1) The analogy doesn't fit. That horses were argued to be more reliable is not at all relevant to whether or not people wanted to own some form of transportation. They did, and they continued to even after the automobile supplanted the horse.

2) Most cars are used and sit idle during the same parts of the day for a large portion of the population, so sharing wouldn't substantially reduce the number of vehicles in use, and without reducing the number of vehicles in use (getting more rides per vehicle) you're not going to lower the cost per trip, which reduces the incentive to share.

3) Most people would prefer not to sit in other people's filth (but, ironically, many are fine sitting in their own filth). Regardless of any logical inconsistency, the "ick factor" will weigh heavily in any determination of whether to rent or own.

I just bring hydrogen and burn it as needed.

ISIS is not even close to being defined along ethnic or religious lines.

They might not have succeeded with more attention to the issue. If, for example, Slashdot had posted the story, we might be reading a different story today.

To be fair, most updates of OS X have required a reboot as well. I'm in the process of installing 10.10.1 right now, and will have to reboot momentarily. There are probably more patches for Windows, but on its own, I'm not sure whether that statistic is objectively bad.

The other half is less use of URLs to pass parameters and query strings, where less is as close to zero as possible.

And while this will certainly reduce sniffing, it won't reduce "metadata" collection at all, and it won't eliminate the need for endpoint security -- if anything, it will increase it.

Also, why on God's green earth isn't Slashdot using https yet??

Still: women are more likely to be displayed in roles perceived as *de*grading, whereas men are portrayed with attributes perceived as positive

I'd like to see empirical evidence of this. Off the cuff, it doesn't ring true, and hasn't for a long time. The leading man in almost every comedy and drama is someone who needs to learn life lessons from his wife or another leading female role. In suspense, the villain is usually a man. Granted, there are certainly genres, most notably action, where women are damsels in distress and nothing more, but that idea does not uniquely appeal to men -- it also appeals to women who like the idea of having their own knight in shining armor. And, aside from some olympic events, most sports don't glorify women. Not sure what to do about that, or why the public doesn't like to watch women compete head-on, but is fine watching men try to stomp each other. I'm also not sure why we're squeamish about seeing women in combat. Why men are expected to earn more in dating, but the same on average, as if one were separable from the other. Why violence against women is generally considered to be *more* wrong, but violence against men is less wrong, despite being a larger problem statistically. Why men under 30 are less educated and earn less than women in the US. Why women's health issues dominate the media and popular culture despite the fact that women live more than 6% longer than men -- and that gap grew last year. Why men are punished more severely and women are forgiven more readily for the same offenses. Why men are less likely to pass on their genes than women, but are treated as if they were surreptitious philanderers, despite the fact that rates of infidelity are roughly equal, and that women are, in fact, more likely to have a child with someone other than their alleged mate. Why we ignore domestic violence and verbal abuse against men; indeed, we seem to expect men to tolerate and excuse bad behavior by women. Why child custody is overwhelmingly awarded to women. Why men are more than twice as likely to be homeless.

Thanks for posting an actual response to this!

I feel that artificial insemination is essentially the same thing, and that's conventionally accepted, and even encouraged in everything from ranching to rescuing species. Would the author have the same qualms about inseminating the elephant to increase elephant numbers? I suspect not. The only difference with mammoths is that we extincted them thousands of years ago.

The ethical concerns I would focus on (not that I am the arbiter of ethical concerns or anything) is whether and how to reintroduce them into the wild, since a) study in captivity would be of limited value, and b) that seems like the most noble and worthwhile end game.

That's relevant to, but not the full story of, the ethical controversy over human cloning, but we're talking about mammoths. I don't think anyone's proposing that we insert mammoth DNA into human eggs.

My co-worker had the exact same issue. I'll go ahead and attribute it to incompetence rather than malice, but that doesn't make it much better. The harm is the same.

My personal views don't affect the process of the legal system any more than yours do; I was just trying to explain that not all threats are crimes in the eyes of the law. How and where that distinction is made is outside the scope of my post.

That was

1) Not a stranger.
2) Posted after the fact, not a threat before the fact.
3) Not premeditated.
4) Not an online conflict that spilled over into "real life."
5) Related to GG in exactly the same way, and to the same degree, as it was related to Syria. (Which is to say, not at all.)

But other than those things, you're spot on.

Or aren't a women, who, coincidentally, happen to be a bit physically smaller and weaker on average than men and therefore are more vulnerable to physical assaults.

Stop. The only times that physical strength is the difference in who wins are in arm wrestling and weight lifting, neither of which are frequently used in attacks or to settle interpersonal conflicts.

Incidentally, men are the victims of violent crime significantly more often than women, so being female makes one less likely to be a target of violence. (Page 6, Table 5. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub...)

It depends on the state, but generally it has to be a credible threat of violence, where a reasonable person would interpret it as such. I think most reasonable people would dismiss threats of violence on the internets, particularly given the very low (zero?) rate of historic follow-through from utter strangers.