In Soviet.. er... USSR, 2+2=5. Also in fictional England circa 1984.

Foolscap!

Was one mention of the blue penis not enough? Did we needed another, more descriptive, big blue penis?

We'll call them "attempted terrorists."

GPL can "infect" a company's IP. And that's not a bug, it's a feature. RMS has said so himself and others are also quite clear on this.

No.

6 digit UID? Don't get into a high UID pissing contest with me, old-timer.

The problem with exempting certain classes of expenditures is the distortionary effects kick in really quickly. The most efficient allocation of resources comes when no good or service gets preferential treatment over another.

What the FairTax does is apply an across the board "prebate" that matches what the CPI says is the poverty level of consumption. This means that anyone living at the bare minimum will not pay taxes, and that consumption over the poverty level will be taxed at a 30% sales tax rate, the equivalent of a 23% income tax rate.

The FairTax doesn't just tax the poor. What it really does is tax the middle. The very poor (anyone living below the poverty line) pay no taxes. The very rich pay taxes commensurate with their consumption, which is almost always lower as a percentage of their income. But this isn't a bug, it's a feature. It encourages production, savings, and investment instead of consumption. This means that the guy who makes a billion dollars worth of widgets is paying no tax unless he spends at least 10,400 dollars of that widget wealth in a year. It encourages him to invest and save, rather than consume. And that is what we want wildly successful people to do. More startups and fewer yachts is a good thing for our economy in everything but the very short run.

I wouldn't be so sure that we got to the moon and haven't done anything with it. We've been able to go to the moon and back for 50 years, but we've already sent technology out of our solar system. Now technology and abundance is coming to the point where space travel is accessible to the masses. Soon, every person who is able to charter a jet will be able to visit space. Give it another 20 years and Joe the plumber will likely be able to visit space instead of taking his once in a lifetime cruise to Hawaii.

I agree that we haven't done anything with space technology in the short amount of time that it has existed, but I can't really imagine that if things keep going as they have been, that it will stay that way for another 50. While interstellar travel is still outside of our forseeable future, interplanetary or at the very least additional lunar travel seems quite likely. But, like all futurists who claim to know what they're talking about, I freely admit I'm riffing from the armchair.

I'm thirsty for Brawndo right now...

Sociopaths don't rationalize their actions. This guy wants to believe he's in the right because he cares what others think. He has a skewed moral compass and an over developed sense of self-justification, but he's nowhere near a sociopath.

You'd think the fix to this would be to allow the RIAA to acquire proof that what is offered is really their copyrighted material. You know, by letting them introduce in court the files they can (and probably did) download from the respondent. That way only the actual distributors get hammered by the laws that they are actually violating.

The reason we see so much resistance to this is, I think, because we don't believe that someone who distributes someone's "intellectual property" should really be punished with a civil judgement. So instead of advocating for the change that makes sure only the violators are caught, and not the guy who named his porn collection "aerosmith - Dream On.avi" we advocate for a severe contortion of the current law so that people who are actually guilty never have to pay a price that we find unjust.

We should all be able to agree that, as much as we might not like it, the people who are making available are probably actually distributing, too. Forcing the RIAA to show who is distributing, and allowing them to do so, would be a step forward in making sure the law is enforced.

That is a very poor analogy for the downloading of files for the reason that MediaSentry can actually download the files being offered for distribution. When thy are, in fact, distributed to the public which MediaSentry by rights should be taken as, that's distribution. The fact that the downloader is employed by the RIAA shouldn't change the fact that the download could happen from anyone. It's a catch-22 for someone who's works are actually being distributed by someone else. You can go out and get a copy from them, but that's somehow not enough to prove they were distributing it? Preposterous. It seems that all to often we here on Slashdot confuse what we would like the law to be with what a reasonable interpretation of the current law is.

There's a huge difference between targeting people who place themselves in civilian areas for their own protection, and targeting civilian areas. No one here who is honest with themselves really thinks Israel is targeting the civilian population. And, though it's lopsided, it would also be lopsided if I were to slap Mike Tyson and call him a bitch, then complain when he beat me up. The fact that the militias are bad at what they do (kill as many Israelis with as little risk as possible) as the Israelis are very good at what they do (kill as many militia as necessary) has no bearing on the justice of the actions of either.

Actually, there has been extensive writing on the moral hazard inherent in the disconnect of incentives between principals and agents in insurance. You do have a stronger incentive to leave your keys in your car if you have insurance, just not a strong enough incentive to leave them there. But, because rational people think at the margins, a guy with a nice car and a mountain of debt just might have enough incentive intentionally get his car "stolen" if he has insurance, which he would never do if he weren't covered.