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.

When I taught my son programming when he was around 11 or so, the project I picked was to have him write a stack calculator, including a simple GUI (like a simple version of the GNOME or KDE calculators). It taught most of the basic elements of a program, including a simple GUI, but unlike a really simple game who's novelty would wear off quickly, it was something he was able to use, improve, and be proud of for some time after finishing it.

As to what language to use, that's a hot topic and you'll hear lots of opinions. At the time, which was a long time ago, we used Tcl/Tk because it was simple, had a very easy-to-use fully integrated GUI toolkit (Tk), and was high level in that it avoided having to worry about complex issues like memory management and pointers, which could overwhelm some 11 year olds. OTOH, it taught programming concepts beyond what you could do with something really basic like LOGO. I'm not necessarily suggesting it now, however -- it might not be the right thing today, when there are other potentially better choices like Python, Java, etc.

Although many patents (both software and hardware) are bogus, the basic concept of the patent system has some validity and there are conditions where patents serve the public interest by encouraging innovation and at the same time making knowledge available to the public which would otherwise be kept as tight trade secrets by companies. In the case of universities, they have been loosing other sources of public funding and so earning some money from patent licensing may not inherently be a bad thing, but there should be requirements for patents obtained based on publicly funded research that although licensing fees could be charged for use by private companies, other universities and other publicly funded research institutions should be allowed to use the technology royalty free.

It shouldn't be hard, as long as you have any kernel/motherboard combination where suspend or hibernate work reliably. Just create a shutdown level that actually does a reboot, then modify the startup scripts to immediately do a suspend or hibernate as soon as the machine is booted if that shutdown level was used. The effective shutdown time will be longer (because it's actually a reboot), but the effective "boot" time will be very quick.

While probably do-able, this actually seems like overkill. Why not just use normal suspend/resume?

I have many gigs of digital photos and I have also more-or-less moved away from optical media for backup and switched to HDD. As the original poster mentioned, most of the "information" you find on the net about archival longevity of optical media is personal anecdotes or pet theories, and good hard data on archival longevity of CD-R or DVD+-R is hard to find. My own personal experience is that name brand discs do have fewer problems than cheap "house brands", but it's hard to quantify or say much beyond that.

Backing up to hard drives has a number of advantages:

1. It's a heck of a lot easier - in most cases of personal data backup, a few 1TB HDDs will hold all the data you need to back up, so there's no need to manage boxes of 100's of discs. I usually back up the same data onto two HDDs, and store one of them in a firesafe. If you're really worried, you can store one of them offsite.

2. Since no media will last forever, you will *always* need to roll your data over to new media every so many years. With HDDs, its *much* easier to roll your data over to new media every 5 or 6 years. Think of transferring two or three HDD's to a new HDD (by the time you roll over the data, the new HDD will probably hold all the data from those two or three older HDDs), compared to re-organizing and re-burning hundreds (or more) of CDs or DVDs.

The bottom line is that if a few HDDs don't hold enough data for your needs, then backing up to optical media will be totally out of the question anyway, and you will probably need to use tape.