Were the planes DC-8s, by any chance?

Except for developers of applications who decide to make inexplicible design changes (cough AMAROK) where you dont have the expertise to fork, sure.

Anyone feel like forking Gnome 2? It shouldnt be hard!

By your logic, with a PC you dont have to put up with anyone's crap cause you can just write your own OS, SSL library, and browser from scratch! Yay, how productive!

The further back you go, the less worth the $3k it is. Their pricing is remotely competitive these days at only ~1.3-1.5x more than the competition. In years past it was as bad as 2x-3x as much.

I will say that I have only dealt with Apple documentation a handful of times, but it seemed substantially worse and more arcane than MSDN.

Im not clear how exactly thats something the schools need to teach. Did they teach your siblings how to brush their teeth too?

Do those ideas involve super injunctions for libel? Blocking the mere discussion of a company and its doings in Africa because they might cause financial harm?

Yes, the US has issues, but our default stance is much more towards free speech than the UK.

There is a qualitative difference between "reviewing code on my spare time when I feel like it" and "Im paid to look for security bugs 9-5".

Obviously you can argue about whether security is prioritized for any particular closed-source software vendor, but there IS a difference.

Most companies allow limited, non-disruptive personal use of computers. Unless youre in a really sensitive job like CIA or something, people generally allow shooting a quick email to family during or after hours.

I dont know. Does the UK system cause fundamental human nature to change such that you can trust those in power to act responsibly with no scrutiny?

Usually. If for instance youre an independent contractor and create the work as part of a solution you sell to the client, the copyright may remain with you.

Scare word alert. How bout a trigger warning next time?

I speak with them quite often, and my acquaintance with China is not casual. I would however be foolish to reveal the nature of that acquaintance publicly, and will not do so; you can either believe me, or not. However I have not known anyone to refer to the church as anything other than "the Three Self church"-- never by its full name, to the point where I had no clue that it had a fuller name.

Zimbabwe and North Korea both have "democratic" and/or "republic" in their name, as did the country run by the Khmer Rouge; they are anything but. Technically, China also has the word "republic" in its name, but its a bit of a stretch given that which party you vote for is pre-decided and local rulers (ie Hong Kong) are selected by the government.

As to whether Slashdot is banned in China, I could find out pretty easily, but in any case im sure the 50 Cent Partyhas a special dispensation to bypass the GFW in order to bend opinion.

I do hate to pull out the shill card, but there are a large number of anonymous posts in this thread where the author is both highly defensive of Chinese policy and highly critical of US policy, which is a strategy (changing the discussion, goalpost shifting) officially recommended for the 50 cent party. I keep seeing this same letter (Ã) in their posts, which occurs on the pinyin keyboard, and they use very strange english phrases ("flogging the religion") which I have never heard native speakers use.

I would have to be naieve to assume that there are no Chinese shills here, and your attack on free speech in point 3 jives with the Chinese official stance that "some kinds of thought must not be tolerated".

The skokie case was specifically about "hate speech". Nazi demonstrators wanted to demonstrate in a mostly Jewish town -- including speech. The Supreme court ruled that they could.

I also find it quite strange that I ask a question about whether missionaries deserve prison, and you respond with a question about treason. The question about missionaries stands, do you think missionaries deserve prison for simply discussing religion? Do students deserve death for simply asking for democracy?

We're not talking about government overthrow here, we're talking about the right to discuss what one believes.

It is very interesting also that your post contains many letters found on a pinyin keyboard, and posted AC. Where are you posting from, exactly?

The context here is Gmail and China, and Chinese censorship at large. If you have specific gripes about the US government, this is probably the wrong topic for it. Getting mad at me because I am speaking on topic seems quite strange; you were better off going to a different article if you were not prepared to discuss the Chinese security context.

Just to go over your points quite quickly,
1) FISA courts have not as far as anyone knows allowed global MITM of SSL, nor (as far as anyone knows) does NSA even have the technological capacity to do so because they dont have the private keys of all US-based entities nor is anyone aware of a method to break 2048-bit RSA.

2) KKK may be "monitored", but they are allowed to speak, demonstrate, organize, and so forth as long as they commit no actual crimes (arson etc). This is not the case in China.

3) The burden of proof is on the accuser. It is reasonable to expect that the NSA is doing a lot of unauthorized spying based on recently disclosed evidence. It is NOT reasonable to automatically believe every crackpot theory about SSL MITM without proof. There is evidence of SSL MITM in very specific cases (ie, Lavabit). There is zero evidence for the kind of global SSL MITM that China enforces.

4) You are veering off into tangents and getting mad at me for doing so. If ranting makes you feel better, by all means continue, but Im not going to entertain it any further. Based on the number of 50 cent army in the thread (counted 3 so far), Im half convinced you're one of them.