the state steps in and forces support for the benefit of the child

Humans respond to incentives. What the State actually accomplishes is encouraging mothers to get rid of the father because she'll get his money anyway (in the vast majority of the cases) without having to deal with him. While this outcome is predictable, empirical evidence has borne it out too. Broken households don't benefit the child, in the vast majority of cases (the empirical evidence bears this out too).

Besides, parents are the holders-in-trust of the child's rights, not the State. The State is a legal fiction and as such cannot hold any natural rights, so it's a non-sequitor. Yeah, they can send the boys in blue to enforce any arbitrary rule, but that's not sound moral reasoning.

On the other hand, even if global warming were not caused by humans, shouldn't we be trying to mitigate its effects anyway? Should we be planning for the effects of rising sea waters, instead of (as the skeptics want) just do nothing and let the waters rise?

Is that their claim? The seas have risen by something like 200m in the past 13000 years.

I thought their claim was that human-produced CO2 is a minor contributor and that the vapor feedback cycle is limiting, so humans should focus on adaptation to change rather than trying to prevent it since they can't.

Is this a misrepresentation of the claims?

In scandinavia, kids are also given fluorine pills

With their school lunches? Baloney.

Xylitol has very little - if any - effect on dental health. It's just a sweetener that is not sugar (does not cause karies).

Nope - plaque uptake the xylitol and try to process it as a sugar and fail, exhausting their metabolites and ultimately starving off. Here's the most cited link on PubMed but you're welcome to search all the others, including more recent ones.

The schools aren't investing in the program because somebody's brother owns a chicklet factory - they've demonstrated success with it.

Source: I read peer reviewed real scientific reports.

Except the ones on the topic that are easily to find?

I tried to point out the difference between sodium fluoride and silicofluorides but you just heard 'fluoride'. Of course studies will use sodium fluorides - because that's the safer one. Silicofluorides interact across calcium channels and dissociated fluoride ions don't. Meanwhile about 80% of municipal water supplies use silicofluorides.

Europe banned Fluoride in drinking water since at least the 1980's.

And all their teeth fell out! ;) Just kidding, they got refrigeration too.

The biggest risk is that fluoride is not fluoride. Sodium fluoride dissociates well, but most water supplies use silicofluorides that don't, and they cause heavy metals to cross the blood-brain barrier because the silicofluoride compounds interact biologically.

The dominant fluoridation chemical is actually toxic waste from fertilizer plant smokestack scrubbers that would have a real disposal problem if there weren't municipal water supplies to dump it in.

And those problems don't even touch on osteoporosis, the economic problems with watering one's lawn with fluoridated water, or the moral issue of involuntary medication.

I've got cavity-free kids on well water. Toothpaste with xylitol (birch/watermelon sugar alcohol) is the simple answer. In Scandinavia they give the kids a couple pieces of xylitol gum with their school lunch - far more economical than the US system and with fewer risks. But in the US, government programs are a secular religion that may only ever be tweaked, not found to be foolhardy.

yeah, and it's probably carcinogenic.

I've got a nasty Diet Cola habit, but switched from Pepsi to Sam's after Pepsi started adding ace-K. It's not hard to calculate a dose of aspartame that your liver enyzmes can handle but there's no safe-ish dose of ace-K.

Oh, and the whole "aspartame makes you fat" meme is bullshit - I've dropped 45 lbs in the past year by getting rid of nearly all the carbs in my diet, all while drinking the stuff. An over-abundance of carbs is what horks your insulin system.

A sweetener that is proven to be incredibly dangerous, though: sugar, especially HFCS. It causes the largest health crisis the country has ever seen and innumerable downstream morbidities. Most articles about artificial sweeteners tend to "gloss over" that part.

A huge number of Americans self-medicate on caffeine (the drug they should be on is probably illegal or guarded behind the nearly impenetrable veil of the AMA's psychiatric guild). But encouraging them to drink their caffeine with sugar is the worst possible idea. Ace-K is probably carcinogenic, but once you've got some cancer cells, to really make them happy, fill them with fructose - Pepsi's got what cancer craves!

At what point did Pandora explicitly ask the artists if they wanted their work advertising? At which point did the artists explicitly agree to Pandora advertising their works?

Pandora is just radio "on the Internet", with the logical efficiencies that unicast delivery can provide. Demanding a different licensing scheme is as much bullshit as every one of the patents that demanded rent for some existing thing and then added "on the Internet" on the end.

It's only lawyers who benefit from re-litigating established societal norms. Of course, they promise some middlemen riches to get them to file actions, but there's only one party that's guaranteed any riches.

This. I don't give a damn about animations or not animations, but what I do give a damn about is when I load G+ and I can't even start typing what I want to type for 15 seconds while the UI gets its shit together and loads all its assets from all kinds of Google domains and re-arranges its layout on-the-fly.

Same reason I don't 'like' YouTube comments anymore - it's at least a 10 second pain while it opens new browser windows, redirects to G+, bounces back, and occasionally works round-trip.

I really don't think that Google is this stupid - engineering principles can fix all of these problems. These must be features that somebody wanted to rot on the vine and incentivized their developers and users accordingly.

I use a few non-search Google products, but the way they seem to trip over 98% of them makes me never want to rely on any of them.

If Google can't even make Lollipop work on its own hardware, how much of an endorsement is that for other manufacturers to put their efforts into Android? Clearly it's not because Google is underfunded.

I'm not jumping to conclusions, but the people who have been making the case for historical alien visitors claim that the written record specifies liquid mercury rotating at high speeds as part of their antigrav drives. The Mayan writings are the most-often cited.

I'm poised to install a $4K backup generator in the next few months. I don't live in a region where I can force my neighbors to pay for my tech goodies, and the $9K difference doesn't get paid for on any kind of time horizon that outpaces even a basic interest rate.

The generator also has a near-infinite runtime, in the case of a bad storm. However, it needs more maintenance, so if there were price-parity I might opt for the battery.

Give it another five years and that just might be feasible - good for Musk for getting this ball rolling, and kudos to the early adopters who take it in the pocket to promote the technology.

If slashcode had ever evolved beyond 2001, we'd be selecting comments like this to replace the summary.

And even with the 'cannon' in China, do we know who lit the fuse?

Almost certainly the same people who arranged for NXDOMAIN on github.com a few weeks back. They really hate that there are open source anti-censorship tools on there.

They had to stop breaking DNS for github since most of China's Internet developers couldn't get any work done anymore.

That Chinese developers are freely using a California hosting service which has benefits to everybody in the world, and everybody recognizes that the "damage" here is government, it actually gives me a bit of hope. People do prefer to cooperate on all things, until a few sociopaths get a set of keys.

Is this a Bayer or Shell astroturfer here to spread disinfo?

It seems unlikely that development support of XP is more costly than the revenue generated by XP users. And Apple has plenty of cash. But this may still be shrewd - let's see if there's a bump in Mac sales this quarter. These users represent existing Apple customers running an OS that Microsoft abandoned. They don't need to know about how fast Apple abandons hardware, but to be fair Apple does upgrades pretty nicely. They can blame MS and gain the customer, all by hosing said customer. Devious and clever.