hippoman

This is a somewhat uninspiring attitude. There was nothing wrong with the PS/2 mouse and keyboard plugs either, nor the 25-pin printer plugs, nor some barrel plug for charging phones. But the problem is there were so many different things that all needed their own plug. Now there's no mouse plug or phone plug or printer plug since they all use USB. Laptops with a standard non-USB plug will still add to the duplication and inconvenience just like those old keyboards did. You won't be able to charge your phone with your standard barrel plug laptop charger, so you'll still have to carry two adapters when you travel.

You seem to be saying stable prostitutes or brothels are OK even though they are also illegal in those buildings. I agree with the parent that a promiscuous person is effectively a prostitute with the distinction being only an arbitrary legal one. As you say though, the temporary nature of their stay is probably the real problem.

That kind of progression really happened. "Perhaps allowing interracial marriage today will lead to men marrying other men tomorrow". Gay marriage was unthinkable a hundred years ago. The ideas that are acceptable to society change over time and we can't be so arrogant as to assume our current set of values is correct while all the previous ones were wrong and no future ones will make ours look wrong. You can already see attitudes towards drug use changing to the point where Krueger's "drug operations" seem harmless to many people today.

Advertising standards in some countries forbid digitally modifying photos of the products. I'm not sure how they define the grey areas like adjusting constrast/etc. though.

Wikipedia says they were probably a fantasy and really just above-average skull size humans similar to what we find today. I wonder if they were found in groups which would suggest they were consistently different, or just randomly appearing among normal-skull people as the final paragraph seems to say (but tries not to).

Whenever people have strong views like this, I'm skeptical how hostile they'll be to innocent people who don't fit their sharply defined worldview. In the UK a 16 year old "adult" can marry a 40 year old. If you support that right are you are active in opposing the 18-years age of consent laws in some US states? If you don't support it, do you see the UK laws as enabling child abuse?

My point is that when you put arbitrary conditions on what you're going to accept, you can end up including and excluding some people unfairly. How about just "as long as nobody is harmed"?

There isn't a rational position on opposing marriage between siblings, yet it's still illegal in the US. Of course there are reasons about damage to children, bullying of children, etc but fundamentally people are just repulsed by the idea so they don't want anyone to do it and it's still illegal. Gay marriage is only one of various types of marriage that are unfairly discriminated against. Fortunately gay marriage might now allow a father and son to marry each other, which may help open the minds of the mob.

I doubt that's actually a reason many people hold. It's more of an excuse. The basic reason is probably common to most anti-gays - simply that gay sex is disgusting and weird and they can't bare to imagine it. If it wasn't that, they'd be supporting gay marriage but trying to restrict effeminate males, "butch" women and single parents from raising children. The "it's disgusting and weird" reason also explains the extreme prejudice against minority sexualities even from members of the pro-gay community.

Yes, "who is going to be harmed" should be the question, not anything about sexuality. Unfortunately most people, both pro-gay and anti-gay miss that point and continue to hold arbitrary prejudices against the sexualities and activities which don't fit what their peers tells them to believe. I can't enumerate them on HN without creating hostility but to get a feeling for the hypocrisy of strongly pro-gay advocates, see Paul Graham's "What You Can't Say" essay http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

Nader did well following Perot. Eventually one of these might make it and if they also act to weaken the two-party system, the floodgates could open like they have in other countries. But none of that can happen if people who don't like the two-party system keep voting for it anyway just because of petty bipartisan tribalism.

We can kill, enslave, and psychologically torture them as well as rape them to make them pregnant (farmers and breeders do this routinely) and most people are OK with that. The real reason people don't like the sex part is because it's seen as disgusting, perverted and weird, not because of consent. Very similar to the real reason people don't like gays, not because they aren't good at having babies.

I agree with you. I just think we shouldn't judge people for their sexual activities no matter how perverted they might seem to us. Instead we should consider if they're harmful to others. Insulting people for having sexual activity with animals is the exact same bigotry as insulting people for homosexual activity. By the way sex with close relatives is still illegal in most of the western world. I know it's a wrong law but almost everyone implicitly supports it.

Except if who they love is a child, or a relative, or an animal, or not their spouse, or a member of another race, or an abused wife, or ... I'm 90% agreeing with you, but most people who claim to agree with you are actually only including a very narrow set of people and still want to treat other groups worse just because of who they love. It should really be based on whether they do harm to others or not. Anything else is simply prejudice.

This is the fallacy that maintains the system you complain about. Voting for a 3rd party supports that party and gains them publicity. Just because they don't win (this time) doesn't mean it's wasted. By your reasoning, any vote for a losing party is wasted, so you should only vote according to the latest poll figures. However all options are guaranteed to produce many of the results you want. The greater of two evils still outlaws murder and theft and still enforces contracts, and all sorts of useful laws, just like the lesser of two evils does.

You should be more direct in your support for incestuous sex and bestiality. Those people are more seriously hurt by bigots since they have a much weaker voice. If you only support popularly-acceptable sexual activity, then you shouldn't misuse the emphasized "any".

The probability of one kid being killed or seriously injured in this one school in, say a year is nearly zero so it won't happen and everyone will think it's wonderful. But if all schools do it all the time, you'll start to see some fatalities and brain damages where rules would have prevented them and people will start saying "let's forbid high forts with concrete to fall on" etc.

Anecdotal story. As a kid playing in the street I ended up under a moving car. The only reason I'm alive is somebody alerted the driver in time. We don't notice rare accident deaths, but we do notice pervasive safety measures (don't play on the road even in a culdesac anyone?)

Agree. Simple tasks I use MS Paint for are more complicated in Paint dot net. Plus it has annoying floating windows that I'm forever dragging out of the way then trying to find again when they get lost. Why do so many paint programs have this inconvenience? Just dock them like Visual Studio.

Looks like readers misinterpreted the context which made his comment quite reasonable. This is why democracies elect incompetent politicians - people won't vote for effective people who say the wrong things. Although calling someone a necrophiliac reinforces people's prejudice against necrophiliacs which is probably worse than calling someone gay but I doubt the outraged group-thinkers are concerned with that.

I'm surprised peadophilia and bestiality haven't come up. These are often victimless but you can say "I want to have sex with children".

Wherever this is legal for private companies (seemingly in a state of flux now) it has to be legal for the government too.

Any private person can collect license plate data with a computer too. Surely that's not illegal? Imagine thousands of hobbyists doing this and building a database of when and where cars are moving around the city. If this data collection is only allowed on "small scales" but when people combine or publish their records it becomes illegal for the group (but not the individual members?), that would become a pretty hairy legal gray area.

Also cars are a massive cause of death and heavily used in violent crimes so it can actually be useful to track them, unlike trying to catch near-non-existant terrorists.

"None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that." ... but I'm not promising we won't!

It's a gossipy story involving sexual attraction. How isn't it relevant? If you feel it's none of your business, then the whole story is none of your business either.

If oxygen masks don't deploy when cabin pressure falls enough to make the passengers unconscious, then what is their purpose? It's hard to believe they could have such a massive design fault. Is there no sensor that could detect the depressurization?

Whenever there's a big disaster, people want to find technical solutions. But the real problem is not even plane crashes at all. It's car crashes, heart attacks, suicides, murders, and other preventable disasters that aren't so newsworthy but can still be helped. We all know air travel is much safer than walking or driving and also expensive, partly to pay for that extreme safety. Adding more expense to make such a safe thing even safer is wasting money.