Your rhetoric smells of lamp-wicks, Demosthenes.

I would venture to note that the great classical rhetoricians had equal if not more respect for those who mastered the extemporaneous mode.

Brought peace?

;-P

What do you even know about China? Did you know that it was home to the largest and most advanced city humanity would ever see until 19th century London?

It's not just China, East Asia as whole loves to anthropomorphosize things. Jesus... have you seen all the x-tans that come out of Japan?

Well, let's see, they invented movable type printing, a calendar that was as accurate as the Gregorian but developed hundreds of years earlier, percussive cap drilling that was capable of the deepest wells in the early 19th century, paper currency, watertight compartments partitioning ships, dental fillings, dominoes, clockwork escapements, forensic entomology, multi-stage rocketry, pontoon bridges, toilet paper, electronic cigarettes, Non-invasive prenatal diagnostic testing for Down's Syndrome, Synthesis of crystalline bovine insulin, and I know it's cliche, but since you arbitrarily set the period at 1500 years I have to include gunpowder.

You're talking about people who invented the compass. Navigation relative to magnetic fields is kind of a big deal. I'll spare you the litany of other things.

WOOSH.

Not the best example considering a) the US has the highest drinking age in the world, bar none and b) the fact that special rights are being conferred after the age of legal majority for voting and all sorts of other independent actions is ethically incongruent at a minimum.

You should have picked on something sensible, like not allowing tweens to drive.

Now, now Ethanol-fueled, we've been over this before. When you go into a room with a mirror, that's not a different person that you are "meeting".

I guess they could always move everything back out, then rents could be lower so property owners lose money and unemployment could be higher too, surely that's the great solution these brain-dead leftist idiots want.

Exactly who would fall of the turnip truck and believe that one of the most popular web services in China would be rerouted to another service whose main purpose is to undermine censorship by accident? I'll believe that Freedom Software wasn't complicit, it was probably some lone wolf, but to think this wasn't a deliberate hack is naive beyond words.

As somebody who has detested Ethanol-Fueled since the time when he posted under his actual account before becoming afraid of his bad karma, I thank you AC.

Crime should be illegal. (That's sarcasm.) The specifics of a criminal's threat are essentially meaningless. Somebody who is deranged enough to use violence or the threat of violence to get money will do so regardless of what specific mechanics are available. What's stopping these people from kidnapping loved ones and sending back body parts until the ransom is paid? That's a pretty classic one. Deranged, violent criminals are going to be deranged, violent criminals no matter what. The merits and detriments of a proposal such as this need to be evaluated outside of a context of law breaking, because, unsurprisingly, law breakers don't care about laws. That's kind of what defines them.

What we are talking about here is a violation of the prevailing interpretation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. You know this as well as anybody, but you're just dancing around it. I don't want one cent of my taxes, which I already resent paying at the implied barrel of a gun, going to sponsor any kind of religious nonsense in a school somewhere. That's private business and should be funded privately at a time and place where children aren't forced to attend by law.

I'm as secular as the next atheist, but it's ludicrous to call state-authorized murder on religious grounds as in the "same ballpark" as some allusions to theism in some textbooks. They're both bad things, but to pretend that they're the same degree of bad is delusional to the point where it would make one certifiable.