Ah, quoting "fallacies" without really understanding what they mean.

No, begging the question is something else, this is a simple argument that goes like this: you trust us with something more, therefore trusting us with something less shouldn't be a issue. There's nothing begging here, no logical flaw in it.

it's a figure of speech, if they compile your kernel and everything else it means that you trust them, it doesn't mean that they can log in remotely to your machine using root access.

The point was that if you don't trust them you should not use Ubuntu because they make it and thus have root access. I think that's a legitimate point to make.

Relevant http://xkcd.com/927/

I don't use it but I see a potential use, for example if you have a laptop that you use at work and at home you can have a work activity with all the documents and shortcuts to programs that you use at work on desktop and then have another home activity with games, photos and other crap on the desktop. Or you could have a boss activity where you switch when your boss is around and a slashdot activity with live feeds from slashdot on desktop and other such productive things :)

It's obviously because of the name, I think it would have been better for the name to remain "Goddamned particle"... also prepare for similar reaction if they call a particle "the Devil's particle".

If you want to hide something you encrypt, otherwise is madness anyway.

I can't say I know the cause, it might be social encouragement (or lack of) and/or natural tendencies, as a guy I was building radios and other electronic devices with my friend and then went out and pranking people who were playing radio too loud, somehow I couldn't see my sister interested in that kind of pranks. Girls mature faster, that's I think at least one non-controversial statement. Building and playing with devices and programs might require a non-mature type of mind that boys have for a longer period, girls might not be so interested in this kind of stuff once they pass a certain age, I wonder if more girls would stay in the field if they are involved at a younger age into these kind of things. I can tell you that when I was 12-14 or so I was fascinated by pong and was interested to write a pong program, again, when my sister was 12-14 she was probably bored to tears by pong and she wouldn't even dream of wasting time to write a pong program.

I thought publishers use copyright not patents to protect their content.

Why do you care about the feelings of the "community"?

A thing is good or bad in itself (make your own opinion), it doesn't matter what is the opinion of some vocal people, especially that they don't get to contribute code to the client, it would be more relevant if the client were open source but is not.

That's a good point, and actually the clothes are probably more important than the color of the skin, just think about meeting a black guy dressed with a Hugo Boss suit somewhere in downtown and meeting in a bad part of town a white dude with tattoos and pants that hangs down... yes, don't deny it, you are probably going to pre-judge them, but which one are you going to be afraid of?

Not worse, but different, racism and anti-Semitism are different things (they might manifest in the same micro-brain, but they are different).

Not only this, but the interest in which browser is on top should decline, the very fact that people give a damn which browser is more popular is because browsers are not compatible and people hope their favorite browser would become the default browser that people would code site for.

So you consider something as being "wrong" just because three people have some arguments against it? Not even that good arguments if you take a look, one uses a slippery slope fallacy and another one is about the feeling of non-Christians (it's debatable which of BCE/CE and BC/AD are more appropriate for non-Christians...)

Regardless of arguments and how good they are, it rubs me the wrong way your certainty "it's also the wrong notation", a more honest approach would be "there are opinions against it".

Universities are the only part of US education that works and makes money (actually they bring a lot of money into US). If you'd see lower tuition (and it's debatable how much would drop if there were no loans because there are enough rich people that could send their kids to expensive schools), you'd also see lower payed professors that would not be as good as they are, the good ones would go to the universities that do have money regardless of the students tuition. Basically you'd only shift things so fewer people would be able to send their kids to good universities.