Denial seems a bit silly.
Now, whether trying to stop climate change is a lost cause or not (i.e, put money into adaptation rather than prevention) is a more valid argument.

Fixing the problem for everyone sounds noble, but saving your own hide might be more practical for those in industrial countries.

Look at the flipside, people-- imagine what happens if someone hijacks a subway train and drives it off course into the side of a major office building.

This is basically a good example of the complete toothlessness of law. If you can't apply sufficient force to make a lawbreaker stop, there is no point in having a law at all.

I'm all for it, particularly the part about customizing the video in the display.
Advertising is irritating when it's for products you don't like, presented in ways you don't care for, at times you don't want to put up with it. If you can see just what you like in a store window, that's not horrifying, it's relaxing-- the useless and annoying crap is removed.

@26 The basic problem with turning the other cheek is that it gives the aggressor very little reason to not just hit you again for whatever reason he hit you the first time.
Ghandi's plans only worked because the British were unwilling to slaughter peaceful unarmed civilians. Against an opponent who has no problem with this, nonviolence is profoundly unwise.

What always confuses me about these types of feuds is why they don't immediately turn into attempted genocide-- if you know that any survivors you leave will seek vengeance, why not go ahead and try and get them too rather than keep playing tit for tat?

@27- That'd be a fun trial.
"My client can no longer hear this high-pitched tone, which I will now play for the jury...none of whom are likely to be able to hear it either. And my client would have naturally lost the ability to hear it in a few years, too. Umm...but it's traumatic and stuff."

@24- There most certainly are. After all, of all the people you'll meet in your life, at most one will kill you. Likely only a handful at the most will try.

The trick is that it's not useful to count all the good people. If only one person in a hundred was a murderer think how many you'd pass on the street in a given day.

This presumes that a degree of physical separation from your neighbors isn't also something of value.
If you like being around crowds, cities are a clear win. If you don't, then you have to balance the economic value of a city with the quiet of more remote areas.

"If you're researching deadly contagious human diseases, you don't put your lab in downtown 'Metropolis'."

This point's been brought up before, but have you noticed where the CDC is located?

No speculation involved-- whether you are your neighbor's keeper or not is an old question. I take it they side with "not".

@#5- Whether the doc ought to have more control or not, they certainly _do_. If the factoid they give you is "You have cancer", you aren't legally allowed to prescribe and administer your own chemotherapy, for example. Nor would any hospital allow you to try and carve out the tumor.
For that matter, the doc is the only one who can actually, legally, say "That thing's cancer, alright".

If I had to guess, I'd say adopting this proposal wouldn't discourage data collection, just pass on another cost. Or, worse, provide a rationale for your government to make sure you don't have any "plutonium-grade data" on your computer.

@#26 Might be so on a case-by-case basis for a while but give it a few centuries of weeding and assortment, and you ought to be able to breed your eventual descendents for whatever you like.

Travel surely helps this-- you're not limited to just picking spouses within walking distance. I imagine a study of (rich enough to fetch spouses and selective enough to choose carefully) European nobility would be illuminating. Even if the Habsburg jaw shows they didn't select for pretty.

@#20- Does this significantly differ from selecting traits for your offspring by selecting a breeding partner with those desired traits? Pretty people picking pretty people, smart ones smart, rich ones rich, etc.

@#4- What makes you think humans aren't basically considered commodities now?

This may sound like playing devil's advocate, but I've got to have some sympathy for the telecoms' view-- through the FCC and such the government could end any telecommunications company with a few strokes of a regulatory pen, and at the very least turn their business into a nightmare of red tape.
So when an arm of that government comes knocking and says "Show us what you've got", it's very much like a person reacting to the local mafia don wandering in and requesting a favor.

@36: There's your big gamble-- you assume that most people agree with you, more or less, on enough issues important to you that you can stand the result.
Imagine that crowd of folks who are willing to passively go along with whoever's in authority. I'd wager that if you made them politically active, all you'd do is create people who actively go along with whoever's in authority-- basic dynamics of a primate tribe. That worries me far more than apathetic support with no real political drive behind it. An enthusiastic, engaged crowd just as easily describes a lynch mob as it does a grassroots political effort.

@21: Okay...but bear in mind that for every politically-engaged Cesar Chavez or the like, you may well wind up a new Karl Rove or two.
The current system of apathy in the US ensures that people who are big believers in the democratic process can get involved in politics. If you start getting other people in politics, you run the risk of engaging people who have no interest in democracy in the political process.

@22: The last time that happened, we wound up killing about two percent of the US population. (US population in 1860 being about 30 million, and 600,000 deaths during the Civil War.) Assuming we're no better at killing each other now than then, ask yourself if what you want is worth perhaps six million people dying over it.

@17: No problem, but which laws do you plan on not complying with, and how, and how much would it cost you personally?

@11: I deeply hope I never live to see the day that everyone actually does become mobilized to change policy. Otherwise I suspect that society and government would become exactly as civil as the internet can be.
We avoid civil unrest and its extreme variety, civil war, only because large portions of the population are willing to just put up with situations they don't like. You personally might be too nice a guy to shoot someone over politics, but there are plenty of people who will if they're sufficiently politicized. Best they just stay on the sofa and let the tides of politics move slowly and gently around them.

@10: That style of work stoppage tends to be polarizing-- you're protesting the government, but wind up targetting those people who are just trying to go to work, etc. Their anger is, I think, more likely to be turned against the protestors than it is to be turned on the government.

Also, it takes just one guy on a blocked road to think "I'll just tap the bastard and see if he moves" to start things getting ugly.

@2: The blunt answer is, because the average citizen will reduce his quality of life more by starting a revolt or work stoppage than he will by ignoring the thing and continuing to do as he normally does.

There's one missing (if bizarre) option here-- you could create software where the sensation of pain didn't match up with the output of suffering signals-- a Pleo that cooed with delight if you whacked it with a hammer or recoiled and whimpered if you fed it. What do you compassionately do to a thing that is only happy when being harmed? Evolution weeds that out for natural life forms (at least for short-term harm), but that doesn't apply as well for artificial ones.