None of that is even remotely true.





They've been fighting on-and-off since at least February (Just one example of a source).

They have killed hundreds of each other's men (Source), including senior figures (Source, one of many). How else could you possibly define mortal enemies?



Both have been fighting each other (and other rebel groups) far more than Assad in recent months. This is sometimes credited as one of the main reasons for Assad's recent regained strength in many key areas. In fact, Jabhat al-Nusra (and other rebels) often accuse ISIS of tacitly collaborating with Assad by targeting mostly other rebels (Source, also see previous source).



These are silly rumors. The Saudis and Qataris (together with the US, Turkey and others) have been funding the moderate rebels who fight against both Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS. They have no interest in funding either one of these organizations. Show me one half-credible source for this claim.



Well, this is very famously false (Source, source and source).

First, what possible connection do you see between GMOs and stem cell research?
It's as if you asked for people's opinion on abortion & global warming (well, I guess they're both controversial and vaguely related to science  ).
The very fact you would bring up both these subjects together shows how shallow the public debate on scientific issues can get.

As to your format:

1. Obviously, both the unrelated subjects you mentioned are very much acceptable. In fact, I really don't see why a reason is needed to find them acceptable; why don't you come up with a reason why they aren't acceptable and we'll see what we can do.

2. Please explain what "treatments" you're referring to. I'm sorry but this looks to me like another testament to the level of the public debate.

3. People already do vote how public money is allocated to scientific research. Well, obviously not "the people" in the broad sense. "People" can't make informed decisions about subjects they know nothing about. But panels of experts who work for the government and serve the public interest do, in fact, judge each grant request and decide which line of research is worthy of public funding. There are also panels of bioethics experts who decide whether biological research is ethical.

Note that for the sake of the discussion, I am purposefully avoiding the question of whether public funding is a good thing. As an anarcho-capitalist I think taxes are theft and governments shouldn't even exist. But I agree that as long as publicly-funded research does exist, the public has a right to regulate the research. And just like in any field, this should be done by experts, not laymen. Just as you wouldn't have a public referendum about which military project DARPA should fund, you wouldn't have one about which scientific projects the NIH should fund. This is what panels of experts are for.

4. Depends what you mean by "normal civilian board". If you mean people who are not scientists and therefore have no idea what they're regulating, the answer is obviously no. See the previous section.

5. Privately-funded labs should be able to do whatever they want as long as they don't harm anyone. This, of course, opens up the extremely difficult question of what it means to harm someone. It's easy to say they shouldn't manufacture chemical and biological weapons. But what about human cloning for example? Does that harm someone? Maybe the clone itself? There are no easy answers here.

You geniuses do realize this has nothing to do with ISIS, right?
ISIS is hundreds of kilometers away. The rebels in question here are Jabhat al-Nusra. They also originally stemmed from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, but they are mortal enemies of ISIS.
Right now, ISIS is confined to the north-eastern corner of Syria while Jabhat al-Nusra works mostly in the south-west, so they pretty much steer clear of each other. But they have fought each other before and they may do so again. They are certainly no allies and they are not to be confused with each other.


As for the situation in question, it should be noted the UN commander did negotiate a deal which should have allowed the UN to free both the Fijian and the Filipino peacekeepers. Unfortunately, the deal fell through because the Filipinos defied orders. Now the Filipinos got away but the Fijians are still stuck.

I'm not necessarily saying that the UN commander made the right call. But I am saying that I don't know the full details of the situation and I do not understand the intricacies involved, and therefore I am not qualified to pass judgment. Since nobody in this thread seems to even know which rebels are involved, I'd guess none of you are qualified to pass judgment either.

It looks like some westerners are starting to panic, so here are some soothing words: if Ebola ever did reach a western country, it wouldn't actually be that hard to contain. Modern medical systems know how to handle Ebola pretty well, despite the fact that there is no proven cure or vaccine. Helping those who have contracted the disease is very difficult, but containing it before all hell breaks loose is entirely feasible.
The reason that containment is failing miserably in Africa is because the public health systems in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone are, well, miserable. If you're in Africa, you should be worried. Otherwise, please go back to your first world problems...

This is very very true, and it's a shame so few people understand it.
Not only was Hamas originally created by Israel, as the years go by Israel makes greater and greater efforts to strengthen Hamas and maintain its power in Gaza while weakening Fatah. This can be seen right now in Cairo: Israel is negotiating with Hamas and showing relatively great willingness to make concessions, far beyond anything given to Mahmoud Abbas during the never-ending "negotiations" with the Palestinian Authority. In fact, Israel is going out of its way to give Hamas a PR victory, at least in the eyes of Gazan Palestinians, so the populace would remain pro-Hamas even in the midst of the unimaginable devastation.
Hamas and Israel exist in unholy symbiosis, serving each others' belligerent interests perfectly.




Actually, Israel has stopped using white phosphorous during the latest offensive on Gaza. I suppose pictures from 2009 like this and this have proven too troublesome for Israel's propaganda machine.
They have, however, started using a new type of bomb called DIME. It's ostensibly meant to reduce collateral damage during bombing raids, but in fact it causes terrible wounds.

Anyway, such inhumane (and internationally illegal) weapons are not very important on the grand scale of things, and there's no point focusing on them. The vast majority of casualties in Gaza were caused by good old-fashioned (and totally conventional) American bombs. Three cheers for the American military-industrial complex, for providing Israel with over $3 billion of armaments each year.

A very similar account of this incident appeared in numerous sources, including Israeli ones. This just happened to be the first source I found. But as I said, the details of this particular incident are not relevant - I agreed to assume, for the sake of argument, that all those Palestinians died during demonstrations.




Heh, you strike me as one of those Israelis who lives 20 minutes away from the West Bank but has never stepped foot there. It takes a special type of cognitive dissonance to defend Israel's violent oppression of Palestinian protests, and at the same time staunchly refuse to accept the fact that Israel restricts the Palestinian right of protest 
And the funniest part is that your "evidence" is pictures of Palestinians protesting... I never said that they don't. In fact, I specifically said that they do... I also said that they are violently subdued by the Israeli army. Why don't you take another look at your own pictures, and tell me how many of them portray Israeli soldiers violently suppressing protesters. Your "simple google search" is evidence of my point much more than it is of yours.

As for the facts, I'd hate to burst your bubble but all Palestinian protest is indeed illegal by military decree (as I suspect you speak Hebrew, here's a couple of sources for you: Wikipedia, B'Tselem). This decree was given by the IDF immediately after the West Bank was occupied in 1967, and it strongly prohibits any kind of protest, including peaceful demonstration, under punishment of up to 10 years in prison. It is an illegal decree according to international law, which protects the right of protest in occupied territories, and it does not, of course, apply to Jews, even if they are protesting inside the West Bank.




Great, you win the 2014 Academy Award for cherry-picking pictures from Google Images. I'm so proud.

As someone who has actually been to quite a few demonstrations, including in Palestine, let me tell you this: I would love to see the faces of those students in Montreal when they encounter the Israeli border police.
The difference between your pictures is that in the first ones, no one is shooting at the protesters. One wonders why you think "replying" is necessary at all, much less justified.




Again with this strange logic of yours... So you agree they should have the right to protest, but you think they should "face the consequences" of the fact that Israel is much stronger?
Obviously, they do face the consequences. They get shot. If anything, that means you should respect their courage. But instead you use it as justification.
Please explain to me why the fact that Israel is stronger justifies the use of force against the occupied population. Are you advocating some kind of social Darwinism, where the weak get beaten by the strong and that's okay because it's the natural order of things?




Not only is none of that even remotely true, it's also entirely irrelevant to what I said.




I actually completely agree with you here, and I never said otherwise.

Your point does raise some interesting questions though. If we agree that people born in settlements are not guilty for the crimes of their parents, does that mean that any act of ethnic cleansing, no matter how horrific, can just be whitewashed by waiting a few decades? Certainly, the ethnic cleansing of 1948 was whitewashed to oblivion and made entirely irreversible by the passing of time. If this is the case, one can only conclude that the Palestinian struggle for liberation bears even greater urgency.

Your ability to parrot back the propaganda you heard from the MSM is truly adorable.

In fact, most of the Palestinians I mentioned were not killed during protests. A few died in their homes; the mentally-handicapped man I mentioned was literally walking down the street minding his own business, when soldiers who were raiding a nearby house yelled at him to stop. He did not immediately respond, so they shot him 4 times (link).

But the details don't really matter. I'm sure you didn't bother to examine any details about any of the deaths mentioned before you responded - you just assumed they must have been "rioting" if the IDF shot them. The real problem is not in the details, but in the substance of the propaganda you're repeating. The sad part is, you never bothered to take a minute and really think about the meaning of what you're parroting. So let's deconstruct it together.

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you're absolutely right and all those Palestinians were killed during protests. Surely, many have died this way in the past, so this would not be surprising.
You say that they are "NOT innocent", because they were "RIOTING". So let's examine what that means.
Palestinians living in the West Bank, who have been under military occupation for 47 years, have their village raided yet again, by hundreds of heavily armed soldiers appearing in the middle of the night. They protest this loudly; some of them even throw stones at the armoured bulletproof jeeps. The jeeps are not even scratched, and neither, of course, are the soldiers. Nevertheless, this protest is illegal and the soldiers respond with rubber-coated bullets as well as live ammunition (in case you didn't know, any protest by Palestinians anywhere in the West Bank is illegal by military decree. Jews can protest wherever they wish, of course, and military decrees don't apply to them anyway). Dozens of Palestinians are injured, maybe one or two die.
So what you're saying is this: Palestinians who apply the human right of protest against a heavily armed foreign occupier, in violation of that occupier's laws and decrees, are now considered "NOT innocent", and therefore it is perfectly justified to kill them. If they were "random kids playing ball" that would be wrong, but if they are protesting against the occupation that is making their lives miserable, murdering them is absolutely legitimate (as an aside, I could find maybe three dozen examples of Palestinian kids being killed by soldiers when they really were just "playing ball", but I doubt that would convince you of anything).
Think about that a bit.

You also say that "rioting" is "not the best idea ever,especially when you want to return home without harm".
You are absolutely right about that. Protesting is a very dangerous proposition for a Palestinian, often deadly. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. Quite the opposite. Protest and popular struggle are the only possible recourse of the oppressed. I have nothing but respect and admiration towards the bravery of those who dare to protest against such absurdly superior force.
But this, again, is besides the point. How do you relate the fact that protesting is dangerous, with the protesters being "not innocent"? Is the fact that they took a risk for their freedom also a justification of their murder? The Jews who rebelled in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 knew they would probably be wiped out within days; does that knowledge mean it was okay for the Nazis to kill them all? 

As for the 3 Israeli teenagers, they were not just "Jewish at the wrong place in the wrong time". They were settlers, forceful colonizers of Palestinian lands. They chose to be in a place that is, in an ethical as well as a practical sense, totally wrong. I'm not saying that fact justifies their murder, but you have to admit they also took a calculated risk. They knew the settlements are a dangerous place, and the probability of getting kidnapped while hitchhiking there is much higher than inside Israel, and yet they chose to be there.
Unlike the Palestinians though, they were not taking this risk for their freedom. They had many other options. They could live anywhere in Israel except the settlements. They wanted to steal Palestinian land, they wanted to take part in the oppression. It is them who truly were "not innocent" in all this.

And maybe that has something to do with the fact that Israel has one of the most powerful armies in the world, while Palestinians are helpless civilians living under occupation for three generations, and the only thing they can possibly do to lash back is get their hands on a gun and kill the first Israeli they see before the army gets them...



The very notion of "Terrorism" was invented by empires to justify their violence against occupied civilian populations.
As your comment demonstrates so nicely, empires try very hard to create a distinction between two types of violence - legitimate violence and non-legitimate violence. The organized, large-scale violence of the empire against the populace, which is always far more deadly, is deemed a legitimate, necessary attempt to maintain order and security. The small-scale, scattered, unorganized violence of the weak populace against the occupying empire is called "terrorism" and portrayed as barbaric and indiscriminate.

Such has been the nature of empires since the dawn of history. Even the Roman empire tried to paint provincial rebellions as barbaric (which is exactly where the word barbarian comes from).

The truth is that organized imperial violence is always more cruel, as well as much more lethal. But it has been my experience that citizens of empires are simply incapable of grasping this truth. To westerners, the illusion that their armies are involved in some kind of noble, almost benevolent pursuit of security, stability and order is too deeply entrenched. I assure you, if you spend some time living under Israeli or American occupation, you will also start thinking of "terrorist acts" as small examples of brave people who's spirit will not be crushed, making a futile but noble attempt to fight back against the horror of their everyday lives.

Is that... truth??? Careful now... There is no room for truth in a discussion about Israel...
Truth has the remarkable quality of always being antisemitic.





Nice job finding this article! Fortunately, all the mainstream media all over the world made it easier for you by plastering it all over the front pages.

Humans are beasts... Indeed.

Now please find the CNN article about the 9 Palestinians that Israel killed in the two weeks since those 3 Israeli teenagers were kidnapped.
You know, those 9 Palestinians, one of whom was 13 years old, one was 16 years old and a third was a mentally-challenged adult, all of whom were murdered in cold blood by Israeli soldiers in the last two weeks alone.

What??? There is no CNN article about the 9 Palestinians killed by Israel in the last two weeks? And there isn't one about the dozens of other Palestinians killed by Israelis since the beginning of this year alone? What a shock!!! One could almost imagine the western MSM is biased!

You might want to leave Popper back in the 50's, where he belongs 

Thanks for that! It actually helps.
You should write a dictionary for TA-challenged scientists like me 

The biggest advantage of a brain wallet is that all the information needed to redeem your money is in your brain (arguably, that is the only advantage of a brain wallet).

The biggest disadvantage of a brain wallet is that people tend to forget passphrases (if your passphrase has even slightly reasonable entropy, it is much more likely to be forgotten than brute-forced).

So your method does not enjoy the main advantage of brain wallets, but it does suffer from the main disadvantage. Clever.


You should pick one option: Either make a very strong brain wallet (using some clever key stretching, like warpwallet) and try really hard not to forget it, or make a split paper wallet and store the pieces in several places. That way you at least gain one of the advantages.


Oh and by the way - how is your method any different from storing a BIP38-encrypted private key?

Well, in the defense of yeast, one should mention that they only ferment sugar to ethanol in anaerobic conditions. However, they're evolutionarily accustomed to living mostly in aerobic conditions. So when you put them in a closed container, they sort of "assume" that the oxygen will come back soon and they can afford to perform fermentation.
In other words, they're used to conditions under which fermentation is not a big problem, so they just assume it will always stay that way.

Another perfect analogy to Ghash.io 



But this is only detection, not prevention. So a game of cat and mouse will ensue, in which they create new users and try to get away with it for as long as they can.

Indeed, there is no proof.
Except, whoever is doing it has a lot of hashrate, probably more than they want to admit. And it seems like the only major pool profiting from this is Ghash.io.
I've seen the pitchforks broken out for less...
Also, keep in mind it's a good idea to avoid Ghash.io regardless of the block withholding attacks, seeing as 51% and such.



EDIT: Actually, strike that. I was wrong on both counts: it probably wasn't Ghash.io, and they certainly didn't profit from it. But still, 51% and such.

This is the explanation:



Ghash.io have probably been pointing hashrate at other pools and performing block withholding attacks.
This allows them to collect rewards without submitting actual blocks, thus lowering the average payout per hash on other pools and increasing it on their own.
This is why they appear to have more luck.


Note that technically this isn't even stealing, it's just misrepresenting the total network hashrate.
If you think you have 0.5% of the total network hashrate, you expect to get 0.5% of all bitcoins mined. But as long as you're on BTCGuild, you actually have less than 0.5% of the total, because some of the total is hidden from sight. So you get less than 0.5% of all bitcoins mined and you attribute it to bad luck, although technically it's good luck with a smaller percentage of hashrate than expected.
If you're on Ghash.io, which apparently is the only major pool not subject to this attack, your hashrate actually does represent the percentage of the total that it seems to represent, because the hidden hashrate that doesn't produce blocks simply does not apply to you. So you get more per given hashrate.

The sad thing is, there's really nothing to be done about this short of hard forking. The only thing we can do at this point is boycott Ghash.io - and suffer the economic cost of doing so for the good of the network.

The US armed forces have killed far, far more innocent civilians than the Taliban. Orders of magnitude more. And not just in Afghanistan, but all over the world.

Now you can add me to your ignore list too. You're already ignoring reality; you might as well ignore those who allude to it.

Like many potential early adopters who never bothered to become actual early adopters, my story is filled with regret...

I heard about Bitcoin just after the 2011 bubble. At first I thought it was interesting, but I didn't really grasp the immense significance of it. I figured, hey, if I can print some money at home, why not? So I started GPU mining on-and-off on my PC, mostly when I wasn't using it. In a couple weeks of occasional mining, I made 0.5 BTC; this was August 2011 and the price was plummeting, so I quickly decided it wasn't worth the electricity and the trouble of turning it off when I wanted to watch a movie on my computer. So I stopped mining. Idiot.

Then I thought, never mind the chump change, this Bitcoin thing is kinda cool and there's a chance it will be worth a lot of money in the future. Why not buy a thousand dollars or so worth of BTC and keep it as a long-term speculative investment? I had a good feeling about Bitcoin and I wasn't turned off by the fact that it peaked at $30 and then crashed. I was this close to buying a couple hundred BTC at about $5. But then I discovered that the only real way of doing that is wiring money to Japan, and at the time that required that I physically go to the bank. I was waaaay too lazy for that. So I figured, meh, I'll do it some other time. And then I forgot about the whole thing until late 2012. Idiot.

Fast forward to December 2012. Price rising. I'm getting really excited. One cautious voice in my head says "$12 for a piece of virtual geek money is really expensive!". But it's drowned out by the other voice that says "This is going to be HUGE! Buy now!". But then that voice is drowned out by an even more powerful voice, that says "Still no good exchange in my area, have to wire money to Japan. Too lazy. Will definitely do it next week". And so I only really start buying on March 2013, at over $100. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that I finally did, but I could have done it so much earlier... Idiot.

Now, do you see the terrible, vicious irony of it all? All this time I was too lazy to go to the bank and wire money to Japan, it never really occurred to me that this is exactly the sort of banking difficulty Bitcoin could easily solve. If only I had realized that Bitcoin was the solution to the problem that was keeping me from buying Bitcoin, I would have DEFINITELY bought Bitcoin. Oh, cruel fate.

This is no accident - Israel, together with some right wing pro-Israeli Jews in the west, has been working very hard in recent years to perpetuate this notion that criticizing Israel is antisemitism. It's a beautifully planned and executed propaganda campaign, and it's working like a charm. This campaign is encouraging antisemitism around the world - which is exactly what Israel wants.

I totally agree. The Jewish religion is being used as an excuse, and certainly not all Jews are responsible for what Israel is doing.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government does not agree.
And that's why we see more and more people like this:


Israel is directly responsible for this, because it insists on defining itself as a Jewish state, using Jewish religion as an excuse for its atrocities, binding its fate with that of all Jews and insisting that any criticism of its actions is tantamount to antisemitism. Zionism is no longer just a continuous atrocity against Arabs, it is now also becoming the greatest enemy of Jews everywhere.

Well yes, except for a couple of tiny caveats:

1. The Israeli definition of "terrorist" is even broader than the American one. It basically means "anyone we don't like". Like most Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails, the vast majority of prisoners released in the Shalit deal were political prisoners, who were not directly involved with "terrorism" (in the narrow definition of the word). Also, most of them were not affiliated with Hamas (not that it actually matters).

2. That 569 number is entirely fabricated. It's more than half of all Israeli terror casualties since the first intifada...

3. And here's what most people don't know: quietly, gradually, without anyone noticing, Israel has been rounding these people up and throwing them back in prison. I don't have the exact updated numbers, but at least a third of those released to the West Bank are now back in prison (possibly much more by now). As for those released to Gaza and elsewhere, they are a minority and not much concern to Israel anyway. What's the point of a prisoner exchange if one side can start rounding people back up immediately after releasing them? Like the word "terrorist", the word "deal" also has a murky definition in Israel.