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Comment Re:I'm from the government and I'm here to help yo (Score 1) 198

A single, super-intelligent person doesn't need other people, so by virtue they have no interest in petty things and can be better leaders.

Ruling over other people's lives is one of the most petty thing one can spend time doing, which is why there can be no good leader, ever. Life is nonsensical, obsessing over others' lives is nonsense squared.

Also, it's painfully obvious you're not a parent if you think you can lord it over your kid any way you think fit. A parent can have over his or her kids nowhere near the slightest approximation of the power even a small city mayor holds over his or her fellow citizens. Kids will seize authority over themselves from you bit by bit without question or notice as soon as they deem themselves ready for it - yes, whether they really are or not - and starting as early as a few months of age.

Comment democracy != elections (Score 1) 1576

In a proper democratic system, all votes should be given equal weight.

Democracy has little to do with elections.

Election is a monarchic or rather an aristocratic process, historically it is the method by which peers of the realm select one among themselves to rule as king. The ancient greeks who defined the very word 'democracy' held no election for public offices, they only had elections for the top military mandates and IIRC Socrates explicitly lambasted elections as being aristocratic in nature. Compare that to the fact that all the main european monarchic dynasties of the middle-age started with an election: Pepin the short was elected king of the Franks, establishing the Carolingian dynasty that assumed the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, Hughes Capet was elected king of France and founded the long Capetian dynasty of french kings. Conrad of Franconia was elected king and basically established the kingdom of Germany, Arnulf of Carinthia was elected king of eastern Francia (which covered pretty much the whole of eastern Europe), etc. In most of eastern Europe, kings succceeded each other through election, for centuries. Even the title of emperor of the Holy Germanic Empire was attributed through election (with quite the same campaigning, mudslinging and corruption going on as in nowaday's elections).

Democracy stands for 'the people themselves manage the institutions and hold the final authority', whereas an election means pretty much the opposite, as it's a method for choosing one person to manage institutions himself and hold that public power and authority over everyone else.

Like most of your contemporaries you have no clear idea of what democracy actually looks and feels like, my guess is you most probably aren't familiar with concepts such a emergence and legal polycentrism, or their foremost place in the history of civilisation.

Comment I, for one, long for more dissent (Score 2) 1160

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that 'when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others' values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.'

Not only can freedom to provoke and humiliate others' values and beliefs be protected, I'll raise it one notch and affirm it *must* be protected, for the sake of mankind's mind health.

I'm constantly amazed to see so many "famous" or "influent" people devise that being famous or influent implies, somehow, that they more than anyone else should not tread onto other people's convictions, offend or openly criticize the many widespread values and beliefs held all over the world. Quite the opposite, I would have thought the more people lend an ear to you, the higher your moral duty to voice out your mind and dish out demolition of common reality-walls, for the sake of human thought.

At every level of being, opinions and decisions are formed through constant dissent, even down to the individual neuron's level, war of words and contradicting thoughts stamping each other out, fighting again and again with reason, passion, humor, eck even contempt or guilt, all this for a flimsy supremacy: this is how our minds work. Dissent is our natural mode of operation. And as a corollary, political correctness, by suppressing initiative and blunting internal dissent so as not to confront other people's own thoughts is a double mistake: it throws a wrench into your own gears of thinking, and leaves your fellow humans wading in what you earnestly believe is wrong - not a nice thing to do, when you think about it. This is what mankind has been doing so intently as of late, and it needs to stop (bashing itself on the mind so hard).

Comment Re:Why is the Obama administration objecting ? (Score 4, Informative) 308

Hmm no. The study done by Seralini, when analysed properly, shows that rats of the specific strain used during the trials developped the normal, expected proportion of tumors (which is 2 to 8 per group of 10 individuals), whether they were fed GMO, Roundup, both, or non-GMO corn. The author of this study mistakenly concluded that there was an effect, whereas his results were actually statistically insignificant.

Comment Re:And in countries where it's legal? (Score 1) 498

Nicotine is not addictive.

Or to put it more accurately: nicotine is not the addicting substance in cigarettes / tobacco. The careful analysis of lab tests (mostly done on rats and monkeys) shows repeatedly that nicotine fails to induce the effects we understand as demonstrating addiction.

However, the belief that nicotine is the substance that you crave when trying to stop smoking, is extremely lucrative to the nicotine-gum and nicotine-patch industry. In my country (France) the state's healthcare plan covers most of those products, making this coverage a (costly) disguised subsidy.

Medicine

Submission + - Chemotherapy Can Make Cancer Growth Worse (gizmocrazed.com) 1

Diggester writes: The common treatment for cancer this day and age is chemotherapy but it is a very aggressive remedy that is not always guaranteed to work, and some new studies show it may actually be hurting more than helping.
The new study show chemo causing healthy cells to make a protein called WNT16B, which essentially fuels the cancer cells to keep growing and resist future treatment. This is absolutely the opposite effect wanted by patients and doctors, but this new research doesn't mean chemo should be canceled altogether.

Bitcoin

Submission + - Bitcoin-Based Drug Market Silk Road Thriving With $22 Million In Annual Sales (forbes.com)

Sparrowvsrevolution writes: Every day or so of the last six months, Carnegie Mellon computer security professor Nicolas Christin has crawled and scraped Silk Road, the Tor- and Bitcoin-based underground online market for illegal drug sales.

Now Christin has released a paper on his findings, which show that the site's business is booming: its number of sellers, who offer everything from cocaine to ecstasy, has jumped from around 300 in February to more than 550. Its total sales now add up to around $1.9 million a month. And its operators generate more than $6,000 a day in commissions for themselves, compared with around $2,500 in February.

Most surprising, perhaps, is that buyers rate the sellers on the site as relatively trustworthy, despite the fact that no real identities are used. Close to 98% of ratings on the site are positive.

Graphics

Submission + - New OpenGL version released (khronos.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The specification for OpenGL 4.3 has been released by the Kronos Group at the SIGGRAPH 2012 conference in Los Angeles. New functionality includes compute shaders, shader storage buffers, improved debug message output, memory security improvements, robustness improvements, texture parameter queries, and more.

http://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-opengl-4.3-specification-with-major-enhancements

Apple

Submission + - How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to Mat Honan's Epic Hacking (wired.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: The story behind the hacking of Mat Honan's multiple accounts has been revealed and points to massive failures in how Amazon and Apple handle password recovery. Accounts for both sites can be easily accessed with simple to find publically available information. If you ask me, both companies should be liable for violating privacy laws.

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