My friend, you are sorely mistaken if you think that money is the only card on the table in the SOPA debate. If it was only about money, Google and Facebook would lobby the **AA's into oblivion, as their pockets are so much deeper that it wouldn't even be a contest. SOPA is not even about copyright; it's about control. By writing such an overly broad rule, the government assures that all sites on the web are in violation of the law at all times. While the vast majority of sites would be assumed to be acting in good faith to prevent infringement, anyone who steps out of line can immediately be wiped out with no due process. Wikileaks and the Occupy movement have showed the Congress critters that an unregulated Internet will eventually bring all of their greed and corruption into the light of day, and that people will only tolerate it for so long. They NEED something like SOPA to reign it back and, so that they can continue fucking the people without worry of being taken to task for it.

This doesn't seem to stop that; you can still exchange phone numbers and personal email addresses with co-workers if you would like to collaborate on projects outside of work hours. Shutting down the official company mail server sends a very clear, and very much needed message; you can leave work at work if you so choose. It isn't healthy to have your job chase you home; if you choose to do that I am not in the least upset, but there does need to be official motions put in place to stop the encroachment of work on personal life.

Yes, you are correct. Things are more secure when they are inaccessible. Also, cars are less likely to be stolen when they have no tires or engines.

That's why you need to be careful when overcocking...

This is such a common fallacy -- we would expect an AI driver to be fucking perfect before we would ever call it "safe". Sure, they will have bugs, and people will die. But they will have nowhere near as many bugs as the meat computer that we have in our heads. Amazing as it is, the human brain is simply not meant for the types of tasks that we often apply it to, and as such, tens of thousands of people die on the road each year. Even if the adoption of driverless cars cut that down to 1% of the current death rate, people would still be screaming about the cars killing us. George Carlin was right; some people are really fuckin' stupid.

...how do they... pose threats to children? I don't want to talk to a scientist, though... those motherfuckers are lying and getting me pissed...

No. You are misguided and wrong. There is nothing in the New Testament that absolves the follower from the rules of the Old Testament. Therefore, any Christian parent who does not stone their children to death for disobedience is not a TrueChristian(TM).

Thor, for sure. Valhalla > Heaven

What a smarmy, self-righteous, nasty thing to say. I know you may even think that you are being nice, but you are really only being astonishingly disrespectful.

My alleged "knowledge" of Christianity is growing up in a Christian household and calling myself a Christian for the first two decades of my life. I have read the Bible numerous times, and it is really an awful book. The Gospels are indeed a small part of the Bible, especially when you consider that most of the material is rehashed from one to the other. Your challenge for the day; read the part of the New Testament that absolves you from following the Old Testament. You can't find it, because it isn't in there. You are still told to hate gays, and treat women as property. Furthermore, the New Testament that you so adore explicitly condones the ownership of human beings. If God couldn't even get the answer to the slavery question right, how are we to trust his moral judgement on anything else?

So the only reason that you are good to other people is that you don't want to go to Hell? Do you really have such a low opinion of yourself? Do you really have that little self-respect?

And Hitler was a Catholic -- so what? Stalin and Mao are another thing entirely. While both were explicitly atheistic, they were both completely hostile to all notions of free-thought. While they both banned any other form of religion, it could be said that they in turn made themselves into gods. Free-thought is the key. While ridding ourselves of the shackles of religion is not sufficient to establishing a free thinking world, it is a necessary step.

Yes. This is human nature. This is why when religion can have its go we are all subject to the innate moral sense of the clerics. This is why in Afghanistan girls have acid thrown in their faces for trying to get an education, and why witches were burned in the Middle Ages. This is why we all need to try to work together and try to balance all of our moral senses against one another, and find the best possible middle ground. It adds nothing to the situation to make a man-made work of fiction the ultimate moral arbiter for all of these matters. Nothing will change the fact that we are primates; we are not capable of perfectly logical or rational thought. We can, however, move forward by recognizing this and moving forward, rather than imposing a silly, barbaric code of conduct that was written by bronze-age goatherders.

Are you fucking kidding me? You don't think that we have any innate sense of right and wrong? You don't think that we have any sense of solidarity with one another? Are you really willing to debase yourself that thoroughly? The fact that we don't have perfect, clean cut, black and white answers to every moral question is no proof against this; that is simply NOT how reality works! You have provided a perfect example of the destructive effect that religion has on our collective consciousness; this sort of binary, black and white, good and evil thinking is what causes the religious to make such bad decisions that are antithetical to reality. In real life, the vast majority of moral decisions are gray and murky, mired in context and implications. I think we can, however, all agree that when religion is given the only say, that the results are uniformly horrifying.

I know you are a troll, but I see this idiotic point made often enough, and I feel that there are enough non-trolls on /. who hold similar views that I would like to address it. While I am sure there exist atheists who want to attack religious freedom, 99.999% of what religious nut-jobs call attacks on religious freedoms are really just a defense of secularism, which is the source of ALL religious freedom.

It is NOT infringing on your religious freedom to abolish a National Day of Prayer, it is simply re-establishing a secular government, which is the only type of government that can truly defend religious freedom. The same goes for getting organized prayer out of school or trying to get "Under God" out of the pledge.

The point it, nobody has the "freedom" to subject others to their point of view. You would not like it if we did it to you, and thankfully, we are not. We are not trying to get the schools to teach that there is no God. We aren't trying to get "Under God" replaced with "Under No God". We simply want the establishment to stop infringing on OUR religious freedom, or more specifically, our freedom to choose not to have a religion.

Is that really so much to ask? I mean, sure, I know that there will be a whole lot more atheists if we take religion out of the public sphere a bit, but what does that say about your cause? People stop believing it if it's not shoved down their throats 24/7? This is a tired, destructive meme that needs to be taken out back, shot, burned, and turned into fertilizer.