The pension funds were quite healthy until the financial industry screwed everything up, extracting their fees and profits from the investments before they tanked them of course.

Now that we can die with dignity, how about we focus on changes that will allow us to live with dignity as well?

The reason all those things bother you when "survival camping," is that you aren't used to them. Modern society has made you soft. Clearly people in the past were different: if they weren't, why would some have been fine living as Eskimos when surely word had filtered back to them about the paradise to the south where clothing wasn't needed and food abundant and there were plenty of soft, sandy beaches to sit on. Some people must have just not been all that bothered by conditions that we would consider brutal. Hell, I can't even understand why people live in American cities where it snows when there are so many more comfortable places to live! But people do.

Sight lines are so bad in cities that often times at intersections or pulling out of driveways, we can't see if anyone is coming from the left or right until we move the front of our car into "danger" because we are seated many feet back from the front of the car. If we had cameras mounted on the front of the car facing left and right we could see before pulling out. Other cameras could completely eliminate blind spots, or aid in parking. The prices quoted in this article seem way too high. Real costs are surely in the low hundreds for a monitor and four to six camera views.

Sorry this reply is really late, but in case you notice, I guess I just feel that anyone who needs more than a second or two to know with 100% certainty whether they will be hit or hit anyone if they go through an intersection should not be driving a car at all. Stop, look, calculate, proceed when safe. If that seems hard to some people, they ought to do the rest of us a favor and not drive.

Then don't sit there. At 3am, on a deserted road, it shouldn't take you more than a few seconds to scan the entire seen and determine that, indeed, there isn't a police officer around and that you can then proceed with impunity. Don't let a light rule your life.

If this is how oddly Americans interpret British English, and then can't let it go, imagine how poorly they must be misunderstanding the words of people from other countries. I wonder how many people have ended up on no fly lists or arrested or held based on gross misunderstandings?

The defendant in this case admitted he purposefully recreated the photo after getting caught using the original (for commercial purposes) without a licensing agreement. He didn't want to pay so he hired someone to recreate it. The fact that his image is somewhat different actually worked against him because it was further proof that he was copying the original and just tweaking it slightly because he thought this would protect him (he was wrong). So it's pretty silly of you to say that it is not copied - it just shows you haven't read the article(s) and the judgement in question.

"If it can be proved that there existed images like this before 2006, then the plaintiff shouldn't have won, but apparently, the examples given in court were undated." I don't think this is accurate. The defendant admitted in court that he purposefully copied the plaintiff's photo (because he didn't want to pay the licensing fee). The photographers of older images than the plaintiffs could try suing him, but they'd have to show that he knew of their photos and purposefully made their own photo based on it. Furthermore, even if this plaintiff lost suits to other photographers, it would have no effect on an appeal of this here case because it would not change the facts that this defendant purposefully copied the plaintiff's photo for commercial gain.

I agree. I work for a water utility and making any changes to our system requires us to physically report to the locked, alarmed office and access (through password login) a scada computer terminal, or to report to the facility in question and log in there. I often wish I could at least access current complete "read only" system data on my phone or computer so that when I'm paged by the system and it reports that a fault has occurred (example could be as simple as "pump #1 failed to start") I could see how crucial it is for me to respond or if it's something that could wait till morning. But we so far have avoided the slippery slope of remote access and so I have to respond physically and access the situation. (and to avoid responding to less than crucial problems, we just set the system to only call out on serious issues and just log the others for review during business hours).

As more and more of my "online" activities take place on the iphone instead of the computer, password management has become much easier. Other than bank accounts, all log in info is kept by the phone and I never have to log in to anything: counting on the password lock of the phone itself to keep my stuff private should someone pick up my phone. But someone could overcome my 4-digit pass key or observe it (I know my wife's because everytime she has trouble with her phone she asks me for help and so I witness her unlock it). What would really be better is if devices had bio-based locking features so that only their assigned users could open them. One big padlock for the house, so to speak, so that we can safely leave all the contents unlocked and easier to use.

I worked as a designer for a market research firm in the late 1990s and Kodak (a client) was then trying to come up with ways to remain relevant. They were always testing new concepts and business models. Not products per se, but entire new ways of looking at imaging and how consumers would use cameras and images in the future. I guess they never found a solution.

Pentax was bought by Ricoh, so that Ricoh would have a brand with better name recognition!

Yes, Japan has a high speed rail system. But they built it before the 1964 Olympics! They aren't trying to build it right now in 2011 when the whole country is filled in the way it is now (and the way California is in many spots).