infringers are innocent until proven guilty

They're "innocent" except they still have to reveal their trade secrets to competitors. Which will _never_ be used outside the discovery process. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Around time the latter wised up and started calling themselves "libertarians".

Beautiful Orwellian Doublespeak, when those who eschew violence are the psychopaths and the bombers of cities are the peacemakers.

Oh, no, you're just a fool.

Precisely - they do not respect his time outside of work, care that his job requires concentration, or that he may be an introvert or blessed with ADD.

Open plan offices work well for people who have jobs that require collaboration and not individual concentration. These jobs tend to be favored by extroverts who tend to occupy management positions because humans tend to favor the illusion of strong leaders.

And the lives of the dozen+ people who died building the Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge apparently mean nothing to him.

When did the mods start +5'ing psychopaths?

They have a model that competes in that space, sure.

However, I'm typing this on an e430. Proper keyboard, non-glare screen, f-keys (OK, the F-key paint is secondary to the 'media' paint, buy they are marked). It has a trackpoint and hard buttons for the insane people who can use those and they work on Fedora just fine. Centrino wireless, mSATA slot for the SSD (128GB Mushkin in mine), DVD-R, removable battery. I've got 8 gigs of RAM in it. The BIOS even has a setting to put the control key back where it belongs. I got the one with the lowest-wattage i5 that has AES-NI and the whole rig cost me under $900.

Two things I would like: backlit keyboard, better resolution screen. What I don't care about: looking hipster at Starbucks.

It's actually because the espionage act defines things that "apparently should" be classified as protected under law too. It's a bad law, but it's not the same as ex post facto.

Our country got by without an Espionage Act for longer than it's had one. It may not have been perfect, but then perfect is hardly what we have now.

Repealing the Espionage Act of 1917 undoes nearly all of the major problems with the US Government. Heck, vacating the soviet-style revolution of 1913-1917 would fix most of what went wrong with this country.

He only got cold feet and started talking on his very last day.

Quite the opposite, I believe - he only found his courage on the last day. It was "do or die" day in soldier terms and he took the chance that they wouldn't shoot a President during his farewell address (or risk proving him right).

Every President that comes into office is threatened and changes his behavior (and campaign promises) to comply. It's notable that until very recently, they were all surrounded by men with guns from the money-changing department. Now they're surrounded by men-with-guns from the Intelligence apparatus, which appears to largely instigate low-level warfare on behalf of the money changers.

Kennedy decided to defy them.

Great, so will the US then also meet EU polution standards? Or does this rule only apply when you like it?

We don't even have a mechanism to deal with this within the US. I live in western New Hampshire, right by the big hydro power plant. Aside from a few automobiles, all of our air pollution comes from elsewhere (and we have lots of trees to absorb pollution so we're probably a net negative for pollution in this area). Yet, when the heat of the summer comes and the midwest cranks up their coal-fired power plants, the smog builds in, our visibility goes to crap, and I'm buying a new set of contact lenses every week (or just switching to glasses if it's bad enough :shudder:). The low visibility hurts our tourism, because there goes the 200-mile views from atop the hilltops, and I'm out-of-pocket for the contacts (and who knows what the long-term damage is).

But just imagine the laughter of the "judge" throwing out our small-claims court cases against each of those coal-burning plants if we try to recover our costs that we incur to ease their expense ratios.

To answer your question - the rules only apply in 'the system' when it privatizes the gains and socializes the costs. The government tells us this is "for the common good". To the GP's point - that's hardly a libertarian approach.

no, zero lifeforms extinquished by the death of their own star, for stars kill their habitable planets long before dying.

The supernova is just the final event in the very long process of a star's death.

hire armed security.

Hire? I think you mean 'build'.

Local residents would be thrilled if a large employer moved in.

And then they'd murder them. Camden needs a do-over, from the beginning.

The information is new to us. Take your meds.

White dwarf? The inhabitants had long since resettled, if they knew about themselves.

The sad nature of the universe is that untold numbers of unique lifeforms have been summarily extinguished by the the deaths of their stars for billions of years.

but I can certainly recognize the nature of the government's response.

These people wanted a new government, they got a new government.

What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else. - Tom Clancy

You'd think they would have learned their lesson with the USSR.

Especially if you ignore that the FBI and NSA are two prongs of the same criminal organization and that the FBI doesn't even pretend to be primarily about law enforcement anymore. The CIA is similarly attacked, using NSA intelligence for both domestic and foreign operations.

Oh, wait, no, there's a piece of paper on it with an org chart on it that says otherwise and another piece of paper that says the NSA isn't involved in domestic spying, so, nothing to see here, move along.