Whoops. Don't start introducing facts into evidence. Nothing good can come of that.

If someone declares their intent to kill you, then I think they are fair game. I'm all for taking people at their word.

Your rhetoric would carry a little more weight if there hadn't been a systematic attempt to destroy Israel since the year it was formed by the UN.

If your neighbor is constantly firing rockets into your country, targeting civilians, you might see things a little differently. If the Palestinians didn't have weapons, there would be peace. If Israel didn't have weapons, there would be no Israel. The "annexed" territory was land captured as the result of war of aggression started against Israel. In any other situation, people would recognize this, but it seems that anti-semitism is still deeply ingrained in the popular consciousness, especially on the Left.

Regardless of whether they sometimes go over the line in defending themselves, there's no denying that this situation was not started by and is not perpetuated by Israel. The "Palestinian" problem would disappear overnight if one of the many Muslim countries in the area would allow them to relocate. Israel didn't create itself. It was created by the UN, one of the very few useful things the UN ever did, and has fought several wars initiated by neighbors to defend its territory. But no one ever seems to care that the country is surrounded by a large number of people who are dedicated to its annihilation and the world seems to put people with this intent on the same moral level as a people who are simply trying to maintain their security. It's kind of hard to negotiate in good faith with people whose charter declares that their goal is to drive you into the sea.

The real "Palestinian" problem is that the Palestinians are pawns in a propaganda war against the Jewish people, and the world has been falling for this transparent trick for 70 years.

I know this may be blasphemy for a lot of folks, but I wasn't that impressed with "Do Androids Dream?". I think "Blade Runner" was a superior story, and of course, it's an excellent movie all around. I hope I don't have to turn in my Nerd card now.

I read this as part of a "Science Fiction" course in college about 30 years ago. I don't recall much about it except that I really dug the alternate-history aspect of the book.

I hope the movie happens and it turns out good. We need more good science fiction movies, because there haven't been many in the last 20-some years. I liked "Europa Report" but the format was pretty cliched, and the movie was almost the same as "Apollo 18", but less improbable. To be honest, I have a hard time remembering any really good SF movies since "Contact". I never saw the remake of "Solaris", but the original was amazing.

But we need more SF films. Most "SF" films today are just action movies or horror movies in a SFal setting, which is a fine way to do things, but it's not really SF.

Obviously the time is right for someone to invent a little portable keyboard (possibly with its own battery) that plugs into the phone's USB port and lets you type like a normal person, instead of like a demented monkey chasing termites.

(Which is what I feel like when I use a stylus, but it's still better than fat-finger syndrome.)

Have you looked at animal samples too? Seems to me it would be easier to get those upper gut samples...

Is it human-host only, or opportunistic wherever its favored bacteria thrive?

Has any of this virus been incorporated in our DNA?

Completely OT, having been preconditioned by the crAss cracks, my brain decided to parse your username as "robed wards" which made no sense. :)

Pathfinder is a lot more D&D than anything else on the market right now. That other crap just got the trademark.

This one seems to be caused by a tiny percentage of assholes on both sides. Peace will never be in the assholes' best interest as it will reduce the amount of control the assholes have over their populations. Dozens of times during my lifetime peace has been within reach, only to be shattered by some asshole on one side or the other. Until such time as leaders arise on both sides who are interested and committed to a peaceful solution, this situation will not change.

The Internet is not powered by experiments on humans. Not even in the DARPA days.

No, websites do NOT experiment on users. Users may experiment on websites, if there's customization, but the rules for good design have not changed either in the past 30 years or the past 3,000. And, to judge from how humans organized carvings and paintings, not the past 30,000 either.

To say that websites experiment on people is tripe. Mouldy tripe. Websites may offer experimental views, surveys on what works, log analysis, etc, but these are statistical experiments on depersonalized aggregate data. Not people.

Experiments on people, especially without consent, is vulgar and wrong. It also doesn't help the website, because knowing what happens doesn't tell you why. Early experiments in AI are littered with extraordinarily bad results for this reason. Assuming you know why, assuming you can casually sketch in the cause merely by knowing one specific effect, is insanity.

Look, I will spell it out to these guys. Stop playing Sherlock Holmes, you only end up looking like Lestrade. Sir Conan Doyle's fictional hero used recursive subdivision, a technique Real Geeks use all the time for everything from decision trees to searching lists. Isolating single factors isn't subdivision because there isn't a single ordered space to subdivide. Scientists mask, yes, but only when dealing with single ordered spaces, and only AFTER producing a hypothesis. And if it involves research on humans, also after filling out a bloody great load of paperwork.

I flat-out refuse to use any website tainted with such puerile nonsense, insofar as I know it to have occurred. No matter how valuable that site may have been, it cannot remain valuable if it is driven by pseudoscience. There's also the matter of respect. If you don't respect me, why should I store any data with you? I can probably do better than most sites out there over a coffee break, so what's in it for me? What's so valuable that I should tolerate being second-class? It had better be damn good.

I'll take a temporary hit on what I can do, if it safeguards my absolute, unconditional control over my virtual persona. And temporary is all it would ever be. There's very little that's truly exclusive and even less that's exclusive and interesting.

The same is true of all users. We don't need any specific website, websites need us. We dictate our own limits, we dictate what safeguards are minimal, we dictate how far a site owner can go. Websites serve their users. They exist only to serve. And unlike with a certain elite class in the Dune series, that's actually true and enforceable.

Er, why? Facebook presumably wants users to feel happy when they visit their website - exploring how to do that doesn't seem substantially different to OKCupid wanting to make lots of successful relationships.

Hmm, factory workers aren't really comparable to soldiers invading a foreign country, are they? The former makes useful things for people at home and the latter signed up voluntarily to go kill people who were not invading.

Look, you may not like people in the military (no clue why), but to say they deserve what they get is naive and stupid. Historically and currently, joining the military has been one of the most sure ways for intelligent, motivated people born into poor circumstances to raise themselves up the ladder of success.

Given the relative abundance of rich entrepreneurs vs rich veterans, I think a citation may be needed there.

My programming skills are debatable but I tested in the top 10th percentile for dick-punching. Here... let me show you...

But we don't do that. We never do that. As developers, we hide our head in the sand until we absolutely can no longer ignore then problem, and then we say "Whoops! My bad!" As consumers we assume that professionally published software should be reasonably free of bugs or exploitable code. And people start being held accountable by law for their shitty software, the status quo will never change.

I was demonstrating to a shitty software developer the other day how all his input sanitizing routines were in the javascript front end to his web application and anyone bypassing the javascript could essentially have their way with the back-end database, and he told me "Oh you're making a back-end API call, no one will ever do that!" No one except the guy who's hacking your fucking system, jackass. People like that make me want to sign on as Linus' personal dick-puncher. Whenever someone writes some shitty software that pisses Linus off, I will find that person and I will PUNCH THEM IN THE DICK. Because I swear to god, that's what it's going to take. Congress is going to have to WRITE A LAW allowing me to HUNT PEOPLE DOWN and PUNCH THEM IN THE DICK over the SHITTY SOFTWARE they write. And when that day comes, with God as my witness, I will PITCH A TENT outside MICROSOFT HEADQUARTERS, and that will be the LAST TENT EVER PITCHED at MICROSOFT HEADQUARTERS!

That's not faking delivery though. The data is actually being delivered, just from a different source. I don't give a shit where the data comes from our how it gets to me*, I care about how fast my page loads.

* except for the handful of times per month I do something sensitive, like online banking, but that's all encrypted.

They could sit on their thumbs doing nothing. While this option pleases the anarchist in us, you cannot expect a lawmaker to ignore lawbreakers

What law breakers? This new "law" that was invented by the courts with zero debate is so vague that whether someone is breaking it or not is entirely debatable and thus eminently ignorable.