The reason western europe and canada is compared to USA, rather than say mexico and russia, is because they are the one which ressemble much the cultural, economical environment but also far more important political environment of the USA. Mexico and russia may fullfil one or two of those, but not all 3.

Drone are actually at this day, used to kill people in other part of the world. They were not back in then 1980's. Furthermore with the incisingly militarisation of the police in the USA, the two fears are : 1) it will make it very easy to itnroduce massive "eye in the sky" surveillance everywhere in the US 2) that the drone will not stay "passive civilian like" but acquiere first strike capabilities on US soil too.

And seeing the evolution of the no knock raid, and the surveillance society the US is building, either toward the inside or the outside (NSA), I don't think this is that an ungrounded fear.

You do not take a PHD because you prepare for a job. You take it because youa re passionate for the subject and might hope to continue the subject. if you think a PhD is to prepare for an job, or even education in general at high level, you got it wrong. Anyway i disagree about not being a good preparation either : the autonomy and the effort needed to do a PhD "over prepare" for practically any job except a few % out there.

If you watch the last century, we added limitation to the world instead of removing them. Back to newton : infinite speed possible infinite acceleration possible and while the greek had a concept of the non divisible (atoms), there was no theoretical "limit" on isntrumentation ,it was still thought you could transmute stuff into other other stuff in the middle age. And the unvierse could go on forever. Nowadays we know that inifnite speed is not possible, infinite acceleration is not possible, there is a limit on what you can measure (uncertaintly principle), transmutation is an energy expansive process, the universe will wind down forever, and there is a maximum limit on how much energy can be extracted, and do not get me started on "you can't win , you can't get out of the game etc...". From all point of view, we discovered new phenomenon, but all those resulted in imposing limitation on everything everywhere. We have discovered new phenomena, but each refined our understanding and added new limitation on what is possible. I'll grant you we have open point as we cannot go smoothly from infinitely small to infinitely big.


Although I would not bet the house on it, I contend that it is entirely possible that we have discovered the rough outline of most laws which drive the universe, and that warp drive and worm hole are stuff of the imagination which have no place whatsoever here. And that in future we might discover refinement and new phenomenon, but none which breaks utterly all those intrinsic limitation, they might even impose on us even *more* limitation on what is doable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Technically only for female, no age of consent for male. Also technically it made what we consider children prostitution (12)legal. In fact if you compare mariage age without parent assent to age of consent it was
pretty clear the age for mariage was only to make sure the previous generation had a strong say in how the assets were handled and only that. I would also had that in welsh the mariage age was 12-14 (1550 or so). Age of consent was only raised to 16 much later (19th century).

"Allow me to propose a simple rule-of-thumb for Bible readers (both "the faithful" and the skeptics) as follows: Do not criticize it any differently than you criticize every other book (i.e. use consistent standards) and do not take individual sentences out-of-context from ANY book."

I'll do that for the harry potter book as soon as the harry potter book (and every other book) will be taken as "litteral truth" like the bible is by some people.

That one with Stein and others from creationist do the same. inf act this is their basic modus operendi : misquoting.

For one in tomatoe there is a lot of glutamate and other elements. In homeopathic madicine ? lactose , maybe water, rarely alcohol no matter which.

Without you, how would we ever see jesus in a taco ? Or other places *cough* Like there *cough*

Company have no morals they are here to make profits. That's why we have so many rules to force them as a society to do stuff they would not do on their own on pure economical ground. For example all tragedy of common like air pollution, or even not hiring children to work in mines, or pay the same a woman and a man, or not discriminate based on skin color.

As such If the CEO political position are such that the customer will massively impact the company , then if the CEO really has the responsibility associated with the (usual) high salary, he should leave on his own on pure economical ground for the company. And that include your case.

Now on the moral position, it is much more iffy depending on what sort of moral you adhere to. In the above case I would say "screw the bigot customer" and try to reposition the company toward non-idiot and keep the CEO no matter the skin color or gender or religion or sexuality or cis/trans or yes indeed politic or whatever people find to discriminate. But it is much harder to define a general point.

In this specific case, even if I tend to be against idiot bigot living in the 19th century like Eich, but I tend to think that he should not be forced to resign (he was not as far as i can tell) but should resign on his own when his own private life negatively impact the customer base (which he did).

" Unlike English WP, the Germans will threaten to 'curbstone' people for saying it."

Yeah because all german are like that. *eyeroll*. Or alternatively one or two scums doing it for paid money saw the danger of their revenue evaporating, or even more likely, one or two idiot thought it to be fun to threaten that guy.

"The militant gay people think they have the right to tell other people what moral values they have to have."

As opposed to pretty much the christian which think they have a god given right (pun intended) to impose their moral value on people, among others things by refusing those people either the same right as others (gay marriage) or by imposing their moral view to stops some type of operation (abortion) or by imposing their religious view in classrooms (creationism in sheep fell - ID), or even by trying to sneak prayer and religion in government stuff like classroom, courtroom. As opposed to the people which want to be inclusive in rights. Welp. The irony burns deeply in that one.

"He said the model used in all EU airports to check the validity of tickets was "malfunctioning" noting they lacked "direct access to the airliner database", but wouldn't be drawn on whether he tested his research by boarding a flight."

To that I have to say only "yeah , right" as in very sarcastic. Some airline in europe have spearheaded the interline and ground handling electronic exchange between TKT and CKI systems (using edifact messages TKCREQ, TKCUAC, TKCRES) since.... 2001. Even the medium airline are using the itnerline access. only very very small airline are still using offline process like ETL list.

That "security" researcher never checked in real life its results.

All the CKI system i know of, count the pax boarded against the pax list in the CKI system. If they find a discrepancy, they check the one in addition and ask to check the ticket. Good luck making your explaining.

The bottom line was that the secure (relatively) thing is not the boarding pass but the ticket. Now if you could free ticket i would be downright impressed. Free boarding pass have long been known to be insecure. They are not there to be secure but to count boarded pax on the system against real boarded on plane, to be able to remove the one which are No-Show and remove their baggage.

You reap what you sow. That guy meddled with private issues with prop 8 and decided that he did not want others to get benefits they should be awarded in a society which gives equal coverage by law. And now he got beaten the same way by having his private stuff smeared on his face. How does this shit sandwich taste like, mr bigot CEO ?