You are suggesting thar all weapons are the same. Most people see a difference between guns, knives and bare hands. I imagine even you would he in favour of restricting a hypothetical atomic bomb printer.

The fact the people do have to stab each other with sharpened toothbrushes suggests that the prison ban on guns is realistic, sensible and effective.

What happened is people proved unable to take that responsibility. It's like drink driving. People are in theory capable of drinking responsibily and not hurting others, but in practice failures happen all too often.

Guns appear to be something else that a significant number of people cannot act responsibly with, and since the consequences are so severe there needs to be some preemptive action.

It might be more accurate to say that by social convention and house rules they are not considered places where public photography is allowed.

Actually there is a legal basis for it as well - taking a picture in the street is fine, taking a picture in the locker room might get you arrested. Similarly you can be naked in the locker room but not in the street.

Because he is being paid to by criminals. A variation of this happens regularly in the UK. Someone puts their house up for sale or asks about having some building work done. There was a scheme where you could get free loft and wall insulation that was a popular target. Any excuse to get into the house legally. The guys then case the joint, evaluating the value and location of various items, looking at the locks and seeing if there are any weak points in the security.

All this is then reported back to another group who use it to burgle the property.

Even if legal those things will still be highly embarrassing. Gamble too much? Sleep with prostitutes and then want to go on a date with a girl/boy who Googles you? Just making something legal doesn't remove the stigma.

Take smoking. The law forbids asking if you do during an interview and it is perfectly legal to light up, but if a potential employer knew you would be taking regular breaks just to satisfy your addiction they might think twice about offering you the job.

The key difference is that even if one group of people votes in a senator that wants to do away with other people's privacy there are hundreds more senators to oppose him. In other words the power that an individual has is pretty limited when voting at he ballot box.

If you decide to buy a... pair... er... if you use Google Glass you can force a loss of privacy on everyone around you. They can't vote against it, there is no balance or rule by majority. It isn't democratic at all.

I have never experienced women encouraging chauvinistic behaviour on the grounds that not being disrespectful to women makes men less butch. I'm not discounting that it could happen, but unless you can point out some common examples I'm not convinced that it is at all common.

Then again I'm used to British and Japanese culture, which might be different to yours.

When women do perpetuate inequality it tends to be because they are perpetuating social norms. Arguably merely doing the latter should not cause the former. For example if a woman wants to be a housewife and "looked after" by her husband that should not be considered weak or promoting inequality because being a housewife and mother is a valid choice and a valuable contribution to society. In the case of motherhood it is something that only women can be.

Problem is all his "manuals" were handed down by worth of mouth to illiterate people who then handed them on to other people who eventually wrote them down. Why choose Mohammed to dictate your book to when he can't even write it down?

On top of that much of what God is alleged to have said is contradictory, even within a single text. He fails to cover many of the basics of medicine and even basic nutritional advice. At best God provided us with a badly translated and badly photocopied sheet of A5 for a somewhat defective and unreliable product.

Oh, the irony. The sweet sweet irony. Here is a story about how in actual fact more than 97% of studies agree that, although there is some doubt as to the exact extent of the problem, global warming is real. Now you are claiming exactly the same thing here - we shouldn't treat Styrofoam as a carcinogen because the evidence is somewhat inconclusive.

Actually there is enough of it for the EPA and IARC to consider it potentially dangerous and treat it as such. Frankly I'm willing to take their expert opinions and those of the scientists who have done studies in this area over yours. This goes to the very heart of what TFA was talking about, and your very own point about uneducated people getting worked up about things they don't understand.

Classic. Absolutely classic.

The US seems to believe that more watts consumed = better quality of life, so is generally opposed to making things more efficient.

It's a general trend in consumer products. There was a discussion on vacuum cleaners a while back on Slashdot and several US commentators said that the best model was the biggest, most powerful suction one. Well, in the rest of the world we value other features just as much or more. I have a small Dyson because it's less work to push around but still more than powerful enough to clean my house. It has a rotating brush that improves pick-up, and good filtering to prevent dust being thrown up into the air. Japanese consumers care a lot about energy consumption, to the point where Sharp and Panasonic make vacuums that reduce power as the movement of the head slows, i.e. at the apex of your back/forth motion.

Actually I really want to buy a Japanese ceiling light. A 50W LED dome produces 5500lm of light, compared to about 1200lm from a 100W incandescent. It's diffuse so lights the room much better, and can switch between daylight and warm hues. They don't even make a 230V version.

America. Big cars, big meals, big lights, moar watts. It's a cultural problem.

Nice straw man. I'll remember to use the non-scientifically-literate-anti-Green next time I need one.

It's also thought to be carcinogenic by the EPA and by the International
Agency for Research on Cancer.

Styrofoam requires quite a few nasty chemicals to manufacture and can't easily be recycled. It ends up in landfill where it won't decompose for a long, long time. Landfill sites cost money to montior to make sure they are not leaking anything problematic into the air or groundwater. While Styrofoam itself might not release any of those things it does take up space and thus leads us to create more sites, with more monitoring.

On the other hand paper can be recycled fairly easily into things like disposable cups where quality and colour are not too important, so the cost of manufacture is amortized over many uses.

So after all that railing against your straw man it turns out you are the one whose knowledge of the situation is lacking. Delicious.

All she asked for (and got) was to put a note next to his stating that she did not agree with his diagnosis and explaining her reasons. Her main reason was that he didn't know enough about her case and was simply dismissing her symptoms. Others seemed to agree.

We can't be at the mercy of doctors, we have to have input into our treatment.

Problem is that it is rather hard to determine which changes are good and which are bad in the long run. Worse than that many changes are good for a lot of people but bad for some.

Take motorcars as an example. Better than horses and carriages in most ways, but put buggy whip manufacturers out of business and helped bugger up the environment.

Calm down dude, stress isn't good for you!

There have been instances of this happening in the UK. The BBC reported on a woman whose GP wrote that she was depressed on her records, and then found it very difficult to get treatment for her actual condition because every doctor that subsequently looked at her assumed everything she said and felt was as a result of mental illness. Eventually she got it corrected and was treated.

Doctors make mistakes. A lot of medicine is making judgement calls, especially when it comes to mental health. Patients can legitimately disagree with their doctors, which is why we sometimes get second opinions or have to take steps like the ones I just mentioned.