"If you're pointing out your virtues to others, you have none to speak of."

Try that in an interview sometime.... If someones life is on the line, and you are more competent than the person or people trying to save them, then it would be not only bad, but possibly deadly, not to point out your virtues.

Yes, but there's a difference between "virtue", in the ethical sense, and "skill" or "knowledge".

I've actually been in the situation you describe. Yelling out, "I used to be a CPR instructor, she's a nurse, anyone better qualified? No? She's in charge!" may have helped save a life here by cutting through the "OMG whut happened?!?!" confusion of the moment. But that's different than "I am an exceptionally honest person, and she is very charitable!" :-)

The US government stopped worrying about the Constitution a long time ago.

True. That goes back to at least 1798.

Just recently, they decided they had the power to mandate that every single US citizen purchase a specific product or be fined (Obamacare).

Under the Constitution, the feds can tax you, or not tax you, pretty much any way they like. Paying a tax if you don't have health insurance is no more a violation of the Constitution than paying a tax if you don't have a mortgage. The ACA's mandate is bad policy, but is entirely Constitutional.

I must be embarrassingly ignorant of Human history because I'm sure we must have solved this problem to become developed nations in the first place.

We became a developed nation by robbing (via colonialism, and even outright slavery, theft of human beings) those undeveloped nations.

Possibly. But is there any particular reason it has to be the same Gallifreyan?

Yes. The same reason every Superman comic is about the same Kryptonian: he's the main character of the story.

All the instances of regeneration we've seen preserve gender. Not just the Doctor -- the Master and K'anpo Rimpoche stay male, while Romana, River Song, and Jenny stay female.

Yes, Romana's regeneration doesn't fit 100% with how the other instances of regeneration occur. and yes, one transgender Time Lord /Lady, the Corsair, is mentioned in one episode, but given the gender-preserving quality of all the regenerations we see it doesn't seem credible that regeneration is the source of that person's transgender status.

and this is one of those rare times when I actually believe they really are trying to protect the children.

Stopping people from sharing photos of the abuse of children no more stops the abuse of children than stopping people from sharing photos of murder would stop murder.

The death penalty removes any motivation to cooperate in revealing the extent of the treason.

"Treason"? There is no treason in exposing the activities of the U.S. government to its citizens; if anything, the "treason" is in the acts of the military/intelligence/industrial complex.

It was science fiction in the classic sense that the science was real

Well, except for the "ET made us smart" beginning. And the "God is not dead, he's living on Jupiter" ending.

If Dish Network want to re-broadcast something, they need permission. If they want to alter it, creating a derivative work for commercial use, they need further permission.

I don't know how Dish works currently, but when I had their service the receiver hooked up to a antenna for OTA bradcast TV, separate from the satellite dish. Dish Network was not rebroadcasting it.

And if fast-forwarding through a copy of some content that you possess (whatever its origin) is "creating a derivative work", then anyone using any sort of reference book who doesn't start reading it from the beginning each time is screwed.

I used to have (well, still have but never use) a ReplayTV PVR that had a similar commercial skipping feature. (There was a lawsuit about it but it was dropped when the company went bankrupt; later models omitted the feature.) All it did was automate what I'd been doing with a VCR (yes, I am ancient of days) for years, hitting fast-forward to skip the noise. So long as the device is just fulfilling the request of its user to skip forward to a different part of the content, there is no "derivative work", no "rebroadcast", and the data's so-called "owners" can get stuffed.

You do realize that YOU are breaking the law by not moving over when you are driving in the left lane?

Probably not. It's a common myth that "the law says the left lane is for passing only!", but this is true in only a handful of states.

The tax rules are quite sane: you get income, you pay tax.

When you get to the specifics, tax law (at least in the U.S.) is insane. The average citizen cannot fully understand all of the laws (deductions and exemptions) that apply to them. It's a standard story during April (tax filing season here) for a reporter to take their paperwork to a bunch of different tax preparation specialists and point out the wildly different results and interpretations.

And tax laws for businesses are so full of loopholes and special carve-outs that no human being understands it all. E.g, the "Excise Tax Exemption for Wooden Practice Arrows Used by Children" buried in the 2008 bailout bill.

And when it's involuntary and only beneficial to a select few it's ... what do we call our system today? I know it ain't capitalism anymore.

Nope, that;s capitalism all right. Benefits in a capitalist system accrue to the minority who own the capital.

Baltimore is following the lead of Maryland which, earlier this year, became the third open law state,

WTF? Maryland law (both statutes and COMAR) has been on-line for years.

And Baltimore City code has also been on-line for a while.

Maybe this is a nicer interface or something, but pretending that putting laws on-line is some kind of breakthrough is counterfactual.

Ads are implicitly requested when you visit an ad-supported site...

No, they're not. Ads are noise, unwanted data that I have to filter out..

...and are sent to pay for the resources YOU consume by visiting the site.

Advertisers already got their money from me when they added the cost of marketing to their products. I've already paid. The relationship between the advertiser, the publisher, and the noise the advertiser wants to insert into the signal, is not my problem.

The real problem is that making money by memetic pollution is a fundamentally broken model. I'm no more obligated to consume the memetic pollution of advertizing than I am obligated to consume the air or water pollution of industrial production. That's not "entitlement".

Are there still security issues with having JS enabled?

There are security issues ANYTIME you let someone run code on your machine. Javascript is code. Therefore, yes, there are "still" (and always will be) security issues with having JS enabled.

Yes, sometimes -- very, very rarely, about 1-5% as often as clueless developers obsessed with shiny things think -- Javascript is needed for functionality. But if you can't make your site safe to access with JS turned off, you fail.

And of course this changes nothing. Folks don't turn off JS entirely these day, they use Noscript.