Actually, the current suggestion is to put a device on your car to track the mileage so they can tax you based on how much you drive.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/18/news/economy/gas_tax_drivers/?section=money_latest

Take away the profits and you might as well take away the games and movies people are pirating. It takes a lot of long hours and hard work to make a decent movie or game and you aren't going to find many people who are willing or even able to do it for free. There are those who will give up their time and effort for indie films and such, but even those people are doing it with the hope that it'll springboard them to a big gig with a big paycheck.

Somehow, I don't think anyone at NASA has to worry about those questions under the current administration.

Good thought, but a 6-month CD won't earn you much (they're only paying about, what, .6%?) so put the money in an online savings account instead. You can get more than twice that from, say Capital One or Amex.

Hey, every little bit helps, right?

I'm sorry, but that argument is just ridiculous. This guy didn't rip off the IDEA--screenwriters and authors have been doing that ever since the first caveman scrawled a "rich girl, poor boy" story on a cave wall. This guy ripped off the actual characters, and even named the main character "pacman". Sure, the original game has been around for almost 30 years, but it isn't like Pac Man is some obscure work that no one remembers. Namco/Bandai currently makes a version for every platform out there--Android included.

As many people have said, all you have to do is create your own characters. You can have them running around doing the same thing Pac Man does all day long, it won't matter because they're YOUR characters. This guy did not even bother to do that. He used someone else characters and someone else's design. Hollywood does this all the time, because it ran out if ideas a long time ago. However, you won't see someone remaking "General Hospital" using the same characters, names, etc. even though "General Hospital" has been around a lot longer than Pac Man. That's because "General Hospital" never went away. Neither has Pac Man.

What it boils down to is this: creative people deserve to be compensated for good ideas. (They can be compensated for bad ones, too... if someone's willing to pay.) The idea may be simple. You may look at it and say "I could have come up with that!". But the fact is, you DIDN'T come up with it--and the person who DID is the one who deserves the recognition. That is the legitimate use of copyright law.

Maybe you aren't the creative type who can come up with something simple and iconic that's still making money 30 years from now, but just because you can't do it, don't knock those who can.

Last time I checked, Facebook wasn't going to reveal any information about me that I didn't put there to begin with. So now instead of simply telling people DON'T PUT ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET THAT YOU DON'T WANT PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET TO SEE, we have to have another set of 500 page regulations that no one will understand, that no one voting on them will even read before voting, and that will end up having some messed up consequences down the road. That makes sense. Your tax dollars at work, folks.

Okay, I admit that it's rotten when apps raid your friends list and scarf their info as well as yours, but again it wouldn't matter if people wouldn't put "private" information on the World Wide Web. I have a crazy idea: go meet people in real life! It's cool! It's even in 3D!

Well, it took controlling interest of GM because allowing it to fail would be harmful to national interest. (And the gov't still has controlling interest,even though GM allegedly paid back its bailout money), Same goes for a lot of banks. And if the financial reform bill passes, it'll be legal for it to take over any company it thinks is big enough to affect the economy. How big is big enough? The gov't decides that, of course. So it pretty much has the ability to seize anything it wants to at this point. It's a little late to complain about it now. There used to be a word for that...

They aren't going to MSN. Criminals don't want to be spammed any more than the rest of us.

If my wife could create a rootkit, I wouldn't be divorcing her!

Isn't Verizon kind of shooting itself in the foot with a "compromise" like this? After all. it's been trying to get Apple to make a CDMA iPhone for ages, once it's deal with AT&T is up. Under it's own plan, it still wouldn't get to have an iPhone. I don't really have a problem with exclusivity agreements in principle. In the case of the iPhone (and really that's what it's all about--nobody was complaining about exclusivity before it came along) the deal with AT&T has just forced every other company from LG to Motorola to Samsung to HTC to try to come up with that "iPhone killer". They haven't done it yet, but the more they try the better phones in general get. Also, these deals tend to have expiration dates. Apple's agreement with AT&T is up next year, I believe. At that point, it will have to be renegotiated. Apple will have to decide if whatever AT&T is paying them is more than what it would be making by selling the iPhone to other carriers as well--and if it's possible to keep up with the demand doing so would generate. Unfortunately, if AT&T shells out enough to make Apple stick around, it will probably have to jack up the price AT&T customers pay per month for all the neat things the iPhone will do. That rate already seems pretty high.

Forget whether all night parties/raves are/should be illegal... forget whether the police overreacted... Whoever wrote that reading something on a Facebook is "trawling for our private information" is a twit. This is 2009. When will people learn that NOTHING on the web private? That's ESPECIALLY true of a social networking site--the whole purpose of which is to put yourself out there where other people can get to know you! You want to keep your party private? Don't #(*^%@ advertise it on Facebook! Seriously, people, this is internet 101. Okay, rant over.

As someone who writes a lot of those news stories (on the local, not national level) I can attest to the fact that sometimes generic scripts are pre-written, with details to be filled in later. Usually they're for events that happen in pretty much the same way every year (parades or festivals, stuff like that). However, I doubt the Chinese launch article was one of those. It reportedly included detailed dialogue between astronauts and the ground. For obvious reasons, you don't include detailed quotes in a pre-written "skeleton" script or article.