> I dunno if we should mandate it on men. Then again, I don't think it should be mandated for women either, at least not without parental consent to opt in.

The problem with that approach is that the anti-vaccination kooks don't just make themselves and each other sick, they incubate diseases that affect everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversy
http://www.skepdic.com/antivaccination.html

As long as we can get Nimoy to do the voice work I'm down.

> It's also why they didn't put Hitler in, as to many people he's just a misunderstood guy who tried to do his best against the forces of Zionist-Communism.

Well, that and he was a Roman Catholic, so it would weaken the point they were trying to make. The superior morality of religion is one of the few arguments that cannot be successfully Godwin'd. =)

It also teaches that if a man rapes a woman, he has committed a property crime against her father and will be forced to marry her as part of her punishment.
Are you really sure these are the old books you want to use?

> Discarding the moral teachings that have been handed down over thousands of years is equally ridiculous.

It's not ridiculous; moral philosophy has been advancing since the bronze age, just like science. There's a reason that religions founded in that era endorse slavery, regard women as property, and practice scapegoating, to name just a few items; they are only as moral, could only possibly be as moral, as the men who founded them were. We can do better today.

> as a practicing physician before the Feds got involved he never saw a patient left to die

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but even so, that can't POSSIBLY be true. I'm only 32 and two people close to me have died because of an inability to afford treatment; one a few years back from melanoma and one just last week from breast cancer.

I suppose it's possible that Ron Paul managed to work as a physician and never notice the poor dying all around him, but is that really the most likely explanation?

> the generally accepted definitions do not preclude the use of hard disks

And THAT, if anything, is what is killing netbooks.

When Asus came out with the EeePC 701, it was something truly different; 9" body (only a 7" display in that first model), SSD only, cheap. It had Linux, but even being the zealot that I am I don't consider that a requirement for a netbook. The 9xx series (full 9" display, same size body) was the pinnacle of netbook evolution from my point of view. (Arguably surpassed by the Asus T91MT, but that one had a crappy GPU which wasn't useful in Linux).

Nowadays, there are "netbooks" up to 12" in size, you almost can't find a 9" anymore, and SSD are uncommon. Basically, the term "netbook" has come to just mean "crappy laptop".

> it is not trivial to take the long road trips into account

It is *kinda* trivial. ;) Back when I lived in dorms and then apartments, I kept a minivan because I had to move frequently, and needed the cargo room. Shortly after I bought a home, my van died and I was shopping for a vehicle. A week or so into the process it occurred to me that I no longer required moving capacity, so I was able to buy an ultra-compact and save buckets of money and fuel. Once a year or so if I find a piece of furniture or other large thing I need to move, and I rent a U-Haul truck.

Same logic applies to battery electrics; I make about two trips per year that are out of range of, say, a Nissan Leaf. I've run the numbers and I come out _way, waaaayy_ ahead by commuting with the Leaf and renting a Yaris or a Civic or something twice a year. A lot of communities are starting up car-sharing systems for an even more flexible and lower cost option.

Quick! You're needed two stories up on the climate change topic!

> I would love to have lower taxes. Who wouldn't?

Unless you make more than $300,000USD/year, Obama has lowered your taxes.

I'd much rather have slightly higher taxes and have a healthcare system modeled on France or the UK, better public transportation infrastructure, free or heavily subsidized college education, a revitalized space program, and a raft of other things that would make the country run better for everyone.

Of course, we could fund all of this and still keep GWBush's billionaire tax cuts by cancelling just one war, but that's a third rail that no politician can survive contact with.

Reminder: 100.0% of the people who post on Slashdot that picking up women is easy, are virgins.

Please make a note of it.

> What I don't understand is why they wouldn't want as much independent coverage of the incident / whatever as possible.

Because they want to have the option to lie about it, obviously.

You assume it hasn't become self-aware and buggered off, Wall-E style.

-nod- I realize this is an expression of the spam problem, and therefore the "Your plan won't work for the following reasons" form letter applies. However, without the financial incentive to get their shit through, plus the fact that every target potentially has a different set of filters (as opposed to say, Gmail, where if you can get something through it goes through for everyone) we might not be in worst-case territory here.

At any rate, the least you could say is that it *would* be an arms race, whereas now the non-trolls are completely unarmed.

Suggestion to Slashdot devs... give us regex-based comment filtering. I'm fairly sure any post matching /nigger/ or /GNAA/ or /\ ps0t\ / will never have any further contents I care to miss.