Are there any valuable functions mapped to a middle button anyway, that make it so important?

Yes. For people who use real computers, middle button = "paste selected text".

Who puts three fingers on the surface of a mouse?

People who use real computers but have not yet found the one true pointing device, the 4-button Logitech Marble Mouse Trackball.

You don't have a right to be able to afford anything. At least in any society beyond pure communism - which has never existed in groups of more than say, 100.

That is untrue. For example, food stamps are all about ensuring everyone can afford food.

Also, Cold War is over and you won. Congratulations. However, it also means that the Red Scare is no longer an effective rhetoric. Get over it already.

Driving isn't a right, it's a privilege.

No, it's not. Like the parent said, it's a necessity. Banning people from doing whatever they must to survive is neither effective nor reasonable. All you get is yet another class of outlaws. Who'll be driving the cheapest, most dangerous cars they can find, should "automatic impoundment" actually become a rule.

I've paid for that privilege my entire adult life, maintaining my registration, my insurance, and my license despite having no at-fault accidents. I expect others to do the same.

But they won't. You can punish them or try to minimize the damage caused by them, but not both. Such is life.

Just because one is a physical limitation and the other is a psychological one doesn't make them different

Yes, actually, it does. That the idea of so-called "mental illness" obscures this is one of the problems with mislabeling various problems of living as diseases.

I've heard claims that one in four women will be raped at some point in their lives, and have yet to hear any sort of data-based rebuttal.

Really? You heard such an extraordinary claim, but apparently made zero effort to look into its validity?

Here you go. And here. And here.

Essentially, that inflated number is based on questionable surveys which often fail to distinguish between a regrettable drunken hookup and rape, and is not just about rape but about behavior ranging from grabbing a woman's butt on up through attempted rape and actual rape. (Yes, grabbing someone's butt is bad. It's assault. It's unacceptable. It is not, however, rape.)

Is rape much more common than most people think? Yes. The data is murky but I would be surprised if the lifetime victimization rate for women was less than 5%, 1 in 20. Is it 25%, "eeny-meeny-miney-RAPE!" common? No.

And a teacher sending a student sexy messages over the internet is certainly a breach of professional conduct...but it's not rape.

That's hardly surprising. Titanic had 5 times the budget of Serenity and Avatar's was even larger. I was at least as impressed with the visuals in The Avengers as I was with Titanic and Firefly was extremely impressive visually for a TV show of that period.

It's quite hard to separate Cameron's direction of Avatar from his other roles of writer, editor, and producer. When a scene didn't work was it badly directed? Or badly edited? Or just poorly written? It's hard to tell. A perfectly well written scene can be ruined with poor direction and even if well written and directed it can be butchered by poor editing. In the end it doesn't actually matter because ultimately the bad result was the product of the same man's creative failure. As you say Cameron wouldn't simply direct a Star Wars movie. Whedon would probably not stick to directing either but I have rather more confidence in his ability to produce something good.

There are clear lines between what is personal and what affects the job. If you take drugs it'll likely affect your work and health costs (still somewhat paid for by the company) - that means the company has a valid interest.

And of course, since me breaking my leg will cost the company in the form of training a replacement, at the very least, it has a valid interest to keep me from going skiing, too. Not to mention my vote - a company is affected by legislation, thus it has a valid interest to make sure I vote for whoever it tells me to vote.

Just because a company has a "valid interest" in some matter doesn't mean it has any business putting its proverbial nose there. Companies exist to serve people, not the other way around.

OTOH, your private emails (or facebook posts) between family and friends has very little to no affect on the company - therefore they don't have any valid need for access to it.

And this is downright absurd. Of course your personal relationships affect your work performance. But you have them so they're off limits.

It's the dishonesty, even moreso than the authoritarianism, of the anti-drug movement that bothers me.

Sounds like you feel entitled to that job...

I wonder if you would give the same answer for, say, mandatory hymen inspections as a condition for employment?

People are entitled to have their private lives, and accepting any kind of end run around that means no one's rights are every going to be safe.

So a company doesn't have to assume you are innocent at all, as neither does your friends, family or random person in the street.

If a company chooses to take upon itself law enforcement, it should bloody well expect to be held to the same standard.

I'm guessing you don't like the sound of a nicely tuned motorcycle engine too, right?

All of us don't need to bother other people just to confirm our own existence. Which is what noisy engines ultimately amount to.

Also, it's hard to take concepts like "nicely tuned motorcycle engine" seriously when the first image that comes to mind is a high schooler who's moped gets 2 hp at 200 decibels.

because some substances/ items actually cause harm and have no fucking reason to be in civil society

That can become a convenient excuse to justify forcing your personal preferences on other people. And if "civil society" reaches beneath my skin to claim ownership on my very body itself, it's hard to avoid thinking it as pretty totalitarian.

the concept of freedom?

completely untouched by this simple truth

That is an absurd claim. Of course freedom is affected by regulations. The question is whether a given set of regulations achieves goals worthy of the sacrifices it requires. Which, I suppose, is easy to answer if you, personally, aren't being called to sacrifice any activity you'd like to partake in.

we, society, LIKE restrictions on, for example, kiddie porn.

Yes, we do. We, as a society, are addicted to power and enjoy wielding it. That does not make such lording over others right. If anything, this particular addiction has caused more misery than all others combined.

this is where you get really mad at me and compare me to an authoritarian freedom crushing "statist" goon... just because i don't want people freely trading in kiddie porn or heroin. which would make you a brainless teenaged drama queen. let's hope you're not

Your entire argument is just one long appeal to authority, mixed with think of the children and with a little bit of an argument from intimidation at the end. You are an authoritarian, or if you prefer, a power addict.

As for trading "kiddie porn or heroin", these are very different and quite obviously so. Heroin is a chemical substance the production or use of which does not imply harm to anyone or anything except the user. A society might seek to ban it on those grounds, but current one jails addicts so its hard to take seriously it's concern over them. And that doesn't really leave many reasons other than a power trip.

The vacuum seems to have energy, so if space itself expands, the vacuum left has to either not have any energy whatsoever or drain the energy from nearby space.

But if cosmological constant is greater thanzero, then our normal intuition of gravity is simply incorrect: what we perceive as gravitational potential is simply the crater at the top of a mountain of infinite height. No conservation law is being broken here, the universe simply contains a built-in wellspring of endless energy that's paying for the creation. Think of it as the ultimate renewable: very disperse but utterly inexhaustible.

Star Trek now has freedom to have any future the writers can come up with

No, they're stuck with the universe Abrams left them. A universe which makes no sense, where starships are irrelevant because transporters can move people over interstellar distances (from Earth to the Klingon homeworld), and where a cure for death has been found in Khan's blood. Not to mention the absurd political situation, with a corrupt Starfleet operating accord to some bizarre system of personal prerogative of individual commanders rather than any rational chain of command.

Why is the tax code so convoluted that there is an entire industry devoted to following the code? It's because Congress keeps piling on the laws, exceptions, work-around, and "social engineering". Instead of adding law to the US Code, they should be removing pages from the US Code. To make things simpler, start eliminating "targeted" deductions and exemptions/exceptions to deductions, so that individuals and married people can play by the same rules as the businesses, companies, and corporations. If insurance premiums are tax-deductible to one class of taxpayer, it should be the same for all classes of taxpayers.

Completely remove the "negative tax liability". If you are going to give people money, give people money directly, and not via the IRS. The IRS is not a social agency. Their job is to collect taxes. I'm not sure what to do with tax-exempt organizations in the current climate, but the IRS shouldn't be making that determination off their own bat. They should stick to the "revenue" part.

The IRS regulations published in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) are to implement the statues passed by Congress. The IRS does not do this off their own bat. Court cases balloons the number of pages of interpretation, because there is no requirement to "backfill" the CFR or the USC, and stare decisis increases the amount of law surrounding tax -- another source of law bloat. That's why WestLaw and Lexus/Nexus is so necessary, and why tax attorneys demand -- and get -- such high fees. Those fees can be chickenfeed compared with the interest and penalties that their clients have to pay out when they don't use an attorney.

I don't have an opinion of the Fair Tax proposal, because I'm not sure I understand it yet. But I do know that there are way too many densely-printed pages in USC Title 26. Shrink that down to something the size of a magazine, and many of the tax ills will be solved. Ordinary people will be able to understand the law they are supposed to follow.

As a consequence, the IRS itself would shrink. And the new IT systems would be far easier and quicker to implement.

(pipe dream, for sure)

I'm coming in late on this. First, the activities of man have released a lot of the sun's energy that has been stored for millions of year. So I agree that the gross heat load on the planet has been increased. Whether this overwhelms our planet's ability to dissipate that heat is open to question. Why is it open to question? Because, without numbers, it isn't science, just an opinion.

The Chicken Little people have been watching with alarm several trends over the years showing varying temperature. First, it's too cold; then, it's too hot. (And the butt of the old Henny Youngman joke: if the water turns black, the baby really needed a bath!) Attempts to model the short-term temperature shift have not accurately predicted what is going to happen in the future. Worse, the models don't accurately reflect the past, when applied to the data collected over the years. How to the CLPs explain this? WIth lame excuses, mostley, that reduce to "we don't know enough".

The research needs to continue. The people who build the models need to add to those models those sources of temperature variations that are just now being discovered, said discoveries having blown the older models out of the water. (pun intended) There are zero-dollar things we can do now to improve the situation. Plant trees, especially re-plant those trees that were clear-cut in the Amazon. Replace incandecant light bulbs (and those mercury-filled CFDs) with LED bulbs, not to save the climate, but to SAVE MONEY in the long term; I'm about 45% through this process myself.

I don't object per se to spending money on the problem. I object to spending money recklessly JUST for climate change, without some accurate way of measuring the effects of the changes. Reducing certain factory emissions results in less acid rain, which can have an adverse effect on buildings, roads, and other infrastructure. Containing the worst methane emissions from oil/gas operations makes perfect sense because we can then use the stuff -- but remember that the release from the Earth without man's help overwhelms our pitiful contribution.

The science is far from settled. If it's truely settled, show me the accurate models that predict, with precision, what we see on November 1, 2016