Seems to me a certain House Representative back in the 1950s pioneered this method.

Slashdot seems to me to be a proponent of the open source movement, the software development methodology that Bradley Kuhn rightly called "greenwashing" (another copy) the free software movement by talking about much the same software and licenses but without the freedom talk in order to placate business interests seeking to proprietarize software. Consider the case in this thread—defending copyleft—this clearly shows the difference between the two movements. The older free software movement wants to preserve software freedom while the younger open source movement was built to not discuss software freedom at all. Kuhn's personal blog post on this topic describes the situation very well and with no punches pulled.

When you come across someone who talks and works to defend software freedom, such as Richard Stallman, in a forum whose participants are (be they a proprietor's shill or genuinely describing their own view) devoted to supporting the kind of power over the user that strongly copylefted licenses, such as the GNU GPLs, were built to withstand you're going to find people using whatever namecalling and misrepresentative tactics they can come up with to try and malign Stallman (as if that would somehow reflect badly on software freedom). The complaints get weaker over time (remember when people used to complain that the GPL wasn't defensible in court?) so the objectors have to find other avenues to try and distract people into not thinking in terms of software freedom. It wouldn't matter if software freedom were proposed and initially championed by someone wholly objectionable; that wouldn't make software freedom a bad thing. Talking about Stallman instead of talking about software freedom is doing that distractionary work because the facts on the ground fail to back the case that we're better off without software freedom.

From the "Second Amendment" point of view- if the government has drones that can fire missiles, why shouldn't we have drones that can fire handguns?

Still, I dislike the engineering method of this. I think there's a far better way to do it, there is no need for a grip or trigger on a mounted gun, that's just extra weight.

"Enlightenment" is just another name for blowing your mind out on drugs until you can't tell the difference between right and wrong and can't remember history.

The "might makes right" crowd is on your side of "progress"- that's why they keep killing children in the womb and selling their body parts online.

That doesn't sound like progress to me. That sounds like regression to where we were circa 8000 BCE.

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."- Justice Kennedy in PPvCasey, 1992, explaining why his future self would push for gay marriage.

Seems like "Progress" is rather primitive to me- it's just the right to live out a fantasy in defiance of objective reality.

Indeed, compilers already automate so much of our programming job. I remember having to avoid using multiplication by a constant if speed was important, and choosing all sorts of crazy things, just because they ran faster... now, the compiler automates this for me, and I can write code that is more legible and clear.

This is just yet, another form of optimization, which computers have been doing for us for like at least 10 years already...

Maybe it never tried.

That and also more importantly: because nature's idea of "better" is almost never the same as our idea of "better." I think it's wonderful that the performance example that they used, happened to be binding to cancer cells. If cancer doesn't illustrate the vast gulf between us and it, I don't know what does!

grep "terror" /var/log/mail.log

The article left out that terrorists will be required to send from a hostname that has the word "terror" in it. Failure to do so, is a violation and will be punished!

Not sure I can duplicate, due to the other strangeness I'm dealing with (It's a cross-database query and the other database doesn't have a primary key, just sets of fields with unique constraints). It may have also been a Select Distinct that I thought I had applied but didn't; the one row that was duplicating did have two in the parent table.