Canada chooses its candidates for Prime Minister in an open, democratic primary election process? News to me.

Thanks for this recommendation. The text is available here.

Came for akebono.stanford.edu, leaving happy.

This argument has always perplexed me. Lock the guy up for life without parole, and we don't need to offer him all these appeals, and we don't need to be so careful about getting it right. Sure, it may be cheaper, but do we really think it's more just? Seems to me if I were falsely accused of a capital crime, and couldn't afford to hire a top-notch attorney on my own, I'd much rather the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty. I'd want all those appeals available to me. I'd want a whole swarm of activists watching the process and making sure they got it right.

[golf clap] 4/10.

So what would mitigate this? Somehow bubbling comments to the top of the page by some criteria other than chronology? Maybe some sort of score based on poster's user ID (lower is better), karma (higher is better), and the post moderation score? Or just shuffling top-level posts before presentation?

Who memorizes phone numbers anymore? Twenty years ago, I probably knew 100 phone numbers, and now I know maybe 10. My phone knows the numbers of the people I call, not me.

The calculator layout is much more important in terms of spatial memory than the phone layout. Data entry operators and spreadsheet power users have been using the 10-key format for many decades. If you need to make a change, make it on the phone, not on the calculator.

This looks right to me too. IANAL, correct me if I'm wrong, etc. but I'm pretty sure that copyright law covers 1) making copies, 2) distributing copies. There's nothing there about possession of "illegal copies". The RIAA have sued on a theory that "making available" is equivalent to "distribution" with varying success. They have not sued anybody making copies for personal use (though I'm not sure that's actually been pronounced as "fair use" by the courts -- again, I could be wrong). Possession of files could conceivably be used as circumstantial evidence in a "making available" suit, but they still need to prove you're sharing, and if you're not, how can they prove you are? And if you were, it wouldn't make a bit of difference if you had ripped the files yourself or got them from somebody who was illicitly distributing them.

And this quote highlights the fact that California has elected an idiot to the office of Attorney General.

At the risk of getting way off-topic and pedantic, I'm pretty sure DSL is indeed modulated and de-modulated, so "modem" is perfectly appropriate. I'm not so sure about cable, but I would suspect that many cable network interfaces still involve modulation and de-modulation.

Because you didn't write it yet.