So yeah, let's allow big pharma to cyberman our core nervous apparatus for something as incredibly stupid as a weight loss gimmick.

The summary is talking about people who are dying from their inability to control their appetite. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Altough real solution would be to treat sugar and fat as the dangerous, unhealthy, borderline poisonous substances they are. And at some point, we'll have to. Obesity epidemic - and all related metabological problems - are getting way out of control.

If there's a drone hovering over my land, or my 'charge' if I am hired security, it is guilty until proven innocent.

Airspace ownership is a complex issue and will only become more so as new categories of flying devices appear. Making your own rules and destroying other people's property based on them is unlikely to go well for you.

we canâ(TM)t penetrate that

Yes we can! Just need some more silicon lube.

I never quite got why plea bargains are permissible in the first place.

They're a form of punishment. Being forced to testify against yourself humiliates the accused and empowers the prosecutor. It dehumanizes the accused, by showing that no, he doesn't have any of those Constitutional rights. The prosecutor is, in effect, establishing his superiority to reality itself: pretend that what happened is what he said happened, or be severely punished.

Plea bargains are basically a sadist's wet dream. And US legal system is built on the idea that justice is institutionalized sadism. Every single aspect of it is geared towards maximum harm to those caught in it, from criminal records (meant to extend punishment to infinity) to keeping people in death row for decades to uncertain methods of execution (as opposed to a simply breathing nitrogen) to private prisons (who have very incentive to make recidivism rate as high as possible). Hence the popular notion that everyone accused must be guilty, so you can enjoy watching the system grind them to bits with good conscience.

Plea bargains are a symptom, but the disease itself is simply bloodlust.

In other words, they are the indigenous for their ancestors, for thousands of years, have settled in that place

Which is impossible for any human being to prove. Or do you have records of all or even most - or even a single one - of your ancestral lines going back to the height of the Roman Empire?

Furthermore, nations are not genetic but memetic. Being French means nothing more and nothing less than that you think of yourself as French. People born in France typically do, as do some of the people who've lived there for a while. That is true even if said people don't agree with every aspect of their nation's culture. You're simply trying to use thinly disguised racism to disqualify the opinions of people you don't agree with.

TL;DR Ein volk, ein reich, ein this bullshit again.

Stripping Western citizenship from dual nationals could be effective: you only have to see all the satellite dishes and ethnic dress in crap parts of Paris to know where peoples' real loyalty lies.

Crimes against fashion don't count as terrorism, bro. Reality TV might, but the viewers are victims, not perpetrators.

Europe will start having to do something similar with both illegal arrivals, and 2nd/3rd generation fifth-columists. Time to make ourselves the master of our own house again.

Who's us? Last time I checked, the people mandating dress codes for minorities or prohibiting listening to subversive foreign radio stations were the enemies.

Since governments tap and read everything; if they can't read it, according to them you must be hiding something.

So that's why Slashdot has had broken formatting when opening subthreads in new tabs recently!

What agency is fighting this dastardly Betaist plot?

That said, given the percentage of a lot of local police budgets currently covered by stealing stuff, it will be interesting to see whether the people who are always drifting toward the theory that freedom can be measured as a direct function of tax rate will be able to keep it together when next year's municipal budgets start being adjusted to account for this.

You know, you could simply cut the costs - tell the police to focus on thieves and murderers and leave pot smokers and prostitutes alone. Maybe stop sending SWAT teams to storm people's houses over anonymous phone calls, cease harassing black people for walking on the streets, take it easy with surplus military gear...

If anything, forcing people to actually pay for police activity might cause some much-needed reconsideration of what, exactly speaking, is necessary police activity and what is someone play-acting action movies on other people's expense.

the current sentiment is "wait, who did this wonderful thing, I must have heard you wrong"

And soon it'll turn into "it was really our doing, those dastardly wabbits just took the credit! Go our team!"

Or, alternatively: "They let druggies keep their drug money! Why do you hate our boys in blue so much?"

Cognitive dissonance is like a Higgs field of psychology: it's bound to collapse into some unpredictable nonzero value, and once it does, all of reality is caught and twisted into a completely new shape.

"in which inborn ability is prized over hard work"

It's not. How could it be? What is prized is your ability to do math or model clothes. No one knows or cares if that ability was a result of natural talent, hard work or a blood pact with the devil.

Look, the guy's hardly going to say it's OK to blaspheme, is he? It's just not in his job description.

Really? Because I seem to dimly recall some dude who challenged religious authorities of the day and was consequently accused of blasphemy and executed. Jesus something.

And the issue isn't as black/white as that either. Freedom comes with a price-tag; are we all willing to pay the price?

The price is that you can't punch people for badmouthing your mother. The payoff is that no would-be tyrant can silence his critics. Frankly, that's about as black and white as it gets.

If you actually believe in freedom, then you have to accept that others have the freedom to not want the same as you.

Certainly. You don't want freedom? Very well then, bow down before me as I begin to rule the world. Oh, you thought you would be the master?

We didn't all just wake up one morning and decide freedom would be a fun thing to try. We simply proved, way beyond reasonable doubt, that every other way of organizing society leads to very bad things. Modern-day theocracies and secular dictatorships keep on proving that over and over again.

The people who make noises about not wanting freedom are simply self-centered egotistic assholes who want everything their way. That's simply not possible, no matter how many temper tantrums they throw.

worker drone

"Worker drone" is a bit vague. What are these drones doing, exactly speaking? Do they require unfiltered Internet access? If not, XP is still fine, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Everyone always talks about "enterprise" like it implied high reliability requirements. But in my experience, "enterprise" means things get duct taped back together when they break. And why not? For most companies, IT is like lighting: it exists to help actual business, and it's no big deal if a few fixtures go dark every now and then.

We have lots of hoops because of two things: 1.a) our patchwork of federal, state, and municipal programs and 1.b) the American idea of self-help and individualism.

No, the truth is uglier than that. A society committed to "self-help and individualism" would strive to ensure opportunities are available to anyone who cares to take them, no matter where they happen to be, and that one can actually risk failing without also risking homelessness. Such societies exist, and are typically derided as "nanny states" by Americans - because compensating for human frailties and failings is what it takes to actually make it possible for people to follow their own path and seek their dreams.

Someone once said US's problem is that everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire. But that leaves out a key fact: everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire who wants to ensure they can stomp on those below them, once they get to the top, and votes accordingly. Thus the seemingly irrational support from middle class to policies destructive to said middle class. It's a self-made hell.

simply steal the information

Origin doesn't "steal" information - you don't lose it. It spies on you, which is a completely different thing. Although I suppose you could say it steals your privacy.

Oh well, any cracker groups out there care to reverse engineer the protocol and make a privacy proxy for Origin?

A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances: mutations can never be absolutely avoided, because they are an inescapable consequence of fundamental limitations on the accuracy of DNA replication, as discussed in Chapter 5.

Of course mutations can be completely avoided. DNA is digital information, which can be copied perfectly. Whether any particular living organism actually does so is another matter, and likely one of the issues that need to be adjusted. Not that it really matters: cancer is actually pretty simple to treat (just kill all of the malfunctioning cells), is only a problem due to the limited accuracy of the knifes we can currently wield, and with nanotechnology and robotics advancing at geometric rate will likely fall within a century to fleets of medical micro-killbots.

In any case, we need to decouple our minds from our bodies at some point. The only place our current physical forms are at home is Earth. Furthermore, while our brains are impressive their inherent biases are worse and worse fit for modern circumstances, and most of their power is not easily accessible to consciousness. We must figure out how to transfer that consciousness from one physical shell to another. That way, we can inhabit human bodies when appropriate, move to supercomputer cluster to do physics, become a spaceship to set up a space colony in outer solar system, and make that colony itself a vast virtual world with high-power transmitters for moving people in and out - much more efficient than building a metal shell filled with oxygenating gasses. And as a nice side effect, it moves cancer from a killer to "damn, ruined my clothes" status.

If a human could live long enough, it is inevitable that at least one of his or her cells would eventually accumulate a set of mutations sufficient for cancer to develop.

That is a tautology: if you live long enough for event X to happen, then it's inevitable that X happens, since if it doesn't, then you haven't lived long enough yet. You can replace "cancer" with "every atom in your body randomly undergoing cold fusion into iron at the same time" and your statement will still be just as true - and just as meaningless - as before.