Q: How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris?

A: No-one knows.

I can choose to enter the movie theater just as the ads are over...

No, I live in America, and never felt in any way constrained by any part of the Patriot Act.

I don't think you lost many freedoms. You think you did, but you didn't.

I don't hate the french; I just find them amusing. I find the antics of De Gaulle during WWII absolutely hilarious, as in, Monty Python-esque funny. He would march down the Champs Elysees when he did virtually nothing in the immediate aftermath of D-Day to help liberate his own country. Even Montgomery, who himself was insufferable, found De Gualle insufferable.

While true, they also tended to fight using outdated tactics, such as forcing millions of men at gunpoint to advance, regardless of the odds or support. Russian "tactics" were a partial cause of them losing so many men.

If having to submit to a little extra time and security checks at the airport constitutes a massive loss of freedom for you, you have your priorities in a tangle. I don't know about you, but I lived my life more or less exactly the same before and after Sept 11th.

+1 funny

All of these are true, except that this holds true for all genres. Sci-Fi isn't just any genre; it has an additional purpose, which is to explore ideas, settings, and technology that don't yet exist. It is, by it's very nature speculative, and that should be item #6 on your list. And I think the argument is that sci-fi is not speculative enough. In this I would tend to agree.

The last good book I read that was truly speculative and actually pushed sci-fi in ways I havent seen in a long time is China Mieville's Embassytown.
A must -read.

While it sucks, there's a good reason why companies have asked people about their past criminal history or have done searches.

If you have past felony convictions for, say grand larceny or other similar crimes, and are hired, and then go on to commit a crime against a customer while working, it's very easy for that company to get sued for millions. It's would be incredibly easy to make the argument that the company knew or should have known that Mr. Felon (who supposedly cleaned up his act) had prior convictions and was a risk to the company and its customers. Then, BLAM, the company is out millions of dollars, all because it didn't check or didn't care.

Now, while this sucks for the felon trying to land a job, it also sucks for the company, and lets face it, the recidivism rate among past felons is generally pretty high. Why should a company want to risk it's own livelihood or existence just to give you a second chance?

This is a risk mitigation issue, and maybe it's a good thing that states are making it difficult to ask or check, but companies will do it anyway, just for the reasons I've outlined. Maybe companies in other, "more enlightened" societies haven't had their pants sued off them enough to make this an issue, bit is one here.

Because humans generally differentiate between humans and non-humans. I know this comes as a shock to the non-specisists out there such as yourself, but there are differences between different species. Did you know that?

Human children and chimps belong to a different species. You do realize this, right?

What about them? They are still human, so we give them human rights. What's not to understand?

Each society can have it's own definition of personhood, but those that defined a black person as less human than others are no longer around or are struggling for survival. Eventually societies that consider all people equal, at least in theory, will win out.

I have a suspicion that good old Abe probably suspected that 150 years hence, things would be vastly different from the time in which he lived and would be prepared to accept that, just as we are all probably aware that 150 years hence things will be vastly different, even morally and ethically...and we should probably just accept it.

They will still be human children and not chimp children. That which separates us from them is at a bare MINIMUM the fact we are a different species. Everything else is gravy.