As much as I like Java, there's a few obvious features that it's somehow still missing:

• Signals/slots
• Async methods
• Properties

C# has all of these, of course.

The Ubuntu trademark is certainly not open source.

Miranda rights are only read to you if you're being arrested. But I guess you'd have to read all the way to the fourth sentence in the summary to see that this guy hadn't been arrested at the time his silence was used against him.

It's not easy to monetize a website, but compared to a desktop application? Are you kidding me?

With a website you have a limited resource that you can control access to. That's just not the case with desktop software.

Users *refuse* to put up with ads in desktop apps. Period. A certain percentage of users will pay if the app is top-notch, but when you're competing against free products it's a tough sell. The Songbird folks certainly had some tough free competition -- Winamp, iTunes, Foobar, etc.

Something similar has been available for YEARS- all you need do is ask the phone company to invalidate the IMEI number.and/or activate the memory wipe software built into Android, iOS, and Windows phones.

There's still no nationwide database in the US of all stolen IMEI numbers. Even if you tell your carrier that your phone was stolen and they bother to invalidate the number, AFAIK there's nothing stopping the theif from using the phone on a different carrier (assuming the phone is compatible, obviously.)

Speaking of danger, when someone sues you because your software crashed their airplane into a nuclear reactor, you're going to be wishing you'd picked a more restrictive license.

Specifically, one with a "no warranty" provision.

How exactly will they do the same with PCIe and SSDs? Explain.

Um... what the hell are you babbling about?

Or number 5: reduce the government to a level where it doesn't matter who is in power (or eliminate it entirely).

Replacing the tryanny of an ignorant majority with the tyranny of a well-armed minority is hardly an upgrade.

Obama must be impeached. The Congressmen and Senators who support his actions must be impeached. The courts who OK this must be removed. Washington D.C. must be burned to the ground and rebuilt if there are none there who will honor their oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

We could do all that, but we'd be right back where we started. The fundamental problem is the American people, who have time and time again said that they simply don't care. The government listening to our calls? We don't care. Reading our emails? We don't care. Hiding disturbing truths about our perpetual wars? We couldn't care less.

Blame government officials all you want, but remember this: as a democracy we get the government we deserve.

And they finally dropped the strange 8-tab maximum on Mobile Safari!

But when you go back far enough, it does requires the belief that everything which set off the chain of events somehow came into being without an intelligent creator.

Preconceived notions about how the universe came into being have nothing to do with science. Furthermore, you don't need to know all the details about how things came into being to practice science.

There's nothing to "believe" in when it comes to science (it works either way) but if the fear of death makes people interested, that's great.

After all, science has brought us not only longer lives, but more fulfilling, healthier lives with less suffering. If you're worried about death it's just sensible to turn to science.

Encrypted mail is a problem of convenience, not technology.

That's only partially true -- there's no way to encrypt or hide the recipient of the email. Do you want the government to know if you're talking to the "wrong" people?

Is there any chance that this and the Verizon metadata will cause real outrage, by which I mean by enough citizens to have some political effect?

If you remember aaaalll the way back to 2005, a whistleblower at AT&T in San Francisco made public the NSA's secret wiretapping program. Despite ongoing lawsuits brought on by the EFF, it doesn't seem like the majority of the public really cared at all.

Seems like most people simply don't give a shit about their rights. The government could announce a plan to cut every man's dick off, and few would complain. Well, some cranky newspaper columnists might complain about the "hippie protesters," but that's it.