You're not kidding. My daughter's 3 month stay cost more than my house.... but it was worth every penny.

They told us my daughter had a disorder that is incompatible with life and scheduled the abortion without even asking us. They said she had trisomy 18 before they even did an amniocentesis. She was born with some abnormalities - She is missing an arm, and her liver was in the umbilical cord - but surgery fixed the latter, and people live with limb deficiencies all the time. Some people's challenges are just more visible than others. She didn't have trisomy 18 either - there are no chromosomal anomalies. She was born 3 years ago yesterday, and spent 3 months in the NICU as she grew strong enough to breathe on her own after the surgery put the liver in her stomach (thus compressing her lungs somewhat). Today, she spent her first day at a Montessori school. She is a normal, well adjusted little girl, just with one arm. Sorry, but the doctor simply isn't always right and I thank God every day that we ignored him, because that sweet little girl wouldn't be here today if we listened to him.

But I'm still not going to hold my breath

Sure, in a place where you don't give people due process to challenge their tickets, yeah. Building some fly by night hobbyist traffic monitoring system will be ok. In a western capitalist country, we get (generally, still) due process, the ability to defend ourselves in court, and we also understand that the whole point of speeding tickets is usually revenue generation for the municipality, state, county, etc. We also understand that while our police tell us it's all for our safety, the real problem is speed DIFFERENTIAL, not speed itself (generally) and thus we just set speed limits below the natural speed of the road, and cash in on the revenue.

So I can't speak to all of those, but usually when people win, there is more to the story that gets left out in the email forwards telling the story. For instance, in the case of the McDonalds coffee thing, they did try to settle for FAR less to cover the medical bills. The coffee at McDonalds was 180-190 degrees, not 134-145 degrees like at home, and thus caused 3rd degree burns requiring skin grafting. Yes, we expect coffee to be hot, but we don't expect it to be THAT hot. http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm Worth reading.

...is firing a hellfire missile a airspace regulation violation?

How did the free market play a role when nuclear regulation has prevented any new plants?

But I hope that they are actually training them in real computer science. Algorithms, data structures, patterns, etc. I have no college degree, but I love to learn (just couldn't afford it when I was that age, and now I'm too busy!) and I did just fine. Worked in management consulting as a developer and then architect, it's definitely possible. However, ignoring the other areas of learning the university can offer may be a mistake - it's great to know your computer science, but it's nice to be well rounded. As long as you're the type of individual who pursues that learning on your own, however, you'll be just fine without that massive student loan debt!

A strange minister who ignores the Word he's supposed to teach - Matthew 13:47-50? Mark 9:40something? Jesus is spoken of as being in hell when He died because He paid the price for our sins.

It doesn't take a genius to see the potential for abuse when your overlords can now assign a nice little fingerprint that they own so they can track everything you do. Good for them for resisting - it takes a special kind of person to actually stand up for what you believe in when the price is that high.

I was a contractor, but that was by far one of the most educational and fun experiences of my life. I know this is /. and that I should be hating on them here if I don't want to get modded down, but I wish them well in their endeavors. If the competition wants to get big, do it by being better, not by pissing and moaning that Microsoft is keeping you down. It's not that hard to be better.