Not so. The process still work. The effects of society (treatment, social services, etc) is simply now a part of the environment in which the natural selection takes place. There really is no difference.

Danmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway at least are non-tanking. Plenty more in the rest of Europe, I would reckon.

The US is unique in beeing a "western world" country without universal healthcare, btw, and while we do have a financial crisis in Europe right now, I am not sure there are any relations to the health sector.

There is no question e-ink is superior to a backlit screen. However, the kindle is not the only e-ink device :-)

I personally like my Sony Reader Wifi a lot. I also own a nook and a no-name device. Not a kindle though, because I prefer not to be locked into a specific eco-system.

Perhaps - I do not have access to Windows versions of the kindle reader. :-/

Current state of affairs, unless you are willing to fiddle quite a bit, is that DRM free kindle files you have bought, potentially can be very hard to extract from your kindle application. (I do not know about dedicated readers).

For some versions of the kindle reader, it is as easy as getting the .prc file from the local storage. However, this is not a foolproof method. Recent versions of the android kindle reader stores the .prc files in app-private space (or whatever), making it only accesible if you root the device.

If you use the amazon/kindle offline reader, the content is actually stored unencrypted, but compressed in your browsers cache/database. It takes some javascript-foo to extract it, but it is possible. Google search/translate is your friend here, but be prepared to fiddle a bit.

IMHO you should seek alternatives to Kindle, if you are not prepared to read your books on a kindle device/app. Adobe DRM on epubs is trivial to remove, using wine and Adobe Digital Editions, and as such is a much more suitable format for cross-device ebook reading. Of course, just selling us books as files, without DRM would be much better. I assume I am not the only one waiting for tor.com to put their announced DRM free store online soon.

Reading the comments, is sort of depressing. I thought you guys were nerds!

The guys behind Copenhagen Suborbitals surely are. The main designer, Peter Madsen, is a true tinkerer, he even built a working submarine. In his spare time!

What they aim to do, is to put a man into space, without the backing of a large commercial entity or goverment. Meanwhile, their work is Open Source, and based almost exclusively on private donations. Check our their website for more, including a number of youtube videos.

http://www.copenhagensuborbitals.com/

These guys can use all the support they can get.

You could repeat your entire argument with horses, and argue that you should be allowed to ride horses in the traffic. Or whatever weird means of transportation you would prefer.

Somehow I really can't see why the fact that you think driving a potential killer machine is "fun and enjoyable", should stop the rest of the world from eagerly choose a safer, more flexible alternative (Yes, *more* flexible as in: "I am pissed and needs to go home", or "Gotta send the car to pick up the kids from sport").

If you want fun and enjoyment, get out of the traffic and onto some dedicated area/track/whatever. Sorry, that is just what it is. The public roads are for the vehicles that have a useful purpose and are deemed safe enough. When person-driven vehicles no longer stand for that criteria, that must go somewhere else, like horses, racercars motorcrosscycles, etc.

Can't disagree much with anything you wrote, perhaps expect:

I think you are underestimating the religious. They are nutters, after all... :-)

I think people in the US/North America need to educate themselves about energy and ressource usage.

58,000 gallons is approximately 220 m3. This is about twice as much water as we use in our family pr. year, with 2 grown ups and two kids. And, we use quite a lot, compared to other families in my country.

Apart from watering the lawns, I suspect the people in TFA have ineffecient utilities (toilets, washing machines, etc), leading them to use way more water than they need to.

TFA mentions several hundres of dollars worth of savings from going from 299,000 gallons/year to 58,000 gallons/year. Say it is $500, then it must be about $2 / 1000 gallon. Compare this to our prices, which is about $40 / 1000 gallon.

Given the right incitaments, you can clearly optimize your ressource usage a lot. Most often *without* having to change your lifestyle (OK, they ripped out the lawn, but I am talking about other ressource usage).

Oh, and the country I am living in is Denmark, in case you were wondering.

Or, maybe you could have a turn knob. Perhaps attached to some sort of metal stick, which you could insert into a slot, then turn right to turn on, left to turn off.

Come to think of it, that would not do, as it is too much like a key. Darn - we really want those pushbuttons, so much better than a key. Now what to do?

Yes, that impacted my life negatively. The FUD influenced a lot of companies to hold back on Linux adoption at a critical point in time. This in turn, reduced the value of e.g. my knowledge and skills. So, yes, it did. And, this was most likely completely intentional from MS/SCOs side.

There is really solid work for live patching a Linux kernel for security updates in http://www.ksplice.com/ - saw a demo of it last week at Eurosys, really impressive: http://www.ksplice.com/paper .