The reason that terrorists use 18-25 year old males from the Middle East by default is that such people are the most practical for them to use, and that using someone else would be a lot harder and would make it more likely they would get caught (for instance, because such alternates have less loyalty to them).

Scanning the targets that are easiest for terrorists to use doesn't stop them, but it makes their plan harder compared to scanning random people, as long as you still scan the random people at some lower rate.

I would expect that in a libertarian society, when you buy a house you'd buy the right-of-way to get to the nearest road system, so nobody could cut off your access. You would also buy title insurance on your right-of-way just like you buy title insurance on the rest of the house today. Eventually there would be an ecosystem where anyone who registers themselves as owning property also registers the status of the rights-of-way through their property (because nobody will transact with you if you don't do it through a trusted company, and all the trusted companies will require that you state your right-of-way ownership).

In practice, you'll probably end up with the road owner having the right-of-way right up to your front door, while you have a contract with the road owner saying that you have a right to use the road as long as you pay your road fee.

And that's what I came up with in just fifteen minutes. I'm sure actual libertarians have thought about it for longer and come up with better answers.

I just looked up that Haitian earthquake quote using your own link. Eric is not arguing that the earthquake was caused by a voodoo curse. All he's arguing is historical accuracy--someone really did perform a ceremony that's pretty much a curse. He's not saying that the curse caused the earthquake, only that the curse ceremony itself was not something someone just made up yesterday because they didn't bother to check the history books.

Yes, I could make that kind of statement 20 years from now (and probably 10 as well), because the p[atents will have expired.

If you seriously think that we shouldn't worry about things that kill fewer people than cancer and heart disease, bear in mind that not only are fewer people killed by terrorists than by cancer and heart disease, but fewer people are killed by ordinary criminals and by a whole host of other things that even you think it's the proper role of government to protect us against. Unless you're an extreme libertarian who would reduce the government's rule down to almost nothing, you really have no business saying the government should stay out of it just because it kills fewer people than cancer and heart disease.

In fact, I'd consider this to be one of the least objectionable things the NSA does. It's what they're *supposed* to be doing, after all..

(The single least objectionable thing the NSA does is spy on foreign governments. Since foreign governments have lots of funds and easy access to the press, they can get lots of favorable media coverage by hypocritically complaining about the USA doing things they're perfectly willing to do themselves.)

Japan is known for making video games. And they're software.

Better than that, many religions are *blatantly* sexist, and yet more women go to church than men.

It's a typo for "cases". Slashdot doesn't let you edit your posts.

You tella car company that you're going to pay them a half million dollars for a special custom car. You sign the contract, which requires that you pay them $500000 and that they give you a car when it's completed. Halfway through the process you suddenly decide that you don't want the car after all.

Well, tough. You already signed the contract and they're already building the car. You have no choice but to pay for a car that you aren't going to use.

That's what goes on in vases like this. The government signed the contract saying that they'll pay. They can't renege on the deal just because they decided they didn't want what they were paying for any more, so instead they have to pay for it and let it gather dust once they have it. I can guarantee that if you or I signed a contract that said we'd pay for something we wouldn't be able to get out of it just because we no longer wanted what we were paying for.

This isn't so much about grandstanding politicians that want money for useless programs, but about grandstanding politicians who like to decide the government doesn't want something for which the contract has already been signed.

1) Women generally are less willing than men to do things that result in them becoming social outcasts as a youth. This will lead to a lot fewer girls doing things that lead them to STEM jobs later in life.
2) Women are a lot less willing to take jobs with low satisfaction and high working hours in order to get high pay. CS-related jobs, of course, tend to be like this. This effect is made even bigger by the fact that it's still, even in these liberated days, a lot more acceptable for the man to be the primary breadwinner, allowing the woman more freedom to choose a lower-paying but more satisfying job.

Any case where someone actually warned the FBI about someone and they caught them in advance won't get the massive news coverage of a successful terrorist attack. So you only remember the cases where they fail.

Moreover, if the FBI is warned and catches someone ahead of time, and does prevent a terrorist attack, it's going to be hard to prove that anything was prevented unless the FBI catches the guy red-handed. Otherwise be prepared to see headlines "FBI destroys life of innocent man based on word from dictatorial foreign government".

And the next day you walked into your son's room, but instead of smoking he was studying for a test. You then forced him to study from then until 6 AM, whereupon he went to school and failed the test he was studying for because he fell asleep in the classroom.

That'll teach him!

Many Europeans know another language because they live close to a border where the people on the other side speak a different language, or they even live in a country where the people have more than one native language. They know another language because it is directly useful in their everyday life, not because knowing another language is good all by itself or because of indirect benefits like knowing the meaning of new words that are related to that language. The US is pretty big and it's a lot more common to live far from a land border (or to only live near the border with English-speaking sections of Canada.)

Googling up the American Botanical Council shows that
1) they're unimportant enough that Wikipedia does not have an article aboutf them or their magazine
2) They are not part of any professional botanical organizations
3) Their facebook page calls them "Your source for reliable herbal medicine information" and shares links for organizatioins whose descriptions include phrases such as "holistic" and "alternative medicine".
4) Their own homepage is clearly aimed at the herbal medicine crowd and even includes a disclaimer that "The information on this site is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified healthcare professional". Their magazine is called HerbalGram, for pete's sake.

I dare you to read their own site's news page at http://abc.herbalgram.org/site... and conclude that they are anything but a bunch of alternative medicine crackpots whose belief about the Voynich Manuscript should be taken as seriously as their belief that it's worth giving a presentation at an aromatherapy conference.

All this injection stuff is to spare OUR feelings, not the prisoner's

Who are you calling "we"?

The reason that "we" try to use humane methods in executions is that there are death penalty opponents who like to call every method of execution inhumane as a way of nickel-and-diming the system to destruction. Occasionally a court disagrees with them, which leaves us with one completely arbitrary method that is established as legally permissible because it's "humane". That's the reason we use lethal injections and not the guillotine--pressure from opponents. I would bet that most supporters of capital punishment wouldn't care about the difference.

The difference is nonsense anyway. Sure, that punishment isn't the absolute least painful execution possible. It harms the prisoner. But it harms the prisoner overalll less than, say, a year in jail, and nobody thinks it's inhumane to put someone in jail for a year (or to put someone on death row for a period that is pretty much guaranteed to be longer than a year), and it's a small amount of extra harm compared to the harm caused to him by, you know, being dead.