The last three times I went to Best Buy I talked to competent employees who wanted me to get what I wanted to get.

The shock's wearing off, but it's still a nasty trick to play on anybody with coronary artery disease.

Not necessarily different. I rear-ended somebody once by looking at the radio. (Nobody was hurt, but it's amazing the expense of an accident you can barely feel.)

No, this is a matter of people not wanting to be stopped from doing something perfectly safe just because some people do dangerous things.

I can talk on the phone perfectly safely in the passenger seat. I certainly would be impaired if I were to use it while driving. Similarly, I can use my hedge trimmer safely on the hedge, but not on anything with flesh or electrical wires attached. Heck, I can drive my car safely, or I can run into a bicyclist. Is that reason to ban cars?

Also, remember that there are side channel attacks, and IIRC some have been demonstrated for AES. Encrypt anything you want to keep secret offline, on a box you're confident you control. Never encrypt AES on the fly or on a box you do not control. AES is almost certainly immune to cryptanalysis (given strong keys and key security), but that really doesn't apply if somebody can observe your computer encrypting it.

And I've read references to copyright infringers as pirates a lot older than 1970. Like it or not, "piracy" has had a meaning of copyright infringement for centuries. It was originally commercial copyright infringement, like this case, but that was when there was essentially no personal copyright infringement, and the extension to that seems reasonable.

Cost to produce software is fairly close to zero nowadays. Support can be more expensive, and probably dominates the per-unit costs.

Software design can be really expensive, but that's a fixed cost by the time the duplication begins. The question is whether the amount earned covers this cost.

This is only true if you discount the fact that each copy has to contribute something towards the cost of creating the original.

No, it doesn't. The number of copies paid for, or maybe something else altogether, needs to account for the cost of creating something. Back around last millenium, Baen Books established the Baen Free Library to distribute digital copies of books they published, free, and no strings attached, and found that it increased book sales considerably. It's almost certainly better for software vendors if those who don't buy what they publish pirate it rather than use something else. Some bands put their music out for free as a form of advertising, hoping for better sales of T-shirts and the like, or more interest in seeing them live.

Tons are not interchangeable, such as the 2000-pound variant, the 2240-pound variant, and the assorted volumes used in measuring ship size (not to be confused with tons displacement, also used in measuring ship size, which can be the megagram one or the 22400-pound one). I'm not even considering the megagram here.

To simplify, there are two reasons people and businesses stick to MS Windows.

First, they're used to it. There are alternatives, like Linux distros, but that would require retraining. Microsoft destroyed that advantage with Windows 8, which is less familiar than user-friendly Linux distros.

Second, they need to run Windows-only software. The move to running more and more applications as HTML5 that only needs a good web browser means that an increasingly large number of Windows-only applications will run just fine on a Linux machine with Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft's been pushing this also.

This means that more and more people and enterprises will find themselves interested in some sort of Linux desktop distro, as long as somebody's going to provide support (Canonical?), or maybe ChromeOS or a version of Android. The biggest advantage, from a business point of view, is breaking the monopoly, so no company can come along, do something that spites the user base, and count on their continuing business.

The desktop business is hardly going away, since tablets have their limits, but a fraction of that diminishing OS market is still worth pursuing.

I had the Peter Principle darn near quoted at me* by a manager once, and he was serious about it. Never did like that place.

*Not the end state of everybody being incompetent, but the idea that you move competent and only competent people to new jobs.

The reason is that 1998 was an exceptionally warm year. Therefore, the planet isn't much (if any) warmer now than it was then. What's wrong with any other year before, say, 2000, is that the denialists can't get the results they want. For example, it's significantly warmer now than it was in 1997 or 1999. Last I looked, the list of ten warmest years known included 1998 and nine years in the 2000s or 2010s.

Anybody who talks about there being no global warming since 1998 is either a fool who doesn't understand how to evaluate noisy data, a deceitful propagandist who wants to obscure the issue, or somebody who hasn't looked into it themselves.

More like...

Ever been in a greenhouse and noticed it was pretty warm in there? Some gasses have a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere, including carbon dioxide. Scientists have figured for more than a century that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to warming the planet. Since 1850, CO2 in the atmosphere has gone from about 280 parts per million to about 400 ppm, while we've been burning fossil fuels. The carbon in fossil fuels has a somewhat different isotopic configuration than the carbon already floating around, and so it looks like the increase is due to our fossil fuels. In the meantime, Earth is warming. There's lots of data out there. There's a lot of problems with it, but careful analysis shows the planet is warming up. It isn't warming up everywhere, since climate is complicated and causes a lot of variation by place, but on the whole it is. Nowadays, there's considerably more high temperature records broken than cold. So, almost all climate scientists agree that the planet is warming up and it's because we're burning lots of coal, oil, and natural gas.

This is similar to what I've been told about my assorted ailments, including my anterior basement membrane dystrophy (which was translated to me as my left cornea delaminating, and that's no fun). There's plenty of room for questions there. Some of them are going to have to be answered something like "It'll take you four years of graduate-level studying to understand that", but that's the case in all complicated fields. Some are going to be fairly simple. "Isn't water vapor a greenhouse gas also?" "Sure, but the amount in the atmosphere stays pretty much the same. When there's too much, it rains. Carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere and stays there for a very long time." A layperson could ask questions about what "isotopic configuration" is, what's likely to happen (and that's hard to figure in any detail), whether there are other possible reasons, that sort of thing.

The only people who are trying to make it seem horribly complicated are those with a non-scientific agenda.

Assuming I agreed with your analysis, I'd consider Bush to be the greater threat. If Obama is simply overreaching his legal power, that's not a long-term problem. Plenty of Presidents have done that, and it doesn't set much of a precedent. Hiring enough lawyers to extend the legal power of the Presidency leaves us with a permanently enhanced Presidency. (Not that I'm in favor of a weak President, but it seems to me the office already has more than enough power.)

Hitler was quite good at military strategy for a head of state (certainly ahead of Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Mussolini). His reputation for messing things up comes largely from the German generals, who were used to extreme levels of independence in operational command (including shaping diplomacy for military purposes), and who after the war wrote their memoirs to show that they would have won if it hadn't been for Hitler. After mid-war, Hitler was increasingly at odds with the military, since they had no confidence in victory and thought they could make peace if necessary (as in WWI). Hitler realized that this wasn't going to happen, and expected the Allies to destroy Germany if they won (and he was correct). Hitler thought that Germany needed to take large risks to win, and correctly suspected his generals of planning to lose slowly. The results of a decent amateur strategist pursuing a goal different from what his professional subordinates had produced the incoherence in German strategy from 1943 on. I have a feeling the initial attack on the Soviet Union would have done better if Hitler either stayed out of the way and let the generals plan and execute, or imposed his plans on them.

However, Hitler also thought that Germany needed to expand into Poland and the Soviet Union to survive, and he wasn't going to let a war go by without trying to grab that. He thought the Communist regime would collapse quickly. It might have, if the German Army didn't perform the quite impressive feat of making Stalin look like the better choice.

Where's your evidence? I'm going from bog-standard public health numbers published by various reputable sources. If US expected lifespans and infant mortality rates are higher than expected, that's prima facie evidence of poorer health care. You can find them anywhere. If you're going to convince people that these stats are misleading, please show some evidence.

Please also show that the evidence is relevant. I would expect people from $X living in $Y to be overall healthier than people from $X living in $X; historically, as far as I've found, people who emigrate have more on the ball (statistically speaking) than people who don't.