Why wouldn't they be allowed to make truthful, but pointed comments, about others? In general, the sort of people who can't deal with this sort of thing are not big fans of freedom of speech. Given the fact that there is a law professor at Uni Wisconsin Madison who is being attacked for "racist speech" when no one even has any direct quotes yet of what he even said, let alone any context, I think the legal profession and education system need to be opened up to the real world where hurt feelings are your problem, and you have to respond to others instead of crying to mommy bureaucrat. How about all free speech fans start a new movement, a new underground movement to thicken up people's skin or terrorize them into not attacking free speech? Everytime someone gets teary-eyed over hearing someone make a "bigoted" comment, says something they don't like, or anything else like that and they seriously try to stop that person from working or having an otherwise peaceful life... *POW* right in the kisser. Do it again, *POW* right in the kisser.
I'm not entirely joking. I'd love the irony of a "brownshirts for the first amendment" >:)
The current method of producing bills is often like a set of diffs. It says shit like "change USC blah blah to blah blah at line X, word Y." If there were a standard method behind the madness, the common man could simply pass the USC (United States Code) and the bill through a merge engine, and then see the changes as they'd finally look.
End result? Probably a revolution because the intentions of most Congresscritters, which are profoundly treasonous to the traditions of liberty and patriotism, would be exposed to the public.
What people like this fail to understand is that content is just one part of the puzzle. Content is cheap; just look at the number of books that are rejected for publication every year. If every author who got rejected said "fuck it!" and published their content online, Google would be swamped with free books. Having published content is also not even a sign of quality per se, as it is a sign that there is a possible market for it.
Google does create value, which is what the real issue here. Value is what matters in economic terms. They are increasing the value of the content that they index by making it more readily available to the public. If they are making money off of this without violating the exclusive right of copyright holders to control publication of their content (aside from fair use and mandatory licensing), then no one is being hurt, and no one is a leech. Being a leech implies that they are siphoning off value, a la file sharing, rather than clearly adding value by making the books more available and useful.
I'm not much of a Google defender, but the reality is that they are not mooching here. Mooching implies parasitism, which clearly they are not guilty of.
That's the golden question here. Can Australian law recognize this as fair use the way the American legal system can? I think it very well may not be able to because this group is being pretty bold, and I doubt they'd expose themselves if they had no legal leg to stand on the way they would in the United States.
No, I didn't. Maybe you want to read between the lines there instead of jumping back and forth between boolean situations. The reason I oppose vice taxes is that I support decriminalization of vices. Heavy taxes are a barrier to enforceability and end up getting the government right back into the system in a bad way. No special taxes makes it easier to enforce, discourages a black market from returning and gives the bureaucrats less work to do, justifying their employment even less.
1) It gives the government financial incentive to keep vice going, rather than let private citizens be the sole determining factor in what happens to it.
2) It often gets carried away, recreating the black market. Cigarette smuggling between states is a good example of this. If every state imposed a modest tax, it'd be non-issue but many jurisdictions can't help themselves.
3) It has no demonstrated tendency to reduce the consumption of or participation in a vice.
The best way to go is to hit vice with existing taxes, such as sales tax for drugs, liquor and sexual services and the income tax for gambling. That way you still get the revenue without getting much bureaucracy involved or encouraging the vice.
Is that none of the big political blogs care one bit about this. Sure, they'll write volumes about things like the NSA wiretapping program, but it's so far been largely up to smaller blogs to track this issue. I've been following it now since the first serious proposal about a year ago. What gives? Why is it so hard to get non-geeks to care about an issue that amounts to one of the biggest police state advances in the last twenty years?
The only problem with this issue is that it will cost them a lot of money to support all of the services affected by it. It won't be like the telecoms with just a few companies affected. Potentially tens of thousands of businesses will have to be compensated if they want similar compliance.
The only way that copyright law will really work is if the public respects it, and right now the public doesn't. It has nothing to do wtih prices or the actual law; most people don't even think about that as hard as that may be for most slashdotters to think about. It's because the public has been conditioned to think that no one is getting screwed, when in fact the creators are getting screwed. DRM is not going to fix what is fundamentally a social problem, and it's not like speeding. Damn, sometimes I hate analogies. You know what it's like? Having a very important part of the law that we teach people doesn't really have any moral component to it. Yes, it does. When you don't buy a band's album, but download it anyway, you're just an asshole. If you can't afford it, so what? If you can't afford even $20 for a CD, you sure as hell are too cheap on average to buy merch or go see them live. So yes, we need education and enforcement. Young people need to be taught that it's not a victimless crime to systematically break this law, and then there need to be fines and jail terms in place for many of the offenders.
So they deleted a post critical of them. The post then appeared on a private blog without risk of legal reprisal. No **rights** were violated unless this was allowed in the TOS, and even then those are rights granted by Dell at their site, not legal rights. It's stupid, tacky and self-defeating. I don't think anyone thinks this was a smart move on Dell's part, but it's not real censorship like what we fear. He is free to post the same post, 5x more vitriolic (provided it's all still true), anywhere he wants.
Besides, who in their right mind thought this was something more than astroturfing on Dell's part?
Why not just block out the MySpace domains and try to get MySpace Bypass too? If they're sophisticated enough that they resort to doing a lookup for the IPs and things like that, they're probably not the sort of employee who would be using MySpace anyway. Chances are, if they are blogging, it's on their own server anyway.
BAE's North American group took over the maker of the Bradley APC that the US Army uses. This means that a company connected to a foreign contractor owns the primary supplier of an important armament. The US also buys some of its infantry weapons from European suppliers. What's the big deal? Surely you're not going to suggest that Microsoft will actually want to obey any future dictates on Britain not using Windows, nor would it shaft a rich foreign government in a way that would cause it to lose that market. They'd fight tooth and nail to keep from losing that business.
There was an article posted outside of a professor's door when I was in college a year and a half ago talking about Microsoft's problem with treating even its IT contractors right. Maybe the real reason that IT is "suffering" is that companies often don't treat their IT employees like real employees. My fiance's dad, for example, has been proven to be a strategic asset to his company, but when he had to switch jobs because the client's manager found out that he made more money than she did, his boss basically said "ain't my duty to lift a finger to find you work" until it became a possibility that a competitor might pick him up. Given his reputation, that's actually possible. Hell, the abuses that IT workers ranging from sysadmins to software engineers face at the hands of corporate bureaucrats is legendary, and many young people are turned off/scared of that! Who wants to get paid a modest salary for that, especially women? My fiance can't take the abuse from the corporate types over her which is part of the reason why she fully intends to say "fuck this industry" and become a stay at home mother coding in her spare time for fun and to teach her kids if they're interested.
And the thing is that people like Bill Gates don't even care that they are adding to this by calling for the dilution of wages even more, at the same time that many "good liberals" like Gates support high taxes, high regulations and other things that cut into the competitiveness of the average worker compared to foreign workers and reduce the wages of the domestic workers. Yes, I know I'm cynical.
Presumably, most of these students are from middle or upper class families if they're doing this work, in college, outside of a first world country. Surely they have access to a bank that can covert dollars to the local currency. Now call me crazy, but it would seem to me that Google could just deposit the dollars into their local bank account and the intern could convert it as needed. I would assume that either way, a conversion fee would be involved. If it comes down to it, I would imagine that most interns would rather have the hassle of being paid in dollars on a regular basis like interns in most companies in the US, than have Google's bureaucrats go through the process of finding out how to convert the currency, especially knowing how slow most HR people are.
No one had sympathy for bullies. They were understood as violent assholes and no judge, jury or parent except maybe their own parents cared if they got tore up at school by their victim. In the 50s when my dad was growing up, he beat the hell out of one such bully and the principal not only didn't even haul him into his office, but instead grabbed the bully, who was busted up and bleeding and pulled him into his office for a lecture before the dread phone call to mom and dad (who gave him a whipping that afternoon for picking fights). The threat of violence works. It is what human beings are conditioned to respect. Bullies frequently get away with it because today they're protected by bureaucrats ranging from school employees to social welfare people to the legal system. You beat one up today, you get expelled and possibly prosecuted. All of the laws against the use of force by students protect the aggressor today, not the victim. School shootings only happen because people refuse to admit that people like bullies only understand the language of violence.
I've used violence against bullies before, and I know from experience that it works. The more they bully, the more you make them suffer. Eventually, they get the idea and leave you alone. To paraphrase Heinlein, it's as easy as training a puppy.
You know how they justify things like this because criminals and terrorists are allegedly more saavy and powerful than ever thanks to "technology?" You look at the sort of weapons and tools that the governments of the first world countries have today, and the power disparity is getting greater. Shit, some of the weapons our military gets these days in the United States are just sick. Seriously, the governments of the world are just afraid of the fact that today the individual has some new power that is still largely harmless. They can't have that because it might mean evolution, not revolution. A slow, but steady push away from the powers that be.
If he really wants to make a difference, he should fork PHP and really fix up the language and interpreter to his liking. Besides bug and security fixes, a standard naming convention for built-in functions would be quite nice. Maybe Esser could do for PHP what EGCS did for GCCS if he did that.
Shows the different meanings of "enlightenment" as defined in politics. In America, you get trouble for boobies. In Europe, you get thrown in prison for merely saying things that sound racist or bigoted. Puritans versus anti-free speech fascists. All I can say, after seeing this sort of effort to block minority points of view is that America really is freer than these countries.
We can sneak porn without getting in any real trouble in general. Europeans have to hide anonymously to express views that are not liked by the bulk of the population. That's what it comes down to.
Like data retention, online surveillance (Carnivore successor that hoovers up all data then processes it!) and things like that. I'm a lot less concerned about personal information than I am about a surveillance state. We already have remedies for identity theft, even if they are a bit of a pain to use. Where are the ones that firmly restrict what the government can do which is far more destructive of privacy?
One can be construed as intelligence gathering, the other is purely commercial. As much as most liberals here don't want to admit it, only two religious and ethnic groups have shown a tendency toward terrorism against America so far, Arab and Pakistani Muslims. I hate to break it to you, but the police will profile such groups because if an officer sees someone who looks Arabic or Pakistani taking pictures that appear to be focused more on the structure of a bridge than the scenery, they will get suspicious. It is what police are there for. They are supposed to intervene when their hackles are raised by suspicious behavior.
Now, go ahead and moderate me down because I have beaten a sacred cow. The reality is that human behavior can be statistically categorized more often than not. This is the essence of profiling, and believe it or not, but most officers will tell you that they would be just as interested in a rich-looking white man driving around a poor black neighborhood as they would a poor black guy going through a rich white or asian neighborhood. The police operate on statistics, and this is how they often get curious about whether a criminal is operating in front of them.
All of these rules and bullshit laws would not be necessary were it not for things like this. A child molester got off and had to buy a bike for a 6 year old he molested! WTF?! The real problem is that you have mindless, liberal judges who go "poor child molester" or "poor murderer" and let them off with a slap on the wrist for a crime that has traumatized someone or left them broken/dead. Laws like this should be opposed on principle. We don't need them. You rape a little kid, you deserve life in prison. Texas, ironically, is the only sane part of the Western world on this. They are discussing giving 25 years mandatory for the first offense, life or execution for the second. No registered emails, no complicated slaps on the wrist. You rape a little kid, you're doing hard time where you can't get to another little kid. The reality is that the systems in both America and Britain are wildly detached from reality. Too often judges sympathize with violent criminals, and IMO, that makes them culpable for the victimization of the next person.
Why is it that no one insisted on Russia being systematically "deSovietized" the way that the post-WWII Axis, Afghanistan and Iraq have been cleaned up? Why aren't the leaders who participated in the gulags, etc. hanging from gallows? Where are the human rights trials? The Soviet Union was as bad or worse in the number of its people that it murdered than the Nazi regime. In fact, despite the cries of "Fascism!" the Italian Fascists were certifiably peaceniks in the numbers they killed compared to either the Nazis or the Soviets. In many respects, the Soviet Union was one if not the worst regime in the 20th century.
Things like this are a left over from the Soviet era. If the Russian people were smart, they would learn to get over their bullshit nationalism and repudiate their "Soviet glory days" with a vengeance by hanging the Communists and abolishing all of the last traces of Communist rule from Russia.
The real issue, people, is that the Russian government has not fundamentally changed since the fall of the USSR. Why are people being sent to Siberia, especially for such a petty crime? I could understand violent crime, such as armed robbery, rape or murder, but simple theft or piracy?
Freedom of religion should not be extended to religions that are clearly made up. There is ample evidence to show that Hubbard pulled Scientology's belief system out his ass, the same cannot be said of any other religion from Christianity to Taoism to neo-paganism. The "Church" of Scientology is nothing more than a roving scam that exploits the first amendment to avoid taxation. It has also been shown to be a haven for systematic criminal behavior and should be considered a threat to American society.
Bottom line is religions don't have "trade secrets," but Scientology does. I could buy that if it claimed to be a mystery religion or a form of gnosticism, but it doesn't. Rather, those secrets are exposed as the result of a financial transaction.
Some religion. Despite my being a libertarian, I think the Germans are right on this one. It's not a religion. It's a subversive organization that needs to be monitored by the state because it has been known to use force and criminal behavior to advance its agenda, which is not even remotely religious.
I have posted links to blog entries on other bloggers' sites during a disagreement because my post had a lot of information that countered their point, including links to some original sources (in some cases, the original source had died and my post was the last copy of that information). Not talking about spamming here, but discretely linking to a post that was relevant and contained information like facts and figures that were relevant to the points I was making. Soon after losing the argument, the other guy made it so that any link I tried to present to back up what I was saying, got flagged as spam. Then, same thing happened with some of the other sites I linked to such as BibleGateway when he'd get into a theological fight with me. I ended up having to actually drop in several kb of text to back up what I was saying because he made it so I couldn't post a link to the original source.
There are a number of very tempermental people out there who will label email that annoys them as spam, even though it isn't. They may have even signed up for a mailing list, but are not the type to be bothered with even trying to get off of that. Same people probably also find disagreement with them to be a sign of sheer stupidity, but that's beside the point. That's what bothers me about some of the user-controlled spam reporting. Most users don't know enough to handle this, and it can be bad for a business, website, blog, etc. that gets marked as spam by some asshole who cannot be bothered to simply delete a message.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly they didn't even know there was going to be a technical problem...
I'd say that odds are they didn't even think that research was necessary.
Why wouldn't they be allowed to make truthful, but pointed comments, about others? In general, the sort of people who can't deal with this sort of thing are not big fans of freedom of speech. Given the fact that there is a law professor at Uni Wisconsin Madison who is being attacked for "racist speech" when no one even has any direct quotes yet of what he even said, let alone any context, I think the legal profession and education system need to be opened up to the real world where hurt feelings are your problem, and you have to respond to others instead of crying to mommy bureaucrat. How about all free speech fans start a new movement, a new underground movement to thicken up people's skin or terrorize them into not attacking free speech? Everytime someone gets teary-eyed over hearing someone make a "bigoted" comment, says something they don't like, or anything else like that and they seriously try to stop that person from working or having an otherwise peaceful life... *POW* right in the kisser. Do it again, *POW* right in the kisser.
I'm not entirely joking. I'd love the irony of a "brownshirts for the first amendment" >:)
The current method of producing bills is often like a set of diffs. It says shit like "change USC blah blah to blah blah at line X, word Y." If there were a standard method behind the madness, the common man could simply pass the USC (United States Code) and the bill through a merge engine, and then see the changes as they'd finally look.
End result? Probably a revolution because the intentions of most Congresscritters, which are profoundly treasonous to the traditions of liberty and patriotism, would be exposed to the public.
What people like this fail to understand is that content is just one part of the puzzle. Content is cheap; just look at the number of books that are rejected for publication every year. If every author who got rejected said "fuck it!" and published their content online, Google would be swamped with free books. Having published content is also not even a sign of quality per se, as it is a sign that there is a possible market for it.
Google does create value, which is what the real issue here. Value is what matters in economic terms. They are increasing the value of the content that they index by making it more readily available to the public. If they are making money off of this without violating the exclusive right of copyright holders to control publication of their content (aside from fair use and mandatory licensing), then no one is being hurt, and no one is a leech. Being a leech implies that they are siphoning off value, a la file sharing, rather than clearly adding value by making the books more available and useful.
I'm not much of a Google defender, but the reality is that they are not mooching here. Mooching implies parasitism, which clearly they are not guilty of.
That's the golden question here. Can Australian law recognize this as fair use the way the American legal system can? I think it very well may not be able to because this group is being pretty bold, and I doubt they'd expose themselves if they had no legal leg to stand on the way they would in the United States.
No, I didn't. Maybe you want to read between the lines there instead of jumping back and forth between boolean situations. The reason I oppose vice taxes is that I support decriminalization of vices. Heavy taxes are a barrier to enforceability and end up getting the government right back into the system in a bad way. No special taxes makes it easier to enforce, discourages a black market from returning and gives the bureaucrats less work to do, justifying their employment even less.
Taxing vice is bad policy for a few reasons:
1) It gives the government financial incentive to keep vice going, rather than let private citizens be the sole determining factor in what happens to it.
2) It often gets carried away, recreating the black market. Cigarette smuggling between states is a good example of this. If every state imposed a modest tax, it'd be non-issue but many jurisdictions can't help themselves.
3) It has no demonstrated tendency to reduce the consumption of or participation in a vice.
The best way to go is to hit vice with existing taxes, such as sales tax for drugs, liquor and sexual services and the income tax for gambling. That way you still get the revenue without getting much bureaucracy involved or encouraging the vice.
Is that none of the big political blogs care one bit about this. Sure, they'll write volumes about things like the NSA wiretapping program, but it's so far been largely up to smaller blogs to track this issue. I've been following it now since the first serious proposal about a year ago. What gives? Why is it so hard to get non-geeks to care about an issue that amounts to one of the biggest police state advances in the last twenty years?
The only problem with this issue is that it will cost them a lot of money to support all of the services affected by it. It won't be like the telecoms with just a few companies affected. Potentially tens of thousands of businesses will have to be compensated if they want similar compliance.
The only way that copyright law will really work is if the public respects it, and right now the public doesn't. It has nothing to do wtih prices or the actual law; most people don't even think about that as hard as that may be for most slashdotters to think about. It's because the public has been conditioned to think that no one is getting screwed, when in fact the creators are getting screwed. DRM is not going to fix what is fundamentally a social problem, and it's not like speeding. Damn, sometimes I hate analogies. You know what it's like? Having a very important part of the law that we teach people doesn't really have any moral component to it. Yes, it does. When you don't buy a band's album, but download it anyway, you're just an asshole. If you can't afford it, so what? If you can't afford even $20 for a CD, you sure as hell are too cheap on average to buy merch or go see them live. So yes, we need education and enforcement. Young people need to be taught that it's not a victimless crime to systematically break this law, and then there need to be fines and jail terms in place for many of the offenders.
So they deleted a post critical of them. The post then appeared on a private blog without risk of legal reprisal. No **rights** were violated unless this was allowed in the TOS, and even then those are rights granted by Dell at their site, not legal rights. It's stupid, tacky and self-defeating. I don't think anyone thinks this was a smart move on Dell's part, but it's not real censorship like what we fear. He is free to post the same post, 5x more vitriolic (provided it's all still true), anywhere he wants.
Besides, who in their right mind thought this was something more than astroturfing on Dell's part?
Why not just block out the MySpace domains and try to get MySpace Bypass too? If they're sophisticated enough that they resort to doing a lookup for the IPs and things like that, they're probably not the sort of employee who would be using MySpace anyway. Chances are, if they are blogging, it's on their own server anyway.
BAE's North American group took over the maker of the Bradley APC that the US Army uses. This means that a company connected to a foreign contractor owns the primary supplier of an important armament. The US also buys some of its infantry weapons from European suppliers. What's the big deal? Surely you're not going to suggest that Microsoft will actually want to obey any future dictates on Britain not using Windows, nor would it shaft a rich foreign government in a way that would cause it to lose that market. They'd fight tooth and nail to keep from losing that business.
There was an article posted outside of a professor's door when I was in college a year and a half ago talking about Microsoft's problem with treating even its IT contractors right. Maybe the real reason that IT is "suffering" is that companies often don't treat their IT employees like real employees. My fiance's dad, for example, has been proven to be a strategic asset to his company, but when he had to switch jobs because the client's manager found out that he made more money than she did, his boss basically said "ain't my duty to lift a finger to find you work" until it became a possibility that a competitor might pick him up. Given his reputation, that's actually possible. Hell, the abuses that IT workers ranging from sysadmins to software engineers face at the hands of corporate bureaucrats is legendary, and many young people are turned off/scared of that! Who wants to get paid a modest salary for that, especially women? My fiance can't take the abuse from the corporate types over her which is part of the reason why she fully intends to say "fuck this industry" and become a stay at home mother coding in her spare time for fun and to teach her kids if they're interested.
And the thing is that people like Bill Gates don't even care that they are adding to this by calling for the dilution of wages even more, at the same time that many "good liberals" like Gates support high taxes, high regulations and other things that cut into the competitiveness of the average worker compared to foreign workers and reduce the wages of the domestic workers. Yes, I know I'm cynical.
Presumably, most of these students are from middle or upper class families if they're doing this work, in college, outside of a first world country. Surely they have access to a bank that can covert dollars to the local currency. Now call me crazy, but it would seem to me that Google could just deposit the dollars into their local bank account and the intern could convert it as needed. I would assume that either way, a conversion fee would be involved. If it comes down to it, I would imagine that most interns would rather have the hassle of being paid in dollars on a regular basis like interns in most companies in the US, than have Google's bureaucrats go through the process of finding out how to convert the currency, especially knowing how slow most HR people are.
No one had sympathy for bullies. They were understood as violent assholes and no judge, jury or parent except maybe their own parents cared if they got tore up at school by their victim. In the 50s when my dad was growing up, he beat the hell out of one such bully and the principal not only didn't even haul him into his office, but instead grabbed the bully, who was busted up and bleeding and pulled him into his office for a lecture before the dread phone call to mom and dad (who gave him a whipping that afternoon for picking fights). The threat of violence works. It is what human beings are conditioned to respect. Bullies frequently get away with it because today they're protected by bureaucrats ranging from school employees to social welfare people to the legal system. You beat one up today, you get expelled and possibly prosecuted. All of the laws against the use of force by students protect the aggressor today, not the victim. School shootings only happen because people refuse to admit that people like bullies only understand the language of violence.
I've used violence against bullies before, and I know from experience that it works. The more they bully, the more you make them suffer. Eventually, they get the idea and leave you alone. To paraphrase Heinlein, it's as easy as training a puppy.
You know how they justify things like this because criminals and terrorists are allegedly more saavy and powerful than ever thanks to "technology?" You look at the sort of weapons and tools that the governments of the first world countries have today, and the power disparity is getting greater. Shit, some of the weapons our military gets these days in the United States are just sick. Seriously, the governments of the world are just afraid of the fact that today the individual has some new power that is still largely harmless. They can't have that because it might mean evolution, not revolution. A slow, but steady push away from the powers that be.
If he really wants to make a difference, he should fork PHP and really fix up the language and interpreter to his liking. Besides bug and security fixes, a standard naming convention for built-in functions would be quite nice. Maybe Esser could do for PHP what EGCS did for GCCS if he did that.
Shows the different meanings of "enlightenment" as defined in politics. In America, you get trouble for boobies. In Europe, you get thrown in prison for merely saying things that sound racist or bigoted. Puritans versus anti-free speech fascists. All I can say, after seeing this sort of effort to block minority points of view is that America really is freer than these countries.
We can sneak porn without getting in any real trouble in general. Europeans have to hide anonymously to express views that are not liked by the bulk of the population. That's what it comes down to.
Like data retention, online surveillance (Carnivore successor that hoovers up all data then processes it!) and things like that. I'm a lot less concerned about personal information than I am about a surveillance state. We already have remedies for identity theft, even if they are a bit of a pain to use. Where are the ones that firmly restrict what the government can do which is far more destructive of privacy?
One can be construed as intelligence gathering, the other is purely commercial. As much as most liberals here don't want to admit it, only two religious and ethnic groups have shown a tendency toward terrorism against America so far, Arab and Pakistani Muslims. I hate to break it to you, but the police will profile such groups because if an officer sees someone who looks Arabic or Pakistani taking pictures that appear to be focused more on the structure of a bridge than the scenery, they will get suspicious. It is what police are there for. They are supposed to intervene when their hackles are raised by suspicious behavior.
Now, go ahead and moderate me down because I have beaten a sacred cow. The reality is that human behavior can be statistically categorized more often than not. This is the essence of profiling, and believe it or not, but most officers will tell you that they would be just as interested in a rich-looking white man driving around a poor black neighborhood as they would a poor black guy going through a rich white or asian neighborhood. The police operate on statistics, and this is how they often get curious about whether a criminal is operating in front of them.
All of these rules and bullshit laws would not be necessary were it not for things like this. A child molester got off and had to buy a bike for a 6 year old he molested! WTF?! The real problem is that you have mindless, liberal judges who go "poor child molester" or "poor murderer" and let them off with a slap on the wrist for a crime that has traumatized someone or left them broken/dead. Laws like this should be opposed on principle. We don't need them. You rape a little kid, you deserve life in prison. Texas, ironically, is the only sane part of the Western world on this. They are discussing giving 25 years mandatory for the first offense, life or execution for the second. No registered emails, no complicated slaps on the wrist. You rape a little kid, you're doing hard time where you can't get to another little kid. The reality is that the systems in both America and Britain are wildly detached from reality. Too often judges sympathize with violent criminals, and IMO, that makes them culpable for the victimization of the next person.
Why is it that no one insisted on Russia being systematically "deSovietized" the way that the post-WWII Axis, Afghanistan and Iraq have been cleaned up? Why aren't the leaders who participated in the gulags, etc. hanging from gallows? Where are the human rights trials? The Soviet Union was as bad or worse in the number of its people that it murdered than the Nazi regime. In fact, despite the cries of "Fascism!" the Italian Fascists were certifiably peaceniks in the numbers they killed compared to either the Nazis or the Soviets. In many respects, the Soviet Union was one if not the worst regime in the 20th century.
Things like this are a left over from the Soviet era. If the Russian people were smart, they would learn to get over their bullshit nationalism and repudiate their "Soviet glory days" with a vengeance by hanging the Communists and abolishing all of the last traces of Communist rule from Russia.
The real issue, people, is that the Russian government has not fundamentally changed since the fall of the USSR. Why are people being sent to Siberia, especially for such a petty crime? I could understand violent crime, such as armed robbery, rape or murder, but simple theft or piracy?
Freedom of religion should not be extended to religions that are clearly made up. There is ample evidence to show that Hubbard pulled Scientology's belief system out his ass, the same cannot be said of any other religion from Christianity to Taoism to neo-paganism. The "Church" of Scientology is nothing more than a roving scam that exploits the first amendment to avoid taxation. It has also been shown to be a haven for systematic criminal behavior and should be considered a threat to American society.
Bottom line is religions don't have "trade secrets," but Scientology does. I could buy that if it claimed to be a mystery religion or a form of gnosticism, but it doesn't. Rather, those secrets are exposed as the result of a financial transaction.
Some religion. Despite my being a libertarian, I think the Germans are right on this one. It's not a religion. It's a subversive organization that needs to be monitored by the state because it has been known to use force and criminal behavior to advance its agenda, which is not even remotely religious.
I have posted links to blog entries on other bloggers' sites during a disagreement because my post had a lot of information that countered their point, including links to some original sources (in some cases, the original source had died and my post was the last copy of that information). Not talking about spamming here, but discretely linking to a post that was relevant and contained information like facts and figures that were relevant to the points I was making. Soon after losing the argument, the other guy made it so that any link I tried to present to back up what I was saying, got flagged as spam. Then, same thing happened with some of the other sites I linked to such as BibleGateway when he'd get into a theological fight with me. I ended up having to actually drop in several kb of text to back up what I was saying because he made it so I couldn't post a link to the original source.
There are a number of very tempermental people out there who will label email that annoys them as spam, even though it isn't. They may have even signed up for a mailing list, but are not the type to be bothered with even trying to get off of that. Same people probably also find disagreement with them to be a sign of sheer stupidity, but that's beside the point. That's what bothers me about some of the user-controlled spam reporting. Most users don't know enough to handle this, and it can be bad for a business, website, blog, etc. that gets marked as spam by some asshole who cannot be bothered to simply delete a message.