I also have no problem with pure fun. I don't require chemicals to achieve it, and don't as a general rule frown upon other people doing so - it's their lives and bodies. It doesn't upset me that I don't find the effects of alcohol interesting, although I've had a few on occasion, and it does concern me when people I know can't handle their drug of choice. But this particular one has a real dangerous potential. Single up-front cost, multiple settings, etc. I can see where those who tend towards addiction would have a strong tendency to keep turning up the intensity and get to the state of wireheads in Niven's work. My solution is to let other people test it out and discover the possible negative side effects. As for the benefits, I'm old enough where the big everyday benefits aren't going to have a huge impact on my life, not unlike laser vision correction, but hopefully my children will be able to blast through university with a deeper understanding and less study thanks to tools such as these. Perhaps by that time they'll also have methods of determining safe limits, and my kids will be able to enjoy the synthetic pleasure such tools could provide with no downside.

Or you could use it for other things. For instance, improve your focus so you can work better. Or improve your capacity to learn so that you can spend less time in school to achieve the same results. Or learn more.

Some of us aren't so tied to stimulating our pleasure centers that we don't do anything else. Note the many people who aren't addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs, for instance. These are already simple methods to stimulate your pleasure centers (and other areas) with, frankly, the same potential drawbacks as your average Niven-esque wirehead. Sure, addictiveness may be lower, but that's already the reason I stay away from things like heroin, opium, and meth.

This would actually be a pretty trivial experiment to conduct. Survey of men who had circumcisions after becoming sexually active, and rate their opinion of the sexual experience before and after the surgery. Granted, there will have to be a number of factors to take into consideration, such as personal perception of self image before and after surgery, etc.

Last time I checked (and it's been over 10 years), about 1% of men require circumcision in adulthood for medical reasons. If even 1% of them were sexually active before the surgery, there would be more than enough candidates to do a useful study.

The key flaw with your point, with respect to this study, is that it doesn't match the results, at all. Fewer males were born, but their survival rates were higher, leading to similar sexes ratios as in less stressful times. So not only does the study not agree with your statement, it seems that selective pressure still favors an even mix of the two sexes.

Similarly, a study of World War II mothers in Denmark, I believe, found that not just their children, but their grandchildren had lower birth weights. This was attributed to the famine caused by the war (i.e., the invading soldiers had plenty to eat, the local citizens, not so much), but it was surprising that the effects were also felt in the next generation. Things that you wouldn't think have a connection to the fetus really can, sometimes even for multiple generations.

As well, since it is a different IP address, it will be fairly clear that even though it went through your modem it likely wasn't you who downloaded the offending material.

Which is why some people will have their projects hosted outside the U.S. This will lead to the "big bags of cash" circumvention method, which can be mitigated by the many eyes validation method, which can be circumvented by the "more big bags of cash" method, etc. The question is, which will run out of first - the big bags of cash, or the qualified eyes?

Absolutely. Not left them free to walk around committing crimes, but also not allow them to be lynched because people disagree with them, even if they do something wrong. Or do you not believe in the rule of law and protecting people's rights?

You realize that the US government has given BILLIONS to these companies to roll out internet infrastructure, right? It would only seem fair that they subsidize their competition since their business was subsidized, as well.

I once worked with a "programmer" who stored all dates as text, would break them down into day/month/year, and use crappy functions to add parts back and forth. I just couldn't get him to understand that more modern languages stored dates as decimals, with the time as the decimal portion and the date as the integer portion, and that simple math could get you the number of days between two dates. Needless to say, I avoided working on projects with him.

It always pays to know the tools you're working with.

What I'm seeing here is that guns are dangerous when the person holding it isn't properly trained in how and when to use it.

It's worth noting that of those 30,000 deaths, about 17,000 are suicide. While they're regrettable, they're also matched by an similar number of non-firearm suicides. Clearly, the suicide problem isn't going to be solved by taking away guns. This is not to dismiss these deaths, just to say that blaming them on guns is rather silly.

In the same year I'm examining, accidental firearm deaths ran at about 600. Again, terrible, but accidental deaths by fire was about 5 times higher, and a great deal of these are cause by improperly trained children dealing with their last live fire drill. Personally, I'm not interested in talking about adults foolish enough to fall asleep while smoking of a bed or couch.

Now, let's talk about homicide. This brings us to about 13,000 per year by firearm. Cut/pierce homicides (stabbing fatalities) run about 2,000 per year, or about 1/6 relative to shootings. I'd say that gun control could probably bring the overall number of homicides down, but not by 13,000. How much is hard to say. As much as it's hard to say how much crime and/or gun deaths would go down if everyone was properly trained with a firearm and could be expected to carry at all times.

I personally don't have any firearms, and would only buy them for hunting (long guns, naturally). I also don't have a problem with properly trained people owning them. Personally, with the freedoms purportedly enjoyed in the US, I think it behooves a great number of the population to not only own guns, but take significant training in their use.

Source for above.

So what you're saying is that gun-control laws keep stupid people from killing themselves, thereby raising the average intelligence of the citizenry? Now I see why the government wants to stop him!

I wonder how long it was before the incident in Tienanmen Square that a Chinese person had said that?

Hmm, judging from the movies I've seen, probably a few thousand years...

Allow me to correct myself, since you're merely trying to make me say what you're saying.

Yes, laws can add artificial limitations. I think whether they should is the topic under discussion...

Oh look, another pedophile!

Seriously, I'm just kidding.