Do you really think mass surveillance has anything to do with "terror" instead of mainly industrial espionage to boost your country's (and campaign contributor's) business.

"I skipped a bit" = (...)
Pause = ...

"I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet!" he hissed. "I'm afraid of grounds." "You mean heights," said Conina. "And stop being silly." "I know what I mean! It's the grounds that kill you!"

        -- (Terry Pratchett, Sourcery)

"Without profit, companies wont do the research necessary to create the drugs. Without profits companies won't create the manufacturing systems necessary to make drugs widely available. Without capitalism doctors won't make heart transplants a routine occurrence."

Cuba disagrees. And even if you're not willing to go that far, you'd realize there's other ways of producing meds and doing research other than private for-profit ones.

I have never heard of such a thing here, and I live in argentina, which is supposed to be a 3rd world country. A few years ago I considered the possibility to go live in the US (my girlfriend at the time had got a grant there so I was consider going with her), and the cost of healthcare was my biggest reason not to do it.

Man, how I wish I had mod points. I always tell the same to every idiot who comes babbling about how they earned their stuff on their own, with nobody's help (self-made man bullshit) so they can justify being self-centered, every-man-for-himself assholes. The fact that some people manage to get where they get in life (no matter how much hard work they put in it), because we live in a society organized in a way that gives them that possibility, and that it's the same society that denies that possibility to others, seems to be incomprehensible to some people. or maybe they're just selfish and don't want to take responsibility for their role in all of this.

Also, the brain size doesn't necessarily account for anything important. I was under the impression that it's the neuronal/synapse density and its interconnection complexity that matters, not the size.

Actually, I was thinking that if people get to choose how their kids will look.. imagine would fads play into this. When a particular set of attributes become the most popular and a high percentage of the population decide to have offspring that have almost the same characteristics.. I don't know, couldn't it be pretty dangerous, messing around like that with genetic diversity?

Obviously, I'm not a biologist :P

I can't believe I had to scroll down like a dozen comments before someone actually pointed this out.
Thank you.

Our countries may very well be spying on others, but that doesn't mean it's OK, and (I think) most of us don't approve of that, be it done by our own country or by others. Just because it's commonplace doesn't mean we shouldn't expose it every chance we get and complain about it. Actually, the fact that it's become so common that some people think it's no big deal means, to me at least, that we should be even more vocal about it.

I cycle to work, 6km round trip (I cycle to the train station then do the rest of the commute by train). Then I do indoor climbing twice a week for a 2 to 3 hours, and I play 5v5 or 8v8 football (soccer for the americans here) once or twice a week.
During week days I hace orange juice and coffee for breakfast, maybe some buscuits (just a couple) then I get either a good salad and fruit or some vegetarian dish for lunch. I do eat meat, but moderately and at dinner or on weekends (usually on sundays, as it's somewhat of a tradition here in argentina).
I only eat junk food like cheetos and such at parties or when I meet with friends for a beer, never at work or at home, and I rarely drink coca cola or anything like that. Mostly water and beer :)

I'm paying my ISP for a service. I'm not paying google for gmail or google+

So, let me get this straight.

Joe goes and buys seeds from monsanto. They belong to him now, as he paid for them. Mind you, he didn't loan, rent or anything like that.. he BOUGHT the seeds. So how on earth does monsanto get any say in how Joe uses HIS seeds? Something's very very wrong here. Patents are not EULAs (and for the record, I also think EULAs that dictate how you can use your own bought copy of any software is also bullshit. You're restricted by copyright law, meaning you can't redistribute without permission and some limitations like that, but otherwise it's YOUR copy and once you bought it companies should have no say whatsoever on what you can do with it in your own home as long as you're not violating copyright law).

I'll take a biased article in which the bias is explicit, and just work with it to extract any interesting information (and opinions) I can from it, over an imaginary "unbiased" article (which has never existed anywhere) any day. Bias is not a problem, it might even be argued that it's sincere. Trying to pass off anything as completely objective is imho much less honest.

why? the title says it: "attempts". Censorship doesn't need to actually succeed to be outrageous.

Wait, you mean there was a debate (I assume there was some kind of public, but I didn't RTFA, this is /. after all), and NO ONE recorded it? No one posted it to youtube? is that even possible nowadays?