An even shorter answer is to stop awarding people exclusive government-enforced monopolies on abstract ideas.

No. What will happen is that making an ass out of yourself will be the new "normal." It will be impossible to hold anyone's previous actions against them.

This is probably enough to explain the Fermi paradox, just by itself.

Exactly. It's not about being able to arrest everybody. They can't arrest everybody, and they don't want to arrest everybody.

It's about being able to arrest anybody.

I'm sure glad I don't get all the 'benefits' I pay for.

Why should I risk personal harm in defending my rights, when the government exists to defend them?

Oh, I don't know. Perhaps because you'd like to be able to face yourself in the mirror when you get up in the morning?

That's a good one.

At the time, I believe Communist party membership was illegal, at least in some sense of the word. I'm not sure when or if that ever changed.

I guess we have more "freedom" in this country than we can handle.

It's acceptable because it's not Bush who's doing it.

What he just stated is the entire moral basis for copyright law.

Copyright law was never supposed to govern end use. That's something some people who were powerful but not very smart made up very recently.

Remember Psy's Anti-American songs? That is just the tip of the iceberg for most South Koreans.

I don't know about that. There was no shortage of anti-American music coming out of Germany in the 1980s, yet there was never any danger that the East and West Germans were going to gang up on us after the wall came down.

News flash: Young people like angsty, subversive music. Ric Romero has more at 11.

Well, it certainly sounds like their plan to add LSD to your municipal water supply worked well.

Those troops could be withdrawn after the NK question is resolved, regardless of who ends up owning the real estate.

I could see a deal being struck between the US and China in which the US agrees to a withdrawal from the peninsula in exchange for providing any military support needed at the DMZ during a Chinese takeover.

Mexican standoffs are bad for business, and both China and the US are all about business, political rhetoric notwithstanding.

I didn't get nervous until I re-read the summary and noticed that the Russians seem to have categorized their genetics research program under Nuclear Physics.

How is it a bunch of crap?

Gee, if only there were a way shareholders could take executive compensation into account when they buy and sell shares.