The police are subject to so much oversight and second-guessing it's not funny. And they go out at night armed with a short stick and 25 grams of pepper spray. That's hardly a militarised force. Read some of the British police blogs sometimes - they are very informative reading.
So a police writes that the police is underarmed and overregulated? No, really?
I recommend Inspector Gadget as a starting point.
And once we're through that, we can continue to Naked Gun and Robocop.
That's precisely why you need to send the SWAT: otherwise, people might start thinking ravers harmless, but if you send a SWAT team, you can report that fact and have people jump to the conclusion that it was necessary because the rave was violent, at which point it's easier to get their support for further crackdowns on ravers.
Every organization needs enemies, and if you can choose, it's best pick the ones who can't shoot back.
Bullshit. Oppressive regimes get overthrown. Not by people like you, of course.
No, they get overthrown by people who have a strong conviction about how the world should be, and are willing to kill for it. Consequently, in the power vacuum that follows a successful revolution, they typically establish a regime that's every bit as oppressive as the one they overthrew.
More to the point: as long as wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few, so will power be.
Wealth is resources, and control of resources gives ability to act effectively, which is better known as power. An economic system which concentrates power doesn't magically stop doing so when it comes to political decisions. That is why libertarian/neoliberal politics are moving us back towards feudalism, and should be opposed at every turn: for most of us they mean ever smaller amount of freedom.
This is one of the few instances where "freedom is slavery" is actually the truth: complete economic freedom lead to most people becoming de facto slaves, and that's the lucky ones - the unlucky ones will beg for food on the streets, if these right-wing lunatics get their way and dismantle social security systems.
Due to this...there will always be people that are suited only for menial, low end, manual jobs...not that all of them will take it.
There's the old saying that " the world needs ditch diggers too".
The problem is that the ditches are dug by machines nowadays. All menial jobs either are or are soon going to be mechanised, since machines are cheaper and more effective than humans at them. What are these people going to do then?
The reason why socialism is seeing such a resurgence of popularity is that large numbers of people have become economically superfluous and thus depend on welfare to survive, just like during the industrial revolution. Back then it resulted in the founding of communism; I wonder what will the result will be this time?
In bad economic times, any company that sells products which will save the customer money in the long run is going to do well. People will spend a lot of money if it will help them save more in the long run.
Only if they have money to spend. If they don't and are struggling to survive they have little choice but to go with the cheapest option, even if it'll end up costing more in the long run. That's one of the reasons why our society is becoming increasingly stratified, and the basic problem with capitalism: you have to have capital in order to make capital, leading to an exponential growth in wealth differences, and all the social and economical problems that brings.
I sure am against the idea of this police/nanny state that the US and other countries are spiraling towards.
Since "nanny state" invokes images of certain amount of benevolence, I prefer the term "wicked stepmother state": socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and corporations at the helm.
Maybe the government and media only makes it seem like we the sheeple are in favor of surveillance.
The word "sheeple" is quickly becoming just as overused as "fascist", and is nowadays my cue to assume that the message I'm reading is an inept Libertarian/Rayndian propaganda rant. Besides, by using the word "we" you are talking about people collectively, and must therefore be a communist. Why do you hate freedom so much, comrade?
Everyone should carry a Road Atlas in the car, and if they spend any significant amount of time in a certain city or county they should purchase a local area map. Most convenience stores carry them. The best places to find local maps AFAIK are truckstops, convenience stores, and the local Chamber of Commerce.
You know, this gives me an idea: how about we scan that atlas and all those local maps from all around the country and compile them into a map database? Since such a database is unwieldy in paper form, we could sell small electronic viewing devices. Maybe we could combine them with a GPS locator, so you can always find your current location quickly and easily? Coming to think of it, computers are pretty good at route-planning, so if you input your destination, it could easily plan a decent route for you; and with voice-synthesizers being quite useful today, it could even read the instructions aloud as you go!
So, what you're saying is that the computer works for people instead of the other way around?
No, what it means is that the computer tries to guess what some dyslexic jackass who insists on writing code despite being functionally illiterate and proud of it meant. Since we have no sentient computers yet, and since the markup diarrhea these people produce would be challenging even for a human to decrypt, the task is hopeless, and the websites that result will break in fascinating ways with each new browser version, or whenever whoever visits them has a different screen resolution than the "designer", or the stars are not just right. And whenever that happens, the website gets replaced by a new, equally broken version, and the designer gets paid for delivering said abomination.
And of course whenever the browser fails to extract meaning from the chaos that would horrify even Cthulhu, it's the user who gets blamed: he didn't use the right version of the right browser, running at the right resolution, with the right versions of the right plugins installed. That, or he has Linux installed on another and unrelated machine.
While I would defend the obscenity of this pornography on first amendment grounds, I would not want to defend it too aggressively while more worthy candidates might exist.
There's this fascinating concept called "the rule of law" which basically means that "worth" doesn't enter it at all. It's a pity that United States doesn't have it nowadays - if it ever did - thanks to courts deciding that they can ignore the supreme law of the country when they feel like it. That is truly obscene.
And you have it wrong on another way too: what's at stake here is not pornography. That's just a red herring. What's at stake is freedom of speech, and possibly all civil liberties. Once the idea that they can be ignored if the judge feels like it takes root, they no longer exist - after all, you've always been allowed to say whatever those in power want you to say, everywhere.
So no, there are no more worthy causes; this is an all-out attempt at breakthrough against the weakest point in the lines of freedom. Do nothing, and it will fall, and the rest will follow. And meanwhile the propaganda machine tries to convince you to do nothing, because it's only pornographers. Divide and conquer is thousands of years old, yet people still keep falling for it.
It's protected by the US Constitution, which is "just a goddamn piece of paper", to quote your ex-president. It's opposed by lots of people for various different reasons (which I suspect have more to do with getting people used to laws having exceptions of the "unless I decide otherwise" -variety than morality, but that's obviously just me being paranoid). And old pieces of paper don't really make much of an armor.
Or, as another fine leader once put it: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
People who already have AIDS will get it, and with a lack of good information (such as the headline's "HIV/AIDS"), people will think they're cured, that they can't pass it on, etc.
If this thing will kill the HIV in your body, it will indeed make you unable to pass it on, as well as the associated symptoms (AIDS). It won't instantly cure the AIDS, as that is more like a wound caused by HIV, but once the virus is out of the way your immune system should start recovering. So for all intents and purposes, it's a vaccine/medicine for AIDS.
If you disagree, please explain just what of the above is incorrect, and why?
Gorack: Yes! I'm hammered. I'm gonna feel up the tavern wench! Can I roll to see if I squeeze boob or butt?!?
The sad thing is that there really is a rulebook for this. Several, in fact, both commercial and free. And the saddest thing is that I've read them all, despite not even playing RPGs:(.
Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and Nymphology: Blue Magic are classics and should be stocked by every library.
I have to say I find pgsql far more flexible than MySQL. And you can't put ACID in the app. Sorry, but whoever told you that works lied to you.
Of course you can. Simply implement it in the client libraries, and have them communicate and coordinate via shared memory to keep track of what data should be shown to the client application. It might be simpler, thought, to separate this functionality to a separate proxy process, which uses the database as a backend. Of course we still won't get the guarantee that data has been logged into permanent storage, but we might be able to solve that problem by writing it to log files on the side, and consulting them on startup. We could even index those logs and satisfy some queries directly from those. And if performance isn't really critical, we could even store all data in indexed flat files and make do without MySQL backend!
You know, I think we might be on to something big here! I think I should patent this "Database Management Proxy".
You'll end up designing this awesome game, and then EA will be like "I don't think this plays well with our 13-year-old boy demographic" and force you to make changes which completely ruin it.
So take that into account beforehand and design your game with the constraint that it must be implementable on your own personal resources.
Of course one might also ask why has the once-innovative gaming industry gotten to the point where the opinions of some pointy-haired manager at EA affects anything expect EAs bottom line, but that would get us disturbingly close to questioning the wisdom of allowing corporations to merge and buy each other and thus concentrate all of the wealth and power into single hands, and that would be simply heresy. All hail the Invisible Hand and your new corporate overlords!
The private companies don't want to compete against the government because the government does not go away even if it loses money on every transaction.
Neither do big companies, judging by recent events.
It is not a fair competition and the consumer is the big loser since public money goes to fund a service that will be worse than the private service, yet paying for it is not optional for those who choose not to use it; sort of like the situation with public education in this country.
How is a telecom the size of a small nation-state a "private" service? Who owns it? Who goes to jail if it breaks the law? Who bears its debt if it goes bankrupt while owing billions?
"Private entrepreneurs" originally referred to shopkeepers, barbers, butchers and other such people. A telecom is not a private enterprise in any sensible meaning of the word. Its closer to a twisted parody of a particularly nasty totalitarian government.
If the government provided goods and efficient services at decent prices then the Soviet Union would never have collapsed.
How strange, then, that all large corporations have arranged their internal workings as command economy. Or maybe not so strange, when you remember that the rising Chinese economy works that way too. And Soviet Union was a near-miraculous success story, considering that it was built on the ruins of a collapsed agricultural (non-industrial) tsarist Russia and became the second-strongest nation on Earth in just a few decades.
It's not the economical model that killed Soviet Russia, but the expenses of a military dictatorship. When you have to simultaneously prepare to deal with enemies at both home and abroad, you can't possibly keep up with a country that doesn't have to worry about rebellions. Besides, I'd argue that the US also finally went bankrupt from the after effects of Cold War, it simply took a few decades more.
Breeding is not a requirement. If people can't afford to, then they shouldn't do it.
Breeding is a requirement, unless your future plans involve extinction. And if people can't afford to breed in the richest nation that has ever existed, then there's something very wrong.
Oh well, having lots of young males around whose only chance of reproduction is a violent revolution should solve the problem in a quick, bloody and cathartic way soon enough. "Breeding is not a requirement" is right there with "let them eat cake" as an unwise way of answering someone who's complaining about income inequalities.
Yes, those Troll raters are total noobs. When I want to punish and suppress anyone that dares to disagree with me, I rate "Redundant", since metamoderators are too lazy to check.
If it was legal to buy discount DVDs in India and sell them in America then DVD producers etc would stop selling in India at the lower rate. Why would you sell cheap DVDs in India to earn negligible income there,if this will cost you masses of money by losing higher revenue sales of US goods. Ergo, the price disparity can't be legally exploited when it exists because it is not legal to exploit it.
If it was legal to employ cheap Indian/Chinese/Hellholian labour producers etc would stop employing Americans at the higher rate. Why would you employ expensive workers in America, if this will cost you masses of money by losing lower cost employees in India. Ergo, the wage disparity can't be legally exploited when it exists because it is not legal to exploit it.
Socialism - by definition - is when you do not have private property on means of production at all (you still do have personal property, however).
The very idea of Marx-style socialism is that the workers, rather than owners, should get the fruits of their labour. Communal ownership only enters the picture because it is impossible to run a factory alone, so it should be owned by all the workers who'd split the profits between them.
Ironically enough, if taken to its logical conclusion, this would effectively make everyone a private entrepreneur.
Any place where you can own e.g. a factory is not socialist.
Any place where you can own a factory without working there is not socialist, or at least not communistic. Or, more to the point: any place where you can get money simply by owning something is not socialistic.
Any place where you can trade goods for money with other people for any price you both agree upon is not socialist.
Trade, or any restrictions place on it, has nothing to do with whether a system is or is not socialist.
Amount of taxes paid is not a defining characteristic of a socialist state.
And yet whenever there's talk of using tax money to provide some service communally, that proposal gets branded "socialist". Yet when someone points to a successful socialistic country, that country is suddenly not socialistic. It kinda makes one wonder if the word "socialism" isn't simply a right-wing boogeyman?
Besides, I always wonder... Why do people act as if pedophiles were horrible people.
Because people have a natural instinct to protect their children, which causes them to be on lookout for potential dangers for them. This, in turn, causes slight anxiety, which is preyed on by the cynical politicians who are drawn to psychological weaknesses like sharks to blood.
It's the same thing as with terrorism: politicians and others who want power strive to fan people's fears into full-blown panic, so they are no longer thinking rationally, and can be manipulated easily. Pedophiles are even better boogeymen than terrorists, because the guy who points out he has better chances of being struck by lightning than dying in a terror attack seems brave while a guy - or better yet, a mother - who points out that her children are more likely to be run over by a car than get molested by a stranger can be branded a bad parent.
Hysteria and lack of rational thinking are considered virtuous when dealing with children, and calm use of reason is seen as callous and irresponsible. The end result is, of course, the same as it's always been: a police state build on the pretext of eradicating witches/jews/communists/terrorists/pedophiles.
But people who just download it from peer to peer networks without anyone profitting or getting hurt more because of that download? Hell, it might even prevent some child abusement cases.
Preventing child abuse is not the point of these policies. Enabling censorship and getting votes for it because "it's for the children" is. If anything, increased abuse would be beneficial for the politicians, since it would be something for them to point to and pretend to be fighting against.
If we had a free market instead of the quasi-socialist/fascist system in place now, the market would set fair prices.
No, the market would set whatever price you'd be willing to pay. Tell me: how much would you be willing to pay to treat a life-threatening condition?
No one ever talks about health care in laize-fair jurisdictions. Last time I was out of the US I paid $65 for a doctors visit and two prescriptions TOTAL. Open system. No govt price fixing. No government subsidies. My friend had a tooth extracted there, cost $150. My father just had the same in the US, cost $800.
How much is the average salary in said jurisdiction? Because it's meaningless to talk about dollar cost; what matters is the cost relative to the buying power of the people in the jurisdiction.
He's not alone (In the assault part he probably is). The concern is universal. A lot of us Tor Network admins who do not provide exit nodes have opened ports for twitter, IM, and IRC...
How do you do that, exactly speaking? I've been running a Tor relay since the Finnish police erected the Great Firewall of Finland and blocked a site critical of it (http://lapsiporno.info/), but I don't really know too much about its internals, or those of Twitter, IM or IRC for that matter.
A man on US soil gets attacked by agents of a foreign government.
Maybe. That would clearly make the attack an act of war. It could also be a bunch of hooligans continuing the fine tradition of political debate in Middle-Eastern style.
Slashdot response: "It's the US's fault".
Nope, for once Bush is blameless. The guy himself may or may not be considered to have brought it upon himself, in the same sense as walking through a bad part of town at night while counting your money might be inviting mugging.
In any case, this does seem to fit the profile of a mild terrorist attack.
Linux seems to have difficulty playing DVDs with good quality, much less running an intense 3D game like Half-Life. Face it - Windows totally kicks Linux's ass with respect to video and sound support.
Well, of course. 3D acceleration on Linux requires in-kernel drivers, and the kernel interface changes constantly, so the drivers need to be constantly updated to work with new kernels. Open-source drivers would solve the problem, but manufacturers don't want to provide them and Linux isn't anywhere big enough to force them to. The end result is a nightmare; for example, I can't update the kernel because the last drivers that work with my card (Geforce 2 MX) don't work with the new kernel. And while I got an old Radeon for free, it won't work with my motherboard (KT7A).
Slashdot Mirror
So a police writes that the police is underarmed and overregulated? No, really?
And once we're through that, we can continue to Naked Gun and Robocop.
That's precisely why you need to send the SWAT: otherwise, people might start thinking ravers harmless, but if you send a SWAT team, you can report that fact and have people jump to the conclusion that it was necessary because the rave was violent, at which point it's easier to get their support for further crackdowns on ravers.
Every organization needs enemies, and if you can choose, it's best pick the ones who can't shoot back.
No, they get overthrown by people who have a strong conviction about how the world should be, and are willing to kill for it. Consequently, in the power vacuum that follows a successful revolution, they typically establish a regime that's every bit as oppressive as the one they overthrew.
More to the point: as long as wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few, so will power be.
Wealth is resources, and control of resources gives ability to act effectively, which is better known as power. An economic system which concentrates power doesn't magically stop doing so when it comes to political decisions. That is why libertarian/neoliberal politics are moving us back towards feudalism, and should be opposed at every turn: for most of us they mean ever smaller amount of freedom.
This is one of the few instances where "freedom is slavery" is actually the truth: complete economic freedom lead to most people becoming de facto slaves, and that's the lucky ones - the unlucky ones will beg for food on the streets, if these right-wing lunatics get their way and dismantle social security systems.
The problem is that the ditches are dug by machines nowadays. All menial jobs either are or are soon going to be mechanised, since machines are cheaper and more effective than humans at them. What are these people going to do then?
The reason why socialism is seeing such a resurgence of popularity is that large numbers of people have become economically superfluous and thus depend on welfare to survive, just like during the industrial revolution. Back then it resulted in the founding of communism; I wonder what will the result will be this time?
Only if they have money to spend. If they don't and are struggling to survive they have little choice but to go with the cheapest option, even if it'll end up costing more in the long run. That's one of the reasons why our society is becoming increasingly stratified, and the basic problem with capitalism: you have to have capital in order to make capital, leading to an exponential growth in wealth differences, and all the social and economical problems that brings.
Since "nanny state" invokes images of certain amount of benevolence, I prefer the term "wicked stepmother state": socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and corporations at the helm.
The word "sheeple" is quickly becoming just as overused as "fascist", and is nowadays my cue to assume that the message I'm reading is an inept Libertarian/Rayndian propaganda rant. Besides, by using the word "we" you are talking about people collectively, and must therefore be a communist. Why do you hate freedom so much, comrade?
You know, this gives me an idea: how about we scan that atlas and all those local maps from all around the country and compile them into a map database? Since such a database is unwieldy in paper form, we could sell small electronic viewing devices. Maybe we could combine them with a GPS locator, so you can always find your current location quickly and easily? Coming to think of it, computers are pretty good at route-planning, so if you input your destination, it could easily plan a decent route for you; and with voice-synthesizers being quite useful today, it could even read the instructions aloud as you go!
Oh, wait...
No, what it means is that the computer tries to guess what some dyslexic jackass who insists on writing code despite being functionally illiterate and proud of it meant. Since we have no sentient computers yet, and since the markup diarrhea these people produce would be challenging even for a human to decrypt, the task is hopeless, and the websites that result will break in fascinating ways with each new browser version, or whenever whoever visits them has a different screen resolution than the "designer", or the stars are not just right. And whenever that happens, the website gets replaced by a new, equally broken version, and the designer gets paid for delivering said abomination.
And of course whenever the browser fails to extract meaning from the chaos that would horrify even Cthulhu, it's the user who gets blamed: he didn't use the right version of the right browser, running at the right resolution, with the right versions of the right plugins installed. That, or he has Linux installed on another and unrelated machine.
There's this fascinating concept called "the rule of law" which basically means that "worth" doesn't enter it at all. It's a pity that United States doesn't have it nowadays - if it ever did - thanks to courts deciding that they can ignore the supreme law of the country when they feel like it. That is truly obscene.
And you have it wrong on another way too: what's at stake here is not pornography. That's just a red herring. What's at stake is freedom of speech, and possibly all civil liberties. Once the idea that they can be ignored if the judge feels like it takes root, they no longer exist - after all, you've always been allowed to say whatever those in power want you to say, everywhere.
So no, there are no more worthy causes; this is an all-out attempt at breakthrough against the weakest point in the lines of freedom. Do nothing, and it will fall, and the rest will follow. And meanwhile the propaganda machine tries to convince you to do nothing, because it's only pornographers. Divide and conquer is thousands of years old, yet people still keep falling for it.
It's protected by the US Constitution, which is "just a goddamn piece of paper", to quote your ex-president. It's opposed by lots of people for various different reasons (which I suspect have more to do with getting people used to laws having exceptions of the "unless I decide otherwise" -variety than morality, but that's obviously just me being paranoid). And old pieces of paper don't really make much of an armor.
Or, as another fine leader once put it: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
If this thing will kill the HIV in your body, it will indeed make you unable to pass it on, as well as the associated symptoms (AIDS). It won't instantly cure the AIDS, as that is more like a wound caused by HIV, but once the virus is out of the way your immune system should start recovering. So for all intents and purposes, it's a vaccine/medicine for AIDS.
If you disagree, please explain just what of the above is incorrect, and why?
The sad thing is that there really is a rulebook for this. Several, in fact, both commercial and free. And the saddest thing is that I've read them all, despite not even playing RPGs :(.
Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge and Nymphology: Blue Magic are classics and should be stocked by every library.
Of course you can. Simply implement it in the client libraries, and have them communicate and coordinate via shared memory to keep track of what data should be shown to the client application. It might be simpler, thought, to separate this functionality to a separate proxy process, which uses the database as a backend. Of course we still won't get the guarantee that data has been logged into permanent storage, but we might be able to solve that problem by writing it to log files on the side, and consulting them on startup. We could even index those logs and satisfy some queries directly from those. And if performance isn't really critical, we could even store all data in indexed flat files and make do without MySQL backend!
You know, I think we might be on to something big here! I think I should patent this "Database Management Proxy".
So take that into account beforehand and design your game with the constraint that it must be implementable on your own personal resources.
Of course one might also ask why has the once-innovative gaming industry gotten to the point where the opinions of some pointy-haired manager at EA affects anything expect EAs bottom line, but that would get us disturbingly close to questioning the wisdom of allowing corporations to merge and buy each other and thus concentrate all of the wealth and power into single hands, and that would be simply heresy. All hail the Invisible Hand and your new corporate overlords!
Neither do big companies, judging by recent events.
How is a telecom the size of a small nation-state a "private" service? Who owns it? Who goes to jail if it breaks the law? Who bears its debt if it goes bankrupt while owing billions?
"Private entrepreneurs" originally referred to shopkeepers, barbers, butchers and other such people. A telecom is not a private enterprise in any sensible meaning of the word. Its closer to a twisted parody of a particularly nasty totalitarian government.
How strange, then, that all large corporations have arranged their internal workings as command economy. Or maybe not so strange, when you remember that the rising Chinese economy works that way too. And Soviet Union was a near-miraculous success story, considering that it was built on the ruins of a collapsed agricultural (non-industrial) tsarist Russia and became the second-strongest nation on Earth in just a few decades.
It's not the economical model that killed Soviet Russia, but the expenses of a military dictatorship. When you have to simultaneously prepare to deal with enemies at both home and abroad, you can't possibly keep up with a country that doesn't have to worry about rebellions. Besides, I'd argue that the US also finally went bankrupt from the after effects of Cold War, it simply took a few decades more.
Breeding is a requirement, unless your future plans involve extinction. And if people can't afford to breed in the richest nation that has ever existed, then there's something very wrong.
Oh well, having lots of young males around whose only chance of reproduction is a violent revolution should solve the problem in a quick, bloody and cathartic way soon enough. "Breeding is not a requirement" is right there with "let them eat cake" as an unwise way of answering someone who's complaining about income inequalities.
Protip: "Overrated" is not metamoderated.
Noob.
If it was legal to employ cheap Indian/Chinese/Hellholian labour producers etc would stop employing Americans at the higher rate. Why would you employ expensive workers in America, if this will cost you masses of money by losing lower cost employees in India. Ergo, the wage disparity can't be legally exploited when it exists because it is not legal to exploit it.
Oh, wait...
The very idea of Marx-style socialism is that the workers, rather than owners, should get the fruits of their labour. Communal ownership only enters the picture because it is impossible to run a factory alone, so it should be owned by all the workers who'd split the profits between them.
Ironically enough, if taken to its logical conclusion, this would effectively make everyone a private entrepreneur.
Any place where you can own a factory without working there is not socialist, or at least not communistic. Or, more to the point: any place where you can get money simply by owning something is not socialistic.
Trade, or any restrictions place on it, has nothing to do with whether a system is or is not socialist.
And yet whenever there's talk of using tax money to provide some service communally, that proposal gets branded "socialist". Yet when someone points to a successful socialistic country, that country is suddenly not socialistic. It kinda makes one wonder if the word "socialism" isn't simply a right-wing boogeyman?
Because people have a natural instinct to protect their children, which causes them to be on lookout for potential dangers for them. This, in turn, causes slight anxiety, which is preyed on by the cynical politicians who are drawn to psychological weaknesses like sharks to blood.
It's the same thing as with terrorism: politicians and others who want power strive to fan people's fears into full-blown panic, so they are no longer thinking rationally, and can be manipulated easily. Pedophiles are even better boogeymen than terrorists, because the guy who points out he has better chances of being struck by lightning than dying in a terror attack seems brave while a guy - or better yet, a mother - who points out that her children are more likely to be run over by a car than get molested by a stranger can be branded a bad parent.
Hysteria and lack of rational thinking are considered virtuous when dealing with children, and calm use of reason is seen as callous and irresponsible. The end result is, of course, the same as it's always been: a police state build on the pretext of eradicating witches/jews/communists/terrorists/pedophiles.
Preventing child abuse is not the point of these policies. Enabling censorship and getting votes for it because "it's for the children" is. If anything, increased abuse would be beneficial for the politicians, since it would be something for them to point to and pretend to be fighting against.
No, the market would set whatever price you'd be willing to pay. Tell me: how much would you be willing to pay to treat a life-threatening condition?
How much is the average salary in said jurisdiction? Because it's meaningless to talk about dollar cost; what matters is the cost relative to the buying power of the people in the jurisdiction.
How do you do that, exactly speaking? I've been running a Tor relay since the Finnish police erected the Great Firewall of Finland and blocked a site critical of it (http://lapsiporno.info/), but I don't really know too much about its internals, or those of Twitter, IM or IRC for that matter.
Maybe. That would clearly make the attack an act of war. It could also be a bunch of hooligans continuing the fine tradition of political debate in Middle-Eastern style.
Nope, for once Bush is blameless. The guy himself may or may not be considered to have brought it upon himself, in the same sense as walking through a bad part of town at night while counting your money might be inviting mugging.
In any case, this does seem to fit the profile of a mild terrorist attack.
Well, of course. 3D acceleration on Linux requires in-kernel drivers, and the kernel interface changes constantly, so the drivers need to be constantly updated to work with new kernels. Open-source drivers would solve the problem, but manufacturers don't want to provide them and Linux isn't anywhere big enough to force them to. The end result is a nightmare; for example, I can't update the kernel because the last drivers that work with my card (Geforce 2 MX) don't work with the new kernel. And while I got an old Radeon for free, it won't work with my motherboard (KT7A).