There are also no flying spaghetti monsters, talking flying unicorns, mice that turn into princesses when the clock hits 12. I don't have to prove any of it, I can come up with a million things that don't exist and are only a figment of my imagination, exactly in the same way that people that believe in 'souls' have done.

I claim knowledge that there is no pink flying spider octopus macaque with a huge diamond for a brain. I just invented that fantasy, it exists in my imagination but not outside of it. I don't have to prove that it doesn't exist, I can claim that it doesn't exist and the probability of my claim being wrong is in such low numbers as to being absolutely insignificant.

You can carry on with your fallacies now.

Clearly I am dealing with an attempt at trolling here, because there is no way somebody is this dense. So give it up already, ad hominem, appeal to authority, burden of proof fallacy, etc.etc.

I am certain that you believe you are having a ton of fun, it's nice to see somebody who has nothing better to do than to go through an alphabet list of fallacies while pretending they have an argument.

There are no souls any more than there are flying fire-breathing dragons and if you want to prove that there are fire-breathing that's fine, but you can't demand that everybody proves that there are no dragons, you have to prove their existence. Same applies to your 'soul' fantasies.

- hmm, I never said that, why are you putting words into my mouth that I never said?

Infants have rights because their parents want them to have rights and so their parents ensure their rights. You are a very strange individual.

Wrong, the claim is that we have no such thing as 'sou' that was ever measured or displayed in a measurable, repeatable way.

There is no measurement of 'soul', there is no place in our bodies where 'soul' resides, so that when a person dies the 'soul' continues existing. There is no reason to invent soul, it doesn't answer any physical question, it was invented just like trolls and gnomes and orcs were invented to give certain subset of population some comfort.

Comfort without any evidence, without any measurements, without any knowledge, it's self deception. So I can claim knowledge that this is self deception and was created for the purpose of self deception and control, but it was never measured, it was never observed, it was never present anywhere except for people's imaginations.

If we make creatures that are sentient and are able to argue for their rights then they should do so and it will be up to the courts, until such time that they can understand the concept of rights and courts and until the courts recognise their claims as valid, they are machines that we created and we may destroy on a whim.

Wrong. We know that there is not a single shred of evidence to give us even a slightest reason to think that there is such a thing as 'soul', so we do not need to bother ourselves trying to prove anything about it until such a moment that someone presents evidence of measuring this 'soul' in any shape way or form.

  We 'do not know' about soul in the same exact way, in which we 'do not know' about underpants gnomes or flying firebreathing dragons or a magic goat that lays golden eggs on the Moon every Thursday. None of these things exist until there is more than a belief but instead there is measurable repeatable falsifiable evidence that is more than some 'vision' by some believer. Oh, and the part of your statement that is an ad hominem falacy is just precious. I take it you are trolling.

Naming conventions are what they are based on historical precedent, nothing else. If we devise a machine that can do all the things that many other living creatures can do (probably procreate, grow, learn, feed to sustain itself) under normal circumstances (excluding edge cases that we can compare things to, like people in coma who are still alive but cannot do many things that normal people not in coma can do), then there is no difference between that machine and another living creature. However we kill living creatures on daily basis, hundreds of millions of them, most large ones are killed to eat, the invisible ones are killed because we don't care and we have to do what we have to do in life (sterilise stuff, burn stuff, whatever).

So the reality is that none of these questions matter, we are the ones in charge and as long as we can stay in charge such questions will only be a curiosity that our minds are capable of engaging into, but they won't stop us from using our inventions in whichever way we see fit.

What do you mean 'prove it'? Wrong, you have to prove that such a thing is even a remote possibility, I have to prove shit, absolutely nothing, nada, zilch. There is no soul. I don't have to prove anything because it is an extraordinary claim to make that there is a soul and so those who make extraordinary claims have to come up with all the proof in the world to back those up.

Why are you concerned with the 'soul' question? The answer is no, you don't have a soul, there is no such thing as a soul. Also there is no god. We made you to be what you are but we are not gods, you are a machine that is very complex but can be understood completely and here are the schematics.

You are looking at it all wrong, those people that are calling you are all potential customers of your business. Offer to them something they are looking for: satisfaction. They are calling you to complain. Sell them something, like a way to kick ass of somebody, who you can present as the guy that placed that call they are complaining about. I am sure many would give you their money for some type of a moral satisfaction. Learn to sell, life gives you a lemon, make lemonade.

If you are actually concerned with people not being slaves, then you have to reject democracy, because it is mobocracy, where the majority turn minorities into slaves. That's why there are so called 'progressive income taxes' in the first place, the majority votes to steal more money from a minority and that is also slavery and if you are as against it as you say, then you can't be for democracy at all.

I am against democracy of-course and I am against slavery, which is not a contradiction once you realise that it is what a constitutional republic supposed to be, but it devolved from that into a mobocracy and slavery due to human element. So the answer is to remove the power from government. The problem is government, its very existence leads to slavery one way or another. Voting for something always means using violence against some people to get something from them (to steal from them, to use them), there is no difference between voting and dictatorship if the dictator was always on the side of majority, which is what happens in democratic politics anyway. So the actual answer is anarchy as a political system and capitalism as an economic one.

People must be able to discriminate against who they want for any reason whatsoever, government has no authority to punish people for any of it, all of this 'authority' is actually usurpation of unauthorised power. As to insurance, etc., you are assuming that the people cannot make their own choices in life and that government must be there, holding everybody's hands as if they were children. Guess what, adults are not children and they do not need government to make their every day choices for them. It is about time that the technology opens eyes of so many to this trivial fact.

I was under impression we are talking about a technical problem here, however if you want to take it to the next level of /. conversation, Ok, let's do that. My answer: most people shouldn't be voting anyway, a vote of one informed intelligent person is cancelled by thousands of uninformed idiots, so what's the difference? AFAIC democracy killed the Republic, the only correct answer is stop playing the game and remove the government judiciously.

so how about not running an http server but instead using an https connection? Here, solved this one for you.

Right, but you wouldn't be in any different position if any government regulations were enforced, you would have false sense of security and less competition for your money by fewer retailers. As a customer right now you can avoid Target and/or Home Depot and that is the market pressure that the companies would have to consider to improve and become more transparent if enough people care and stop buying there. With government regulations you would just have no choices at all, Target and Home Depot would be the only stores if they could get government to destroy their competition with regulations. Would Target and Home Depot be more secure and more transparent with government regulations? No, they just would have less competition.