This is always something that has really bugged me. Why exactly is it someone's right to borrow money and then not pay it back? If you borrowed it, you should have to pay it back. It doesn't make any sense to allow people out from under their debts that they made the conscious decision to borrow. If you don't understand the total costs, how the lending and repayment processes work, or if you don't have any solid plans for living with that debt, you shouldn't be borrowing it. Period. I don't care if it's a mortgage, a car loan, a school loan, or even your neighbor's tools. Your borrowing choices and the repayments from those choices should always be your own responsibility.

Use Discover.

Happens in Chicago all the time. One correction though is that it's not once every 5 seconds. It's a nearly constant stream much of the time. If you try to leave the correct distance in front of you, you will spend more time on the brakes than anything else.

Also, the concern at red lights is not generally that I'm too close to the car in front of me, it's that the car behind me is too close. I can, to at least a small extent, control the distance in front, but I can't do a damn thing about the distance in back.

True, true. My mistake. The article was about politics though, so that seemed the most relevant at the time.

This message brought to you by the hometown newspaper for what is usually considered one of the more politically corrupt cities in the country.

Is this supposed to surprise anyone? And, more importantly, does anyone out there actually believe that the US isn't doing the same thing toward [insert long list of nations here]? I, for one, certainly believe they are.

Is anyone outside of the teenage girl crowd even paying attention to Facebook announcements anymore? I'm legitimately asking. I have a Facebook account that I log into maybe once or twice a year. And most of the circles I spend time in don't really use it much anymore either. Am I the only one that sees Facebook announcements and just shrugs with indifference?

After the Patriot Act, you need a physical address for most things now. For instance, you can't legally open a bank account or apply for a credit card with just a PO box. You can add a PO box as a mailing address, but that won't be sufficient by itself anymore. I'm not sure if this extends to a drivers license, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me.

Rsync does not delete on the target end by default. You have to specify the --delete option, or else it just adds and updates files. So just leave that out and an rsync script should do the trick just fine.

Ahh, beat me to it. That was the very first thought that popped into my head when I read the summary.

I never implied that the private sector doesn't accept incompetence. I stated that the government allows it in mass quantities. I do work in the private sector and see incompetence routinely. However, there's a huge difference between what happens in a private company and what happens in government. When incompetence is allowed in a private company, the company suffers. Sometimes, depending on the type of incompetence, the customers suffer by having to pay higher prices for inferior products (see things like the content holders and providers like Comcast). When incompetence is allowed in the government, however, it comes with the business end of a gun, so to speak. It can, and often does, result in a loss of basic freedoms, jail time, or worse. There's a huge, huge difference there.

Also, don't forget that many, if not most, of the problems you see in the private world are the result of government actions. For instance, going back to the content industry, a lack of competition and other factors created by FCC regulations (among many, many other laws) are a large reason prices are so high and options are so few. I can't say with certainty that the industry would be perfect without government involvement, but I have yet to find anyone who thinks that it'd be anywhere near this bad if the industry was left to its own devices.

Because they work for the government? I wish there was a better explanation, but that's pretty much it.

Sadly, no. I know that there are regular grammatical mistakes, but it doesn't mean that I can't hope that someday /. will actually start proofreading article posts.

*sits in a corner and silently weeps for humanity...*

This. I had to read the summary a couple times to get past the awkwardness of the wording. A simple proofread of one sentence before posting a submission shouldn't be too much for /.

What you described related to the UK's DPA makes it a legal issue, not an ethical one. My best guess is that they're concerned with sensitive information being exposed to unauthorized people. So his security and ethics claims would really be one in the same. The ethics problem has nothing to do with laws though. Laws don't make something unethical. Legislators often make laws surrounding ethical issues, but they were ethical issues before the laws ever appeared.