Compare it to any violation of rights you wish. The GP's assertion that corporate profits trump rights is pants on head crazy.

Well, the money is flowing along that highway. Hope you are willing to financially wither for your unrealistic and unsustainable ideals.

You could have said the same thing about slavery, child labor, anything OSHA regulates, etc. What's good for corporations is not the same as what's good for people.

We would have LOVED to support the standard and commit code back, but the restrictions on our own code were unsustainable

In other words, your project could not be viable without oppressing your users. Sounds like good riddance.

While theoretically GPL could subsume BSD code produced from the collaboration

Yeah, ask Theo DeRaadt about that.

Today's anti-missile systems will be useful for many years to come.

Are today's anti-missile systems useful? Or are they just meant for posturing? I remember during the first Gulf War that not a single PATRIOT missile shot down a SCUD. Is there anything better today?

Slashdot has long been in decline anyway. They are taking the risk of driving everyone away, in the hopes of attracting a new audience. It won't work, but I can see how it is at least a rational attempt to recover some of their sunk costs.

if you think they're ticketing for something they *know* isn't a crime

Whether they know it or not is irrelevant. Every person falsely accused deserves compensation. If charges are dropped, dismissed, or you are acquitted, you deserve 100% of any costs you incurred because of the accusation.

This ruling won't stop cops from ticketing you, forcing you to leave work to appear in court, and paying the court costs after the ticket is dismissed. Cops can and do write invalid tickets simply to be dicks, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Our justice system needs to ensure that the victim of a false accusation of a crime is made whole again.

So, hook the nuclear power plant up to batteries, a flywheel, or pump some water uphill for hydroelectric when needed. Or shit, just provision for maximum capacity and release waste heat when it's not all needed. This is not a serious practical objection to nuclear power.

Creationists, in my experience, would be happy to be corrected on actual, observable, testable science

In my experience, creationists believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. Try correcting them about what the fossil record actually shows, you won't get anywhere.

an atheist believes there is no God, so any option that leads to a God conclusion must be false

Not true at all. I've never met an atheist with an active belief in the absence of gods. Not even Richard Dawkins goes so far. What atheists do is withhold belief until there is evidence, and no evidence exists for the existence of any god or gods.

Speciation. Where is the speciation?

It's in the fossil record.

We lose dozens of species every year, and we have yet to see a new one arise.

Which is exactly what you'd predict from the theory of evolution. Natural selection is an iterative process that takes many generations to dramatically shift allele frequency. There's no reason to believe that we could observe it on human time scales.

How do you like that for contradictory evidence?

It's entirely consistent with evolution by natural selection. Not only consistent, but supportive. If speciation occured in just a few generations, which would be observable by human scientists, natural selection could not be the cause.

First off, there is a lot of confusion about what "creationists" actually believe.

If you tried believing only in what there is evidence to support there would be a lot less confusion.

From a Christian standpoint, we've got two parts - primary doctrine, and secondary doctrine.

See, you've got this entirely backwards here. If creation is fact, you should be able to infer the Christian doctrine from observations made in the real world. Forget about what's in the book, and just look at the world. Do your observations lead you to the same conclusion the book does?

Everything else, regarding God's implementation, and the methods He used to actually perform the act of creation...that's secondary doctrine, and in any room of ten creationists, you'll have a dozen answers.

That's because they're all making it up. If you ask a room of biologists about the actual method by which speciation occured, you'll get one answer. Evolution by natural selection. That's because that's where the evidence actually leads.

Any good critical thinker will change his mind when presented with contradictory evidence. But no such evidence exists. It's been 155 years since the Origin of Species was published, and not one observation has been made that contradicts evolution by means of natural selection. Every single observation made, including the discovery of DNA, has reinforced this basic idea.

And how is that worse than never exposing these people to any contradictory information at all?

Anyone with a web browser can see the falsity (indeed the sheer inanity) of Ham's claims

They can, but probably won't. How many of Ham's congregation do you think have read talk origins? Why would they, when Ham has all the answers?

So how do you get them to even listen to opposing arguments? This debate is a good way. Even if these people are coming just to see Ham speak, they have to listen to Nye in order to evaluate Ham's performance. In the process, some of them might realize that evolution isn't as crazy as they've been told.

Yes, it gives Ham a platform. You know what, he already had a platform. There is no downside to this debate. Nobody who isn't already a true believer is going to be swayed by Ham.