The definition of republic from Wikipedia is: A republic is a form of government in which the people, or some significant portion of them, retain supreme control over the government.[1][2] The term is generally also understood to describe a government where most decisions are made with reference to established laws, rather than the discretion of a head of state, and therefore monarchy is today generally considered to be incompatible with being a republic. I think that people who say this are interested in changing from universal suffrage to "some significant portion of them". The same sort of people who spout this sort of stuff will often be heard to say that things were better when only those who owned land could vote. That is the presupposition hidden in this meme--disenfranchisement. Since we're quickly moving to a society where the minorities are a majority and where only the bankers and a few rich (white) people own land, this is simply advocating a new form of apartheid through the back door. For those of you who find liberal or Democrat a dirty word, be aware that college students can guess party affiliation from a head shot 80% of the time. That means that liberal and conservative reflect basic personality traits, and it takes all kinds.

Could we simply start with preventing paranoid schizophrenics getting guns? I know that these folks aren't supposed to get guns already but we seem to do an absolutely lousy job of it as recently witnessed in Az to our collective sorrow and horror.

What a load of BS in the summary. http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4a3.html

So in effect because some outside black box not-IT QA organizations (i.e. DoT and NTHSA) can't reproduce the fault you're going to believe them over the people reporting the bug? Instead you're jumping to the conclusion that it's all a conspiracy theory instead of incompetent QA? Silly wabbit. You've obviously never worked in software development, QA or tech support. If you had you'd know that sufficently complicated software systems almost always have real world failure modes that can't be reproduced in the lab--sometimes for years.

I wonder if there's a crack in the EULA that would allow Sony to be prosecuted for unauthorized access to a computer system? It certainly doesn't seem likely to me that anyone who had installed cracks would knowingly authorize Sony to access their system.

I think God might be sending us a low bandwidth message via P=NP and P=!NP papers. The message can theoretically be extracted by assigning 1 to P=NP and 0 to P=!NP then arranging the bits in the chronological order of the papers (or maybe that should it be 0 to P=NP and 1 P=!NP). The problem is that you can't find "papers" and tech reports which have disappeared down the memory hole and lots of the nutjobs won't have put dates on their offerings. http://www.archive.org/ to the rescue!

Can you say "Agency Capture"? That and PR which is also on full display here are the American political diseases.

Sheesh. I know that the modern slashdot man is ahisotorical but this is the 2nd time in a week that this PR shite is being shoveled.

Not only are you not a lawyer you don't know much about contracts or publishing rights either. Publishing rights are sold on a country by country basis and format by format basis. If you sell a book to be marketed in the US your publisher has no right to sell it in the UK or Australia unless they negotiate that separately. Same goes for audio books. So those advances are paid for the rights that were negotiated in the contract. Given that's the case then why would you think a pre-digital paper publishers have the right to publish digitally unless they've negotiated it or you work for a publisher who's interested in spreading FUD? The older contracts don't include those rights. Unless a contract is written specifically to allow future changes then things don't get grandfathered into a contract. They have to be renegotiated.

Did you copy and pasted your boiler plate industry talking points here? The simplest possible search shows that they did indeed have patents in Soviet Russia. Yes, copyrights and patents were established for the common good and they've long since been hijacked in the interests of long term monopoly via regulatory capture. Patents and copyrights were an elegant 18th century solution to a social problem has morphed into the modern day *cause* for a problem with effects similar to those copyright and patent were created to address way back when. Doesn't mean we shouldn't have copyright and patent. I think we just need government by and for people instead of (rich) corporations.

You mean fairy tales like the public letter signed by the presidents of every US scientific organization with any connection to climate research in the nation warning that human induced climate change is a very great danger to the human race just this past October? Or do you mean the fairy tail that 2 studies that were called into question in the last six months have changed the judgement of those same scientists. The human race, at least the US part of it seems to be in a headlong race to win the Darwin award. I just hope I'm dead before it really starts to crash hard and there's mass starvation and general warfare. I don't expect we'll avoid those either. I figure if there are 100 Million human beings by the end of the 21st century we'll be doing pretty well given the direction things are headed.

So just how many of those HP workers on strike have any connection to this project? Do you know? Or are you just another foul mouth knee-jerk flamer?

Mad cow disease or creutzfeldt jakob disease and kuru or laughing sickiness are prion diseases. Both are caused by eating infected nervous tissue or brains. Apparently prion disease is caused by eating misfolded prions. These misfolded prions apparently get into your nervous systems cause the normal prions in your nervous system to misfold as well.