ends the chase. Then they jump out of the car and cause a long foot chase and / or search before they finally put him in cuffs. These people don't just deserve a beat down. After all that effort, they deserve to be fed into a wood chipper.

And, if we're all being perfectly honest about it, it's those kinds of people who are causing the police to act over-zealously when the slightest thing happens in an standard police encounter.

Isn't that the exact argument for evolution?

I'm with you. I took a couple of hours and literally, manually deleted 99% of the stuff I've done on Facebook, and have stopped using it. (Yes, I realize that the company has this stuff forever, but I've learned my lesson.)

The problem is that "free" will always win. Always. People, in general, are willing to trade anything for "free." The few, vocal persons who are not (willing) will always be inconsequential in these matters.

First, Wordpress is GPL software, so you can't lump it in with Flickr, et. al. (I just converted my personal site from a custom Rails app to Wordpress.)

Second, what I haven't seen anyone remark about in this thread so far is RSS feeds. If people create their own sites, put whatever content and restrictions they would like on them, and then make different feeds for different groups of people, those people can aggregate what they want with a good feed reader, and everyone's happy!

But, yeah, that's a lot more work.

You must have been using it with a VERY low duty cycle.

I keed, I keed.