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source.
I can't find a source for it, but I also recall reading that they "proved" the patches work, by giving the placebo-group (or whatever you science-people call it), not drug-free fake patches, but patches with a tiny amount of nicotine in them.
Usually, physical nicotine withdrawal symptoms are over in 5 days. However when supplying the placebo-group with a tiny amount, the withdrawal gets prolonged to...well...until you stop the patches + 5 days.
Yes, how very clever, giving placebo's that contain the very drug you're testing on the other group!
It's just yet another god damn big pharma lie.

If you want to quit, you quit. Addiction is about being dependent. If you don't want to be addicted, you need to stop being dependant on these substances and start taking responsibility for your own life, instead of making yourself feel a victim of whatever drug (food/prostitute/whatever) you use. Replacing tobacco with nicotine patches or e-cigarettes, reinforces the idea in your head, that you cannot do it alone. Which is a lie that belongs to the addiction pattern, which you then are propagating.
These are all illusions, trying to survive in your person, out of fear of responsibility.

Can you provide a better link? I'm curious what safety measures are in place, considering the recent disaster in Spain.

The reality is, there are thousands of rebel groups in Syria, most fighting Assad in a respectable way.

Did you do a census or use random sampling to deduce that most of the groups are fighting in a respectable way? I'd love to see your data.

Also, I'm not sure if you did this on purpose, but are you confusing "most of the rebel groups" with "most of the rebels" since many of the groups are very small and a few of the big rebel groups make up the majority of the actual people?

and no funding is being planned anyways.

You are joking right? NO funding? For someone as knowledgeable about the Syrian rebels as yourself, you must know that we are arming and training them. Here are some links to get you started:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10283758/First-Syria-rebels-armed-and-trained-by-CIA-on-way-to-battlefield.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/us-aid-to-syrian-rebels

I dispute that these vigilantes should decide what should be "declassified" or what isn't.... I just strongly object to the methods being used by the anti-secrecy crowd, and I don't trust their motivations at all.

That is a fair enough opinion and nobody can argue with it, it is good to have a healthy dose of skepticism about any information that is presented to us via any channel. However what is more difficult to dispute is when a leaked document reveals heinous war crimes - should focusing on the messenger still be more important than a message of that significance? Also remember that Washington leaks information all the time (for example the Bin Laden operation) - why are leaks that expose crimes be worse than leaks that make the president look good? To most people that just reeks of hypocrisy.

The usual reply to this logic is "what war crimes, there were no war crimes exposed - but look over there - Assange is a narcicist and Manning is a traitor!!". However even a basic search and read of the documents they destroyed their lives to bring to us show that this claim is absolutely false:

Revelations from the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs detailed the use of paramilitary death squads, complicity in the torture of Iraqi citizens, the indiscriminate killing of civilians by private military contractors and many other abuses. Meanwhile, the leaked State Department cables brought to light scores of secret drone strikes in countries we are not even at war with, and uncovered the collusion between the U.S. and Yemini governments to lie about American responsibility for the massacre of 41 people in the Al-Majalah region. They also revealed U.S. interference with judicial efforts in Spain to investigate the Bush administration's torture practices. In Tunisia, leaks exposing the opulence and corruption of Ben Ali's government were a catalyst for the revolution that brought down the repressive regime and ignited other pro-democracy movements throughout the Arab world. The list could go on but the point is simple: it would have been a disservice to democracy to withhold this important information.

The more interesting question is where is the graveyard holding millions of unsold original Surface tablets?

I don't know, but here's. their new next door neighbor.

Who is al Qaida to you? ...Who do you think they are? Friend? Enemy? No idea? Don't want to take sides?

You should take that question to Obama, congress. As this post above, so graciously points out:

"Al Qaeda" is a term of convenience. The Libyan "rebels" were 70+ % Jihadi "Al Qaeda".

The Syrian "opposition" is 80+ % "Al Qaeda" - funded by Qatar and Saudi, for the same regional purposes, with a generous assist from these CIA heroes, that you rush to defend.

http://syriareport.net/fsa-al-qaeda-fighting-under-the-one-flag/
http://www.cfr.org/syria/al-qaedas-specter-syria/p28782
http://rt.com/news/qaeda-militants-kill-fsa-commander-979/ [rt.com]

They laugh at your ignorance, and they count on it.

"Al Qaeda" is a term of convenience. The Libyan "rebels" were 70+ % Jihadi "Al Qaeda".

The Syrian "opposition" is 80+ % "Al Qaeda" - funded by Qatar and Saudi, for the same regional purposes, with a generous assist from these CIA heroes, that you rush to defend.

http://syriareport.net/fsa-al-qaeda-fighting-under-the-one-flag/
http://www.cfr.org/syria/al-qaedas-specter-syria/p28782
http://rt.com/news/qaeda-militants-kill-fsa-commander-979/

They laugh at your ignorance, and they count on it.

Sorry about our deserts not being boiled, but froyo is frozen yogurt which even you should be able to get. How is it exactly that the limeys are unaware of lime pie?

Hey, it would be pretty boring if Britain was just a smaller, older version of the USA. Frozen yoghurt is available, but only quite recently.

Here's some (supposedly) quintessentially British desserts: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatpicturegalleries/9213506/Famous-British-desserts-in-pictures.html (including a few I've never heard of).

None boiled, though a couple are steamed. (None deep-fried either, the author clearly wasn't from Scotland)

Indeed. The US government wants everyone to talk about current affairs online, so they can easily flag and monitor the trouble-makers.

Where " trouble-makers" is the set of people trying to use truck bombs, car bombs, and suicide vests, plus various experiments with poison gas and plague, to kill masses of innocent people, yes.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

We've certainly 'progressed' since then.

Don't ANY of us know how to read a news story and think for ourselves, anymore?

There's a methodology used to substantiate this kind of BULLSHIT claim. It can be described as shooting an arrow towards a wall, then drawing a bulls-eye around it, after the fact.

For another metaphor? Here's the word you get to drive your Mack truck through:

"Affiliated"

When you have the NYPD secretly assign all Mosques the "Terrorist Organization" label, and you have the CIA recruiting for record numbers of native Arabic speakers, for translation?

Call it "Psyop Ju-Jitsu". This is an all-star set up, to make a positive scare-tactic out of the negative public relations resulting from Snowden's revelations.

By-the-fucking-way, what else do you expect, when you let this kind of shit go down? Objective and agenda-less reporting of fact?

USA. It's like a police-state with Tesla Model S and overnight shipping, instead of Bread and Circuses.

Fortunately not all countries in the region are that batshit crazy.. Turkish authorities recently cleared a bird suspected of spying for Israel.. such a shame the bird in question wasn't a Turkey as that would have made for some great headlines - "Turkey spies for Israel!" followed by "Turkey clears Turkey!" etc.

Where " trouble-makers" is the set of people trying to use truck bombs, car bombs, and suicide vests, plus various experiments with poison gas and plague, to kill masses of innocent people, yes.

Ummm... some would say US is happily in bed with such trouble makers.
But this can't be true... or can it?

Indeed. The US government wants everyone to talk about current affairs online, so they can easily flag and monitor the trouble-makers.

Where " trouble-makers" is the set of people trying to use truck bombs, car bombs, and suicide vests, plus various experiments with poison gas and plague, to kill masses of innocent people, yes.

There are more people lighting more fires than ever before. Of course there are more bloody bush fires. What do you expect? This one was apparently started by illegal weed growers.

What enemy, you ask? Well, that would (generally) be the citizens and the alternative and independent media that hasn't been compromised or taken over.

It looks like you are guessing, and are way off the mark. Try again.... here is a hint.

At Least 4,000 Suspected of Terrorism-Related Activity in Britain, MI5 Director Says
London terror bomb plot: the four terrorists
7 July Bombings

Snowden has stated that he took his job with the plan from the start to steal and leak classified information. To do that he would have to have lied to get his job, lied to get his security clearance, and lied to get access to the data. You only consider him "trustworthy" because you agree with his crimes, the ones that can actually be found in the law as opposed to the placards of activists.

If he had been some outsider who decided to infiltrate the NSA and dump all the info I'd have some doubts about his motives.

But he had worked for the NSA in various capacities since 2006. It's not so much joining a company to leak whatever docs they might have, it's switching jobs in a company so you can leak the docs you know they have.

Snowden has stated that he took his job with the plan from the start to steal and leak classified information. To do that he would have to have lied to get his job, lied to get his security clearance, and lied to get access to the data. You only consider him "trustworthy" because you agree with his crimes, the ones that can actually be found in the law as opposed to the placards of activists.

It sounds like he abused his privileges to confirm his suspicions, and then took a course of action. Which is the right approach, depending on the suspicions.

That isn't what Snowden says. Snowden said he planned to gather and expose secret information from the start - before he took the job.

Edward Snowden admits infiltrating contractor to harvest documents

Edward Snowden has admitted he deliberately went to work for the US intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in order to harvest highly classified evidence of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs that he hoped to expose

And I mean that literally. The CAGW folks are saying we must take drastic steps to prevent disaster: shut down coal plants even if it means blackouts on the Eastern Seaboard, capture all the emissions from smokestacks and pump the CO2 underground, spend and/or lose trillions of dollars on the projects. The problem with this is that people don't think the alleged threat of CAGW is worth that level of pain.

People will buy a Prius, and feel good about it. But that is a rational decision, since a Prius costs less to feed than other cars. People will not, in general, sell their cars and start bicycling to work to Save The Planet, because that's a pain and they don't take the threat seriously.

I personally am a Climate Change Denier (oh no!). I don't think the CAGW guys have proven their case to the level required for me to take it seriously.

The "hockey stick" turns out to be much less robust than originally claimed. And the "hockey stick" model can make an alarming hockey stick graph out of random input data.

There are serious questions that the CAGW folks have not adequately answered, such as "CO2 levels are higher than ever so why is the warming flat?" "CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but we have had enough for decades and additional CO2 does little, so why should additional CO2 matter?" "Where is the hot spot?"

And the ClimateGate emails showed collusion to tamper with or suppress evidence the CAGW guys didn't like, collusion to keep skeptical papers out of the peer-reviewed journals and then point at those papers and say "Hah, those were never published in the peer-reviewed journals", "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline".

Worst of all, some of the top CAGW guys massaged and massaged the data, and destroyed the original data making it impossible to fact-check.

Extraordinary propositions require extraordinary proof. I don't think the CAGW idea has been proven to the level that I am comfortable with the extreme measures that have been proposed to fight it.

Hmmm, 1st quarter, 2nd quarter, 3rd quarter, 4th quarter

I'm going off of the UK's Met Office, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2259012/Global-warming-Met-Office-releases-revised-global-temperature-predictions-showing-planet-NOT-rapidly-heating-up.html. Also http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/16/2012_temperature_figures/. And http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3624242/There-IS-a-problem-with-global-warming...-it-stopped-in-1998.html.

RT is infamous for being virulently anti-American; it's a Russian news organization with an agenda that is fairly obvious at times

Although the BBC may have its faults, RT, nee Russia Today, is both government funded and controlled.

VGTRK, Channel One and NTV will also collect new government cash.

MOSCOW – The Russian state-controlled English-language TV channel Russia Today has avoided cuts in funding for 2013 and is to receive 11.2 billion rubles ($355.6 million) from the government next year.

Similarly, the state run TV company VGTRK, which runs several channels, including Rossiya, Rossiya 2, Kultura and Rossiya 24, is going to collect 19.98 billion rubles ($634.3 million).

Sniffing/monitoring WLAN would be traceable maybe even expected where used?
This notes years hidden with options to conserve energy, get more useful life from the sun and radiation detectors with local weather details. Images over low-capacity mesh radio is just fine if its one 'site' and under years of expansion.
Different mission to devices like http://rt.com/news/spy-rock-britain-admit-147/ (2006)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/9022827/Russian-spy-rock-was-genuine-former-chief-of-staff-admits.html

If Obama can arrange to have his dog Bo airlifted to Martha's Vineyard , he can arrange to visit with the NSA to make sure they're following the rules.

C'mon, Mr Prez!

Actually, the Fukushima disaster has already released over 168 times the amount of radiation as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

It was a myth, a good PR. The truth is probably the USA were never more, or less, democratic and free than most of western europe state.

Today, Western Europe is about as democratic as the US because within living memory various countries had actual fascist governments overthrown by war or social change, and communist governments removed or communist movements thwarted either by war or social change. Collectively all of Europe is far freer today than it was 70 years ago. The US and UK have been free and democratic the whole time, now Western (and most of Eastern) Europe has joined them. Even formerly Soviet Russia is now freer even if there are some troubling trends. (And there is a country that is an exception. And there is an ugly trend that should be a relic of the past - will that curse never leave? )

So no, it isn't just PR. This is all subject to change if people forget or act unwisely.

The Nazis were not left-wing

Yes they were. And merely blabbering "no they were not" with zero argument won't somehow magically unmake them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/9234715/Wind-farms-can-cause-climate-change-finds-new-study.html

"Usually at night the air closer to the ground becomes colder when the sun goes down and the earth cools.

But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world's largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.

This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. "

You were saying?

People are just wondering how you're planning a marriage at your funeral.

If the GPP is a girl, there are plenty of Chinese parents who will be happy to do it for her. Of course, if the GPP is a guy, it might be up to his parents to find the corpse to steal. And you thought the GPP was odd.

Solely based on the picture in the following link...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/3563537/Shakespeare-best-to-worst.html ... I pronounce Hamlet as the best play. It (the photo) deserves a caption contest.

Though I like RIII or HV best, Hamlet is certainly the most popular.

But it'll be very interesting to see what happens when they use it on the severely retarded and possibly find that they have at best the consciousness of a dog. The "ethics" of the medical profession are already starting to take a real downward spiral at the higher levels with people like Peter Singer (a respected "bioethicist" at Princeton) and now the Oxford Medical Journal saying that literal infanticide is no different than abortion.

This is what we pro-lifers mean when we talk about the "culture of death." If you asked the average woman about this, she'd think you're a complete monster for suggesting the existence of a "woman's right to kill a 6 week old infant." Yet this is what at least one wing of our ruling class is increasingly coming to believe is a real right. The average guy on the street has no idea how his simple understanding of an issue often is quite reasonable while our ruling class's take is just evil by comparison. Similarly, this is how you get the delta between what the Republican base feels Capitalism means and what the RNC feels Capitalism means which should explain to many why a lot of people vote the way they do seemingly "against their interests." What always matters is what the guy at the top thinks an issue means.

Socialized medicine works better when the USA doesn't have it. Most of the new drugs and treatments come out of the USA. The companies inventing them are making a profit, while the government is trillions in debt... if the government takes over all health care, it will not end well. R&D will be slashed to free up some money for treating more people, and R&D progress will slow.

Sure, when you spend millions on every cancer, even when there is only a 1% chance of saving the life of a 60 year old smoker, when the universal care country says "you got plenty old and are still smoking, so we deny your care to use those resources on others who didn't knowingly cause their own problem and have better quality of life after treatment, if successful", it's going to affect the statistics.

It's nice that you have such confidence in the wisdom of the death panels. On the other hand, I would prefer to choose my own benefits and pay for as much care as I want.

What would really fix things would be widespread use of Health Savings Accounts combined with high-deductible insurance plans, and some reforms such as tort reform and requiring hospitals to publish their prices and charge the same amount to everyone. (Not one price for cash customers, and a lower one for insurance company customers.)

We won't get tort reform because lawyers don't want it, and lawyers are a really damn powerful political bloc.

The other good thing about widespread HSAs is that it would solve the pre-existing condition problem: if you buy your own insurance, then you are free to change jobs without worrying about insurance issues. It's a problem that the current system incentivizes a link between a job and insurance.

Universal care works great enough of the time, people don't see the need.

I have read so many horror stories coming out of England's NHS and Canada's system that I don't want to try it myself.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/heal-our-hospitals/10178296/13000-died-needlessly-at-14-worst-NHS-trusts.html

http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/hard-lesson-about-socialized-medicine

Morsi executed his own coup when he granted himself dictatorial powers. That, combined with the fact he was a corrupt and colossal failure who engendered a popular uprising against him, justified the army removing him from power.

Morsi's "democracy" was of the same sort that blessed vast swathes of post-colonial Africa in the 1960s and 70s: One man, one vote, once, followed by brutal dictatorship. Now at least Egypt has a slim chance of having something resembling a real democracy. Under Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood cronies, there was none.

maybe it's trendy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2449342/Newspaper-misspells-name-on-front-page.html

Until concerned parents boycott the vaccine because they think it causes autism.

I don't think that is going to be a big problem in Africa.

. . . where people allegedly believe raping virgins is a cure for AIDs...?

The fascinating thing to me was that the funniest jokes it managed to come up with had a definite misogynistic streak. Is it because misogyny is inherently amusing, or because sexist jokes are low-hanging fruit? Link to more coverage of the same story.

The only article that even seems to come close is one from the Daily Mail. As usual they do not cite their sources nor do they get commentary from anyone but an alarmist charity.

How about some actual citations?

Well, since you don't like the Daily Mail reporting stuff, you won't follow this link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-189451/Neglected-patients-went-blind.html

But what if the same story is at the Telegraph?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1437054/Optitians-blame-patients-loss-of-sight-on-targets.html

And what about the BBC?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3085105.stm

Are they making up stories too?

Please, what argument are you going to use to defend the honor of the NHS in this argument?

You can build a 100% safe plant... And with safe i'm talking about the surroundings....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor#Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
Worst case with these would be that the plant would be unusable and would have to be rebuilt, but the surroundings would still be safe from contamination.

And other types of power-plants can be quite problematic too:
Coal - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill
Hydro-power - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hydroelectric_power_station_failures (Banqiao Dam in china did cause quite a bit of havoc)
Natural gas (pipelines) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents
Natural gas (power-plants) - Found a few accidents on google but no list of them all or any big one.
Wind-turbines - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8948363/1500-accidents-and-incidents-on-UK-wind-farms.html (about 1500 accidents in the UK)

No power is safe... Nuclear power has the lowest death-rate per generated amount of power......

Biggest problem with nuclear power is the public opinion about it that is causing issues and resulting in that no new, not even the safe ones, will get built so we continue using the old ones re-licencing them for 20 years more at a time.. I would like to see that we would scrap all the old ones that have 40 years in service and then build new safer and more efficient plats.

Even worse, by the best friend of the wife of a partner.

1) Killer whale teeth.
2) Killer whale skull.

The killer whale can weigh up to 22,000 lbs for males and 16,000 lbs for females, and be up to 32 feet and 28 feet long respectively. A great white shark can reach up to 5,000 lbs and 20 feet long.

I saw a PBS video showing great whites feeding on seals at a beach. Suddenly the great whites fled and shortly thereafter, orcas showed up to begin feeding. The narrator noted that orcas can kill great whites.

The male killer whales at Seaworld weigh 5-6 tons. It's quite remarkable that these orcas have not killed more trainers.

Running a weapons warehouse and shipping Libyan weapons to 'freedom fighters' is Syria is a bit more than a "mess"....
Who is getting the flow of arms in Syria? The best friends the USA ever had: Al-CIA-da.
The black flags, battlefield bbq, one faith only types.
"CIA moved missiles out of Libya to Syria's rebels"
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4413289,00.html
"CIA 'clamping down on Benghazi operatives'"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10219347/CIA-clamping-down-on-Benghazi-operatives.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2383654/Congressman-cries-cover-claims-Obama-administration-hiding-Benghazi-witnesses-relocating-giving-new-identities.html
http://world.time.com/2013/05/14/we-will-slaughter-all-of-them-an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-syrian-atrocity-video/

Steve Jobs 'single-handedly' created the digital music market

This struck me as well. In the original article, they put a bound of 100 milliseconds as counting as "low latency" in their book, but Wikipedia's article on algorithmic stock trading puts it in the microseconds instead:

"Low-latency traders depend on ultra-low latency networks. They profit by providing information, such as competing bids and offers, to their algorithms microseconds faster than their competitors."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading#Low-latency_trading

100 milliseconds is about 10,000 times too slow, even if we are talking in the neighborhood of "tens of microseconds faster", rather than just "microseconds faster".

Here's an article from 2011 where they justified spending $300M ($0.3B) on a new transatlantic cable to eke out an extra 6 milliseconds: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8753784/The-300m-cable-that-will-save-traders-milliseconds.html That's just 6% of the 100 milliseconds that these Java guys are willing to waste running Java instead of C code.

You are a liar who's spamming the hell out of this thread with your lies. The original article clearly states that 533MHz is not available for any other apps nor games - it's only available for benchmark tests.

Stop spreading lies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/samsung/10213672/Samsung-deny-performance-boosting-hardware-in-Galaxy-S4.html The original article is wrong.

You have a laptop.

I've been carrying 'laptops' since you were probably in diapers. My Pro is not a laptop. It's a cleverly designed multifunction device that is a laptop, desktop and tablet all in one. It replaced a 'laptop.'

I think you are still missing the point. My Windows Mobile brick also tried to be a phone and a computer at the same time. Guess what? It was the most horrible device I ever owned.
People prefer devices designed for specific functions, otherwise we wouldn't have stereos, tv's, dvd players, etc.. We would just have a single computer.

There are cases where you can merge functionality (for example mp3 players into smartphones [1]) but NOT in the Surface Pro's case.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9741910/Smartphones-wipe-out-sales-of-MP3-players.html

Your unstated major premise is "what Samsung has told me is accurate". This is a mistake. Samsung's explanation is a rival hypothesis to Anandtech's. At the moment you have to compare the two hypotheses with the presented data. That data tends to favour Anandtech's explanation.

Hypothesis implies something that is not known. Samsung knows the clock speed on their phone, and seeing as you have read the article you surely know that this is verified when you run the benchmark tests. For the other side of the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/samsung/10213672/Samsung-deny-performance-boosting-hardware-in-Galaxy-S4.html

Ugh that risotto with grubs did not help either... yuuuuucckkkkk! Bleah! Ugh!

And yet there is at least one group of native people living in the forests of Indonesia, The Koroway, who regularly eat Capricorn beetle grubs taken from rotten Sago tree logs.

There is only one part of what I posted that was speculative, and that is the link between Manning and Assange. It isn't much of a leap, is it?

Taliban prepare to punish WikiLeaks Afghan informers

I assume you prefer that terrorist attacks against Australia and Australians fail, rather than succeed? (Hate to ask, but can't really assume on Slashdot, can we? Plenty of people (narcissists?) are actually indifferent.)

Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia

The inherent problem with things like this are always with making sure that you don't infringe upon free speech -- hyperbole, sarcasm, irony, humor, and rudeness -- and only get involved in situations where realistic threats are legitimately intended and made.

No, the inherent problem is people who think that, because it's on the internet, they can get away with threatening behaviour by dressing it up as a free speech issue; "hey dude, I was just expressing my hyperbole/sarcasm/irony/humor/rudeness/whatever".

Like for example, one of the guys quoted in this article (thanks to deains for the link in another thread) Twitter abuse: What women-hating trolls really believe - Telegraph; "She would know these men wouldn’t actually come and rape her. They don’t mean it. Rape is a metaphor.".

Oh really? And how are we meant to intuit that? Is there a special smiley that says "I'm not really going to rape you, I'm just having a laugh"? Making threats against another person is illegal; there's no magic exemption for doing it online.

TBH I think the issue about the bank notes themselves is fairly peripheral to all this. The "people" (for want of a better word) sending these abusive tweets probably couldn't care less about who's on the back of their money, they just simply hate women and so will take any opportunity to threaten, belittle and abuse them anonymously. This article in the Telegraph kinda gives some insight: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/10208418/Twitter-abuse-What-women-hating-trolls-really-believe.html