Sure they can do something about it, and they are welcome to it. But any approval is morally void by the most basic natural laws, at least according to my morality compass. There is no process that justifies subjecting anybody to this treatment. And whoever is affected has an absolute right to self-defence against such treatment - and I'm hard-pressed not to argue that there even is a right, if not a duty, for others to intervene. If we go there, all claims of moral superiority of the west evaporate, and most "terrorists" suddenly have a valid moral claim. It seems to work fine the other way round - see classics like Rambo 2 or Red Dawn.

How do you know it's necessary? In all those ticking bomb scenarios, how do you ever know 100% that there is a ticking bomb, and that you have the one person that can tell you where it is, but miss any other useful information?

Apart from the immorality of torture, and the ineffectiveness of it, it also leads to the deterioration of proper police and intelligence work. Why infiltrate organisations, keep your ear on the ground, talk to people, maintain contacts, observe, when you can just grab some schmuck of the street and torture him (or her)? You'll get a lot of information you can sell as a success, wether true or false...

It's not something within the remit of voters to approve or disprove. Inalienable rights and all that....

• There must be a way to travel faster than then the speed of light!
• There must be 3 integers a,b,c, such that a^3+b^3=c^3 and there certainly must be a way to get superscript in Slashdot!
• There must be a way to determine if an arbitrary computer program halts for a given input!

...and so on. Maybe there is a way of telling smart people from dumb people (Forrest Gump comes to mind), but there is no guarantee that we can always reasonably measure a vaguely defined property like "intelligence".

You miss the point. It's not the "general purpose processor" that is harmful per se. What is harmful is the labelling of a certain class of processors as "general purpose", when, in the view of the author, they are not really general purpose, but specialised for executing C code with, at most, mid-sized working sets and little inter-processor communication. By assuming this workload as the default and calling processors good for it "general purpose", we may miss other approaches that might be more suitable for certain classes of problems.

Not true. There are many things of which I know how they don't work without knowing how they work. Before the detection of nuclear fusion, we didn't know how the sun was heated. But we did know that it was not a chemical reaction (not enough fuel for the time it had been burning). I don't know how Google indexes keywords. But I do know they are not looking them up via sequential search (too fast for that). I don't know what the annoying traffic light on my way to work is triggered by, but I know its not telepathy - or I wouldn't be standing there forever each day. And so on. Indeed, that's how science works - you formulate hypotheses and then refute them one-by-one. If you can't refute a reasonable one, that's your tentative model of reality.

Ok, my experience is mostly with computer science, math and physics. Typically, you write your paper in LaTeX with a style provided by the publisher. LaTeX does the actual typesetting, of course. Some journals also have Word templates, but that's much rarer.

Nowadays, most journals will expect the author to provide a camera-ready copy. They don't do any editing or typesetting anymore, they just handle peer-review and publication. Authors can modify papers following suggestions from peer review, which may include suggestions on citations. I think Nature and Science still to their own typesetting, and may commission better illustrations, but that's a rare exception. In nearly all cases where the paper has been accepted, the author has the final say about the details (within reason, of course).

I'm regularly attending conferences in the field of theoretical computer science and AI, and about 70% of laptops there are MacBooks. 25% are Linux, and then there are a few researchers paid by Microsoft Research ;-). But Macs are not just for humanities people - a significant draw is "a UNIX box that just works". With Fink or MacPorts, package management is nearly as good as on the best Linux distributions, and the hardware integration is totally trouble-free. And the hardware is nice from a purely physical point of view - smooth, quite, compact, with decent performance and reliability. Of course, most of the people with Mac laptops use Linux servers for nearly everything else.

Another thing that Apple has going for it is consistency. The PC market is gigantic, and if you want to get a good deal, you must spend a lot of time investigating and usually also get lucky. With Apple, the chances of getting a complete lemon are very low, and the choices are limited enough that it's easy to get an overview.

That's wrong. Not everyone has that time, but someone usually does have - and for popular programs, many people do take the time. That does not make the system completely fool-proof, but it does make hidden backdoors a lot less of a concern. If neither of two approaches is perfect, it does not mean that one is not vastly superior to the other. Take antibiotics and witchcraft as treatments for pneumonia....

Maybe you forgot a smiley here? We run this risk every time we install and run a proprietary program - how often do you need your nude pictures, private medical records and credit card information leaked all over the internet?

Even if he can be hard to handle, this is one of his core arguments. If you don't control your computer, your computer controls you. With proprietary software, you are basically handing control of your computer over to the software company. You can hope that are both honest and competent. Keep those fingers crossed...

Somehow a quite conservatively formulated claim (subjunctive mode, "some models, 75% chance, 5-7 years, during some month of the summer") magically morphed into the strong claim "Al Gore said in 5 years time the Arctic will be completely ice free". How much did you pay for that perceptional filter? And can you get a refund?

Just for your information, bicycles are part of the traffic! As for "interference", the appropriate control situation is not one where the cyclists are magically poofed to New Delhi (or the moon), but one where every cyclist is replaced by yet another car...