Not quite sure what you mean there. Do you mean removing the Wikipedia links from the maps, or something else?

Now can someone please publish the counter-argument, that Copyright is not in the Public Interest.

Shall we compare them side by side?

Would you buy a computer with the hood welded shut?

If America keeps bombing Pakistan ... is it OK for Pakistan to bomb America? Because the level of "because we're special" which happens here is mind boggling.

Maybe it will be, when militant groups trying to force their religion on the world start kidnapping Pakistanis and holding them in America.

Forgive me for going all pedant on you, but that is not a war, it is a conflict.

The United States of America has not been at war since 1945.

Tomato juice sells well here. Possibly in its usefulness in making bloody marys...

Show me a common laptop that lets me RAID1 two primary storage devices.

Until that happens, they cannot be regarded as more than throwaway novelties since anything on them is either dependent on a single point of failure or in a cloud.

You're an idiot.

Re-read my first post that you responded to. Is there anything there to suggest that I or anyone I am responsible for has not been vaccinated?

Again, this post is not for you, since you are clearly unwell and incapable of reason, but anyone else following this thread.

The homebrew PC market is still booming.

PS. US scientists are also pursuing embryonic gene therapy (albeit using different technology). Of course, because they're not simply trying to win massive publicity, and want to actually understand the system first, they're using mouse embryos for now.

We've been hindered by what is basically a cult ideology about unborn life that we cannot do experiments like this (legally) in the west.

The fact that this experiment was done in China rather than "the West" has nothing to do with religion. The application of the CRISPR-Cas system for genetic modification was only discovered in 2012, and molecular analyses and proof-of-concept experiments - performed in the US and Europe, mostly - are being published in high-profile journals almost every month. There are, at last count, at least three companies (two in the US, one in Europe) founded by the scientists who elucidated the mechanism that have the explicit goal of human gene therapy. In fact, one group (in the US) just demonstrated in vivo genome editing (in an animal model, because only a lunatic would try this experiment in humans first).

There is no legal barrier to performing these experiments on human embryos in the US or Europe. In the US, I believe researchers are still prohibited from using NIH funding for such experiments, but that would not stop them from using private funding (and at this point, VCs and private donors are practically flinging sacks of money at this system). Their hesitation is based on concerns about the ethics of potentially lethal experimentation on unwilling test subjects. No, not the embryos, but the hypothetical live births that would result from implantation. If they're really, really lucky, the off-target effects will be silent or embryonic lethal. If they're unlucky - and given how new the system is, it's very difficult to guess what would happen - they'll wind up creating new genetic afflictions. Everyone working on the system is very excited about the potential applications to human health; no one wants to bring the field to a premature halt by rushing into human experimentation and accidentally causing severe birth defects because they didn't understand how it worked well enough.

There is a secondary issue, which is that China is almost pathetically desperate to prove it can do the same caliber of science as the West, to the extent that it's starting to throw money at non-Chinese researchers to set up labs in China, and offers large bounties for high-profile publications. (They're also known to be desperate for a Nobel prize in the sciences.) So far they've tended to just cherry-pick relatively easy, unimaginative projects following up on research done in the West (to be fair, Western scientists have done this among themselves for decades), rather than making entirely novel discoveries. Thus there is an enormous financial (and social) incentive to jump into a fast-moving field and try the obvious - but ethically dubious - application to human health.

I'd bet £10 that, in all these cases there was a subtle bug in the code.

For example, in C, shifting a 32 bit value by 32 bits is undefined behaviour. Intuitively, you might expect all of the bits to be shifted out of the number, the same as if you shifted it by one bit thirty two times. However, it is just as likely that nothing at all happens. I guess it is even possible to generate an invalid op code.

Why? On 32 bit Intel, the field in a shift instruction is only five bits wide and you need six bits to represent 32. The compiler could compile a 32 bit shift as a 31 bit shift and a 1 bit shift or mask the shift amount leaving you with a shift of 0 or possibly even put 32 into that field thus setting a bit outside the field.

Weird crashes that go away when you call particular functions or add local variables to a function are almost always caused by stack smashing bugs. For example, you might allocate an array on the stack and then pass a pointer to it in a function call. If the called function assumes the array is bigger than it really is (or is told that), it might write past the end of the array thus destroying something important, like it's own return address. Adding local variables makes a bit of extra padding so writing past the end of the array doesn't do enough damage to crash the program.

This is not about vaccines, it's about making them mandatory.

Look I'm sure you're comfortable with having such naive trust in anything that has the word "vaccine" attached to it. I choose to be a bit more cautious. Before something is injected into your bloodstream you'd better be damn well sure that it is safe. Because a lot can go wrong with human chemistry. A lot.

You said it yourself in another post:

Can you not see how such a megalomaniac would use a mandatory vaccination programme to their advantage?

Of course current vaccines are perfectly safe, as they have undergone rigorous testing and refining. Why did they undergo such a process? Because of people who don't think like you do. My point was that at some point malice or error could very easily cause something undesirable to enter your bloodstream.

Blind trust is seldom a good thing. I'm sorry that you don't seem to grasp that, and from your post it doesn't look as if you will be receptive to anything I say here - I just leave this here for the benefit of anyone else following this thread.

tl;dr: Trust, but verify

Disclaimer: I am pro-vax.

It has been established beyond all reasonable doubt that current MMR, DTaP, etc, vaccines are harmless except to those with specific medical conditions, and are effective against the diseases they target.

Current vaccines.

I think, however, that giving the government power to mandate vaccincations in this manner could lead to serious problems in future.

While today's vaccines are fine, there is the possibility that one day a vaccination will be produced that will not be desirable by the people. The NSA for example has proven itself to be insidious and virtually untouchable. At some point in the future they could introduce tracking nano-devices or a behaviour modifying cocktail to some otherwise innocuous vaccine, and the populace would have no legal standing to object. Another possibility is a product being introduced that may not have gone through sufficient testing due to some failure in due process. While the government launches inquiries and debates matters, people who refuse it are subsequently refused healthcare and die.

Vaccines for other conditions exist that have raised legitimate safety concerns: look up the current HPV vaccine for example.

So, how exactly do they propose to recover from a compromise of these kinds of systems where it's impossible to change the authentication data? And these systems will be compromised, history has taught us that. At least with a password or a certificate carried in a two-factor dongle I can change/reissue it and what the crooks have is no longer valid. I don't like systems whose failure mode in the event of a compromise is catastrophic.