OK. Lets do it. The Koran says that Jesus was a prophet (abliet rather a special one) and not the Son of God. That is blasphemy, so the Koran should be banned in all Christian countries. I may be an aetheist, but I know double standard where I see them.

This is technically true but grossly misleading: England also already has Jewish courts. They have exactly the same standing, which is they have no standing in law. They operate purely where the plaintiffs agree to abide by their judgement. Really, they are no different from say two people going to a mutual friend and asking the friend to adjudicate on a disagreement.

I detest Ruby and ROR as much as the next man, but I have to take issue with "active record" causing security holes. Its not active record, its using active record with mass assignment that is the problem. Though, active record can cause horrible performance. I blame the lets-hide-SQL-behind-an-ORM culture; nothing wrong with ORM *provided* you understand what happens behind the scenes (and how RDBMSs can be performance killed).

http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2654:united-states-disease-death-rates&catid=55:united-states-deaths-from-diseases&Itemid=55 By the time the measles vaccine was introduced in the US, the death rate was down to under 1 per 100,000. Since almost everyone would have contracted measles once, and assuming a population of 200 million with an average life expectancy of 50 years, then that's about 4 million births per year, or 40 deaths. You are free to argue for vaccines, but please don't selectively quote misleading statistics, even TFA does.

So? "Measles once infected four million people and killed 4,000 of them each year, mostly young children". What year and over what period? Four million in the US population sounds around the birth rate, so that's one death per 1000; if that's around 1988 then the UK was a lot healthier - one death per 35000, but I bet it was longer ago than that, I'd assume the US wasn't that must worse. Ditto the savings: if you don't have the dates then the information is worthless.

Whooping Cough, Measles. I don't live worldwide, I live in the UK. If you live in the third world then the balance is different.

Slashdot. This is science. Pro-vaccine is science by definition. Abandon all hope, mate.

That's right, people of your age never lived in a world where you could get polio or mumps at any moment. People of my age (55) have, so my experience might be a bit better than yours. I've had measles, I've had mumps, I've had chickenpox. So did all my friends. My wife (48) had all those and she had whooping cough, and so did several of her classmates. No big deal. Neither she nor I know anyone who were scarred for life, etc. Maybe we are both statistical anomolies, or maybe it just wasn't as bad as you seem to believe. I'm not suggesting it was perfect; but it just wasn't that way.

Indeed. BTW, how old are you. I'm 55, I've had measles, I've had chicken pox, I've had mumps, I've very likely had rubella. My wife is 48. She's had all those, she's had whooping cough. No big deal, and neither of us can remember "all the wacky pathogenic fun". In 1988, when MMR was introduced in the UK (measles vaccine had been around a while but take up was patchy) there were 16 deaths (http://www.hpa.org.uk/web/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1195733811885): since measles was endemic and virtually all kids would get it, that would be 16 deaths in around 600000. Not nice, but absolutely awful either. So vaccines may be good (broadly, I agree); vaccine *policy* may be good (broadly, I disagree); but most of the things vaccinated against were not the mass killers/mass complications that the pro-vaccine people would have others believe.

40? Pah. I'm 55 and we've just had twins. Sure, its hard. Physically exhausting, nope.

Except: A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have (they are not produced over the woman's lifetime). On the other hand sperm are produced more on an as-needed basis. So, there is much more opportunity for problems to arise with eggs (presumably why the chance of having a Down's Syndrome child increases with the mother's age).

For a bit of fun, I tried Haiku-OS out yesterday. Its a bit limited, but dear god its fast - in a VirtualBox, boot to GUI in maybe 5 seconds. If someone - anyone - could produce a mainline Linux/GUI that performs anywhere near like that, they'll get my vote.

Alternatively, suppose I run a company newsletter, which is posted out, and includes customer commends, and someone submits a comment "ThunderBird89 is a dirty paedo, go torch his house with him in it". Could I reasonably claim that I have no responsibility? BTW, this isn't a rhetorical question - the whole area is horribly complicated.

Met a Canadian once, he came over on Autumn (Fall) "You guys don't know what winter is", left in Spring "that was the coldest winter I've ever experienced". Because our weather is not as cold, we can manage with crappy houses with crappy insulation and crappy heating .... as he discovered!

Back when H5N1 was doing the rounds, my wife had a long running worse-than-average but not debilitating chest infection which came and went over two or three months; I had something pretty similar; and lots of people we know and work with had much the same. But none of us or them were ever diagnosed as having H5N1, because none of us got bad enough to see a doctor. My wife (a biologist who worked in an immunological research laboratory a while back) thinks that the H5N1 infection rate was really much much higher than it was supposed to be, but the infection was much much less severe than H5N1 was hyped to be in all those cases. If she's right - and it seems pretty plausible to me - then H5N1 was just not the risk it was painted as. Granted it was nastier than the average flu bug, but nothing like governments would have us believe. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?