Considering recent studies show that cancer is more likely to be caused by genetics than smoking ... you might want to adjust your ignorant holier than thou attitude and learn how science actually works rather than blindly believing shit you've been indoctrinated with and being too stupid to think for yourself.

Death is more likely to be caused by car accidents than being eaten by wolves. Therefore, being eaten by wolves doesn't cause death. Science, bitches.

So, in summary, vaccines are one thing, out of many, that help your immune system and reduce your chances of infection. If you assign liability, or worse, criminality, to not boosting your immune system in one way, why not the others too?

Because some things are easier and more effective than others, so the reasonableness of the requirement and the benefits of compliance are different. How is this question different from, "You're not allowed to drive while drunk, but why just have that rule and not also a universal speed limit of 2 mph if we care about safety?"

Sadly, I can't argue with a straight face that they won't do exactly that, or that a large portion of the public will actually believe it.

Good. That's something that you can at least respond to in front of a judge. "Are there bad pictures on my phone? No? Then give me my car back." On the drug side it was, "Nice cash. You're probably going to use it to buy drugs, so it's ours now." How can you even theoretically respond to that? If it's your word against theirs and there's no evidence to break the tie either way, you're screwed.

My primary worry is that the child porn hole will result in more people having to track down the source of every movie in their porn collection to show that everybody was 18 years old and if they can't, they lose their property. That could be a huge mess. We'll see if "child pornography" arrests based on somebody having a lot of videos suddenly skyrocket to make up the lost income from drug seizures.

At least with child pornography, they have to have some sort of evidence that you might be involved in child pornography. Even flimsy evidence. With drugs, all they needed was to find you carrying a lot of cash or a nice car and say that they were suspicious of you. The "drug dog alerted on his car outside the view of the dash cam" or the, "only drug dealers carry large amounts of cash" lines are totally irrefutable wildcards that the cops could use to steal your stuff if they saw you on the street with something valuable. It's a lot harder to steal your car or your cash on suspicion of child porn during a routine traffic stop. At least they need to pull some Internet records and search your house to see if you have any in your possession.

Exactly. Every time something like this happens, the government appears within a couple of days and says, "We've used the data we have to reconstruct everything that happened. Also, in order to prevent future attacks, we need more data." The story they're telling is not consistent with needing more data. It's the story of an organization that's awash in so much data that it can't make any useful predictions from it. It's only useful in hindsight.

I personally believe (and I accept that I cannot prove this) that a great many people who are currently speaking in favour of Charlie Hebdo's right to deliberately offend a "them" would take offense to the Sia video and would be denouncing her right to incidentally offend the "us".

How many of those people you imagine exist do you imagine would change their tune if the people who worked on the video were all shot in the head?

sounds like you're the one with the problem. Its simple - if you insult a person, expect them to respond. If you greatly insult a person, expect them to respond greatly. Your actions have consequences, same as anyone else. If you your a man, man up and accept them.

Is there an upper limit on what "greatly" means for the response? Arson? Murder? Nuclear war? Destruction of your planet and its three nearest neighbors?

Boy, that didn't come across clearly or nicely. Americans and US government agencies actually own most of US federal debt. The breakdown for the debt that's held by foreigners is here. Looks like China is the biggest holder of about 7% of our total debt and about 20% of our total foreign debt. Japan is a very close second, but for some reason they stopped being a major bogeyman sometime in the 90s.

No, it doesn't.

That really only works if your rational explanation isn't another basically omnipotent being. If I say, "We found your DNA on the knife," and you say, "That's also consistent with an inconceivably advanced alien beaming my DNA into the vial," I suppose that's true, but by that standard, can anything at all be proven?

Sure, it's not possible for us to distinguish between an omnipotent being revealing itself and a slightly-less-than-omnipotent being messing with you, but you can't meaningfully distinguish between *any* observation and a slightly-less-than-omnipotent being messing with you. So unless you want to put the word "prove" away on the shelf for good, I don't think the "Can I tell if it's a nearly omnipotent alien messing with me?" test is a useful metric for provability.

If you want to go that route, at some point you just throw up your hands and say nothing can be proven, which is OK, but it kind of makes the word "proven" useless in general conversation. I mean, the flu may be caused by advanced aliens as well, but we're OK with calling the germ theory of disease more or less proven.

Being able to cut deals like that would definitely be cool. But from the looks of it, being able to cut those deals will come with other baggage, like major ISPs picking and choosing winners in the content industry, squeezing out competition in favor of their own products, and extracting monopoly rents not just from their own customers but from profitable media suppliers as well. So you have efficient taylored packages like what you describe on one hand, and on the other hand you have the potential for an Internet future that looks a lot like buying channel packages from your cable company. I don't see a lot of cool deals like the one you described being cut, but I am starting to see examples of the monopoly abuse stuff.

So on the balance, it seems like until we can figure out a way to de-monopolize the ISP business, the net neutrality vs custom bandwidth contracts debate is just another case of, "This is why we can't have nice things."

Seems like seizing and selling the car they were driving illegally is one reasonable option. They could keep doing it, but most people will eventually run out of cars.

And as for the analyst who was spying on her spouse, she's damn lucky she got a slap on the wrist. She could have gotten much, much worse for that.

That's kind of the problem. She could have and should have gotten much worse. The fact that she didn't indicates a serious dysfunction in the system. And it's the type of dysfunction that sounds a lot like the type of arrogant, "The rules don't apply to us," and, "If you're not police, you're nobody," attitude you get from dangerously corrupt police forces in countries we sneer at. That's not good. Not good at all.

Given that, I have a very hard time buying the idea that these people take their jobs seriously at all. Anybody who took that job seriously would have immediately stomped down on that person, drummed her out of the service, and immediately made changes to make sure it didn't happen again.