Oh, and maybe a few million people who get jobs. But hey, darn those evil corporations.

I spent a few weeks in NZ in 2006 and it was FAR better than you describe even back then, and that was in a small town far from any large city. Either it's gotten much worse over the last few years, or you're not being entirely honest.

Metering makes less sense for broadband because, unlike water and electricity, the marginal unit cost of sending "one more gigabyte" over the network is negligible; the main costs are capital costs (investment in infrastructure and expansion) and maintenance. The only actual marginal cost of sending a signal over the network is a tiny amount of energy. If you don't understand this, imagine you purchase a 100Mbit switch and some ethernet cable and create a network between you and your neighbor ... now consider the relative cost of installing that setup, vs. sending enormous amounts of data across that line ... you can pretty much keep that cable saturated and your marginal costs will be miniscule. Comparing this to gas or water is a false analogy.

http://www.google.com/search?q=virtual+machine+vulnerabilities Sigh ... when will people ever learn.

No.

And yet for many, many years HD manufacturers all used the base-2 definitions, and in fact only very recently (in computer history terms) changed over to the base-10 definitions. So certainly there was a very well established de facto standard of using the base-2 definitions amongst HD manufacturers.

That I know of, anyway.

It's possible, I don't know. I must say though, I own a small ISV and one day I discovered pirated copies of our own software on RapidShare. I fired off a letter to their abuse address, and within 24 hours they had removed (and, they said, permanently blacklisted) the content and sent an apologetic response. It was certainly a more positive response than I had expected. This was about 3 years ago, and I haven't yet seen any of our software appear again on RapidShare.

This has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not it's a good idea to keep a gun 'loaded and ready for home defense', because doing that wasn't the cause of this negligent accident: This guy left the thing *loaded and lying on a table near a 3-yr old*, something you just don't do regardless of whether or not you prefer to keep a gun loaded and ready for home defense. Why are you trying trying to turn this into an argument about something it isn't, and falsely equating what he did with general carry for home defense?

And how has the NSA "won" exactly? You think they have secret 'backdoors' for all major encryption algorithms? And if they haven't actually "won", why hasn't there been the disaster you predict?

If you ask me, most of the rhetoric one hears from government officials is more about money than anything else; warning of a 'rapidly expanding cyberterrorism threat' is mainly scaremongering that translates to 'give us a bigger budget than ever'. Not saying there aren't vulnerabilities; certainly there are, just look at all the Windows botnets and viruses (and nowadays PDF seems to be a primary attack vector). If there was a "cyberwar" already being waged, it would probably already have been lost. But giving more money to some state department to employ a building full of people somewhere to 'tackle the problem' is hardly going to fix things like IE and Adobe's PDF reader.

Um, no, fallacy of false choice - not having DECENT healthcare insurance services is what is detrimental - yet you posit that the only choices available are "universal healthcare" and crummy healthcare. Yeah you got crummy healthcare, but there are other reasons for that (e.g. lack of competition), most of which are probably fixable in other ways without having to create "universal" healthcare. You didn't need *universal* healthcare in your case, you just needed a decent option.

The notion that the notion is a fairytale is a fairytale. People love to blindly spread memes like this because they enjoy feeling sorry for themselves, but it simply isn't true:

Rags To Riches Billionaires: "Almost two-thirds of the world's 946 billionaires made their fortunes from scratch, relying on grit and determination"

That doesn't mean everyone can end up a billionaire, but it's simply false that this notion that 'anyone can make it' is a fairytale; it's borne out on practically a daily basis. If you open your eyes and look, you'll find true-life rags-to-riches story under every second stone you turn --- especially in the USA, but also these days frequently in places like China. But yeah, not everyone is born hard-working, I guess, so keep sitting and feeling sorry for yourself and you'll definitely ensure that nothing ever changes for you.

Rags to Riches CEOs

7 greatest celebrity rags to riches stories

Rags to Riches

Entrepreneur takes women from rags to riches

Rags to Riches billionaires

Asian American Rags to Riches Sagas

Case Study: From Rags to Riches (Brenda French)

Cordia Harrington: From Rags to Riches Success Story

Local cosmetics magnate reveals rags-to-riches life story

China: A rags-to-riches story to dream about (Yan Huiyan)

China’s paper magnate is a rags-to-riches story, literally

Rags to riches: Bill MacAloney: from orphan to successful business owner to CBA

From rags to riches: Filipino weavers trade up

Etc. etc. blah blah ... I could go on pasting these stories in here all day. Nothing worse than listening to whiny losers feeling sorry for themselves that they weren't born rich.

As a matter of fact, by and large, yes, yes, it really is. Especially if you don't want to get caught. Think about it a bit.

And no, government giving grants for video game development can simply not be considered a case of free-market capitalism in action, by definition. At all. That cannot be reconciled. I suggest you read up on what free-market capitalism actually is; the reason you're probably confused about is, understandably, probably that you've been told that what we have is a system of free-market capitalism. The term "capitalism" has a specific definition in economics --- it can't mean whatever you want it to mean (sorry) and by its definition, calling government funding a video game an instance of "capitalism in action" is so misguided, it's honestly difficult to know where to begin to correct such a confused view. People may differ on various less crucial aspects of the definition of capitalism, but one thing fundamental to its definition is the means of production being privately (i.e. not government - by definition) owned and traded.