You guys are just plain nuts. Here's how it it meant to work. Excuse sir/madam you are not allowed to carry that item onto the aircraft, allow me to check it in for you. Either arrest them for an illegal item or if it is not illegal check it in for them. Why the bloody hell do you just allow them to steal your legal stuff, the items that you are not allowed to carry on should just be checked in. The crap cowardly people are willing to put up with is just amazing.

They will never need an external attack to sink their fantasy floating island, they will inevitably do it to themselves. They all want the freedom to do, what ever they want to do, when ever they want to do it and of course no group of people ever can do that at the same time. So they want their forever teenage libertarian floating island as long as they are the ones in charge. We already have that it's called Freewind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... (never been a more doublespeak title for a ship ever) and the only people free are the fakers at the top ruthlessly taking all the freedoms away from the ones down the bottom. Should they ever be able to build that crazy vessel it will inevitably devolve to an organised crime haven.

Regardless the of the psychopathic nature of North Korea's government and the pathetic egoistic nature of it's leadership and the quisling nature of it's many middle persons who keep that leadership in power, the only acceptable response is cutting the cable. Unhappy with the contribution to the global internet, cut them off. Seriously, fuck off with the escalation, it will just make the whole situation worse.

Treat is a developer's portfolio, collect things you have done and present them as documentations of your skills (or skillz depending on how hacky they are).

Computers aren't the only thing networking, people do it as well ;). One of the main things you do when contributing to an open source project is establish social and business relationships with those people most likely to be able to connect you to a job, directly and indirectly. Smart recruitment would have companies employ people to contribute to open source and specifically vet fellow contributors with a view to recruiting future staff. Basically companies can forgo the whole trial period of trial and error when it comes to recruiting essential staff by being able to assess potential employees in a voluntary work place over an extended period of time. FOSS is a public showcase of the efforts and abilities of skilled people and in terms of the relationships of the people involved, how well they work with others in a voluntary environment. Even when you are already employed it still remains the most viable opportunity to showcase all of your skills in a public environment and also to maintain multi-company and multi-national relationships with people that can help you define your future dependent upon of course how well you play with others. For all the three letter et al agencies around the world, it also provides the opportunity to resist the idiotic temptation to break global computer security and instead focus on gathering knowledge on relationships between the people involved and to do their own, ugh, recruiting ;).

You yourself talked about "until they reach 18 years of age"; abortion is clearly but one aspect of this, and arguably not the biggest one by far (there are far more children who are born, but have their rights limited until they are of age, than aborted fetuses).

I didn't want to touch on abortion for the simple reason that it's vastly more complicated - there's the issue of when you start considering a fetus a person (it is obvious to any rational person that a fertilized egg or an embryo is not a person in any meaningful way, while a pre-birth fetus is; but where do you draw the line in between?). There's also the sticking issue of the fetus, regarding of any rights it may have as a person, potentially infringing on its mother's rights to her body. Reconciling those two rights is not obvious.

In any case, none of this has anything to do with this particular case.

This is not true, actually. The hardline conservatives are into cop worship, but libertarians are pretty strong in pro-gun movement as well, and they are generally not a fans of police militarization and excessive use of force.

Assuming that you're referring to actual babies that have been born, then they still have human rights that their parents or legal guardians can't deny them. For example, you can't lock up your kid in a cage, even though other more reasonable limits on the freedom of movement are allowed. Generally speaking, it's okay so long as it's in their interest. Similarly, in this story, they're not letting the orangutan go where it wants, but admitting that the current arrangement is definitely not in its interest.

I thought about it as well, but now I think there might be precedent for a kind of a special status there. Think about those uncontacted Amazonian tribes - they're definitely considered human, and if you were to kill one of them you'd be charged with murder, but I'm pretty sure that those tribes don't know or care about e.g. Brazilian laws, and they are not actually enforced against them. I do wonder how they word that in law, though.

I would assume that if this ruling stands, the law would treat an ape the same way it treats human children, or adults that are considered incompetent. This means that someone else makes the decision for them, but the law still protects their fundamental rights (such as e.g. a right to life), and, at least in theory, the decisions must be in their best interest, which can be legally enforced in some circumstances. It's still way better than being treated as property.

No it wouldn't. It wasn't a problem to fight against the hobby knives unarmed either, no one expected the hijackers to be suicide terrorist, and the only thing that would make a difference is hind-sight.

There is a difference between tolerating and supporting. With Batista, US has actually supported him - helped him maintain power and suppress his political opponents. With Cuba, we're talking about tolerating what they are. Which is clearly the best that can be done, given how several decades of attempting to pressure them did absolutely zero good for anyone in the country.

The only people who object to the lifting of sanctions are those that are motivated by personal revenge against the Castros. There's no other logical reason for the embargo.

I didn't. I attacked your nonsense ;)

They were okay with hitman contracts, but not with guns?

That's hilarious.

Demerit points, hmm, who gives a crap when you can afford a driver and we are not talking golf here.