In other news, another pseudo-intellectual on /. offers up an opinion.

The vast majority of deaths are caused by one species, though, Plasmodium falciparum . Infections from other species can cause serious illness but are rarely fatal.

However vaccines for any kind of parasite are difficult and only recently has real progress been made. As of this 1998 review there were no effective vaccines against any human parasite.

Oh, wait, you didn't need to pass a test for that.

I'm just trying to think how that would have been possible. I think back then there was a medical exception you could plead for. I didn't. I passed the 20 WPM test fair and square and got K6BP as a vanity call, long before there was any way to get that call without passing a 20 WPM test.

Unfortunately, ARRL did fight to keep those code speeds in place, and to keep code requirements, for the last several decades that I know of and probably continuously since 1936. Of course there was all of the regulation around incentive licensing, where code speeds were given a primary role. Just a few years ago, they sent Rod Stafford to the final IARU meeting on the code issue with one mission: preventing an international vote for removal of S25.5 . They lost.

I am not blaming this on ARRL staff and officers. Many of them have privately told me of their support, including some directors and their First VP, now SK. It's the membership that has been the problem.

I am having a lot of trouble believing the government agency and NGO thing, as well. I talked with some corporate emergency managers as part of my opposition to the encryption proceeding (we won that too, by the way, and I dragged an unwilling ARRL, who had said they would not comment, into the fight). Big hospitals, etc.

What I got from the corporate folks was that their management was resistant to using Radio Amateurs regardless of what the law was. Not that they were chomping at the bit waiting to be able to carry HIPAA-protected emergency information via encrypted Amateur radio. Indeed, if you read the encryption proceeding, public agencies and corporations hardly commented at all. That point was made very clearly in FCC's statement - the agencies that were theorized by Amateurs to want encryption didn't show any interest in the proceeding.

So, I am having trouble believing that the federal agency and NGO thing is real because of that.

I don't understand why they would want to reduce reliance on nuclear power. Nuclear is presently the best option there is. It generates massive amounts of power, has very little waste, and a relatively small carbon footprint.

"unreasonable" is the key word. If you are a suspect in an investigation, checking the contents of that person's facebook account for evidence is reasonable.

The Technican Element 3 test wasn't more difficult than the Novice Element 1 and 2 together, so Technican became the lowest license class when they stopped having to take Element 1.

The change to 13 WPM was in 1936, and was specifically to reduce the number of Amateur applicants. It was 10 WPM before that. ARRL asked for 12.5 WPM in their filing, FCC rounded the number because they felt it would be difficult to set 12.5 on the Instructograph and other equipment available for code practice at the time.

It was meant to keep otherwise-worthy hams out of the hobby. And then we let that requirement keep going for 60 years.

The Indianapolis cop episode was back in 2009. It wasn't the first time we've had intruders, and won't be the last, and if you have to reach back that long for an example, the situation can't be that bad. It had nothing to do with code rules or NGOs getting their operators licenses.

A satphone is less expensive than a trained HF operator. Iridium costs $30 per month and $0.89 per minute to call another Iridium phone. That's the over-the-counter rate. Government agencies get a better rate than that. And the phone costs $1100, again that's retail not the government rate, less than an HF rig with antenna and tower will cost any public agency to install.

You think it's a big deal to lobby against paid operators because there will be objections? How difficult do you think it was to reform the code regulations? Don't you think there were lots of opposing comments?

And you don't care about young people getting into Amateur Radio. That's non-survival thinking.

Fortunately, when the real hams go to get something done, folks like you aren't hard to fight, because you don't really do much other than whine and send in the occassional FCC comment. Do you know I even spoke in Iceland when I was lobbying against the code rules? Their IARU vote had the same power as that of the U.S., and half of the hams in the country came to see me. That's how you make real change.

The Scandinavians are all very similar, but the Finns are historically distinct, more closely related to other eastern groups like the Karelians (nowadays in Russia) and Estonians. But a substantial portion of modern Finns are descended from other groups, mainly Swedes.

True, more precisely I should've said "recent non-white heritage". The DNA sequence tests aren't looking for correlations that go back that far in the past.

No, that's bullshit. If you're going to shut down an argument, shut it down by attacking the failings of the argument. Not the gender of the person making the point. All arguments should arrive at a weight of 0 until valid points are made to either support, or debunk it.

There's a great deal of irony in that statement. Do you think men never suffer harassment, or discrimination? Are these things which are exclusive to women?

Do you not see how hypocritical it is to shut someone out of an argument based on gender?

I don't think it's fair to say men can't talk about women's issues because they're men. That just creates a closed loop where any outside argument can be shut down by saying "well you're not a woman, so anything you say is invalid". That's the sort of thing you see a lot from hard line feminism - the idea that nobody but them can truly understand the argument, and we just have to take their word for it. Other SJW groups tend to do the same things. Any time you hear something like "check your privilege" or statements which point in that direction, it's a sign that the person you're talking to probably has no reasonable rebuttal to an argument.

I appreciate all your accomplishments as a developer. I don't appreciate all your comments as a feminazi.

I'm getting really tired of people trying hard to make it seem like all women are victims and we need to be run like a nanny state as a result. If you continue to treat men like the enemy you'll have a self fulfilling prophecy.