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Access to Tor has not been blocked and that's the point.

Not here.

Feel free to lodge your complaints with the governments that do.

I am fully aware of psychological frailties, but appointing the Handicapper General is not the cure.

That's so far off base that I'm embarrassed for you. Nobody is being handicapped.

As long as the market is open and universally accessible (dumb pipe), not subject to arbitrary authority, I will go along with that.

Great. Support net neutrality.

But as long as anybody has the power to shut them/you down...

The laws of physics ensure someone will always be able to take away your rights using brute force. Perfect is the enemy of good.

Access to Tor has not been blocked and that's the point.

Not here. And it is cat and mouse. And the connection is still subject to the whims of the service provider.

Again, it doesn't impact the psychologically stable and educated individuals but rather the significant contingent of humanity that is unstable and/or uneducated and impressionable.

I am fully aware of psychological frailties, but appointing the Handicapper General is not the cure.

I'm not suggesting regulating speech, I'm suggesting owners of sites have the right to do whatever they want with their sites because it belongs to them, not you. The fact that they allowed you post to it does not mean you have the right to post to it.

As long as the market is open and universally accessible (dumb pipe), not subject to arbitrary authority, I will go along with that. But as long as anybody has the power to shut them/you down, we need to develop technological defenses against all censorship to avoid even having to discuss the issue of regulation.

We have to cripple the tech...

This story sounds very familiar

Harrison Bergeron was supposed to be a cautionary tale, dammit!

Obligatory Kurt Vonnegut story: Harrison Bergeron

Harrison Bergeron FTW!

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

So rather than try to bring those kids up, we should instead bring everyone's kids down to the level of the lowest? Sounds like something out of Vonnegut.

Yet another tool in the arsenal of the Handicapper General.

(Obligatory reference to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Harrison Bergeron .)

As long as everybody is equally unhappy, then things are fair. What would be unfair is for certain people to be happy when others are not.

Based on the rest of your post, I don't think you are advocating this position (merely stating why someone would do this). Still, I'd suggest that anyone who agrees with this notion to read Harrison Bergeron, where "equality of outcome" is the central theme. This is where we will eventually be led.

...programmers and smart people...

There's a way of dealing with their kind

But the rule of civilization is that some outlying people have to give up some minor liberties to ensure the safety of everyone.

So sayeth the Handicapper General.

... of "Harrison Bergeron"?

Read it: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

Read about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

timothy

That Harrison Bergeron is a warning........not a fucking "how-to" manual.

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

For some useful background, I think this site has a lot of good information: (Via the Chronicle of higher education / Arts & Letters Daily):

http://www.tnellen.com/ted/tc/computer.htm

Essentially, the benefits of using computers in basic education are dubious at best. It could perhaps be useful in conjunction with the internet, as a textbook replacement, but I doubt service quality is going to be good enough if you have to use a crank-powered laptop.

By golly, I want my heroes fat, club-footed, bucktoothed and bedridden.

Anyone other than me reminded of Vonnegut's Handicapper General from Harrison Bergeron?

We all abuse the apostrophe, just by posting on Slashdot.

we (1) made Saddam Hussein, put him in power, and it was our (2) job to scrape him off the sidewalk after what he did to his own people.

If the US government (1) had cared about the plight of the victims of Hussein's government they (2) wouldn't have given him all the money and technology they did.

The US is a vague, abstract, amorphous, non-human characteristic-having blob that changes continuosly over time, and it's fallacious to refer to it as the same thing across different swaths of time, having human characteristics or to confuse the US with the US government or a past US government. People do this all the time and it annoys the hell out of me.