Case number 2... You can't buy stamps in the lobby any longer. The post master at my local office said the vending machines were too problematic and expensive to maintain, so they were removed. Now if you want to buy stamps, you have to get to the post office when they are open. See above for the likelyhood of that. I've received postcards from the USPS that offered to sell me stamps by mail.... with a postage fee added to my purchase. Are you kidding me?

There are paranoids out there, but even many of them would give a pre-schooler a pass on the security or at least acknowledge that they shouldn't be on the no-fly list.

Wow, and yet Gore STILL got more votes than Bush in Florida, only to have them not counted by a conspiracy between corrupt election officials and corrupt Supreme Court justices.

My thanks go to the Washington Post and other fine newspapers for establishing this fact, so that nobody in the future will ever consider Bush 's first term to be legitimate:

...the study also found that Gore probably would have won, by a range of 42 to 171 votes out of 6 million cast, had there been a broad recount of all disputed ballots statewide...

In the USA, there are plenty of people - millions actually - who have the means to kill anyone wearing a pacemaker quite easily. These people are called "gun owners". Now the number has increased by one - some idiot hacker who figures out how to hack into the pacemaker software. So what has changed?

You are getting muddled. The googVorc case was if oracle could copy right the API (that is, the list of function name, their hierarchy, intput/outputs) and prevent google from doing a clean room implementation that complies with their API. In this case, they are saying NVIDIA can't make an API call _into their code_ and ship proprietary bundles linked against their GPL library. NVIDIA could do a clean-room re-implementation of the kernel if they wanted to, but that is not what is going on here.

If you don't have the constraint that linking is derivative then the whole notion of copy-left is dead, as you can fully use any library in any application. The authors are giving you a license to use their code for free, they can put what ever restrictions on that license they want.

I've never seen anyone who refers to Obama as BHO who wasn't a racist/bigot/whackjob-extremist.

Using it immediately labels you as someone who is dissociated from logic.

No, Audi and Volkswagen's entire new line has LED headlights on all of their models this year and the A4/A5 have had them for 4-5 years now. But don't think I'm agreeing with Tastecicles, because they're almost wrong. They are only the dipped/low-beam headlights as LEDs are not yet legal in the USA or Europe for full or high-beam use. But as for this usage, even SEAT has them now on some of their models and that's one of VAG's "budget" brands.

From where do natural rights spring? From being conscious individuals, from having rational faculties. It comes in short from being 'moral agents' - capable of making moral choices. It is only because we are capable of acting morally that we have both rights and the responsibility to allow others their rights. If you are an individual capable of making the choice to shoot or not, then it was murder, but if you are a trained chimp, or a machine, or something else which is not an individual moral agent, then you cannot commit murder, even though you can still kill.

A fertilised egg is quite clearly not an individual, nor a moral agent. It is a biological function of the mothers body - certainly a very unusual and interesting one, but it is only later that it develops individuality and becomes something more - and only in some cases. In fact, eggs are routinely fertilised, malfunction, and are washed out with other debris.

gaming, not faming. I am not making people famous via some computer method.

Which just goes to show you why most Americans are fucking idiots. They donate to charity for the bragging rights and tax benefits.....while being too stupid to realize that the tax "benefits" are essentially worthless. And patting themselves on the back the whole while for being "smart" with their money. LOL

I don't have a big moral problem with free file sharing only because the people this harms (MAFIAA) are such immoral scam that they deserve the treatment way worse than this. They are greedy assholes who are going around harassing and suing single mothers for ridiculous amounts of damages. This waaaay overshadows everything file sharers do.

BTW, I know people who download content illegally on principle, just because they don't want to give any money to this scum.

Because the city slickers think they're entitled to the amenities of rural areas, like, say, food, and transportation across rural areas via roads.

The other part of the argument is unlike medical and museums, you don't have much of an internet without the monopoly granted easements across rural property for buried fiber...

So we'll make a deal... stop eating our food, rip up the roads between the cities, and rip out the buried optical fiber, and you can keep your internet access to yourselves.