More specifically, Americans can (without a special license, although registration is usually necessary) own handguns up to 12.7mm in caliber, semiautomatic and manually-operated rifles up to 12.7mm in caliber, shotguns with a valid sporting purpose (only a few military-grade shotguns are prohibited), and flamethrowers (they were exempted apparently because they are the only sure defense from Africanized honeybees).
With a proper license, one can also own an automatic weapon or a large-bore weapon, although these are rather rare. Note that a license is also necessary to "conceal" a weapon (if it isn't immediately and completely visible, it is concealed), there are significant restrictions on purchasing a gun (background check, waiting period, etc.) and transferring ownership of a weapon is heavily taxed. Not to mention that walking down the street with a semiautomatic rifle WILL get police attention, and pretty much nobody practices "open carry" in urban or suburban areas - just in rural areas where hunting is ubiquitous. Finally, the concealed-carry license, depending on your state, may only be issued if you can demonstrate "reasonable need", while others may issue one unless they find a reason not to.
TFA says nothing about making it a mandatory retrofit. Actually, it says nothing about old cars - the only requirement is a four-year phase-in of backup cameras on new cars, something I personally have no problem with.
700K is cheap for a supercomputer. Prices can be as high as $125 million (IBM Roadrunner), $88 million (Tianhe-I), even $700 million (Earth Simulator). Hell, Tianhe-I uses $20 million in power and maintenance per year. Yeah, all those computers are several times above the scale of this one, but the price per teraflop is probably pretty good.
Well, I'm currently a full-time student, so I don't make a living doing anything. However, I'm training to go into the video game industry, where a) I will have to live off my artistic creations, and b) a 90% piracy rate is considered "pretty low". So I'm at least tolerant of people stealing my work - I probably wouldn't get money from them anyways, it generates good word-of-mouth, and maybe they'll buy another of my games later on.
I'm also not being self-serving: I rarely pirate anything. Seriously. I've torrented a few albums, four movies, and a handful of out-of-print games. Between my open-source work and my mod work, I can sincerely state I have contributed almost as much back to the community as I have taken. Perhaps not as high-quality, but I at least try to plant a tree every time I cut one down, so to speak.
As a brief aside, I think I have a DRM scheme that both sides would like. It does the normal sort of authentication, but if it fails too often (there would be some leeway for various reasons), it shows a short, fourth-wall breaking cutscene, in which the characters guilt-trip you over it, before continuing on to the game. The DRM doesn't make the product worse (hell, some people pay $10 extra for a few more cutscenes); guilt is perhaps a more effective way to get people to pay for something.
Roentgenium is element #111, right below gold on the periodic table, and well within the zone of "highly unstable elements". Not just "unstable" - it's well into the group of elements that decay in seconds. The most stable isotope discovered so far, Rg 281, has a half-life of just 20 seconds. So I have some doubts about this - every other "stable transuranic element" story I've heard ended up being a mistake or a hoax.
I'm also wondering how Marinov suspected it would be in gold. The only link I can find is that they're both group 11 elements, but by that logic you should be able to find tellurium in sulfur, which isn't the case.
In case you didn't read my thing, the entire point of including the patents at all was actually to make them easier to defeat in court. Nobody is going to waste time patenting something that will be PD before they can even finish the paperwork for a lawsuit. Obviously, then, any corporation that wants to patent a method or algorithm would find a way to make it seem like a genuine invention, and patent it that way. Then, when they start suing people, the defense isn't "the patent office fucked up on this one; the patent is invalid because it's unpatentable", the defense is "this was patented under the wrong form; as it is a software patent, it must be categorized as such, therefore the case is moot because the six-month period has passed. Either that, or this is beyond the scope of the patent; as this is a software product, which is not encumbered by patents on physical systems." While there isn't a difference in effect, it's vastly easier to convince a judge "the paperwork was incorrect" than it is to convince him "the government was wrong". Thus, by allowing software patents to exist but be completely useless, you defeat more software patents than you would by merely not allowing them.
Actually, the predicted speeds for racetrack memory are rather close to RAM speeds. It could be possible to operate it as primary storage - it would be a bit sluggish for calculations, but it would eliminate the need to read in chunks of files to be operated on. Given the increasing size of L3 cache, it could be possible for racetrack memory to replace SSDs and RAM while pushing hard drives into the "long-term storage" role, and have the L3 cache take the role of RAM.
This isn't a firm prediction - I'm not even sure racetrack memory will come to anything, but if it does, "the death of RAM" is entirely possible.
That brings up an interesting point: what happens if we win? How would open-source be affected if intellectual-property laws were abolished?
But that's not what I was saying. I should have put (Software|Method) Patents, as in Software Patents and Method Patents. Under my plan, software itself would be covered by copyright. This ought not to be a problem for the "release early, release often" open-source community; if one were to build from the public domain release of the Linux kernel, they'd be back at 2.2
My reasoning for allowing software and method patents is actually to defeat them. People will realize a 6-month patent is useless, and try to register it as an invention patent instead. Saying in court that "this patent was filed under the wrong type" is much easier than "this patent is completely invalid", although it will give almost identical effects.
Movies, books, TV shows, video games, etc.: 10 years from first publication. No extensions, although a "new and improved version" rerelease is copyrighted separately. This puts plenty into the public domain: Star Trek up to Insurrection, the classic James Bond films, the first few Super Mario Bros. games, and so on. However, it also provides plenty of time to make a profit, and even when something enters the public domain, some people will still buy it (see The Lord of the Rings, the original printing of which is PD in the US due to an oversight)
Genuine inventions: Patent lasts 10 years. Extension can lengthen it by another decade if you are actively using the patent in a product. This cuts down on patent trolls, but otherwise keeps the system as-is.
Software/Method patents: Six months. This is mostly to make it easier to strike down the 20-year patents: it's less of a jump to say "this was patented in the wrong category, and as it has been X years since registration, the patent is no longer valid" than it is to say "this thing should never have been patentable".
Trademarks: Pretty much as now, although I'd make protection of parodies much more explicit
"Casual infringement": If you "steal" something from a P2P site, the most you can be liable for is the most common trade price of the thing, and the prosecution is responsible for court costs. This would make it pointless to sue people for downloading a few albums, but it would still be possible to sue massive-scale "pirates" or even people running torrent sites if they're advertising "pirated" material.
Yeah, I'm aware that the Colt was an excellent pistol. Hell, it's still among the best suppressed weapons. However, it's got rather poor armor-penetration capabilities, making it less than ideal on a battlefield where everyone has body armor. Some sort of replacement was obviously needed. I would have chosen some 10mm Auto, but NATO politics went with 9mm Parabellum.
The XM25, if it's the same one that I've read about, only uses microchips in the grenades, not in the bullets. If you've played a modern-combat FPS, you know that you don't just spam the underslung grenade launcher, because you can't carry more than a handful of rounds for it. If it actually makes it into production (I highly doubt it, since the US military seems paralyzed when it comes to infantry weapons - just look how long it took to replace the M1911), it will be useful for urban combat, trench combat, maybe even anti-vehicle uses, but it won't be revolutionary.
It's also not news. A relatively similar weapon, the OICW, predates the War on Terror - I first learned of it because it was in the beta version of Half-Life 2, a game that came out 6 years ago. Hell, the basic principle is practically ancient - the Soviets made prototypes of an AK74 with such a grenade launcher, albeit without the complicated microchip fuse.
Let me put it this way: "destroying a city" means it isn't there anymore. Burned to the ground. Razed. Pulverized. Wiped off the map. Bombed back to the stone age. Gone like Donkey Kong. If you still have a door for the army to kick in, the town isn't destroyed.
As to "how can an offensive action be justified", I will point to things like Hiroshima or Monte Cassino - destroying them was deemed a necessary tactical/strategic maneuver, either to destroy a major command/control center for an enemy army, or to deny a strategic position to the enemy. Both were committed by armies on the offensive. Both were militarily justified.
Now, as to scale. The laws use the term "widespread and systematic". Obviously, there is no definite line, but I would venture to say that 800 people (not all of whom were actually tortured) from a population of 57 million is not widespread, and that taking only those believed to have been involved terrorist acts is not "systematic".
Finally, your last arguments about historic actions is irrelevant to the current discussion, but I will briefly answer it: Yeah. America done fucked up. We've done some really crappy stuff over the past 400 years. Every country has. Vigilance against it is always required, but throwing about exaggerated accusations is not the way to guard against it.
Once again, people COMPLETELY ignore what I say, assuming that because I'm not chanting along with the angry mob that I'm against you. I'm not. Should Bush be tried for crimes? Yes. Should soldiers be executed for killing civilians? Yes. Should Gitmo be shut down? Yesterday, if possible.
What I'm actually saying is "while deplorable, the recent actions of the US military do NOT qualify as a crime against humanity, nor do they qualify the entire army for war crimes.
Bush isn't Hitler. He may have been the worst President since Hoover, maybe even since Buchanan, but Bush was incompetent, not evil. Keep things in perspective. The only mass killings of civilians in Iraq have been committed by Iraqis. There's no mass torture, no mass rapes, no cities being razed, no enslavement of populations. Get some fucking PERSPECTIVE: Compare Baghdad to Nanking, or My Lai, or Katyn, and then tell me that it's a crime against humanity.
You people need to get some perspective - you're getting to be as bad as the ultra-conservatives screaming "impeach Hussein Obama". Chanting "death to Bush" isn't exactly the rational and logical way to deal with the issue - but that's EXACTLY what you're doing. Get a grip on reality.
OpenNIC. While it mirrors the ICANN addresses, it also adds several new TLDs (.oss,.geek,.parody, even.gopher) which can be easily used. This is but one of the many alternative DNS roots, but it's the most popular, and it's democratically-run.
"when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population". That's the key part. There's what, a few hundred people at Gitmo? With the only trait common to them all that they are suspected of committing, or intending to commit, a combative action, an act that would remove them from the category "civilian"?
Is it torture? Yes. Is it criminal and unjustifiable? Yes. Is it a crime against humanity? NO.
It was rather obvious that I was referring to modern times. Yes, the US has done some bad things over 400 years, but you can't exactly execute Andrew Jackson for anything at this point.
I'm also going to point out that killing enemy soldiers during a war is not murder (in fact, it is not even illegal). I'll also end by saying that the vast majority of civilian deaths in Iraq were caused not by Coalition troops, but by other Iraqi.
Uh, no. Starting a war of aggression is a "crime against the peace". Yes, it is possible (and in fact likely) that war crimes will be committed during a war of aggression, but the two are not inextricably linked.
"Crimes against humanity" is a very, VERY serious charge. Not just "serial killer" serious. I'm talking "Hitler"-level evil, the sort of crime that is remembered for generations to come. If you use that term for every politician you disagree with, you're diluting the term.
I'm not trying to shield anyone from justice. I'm just trying to put things in perspective. By all means, accuse the Bush administration of concealing facts, starting a war of aggression, and human rights violations. But "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity", no.
You're obviously not a lawyer, then. Hell, you obviously haven't even read the Wikipedia articles on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Has the US government committed acts of genocide, ie. the killing of an entire ethnic group? No.
Has the US government, as a policy, condoned or ordered any of the following on a large scale?
Murder: No
Torture: No. Even Guantanamo isn't large enough to qualify as a crime against humanity
Rape: No
Racial/Religious/Political Persecution: No
Enslavement: No
So, that eliminates "crimes against humanity". Now, on to war crimes. While I will agree that several individual actions could qualify as war crimes, you are talking about high-command stuff. So, then, has the command of the US armed forces systematically condoned or ordered any of the following:
Murder or enslavement of prisoners of war: No
Murder or enslavement of civilians: No (as with any war, some civilians will be killed in the crossfire, and this, while regrettable, is only a war crime if deliberate)
Murder of hostages: No
Destruction of cities, towns and villages not justified by military or civilian necessity: No.
So, then, there is no justification for bandying about charges of "crimes against humanity" or "war crimes" for GWB et al. The most serious crime you could reasonably accuse them of is "crime against peace", as the invasion of Iraq was not, strictly speaking, a defensive military action. However, since such charges are reviewed by the UN Security Council, and the US is on said council (along with two significant allies), good luck trying to convict them.
Lesson: If you're going to accuse an entire government of something, at least check Wikipedia first to see if you're using the terms properly.
How the hell are you going to start a flamewar on/. by saying "put Linux on it"? Unless the BSD guys start something, you'll hear nothing but agreement.
It's like digital silly putty. I'm not expecting the kid to actually make something cool, but I'm sure he'll have fun making ridiculous shapes and blobs.
Most filters are effective at stopping accidental viewings. If the user actually tries to access porn, it will fail sooner or later, emphasis on the sooner. But, given that the kid is four, it seems unlikely he's going to be typing "free porn xxx" into Google.
If you just want casual filtering, I would recommend OpenDNS. Just set your DNS server to 208.67.222.123, and it will quietly block porn, malware and warez sites. I haven't found many false positives either. It won't catch everything, but if you want to delay teaching your kid about such things until he's mature enough to understand it, it works well enough.
As for productivity software, try letting the kid loose on Blender. Open-source 3d modelling/rendering program. Might be a bit slow on netbooks, but if the kid's creative, he'll find something to do with it.
Not of this level of quality. I've checked out many of the GPL engines, and they just aren't up to the level of quality of Unreal Engine 3 or Unigine. There's a lot of things open-source does better, but so far, game engines are not one of them.
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More specifically, Americans can (without a special license, although registration is usually necessary) own handguns up to 12.7mm in caliber, semiautomatic and manually-operated rifles up to 12.7mm in caliber, shotguns with a valid sporting purpose (only a few military-grade shotguns are prohibited), and flamethrowers (they were exempted apparently because they are the only sure defense from Africanized honeybees).
With a proper license, one can also own an automatic weapon or a large-bore weapon, although these are rather rare. Note that a license is also necessary to "conceal" a weapon (if it isn't immediately and completely visible, it is concealed), there are significant restrictions on purchasing a gun (background check, waiting period, etc.) and transferring ownership of a weapon is heavily taxed. Not to mention that walking down the street with a semiautomatic rifle WILL get police attention, and pretty much nobody practices "open carry" in urban or suburban areas - just in rural areas where hunting is ubiquitous. Finally, the concealed-carry license, depending on your state, may only be issued if you can demonstrate "reasonable need", while others may issue one unless they find a reason not to.
TFA says nothing about making it a mandatory retrofit. Actually, it says nothing about old cars - the only requirement is a four-year phase-in of backup cameras on new cars, something I personally have no problem with.
700K is cheap for a supercomputer. Prices can be as high as $125 million (IBM Roadrunner), $88 million (Tianhe-I), even $700 million (Earth Simulator). Hell, Tianhe-I uses $20 million in power and maintenance per year. Yeah, all those computers are several times above the scale of this one, but the price per teraflop is probably pretty good.
Interesting. I knew there ought to be some reason, but I didn't know what that reason was.
Well, I'm currently a full-time student, so I don't make a living doing anything. However, I'm training to go into the video game industry, where a) I will have to live off my artistic creations, and b) a 90% piracy rate is considered "pretty low". So I'm at least tolerant of people stealing my work - I probably wouldn't get money from them anyways, it generates good word-of-mouth, and maybe they'll buy another of my games later on.
I'm also not being self-serving: I rarely pirate anything. Seriously. I've torrented a few albums, four movies, and a handful of out-of-print games. Between my open-source work and my mod work, I can sincerely state I have contributed almost as much back to the community as I have taken. Perhaps not as high-quality, but I at least try to plant a tree every time I cut one down, so to speak.
As a brief aside, I think I have a DRM scheme that both sides would like. It does the normal sort of authentication, but if it fails too often (there would be some leeway for various reasons), it shows a short, fourth-wall breaking cutscene, in which the characters guilt-trip you over it, before continuing on to the game. The DRM doesn't make the product worse (hell, some people pay $10 extra for a few more cutscenes); guilt is perhaps a more effective way to get people to pay for something.
Roentgenium is element #111, right below gold on the periodic table, and well within the zone of "highly unstable elements". Not just "unstable" - it's well into the group of elements that decay in seconds. The most stable isotope discovered so far, Rg 281, has a half-life of just 20 seconds. So I have some doubts about this - every other "stable transuranic element" story I've heard ended up being a mistake or a hoax.
I'm also wondering how Marinov suspected it would be in gold. The only link I can find is that they're both group 11 elements, but by that logic you should be able to find tellurium in sulfur, which isn't the case.
In case you didn't read my thing, the entire point of including the patents at all was actually to make them easier to defeat in court. Nobody is going to waste time patenting something that will be PD before they can even finish the paperwork for a lawsuit. Obviously, then, any corporation that wants to patent a method or algorithm would find a way to make it seem like a genuine invention, and patent it that way. Then, when they start suing people, the defense isn't "the patent office fucked up on this one; the patent is invalid because it's unpatentable", the defense is "this was patented under the wrong form; as it is a software patent, it must be categorized as such, therefore the case is moot because the six-month period has passed. Either that, or this is beyond the scope of the patent; as this is a software product, which is not encumbered by patents on physical systems." While there isn't a difference in effect, it's vastly easier to convince a judge "the paperwork was incorrect" than it is to convince him "the government was wrong". Thus, by allowing software patents to exist but be completely useless, you defeat more software patents than you would by merely not allowing them.
Actually, the predicted speeds for racetrack memory are rather close to RAM speeds. It could be possible to operate it as primary storage - it would be a bit sluggish for calculations, but it would eliminate the need to read in chunks of files to be operated on. Given the increasing size of L3 cache, it could be possible for racetrack memory to replace SSDs and RAM while pushing hard drives into the "long-term storage" role, and have the L3 cache take the role of RAM.
This isn't a firm prediction - I'm not even sure racetrack memory will come to anything, but if it does, "the death of RAM" is entirely possible.
That brings up an interesting point: what happens if we win? How would open-source be affected if intellectual-property laws were abolished?
But that's not what I was saying. I should have put (Software|Method) Patents, as in Software Patents and Method Patents. Under my plan, software itself would be covered by copyright. This ought not to be a problem for the "release early, release often" open-source community; if one were to build from the public domain release of the Linux kernel, they'd be back at 2.2
My reasoning for allowing software and method patents is actually to defeat them. People will realize a 6-month patent is useless, and try to register it as an invention patent instead. Saying in court that "this patent was filed under the wrong type" is much easier than "this patent is completely invalid", although it will give almost identical effects.
Here's my proposal:
Movies, books, TV shows, video games, etc.: 10 years from first publication. No extensions, although a "new and improved version" rerelease is copyrighted separately. This puts plenty into the public domain: Star Trek up to Insurrection, the classic James Bond films, the first few Super Mario Bros. games, and so on. However, it also provides plenty of time to make a profit, and even when something enters the public domain, some people will still buy it (see The Lord of the Rings, the original printing of which is PD in the US due to an oversight)
Genuine inventions: Patent lasts 10 years. Extension can lengthen it by another decade if you are actively using the patent in a product. This cuts down on patent trolls, but otherwise keeps the system as-is.
Software/Method patents: Six months. This is mostly to make it easier to strike down the 20-year patents: it's less of a jump to say "this was patented in the wrong category, and as it has been X years since registration, the patent is no longer valid" than it is to say "this thing should never have been patentable".
Trademarks: Pretty much as now, although I'd make protection of parodies much more explicit
"Casual infringement": If you "steal" something from a P2P site, the most you can be liable for is the most common trade price of the thing, and the prosecution is responsible for court costs. This would make it pointless to sue people for downloading a few albums, but it would still be possible to sue massive-scale "pirates" or even people running torrent sites if they're advertising "pirated" material.
Yeah, I'm aware that the Colt was an excellent pistol. Hell, it's still among the best suppressed weapons. However, it's got rather poor armor-penetration capabilities, making it less than ideal on a battlefield where everyone has body armor. Some sort of replacement was obviously needed. I would have chosen some 10mm Auto, but NATO politics went with 9mm Parabellum.
The XM25, if it's the same one that I've read about, only uses microchips in the grenades, not in the bullets. If you've played a modern-combat FPS, you know that you don't just spam the underslung grenade launcher, because you can't carry more than a handful of rounds for it. If it actually makes it into production (I highly doubt it, since the US military seems paralyzed when it comes to infantry weapons - just look how long it took to replace the M1911), it will be useful for urban combat, trench combat, maybe even anti-vehicle uses, but it won't be revolutionary.
It's also not news. A relatively similar weapon, the OICW, predates the War on Terror - I first learned of it because it was in the beta version of Half-Life 2, a game that came out 6 years ago. Hell, the basic principle is practically ancient - the Soviets made prototypes of an AK74 with such a grenade launcher, albeit without the complicated microchip fuse.
Let me put it this way: "destroying a city" means it isn't there anymore. Burned to the ground. Razed. Pulverized. Wiped off the map. Bombed back to the stone age. Gone like Donkey Kong. If you still have a door for the army to kick in, the town isn't destroyed.
As to "how can an offensive action be justified", I will point to things like Hiroshima or Monte Cassino - destroying them was deemed a necessary tactical/strategic maneuver, either to destroy a major command/control center for an enemy army, or to deny a strategic position to the enemy. Both were committed by armies on the offensive. Both were militarily justified.
Now, as to scale. The laws use the term "widespread and systematic". Obviously, there is no definite line, but I would venture to say that 800 people (not all of whom were actually tortured) from a population of 57 million is not widespread, and that taking only those believed to have been involved terrorist acts is not "systematic".
Finally, your last arguments about historic actions is irrelevant to the current discussion, but I will briefly answer it: Yeah. America done fucked up. We've done some really crappy stuff over the past 400 years. Every country has. Vigilance against it is always required, but throwing about exaggerated accusations is not the way to guard against it.
Once again, people COMPLETELY ignore what I say, assuming that because I'm not chanting along with the angry mob that I'm against you. I'm not. Should Bush be tried for crimes? Yes. Should soldiers be executed for killing civilians? Yes. Should Gitmo be shut down? Yesterday, if possible.
What I'm actually saying is "while deplorable, the recent actions of the US military do NOT qualify as a crime against humanity, nor do they qualify the entire army for war crimes.
Bush isn't Hitler. He may have been the worst President since Hoover, maybe even since Buchanan, but Bush was incompetent, not evil. Keep things in perspective. The only mass killings of civilians in Iraq have been committed by Iraqis. There's no mass torture, no mass rapes, no cities being razed, no enslavement of populations. Get some fucking PERSPECTIVE: Compare Baghdad to Nanking, or My Lai, or Katyn, and then tell me that it's a crime against humanity.
You people need to get some perspective - you're getting to be as bad as the ultra-conservatives screaming "impeach Hussein Obama". Chanting "death to Bush" isn't exactly the rational and logical way to deal with the issue - but that's EXACTLY what you're doing. Get a grip on reality.
OpenNIC. While it mirrors the ICANN addresses, it also adds several new TLDs (.oss, .geek, .parody, even .gopher) which can be easily used. This is but one of the many alternative DNS roots, but it's the most popular, and it's democratically-run.
"when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population". That's the key part. There's what, a few hundred people at Gitmo? With the only trait common to them all that they are suspected of committing, or intending to commit, a combative action, an act that would remove them from the category "civilian"?
Is it torture? Yes. Is it criminal and unjustifiable? Yes. Is it a crime against humanity? NO.
It was rather obvious that I was referring to modern times. Yes, the US has done some bad things over 400 years, but you can't exactly execute Andrew Jackson for anything at this point.
I'm also going to point out that killing enemy soldiers during a war is not murder (in fact, it is not even illegal). I'll also end by saying that the vast majority of civilian deaths in Iraq were caused not by Coalition troops, but by other Iraqi.
Uh, no. Starting a war of aggression is a "crime against the peace". Yes, it is possible (and in fact likely) that war crimes will be committed during a war of aggression, but the two are not inextricably linked.
"Crimes against humanity" is a very, VERY serious charge. Not just "serial killer" serious. I'm talking "Hitler"-level evil, the sort of crime that is remembered for generations to come. If you use that term for every politician you disagree with, you're diluting the term.
I'm not trying to shield anyone from justice. I'm just trying to put things in perspective. By all means, accuse the Bush administration of concealing facts, starting a war of aggression, and human rights violations. But "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity", no.
Yes, I'm fully aware of and against those things. However, the subject was "recent wars". Blaming Bush for WW2 and Cold War crimes is just ridiculous.
You're obviously not a lawyer, then. Hell, you obviously haven't even read the Wikipedia articles on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Has the US government committed acts of genocide, ie. the killing of an entire ethnic group? No.
Has the US government, as a policy, condoned or ordered any of the following on a large scale?
So, that eliminates "crimes against humanity". Now, on to war crimes. While I will agree that several individual actions could qualify as war crimes, you are talking about high-command stuff. So, then, has the command of the US armed forces systematically condoned or ordered any of the following:
So, then, there is no justification for bandying about charges of "crimes against humanity" or "war crimes" for GWB et al. The most serious crime you could reasonably accuse them of is "crime against peace", as the invasion of Iraq was not, strictly speaking, a defensive military action. However, since such charges are reviewed by the UN Security Council, and the US is on said council (along with two significant allies), good luck trying to convict them.
Lesson: If you're going to accuse an entire government of something, at least check Wikipedia first to see if you're using the terms properly.
How the hell are you going to start a flamewar on /. by saying "put Linux on it"? Unless the BSD guys start something, you'll hear nothing but agreement.
It's like digital silly putty. I'm not expecting the kid to actually make something cool, but I'm sure he'll have fun making ridiculous shapes and blobs.
Most filters are effective at stopping accidental viewings. If the user actually tries to access porn, it will fail sooner or later, emphasis on the sooner. But, given that the kid is four, it seems unlikely he's going to be typing "free porn xxx" into Google.
If you just want casual filtering, I would recommend OpenDNS. Just set your DNS server to 208.67.222.123, and it will quietly block porn, malware and warez sites. I haven't found many false positives either. It won't catch everything, but if you want to delay teaching your kid about such things until he's mature enough to understand it, it works well enough.
As for productivity software, try letting the kid loose on Blender. Open-source 3d modelling/rendering program. Might be a bit slow on netbooks, but if the kid's creative, he'll find something to do with it.
Not of this level of quality. I've checked out many of the GPL engines, and they just aren't up to the level of quality of Unreal Engine 3 or Unigine. There's a lot of things open-source does better, but so far, game engines are not one of them.