The distinction isn't whether something is entertainment or not, nor whether they determine what their content is. It's that broadcast media like Fox News are subject to liability regarding libel, slander, and defamation. There are ways that entertainers can stretch things a bit through parody and satire, etc., but they and the broadcast networks that carry them are still subject to laws regarding libel, slander, and defamation, whereas Twitter and Facebook are exempt. The problem is that sites like Twitter and Facebook are now used effectively for broadcasting, which wasn't the case in the mid '90s when these rules were passed. The immunity makes sense when there are millions of small accounts that each connect only a few hundred people. There is no way that many separate accounts can be manages as broadcasting. But when these platforms host huge accounts for national politicians who tweet to 10's of millions of followers which then re-tweet and re-post, they are acting more like a broadcast media than a social media platform. The problem is that unlike in the mid '90s, they are now both, but are still governed by a set of rules that only applies to one of those use cases.

Some good points. One of the problems, which may not have been fully envisioned in the mid '90s, is that sites which started out to allow relatively small groups of people to follow each other, such as Facebook and Twitter, have over time become more like broadcast media for a small group of very large accounts. While the majority of accounts on Facebook and Twitter are used to update a relatively small groups of followers, when national politicians like Trump and others use twitter to tweet to 10's of millions of followers which then re-tweat or re-post, sites like Twitter and Facebook now look much more like broadcast media than a connection between a group of friends, classmates, or coworkers.

So the majority of the time, the social media platforms serve the small groups of people that the rules were originally intended to insulate the platforms from, but there are now times when the same platforms act more like a broadcast medium. The result is that you can argue it either way depending on which use cases you are considering. At some point these platforms need to treat the large accounts of national politicians as broadcasting while treating an account with 500 followers as social media.

Things might affect you more than you think at the moment. I kind of agree with you on the middle east, but not on China. I don't know about you, but I don't look forward to living in a world order which has become dominated by the CCP, which is the direction we're headed.

Sorry, don't hang our national security on Taiwan, unless the US makes a FULL commitment to defend Taiwan against an attack by the PRC with whatever effort is necessary - strong enough of a commitment to become a deterrent. Right now, we appear to the CCP as a paper tiger. Regardless of how you feel about the probability of the PRC invading Taiwan at any given time or whether the PRC will take the risk of doing so, the threat is there and must be accounted for in our national security strategy. Both Taiwan and South Korea are ideologically reliable partners at the moment, but Taiwan is heavily threatened by the PRC.

If Taiwan gets attacked, even if we defend them, those resources will be offline or compromised for a long time. That leaves South Korea as our least-threatened alliance partner. I've been designing chips for 35 years and I've dealt with both Korean (Dongbu, etc.) and Taiwanese fabs (TSMC, UMC) and the Taiwanese ones are better. Global Foundries is good but doesn't offer everything TSMC does. We ABSOLUTELY need to retain/regrow onshore cutting-edge, sustainable semiconductor capabilities to maintain stable national security. There's just no other option. It will have a cost. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be careful about how any funding or assistance is structured, and make sure it includes ways to keep companies accountable, but after working in this industry for my entire career (which makes me biased, I admit), I believe we absolutely must retain the lead in this technology, onshore as well as with reliable partners.

Nevertheless, rather than just whining about the big, bad, evil DMV (who are mainly enforcing laws passed by others), it would be more productive to work to get the bad/outdated laws changed. Yes, that may mean fighting an uphill battle against a powerful lobby (existing cab companies), but it there is already a lot of public support for this.

That's not completely true, at least as the system works. If there is something sufficiently innovative that it is "not immediately obvious to someone trained in the field", then it essentially qualifies as an invention. Inventions can be small and limited in scope as well as large. The real problem is in determining what is innovative enough that it would not almost immediately occur to most people trained in the field as an obvious solution to the problem. It is a subjective test, and IMHO, too many patents are given for things that really shouldn't pass that test. Patents can always be contested, but, it is a long and expensive process, so bad patents have a way of sticking around.

True, and lets not forget to add:

Non-destructive editing.
a 10x increase in speed of the basic engine (which will be needed for non-destructive editing)
A macro recorder to easily record repetitive operations.
photo-shop like history operations

A single window mode is not the most important thing GIMP needs to compete with Photoshop

Typing has definitely reduced my ability to hand write quickly and legibly, but not my ability to spell. I think spelling has been affected more by the fact that I write much less now than a long time ago.

I agree. This obviously isn't the ultimate alternative fuel vehicle, but this process has to start somewhere. Yes, it's expensive, yes it's hard to justify on pure economics at the current gas price of $3/gallon here in the US. But $3 gasoline isn't going to last forever. Last summer, before the economy crashed, we had $4.50 gas, and once the economy cycles back and demand for oil goes back up in the face of flat or declining world oil production, prices will likely climb even higher than that and the economic balance point will change. This car may be coming out a little before its time, but someone has to take the first step in this direction; it just happens to be GM, who everyone loves to hate right now.

Of course GM could totally botch things up like they did with the EV1, only time will tell if they learned anything from that and their current bankruptcy.