Way to manufacture a .. whatever this is going to be. Take a bizarre idea, such as "the Earth is flat" as your premise, and ask a question that stems from it.

Given the well-established fact that the Earth is flat, are we at risk of losing the oceans due to them draining off the edge faster than they're being filled?

Then throw in an acknowledgement from the editor, that the flat earth hypothesis isn't quite unanimous, implying that if one were to turn over enough rocks, they might find a handful of godless irreverant curmudgeons, who cite obscure observations which cast an ambiguous shadow of minor doubt upon it. Then sit back and watch as people slowly get over how shocked they are, as they try to stammer out explanation of which earth-geometry hypothesis is really the prevailing one and which one is viewed as .. not even antique but naive to the point of dumb. I suppose the conversation will then transform into questions about whether or not anyone ever really held the fringe hypothesis in the first place.

What do you mean by "get involved?" You're talking about an area that is already highly regulated, and even has government granted and enforced spectrum monopolies. Saying they shouldn't get involved in this, is like saying they shouldn't "get involved" in the traffic signals on public roads. Whether your argument is good or bad, it's based on a premise that is totally inapplicable to the current situation; you needed to bring up your argument sometime around ~1920, when the "get involved" decision got made.

You can possibly make a case for getting government out of it, and you might even be talking good sense, but then the specific issue at hand (ad loudness) will become about .01% of the discussion.

those same corporations are buying those same politicians specifically to favor them with laws written by the corporation lobbyists.

And yet it'll fall apart if we, on voting day, withdraw our support for those politicians. We never do, though.

We The People know how Democrats and Republicans get the text of the laws they enact, and every two years we re-affirm that yes, we want those people to keep on doing that.

There's nothing wrong with being angry, but you're getting angry with a machine that we've signed off on, which acts in a predictable fashion and hasn't malfunctioned. We knew what we would get, and we got it. Be angry at our hypocrisy instead, where we say we want fair government, but then vote against it, sometimes with mumbled excuses for why we reluctantly did it yet again.

I know what you're thinking: being angry at our hypocrisy will just lead to an acknowledgement of our responsibility, and nothing good ever comes of that. What we need is for a new veil of self-deception, since the old one is so tattered. Nobody believes our old excuses, or believes that we're stupid enough to believe them. It's time for a fresh start. Therefore, for the 2014 elections, I propose we each dedicate ourselves to one of two projects:

1. One team should come up with some new and credible reasons for why we should send Republicans and Democrats back to Congress again in 2014. Please, no right/left arguments; the claim that these parties politically ideological, is very old and tired and long-past exposed. Try a new approach to justifying these people, please.
2. The other team should come up with some credible pretenses for how we can all act SHOCKED, when the Democrats and Republicans "surprise" us by doing what they always do. What we want here, is for there to be a tragic narrative about how we all believed the stuff the first team comes up with, how it was an honest mistake anyone could have made, in spite of, in hindsight, being moronic beyond the imagination of the very best comedians.

We can do this if we try. There is no reason we, our our children, should ever have to face the realization that political power always rests in the hands of the governed.

The better your idea and the more compelling it is, the less likely that pixels will die in 5 years. Because the better your idea, the more likely you've patented your vector codec thingie, so nobody will be allowed to implement it for 20 years. "promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences," indeed.

tl;dnr. I assume that explicit images are the same as the implicit ones, but where the images have alt attributes so your scrapebot doesn't have to infer from the pixels, what the image is about. AI vision is hard!

Yeah, the idea of a contract without any communication, or even evidence that communication might have happened, is pretty hilarious.

How does this get around wire-tapping laws in the two party states (where both parties need to know there's recording going on)?

That's the buyer's problem. His computer, not Verizon's computer, is recording people without their consent or knowledge.

Your computer is your agent. If you don't know whose interests your agent serves, maybe you should fire that agent. If you think your agent might get you in trouble with the government, then all the more reason to JUST SAY NO.

Typically these types of laws prohibit $ACTIVITY "without authorization by the copyright holder." Since you'll be the copyright holder in these situations, you'll be allowed to do whatever you want with your own photos.

If the government mandated that you were required to strip data from your own photos, you ought to be able to safely ignore that law, on First Amendment grounds.

There are two ways to look at the buyer's market which exists whenever there is extreme competition. Yes, your way is one of them. ;-)

And if you happen to be a professional game programmer or publisher, your way of looking at it is probably the best .. for you.

From the PoV of a game player, as well as from the PoV of an amateur or smalltime-pro game developer, it is undesirable for there to be barriers to entry. Reducing competition and the diversity&availability of software are seen a negative attributes of the platform.

Indeed, Nintendo was actually the original "evil empire" to home users, bringing what had once been a 1960s IBM mainframe problem to the consumer world: "what do you mean I'm not allowed to do whatever I want with my own computer?" The NES is the spiritual grandfather of the XBox and iPhone. It was a long time ago, so most of us have stopped hating Nintendo; there are more threatening, more in-your-face enemies out there today. But it's not like they ever stopped sucking.

And yet, even with that and my usual intolerance for these shenanigans, there's a Wii in my home. We use it almost exclusively to play "ass bowling" (Wii Sports, with heavy drinking and the rule that you're not allowed to take your ass off the couch). Somehow that makes it ok: that we're not playing the way they intended us to. I hope this is some kind of license violation but realistically, I fear it's not. Please, no one tell me.

Why, for example, was Romney's dog a major issue?

Was it? I don't remember Gary Johnson talking about that.

Those who frequently smash gorilla glass will end up destroying a floppy phone just as quick.

I think I already know from history that just isn't true. My "dumb" flip-phone is hanging in there just fine. I've dropped it a few times, but when Samsung made this in 2006 they used plastic (geniuses! who would think of this?!), and face it: plastic is awesome. This plastic just keeps on not breaking.

My glass tablet lasted a month. I am so glad I only spent $89 on it (no, a $200 one would not have survived better).

It's not even just clumsiness and carelessness, though I won't pretend I'm graceful and always on-the-ball. Some things in some situations just happen to take a beating, by virtue of being in a pocket all the time, going everywhere the user goes. Keys and change constantly grind away at whatever they share space with, dogs jump on laps, my pants-containing-phone get stepped on while getting up in the middle of the night in a tent on a camping trip, stuff is outside in freezing temperatures (and low humidity) and then comes into the house where it's warmer and higher humidity for a while and then goes back out. Shit happens, so much of it and in so many ways.

I don't feel entitled to have "tough SOB" equipment, and if I drop something and it breaks, it's almost certainly my fault. But let's not pretend that stuff-which-usually-doesn't-break wasn't the ubiquitous norm prior to 2007. The very idea that we're all carrying glass personal items around all the time, is actually pretty hilarious when you think of it. The guy who stepped out a time machine from 2006, after chuckling a little, would at least say, "well, I'm sure they break a lot, but I guess the point of this cheap shit is that people don't complain when it breaks, because you can always get another $20 phone to last enough 3 months. $80 a year is a hardware budget I suppose anyone can live with." Then we 2012ers would nervously glance around at one another, wondering, "Who is going to tell him?" Fucking time travellers. They always make me feel so uncomfortable.

It was like that back when you had a slow line, too.

Glad that works for Denmark. Here in USA we have come to realize that science is all lies straight from the pit of hell. Ergo, beer must be prohibited.

They were lying through their fucking teeth the whole time

What I don't get is: why bother lying about such things? Everyone knows and expects gerrymandering. It is part of the system, and there's unanimous bipartisan agreement that it should happen (though of course disagreement about who the winning and losing parties should be) and saying that it isn't the primary goal of all redistricting and reapportionment operations, is instantly recognizable as a lie. So why lie?

Republicans and Democrats: don't say you don't gerrymander. Everyone knows you do. If you lie about obvious things, you'll never fool us into believing you when it's time to tell a subtle and not-so-obvious lie.

I think it may be perhaps the most unfair thing I've ever witnessed in politics

Unless you've supported some kind of constitutional amendment to have districting done by some kind of impartial algorithm, this unfairness isn't something to be angry about. It's either a desired unfairness that the system is supposed to have, or at least an unavoidable one.

Getting mad at parties for gerrymandering is like getting mad at wasps for injecting eggs into other bugs. Parties' purpose is to win.