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"The best solution there is to not rip things off."

Yes, and if people do copy a few dollars worth of music rather than buying it it's obviously worth making them lose everything over.

"Yes, unfortunately the Obama administration really did screw that up."

Ah, you're a Republican, that explains a lot. You do realise that it was Bush who put them all their in the first place and held them without trial for the first few years before Obama took over and continued the fuckup don't you?

"But things are getting straightened out so that enemy combatants, terrorists, and the like who fit into the awkward space between domestic arrests and uniformed soldiers in combat elsewhere can go back to being tried in a military venue."

So which category do you put the innocent ones into who haven't ever been charged with anything and for which no evidence of them ever being wrongdoers go into? are they the ones you say "the like"?

"In the meantime, your assertions about conditions in Guantanamo are, of course, made-up BS, and you know it."

Really? Which ones? Are you telling me Cuba doesn't actually reach extremely high temperatures? are you suggesting the people at Guantanamo are allowed to walk pretty freely around the prison? That doesn't stack up to even US provided film of the place.

"And endless parade of journalists, Red Cross people, and the like disagree with you, having been there themselves."

Well, no actually:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3179858.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/07/cia-medics-guantanamo-torture-red-cross

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6526589.stm

Still, nice try at outright making things up to cover the fact that once again you actually don't have a clue about the topic at hand.

"Who cares where they are? If they're in the middle of plotting, executing, or supporting efforts to kill us, and the country in which they're hiding has no will or ability to do anything about it, it's exactly the right thing to do."

So what you're saying is that al Qaeda was justified with 9/11? they were after all attacking a country that had for some time been plotting it's downfall. Similarly, I assume you'd be okay with an Iranian nuke hitting Washington for the same reason? Or is this another one of those issues surrounding your misunderstanding of "neutral" as in "It's fair if the US does it, but no one else".

"Ah, I see. So when a campus cop goes ove the top dealing with people blocking the street, that's a sure sign of actual, nation-wide policy, right?"

I think you need to stop watching Fox news. You seem to genuinely believe that it's okay if beatings/abuse/killings by people in positions of authority happen all over the US regularly as long as their superiors can deny responsibility, whilst if the Iranian government denies responsibility for some of the actions of the republican guard, it's different? Again, you really don't get this neutral thing do you?

Look, if I'm honest, I'm not really disagreeing with you that the Iranian leadership is pretty awful, I'm being difficult to make the point to you that it's not as simple as you think. I'm making the point that it's hard to criticise Iran on the human rights board when the US does have a far far less than perfect track record on it. By letting Iran onto the board, to call out the US on it's abuses it keeps Western governments in check - the last thing they want is to be embarassed over fuckups in their own country and get called out on it by someone as hypocritical as Iran, but without Iran being put in this position it would just mean countries like the US could continue with their abuses uncontested. A bit of international em

Well, here's the press reports on the ruling.

More importantly, here is the summary from the EU Court of Justice, the judgement of the court, the directives involved and the opinion of the court, but in French ad the English translation isn't up yet.

This is the information any of us have to work with, when it comes to understanding the ruling. Bearing in mind that none of us (except for three sheep and a hedgehog) are lawyers, a definite answer is impossible. I read it that ISPs are absolutely required to be common carriers, at least within the EU, and that common carrier status may not be infringed even at the request of a major corporation or pressure group.

Fun Fact: The Solyndra loans were approved of during the Bush administration. Have fun with your partisan pissing contest.

I'm sorry, you seem a bit short on facts. Here are some facts from the left leaning New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

Preliminary approval under Bush, final approval under Obama. Then financial analysis was skipped under Obama and warnings were ignored. Plus Solyndra's owner was a top Obama campaign contributor. Plus the Obama administration structured the deal so that investors would get paid before taxpayers if the company failed.

"George B. Kaiser, a billionaire from Tulsa, Okla., was a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign and the backer of a foundation that is Solyndra’s leading investor ... during the period when Solyndra’s loan guarantee was under review and management by the Energy Department, the company spent nearly $1.8 million on Washington lobbyists, employing six firms with ties to members of Congress and officials of the Obama White House. None of the other three solar panel manufacturers that eventually got federal loan guarantees spent a dime on lobbyists."

""“It was alarming,” said Frank Rusco, a program director at the Government Accountability Office, which found that Energy Department preliminary loan approvals — including the one for Solyndra — were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects. “They can’t really evaluate the risks without following the rules.” The Energy Department’s senior staff has acknowledged in interviews the intense pressure from top Obama administration officials to rush stimulus spending out the door. “We had to knock down some barriers standing in the way to get these projects funded,” Matthew C. Rogers, the Energy Department official overseeing the loan guarantee program, said in March 2009, just days before Solyndra got its provisional loan commitment. Mr. Rogers said Energy Secretary Steven Chu had been personally reviewing loan applications and urging faster action on them.""
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/us/politics/in-rush-to-assist-solyndra-united-states-missed-warning-signs.html?pagewanted=all

"At a White House meeting in late October, Lawrence H. Summers, then director of the National Economic Council, and Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, expressed concerns that the selection process for federal loan guarantees wasn't rigorous enough and raised the risk that funds could be going to the wrong companies, including ones that didn't need the help. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, also at the meeting, had a different view. Under pressure from Congress to speed up the loans, he wanted less scrutiny from the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB."
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/26/nation/la-na-energy-loans-20110927

"Energy Department officials were warned that their plan to help a failing solar company by restructuring its $535 million federal loan could violate the law and should be cleared with the Justice Department, according to newly obtained e-mails from within the Obama administration. The e-mails show that Energy Department officials moved ahead anyway with a new deal that would repay company investors before taxpayers if the company defaulted."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/solyndra-obama-and-rahm-emanuel-pushed-to-spotlight-energy-company/2011/10/07/gIQACDqSTL_story.html

Oh no, Fikri is real...The problem is he's just on a Disneyworld vacation and put his bank accounts in Russia because he felt his own government was becoming unstable. He's talking to people in Syria due to the influence of the Arab Spring. The problem is a lot of perfectly normal activity can be spun as suspicious activity very easily and suddenly you end up in Gitmo for taking a vacation to Disneyworld.

It's The Umbrella Man effect.

Why are you so unsure about 1984 and so sure these random connections add up to something sinister?

Yes, high speed rail is going to be expensive. Yes, it's now projected to cost much more than the original estimate. (The cost has largely increased due to delays (the longer it takes to build a project, the more it costs), particularly fuelled by NIMBY appeasement ("We don't want the train passing near our house!" "But it is much quieter than standard trains and will increase your property values by being near an HSR station." "Build a tunnel!" "Okay, we'll build a tunnel." "The costs on this project are ballooning!").)

But you have to compare the cost to the alternatives. California's freeways and airports are jammed. With increasing population and mobility, something to move people around will have to be built. And the estimated costs to add volume to airports and highways is estimated to be $100-billion as well.

And, to top it off, high speed rail runs on an operational profit. (This means that yearly revenues are higher than yearly costs.) Everywhere. Yes, high speed rail lines run an operational profit in Japan and France, Spain, Russia, Taiwan and car-loving-and-train-hating America. In Britain all rail is private, and for-profit companies are in fierce competition to pay for the rights to run rail services, which are barely at HSR levels if at all. It's a strongly held misconception that rail travel is unprofitable: HSR makes a profit all over the world, and it usually subsidizes local and regional rail transport (which the US has much of).

And though only the Tokyo-Osaka and Paris-Lyon line have paid off all their construction costs, that's because they're the oldest HSR lines; others are on track to in the future. Which modes of transportation don't pay off their construction costs? Oh, that's right, nearly all roads. Remember Carmageddon/The Carpocalypse, when an overpass outside LA was torn down, shutting traffic for the weekend? That was all so they could widen the highway through a mountain pass. Were the anti-HSR people asking for ridership studies for the Sepulveda Pass? Were they asking for the expansion to run an operational profit, let alone an overall profit? Of course not; only rail is subjected to such standards.

Add to this that a train is much more efficient in transporting this number of people, from an energy, environmental and economic perspective, and this is using studies that are assuming that gas prices will be relatively stable over the next few decades.

Obviously there still has to be overview of the project, making sure money is being spent efficiently and for best value. But the entire transportation sector needs to be looked at from this viewpoint. Airlines can work with rail to transport their passengers on their "last mile", freeing up their planes for more profitable medium- and long-haul routes, like done in Germany (Frankfurt Airport has two train stations). Road funds can be diverted to repairing our existing infrastructure as opposed to building more asphalt that needs to be maintained. And everyone will get to where they are going sooner. If this is done, North America will look back 20 years from now, not wondering "How could they do this?", but instead "How did they wait so long?"

Well, wouldn't you know, David Pogue, of the New York Times, just published an article about this: Three Small Cameras Come Up Big in Photo Quality

Yet Richard Branson alone has donated over $3 billion to the study of AGW.

Balls.

  In 2006 Branson "pledged" to spend his profits over the next 10 years on developing "energy sources that do not contribute to global warming".

Nothing for climate research.

Has he spent any of this money? I have no idea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/21/science/22warmcnd.html

Mr. Liberty? As in USS Liberty? Cheers!

No mods? Why not donate to the victim's fund instead? This economy is really putting the hurt on some of us: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/business/22yachts.html?_r=2&hp

"This "spend rod" problem you have basically in every nuclear plant on this planet."

That has absolutely no relevance to the point I made... except to reinforce that putting spent rods in these "temporary" holding pools is a stupid thing to do and a real problem that needs to be addressed.

"Yes, they had trouble to keep the "spend rods" cooled. But far less than with the core itself. Also the spend rods 'only' where problematic regarding fires, not regarding a melt down. The melt down happend in the core(s)."

Sorry. Wrong. Melting of the spent cores -- which could happen if the cores were kept wet but not cool enough -- was a very major concern. That's just one example. Again, reports of what was happening at those reactors were all over the internet. And I'm not just talking about stupid reporters, but comments by nuclear industry experts.

Why not try looking things up sometime, rather than just pulling arguments out of the air?

There are billboards that aggregate the fm radio stations being listen to in passing cars the show the advert most likely to target the largest percentage of passing drivers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/27/business/media-business-advertising-new-billboards-sample-radios-cars-go-then-adjust.html

No, someone claims to be able to determine what radio station is playing in passing cars, and use this to target advertising. Sounds like a load of crap to me - how the hell do they know what station a passing car is listening to? And this is from 2002, if there are still no reports of it actually working it's probably rubbish.

I'm not exactly sure which country you are from, but here in the U.S. a billboard is never a "sign. . . [that] doesn't do anything."

There are billboards that recognize your car and greet you personally:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/business/media/29cooper.html

There are billboards that aggregate the fm radio stations being listen to in passing cars the show the advert most likely to target the largest percentage of passing drivers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/27/business/media-business-advertising-new-billboards-sample-radios-cars-go-then-adjust.html

Interactive advertising inundates our modern lives. You're individual concerns aren't worth as much as the advertising dollars spent on you. No one cares that you feel like your privacy is being trampled, you're a target demographic and consumer. That makes your interests important only if your spending money. Opting out only makes advertisers not care what your opinion is because you are a "fringe demographic".

On a personal note, I still hate interactive movie posters. Ever since I walked past a poster for Step-Brothers and Will Ferrel scarred the piss outta me by suddenly coming to life and badgering me to come see the movie.

I'm not exactly sure which country you are from, but here in the U.S. a billboard is never a "sign. . . [that] doesn't do anything."

There are billboards that recognize your car and greet you personally:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/business/media/29cooper.html

There are billboards that aggregate the fm radio stations being listen to in passing cars the show the advert most likely to target the largest percentage of passing drivers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/27/business/media-business-advertising-new-billboards-sample-radios-cars-go-then-adjust.html

Interactive advertising inundates our modern lives. You're individual concerns aren't worth as much as the advertising dollars spent on you. No one cares that you feel like your privacy is being trampled, you're a target demographic and consumer. That makes your interests important only if your spending money. Opting out only makes advertisers not care what your opinion is because you are a "fringe demographic".

On a personal note, I still hate interactive movie posters. Ever since I walked past a poster for Step-Brothers and Will Ferrel scarred the piss outta me by suddenly coming to life and badgering me to come see the movie.

Yes with MF Global and now http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/business/new-york-state-says-bank-of-new-york-mellon-cheated-pension-funds.html
Its not just play cash for the rich anymore.
As for the tanks, the US has a few. You have the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Range_Acoustic_Device and local police forces have armored personnel carriers via federal grants as dual use "Amphibious Rescue Vehicles" ect.
How will the US use them? At a point they will be near a crowd and someone will have to make the call to clear into the crowd using their small "tank".
Then it gets interesting. Is the cute young person in front of the tank/APC an undercover working on their long term street cred?
A few real arrests and local press in front of a tank will let them get near that hidden protest leadership...
The international press is a block away and very distracted - air space above is clear, its safe to move... any citizen cameras can be collected under the threat of state wiretapping laws - 20 years in jail or wipe the footage.
So roll the APC - until you meet a veteran who went on lots of training manoeuvres with the same type of APC ;)
East Germany did the math on using tanks - its bad for the press/politics, you endanger your best agent provocateurs/deep cover officers and anyone in the crowd who was a conscript/vet is huge unknown risk.
But the US has Kent State - so expect to see the tanks...

I was actually impressed with the idea of automatic spending cuts, especially with Republicans putting their sacred cow of Defense spending on the table. I was certain the committee wouldn't reach a deal since they previously rejected the Democrat's offer of 3 to 1 spending cuts to revenue increases and with Obama finally showing some backbone, so I was really curious to see how the automatic cuts would go into effect legislatively.

Turns out the next step will be making sure those cuts don't happen. Because, while Congess can't agree on how to cut spending, they can apparently agree on how to keep spending in place.

I wish America had a system that allowed viable third party candidates... but, as it stands now,Americans will have to choose between corrupt and corrupter in 2012. We are so screwed.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/taliban-study-wikileaks-to-hunt-informants/

I think you are referring to these reports from Afghanistan. Those have not been connected to Manning, AFAIK, although if he was the source, you would be correct.

MSSQL may currently run on Itanium but support is rapidly being dropped.. Not sure about DB2 but i doubt it runs on Itanium..

It does run on HP-UX Itanium systems, but doesn't run on Linux Itanium systems. The latter might not be all that surprising, given that the majority of Itanium systems come from HP; if you want to run Linux rather than HP-UX, you have more choices, so I suspect relatively few Linux servers are Itanium boxes.

Do you really think the general public is going to shell out money for an as-yet-unwritten book?

Did I say unwritten? No, I did not. People have been known to shell out money for unpublished books:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

I guess since you are so anti-copyright even people who didn't pay would be allowed to have a copy.

Yeah, and so what? The age of copyrights is over, it is time to grow up and move on with your life.

What incentive is there for anyone to pay anything under those circumstances?

If nobody pays, the book does not get published; people who want the book will pay for it.

Furthermore, anyone who wants to try such a system is perfectly free to do it today. The fact that by far most authors don't choose such a method says volumes about what they think of such an idea.

Or that there is still a substantial market for dead tree books, and that the penetration of tablets has not yet reached a level that would make such a system attractive. We also have a system of ever-more-draconian copyright laws that are propping up old publishing models and businesses, which removes any incentive to develop a new system. I really do not think that the lack of a new system is evidence that there could be no workable alternative to what we have today.

we are stuck with something that is not the best, but is workable.

Sorry, but this is not a workable solution:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html

I take it you didn't take statistics from an elite school. Since 'elite' schools have tougher acceptance criteria, it only makes sense their students would perform better. To my knowledge, there has never been a true 'double blind' study, where students with similar grades and performance levels in high school were compared between community colleges and 'elite' schools. Please post one if there is one.

it seems as though you don't even have to be accepted - just being the type who would apply is a pretty good indicator of future performance:

Graduates of "elite" schools do go on to have more "successful" careers in terms of money and other measurements compared to other less "elite" institutions. However those graduates did not necessarily have that success because of the school - they might have had similar success had they gone elsewhere. The elite schools might be "creating" winners, or they might be "picking" winners.

How could we find out? Well, we could examine the "success" of people who were accepted to an elite school but went elsewhere and see how the compare to those who did attend the elite school. Fortunately, people have done such studies:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/ [nytimes.com]

"A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion."

Basically, if you've got the chops to apply to these elite schools, you're very likely to be successful no matter where you go.

Though I would then ask you to show what information leaked you believe was so important for the public to know

After Disclosures by WikiLeaks, Al Jazeera Replaces Its Top News Director

"CAIRO -- Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network financed by Qatar, named a member of the Qatari royal family on Tuesday to replace its top news director after disclosures from the group WikiLeaks indicating that the news director had modified the network's coverage of the Iraq war in response to pressure from the United States...

In at least one instance, involving a report on the network's Web site, Mr. Khanfar said in the cable that he had changed coverage at the American official's request. He said he had removed two images depicting wounded children in a hospital and a woman with a badly wounded face."

The fact that American officials are censoring the media, including Al Jazeera, may not be news to you, but it does further explain why the Iraq War looked nothing like Vietnam as far as news coverage was concerned. It wasn't because it was a good war. It was because reporting was limited to what American officials wanted Americans to see.

Well too bad for Manning then he uncovered NOTHING

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/world/26wikidrugs.html?pagewanted=all

Complete crock. Read: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/dispute-over-confinement-of-wikileaks-suspect-echoes-guantanamo-chaplain-case/

His POI confinement has been ordered by the brig commander, which is not within his jurisdiction. The brig psychiatrist has specifically requested his status be changed and has been ignored.

And for "talent" one should generally read "drive/motivation/work". But to continue on this idea of "it's not the school" that can lay claim to success, here are some thoughts.

Graduates of "elite" schools do go on to have more "successful" careers in terms of money and other measurements compared to other less "elite" institutions. However those graduates did not necessarily have that success because of the school - they might have had similar success had they gone elsewhere. The elite schools might be "creating" winners, or they might be "picking" winners.

How could we find out? Well, we could examine the "success" of people who were accepted to an elite school but went elsewhere and see how the compare to those who did attend the elite school. Fortunately, people have done such studies:

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/revisiting-the-value-of-elite-colleges/

"A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion."

Basically, if you've got the chops to apply to these elite schools, you're very likely to be successful no matter where you go.

The EU have made the the right to use the internet a law in 2009.

Bigger Is Better, Except When It’s Not. Interesting article. They say distance running and cycling.

The vast majority of music isn't produced in France or in French. Even music consumed in France. The French government have a history of trying to distort this in honor of gallic pride. In 1993, the French passed a law requiring French radio stations to play at least 40% French language music even though listeners didn't want it.

Information on this latest levy is pretty sketchy but it appears to be a tax to fund Centre National de la Musique whose goal appears to be to fund French music production.

So the French are collecting a tax based on the assumption of music piracy - where the majority of piracy is of British or American music - and then, by the looks of things, giving it entirely to the French music industry, not to the artists and labels whose music is actually pirated by French listeners and internet users anyway. Tres Francais.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/11/18/us/life-us-usa-lunch.html?scp=1&sq=House%20protects%20pizza&st=cse

Ok, ok I know that we're talking about Republicans here but still it shows stupidity is rampant on both sides of the Atlantic!

The sauce on a pizza can contribute a serving of fruit/vegetables. But it's way more fun to spin the facts into "pizza is a vegetable" rather than "pizza sauce can be a serving of fruits/vegetables". I mean, it's not like spaghetti sauce makers boast about how they have a serving or two of vegetables, and so mothers can stealthily give their children vegetables, and "SHHH!!! DON'T SAY THAT IT HAS A SERVING OF VEGETABLES TOO LOUD!" otherwise the kids might hear, and freak out "zOMGs! WE'RE EATING VEGGIES?!"

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2011/11/18/us/life-us-usa-lunch.html?scp=1&sq=House%20protects%20pizza&st=cse

Ok, ok I know that we're talking about Republicans here but still it shows stupidity is rampant on both sides of the Atlantic!

So's pizza.

The summary is a little misleading. This is not a "major upgrade," it is a complete rewrite of the MyFord Touch system. You see, for their first attempt, Ford decided to outsource the project to a company called BSQUARE who put the UI together using Adobe Flash Lite. For some reason, the results were slightly less than stellar.

Anyway, Microsoft itself is supposedly helping with the rewrite and Ford is doing the rest in-house (without Flash) so those of us who have been dealing with this awful system for the last year are at least a little hopeful.

Hey, at least that's ~1.25 fewer drones at $8m apiece flying around blowing up innocent people. I'm all for the US simply wasting money rather than wasting innocents and creating the conditions for more terrorism.

Some of what you proposed was the law in the United States (specifically limits on what unions and corporations could donate). It was stricken down by the Supreme Court of the United States as a violation of free speech: NYTimes Article, no registration required

The case itself is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, if you would like to look it up.

Some would say the movie "The Social Network" helped

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/technology/11computing.html?pagewanted=all
http://jezebel.com/5667829/why-programming-is-hip-again-hint-its-not-the-bong-hits
http://www.chron.com/business/technology/article/That-Hollywood-touch-gilds-computer-science-1691321.php

Nice a-factual rant, you've got there.

As an EU citizen, I find US practices completely unacceptable.
Oh, ok. I find some European practices unacceptable. For example, I don't think european countries should ban religious symbols or headscarves. I also don't think Europe should be allowing piracy. I know everyone likes to get stuff for free, but pirates don't have a sustainable economic model for the creation of digital media - except for the cheapest kinds, like TV shows (paid for by commercials) and YouTube videos. I hate to see what the world will become if piracy were the norm. I think europeans are being jerks by allowing groups like the PirateBay to continue operating. (Which is not to say that I agree with SOPA, but I do agree that things need to change.)

Even China doesn't try to restrict other countries.
That's good. Oh wait, wasn't there a recent story about Chinese hackers trying to take down a Fulun Gong website that was located outside China?
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/238655/china_hacking_video_shows_glimpse_of_falun_gong_attack_tool.html

Say, wasn't it China that put pressure on the US and other countries to shut-out the Dali Lama?
China Warns U.S. on Dalai Lama Trip, October 16, 2007 - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/world/asia/16cnd-china.html
China: Obama visit with Dalai Lama has 'harmed Sino-U.S. relations' - Jul 16, 2011 - http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/07/16/dalai.lama.white.house/index.html
China pushes Mongolia to cut short Dalai Lama lecture, Nov 08 2011 - http://mg.co.za/article/2011-11-08-china-pushes-mongolia-to-cut-short-dalai-lama-lecture/

They do what they have to do inside their country, but they have never tried to block or manipulate other countries to do the same.
See above.

Yet US has the balls and hypocrisy to accuse China about its censorship practices, as do most US citizens here on Slashdot.
Stoping piracy is not censorship and you will lose this argument if you claim that it is. And cracking down on political and religious dissent is not the same thing as enforcing copyright. If you're going to make that comparison, you might as well compare one country's jailing of political dissidents with the US' jailing of criminals. There are political dissidents in Chinese jails for the crime of speaking out against the Chinese government.

US is much worse than China.
This should be interesting. By the way, as much as I dislike some of the things going on in the US, I do not like the way you're providing political cover for Chinese policies.

They try to force their views and laws globally.
When you say "views" and "laws" - those are very broad terms, as if all US views and laws must be enforced globally, which obviously is not the case. Let's talk specifics.

They install their own law enforcement agents inside other countries in the name of "providing training" to manipulate.
Not even clear on what you're talking about here.

They revoke IP addresses and domains used by non-US people.
As much as I'd like to agree with you, the problem stems from the fact that the internet is global. What this means is that, either the world enforces copyright or there will be some country which doesn't and everyone in the world will be able to side-step all the copyright laws. What we're talking about here is that one of the two extremes will win-out. It doesn't help at all that the PirateBay was operating for years, serving up pirated material to the whole world while sendi

Remember Citizens United? Individual votes mean nothing now that corporations can use unlimited money to fool voters by the million.

Right, because the regulations it struck down were so effective.

I disagree with the Citizens United decision in theory, but in practice, its adverse effects on our political system have been vastly overstated. If anything, it has led to more transparency

Old news. The US has been blocking "politically undesirable" speech for years. Check out the story of Steve Marshall for one example.

Except that the true hidden cost of using coal for electricity "are probably even higher than the studyâ(TM)s worst-case estimate of more than $500 billion a year."
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/tallying-coals-hidden-cost/

And the true hidden cost of oil is probably in the same range:
http://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/oil-price-fantasy-the-true-cost-of-crude/2730
"According to estimates, we spend nearly half of our entire $685 billion defense budget protecting and ensuring the free flow of the approximately 730 million barrels of oil that we import annually from the Persian Gulf. And given the realities created by such terrifically large numbers, this means we spend an additional $469.00 on each of these units in order to bring them safely to market."

Ironically, it may even take more energy to refine oil into gasoline using electricity and heat (from natural gas) than cars get from the gasoline:
http://evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm

Renewables have been cheaper since the 1970s if you tally the true cost.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]"

There was also an op-ed by Rebecca MacKinnon in the NY Times: "Stop the Great Firewall of America". Unfortunately behind their paywall, but may be accessible through a Google search?

dude video games did that. this is why grey squirrels make a tasty snack http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/dining/07squirrel.html

...unmitigated throttling any time the provider feels like it (apparently 65-85% of the time), 'unintentional' throttling of gaming, etc. Aside from the low caps, you can't even get around any of this by going with one of the smaller ISPs since AFAIK the leased lines are subject to the same 'traffic management' policies.

Actually that's not quite true at least not right now. Bell does indeed put the screws to its 3rd party resellers and forces its traffic management upon them but Rogers via Teksavvy at least here in Ottawa has not and this might be true of any cable based 3rd party ISPs or at least any of them that aren't running on Bell's lines. Which is specifically why I switched to Teksavvy Cable the very day it became available in my neighborhood. Internet cost chopped in half, monthly bandwidth more then tripled and a very minor sacrifice in download speed for all of that which I think was well worth it.

"The truth is that gun rights have gotten a lot better in the last 3 years."

you mean like this?

"Felons Finding It Easy to Regain Gun Rights"

thanks NRA!

Sure, score a small point for not letting Bell and Rogers increase the abuse, but our wired broadband status quo is still terrible. High prices, low monthly caps (60GB typical) with massive overage fees, absurd asymmetry between D/L and U/L rates (10 Mbps down / 0.5 Mbps up typical), unmitigated throttling any time the provider feels like it (apparently 65-85% of the time), 'unintentional' throttling of gaming, etc. Aside from the low caps, you can't even get around any of this by going with one of the smaller ISPs since AFAIK the leased lines are subject to the same 'traffic management' policies.

The service is pretty shitty also - video buffering on a 25Mbps D/L connection, ping to the west coast randomly spiking up to 400ms, problems that 5 calls to tech support over the period of a month and one modem replacement failed to resolve. The tech support guys and technicians all but admit that it's a policy issue rather than anything they can fix.

There's an example in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/06/opinion/06hallinan.html It stretches the analogy perhaps too far, but the part about the music is pretty interesting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/26/business/barnes-noble-will-try-to-squeeze-better-deals-from-publishers.html?pagewanted=all

Deals by publishers and booksellers are among the most contentious issues in the industry. For the last decade, independent bookstores have filed a series of antitrust lawsuits against publishers and the national chains Barnes & Noble and Borders arguing that the chains shake down publishers for unfair deals that are not made available to small stores. The independents' continuing litigation kept both publishers and the national chains on tiptoe in their price talks. In April, however, Barnes & Noble and Borders reached a favorable settlement to end the independents' most recent suit, and now both publishers and booksellers have returned to the bargaining table with renewed determination. Mr. Riggio told the analysts on the conference call that he hoped for better terms next year, with more news in January.

Meat and grease is good for your metabolism anyway. Best Q&D article on the subject...

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
or
http://tinyurl.com/3hk3a2r

Being a long-ago biochem major, I'm going "But we already knew all this stuff!" Funny thing, this here carnivore wears the same clothes I did in college. :)

But yeah, used to be the obese adult wasn't typical and the obese kid was an extreme rarity; now both are the norm. And the two biggest differences between then and now are the anti-red-meat/fat craze and being glued to the computer screen instead of making their own entertainment (which usually required effort, tho downtime "wastes of time" like watching clouds and playing in the mud are just as important).

The restraining order actually prevents the police from removing the protestors again until it can be properly litigated. It will likely be weeks until this is settled.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/nyregion/zuccotti-park-is-privately-owned-but-open-to-the-public.html

Great. It's also the only western country where the government agencies and their subsidiaries can torture you and you cannot sue them for that.

People just don't seem to understand what limited liability is. If you're the CEO of a corporation and you hire an assassin to kill your competitor's engineering team, you go to jail for murder.

If I get drunk and run over someone, I'll go to jail for negligent homicide. But if a corporation breaks safety rules that prevent a buildup of explosive gasses and the mine expolodes, killing two dozen men, nobody goes to jail, even though that's plainly negligent homicide.

It's perfectly legal for corporations to kill human beings.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/switching-to-grass-fed-beef/

"Grass-fed beef has a distinctly different and “grassy” flavor compared with feed-lot beef and also costs more. A recent comparison in The Village Voice cooked up one-pound grass-fed and grain-fed steaks. The grass-fed meat tasted better, according to the article, but at $26 a pound, also cost about three times more."

Sure, there are tons of grazing animals. They still cost three times more per pound than cornfed or CAFO operation beef.