Having sex with a 17 year old is legally no different than having sex with a 10 year old. What changes is that the consent of the 17 year old might be seen as a mitigating circumstance whereas the naiveté of the 10 year old would be seen as an aggravating circumstance.

So, I doubt that he would have been treated the same had he raped a 10 year old. The fact that he raped a 17 year old probably just resulted in less prison time. There's your differential.

"Has HP unknowingly been supplying Iran with technology or have they been trying to secretly get by the U.S. governement's export restrictions?"

Nope! They haven't been doing it unknowingly.

Doesn't AT&T already nickel and dime you to death for the privilege of using hardware that you supposedly own?

Want to use the internal GPS receiver? That'll be $10/month. How about playing games? Well, that'll be another fee.

The electric car isn't dead because of cheap oil. The electric car is dead because electric cars are twice as polluting as gasoline cars when the environmental impact of battery manufacturing is taken into account.

GoogleMap Sudbury Ontario and view the 20 mile circle of death around the nickel mines. The Toyota Prius is singly responsible for destroying those 300 square miles of formerly pristine habitat.

If your data is that important, you need to take a serious look at some _real_ data integrity and disaster recovery plans.

You need help. Seriously.

HFCS is not significantly different than cane sugar.

Cane sugar is 50% glucose and 50% fructose. HFCS is 45% glucose and 55% fructose, unless you get the "low fructose" HFCS, which is only 42% fructose and 58% glucose.

HFCS is being unjustly demonized not because it is unhealthy, but because of peoples' tendency to consume so damn much of it.

Guess what, if you overconsume cane sugar, the exact same thing is going to happen to you.

Welcome to "Science by Consensus."

I did not even remotely sound like a Xilinx "fanboy," as you put it, neither was my post anti-Altera.

My post was meant to call attention to the forced polarization of education by corporate interests. Instead of "learning to learn," students are "trained" in the use of one particular toolchain to the exclusion of all others. Instead, students should be taught to learn things, not taught to use things.

One thing that bugs me to no end when I hire kids out of school is that they don't know how to DO anything. They only know how to regurgitate things. They know how to "turn this knob and hit this button" on the scope, according to their lab manual instructions, but they have no Earthly clue what it is that those things are doing. It's the same thing with these "trained" toolchains.

I hope that clears it up a bit..