The original intent of the patent was to give the lone inventor a monopoly over his invention in order to spur innovation. And it may have served that purpose once. But today, patents have taken on a completely different use -- the leverage for big deep-pocket corporations to beat up on other corporations and obliterate any possible competition from "the little guy", who could not possibly afford patent litigation.

So, it is my view that patents no longer serve it original intended purpose, and thus should be eliminated. Monsanto patents organisms and genes and uses that to force small farmers to buy their GMO seeds; Microsoft may use patents to beat down startups they deem as a threat, and so on.

Today, people will innovate whether or not patents exist. And most innovations don't ever see a patent, I think. It's just too expensive to procure a patent -- $5,000 to $10,000 -- and if ever someone -- even another little guy -- violated your patent "rights", you could not afford the litigation, anyway.

So let's abolish all patents and close down the USPTO!

My Smartphone Data Plan costs me only $30 per month. What's really wild and unbelievable is that TEXT MESSAGING, which represents a much smaller bandwidth, costs also $30 a month, separate from the data plan. Totally insane, AT&T! (and the others do it as well).

I'm sure you can find a classical streaming source to get the classical music that you love. Or just buy a separate FM receiver. They don't cost much these days.

The real truth is that with the Internet, consumers have bazillions of choices already as far as what they wish to listen to or view, and adding FM radio would only add a tiny fraction to those choices.

Besides, many radio stations already stream their content over the Internet, anyway, making FM even less relevant.

Let's face the cold hard facts: Broadcast media is on its way out. Good bye and good riddens. Only a handful of choices, and 99% of them lousy or mediocre.

And the FM "feature" that nobody really wants (nor would listen to in all probability) would be at the expense of some other feature consumers may actually want.

Government needs to stay the hell out of regulating the "free" marketplace. Consumers can and will make the choices they want, and the manufacturers can and will respond to those choices to grab marketshare.

The Government and the RIAA can go please themselves elsewhere. Leave the rest of us ALONE!

Guns and Cars -- yes, there are many people who drive cars, and most are probably less intelligent about it than I am. And the 41000 deaths per year on our roadways speaks volumes to this.

Innocent people are killed in car crashes, too -- lots of them. And yet we are willing to tolerate the risk. Somehow, even if everyone were free to carry, I don't think we'd have a death rate due to idiot gun accidents that would even approach what we see on the roads everyday.

Of course, we can get some ideas from hard facts. The Swiss, for instance. Or States in this country that have pretty open laws about guns, like New Hampshire.

You may be right about the DC sniper -- bad choice on my part. But I dunno. There's a good chance someone may have seen him pulling out his guns that would've been in a position to do something about it. DC is not exactly a rural area. But I would have to dig up the details of each incident, and I don't have the time. But there's been others, like the one you mentioned yourself, and a McDonald Shooting some time back. Not to mention the handful of incidents where a crazed student shoots up all his classmates. If teachers were armed, they could've taken out this individual before much damage was done.

But then there are some crazy teachers as well -- well, the public school system is crazy in its own right, worthy of a thread all its own.

It's all about risk vs. the reward, and realism. We are willing to accept a relatively high mortality rate for our right to travel. I used that as a benchmark to see how realistic our expectations and perceptions are. Everyone goes insane over the 9/11 incident, a singular incident where ONLY 3000 or so people died, but doesn't bat an eyelash to the 41000 annual fatalities on our roads. Trillions of dollars are being wasted on the so-called "War on Terrorism", and just think what that money would do if it were, instead, used to improve road safety and technology in a realistic way! How many US lives (not counting soldiers) are lost due to terrorism? The risk factors are very low and yet an astronomical figure is spent fighting it.

Which convinces me that Government has it all wrong, period. Always has, and it always will.

All the gun owners I know of are highly responsible and have had training in some regard. Occaionally you get the idiot, but all of the idiotic cases I have ever heard of happened in Massachusetts, which is a lot more restrictive of gun ownership than New Hampshire, where I reside.

Government restriction creates inexperience, and inexperience create the problems you describe.

I am fully for responsible gun ownership, and the State must have no regulation or licensing in the matter. Why do I say this? Because if Government has a list of who owns a gun, it can decide to harass those individuals needlessly.

Case in point? New Orleans. I have a friend who volunteered for relief efforts after the mess hurricane Katrina created, and guess what? The government there were rounding up all the guns owned by "blacks", but leaving the "whites" alone. Pure discrimination, plain and simple, at a time you need your gun the most.

Perhaps you have a blind trust of government, but I know too much history, recent and past, to be that naive. We have few to no problems in New Hampshire with idiots owning guns, as we have a very strong culture of gun ownership here, and neophytes are strongly encouarged by their more experienced peers to seek training -- or are simply taught directly by their more experienced peers.

Places like Massachusetts south of us don't have this, since they hate guns so much, and that's where you see the most inane mishaps, like a young kid being allowed to handle a semi and loosing control of it due to the recoil. That crap would NEVER happen in New Hampsire. I can't imagine why anyone would be so stupid.

And I needn't say that licensing will only affect law-abiding citizens, not actual criminals who will conceal carry despite whatever laws you want to have. Better to allow free gun ownership with the option to freely conceal carry in public for such idiots. They'll be put down after the squeeze off the first shot, I assure you, thus saving many lives otherwise lost -- like in that shooting spree incident that occurred around Washington DC shortly after 9/11, or that case where the loon on the barracks went on a shooting spree recently.

But this would require you to put the usual knee-jerk fears aside and look at what ACTUALLY HAPPENS.

We are gun-loving. But that doesn't make us crazy SOBs. Just a part of our long standing tradition and culture, as all...

That's a completely functional explanation. Shame on you! :-)

Of course, explaining HOW a rootkit does all of that is another matter. Whether or not that level of understanding is necessary to the investigation is even more of another matter.

Nice little trick. And then all you'd need is some Flash or JavaScript to copy the images to some place else on the computer.

Good.

More Guns, Less Crime by John Lott.

Agreed.

Here we disagree. The government should NOT be in the business of regulating our rights to bear arms. Period. While I hold strongly that all who do bear arms should also go for a training course or otherwise become HIGHLY educated in the proper use of firearms, it's not the government's place to force that upon us.

Besides, I think most would want to train up as they arm up, anyway.

And so beating up people in our country who happen to have it on their hard drives does NOTHING to stop the production of kiddie porn in those areas of the world it's coming from.