This the kind of paranoia that is along the lines of "Cars that could get 100 miles to a gallon of water were available in the 1970s, but the Big Three bought them up and destroyed the information". I will tell you why I don't agree with you. It seems to me as a general observer that drug patents are not subject to the kind of "minor change = new patent" nonsense that is destroying the software industry. If this kind of thing was common, believe me, drugs like minoxidil would be covered under some kind of new patent instead of being in the public domain. Saying that Big Pharma doesn't want to cure diseases sounds plausible, but patents release the information on how drugs are created. So suppose Big Pharma A finds a cure for, say, pancreatic cancer, but they also find a drug that doesn't cure it, but keeps people alive, perhaps related to the cure. The other drug companies will see their patent on the treatment and one may figure out the cure and patent that, putting a complete end to the treatment drug. No, there's too much risk in knowing a better medicine and trying to keep it secret. If company A figured it out, it's only a matter of time before company B does too. If Big Pharma A has a great medicine, they can get established on selling it so that even when generics come out, they may still be able to retain sales (at a cheaper price of course) by having their name associated with the original medicine. Besides, it's great for business to say "We're the guys who cured X for the world, so now try our new medicine to cure Y".

"The Show" = Big Leagues = Major League Baseball, the highest professional baseball league.

Note that there is no question at all that MLB is the best professional baseball league. This is not like soccer/football where fans night argue that the EPL or Bundesliga or La Liga or some other league is the best. MLB to every other baseball league is like the EPL to MLS or worse.

The fact that Broshuis (his name is misspelled on the original post) was asked to cheat is a good indicator that on talent alone he wasn't good enough for MLB. I found his minor league record and at the highest level of minor league baseball, AAA, (consider this to be something like playing soccer/football in Football League Championship in England) he barely played and was bad. He played quite a bit in AA, which is the league below AAA, and had mixed results. I've seen worse for sure, but nothing in his stats was so great, even at his best, that it looked like he was going to be a future pitcher in MLB. He barely got a chance in AAA (3 games) which to me strongly suggests that his organization gave up on him being a serious candidate for MLB and gave him a very quick test to see if he might be better than they thought, and he wasn't.

I'd probably put this way - Italy != justice

Among Italy's proud moments related to the justice system, and keep in mind that this is a sampling and not a complete list...

1) Sending armed Italian troops or police (not sure which) who at gunpoint threatened the lives of American soldiers and demanded that the US military turn over the Achile Lauro hijackers who had been forced by US naval pilots to land at a US base in Sicily. Keep in mind that these were the actions of a supposed "ally" of the USA. They threatened to kill US soldiers if they did not surrender the hijackers to them.
2) Once they got the hijackers and convicted them, in the pansy way only Italy can do "justice", they immediately felt sorry for the kidnappers and began doing things like giving them furlough. One of the kidnappers took advantage of it and ran away. To the shock of the world, Italy actually tracked him down and sent him back to jail for a little while.
3) Italy routinely interferes in US law and refuses to extradite US citizens who flee to Italy until the US promises to take the death penalty off the table. Again, this is a supposed "friend" of the USA.
4) There was a terrorist attack in the UK that failed some years ago and one or two of the suspects fled to Italy and demanded to be tried there. Gee, anybody want to guess why?
5) Amanda Knox - First she's completely and utterly guilty. Never seen more conclusive proof of a crime. Then she's completely innocent and a victim. Now they want to try her again. They had two attempts and one of them was completely wrong. Anybody want to be that they'll get it right this time? I don't.
6) The USA refuses to let American soldiers face Italian justice, even when they did something that results in the loss of life of Italian citizens. Gee, I wonder why that might be?
7) Italy felt sorry for the guy who tried to kill the pope and set him free after John Paul II died. The only surprise was that they didn't free him while the pope was still alive.

One of the really great things going for Spanish is that to native speakers of a Western European language like English, Spanish is very easy to learn. Spelling is phonetic. Grammar is essentially simple with the possible exception of reflexive verbs, but those are easy enough to learn. That's in no way a criticism of Spanish to call it "easy to learn". In fact, I'd argue that it's a great strength. One of the reasons that English became a world language is that while there are complicated aspects (strange spelling, incredible number of verb tenses), on the whole it's a fairly simple language (ie. plurals are usually simple, there's no grammatical gender).

The Asian languages are pretty strange for speakers of European languages. The various Chinese "dialects" (that's how they see them rather than as different languages) are tonal, which creates its own set of problems for speakers who don't speak tonal languages. Chinese grammar is for the most part very simple, although measure words can be difficult for some people and the strange "topic-comment" word order is quite a bit different from English in particular. Japanese and Korean mercifully don't have tones, but they instead have rather complicated grammars, with Japanese being the worse. They also use "topic-comment" word order. My experience is that grammar in all of the English speaking countries is abysmally bad in the educational systems and I just don't know how realistic it is to expect kids who don't even know or understand the grammar of their native language to successfully grasp languages that require complicated grammar rules. Pick your poison - tones or grammar. I don't know anything about Hindi, but as it's an old language I'd expect that very likely it's got quite complicated grammar too. Australian English is rather infamous for its incomprehensible slang (Strine) so I wish them a lot of luck. I'm not going to be surprised at all if this program fails. We can't even graduate Americans with a correct understanding of English (you'd be shocked at how many students seriously believe that "prolly" is a real word) and based on what I'm seeing in posts on the internet in various forums, I don't think the Aussies are doing any better.

Fortunately, my current job does not use Notes. My previous job did. All I can say about Notes is that my previous job used it because it was simple enough for out technology challenged managers (we had a ton of them) to be able to use it. It wasn't very good and it took a surprisingly large support staff to run it, but the managers could do things with it and that ended up being why it was used.

Because they're not really as good at IT as the people who use them as cheap labor realize.

cluedweasel says in the parent post:
"The judge was not enthused that they offered to settle for $7500 while noting that potential penalties could be as much as $150,000."

While technically accurate, it's extremely misleading. That makes it sound like the judge got angry that they were letting people off the hook for "only" $7500 when they could have asked for more. In fact, the judge's point was that a movie that could be legally purchased on Amazon as a disc ($9) or a rental ($3,.99) should not have a settlement offer of $7500. The $150,000 issue wasn't made by the judge and is in fact essentially irrelevant to the ruling. Once again the person who posts something interesting on Slashdot icnorrectly seizes on a relatively minor point as being the key issue of the post.

I agree with you, but my fear is that what's going to replace it will be much much worse. The Arab Spring has shown that if given the choice, Muslims will choose to enslave themselves in repressive Islamo-fascist regimes. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the successor regime to the House of Saud ends up being Osama Bin Laden's dream government. Even Turkey has gone backwards. 10 years ago they had a legitimate shot at joining the EU and now the unspoken truth is that the EU will never let them in because they fear what they have already become and they fear that they could get even worse.

It is in part, but not all. American food production has for several decades been driven by the unstated goal of "zero loss". This is why animals get fed antibiotics - so that the farmer ideally will not lose any before they can go to market. The idea behind using Roundup is to kill all non-food plants so that they don't outcompete food plants. I think US food production is based on unreasonable goals and I wish the government would ban the use of antibiotics in particular, but this is a problem that it seems that the free market cannot solve and the government has little interest in.

How often do you listen to the following people?
Glenn Beck
Rush Limbaugh
Sean Hannity

I hope your answer is somewhere in the neighborhood of "Not at all". Because if it's not, then you are blind to the problem.

Yes, outside of a few nut job average joes, nobody talks about Obama's color. But you'd have to be blind to miss the hints. "Did you know he's really a Muslim?" "He wasn't even born in the USA!" "All he wants to do is let Mexicans come here illegally and become citizens." "Obama wants to make you pay for healthcare for illegals." "Notice how he can't find a white male to nominate for the Supreme Court?" "Obama is a citizen of Kenya and has never been a US citizen." I mean if you do not detect the hidden, racial subtext between all of those comments, there's not much I can to help someone who is that blind.

As an American, I can say the following. Those of you who don't live in the USA need to understand that everything is different here. Sometimes in good ways, but maybe most of the time in bad ways. Few Americans travel internationally so the demand for unlocked phones specifically to use them in other countries is quite low. For years, even after you finished a contract AT&T and other providers were rather infamous for refusing to unlock your phones. T-Mobile was an exception to this at the time as they had a policy to unlock your phone if you asked them to do so after your contract ended. Maybe it is different now and everybody unlocks when your contract is up. But perhaps 7-8 years ago, AT&T would tell you to suck it if you asked them unlock a phone after your contract ended with them. By keeping the phones locked, they were able to prevent people from moving to other carriers. Many people keep their phones for years after the original contract is done just to save money and by refusing to unlock them, those people found it cheaper to just stay with the carrier that locked them in than to get a new phone and possibly a new carrier. Also, those of you who don't live in the USA would not believe how much all the phone carriers bitched about being required by law to allow customers to move phone numbers to other carriers when their contracts ended. For years this was not possible, so some people also didn't ever change carriers just so they could keep the same phone number. So all this led to a situation where there was little demand for unlocking.

Yes, you have nailed it. It's not racism, it's Zero Tolerance. It provides a theoretical way for the schools to enforce discipline and standards on all the students by setting out a policy and making no exceptions to it. The only problem is that life doesn't work that way. For example, it's one thing to shoot your ex-spouse just because they made you angry and something else entirely for a policeman to shoot an armed robber at a bank who is holding hostages and threatening them. Zero Tolerance in those circumstances would require the policeman to be charged with a crime because he "killed someone". To me, this is just symptomatic of how American schools have failed and continue to fail. Zero Tolerance is the answer for everything. Just this week, a principal in (I think) Kansas City had to apologize because he refused to allow a student's solder brother to escort her to her prom because he was "too old" (he was 21). They had a rule that established a cutoff age for non-student escorts, and he was above that age. The only problem was this decision went viral and thousands of people gave the principal and the school district hell about this for "dishonoring an American hero" and the superintendent of the district made the principal apologize to the soldier and the policy will be changed to allow exceptions. But that's how America has decided to handle everything in the schools - These are our rules and they can't be changed. No exceptions. Oh your kids need to learn? Sorry, our business is enforcing the rules.

I know you are joking, but unfortunately according to the horrible decision in Capitol Records vs. Naxos of America, Inc. those Alexander Graham Bell records are technically still under copyright.
http://http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050412225604578

To summarize the court case, Naxos, a classical music label, was taking old 78 RPM vinyl records and using modern technology to clean up the surface noise and putting them out on a budget label they run. This was perfectly legal in the EU and Asia as the recordings in question were over 50 years old and not under copyright in those places. Unfortunately they got greedy in the USA and released a CD of Pablo Casals' famous recordings of the Bach Cello Suites from the 1930s. There was never any doubt that these recordings were still covered by US copyright law and I remain amazed to this day that Naxos somehow believed that they could get away with this reissue in the USA, but Capitol (the US copyright owner of the recordings) found out about the release in the US market and sued them and won. In my opinion the court decision was far overreaching, ruling that every sound recording ever made in the USA before 1972 was still under copyright protection through state law and would remain so until the superseding Federal law covering copyrights allows those copyrights to begin to expire, which will be 2067 at the earliest. The case is somewhat involved but basically after realizing they got caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Naxos resorted to some legal trickery in arguing that the Casals recordings (they were all made in London, England) were not covered by US state copyright law since they weren't made in the USA. The court didn't buy it and ruled that everything ever released or recorded in the USA is still under copyright and since Naxos had no real way to argue the case any further (they did indeed violate US copyright law), this crazy decision remains the US law on the matter.

Arrested Development is in the same boat as Firefly. It has hard core devoted fans, but there have never been enough of them. If it was really and truly as popular as its fans seem to think, it would still be on the air and it wouldn't be having to rely on Netflix to get available again. I watched the show a few times and it just didn't work for me at all. I really do not get what the big deal was. Let me put it another way - All you guys who posted about how Futurama sucks, so you're glad it's off the air - yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about Arrested Development. I will say that I really cannot think of any other show that Fox tried for so long to shove down its viewers throats despite plenty of evidence that most American TV viewers really did not care at about it and never were going to care about it no matter how long they kept it around and how many promos they ran for it.

I can't get real worked up about that. You sound like a guy I know at work. You did forget the obligatory quote from Jefferson or another founding father containing dire warnings about giving up liberty.

I've just heard too many people rant and rave for years about how the Constitution is being ignored, destroyed, etc. to get worked up about this. When George W. Bush was president, we heard that he was going to declare martial law and suspend the elections. Yet the man obeyed every Supreme Court decision that came down and when he stepped down, as required by law, the people who swore he never would give up power had no answer. Then the other side started to claim that Obama doesn't care about your rights, blah blah blah. Despite the hysterical ramblings we get here, the US legal system has remained independent as always. In fact, the only place that I've noticed where rights really and truly do seem to be disappearing is Western Europe, but nobody complains about that. You can still express distasteful thoughts in public in the USA and not be put in jail as long as you don't make threats against individuals, but Western Europe is at a place right now where you can get serious jail time for saying things that in no way invoke threats on anyone.