You can take the HSR and travel from SF to LA in something like 4-5 hours. It has too many stops along the way to be efficient. And if you factor the costs of the tickets, it is cheaper and faster to fly. There is no benefit to a 200 MPH "HSR" system over conventional flying, other than liberal bias of Trains over planes. My guess, is that even liberals who don't like planes will still take them over trains given the two options. Which means they will target the Airline industry with new taxes and regulations designed to put the airline industry out of business OR increase Taxpayer funded subsidies for HSR, or Both.

HSR never made economic sense, even at original budgeting. It is already over budget which only makes things worse. But that doesn't matter to the liberals providing union jobs on a economic boondoggle work project

Oceans are nice, but there is a huge problem with oceans. They tend to be made of this highly corrosive material called Salt Water. Additionally, various forms of sealife tend to attach themselves to anything and everything under water. Lastly, you'll have people who talk about some shrimp that you'll disrupt or some whale that won't like the noise and ... well ... Good Luck!

Sheep are not people.

So, fake people want fake people to impress fake people. .... Why I don't "tweet"

I am not opposed to ads. I'm opposed to ads using loud obnoxious flashing popup, popunder, Malware spewing crap that reminds me of the days of Geocities websites. The ad companies have done this to themselves, I have NO sympathy for them.

The rule of asshole applies here. Assholes are assholes, because they think they can get away with it. When people stop dealing with assholes, they become irate that they have no friends and whine about how everyone hates them and how the world is unfair to them. And they ruin it for the people who are doing things right. In short, assholes ruin things for everyone, including themselves, they just don't care, hence why they are assholes.

There isn't enough time or energy in this life for me to want to deal with assholes. I view assholes as damage and route around them. It they whine in the process, I don't care.

Serious question. How come NO Press person has hammered the "phoney scandals" line? I mean not one.

When you can answer that, without saying "they are phoney scandals" ... then we'll talk.

Yeah, when GWB was president and they could pin it on him. However, now that their guy is in office, they go silent. I remember the daily scandals of GWB presidency being announced. Today, it is MSNBC coverage of "Fox News" (aka "Faux News") take masquerading as "news". And Obama's in depth interviews are done by the likes of Jay Leno, a comedian talk show host.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Every stand alone Email Client is an SMTP server, with limited relay capability. YOU can use a SMTP server on Comcast network, just not a "public one".

Set up your own domain, with your own SMTP server, is perfectly within the guidelines you just quoted. Key phrase "anyone outside of your premises".

Trade Federation: "Is it Legal"
Senator Palpatine: "I will make it legal"

Legality is the buzzword of tyrants. Almost everything Hitler did was legal. AND he was democratically elected. This is the problem with tyrannies, is they don't usually happen overnight.

And trust me, I have enough (R) and (D) friends to know, that most of these people can agree that the government has too much snooping power. The problem is, they see the other (R) and (D) as the enemy, and those in power like it that way, and keep marching us towards tyranny. But Bread* and Circuses** keeps the masses happy enough to not really change.

*Government handouts are slavery.
**Kardashians and Royal Babies distract us from the "phoney scandals" in a two pronged approach of distractions. It is, however, entertaining!

... and gets a pass because he is a (D) and the press is (D) and not (R).

We have no fifth estate any longer. The MSM press is NOT an ally of the public interest. Not when they realized they could influence politics to their own benefit.

The real scandal in America is the Press. Obama is getting away with things the press would soundly criticize(rightly so) GWB on.

No. But did you, when you voted for Obama, think that he was going to be worse than GWB?

Silly (D)s and (R)s, thinking their guy is somehow different than the other guy.

Substitute "Sex" for "Bitcoin" and see if this holds true.

Yup, it fits. Sex is now under regulation of the SEC.

Quitting AOSP doesn't solve the problem. It makes it worse.

What we can do, is start a campaign of "name and shame", that starts asking key questions of Qualcomm spokesdrones, why?

And here is the real bits that should concern people, I rather doubt there is anything all that special about the blobs of code needed, or even the underlying hardware. Further, given the Copyright and Patents that SHOULD be protecting the "intellectual property" of Qualcomm, there is NOT A SINGLE REASON to release the code.

Even if the Lawyers want to be involved, how about writing a waver for AOSP so they can include the blobs needed, or the APIs to code themselves what is needed (probably showing up the crappy programmers at Qualcomm) etc etc etc.

There are plenty of ways around this issue, but if Qualcomm won't play nice, then it is time to start playing hardball. Believe me, a very loud "name and shame" Campaign would work. Here is just a one suggestion.

1) Android Apps detect if the device is running a Qualcomm chip (of any kind) and simply puts a blurb up that says "Your device is using Qualcomm Chips. Qualcomm doesn't fully support Android Open Source Projects, so please consider as part of your next Android Phone/Device one that doesn't use Qualcomm chips. Thank you.

It isn't enough to DMCA something. IF you have a copyrighted work, and GOOGLE uses it for commercial purposes, then sue them, and scraping an image (or whatever) to put into a database, which they offer for free, to sell advertising IS commercial use. Sue them. DMCA is just the first step in stopping their usage. SUE THEM for commercial use of your works.

Also, using the tools built into web standards (i.e. "robots.txt") is your friend. IF you post something copyrighted on the internet, it will be "stolen" by someone, somewhere (if it is interesting enough).

Intelligent comment. Exactly what I expect from a (D) lemming.