This is nonsense (in North Carolina, anyway); I recently took someone to small claims court over $240. The judge ruled in my favor, and the other party had to pay my legal fees, court fees, and a sum of money towards my lost wages (though not a complete refund).

Whoosh :)

You don't think David Irving has had to worry about credible death threats from Israeli extremists?

I didn't say we couldn't be disgusted at retaliation of the violent nature; I said we couldn't be disgusted with cartoons aimed to show western hypocrisy. if we censor holocaust denial and not Muhammad, then the only difference between us and Iran is what is culturally offensive, not the level of censorship, which is equal.

Before we get all high and mighty about stupid a-rabs getting upset over pictures of muhammed, lets remember that holocaust denial is illegal pretty much everywhere in eastern europe and is strongly censored everywhere else in the modern world. This is important because even though holocaust denialism's arguments have been thoroughly refuted on every front, they still aren't allowed to make them. This is a very strange policy and likely leads to more suspicion in this day and age, with censorship of an idea almost automatically giving weight to that idea.

So when we have mass huge contests for drawing pictures of muhammed, demonstrating our right to free speech with such a dividing, needless, harmful exercise, alienating an entire region of the earth, just remember: you aren't allowed to be disgusted when the islamic world responds with an International Holocaust Cartoon Competition.

Never hire?

Oracle's lawyer is David Boies, who is widely reputed to be the best lawyer around today. He did Microsoft vs United States, he did Justice Department vs IBM, he did Bush vs Gore (!!!!!!!!!!!!).

We owe way more to Hippocrates than we do to Ancient China, and Hippocrates believed that all illness was caused by an imbalance of the four biles, which is absolutely ludicrous and shares absolutely no notions with reality.

Everything today owes everything to the past. To say that the past is in any way better or more important than the present, however, is hugely ridiculous.

In order to live in the United States, you must pay the United States Government a tax. This tax must be in the form of United States Dollars. You can always use USD to pay your taxes. The government is never going to accept anything other than USD, and so there is an anchoring point for USD where there is none for, say, bitcoins. That is what makes USD legitimate; the fact that you can *always guaranteed* use it to pay your taxes.

I'm not saying this isn't a few, I'm just saying that it's a career opportunity you might not have thought of if you didn't know about it, and it's related to open source. Large companies paying people to write good code for the open source things that they want to use. That's how linux gets developed nowadays.

Only a few people make a living off of open source?

A fortune 500 company I am familiar with, NetApp, has over 300 employees on the payroll whose job is to contribute *good* code to the open source projects which NetApp uses. I would assume many many companies do the same thing.

The useful part of this idea (making all drugs OTC) is that the consequences are negative enough for natural selection to take effect.

That is, people who go to their drug store and buy $100 worth of methylenedioxypyrovalene are going to *die* and will not reproduce.

So, unlike most other 'remove-the-warning-labels' arguments which will simply inconvenience everyone because there are no REAL negative consequences in today's society, people will become more intelligent.

Assuming the trait 'researches drugs before taking them' has a 10% advantage over the control 'does not research drugs before taking them' trait, it will only take around 380 generations before all humans research their drugs. And because this advantage would be hardcoded into our genetic material as opposed to relying on the memory of society, it would be a true improvement.

380 generations is only like 7600 years! We should get started.