Religion so easily uses itself to conduct evil acts. Atheism implies no actions or motivations for actions. And most atheists will scoff at state dogma just as obviously as we scoff at religious dogma. Believing something for which there is no good reason to suppose is true is not desirable. Were there social aspects to the witch trials, sure, people made money hunting witches and got to closely examine the breasts and genitals of young girls, but is there a religious aspect too. Yes. Whereas there's no atheistic reasons to do anything, much less enforce an absurd form of biology on pains of death. You either believe wheat gets coldness power from having their seeds frozen or you go to the gulag, that's not a cry for too much rationality or too much logic. Those are both idiotic dogmas. Dogma is the enemy.

Apparently if you talk about wanting evidence for beliefs too much, you will inevitably lead to the gulag. No other way around it.

Being waited on gripper and wheel doesn't make a person independent. It makes a person dependent on a robot.

Why not remove infant girls breast buds? Seriously. You'd save thousands of dollars in breast cancer costs among other things. By this same logic you could well support removing a great many body parts. Imagine the savings if I could be rendered completely hairless?

Clearly they would offer that no matter how much humans through their own personal intelligent design and modify dogs appearances they never stop being dogs as evolution says they should.

Evolution never says that, and the analogy to natural selection is to think about how much greater the modifications of nature could be if working on the principles of success rather than the trivial human inkling of noticed traits in breeding animals. Darwin noted to great lengths the changes by dog breeders and pigeon fanciers go to illicit in their relevant stocks and points out that given geometric growth potential and linear growth actuality that a great many animals that could exist, do not exist because they lose the struggle for existence and any edge in that will pay huge dividends to those descendants with that same benefit and so the natural propensity for life is to improve over time. Which in no way implies dogs becoming non-dogs but rather dogs becoming a rather large group with many very different species without that group given natural selection and millions of years.

With the exception of COBOL those might be fine things to teach kids. They get the basics down without corrupting their ideas. It's pretty easy to go from basic to something like Java because you just relearn everything and the better structures mean you like it more and don't have to unlearn all the crap you learned. You just learn an entirely different form. You're not going to corrupt somebody's ideas by having them write out a factorial program in assembly.

Screw the 3rd world. If you can do this fast enough and cheap enough, I could filter all my pool water and forgo chlorine entirely!

Actually the health care law has some sticks for that stuff too. You need to actually pay a specific percentage of that money towards healthcare costs or cut the people on your health care a check.

But are you mud on your mother's side or your father's side?

It's not self-sustainable. It's sustained by the sun.

Interestingly, the best current source of spider silk today are genetically engineered goats which produce the protein in breast milk. Fiddle with nature indeed.

I'm not supposing this stuff idly as a great what if. People are buying and selling these goods for real money (which is valued at what people value it at too), and when they are actually robbed in a way unassociated with game dynamics they seek restitution if the police won't help them they will help themselves. People have died over the theft of virtual goods. That people spend cash, sweat, and blood in the market necessarily says it's a real market. Shrugging your shoulders because it's hard and forcing it into realms of black markets because people are valuing bits in a computer, is not going to help things.

Your objects value are determined by what they are valued at. They are worth what people are willing to pay for them. With the shut down of a game service the objects would become devoid of value because their value is only as part of the game which no longer existed, effectively the game shutdown would cause an economic collapse of the value items of the game.

If the MMO simply stole your stuff because they wanted to, you should be allowed to sue them for the value of the items. Somebody might well give you real money for those actual items. But, if they shut down, all the items are without value at all because nobody would pay you anything for them even if transferring the items from one deactivated account to another were actually possible.

Add to that the fact that you can sell many of those items for real cash money. And that when property rights are denied there are real and serious problems.

There have been cases where Person A borrows a sword from Person B. Person A sells said sword on Ebay for $500. Person B contacts the police. Police say person B has no recourse. Person B kills Person A.

It's really a problem that such things are not rightly classed as property under current law just because of the digital nature of the good.

Dead people do not take offense or breath.