What percentage of your income is taxed?

Neg, they've been using it. My dad's house was just built less than 2 years ago, and they used Cat5e throughout the lot of it. I know because I swapped over half the phone jacks to network jacks and wired it all up for them.

Sorry dude. I own the copper. I fucking put it there. There's a junction box outside the house, and from that point on, it's my property, my responsibility, and occasionally, my problem. If I want ANYBODY else to touch it, I either have to pay them or I need to get line protection insurance. But I don't, you see, because I fucking put it there, and I can handle any problems it throws my way.

Just because it always seemed an annoying, snarky thing to say and I've never got the opportunity to say it: not everybody lives in Australia, and not everybody who reads Slashdot is Australian. Stop being so aussie-centric.

(Roofles. I made myself giggle.)

We pay income tax, though, so it's really apples to starships in comparison

The problem is for any libertarian viewpoint to come across, it almost needs to be an extreme viewpoint or else people won't pay attention.

This has the ironic side effect of people attributing lunacy to libertarians.

I feel strongly toward many libertarian things, but I fully recognize the absolutely essential public works such as roads, bridges, schools, dams, communications - in a word, infrastructure - as being a governmental responsibility. I would even go so far as to say health care.

Other than those few things, however, I reserve the right to enter into any political discussion with the initial stance that it is not the federal government's duty to intervene. In some situations, I may change that position, but our fundamental resting point should, always, be "is this even the United States government's fucking job to worry about?"

In some cases, a little regulation will help quell sporadic (and occasionally horrific) turbulent moments. We need to err on the side of not doing enough than doing too much. I doubt many legislators go into office thinking "oh, it's perfectly OK to make crappy laws that serve a specific purpose now but have serious ramifications in the future, and we'll never revisit it again". They likely do have the best of intentions.

The problem is, much like software engineering, you rarely (if ever) get the opportunity to go back and rectify your mistakes. Instead they stick around forever, problems with them pile up, and you attempt a hack workaround because you've got 1098180158901509815 things that need attending to RIGHT THIS SECOND zomg. It just happens. It's not something anybody intended, but what you intend to has little bearing on what actually gets done. So these crappy little hacks stick around for years and eventually they cause more problems in the end than they solved.

A slower, steadier pace on federal regulation would be a far more sustainable situation than the breakneck, half-assed pace we take now.

In essence:
First ask if the issue at hand truly requires a federal law to address.
Then discuss the situation in a relatively calm manner. For most individuals, the more passionate you feel about a subject, the less rational you are able to come across. If the situation is truly an egregious problem that only the federal government can solve, THEN begin discussing solutions.
Under all circumstances, keep the regulation as simple as is absolutely possible. I fully understand this is, without a doubt, the most difficult step to be on. If a problem is complicated, the solution often tends toward the complicated as well. However, at all times, the legislators must be fully cognizant of the fact that overly complicated laws tend to have a higher incidence of unintended consequences than those that are simple. Laws should be constructed with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, not the brutality of an 18 wheeler shot from a railgun into a kitten orphanage. On fire.

These are all ideals that I believe most individuals can get behind. The problem is that ideals can never be ideally implemented. They will be perverted, for humans are imperfect, and in this particular case, the siren song of power corrupts.

I'm a libertarian who believes that choice is fine, drugs should be legal, health care should be provided by the state, any consenting non-married adult can marry any other consenting non-married adult. I'll argue each of those specific points with anyone, but the basic, core belief I hold is that the more we rely on imperfect individuals to resist the perversions of power, the worse off we are. The "closer" these individuals are to us, the less power they will wield, the less it will (hopefully) corrupt, and the more localized the impact of poor laws will be found. In that way, if you dislike the laws of your state, you can either move to change them, or move to another state closer to your liking. Consider it "moving to Canada" on training wheels. That should be enough to make almost everybody empowered and modestly content. It won't be perfect, but it will likely* last longer than the more rigid, top heavy balance we have now.

* IANAP(sychic)

True, we would, if only because we wanted to see what a penisLength - 120 would end up looking like.

Some of us are infinitely curious, after all.

No kidding. I just looked through the mod option list for the GP and I couldn't find "-1: Fucking Moron" in there to give to him. I'll just go with a comment in support of your comment instead.

If I can't get a recipe to make something for dinner that someone wants, because some individuals decided to keep said recipe to themselves, it may be a problem with them in that they're not sharing knowledge, but it's still my fucking problem that I don't fucking have it.

You can blame the vendors all you want, but when it comes to my OS, if the drivers for it don't exist, it IS the OS's problem if I can get them for another OS. Is that entirely fair? No. But life isn't fucking fair.

So you keep your fridge at or below freezing?

How do you like your milk slushy on your cereal each morning? Is it nummers?

Then they can be the kind of friends that you never see and can imagine don't exist. A lot like House Elfs, really, only less sentient and subsequently more socially acceptable to "enslave"

I don't care. I don't care if they just want to cuddle, make you dinner, and sing sweetly in the dusk. I don't care if they all have a sack of a million dollars they're dragging behind them. I don't care if they know the keys to long life and perfect health and are just dying to tell us.

Kill them. Kill them all. Every last one. Then kill everyone who ever saw one, just in case.

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Need moar fucks.

No, we don't think the UN is good because countries like Libya chair the human fucking rights commission, for fucks sake. The only way to make that any more surreal would be to put North Korea in charge, or resurrect Hitler, form the country of "Hitleria", and put THEM in charge.

Really? As part of the global warming camp, I didn't realize we got the go-ahead to start killing people.

This should make my job a lore more enjoyable.

Actually, after this event and the last "glitch", I'm leaning toward Barnes and Noble and simple Google Product Search for the rest of my needs. Amazon was already reeling from the "we hate gays lol (but we actually don't, it just looked that way)" uppercut of a few days ago, and this last jab was just enough to send them to the mat.

As for the individual returning items - maybe he was a legitimate asshat, maybe he was not, but revoking his access to the products he's already purchased is, in my mind, no better than theft. After someone steals something that you lawfully paid for, you no longer have access to it. After Amazon revokes your access to something that you lawfully paid for, you no longer have access to it. The only difference here, to me, is that you can't toss Amazon in jail for doing this, even if the access were only revoked for a few minutes. (Would you feel it acceptable if a thief snuck into your home, stole your HDTV for a day or two, then returned it? Or would it still be theft, even if they did have at least a minor modicum of decency to return it after it was done?)

Even if this was a mistake on Amazon's part, I frankly don't give a damn. This is something that flat out cannot happen.