I cannot keep up with the contortion of intellectual dishonesty required to type that sentence with a straight face. I don't think you're lying to me and that you really believe this, but I equally believe that you're lying to yourself. Have a nice day and best of luck in your future endeavors.

It was no less than Thomas Jefferson who said:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

Next, your strawman:

Correct. Still doesn't. You're legally entitled to say "blacks are of the devil" (or whites for that matter). Go ahead! No government agency will stop you. However, you're not allowed to discriminate based on race, color, religion or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce (court-upheld interpretation: pretty much anywhere).

No one believes that any of our rights are unlimited. You can speak your opinion, but you can't yell fire in a theater. You can bear arms, but don't expect to own a nuclear bomb. You can sincerely believe that whites are a superior species to blacks, but you don't get to own, kill, intimidate, lynch, or otherwise harm a black guy, regardless of your vile beliefs. This isn't something I'm making up out of whole cloth, but well-established and widely accepted interpretation of Federal law.

Read your Constitution, son. The 14th amendment says:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This codified previous Constitutional supremacy thoughts by explicitly stating that States don't get to write laws violating the Constitution or selectively affording privileges to one group and not another.

Except we've decided as a country that there are certain ways it's not OK to be an asshole, particularly when it's because the other person is black, female, Muslim, etc. I did not advocate for restricting free speech. I'm advocating for what law already says regarding other minority classes: feel free to speak your mind, but you shouldn't get to act against gay people any more than you're allowed to act against black people.

I'm dyed-in-the-wool small-l libertarian (and a registered large-L), but I'm horrified at the idea of passing laws to explicitly protect the "right" to discriminate against minorities. "First they came ..." and all that; we shouldn't be looking for new and creative ways to crap on our neighbors.

You mean the case where the court ruled very narrowly that atheism should be afforded the same legal respect as religions when ensuring the rights of people holding those opinions? You would be hard pressed to choose a case less helpful to your viewpoint.

So you're not American and you're unfamiliar with American law, but feel compelled to comment on a case involving one particular American state. Allow me to give you a quick introduction: your opinion is explicitly opposed to American case law. Feel free to speculate as much as you'd care to, but understand that from a US point of view, you are completely wrong.

Recently, because of stupid laws like Indiana's RFRA which would prevent a minority chunk of their population from living theirs. "Opposition to bigotry" is not "bigotry".

Are ye daft, son? That's exactly what it says: religion cannot become the basis for law. It is literally impossible for my religion to write laws without prohibiting your free exercise thereof; that's what laws do.

IHBT. Sigh. I hope you're trolling anyway, because I'd hate to think that an adult could pack that much accidental ignorance into a single sentence. No courts have ruled that way, and atheism cannot be a religion (any more than my lack of belief in the Tooth Fairy establishes me as an "aTooth-Fairyist").

You can say asshole things to people, but there are enumerated acts of assholery that are explicitly illegal. You have the freedom of speech, but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says it ends at the cash register.

Jesus fucking Christ. What backwoods school did you go to that didn't teach American History? The rules you're protesting have been the law of the land for 51 years now and somehow we've persevered. Your opinion is wrong. We took a vote and decided, almost half a century ago. You lost.

Yes, I'm angry. I'm having a hard time believing the among of ignorant bigotry I've seen pouring into Slashdot very recently. Where the hell did you guys come from? Were you here all along, and just recently felt brave enough to come out of your hateful little closet?

I ask this honestly: would you have used the same argument when "those people" were blacks who didn't believe in "separate but equal", or is this your new opinion that only applies to gay citizens? Suppose I own a hamburger stand, that I am a white man, and that I dislike blacks and gays. By your words, it would seem that you'd be OK with me selling hamburgers to white men but not black men. If I am incorrect, what distinction do you draw between a black man and a gay man that would compel me to do business with the former but not require me to serve the latter?

It's right next to "freedom of speech", which I'd lay down cash that you claim to cherish.

Grownups understand that things like "freedom of speech" and "separation of church and state" are phrases that refer to an enormous body of legal rulings that collectively establish and define those concepts. Grownups also recognize that "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins", and that a law keeping you from being an asshole to people you don't like is not oppressing your religious rights.

Your analogy is completely wrong. Of course a pet store owner would be within their right to refuse the sale of an animal to a person that's going to abuse it.

A better example would be a shop worker refusing serve a gay man because the shop worker's religion says that homosexuality is a sin.

Religious Freedom is about the freedom to practice your religion, not to use it as an excuse to be an asshole to people.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what religion is about these days.

What they're trying to say, using the usual feminist sociology over-loquatiousness is:

For some on the planet, keeping it under 2 degrees will preserve a relatively familiar or at least acceptable quality of life.

For others on the planet, quality of life can only be preserved by keeping it under, say 1.5 degrees, or even one degree.

The first group (that can live with a higher threshold) are those in the upper portions of the global economic scale, and it's an acceptable rise for them because they can also afford technologies and tools (getting crude, say, air conditioners, new home materials, new kinds of agricultural output, etc.) that make a 2 degree rise tolerable.

The second group (that can't live at the 2 degree threshold, and really need a lower one) are going to tend to be in the lower portions of the global economic scale, who won't have access to the technologies and tools that make a 2 degree rise livable for those at the top of the scale.

Policymakers and scientists tend, by virtue of their privileged position, to be in the first group, and have thus set the 2 degree rise in connection with thinking of their own, best-case lifestyles, rather than—say—a member of one of the globe's largely impoverished equatorial populations without access to much in the way of resources, tools, or technologies already.

It's a good point: the effects are not uniform, and if 2 degrees is the upper bound for the people who are the globe's *most* comfortable, then it's probably a bad upper bound in general, because it will "cook" (even more than already occurs) those that are the *least* comfortable.

It was, however, bad language and clarity—which is a sin that social science commits far too often.

Their point is well taken:

And that's not all. From her Wikipedia page:

Following an August 4, 2010, federal court ruling that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, Fiorina expressed disagreement with the ruling, saying that California voters spoke clearly against same-sex unions when a majority approved the proposition in 2008.

And she wants to lead the Executive Branch?

Majority != Constitutional.

And she's got a bit of money. So .... what's she been doing with it AS A PRIVATE INDIVIDUAL to help with any of the "problems" that she's talking about?

So far it looks like a lot of paid speaking engagements. She is paid to be "concerned" but she doesn't fund anything herself.

They're getting cracked because they're not paying attention to their security.

After resetting users passwords, Twitch initially introduced longer password character requirements, but had to dial back its new 20-character password length requirement to 8 characters after users complained.

Fuck you! If you cannot detect and mitigate a brute force attack then hire someone who can.

Twitch also said it encrypted passwords, but warned that hackers might have been able to capture passwords in the clear as users were logging on.

And make sure you know the difference between encrypted and hashed.