Personally I really wish there was a way to ensure routing so that my traffic would never enter or be processed by a particular jurisdiction to avoid legal problems and illegal (but commonplace) monitoring.

I would happily accept the potential for greater latency to keep anything that does not have an end destination in the US from passing through that country. The madcap laws and privacy invasions don't even recognize the token acknowledgement of the constitution that citizens get for us foreigners and I'd feel much better not being hostage to the American governments descent into totalistarianism.

I actually agree with you on governments having the right to control their own TLD and leverage that towards employment but lets be honest that this is not why Kazakhstan has made this law. Nazarbayev the (first and only) president, commander of the armed forces, and head of the political party which controls the 'democratic' legislature is a dictator in all but name. The reasoning for this law is to place Google's data where it is physically vulnerable to being seized, blackmail, or some similar tactic. The government there is interested solely in suppressing opposition and increasing personal wealth and power rather than high minded concepts like ensuring their populace has jobs except insomuch as it impacts their real interests.

Because it wouldn't let them punish Kazakhian internet users for their governments foolish behaviour. As a result it wouldn't allow Google to implicitly threaten any other country (due to lack of economic clout and small internet using population) where a law like this might actually have a non-negligable effect with unhappy constituents as a means of preventing them from excercising their sovereign rights and obliging Google to abide the laws outside the US.

Mostly because unlike the US the system is not designed to encourage corruption. You get people making bad decisions because they are wrong rather than because they were bought off by commercial interests who don't want restrictions to impair their ability to make money.

-Lobbying is tightly controlled and restricted with real criminal penalties levied against both the politicians and the companies who violate the restrictions.
-Revolving doors between regulators and industry are often illegal and even when not are considered highly inappropriate causing major social suffering and diminishing their ability to abuse their previous contacts.
-Money is a less significant player in elections. Most countries have some form of public financing and thus the legal bribery of the US does not occur.

So very true.

On the other hand Europe does have its extreme right which is a touch to the right of any US politician who actually is capable of getting elected. The simple fact is that in European countries that have minimal visible minorities due to lack of imigration the extreme right can get away with extremely overt racism and still occasionally grab a seat or two in a way Americans can't. Instead the republicans and tea party just have to look on with awe and stick to using dogwhistle language and covert racism.

On the other hand compare the quality of news programming available in France and the UK which 'restricts' them to producing relatively unbiased, non-promotional programs to the US which does not.

US news programming varies wildly in quality from Fox News,a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican party (or vice versa), to ABC, NBC, and CBS which compete with each other for the position of television tabloid. At best in the US you are getting wildly pro-corporate news typically focused on extremely rare crimes in far away places, this weeks sex scandals, and junk filler that oftens is promoting a product. In France and Britain you get in-depth analysis of real issues, opinions and info from non-partisan sources, and less tabloid fear mongering.

Removing bias from newscasting may not be why the European news networks produce content that is head and shoulders above Americans but the lack of restrictions in the US certainly does not ensure that anything resembling news is actually produced.

The difference is that Zuckerberg is taking moral responsibility for his actions by accepting whatever unpleasentness is involved in killing the animals rather than passing off an excuse that it would be too hard to not participate in the enslavement of workers to make his goods like you are.

That was my reaction too. If they are this cautious about unexplained traffic then maybe a online password service (run by them) isn't the disaster I thought it would be.

Because IQ is supposed to be a measure of intelligence not future success. The fact it predicts future success moderately well is interesting but the fact it fails to measure what it is supposed to measure is profoundly problematic. By failing to accurately measure the desired specific factor the resulting value is rendered fairly meaningless.

If I had a speedometer that gave me useful information about my fuel consumption it would be interesting and possibly useful but it wouldn't help me avoid getting speeding tickets.

I'm glad that they are identifying how much motivation is important in success compared to the numeric value you get on an IQ test.

I scored very highly on my IQ testing from an early age. I was able to coast through school achieving high marks and all the praise and benefits that entailed without putting almost any effort into it. Then I hit university and was completely bludgeoned by the fact I had to self-motivate to produce and that there was actual efforted required to succeed and I couldn't just pound out my assignments in 20 minutes and get back to playing computer games. That early engraining that success doesn't require work, along with significant mental illness has left me far less successful than the numbers say I should be. My general conclusion is that IQ is an interesting number but other than indicating how well you perform on a limited variety of tests it doesn't have much value.

That is actually a downright insightful potential solution and one so toxic that no politician could ever mention considering it, let alone actually putting in forward. By placing the government in the position of providing morally (if not legally under this scheme) objectionable material, the 'think of the children' brigade and religious moralizers would come out against it screaming for the head of anyone who supported it.

The other problem this would face is that many people consider the viewing of child exploitation as re-exploiting that child each time. Imagine how that child (or now grown) victim feels about pedophiles whacking off to their picture, a picture that they were forced to take against their desires that disgusts them and they wish every trace of it were eradicated. How do you balance the victims rights and the fact they never (and could not have) consented to those pictures being taken. Also the law would need to disolve copyright for seized childporn in order to redistribute it legally.

This is an example of buying the hype the police are selling. Fewer people respond violently to law enforcement today than 20 years ago but the fact that the 24-hour news networks are reporting every case across the entire country as if it happened in your own town creates an impression of an epidemic of violence. Using a raid for gangs or drugs where disposal of evidence is a real risk is reasonable.

However deleting childporn from a computer is fairly time consuming given the quantities these people usually accumulate it in and preventing it from being easily recoverable even more so. Approaching the door with two uniformed officers with a warrant for the computers is an easy solution. One officer stays with the accused at the door while the other goes and unplugs any computer they can find. An extremely computer saavy childporn downloader might have set up sufficient failsafes to delete his data but it is very difficult to do and they aren't going to be using their own IP address in the first place so there should be an indication that greater preperation is needed when they are finally tracked down.

Canada has the same (flawed) system but sustains 3 major national parties, 1 minor national party, 1 major regional party, and a hodgepodge collection of irrelevant (electorally) parties. Granted we have been slowly shifting towards consolidating the parties since the two conservative parties merged and promptly took control of the government (more related to the current ruling party's overblown scandal). In many ways our greater number of parties actually is an advantage towards moving to proportional representation because there are politicians who would gain from it that support it (it is actually a policy plank of the NDP) rather than having everyone with the power to reform the system benefiting greatly from the way it excludes others from accessing political power.

Lots of judges do have the knowledge and issue reasonable warrants (not no-knock) when the police come to them. The police know this too but they have the choice about which judge to request the warrant from, so they go to the most ignorant and pliable judge who blindly accepts their questionable assertions as fact and issues them a no-knock warrant to send a SWAT team in. If the police weren't given the ability to 'shop' for a compliant judge there would be much less of an issue but currently they bypass anyone who knows enough to not go along with their rediculous plan.