I watched that Penn and Teller piece with the glass wall, and although it's entertaining, it's statistically misleading, which is unforgiveable in that context.

They knocked over a single pin and said that that was representative of any potential link with autism. They then went on to throw balls to represent all the different diseases that vaccines protect against. But the "cost" of all vaccines was only counted once. The "benefit" of vaccine protection was counted dozens of times.

The implication is that that one pin being knocked over is the only thing that can happen for all of the vaccines against the diseases that they mentioned. Maybe that is statistically representative, I'd like to know. I am pro-vaccine, but I'm also pro-telling-it-straight, which they did not.

Faith is not necessary in order to hold all human life to be precious. As an agnositc-almost-atheist (in that you cannot prove a negative) I am actually rather offended at the suggestion.

That's what the Romans believed.

If some software that is released has problems, people should point it out. If a development process is flawed, people should point it out. If you work in open source software, specifically in security software, you should be prepared for people to criticize both your code and your development and testing safeguards. Maybe billrp could do better. Maybe (unlikely) I could do better. Maybe a hundred people on Slashdot could do better. But do we really want a hundred different open source SSL implementations all written by unknown people? That would not help the situation at all. Maybe all we need is one competing implementation by a different team with different methods, and maybe enough people saying "OpenSSL is not up to the job" might just inspire someone to build that team.

Free and open criticism is vital in security software. Nobody should ever be told to shut up about this kind of thing.

You're only violating their copyright if you distribute it. If I legally acquire a copy of a piece of software, I can use it without agreeing to any other stipulations. Depending on jurisdiction, of course, different legal systems may rule in different ways on that point. And I'm not sure what the jurisdiction that this guy lives in has said about it.

The GPL has a specific clause pointing this out, and it's there because the authors of the GPL believe that they have no authority to prevent you from using their software. I agree with them. It always amuses me when GPL'd software contains a clickthrough insisting that you press an "Agree" button, when the licence specifically says that no such agreement is necessary.

Bennett-bashing seems to be popular round here, but I usually find his articles to be interesting. This one is excellent.

Same here. I love sweet peppers, which are pretty much zero on the scale if you remove the seeds, and I certainly use more of those than hot peppers, but I like jalapenos as well, and plenty of finely chopped scotch bonnets in a chilli.

Are you implying that a 23% boost in CPU speed is irrelevant?

Minecraft runs pretty well.

Closed source applications that access web services have to ship with a key as well. The only difference is how easy it is to access the key. It's the same issue as DVD players. Eventually someone cracked a key, because the DVD player has to be able to read the key.

I could see that Crusade was going to suck right from the start. It had a Technomage in it.

My mum watches a lot of real crime documentary programmes, and there was one where the detective (Joe Kenda), on seeing that the obvious culprit had killed himself, said "Well, good for you. You just saved the taxpayer a lot of money." I agree with him. I'm not in favour of capital punishment, but if someone who has committed a heinous crime wants to end their own life, that's fine by me.

I said, there was a credible theory that said that. Turns out it was probably wrong. However, it happens all the time. Pretty much every species that has ever gone extinct has done so because it couldn't adapt to changing circumstances. Some new predator arrives that you can't defend against, some big prey you rely on is out-competed by something that you can't hunt, some volcano goes off and kills off the vegetation that you eat. The longer your lifespan, and the more specialised you are in what you do, the more likely it is that you will go extinct. Evolution is blind and occasionally goes down dead ends. Why is it ignorant to say that? I'm not an evolutionary biologist, but I have a broad scientific education. I may be wrong on a few details but I'm pretty sure that the basic gist is valid.

Also, learn to grammar proper!

RTFA. There was a credible theory that the Moa had evolved itself into a corner and was going to go extinct anyway. There's a similar theory about the giraffe now. If someone ate all the giraffes, people would say that it was that that killed them off, and in a literal fashion they'd be right, but the giraffe isn't going to last long anyway even without human assistance. It's way too specialised. For one thing, if anything threatens the acacia tree population, like a virus or a change in climate, they're screwed. And that's not the only problem they have. People say "oh, nature is balanced, humans are out of balance". Nature is not balanced. It gets messed up all on its own all the time. It's just that we mostly see the stuff that has survived, that currently is in a state of balance, and we assume that nature is this magical cohesive force that stays in tune with itself. Nonsense. We are part of nature, and we're just one example of how nature sometimes gets out of balance and creates a big mess for itself.