Similarly, the suggestion that pharmaceutical companies make vaccines hoping to pocket huge profits is ludicrous to Offit. Vaccines, after all, are given once or twice or three times in a lifetime. Diabetes drugs, neurological drugs, Lipitor, Viagra, even Rogaine — stuff that a large number of people use every day — that’s where the money is.

That’s not to say vaccines aren’t profitable: RotaTeq costs a little under $4 a dose to make, according to Offit. Merck has sold a total of more than 24 million doses in the US, most for $69.59 a pop — a 17-fold markup. Not bad, but pharmaceutical companies do sell a lot of vaccines at cost to the developing world and in some cases give them away. Merck committed $75 million in 2006 to vaccinate all children born in Nicaragua for three years. In 2008, Merck’s revenue from RotaTeq was $665 million. Meanwhile, a blockbuster drug like Pfizer’s Lipitor is a $12 billion-a-year business.

(Source -- definitely worth reading)

Vaccines save lives. Anti-vaxxers use lies and bullying to kill people and promote their pseudoscientific nonsense. It's a shame they won this battle, and people will die as a result. If there's one area of science and technology that needs an army of Slashdotters defending it today, it's vaccines and science-based medicine in general. Fight back.

I can't see the people that are really hooked on the intarwebs rioting.

I'd riot. Shutting down the Internet would kill the economy. Technologic regressions are never really a viable option, and losing the Internet would be a huge one, especially as far as the economy is concerned.

One second thought, no, I wouldn't riot. If they turned off the Internet, I'd just turn it back on again, with the help of the other millions of tech-savvy people who like having jobs, to say nothing of food, electricity, running water, etc.Yes, we survived without the Internet. We also survived without agriculture. But that doesn't mean we can do that with todays needs.

Asimov said it quite well in Science Past--Science Future:

Faced with that cold fact, only scattered individuals here and there have ever returned to the "simple life." No matter how much they urged it on others, the population generally could not follow; they literally could not. No farming community in history, anywhere, at any time, has voluntarily and en masse abandoned farming and resumed food gathering. It is not possible to make such a change.

(And this holds true for every important technological advance. Any retreat to a previous level must mean a large reduction in man's range or his numbers or both--and this is a catastrophe men will not accept voluntarily.)

Losing the Internet might not dramatically reduce our range or numbers, but it would catastrophically reduce our wealth (read: quality of life).

They still don't use SSL (though it looks like if you tell it to, it will--most people won't. Most people don't even know how.) or anything other than your username and password.

People (hopefully) use strong passwords for their online banking, and banking sites add additional possibly-helpful (though often not really) authentication methods. I doubt people guard their Twitter passwords so jealously (or that Twitter takes security as seriously as the banks).

One principle of security: if security is important, avoid relying on external systems any more than necessary, especially relatively low-security. Using email is for stuff is a necessary evil. Using Twitter is not. I guard my email account jealously, because I know you can use it to access dozens of my accounts.

Most of their services are free.

Like IE.

'The people' have already paid for the BBC via their TV license fees, it is in no way 'free'. Why should they pay again just because Murdoch doesn't like the competition?

Way to completely miss the point. Everyone in the UK (with a TV?) is forced to pay for the BBC. News Corporation doesn't get the option of forcing everyone to pay them. Therefore, the BBC has an unfair advantage, which is anti-competitive and may damage the news market.

Of course, the reality is that the BBC is providing a valuable public service that the competitive market refuses to fill: objective, mature reporting. And News Corporation fails the worst.

1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. No one is saying (or no expert is saying--no telling what random activists will claim) that every year with be successively hotter than the last, any more than each successive day in December is colder than the last. Global warming is a global trend, and needs to be considered as a trend. Here's a good debunking of this particularly bad GW-skeptic argument.

(I realized that with the Winter analogy I just cued the 'it's a natural cycle and therefore humans have no effect' people. But scientists didn't just somehow overlook that possibility. Maybe they're not a bunch of absent-minded bumblers after all?)

As any sane person would expect, and thirty seconds on Google would confirm, the browser asks permission before sending the location data. Screenshot. No privacy is being taken away.

Lesson of the day: don't make nutty assumptions, and don't post knee-jerk reactions based on them.

Wait, wait. How is messing with other people's stuff on the net from safely behind a computer 'gutsy'?

Ah, yet another person who mistakenly assumes what they do on the Internet is anonymous and therefore risk-free. If you're just being an annoying troll, you're relatively safe, but if you get the law and security experts involved, the supposed anonymity drops away pretty quickly most of the time.

I pressed ^t, typed in 'wp memristor' (actually it was either 'wp ^v' or 'wp [middle-click]'), and pressed Enter. Bookmark keywords are your friend.

This is Slashdot. I think we should assume people are capable of locating Wikipedia on their own.

No, see, he doesn't care if it's mom or pop or not. He's not saying anyone should be punished, he's saying no one should get special treatment. You're the one who seems to think small companies deserve special protection from entities doing things efficiently by reaching an economy of scale.

Note to moderators: dishonest arguments aren't insightful, even if they support a conclusion you like.

I nowadays perceive it as a humanitarian issue--embargoing Cuba hurts the Communist leadership that is oppressing the people there (seems pretty clear that blocking IM hurts the people and helps the oppressors, but whatever). The people who care about it most are people who fled Cuba and hatehatehate the Cuban government, so policy reflects that.

1. Walls: If these weren't so effective, I'd just live outside.
2. Mundanity: I have nothing of significant value in my castle. Go attack my rich neighbours.
3. Guards: The other residents are young, fit, and often awake into the wee hours of the night during my sleepy time. It's like a pack of super-intelligent guard dogs.
4. Obscurity: Who told you I had a castle? I can't afford a castle. I live in a tent in the park.

Your post mentions all those things, and yet failed to scare me.

Maybe there's more to scariness than bland reference to things that scare people.

Is drug smuggling really such a big problem to require the use of military resources?

Yes. Hell yes.