It's for ideas like this that the saying "it's important to be open-minded, but not so much that your brains fall out" was coined. Tolerance and respect for the views of others are, on the whole, a good thing. But the views of people who believe that other people are in the wrong simply for living their lives as they see fit deserve not tolerance and respect, but scorn and condemnation. It's pretty much the verbal equivalent of another fine saying, "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

Life on your planet must be very pleasant.

The werewolves are going to rip that guy apart.

I remember people who cracked early DRM calling themselves "pirates" long before I heard politicians using the term. There was (at least) one fairly prolific cracking group back in the early 1980s that included amusing ASCII art of a pirate ship with every piece of software they distributed. So while I agree that the current legal use of the word is ridiculous, the fact is that we the geek-people kind of brought it on ourselves.

He says, in a post currently modded to +5.

On practically every issue, you'll see thoughtful, well-written posts expressing practically every possible opinion on that issue modded up, and trollish or semi-literate posts modded down. To be sure, there are certain opinions held by the majority of Slashdotters on a lot of these issues, and the ones you name are among them (with the exception of religion, where we're all over the map; believers who complain about anti-religious prejudice online are mostly just whining because their beliefs don't get the deference in forums like Slashdot that they usually do in our overwhelmingly religious society). But rarely if ever are these majorities overwhelming, and minority opinions very often receive upmods as long as they're expressed well.

AFAICT, the whole "hivemind" thing really only exists in the minds of a small group of people who've convinced themselves that it exists, and take pride in all thinking alike on the subject. ;)

Standards are wonderful, and everyone should have their very own!

Thank you for illustrating my point so neatly. Just as die-hard communists insist that real communism looks nothing like was practiced in the USSR, so do free-market fundamentalists insist that real capitalism looks nothing like what we have in the US ... both groups neatly ignoring the fact that in the real world, this is how their preferred system behaves. You can talk all you want about how it should work, or how you think it would work if certain conditions were met, but it doesn't make a damned bit of difference to how it actually works.

Yep. Anyone can describe a utopian economic system ("Under communism, everyone will work together for the common good!" "Under capitalism, competition and individual choice will lead to the greatest possible efficiency!") but in the real world, they all tend toward cronyism and corruption. Every single time.

I'd be willing to bet there are more deployments of MySQL than of all other standalone RDBMSs combined.

Does it cover both the aging of the body and the heart? Both the aging of the body and the liver? Both the aging of the body and the third toe on the left foot?

I know what you meant, but I get really tired of people acting like the brain and the body are something separate. The brain is part of the body; a complex and unique part, to be sure, but essentially it's just another organ. So if we can slow down aging generally, most likely our brains will benefit just as much as the rest of our bodies will.

Okay, you win. ;)

If I see "such-and-such biological structure is too complex to have arisen by chance," I don't need to see the word "create" to know the person making the post is a creationist. If I see "Barack Hussein Obama" and "Kenya,", I don't need to see the word "birth" to know the person making the post is a birther. If I see a rambling post about Israel, the melting temperature of steel, and the patterns of building collapse, I don't have to see the word "truth" to know the person making the post is a 9/11 truther. Etc.

Oh, please. This experiment is performed over and over again on Slashdot, on every story on the subject, and the results are plain to see. Most AC posts go unnoticed because they're AC, but for those that don't, there are plenty of responses giving links to easily accessible information on the actual science involved ... along with lots of upmods for the person making the original post, and responses talking about "warmism" and the huge piles of money allegedly being made by the AGW conspiracy and "hah hah, Al Gore is fat."

American ballots aren't as simple as you think they are. We have lots of candidates for each office (almost all the time, the Democrat and the Republican are the only ones most voters have ever heard of, but there's no shortage of others) and tons of ballot initiatives as well. Granted, we don't have the problem of major parties with confusingly similar names, but that's mainly because we're so boxed into the two-party system, without even a semi-major third party to act as a spoiler most of the time. On the rare occasions that candidates who aren't (D) or (R) get the top spot on the ballot, they do tend to get a lot more votes, probably for exactly the same reason as happened in this election.

Or it can get you lots of upmods from all the Bold Individualistic Un-PC Rebels Speaking Truth To Power just like you.

Like religious fundamentalists, denialists pretending they're a persecuted minority are simultaneously pathetic and hilarious.