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Nobody gave a flying fuck when Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham openly admitted to being rapists and pedophiles.

Citation needed. Googling Schumer and pedophile didn't come up with anything.

Lena Dunham DID get a lot of heat for writing that she touched her one year old sister when she was seven years old. It was predictably all from the far-right smear machine, the same one that has convinced many Americans that Hillary Clinton murdered soldiers at Benghazi on her way to build atomic bombs for Russia.

it's a witch hunt where all it takes is a social media post to ruin people's entire lives and career without a shred of evidence

You're projecting here. That is literally what you're doing.

Don't forget that there are many young, underage kids that are now sex offenders in the glorious United States.

"Throughout the United States, children as young as nine years old who are adjudicated delinquent may be subject to sex offender registration laws"

http://bostonreview.net/blog/y...

http://www.sacurrent.com/sanan...

http://www.justicepolicy.org/n...

I can recall several years ago a story about two young girls, not even in middle school becoming registered sex offenders for sending pictures of themselves to each other. Under current laws, they were "producing child pornography".

Sure, there are a lot of sick fucks out there, but the current method is completely broken.

Exactly what this guy says, as well. From the article:

I don’t know if the editors of The Atlantic have found a goldmine of reader interest in the topic or if they are just irritated by their kids being online all the time, but once again we read in their pages that the Internet is destroying the good life. In 2008 Google was making us stupid; last year Facebook was making us lonely (it isn’t); and now online dating is “threatening monogamy.”

I have quite a few Israeli friends; most are concerned with civil and social issues, not with military issues, and I am told that is basically what politics in Israel are like. There were major protests in Israel last year; they were over the price of food, the rent, etc. Israel is not terribly different from other countries: the people are mostly concerned with things that immediately affect them like the cost of living.

Of course, most able-bodied Israelis serve in the army. Here, for example, is an Israeli soldier's view of what it was like in West Bank:

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defense_forces_palestinians_occupation.php

For what it's worth, I met many Israelis at an academic conference this past summer. I also met Egyptians, and my Iranian coworker was there with me. We all had dinner together, and there was no tension, no arguing about politics, none of that -- most of these people thought the situation was absurd and that the violence was unnecessary (the Iranian recently finished her immigration paperwork and will soon be a US citizen; the Egyptians were glad to have not been in Egypt during the revolution).

Maybe they should think about using the methods employed by countries like Israel which actually work.

I know you were referring to airports, but another Israeli approach comes to mind when I think of the TSA: the approach to West Bank checkpoints. Read this:

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/oded_naaman_israeli_defense_forces_palestinians_occupation.php

Arbitrary policies set by inept guards who know nothing about the high level reasons for what they do? Random harassment at will? Punishments for daring to say "no" or for standing up for your own dignity? Guards that have no idea whether or not they actually picked the terrorists out of a crowd of non-terrorists?

This is what the TSA checkpoints are about. They are not trying to keep us safe from terrorists by humiliating us, punishing us for exercising our rights, or wasting our time and making us miss our flights. The checkpoints probably make us less safe, since we are standing in a neatly organized and easy-to-attack crowd before passing through. The goal is to attack our psychology, to remind us that the government can do whatever it wants and that we need to just go along with it if we do not want to suffer.

After all, metal detectors and X-ray images of your luggage are more than sufficient to convince people that you are doing "something" to keep them safe (most people probably never noticed the available of glass at airport bars, or the fact that people who charter private jets go through no security at all). The purpose of the humiliating practices of the TSA is to make sure that people stay in line and do as their government demands. Eventually the TSA will spread these practices beyond airports, to trains, subways, and buses, until almost everyone deals with it on a daily basis. Then the TSA will have won: they will have conquered American psychology.

RMS has always been about being as free as possible.

Remember that he started out writing Free Software (we really should just call it Software Libre so the 'Free' isn't misunderstood) on non-Free Software computer systems.

I think that RMS would love to not have to interact with non-free Cisco routers, nor medical devices running non-free device drivers, but sometimes that's the only choice.

I DO admire much of what Mr. Stallman stands for, and I'm glad there is a champion for free software ... but I live in the real world, where to buy goods, you need some government's currency, and to do anything electronically, you have to use SOME commercial software somewhere.

Ten years ago it was 1999, and running a Free Software desktop like RedHat wasn't the easiest thing to do. Over the past decade Free Software has come a long way and is being used in all kinds of new applications. But that doesn't mean that it's going to stop here and not be used to a greater extent over the next decade.

I'm not sure if there's a fully Free-Software credit-card processing library you can use to take credit cards online right now, but I'm pretty sure that most of the pieces exist already. Can you think of some limitation on why one couldn't implement such an online interface using completely Free Software?

I wonder, too ... does Mr. Stallman's PC have a proprietary BIOS, or did he write that code, too?

The FSF runs coreboot on most or all of their servers now. Due to lack of documentation, coreboot is still unable to run on any laptop (AFAIK).

RMS started working with an XO laptop (as that had a Free BIOS), but then abandoned that hardware when he felt that the project betrayed its commitment to providing children in developing worlds with a Free and Open software/hardware stack, snuggling up with Microsoft instead.

Right now I believe that he's using a Lemote Yeelong, which has a Free BIOS.

I don't think that RMS had a hand in writing any of the Free BIOS code that runs his laptop -- I think that he's benefiting from code that other people have written, the same way that some of those people have undoubtedly benefited from code that RMS has written or advocacy work he's done for Free Software.

Except for the freedom to modify it to suit your own needs. The freedom to maintain it if the company goes out of business. The freedom to know how it stores your data so you can migrate to something else if your needs change. The freedom to move it onto a replacement machine if your current one dies. Yeah, except for, well, everything, you give up nothing.

The vast vast vast majority of consumers dont give a shit about any of this. They dont benefit AT ALL from having access to the code. The computer is a commodity, much like a toaster.

And BTW your little brain is confusing access to code with file format standards. They are not the same. I could write a .abc format reader & writer and the format could change and not be backward compatible with previous revisions. And then I could just dump 200,000 lines of crap onto people and be smug about how 'open' my codebase is. Meanwhile user 1 and user 2 are using different revisions and they cant exchange files.. who cares right? The code is GPL, why dont they patch their own software !!!!

"Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco"
- Richard Stallman

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR33.6/stallman.php

What a fucking wackjob.. this guy needs medication. I hope gates and throw some cash at him so that he gets help... Its getting to be sad :(

Because they switched to being windows-bootable. http://bostonreview.net/BR33.6/stallman.php

http://bostonreview.net/BR27.3/bollier.html

That's their goal.

The Space Command released plans to go beyond U.S. "control" of space for military purposes to "ownership," which is to be permanent, in accord with the Security Strategy. Ownership of space is "key to our nation's military effectiveness," permitting "instant engagement anywhere in the world. . . . A viable prompt global strike capability, whether nuclear or non-nuclear, will allow the United States to rapidly strike high-payoff, difficult-to-defeat targets from stand-off ranges and produce the desired effect . . . [and] to provide warfighting commanders the ability to rapidly deny, delay, deceive, disrupt, destroy, exploit and neutralize targets in hours/minutes rather than weeks/days even when U.S. and allied forces have a limited forward presence,"6 thus reducing the need for overseas bases that regularly arouse local antagonism.

Only a few.

You also have to ask yourself: what would you expect an evolution-dominated textbook to say? "We're presenting six hundred pages on evolution here, but we don't think it's important?"

Repeated assertion is not proof.

Evolution is a theory (perhaps I should say Theory) which attempts to explain Linnaeus' organisation. That it succeeds is what's in question here. The Creationists explain the same things which evolutionary principle has had kingship of claimed for it, many of them far more plausibly. They claim, with this as justification, that creation is the central organising principle of biology.

You assert that "creation science has yet to generate a single testable, falsifiable, hypothesis, which is the first step to becoming a theory", but you do so speciously. Creation science sites are awash in hypotheses and you simply haven't noticed. Fixed speciation is one such hypothesis, and it matches reality exactly. The absence of interspecies fossils is another prediction of Creartion, and so far they've won the day on that one pretty convincingly (the closest to a refutation we've come is that glorified hoatzin called archaeopteryx).

Early Creationists (at least in Europe) got too carried away with this and insisted that not just species but individual subspecies of animal were immutable. This in the face of cross-breeding programs. Mind you, this was back in the day when Spontaneous Generation was accepted as the scientifically valid opposition to this concept, so I'm inclined to cut both sides some slack here.

Go and actually read some Creationist sites -- know thy enemy and all that. They've got reasonable-sounding hypotheses on geology, astronomy, all manner of stuff. If you're going into a battle of wits, do remember to go in armed! Read some of the refutations of DDI (and DCD's errata) as well. Have an argument, not a shouting match! (-:

Meanwhile, there are many evolutionary biologists who would cheerfully donate a limb to the cause if they thought they'd get a naturalistic self-organising principle out of it. That alone should be a big hint that there's something major still missing from the panacea called evolution.

As far as I know, nobody has actually refuted "Darwin's Black Box" by Michael Behe.

Maybe you should actually do something called RESEARCH, using a crazy new thing called the INTERNET (or does ID proclaim GOOGLE doesn't exist?):

Here, try THIS ARTICLE.

This sounds just like a rehash of Cass Sunstein's article "The Daily We"

Most of the species you refer to are generalists
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.2/meyer.html

This is quite interesting to see that the same people asking for technical papers on IT are rejoicing about the prospect of feeling clever by looking at some non-sense pictures.

I'm not going to discuss about the strength of the immediate impact of a very intuitive and emotional object, ie a picture, a photography. I think history gave us some very interesting examples of misuse of information through pictures, videos, etc. My main point is that we should be careful, because our relationship to visual stimuli are not that rational ; you can go there if you want to learn more about the debate on the power of pictures, and what they really represent in our society.

Our world is by now so complex, so wide-open, that only strong and addictive stimuli can catch our attention. This is not surprising that the story of pictural representations is tightly related to the complexification of the world we're living in right now.
Thus, I have such an admiration for photographers such as James Nachtwey; what the folks like him did and still do is all the more useful than everyday brings a little more sadness to our daily lives.

But in no manner they represent - and themselves acknowledge it frankly - the truth. Because the truth is not in a picture, nor it is in a series of pictures. Photographers are here to draw our attention to urgent, revolting, funny, clever, ie interesting subjects. But I hate nothing more than people going to see Rwanda's genocide exposition in a museum, and then coming back with the so good-conscience feeling about the fact that yes, they did something, and what's more, they understood the problem.

Pictures are a beginning. I see a beautiful -yes, beautiful- picture of kids starving in Ouganda, my first reaction is to take some time and read papers about it. If I have some interest in Africa's demise (yes, yes, you'll see that in some time, the Southern part of Africa will be empty of black people), and if I have some time to spend on that, I'll read very different papers. Read NGO reports on the subject. Try to understand how I can be of any help. Etc. etc. etc.

A site that is supposed to make you understand the whole international actuality with pictures and snippets is the best way, first to make Ignorance's realm all the more important, and second to encourage, indeed, lazzyness. I don't even see why /.ers are not discussing more sharply such a decisive issue. Of course, this is socially gratifying to be able to discuss on a shallow way of roughly every subject on Earth. But when you meet someone that truly knows what he/she is talking about (exactly the same way that people on /. know what they are talking about when it comes to IT), then you are fucked up. It's worth to get involved in a more serious way of learning how our world is rotating.This is exactly what I try to do by visiting this site, and learning from people that are competent on this precise subject.

And this is really what a responsible citizen should do with the general purpose information.

Regards,
Jdif