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Comment Re:Free speech? (Score 1) 226

You don't think David Irving has had to worry about credible death threats from Israeli extremists?

I didn't say we couldn't be disgusted at retaliation of the violent nature; I said we couldn't be disgusted with cartoons aimed to show western hypocrisy. if we censor holocaust denial and not Muhammad, then the only difference between us and Iran is what is culturally offensive, not the level of censorship, which is equal.

Comment Free speech? (Score 4, Interesting) 226

Before we get all high and mighty about stupid a-rabs getting upset over pictures of muhammed, lets remember that holocaust denial is illegal pretty much everywhere in eastern europe and is strongly censored everywhere else in the modern world. This is important because even though holocaust denialism's arguments have been thoroughly refuted on every front, they still aren't allowed to make them. This is a very strange policy and likely leads to more suspicion in this day and age, with censorship of an idea almost automatically giving weight to that idea.

So when we have mass huge contests for drawing pictures of muhammed, demonstrating our right to free speech with such a dividing, needless, harmful exercise, alienating an entire region of the earth, just remember: you aren't allowed to be disgusted when the islamic world responds with an International Holocaust Cartoon Competition.

Comment Re:Hypocracy (Score 2) 566

We owe way more to Hippocrates than we do to Ancient China, and Hippocrates believed that all illness was caused by an imbalance of the four biles, which is absolutely ludicrous and shares absolutely no notions with reality.

Everything today owes everything to the past. To say that the past is in any way better or more important than the present, however, is hugely ridiculous.

Comment Re:This company scares me more and more (Score 2) 189

In order to live in the United States, you must pay the United States Government a tax. This tax must be in the form of United States Dollars. You can always use USD to pay your taxes. The government is never going to accept anything other than USD, and so there is an anchoring point for USD where there is none for, say, bitcoins. That is what makes USD legitimate; the fact that you can *always guaranteed* use it to pay your taxes.

Comment Re:Free2play in games... (Score 1) 321

I'm not saying this isn't a few, I'm just saying that it's a career opportunity you might not have thought of if you didn't know about it, and it's related to open source. Large companies paying people to write good code for the open source things that they want to use. That's how linux gets developed nowadays.

Comment Re:Free2play in games... (Score 1) 321

Only a few people make a living off of open source?

A fortune 500 company I am familiar with, NetApp, has over 300 employees on the payroll whose job is to contribute *good* code to the open source projects which NetApp uses. I would assume many many companies do the same thing.

Comment Re:pretty sure congress is supposed to make laws (Score 1) 214

The useful part of this idea (making all drugs OTC) is that the consequences are negative enough for natural selection to take effect.

That is, people who go to their drug store and buy $100 worth of methylenedioxypyrovalene are going to *die* and will not reproduce.

So, unlike most other 'remove-the-warning-labels' arguments which will simply inconvenience everyone because there are no REAL negative consequences in today's society, people will become more intelligent.

Assuming the trait 'researches drugs before taking them' has a 10% advantage over the control 'does not research drugs before taking them' trait, it will only take around 380 generations before all humans research their drugs. And because this advantage would be hardcoded into our genetic material as opposed to relying on the memory of society, it would be a true improvement.

380 generations is only like 7600 years! We should get started.

Comment Re:He misses one HUGE assumption (Score 1) 482

In medieval times, conquerors used to go around and lay siege to towns. it would take a long time. they would usually salt the fields of the city.

scientists in medieval times (usually advisers to advisers to kings or something) had uncovered a marvelous fact: if conquerors continued to do this at the rate which they had been, the entire earth would be salted within a hundred years.

Comment Re:The sad thing is... (Score 2) 295

Here is the difference:

The GPL implies free-as-in-beer, which is a major point. If there were a story about a copyright violator who downloaded Inception.720p.xvid.GROUPNAME from thepiratebay, burned lots of copies of it to DVD, and then sold each copy on the street, I have no doubt every person on slashdot would see this as a morally reprehensible act (perhaps some would say that "turnabout is fair play" but even these people see it as an ethical wrong.)

Copyright is supposed to keep *that* from happening. Making a profit off of someone else's creativity without permission. That is what most GPL violations are.

Comment Re:we could take back control... (Score 1) 292

I'd just like to point out, in support of the argument against back-scatter Xrays, the dosage of radiation from them for a single scan on a human is around 0.009 mrems. While this is insignificant and will result in roughly 4 cases of cancer per million people, the number of people who will develop cancer from these scans per year outweighs the number of people who were killed in US-centric terrorist attacks in the last decade, including 9/11.

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