It's stupid for Explorer not be handling this instead of the browser (or at least not in addition to the browser). What if files get on by some other means, like a backdoor in a service (and it's not like that has not been seen before!!).
How the heck is Explorer supposed to know the origin of the data in a file some other program wrote ?
Repercussions, on the other hand, are very heavy handed. The Chinese executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog for accepting bribes to allow untested medicine to be sold.
Executing someone who endangered other people's health and lives for personal monetary gain is not heavy handed. While I oppose death penalty, because I think we should be better than the people we punish, the bastard had earned it.
Tell them that your religion forbids you from being photographed in any way as you believe every time a picture of you is taken, you lose a piece of your soul.
"That's fine, sir; as soon as it has all gone, you're eligible for a lucrative career in law, business or politics."
Silly nervous kids! If they blew themselves up for the glory of Allah, he would guarantee them 72 cute virgin girls all to themselves for eternity in paradise.
And they'll stay virgins for all eternity too. The more cynical amongst us might draw some rather unflattering conclusions about the people who are willing to kill themselves just to take a bunch of innocent bystanders with them from that.
Religions only become mythology when their number of adherents drop to 0 and that is not the case with Zoroastrianism in Iran or Parsis (the ones that migrated to India (and again to America; I had a Parsi friend in Miami)), despite its ancient origins surprisingly.
Religions never become mythology, because religion is a belief system while mythology is a set of associated myths - stories of past events which may or may not be true partially or completely. Religions typically have associated mythologies but they are not mythologies themselves.
It doesn't seem like a very bright idea to use an existing religion - in the middle east no less - and fantasize a conflict with it and another religion.
Then again, we aren't talking about Islam here, so there are unlikely to be large-scale riots and death threats. Besides, finding a religion with not a single follower left might be quite difficult; if the religion is common knowledge - which it would have to be for the game makers to have heard of it; they aren't archeologists - it will likely attract a few oddballs to it.
"Arbitrary" code will see lots of 'permission denied' errors as it tries to do evil.
Unless, of course, someone was so careless as to let a server who's purpose is to grant remote access to the filesystem actually access the filesystem it is supposed to grant access to:).
There is no way to detect the difference between an evil program overwriting an important file with random garbage and a saintly user editing that same file to contain extremely relevant data. Consequently, SELinux doesn't help at all here. Samba simply has too wide a function to effectively restrict it and still let it do its work.
Unless, of course, you have a policy to deny all actions for programs with the evil bit set;).
Is it technically possible to design a system that is immune to buffer overruns or, by default, fails safe, as in not allowing any old code to walk all over the address space.
Yes: Java, for example, assuming that the JVM itself doesn't have any bugs. Let the flamefest begin.
Please note, however, that any sufficiently complex protocol can be considered a programming language in itself, and the program using it a virtual machine; and it is impossible to guarantee that the interpreter can't be put into an incorrect state with sufficiently corrupt inputs.
I'm sure it's horribly flawed in some way. But it's also beautifully poetic.
Any system where you have to have money in order to sue or defend yourself in court is horribly flawed, because it exchanges the rule of law for plutocracy. I'm not sure how to fix it, thought; if you simply have the state pay all legal fees, it makes rising nuisance suits even easier than they are now, and might even make making them for hire a new profession.
Otherwise it'd be a madhouse in which I could sue people and automatically win most of the time (without even making any arguments), just because they didn't have the wherewithal to defend themselves properly.
Well, isn't that exactly what the RIAA has been doing ?
On the other hand, the two exceptions listed in the summary make it pretty clear that straight up net neutrality isn't the best idea. Different services have different QoS requirements, and defining which ones are ok to support by law hinders future innovation.
Wrong. It simply makes it neccessary to tailor these future innovations to fit the Internet - that is, to the already-used programs - rather than require that the Internet conforms to them. Furthermore, if you Irene ISP leases a 10 megabit/second connection to Pete P2P and also leases a 10 megabit/second connection to Ted Teleconference, and is unable to deliver the latter when Pete actually uses his connection... well, I guess Irene is a shameless fraudster and should go to jail, or at the very least be forced to return Pete's and Ted's money.
Opposing strict Net Neutrality because it disallows QoS is simply another way of saying that it's okay for Irene to sell nonexistent bandwidth and accuse her customers of being "unreasonable" or "abusive" when they actually try to collect what they bought. Supporting Net Neutrality is demanding that ISPs actually deliver what they promise.
And "innovation", as used by you, is nothing but a weasel word: some unspecified future application might require lots of bandwidth and low latency, so laws must be built to support that particular application at the expense of current customers.
I'm mainly a C hacker, but I don't get why people would prefer Python over Java. Dynamic typing where you can create new identifiers implicitly is pretty scary to me. I'm not even sure what Python offers over the dozens of other languages that preceded it.
Python is an excellent scripting language. It can be used to make quick and dirty programs with the minimum of hassle. The problem is that some people insist on making actual applications with it; dynamic typing and lack of data hiding make it unsuitable for that, and the resulting programs tend to be very fragile.
I want to be able to listen to a song on the radio or in a club, go out and buy that song. Which is what I have now.
And I want to be able to use and recombine cultural material without worrying about someone suing me because I'm doing the same as human beings always have: building on top of what those who came before built. Which I don't have now.
It was (and probably still is) costing more to maintain the damned ticketing system than the ticketing revenue. It would have been cheaper to make public transport free of cost. What a change that would have to Melbourne's smog cloud!
But making it free would make libertarians and wannabe economists cry out: "Socialism ! Bad ! Why should my tax money support anything, you communist swine ? Free market ! Free market ! Free market !"
It's politically better to have a wasteful payment system than to give the appearance of being anything but ultra-rightwing free market fundamentalist.
No, I'm saying (quite clearly, I thought), that there is no longer a motivation for someone to invest a lot of time and money into making a car in the first place.
I presume you meant "making new car models", since the original assumption was that making a single physical car is essentially free.
Either there is a demand for continued development for cars, in which case it's simply a matter of making a payment system which can pool payments from multiple persons, hold them in escrow, and return them if the pool doesn't reach high enough amount, and if it does reach that amount keep them safe until the new design has been completed and delivered to the payees, after which it can be paid to the designer; or there isn't, in which case no one making new car models isn't a problem since no one wants them, that being the definition of "no demand".
I think banks should look into developing the afromentioned escrow system. It would fit naturally into their business model, and faciliate business in the post-copyright era. Naturally a critical component is that they only take a payment if the pool does reach the "full enough" state; otherwise, there's risk in investing in it, discouraging less certain projects. For the same reason it should be impossible for the payees to check the current state of the pool, both the total money required and current balance.
Blueprints in exchange for money ? Heyhey now, they can be duplicated FOR FREE. I thought you were PRO-piracy, not against it...
Sure they can. Go right ahead. I can't stop you, once you have them in your possession. Which is why I want money before revealing them:).
And I'm against copyrights, yes.
Information wants to be free, man ! So just give me those blueprints for free (and obviously you will provide the necessary support for free as well, since it's *YOUR* fault that I don't know what half the lines on your blueprint mean, and it's *YOUR* fault that if I make the drivetrain out of gingerbread that it doesn't work. Gingerbread was my genius stroke man ! Make it work)
I'm not stopping you from giving copies of the blueprints to whoever wants them. However, I'm not under any obligation to give a copy to you. Why on Earth would I be ? Nor am I responsible for your incompetent modifications; why on Earth would I be ?
However, I suppose I could provide support for an additional price.
(the point I'm trying to make is that customers are like managers : I've swatted flies that were smarter than they are.
You are failing to make any points against any of my arguments. You are, however, making good points against other arguments which I've never stated. Perhaps you suffer from delusions, or answered to a wrong post ?
Oh and people who pirate stuff do so out of an entitlement mentality (they "have a right to your stuff, your time,... etc")
People who support copyrights do so out of an entitlement mentality (they "have a right to get paid by selling the same content over and over again, and control what anyone who's purchased a copy does with it afterwards").
Information wants to be free, man ! Don't hoard it all for yourself !
You do realize that the arguments "you cannot control what other people do with information you have given them" - which is what I'm saying - and "you have an obligation to reveal all your secrets to anyone who asks for them" - the strawman you seem to be beating - are entirely different, right ? I want to remove the control creators have over others in the form of copyright law, while you are twisting that to mean that others should have control over creators, which has nothing to do with my argument.
The shit is pumped into the bottom with a supply of water, and bacteria process it and heavy metals settle out and are fixed by other bacteria.
If your shit contains enough heavy metals to make them an issue needing consideration in waste treatment, I'd say that you have bigger and more immediate problems than processing said shit. Of course I suppose that you could have depleted uranium guts, literally...
If you have a neighbor, that means you're still living indoors.
Or it's getting crowded under the bridge. Which will propably collapse and fall on your head from lack of maintenance any minute now. Not that that'll kill you, of course, merely give you horrible migrenes for the rest of your life, which make you unable to concentrate and thus unable to hold any good job once the economy pics up again.
Unless, of course, one of the other bridge-beneathers decide to accuse you of pedophilia first, to get you hauled to prison and thus claim your portion of the space for themselves, starting a brawl which escalates into a bloody civil war leading to a nuclear exchange and extermination of humanity while you get hauled into the federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for the rest of your miserable life; not that that's long, since the imminent collapse of US economy makes them unable to feed the prisoners, leading to widespread cannibalism amongst the inmates.
You might, if you're lucky, escape this grizly fate if the afromentioned nuclear exchange blows open the prison wall before you are made into rations. Then, after making your daring escape, you get the joy of making a shelter from frozen human bones and remains of cars, and spend the rest of your life walking through the radiactive snowstorm, uphill both ways, to the only source of food - a former supermarket - ten kilometers away, and making bets with the side personas you will undoubtedly develop from the maddening loneliness about how long it takes before the skin cancer kills you, and whether the giant mutant cochroaches will get you first, or perhaps the saber-toothed wolves.
Things can get worse.
Things can always get worse. If you're alive, you could be dead. If you're dead, you could be in Hell. If you're in Hell, you could be a snowball. If you're a snowball, you could be a living thing and thus actually capable of suffering. And if you're a living thing, you could be dead.
"Worse" is an endless vicious circle, where the guy at each place could be made worse off by moving him one step clockwise, and again, and again, until he finally returns right where he left, no different than it used to be but still far worse. And so the cycle continues, pushing you down in an endless cycle.
Look, it's encoded in the very fundamental physics themselves: You can't win, you can't break even, you can't stop playing - also known as the three laws of thermodynamics.
Oh, but on the good side: you can print out this message and use the sheer Negative Energy in it to rebuke any undeads in case we get a zombie apocalypse instead (and they obey D&D rules). Or you could if I hadn't written this last paragraph. Maybe you could tear this off from the scroll ?
But they only have one toilet up there? I mean, sure it's not a "Criticality One" component, but you'd think that would be a good candidate for redundancy.
Actually, in a small airtight container where the air cannot be exchanged easily (if at all), waste management is Criticality One, especially since there's no gravity and the waste is gas forming and full of micro-organisms.
Regardless of what happens to a part of the human body that is exposed to a hard vaccum (explodes spectacularly as seen in Hollywood movies vs. just becoming freeze-dried really quickly), and attempts at this are a sure way to earn a Darwin award.
Piss on a sponge (or a towel or something similar), squeeze the sponge dry outside of the station, return it inside for reuse. You don't even get a cloud of ice crystals following the station, since Sun's radiation will vaporize water and then break apart water molecules.
And the purpose of government is to control people's rights, and all control of rights is wrong, right?
No, the primary purpose of government is to allow large groups of humans living in close proximity without killing each other. The secondary purpose is to encourage and coordinate cooperation between said humans, and the third most important to establish a safety net to allow people to survive even when they are ill, crippled or old.
And properly implemented, the Palladium tools could be used to provide robust authentication and access control for personal document transfers, contracts, email, VPN's, etc. Such authenticated connections or documents could be tied to particular users and particular computers with a wonderfully secure chain of trust, and put a big spike in such disparate problems as authenticating money transfers, reducing identity fraud, even protecting access to your medical records.
Palladium is not robust by any strech of imagination. It depends on the machine handling the documents to conform to the spec. As such, it works fine when used against an individual, but is worthless for money transfers, contracts and such, since organized crime would easily have the methods of breaking it - specifically, access to an encryption chip emulator.
I agree that it is massively and ocmmonly misused. But the demaind is large enough that we must accept _some_ form of integrated document authentication and encryption, or we're going to remain extremely vulnerable to document snooping and identity theft in this electronic world.
Palladium does not stop identity theft. How could it; the computer doesn't know who sits in front of it. Nor can it stop anyone from taking photo's of documents displayed on-screen and distributing those, or simply memorizing and retyping them word for word. You can't stop the receiver of the document from leaking it, and Palladium isn't needed for an encrypted transfer channel.
So it doesn't seem that Palladium gives anything to me, Joe User. In fact it doesn't seem to give anything to anyone except Hollywood.
It might be an idea to go through the EULAs for the main packages you use and show your boss the sections where they disclaim any liability. Many of them specifically forbid you from suing them for defects, too.
It might not be such a good idea to show your boss that he's wrong. While some are professional enough to take the valuable advice and be thankful for it, the chances are that any given one isn't, and will consider it a personal insult and take vengeance instead.
So AIDS, Syphilis, and other VD isn't a disease? You volunteer for them.
No you don't, any more than you "volunteer" for getting a flu by going out amongst people. Having sex is a normal part of human lifecycle and most likely won't result in getting a veneral disease. Smoking is not a normal part of human lifecycle, but a disgusting habit you pick up yourself, and almost certainly leads to an addiction.
Lets see, certain forms of lung cancers caused by radon gas because you volunteer to live in the basement apartment, that's not a disease?
Again, even if you live in a basement apartment, it very likely won't have any adverse effects, at least not due to radon. And if the apartment is done right - that is, it has sufficient venting underneath it - there isn't significant amounts of radon in the air even in the basement.
What else can we list that people volunteer for, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's(heavy metal induced).
No one choses to get any of those. They may or may not indulge in activities which may or may not increase the likelihood of them; but that is hardly comparable to getting addiction because you purposefully and repeatedly inhaled an addictive substance.
There are lots more diseases that are thought to be caused by legal choices someone has made over their life time. They aren't diseases now?
"Contributing factor" is not the same as "cause"; the latter implies that it was the sole or at least the most important factor by a large margin. And none of the things you listed are addictions, while tobacco addiction - as the name indicates - is an addiction.
No, it isn't. Tobacco addiction is an addiction. An addiction is not a disease.
Its also a bad precedent for employment discrimination based on what one does on his off time. You want to drink like a fish or smoke a doobie on your off time? As long as you always show up for work sober, that's your business
This I agree with.
You can't compare this to genetic discrimination.
Yes you can, since we know there are genes that predispose to tobacco addiction.
But unless you actually start smoking, those genes doesn't do anything. They simply make it harder to stop smoking once you've started.
Besides, everything you do or are capable of is influenced by your genetics, so every possible selection criterion could be considered genetic discrimination by that standard.
Well, DRM is just a policy. The way it is implemented can be good or bad, and it can be for good or bad purposes.
No it can't. The purpose of DRM is to take control of a machine away from the owner of said machine, and put it into the hands of media corporations and other 3rd parties. The intended purpose of DRM is bad. It has no uses beyond that.
"You can not access this website with adblock installed", "You must be using Internet Explorer 7 to access this banking website", "You must use Windows Vista and have our ad viewer running to to use our broadband" - those are the true face of DRM. It has no beneficial use whatsoever; that is, beneficial to the person who's computer has been infested with it.
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How the heck is Explorer supposed to know the origin of the data in a file some other program wrote ?
Executing someone who endangered other people's health and lives for personal monetary gain is not heavy handed. While I oppose death penalty, because I think we should be better than the people we punish, the bastard had earned it.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to just lock the cockpit door ?
"That's fine, sir; as soon as it has all gone, you're eligible for a lucrative career in law, business or politics."
And they'll stay virgins for all eternity too. The more cynical amongst us might draw some rather unflattering conclusions about the people who are willing to kill themselves just to take a bunch of innocent bystanders with them from that.
Religions never become mythology, because religion is a belief system while mythology is a set of associated myths - stories of past events which may or may not be true partially or completely. Religions typically have associated mythologies but they are not mythologies themselves.
Then again, we aren't talking about Islam here, so there are unlikely to be large-scale riots and death threats. Besides, finding a religion with not a single follower left might be quite difficult; if the religion is common knowledge - which it would have to be for the game makers to have heard of it; they aren't archeologists - it will likely attract a few oddballs to it.
Unless, of course, someone was so careless as to let a server who's purpose is to grant remote access to the filesystem actually access the filesystem it is supposed to grant access to :).
There is no way to detect the difference between an evil program overwriting an important file with random garbage and a saintly user editing that same file to contain extremely relevant data. Consequently, SELinux doesn't help at all here. Samba simply has too wide a function to effectively restrict it and still let it do its work.
Unless, of course, you have a policy to deny all actions for programs with the evil bit set ;).
Yes: Java, for example, assuming that the JVM itself doesn't have any bugs. Let the flamefest begin.
Please note, however, that any sufficiently complex protocol can be considered a programming language in itself, and the program using it a virtual machine; and it is impossible to guarantee that the interpreter can't be put into an incorrect state with sufficiently corrupt inputs.
Any system where you have to have money in order to sue or defend yourself in court is horribly flawed, because it exchanges the rule of law for plutocracy. I'm not sure how to fix it, thought; if you simply have the state pay all legal fees, it makes rising nuisance suits even easier than they are now, and might even make making them for hire a new profession.
Otherwise it'd be a madhouse in which I could sue people and automatically win most of the time (without even making any arguments), just because they didn't have the wherewithal to defend themselves properly.
Well, isn't that exactly what the RIAA has been doing ?
Wrong. It simply makes it neccessary to tailor these future innovations to fit the Internet - that is, to the already-used programs - rather than require that the Internet conforms to them. Furthermore, if you Irene ISP leases a 10 megabit/second connection to Pete P2P and also leases a 10 megabit/second connection to Ted Teleconference, and is unable to deliver the latter when Pete actually uses his connection... well, I guess Irene is a shameless fraudster and should go to jail, or at the very least be forced to return Pete's and Ted's money.
Opposing strict Net Neutrality because it disallows QoS is simply another way of saying that it's okay for Irene to sell nonexistent bandwidth and accuse her customers of being "unreasonable" or "abusive" when they actually try to collect what they bought. Supporting Net Neutrality is demanding that ISPs actually deliver what they promise.
And "innovation", as used by you, is nothing but a weasel word: some unspecified future application might require lots of bandwidth and low latency, so laws must be built to support that particular application at the expense of current customers.
Python is an excellent scripting language. It can be used to make quick and dirty programs with the minimum of hassle. The problem is that some people insist on making actual applications with it; dynamic typing and lack of data hiding make it unsuitable for that, and the resulting programs tend to be very fragile.
And I want to be able to use and recombine cultural material without worrying about someone suing me because I'm doing the same as human beings always have: building on top of what those who came before built. Which I don't have now.
Why should your desire trump over mine ?
But making it free would make libertarians and wannabe economists cry out: "Socialism ! Bad ! Why should my tax money support anything, you communist swine ? Free market ! Free market ! Free market !"
It's politically better to have a wasteful payment system than to give the appearance of being anything but ultra-rightwing free market fundamentalist.
I presume you meant "making new car models", since the original assumption was that making a single physical car is essentially free.
Either there is a demand for continued development for cars, in which case it's simply a matter of making a payment system which can pool payments from multiple persons, hold them in escrow, and return them if the pool doesn't reach high enough amount, and if it does reach that amount keep them safe until the new design has been completed and delivered to the payees, after which it can be paid to the designer; or there isn't, in which case no one making new car models isn't a problem since no one wants them, that being the definition of "no demand".
I think banks should look into developing the afromentioned escrow system. It would fit naturally into their business model, and faciliate business in the post-copyright era. Naturally a critical component is that they only take a payment if the pool does reach the "full enough" state; otherwise, there's risk in investing in it, discouraging less certain projects. For the same reason it should be impossible for the payees to check the current state of the pool, both the total money required and current balance.
Sure they can. Go right ahead. I can't stop you, once you have them in your possession. Which is why I want money before revealing them :).
And I'm against copyrights, yes.
I'm not stopping you from giving copies of the blueprints to whoever wants them. However, I'm not under any obligation to give a copy to you. Why on Earth would I be ? Nor am I responsible for your incompetent modifications; why on Earth would I be ?
However, I suppose I could provide support for an additional price.
You are failing to make any points against any of my arguments. You are, however, making good points against other arguments which I've never stated. Perhaps you suffer from delusions, or answered to a wrong post ?
People who support copyrights do so out of an entitlement mentality (they "have a right to get paid by selling the same content over and over again, and control what anyone who's purchased a copy does with it afterwards").
You do realize that the arguments "you cannot control what other people do with information you have given them" - which is what I'm saying - and "you have an obligation to reveal all your secrets to anyone who asks for them" - the strawman you seem to be beating - are entirely different, right ? I want to remove the control creators have over others in the form of copyright law, while you are twisting that to mean that others should have control over creators, which has nothing to do with my argument.
If your shit contains enough heavy metals to make them an issue needing consideration in waste treatment, I'd say that you have bigger and more immediate problems than processing said shit. Of course I suppose that you could have depleted uranium guts, literally...
Or it's getting crowded under the bridge. Which will propably collapse and fall on your head from lack of maintenance any minute now. Not that that'll kill you, of course, merely give you horrible migrenes for the rest of your life, which make you unable to concentrate and thus unable to hold any good job once the economy pics up again.
Unless, of course, one of the other bridge-beneathers decide to accuse you of pedophilia first, to get you hauled to prison and thus claim your portion of the space for themselves, starting a brawl which escalates into a bloody civil war leading to a nuclear exchange and extermination of humanity while you get hauled into the federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for the rest of your miserable life; not that that's long, since the imminent collapse of US economy makes them unable to feed the prisoners, leading to widespread cannibalism amongst the inmates.
You might, if you're lucky, escape this grizly fate if the afromentioned nuclear exchange blows open the prison wall before you are made into rations. Then, after making your daring escape, you get the joy of making a shelter from frozen human bones and remains of cars, and spend the rest of your life walking through the radiactive snowstorm, uphill both ways, to the only source of food - a former supermarket - ten kilometers away, and making bets with the side personas you will undoubtedly develop from the maddening loneliness about how long it takes before the skin cancer kills you, and whether the giant mutant cochroaches will get you first, or perhaps the saber-toothed wolves.
Things can always get worse. If you're alive, you could be dead. If you're dead, you could be in Hell. If you're in Hell, you could be a snowball. If you're a snowball, you could be a living thing and thus actually capable of suffering. And if you're a living thing, you could be dead.
"Worse" is an endless vicious circle, where the guy at each place could be made worse off by moving him one step clockwise, and again, and again, until he finally returns right where he left, no different than it used to be but still far worse. And so the cycle continues, pushing you down in an endless cycle.
Look, it's encoded in the very fundamental physics themselves: You can't win, you can't break even, you can't stop playing - also known as the three laws of thermodynamics.
Oh, but on the good side: you can print out this message and use the sheer Negative Energy in it to rebuke any undeads in case we get a zombie apocalypse instead (and they obey D&D rules). Or you could if I hadn't written this last paragraph. Maybe you could tear this off from the scroll ?
Actually, in a small airtight container where the air cannot be exchanged easily (if at all), waste management is Criticality One, especially since there's no gravity and the waste is gas forming and full of micro-organisms.
Breathing powdered shit is dangerous.
Piss on a sponge (or a towel or something similar), squeeze the sponge dry outside of the station, return it inside for reuse. You don't even get a cloud of ice crystals following the station, since Sun's radiation will vaporize water and then break apart water molecules.
No, the primary purpose of government is to allow large groups of humans living in close proximity without killing each other. The secondary purpose is to encourage and coordinate cooperation between said humans, and the third most important to establish a safety net to allow people to survive even when they are ill, crippled or old.
Palladium is not robust by any strech of imagination. It depends on the machine handling the documents to conform to the spec. As such, it works fine when used against an individual, but is worthless for money transfers, contracts and such, since organized crime would easily have the methods of breaking it - specifically, access to an encryption chip emulator.
Palladium does not stop identity theft. How could it; the computer doesn't know who sits in front of it. Nor can it stop anyone from taking photo's of documents displayed on-screen and distributing those, or simply memorizing and retyping them word for word. You can't stop the receiver of the document from leaking it, and Palladium isn't needed for an encrypted transfer channel.
So it doesn't seem that Palladium gives anything to me, Joe User. In fact it doesn't seem to give anything to anyone except Hollywood.
It might not be such a good idea to show your boss that he's wrong. While some are professional enough to take the valuable advice and be thankful for it, the chances are that any given one isn't, and will consider it a personal insult and take vengeance instead.
No you don't, any more than you "volunteer" for getting a flu by going out amongst people. Having sex is a normal part of human lifecycle and most likely won't result in getting a veneral disease. Smoking is not a normal part of human lifecycle, but a disgusting habit you pick up yourself, and almost certainly leads to an addiction.
Again, even if you live in a basement apartment, it very likely won't have any adverse effects, at least not due to radon. And if the apartment is done right - that is, it has sufficient venting underneath it - there isn't significant amounts of radon in the air even in the basement.
No one choses to get any of those. They may or may not indulge in activities which may or may not increase the likelihood of them; but that is hardly comparable to getting addiction because you purposefully and repeatedly inhaled an addictive substance.
"Contributing factor" is not the same as "cause"; the latter implies that it was the sole or at least the most important factor by a large margin. And none of the things you listed are addictions, while tobacco addiction - as the name indicates - is an addiction.
No, it isn't. Tobacco addiction is an addiction. An addiction is not a disease.
This I agree with.
But unless you actually start smoking, those genes doesn't do anything. They simply make it harder to stop smoking once you've started.
Besides, everything you do or are capable of is influenced by your genetics, so every possible selection criterion could be considered genetic discrimination by that standard.
No it can't. The purpose of DRM is to take control of a machine away from the owner of said machine, and put it into the hands of media corporations and other 3rd parties. The intended purpose of DRM is bad. It has no uses beyond that.
"You can not access this website with adblock installed", "You must be using Internet Explorer 7 to access this banking website", "You must use Windows Vista and have our ad viewer running to to use our broadband" - those are the true face of DRM. It has no beneficial use whatsoever; that is, beneficial to the person who's computer has been infested with it.