Granted these are all daunting challenges and working out how to get that many people off the planet in city sized starships is going to be close to impossible. All I ask is that if it does somehow happen the starships be shaped like giant guitars. If we can overcome all the other challenges this should prove to be a small matter.

There's actually nothing degrading about a handout. Nothing at all. I get so sick of hearing this bullshit. If there was no "subsistence and degrading handout" people who think it's degrading would be complaining that there wasn't even a system in place to provide these people with even a subsistence level handout. What's degrading is being satisfied with a handout. Coming to expect the handout and refusing to work hard to improve your lot in life is degrading and people bring that on themselves all the time. Before you take me to task for anything understand that I grew up as poor as anyone in the United States you can point to. Go ahead and find an example and I can most likely match them or put them to shame. My family lost everything when I was growing up and the one thing we didn't do was lay down and accept a handout. My mom refused food stamps when we could have used them. She never went on welfare and she only accepted unemployment grudgingly. She beat the fucking bushes for work and never gave up. My brother is the first person in my family to get a college degree and he did it working full time paying his way as he went. I have literally gone to work with a broken back (wasn't aware of it at the time). Fuck the poor who spend their lives crying about what they don't have and how unfair it is. Everything they could ask for is there for the taking in the US if they will just get up on their feet and work for it.

The amount only came to a few thousand dollars and it was done with a series of fake checks that the thieves printed up themselves and passed off at stores that were known at the time not to use any kind of check verification system but it still screwed my life up for months and even then nobody was really interested in catching the people who did it. The stores had pictures of them and everything but didn't pursue it (to my knowledge). My bank only wanted to get me to sign statements that I hadn't done it and they reimbursed my account all the money that had been taken.

Where did you get your new eyes? Hannibal Chew? He makes great eyes!

Along with local law enforcement.

But then I didn't pay much attention to the studies this is telling me may be wrong either. I was going to drink it either way and I think we all know that. Mmmmm, Beer!

Yeah but my kid has to go to school with your unvaccinated kid (in theory). Just seems like a bad idea to let people opt out of shit like this.

Seriously, I downloaded every bit of music I could ever want years ago and now I buy songs one at a time (mostly) through iTunes because it's easy and cheap. Music piracy in its mass-orgy like form was based on one thing. Decades of being fucked by record labels and an opportunity to fuck them right back. It was about artists or people being too cheap to buy music. It was about people who had spent money on music for years and years with no real way of backing them up. I bought music over and over again as formats changed and as crappy cassette tapes broke. I probably bought Permanent Waves by Rush 5 times if I bought it once! Initially I was OK with CD's but I didn't get excited about them until I realized that I could rip them. Naturally after that came realizing I could share the files I'd ripped and suddenly my music collection became one with all my friends music collections. Sneaker-net kicked in and then later the network at my office followed by the Internet. I'm now squatting on around 400GB of music, much of which I'd never gotten around to sampling if a friend or co-worker hadn't had it in their collection. Good stuff. When it comes to "what has gone before" I'm like the fat guy in the restaurant in Monty Python's Meaning of Life. "Fuck off! I'm stuffed!". Now, going forward I will buy what I want at a price I think is fair and in the format I choose. That's what I call freedom (even if I had to violate a bunch of people's copyrights to get it)!

They make some outstanding fake jerseys over there and sell them at a fraction of the price they go for here. Nobody in their right mind buying those would think they were legit though. Not at those prices.

You got a whole planet secreting insecticide? WTF! I'm no scientist person but even I know that's a bad idea.

Not likely. I don't think that's the same thing.

That's unfortunate because you're far more likely to get a treatment that made you content being the man you were born than a genuinely effective way to make your body into the female that you believe you are supposed to be. I feel for you because that can't be easy but eventually it will be treatable and when that happens you'll have the opportunity to make that decision though it won't come down to "jump of a building or be male". It will probably look more like "jump off a building, be male, or continue as you are dealing with it the best way you can" because thankfully society seems to (slowly) be getting better at this kind of thing.

And since then? What have Muslims contributed to the sciences since the medieval age? Honest question. I have been told over and over again about the substantial contributions to science from the Muslim world back in the "Long ago time" but where did that go? Why did it go from world-leading and brilliant to a slow trickle and then dry up almost completely?

I haven't actually met 99% of the people who bash the Windows 8.x interface so I'm not able to say how long they have or haven't used it. I know that I use it every day and while I still find it to be a minor annoyance I can safely say that it isn't unusable or the giant tragedy it's made out to be. It's not good and I should never have had to go through the trouble of getting used to it. It seems the work of persons trying to do the opposite of what would have made sense and so it suffered the appropriate fate. Microsoft went and attempted to improve upon something that no one wanted fixed. But it's not as bad as the worst of the critics make it out to be.

Sometimes. Not always of course but often enough.