I'm not attacking your facts and your logic is just as sound as the pro-slaver's logic was. I'm also not saying that Scotland is a vassal state. I'm only saying that your entire premise is false.

The post you responded to stated that "I don't think you understand that you've not exactly treated Scotland very well and that's one of the reasons it wants to leave," to which you responded that Scotland was poor before and would still be poor if they were left to their own devices. The argument that self-determination can't be trusted to the Scots because you know better is exactly the same argument made in favor of slavery.

Many slaves in the US weren't happy about losing their "job" and being cast out on their own, so I guess they were hardly "unwilling subjects".

From an American point of view, your whole screed reads like the "defense of slavery" essays of old. A single issue argument based only on economics and dependent on the presumed incurable ignorance of your unwilling subjects.

I don't really care about this vote either way, but after wading through your disdainful little piece, I'm rooting for the Scots.

Anyone who isn't from the US probably needs to fix their intermittently failing shift key, though. SI actually assigns meaning to capitalization in units and there is a big difference between mHz and MHz.

That's up to the jury, but they can't make the case with laws that prevent "defend[ing] yourself against a police officer".

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss everybody else as useless sheep. This entire situation is engineered to be difficult to escape.

How are you responding appropriately? You're complaining anonymously on a backwater echo chamber website. Have you actually done anything to fix the situation or would all of the other concerned, but helpless, people see you as just another one of the idiots who still don't understand?

I'm a chemist, but I've had the opportunity to work with some of this to make customized proteins and cells to work with. It really is getting surprisingly easy and inexpensive to play around with this stuff and the range of what you can make is huge.

That said, I really see this going the same way as amateur chemistry and rocketry (and soon drones and 3D printing). The mere fact that it's possible to do something dangerous or disallowed means that the entire field is off-limits to amateurs. Any interest in it will be suspicious and used against you in your imminent trial, even if it's not technically illegal.

But these aren't police officers. They're only pretending to be police officers. They're doing so with the approval of the county, but they're not deputized or anything (per TFA).

"Locale" refers to language, keyboard layout, period/comma decimal notion, and such. Flying from the US to Paris and having your desktop session change to French menus and AZERTY keyboard layout is not something you'd likely ever want.

20 seconds away was ~20 km away. None of the passengers would have even noticed it. It was a near miss in that if it wasn't prematurely detonated it would have struck the aircraft, not in that it was actually near the aircraft.

The business class used to be that intermediate class. First class was the luxury class for the monied and coach was for everyone else, including business travelers. As coach service started getting worse and worse (and being called "economy class"), the intermediate business class was made for frequent travelers. It was not as bad as economy, but not posh like first class.

I think business class cannibalized the first class business, so first class was reabsorbed into business class (even if it's still called "first class"). First class is much cheaper than it used to be and not nearly as nice. The people who used to travel in the truly luxurious first class can afford to keep or charter their own planes now, so the market for the old first class service is gone (at least for domestic and intracontinental flights).

The plan now is to make economy service so bad that upgrading to "Economy Plus" or business class becomes tempting for anyone who can afford it. The difference between economy and business/first is only like 2-3x on many domestic flights these days.

I also fail to understand the mindset that we should silently endure any cuts to our standard of living until we're as bad off as the worst among us. Our goal as a civilization and a species should be to constantly ratchet up everyone's standard of living so that we're all better off than we previously were.

All the while, the airlines will deliberately cramp people as much as possible for increased profit. The problem with (3), is that it will keep costing you more and more personal space, even while you pay more and more, until people push back. At the extremes this isn't a natural problem, it's manufactured by the airlines to maximize their profit. If you just shut up and enjoy your cramped flight as much as possible, they'll cramp you more next time.

You know that, unless the surgeon has done that specific procedure dozens of times before (and memorized it through practice), they'll review it before the surgery starts. Personally, I'll trust a surgeon that rechecks the books and videos before I'll trust one that operates based on memory of med school alone!

Your first pet's name is also known to every site that used that as a security question. You don't keep stuff like that confidential by telling it to anyone who asks.

Were you doing that for testing purposes or do you actually have that many tabs open on purpose?

Since there's no way you could actually look at all of them in a single day, perhaps you'd be better off with bookmarks than actual open tabs. What benefit do you get from having the actual pages loaded and running their rogue javascript in the background? Have you downloaded the entire web to your hard drive, too, instead of just fetching the relevant pages as you need them?

Genuinely curious... (though that last sentence had some [required] snark.)