Actually, it would make sense to charge smokers less than the non-smokers for health insurance.

Sure, smokers die early. But the typical reasons for a smoker to die are quite cheap for health insurance. Yes, lung cancer is nasty, but you are dead after half a year. A healthy non-smoker with just a tad high blood pressure gets fifteen years of treatment until he dies.

Not the nicotine itself, but the amide of nicotinic acid, namely nicotinamide a.k.a. Vitamin B3.

But that's the general problem with many toxins: They are often toxic because they are so similar to a very important compound that's quite necessary for us, and they poison us, because they are nearly, but not completely right.

That's because many people listen to those who talk about the "viral GPL" (the copyright law itself is viral as it requires each derivative work to be licensed, thus any license that deals with copyright has to be "viral". GPL is no exception), and how it complicates the licensing process. I have to deal with proprietary licenses every day, and I can tell you that any other license model I have encountered is more complicated and more burdensome than the GPL. I estimate that about 10 percent of my work time is spend on ironing out licensing issues.

If you don't get your information from the actual institution that invented and maintains the GPL, but from secondary sources, you are prone to run into misconceptions and misleading ideas. But generally, hearsay is a bad advisor.

People are not used to the GPL, don't know how it works, and then don't use the GPL. This is at first a problem of the people not educate themselves about the GPL. The license itself is clear: Yes, you distribute the original code or your derivative work upstream, as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedoms you had when you got the original code. It's quite simple.

And this is the real difference between BSD and GPL: as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedoms. BSD doesn't have a provision like this. BSD allows you to take away freedoms you enjoyed. Some people argue this would somehow be more free.

The whole amount of money that all governments of the world spend on climate research and weather prediction per year is about 5 billion dollars. Yes, that's a huge amount. But just for comparisation: the fracking industry in the U.S. alone has invested about 1400 billion dollars. So if you are looking for a wellpaid research job, don't become a climate scientist. There is no money in it.

Greece is actually an example of the "low taxes for rich people" approach, not for collectivism. In Greece, allowing rich people and property owners to avoid taxes brought the whole state in financial disarray while at the same time "trickle down" economics just didn't work.

From a taxation point of view, Greece is a libertarian heaven. Your point being?

You don't get me, right? People eat rice, because this is the cheapest food available. Some people can afford only rice and nothing else. Those people thus have a quite unbalanced diet, and Vitamine A is one (but not the only) nutritient that is underrepresented.

To solve this problem by adding Vitamine A to the rice is misguided. The diet is still unbalanced, and just adding more and more nutritients to rice will just make the crop yield less in general, being thus more expensive, and people will still be poor and not able to afford anything but rice - and in general more of the old fashioned white rice as this one will still be cheaper.

It would make more sense to empower those people to earn more money to pay for a much more balanced food.

Golden rice solves just the wrong problem. Yes, there are people who don't get enough Vitamine A, but to solve it by increasing the price of the only food they can afford does not exactly solve this problem. There are cheaper rice crops with higher yield than Golden rice.

I consider most people in Gamer Gate as trolls, and I am no feminist.

Actually, Saturn also has a moon that is larger than Earth's Moon, Titan. Albeit the largest moon of Neptune, Triton, misses the size of Earth's Moon by about 200 km of radius.

It is not as it doesn't dominate its orbit around the Sun (this orbit is dominated by Earth).

Oh, Slashdot ate my degree sign.

The only planet whose north pole is not on the same side of the Ecliptic as the Earth's north pole is Uranus. In Uranus' case, the north pole is nearly in the Ecliptic itself, tilted at 98. All the other planets have their rotation axis (axial tilt) either nearly vertical to their orbit plane (e.g. Mercury, Venus, Jupiter), or tilted at about 20-30 (Earth, Mars, Saturn, Neptune).

The company I work for is considering to outsource their service division to IBM...

The human as a species is not stabile in any biological sense. To the contrary, it seems as if the genetic drift within the human genome has sped up considerably in the last 5,000 years.