@meatbag_pussrocket: This is true of any business, but especially an internet company where most trade secrets can be reproduced by anyone with a laptop. It's not like you need a big factory or tremendous capital to make money on the internet.

@rick23: Yeah, I'm wondering how Google can come up with 2 people a month that are doing anything that even resembles sharing company secrets.

@stationx: I would tend to say that stealing is wrong about as often as lying (if not more often). Does this mean that if someone steals something from me, and I (or the police acting in my interest) go and forcibly take that stolen thing back, that action is wrong? I tend to think that moral absolutes only apply if…

@NorwoodIsMyHero: No really what they should do is not restrict network access in an anti-competitive way, because that is against the law.

@Chewmieser: I tend to think that there are is a much higher support for EFF in the linux community than the windows community (for fairly obvious reasons).

@tonykayeisadouche: A body scanner is a 'gadget'... Also, driving to my destination won't make my tax dollars less wasted, which is the only negative thing ('whining') said about the scanners in this article. Reading is an important skill.

@Bilsko: Yeah, and that's assuming that 33 MJ is the muzzle energy, and not the electrical energy being put into the rail gun (efficiencies for rail/coil guns tend to be less than 10%).

@ItsSoFluffy!!: I propose this thread be hijacked to include a complete list of things made of a single piece of aluminum. Like garage doors

@The Terminator: No, the trouble with blowing up the world is the worry that the world will blow you up back. Mutually assured destruction and such.

@Fossa: In the places where this would most likely be implemented, false positives for visual inspection/person not stopping when they're told to (and subsequent shooting deaths) are (regrettably but understandably) high enough that this would probably be an improvement.

@TheOneYouHeardAbout: Well, we elect the president, and he makes top level decisions. Everyone else in the military/CIA is unelected, and often is incumbent through multiple presidencies. And if it were just "political wrangling" there wouldn't be a reason to keep it secret in the first place. Also, the idea that…

@TheOneYouHeardAbout: but 'the people' will never get this sort of information unless some organization like wikileaks publishes it, so it amounts to the same thing. You can't agree that the people should have access to something and simultaneously say that no one should give people access to it.

@TheOneYouHeardAbout: "These classified documents belong to the government" I'm going to stop you right there. I find the separation between "the government" and the people it governs to be rather troubling.

...

@ComputerMonkey: I know right! It's like, why do they put seatbelts in cars when it's so much easier to just not get in an accident in the first place?

@gebinsk: ...and then there was the tenth amendment.

@jedcred: ...I have all of these at my house. If you regularly do any sort of hobby electronics, these are common supplies.

@Char Aznable: were you installing a game with multiplayer? If so, yes there is a very good reason why you need to download some things (updates).

@the_joe_kirby001: hmm... how does the voice recognition on your ps3 or wii work?

@dantheman12: Filtering a known sound out of an audio signal is actually not terribly hard. You can try it at home with something like Audacity by playing a recorded sound through your speakers, recording it via microphone, and then eliminating that sound from the microphone recording.