Most states have their own versions of FOIA, including New York. See http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/New_York_FOIA_procedures.

My first thought was that the Black Chamber might be implementing their own version of SCORPION STARE, but then it occurred to me that they wouldn't be this incompetent about it. So maybe there's some other party involved- it is still possible that these are loaded with basilisk technology.

The data in TFA does show a strong link between education level and acceptance of evolution. But there's still a lot of rejection of evolution by educated Americans. According to the data, 25% of Americans with post-college education are Young Earth Creationists. Now, it is likely that some of those are people who went to Podunk Bible School and then got a masters in theology or ministering or something similar. But even given that, there's a lot of educated YECs in the US.

The problem is the behavior of the CHRC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Human_Rights_Commission_free_speech_controversy which falls under Section 13(1) of the CHRA. Different legislation. The relevant penalties are civil not criminal.

Possibly relevant, but the data in the above link is for Muslims living in the US. It is possible that they are being influenced by their compatriots outside the US (and of course many are immigrants). And in fact, Muslims in many other countries have much more severe numbers, which suggests that your hypothesis is correct.

For a while I thought this, but then I was pointed out that Muslims have very low acceptance rates of evolution even though Islam doesn't need the details of a creation story in any deep theological way. http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/02/21/acceptance-of-evolution-by-var/. This may be due in part to the general more reactionary and hyper-religious aspects of Islam currently having more sway than in much of Christianity, but at least on its surface this suggests that whatever causes high rates of creationism in Christianity may be more subtle.

Many religious individuals don't want public prayers, and don't want the Ten Commandments in public schools(Catholic, Protestant or Jewish version and which set given that the text is repeated twice in the Bible), and damn well don't want someone else's theology like intelligent design put in their kids' science classrooms. A lot of Jews for example are probably in the 79%. The First Amendment protects everyone, whether religious or not religious.

Yes, and if you read the summary of the article you were commenting on, you would see that that accounted for 33%. C'mon. That didn't even require going TFA but rather just reading the summary before commenting.

Gallup and a few others have consistently gotten numbers between 40-48% for this data, but for reasons I don't fully understand, CBS polls on the same issue get slightly higher results. They get routinely in the 50-55% range http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-965223.html. I'm not sure why this discrepancy exists, but it isn't a single yearly issue and it doesn't seem to be connected to how the questions are phrased, which suggests there's some more subtle issue going on.

The data for both this years Gallup poll and previous years does show some fairly predictable patterns. For example, by most of the previous polls, around 60% of Republicans are Young Earth Creationists while a little under 40% of Democrats are Young Earth Creationists. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. This should not however be taken as general evidence that Republicans or conservatives are dumb or uneducated. The GSS as part of their regular survey does a set about general science knowledge, and that data suggests that when not asking questions about evolution or age of the Earth, progressives and conservatives look very similar, and there's some evidence that the people with the least science knowledge are self-identified moderates http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-republican-fluency-with-science/ although exactly what is going on is not clear. http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2011/04/political-affiliation-and-scientific.html. This is part of a general trend which suggests that moderates in the US are often not very well informed.

Also, while Gallup says that the fraction of people who reject evolution has stayed roughly constant, there's a potentially more interesting trend in the data, over the last 30 years there's been a steady increase in people who say that evolution occurred with God taking no part in the process. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. Most of that is movement not from the strict creationists but from a reduction in the size of the group that thinks that evolution happened with God guiding it. This may reflect the general decline of the moderately religious, especially so called "mainline Protestants" or it may be due to other effects such as general increases in partisanship.

The US is not great. The US does things like seizing domain names based on minimal cause and then spending years before they give them back. A lot of those seized have been over copyright issues and in some cases they haven't even been clearly infringing. This is similar to how many states in the US have assert forfeiture laws which allow police to confiscate large sums of money or cars under minimal suspicion of involvement with illegal drug dealing, and getting them back is difficult.

But the UN would be worse. The UN contains many countries with little conception of free speech. Even allies of the US like Canada and Britain have substantially less free speech than the US does. In the case of Britain libel although being reformed is still very much a danger. In Canada, speech which specifically targets minorities or criticizes religions can be labeled as hate speech with fines given. And most of the world, is much much worse. Consistently a large fraction of the Islamic countries have tried to push through anti-blasphemy regulations in the UN. So far they've failed. But it is easy to imagine what would happen if they could actually block pictures of Muhammad. Similarly. China would slaver at the thought of not having to do its own censorship but simply have no websites discussing Tiananmen Square at all. Letting even weak internet control get in the hands of the UN is a recipe for disaster. Maybe in 20 or 30 years when the free speech situation has improved. But not right now.

Ugh, Slashdot is unhappy with Hebrew again it looks like. Ok, spelling phonetically- the word used in the 10 commandments is "Tierztach" while the phrase used for the death penalty is "mot yumat".

Do you have an example? In the 10 commandments the the word used is while in the next two chapters of Exodus the phrasing used is ? There may be other examples where is used to mean a lawful killing, but I'm not aware of them.

The word used in the Hebrew translates much closer to murder than kill. That's also obvious from context because the next few chapters in the text include various death penalties, including a death penalty for murder. But never mind that, the thing is those who are murdering doctors who perform abortion are actually being logically consistent, in that they are trying to stop what they see as mass-murder, and killing a few to save many is a rational course of action. The really inconsistent anti-abortion people are the many who shout about how abortion is murder and then aren't willing to kill doctors. Those people are either liers. hypocrites, or cowards. Frankly, though I'm pretty damn happy that those people are all hypocrites. I really don't want them to find consistency or a spine.

If you think this, you really should look at 3.5 or pathfinder a bit more. There's a lot of customization. For example, sorcerers get a limited set of spells known, so pretty much any two sorcerers will have different abilities. A sorcerer gets around 40 spells to choose from (unlike the classical "Vancian" casting of a wizard who has to prepare spells, a sorcerer may cast their spells with no preparation). So every sorcerer has a slightly different set of strengths and weaknesses (in core alone there are over a hundred spells to choose from) Similarly, the Tome of Battle splatbook made a pretty similar system for combat classes where they can learn specific martial maneuvers. Again, the level of customization is high. And this is before we get into feats and prestige classes. I agree that GURPS does still do a better job in terms of overall flexibility (especially weaknesses which D&D never really handled that well) but the level of flexibility is still pretty high.

They have to release fifth edition because 4e has been such a dismal failure. A lot of people stuck with 3.5, probably a lot more than they anticipated. And some of the people just switched to Pathfinder which is effectively D&D 3.75. There was pretty big backlash on 4e. A lot of people have objected that all the classes feel similar (every class pretty much has some number of daily powers, some number of per an encounter powers and some number of at will powers), that magic has become too weak, that multiclassing is too inflexible (you can't just take a few levels of one class and a few of another but rather need to spend feats to get some limited multiclassing functionality), that it feels too much "like WoW" (this last encompasses many of the other objections but also gets to the feel that the game is not as simulationist but more gamist since NPCs and monsters are no longer working off the same rule set of players). There are other objections also, but the basic result is the same: not great sales for WoTC and a very fractured base.

It also doesn't help that WoTC took the time to also redo their forums around the same time and make a lot of good links to homebrew content and the like go simply dead, and then precede to dump all discussion for pre 4th edition into a single forum (why yes, it does make so much sense that people trying to design new prestige classes in 3.5 should be posting in the same forum where someone wants advice about how to run AD&D.).

I think that a lot of people are hoping that 5e will look more like 3.5 or 2e than it looks like 4e, but I'm not that optimistic. So far WoTC has shown that they have more business sense than TSR but less understanding of what players want (although TSR made some real doozies in that regard also).