I did say "sad and desperate".

The irony is that the kind of people who post comments on articles on web sites tend to be the least qualified to do so. By commenting on a news article, you are acknowledging that you have nothing more constructive to do with your time, and that you aren't satisfied with the attention that you get from the people around you. The level of hateful and ignorant bile in most news sites' comment sections is so great that anyone who would stoop to adding to them must be kinda sad and desperate.

And yes, I am completely aware that my comments here contain a full day's supply of irony.

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Or maybe the comments are just so full of utter garbage posted by the most degenerate members of society that it turns off regular readers.

"Brigid" (named after an Irish Saint no less!).

Or maybe the Irish goddess.

"Lack of national unity" isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Is there really any one person – even Theo de Raadt – who is personally familiar with the entirety of OpenBSD? And even if there are such people, isn't that more a reflection of the fact that it's fundamentally still Ye Olde BSD (which was tightly focused and built-to-purpose), and not a modern general-purpose OS?

It's a "solution" that only a libertarian would think is workable. Instead of enforceable government regulation, it's a voluntary opt-in system run by a private entity, which will work because all people are "rational actors" who will see that their self-interest is served by it. Or something.

It isn't just Linux; it's the nature of modern systems to become "too complex". Back in the days of my youth, it was possible for one person to grok an entire operating system, but it simply isn't possible anymore, unless it's a tightly-focused and built-to-purpose system.

Not just Common Sense, also The Federalist Papers .

Home schooling is a great way to ensure that your children get the same singular viewpoint and misinformation that their parents grew up with, and that they aren't burdened by the intellectual challenge of deciding which of the conflicting ideas they might encounter from classmates and teachers, is correct.

Just as a healthy immune system needs exposure to a variety of germs during the formative years (with some vaccinations to take care of the worst ones), a healthy intellect needs exposure to a variety of ideas, good and bad. Involved parents at home help to quash the most irredeemable ideas that kids will be exposed to (like vaccines do), while letting children reach their own conclusions about the rest of them (and generally landing pretty close to the tree).

It's bad enough that adults are increasingly getting all of their news and information from singular ideological sources (Fox News, HuffPo, etc), but to restrict the intellectual diet of a child to what Mom and Dad teach them will isolate them before they even leave the nest. One of the great achievements of the American publication education system in the 20th century – something that was worth breaking down separate-but-equal to accomplish – was to bring together children of different ethnicities, religions, races, and even (to some extent) economic classes, teaching them a shared history and a shared set of values. Which they learned as much from each other as from the teacher. As a member of a Middle-Class White Protestant Republican family, I'm a better person – a better citizen – now because of the time I spent learning side by side with kids who weren't all of those things ... and in some cases none of them.

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Religions have been adapting to discoveries of new intelligent live for as long as they've been around. Like the inhuman savages that European Christians discovered in the New World 500 years ago. Christianity would struggle a bit with the notion that these aliens clearly aren't children of Adam and Eve, and the fundamentalists would probably have to give up on their 6000-year-old Earth-centric universe, but they'd quickly move on to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them.

Spirit and Opportunity

The notion that Facebook supports free expression is really quite laughable. You don't even need to be a government to get Facebook to censor images for you. Their content-reporting system allows one self-appointed censor to complain anonymously about an image they don't like (such as two clothed men about to kiss, or PG13-level partial male nudity), and if the complaint gets assigned to someone equally homophobic, the image gets deleted and the person who posted it gets blocked, with no effective method of appeal. The whole Facebook content-policing system is rigged heavily in favor of bullies and censors.