Why can't George Lucas die of a high cholesterol induced heart attack so I can stop worrying about Indiana Jones 5 and Star Wars 7 and go back to enjoying the memories of my child hood.

This is wrong. There are various ways of obtaining 'expunged' records. There is no delete button on your criminal record. Don't believe me, just ask anyone who has ever taken a bar exam, ever.

This needs more +mod points. If I had them today, I would give them to you.

Let's just get it on the table, that if you chose to forgo a degree rather than get one, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle as to why someone should read your resume for the rest of your life.

Yes, part of getting a degree is simply showing an employer that you are willing to take shit for 4+ years, but to almost all of them, it's an important qualification. TFA is a neat story for sure, but don't decide to eschew college for entering the work force because you think you will be better able to get a job. College (and grad schools) are not a job security guarantee, but they do improve your odds. I for one would rather spend a few extra years racking up *reasonable* debt (thank you state schools) and have a better chance to get an interview than have to hope the HR manager isn't so short sighted that my resume just gets thrown away. You can't impress someone with your skills if they don't meet you. The degree is a better ticket in the front door.

All that said, I have finished 7 years of advanced education. My grand total (excluding room/board which I would have needed anyway) was $60,000. I have $10k in loans. I'll take 10k in loans and an advanced degree, thank you. Your perspective may be different if you went somewhere private like Harvard and owed closer to $300k Worse yet, if you went somewhere SHITTY and private and had a crap degree that no one heard of and $300k in debt.

I would tag this as a sudden break out of common sense, but I am not sure that it is. Yes, it's better in that I will be able to terminate my own video cables again, but how many cable standards do we need? I fully welcome our new Cat5e overlords but I just want the madness to stop.

To be fair, Apple lets you have porn on the iPhone too. They just want to protect you from paying for porn. News flash, there is a lot of free porn on the internet. There is even more 'free' porn if you know where to get it and don't care about copyright infringement.

/Ret con.

People don't even uncheck a box when it says "It's OK to contact me periodically(6 times a day)" Less than 10% change default states whether they are opt-in or opt-out.

The only exception is the Do-Not-Call registry

I wish I had a [blink] tag. Selection bias. You run a site about inane bs. perhaps those who comment about the inane bs will be commenting... inane bs!

You are aware that that is basically how the patent system works.

You pay based on your application and the calculated prosecution complexity. You get so many claims for a fee and the more complex above that basic level you pay more. Then if (or more likely when) your application gets rejected you file a response. When you screw that up, you pay more money and file some more. The examiners also get paid for doing rejections.

The reason shit like this gets through is largely in part due to the fact that because of the backlog the PTO had billions in cash sitting around. What happens when a government organization has billions in cash reserves? Other government agencies borrow from it to meet their budgeting shortfalls. So, as filings have rocketed up, the backlog has gotten worse because they don't have enough money to get new examiners and are grossly overloaded. The response should be to give the patent office MORE money, not less. MORE money might actually allow them to spend more than 45 minutes looking for prior art.

The (free) press has already been asaulted by the bankruptcy laws. I don't mean to be overly 'Rupert Murdoch owns everything and is using it for Faux News' but more of a practical argument that the idea of a healthy and effective press has long since been an ideal not based in reality.

Even discounting the TMZ effect of publishing trash instead of news, the financial realities of the traditional media and the practicalities of the new media have simply diluted the ability of people to hear a message and organize change. The press corps of one have caused so much fragmentation that stories aren't able to gain the critical mass to affect change. This (public photography) has been a big internet WAAAAAAAMBULANCE issue since about 2002, yet it seems from the discussion here that even the generally liberal crowd on here hasn't even heard about this yet.

If you think TFA was bad, take your camera to a public park and take pictures of kids playing in that public place. Bonus points if you do it with a trench coat and a big white Canon 300mm F/2.8L

These are two different things. The problem is not that they have designed something that interoperates but the fact is that it accesses their server. Under the CFAA, it is illegal to access a system without authorization. It is immaterial that the system is public and freely available. AOL, NullSoft and LamaEnterprises are free to set the terms for freely and publicly accessing that system and if you don't comply with the terms you run afoul of the CFAA, a felony. This is actually far worse than Civil Liability possible under copyright because AOL simply has to complain to the federal government and they will prosecute VLC with tax dollars and possibly send coders/officers to jail.

I'd call this a don't be evil move.

Some are stuck in corporate environements where they can install plugins to their browser but can't change their default browser or still need to use ie. I specifically need to use an IE browser for work and my attempts at using Firefox and Chrome (my personal choice) don't work. This is a good thing that doesn't really help Google that much, but doesn't require a lot of effort to make things better.

I agree with you in alternate-1985-what-should-happen reality. But in this reality we have tried that and failed miserably. Metrification I can quickly convert all of the basic weight, distance, volume measurments in my head, and most can too if they would unlearn their learned ignorance but if we are wishing for impossible things, I'd rather wish for something totally awesome like a time machine or totally useful like a cure for cancer.

TFA: $1.5T; 200m downloads @ $750 per
That's not how copyright statutory damages work. It's per work infringed not number of times the work was infringed. You would have to cite that you owned 200,000,000 (or at the very least 600,600) works and that all of them were copied illegally by the proposed system to get that far. Even then it's pretty remote for vicarious/inducement liability. Copyright has statutory damages due to the general rules against presuming damages. Statutory damages are your option if you wish to not prove the exact damages. I wouldn't be surprised if Limewire made a Rule 11 (b) motion to sanction this pleading. It's REALLY POOR. The UPPER limit of the presumable damages for this action are the 30 songs named in the complaint times the ~$250k in statutory damages available. That's ~$7.5M.

100% unless the police department has someone smart enough to know about UDRP in which case they will likely get it back without it.

Hopefully he isn't stupid enough to offer to sell it back to the police station (which would sink his UDRP case).