How can you make a blanket statement like this? Is this true of all hunter-gatherer societies worldwide, and throughout (pre-)history? For instance it would surprise me to learn that Great Plains Native Americans only ate buffalo meat once per 20 days.

You completely missed my point. The type of altruistic people that find and report holes would do so regardless. The type of people that take advantage of exploits for their own gain would also do so regardless of the openness of the target.

Can you cite an example of this behavior? I believe hackers that would exploit a hole on a closed platform would also exploit the hole if the platform were open. The key issue is not whether the platform is open or closed but that there are hackers willing to exploit holes for their own gain.

Because the economic environment that made all of those things valuable is only possible with a government regulating it.

I hear taxes are low in Somalia, maybe you'd be happier there.

The Households column in your linked chart uses thousands as the unit. Therefore the number of households in the top 1.5% is 1.699 million.

I mean, it's right in the name: Democratic People's Republic of Korea, so it must be true! /s

I have the Netflix client on my iPod Touch, iPad, and PS3, none of which have or require Silverlight.

It's certainly possible for a Linux user to download an executable to his/her home directory and run it. That was GP's point.

Not to take anything away from the military, because force was justified in fighting WW2 (unlike pretty much all of the military force we've projected since then), but the freedoms that are enjoyed in those defeated countries has a lot more to do with what came *after* the war than the actual war itself. Specifically the Marshall Plan and the Keynesian/New Deal economic programs and progressive constitutions that we gave them.

I never made a claim as to its rightness or wrongness.

However you're wrong again, Jewish law considered the actions which lead to an accidental miscarriage to be wrong in the same way as accidental property damage. It says nothing about voluntary abortion.

Ask yourself what the "bitter waters" in Numbers 5 is *really* all about.

Do you agree that the monetary fine applies to the fetus and that only injury to the mother results in an eye for an eye etc?

BTW, I didn't choose the translation it's the one given in the wikipedia page I linked to. Hence the quotation marks.

That's actually exactly wrong. The loss of the fetus results in a monetary fine equivalent to property damage. It's only injury to the woman that results in an eye for an eye:

"When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other damage (to the woman) (ason) ensues, the one responsible shall be fined according as the woman's husband may exact from him, the payment to be based on reckoning. But if other damage (to the woman) ensues, the penalty shall be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_abortion

You don't think Mendel was a Creationist in the sense that we use that word nowadays, do you? He was a Catholic priest; already by the 1850s the Catholic Church didn't interpret Genesis literally.

If you're talking about the Christian bible when you say 'some book', I don't even think you can use that as a source for the belief that abortion is wrong. The bible is pretty clear that an unborn fetus is not a person.

If your competitor figures out a way to be more efficient without raising his rates, he will win in the marketplace.

That's how markets work. It isn't a good reason to not tax businesses.
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