General references to communism in terms of the left/right spectrum just miss the point. The communists in eastern europe and china are/were very conservative and reactionary in many if not most ways.

It just shows that the left/right thinking is just not a very good way to distinguish political beliefs in the real world.

Yeah, I slept with Angelina Jolie one time and she was constantly biting me. I was like "whats up???" and she was like "Brad loves it".

I really want to run Silverlight in Ubuntu! Well, no that was sarcasm, but Linux should be mentioned when one talks about cross comparability. We should not allow the meme to emerge that the only options are Mac or windows.

This regulation only applies to NEW TVs that are to be offered for sale after 2011. So nobody is going to take your TV away. Also, most existing flat screen TVs on sale already pass the regulation.

By the completely pointless and irrelevant discussion of how one can comply with the regulations by decreasing the brightness and backlighting and removing the sound creates the erroneous impression that you have to do something to your existing TV to comply. This is not true only new TVs are covered, your existing TV will be completely fine regardless of what your brightness is.

Also the the reference to the train wreck of unintended consequences links to an article that does not actually mention a single unintended consequence.

So basically this article is just a hit piece produced by some PR flack that has been taken verbatim by slashdot editors. I thought slashdot editors were smarter than that.

Linux has inkscape which is perfectly fine for ordinary users.

basically, freezing causes water to form crystals and these crystals can tear apart other molecules in the area.

There is a way to freeze things without crystallising water, but then you have to drop the temperatures really really really fast, and that is not possible for large objects like human heads. (Although it is apparently possible for human embryos).

Well the basic question is if the freezing and thawing process will change information bearing chemicals in the brain in a random way. If information is changed in a random way there is no way to get it back.

We know from quantum mechanics that on atomic level things are pretty much random. And while freezing is intended to stop all changes, getting to the frozen state involves some drastic changes.

So from my limited knowledge of chemistry and physics I will say the chance is pretty much certain. But granted, my knowledge is limited.

But even a thermos warms up eventually. If you want to store something in liquid nitrogen on earth, you have to keep actively cooling the liquid nitrogen because eventually heat from the external environment will come in and the liquid nitrogen will start warming up and boiling off.

Have you ever noticed how meat tastes so much different when it has been frozen and thawed than when it is fresh. I thought the difference was obvious and well known, but I suppose nowadays most people only eat frozen meat so they don't know. Well I will not go off on another rant about how fast food is changing America, but freezing definitely destroys cells and plays all kinds of havoc with DNA.

Of course it is a bad scam preying on old people. But there are many such scams. The brilliant thing about cryogenics or whatever they call it is that the scammers can never be discovered. Let's face it it will not be possible to revive those poor dead people for a long time and probably forever. Even if micro biology advances it will not be possible because freezing tissue destroys all the cells and turns everything into mush. They need more than micro biology they need someone to reverse entropy, and good luck with that.

But anyways, let's imagine, for the sake of argument that it does become possible to revive those ppl. Even if that happens it will be far far in the future. And then of course when the people discover that everything has been stolen and there is no money in those funds, the perpetrators will be looong gone. Of course it is likely that by that time someone will have stopped paying the bills, the freezers would be switched off and some unlucky municipal government will have a hundred thousand rapidly thawing severed human heads to deal with.

The rule against perpetuities is not as ironclad as it used to be in the classic common law times. There are a lot of statutory exceptions and some states have even completely abolished the rule.

I think the bigger problem is to find a way to make your re-created self be the beneficiary. There is absolutely no legal concept of someone dying and then reviving. And usually (although i am not 1oo% sure) if you make yourself the only beneficiary of a trust, the trust will get invalidated as a sham trust.

Oh yes, this is not legal advice.

Good point. Cuban is just a very good salesman, nothing more nothing less. Being a very good salesman is a pretty valuable quality in the modern world. It was amazing how he sold what was essentially just an obscure website for a billion dollars.

Nevertheless, he is completely unqualified to provide advice on web strategy, or predict the future of the web. If you doubt that you can just take a look at his past blogs where he was predicting the end of youtube.

Yes they may have been able to clear good margins if they had an efficient operation. But of course companies like that are rarely efficient, because a thief usually does not know how to do anything well other than stealing.

Also, outfits like these are usually high pressure sales operations which means they have to pay their salespeople a lot of money per sale.

But in any event, I suspect they were planning on shipping the computers some time but they just did not get around to it because they were too lazy, and having too much fun making money to actually spend any money on computers.

Your post was going well, but I do not know why you decided to blame the lawyers in the end. Class action lawyers are usually the only people these scammers are afraid of. Government agencies are slow and it is rather rare that they actually go out of their way to chase scams. It is great that the FTC decided to go after those bluehippo people, but this is a very rare occurrence.

Usually when companies try to do something dodgy towards ordinary consumers they are mostly worried about the class action lawyers. Because there are lawyers out there that do nothing but look out for scams so that they can get their payday. Sure it usually ends up that the lawyers get a lot of the money and the scammed customers get a small check in the mail. But even if the lawyers get all the money they still take alot of money from the scammers and thus punish them, and that is actually a benefit to society.

It would actually be very difficult to make it better than the random BNET player. Starcraft players are getting very good. And it is pretty hard for a computer to beat a human for an RTS in general (without cheating of course).