Mod parent up! I heartily agree, there is absolutely no equivalence between being a bigot and opposing bigotry. And it's disappointing that this fairly obvious distinction even needs to be pointed out.

Also, Slashdot commenter feigns cynicism in a desperate attempt at seeking attention.

"... I detest Islamic culture..."

Don't equate Islam and Islamic culture interchangably with al Qaida and jihadism and 7th century bullshit. Islamic culture is very rich and has contributed much to civilization. Your own culture isn't without its own flaws and stained past either. People don't go around judging your culture by the Westboro Baptist Church or Hitler. You'd do well to remember there's a LOT more to Islamic culture than jihadism and bin Laden.

By "open" Gitmo I mean begin using it as a gulag. I realize it's been around for a while. Obviously.

Mod parent up!

Bush had no problem steamrolling over the process to do whatever the fuck he wanted. He didn't ask Congress or anyone if he could open Gitmo. He just did it. He claimed his commander in chief authority. When you're the most powerful man in the free world, you can do a lot without asking permission. Obama is president and commander in chief now, and he's used that authority to start foreign wars and assassinate US citizens without asking the courts or Congress, among many other controversial and probably very illegal things. Obama could close Gitmo in a day if he wanted to. He doesn't want to. Simple as that.

That he claims his hands are tied is simply bullshit to avoid the embarrassment of admitting he broke a core promise of his campaign.

OH HEY LOOK! They backtracked and apologized! What do you want, a pound of flesh?

Followed by: The FBI has seized and taken down a drug-dealing website posing as a technology news website, slashdot.org, for associations with a ring of probable drug dealers.

Probably because Android users can't figure out how to take screenshots (Zing!)

But seriously, as a mobile QA tester, it's a pain in the butt to figure out and remember how to take a screenshot with any given phone, since it isn't standardized, and some phones have no screenshot-taking ability short of connecting it to a dev console.

This was my first thought as well. Why is *Eric Schmidt* so concerned about *private* drone use, as opposed to governmental? Smells like an anti-competitive effort to me.

> If you can't survive and thrive in the very worst conditions this planet has to offer, then you won't do better off outside the atmosphere.

Says who?

> we're not overpopulated now, but in a few generations we will be.

They said that a few generations ago, too. Hell, Thomas Malthus said that we already were, and he said that centuries ago. We always seem to be on the brink of a catastrophic population explosion that will result in mass starvation and misery. Maybe it's time we admit that Malthus was dead wrong.

You might say that we'll soon run out of room, but why is no one saying we ran out of room a long time ago? The natural human condition is to live off the land as nomadic hunters and foragers, in groups of no more than a few hundred, not live sedentarily in cities of many thousands if not millions of people. Is that way of life feasible now, with how many people there are now?

We've been adapting for about 10,000 years, or 500 generations, to live sustainably with overpopulation. We've dealt with famine and plague. We will continue to innovate and find new ways to deal with them. And, as population grows exponentially, so does human innovation, so long as we continue to provide the means for humans to innovate.

As if those are the only two options. Neither of them even make any sense. We are far, far from depleting the Earth's resources, so much that it isn't even in the realm of realistic possibility. And as far as "surviving" on this planet, can we learn to tame and prevent every possible external threat that can take Earth out, like a nearby supernova? Absolutely not.

How about looking at things realistically, rather than in such irrationally absolutist terms? Something, anything could happen to Earth, from nuclear war to unchecked global warming to an increase in volcanic activity to meteorite impact to a freak solar or interstellar event. The survival of humanity, our descendants and the only intelligent species we are aware of, depends on colonizing space. We've lived on Earth as a species for hundreds of thousands of years without coming close to depleting its resources, we are getting quite a lot better at learning to live sustainably without damaging the environment than we were even 40 years ago, and we haven't realized any imagined dystopian futures yet. What precedent is there for imagining that, if it suddenly becomes easier to colonize new worlds that we will simply toss away the ones we're already living on?

Your false dichotomy is both false and terribly ridden with inaccurate smuggled premises.

So if an infant or toddler is too stupid to not eat toys, they deserve whatever they get from these things? Fuck you, you are an asshole. I hope to god that you aren't and won't ever be a parent.

All the arguments in the summary are economic ones. Creating monopolies, raising prices, and market distortions are what patents are for. It's a reward to the creator that is supposed to drive creativity and innovation.

The real argument against gene patents is that they shouldn't be patentable in the first place. They are natural phenomena, not inventions.

It's disappointing how many self-proclaimed Christians ignore what Jesus said in favor of what's in the Old Testament, which was written before Jesus Christ. It's like they don't want to be Christians at all.