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Comment Re:I must live in a different country... (Score 1) 1374

I hear my fellow Americans talk about needing guns in every room of the house to ward off the nightly assaults of Orc maurders but what country do these people actually live in? How many times has anyone ever personally had to fire a gun for self defense?

Trolling won't help, especially with something as flagrantly invented to distort reality.

Reality is that people know that the 2nd amendment is not, and was not, primarily intended to protect yourself from a bad guy. The primary purpose of the 2nd amendment is for the populace to defend themselves against tyranny.

Really? Please, in this age of the NSA surveillance state and free speech zones, let me know when my fellow gun owners are or are planning on defending themselves against tyranny. All I see is tacit complicity with the actual tyranny and a bunch of idiots in Nevada defending a tax avoider on Fox News.

Comment Re:Gun nuts (Score 2) 1374

There are commonly used legal/medical avenues to declare a person unfit to make life-changing decisions for themselves, to declare guardianship by others, and to likewise screen out those that are a danger to themselves and others.

How else do you think there's a legal basis for taking away grandma's car keys when her driving is a danger to everyone else on the road?

As a gun owner, I would welcome having to take a screening along with my weapons safety and firearm training classes. Especially if it meant some of the loons out there would be weeded out from gun ownership.

Comment Interest (Score 2) 405

Making an easy mode golf will surely bring people back to the expensive courses, like Reynolds Plantation resort! In fact, they should invent a throwing golf - Americans like throwing things - they could even use some sort of flattened plastic disc, to make it more aerodynamic. If only golf would be more innovative like that, people would flock to play golf!

Sarcasm aside, my friends and I never cared about how "hard" golf was. In fact, most of the charm of actually going out and playing was laughing about how bad we all were. We don't go back very often because most of us can think of 30 or 40 other things that we'd rather be doing for those 6 hour consecutive stretches on a weekend.

Comment Re:Why fear designer babies? (Score 1) 155

The assumption here is that there is no set of genes that are guaranteed to be purely negative for humankind. That's just false. There's just no reason we'd want to let somebody grow up with cystic fibrosis, for instance.

Yes, except being heterozygous for the cystic fibrosis mutation actually turns out to give resistance to cholera, in the same way that being heterozygous for sickle cell gives resistance to malaria.

The sickle-cell anemia vs. malaria case is actually unusual, and a population high in sickle-cell anemic individuals is not actually a desirable outcome.

The former is false, the latter is true. The only reason something as disadvantageous as sickle cell has existed to be passed down through the generations is, and I cannot stress this enough, malaria is such a horrible disease (and thus a good natural selector) that such a disadvantage can be outweighed by its survival advantage in heterozygous form. There is NOTHING unusual about that situation; if it was unusual 200 years ago, sickle cell as a trait would have quietly died out.

Also, if we can prevent genetic engineering, then surely we can prevent choosing the gender of children. If you can't prevent choosing the children's gender, then how do you think we can prevent other genetic engineering?

You can't. Once the Pandora's Box is open to the rich, enough money can not only get the genetic meddling done, but keep the appropriate parties quiet. But just like you don't get rid of murder by outlawing it, it doesn't mean society should give a green light to weeding out diversity from the human genome based on what popular culture believes is attractive and beneficial today.

Comment Re:Paranoia (Score 1) 155

They lead to more spying, which is what GP said but was omitted in your quote.

I omitted it because it it is true. I question the part about "more death and destruction". I am allowed to question part of a statement without questioning every singe part.

And sooner or later they'll be armed, let's not kid our selves.

Spying does not inevitably lead to armed drones, lets not be paranoid. If armed drones are ever proposed then we can deal with the proposal. That is not happening now so lets just deal with surveillance drones.

My original statement still holds "Not all government drones are bad".

Wait, what??? "If armed drones are ever proposed then we can deal with the proposal." Is this along the same vein as, when the US government gave the CIA and NSA armed drones with Hellfire missiles, there was a very public and conscientious debate about their use, when to use them, when not to use them, and who will provide oversight and transparency to the process of killing by armed drone?

I agree 100% with the grandparent poster. We'll know when the drones are armed after the trigger is already pulled.

Comment Re:Personal Drones (Score 1) 155

It amazes me how people don't understand that owning weaponry is a right that NO OTHER CITIZEN is supposed to be able to infringe. Every single adult citizen is supposed to be able to own a weapon, regardless of training or qualification. The only true qualification is to be alive. You, me, your waiter, your drycleaner, EVERYONE.

Um, no. Just like the freedom of speech is not 100% absolute, there are reasonable limits to owning weaponry. Felons, especially with violent crime histories, and people with mental illnesses rendering judgement suspect have NO BUSINESS owning firearms or gaining access to them. The regular citizenry, with a few exceptions, doesn't need to own heavy weaponry (what some people arbitrarily separate into "ordnance").

The truth is, every right, including every constitutional right, has its logical limits. What they are is up for healthy debate. But until the fringe of the gun rights crowd can mature enough to realize that yes, healthy limits do exist, they will be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Comment Re:wouldn't matter if it weren't canned (Score 1) 396

This is a nicely sanitized story with a pro-Russian jingoistic slant, and is nearly identical to the propaganda coming out of the Putin mouthpieces. Completely missing are the brutal suppression tactics by Yanukovych and his cronies on the protesters in Ukraine, the looting of Ukraine's economy and corruption that occurred under his leadership and his puppet status to Moscow.

This is like a setpiece on Syria and Bashar al-Assad that neglects the fact that al-Assad imprisoned, tortured and killed tens of thousands of his own subjects in his quest to retain power, even before foreign extremists started supporting both sides. Oh yeah, little details like that.

Comment Re:Old proverb (Score 1) 396

BS? Diane Feinstein said "Snowden should be killed", as did at least a dozen other politicians and heads of 3 letter agencies. His trial would have been any different than any other whistle blower trial? Meaning they would be fair and impartial in both verdict and penalties. Was media blocked from broadcasting slander or printing libel statements against him so he had a chance of getting a fair trial? (Claiming a person is guilty and treasonous when the person has never been in court is slander and/or libel, go check a law book).

Those allegations are all based on verifiable facts. Facts are not BS, unless you are delusional. You on the other hand, are handing out an opinion without any factual basis. Your circular logic about him running would be laughable if it was not so pathetic and popular as propaganda.

Citation, please. Extraordinary claims... I just ran a google search on Dianne Feinstein calling for Edward Snowden to be killed, and turned up zero hits. Now I also found a ton of articles saying Feinstein and other career politicians butthurt in the scandal were calling him a criminal. But please, feel free to support your assertions.

Comment Re:Useful Idiot (Score 1) 396

So you would rather that he should have stayed to be broken like Manning?

A safer, and more intellectually sound, option would be to become an anonymous whistleblower, like Deep Throat / Mark Felt. You don't get the notoriety, but then you also don't become Vladimir Putin's sock puppet when it becomes convenient.

Comment Re:Relevant Skills (Score 2) 355

"Kids these days can't even swipe a tablet, all wired-up as they are with these direct brain interfaces! It's terrible I tell you, terrible!"

In 2025, they probably will be stuck in their Buy 'N Large hover recliners, with drones delivering everything and informercials streamed directly to their heads-up or retinal displays. They won't need silly things like "interfaces" for antiquated notions like "choice".

Comment Re:Simple math (Score 4, Informative) 245

Today, the PC market isn't really about pushing hardware. Remember Crysis? It sold nothing,

In the first couple weeks, Crysis sold ~90,000 copies. The developers were vocally disappointed by this, and immediately blamed the large amount of piracy of the game for poor sales, Crysis then went on and sold ~1 million copies in the following two months, and is presently sitting somewhere around 3 million copies sold.

Which means Crysis is now #33 in the list of "best selling PC games of all time".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

That is not "selling nothing".

Comment Re:how many Glassholes will get mugged? (Score 1) 167

And I cannot wait to see people who kick the shift out of glassholes facing legal consequences for thinking that they somehow have a right to enforce what they believe on others through violence.

And honestly, you may be waiting a while! For there are surely legal consequences for such things, but the police and judges are human and tend to view unexciting assault and battery cases as exactly that.

I mean, seriously, how many people as a percentage actually serve jail time for bar fights? Not many, and there are some serious injuries from those. And let's not forget extenuation - if Peter gets up in the face of the elderly mother of Paul and starts screaming at her for road rage and Paul punches his lights out, Paul may be congratulated by the arresting police officer after he's let off with probation. If Paul claims Peter was harassing him with his Glassholeness Sarah Slocum-style, Paul likely walks with community service.

And let's not forget, the police only have so much manpower and funding. Hell, they can't even muster up enough time here at my hometown to shut down any of the massage parlors for blatant sex trafficking of illegal immigrants. Robberies may take a while to investigate. Do you think police officers, who most likely already view Glassholes in a dim light, are going to be spending much time about finding out who Random Guy A was who punched the Glasshole recording him at a local bar?

Comment Re:And there was much rejoicing (Score 1) 167

And how about we quit acting like this is the end of privacy and not CCTVs or the NSA.

That's weird. I didn't realize because X and Y are worse on a continuum of bad things, it means Z is somehow A-OK!

I hate the NSA and it's intrusions. I hate CCTV and the casual police state. Oh, and I hate Google Glass and its commercialization of the surveillance state.

See? Is that so hard?

Comment Psychohistory (Score 1) 136

This story actually really interested me - On its face, the idea of a website that does these things: Poses user-submitted predictive questions, with user profiles so you can track the most successful predictors, and probably some sort of range voting system for the actual voting process, seems like a really swell idea.

Unfortunately, I've not nearly the technical skills or capability to jump into making a website that aggregates questions, votes, user statistics, graphs, profiles and so on. I went ahead and did the next best thing I could think of: http://psychohis7ory.blogspot....

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