There's a decent argument for most (not all) of Stallman's position. The essential problem with pedophilia is that children can't consent in an informed fashion. But that's not much of an issue for most of the rest of that list. If someone states in their will that people can use their body for necrophilia, then why should society have a problem with it?

The issue of possession of child porn is a really interesting case. What actual benefit comes from having laws against possession of child pornography? One can argue that exposure to child porn will make people more likely to go out and molest children. That's an interesting argument, but there's nor real evidence that exposure does make it more likely. Moreover, one could easily make an argument in the other direction- that people with pedophilic tendencies will be less likely to act on them if they have outlets in the form of porn. There's some corroborating evidence- in general rape levels go down when internet access goes up- http://www.toddkendall.net/internetcrime.pdf. Now, you could argue that the continued distribution of child pornography will further traumatize the children who were abused to make it. But if one believes this argument, then one shouldn't have any problem with porn that has been digitally altered to look like it is child porn, something which is currently illegal. And one shouldn't have a problem with child porn when either the children are dead or as adults they've stated that the material's continued distribution doesn't bother them. Yet, again, the law doesn't allow this.

In the case of the subreddits this is particularly interesting in that according to the people who actually spend time in these subreddits, these pictures aren't taken in any coercive fashion but are often simply found on the internet, taken from Facebook profiles, or taken at public beaches and the like. There's no real difference then than creepy individuals watching teenagers in public locations. Creepy and disturbing but not illegal. Moreover, this sort of thing runs into serious issues of legality between countries. While pretty much everyone agrees that a 12 year old can't consent, the actual age of consent varies a lot from country to country, and many are much lower than those in the US. So using a standard of 18 years essentially forces the US standard on an international internet community. In any event, it is very difficult to argue that anyone is being actually harmed by this content.

The behavior in question is sick, disturbing and morally repugnant. But the actual measure of how much one really allows freedom of speech and tolerance is not what one allows that one doesn't mind, it is how much one allows that one does mind. In a similar fashion, one isn't demonstrating incredible tolerance when one supports gay marriage if one doesn't have a moral problem with gay marriage. The individual who has a moral problem with homosexual activity but still supports it being legal is exercising tolerance. The situation is similar in this case. The fact that we find these people to be sick and morally repugnant is all the more reason that we need to think very carefully before we say that this behavior isn't protected as free speech and basic autonomy.

Right, they really wanted to go and defend Byzantium. That's why during the First Crusade, the crusaders first action was to massacre the Jews in Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade#Attacks_on_Jews_in_the_Rhineland.

Sure. No disagreement. My response was completely about the generalization which I quoted. In the case in question, it seems pretty clear that what happened with Challenger was the wrong result.

This is nice rhetoric. At another level, we do actually make real trade offs involving how many deaths are acceptable. For example, banning personal cars would likely save lives. But we're not going to do it because their convenience is too high. Similarly, in the US many children die drowning in backyard pools. Banning such pools would make sense if all you care about is total deaths. But we're not going to do so, because the overall chance of death is pretty small in any given case. Lots of people also die from alcohol related issues even without counting those from drunk driving. Etc. Etc. It creates a lot of cognitive dissonance to acknowledge that we're actually ok with letting some people die, because we don't like to tell ourselves that we allow that sort of thing. But we're still going to make the tradeoffs.

There's no danger that everyone using Linux will have to pay Linus Torvalds to keep using it after it gains market ascendancy.

Yeah, see most of us aren't so nationalistic that we think that minor indirect help to our home country excuses stealing money from poor retirees.

Absolutely not. This is criminal behavior. The vast majority of traders are law abiding citizens who are trying to make a living. They are necessary to allow for general market liquidity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_liquidity and for the world economy to function. In a general economic crisis, everyone is going to get hurt, and some countries more so than others. It is also pretty damn clear that he was't using this money to help little orphans or unemployed widows or what not. This was money that the criminal directed to himself. And much of the money in the stock market is in pension funds and the like for all sorts of companies, so draining money from the market ends up hurting all sorts of people who are about to retire and live on fixed incomes or people who have already retired and are stuck on tiny fixed incomes. This isn't Robin Hood, this is a thief taking advantage of regular people.

Unless the solar flare actually directly hits the spacecraft this isn't a big worry. In fact, to some extent under the right circumstances things are safe during a solar flare since there will be less exposure to cosmic rays due to the Forbush effect- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbush_decrease. And magnetic shielding can easily handle any indirect solar flare, while direct hits are extremely rare (the ISS for example has been in space for about a decade and has never gotten a serious direct hit). In general, the risk of solar flares is wildly overestimated.

Endeavor Crater where it is very close to now is about 17 km (11 miles) from the point Opportunity landed. But the actual travel path was not a straight line, so the actual total travel is probably on the order of 20 or 25 km.

Actually you can use a padding argument to construct languages that are equivalent to the Halting problem but aren't NP-hard. For example, let t_n be the nth Turing machine by some reasonable ordering. Consider then the language that accepts a number k written in binary if and only if k=2^2^2^n for some n such that t_n halts on the blank tape. This is equivalent to the halting problem but the language size blows up too fast to gives answers to NP-hard problems (as long as P!=NP. Of course if P=NP then all languages are NP hard).