If that unit has been willing to work for the Good Magician Humphrey for a year to get the answer to that question, there can be only one answer.

At what point does it become unethical to consider and treat these as lab animals. How much brain complexity is enough? This probably isn't it, and our A.I. isn't good enough yet. But some year we're going to cross the line, and I'm sure that as a society we're going to be completely unaware and in denial when we do.

I feel the same way about some very prominent members of the US science and technology committees.

Explain how, exactly.

There are things that you just don't do (like, say hitting a woman).

Unfortunately, if the population is large and anonymous enough, you always have someone who does something that you shouldn't do. That's when we need a law. You understand these laws don't fall from the sky, yes? They're the written down rules of society. And society needs rules, otherwise it's not a society, it's just a mob.

And posting sex pictures of other people without their consent is just the kind of stuff that you don't do. And if people don't get it, you have to tell them.

Also if you have an indoor skydiving facility near you, I'd take her to do that and spring for the video. I'd say 6-10 minutes each. You may as well keep experiencing new stuff up until you die, and it's quite memorable. Hell if I was you I'd go on a tandem skydive too. What have you got to be afraid of at this point? And maybe a hot air balloon ride, too. You'd be surprised how easy it is to find a hot air balloon pilot in a given area, and that's something you can take the entire family to do. Knock out that bucket list and make some memories for everyone!

Ultimately, it comes down to the question "why do you care who Andy Canfield is?" Are they planning to exchange money for goods or services? Write you a mash note? Collect on a debt?

As you say, "Andy Canfield" is kind of a red herring there. It's really the operational/instrumental definition of "is there some connection between this key and some object or information I want?" I'm not sure there really is any meaningful way to do that in the general case. It needs to be reconsidered as an array of different questions about why we care about identity in the first place.

Right now a lot of the notions of identity are really badly defined. "Identity theft" happens because lending institutions are legally allowed to connect your physical body (which can be punished in a variety of ways) to various intangible measures of identity with extremely thin degrees of proof. That may be the worst possible case.

Unfortunately, I've found that increasing numbers of sites require those cross-site scripting just to render themselves. It's not uncommon for a site to require enabling literally dozens of other sites. It can be hard to tell which of those are content, which are navigation, which are ads, and which are tracking. At least some are starting to detect when you're selectively disabling the ad servers and metrics sites, and refusing to render at all.

In general, I'd prefer to avoid those sites entirely. I do understand their need to foist off ads on me, which is why I haven't run with AdBlock. I just want to disable antisocial behavior like animations, which make the content hard to read. But I can think of a few sites which have useful content that require me to let more things through NoScript than I'm really comfortable with.

Ultimately, his idiot opinion on astrology doesn't really matter, since he's not going to make much headway against hundreds of other MPs. In the US, a well-place committee member can make his personal biases and idiosyncracies matters of law. I don't know if this guy has similar power; he is on the Health Committee and Sci-Tech committee but I don't think he has a lot of pull there.

My bigger concern, though, is in the constellations. Not of stars, but of beliefs. Poor reasoning in one area doesn't have to mean he reasons poorly in every area, but I've found that certain kinds of stupidities tend to cluster together. If he's just a guy with a stupid idea about the stars, even a well-placed guy, there's only so much harm he can do, and his constituents can be forgiven for electing him despite a foible. But it would not surprise me to discover that he buys into other conspiracy theories and applies similar poor reasoning to other areas. If that's the case, yeah, I blame his constituents.

The GOP realized that this is not a policy that’s going to help them keep the Senate in 2016. Right now the GOP is dominated by old Republicans who want the party to attract young voters, so ginning this issue up into a war wasn’t worth pissing off the young voters. The other important group in the GOP are the sham libertarians who are trying to bring wealthy techies into their camp. Going to war over net neutrality would halt Rand Paul’s advance into silicon valley. All the money the telcos and cable companies can throw at the GOP isn’t really worth pissing off all the people who want uninterrupted streams from Chaturbate and Russian pirate TV streams.

That is stupid. It's like saying blame the drivers for not giving a fuck about fuel injection. Users should not have to care about encryption. They should care about having secure and private communication, and how to make that happen is our job, it's why we are being paid more than burger flippers.

But you've heard of Hushmail, yes?

We have the technology. If we want, we can make strong crypto work. Problem is that most of the big players with the money to make it happen don't want, and the small guys either don't understand the technology and complexity (users) or are incapable of making it actually usable (techies).