My post will get modded down. It shouldn't, though.

"Remember 50 years ago when people were all concerned about species loss? Then they resurrected them? (Said to a 17 year old neanderthal.)"

Amish dude: "What be with yon multitude of new converts??"

Sounds like it's time for a major browser to implement a default feature (so it becomes common as of the next update):

"Return opaque white canvas unless the user instructs otherwise."

Because I can't think of any good reason why the default should be "Return valid canvas" (tho "Ask" might also be a good setting).

I foresee the next step being websites that refuse to speak to you until they receive something they think is a valid canvas... at that point we'd want to add "Return random canvas" where "random" means "made up of common-as-dirt elements so it looks tolerably real".

One might drag forth the "buggy manufacturers' argument": if your product is no longer needed or wanted, you can't force people to buy it.

Of course that would depracticalize a good deal of the Web, but point being that it's not a *right*. They can try to sell it to us, of course, but how invasive should they be allowed to become? At what point does their "making a living" become "at our expense" ??

Old Sam Kinison joke, about starving kids in Africa: "These kids don't need food. What these kids need is luggage. We have deserts in America, too. WE JUST DON'T LIVE IN 'EM!!! AHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Except that we do. And we farm vast deserts, too.

A small problem with Ghostery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I own a large commercial building in Ephrata, Pennsylvania.

That's a small commercial building, Dwight.

> "According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, the total economic impact could exceed $2 trillion,"

Holy Jesus! That's a little bit more than half of what we borrowed those two years!

There's also the people who think they "need" an SUV but get upset about how much they have to pay for fuel. It's a stupid market, but that market exists.

> Can you imagine the uproar if 80% of those killed in Afghanistan by US forces were civilians?

They mostly are civilian casualties. Much of what's happening now in Afghanistan is guerrilla warfare, not military forces.

> This is especially bad if they turn out to be seriously vulnerable to any missile system developed that isn't ruinously expensive per shot or a closely held secret used only by somebody's elite guard

Or if, say, the very large and expensive amount of fuel used b supersonic aircraft can be cut off by the opposing force bombing the oil lines from their own country that we relied on to get cheap fuel. It's a bit of a conundrum when the country you're invading is a major source of your fuel. Or if what you need to "win" the conflict is troops and engineers and nurses on the ground to re-establish water, food, and medical supplies after a decade of civil strife.

$500,000 missiles that can hit another supersonic craft at speed is a complete waste of resources in most modern conflicts. The more sophisticated US craft, and their pilots, very effectively cleared the air and the ground of Iraqi and Afghanistani armor and military vehicles in the last few wars. But I'm afraid the lessons of Vietnam and Korea were ignored. Successful air campaigns lead to wars of occupation, and both countries have _centuries_ of experience of outlasting foreign invaders.

Please, please. Don't compare a restaurant to a plane, or bus, or a public street, or a simply invent legal anaglogies. It gets very confusing very fast.

A plane is not a "public place". People need purchased tickets to board, and that ticket can be _revoked_ by the other party. It may be enormously inconvenient, or expensive, or a contract violation, But that has little if nothing to do with law about "public spaces". It doesn't make this situation reasonable.

I think calling someone a Nazi lands somewhere between lame and tasteless.
Help me out: how does pointing out that a symbol is an acronym comprised of other symbols, e.g. . . .

. . .constitute labeling comparing you to anything? The only thing you were encouraged to own (that is, acknowledge) was the literal presence of the symbol "Socialism" in the acronyms of both a political party and a country. Milady, thou dost protest too much, methinks. But that, at least, is in character.

Some principles of Biblical analysis are:
(a) take the whole counsel of God, that is, every principle you draw should be in harmony with the rest of it, and you shouldn't be cherry-picking lone bits, merely because they seem to make a convenient point,
(b) take every utterance in context, the full who/what/where/when/why/how.
And so (you) make a good point that running around being vengeful is not in keeping with much of any of the positive message of the Word.
Also not in keeping: being a doormat, or tolerating injustice.
Is your opinion of the Bible and its teachings so simplistic and bloody-minded that you think, as a logical consequence, it should render human beings as doormats?

Oooops! I would drop an 's' from assess and make it asses. Why just mispell something when you can make what someone will probably call a Freudian slip, after all? Please excuse me.