derleth

the law does not specifically mention Islam and it does not prohibit, as you have misrepresented, "dressing up as a Muslim"

Ah, but it bans something that it just so happens only Muslims would wear. Suspicious, no?

Also accusations of Big Brother coming from Americans at this point is rather hilarious.

Irrelevant. If you think the NSA is alone, you're delusional.

None of this is relevant. You can't argue the actual points, so you descend to irrelevancies.

BULL and SHIT. In Australia, there is no routine pixellation of middle fingers, likewise pixellating the mouth of someone swearing.

We don't ban whole works. Australia does.

Hell, even movie ratings are a form of censorship,

Nonsense. Self-imposed rating systems are in no way comparable to governmental censorship.

Some US states prevent atheists from holding political office

Wrong. Those laws may be on the books, but they could never be enforced, due to the First Amendment of the Federal Constitution.

Your wikipedia link has little that Australia has banned in the past couple of decades

It's the principle of the thing.

Idealism is nice... until it's tested, then pragmatism needs to have a voice.

Wrong. Utterly wrong. If you abandon your principles the moment they're tested, they were never your fucking principles at all.

But the pragmatism of legislating against holocaust denial or sporting the swastika is basically the same as anti-defamation legislation: it's saying 'don't diminish this'.

By making it seem that it can't fight deniers on an equal footing, that it needs laws to bolster its argument.

those laws are very specific in terms of what they ban

So? That doesn't make it better.

US free speech also does nothing to solve any of the real problems modern America has with anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim racism.

We don't ban face veils. Talk to me about racism when you've stopped banning veils.

They're there to stem violent nationalism, the European forms of which don't exist in the US.

We had the KKK, which was just as violent and just as nationalistic as European forms of it. We were able to destroy it (twice!) without resorting to the destruction of fundamental freedoms.

The argument for this law is not grounded in any religious objection, as I understand it

Wow. This is monumentally dishonest, especially given how the law came to be and how it's been applied.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/when-did-islamop...

but rather in the fact that face coverings make identification difficult

A poor reason to assault someone's culture and religion. Rather Big Brotherish, in fact.

and do not fit in with the expected norms for social interaction in that country.

Back in the day, allowing blacks and whites into the same schools didn't fit in with the expected norms for social interaction in the USA. We got over it.

France also has a ban on the display of religious symbols in public schools.

This I don't have a huge problem with, even though it seems a bit over-broad. Does it also prohibit people from wearing cross necklaces, for example? How about if someone had put ashes on their face for Ash Wednesday?

OK, to begin with, Australia still bans things. This is something the USA grew out of decades ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Australia

It's insane.

Also, there are the defamation laws:

https://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/defamation.html

In theory, the objective of defamation laws is to balance protection of individual reputation with freedom of expression. In practice, defamation laws are frequently used as a means of chilling speech. A threat of (costly) defamation proceedings and damages, whether or not a plaintiff's claim is likely to be upheld by a court, is often used to silence criticism not only by a particular person or group but also as a threat to others.

Basically, defamation laws in the USA are much more defendant-friendly compared to their equivalents in Commonwealth countries. Australia deserves much praise for apparently being much better in this regard compared to the UK, for example: Australian law recognizes truth to be an absolute defense, which is not generally the case in Commonwealth libel laws.

Canada deserves special approbation for its insane hate speech laws:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Human_Rights_Commissio...

Which are similar to the insane laws against denying the Holocaust or even using certain images in parts of Europe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_%C2%A7_86a

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_legal...

There have been just as many substantial fascist parties in places with those laws as there are in places without them: Zero. They're an attack on free expression, a universal human right, and they're an absurd over-reaction, an example of terrified cowering at a few worthless fools. What's worse, they do nothing to solve any of the real problems modern Europe has with anti-Roma and anti-Muslim racism.

I note you didn't respond to the fact it's illegal to dress as a Muslim in some places in Europe but it's legal everywhere in the USA.

Robust free speech protections, ability to rough it in a country that's still in the first world, and the ability to enter industries that don't exist to the same extent elsewhere.

We're also much less racist than Europe, for example: We haven't banned wearing traditional Muslim garb, for example, and we don't have the hatred of the Roma which is endemic to the European continent.

Right, because a whole country is TexaFlorida and all the inhabitants are Duck Dynasty Honey Boo Boo.

The categorical imperative is strictly weaker: It's possible to use the veil of ignorance to argue against positions nobody is insisting must be made universal.

For example, "In this house, you always clean up": The categorical imperative only works to argue against this if you try to find a way to apply it to every household; the veil of ignorance works simply by forcing the members of the household to be ignorant about who 'you' refers to.

Vim did win the war; there's still nothing better.

GNU Emacs is much better. It's easier to use and easier to extend.

Predicting food shortages, particularly of meat, was commonplace then, and increasingly common through the 1970s. Housing shortages were another theme, as was endless billowing torrents of acid rain. Turns out, the EPA actually did its job on that front and headed off a disaster in this country.

How often do the programmers around here need binary arithmetic? Not very often, I'd wager. Even the people who do low-level programming use logic and decimal arithmetic more than actual binary arithmetic.

It's almost as funny as Heinlein just assuming that every computer expert would need to have tools to repair hardware. He never quite wrapped his mind around someone focusing exclusively on software; maybe he never grasped 'software' as a distinct concept.

for most of the 90's the concern was underpopulation

Heh.

When the birth rate is much above replacement, we worry about overpopulation. AND THAT'S TERRIBLE.

When the birth rate is near or below replacement, we worry about underpopulation. AND THAT'S TERRIBLE.

It wouldn't be nearly as funny if it weren't the same people worrying each time.

x86 is a modern architecture

It's a modern ISA, implemented by modern microarchitectures.

And what do you think caused the social change? Did you notice that it came about after the laws were put in place?

The laws didn't come from nowhere, but they certainly had an impact on the majority's way of thinking. Why else would the Religious Right be so absolutely set against laws allowing same-sex marriage? If laws didn't change social values, they'd have nothing to fear from them.

These days kids barely know who Donald Duck or Mickey are.

Ignoring the fact this is likely false, this has nothing to do with copyright. It's a matter of trademark law, and Disney would in no way lose the trademark over any of its characters if certain specific films featuring them were released into the public domain.

We don't need your sexism and racism.

You can brow-beat, I asked nicely.

The government doesn't care about your rifles. Not even your semi-automatic ones with sights and stocks and lasers and so on. They barely even care about a well-trained militia full of people who are angry with them: The US Armed Forces destroyed something a lot scarier than anything the NRA could muster when it steamrollered Iraq in 2003.

So get off your horse about needing guns to protect yourself from the government. The government could destroy you and your guns in a second if it wanted to.

If you want to be persuasive, stick to defending yourself against home invasion. That's a band-aid on a serious problem, but at least it's a historically and logically honest argument.

Does anyone here know how big the relevant database actually is?

This long predates Bitcoin, although BTC gives it a new immediacy. Assassination prediction markets like this were a topic of discussion on cypherpunk mailing lists back in the 1990s.

It's one way to give anonymity (or strong pseudonymity) a political dimension, positive or negative.

the ideas that copyright is a granted right

So is ownership of land, when you come down to it. We like to pretend, in most countries, that land tenure is absolute and that it's the foundation of society, but it isn't. Only a sovereign has absolute land tenure, and the only sovereigns in the modern Western world are corporate entities called governments. (A constitutional monarchy is pleased to pretend that certain individuals are sovereign, but in point of practical fact a crowned head can be deposed by a functional constitutional government.) Everyone else holds tenure contingent on their sovereign not exercising eminent domain to take the land from them and use it to its own ends. Sure, you'll likely get paid, but you don't have the option of turning down the offer and keeping the land.

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society." -- Thomas Jefferson

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12....

Also because surgeons were manual laborers, and therefore not accorded the same respect as gentleman physicians.

Also, Cisco routers and Sysco restaurant supplies, even though a company that sold network hardware wouldn't be able to call itself Sysco for long. This is because the standard is confusion, not an exact string match. As per 15 USC § 1125:

(a) Civil action

(1) Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which—

(A) is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person, or

(B) in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person’s goods, services, or commercial activities,

shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1125

This is because trademark law is a consumer protection law first and foremost, as opposed to being a property law like copyright and patent laws are. This is also why you can lose trademarks so easily: If you're not using it and defending it, it's presumed you don't care, so nobody's going to confuse an active trademark with a defunct one.

You have to design with the user in mind. Always.

We don't need your sexism and racism.

The rule: A message encrypted with a private key can only be decrypted using the corresponding public key. A message encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted using the corresponding private key.

If the poster wanted all of us to be able to read it, they would have encrypted it with their private key. Then we'd just need their public key, which is published on keyservers, to decrypt it.

Why would anyone do this? Because it is a way to verify that the message came from a specific person or group. If you can decrypt a message with a given public key, you know "Only the people who have access to the corresponding private key could have published this message." You don't necessarily know who, in specific published it, but you can do things like determining that a batch of messages all came from the same group.

Now, if the person had encrypted it with a specific person's public key, then only that specific person would be able to decrypt it, because messages encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. Being able to post private messages in public fora without needing to meet the recipient beforehand is one of the main features of public-key cryptography.

RMS doesn't care about reverse-engineering binaries from disassembly dumps as far as I know; he'd be more apt to promote a complete re-write based on observed behavior.

The GPL does mandate that the source code must be in the preferred form for making modifications to the software, which forecloses on people releasing obfuscated source code and claiming to be in compliance with the GPL.

In a crazy way, this reminds me of a policy at a grade school I went to: Fight-free schools, where "It takes two to fight" was the mantra. Anyone caught fighting was in trouble; it didn't matter why, even if it was self-defense.

"It takes two to fight" means that if anyone tried to fight you, you had to go to a teacher and report them. That was the only sanctioned remedy.

It worked about as well as you'd imagine. I wonder what would happen if we applied the same logic to adult arguments and crimes.

rufie

Roofie? Or something else?