and restricting access to the DNA that would let drug cartels reproduce them

One problem there - Humans contain the DNA for producing morphine. It works so well precisely because out body already uses it to regulate our natural pain response.

You could ask the same about why a US dollar has a higher value than a Mexican Peso.

Whoever used bitcoin is on a watch list.

Would you like some Taco Bell to go with your paranoia?

FWIW, that'd make for a preeety long list at this point... The feds might do better just using the phone book.

...well, maybe they weren't happy with the specifics of the Nationalist-Socialist platform. (I bet it was the anti-smoking mindset.) It's not quite as if neo-Nazis have a monopoly on profound racism, or even a monopoly on holocaust denial. Sometimes it's just desirable for the sake of some local variety of nationalism to pretend the Jews weren't as abused during World War 2 as they actually were.

This is the same asshole who buys a pretty little property out in the countryside, and then after a year or two launches a farm practices complaint to shut down the neighbouring farms (which have only been there for two hundred years) because they smell like farms.

Then he shows up in town council explaining that only sociopaths raise farm animals.

What an incredible self-interest bullshit configurator this man possesses.

Get the fuck off my moral lawn.

The only assumption you should be making is that nothing is secure.

I'll file that right beside "In the beginning, God created the universe, and it was good."

...But it's okay, because he actually died years ago; no one has bothered to check because he continues to emit information.

In tech today if you dont speak english your dead in the water.

Emphasis on the word "speak".

Vigorous!

Maybe unlimited storage of email text?

I believe the correct response to extremist right wing guff like this is "fuck off to Somalia then you retard".

As a liberal, do you actually approve of your tax dollars funding the killing of brown people on the other side of the planet because something something terrorism ?

It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming.

Simply not true, unless you believe that non-terrible code requires God himself to reach down and personally touch type.

I heard a bit of CBC episode recently, where a breathing consultant by the name of James Chambers argues that humans are terrible at breathing, and that with proper training (this takes about a year), we're almost competent (and then flowers bloom everywhere in an orchestral swell).

Breathe In, Breathe Out

One thing I will say is that a programmer is only as good as the API he or she programs against. In the spirit of Bill Maher, I hereby announce a New Rule: Garbage under, garbage above.

Most of the programmers with legendary reputations for writing correct systems have worked at (or fairly close to) the bare metal (or some POSIX-ratified virtual bare metal with extra starch).

Humans actually suck at just about everything. Programming is not especially special (modulo rampant innumeracy). All the greats in any discipline recognize and work within their personal limitations.

It's not constructive to become so bitter that you give up, or delegate the hard work to a tool that can only take you so far (perhaps less far than you wish to go).

Just the other day I listened to this Econtalk episode from six months back: Joshua Angrist on Econometrics and Causation

For the entire episode, Russ Roberts is trying to play the same pessimism card, effectively implying that humans suck at everything.

Joshua Angrist is having none of it. He directly refutes the posture of excessive pessimism time and again. It's a joy to hear Russ taking one on the chin for a change.

Now we just need an enterprising academic to self-subscribe to a personal mission to save us all from ourselves to come along and wrap up the whole of econometrics into a protective cocoon inside of which many of the basic errors simply can not be made.

Brave new world? Or cult of pessimism?

In my corner of the world, hard-baked optimists don't write unthinking rants anchored on assertions prefaced with "statement of fact". Wits on dial tone predicts no good thing.

download the file, pay $3.49 for it, and print it at home

Umm, no, nice try - I don't pay the original manufacturer to fix their own defective merchandise for them. I would expect them to host files like that entirely for free, the same way PC hardware makers currently let you download drivers.

Of course, I don't actually expect them to do so; but that matters not at all, since countless other sources will.

If you want to arrive unmolested you might try not taking part in an ongoing criminal conspiracy.

Unfortunately, I pay taxes in the US, thereby providing material support to a terrorist organization.

Easy to say "just don't do it", not so easy to spend a few years in Club Fed for resisting the IRS' annual shake-down.

Strange - This exact exchange has happened around a dozen times in this discussion already.

Read the Fucking Article. It bluntly says as much.