First, I don't understand the religious aspect. Whose freedom of religion are they trying to protect, Islam? Because Christians are forbidden from judging others, and ordered to love everyone. Neither Jesus nor Bhudda would agree with this law.

Second, why are you bashing the US rather than Russia or Uganda, where you can go to prison for life for being gay?

Third, WTF is this doing on "news for nerds?" The fact that a tech company, Apple, joined the NFL and a lot of other anti-nerd groups in opposing this does not make it "news for nerds". News for gays, news for bigots, news for Arizonans, yeah, but not "news for nerds".

Having stories like this on slashdot is worse than Beta, they're trying to attract a "wider audience" which means bringing in even more greengrocers and other aliterates (if you think that is a misspelling, you may be an aliterate!). This attracts all those n00bs who say "Nasa is a waste of taxpayer dollars" and "global warming is a hoax" and "they spent my tax money studying THAT??"

In short, they're attracting the folks I come here to escape from. I get enough non-nerd ignorance IRL.

Well, that's the thing. They're honestly going to have a college class about fortune telling? What's next, tarot and tea leaves? Futurism is bunk! Nobody seriously envisioned the internet, althogh Asimov had written about "mltivac" and Murray Leinster came damned close to predicting it in 1946, although his PCs were "logics", servers were "tanks", and his internet was heavily censored (in fact, the story revolved around how horrible it would be if a bug in a program overcame the censorship).

Nobody but Roddenberry foresaw cell phones. Nobody I heard of foresaw the end of the analog era. And more telling, the only ones who even came close weren't futurists, but fiction writers. The "futurists" have been wrong every single time. Flying cars? Disney's "home of tomorrow"? The "singularity"? Fusion power? Wrong every single time.

Yet you want to teach a class on it? Amazing.

I'm not using gmail, I use Thunderbird. But folks who were using a web interface to read their email had a reason to switch. I tried Gmail and it was indeed better than the web interface for my mail host, but I don't use their interface.

Gmail took off because its interface was so much better than anyone else's webmail. I got my present webmail address when I kept losing my address when changing ISPs. Since I can use Thunderbird for a client for it, why in thw world would I want to change it? Especially since there's not only no compelling reason to, there's no reason to at all.

Oh, how the mighty slashdot has fallen, when a logged in slashdotter makes the insightful comment that Windows was never designed with security in mind. Although they did better with Vista and 7 than previous OSes it's still the most insecure OS I know of.

Yet he gets modded -1 troll for a factual comment. Do we have more shills than real users? Or are anti-MS comments being modded down by editors on orders of Dice because Microsoft is advertising here?

Either way, it saddens me.

How about teaching people to read?

Why bother? Even when they know how to read, they don't. Something like 97% of Americans are aliterate, and as Twain said, an aliterate has no advantage over an illiterate.

We can't even feed ourselves reliably yet.

We can, there's no shortage of food. The trouble is, we don't.

I don't get it. Why should robots have any more theological ramifications than any other tool? And if you are created in God's image, wouldn't you also want to create beings in your own image? I mean, if he's any kind of artist at all...

Ghostbusters? Pshaw! How about the National Lampoon radio Hour, which was SNL without pictures? Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Ankroyd, John Belushi, Gilda Radner... and, er, wasn't Ramis with them on SNL, too? I taped a couple of thise NLRO shows, have them digitized now. Some hilarious stuff!

Of course, most of you folks weren't even born then. Hey, would one of you kids mow my lawn?

Falwell is a terrible example. Preachers are supposed to lead by example, they're supposed to be above worldly things (and believe it or not, many people both clergy and non-clergy are).

A better example would be Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich. With Clinton, he was a lousy husband but the best President I've seen since I started voting in 1972 (voting age was 21 in 1968). Those who hated him still hated him, everybody else complained about the government paying forty million bucks to prosecute a blow job.

Gingrich was pretty much the epitome of evil while pretending to be a Christian (he actually worships money, like most Americans). Christians do NOT divorce their wives who are dying of cancer so they can legally bang some other chick. Yet he's still got a lot of clout (ran for Pres in 1012).

Clergy are held to a higher standard than their congregations are. What's worse, Falwell practiced what he so vehemently preached against.

One of the few places in the world where murder is legal.

Route 66 and other roads did cross state lines, but until Eisenhower the feds weren't in the highway business, the states took care of their own roads. Eisenhower saw the Autobahn and saw what a military use it would be and when elected President, pushed the Interstate Highway System through (It took two hours to get to my grandparents', about 45 minutes these days).

Do you really want government "competing", keeping ie Google fiber out while they offer up government service that works as well as Congress does, with DMV style customer service, and healthcare.gov quality?

Local government does a damned good job of running the city-owned electrical infrastructure and generation here. Lowest rates in the state, best uptime, best customer service. And it damned well better stay that way or the Mayor and city council get voted out of office.

So tell me, how can you alone possibly affect Comcast or Google? YOU CAN'T. OTOH, if your local government is running it, YOU HAVE A SAY.

Oh, as to the DMV, that's what you get when you vote people into office who think government is always the problem and never the solution. The DMV here in Illinois has been fast and courteous, although I can see where you might have shitty service somewhere like Texas, Florida, or Indiana since they're run by right-wing nuts who WANT government to fail and want people to hate their government (I used to live in Florida, their DMV is horrendous, like one would expect from a red state).

You're a fool. Your politicians have pulled the wool over your eyes.

And don't think for a second that the people involved in local government aren't interested in making decisions that personally profit themselves and their friends.

The graft isn't the problem, the lack of accountability is the problem. Take electricity -- the city owns and runs our power company. We have the lowest rates in the state, the lowest downtime, and the best customer service. Oh, and it profits from power sold to other power companies, keeping our taxes and rates down. So why is it so much better than the next town over?

Because the next town over is Amerin, a corporation. Its CEO is beholden to the stockholders, and no one else. It isn't like you can buy your electricity from a competitor. So the rates are as high as state government will allow, customer service is pretty much nonexistent, and downtimes are high and there's nothing the customer can do about it.

Here, more than one Mayor has been voted out of office because folks were pissed about electrical service. CWLP customers can fire their "CEO".

I'd rather type on my old ZX81 than on my Android. Typing on glass sucks.