california doesn't focus on math. to graduate high school you need 2 years of math and 3 1/2 years of p.e.

It's not like after learning 2 years worth of math you just forget it instantly. But with P.E., if you stop exercising, your body goes straight back to tubby-land. You are comparing apples and oranges in a most ridiculous way.

And the federal minimum wage is still $7.75/hr, last I checked. Why are we paying them so much more than the private sector? They already get cushy benefits!

Yeah, those $50k per year salaries are just totally ridiculous. We ought to pay them exactly at the poverty line. That will ensure a more efficient postal system.

Awesome. One less day per week I have to park my car in a less-than-convenient spot in order to leave room for a dour-looking gentleman to bitterly deposit a six-inch thick stack of garbage in my mailbox. Maybe soon I won't need the freaking mailbox at all.

I see a LOT of folks complaining on /., but I never hear about anyone actually DO anything.

People actually doing something about it don't have time to rant on Slashdot. How exactly do you expect to hear about it? Telepathy?

I keep getting ads for bail bonds and DUII attorneys. This started happening lately -- the only change in my behavior lately is that I've stopped buying and drinking beer (reasons to do with the circumference of my waistline). While it's extremely disturbing, I wouldn't be surprised if that information -- somehow -- is filtering back to Internet ad companies. Who the fuck knows how they know, but they do.

That's correct. The only two possibilities in the universe are sing-a-longs or badly fitting three piece suits. You see, the universe is actually quite simple.

Nikon is Japanese, retard.

Whoosh.

Back in your place, consumers. You barely even own what you own, much less have any right to fix it or pay someone else to fix it.

The economy of America will collapse unless you keep buying brand new stuff constantly. You don't want that, do you? Are you some kind of terrorist?

Anonymity brings out both the best and worst of society.

People who want to get around intrusive and ineffective government restrictions on private behavior are "the worst of society?" Why?

Sometimes I buy them even if I don't want to play them (seriously). I think I bought a Humble Bundle last year that I still haven't even looked at yet. Hell, I'm not even a gamer. But I'll spend money on non-DRM software just to encourage more of it.

Agreed. I only buy games from companies that enable online play through supernatural means.

Drugs aren't a victimless crime if the family has to deal with it.

Poor you, the weight of your family obligations must be absolutely crushing. Seriously, what kind of family do you live in, where if a family member is struggling your response is to have them thrown in jail?

I have two identical external HDDs. One of them is always inserted in my workstation. The workstation backs itself up to this disk nightly. On occasion, I will swap the current external drive with its twin, and take the removed one to storage at another location. Also, the nightly backup is also done across my LAN to a Samba file server. So there are three copies of my data at my house and one copy off site. I do not keep the off site copy as fresh as I probably should. Also, I try not to backup stuff that I could just download again.

Then you have them arrested for breaking the law. It's illegal. It's called trespass. Try shoplifting at a Walmart and see how it works for yourself. Your picture goes up on the wall and the security team has you escorted off the property if you come back.

We're not talking about a shoplifter. We're talking about (hypothetically) thousands of people who relentlessly occupy your space. If the cause is really so wrong, that population of thousands (millions, translating to Internet scale) will not materialize, and we're arguing about something that will never happen. When a big chunk of the world is screaming at you, locking them all up is just impossible and you have to face the fact that there is conflict between human beings. And resolve that conflict.

For example, what would happen to all that "potential energy" if Earth just suddenly ceased to exist, leaving behind the object floating in space?

Speculation on the consequences of impossible events is not really informative.