Actually whoever the new guy is, I don't find the site to be "improved" at all; seems a little crummy. The story was butchered and incorrectly interpreted, and the all important software for interaction seems less interactive.

But what do I know?

As to my absence I've been a bit overwhelmed by work stuff, sorry about that, it's no excuse :)

The story as published implies that the ruling overruled the lower court on the 3 issues. In fact, it was agreeing with the trial court on the third issue -- that the sporadic instances of Vimeo employees making light of copyright law did not amount to adopting a "policy of willful blindness".

The galactic scale actually helps the pro-alien viewpoint. There are so many billions of planets in the galaxy that we would expect them to spawn life. Many systems in our galaxy are far older than Earth. By the time the Earth was formed, the linked solar system had already had a chance to evolve from accretion disk->Kardashians.

And yet the galactic scale is no impediment to colonization. Assuming a 0.0025*c travel speed, it would take only 50 million years to colonize the galaxy. That's nothing in galactic terms.

So maybe alien life is common, but not a single one of the isolated species decided to expand to the stars. Maybe travel between the stars is somehow impossible, even for machines. Maybe they're extinct or maybe then never existed to begin with. But one thing that doesn't explain the absence of aliens is the vast galactic scale. It's smaller than you think.

Another clue: picking out a simple spelling mistake and ignoring the actual point, again as an AC. Well done.

No, an anti-scientific non-sequitor posted on a tech blog by an Anonymous Coward must be a troll.

I think that's the point of calling you sociopathic. You shouldn't need a reason, because the empathy present in most humans would be enough.

I can't give you a personal reason, but I can give you one that applies to people as a collective: I live the full live I have now because of the sacrifices made by the generations that came before. People who put off their own happiness to improve the world in some way. It's a form of paying it forward, and I have a huge debt. I'll never be able compensate those countless generations who got the world to where it is now, but I can do my part to improve upon their work.

Tell that to the people who have been asking for MRU tab-switching for ages

Chrome doesn't even allow plugins to enable MRU for ctrl+tab.

This is a different author. As far as I can tell, K5 was the only host for this story on the entire internet.

(and yeah, I'm signed up for localroger.com's newsletter. Prime Intellect and Passages in the Void are incredible stories)

And I just found it on Google cache. Glad I could grab it before it disappears forever:

http://webcache.googleusercont...

True. Some of the best fiction I've read was first published on that site.

There was another one about the corpse of an angel, found floating in space, hooked up to play a perfect allegorical game of Go to solve political and economic puzzles for its masters.

Very few things stick with me for this long, but K5's fiction did.

Can you point me to some examples? Religious schools tend to be private institutions, so aren't beholden to non-discrimination clauses. Same goes for churches. No one has ever been forced to lend the weight of their religion to a marriage. Can you point to a case where a private institute has been forced to go against their religious beliefs?

People who own public companies like bakeries do not have the right to discriminate when selling wedding cakes. People who work for the public government do not have the right to discriminate when deciding who gets a marriage license. For those people, their religion prevents them from providing protected classes the same rights granted to everyone else. As I mentioned earlier, their religion has started affecting others, and that's where their rights stop.

And no, no one can be punished for believing in God, or lacking a "belief in the lack of a god". But again, once their beliefs lead to actions that affect others, all bets are off.

How, exactly?

From what I can see, the intolerance towards "beliefs" only starts when those beliefs start affecting other people. People have every right to believe gay people are sinful and going to hell. But they shouldn't have a right to fire someone just because they're gay.

Note the difference between tolerating a belief and tolerating an action. Yes, a lot of actions are informed by religious beliefs and are no longer being tolerated. But that's exactly as it should be. Religion should not have an adverse effect on anyone not of that religion.

Can I just say I appreciate you responding rationally and calmly to this line of questioning. It's refreshing to see a well-thought-out answer in the face of the obtuse disingenuous questions being thrown your way.

You seriously can't tell the difference between "intolerance towards X" and "intolerance towards intolerance"?

Are you also against financial penalties for thieves, because that would be theft?