You'd probably have to choose. Kids, or immortality. The earth can't fit both.

Life is too short to work with Windows all day. I'd quit, too.

If you refuse, they'll grope your genitals repeatedly until you give in.

Monopolize public education and then fail to teach anything.

True enough. And even Lepanto was in 1571 I guess. I need to remember how bad my memory is before posting. Thanks.

Seriously, the Otttomans? The Turks hadn't been a real threat to Europe since the 1400s. That's as bad as the Arabs still bitching about the Crusades.

Well that's just not true. You don't get to be the biggest country in the world by being on the defensive. And the Soviets most certainly did want to turn the whole world into a worker's paradise, whether that was to be ruled directly from Moscow or not.

You probably still think Stalin was just a nice guy who didn't really starve millions of his own subjects, too.

As I recall, the US engineered the rebellion that saw Panama separate from Colombia. They had a deal in place with the resulting local bigshots to get rights to the canal right-of-way afterwards, and then finished the construction begun by the French.

No, the only way they can do that is to host the data (and their staff and business operations) outside the US.

The US government and its police forces don't give a flying eff what the law allows them to do or not. And all recent legislation is aimed at removing any remaining restrictions of due process.

Your argument is just stupid. In a free country government is the means by which we organize to protect ourselves against other people, and get other things done that make sense to do collectively. Just because you call it government doesn't make it automatically evil. Protecting property rights is an essential basic bedrock means of creating a free country in the first place.

If we didn't have government we'd have security companies with so many subscribers that they would essentially be governments, only we wouldn't be able to vote for who runs them. The last time we tried that on a large scale we called it the Middle Ages. Turns out the security companies found it amusing to constantly make war on other security companies, and kill a lot of their subscribers in the process. And they weren't big on the voluntary part of signing up. No more than government is today, of course.

I'd like to see federal and state(/provincial) governments do a LOT less, but the things that municipal governments tend to be good at still need to get done, and it makes a lot more sense to do it in a non-profit everyone-contributes kind of way than through other mechanisms.

As for copyright ... it used to make sense. For a limited time, to genuinely encourage the creation of new works, it makes sense. To pass to giant corporations and be extended forever, definitely not. I really don't think Disney would stop making movies if they only had copyright on the works for 10 or 20 years. Their payback period is much less. And gaining the power to arbitrarily shut down Internet sites without due process will just break a lot of things, not stop the theft anyway. So it's all stupid.