Well, all the Y chromosomes trace back to a single male, too. The only problem for the Adam-Eve myth is that they lived 150,000 years apart, so likely they were not married.

That's arguable. Limiting emissions to a level where it makes an appreciable difference might be so expensive that it is the non-conservative choice. (To me, it seems like it is that expensive - the limitations we are doing only gives us a few years bonus time. Our only rational choice seems to be geo-engineering. Though TFA shows something that might change all calculations around the topic.)

My Social Psychology textbook (David Myer's "Social Psychology") spends a chapter arguing that the evidence shows that pornography leads to more rape, with fairly credible citations, in particular natural experiments where introduction has rapidly led to increase in rape, and as far as I remember one example (Hawaii?) where it had been introduced, rape had increased, and then removed, and rape had decreased, and it had been re-introduced and rape had increased again.

I'll also say that american textbooks are ridiculously expensive - I just searched on Amazon to find the book, and it costs over twice what I paid for it maybe three years ago in Norway. And it's the same book, just a more competitive market.

I think the definition of "porn" here is dependent on a particular country you're from. I'm from a less liberal country than Denmark (Norway), and I don't consider topless pictures to be anywhere near porn. I consider the page 3/9/whatever girls to be slightly tacky, but that's all.

My regular newspaper is the 3rd largest newspaper in Norway, and probably the one with the most influential mainstream cultural debate. They've fairly regularly had full frontal nudity on the front page of their online newspaper. They've also had people having sex (though not "moving private parts", as is the former porn limitation in Norway). And they're not considered an at all racy newspaper here. (It's also the second largest direct sales newspaper.)

The problem is that if Apple gets a stranglehold on a large part of the (paid) online market, then the censorship necessary to avoid offending the outer mainstream in the least liberal parts of America suddenly becomes global. And for many of us, this seems bad.

No. Clearly no.

There's a remote risk that you, avatar139 (918375), are going to snap and kill a lot of people with your bare hands. This does not warrant installing 24/7 surveillance to detect signs of you snapping.

The world is filled with risks. The only sane way to deal with them is by looking at the chance that they'll occur, and what cost they have if they occur. A few people killed is a fairly low cost. We take much higher costs from e.g. allowing McDonald's to advertise, or from allowing television, or from the low amount of training required from car drivers. Heck, as far as I've understood, building a skyscraper generally cost a couple of lives (accidents during construction).

The thing is: We shall all die some day. There's ways of decreasing risk, but a lot of deaths are clearly related to available resources - if we pushed more resources at the problem, we could decrease deaths. However, we don't have infinite resources, so the right thing is to use the ones we have where they can make the most difference. Regulating and enforcing "anti terror" laws likely isn't that place.

All of these are allowed in the name of freedom; we take the

That seems unreasonable if you're going to vote in an election influencing this.

Sony sold the PS3 with the following features advertised:

1. Ability to run PS3 games, present and future
2. Ability to play online, present and future
3. Ability to play Blu-Ray movies, present and future
4. Ability to run Linux

Then they come in and force the end user to choose between either (1, 2 and 3) or (4).

Now, even if you don't use Linux, the ability to run Linux has value for the consumer. It allows for re-purposing the PS3 as a high end mediacenter (with continual software updates) after it is EOLed as a game machine, and it allows for the consumer to re-sell the PS3 to somebody that wants to run Linux - e.g, to one of the supercomputer builders.

People's ability to run Linux on non-sold PS3s has value to Sony, in the form of making higher sales. People's ability to run Linux on already sold PS3s has no value to Sony; it has negative value in the form of PS3s being occupied doing something else than running games, making Sony not earn licensing money from sales of games. It also has slight negative value in the risk that somebody could use it to pirate games, but at the time when Sony shut down OtherOS, *no game had been pirated*.

Anyway, the value was all at the consumer side - the only value Sony had left in OtherOS was that they would keep their word. They chose to steal the value from the consumers.

This is why we call it a scam: They sold something with a particular set of features. Then they stole one of the features later. It's bait and switch - but bait and switch in an even worse form.

And it is why I boycott Sony, even though I did not have an affected PS3. I don't give my money to thieves.

From your low UID, you're too old to have kept track of how the net infrastructure evolved...

A /28 means 28 bits routing - ie, a router has to look at the first 28 bits of the IP address to know where to send it. Presently, the main (core) routers of the net will only accept /24s and there's problems with router memory just due to too many /24s; with /28s, there will be potentially 4 bits (16x) more routes.

Where are you living? Where I'm shopping (Norway and Ireland), non-blockbuster DVDs usually cost less than CDs. And I feel cheated if I pay more for a CD than a DVD - it just seems like a DVD has more in it than a CD (even if I play the CD many more times than the DVD.)

Your description of fractional reserve banking doesn't match what I've learned (which seems to make more sense).

Let's for a moment assume one bank - this can also be "the banking system", it sorts of average out. Let's start with a "fresh" $1000, coming from the federal reserve, and somehow paid to somebody (e.g, a bond buyback). Let's also assume that everything is deposited in the bank - this is almost but not quite true. Remember, if they spend it,

When A deposit $1000, then the bank can lend 90% - $900. This is $900 "created". The bank lend these $900 to B. The bank now has $100, A "has" $1000 (as a deposit), B has $900, for a total of $2000.

B then deposit $900 in the bank, and the bank can lend $810 to C. The bank now has $190 ($100 reserve for A, $90 for B), A "has" $1000 (as a deposit), B now "has" $900, and C now has $810, for a total of $2900.

C then deposit $810 in the bank, and the bank can now lend $729 to D. The bank now has $271 ($100 reverse for A, $90 for B, $81 for C). A "has" $1000, B "has" $900, C now "has" $810, and D now has $729, for a total of $3710. ... and so on, ending up at a limit total of $9999.99, with $999.99 as reserve in the bank and $.01 lent to somebody. Effectively $10000.

Don't know where you've been. Most of the countries I've been to won't routinely accept US dollars; it'll be accepted at the airports and can be exchanged at the banks, of course, but that's it. Apart from the US, the only country I think would accept it was Ghana.

What evidence I've seen is that use of the death penalty increases illegal violence in the jurisdiction; possibly because it increase the legitimacy of using violence to solve problems.

My arguments against death penalty are pretty simple:

• I don't accept the government murdering innocent people when there is an alternative. Since there is no justice system known to man that is able to weed out false positives, I don't accept the death penalty for civil crimes.
• There seems to be a positive correlation where the death penalty leads to more (unrelated) victims of violence in society; I don't accept that cost to have people get their sense of revenge tickled.
• The death penalty as implemented in the USA is horribly costly; it's much cheaper to keep people locked up for life, and this avoids the two problems above.

The introduction of DNA testing showed how horribly unreliable the justice system is - there were lots of death row inmates that were let go on the basis of DNA evidence, and if the system had avoided taking innocent people, there would have been none. There is little reason to believe that the system including DNA tests is so much more reliable that there now aren't innocent people there.

So, the question to any person in favor of the death penalty is: How many innocent people are you willing to have executed?

"Worship at the Throne of Darwin" doesn't exactly show an example of being adult.

I think we can all agree that most religions are mistaken. Zeus, Odin, Vishnu, Jesus' miracles - I think you'll agree that at least three out of the four do not exist. There is no one religious view that reach the majority of children. That means that most children are being taught lies. In my book, that's child abuse. You're saying that the "adult" thing to do is to allow child abuse - in the form of indoctrination - until the child is old enough to "make up their own mind" - which they don't. Most people believe the same thing as their parents. The chance of getting the abuse to stop - the children to stop re-doing the abuse on their own children - is to start when they're children.

Oh, and by the way: "The Throne of Darwin" indicates to me that you disagree with "evolution". I contend that I have never talked to a person that disagreed with modern evolutionary theory. Everybody that disagree disagree with something else - because they do not understand what modern evolutionary theory claims.

If you want to be consistent with evidence and believe that God made the Earth in six thousand years and that evolution had no place in it, there is only one way to do this: You have to believe that God created the Earth so that it was supposed to look like it had been made by evolution. And he could have created it five minutes ago, with fake memories in you.

*Top* students have no problem getting full time offers. A lot of companies will extend them. It's the students that aren't stellar that can't afford to turn down offers; the top ones will have to turn some down, as they'll have more than one on the table.

And sexual reproduction also count as a form of spell checking. It allows you to introduce random errors in the DNA, and get back perfect DNA from other individuals when you reproduce. (Muller's ratchet, which to my mind sufficiently explains why we have sexual reproduction, and which I was sad to find that somebody else had thought of before me.)