I'm actually kind-of shocked you guys haven't already done this. I mean, if anything can be argued to be a public good it's the country's communication channels.

if the ipad is over priced why isn't their a single competitor with a similarly priced device? Every single device that matches specs is $700 plus. now don't go find a resistive touch screen, I said match specs.

Uh, OK. Boy, that was easy.

Oh, you said match specs. I don't know if Dell offers a cheaper, more Apple-like alternative to the Dell's far superior Gorilla Glass.

I feel that the pro side has a much stronger case

You are forgetting another argument for the pro side: while marijuana is illegal you have a defacto illicit market for its distribution. Once it's legal and regulated, legitimate entrepreneurs come in and market forces push the price down, which drives the criminals away.

I do believe the DEA will challenge it if it passes

No, they won't. They're not that stupid.

The Feds do not have anywhere near the numbers of agents necessary to do this. Just to put things in perspective: even if you took all the currently available federal agents from the FBI (~13500), the ATF (~2500) and the DEA (~5500), that's about the same number of sworn officers in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department alone.

There is simply no way they could do it. And on top of that, they would get no cooperation from local police if they tried this. Why should they? It's a complete waste of taxpayers dollars that could be better-spent fighting real crimes.

As someone who primarily makes his living writing real-time transaction processing software, and wouldn't touch .NET with a hundred-foot pole, let me be the first to say, excellent shilling, sir.

No, he's saying that several hundred pools of molasses operating concurrently in a load-balanced manner move at roughly the same rate as an individual pool of molasses.

So, same speed, but higher throughput. That way more people can feel the molasses at the same time.

Where are they going?

Hopefully IBM, who should have bought Sun to begin with.

Note to former Sun folks/management/board involved in the Oracle buyout: Nice job, fuckheads.

your custody can be affected by dismissed or acquitted charges

Sentencing rules for judges (or lack thereof) are absolutely, fundamentally fucked in this country. This all but ensures a revolving-door policy for prisoners. You're basically guaranteeing that they'll stay criminals for the rest of their lives.

I'm sorry to hear about your injustice.

Good luck taking away people's coffee or cocoa beans.

There would be blood in the streets. Male blood. Lots of male blood.

Have you ever seen someone high on pot drive? they are worse than drunks. [...] How do you know someone won't go homicidal while on pot?

OK, OK, we get that you've never smoked.

Here are the only numbers that matter:

Phones that use Android (spoiler: ~80, ~110 including tablets)
Phones that use iOS (spoiler: 3, including tablets)

Number of Android carriers: 4
Number of iPhone carriers: 1

The fact (and it is a fact) that Android outsells iOS should come as no surprise.

Devices like iPad are making computing palatable for people who might otherwise shun desktop or laptop computers. This is deeply offensive to mainstream geeks, who are the real "elitists".

It is deeply offensive to those of us who learned how to use computers without them having to be so locked-down and dumbed-down as to render them crippled-by-design. Yet for some reason "kids today" are so intellectually hobbled that they happily hand over the reigns to their own hardware like drivers giving up keys just to tag along for a ride in the passenger seat of their own car.

+1 Preach, Brother

Where are my mod points when I need them?

Most JS code on websites is actually for cross-browser compatibility work-arounds to issues that modern browsers don't have a problem with (navigation menus, hover effects, etc.)

Once the world is rid of IE6 (and, let's be honest, IE7 as well) web developers won't need to add giant libraries to their HTML to guarantee everyone is seeing the same thing. Of course, a lot of those developers aren't much smarter than script-kiddies, and rely heavily on 100K+ JavaScript libraries because they never bothered to learn the fundamentals of the language and only understand jQuery shortcuts.

Lots of words to say, its gambling. Akin to betting on horses.

No, just the right amount of words to describe something entirely different than gambling. That's the whole point, which apparently sailed quietly past your dock.

Gambling is when you don't know the outcome.
Gambling is for suckers. These guys merely recognized the patterns and took advantage of them.