This Omand guy should be fired immediately for even mentioning the possibility of a government service using unethical methods.
A government that is anything less than completely ethical should be no government at all.

You've got it the wrong way around; he doesn't understand it because he's NOT a moron.

Whenever I hear the name "J.J. Abrams", I can't help but hear that SNL "More cowbell!" sketch but with the words "More lensflare!".

Does science say womens' and mens' brains are identical? No, it doesn't. There are differences. If you don't believe me, ask your doctor. Also, try to explain why most women feel like woman and most men feel like man.

Did I say men don't have feelings? No, I didn't. I merely suggested they might _EXPERIENCE_ them _LESS INTENSELY_. Basically like all humans experience emotions at a different level of intensity. I was merely suggesting there might be some bias coming from gender.

Do you have any numbers to back up your claim of "so many men in prison for crimes of passion"? I couldn't find any. Only thing I could find even remotely applicable was an article on how men are more likely to get longer sentences for crimes of passion. http://www.psmag.com/legal-aff...

I'm sure you'll continue fighting your imaginary strawman, but I shall have no further part in it.

First of all, why would this be unlikely? Women's and men's brains are wired slightly differently, why would that not have an impact on how intensely the brain perceives emotions considering it has an impact on a lot of other things.

Secondly; why would this be insulting? You're good at some things and not as good at other things. So what? Why would you have a need to feel better than the average person at everything? More importantly though; whether you feel insulted by something doesn't make any difference to whether it's true or not.

I'm a man and personally I don't feel insulted by the notion that my half of humanity might feel emotions slightly less intensely on average than the other half of humanity.

Or perhaps men just experience emotions less intensely, thus have less need to vent them.

There's a difference between offering lots of nannying for those that want it and forcing your nannying upon everybody.

It is. It just protects against fewer problems.

Every type of backup method has drawbacks and benefits.
If there existed a perfect backup method, we would have only that method.

Redundancy makes it very easy and fast to recover data, but lacks security against localized physical problems and malicious software. It would be a perfectly valid first layer of backup and sufficient for backing up reproducable information such as downloaded/scanned/ripped media. It protects against accidentally deleting files or hardware problems. For less easily reproducable information you probably want some additional backup layers.

There are several hundred other countries to choose from.
My own country is slowly turning into a nanny state as well, but we're not nearly at USA-levels of government control yet.
When we do, there are some fine scandinavian countries still keeping it relatively sane and some other regions on the earth where you still have some freedoms.

The trauma caused by the police and child protective services far outweigh any damage that could have rationally and reasonably been expected otherwise.

If everybody wants to use that technology, why would it be sad?

Only for sufficiently big companies, and even then it's not going to happen overnight. If you can build a solid product to fill that transition gap for a ~10 year period, you can make a lot of money.

Here's the thing; what YOU think might be "common good" might not be what other people think is "common good".
I'm pretty sure the assholes that kill cartoonists think they are doing it for the "common good".

Subjective values must never limit freedom of speech.

How do I translate "trampoline" without reading the entire freakin' maillist history?
This is slang and you won't find the intended meaning it in a dictionary.

The summary could use a bit of translation, instead of merely copying content off a maillist post intended for a very specific group of kernel specialists using slang terminology.