Why, is "borrowing", or intent to borrow, some kind of a constitutionally protected act that invalidates other laws? We aren't arguing mens rea, we're arguing the legal definition of speech.

The first thing I think of here is encode all the porn as ascii art, or as colored text where the letters are so small they are no longer visually register.

I could put an LED billboard up in times square where every pixel was shaped into a letter, spelling out Moby Dick or some such, and if the billboard displayed Moby's Dick instead then one could argue that I am using words to convey information, therefor it is protected speech. :3

This is all rather farcical obviously, but it illustrates how a message cannot so cleanly categorized as "words" or not. "fire" in a crowded movie theater, and all that.

I get the feeling the law is not codified this way, but I prefer to look at the matter as the *content* of speech should be protected, but that the *implementation* of speech should be something we can legislate against in order to protect the rights of others so long as alternate methods exist to convey the content.

Too bad you apparently can't even fathom what those reasons are, or you'd have shared them instead of appealing to ridicule.

> As a general rule, economic systems run more efficiently when people pay for the resources that they use, and run inefficiently when other people pay for resources that somebody else uses. Just a general rule to keep in mind. Hmm. Does it run efficiently when the significant segment of the population (children, elderly, ill, disabled, mentally unbalanced) that cannot earn *any* revenue to pay for their own weight are left to slowly starve? õ_O I know you're saying it's just a general rule, it's hard to balance systems on rules that require as many presumptions as this one to find balance, and slide out of balance as soon as those presumptions fail.

So I'm sure if they offer fiber in your neighborhood you wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole. :>

You've claimed that any investment in a fixed supply of something is a pyramid scheme. We mention Gold and Land (which also fit these criteria) and you hand wave about whether you're trying to use something as a currency or not.

Virtually all commodity investments have static supply in the short term. Bitcoin is a digital commodity. In fact it's the first digital commodity to be both counterfeit-proof and non-centralized, and those four properties (digital + commodity + counterfeit-proof + decentralized) drive 90% of it's value as a transaction and value store system. Can you name any alternatives which satisfy all four of those criteria?

What I ask from you is to disambiguate how it is that you view Bitcoin as a scam compared to any other fixed-supply commodity investment.

On the other hand, accept "non-functional today, but I promise tomorrow it will be amazing!" then that's all you'll ever have, too.

This.

Good god, screw the standards. If it's good enough for microgoogle, we should be doing it too. The only thing we have to lose is visitors to our own damn sites, right? So how can I tune my kernel / apache to firehose the TCP window? xD

So which is it? Are you going to factually challenge someone's belief or backpedal from a badly played bluff because you simply don't have the cards?

I responded to you because I had just got done complaining about how much argument is taking place on this subject without a single mention of evidence. And then I happen upon you, who not only talks of evidence but suggests that there is an abundance of it, in favor of censorship — which is the windmill I happen to be tilting at today.

I mean I don't know anything about porn — I'd be lucky if I could perform a Google search on the topic without somehow lousing it up — but I strongly resist censorship. Especially when the folks doing the censoring cannot produce empirical data about what ill is being resolved by slicing up other people's access to empirical data and replacing it with falsehood.

I mean, no matter how many citations we might potentially find suggesting there is no causal link to harm, how can I find the studies you specifically claim to have that there is? Your claim is fantastic. On par with claiming to have proof of evidence of God. So imagine my disappointment when I learn you were just making it up as you went.

As to the Ad Hominem (please look that up too), If it's any help, I am sorry for suggesting you don't know the meaning of the word "poison". That was very passive-aggressive of me. I should have just flat out said it instead.

It's just that I have high expectations for people who spam promo codes, trying to make a buck convincing people that coconut oil can cure hypothyroidism. You've got to at least demonstrate knowledge of the basics, or you'll be taken about as seriously as Sarah Palin when somebody calls Bullshit on you.

Wait, you're still talking about Jeeves and Wooster, rite?

"I've never heard of" != "There is no such thing as"

Nonetheless, I would imagine from his vantage of tech support he's never heard of it only because it's such a delicate topic that it is not often discussed with tech monkeys. But that's the danger of not hearing about things: it's easy to infer they must not exist or must not be a serious threat.

This demonstrates that Censorship, be it systemic blacklisting at an ISP or self-censorship due to embarrassment, dooms any population to fall prey to exactly what dangers they use the censorship to avoid.

While I can't profess that this statement is accurate, it paints an interesting stereotype of how each political movement sees the other, doesn't it?

(American) Conservatives want to centralize morality..
(American) Liberals want to centralize equality..
Authoritarians want to centralize .. well .. authority..
Socialists want to centralize industry..
Anarchists want to decentralize everything.

Us Libertarians just want to slap y'all upside the head, and centralize absolutely as little as we have to in order to optimize both liberty and social order. We see liberty as important because it pushes routing decisions to the edge of the network where they belong. Without it civilization and culture really cannot scale. But we also require a minimum of centralized power in the form of government as an officiator to resolve exceptions and disputes.. lest too much power collect in one organization which would rise up as a de facto government and endanger liberty all over again.

Mom! tehcyder said a bad word, why isn't he filtered yet? D:

Brilliant! We've been waiting for you to step up to the podium, sir. Now, please link to some of this wonderful evidence you speak of demonstrating that pornography is in any way harmful, and if possible that it is sufficiently harmful to warrant censorship as a remedy. Maybe you can even churn out a good definition for "pornography" seeing as how, you know, "harmfulness" would have to be a good litmus at this point. Yes? No? I mean, why bother blocking "pornography" in specific if we could just block whatever data is proven to be harmful?

It's hard to make progress in any direction in a debate like this without some hard facts. Please get our lazy, slashdotting butts off of the couch by bringing some peer-reviewed results to the party and up the ante. :)

Also, I really cannot help but directly refute your basic illustration:

To which I really need to refer you to my home boy Paracelsus:

Which leads to the answer: "I would seek to imbibe at most a sub-toxic amount of the drink".

But that's something I really would have expected someone hawking "iHerb.com" in their sig to know already? I'm just saying..