As a fellow biomedical researcher, I think you're correct that most of us wouldn't want any applicable science to be withheld from anyone on the basis of their ideology. However, I think you're still wrong that you'd rather see people living up to their beliefs when the result is morbidity or mortality. I'd much rather encourage a person to accept treatment (that from my point of view is ethical) and live as a hypocrite if the alternative is to die because we advise them to stick to their beliefs. Life is too valuable.

Yes. Revenge is no basis for a moral system of government.

Perhaps this is a case of citation needed? I think it has been established that there are acute autoimmune reactions to vaccine (e.g. Guillain-Barre Syndrome/AIPD), but I've had some difficulty verifying that there is a consensus that vaccines are a long term autoimmune disease risk factor. You do make a good plausibility argument (consistent with the molecular mimicry model), so I would be willing to believe if it there were some studies done.

I have considered that the law is implemented under the constraints of reality. Besides, you have mischaracterized my suggestion: I propose that age limits be replaced by something with higher predictive power (for example, objective knowledge-based exams) across a wide variety of issues: voting, driving, consent to contracts, etc. Would this really be that insane of a process to administer? It would be slightly more complicated than administering - for example - citizenship exams to resident aliens.

Obviously the law must protect those who are incapable of protecting themselves; I do not object to this. In fact, I even believe that in the Polanski case that the law has correctly identified the girl as someone who needed protection. What I object to is far more general: the very simplistic way in which the law determines who is competent to represent their own interests and who must continue to be classified as under the protection of the state. Even if you think my proposal is not the way forward, the response then isn't to support the status quo, but rather to acknowledge the failures and ageism inherent in the law and seek innovative ways of dealing with these problems.

While I appreciate that you're trying to point out that no formal legal system can ever deal with the complexity of civilization (true), I'm not sure that this follows that these types of very simple laws are appropriate. The law (and the legal process) specifies an algorithm for society to handle these complexities, and - frankly - laws of the type "If you are of age X, you may do Y; otherwise not" are horrible in that they have (in my experience, anyway) pretty high false negative rates (a younger person being restricted incommensurate with the ability). A more effective algorithm would be to authorize some group (spreading power away from individual assholes) to determine the capacity of specific minors thus removing some of the obvious failures of the law.

I'm not saying this is the end-all solution for this, but I'm not exactly a legal scholar and even I see obvious ways to craft better legislation. We pay our legislators enough -- demand better quality!

I don't know: The argument sounds reasonable from a pedagogical perspective, but I'm not sure that it rings true with experience. I mostly taught myself how to program and only until I took a course on assembly in college did I encounter this type of teaching tool. I am not convinced that this sort of pen-and-paper debugging really taught me anything I didn't already learn from debugging using the computer. Mostly, it was an exercise in 'figure out where I made a small math error when updating one of my registers'.

On the other hand, code review can be extremely useful especially when attaching a debugger has been fruitless. Obviously it would be stupid to say that understanding the logical flow of your programs is somehow a useless skill. Code review is also a skill that I think is under-appreciated by teachers of programming.

YMMV, obviously. Perhaps like everything, different strategies work well for different students. Maybe the best compromise I saw was in Russell and Norvig's AI book wherein algorithms were described in pseudocode which was general enough to convey high-level thoughts but specific enough to capture important implementation details.

A 1997 article in the New England Journal of Medicine even seems to indicate that the cost of having a mixed population of nonsmokers and smokers (like we do now) costs less (strange as that sounds to me) than a completly non-smoking population in the long run due to the exact way in which the following factors balance out: (a) smokers do not live as long, but (b) smokers consume more health care resources while still alive. The taxes against smoking has everything to do with promoting a public health policy (the wisdom of which can be supported or denied individually) and not much to do with somehow forcing smokers to pay for the (non-existent, according to NEJM) additional long term social costs of smoking.

Just to be clear though: Smoking cessation is the number one positive thing a smoker can do for their health and I wholeheartedly encourage any smokers to seriously think about if they're ready to quit and speak with their family physician about it.

Good point, but I think you might get more mileage out of your definition by framing it in terms like the DSM-IV might: an obsession is an interest that has become maladaptive. (No, I didn't go look it up, but it feels to me like the appropriate spirit.) In this way you might be able to make a distinction between people who have an interest in the social affairs of a subset of humans who interact in strange ways (w.r.t. the rest of human society) and those who have become so interested that it interferes with the conduct of their own lives.

Interesting other points though.

I guess I can't relate to this. When I went to college, I took the maximum allowable (or more) credits per semester and spent most of my free time either in labs, working on coursework or working on personal projects that extended my knowledge. That's not to say I didn't have some free time to do other things, but I would never describe the process as primarily a chance to do any of the things you listed. If you do it right, you can end up with enough specialized knowledge to avoid becoming stuck in a job you don't enjoy and can pursue a line of work closely in line with your passions.

Sure you can! It's definitely possible to get efficiency increases unrelated miniaturization. There is significant research into identifying materials that can be cycled at higher frequencies which would give a speedup unrelated to simply putting more transistors in the same space. Alternatively, you could optimize the architecture of the microprocessors so as to require less clock cycles per opcode which would translate into an efficiency increase independent of either transistor size or clock frequency.

Indeed, if both were improved at the same rate you would only need a SQRT(570x) ~= 24x improvement in both technologies to get a combined increase of 570x (also ignoring Amdahl's law). Nothwithstanding the (possibly serious) limitations of Moore's law there are four 18-month periods in 6 years predicting a 16x reduction in chip size over that time period. I have no experience in the increase in efficiency increases, so I won't comment on that, but to my mind the combination at least doesn't seem horrifically farfetched.

Regardless though, you are right to be skeptical of a long range prediction like that.

So you claim that there isn't any chance that we will ever discover a use for cells that have the capacity to differentiate into any tissue type found in the body?

If it was already well-understood how to use them effectively, it wouldn't be called research.

True enough, but you still might run into overheating issues. Pretty much every laptop I've ever worked with has gotten pretty hot if it's left operating with it's lid down for any length of time. YMMV though (perhaps I've just dealt with oddball laptops).

Nonsense. Responding to an request, they provided a text file containing rendering instructions compliant with standards (or not, but close to compliant). End of transaction. You don't violate any of their rights by not reading their reply in the way that they expect you to.

You don't HAVE to use a browser at all to view their site. You could use wget piped to less and 'render' it in your mind's eye. Alternatively, you could use a simple (or complicated!) algorithm to render the parts that you were most interested in and suppress those parts that you were not interested in. The fact that someone else will give the webmaster money every time someone downloads the instructions and subsequently renders the ad in no way changes the fact that you are free to use your computer to process information in a manner you see fit.

From a pragmatic standpoint, I agree with you that in order to support websites that ads should be viewed, but claiming that you're required to process information the way the sender wants you to simply doesn't seem to have support.