Advertising on the internet will never die out. As long as Google can get their targeted advertisements in front of as many eyes as they can, they'll be a success.

Yes, they could appeal, and yes, it could take a long time-- but that's how our legal system works. Long, heated debates ending in a hopefully lawful verdict. Are you trying to tell me the Federal government can't order Toyota to reveal the data on all the cars they are investigating?

I see no reason that our solutions are mutually exclusive. I agree with what you say here, but I still feel we need to isolate criminals from each other while incarcerated so that they have less opportunity to share information and do not develop a sense of comradery. A big part of our violent crime problem is that prison gangs keep close ties to their outside counterparts. A gang-banger who gets out of prison after 10 years goes right back into his old gang, usually as a hero. Imagine how different it would be if he got out, and everyone he knew had moved on. Instead of going back to his old contacts, he'll have to find a real job.

"People learning English as a foreign language get taught proper grammar and only learn the vernacular later." Oh my, Cedric. I have friends (we also take in stray dogs and cats) who have been entered in ESL courses, graduated and passed the citizenship test (yes, they were all in this country legally). The horror stories they tell me about the classes are proof of idiocracy being rife and disseminated among all those about to become Americans. I am told story after story about illegal Mexicans who treat the classes as though they are a joke, do not learn any real English (they do, however, get the "dirty" words, right) and yet when the class ends they receive a passing grade. I can only point out to my friends that they themselves are the real winners. They will be able to order dinner, read newspapers and books, and converse with us snobby collitch graduates. No, I do not know why they continually use the Mexican peon as an example. One told me about a Chinese male who spent all his class time cutting out paper designs. I've also heard how one teacher of ESL (a graduate of a local high school) was asked by a student for some help in writing to a Senator. The teacher started out by having her write "To Whom It My Concern...." The rest of the letter only got worse and less grammatically correct. You and I, fellow taxpayer, pay that ESL teacher for all the hard work.

I think it's more true on slashdot and the internet in general. People either are intentionally being trolls, or they let their words get away from them in an online forum without a second thought because it's not like they are at a work party and are going to get looked at weird. Full Disclosure: I am an American, I know people that voted for Bush/Mcain and Al Gore/Kerry/Obama and none of them are ever this polarised.

It's even worse than stuck on dialup. We have internet access via our cable provider, and my mother pays for that AOL bring your own connection crap.

I do not touch that computer except in an emergency.

So the stupid driver who was texting on their mobile phone or eating a burger is fine, great. What about the ten year old old they've just thumped into with their SUV? Does it help them at all?

Hopefully a foam bumper will help minimise the damage to the kid who has just been torn off their bike by a stupid auto driver, though my suspicion is that the laws of physics will say getting hit by a ton of metal moving at 28mph is still going to damage somebody really badly. I'd be interested to hear about the benefits the foam offers to people being hit by the car, as well as the person inside and already wearing a seat belt, with crumple zones and air bags.

Agreed with the other post which includes the quote about spikes in the middle of steering wheels being more likely to encourage careful driving than technological improvements which mean you can be a total idiot and smash into anyone or anything and walk away, because you're all right Jack and you don't care who you hit.

Name one other browser that even makes an attempt at supporting Group Policy.

Now you know why MS is the number one browser in enterprise today.

If you are naive enough to believe that MSIE stole the game from Netscrape, then I have to hope that you are simply too young to remember Netscrape 4.0. IE crushed the market because 'Netscape' simply SUCKED. IE keeps the enterprise because nobody else has bothered with GP. Change is *hard*. As a sysadmin, any time you can be certain that 90%+ of all settings for an app are the same across your enterprise, you JUMP at the chance.

If you are naive enough to believe that ANY browser is "secure" then you are simply an idiot, and age can be no excuse at all - unless you're 12 or younger, I suppose. If you, personally, are targeted by a remotely skilled script-kiddie, your secrets belong to the world. Unless you PAY ATTENTION, and keep your entire environment up to date, patched, and locked down to the highest degree you can manage. And then you stand a *chance*.

Finally: This has absolutely nothing to do with anticompetitive behavior. While we could argue if it is just an idiotic knee-jerk reaction, YOU would come up short, should you search for evidence supporting any argument that relates to monopoly practices. Choice. Exists. Period. Chrome, FF, Opera, Lynx. Three of those are all various degrees of 'better than' the current version of IE. ALL FOUR are various *orders of magnitude* better than IE6 on XP. Which is what this breach is about.

Yeah. IE6. Can't think where I might pick me up something better than THAT.

No, buying the game means I liked the game. I could not give a crap about how they con or bribe the reviewers, I don't care if it is made by sony, MS, blizzard or adolf hitler for that matter. If the game is fun (and it is) and is well made (it is) then I am more than happy to pay for it regardless of how they treat the scumbag media.

If these robots really want to start an apocalypse, they'll have to be able to figure that out themselves.

I'd like to see the Cult of Celebrity lay down and die.

Except that this will not happen. If stars are virtualised then the cult of celebrity will just start worshipping the virtual celebrities. The only difference is that it will be worse, the virtual actors will have no flaws. No nasty drug habits, no prima donna outbursts, no affairs or moments of indiscretion, perfect for all intents and purposes. This is exactly what the movie studios want, a blank slate that can be modified in any fashion to be appealing to the highest possible number of people.

For those who have read PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep can immediately draw comparisons to the Buster Friendly character. Inhumanly likeable, every character made to be perfect and desirable. This is what will happen with virtual celebrities and I have no doubt we will have them within 20 years.

What is the biggest problem facing a music producer this day and age, no it's not piracy it's talent. They've spent years crafting the perfect image for the latest Pop Sensation(TM) and then she goes and does something or says something that puts that in jeopardy, people stop buying albums because the perfect illusion of the pop stars purity and virtuousness begins to show imperfection, its almost as if they have a mind of their own. No, no, this cannot be allowed to continue, just as Stalin asked for a soldier "impervious to pain, indifferent to the quality of food it eats" the music exec asks for a celebrity that is "unthinking, never acts of their own accord and is perfectly likeable". The only difference being that Stalin never got his soldier, the music exec will likely get his virtual celebrity.

Please show me where the New Testament supports violence. (Unless you can do so, you're blowing smoke.)

The Pope himself has ordered people to be burned at the stake and he has ordered people to go into the crusades; go look at their reasoning.

Or you can simply look at the story of Paul: here we have a man who persecuted and killed prior to his conversion to Christianity, but all of that was forgiven simply because he accepted Jesus. But the church he founded then simply continued to commit the same acts of persecution and killing against non-Christians.

This is common to any group of people, whether or not those people are Christian.

Any sufficiently large group of people contains people who commit violence, but that's not the issue. Atheism, chess clubs, or debating societies don't claim to instill a sense of morality into their members, so they can't fail at doing so.

But Christianity is explicitly about morality, about right and wrong. Therefore, how Christians behave tells us whether Christianity is effective as a moral philosophy.

Furthermore, when we examine Christian dogma in more detail, it becomes clear why Christianity fails to instill morality into its followers: with Christianity, acceptance of Christ is more important than moral behavior. That is an intrinsic moral flaw with Christianity and the reason why Christianity has a two thousand year history of violence and intolerance.