I'd invite more scientific investigation of the field.

There's been quite a lot already. There is no science behind the core tenants of chiropractic, nor is there any verifiable evidence to support their more wacky claims. The practices of chiropractors that actually work are already done by physical therapists and related specialists.

Reminds me of Tim Minchin's Storm when he says: You know what they call "alternative medicine" that's been proven to work? Medicine.

So I suppose if you're educated and experienced enough to find a chiropractor who is only going to practice a sensible therapeutic intervention on you, then you might get some reasonable medical care. But then you still have to wonder why they aren't already a DPT.

Why is it that people jump on chiropractors all the time but not on psychologists?

Well, I agree that there's probably a lot of crap in practicing psychology, and there's also a lot of argument and controversy. But generally psychology practices trend along with the evidence. Cognitive therapy does actually have some evidence to show efficacy in certain circumstances, for example.

Actually, yes, you can throw out the entire field, because the entire field is based fundamentally on pseudoscientific quackery.

I think what you maybe wanted to say is you can't dismiss all chiropractors as idiots because the field is fundamentally nonsense and because most chiropractors believe in fairytales. I think I'd tentatively grant you that claim.

One thing alt med does seem to do decently is personal attention to patients. This is almost certainly the largest factor for people feeling better after visiting their naturopath, homeopath, acupuncturist, chiropractor, etc. It's extremely fortunate for your wife that you happened upon a chiropractor who wasn't a complete quack and referred her to a proper specialist, because I believe a non-trivial number of chiropractors would insist the problem was merely a vertebral subluxation that could be treated through manipulation (and, of course, life-long maintenance).

If you weren't happy with the diagnosis of your MD, the proper course of action would be to consult one or two other MDs, not to consult a witch doctor. There are certainly going to be idiot MDs too, not to mention, more likely, overworked, stressed, and fallible MDs who will offer a misdiagnoses. But this fact doesn't legitimize alternative medicine. It means we need more MDs, because at least their practice is primarily based on evidence with the science to back it up.

This is depressingly nihilistic. There are legitimate arguments to be had about where our priorities should be given the vast suffering on our current planet, but to say you don't care at all what happens to our species is where I, and I hope most other people, would part company with you.

Statistical arguments are all we have to suggest there's other intelligent life out there. The evidence we have says we're unique. Either way, imagine what we can accomplish in the next several thousand years if we managed to survive. It would be tragic not to have the opportunity.

(I'm not atheist, I don't disbelieve and I'd like to believe I'm open to the idea of a god, I just lack the blind faith requirement)

Atheists aren't necessarily closed to the idea of a god. I'm sure there many who are, but those whose atheism follows from a scientific skepticism (which is typically the case for the so-called "new atheist" movement) are open to anything for which sufficient evidence can be presented.

As for disbelief, I've noticed that the weaker form of agnostic unbelief is usually operationally indistinguishable from disbelief.

[...] that reduce the search space to something like 2^110.5 instead of the 256bits that AES 256 implies.

I think you're saying here that the referenced attack on AES-256 reduces the complexity from 2^256 to 2^110.5, but that's not true. Because of the birthday paradox, for a 256-bit key space you start at 2^128, and then more refined attacks reduce it from there.

+1. I've noticed that the people I respect the most are those who will honestly say "I don't know" when they actually don't. Generally the more intelligent and rational people will start dropping qualifiers left and right when talking about something they're not deeply familiar with.

Unfortunately PSNR correlates poorly to perceived quality. Most of the impressive psychovisual work that's gone into x264 over the past 1+ years has actually reduced PSNR.

Because comparing languages is not about counting up a feature checklist and seeing who has more.

Python's core is elegant and coding in it is enjoyable. In contrast, after a few hours with PHP I feel like I need a scalding shower and a strong exfoliating bodywash.

I'm sure I must be misunderstanding you. If the safety is engineered such that a 3-year-old child can discharge the weapon in any case, then it's not a safety.

I couldn't help but notice that your argument has absolutely nothing to do with down syndrome, and would apply equally if the boy in the video didn't have it. That is, perhaps, why down syndrome has not been discussed much in the comments: the fact that the boy has down syndrome is incidental, and using it to support an argument is an appeal to emotion.

Islam was singled out by the GP presumably because this is an article about Iran, whose official religion is Islam.

I can only assume you were not around before IE7 or something like that, because that's how long it took to get proper PNG support (in the form of the alpha channel you tout as a killer feature) all major browsers. It was anything but easy.

It's much nicer now, true, but it wasn't a huge problem pre-IE7. You needed to jump through the filter=DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(...) hoop, but things like that were easily handled inside the web framework, or could be automatically "fixed" with a bit of Javascript.

But it still DOES starts the encrypted request all over again.

Not all over again. Nowadays, subsequent and parallel SSL/TLS connections are quicker than the first, because certain SSL session parameters can be cached and don't need to be renegotiated. The web server needs to be setup to support this, but I expect Gmail already is.

Either you do not, in fact, disagree with Adrian Lopez, or you are committing the naturalistic fallacy.

You seem to be arguing why things are the way they are, while Adrian is arguing how things should be in a rational society. These positions are not in conflict, contrary to your tone, unless you intend to argue an "ought" from an "is."

I know two Brits at work who have moved to our Canadian office, and have described the situation as night-and-day. One, while on his decision-making trip, took notice of the well-traveled path through a tree-dense field and was surprised to see actual children walking on it. Without adult escorts. He was further struck by the absence of tall, barbed fences blockading the school he was evaluating for his kids.

He told me that if he were walking across the street back home and a child in front of him tripped and fell, his first instinct would probably be to keep walking and turn a blind eye (and indeed, he figured that most men in that situation would do exactly that). I was reminded of this recently when watching Torchwood - Children of the Earth, when an adult male character, seated with a female colleague at a picnic table at a playground, rushed to help a kid who hurt herself. The mother yelled at him to get away, calling him a pervert.

Is this really representative of the situation over there? Or does the above paint an overly extreme picture?