Wrong. Most criminals who get caught are stupid. We don't hear much about the successful criminals, which is precisely how they like it.

Why do people keep repeating the absolute lie that anyone can always get free care at the emergency room? True, they have to treat you, but you absolutely will get billed, and if you don't pay that bill it will be handed over to a professional debt collector. I should know, I'm currently being hounded for a $1200 ER bill. A few years ago a local hospital made national news by actually putting liens on the houses of any poor person unlucky enough to still retain a family home. Yes, they actually took poor people's homes if they didn't pay up. This is not my or anyone's definition of free! Furthermore, in my State even if you're eligible for the local flavor of medicaid, any money that the State pays out for your care is considered a loan, NOT a benefit! This means that if you are covered under this so-called plan and later on you hit the lottery, or inherit, or make it big as a rock star, or just have a good night at the casino, if the State finds out about it they will come and take your money, right up to the last cent that they ever spent on you. So once more, with feeling: emergency room care is NOT FREE in the USA. Some people do manage to avoid payment, but that's another story entirely. There is currently no free care available to anyone at hospital emergency rooms, not if you mean free as in beer. This is a maddeningly pervasive urban myth that conservatives especially seem to like to promulgate, but it simply is not true.

What??? There are so many things wrong with that blanket statement - which he bases solely on data self-supplied by the large recording studios, no less - that I didn't read any further in the article. There were other statements equally as nonsensical. The summary indicated Lowery had both the experience and the data to back up his rant, but after reading a good chunk of it all I see is another idiot with preconceived ideas, barely coherent logic, cherry-picked data, and multiple straw-man arguments. Seek elsewhere for a reasoned analysis backed up with solid evidence.

Only available in HD on Netflix? That's wrong, you can set the quality to whatever you like. To pull up the stream manager just hit shift-ctrl-alt-s, then check off whatever bit rate/quality you want.

How is this any different from telling a pollster that you approve of something? It's basically the same thing, and if stating one's opinion on a political poll is not protected speech under the 1st amendment, I don't know what is. The judge doesn't seem to have thought this through. Note that arguments about whether employers should or shouldn't be able to fire people based on their beliefs are pretty much irrelevant here, because if the judge says this is unprotected speech and the ruling is upheld, the precedent would apply in any situation, not just employment disputes. Unprotected is unprotected. Hopefully a higher court will revisit the issue and overturn the ruling.

Wait, wait... So kids these days routinely take naked pictures of themselves and then send them to themselves??? That has got to be the most perverse method of masturbation I've ever heard of! I suppose sexting oneself could conceivably be seen as a natural outgrowth of the ever-more-pervasive role of the internet in modern sexuality, but still... I find the need to send oneself naughty pictures a bit strange. In fact, behavior like this deserves a name: "auto-erotic techno-narcissistic syndrome" or something. Jeez, in my day we just looked at girly mags.

You're making an assumption that there must be some kind of standard of quality to commercial textbook publisher's products. Sure, there are probably standards set by some accreditation body somewhere, but nonetheless I strongly suspect that "pulling stuff from various sources and slapping it together quickly" is probably a pretty good description of how most of the pros go about it. I can easily believe the free product described in TFA is "as good as" the average commercial offering. Remember, these are introductory courses we're talking about here, not advanced topics. The fact is, at this level the freely available online stuff is probably as good as anything else, and the publishers know it, which is why they are turning to lawsuits. We've all seen this kind of thing before, it's just the final dying spasms of dinosaurs who don't have the brains to recognize their own imminent extinction.

Your healthcare link for #4 is broken, should be this: http://silver.neep.wisc.edu/~lakes/iatrogenic.pdf No one noticed, though, because they were all going "LA LA LA LA LA I CANT HEAR YOU!" and covering their eyes with their hands.

But none of the things you list actually require that a gene be patented, they are all more or less processes that happen to involve genes or make use of genetic information. For instance, in principal there is no reason that a genetic diagnostic test manufacturer has to patent the gene that is being tested for, they could just patent the test, except that their lawyers told them it would be a good idea to include the gene itself in the patent application, and geniuses down at the patent office have gone along with this insanity. IANAL, but it seems to me the types of patents you list could all in theory exist in some form without granting anyone exclusive ownership of a naturally occurring gene.

Uh, if we evolve into the Q it will be pretty clear that evolution exists. I mean, one can't evolve in the absence of evolution, can one? So if we evolve into the Q, we may or may not understand every last little detail about the evolutionary process, but I think intelligent design will be pretty much disproved!

Yes indeedy, I suspect the best way to make ID disappear is to evolve beyond it. Sadly, even then there will probably be a few reality-denying fundamentalist throwbacks.

Well, I don't know about you, but in my school we spent it mostly on drugs. Hell, cocaine was friggin' expensive back in the late '70s and early '80s!

Someone should mod parent up, even though there's no way to mod +1 Ironic. Because it's true, this has become a pure thought crime, which leads to some rather ludicrous scenarios.

"Think of the children, the poor children! Er, wait, don't do that, do NOT think about children, no no no, think about anything else but not children, never children, not even imaginary ones..."

Ludicrous.

Yes, Vance absolutely should be on the list, in fact I consider Jack Vance pretty much THE forgotten genius of SF and Fantasy. To the must-read works by Vance that others have mentioned I would add the five Demon Princes novels, some of the best space opera ever written, but pretty much almost anything by Vance is worth looking at.

The other great forgotten SF novel I would recommend is The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. This is a mind-blowing kaleidoscope of a novel, a true classic that easily holds its own when compared to the best modern SF, the style and writing is so far ahead of its time it's almost impossible to believe it was first published in the '50s.

So let's see, if Heroin use is a terrible thing with awful consequences, and all users of heroin deserve whatever happens to them, then... Why bother to make it illegal at all? If it's so bad, then anybody who decides to use it will automatically get their just rewards in the end. Problem solved!

What makes you think they don't already do this? In fact, I've read elsewhere that exporting methamphetamine is indeed one of the other ways NK gets money - and I don't mean pharmaceuticals, this is high quality powder sold in bulk directly to drug dealers. Not much of a step from there to opiates or cocaine, so maybe they're already doing that too, who knows... This is a very scary regime.