Any municipality that allows cellphone use while driving is, essentially, endorsing driverless cars.

You're not seriously suggesting that driverless cars will have the same reaction ability as someone talking on a phone while driving, are you? If so, um, no. If not, what's your point?

At that point, you want just to have MDI = every image as own window and tools in own window.

no, at that point YOU want to have all those as different windows on your screen(s). Not everyone uses virtual desktops or has access to multiple monitors, and even if they did not everyone shares the same mental model. Lots of people see no need whatsoever to have a tool palette be a top-level window (from the window manager's point of view) because they view their WM's window switcher as an APPLICATION switcher, and why the hell would they want to alt-tab to a tool palette but keep hidden the image windows it applies to?

I have nothing against MDI. It obviously works fine for some people. But guess what? SDI works fine for some people too, so why shouldn't the GIMP devs give their users the ability to choose between the two modes? They are, and that's great, and I applaud them for it. What's not great is people like you condescendingly asking if other folks have never heard of multiple monitors or thinking that the stupid unwashed masses would see the light if only they'd use the proper window manager.

decent radio as we know it just DIED across most of rural America

um no. The House voted to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), from which NPR gets some but not all of its money. The provision won't make it out of the Senate, and even if it does the President still has to sign it into law, and even if he does NPR still gets revenue from user donations and from local stations subscribing to its content.

It's a damn shame that House Republicans are playing games like this when they promised to make this legislative session all about job creation, and I donated my sixty bucks to NPR as soon as I heard of this happening, but let's not distort the facts here. That makes you just as untrustworthy as Fox News.

Oh dear - you just imagined a government providing no safety net to citizens and no confidence to investors until some vaguely-defined point in the future! How silly of you!

State and federal governments are not spending too much money - if anything, they're not spending enough (and not only that but they're taxing the wrong people to get it). The job of the government is to provide for the security and well-being of its citizens. Cutting spending during a massive economic downturn is absolutely no way to do that job. Providing help through stimulus and job creation is.

I swear, it's like the only lesson all the small-government starve-the-beast meatheads learned from the Great Depression is to have a couple of wars when your country is going to shit.

because a "Democracy" would have "Democrat" in it.

This is completely unsupported by the linked article. Either include the proper links to back up your statements, or stop editorializing in your submissions.

Nowhere did the parent to your post claim that he was the creator of the webcomic. He only wrote that he "detailed" it.

And what happens when you want to have a USB device and a DVI/HDMI device plugged in at the same time? PDMI is stupid. Why combine a general-purpose connector with a display-specific one?

For decades the Mac has had a viable shareware scene where you download apps and, if desired, pay a modest fee to upgrade to a full or non-crippled version. I don't see how anyone could possibly argue that a Mac App Store will be the end of the world unless they're a clueless analyst who thinks the only programs people run on Macs are Photoshop and Office.

no love for the safe-crackin', bongo-playin', Challenger-investigatin' Richard Feynman?

4chan can use their powers for good?

4chan isn't just /b/ . Some of its less-popular boards like /co/ (the comics board, where this took place) actually have, on occasion, informative and insightful discussions.

I can't seem to get it to stick...

you can lead a brain to knowledge but you can't make it think.

uh, it's not like they're just examining the X-Priority: OMG CRITICAL header field or anything here. TFA says it's based in part on the people who you email the most, and the emails which you choose to reply to. I imagine it'll work about as well as Gmail's spam filtering (i.e., pretty damn good in my experience).

I don't agree at all with publishing commenters' real names (though the city and state of the billing address strikes me as useful), but a one-time fee coupled with halfway decent forum moderation policies really is the way to go. The financial aspect causes idiots to think very hard before shitting in a thread, and light-handed and pragmatic moderation helps keep a discussion civil.

MetaFilter has been doing this for a long time now, requiring a one-time $5 signup fee and employing a small handful of fantastic moderators (4 or 5 mods for 100K+ users), and the level of discourse is some of the highest I've read on the Web.

We're all thinking it, so I'll say it: "Hey, let's let our government handle healthcare to increase effeciency"

uh, no. Some of us are thinking "hey, let's let our government handle healthcare because it's fucking criminal that for-profit entities are allowed to literally and figuratively bleed us dry in order to please their stockholders. And a big contributor to inadequacies in things like Medicare and the VA system stem from a lack of funds for improvements, either because people are too cheap and shortsighted to raise taxes or they have screwed up financial priorities like funding instead the biggest military on the planet so it can go bomb people overseas."

But then again I'm one of those filthy Commies who wants a single-payer healthcare system in the US, so feel free to disregard anything I say.

In certain states like Massachusetts, the power plants and the transmission wires are owned by different people. Residents can choose who they want to get their electricity from.

That way the local public utility infrastructure can be regulated by one set of rules, and the electricity providers by a different set. Makes sense to me. Now if we could only have the same separation of infrastructure and content with the cable companies...