Not really, no. The "We're called racists if we say anything against Obama"/"Obama's a Kenyan Muslin usurper!" nonsense has been going on now for a long time. The AC's criticism is absolutely on the money. And ironically, you're attacking the AC for bringing up what you consider to be a strawman when you the "We're called racists just because we disagree with Obama" thing is a ridiculous characterization of what Democrats and liberals have actually criticized.

If you really want to do something about it, you need to counter-attack your allies when they try to pull either BS. Tell those who insist that Democrats are not highlighting actual racism when they complain about it to knock it off. And tell those who continue to push the Kenyan Muslim Usurper bullshit to leave, and stop self-identifying with Republicans. If you continue to call yourself a Republican, but also continue to allow such views to be associated with Republicans, you don't have a leg to stand on when you claim it's a "fringe".

I knew someone in Los Angeles who had disposed of some tired storebought tomatoes by tossing them into the front yard for the birds to eat. The seeds volunteered all over the place and after a few years of benign neglect, their yard was one big self-renewing tomato patch -- producing perfectly edible tomatoes, all of the same variety. Apparently whatever they'd bought at the grocery were not hybrids.

They don't. They lead to more spying, which is what GP said but was omitted in your quote. And sooner or later they'll be armed, let's not kid our selves.

I see your point. And much though I admire Verne and his visionary imagination... I was under the impression that he was extrapolating from contemporary science and engineering.

Now, perhaps I'm just hopelessly out of touch, but I'm not aware of any current work, not even any out-of-box blue sky imagineering (eew), toward actual teleportation.

Would love to be wrong though!

I don't follow you, both have the ad absurdum label for much the same reason. Both can be applied correctly or not. I fail to see how it is "funny". But we're severely off topic here, so never mind; it's probably some really specific humor deficiency on my part.

Heh, tell that to the 39% of survey respondents who apparently believe teleportation will be "solved" by 2064.

Not all that funny, reductio ad absurdum disproves the hypothesis you started with. The fallacy of the hypothesis proves its logical negation.

If you honestly believe this, it makes me suspect everything else you said.

Well, tough, because it's true. Railroads were suffering from ever increasing property taxes, and the only way they could deal with them was by getting rid of as much property as possible, undermining their network effects. And like I said, it's in part one of the reasons, not the whole reason.

Interestingly most of the reasons you give are not real reasons - the Interstate system being a partial exception (though if that had been it I think the railroads would have survived), but the major ones are:

- Aforementioned tax burdens where taxes were in proportion to area and people served, not income.
- Stifling Federal bureaucracy, making it impossible to reorganize services as population shifts occurred and making cutting routes actually preferable to reorganizations.
- Aforementioned Federal bureaucracy preventing railroads from setting competitive prices. They were forced to sell many services at a loss, even when there was no reason to believe customers weren't perfectly prepared to pay proper commercial rates.
- Zoning reforms that made car ownership mandatory for anyone living in any area developed since the 1940s, plus the (deliberate, in my view) mal-administration of urban centers.

Add union intransigence to the mix, and the occasional mismanagement (Penn Central - if only they'd have let Al Perlman do his job), New Haven, etc) and it was a recipe for disaster.

Possibly so, at first. However, these days the strains used for industrial use (rope, clothes, paper) are almost a different species from the ones for, um, recreational use. In fact, some of the mom and pop growers specifically do so because they find the stuff from the coffeeshops too potent.

Yes, it is actively enforced. Everything over 5 plants constitutes a rather serious offense, and people do get caught.

That is correct. Like I said, an utterly silly state of affairs. So the output of these coffeeshops is legal (provided they respect the weight limits, don't sell to underage visitors, etc) while their inputs aren't.

The way it is now (but this is being debated constantly) we are basically not enjoying the major potential benefit of decriminalisation, which is taking the wind out of the sails of organized crime.

The Netherlands here. Not quite. We have this utterly silly situation where the selling of mj is sort of legal, up to a certain weight and only in designated establishments (the famous coffeeshops). However the growing and distributing is quite illegal.

The mom and pop growers are entirely insignificant compared to organized criminals. The latter produce way more than local demand, so much of that is exported.

I think the point is neither of these are attacks on the open source community. They're arguably attacks - albeit mere criticisms of - on "GNOME/Linux", but that's not the same thing.

A company contributing bodies and work to a community is helping it, not harming it. It's up to us to decide if we want Mir and Unity. We're not harmed by their existence. And FWIW, anyone arguing that Mir is terrible because it undermines Wayland isn't thinking this through, both because there's a much greater case for saying Wayland is damaging to the future of GNU/Linux, and because Mir has changed the politics whereby Wayland was once an obscure thing nobody was taking any notice of, but Mir basically turned the entire argument from "Should we replace X11 with Wayland?" (Hell no) to "OK, should we use Mir or Wayland [abandonment of X11 is implied to be a settled issue.]"

The real reason is probably a lot simpler: Cost.

Before you break ground on a single-family home in Pleasanton CA, you must cough up in excess of $125,000 (yes, 125 grand) in fees and permits.

I expect said fees and permits are even more expensive in San Francisco proper.

[For comparison, in Los Angeles County a home building permit is $38,000. Here in Montana it's from $50 to $2000 depending where you are.]

I thought we'd moved on past the putting words in people's mouths BS.

1. The paranoia in the original post that I was refering to was the notion that the Canadian press had concocted a headline with the intention of providing a world wide news story that would make everyone think that Heartbleed isn't a story. I don't know where the fuck you get any other interpretation from.

2. I haven't apologized for censorship anywhere, neither in the comment you quote, nor anywhere else. The fact you think that Eich was targeted for his views rather than for being an ass about them doesn't make it true, it just makes you another idiot who puts their fingers in their ears and cries "la la la" when anyone tries to explain the truth to them.

Actually refusing to listen to what someone has to say is one thing. Inventing an entire story about what you wish they said and believed isn't just arrogant, it's a sign of a serious mental problem. Get help.

I'd say that his revision would have the direct effect of creating a more-effective police state, where the government need never fear The People.

The whole POINT of the 2nd Amendment was that government SHOULD fear The People.