I do not live in France, but nevertheless in my own country, where there are supposed to be checks and balances, I believe there aren't enough of them. It is possible, if a single party gets more than 50% of the House and Senate, for that party to do almost anything with impunity. Sure, it takes effort to pass a bill into law since it must pass in both chambers of Congress and then get signed into law by the President. But because government is an entity that tends toward corruption and total control, I think the Constitution should have thrown a few additional monkey wrenches into the gears and added the following requirements to the mix:

1. A mandatory waiting period of one year from completion of the writing of a bill until it can be voted on by legislators. The bill must be made available to the public at the start of this waiting period. This forces a review and comment period. If the text of the bill changes, the waiting period restarts.

2. More eyes. After a bill passes both houses, it must be shelved until at least 50% of the members of both houses have changed. Once that happens, the bill must pass both houses a second time. Only then does it land on the President's desk. This means that the passage of bills into law requires the NEXT Congress to agree with the current one.

3. "One subject matter." In other words, you can't sneak a failed bill regulating commerce into the bowels of another bill regulating something else.

4. "Plain English," and "Reasonable length," meaning an eighth-grader should be able to read and understand the bill. As a bonus, instead of "Reasonable length," the Constitution should have defined a hard length limit of, say, 200 pages in a bill, where each page may only contain up to a maximum of a certain number of words. No more bills so long they need all of Google's storage capacity to store them and vote on them without reading them. Not to mention, if you can't explain it in 200 pages, it's probably too complicated to be understood by the public, which will be expected to abide by it.

5. A Constitution-defined ceiling on the total number of pages in law. Once that limit is reached, they can't add pages until other pages are repealed to make room. Repealing should be as complicated as enacting, by the way. Say, 100,000 pages total maximum number of pages in law. This is a HUGE number! To put things into perspective, the federal tax law takes up 70,000 pages. That's just ONE law. There must be millions of pages of complicated, convoluted law. This is ridiculous! You are somehow expected to know and abide by the law, but it is impossible for any person to actually know so much. Laws are misunderstood, and this allows lawyers and other corrupt people to take advantage of normal people. There should be a hard limit.

Encarta could never compete with Wikipedia due to the tremendous workforce updating Wikipedia every day. Once gain open source wins against proprietary.

As I understand if the destination of an international flight is the USA they cannot serve booze to under 21 for the duration of the flight, even if they're flying over the Atlantic for many hours. Is this correct?

Why is it every time someone points out that maybe, just maybe, socialism actually has *shudder* disadvantages, they get modded --1 troll?

Oh I forgot... I'm new here.

Government. What do you expect?

The astronauts in the ISS should declare independence and form their own state in the ISS.

Benchmarks are a good thing but we need to make sure that the FOSS community gets plenty of "real world use" data pertaining to the actual things people do with their software. With this data available the software can be streamlined and optimized to give the FOSS community software that is efficient with the use of resources, fast in terms of speed, and conservative with the use of battery power. This doesn't necessarily mean shaving cycles by coding in assembly or using different compiler switches. It does necessarily mean finding more efficient algorithms but it would be a waste of time to do this work in areas where the outcome won't be noticed. Here's the key: Software can be slow and it doesn't necessarily get noticed. Thanks to Microsoft's widespread install base and liberal use of processor and memory resources, people are accustomed to waiting for their computers. Better performance will be noticed when there is a basis for comparison.

True. But ear plugs won't provide the real life experience that working in a Real Job prior to college will. That experience provides not only quiet, money, and freedom during college, it provides what you need to make the most of college.

I used to help in hiring people where I work. Those fresh out of college who never worked before are always less capable than people the same age who finished high school and then worked in any job. The former are locked into the "follow directions" mentality and expect everything provided to them on a silver platter due to so many years of being in classrooms. They literally cannot think. The latter know how to think for themselves.

Shit like this will fly only until there is some serious competition *cough* Android *cough*.

Military. It doesn't need to be cheap. It only needs to look cheap.

You're not thinking like an entrepreneur! If you can convince people that they should change their MAC addresses, and if you have a EPROM recorder with which you can perform that service for a nominal fee, then you're in business! It's as easy as:
1. Marketing
2. ???
3. Profit!!!

Reminds me of a guy on the evening news one night who argued against something by using band-aids as an example in his argument. He said something to the effect that you live in a country where band-aids are sold in colors matching the skin tone of white people. This individual happened to have a dark complexion, so his example made a point. But if he would like a black band-aid, chances are that others want one, too. So instead of arguing that this country is crap because we don't have black band-aids, he should have:
1. Shut up so someone else wouldn't think of this idea.
2. Go into the black band-aid business.
3. Profit!!!

Bottom line: When you find a need that nobody fills, YOU should fill it!

Noisy dorm room? The solution to the excessively noisy roommate is very simple but requires a slight modification of the way we view the world with respect to education. The solution is to live in your own apartment while attending college. Impossible unless your parents have tons of money? Nope. You don't need your parent's money. I'll explain:

Today, it is common practice to finish high school and immediately go to college. Why?

I did things differently and I believe it was extremely beneficial. I went to college, but not until later. First, I got a Real Job. Contrary to public misconception, you do NOT need a college degree to get a Real Job!

Now mind you, in the beginning, it wasn't a particularly well-paying Real Job and it wasn't in the field I wanted to work in (software engineering). But I was out of high school so who cares? It was a job in a dirty machine shop where I started off sorting nuts and bolts, moved on to sorting expensive end mills and drills, moved on to cleaning dirty machine parts, and moved on to writing programs for their machines, setting up a company-wide network, and doing quite a few wonderful IT-related things for that company, all of which began one day when the boss found out that I knew quite a bit about computers and programming. By the way, the job started paying pretty well! Since I was living well below my means, not going out to bars nearly as much as my friends and not spending money on anything that wasn't absolutely necessary, I saved up quite a bit of dough during those years and learned a tremendous amount.

When I was 24, I decided it was time to attend college and get that degree. I noticed something very interesting. The students who were fresh out of high school had NO CLUE about living in the real world. They would cram for tests only to forget the stuff a day later. They didn't have the life experience to recognize which information was a solution to an important problem, and which information was interesting but unimportant. How many times have you heard a student ask, "When are we ever going to need this in real life?" I heard this quite a few times, and always in reference to EXTREMELY IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE!!! But you cannot possibly recognize what is important without the real life experience that you can ONLY get by working in a Real Job before going to college and getting into lifelong debt with student loans.

Remember, back in the day, children worked after school and during school vacations. Nowadays that is very uncommon, even in high school, due to "child protection" laws that place many limitations on how, when, and where children can work. Although these laws may protect children in one way, they harm them in another way by robbing them of important life experience during those years. Today, 30 is the new 20 because you need to gain, during your 20s, the life and work experience that your grandparents gained when they were in their teens. Today, people in their 20s are less mature than their counterparts in the 1950s were. You need that time, after high school but before college, to get that real life experience. Plus you earn Real Money, live in a Real Apartment, and if your job, like mine, isn't in the field you wanted to work in, you gain additional insights, knowledge, and experience by exposing yourself to something totally different. Much better than graduating from college and realizing that you have an infinitude of student loan debt and no clue what to do next. Not to mention that you do NOT have roommates (quiet or loud) during college, and you do NOT need your parent's money! When you want noise, you can go to a bar.

Ah the good ol' operating systems of yesteryear.

Good thing they figured out the swabs were contaminated. Had they not, some innocent woman might have spent years and years of her life in prison, for nothing.