That's it, I'm going to get a job at the TSA.

The type of "reimplementing" Google is alleged to have done has always been illegal unless the license terms of the software said otherwise. Had Google done a clean room reimplementation then they would have been in the clear, but instead they allegedly lifted code directly from Oracle's (copyrighted) APIs and used it without a license.

Many (most/all?) of the other languages mentioned have highly permissive licenses that expressly allow the sort of thing Google did. In many cases, the copyrighted portion of the language is little more than a set of standards to be followed, with the actual method for following those standards left up to whoever wants to write a compiler/interpreter for it.. Java has a much more restrictive license and always has, even when it was owned by Sun. Sun just didn't bother going after these sorts of suits. Of course, they didn't have the most powerful Internet company in the world making billions of dollars off a reimplementation of their code, either, at least not until they were already hemmorhaging money too fast to do anything about it.

That sounds good in theory, but I don't think it would work in practice. If you're in the middle or lower classes, you don't tend to have the time to waste pursuing an education for its own sake. Instead, you need to concentrate on doing something that will make money when you're finished. So, even if you had an interest in this University concept, you probably wouldn't go because you know that you would be wasting several years of your life with nothing marketable to show for it.

The general upshot of this would be your working classes would have to pay for their schooling anyway, and the idle rich who have the ability to spend several years of their life doing something that isn't economically productive would get a free liberal arts education. This would only serve to deepen the divide between the very rich and everyone else.

The problem with nursing is two-fold: One, it became the big thing like you said and too many people got into it all at once. Two, people got into the wrong kind of nursing. The reason nursing was projected to (and probably still will) face such a shortage is because of all of the baby boomers retiring and needing care. However, it turns out that most people really don't want to work in geriatrics. When I was going back to school a couple of years ago, I would ask nursing students what they wanted to do after they graduated. The majority wanted to do obstetrics (delivering babies), despite our declining birth rate. Almost none of them wanted anything to do with geriatrics.

Except that most employers will immediately round-file your application if you show up on a sex offender registry at all. They rarely go through the effort of finding out the details.

Or "Dumbledore is gay".

If we start reporting on how the violence in Mexico is impacting the United States, then people might want to actually do something about it, and we can't have that.

One of the big reasons Spaceport America was built there was because it's right next to White Sands Missile Range, which is a vast area of land used by the military to test things like missiles (hence the name). Even if something goes wrong after the spacecraft has left the missile range, there's still a huge swath of lightly populated land before you get anywhere near a major city. By the time it got anywhere close to Houston or Dallas, assuming the flight path even takes it anywhere near them, there would have been plenty of time to abort and most of the fuel would have already been spent.

Sorry, but in this case we're definitely talking religious social conservatives here. Now obviously the social conservatives in places like Iran are a lot more extreme than the ones we typically find in the US, but they're still coming from the conservative side of things, as they're attempting to rule by a set of ancient religious laws that are designed in part to stifle progression and return life to a time long ago (that probably never existed) when society was morally pure.

The words "conservative" and "liberal" mean different things in different contexts and in relation to different countries and political systems, and mean even more different things when you throw in the differences between social, fiscal, and general governmental policies. A conservative in Iran is not the same as a conservative in the US, so there's really no need to take offense if you identify as a conservative and that word is used as a pejorative when describing a group in a different country and culture.

No bandwidth caps except for the fact that it takes 3 weeks to download a single episode of a TV show. I used to have dialup for similar reasons, but these days nearly every hotel has wifi available and if your DSL or cable goes down frequently enough to be a problem then you should probably switch to a different provider.

To some degree, but the first prius went on sale in the US in 2001, which was 11 years ago. Lots of people replace their cars far more often than every 11 years.

From what I've seen, diesel prices tend to be more volatile than gasoline prices. Around here, diesel will range from around 50 cents cheaper to 50 cents more expensive than gasoline depending on a number of factors (including, as far as I can tell, a coin flip). So, the price of the fuel shouldn't be an overarching factor in deciding to go for one or the other.

Having said that, though, diesels do get good mileage, and as long as you live in a decent-sized city or near a major highway there usually isn't too much difficulty in finding gas stations that sell diesel fuel.

We have a couple of problems here: As you point out, hybrids are more expensive than they should be for purely cost-concious consumers. Secondly, though, with all-electric cars (or even gasoline-assisted electrics like the Volt) coming out, it's becoming more and more obvious that hybrids are destined to be a short-lived stepping stone and not the long-term solution to our oil and pollution problems. This means the environment-concious people are more likely to buy a Leaf or a Volt than buy another hybrid.

So, basically, hybrids aren't cost effective enough for people buying primarily on cost, and they're not green enough for people buying primarily on environmental friendliness. As all-electrics continue to improve, the age of the hybrid will come to an end.

As in "Caprica was a major frakking disappointment."

If the influx has only been happening for the past 10 years, then it's far too early to make those sorts of claims. Unemployment in Ireland has been steadily rising and they're just now starting to implement the types of austerity measures that have tipped Greece into chaos. When economic times get tough and people start losing their jobs, they start to look for people to blame. Foreign immigrants are an easy target.

You may be right that Ireland will be able to escape the rampant racism and ethnic conflicts that usually occur in situations like that when the economy goes south, but I think it's too early to tell how it will pan out.