Just need to point out here who's in charge. This is being rewritten by Sen. Leahy of Vermont. Democrat.

I know of a group of people who tried to start a small bank. Even though they had sufficient resources, government regulators prevented them from doing so.

That's how regulation always works. Those who are already in an industry use regulation to keep out competition.

Your comments will not be popular here, but you're correct. Such a scenario is plausible.

So, thank you, Democrats. I look forward to watching you become even more insane after President Palin is sworn in.

This is quite right, and is what is at issue here. One side has been controlling education for decades...really a century or so, and the other side is finally fighting back, trying to wrest control.

Now, in my opinion, the real answer is decentralization of education, with more homeschooling, and devolving large schools into small, independent (preferably private) neighborhood schools. Then, you have less centralized power for anyone to try to control.

Regulation will *always* be used by the powerful to buttress their power and position. Always.

The only check against that is a limitation on government power. That is what the founding fathers were attempting to do.

Adding regulation only makes matters worse.

Too bad the Americans can't tolerate the idea of an empire based on non-American culture and values, as such an empire wouldn't necessarily listen to political and military pressure of the American government as it tries to enforce the ideas of political capitalism, that is, a capitalism providing benefits for the few instead of the many as it feeds the hungry, overweight employees of the American companies and the dictatorships formed by political assassinations.

As much as I tend towards isolationism, it's still hard not to respond that over the past century, at least a couple of "empire(s) based on non-American culture and values" have been proposed and imposed, with somewhat less than positive results.

As long as you don't distribute what you create, you are free to do whatever you like with GPL software. You can *use* it however you like. You are not required to even accept the GPL. The only limitation is that you have no right to distribute any derivative works, other than those provided by the GPL, if you choose to accept it. Read COPYING some time.

This is idiotic, and is typical of the kind of pseudo-science underlying much of the climate alarmism currently en vogue. Like a lot of things, it is pretty much impossible to quantify which language ultimately uses more power, because of all the variables. As others have pointed out, you might save some power in the deployment of the code, but you would surely use more power in the development of that code. Then, you have to figure out what the total impact of that is, since you'd have more man-hours of coding, using human coders, who sit at desks, in offices, which must be heated and cooled, etc., etc.

what does this supposed conspiracy inflating global warming stats hope to gain by inventing it?

Money. Power.

As it has always been throughout history.

Clinton did the same stuff, FYI. So, you could just say that Obama is continuing Bush's continuation of Clinton's anti-privacy policies.

Yes, you can argue that it's really Congress that is doing this, but there is a lot of coordination, especially when you are talking about a Congress controlled by the same party.

And there isn't a single "right wing" or "left wing" view on this. What it boils down to is a statist view, and an anti-statist view.

BTW, did you click the link to the Atlantic article? That article is really good, and proposes a real fix to the health care system. It should be seriously considered.