You may want to try the also-mentioned Pixel instead. That one already has both those features you mention. It's not open source though, but shareware.
And again, you're assuming that I'm saying this when I most certainly am not. Nowhere in my post did I make a reference to the absolute number of terrorists.
This AC explains perfectly what I mean in his reply to your post.
Nor do I expect that our strategy of keeping troops in the middle east will work forever. You seem unable to make the distinction between short-term and long-term goals/effects. Our efforts in the middle east (as I understand them) are a temporary strategy to buy us time domestically (by focusing the enemy's attention on Iraq)
You're not saying that the US Gov't is using Iraqi people and their country simply as bait, I hope? And I indeed mainly focus on long term effects, although in the short term I also see little positive. I really fail to see how growing Al Qaeda from nothing to a powerful force in Iraq has made the US (or the rest of the world) any safer in the short term. That strategy is only creating new enemy and making the enemy stronger.
whilst we address the social factors which lead to terrorism. The theory is (and we can debate the legitimacy of this) that a democratic society in the center of the middle east will undermine Islamic extremism and provide a model for reform to neighboring countries.
People can't be tortured into democracy. Extolling the virtues of democracy and international cooperation and at the same time ignoring the UN (or at the very least creatively and pretty much unilaterally interpreting resolutions) don't work if you want to set an example. Bombing villages killing a lot of innocent people (like recently in Pakistan) and then condemning the same thing when done by suicide terrorists just looks hypocrite, especially if you live or had relatives in such villages.
This is not the way to create a stable democracy at all.
And the only way to make people swallow this, to make them support actions that may result in having their houses bombed, their country politically isolated etc, is if they feel that things are already extremely bad and will only get worse anyway.
The only way...? Don't you think that's a bit of a sweeping statement? What about an appeal to religion? What if your actions are being rewarded in the afterlife quite greatly? What if you're told that your actions are in support of your brothers and sisters or an effort to defeat the embodiment of evil? Couldn't these be other ways of garnering support that are independent of U.S. foreign policy?
I am an atheist, so my views are obviously skewed in this, but in these conflicts I see religion only as a tool being used to control and steer people (indeed by sometimes making it easier for themselves to justify and carry out their deeds), not something which inherently drives them into committing atrocities. If someone starts shouting on the street that I'm the devil incarnate (even if that lunatic is a priest) and that he can prove it with the Bible, I doubt anyone would even pay attention to him. On the contrary, if for some reason people would already want my skin, any excuse would be welcome.
There are deeper reasons than just religion and jealousy that make people do such things. And in case of suicide bombing, unless there's a suicide bombing gen which is somehow widespread among the people doing that, there have to be pretty big incentives. Afterlife or not, if you believe (or can be made to believe) that you can serve your family, your friends and society better by blowing yourself up than by staying with them and caring for them, the situation has to be pretty fucked up (yes, I assume that the suicide bombers are not blowing themselves up just to get at the supposed virgins that are awaiting them).
You seem to be of this notion that all the problems in the world are
That's based on the false premise that the number of terrorists is somehow predetermined and fixed, regardless of what you do (and that you therefore preferably keep them busy as far away from you as possible). That is not true.
No it's not. Nowhere in the author's statement did he indicate that he thought there were a fixed number of terrorists.
Presenting targets of opportunity to an enemy in the form of U.S. troops is actually a good strategy. It forces them to reveal themselves by attacking us where we are most prepared. This is aggressive, yes, but not an ill-founded, strategy.
Again, this assumes that
with this strategy for every "terrorist" you take out, you don't create two new ones to take his place, and you give the big guys at the top (like Osama) less instead of more power over the people's minds and hearts
There is no way (or at least less chance) they will attack again on American soil as long as there is "low hanging fruit" available shorter to home so to speak (I guess this is what you meant).
To me, both of those assumptions seem quite wrong.
Ahh.. but is based upon the false premise that terrorists are desperate, tormented souls. This isn't the case. Look at Osama Bin Laden.
I completely agree with you that the guys at the top are not desperate, tormented souls in general (although, I guess you could say that in a sense even Hitler was a desperate, tormented soul). Anyway, quite a few of those leaders may very well be fascist, power-hungry souls who are simply using and amplifying the insecurities and fears of others (mainly by using tools like religion and latent racism) in order to reach their goals.
He was extremely rich and grew up a privileged life, only to become the most notorious terrorist in the world. And he's not an exception to this. I suggest you read "Dying to Win." The author creates a database of every suicide terrorist incident since the mid 80s until the time that the book was written. The resulting conclusion is that our stereotypical views of terrorists and their motives are strikingly incorrect.
Whatever the case, such terrorist organisations can nevertheless not survive (at least not on a large scale) without support from "the people". You need large groups of people who feel that what these terrorists are doing is justified. Look at Al Qaeda, look at the IRA, look at the Tamil Tigers,... These organisations don't exist on thin air, and while weapon and drug trafficking may be their main sources of income, they also need logistical and moral support from tons and tons of people. These aren't Soldier-of-Fortune-type small, professional, organised independent groups. The people at the top may be, but they can't do much on their own.
And the only way to make people swallow this, to make them support actions that may result in having their houses bombed, their country politically isolated etc, is if they feel that things are already extremely bad and will only get worse anyway.
What the we in the West view as a last desperate attempt is actually seen as just another means of coercion to achieve victory by our enemies.
That was exactly the point of my original post. It only helps them rally more people.
Many suicide terrorists are educated and not actually personally affected by the conflict in which they participate. Given that is the case, how can you be so confident in your claims that the current administration is creating more terrorists or that "doing nothing" would alleviate the situation?
Because it would stop amplifying the popular support and the general feeling among large groups of people that these actions are somehow justified.
Fair enough, but don't be surprised if others look upon your views as whi
You can attempt to distract him so he's blowing things up on the other side of the world rather than in your neighborhood.
That's based on the false premise that the number of terrorists is somehow predetermined and fixed, regardless of what you do (and that you therefore preferably keep them busy as far away from you as possible). That is not true.
And one thing you can't do is do nothing. Maybe it works for you, but sitting around waiting for some terrorist to kill me or someone I love is not an option.
Doing "nothing" is better than doing things which as main consequence have that more people become so desperate that they are willing to blow themselves up. You do not solve the problem of terrorism by creating more torn apart families, torturing family members, locking up family members without due process, bombing villages because there might be some terrorist in a building etc.
Always remember that everyone that dies had family and friends. And every disturbance to the social cohesion and structures takes away "civilisation" so to speak (just look at some of the things which happended in New Orleans after Katrina to see what happens if our thin layer of civilisation disappears because people are completely disoriented and desperate when their social structures and networks are gone or disfigured).
Maybe in some way everyone is a potential terrorist, but it takes a whole lot of work before someone gets as far to be willing to blow himself up. People don't blow themselves up because they and their family are living a happy life and feel content and unthreatened. And also not because they are jealous, or merely annoyed, or even angry.
Somewhere something has to break, you have to become mentally unstable (some people are so from birth of course, but I like to think this is a small minority, usually termed psychopaths or sociopaths).
Capitulation to the demands of the terrorists are, really, leaving Saudi Arabia (I have no problem with that) but more importantly abandoning our ally, Israel. The latter is not acceptable. So saying we should try to remove the reason they're mad at us is not something we can consider--we can't turn our back on an ally just because a bunch of terrorists want us to. Even if you don't personally like Israel, for better or worse they are our ally--and we can't let bands of thugs dictate who we choose to be our allies.
The main criticism on the "war on terror" is that the way it's being waged it only creates more terrorists. That's independent of whether or not you stand by recognising Israel as an independent state (the UN recognised it, that's not some purely Western or US position).
The Israel-Palestina case is very important and delicate (and both sides have committed countless atrocities), but the solution to that problem is not the War on Terror, nor is stopping this War on Terror (at least in its current form) a capitulation to terrorists (at most it would a capitulation to rational decision making: it doesn't work, it makes things worse, so scrap it).
It almost seems like desperation carries it forward: we have no idea what else to do and we cannot do nothing, so lets just go on making things worse, because at least then we have the feeling we tried. That's a position of weakness, not of strength. Of course, there are also people who honestly believe the current approach is the right/best one, but you do not seem to be one of them.
So given that we can't do nothing and we can't really make them happy without letting them dictate our foreign policy and choose our allies for us, what can we do?
The least you can do is not do things which only make the terrorists stronger. The War on Terror as it is, is trying to put out a diesel fire with water. If you do not have a better approach than that, just letting it burn is a whole lot more effective.
When are they going to delist the many, many sites that seem to be created wholely for users looking for an obscure product, however, when you go to the page it is yet another "index" page full of advertisements, often without reference to the product that the user was looking for.
Probably as soon as you inform them about it. They did so at least shortly after I reported a bunch of spamvertising sites that came up if you searched for "De Sleghte" (common misspelling for a known second hand bookstore chain in Belgium and The Netherlands).
I used "parallel gcc's" as a shorthand for "gcc's running in parallel", or even more elaborate "single-threadded gcc processes running in parallel with each other, i.e. at the same time".
Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to spawn as many instances as you have cpus/cores. I figured that was clear from the context, but boy, was I wrong...
XCode by default spawns as many parallel gcc's as you have cpus/cores (unless you turn on distributed compiling, because then the main node has to do all preprocessing).
I don't remember the US vetoing the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights when it was signed. In fact, it was drawn up by a committee chaired by by Eleanor Roosevelt.
The G5 was a decent chip, IBM just didn't have a mobile chip to sell Apple and was too distracted by Xbox 2 and PS3 to care.
Can someone please finally tell me how this power equation works exactly? A dual core G5 consumes 18 watts at 1.6 GHz. Extrapolating based on quadratic increase with the frequency, that gives about 23 watts for 2.0 GHz (typical usage).
So, there's definitely the difference between typical for the G5 and maximum for Yonah. I do not know what the relation between the two is (i.e., whether it's possible to guestimate one based on the other). Then, there's possibly also the issues of support chipset.
But all in all, at first sight it does not seem to me that there's that big a power consumption gap between Yonah and the dual core G5.
I don't understand this at all (and I did look at IBM's site, they list power consumption for a 2 GHz 970 at around 50W). How is it that a G5 Powerbook was such a problem?
The only thing I can think is that there are no power conservation features on the chip, and/or the support chips take quite a bit of power.
The latest G5's have many power conservation features on the chip. The only thing I can think of, as mentioned earlier, are indeed possibly the support chips (doesn't Yonah have an on-die memory controller?). Or Steve may have just been fed up with the PPC partners for failing to deliver on their promises time and time again, and used fake excuses to the public...
At any rate, Core Duo laptops look to be good for 5.5 hours of moderate use...that's quite good for a single core system, let alone dual core.:-)
Where did you get that data? All I found was "probably around 3.5-4 hours", based on a comparison with an Acer that also uses this processor (the Travelmate 8100). Of course an Acer is incomparable to an Apple as far as design is concerned, but I don't know how much different power consumption will be.
And I really wonder why on earth Apple doesn't mention it on its website, after it has done so for all these years...
Damn, I missed that the Anandtech page was talking about total system power consumption. CNet mentions the cpu's power consumption: maximum between 25 and 49 watts. So it seems it's about the same as the G5's.
Also, the dual-core Yonah uses something like 1/4 to 1/2 the power of the single-core G5. Pretty nice!
According to Anandtech, a 2GHz Yonah consumes between 92 watts (idle) and 108 watts (fully loaded). That's about double of the original 130nm single core G5's and 4 times as much as the 90nm single core G5's.
A dual core G5 at 1.6GHz consumes 16 watts (typical usage). Given that power consumption goes up quadratically in relation to the frequency, this comes to about 23 watts for 2.0 GHz (typically, max consumption can be (much) higher). It seems to me rather that the G5 consumes 1/2 to 1/4 of Yonah, instead of the other way round.
Don't ask me why Steve kept saying the G5 requires so much power, I don't know... Maybe it's one of the G5's chipsets that requires so much power (I do notice that the U3 chipset gets a lot hotter than either of my first generation 18 GHz G5's -- but afaik that's an Apple and not an IBM design).
No, at best that demonstrated that each Yonah core is speed-competitive with the G5. Since the G5 has one core, and Yonah has two, that makes Yonah...twice as "fast". (Really only twice as fast on perfectly parallel code, but hey...)
Oh come on, like the G5 was twice as fast as a single core P4? It doesn't work like that in practice.
I'm looking forward to getting a Macbook Pro as soon as possible.
I'm definitely going to wait until the second or third generation and until someone can tell me the battery life, because for the first time Apple does not mention battery life on its tech specs page. This suggests to me that battery life has become worse, even though they use a higher capacity battery for the MacBook Pro.
Well, there are some weird things with Mac OS X boot times (possible linked to open firmware). My iBook G4 1.2GHz (with 768MB ram) also boots Mac OS X quite a bit more quickly than my dual G5/1.8GHz. I can't imagine that 256MB less makes that much of a difference to test...
The QuickTime test almost certainly uses hand-tuned Altivec instructions on the G4/G5. There's no evidence yet that the Intel code is tuned for SSE.
It is. It already was when Quicktime/x86 only existed for Windows. And the OS' core libraries (like the Accelerate framework) are also already optimized with SSE3 wherever possible. Source: Apple's performance optimization mailing list.
You actually missed the only really important difference: Steve's benchmark, namely spec_rate, is a benchmark which automatically spawns as many instances of itself as you have cpu's/cores, and then adds up the scores. So if you compare a single core G5 to a dual core Yonah and the latter obtains twice the score of the former...
At best that demonstrated that Yonah is speed-competitive with the G5, although possibly while using less power.
Plus the fact that Quicktime can scale video using other algorithms than just doubling the pixels. Scaling up video in Windows Media Player for Mac looked horrible.
And you can now export WMV files to any other format supported by Quicktime, yay!
I agree this is a major improvement! But I hope they or Apple can quickly fix the bug that makes the Quicktime Player of Quicktime 7.0.4 crash after closing a Windows Media File (worked fine in 7.0.3). And support for the asf format would be nice as well (I still have some files which play in Windows Media Player for Mac but not with Flip4Mac, even if I rename them to.wmv).
No country has absolute free speech, e.g. slander and libel are illegal in the US as well. Where exactly the border is drawn depends a mostly on historical reasons and has nothing to do with "me and my buddies"
Dude, Nazism was the end result of racism that has been simmering in Europe for Millenia.
Nazism was simply a tyrant and his cronies who profited from massive unhappiness caused by economic downturn and unemployment after WWI to make their fascist dreams turn into reality. And of course the Jews, who didn't suffer that much from the economic downturn because of the way they are organised to a certain extent, were an easy scapegoat to divert the attention to. Fascism always needs some kind of external evil which can be conquered in order to rally popular support, otherwise people just don't put up with it.
Racism is much more a tool than some inherent human property.
Do you think if we don't talk about it, it might go away?
People who think that are just as braindead as those who believe that others may think this. Read here for more.
Most countries in europe do not recognize the right to free speech.
Actually all of them recognize it, at least those in the EU, since they have to subscribe to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (see article 11) to be allowed in the EU. But it's more complex than that, see this post.
Actually that's one of the benefits of these laws from the perspective of someone who doesn't have to live under them. They provide a nice counter-example to prove that criminalizing an unpopular opinion does not make that opinion vanish.
And I honestly can't think that anyone's so braindead to believe that making the denial of the holocaust an illegal act will somehow make everyone automagically believe that it happened. Just like having the right of free speech or privacy in the US constitution does not automatically make sure you actually have those things all the time, nor does it prevent people from making sure you don't have those rights all the time because other interests (TERRORISTS) are more important (THINK OF THE CHILDREN).
Such laws are simply balancing the various human rights (from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights etc) one way or another. Which way the balance goes usually has historical roots, and changing such laws is, imho, more dangerous because of the symbolism attached to them than because of the rational implications you would expect from these changes.
If we in Europe remove laws that make a crime out of denying the fact that the holocaust happened, this would be mainly interpreted as a general doubt about whether or not it happened and not as a win for free speech proponents. Just like removing the amendment to the US constitution regarding the right to bear arms would mainly be seen as a power grab by the government against the people, as opposed a win for the people who think that this would make US society less violent.
Slashdot Mirror
You may want to try the also-mentioned Pixel instead. That one already has both those features you mention. It's not open source though, but shareware.
This AC explains perfectly what I mean in his reply to your post.
You're not saying that the US Gov't is using Iraqi people and their country simply as bait, I hope? And I indeed mainly focus on long term effects, although in the short term I also see little positive. I really fail to see how growing Al Qaeda from nothing to a powerful force in Iraq has made the US (or the rest of the world) any safer in the short term. That strategy is only creating new enemy and making the enemy stronger.
People can't be tortured into democracy. Extolling the virtues of democracy and international cooperation and at the same time ignoring the UN (or at the very least creatively and pretty much unilaterally interpreting resolutions) don't work if you want to set an example. Bombing villages killing a lot of innocent people (like recently in Pakistan) and then condemning the same thing when done by suicide terrorists just looks hypocrite, especially if you live or had relatives in such villages.
This is not the way to create a stable democracy at all.
I am an atheist, so my views are obviously skewed in this, but in these conflicts I see religion only as a tool being used to control and steer people (indeed by sometimes making it easier for themselves to justify and carry out their deeds), not something which inherently drives them into committing atrocities. If someone starts shouting on the street that I'm the devil incarnate (even if that lunatic is a priest) and that he can prove it with the Bible, I doubt anyone would even pay attention to him. On the contrary, if for some reason people would already want my skin, any excuse would be welcome.
There are deeper reasons than just religion and jealousy that make people do such things. And in case of suicide bombing, unless there's a suicide bombing gen which is somehow widespread among the people doing that, there have to be pretty big incentives. Afterlife or not, if you believe (or can be made to believe) that you can serve your family, your friends and society better by blowing yourself up than by staying with them and caring for them, the situation has to be pretty fucked up (yes, I assume that the suicide bombers are not blowing themselves up just to get at the supposed virgins that are awaiting them).
Again, this assumes that
To me, both of those assumptions seem quite wrong.
I completely agree with you that the guys at the top are not desperate, tormented souls in general (although, I guess you could say that in a sense even Hitler was a desperate, tormented soul). Anyway, quite a few of those leaders may very well be fascist, power-hungry souls who are simply using and amplifying the insecurities and fears of others (mainly by using tools like religion and latent racism) in order to reach their goals.
Whatever the case, such terrorist organisations can nevertheless not survive (at least not on a large scale) without support from "the people". You need large groups of people who feel that what these terrorists are doing is justified. Look at Al Qaeda, look at the IRA, look at the Tamil Tigers, ... These organisations don't exist on thin air, and while weapon and drug trafficking may be their main sources of income, they also need logistical and moral support from tons and tons of people. These aren't Soldier-of-Fortune-type small, professional, organised independent groups. The people at the top may be, but they can't do much on their own.
And the only way to make people swallow this, to make them support actions that may result in having their houses bombed, their country politically isolated etc, is if they feel that things are already extremely bad and will only get worse anyway.
That was exactly the point of my original post. It only helps them rally more people.
Because it would stop amplifying the popular support and the general feeling among large groups of people that these actions are somehow justified.
That's based on the false premise that the number of terrorists is somehow predetermined and fixed, regardless of what you do (and that you therefore preferably keep them busy as far away from you as possible). That is not true.
Doing "nothing" is better than doing things which as main consequence have that more people become so desperate that they are willing to blow themselves up. You do not solve the problem of terrorism by creating more torn apart families, torturing family members, locking up family members without due process, bombing villages because there might be some terrorist in a building etc.
Always remember that everyone that dies had family and friends. And every disturbance to the social cohesion and structures takes away "civilisation" so to speak (just look at some of the things which happended in New Orleans after Katrina to see what happens if our thin layer of civilisation disappears because people are completely disoriented and desperate when their social structures and networks are gone or disfigured).
Maybe in some way everyone is a potential terrorist, but it takes a whole lot of work before someone gets as far to be willing to blow himself up. People don't blow themselves up because they and their family are living a happy life and feel content and unthreatened. And also not because they are jealous, or merely annoyed, or even angry.
Somewhere something has to break, you have to become mentally unstable (some people are so from birth of course, but I like to think this is a small minority, usually termed psychopaths or sociopaths).
The main criticism on the "war on terror" is that the way it's being waged it only creates more terrorists. That's independent of whether or not you stand by recognising Israel as an independent state (the UN recognised it, that's not some purely Western or US position).
The Israel-Palestina case is very important and delicate (and both sides have committed countless atrocities), but the solution to that problem is not the War on Terror, nor is stopping this War on Terror (at least in its current form) a capitulation to terrorists (at most it would a capitulation to rational decision making: it doesn't work, it makes things worse, so scrap it).
It almost seems like desperation carries it forward: we have no idea what else to do and we cannot do nothing, so lets just go on making things worse, because at least then we have the feeling we tried. That's a position of weakness, not of strength. Of course, there are also people who honestly believe the current approach is the right/best one, but you do not seem to be one of them.
The least you can do is not do things which only make the terrorists stronger. The War on Terror as it is, is trying to put out a diesel fire with water. If you do not have a better approach than that, just letting it burn is a whole lot more effective.
I'm not
Or even that they should be watched over 24/7.
Otherwise it wouldn't make sense to spawn as many instances as you have cpus/cores. I figured that was clear from the context, but boy, was I wrong...
XCode by default spawns as many parallel gcc's as you have cpus/cores (unless you turn on distributed compiling, because then the main node has to do all preprocessing).
I don't remember the US vetoing the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights when it was signed. In fact, it was drawn up by a committee chaired by by Eleanor Roosevelt.
For Yonah, it's 25 to 49 watts (maximum usage).
So, there's definitely the difference between typical for the G5 and maximum for Yonah. I do not know what the relation between the two is (i.e., whether it's possible to guestimate one based on the other). Then, there's possibly also the issues of support chipset.
But all in all, at first sight it does not seem to me that there's that big a power consumption gap between Yonah and the dual core G5.
And I really wonder why on earth Apple doesn't mention it on its website, after it has done so for all these years...
Damn, I missed that the Anandtech page was talking about total system power consumption. CNet mentions the cpu's power consumption: maximum between 25 and 49 watts. So it seems it's about the same as the G5's.
A dual core G5 at 1.6GHz consumes 16 watts (typical usage). Given that power consumption goes up quadratically in relation to the frequency, this comes to about 23 watts for 2.0 GHz (typically, max consumption can be (much) higher). It seems to me rather that the G5 consumes 1/2 to 1/4 of Yonah, instead of the other way round.
Don't ask me why Steve kept saying the G5 requires so much power, I don't know... Maybe it's one of the G5's chipsets that requires so much power (I do notice that the U3 chipset gets a lot hotter than either of my first generation 18 GHz G5's -- but afaik that's an Apple and not an IBM design).
Oh come on, like the G5 was twice as fast as a single core P4? It doesn't work like that in practice. I'm definitely going to wait until the second or third generation and until someone can tell me the battery life, because for the first time Apple does not mention battery life on its tech specs page. This suggests to me that battery life has become worse, even though they use a higher capacity battery for the MacBook Pro.Well, there are some weird things with Mac OS X boot times (possible linked to open firmware). My iBook G4 1.2GHz (with 768MB ram) also boots Mac OS X quite a bit more quickly than my dual G5/1.8GHz. I can't imagine that 256MB less makes that much of a difference to test...
You actually missed the only really important difference: Steve's benchmark, namely spec_rate, is a benchmark which automatically spawns as many instances of itself as you have cpu's/cores, and then adds up the scores. So if you compare a single core G5 to a dual core Yonah and the latter obtains twice the score of the former...
At best that demonstrated that Yonah is speed-competitive with the G5, although possibly while using less power.
Or at least be a little more creative if you're going to misspell it. Some ideas:
viri
vires
virui
virua
virres
viruae
viriii
virula
virusi
virussi
virussa
virulua
And then to avoid the lameness filter
virussae
viruluae
virusula
virusuli
virusulae
we have to add some junk here
viruletti
virulumsi
virulumni
virulussi
virulussia
virulussiae
and here as well.
virusulumni
virusulumnia
virusulumniae
The possibilities are endless!
Plus the fact that Quicktime can scale video using other algorithms than just doubling the pixels. Scaling up video in Windows Media Player for Mac looked horrible.
.wmv).
And you can now export WMV files to any other format supported by Quicktime, yay!
I agree this is a major improvement! But I hope they or Apple can quickly fix the bug that makes the Quicktime Player of Quicktime 7.0.4 crash after closing a Windows Media File (worked fine in 7.0.3). And support for the asf format would be nice as well (I still have some files which play in Windows Media Player for Mac but not with Flip4Mac, even if I rename them to
It would surprise me if they didn't, given the Windows, Red Hat, Novell and Terra Soft certifications they boast about on their website.
No country has absolute free speech, e.g. slander and libel are illegal in the US as well. Where exactly the border is drawn depends a mostly on historical reasons and has nothing to do with "me and my buddies"
Racism is much more a tool than some inherent human property.
People who think that are just as braindead as those who believe that others may think this. Read here for more. Nice to meet you, Anonymous CowardSuch laws are simply balancing the various human rights (from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights etc) one way or another. Which way the balance goes usually has historical roots, and changing such laws is, imho, more dangerous because of the symbolism attached to them than because of the rational implications you would expect from these changes.
If we in Europe remove laws that make a crime out of denying the fact that the holocaust happened, this would be mainly interpreted as a general doubt about whether or not it happened and not as a win for free speech proponents. Just like removing the amendment to the US constitution regarding the right to bear arms would mainly be seen as a power grab by the government against the people, as opposed a win for the people who think that this would make US society less violent.
Please read this post and the replies to it. See also articles 11 and 21 of the European Declaration of Fundamental Rights. As that poster said: if rights conflict, you have to make a choice.