"Oxygen isn't a pollutant either, unless you breath too much of it. Similarly for nitrogen."

How much you breath has absolutely nothing to do with it. Oxygen, Nitrogen, and CO2 are the natural components of the atmosphere, not pollutants.

"Here's a clue, have a sense of proportion. Pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere, big surprise, the atmosphere heats up. Don't want to believe it is problem? Please, don't. However, you cannot ignore the CO2 acidifying the oceans and taking out coral reefs and shell fish. Don't think that's a problem? The ocean is the base of the food chain. Surely, you care about that, eh? Nah? Okay, please go back to sleep."

This does not appear to be relevant to anything I posted, indeed, you appear to behaving quite the conversation with an imaginary friend there.

Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant.

It's a natural component of the atmosphere, produced every time an animal breaths or respirates in any manner (fish do it too.)

Now, focus on the real pollution for a moment and realize that there are still very real and enormous costs to your proposed policy of 'If it pollutes simply end it.'

So what are you going to use for power, Solar? Do you have any idea how much pollution you have to create BEFORE you get a PV cell ready to START producing a miniscule trickle of electricity? Hydro-electric damages the riverine ecology and there is still plenty of pollution attributable to its construction and maintenance on top of it. The latter goes for wind as well. *You cannot even construct* your "clean" power plant without polluting to do it, so electricity is out the window, welcome to the new dark ages.

Unless that is really what you want, you will have to adjust your expectations. Some level of pollution being unavoidable, the question becomes how to keep it within safe bounds.

Fine. McDonald's for you.

This

"Hahahaha, Nazis? Unless you're taking a direct flight to a concentration camp, gtfo."

The iconic image of the Nazis I was raised on was the Gestapo agent demanding papers. The US is supposed to be better than that. No internal passports, a free man (or woman) has the right to go about their business in peace, does anyone still remember those days?

Unfortunately this is exactly what you should expect with the likes of Steam. DRM is DRM is DRM, no matter how you sugar coat it.

You beat me to it, but that was exactly what I was thinking.

Everything old is new again, you just have to wait for it to go out of fashion for a couple years and give it a new name.

You misunderstand the function of law enforcement.

It is not, directly, to help the victim. In many cases the victim is, after all, beyond help.

Rather, it is to prevent future victims. First by putting the victimizer out of business - and if that doesnt help the existing victim, in fact even if hurts the victim, it still has to be done, for the sake of the potential future victims. This is why we ask rape victims to testify even though they may find that as traumatic as the original crime. Not to fix the damage that's been done (that's the function of civil law, not criminal law) but to prevent future damage.

The problem does't come from, "If I'm in group A, then I must have beliefs X," it comes from the recognition that an issue will be seized upon by a faction and used to pump their wider agenda. Use climate change, since the OP brought it up: Rather than a rational discussion of whether it's really happening, whether it's human-caused if so, and what to do about it if anything, we've got one side using it to justify all manner of intrusive measures, while the other wants to ignore the issue entirely. The same thing happens with any talk about WMD, terrorism, abortion, etc. The issue itself is the carrier wave for a lot of additional modulation that's usually far off the topic but important to one side or the other. It's the, "Never let a crisis go to waste" mentality. I don't know how you fix that.

I am not surprised that the reporter is a technical illiterate who cant tell memory from storage, but surely the submitter or the editor one could show half a brain cell working and correct it?

All the devices mentioned are storage, not "memory".

Anyway, police dogs are a scam. Like Clever Hans, they are more attuned to their trainers emotions than s/he is, and can baffle and impress the unwary with seemingly impossible tricks as a result. Granting a warrant based on a dog alerting is effectively the same thing as granting it because a cop has a hunch.

The correct question, assuming the story is factual, would be something along the lines of "What do want us to put in the lab we're going to give you for free, sonny?"

eyes open, unresponsive to stimuli (can't be woken up), no memory of entering the state

Yes, but this isn't sleep. This is more like watching Fox News.

The claustrum has a phylogenetic background appearing predominantly in insectivores, Prosimians, and Marsupials.

Hmmm. A hint as to where to look for consciousness most similar to humans?

They will probably always remain inherently beyond the reach of scientific evidence.

Yes. that's because they are 100% made-up. Just as Santa Claus is inherently beyond the reach of scientific evidence.

You will never find evidence, that is, anything manifesting as objective reality, for a wholly illusory concept. You can, of course, drown yourself in delusion. We appear to be well designed for exactly that exercise, we even practice it most nights during REM sleep. And it's perfectly acceptable, socially speaking. Imagine away.