Good grief, so many people are piling on and hating Indiana for this, but they are mistaken. This is not about saying "we don't serve your kind here". This is about establishing guidelines for government to avoid reflexively punishing religious individuals over their scruples of conscience.

If you want to talk about brainless and/or dishonest liberal media, today would be the day, because the NYT, CNN, and any number of other outlets are acting like this is something new and unnecessary that Indiana is doing, when in fact the opposite is true. There has been a very similar federal law on the books since Chuck Schumer proposed it and then-President Bill Clinton signed it into law. The only reason Indiana enacted a state law equivalent is that courts have determined that the federal law doesn't protect religious individuals from non-compliance with certain local laws.

This is not to allow the local deli to refuse to serve gays, and in fact will not allow them to do so. This is to prevent bullies and jerks from picking on people who happen to be small business owners over their religion.

Example: if a Christian goes to a kosher bakery and asks for "holy cross" themed rolls for an Easter party, and the proprieters kindly offer to refer them to the secular baker down the street, should the Christian sue those dirty Jews for all they've got, and attempt to bankrupt them and destroy their business over this scruple of religious conscience? No, of course not. The Christian would be a jerk in that case. So why are so many gays being jerks about the exact same kind of thing?

Sad to say, my own code probably has a huge number of them. I'd approximate it as:

(int)0xFFFF... with a bunch more F's

Nope, not true. I have a friend with a Physics Ph.D. who does nuclear weapons related research at LANL. Her work is read only by fellow DoD scientists and certainly is not published in public journals.

OK, fair enough to some extent, I agree that people clamoring for sharia law and/or jihad isn't a real threat as long as individuals never act on their barbarous ideology (unfortunately many individuals do), and as long as Muslims don't become the majority locally, regionally, or nationally (they have in some areas here, and regionally/nationally elsewhere in the world). A pretty good litmus test for how the progression to sharia is going would be to walk through a neighborhood wearing a yarmulke and see how you are treated. That's not safe in some neighborhoods of Paris these days, although I have a vague understanding that it's politically incorrect for me to point that out. It's weird how Jew-hatred goes in and out of vogue among the self-designated intelligentsia of Western culture; currently it's "in".

One of us is in denial about the obvious, that's for sure.

Aha, that is creative. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Perhaps you're unaware that death is specified in Muslim holy texts as the correct response to desecration of the Koran, blasphemy of Mohammed or Allah, attempted apostasy or turning away from the Muslim faith, along with a laundry list of other sins. This is actual law in many places around the world, and it's amazing to see liberal non-Muslims "see no evil, hear no evil" etc. when they fail to admit sharia is creeping onto their own turf.

Nobody will kill you for burning an American flag. Maximum forcefulness of response, like on the order of a punch in the nose, I guarantee it. ;)

I'm going to leave that up to you -- be creative, see what you can come up with.

No, they're still different despite your efforts to paint them the same. The ban on Koran burning will almost never exist in isolation, but rather as part of a continual progression toward Islamic domination of the society. It's part of a larger package we really don't want, which is called "sharia". Well, at least _I_ really don't want it, don't know about you.

Are you unaware that sharia principles are not isolated, one-off notions taken by individuals, but rather are actually written down and codified in Islamic primary religious documents? Do you know what it's like to live in an Islamic country and face a modern Inquisition for being a free thinker?

Don't be so naive about Islam. I agree that there are some practitioners of a sort of modern "hippie Islam" who are cool with coexisting and diversity of thought, but I think they're in the minority. The aim of Islam in general is to take over, run things, and enforce sharia law in some form; and you're naive if you don't recognize that.

Look, if I burn a flag, I am likely to get an evil eye from a bunch of people, and possibly be punched in the nose by a veteran. All things considered I don't regard that as a huge threat, and I admit a certain fondness for these misguided patriots, even as they're punching me in the nose.

If I burn a Koran, I may be murdered by those who want to split the USA into favored adherents of Islam versus subjugated slaves of Islam (dhimmis). I am... uh... really not OK with that, and I despise and want to publicly shame people who promote that agenda. Do you see the difference now, hippie? :)

This may come as a shock to you, but this is the USA, and patriotism is OK here. If some people get a little carried away, that's not as big a deal as people who want to subject non-Muslims to sharia law. If you really don't see the difference between the two, then it appears that you will never be in danger of someone demanding you relinquish your hippie credentials.

(Side note: I agree with the SCOTUS that flag burning and other forms of expression that don't actually cause harm to others should remain legal.)

If I encounter any apostles, I'll be sure to warn them.

You're really going off on a tangent here. Getting back on subject, perhaps we can agree that the most likely reason for SMBC's curious silence toward Islam is not because Zach can't find anything silly in their beliefs, but rather because conservative Muslims around the world, aka Islamists of different degrees, are likely to commit acts of violence in response to their religion being made fun of.

Also, just for the record, equating "Muslim" and "Islamist" is often a reasonably accurate approximation, particularly outside the USA but frequently here as well. There are useful litmus tests to identify an Islamist, such as: "Should it be illegal to burn a Koran?" "Should people be allowed to apostatize from Islam?" and so forth. If you only ask about affinity for Osama bin Laden you will definitely miss a lot of the scary religious nuts. Their ultimate goal is not peaceful coexistence in a pluralistic society, but rather enforcement of norms of sharia law and subjugation of non-Islamic people. Whether they are likely to be successful in their goal is irrelevant as to their classification as Islamists in that respect.

So you're saying Islam is a "foreign culture" in the USA. How many Muslims do we have to have living here as citizens before it becomes one of the (many) American subcultures?

Also, your use of the term "disempowered" is hilarious. Just because Islamists in the USA can't get away with chopping off people's heads here (like they do elsewhere in the world) doesn't make them "disempowered" relative to Christianity and Judaism. Always with Islam it's the (pardon the expression) camel's nose in the tent. Islamists have no sense of humor, no tolerance for criticism, and no qualms about taking their half from the middle and screwing atheists, homosexuals, apostates, and in general, persons of other religions (inculding variants of Islam slightly different from theirs).

He is actually really careful about that. There are regular barbecues of sacred cows related to Judaism and Christianity, but never so much as a hint of poking fun at Islam or Mohammed.

It gives me a warm feeling to know that some things about Slashdot never change.

Probably premature to say this, but it would be funny if Intel does to mobile processing and ARM what it did to Mac computers and RISC. For a long time the Mac-heads were constantly harping about how superior PowerPC was to anything in the Wintel world. And then suddenly everything was x86 again. It seems x86 is the technology that can't be killed.

*mind blown*