Are you also anti-medicine, as that is a 'technical intrusion into matters of life and death'? No medicines, no splints for broken legs, no respirators, no dialysis machines, or anything of the sort. Or is your complaint with technical intrusions limited to the extreme ends, where it either ends a life or makes a new one?

This is basically how I see it too. While I'm on board with sexual offenses being some of the most violating forms of violence on others, it's being applied in places it doesn't belong, such as (without prior coercion) taking a nude picture of yourself should you be under age, at the most basic enforcement. Making the law ever stricter just ensures that you'll have a reason to compel compliance at best, and get the aggressor to live in fear.

Reform (something our justice system SHOULD be focused on) shouldn't be about living in fear, it's should be about not wanting to commit the acts again and feeling remorse for the acts committed. If you go to the extreme and tag them for life, you give no incentive to behave and every incentive to commit crimes again. This ultimately does not help build a better society.

To play Devil's Advocate for a moment... is there any particular need to give tax breaks for people needing to buy large vehicles for large families? Do we give tax breaks because large families consume a larger dollar figure in food too? Or is it just the cost of having a large family?

I'm not picking one side or the other, but the notion that the large families NEED tax breaks because it costs more seems off to me.

I always thought prohibition went back to moral puritans that felt that alcohol was somehow the Devil's work and needed to be legislated away. I don't recall it was something women as a gender had any vested interest in enacting. Either way, that moral experiment failed horribly, unless you love Nascar, and we're back to enjoying whatever mind-altering liquid refreshment we like (almost).

Isn't that equivalent to the answer of 'If you don't want Windows SmartScreen to tell Microsoft about your installed apps, go into Privacy and turn it off.'?

It would seem to me that the point the parent was making is that Chrome's data reporting habits and this new one in Windows 8 are effectively the same. Both are enabled by default, and both report data back to their 'owners'. That both have an 'opt out' to turn them off really doesn't differentiate or describe either one as awesome with regards to privacy.

But.... Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell.

Why stick to religion on that one. For over 100 years, the United States didn't consider women citizens either. It wasn't until the 20th century that they were even allowed to vote. Seems like all these kinds of folks are trying to do is return us to the 'less complicated' days when women were more like property and less like human beings.

Do you get to control what you create at a workplace? Your employer gives you money to do work with and you use it to create something. Do you then get ownership of that creation, despite the fact that it was funded from your employer? A bit disingenuous, don't you think?

In other words, there is precedent for the person or entity funding a project to retain ownership of it despite it being created by another party.

Instead of, oh, I don't know, simply implementing a rate limit to the number of patches that are allowed to be deployed to consoles. One makes you money, the other accomplishes the same task, but there's no money involved. No shocker which one the business goes for.

What's the point of certification of your game for a 5 figure fee if they at least don't provide SOMETHING useful other than a little sticker that says "I approve this game"?

Plants consume CO2 and O2 for different reasons, photosynthesis and cellular respiration. If you watch atmospheric levels of CO2, they dip and rise in response to the seasons. The image from wikipedia below kind of shows this trend. The red line is average CO2 levels, the grey one is the more accurate one that responds to seasons. See, while plants sequester CO2 during photosynthesis, deciduous trees lose a lot of plant matter at the end of the growing season that rots, releasing CO2 back into the air during the fall and winter months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide-en.svg

You're confusing science with something else, I think. Going back to the parent, the skeptics need to disprove one of several reliably tested things, that 1) CO2 is a greenhouse gas, 2) atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing, and 3) Man is dumping a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. The conclusion from these simple statements is that temperatures will increase because of man's contribution. There has been a body of work already indicating these three criteria already exist. Predictions based on these criteria may be inaccurate or may be incomplete due to other forces at work not included in the model, but that doesn't make them wrong for what we know.

Skeptics may disagree with the recommended actions and they may disagree on the predictions based on the gathered evidence, but to refute the science behind the prediction, skeptics need to provide the evidence to the contrary. It also helps if they also can follow the scientific theory and come to a conclusion of their own. Bonus points for including other scientific works (even the work they're trying to refute) in their research. Skeptics seem to have a vested interest in the status quo. They don't get to push off the burden of responsibility on others just to maintain it. If there IS evidence to the contrary, we ALL benefit from knowing about it, and it is in their best interest to get it published. It would go a long way to holding up their argument.

Simply saying "I don't believe you or your conclusions about the future" is not a valid scientific rebuttal. It is laziness at it's finest and the sign of a closed mind.

You're absolutely right. Those are people, and the people have rights to free speech. Can a corporation sign a petition, or do the constituents sign the petition? When a corporation does sign or say something, does it do it on its own, or does it use a proxy... perhaps an authorized representative of the human species to do it instead? Nothing says that you cannot collectively group together and have your voices heard. Hell, that's what a petition IS, is a collective group of people standing together on the same idea. What you should not be able to do is say "We are and we get one extra voice because the right of the corporation to be heard is just as important as the right of the people." People can argue on behalf of corporate interests, but it is the people speaking, NOT the corporation.

What makes me laugh the most, though, is that you held this idea that "corporate speech" is somehow the weakest form. Tell me again how ineffective corporate lobbying is against constituent lobbying in US politics?

You know, it could just be that THIS property (ie: music) is deemed to have little enough value that owning it just isn't worth the value they want for it, arguments about burden aside. There's no amount of availability or free that could make me want to own an Bieber album, for instance. To take the commentary on current music listening habits and extract it to the very general 'we don't want to own, we want convenience in all things' and 'we want castration because we don't want to make the choice' is just a really bad argument.

Because it can't work. Because we can't go faster than the speed of sound? Because it can't be true that we orbit the sun? Those sound like someone closing the book and dismissing a possibility before determining whether or not it can be done. Any scientist I would consider worth their salt would say instead "We have not yet found evidence to believe that such a process exists" or something similar. It's similar to the idea that we can't go faster than the speed of light, AND YET, someone's hypothesizing suggests that it may be possible globally while not doing so locally (ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive). Obviously, we lack evidence that it can be done, but making a blanket statement of "can't" dismisses a possibility out of hand without any good reason why not. Humans have been the masters of doing what "can't" be done, when we figured out how.

So no, "because it can't work" isn't a valid way to disprove a scientific claim. It's a small-minded way to say "I don't believe you."