<cite>http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110409161444432</cite>

So basically they Won.

They don't win unless we've stopped fighting. And we're a long, long way from that.

I just sneezed, and it typed perl.

Welcome to Slashdot, Mr. Weiner

drop in the number of people who use Kleenex when they blow their nose

Merge the tissue and the OS: Kleenix

I blew my nose with Winex, but got a Blew Screen of Death.

Democrats tax weeds, while Republicans make you pay royalties on weeds. Your pocket is emptied either way.

(Although one tends to flow to the poor, the other to the rich.)

It never ceases to amaze me that for all the hardware the human brain possess, we are so bad at many of the tasks we perform. I mean, it's ludicrous to think how the avian or reptilian or cetacean or insect or even other mammalian species can perform advanced calculations in 1/100th the amount of time that it takes a human mind to complete the same damn calculation. I find that deeply troubling. A freaking spider can scan a series of stems, like a mainframe computer, and determine which one is the right one to climb, with a brain less than the size of a pin...and yet a human child, of several years of age, might fail at even understanding the task to be performed, let alone performing the task itself.

Part of evolution involves specialization, and we lose certain instincts or abilities that are unnecessary for maximum fitness. We don't have the speed of a cheetah, or the sense of smell of a bloodhound, or the vision of a falcon either. Instead, we ended up with verbal communication, opposable thumbs, and creativity and intuition beyond anything we've observed so far in the animal world. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.

I just don't get why so many people are so negative or consider it to be some kind of dream to want to try and improve the world in any way.

Because people grow up and realize that the fantasies they had as a child won't actually become reality, and it makes them bitter. Because they see youthful optimism and exuberance and it makes them more bitter, and the only way they can feel better is to bring a little more despair and anger into everyone else's life. Most of them, growing up, probably had a more idealistic view of the world, and their fellow humans, and were exposed to mythical ideals of the "good old days" (which actually sucked for most people), and as they got older and realized how things actually worked, they became even more convinced of the inevitable decline of their country and civilization in general. A few of them probably read Marx, or Rand, or Chomsky, or Buckley, and became even more convinced of their own rectitude and everyone else's corruption, and find it immensely gratifying to think of themselves as lone, heroic figures whose duty is to warn the rest of us sheeple of our imminent demise. (Needless to say, our reaction only validates their sense of persecution and intellectual superiority.)

I'm a professional scientist, but I have several bookcases full of history that I read for fun, so a) I'm a big fan of technological advancement, and b) I have an excellent idea of how shitty most of human civilization was for all but a tiny handful, and how far we've come. People living today are on average freer, healthier, and more prosperous than at any time in history. Everyone knows there is still much room for improvement, on both a moral and a technological level, but I'm pretty sure the people dreaming about transformative technologies will end up doing far more to make the world a better place than the people who have nothing better to do than whine about how awful everything is.

I don't entirely disagree with some of the naysayers; it still makes my teeth grind every time someone who watched too much "Star Trek" demands that we convert to a command economy so they can have their Mars colonies. And I'm not a fan of our military-industrial complex either. But I'm glad there are people fantasizing about traveling to Mars (and working on making that a reality, minus the massive drain on tax dollars) or finding extrasolar planets, and I'm glad there are people researching brain-computer interfaces, because the world will never get better if everyone spends all day bitching about it on Slashdot. The only part I find frustrating is that things aren't moving faster, because I want to be able to work from the beach and live to 180, goddammit.

My $8/month comes with complete and total peace of mind. I can keep my chin up knowing that I'm legal and don't have to worry about it.

I buy at least 1 drive-thru coffee a week for $4, which should put this into perspective.

Why would you assume faster is better? If the car drives itself, it has no need for a driver. Thus, it could be completely unattended, and take advantage of the fact that optimal fuel economy tends to occur at about 35-55 MPH, where wind resistance is too low to be problematic.

Thanks to exponential nature of inertia, doubling speed generally causes four times the wind resistance. It doesn't take long for that ratio to get stupid, and that's why we don't have planes that fly 5,000 MPH.

In general aviation, it's commonly understood that a more powerful engine will help you climb faster, but typically doesn't speed the plane up much except at the extreme lower end of the power/weight curve - that's mostly a function of wind resistance.

Are you kidding? I was paying that much per month for Cable...

I'm hard pressed to find a device *other than* your Linux box that doesn't do Netflix! In my large-family household, we have: My phone, Wife's phone, Son's phone, 3 Daughters' phones, my still-working, wifi-only old phone, my 7" tablet, Son's Xbox, PS3, Wif'e's iPad, and several laptops and desktops up to 3 or 4 generations old.

I love Linux. I use it for work, at which it does fantastic. Reliable, cheap, powerful; it's a programmer's paradise! But when I play, I use toys like Windows to watch videos and play GTA.

Well, I've occasionally wondered when it would occur to people to lump these rather disparate groups together, with a phrasing implying that the people involved are both. ;-)

After all, it's been some time since the media decided that "hacker" should no longer mean someone who enjoys tinkering with technology and is good at it, and conflated that term with "criminal". It's about time that other groups that believe in various sorts of freedoms to get the same treatment.

It's actually a bit surprising that it took so long to read someone conflate "libertarian" and "criminal". I wonder what other groups are overdue for this treatment ...

Eighty Nine Percent of New Zealanders oppose new legislation to broaden the powers of the GCSB, the New Zealand Signals Intelligence agency that has tradisionally been used to spy on other countries.

But wait, that also means that at least 51% of the population actually voted for those who put these laws and legislation into effect. Can the same people who voted them into power, also vote them out?

Advances in military technology trickle down to civilian life all the time. Radar, computers, jet engines, satellites, the list goes on. (Oh, and the Internet, which I already mentioned below.) Battlefield medicine has made huge advances too, which are applicable to injuries that have nothing to do with warfare. The big area where I think there has been too little transfer is rocketry, where federal regulations severely restrict employment and the availability of technology.

I don't view any of this as an actual justification for military spending - I'm firmly in the camp that believes the US should be like Switzerland with nukes. But it's simply ignorant of history to claim that military research never benefits anyone but the military.

I think most of us here thought this was something like using an Electrodynamic Tether which allows for considerable maneuvering capability without the use of any propellant whatsoever. Maybe reading TFA before forming an opinion might be advisable?