I live in the suburbs of London. I've been doing my supermarket shopping online for the past ten years. Not having to go to Tesco on a Saturday afternoon and overcome the urge to stab every fucker I see there in the face is worth every penny of the (typically) £5 delivery fee.

New York is a plausible place to do this, as it has the density of population. Might have a harder time in the 'burbs.

There are indeed shades of grey. But a constitutional republic is not a "shade" of a democratic system. Majority rule is two retarded wolves and an intelligent sheep voting on what's for dinner. A constitutional republic is someone else looking at all three, consulting a set of hard limits neither the sheep or wolves have any direct control over, and making sure that dinner consists of bread and water.

FFS. The USA was designed as a constitutional republic. Not a democracy. Which is the only reason we ever had a chance. A democracy is one of the most failure-prone systems out there; majority rule is two retarded wolves and an intelligent sheep voting on what's for dinner. And no, choosing representatives doesn't make a society a democracy any more than choosing a dictator does.

Other than that, yes. Great intentions, just as you say; yet these have resolved today in an almost complete and total failure to hit those lofty mark(s.)

The principles that underly the actual USA, specifically the constitution (as written, not as "interpreted"), are the foremost in the world by quite a distance -- they do the best job of balancing individual rights without falling overboard and choking off individual freedoms. Not perfect (oh, would I love to rewrite some of it), but still the best to date. Comparable efforts make serious mistakes, particularly in the areas of suppressing speech and giving cover to superstition. The ideal here in the USA was a profoundly well thought out constitutional republic, given the time frame the ideas were laid out in.

However, those principles are now only a vague memory in the actual day to day operation of the US legal and social systems. So while one might admire the foundation, the intent, and even the attempts of many individuals within the context of what one could simply call 'The USA", it's a huge mistake to take those high points as a legitimate description of who and what we are today: A corporate oligarchy, wildly out of the citizen's control, engaged in wholesale deception to keep it that way. Today, we have embraced some of the most repulsive things we used to say we stood against. From torture to surveillance to pervasive, systemized political corruption to massive, for-profit imprisonment, the USA at this time is no more than a caricature of its founding ideals.

Speaking to the younger generation (yeah, I'm getting old, and this is my lawn), I'm sorry, very sorry in fact, but you're well and truly fucked.

are you actually that eager to carve up other people into spare parts? Do you want to live in a society that does that?

I must say, I am shocked at the number of people posting here who support China's policy. Is there a sudden flood of postings from Texas high-school students, or something? I haven't seen this much sociopathy on display since someone tried to defend the execution of Islamic apostates a few months ago.

Every time one of these arguments comes up, I end up even more firmly convinced that we should abolish the death penalty without exception. I'd rather let mass murderers die of a ripe old age (in a small, windowless cell without books or TV, of course) than indulge the bloodlust of some of our upstanding citizens.

China's policy *starts* once a prisoner is already on death row... they're genotyped, then kept alive until recipients are found for their organs. The system mostly works well, because it eliminates the rush to perform a transplant on short notice and the dependency on local availability. They can schedule the execution, harvesting, and transplant well in advance, and have everyone in place & ready to go before the prisoner gets executed... The *real* ethical problem

Holy shit, you think the fact that the victims may not actually deserve their fate is the only ethical problem? How about keeping people alive in detention indefinitely with the promise that eventually, one day, they'll be killed for their organs? That's fucking goulish, and far crueler than simply executing them immediately.

So instead, we only have to worry about hospitals purposely letting you die so they can harvest your organs. If you object, please tell me how this can be avoided.

In the US, if a doctor deliberately lets you die so the hospital can harvest your organ, we call that "malpractice" and quite possibly "murder", and there are legal remedies for both of those offenses. In China, if the government executes someone and harvests his organs, it's called "preserving social stability", and there is no legal remedy because the state makes its own rules, and is notorious for locking up people who complain.

We now have well over 100 flowers blooming in our (average-size, suburban) yard. Should be be worried that the NSA are monitoring our gardening?

But the daylilies are nearly done; I've started to cut down the not-very-attractive stems that they've left behind. I wonder if the NSA has recorded this behavior. We were also wishing we'd kept records of when our various perennials bloomed, so we could see what effect the climate change has had on our yard. Maybe we should ask the NSA for that information.

(And firefox doesn't recognize "daylilies" as an English word. I did a quick google check, and even when I asked for "day-lily", most of the hits had it as one word with no space or hyphen. Most of the technical botanical pages spell it as one word. I guess we still have a long way to go before our vaunted natural-language software can even handle something as simple as dictionary lookup. ;-)

<cite>http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110409161444432</cite>

So basically they Won.

They don't win unless we've stopped fighting. And we're a long, long way from that.

I just sneezed, and it typed perl.

Welcome to Slashdot, Mr. Weiner

drop in the number of people who use Kleenex when they blow their nose

Merge the tissue and the OS: Kleenix

I blew my nose with Winex, but got a Blew Screen of Death.

Democrats tax weeds, while Republicans make you pay royalties on weeds. Your pocket is emptied either way.

(Although one tends to flow to the poor, the other to the rich.)

It never ceases to amaze me that for all the hardware the human brain possess, we are so bad at many of the tasks we perform. I mean, it's ludicrous to think how the avian or reptilian or cetacean or insect or even other mammalian species can perform advanced calculations in 1/100th the amount of time that it takes a human mind to complete the same damn calculation. I find that deeply troubling. A freaking spider can scan a series of stems, like a mainframe computer, and determine which one is the right one to climb, with a brain less than the size of a pin...and yet a human child, of several years of age, might fail at even understanding the task to be performed, let alone performing the task itself.

Part of evolution involves specialization, and we lose certain instincts or abilities that are unnecessary for maximum fitness. We don't have the speed of a cheetah, or the sense of smell of a bloodhound, or the vision of a falcon either. Instead, we ended up with verbal communication, opposable thumbs, and creativity and intuition beyond anything we've observed so far in the animal world. Seems like a fair tradeoff to me.