No you don't have to blindly agree, nor agree to everything. Blaming the GOP for 9/11 is really dumb though. Are you seriously defending that argument?

What if you're a devout Muslim who believes Twitter should be blocked since it's a tool of Western agents to defame and slander your leader, a true lion of Islam, who wants to restore the caliphate?

Yeah, there are more people like that in Turkey than people like you...

Hi anon, you are an idiot.

You better alert states like New Hampshire, which don't require you to wear a seatbelt.

Bunkering up at home is not the only alternative to vaccination. How about, for instance, breast feeding your baby so that the baby has the advantage of the mother's immunities before he can be vaccinated himself? Should that be a legal requirement since it's a pretty reasonable thing to do? If a woman chooses not to breastfeed, should she be criminally liable if the baby gets sick?

I don't think you read the post I was responding to.

Hmm the big difference is that Mubarak suppressed Islamist groups and Erdogan works with them. Who do you think was the muscle behind the protests in Egypt? Who is going to topple Erdogan? How are they going to do against the hardcore Muslims who support Turkey's fall into Islamism? I'm reminded of the hilarious naivete of Iranian intellectuals and communists who thought that allying with radical Muslims was a great idea to get rid of the shah. "Hey we'll let the Muslims do the fighting, and then they'll let us rule over them and impose a secular system that they hate to the core! What a simple and elegant solution! I wonder why other Muslim countries didn't think of that??"

Tangential point... why do you think the Arab spring began in Egypt instead of Tunisia? Tunisia has been oddly forgotten in the last few years, not just by you but the mainstream press as well. God only knows how many times NPR has linked Tahrir Square to the start of the Arab spring.

What if it's not pure bullshit? More to the point, the danger with limiting political speech based on libel and slander is that the government decides what libel and slander is. If Country X has a law that what politicians do in private is private, and that revealing those private actions is a form of libel/slander, then do you support the ban?

How far off am I? According to CNN Erdogan said the leaked material he's apparently trying to suppress was "immorally edited." He also said "Freedom is not invading someone's privacy."

What I don't get is why anyone outside of Turkey gives a crap if they block twitter. I get that some people are sad to see this so-called Islamic democracy turning into a failed state, but that's been going on for years. Twitter was the final straw?? Okay..

Looser name matching would increase false positives, but profiling would probably balance that out. Of course that would entail further invasion of privacy etc. If the authorities do it correctly, it would be pretty minor though. You have nothing to fear unless you start going to a mosque, etc.

I know you're just being funny, but terrorists don't have a goal of inconveniencing people, or interpreted loosely, throwing wrenches in the system. They are proud of who they are, what their ideology is, and they want to fight battles and win and be remembered for it.

The more hardcore the name, the cooler. Remember "Johnny Taliban?" Aka John Walker Lindh. He had a great undercover name. But he wanted to sound more authentic so he became Sulayman al-Faris.

While you are raising valid concerns about algorithms like soundex, aren't they minor concerns? Yeah there could be a typo in the name. But in the case we're talking about, it wasn't a typo, it was an alternate phonetic spelling.

And regarding false positives, luckily there aren't many terrorists today named John Smith. False positives would be restricted to relatively small populations anyway, like Muslims and non-Western names. How many "bin laden/bin ladin/bin ladan/ben laden/etc" names are there in the US? Maybe a few, who would all be false positives. So? That's still tiny.

The other thing you're ignoring is that name matching is just part of identity verification. I find it unlikely that Russia gave us this name and nothing else. There was probably a picture as well, or a description. Some percentage of false positives would be eliminated on that basis. "Oh this guy is 80, we're looking for a teenager. Next."

That's a bad way to evaluate the false positive rate because it assumes the distribution of terrorist names is the same as the distribution of names in Social Security. In reality there aren't many Muslims in the US, so the false positive rate for the general population would be much lower. (It may be high for Muslims though, especially since from what I recall soundex etc aren't really optimized for non-Western names.)

Not to mention, name matching is just step one of identification. I'm assuming there's also a picture that would pop up. If the person in front of you is an 80 year old man and the picture is a 17 old year kid, the security agent doesn't have to even mention it.

Excellent point. I don't know why you've been modded as a troll. GP sounds exactly like Newsnight's Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels).. the Hollywood fantasy version of a conservative who is "fed up" with how "real" conservatives have no options because their party has been "hijacked" by nutjobs.

It is really transparent.

Yeah the game-play of an MMORPG is not radically different, which is why it's in the RPG genre I guess. The big two problems with them are the players and the resurrection of characters.

The players ruin the RPG environment because most of them are not there to RPG, they're there to chat or trade stuff. Most other players ignore you. It's just too annoying to go into town and suddenly it's like "hay ne1 got flour? I nd it 4 Barta's Recipe qst" or whatever. That kind of noise is no fun.

The constant availability and replayability of quests is also dumb and annoying. It makes sense that in an RPG I can wander around and kill the same type of creature over and over -- there are lots of them. It's dumb when entire dungeons respawn including the named boss characters. Diablo also had this feature, so it's not exclusively MMORPG, but I'm pretty sure it's universal among MMORPGs and rare in regular RPGs.

One obvious solution to your puzzle is that the average is staying the same but the extremes are narrowing, so the coldest spots on Earth are becoming warmer. Certainly if the arctic sent a polar vortex down our way, that cold air must have been replaced by warm air from here.

Screen readers have contextual commands and may behave differently in real tables. For instance http://www.freedomscientific.c...

If the user is just having it read all the text on the screen it will probably be about the same, but if he's navigating within the page it will be different.

People who want the right not to be vaccinated are not motivated out of a desire to kill babies with the diseases they carry. That's a ridiculous argument. It's just like how people who want the right to drive are not motivated out of a desire to cause car accidents and kill babies, even though they know that getting in the car raises the risk that they will kill a baby in a car accident.

All of our actions affect other people, so you'll have to be more specific.

That's a great example... to me, it's not okay for the police to do things I think are unconstitutional in the name of ending drunk driving. Are you really okay with things like police checkpoints where everybody is forced to submit to a search in order to get past it?? It's not worth giving up our rights to slightly reduce the chance that some people will die. We're all going to die eventually.

Your rationale for absolving parents of vaccinated kids is that "you have done everything you could, so it's just unfortunate" -- but that makes no sense because vaccination is not "everything you could" do to prevent illness. Just as a small example, say you give your child the flu vaccine, but he still catches the flu at daycare. You're not absolved. You could have quit your job and kept your child at home instead of sending him to daycare (which is a known risk factor for illness). So you should still be held criminally negligent according to the spirit of your law.

Perhaps that points to why laws like yours are not acceptable. You are criminalizing things which many people still believe fall within their freedoms to take care of themselves and their families as they see fit. I'm curious what you think about the myriad other activities that may (or may not) harm children. I'm guessing you would be pro-criminalization for things like your child twisting his ankle while playing basketball, since you could have easily prevented it by not letting him play basketball. Maybe that's not harmful enough for you to take notice. I'm sure you would agree that the parents of children who are shot in school shootings should be sent to jail for not protecting their kids. "You don't *have* to homeschool your kids, but if you don't and they get shot at school, then you are responsible for their murder." Something like that?

The main thing I'm curious about is why you wrote your hypothetical law the way you did. You clearly want to encourage vaccination. So why not make the law "You have to get your kids vaccinated" rather than the circuitous route you took?