But protecting it does. That's why the constitution is rather longer than the declaration of independence.
Now you are correct that "being allowed to take somebody else's freedom away" is a freedom, so is being allowed to punch people in the nose. In both cases society is more free over-all if each individual is less free by removing freedoms from individuals that would reduce the freedoms of others.
I was the lead developer of the Kongoni Distribution, and the FSF requested I actually mirror the upstream slackware source tree as part of my repository so that the sources for the binaries I distributed unmodified would be available with them. I had already been providing source packages for every package that was custom-built or modified, but they specifically requested I also provide the original sources for the unmodified binaries (as opposed to just linking back to slackware's repo as I had previously done).
Yes, it is indeed a critical part of the unix philosophy. Generally known as the rule of optimization which The Art of Unix Programming expresses as: "Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it"
Well if you deem Oscar Wilde to be poorly educated that says more about your standards of education than it does about the people you are judging, since he used that second meaning multiple times in his writing and is generally considered one of most skilled masters of the English language to have ever lived.
It's like saying that "basing the theory of your CPU on the underlying principles of the Turing machine marks you as a badly trained engineer".
Well, of course I will take the utterly unsubstantiated opinion of a random person on the internet over the shared conclusion of three distinct teams of lexicographers at three separate dictionaries including the one published by the world's most prestigious university and held as the canonical record of the English language in determining which meanings of a word is "wrong". That wouldn't be stupid of me at all.
Well thats also debateable. Out of dozens of homo species only 2 survived the last ice age. And only one survived to the present day (almost certainly unless one of those scientiffic yeti expeditions actually find something). The other ice age survivor was confined to one tiny tropical island (and an example if island dwarfism). They survived the ice age by not experiencing it. Thats evolution right there. New DNA evidence proves that almost 20% of the human genome is neanderthal (though any given person averages only 2% neanderthal dna - we just have different 2%s). That is evolution too. Inside our dna, broken into pieces so it cant infect us is the complete dna for an extinct virus. Once it must have been a great plague because it is almost perfectly invisible to the immune system. We hijacked that ability and now depend on it to survive. Fetusses hide their foreign dna from moms immune system with the leftovers of an ancient plague. We are impressively evolved. Of course a cockroach and an amoeba is exactly as evolved as we are but so is every non extinct living organism. Until we find something older than earth that is not going to be something that varies.
But you are also assuming that our understanding of those laws is absolute and final.
You don't think a race whose technology was at the building-a-Dyson-sphere level would have science far beyond ours ?
That assumption may hold true if, tomorrow, we found a theory of everything which was, in fact, the absolute truth (though of course, we would then spend forever looking for the next leap forward so even if we found it we would never know it - after all it took 2000 years to move beyond 4 elements and almost 500 to move beyond Newton). But the fact is, even if we came up with a theory of everything tomorrow, it almost certainly would *not* be the very last word in physics (and may well lead to some modifications to the laws of thermodynamics). As it stands thermodynamics is just a model, a very simplified model (in which molecules are modeled as hard perfect spheres). It's extraordinarily useful as such but it would be incredibly surprising if that simplification did *not* mean there are things it doesn't account for which in extreme conditions would change the outcome. That "coarse-graining" effect is one likely explanation for why the universe is clumpy and seems to have gotten more clumpy over time (the exact opposite of what the entropy law predicts - it's Hawking's preferred explanation, and Roger Penrose made much the same argument in the Emperor's new Mind.).
You never even considered that by the time building a dyson sphere is possible, we may have somewhat more fine-grained laws of thermodynamics ? That we may be able to advantage of what we've since learned ?
Now, this is not a scientific post - there is no way for us to scientifically test of this idea (since we have no concept of what the idea would look like - we don't yet have anything remotely resembling a viable alternative to or improvement upon thermodynamics) - but it is utterly unscientific to assume there isn't one. I promise you there is.
Except of course we don't actually have a confirmed way to detect gravitational waves yet. Now there are hopeful rumbles that we may have a confirmation published in the near future but it could just as easily be a "sorry, we failed" at this stage, the scientists are being very hush hush about the data while they are busy checking it.
> A thousand years is not enough for evolution to make much of a dent
Cultures evolve much, much faster than human bodies do - and even they are several orders of magnitude slower than the rate of evolution of a neural network - like the ones we get born with between our ears. Also - you massively underestimate just how different our world really is compared to the one from a thousand years ago.
For starters, a thousand years ago you would probably be dead - seeing as child mortality rates were so much higher, and even if you survived childhood, you would probably die young. The current population of earth could literally not have existed a thousand years ago - the vast majority would have been wiped out by a mass famine, the farming techniques and technologies needed to feed 7 billion people simply did not exist, hell we couldn't have fed 2 billion back then.
Considering that even if we could launch nukes at light-speed (Which we can't - nothing remotely close) they wouldn't get there for a millenium and a half - it's already too late.
Whatever it is we're witnessing now, actually happened around 600AD - when we were busy trying to invent a better horse-collar.
That would be you. According to the dictionary the word "literally" has two meanings - and you only know the first one.
Webster's dictionary and the OED both include the second one - which is correct here. Even dictionary.com lists it as option 4 - with a note that this can be confusing since this meaning is very nearly the opposite of the first meaning, but this meaning has been common throughout the English speaking world since at least the early 19th century. In dictionary.com it is listed as: "in effect; in substance; very nearly; virtually:"
Webster's lists the second meaning as: " in effect : virtually will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice" And gives the note that this is not actually an opposite of meaning one, nor is it a misuse - it's a perfectly valid use of the word for hyperbole or emphasis.
I'd have added the OED as well but their website is unusable and I haven't got the patience to copy and paste dead-treeware.
Either way - the point is made, if you think there is something wrong with how "literally" was used in that sentence, then it is literally you who don't know what "literally" means.
>Yes. Surrender to government micromanagement of everything. Otherwise the corporate bogeyman will get you. The government boogeyman is less scary. At least, when the corporations haven't actually *bought* the government - in which case it's the same boogeyman. Face it, the worst things governments ever do - are done because corporate donors demanded them. Just ask the people of Flint Michigan about their water.
>Can we agree that there's an important role for regulation Yep. Everybody seems to have skipped over the huge part of this plan which is to remove current regulatory barriers (because the laws of the road were designed 100 years before this was a conceivable possibility) and ensuring we get the right regulations in their stead ?
> and also agree that there's no incentive for GM and Google to kill their customers Nope. Incentives to hurt customers arise all the time. Just ask the tobacco industry. On a businessman's ledger not hurting customers is a cost, potential customers lost when you hurt some is also a cost - and any time the former cost is larger than the latter there is a massive profit incentive to hurt them. Human beings wouldn't usually act that way, but corporations readily do. Not least because hardly ever does the punishments a human being would get for it get meted out in equal measure to corporations who do it. For your belief to hold value - that would need to be the law. The CEO is personally responsible for everything the company does - if the company commits a crime he is charged like you and I would be. If the company dumps toxins in the water, he gets the same mass-murderer charges we would get for poisoning a well. If he names other executives who knew about it and let it happen (or ordered it) he is STILL guilty, but can get a reduced sentence while we charge them as accessories. I promise you, we would only have one or two cases where those CEOs end up serving 50 consecutive life sentences (and pray they are not in a death-sentence state - the Texas courts will suddenly be a *lot* less popular with corporations). That's all it would take for the rest to very quickly clean up their act and make damn sure they *do* know what their company does and stops anything that is a danger to the public - because mister CEO personally will be facing the chair if it's found out.
As long as that is now the world we live in - your claim is unsupportable and you only have to read the news regularly to know it's provably false. We can barely go a week without yet another corporate scandal on the frontpages and every single time a bunch of innocent people end up dead.
Except of course that the scenario you claim was an unrealized hope has happened numerous times. There is an entire stable of free programs and libraries which were GPL'd only because it would be too much effort to reimpliment the GNU readline library.
That library being GPL'd rather than LGPL'd has by itself led to hundreds of other projects also being GPLd and that's just one library.
On the other hand - the C-library would not have such an effect, a C-library must implement a well known common set of functions and anybody could write one with some patience, and it's all fairly basic stuff - to GPL the GNU C-library would have only led to dozens of competing, incompatible non-free c-libraries having to co-exist to run various programs - so glibc is LGPLd instead. And as a result there are really only two c-libraries in the GNU/Linux world even today - glibc which almost every distro runs and mulc which is extremely minimalistic and deliberately built ultra-tiny for very small distros.
Also note how nobody has seriously ported or replaced the GNU utlities with non-gpl'd versions. It would not be very hard to port the BSD utils to all run on Linux and make a distro out of it (quite a lot of BSD utils are in Linux already where GPLd ones weren't available), yet nobody has bothered to do that. There are only really two core-utils sets that work with the Linux kernel - the GNU utilities and busybox (again - targeted at ultra-tiny use-cases like embedded systems) and busybox is also GPL'd. Busybox being GPL'd has been a massive boon to the community. More than any other project busybox has challenged companies who violated the GPL and the fact that it exists, works fantastically and is GPLd has directly led to hundreds of devices having their firmware source available that otherwise would not be - mostly consumer devices like routers. There are any number of consumer router replacement-software projects adding features like advanced firewalling, all possible because the busybox and linux licenses forced the router-makers to make their changes GPLd which allowed other developers to use those to create custom firmware products.
There is some thought that goes into this stuff you know...
Exactly ! Before netflix over VPN became viable here, I pirated tons of shows - not because I have a problem with paying (I actually bought the entire X-files and House series on DVD in the past) but because the local TV stations were always at least one and more commonly 3 years behind - and I wanted to see the things my friends around the world were discussing and see them while the real-world-events being referenced were still relevant. I also wanted to see some shows which were not released here at all because somebody decided the market would be too small.
Netflix and a VPN solves that problem (a local netflix account would not) so why would I go back to paying for a TV subscription I would hardly use on a schedule I don't control ? And why would I get a local subscription that doesn't have the shows I want ?
Well, netflix is now available in my country - but I am still using a VPN service for the American version - I simply am not willing to pay the fee for a catalog less than a quarter as big as the one I get now - and critically, one that misses almost every single show I actually watch one it. Netflix internationally seem to actively avoid including shows already licensed to local television networks - despite the fact that the decision to stream can primarily be driven by the advantages streaming has over centrally scheduled television (like deciding for yourself how many episodes of what you want to watch when). I can understand the legal and business reasons for that, but for those of us technically adept enough to get around these restrictions - I feel absolutely no guilt whatsoever. I do, after all, pay for the service.
That's what the R50 is for - so there is something to satisfy them, but like I said - they mostly take phones now. Everyone has one, they are worth hundreds or even thousands of rands on the second hand market, they are small and easy to carry - perfect loot for a mugger.
Which country do you live in ? I'm from South Africa and we are definitely among the worst countries in terms of violent crime (though it is a *lot* better now than it was a few years ago - a change I attribute primarily to people no longer carrying much cash).
The activity it seeks to prevent is indisputably despicable. The potential negative outcome is on people liveblogging events of genuine public interest and being prevented simply because somebody was injured (i.e. you would not be able to post say a video clip of police brutality for several hours). Then there is the fact that even a forced delay is censorship (mitigated by being very, very temporary but that is only a mitigation at best).
I tend to think it would be much better to find a solution to this problem which is not legislative in nature... but I'm stumped as to what that might be ?
So now you are, again, judging an entire group of people by the actions of a few. I will apply your logic and assume every American is exactly like those vanilla ISIS idiots in Oregon who were too dumb to take food along for their occupation and ready to shoot innocent people just for coincidentally having a job with the government.
I'm anti-religion, period. I despise all religion as a concept - but it's the magical thinking I despise, I have nothing but pity for the victims of religion - whatever that religion may be. I also know that your conclusions about Muslims are mathematically impossible. I know that there are about a million Muslims fighting ISIS for every Christian. 8 Muslim countries for every Christian one are fighting them. I know that if 1.6 billion people were like the few nutjobs you think are representative then we would all be dead. Oh and I know that most terrorists aren't Muslim to begin with - not by a long shot. In fact, Islam is only number 3 on a count of belief systems by terrorists within it.
I've travelled a lot but not to either Britain or Canada and in the places I've been the metric system was used quite exclusively and it certainly is here where I live in Africa (most of the countries where I've lived are also on this continent). I wouldn't even know what a "mile" or a "pound" was if not for American television because I never see it here. The only business here that sells anything at all weighted in pounds is McDonalds with their quarter-pounder (which sounds big but is miniscule in a country where the average burger 500grams). My car gives speed in km/h, every tape-measure and ruler in the country is marked in centimeters. Everything on every store shelf is marked in grams and kilograms. We don't even learn imperial units in school - they literally aren't taught at all.
As adults the few of us who care enough to try and translate American measurements for understanding movies that tiny bit better learn that a pound is about half a kilogram and a mile is just over 1 and a half kilometers. I've never met anybody who actually knew the exact formulas for conversion. If you did need an exact conversion you would get google to tell you.
The only use of an imperial unit I ever encounter is the occasional person describing a place as being "miles and miles" away - which is really just a hyperbolic way of saying "far" and is used only because "kilometers and kilometers" would be too long.
Just because I have seen a Michael Moore film does not suggest it is all I know about American culture. I have actually lived and worked in the USA. I just chose not to stay.
The 13th would only be "irrelevant" if slave labour was no longer a fact of life. Entire US industries are still so utterly dependent on it that even after being revealed to the public they have done nothing to remove it from their supply chains. The chocolate industry is a prime offender. Every major chocolate company is guilty. And were not talking gray areas like child labour sweatshops. We are talking farms literally worked by abducted, unpaid child slaves. Hershey must be spinning in his grave. If anything the 13th should be expanded. This will only end if these imports are made illegal and that law is actually enforced to destroy the market. Ban importing any goods into the USA made by slaves. Then we can talk. Hell the indentured servitude of immigrants is rife in America itself.
Compared to sane countries there arent. This is a country where banks give you a free gun of you open an account and blind people get gun licenses.
Sane progun countries make owning one contingent on proof of responsibilty and profiency, not just background. The same way we license anything else that would otherwise constitute excessive risk on other citicens who did not consent to that risk.
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> but still low enough that air quality is OK
Define OK... because it most certainly isn't with what the scientists whose recommendations the regulations were based on defined it as.
>Granting freedom doesn't require many words
But protecting it does.
That's why the constitution is rather longer than the declaration of independence.
Now you are correct that "being allowed to take somebody else's freedom away" is a freedom, so is being allowed to punch people in the nose. In both cases society is more free over-all if each individual is less free by removing freedoms from individuals that would reduce the freedoms of others.
I was the lead developer of the Kongoni Distribution, and the FSF requested I actually mirror the upstream slackware source tree as part of my repository so that the sources for the binaries I distributed unmodified would be available with them. I had already been providing source packages for every package that was custom-built or modified, but they specifically requested I also provide the original sources for the unmodified binaries (as opposed to just linking back to slackware's repo as I had previously done).
Yes, it is indeed a critical part of the unix philosophy.
Generally known as the rule of optimization which The Art of Unix Programming expresses as:
"Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it"
http://catb.org/esr/writings/t...
Notice how the rule of optimization is expressed by people like Kernighan and Knuth - the kind of people who helped create the unix philosophy ?
Well if you deem Oscar Wilde to be poorly educated that says more about your standards of education than it does about the people you are judging, since he used that second meaning multiple times in his writing and is generally considered one of most skilled masters of the English language to have ever lived.
It's like saying that "basing the theory of your CPU on the underlying principles of the Turing machine marks you as a badly trained engineer".
Well, of course I will take the utterly unsubstantiated opinion of a random person on the internet over the shared conclusion of three distinct teams of lexicographers at three separate dictionaries including the one published by the world's most prestigious university and held as the canonical record of the English language in determining which meanings of a word is "wrong". That wouldn't be stupid of me at all.
Well thats also debateable. Out of dozens of homo species only 2 survived the last ice age. And only one survived to the present day (almost certainly unless one of those scientiffic yeti expeditions actually find something). The other ice age survivor was confined to one tiny tropical island (and an example if island dwarfism). They survived the ice age by not experiencing it.
Thats evolution right there.
New DNA evidence proves that almost 20% of the human genome is neanderthal (though any given person averages only 2% neanderthal dna - we just have different 2%s). That is evolution too.
Inside our dna, broken into pieces so it cant infect us is the complete dna for an extinct virus. Once it must have been a great plague because it is almost perfectly invisible to the immune system. We hijacked that ability and now depend on it to survive. Fetusses hide their foreign dna from moms immune system with the leftovers of an ancient plague.
We are impressively evolved. Of course a cockroach and an amoeba is exactly as evolved as we are but so is every non extinct living organism. Until we find something older than earth that is not going to be something that varies.
But you are also assuming that our understanding of those laws is absolute and final.
You don't think a race whose technology was at the building-a-Dyson-sphere level would have science far beyond ours ?
That assumption may hold true if, tomorrow, we found a theory of everything which was, in fact, the absolute truth (though of course, we would then spend forever looking for the next leap forward so even if we found it we would never know it - after all it took 2000 years to move beyond 4 elements and almost 500 to move beyond Newton).
But the fact is, even if we came up with a theory of everything tomorrow, it almost certainly would *not* be the very last word in physics (and may well lead to some modifications to the laws of thermodynamics).
As it stands thermodynamics is just a model, a very simplified model (in which molecules are modeled as hard perfect spheres). It's extraordinarily useful as such but it would be incredibly surprising if that simplification did *not* mean there are things it doesn't account for which in extreme conditions would change the outcome.
That "coarse-graining" effect is one likely explanation for why the universe is clumpy and seems to have gotten more clumpy over time (the exact opposite of what the entropy law predicts - it's Hawking's preferred explanation, and Roger Penrose made much the same argument in the Emperor's new Mind.).
You never even considered that by the time building a dyson sphere is possible, we may have somewhat more fine-grained laws of thermodynamics ? That we may be able to advantage of what we've since learned ?
Now, this is not a scientific post - there is no way for us to scientifically test of this idea (since we have no concept of what the idea would look like - we don't yet have anything remotely resembling a viable alternative to or improvement upon thermodynamics) - but it is utterly unscientific to assume there isn't one. I promise you there is.
Except of course we don't actually have a confirmed way to detect gravitational waves yet. Now there are hopeful rumbles that we may have a confirmation published in the near future but it could just as easily be a "sorry, we failed" at this stage, the scientists are being very hush hush about the data while they are busy checking it.
> A thousand years is not enough for evolution to make much of a dent
Cultures evolve much, much faster than human bodies do - and even they are several orders of magnitude slower than the rate of evolution of a neural network - like the ones we get born with between our ears.
Also - you massively underestimate just how different our world really is compared to the one from a thousand years ago.
For starters, a thousand years ago you would probably be dead - seeing as child mortality rates were so much higher, and even if you survived childhood, you would probably die young.
The current population of earth could literally not have existed a thousand years ago - the vast majority would have been wiped out by a mass famine, the farming techniques and technologies needed to feed 7 billion people simply did not exist, hell we couldn't have fed 2 billion back then.
Considering that even if we could launch nukes at light-speed (Which we can't - nothing remotely close) they wouldn't get there for a millenium and a half - it's already too late.
Whatever it is we're witnessing now, actually happened around 600AD - when we were busy trying to invent a better horse-collar.
That would be you.
According to the dictionary the word "literally" has two meanings - and you only know the first one.
Webster's dictionary and the OED both include the second one - which is correct here. Even dictionary.com lists it as option 4 - with a note that this can be confusing since this meaning is very nearly the opposite of the first meaning, but this meaning has been common throughout the English speaking world since at least the early 19th century.
In dictionary.com it is listed as:
"in effect; in substance; very nearly; virtually:"
Webster's lists the second meaning as:
" in effect : virtually will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice"
And gives the note that this is not actually an opposite of meaning one, nor is it a misuse - it's a perfectly valid use of the word for hyperbole or emphasis.
I'd have added the OED as well but their website is unusable and I haven't got the patience to copy and paste dead-treeware.
Either way - the point is made, if you think there is something wrong with how "literally" was used in that sentence, then it is literally you who don't know what "literally" means.
>Yes. Surrender to government micromanagement of everything. Otherwise the corporate bogeyman will get you.
The government boogeyman is less scary. At least, when the corporations haven't actually *bought* the government - in which case it's the same boogeyman. Face it, the worst things governments ever do - are done because corporate donors demanded them. Just ask the people of Flint Michigan about their water.
>Can we agree that there's an important role for regulation
Yep. Everybody seems to have skipped over the huge part of this plan which is to remove current regulatory barriers (because the laws of the road were designed 100 years before this was a conceivable possibility) and ensuring we get the right regulations in their stead ?
> and also agree that there's no incentive for GM and Google to kill their customers
Nope. Incentives to hurt customers arise all the time. Just ask the tobacco industry. On a businessman's ledger not hurting customers is a cost, potential customers lost when you hurt some is also a cost - and any time the former cost is larger than the latter there is a massive profit incentive to hurt them. Human beings wouldn't usually act that way, but corporations readily do. Not least because hardly ever does the punishments a human being would get for it get meted out in equal measure to corporations who do it.
For your belief to hold value - that would need to be the law. The CEO is personally responsible for everything the company does - if the company commits a crime he is charged like you and I would be. If the company dumps toxins in the water, he gets the same mass-murderer charges we would get for poisoning a well. If he names other executives who knew about it and let it happen (or ordered it) he is STILL guilty, but can get a reduced sentence while we charge them as accessories.
I promise you, we would only have one or two cases where those CEOs end up serving 50 consecutive life sentences (and pray they are not in a death-sentence state - the Texas courts will suddenly be a *lot* less popular with corporations). That's all it would take for the rest to very quickly clean up their act and make damn sure they *do* know what their company does and stops anything that is a danger to the public - because mister CEO personally will be facing the chair if it's found out.
As long as that is now the world we live in - your claim is unsupportable and you only have to read the news regularly to know it's provably false. We can barely go a week without yet another corporate scandal on the frontpages and every single time a bunch of innocent people end up dead.
Except of course that the scenario you claim was an unrealized hope has happened numerous times.
There is an entire stable of free programs and libraries which were GPL'd only because it would be too much effort to reimpliment the GNU readline library.
That library being GPL'd rather than LGPL'd has by itself led to hundreds of other projects also being GPLd and that's just one library.
On the other hand - the C-library would not have such an effect, a C-library must implement a well known common set of functions and anybody could write one with some patience, and it's all fairly basic stuff - to GPL the GNU C-library would have only led to dozens of competing, incompatible non-free c-libraries having to co-exist to run various programs - so glibc is LGPLd instead. And as a result there are really only two c-libraries in the GNU/Linux world even today - glibc which almost every distro runs and mulc which is extremely minimalistic and deliberately built ultra-tiny for very small distros.
Also note how nobody has seriously ported or replaced the GNU utlities with non-gpl'd versions. It would not be very hard to port the BSD utils to all run on Linux and make a distro out of it (quite a lot of BSD utils are in Linux already where GPLd ones weren't available), yet nobody has bothered to do that. There are only really two core-utils sets that work with the Linux kernel - the GNU utilities and busybox (again - targeted at ultra-tiny use-cases like embedded systems) and busybox is also GPL'd.
Busybox being GPL'd has been a massive boon to the community. More than any other project busybox has challenged companies who violated the GPL and the fact that it exists, works fantastically and is GPLd has directly led to hundreds of devices having their firmware source available that otherwise would not be - mostly consumer devices like routers. There are any number of consumer router replacement-software projects adding features like advanced firewalling, all possible because the busybox and linux licenses forced the router-makers to make their changes GPLd which allowed other developers to use those to create custom firmware products.
There is some thought that goes into this stuff you know...
Exactly !
Before netflix over VPN became viable here, I pirated tons of shows - not because I have a problem with paying (I actually bought the entire X-files and House series on DVD in the past) but because the local TV stations were always at least one and more commonly 3 years behind - and I wanted to see the things my friends around the world were discussing and see them while the real-world-events being referenced were still relevant.
I also wanted to see some shows which were not released here at all because somebody decided the market would be too small.
Netflix and a VPN solves that problem (a local netflix account would not) so why would I go back to paying for a TV subscription I would hardly use on a schedule I don't control ? And why would I get a local subscription that doesn't have the shows I want ?
Well, netflix is now available in my country - but I am still using a VPN service for the American version - I simply am not willing to pay the fee for a catalog less than a quarter as big as the one I get now - and critically, one that misses almost every single show I actually watch one it.
Netflix internationally seem to actively avoid including shows already licensed to local television networks - despite the fact that the decision to stream can primarily be driven by the advantages streaming has over centrally scheduled television (like deciding for yourself how many episodes of what you want to watch when).
I can understand the legal and business reasons for that, but for those of us technically adept enough to get around these restrictions - I feel absolutely no guilt whatsoever. I do, after all, pay for the service.
That's what the R50 is for - so there is something to satisfy them, but like I said - they mostly take phones now. Everyone has one, they are worth hundreds or even thousands of rands on the second hand market, they are small and easy to carry - perfect loot for a mugger.
Which country do you live in ? I'm from South Africa and we are definitely among the worst countries in terms of violent crime (though it is a *lot* better now than it was a few years ago - a change I attribute primarily to people no longer carrying much cash).
The activity it seeks to prevent is indisputably despicable. The potential negative outcome is on people liveblogging events of genuine public interest and being prevented simply because somebody was injured (i.e. you would not be able to post say a video clip of police brutality for several hours).
Then there is the fact that even a forced delay is censorship (mitigated by being very, very temporary but that is only a mitigation at best).
I tend to think it would be much better to find a solution to this problem which is not legislative in nature... but I'm stumped as to what that might be ?
So now you are, again, judging an entire group of people by the actions of a few.
I will apply your logic and assume every American is exactly like those vanilla ISIS idiots in Oregon who were too dumb to take food along for their occupation and ready to shoot innocent people just for coincidentally having a job with the government.
I'm anti-religion, period. I despise all religion as a concept - but it's the magical thinking I despise, I have nothing but pity for the victims of religion - whatever that religion may be. I also know that your conclusions about Muslims are mathematically impossible. I know that there are about a million Muslims fighting ISIS for every Christian. 8 Muslim countries for every Christian one are fighting them. I know that if 1.6 billion people were like the few nutjobs you think are representative then we would all be dead. Oh and I know that most terrorists aren't Muslim to begin with - not by a long shot. In fact, Islam is only number 3 on a count of belief systems by terrorists within it.
I've travelled a lot but not to either Britain or Canada and in the places I've been the metric system was used quite exclusively and it certainly is here where I live in Africa (most of the countries where I've lived are also on this continent). I wouldn't even know what a "mile" or a "pound" was if not for American television because I never see it here.
The only business here that sells anything at all weighted in pounds is McDonalds with their quarter-pounder (which sounds big but is miniscule in a country where the average burger 500grams). My car gives speed in km/h, every tape-measure and ruler in the country is marked in centimeters. Everything on every store shelf is marked in grams and kilograms. We don't even learn imperial units in school - they literally aren't taught at all.
As adults the few of us who care enough to try and translate American measurements for understanding movies that tiny bit better learn that a pound is about half a kilogram and a mile is just over 1 and a half kilometers. I've never met anybody who actually knew the exact formulas for conversion. If you did need an exact conversion you would get google to tell you.
The only use of an imperial unit I ever encounter is the occasional person describing a place as being "miles and miles" away - which is really just a hyperbolic way of saying "far" and is used only because "kilometers and kilometers" would be too long.
Thats not a bad assessment.
Just because I have seen a Michael Moore film does not suggest it is all I know about American culture. I have actually lived and worked in the USA. I just chose not to stay.
The 13th would only be "irrelevant" if slave labour was no longer a fact of life. Entire US industries are still so utterly dependent on it that even after being revealed to the public they have done nothing to remove it from their supply chains. The chocolate industry is a prime offender. Every major chocolate company is guilty. And were not talking gray areas like child labour sweatshops. We are talking farms literally worked by abducted, unpaid child slaves. Hershey must be spinning in his grave. If anything the 13th should be expanded. This will only end if these imports are made illegal and that law is actually enforced to destroy the market. Ban importing any goods into the USA made by slaves. Then we can talk. Hell the indentured servitude of immigrants is rife in America itself.
While I share your aversion to the military the point was that those militia nutjobs are far worse and lack even a theoretical redeeming quality.
Compared to sane countries there arent. This is a country where banks give you a free gun of you open an account and blind people get gun licenses.
Sane progun countries make owning one contingent on proof of responsibilty and profiency, not just background. The same way we license anything else that would otherwise constitute excessive risk on other citicens who did not consent to that risk.