Let me rephrase because I think you missed the point. Discriminations are generally wielded by a majority against a minority. Your argument that we should let the market decide makes no sense: the majority will not feel the impact of a minority of their customers going elsewhere and thus will not have any reason to change their behavior. So it's a hypocritical way of say minorities should continue to be discriminated against "until the problem goes away".

And here are some parts of the the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the US helped draft, that you don't seem to be aware of:

Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

So it seems your view is that religious freedom must trump every other freedom or right. But that cannot work. Not everyone follows the same religion (if any). Ensuring that is the whole point of religious freedom. But each religion has its own idea of what its followers must do. Some say unmarried women who have sex must be stoned. According to your argument, making that illegal would be denying these people their religious freedom. Sure you may not agree with their religious mores, but you cannot question or deny theirs while refusing your right to discriminate based on yours to be questioned or made illegal.

the only way out is to hold that religious freedom must stop where other people's freedoms start. That means the right to go about their live peacefully, and not to be discriminated against.

Just like doctors should not be allowed to discriminate for any reason, people running stores open to the general public should not be allowed to discriminate. If selling to some categories of the population goes against their religion then they should run a private store, one that requires a membership card from their congregation or something, or they should find themselves another job where they can choose their clients.

I think you were more specifically thinking of the Bill of Rights. It's a good document but it's not the absolute unambiguous answer you make it out to be. For instance, the first amendment, the one you care about because it says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof", immediately continues with "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press". Well, lots of religions consider blasphemy to be a religious crime and want it to be forbidden and punished. But that would go against the very same amendment's protection of freedom of speech. So which is it? It seems like according to you religious freedom should trump freedom of speech but I'm not sure your fellow citizens would agree with you on that, or that you'd really like to live in such a country.

Don't need to. I already leave in a country where discrimination is illegal. Works just fine. Thank you very much.

Wonderful community you want to build. One where minorities can be ostracised, denied service by the majority, forced to either supply themselves from shaddy sources who will overchage them or to die or leave if they can. Members of that holier than thou majority can try to hide behind the veil of religious mores all they want. The truth is it is they who don't have one shred of morality.

As far as I can tell this is speculation on your part. Past a certain weight people are not going to throw the box around. As a heater it's also quite possible that it will be fastened to a wall or something too. Not that it matters anyway.

That however is totally unrealistic. First they say they'll pay for power, not that they will lay their own electric cable all the way to the customer to bring power. That would be incredibly stupid, wasteful and so expensive they would never get a positive return on investment. So they will at most install a separate electric meter at the customer's premises, and then hook up their machine to a regular power outlet. So then this fiber you want to put in the power cable will have nowhere to plug into. And again, given that most houses/apartments don't have fiber yet it, requiring a fiber connection would limit them to just a fraction of the potential market, or would force them to lay their own fiber which again is incredibly expensive (but at least it would not be redundant if they manage to resell it to regular ISPs). But it's more likely they will simply reuse their customer's Internet connection (remember data caps are mostly a US thing). So really what this tells us is that they will limit themselves to workloads which don't require too much communication. The ideal case would be CPU/GPU intensive computations like Folding@Home, SETI, GIMPS, etc.

I think you meant to say there is no power shortage. However we only have 56 years of proven reserves of oil, add another 4 years counting oil sands. To me that qualifies as a looming shortage of one of our primary source of energy. And that's all assuming zero increase in energy use, and as a corollary that about 85% of the population keeps on using 5 to 10 times less energy per person than Americans. So saying there's no energy shortage is a bit optimistic.

That said I'll grant you that although we only have 58 years of proven natural gas reserves, at least discoveries seem to be keeping pace. We'll see how that goes once the oil runs out however. Also while we can switch to other energy sources like wind and solar, they require an important initial investment of energy which will be hard once we start feeling the crunch.

That's disingenuous when it's caused by a byproduct of our main sources of energy. CO2 is not something you can filter out of your car exhaust or that we can easily take out of power plants.

No. He's saying that whether we want it or not the world population will go down to 1 billion, either in an orderly fashion of our own choosing; or through famine, disease and war over resources.

While I don't agree with his 1 billion mark, it's obvious the population cannot increase indefinitely. Fortunately it's expected that it will plateau at or before the 10 billion mark. But there's still the question of whether there's enough resources (energy, drinking water, ores, etc) to sustain a population of 10 billion, all living decent lives (unlike now), indefinitely.

Studies are not hard to find: type 'weather impact of wind turbines' in Google and the first link will be Wikipedia which will point you to five studies on the subject!

To summarize the current set of studies don't find a significant impact but more detailed analyzes will tell us more. But we've been building sky-scrapers and other tall structures for a century now and have yet to see any impact of these. Also wind-turbines are about 150 meters high when our atmosphere is 20,000 meters thick. Finally taking down wind-turbines is much easier than scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. So overall I have a hard time feeling concerned.

You're forgetting all the the food that is thrown away by producers and then supermarkets because it would not sell, then all the food people buy and let go bad, and then all that they put in their plate and then throw away because they're full. So to get this 2000 calories intake farmers need to produce at least 4000. But probably you think that solving this issue is trivial.

A no less considerable amount does not lend itself to standard agricultural practices either because of the terrain or the lack of water for irrigation. The 'efficient land use' also relies on a massive use of fossil fuel based fertilizers. But you probably think we have an inexhaustible supply of fossil fuels.

Sure. Convincing everyone to stop eating beef, let alone most forms of meat, is totally realistic. And having to go down this path is absolutely not the sign that there's more people than the earth can support given our current lifestyle.

Great! 0.5% of the population can afford increased food costs! Even if we ignore disparities among their populations and extend your reasoning to all developed countries we end up with at most a billion people. Do you even care about the remaining 85%?

So maybe the earth can sustain 7 billion people but all your arguments are naive and totally off the mark.

I have been wondering about Stingrays too. Based on the Stingrays Wikipedia page they would not need access to the SIM card's private key. Instead they force the device to use the weaker A5/2 security protocol and then crack it which allows them to recover the SIM card's private key.

This perfectly illustrates why allowing protocol variants with weaker security is a bad idea. It also makes Gemalto's security lapse look somewhat irrelevant: cracking the SIM's private key seems pretty trivial anyway.

My understanding is that's what they do already. The private key is generated and put directly into the SIM card and never leaves it. But a private key is useless if nobody knows the corresponding public key. It's the transfer of that public key to the entity that needs it, the carrier, that the NSA/GCHQ intercepted.

Maybe a fix would be for Gemalto to sell blank SIM cards and have the carriers themselves generate and burn the private key to it using a software WORN API: Write Once, Read Never. Of course then the NSA/GCHQ would have no trouble forcing the US carriers to hand over all their public keys but then they can already force them to intercept the communications. At least the rest of the world would only be subject spying by their own government.

Sorry, wrong story.

The report says "Titi is a French diminutive for Thiery, or a colloquial term for a small person".

Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi referring to a small person.

But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up ;-) ).

So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.

Well first it's Thierry with two 'r's, but I've never seen titi being used as a diminutive for it, though that's because nobody would stand to it being used in public. Then there's the titi parisien but I've never seen titi refering to a small person.

But all this misses the point. Just like an uninspired English-speaking programmer will call his variable 'foo' and then 'bar' if he needs a second one, a French programmer will call his variable 'toto' (from the classic Toto jokes) and then 'titi' if he needs a second one (and then 'tata' but normally by the time he reaches tutu he realizes he really needs to straighten up ;-) ).

So what this really tells us is that this developer has a collegue whose username is 'toto'.

Quite the opposite. It proves that the anti-French sentiment is so strong in the US and UK that it drowns any rational discussion.