Stupidity tax: we collects it!

now seriously, the parent is right: somehow, some (a lot of?) people have lost something that is a very useful evolutionary trait: skepticism; for most of our fellow mammals, the lack of it usually means an early death (think mouse who eats poisoned food or walks into a trap without sniffing around, think the La Brea pits, think predator trying to bite more than it can chew)

Unfortunately for our species, these things most of the time only cost some discomfort (money lost), and are not life endangering; methinks we would have a much saner world if the latter were the case.

except it's a bit reversed: businesses are the ones suing :D

Mr Crichton's points in that book are still pretty much valid, though.

this is (slowly) changing, as more and more people can afford high quality cameras and lenses; while most of them will be just as crappy a photographer as before, some are bound to out-talent (and eventually outnumber) the so-called "pros"

and some of those who are really good are bound to do it as a means of expressing themselves (giving the results away for fame - getting laid being the ultimate purpose :P) rather than as a means to make a$$loads of money (which only happens to a handful of high end photographers, anyway, the rest are left simmering in their own mediocrity and decrying the state of the industry being ruined by those pesky amateurs)

yep, just like you can't find anything on bugmenot any more, everyone "opted out"

kinda defeats the purpose of ad blocking.

I'm rather sure that if religious types would keep their religion for themselves and contain their own wackos nobody would have a problem with them.

But when:

• my kids - if I'll ever manage to have any - will have to study christian orthodox religion in school and learn that if they don't say their prayers they'll get hit by a car - this being in a country that's supposedly secular, mind you
• the education minister says "we don't want to raise godless robots"
• a senator says the atheists are dangerous
• the prime minister is consulting with the head of the church whether to uncriminalise prostitution or not (I'll leave you to guess the result), and about the definition of marriage (ended up with "union between man and woman")
• some other MPs gather a crowd to protest against a (non-public) lesbians' meeting (I dislike the attention whores' parades, but a private, no-media, event? wtf?) - and they're from the governing party
• a nation-wide HPV vaccination attempt has failed due to religious wackos spreading FUD
• religious fundamentalists have monopolised the discution about RFID passports and turned it into "omg they'll brand us with the number 666" crap, so people who have reasonable complaints about this can't get their voice heard any more
• this year's budget gives money for 806 new churches, 242 schools, 36 hospitals, 37 cultural centres

it starts to become annoying. really annoying.

this reminds me of Michael Crichton's "State of Fear"; while being rather lousy piece as literature goes, it is still an interesting read as a rant on media hyped bad science :)

not very likely, taking into account that browsers have been waging war against self-signed/free certificates for a while and the "warnings" are getting worse with every release (I, a geek, had a hard time finding the tiny "add an exception" in Firesloth^H^H^H^H^Hfox 3, and found it impossible to explain over the phone how to do it to someone not so computer literate)

yeah, according to that page, they are winners of the "Red herring Europe" award ;)

if someone steals my IP I'll just use another one... or keep it and also use their MAC address for interesting results ;-)

it's not like automatic virus removal hasn't been done before (remember the W32.Welchia family?) ;)

... unless, like a lot of Americans, one equates capitalism with corporatism (a.k.a. oligarchy), which is not that far away from communism: both mean the economical and political power are concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, which dispose of it as they please and can't be held accountable for their actions; in other words, communism is man exploiting man, corporatism (American implementation of capitalism) is the other way around.