The Immaculate Conception refers to the birth of Mary (a child conceived without the taint of original sin). The Virgin Birth refers to the birth of Jesus (a child born to a virgin). They are not at all the same thing. You are approximately the 6,696,844,874th person to get them confused.

For those wondering about the calculation:
6,697,254,041 - world population (from Google)
- 409,166 Catholic priests (source)
- 1 (me)
---------------------
6,696,844,874

You could have simply verified one of the claims made: that he submitted legislation to let people remove DRM for lawful purposes (It's the Fair Use Act of 2007). Now, it's perfectly reasonable to check up on people. But you need to do that in spite of their biases, not just because of them. If you never check up on the people you agree with, you have no basis for thinking you know what you think you know.

So ad hominem is NOT warranted, despite what you claim. This is the internet. You can look up things as much as you want to. If the one and only thing you can figure out is the political persuasion of the person speaking, if you can't find even one single fact about something--anything!--to call the conclusions into doubt except their political leaning, nobody should take you seriously. Ever. Until you reform your ways.

Why? Because you've proven to be a lazy thinker. You took a mental shortcut and didn't even bother to check if it was warranted or not. You said that it's "completely rational to double-check anything they say" but didn't bother doing that (or even trying to!).

By your own definition, you are not behaving rationally.

If it helps you any, I'm not a Republican, Democrat or Libertarian (though I may have voted for some). I simply hate seeing people promote logical fallacies. Boucher had his flaws, but he really was one of the best in Congress on tech issues (that's a VERY low bar to clear, mind you). I know because I read all the news, figure out the things people agree on (even if they disagree about the implications of those things), and do a bit of fact checking to see who is lying. (Everyone is, sometimes. The trick is knowing when.)

You wrote:
> Why do you only single out Apple out of all of Foxconn's customers?

In reply to someone who wrote:
> While I'm not faulting Apple anymore than -- say -- Samsung or Sony

How is that being "singled out"?

He hates the unethical behavior. You imply that what he said means that he hates Apple.

What gives?

Verizon has delegated enough authority to let the UAE write SSL certificates impersonating any site which will get automatically accepted by most browsers, so don't you think it's getting hard to know if your communications are actually secure from eavesdropping?

Part of the problem of secure communications is that there are too many governments who don't want people to have them because people can (and do) plot nefarious things with them.

They've tried that, but all that's been proven so far is that several types of proof won't work, rather than proving that it's impossible to prove. The first few sections of this paper itself go into detail about why this proof isn't one of the kinds of proof that won't work, incidentally.

Terrence Tao has a blog post on why a P=NP proof can't be relativisable if you're interested. Incidentally, there are several other classes of proof that won't separate P from NP.

For anyone interested in the details, you can find a lot more on this wiki, where a lot of mathematicians are weighing in on the proof and its potential flaws. Mathematicians are gathering from all over to examine this paper because it's so interesting. Even if one of the serious objections that have been raised so far kills it, it contains some novel ideas that will get people thinking.

They've also been gathering the news coverage and such, so it's probably the best place to find up-to-date information about this proof. It seems to have sparked quite a lot of interest for a paper that hasn't even been properly published.

>> And to prove his point I'm going to send Eric Schmidt 14 pictures of my ass.
> And his response will be: "You again?"

Mr. Goatse, I assure you that we're entirely too familiar with you and your work.

> To you, it's okay to flat-out lie about Apple on Slashdot because it reinforces your existing opinions.

I would like to note that you did not, because you cannot, say that I was wrong about the fact that the submission correctly stated that the copied drawing was not part of the claimed invention. Instead, you told me what you believe my opinions are, with the implication that you disapprove of what you believe them to be. You then referenced non-specific "flat-out lie[s]", as if it were impossible for a submission to be accurate in part and inaccurate in part.

Why not rail against those things you believe to be untrue instead of attacking anyone who points out that the submission is at least partly correct?

> Slashdot should just stop accepting any patent-related stories until it gets an editor who can grasp the concept that you have to read the claims and specification to know what is covered, not just glance at the pretty pictures.

Did you actually read the Slashdot submission? You know, the one where they wrote: "Even though it's true that the figures are just illustrations of a possible UI and not a part of the claimed invention, [...]" (emphasis added)

Or do you automatically post the same comment to every Slashdot story about patents expecting to be right most of the time?

If not, maybe I should patent that idea. Then I could autopost "Is Google evil now?" to every Google story, "Did the editors even READ the story they linked to?" to every kdawson story, and save us all a lot of time...