I don't think anyone forgets that. It's like a defining character trait.

There is no "war holiday" in the UK, just ceremonies on 11.11, and also the nearest Sunday. I agree that a holiday does not sound appropriate.

If there are annual commemoration rituals on a day, ipso facto it's a holiday, at least in American usage of that word. For example "Mother's Day" is a holiday, though no businesses shut down or anything. (See, e.g.,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day#Founding_.28US.29 ) Perhaps UK usage differs?

That issue is not raised in the UK ceremonies; it entirely about remembering the dead

It's meaningless to remember the dead without remembering why they died: a war between exploitative colonial powers to see who would get to fuck over which group of non-industrialized nations. We ought to honor the dead by working towards a world where people don't die and kill for the glory of the ruling class.

If ever you can be legally punished not because you did something that hurt or even endangered someone, but simply because you didn't ask permission first, liberty has one foot already in the grave.

If someone with a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody anyway despite their license, they get rightly punished for it anyway.

If somebody with a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they don't get in trouble for anything, as they shouldn't.

If somebody without a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody, they get rightly punished for it too.

But if somebody without a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they get punished, not for causing any harm or danger, but for having the gall not to ask permission before safely and harmlessly doing something.

The only difference mandatory licensure ever makes is punishing people who wouldn't have been punished otherwise because they weren't doing anything harmful or dangerous. Mandatory licensure, of anything, only ever harms innocents, by punishing them for harmless behavior that they simply didn't ask permission for first.

Or the clothing ad (forget which company, possibly late '90s or early 2000s) with a young lady opining that "I want to be different, just like everybody else."

When I pointed my browser at that story about net anonymity, michaelgeist.ca tried to set about 20 cookies in my browser. Kinda ironic, huh Ren? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

The strip club doesn't care who dances as long as money comes in. At least with licensing you can have some sort of auditing.

If licensing is supposed to keep "underage" women from performing at these venues, then you have to send people out to check the licenses. And if you're going to do that, you can check other documents instead of a license. A license introduces nothing additional into the situation.

Depressingly many instances of communication are effectively just disguised commerials for something or other. People say things to manipulate others into doing something for the speaker's own benefit all the time.

Political science is not the same thing as politics. You're discussing the latter, not the former.

'Until they fail to meet their requirements' would mean 'immediately', as the requirements begin unmet; and if you mean they'd declare a deadline for meeting their requirements, that'd just be letting them set their own term limits. "I promise to [fix all problems] over the next 50 years!" and bam, president-for-life.

Only partially. The rest, he was discussing hypocrisy.

The effective yearly tax rate on Worgl's freegeld was 120%. I think you could fund a whole government on fiat currency alone at those rates.

Yes, this! The way I like to phrase it is that "life is self-productive machinery", where "productivity" is defined as a property of mechanical work such that that work decreases the entropy of the system it acts upon. Life is then any physical system that transforms some kind of energy flow through it (i.e. is a machine, does work) in a way that causes its internal entropy to decrease (necessarily at the expense of increasing the entropy of the environment). The operating conditions of such a machine are the conditions in which such life can live.

By this definition, all traditional (DNA-based) living things are alive, but viruses are not (despite reproducing), fire is not (despite consuming energy and reproducing), crystals are not (despite reproducing and reducing their internal entropy — because they are not doing the work that reduces their entropy, they don't consume energy to do that, they have to have energy removed from them and then that just happens spontaneously), and perhaps most interestingly, computers are: the processing and storing of information is a reduction of their internal entropy, and they are machines that consume energy to accomplish this. A computer that built other computers that built other computers (etc) would undeniably be artificial life... but then if we add "reproduces" to the requirements, as you say, mules are out, and we definitely want them in, more so I think than we want non-reproducing computers out.

However, "Into Darkness" was actually pretty good.

If you don't mind movies that make absolutely no sense, sure. And now that that Trek-alt 'verse has a Starfleet that's corrupt to the core, interstellar transporters and thus no need for starships, and a fricking CURE FOR DEATH, it's hard to see how any sensible Trek movies can be made without jettisoning STID from continuity.

Those internet age demographics you link seem to claim that absolutely nobody on the internet is under the age of 15, which makes me somewhat doubtful about the accuracy of the rest of the breakdown.

Que? Cómo "que" una broma? Quiso decir "queue"? O "más probablemente "cue"?