Commercial tomato varieties are bred for tough red skin and blemish-free fruit. Flavor has no part in the equation. The commercial tomato industry was on the verge of collapse due to the increase in mechanization in farming but tomatoes were so fragile that there was no ability harvest them without destroying them. So the food scientists developed breeds that were firm, that were uniform in appearance, and that could be picked earlier. US producers pick their tomatoes while still completely green and subject them to 24 hours of ethylene gas to artificially ripen them. Many are refrigerated to further reduce spoilage but this also destroys nearly all of the flavor that may have accidentally remained.
Recent research has indicated that the same genes that cause the uniform coloration selected for in commercial tomatoes also cause the fruit to convert the sun's energy into sugars. It isn't just that the round, red tomato-like cardboard balls at the store lost their flavor because it wasn't a priority in the breeding program - it appears that the flavor and appearance may be mutually exclusive.
I grow many different varieties of heirloom tomatoes; my Hillbilly Potato Leaf vines often grow at least 8 feet and will be two inches in diameter. They destroy every tomato cage I've tried so now I use a heavy cage reinforced with a t-post driven beside it and wired to it for extra support. I hate dealing with the vines but the tomatoes are huge and taste wonderful.
We have about 20 hives as well but keep them purely as a hobby. They help us with our garden and fruit trees, as well as providing enough honey each year for us, our extended family, and close friends. We do not manage them for multiple extractions a year or other high production goals. The time and work is certainly not for the uninterested but neither is it a killer. I genuinely enjoy working with them and I love the honey we get.
Your notion might please Adam Smith but your global economy and efficiency at all costs ignores the real impacts to each and every locality. I don't find it particularly helpful to a take a self-sufficient local culture, turn them into a monoculture doing whatever one thing that the globalists find they can do the best/cheapest, and make them dependent on people on the other side of the world for something they did themselves a generation ago. There's more to life than maximizing your economic output, particularly when most of the benefit accrues to others and you've mortgaged your future to do it.
Just be careful that you don't heat it too much. Warm it like good BBQ - slow and low. Also, you'll often end up with some foam on top when you are finished. This stuff is like marshmallow cream, expect it is pure honey. I can't explain just how good it is.
We keep about 20 hives of bees and I grow buckwheat on a portion of my garden each year specifically for the bees. That honey is darker and more flavorful than any I've ever encountered elsewhere.
The local apiary group hosts a honey tasting event each year; the range of colors and flavors in the local area is amazing.
The fact that honey doesn't spoil does not imply that the flavor is maintained. Of course, independent of the freshness itself, local honey usually is made from an assortment of flowers that impart their own unique flavors, unlike the bland clover and corn syrup commercial stuff.
There were several slightly different versions of this found during the deliberations. The version approved by the states is actually much clearer than the version approved by Congress.
I saw a few articles last month speculating that the season would be a bad one because we were seeing a higher than normal rate of infection early in the season. I did not see any that made your follow up claim that it was caused by insufficient vaccination levels. In fact, the CDC reported about a month ago that this year's vaccination rates were similar to last year's. Would you mind sharing some support for your well understood reason?
Unfortunately, you (and those who modded you up) seem to have no understanding of the flu vaccine. Your numbers are complete bunk. Unlike most "traditional" vaccines where the target is pretty well understood, the flu vaccine is a crap shoot every single year. If 100% of the population was vaccinated, your risk of getting the flu that year may be the same as another year when no one was vaccinated, because those making the vaccines very well may have guessed wrong on the strains that would be prevalent in that year.
The national news carried reports up until a few weeks ago that this year's vaccine was a great match for the strains circulating in the wild (for example). With flu rates coming in at well-above average, this story suddenly went away. If the vaccine was such a good match when we were urging everyone to get a shot, why it is suddenly so ineffective? (And, yes, that is an actual question, not a smart-ass rhetorical one.)
Actual evidence for the effectiveness of the flu vaccine is non-existent. Do yourself a favor and read some of the recent reports about this from reputable sources. For example, the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy released a report just a few months ago indicating that influenza vaccinations provide only modest protection for healthy young and middle-age adults and virtually no protection to those 65 and older. They concluded that US federal vaccination recommendations are based on inadequate evidence and poorly executed studies. You can get a PDF of the report here. The Center's director is not an "anti-vaxxer" but an experienced expert and government insider. He still recommends the vaccine in general because it is quite safe even if the paybacks are greatly overstated.
You might also want to review some of the Cochrane Collaboration's reports. In the past few years, they have found there is no evidence that vaccinating health care workers had any effect on influenza or pneumonia deaths in the elderly or that vaccinating the elderly provides any benefits to them, They also found that the flu vaccine has no impact on the number of people hospitalized, transmission rates in the population, or associated health complications. It does appear that in a year when the vaccine and virus mix actually match up well, healthy adults under 65 will see milder/fewer symptoms and gain an average of half a workday.
I do not get the flu vaccine. I also rarely get the flu (perhaps twice in the past decade). My spouse usually gets the vaccine for herself and our children. In my personal observations during the past decade, there is no discernible pattern to our infection rates from year to year, vaccination or not - sometimes our house sees a flu or two despite vaccinations and sometimes we see none despite no vaccinations. I'm not suggesting that the flu vaccine is dangerous or completely ineffective, but it seems obvious that the government and drug companies have vastly oversold it.
The federal regs state that "a combustible gas in a distribution line must contain a natural odorant or be odorized”, which means that gathering lines from wells and transmission lines are exempt from odorization. Many companies have classified their farm taps as transportation or gathering systems to avoid the requirement to add odorant. However, PHMSA has made clear recently that they consider farm taps to be distribution systems except in a few limited circumstances. Unfortunately, there aren't many options for economically adding mercaptan to an individual tap. Responsibility for this isn't always clear either because some jurisdictions leave the meter with the pipeline owner while others make the incumbent local distribution company provide the meter and support the customer.
The Witcher 2 was originally released in May of 2011, not this past year when GOG finally started selling the game.
The game was available on GOG from release day. Why do you claim otherwise?
So, of course the most pirated version of the game would be one of the DRM variants, since the DRM version was available for a longer period and typically more in demand closer to the original release date.
Since the DRM-free version was available from the beginning, your argument is invalid.
But no mention of either date (original release of the game) or GOG's release are mentioned in the article
They are the same - May 17, 2011.
Anyway, sorry for interrupting the anti-DRM circle jerk with facts and logic.
I stopped using Newegg altogether after last year's Black Friday purchase. My laptop arrived DOA (and later reviews indicated that this was an issue with most of the units). The initial RMA request process was simple but it quickly went downhill. They received my laptop then days later claimed they didn't and told me I'd need to file a claim with the shipper. During the next two months I spoke to various levels of customer service, traded emails with them, and used their online chat option. Across the board, they were unhelpful and often dishonest about the process and my options. They refused to cooperate with the shipper in processing my claim but lied and told me that the shipper wasn't contacting them. They agreed to send me pictures of the damaged box but wouldn't follow through. I eventually had to file a claim with my credit card company to get my money refunded. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most unpleasant experiences ever dealing with a retailer of any sort.
In my state, the gas distribution companies are allowed a set percentage of lost and unaccounted for gas (gas the company buys but doesn't sell to customer and no longer has). As long as the company stays within that acceptable range, they have little reason to care about further reductions since that offset is built into their rate. However, being above that rate means they blowing money out holes in the pipes.
In rural areas, customers are often served by farm taps on well gathering lines or transmission lines. The gathering lines are usually odorized but transmission lines can be a real problem. Transmission companies are not required to add odorant to their lines. The local distribution company has nothing but a regulator and meter sitting on the transmission line. Many of these taps are simply out of compliance and have no smell.
This only makes sense if the scoring thresholds are set per school, not per race. The kids that go to the same school and live in the same neighborhood receive about the same education, so you should aim at improving that by increasing their school's scoring goal by a set % each year.
Now you're using geography as a proxy, which I would wager is even worse at tracking the underlying issues. Sure, poorer areas (inner cities or extremely rural counties) generally will score lower across the board but many smaller towns and larger school districts cut across multiple socio-economic layers. The high school just down the road is considered one of the best in the state and serves most of the city's well-to-do neighborhoods, but it also includes some pretty poor areas. Are we happy that the school scores above average even if distinct groups within that population consistently do poorly?
but pre-setting goals simply based on race is the very definition of racism
I would agree if the state said "Since blacks aren't as smart as whites, we shouldn't require them to do as well on these tests." However, they are using empirical data to demonstrate that, when grouped by their chosen racial divides, Asians score quite well compared to the rest and that whites are slightly above the remaining categories. Their goal is to get everyone to the same level but they suggest it is unreasonable to expect a group currently scoring at 48% to suddenly reach the 82% score of another group. This does not imply an inability for any group to score as high as any other group. But it does recognize that everyone isn't starting from the same place so some may take longer to get there.
Don't try and excuse it. Admit it, and find a better mechanism.
My post was really too long for you to read? Let me quote the last paragraph for you again:
The problem I have is that race is being used as a proxy for what is most likely a set of complex socio-economic factors. Bringing in more wealthy Hispanics will most assuredly raise that population's test scores without the state doing anything differently. But cultural and social indicators are more difficult to track than a few big racial categories, so they've picked an easy but weak measurement tool.
The MUD that I played for years in college had a system where you could "re-mort" and level again. You had to be at max level and complete a series of fairly difficult fights and challenges. If you succeeded, your character returned to level 1. You essentially rerolled at that point and started from scratch, except with a new ability available only to those who remorted. You could do this multiple times, with a new unique spell or ability each time.
This MUD also had death traps that would claim all of your gear and anything in your bags, as well as perm death if your experience points dipped into the negatives. As interesting as some may find these features, they would not be popular in WoW, especially at this point. As others have pointed out, a good portion of WoW's subscription base is driven by lock-in these days. Just like my buddy feels stuck with his iPhone because all his stuff is in iTunes, it is hard to walk away from a dozen well-geared characters and several years of time invested to start over elsewhere. If those characters aged and died, it would ease the movement to other games, which of course Blizzard doesn't want.
No, and if you bothered to read past the intentionally flamebait summary, you would see that isn't what they're doing.
The NCLB act requires states to meet benchmarks on student standardized testing and to demonstrate progress in areas where they are deficient. Virginia's proposal actually makes sense, for the most part. They have identified that their scores can be segregated into cohorts that are easy to track. Rather than expect the entire population to meet overall improvement levels each year, they want to raise up each group at rate realistic for them. If a category of students are consistently scoring at 50%, a second group at 75%, and a third group at 85%, they are saying it makes more sense to expect each group to demonstrate progress instead of just asking the entire population to hit, for example, 80%.
This change has no impact on the expectations of individual students. The new pass rates are for how they track their progress as a state. Virginia wants to say that if they can show that group 1 improved from a 50% to 62% in three years, they have succeeded with them even if the state didn't hit a global target.
The problem I have is that race is being used as a proxy for what is most likely a set of complex socio-economic factors. Bringing in more wealthy Hispanics will most assuredly raise that population's test scores without the state doing anything differently. But cultural and social indicators are more difficult to track than a few big racial categories, so they've picked an easy but weak measurement tool.
At this point I'm leaning away from you trolling, which leaves the other option. Since it seems obvious that logic will not work with you, I'll make it simple.
If a court, cop, or any other representative of the government can, without limit, compel the identity of a speaker who wishes to be anonymous and, up to this point, is completely anonymous to the government, then there is no right to anonymous speech. Your inability to grasp this doesn't change the fact.
So your argument is that as long as there remain theoretical means to protect your anonymity via technology, nothing the government does should be construed as stepping upon the right to anonymous speech?
Within reason.
Are you saying it is a problem if the ISP was required by law to keep the data and then the government asked for it, but would not be a problem if the ISP kept it for their own reasons and the government asked for it?
Yes, that is what I'm saying. The government has a legitimate interest to uncover the author, and is using their judicial power to do so.
Then you truly do not believe in the right to anonymous speech. If there are no limits on the government's desire to unmask anonymous speakers, the right to anonymous speech does not exist. Period.
Your examples about investigating a crime speak to limits on the right of anonymous speech, whether the right should be absolute or are their reasonable limits. That, however, is outside our discussion of whether or not the right exists at all.
I don't agree. This poster wasn't required to identify themselves, and that means a lot. They could have used a proxy, or used an open Wi-Fi spot.
So your argument is that as long as there remain theoretical means to protect your anonymity via technology, nothing the government does should be construed as stepping upon the right to anonymous speech? If I use Tor but the local node was ran by the NSA and they reveal my identity, there is no problem because I should have selected an anonymous proxy in Bulgaria? I suppose the freedom of religion isn't abridged if the government shuts down every church in the nation, since worshippers could meet in secret in someone's basement?
If ISPs and websites were actually required to log the information you say, then that would be an issue. But that's not the case now. Hopefully it remains that way.
I don't follow your logic here. Are you saying it is a problem if the ISP was required by law to keep the data and then the government asked for it, but would not be a problem if the ISP kept it for their own reasons and the government asked for it?
Slashdot Mirror
Commercial tomato varieties are bred for tough red skin and blemish-free fruit. Flavor has no part in the equation. The commercial tomato industry was on the verge of collapse due to the increase in mechanization in farming but tomatoes were so fragile that there was no ability harvest them without destroying them. So the food scientists developed breeds that were firm, that were uniform in appearance, and that could be picked earlier. US producers pick their tomatoes while still completely green and subject them to 24 hours of ethylene gas to artificially ripen them. Many are refrigerated to further reduce spoilage but this also destroys nearly all of the flavor that may have accidentally remained.
Recent research has indicated that the same genes that cause the uniform coloration selected for in commercial tomatoes also cause the fruit to convert the sun's energy into sugars. It isn't just that the round, red tomato-like cardboard balls at the store lost their flavor because it wasn't a priority in the breeding program - it appears that the flavor and appearance may be mutually exclusive.
I grow many different varieties of heirloom tomatoes; my Hillbilly Potato Leaf vines often grow at least 8 feet and will be two inches in diameter. They destroy every tomato cage I've tried so now I use a heavy cage reinforced with a t-post driven beside it and wired to it for extra support. I hate dealing with the vines but the tomatoes are huge and taste wonderful.
We have about 20 hives as well but keep them purely as a hobby. They help us with our garden and fruit trees, as well as providing enough honey each year for us, our extended family, and close friends. We do not manage them for multiple extractions a year or other high production goals. The time and work is certainly not for the uninterested but neither is it a killer. I genuinely enjoy working with them and I love the honey we get.
Your notion might please Adam Smith but your global economy and efficiency at all costs ignores the real impacts to each and every locality. I don't find it particularly helpful to a take a self-sufficient local culture, turn them into a monoculture doing whatever one thing that the globalists find they can do the best/cheapest, and make them dependent on people on the other side of the world for something they did themselves a generation ago. There's more to life than maximizing your economic output, particularly when most of the benefit accrues to others and you've mortgaged your future to do it.
Just be careful that you don't heat it too much. Warm it like good BBQ - slow and low. Also, you'll often end up with some foam on top when you are finished. This stuff is like marshmallow cream, expect it is pure honey. I can't explain just how good it is.
We keep about 20 hives of bees and I grow buckwheat on a portion of my garden each year specifically for the bees. That honey is darker and more flavorful than any I've ever encountered elsewhere.
The local apiary group hosts a honey tasting event each year; the range of colors and flavors in the local area is amazing.
The fact that honey doesn't spoil does not imply that the flavor is maintained. Of course, independent of the freshness itself, local honey usually is made from an assortment of flowers that impart their own unique flavors, unlike the bland clover and corn syrup commercial stuff.
There were several slightly different versions of this found during the deliberations. The version approved by the states is actually much clearer than the version approved by Congress.
I saw a few articles last month speculating that the season would be a bad one because we were seeing a higher than normal rate of infection early in the season. I did not see any that made your follow up claim that it was caused by insufficient vaccination levels. In fact, the CDC reported about a month ago that this year's vaccination rates were similar to last year's. Would you mind sharing some support for your well understood reason?
Unfortunately, you (and those who modded you up) seem to have no understanding of the flu vaccine. Your numbers are complete bunk. Unlike most "traditional" vaccines where the target is pretty well understood, the flu vaccine is a crap shoot every single year. If 100% of the population was vaccinated, your risk of getting the flu that year may be the same as another year when no one was vaccinated, because those making the vaccines very well may have guessed wrong on the strains that would be prevalent in that year.
The national news carried reports up until a few weeks ago that this year's vaccine was a great match for the strains circulating in the wild (for example). With flu rates coming in at well-above average, this story suddenly went away. If the vaccine was such a good match when we were urging everyone to get a shot, why it is suddenly so ineffective? (And, yes, that is an actual question, not a smart-ass rhetorical one.)
Actual evidence for the effectiveness of the flu vaccine is non-existent. Do yourself a favor and read some of the recent reports about this from reputable sources. For example, the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy released a report just a few months ago indicating that influenza vaccinations provide only modest protection for healthy young and middle-age adults and virtually no protection to those 65 and older. They concluded that US federal vaccination recommendations are based on inadequate evidence and poorly executed studies. You can get a PDF of the report here. The Center's director is not an "anti-vaxxer" but an experienced expert and government insider. He still recommends the vaccine in general because it is quite safe even if the paybacks are greatly overstated.
You might also want to review some of the Cochrane Collaboration's reports. In the past few years, they have found there is no evidence that vaccinating health care workers had any effect on influenza or pneumonia deaths in the elderly or that vaccinating the elderly provides any benefits to them, They also found that the flu vaccine has no impact on the number of people hospitalized, transmission rates in the population, or associated health complications. It does appear that in a year when the vaccine and virus mix actually match up well, healthy adults under 65 will see milder/fewer symptoms and gain an average of half a workday.
I do not get the flu vaccine. I also rarely get the flu (perhaps twice in the past decade). My spouse usually gets the vaccine for herself and our children. In my personal observations during the past decade, there is no discernible pattern to our infection rates from year to year, vaccination or not - sometimes our house sees a flu or two despite vaccinations and sometimes we see none despite no vaccinations. I'm not suggesting that the flu vaccine is dangerous or completely ineffective, but it seems obvious that the government and drug companies have vastly oversold it.
I thought you didn't get karma points just for being funny? That's why you see some hilarious posts modded as "informative" or something instead.
Which grants you Karma for being funny, thereby proving the GP correct.
The federal regs state that "a combustible gas in a distribution line must contain a natural odorant or be odorized”, which means that gathering lines from wells and transmission lines are exempt from odorization. Many companies have classified their farm taps as transportation or gathering systems to avoid the requirement to add odorant. However, PHMSA has made clear recently that they consider farm taps to be distribution systems except in a few limited circumstances. Unfortunately, there aren't many options for economically adding mercaptan to an individual tap. Responsibility for this isn't always clear either because some jurisdictions leave the meter with the pipeline owner while others make the incumbent local distribution company provide the meter and support the customer.
The Witcher 2 was originally released in May of 2011, not this past year when GOG finally started selling the game.
The game was available on GOG from release day. Why do you claim otherwise?
So, of course the most pirated version of the game would be one of the DRM variants, since the DRM version was available for a longer period and typically more in demand closer to the original release date.
Since the DRM-free version was available from the beginning, your argument is invalid.
But no mention of either date (original release of the game) or GOG's release are mentioned in the article
They are the same - May 17, 2011.
Anyway, sorry for interrupting the anti-DRM circle jerk with facts and logic.
Don't you have a bridge to go hide under?
I stopped using Newegg altogether after last year's Black Friday purchase. My laptop arrived DOA (and later reviews indicated that this was an issue with most of the units). The initial RMA request process was simple but it quickly went downhill. They received my laptop then days later claimed they didn't and told me I'd need to file a claim with the shipper. During the next two months I spoke to various levels of customer service, traded emails with them, and used their online chat option. Across the board, they were unhelpful and often dishonest about the process and my options. They refused to cooperate with the shipper in processing my claim but lied and told me that the shipper wasn't contacting them. They agreed to send me pictures of the damaged box but wouldn't follow through. I eventually had to file a claim with my credit card company to get my money refunded. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most unpleasant experiences ever dealing with a retailer of any sort.
In my state, the gas distribution companies are allowed a set percentage of lost and unaccounted for gas (gas the company buys but doesn't sell to customer and no longer has). As long as the company stays within that acceptable range, they have little reason to care about further reductions since that offset is built into their rate. However, being above that rate means they blowing money out holes in the pipes.
In rural areas, customers are often served by farm taps on well gathering lines or transmission lines. The gathering lines are usually odorized but transmission lines can be a real problem. Transmission companies are not required to add odorant to their lines. The local distribution company has nothing but a regulator and meter sitting on the transmission line. Many of these taps are simply out of compliance and have no smell.
I agree with you. And the answer is because it much harder. Race is easy, but a poor metric to use.
This only makes sense if the scoring thresholds are set per school, not per race. The kids that go to the same school and live in the same neighborhood receive about the same education, so you should aim at improving that by increasing their school's scoring goal by a set % each year.
Now you're using geography as a proxy, which I would wager is even worse at tracking the underlying issues. Sure, poorer areas (inner cities or extremely rural counties) generally will score lower across the board but many smaller towns and larger school districts cut across multiple socio-economic layers. The high school just down the road is considered one of the best in the state and serves most of the city's well-to-do neighborhoods, but it also includes some pretty poor areas. Are we happy that the school scores above average even if distinct groups within that population consistently do poorly?
but pre-setting goals simply based on race is the very definition of racism
I would agree if the state said "Since blacks aren't as smart as whites, we shouldn't require them to do as well on these tests." However, they are using empirical data to demonstrate that, when grouped by their chosen racial divides, Asians score quite well compared to the rest and that whites are slightly above the remaining categories. Their goal is to get everyone to the same level but they suggest it is unreasonable to expect a group currently scoring at 48% to suddenly reach the 82% score of another group. This does not imply an inability for any group to score as high as any other group. But it does recognize that everyone isn't starting from the same place so some may take longer to get there.
Don't try and excuse it. Admit it, and find a better mechanism.
My post was really too long for you to read? Let me quote the last paragraph for you again:
The problem I have is that race is being used as a proxy for what is most likely a set of complex socio-economic factors. Bringing in more wealthy Hispanics will most assuredly raise that population's test scores without the state doing anything differently. But cultural and social indicators are more difficult to track than a few big racial categories, so they've picked an easy but weak measurement tool.
The MUD that I played for years in college had a system where you could "re-mort" and level again. You had to be at max level and complete a series of fairly difficult fights and challenges. If you succeeded, your character returned to level 1. You essentially rerolled at that point and started from scratch, except with a new ability available only to those who remorted. You could do this multiple times, with a new unique spell or ability each time.
This MUD also had death traps that would claim all of your gear and anything in your bags, as well as perm death if your experience points dipped into the negatives. As interesting as some may find these features, they would not be popular in WoW, especially at this point. As others have pointed out, a good portion of WoW's subscription base is driven by lock-in these days. Just like my buddy feels stuck with his iPhone because all his stuff is in iTunes, it is hard to walk away from a dozen well-geared characters and several years of time invested to start over elsewhere. If those characters aged and died, it would ease the movement to other games, which of course Blizzard doesn't want.
No, and if you bothered to read past the intentionally flamebait summary, you would see that isn't what they're doing.
The NCLB act requires states to meet benchmarks on student standardized testing and to demonstrate progress in areas where they are deficient. Virginia's proposal actually makes sense, for the most part. They have identified that their scores can be segregated into cohorts that are easy to track. Rather than expect the entire population to meet overall improvement levels each year, they want to raise up each group at rate realistic for them. If a category of students are consistently scoring at 50%, a second group at 75%, and a third group at 85%, they are saying it makes more sense to expect each group to demonstrate progress instead of just asking the entire population to hit, for example, 80%.
This change has no impact on the expectations of individual students. The new pass rates are for how they track their progress as a state. Virginia wants to say that if they can show that group 1 improved from a 50% to 62% in three years, they have succeeded with them even if the state didn't hit a global target.
The problem I have is that race is being used as a proxy for what is most likely a set of complex socio-economic factors. Bringing in more wealthy Hispanics will most assuredly raise that population's test scores without the state doing anything differently. But cultural and social indicators are more difficult to track than a few big racial categories, so they've picked an easy but weak measurement tool.
Can I refer you back to my earlier comment?
You're likely correct. I wasn't commenting about this specific case but the OP's twisted logic.
I am not questioning that any right may have reasonable limitations. I'm not even commenting on the appropriateness of this specific case.
At this point I'm leaning away from you trolling, which leaves the other option. Since it seems obvious that logic will not work with you, I'll make it simple.
If a court, cop, or any other representative of the government can, without limit, compel the identity of a speaker who wishes to be anonymous and, up to this point, is completely anonymous to the government, then there is no right to anonymous speech. Your inability to grasp this doesn't change the fact.
So your argument is that as long as there remain theoretical means to protect your anonymity via technology, nothing the government does should be construed as stepping upon the right to anonymous speech?
Within reason.
Are you saying it is a problem if the ISP was required by law to keep the data and then the government asked for it, but would not be a problem if the ISP kept it for their own reasons and the government asked for it?
Yes, that is what I'm saying. The government has a legitimate interest to uncover the author, and is using their judicial power to do so.
Then you truly do not believe in the right to anonymous speech. If there are no limits on the government's desire to unmask anonymous speakers, the right to anonymous speech does not exist. Period.
Your examples about investigating a crime speak to limits on the right of anonymous speech, whether the right should be absolute or are their reasonable limits. That, however, is outside our discussion of whether or not the right exists at all.
I don't agree. This poster wasn't required to identify themselves, and that means a lot. They could have used a proxy, or used an open Wi-Fi spot.
So your argument is that as long as there remain theoretical means to protect your anonymity via technology, nothing the government does should be construed as stepping upon the right to anonymous speech? If I use Tor but the local node was ran by the NSA and they reveal my identity, there is no problem because I should have selected an anonymous proxy in Bulgaria? I suppose the freedom of religion isn't abridged if the government shuts down every church in the nation, since worshippers could meet in secret in someone's basement?
If ISPs and websites were actually required to log the information you say, then that would be an issue. But that's not the case now. Hopefully it remains that way.
I don't follow your logic here. Are you saying it is a problem if the ISP was required by law to keep the data and then the government asked for it, but would not be a problem if the ISP kept it for their own reasons and the government asked for it?