Clearly, the African continent is home only to the most primitive peoples. It's not a place that would birth historically powerful, flourishing civilizations whose large-scale engineering feats would be regarded among the "wonders of the world" millennia later. Oh, wait...

Fair enough. I learned something about German editorial conventions today. Thank you.

Presumably, having earned an appropriate commercial vehicle operation license, and a past history of employment as a delivery driver, would be typical attributes for which someone would be termed a "delivery driver" even if currently unemployed, similar to how others might be referred to as "unemployed programmers," "unemployed engineers," etc.

Or, is the job of "delivery driver" so far below your contempt that it deserves no distinction from "unemployed bum"? I.e., are you a total elitist asshole?

Rosa Parks' civil disobedience action turned out to be effective because there was a lot more than one lone person involved. Ms. Parks was secretary for an NAACP chapter, which mobilized the work of a *lot* of activists to make sure Ms. Parks' arrest wasn't just another "negro arrested, so what?" case. "Just one person" would have been forgotten by history --- the only reason we remember this is because of the large, dedicated, grass-roots activism organization backing her up, turning out tens of thousands for boycotts and marches.

There's no "You" term in F=ma, or in the Standard Model Lagrangian, either.

The fact that "you" are around to ponder being snarky on Slashdot indicates that some pretty nifty emergent behaviors can come out of our favorite physics formalisms.

Saying that "there is no free will" is approximately as helpful as obstinately rejecting the existence of protons, just because they're built from quark and gluon fields.

Congratulations on being pedantically correct in the least useful way.

And you've hit a sore spot of mine, which is: indefinite hoarding of wealth is not the keystone of a functional society.

The world's a lot bigger now than it was a century ago --- lots more people, lots more property. Only slightly more gold. That's why making gold a primary monetary standard (i.e. getting rid of fiat currency, using only gold-backed securities) is an absolutely horrible idea --- supply doesn't expand to keep pace with the size of the economy and number of people who need money. I don't think anyone *deserves* to be handed an unending cut in the entire growth of the economy for doing nothing more than hoarding shiny metal in the basement --- if you want your personal wealth to grow with the economy, then get a job (or at the minimum lend your money out to start up other people's jobs). Tying the supply of money to a fixed quantity just results in horrendous stagnation-deflation: why would anyone with money go through the risk/bother of growing the economy, when they could capture all the gains of others just by sitting on their gold?

Do I think the Fed is the best and most trustworthy steward of national finances? No. Does it destroy my life that my $$ lose 3%/year? Also, no --- and for any that I'll keep around past the end of the month, I have plenty of other options than stacks of paper bills for storing wealth that will more or less keep up with inflation. This includes gold, or I can even hand my $$ back to the government and they'll compensate me for inflation (I-series bonds), or I could buy stocks, or hire a worker in a business, etc. Some of these things contribute to a functioning economy; the gold-hoarding option doesn't.

A slow, steady, predictable rate of inflation is, basically, a good thing (encouraging spending/growth over indefinite hoarding) --- and far preferable to the massive deflationary spiral of non-fiat-backed currencies. If you don't like how your government is managing the money supply, then work on changing the government (or establishing alternate fiat money supplies) rather than pushing for the quack cure of gold-backed economics.

And the price of labor has remained approximately flat, and Compact Flash camera memory has fallen by 99.95%...
You're an idiot if you think gold is any more "real money" than any other commodity, especially given how strongly the price is driven by the whims of investor speculation.

Blaming this specifically on GMOs is a bit of a stretch. The issue is more that, while both Europe and the US control their food supplies through massive government subsidies, the US subsidies are strongly focused on supporting pure corn/soy monocultures (instead of subsidizing the broad variety of regional products necessary to support healthy diets). GMOs do contribute to this cycle, by making it easier than ever to produce huge volumes of a very limited number of crops (instead of supporting a slightly lower volume but more varied food supply).

Perhaps the fact that their deployment is tied to concentrating control over the world food supply in the hands of a single viciously greedy corporation?

You have a serious problem with things the government is doing, allowing others to do, and/or requiring others to do. As a Christian, so do I (on many issues)! The problem here is that you are assuming the First Amendment has a mystical absolute reach (which Obama has presumably violated) that it has never actually had --- throughout this countries' history of jurisprudence (not just beginning with Obama), the government has, by balancing against other (contradictory!) legal principles, placed boundaries on how far claims of religious freedom can be taken. For example, with a long history of legal precedents, I don't have a First Amendment claim to replace my taxes with an apology note to the IRS saying I don't like the government's wars. A certain common level of employee treatment is something that (religious) employers of secular workers don't get to define from their personal beliefs (which are not universally held in our pluralistic society --- a significant segment of the population does not morally equate "morning after pill" with "murder a child").

This doesn't mean you're *wrong* to object to birth control funding mandates --- just that this argument doesn't stand up from *within* in the existing constitutional framework. Perhaps "First Amendment" freedoms should have a much stronger scope (at the expense of "equal protection" principles) than they do; but this isn't a problem with Obama unilaterally violating religious freedoms, it's a problem with that level of religious freedom never having existed in the first place. Working from within the system, you can continue to strive to win the hearts and minds of the nation to agree with your definition of "murder a child" --- this is what "First Amendment" protections guarantee you. Or, you can fight the system from the standpoint of a higher external logic that pushes for a radical change in the scope of "First Amendment" protections. But you don't have legally sound grounds from "within the logic of the system" to claim that Obama is doing anything at all extra-ordinary.

The government has always had an absolute ability to order you to act against your religious beliefs.

Your religion might demand that you punch strangers in the face, or oppose interracial marriage. The government orders you not to go around punching people in the face, or to run a car dealership that refuses to serve interracial couples. "Freedom of religion" protections guarantee that you can continue believing and preaching that God is sending the country to hell for its lack of face-punching or abundance of interracial relations --- just don't act on your illegal impulses.

Should I assume that your particular gripe was with Catholic hospitals (a secular business, with employees not required to be personally Catholic) being asked to provide their employees with the same type of healthcare benefits that *every other* employer is required to provide? Should they also get a free pass on employee benefits if they believe God wants a lower minimum wage and no paid overtime for 80 hour work weeks?

I'm actually not particularly a personal fan of stereotypical "Cyber-ideology." I find "techno-salvation" fantasies to primarily consist of trite, puerile escapism; and the communities constructed around them to be riddled with systematic failures. My above defense of "Cyberspace" is in kin spirit to defending free speech even for those blathering pure evil --- but in this case, the battle line is drawn beyond speech, at thought itself. Despite my low opinion of most "cyber-idealists," the logic underlying Lind's argument is too insidious to let slide. Basically, "because a free, idealized Cyberspace has never and cannot exist under the current order, folks should give up thinking/talking about it at all." I'm fine with arguing against the ideas of Cyberspace (or debating the likelihood of Star Trek or the FSM), but not eradicating the entire avenue of thought simply because it contradicts the ideology of current hegemonic corporate/governmental hierarchies.

This is precisely where philosophically touchy distinctions are most needed.

The physical embodiment of Cyberspace ("people doing stuff on computers") is indeed stuck under the same legal jurisdiction as "people doing stuff on X," whether X is paper, telephones, or roads.

The idea of Cyberspace (not new by virtue of chronology, but new by distinction from status-quo orders) is subject to law only so far as we permit jurisdiction of our minds --- and that is a border conflict that I have not yet conceded.

I'm not denying that the component ideas of Cyberspace existed *long* before computers --- but that doesn't mean the ideas don't exist. That desire for human connection that drove early anonymous phone connections still projects itself into contemporary ideas of Cyberspace. Maybe you'd prefer we called such things by different, less pretentiously dorky, names; perhaps give more credit to their pre-computer philosophical underpinnings --- as soon as you're appointed King of Language, you can declare whatever changes you want. For the people who discovered communities and ideas in the cyber-world (instead of the telegraph-world or phone-world), these were indeed new things to them, and transformative of their world beyond minor extension of the status quo (which, for most people, did not include anonymous phone friendships).

Indeed, replacing "Doing X" with "Doing X... with a computer!" changes nothing. Re-creating the old world a little faster and easier does not a revolution make.

But, perhaps people have found a few *new* things that they can do in "Cyberspace"?
"In the real world, everyone knows you're a dog."
To create new identities, fluidly and anonymously, independent of existing hierarchies of age, race, wealth, and power; to explore new social arrangements and communities built from these new synthetic identities; these can be transformative things.

That the word "cyberspace" exists (where "Fax Space" doesn't) demonstrates that something new was created: an idea. The computers and wires remain solidly subject to the old world's laws and regulations --- in this sense, there is no cyberspace. But the idea of cyberspace --- rather, the many ideas of many cyberspaces --- doesn't give a fuck that it was done... with a computer!