Now weâ(TM)re going to be packing all those waste protons into landfills.

Government.

You can always choose to walk away from a computing platform.

Walking away from a government is very difficult, sometimes impossible. Try to leave the United States if you have substantial income and assets and you will see this.

Facebook is a pretty good way to keep in touch with friends and share my photographs with them. That's what I use it for. It's also pretty good for non-political special interest groups. As far as I know, there is no political component to Miami YouTube users or the Gringo Gardeners of Costa Rica (where I live part of the year), and so there is no censorship worth discussing. So if Facebook's politics are not congenial to me, I can simply use blogs and web sites that are. No need for government interference for me to do that.

Unfortunately the history of online communities have shown that there is some censorship that can be tolerated. Otherwise every other message would be some kind of noxious advertisement. Censorship of political views is best gotten around by reading web sites that include information from a variety of political views. The left checks the right and vice versa.

I think Goldman's memo is too pessimistic, and I'd like to explain.

The promise of profit enormously motivates people, far more so than any charity or government endeavor. So with the profit motive, people are motivated to work the long and tedious hours needed to find cures.

Obviously, if we cure the related disease, and it eventually goes away, we have no more revenues. But the whole business model of drug companies generates money to do the research to create the next generation of drugs. We grow to trust brands. So if FooCorp Unlimited makes a successful cure for hepatitis, we will consider FooCorp's cures for arthritis, AIDS, etc over others. In other words, FooCorp is building a brand, and until the end game where all diseases is eliminated, there will be profit to be had.

In the example given, the cure for hepatitis generated $12 billion in one year, and two years later was still generating $4 billion. That doesn't exactly sound like chump change. That sounds like a highly profitable product lifecycle, and since it cures the disease they can build a brand as they find more cures for other diseases.

This is really no different from a car company, say Ford. As our story begins, Ford makes cars. The public starts preferring SUVs, and so Ford starts making SUVs. Eventually it completely abandons car production in favor of SUVs, because that's where the fickle taste of the customer takes them. That's no different from drug products becoming useless because they have cured the diseases.

So in short if a drug maker creates a cure, it can still be highly profitable, and the business can continue to do well over time as it plows revenue into additional research to create new cures.

Also remember that diseases mutate eventually, requiring new or substantially modified cures. The story of disease, sadly, isn't going to end so easily. As long as the profit motive incentivizes cures, we will see them developed, and in the long run, everybody benefits from that.

They could put it in the center of the screen for better selfies!

My first BBSs were single line and used my own software written in Basic and then Turbo Pascal. I loved to be original and people enjoyed my software, even when it wasn't as reliable as it should have been. Back in the day, if your software crashed, your BBS would be down until you got home ...

I eventually bought someone's failed BBS project through The Recycler, yesteryear's equivalent of Craigslist. It had a six-line serial adapter and Microport Unix. I never liked Microport but it did work, after a fashion, and my six lines were quickly humming. Unfortunately, as we say in the Internet world, the revenue model was never what it should have been, although I remember being thrilled when my first subscriber check – $60 for an entire year! – came in, from one of my favorite users. I wanted to be a general purpose home for eccentrics, with both dating and discussion parts equally balanced. I have never had a more successful social life before or since. We would have roughly monthly meetings at various local venues, and a pretty substantial number of people would turn out. It was relatively easy making a geographically based community, because most people lived nearby thanks to free local calls and pricey "local long distance" ones.

There were a couple of bad apples, who trolled like crazy, but it was definitely a fun environment, and my six lines were always busy. I had the first three lines for the paying users, two for non-payers and one for administration. I set up a "holding tank" for new users and those who had been troublesome, which was a forerunner of today's ultra-complex moderation systems. It didn't work all that great since I have never been a big censorship supporter.

I still remember the one user who loved Werner Erhard's The Forum and kept posting about it, even though people were totally sick of the topic from minute one. I eventually set up the typo corrector (which changed "teh" to "the" and other similar conveniences) to change Forum to Murof. Made him mad as a hatter, but all in good fun.

Even though the system vanished due to a failing disk drive in the 1990s I still have fond memories of it. And I still have friends who are former users. Wish I'd kept a copy of the software. It did some pretty cool things. For instance, the dating questionnaire let you answer questions in your own words if one of the prepared answers didn't work for you.

What I really find sad about today's environment is that we are no longer open to much unique, different or eccentric. I tried creating a social network of my own, but I wasn't able to get anyone excited about it. It was unique, and different, and just not what people wanted. The world wanted the uniformity and impersonality of Facebook, not the informality and homey atmosphere I wanted to provide. The big city, not the small town.

Nowadays I'm a photographer instead of a programmer, with almost 2000 friends on Facebook. So you can teach an old dog new tricks. And honestly, I'm glad my photographs never crash.

It shouldn't even require a counter-suit. It should be automatic that, upon demonstrating the DMCA demand was wrong, bad, or deliberately fraudulent, the DMCA claimant is charged, say 10 times the claimant's own estimate of the damages they did, or could have, incurred due to the the so-called copyright infringement. (And DMCA claims should all require an estimate of damages if the claim is not resolved.)

I think you'd see false claims (by movie studios, in particular) dry up pretty damn fast.

I live in a grass hut, you insensitive clod!

I'm in a blue state, so the electors are going to the Democratic nominee, regardless of who is running on either side.

I'd vote for Sanders if he's on the ballot, but if I have to hold my nose while I choose between Hillary and Trump, I'll go ahead and throw my vote over to Trump.

I may not be able to contribute to the election of the president, but maybe I can hasten the destruction of the current Republican party, even if by only a tiny bit.

That was exactly what I said about Trump before the primaries started - that when people were actually standing in the polling booth, they would realize that maybe Trump isn't their candidate of choice.

Seems that I overestimated people a bit. Or maybe I underestimated their frustration with the system.

That's just it. The wedding wouldn't be legally recognized.

Most likely, trying to put a wedding date on a legal form with a date in the prohibited range would invite scrutiny and a visit to a reeducation camp. They'd also demand to know who performed this "fake" wedding and make sure he never performed another.

I think it would be worth most people's while to just wait out the ban.

Is marriage a religious thing in NK, or is it a government thing, requiring a civil servant like a justice of the peace?

If the former (if religion is even allowed), I'm sure all ministers are registered and have permits to operate. Just tell them not to perform weddings (or else).

If the later, then you just instruct all civil servants not to conduct weddings.

Well, my neighbor isn't quite dead yet, but he will be soon, I think.

Actually, he's not even sick. Some even might say he's a picture of health.

But _just in case_ he dies next week, when it would be very inconvenient, would it be OK if I bury him this week?

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

It's Washington D.C.

There are already plenty of sharks in the Capitol building.