I'm not sure this only happens where there's "less" democracy. Is not collectivism vs individualism an equally good answer?

Cultures that leain more towards collectivism and less towards individualism would also be more likely to be successful. The state could seize property for the common good, attempting to fairly compensate the land owner, while it not being seen as controversial.
The dicussion would be about the level and nature of the compensation. Not whether individual land owners should block mass transit options that would benefit the plebs and potentially assist in saving the environment.

As long as I am actively/daily reading the site, I quite commonly get 15 points daily to spend. Sometimes back to back as soon as I spend the first 15, a new batch is handed out.

I have excellent karma, and have had that for most of my many years on /.
I consistently get mod points almost daily, as long as I'm actively reading the site.
If life takes over and I only stop by once a week or so, the frequency drops.
I always get 15 points to spend.

FLAC is also for users that want to store the original audio without any losses.

You can always encode and compress the audio again to suit your purposes, but you can't go backwards from a lossy format into a lossless one.
Whether this is for permanent future compatibility or because you wish to work with, edit, mix the audio in some way is another story.

But there's no reason to support what is essentially a worldwide standard for losslessly compressed audio, except of course because it doesn't support DRM..

Isn't that exactly what Google Fiber is doing ?

How about doing what has been done in the US, and is being done successfully all over the world:

Let the local government own the network.

Either the local government makes their own infrastructure company for maintenance and development of the network itself, or let an established company do it.
The point being of course, that everyone can buy access and then sell services in the network. Whoever runs the network publicly document costs, and charges everyone the same, cost based, non-profit fee.

Meaning you have close to the perfect competitive environment, in a future proof network environment that will benefit the consumer/citizen AND corporations alike, no matter what the current size of the corporation happens to be.

It's proven successful, easy, fast and functional everywhere it's been tried. Why not try it yourselves?

Any chance of you being involved in some form of spaced based show in the near, not-so-near, or entirely not near future at all?
I would probably kickstart the hell out of some more Farscape being brought back to life with you as a writer. How about some of that?

So it's just something you adhere to for protection when you're caught raping children?
Cool.

Why someone creates a religion or belongs to it in the first place is a complex issue.
I very much doubt their reasons are quite as lofty as we like to imagine though.

You are not forced to sign up with paypal. Paying works perfectly fine without it. This is made clear on the site and in several comments to this thread.

I know that this goes beyond TFA, but in the TFA the following article is linked: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bt5akp

Now he certainly got all his google services suspended or removed entirely, all due to an image automatically flagged on picasa. No human oversight, no appeals process or means of proving innocence. He was automatically assumed guilty and data being deleted, services terminated.

That sounds a little bit different from what you're describing.

Clearly the way you got about storing and concealing your child pornography is by creating an on line web album of it on picasa.

Also, I find it very strange indeed that Google can make these claims, highly dangerous claims to make about anyone considering what they can do to your reputation or indeed your life, and then refuse to give you a single reason why they did it. Not even a hint of a reason, just a brick wall.

It's strange how a highly public company that we trust with most of our data can act this way and get away with it, that it in fact can even be legal. There should be some form of due process or consumer right involved her that couldn't legally be signed away with a simple EULA. Free service or no free service, both parties should have certain obligations as long as they're in business. Whether that business be eyeballs for emails or any other form of relationship, especially a commercial one such as this.

So basically what you're saying is that in spite of having a society that almost in every way favors white males, as long as you can still find instances of prejudice against the favored, privileged men, inequalities is not a problem for you?

Basically what this amounts to is actively discouraging anyone in the technology sector, anywhere in the world, to do business in the USA. You're clearly showing that what works and is successful in the rest of the world is an unwanted development in your country. As someone is pointing out, this has reduced, almost eliminated the need for music piracy in a lot of European countries, which apparently isn't something you're interested in either.

On top of that, you're considering not paying the interest on the money you borrowed from the rest of the world. This would of course end people betting on your country as a safe investment. Money flowing into your economy from the rest of the world appears to be something to avoid as well. Reducing the number of people in your country that can actually pay their mortgage or stay employed at all seems to be no cause for concern either.

The only thing I can really see you doing that would cause your status as an ally and first rate investment opportunity to go into decline any faster, would perhaps be to start senseless wars that ran on for decades mainly to keep the price of oil up.

Oh wait...

Because whatever's left in my inbox is a task i've yet to do. Ask tasks are done, mails are moved to an archive folder entirely unsorted which can be easily searched, often tagged in one way or the other. But my inbox remains clean and empty when my work is done.

As others have pointed out, the middle mouse button works. Otherwise, ctrl+shift clicking will also open a tab in the background.