Hardly.

How is pride anything else than a costly signal that you're virile enough?

From an evolutionary perspective that would be very meaningful.

War is mate competition carried out by other means. There is no other rational for it (war is always economically irrational, although this is not generally understood because it "just makes sense" to so many people that war is somehow a good idea.)

You speak in bold assertive tones about studies and ideas (including kin selection) as if they were established truths.

You claim there is no other rational reason for war, while there is an entire rich field of study on the possible motivations for war amongst humans.

For example it was Ernest Becker who (if not developed at least) popularized the (widely held today) believe that humans war for reasons chimpanzees can't. That (and I'm going to grossly oversimplify here) our death-denial systems rely on an outsider, rely on an enemy, and if one looks past the economic value of many wars (and yes war is often economically rational too) what one will find is a clash of death-denial stories.

And, yea, let's get onto that untruth - that war is somehow always economically irrational. Seizing buffer lands, trade routes, ports, or natural resources is hardly irrational.

Wow, you kids with your high uids.

This kettle is calling your pot out. I'm a noob.

For me, both coffee and beer took a certain amount of acclimation. For coffee, I started out 'candying it up' with a ton of sugar and cream/creamer. And then one day I said "the heck with it" and started drinking it black. Within about a week or two of drinking it every day, I found I actually really liked it. Now you can't keep me away from it. I drink half a pot to a pot of coffee a day, and don't shy away from espresso.

It was a similar story with beer. I started out with really smooth beers (Red Dog was the choice for a fairly smooth, inoffensive beer at the time), and then one day I decided I was going to try all sorts of varieties whether I liked them or not. I started with the beer I had tried and liked least (Guinness Extra Stout—this was before they had the widget cans), and made that my exclusive beer for awhile. After a couple six-packs, I found I really appreciated it, and my palate was now open to a much wider range of beers. I've tried a few hundred different beers since then, and found it quite an enjoyable journey.

I think with both, there's the 'bitter' aspect to get over. Once you get past 'bitter', you can taste the rest of the beverage and enjoy it.

Try a Rochefort 10 sometime. It's a delicious (and potent) Belgian beer with carmelly goodness and very, very little hops to it. It's liquid candy.

When I tried to brew a clone recipe of it, the recipe called for a ton of Belgian Kandi sugar and grain, but the only hops were aroma hops added in the last few minutes of the boil. The clone came pretty close. (I think the differences were in the yeast, and the temperature profile during fermentation, really.)

I've actually visited a coffee plantation in Puerto Rico. The fresh ground coffee I had there was delicious, too. But, then, I voted for "bioengineer all the major vitamins," as I drink between half a pot and a pot of coffee a day. (It doesn't need more caffeine; I enjoy the flavor and too much caffeine means I'd get less of the flavor! But I also enjoy the caffeine so no decaf either, please.)

Or did you mean "everyone voting for Roundup Ready?"

You still need a way to mix a key into the result if you want a symmetric cipher.

In any case, certificate validation doesn't use SHA-1 as a cipher.

While that may be true, web browsers aren't using SHA-1 for encryption, especially for validating certificates. It's a cryptographically strong hashing function, but not, on its own, encryption.

Or better yet...turn off Windows Defender and disable the services it needs to run. Yes, Windows will complain at you. But you can forcibly turn off those warnings as well. And if the warnings do pop up and annoy you, you can disable the service that shows the warnings as well. It's my computer, I will do whatever I want to with it, and the OS will let me, or I will modify it until it does.

What about an app that burns the bandwidth of playing a video as part of its 'preload', but never provides feedback that it's doing so? Is the user supposed to be clairvoyant?

And where on the label does the Facebook app say how much data it's going to use?

And how about the fact that for a long time, the FB app was fine, and then a change that FB pushed out to folks surprised them later only after they were using it?

It's worth remembering that not using the facebook app is supposed to hit facebook harder than yourself.

That's only true if there's a wide-scale boycott. Otherwise, network effects suggest you're wrong. It's like arguing "Not using Windows is supposed to hit Microsoft harder than yourself." BS. Microsoft hasn't felt a thing since I switched to other platforms years ago. I, however, have had to deal with incompatibilities and quirkiness. For the vast majority of users it never made sense to switch from Windows and it still doesn't, and the reason why is network effects.

Your arguments remind me of the 'Countepoint' guy from Airplane.

The issue here is that most smart phone plans make you, the user, responsible for paying for the total amount of bandwidth consumed, but the phone and the apps don't give you a good mechanism to allow you to act on that responsibility in a meaningful way. Saying "Well, then, don't use it" is unhelpful and unrealistic.

Ok, as explained elsewhere, this isn't autoplay per se but rather auto preload. That is, the video consumes bandwidth with no outward indication it's doing so. Again, do explain how the miracle of personal responsibility solves this.

On my BB10 (which I otherwise quite enjoy), many websites will autoplay video. I'll click on an article to read it, and then 10-15 seconds later (sometimes faster, sometimes slower), it'll freeze and force me into a full screen video due to autoplay. Sometimes I can get it to stop quickly and can go back to the article, but quite often I just swipe to make the video not-full-screen and immediately close the page.

That gap between opening the page and getting hijacked by the video appears to be buffering time. That burns bandwidth my connection before I even get a chance to know it might be happening. And, as you say, it's a special kind of awfulness. I'd love to disable this autoplay, but there doesn't seem to be any option for this. (FWIW, disabling Flash doesn't do it.)

At least FB has a setting where you can disable this. The fact it's taken multiple 'news' articles on multiple websites to get the word out, though, hints that FB's roll out of the feature is antisocial at best. If nothing else, they should have defaulted it to preloading only if it was operating over WiFi.

Ok, so you're saying "never launch the Facebook app" is the only responsible choice? These are videos that autoplay without audio when they're not even visible on the screen, so you don't even know that this is happening. (Ok, for the FB app, there is a setting to disable this, but the fact that people haven't heard of this without multiple news articles on the topic says that FB's default caught a good fraction of their users by surprise.)

I personally have been bitten by autoplay ad videos on my BB10 when trying to visit news articles. I haven't found a way to disable video auto-play on this phone with its browser at all. (No, disabling Flash doesn't help.) Are you saying that the only responsible action is to never browse the web from my phone, so I never get bitten by a website that might spring an unwanted, unwarranted (and usually unrelated to the article) video on me? If I browse the web, I'm irresponsible?

Please, do explain how personal responsibility plays a role here, and what it translates to for someone who has no interest in viewing any videos ever on his/her smartphone unless they explicitly ask them to be played. Do tell me how to rectify this moral failing.

Sorry, dude, that's sarcasm. not satire.