Seriously, what if we make a better world for nothing?

I'm happy that you're happy that you get false positives.

Oh yeah that's encouraging. At least we have a bill that doesn't suck out there.

It is a good choice. For, y'know, the United States. Where Iowa is. Which might explain why we use it.

I live in Iowa. Temperature here goes from about 0F to about 100F over the year, give or take 5 degrees. It's pretty convenient. Also if the metric system is so great, why doesn't anybody use gradians?

I seriously use it for that, actually. Though even THOSE articles have had some errors, mostly trying to interpret vague statements from interviews as support of their personal fanon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvdf5n-zI14

Yeah, wrap your head around that one.

If you want to do what's RIGHT, take the example of red light cameras. Everyone hates them. They get massive opposition (at least in my area) whenever they're introduced. Now, why, exactly do you think this is? It's not because it's a waste of money, it's actually quite profitable. It's because they WORK. People run red lights all the time and they don't want to get caught.

To continue the driving metaphor, you speed on the highway. I know you do, everyone does. It's an open secret that at some point in your life you've probably gone above 80 and NOT gotten caught. This would be so trivial to stop it's laughable. A couple lines of code in the onboard computer to limit your speed to 70 mph. Depending on your region you could just take it to a mechanic and have them adjust the limit in accordance with local laws. Now how would you feel if they did that? Pretty pissed I'm sure. I know why I would be, because they're taking away my freedom to break the law.

Now I'm sure by now you think I'm going to say piracy serves some important moral purpose. It doesn't, it's wrong. But the RIGHT thing to do is to let it happen, because like the occasional speeder or the kid with a dime bag of pot, it is not something life threatening that MUST be stopped in its entirety. You have a choice to make between harming the tech sector or harming the entertainment sector. The right thing to do is to take the choice of lesser harm. SOPA and PIPA will hurt EVERYONE in a fantastic myriad of ways I'm sure you're all familiar with. Piracy only hurts those who are pirated against, and only in one way - by eroding their profit margin.

This isn't to say we should give up the fight against piracy. That would be like abolishing all traffic laws, there would be chaos on the streets. Nobody wants that. But we have to take MEASURED steps against it. We can never eradicate piracy, so in taking steps to fight piracy, the government should first make sure nobody is going to get hit in the crossfire.

Or you could just subsidize the entertainment industry and institute a piracy tax on high speed internet connections, that could work too. Didn't Switzerland already do that?

The so what is that the registry mechanic does exactly what it says it does. It does not do 'nothing'. It does something trivial, but if people want to pay for it, that's their business.

Just ran the registry mechanic myself, it does what it says. I verified that it was detecting legitimate registry errors (really more like artifacts) from programs I'd uninstalled. It also did a fine job of erasing all of my internet history which I really would have preferred it notify me about first.

Our hopes for common sense and freedom reside on the decision of the guy from TEXAS? Man are we boned.

I think what a lot of people forget is most of the great works of civilization weren't created with money in mind, but simply for the love of their art. If any of the indie bands I knew (personally) were in it for the money, they'd be in a different line of work. Most of them ARE in a different line of work, at least one makes six figures writing banking software. Besides which, even if you broke into a store and stole a bunch of albums the only people you'd hurt would be the label executives, which nobody should actually care about because they're parasites on the industry. And then you take a look at websites like bandcamp which have many free albums you can optionally pay for, or any of the indie bundles on steam where the product is supplied for free or nearly so but people just throw money at them because they're good. Copyright by no means ensures profit and allowing people to download for free by no means excludes it because if 1,000 people download your song and one person sends you $5 for it, you've just made $5. Copyright is a century old concept, its methodology is outdated. Its usefulness was to prevent more powerful people from stealing an idea and profiting off it while the original author lacks the power of distribution, but now EVERYONE has the power of distribution. Music piracy at the moment is far more profitable due to the sheer publicity it generates for the artists than it is lossy from the lost revenue. That's not to say copyright is useless as a legal construct, as it protects proper attribution, but to enforce it as rigidly as the RIAA would like is simply lunacy. The fact is with digital distribution, CDs are fairly useless. The RIAA is running scared, trying to milk every cent they can out of their existing artists, because there's little to no reason for a new artist to sign up with them. Also,if this trend of the US attempting to implement a police state on the internet and Switzerland saying lolno continues, the entirety of the internet might end up located in Switzerland.

Well the doctors are pretty split on the issue, so I don't think that would help if he was one.

Wasn't firefox originally intended to have a LIGHT footprint by being modular and relying mostly on extensions to provide functionality beyond basic web browsing? PDF is not basic web browsing. You might as well include routines for MSOffice documents too. And mp3s, and movies, and pretty soon we've got one gargantuan program that does everything and does it badly when all we wanted to do was look at cat pictures.

Because intragovernmental debt (which is what he's talking about) is different than intergovernmental debt, which DOES have to be repaid and what everyone was panicking about a couple months ago.