Sure. Here you go. Source of that URL, an article of the German IT publisher/news site Heise.

That article is about kino.to, a streaming "service" for pirated movies, to which you had to subscribe for a flat monthly fee. It is assumed (and that's what the Süddeutsche article linked there states), that anybody subscribing to that service had to know - by using common sense - that it can only be an illegal streaming portal and that streaming of illegal content is, well - illegal. And you had to be a suscriber in order to use that service.

That's a bit different from the current case.

... or pick a religion which hasn't a contract with the German state for collecting taxes (hint: any non-christian religion).

In thousand years? Just ask your replicator (aka "3D printer" these days) to create one ...

The question is whether that worry is rational or not

I don't think that is the point. It's rather how many feel the same (rational or not) and censor themselves. If a big enough part of a constitutional democratic country's inhabitants feel that way, it's troubling for a democracy. It typically is one of the attributes of a totalitarian regime that its citizens don't dare to speak up freely.

There are plenty of markets that are free enough that the advantages (and disadvantages) of free markets are clear.

No there aren't, because people like you keep forgetting (or ignoring?) one of the main prerequisites that Adam Smith described for a "free market" to work: equal knowledge of buyer and seller.

For a free market to work (according to Smith), a seller must be aware of all "ingredients" (cost of work for production, production methods, cost of raw materials etc.) of a product in order to decide a) the product's worth and b) being able to compare it to similar products. The cheap, low quality knife might be good enough for me, whereas the professional cook goes for the high quality and expensive one.

So, be honest: for how many of the products you buy each day, do you know the exact raw material combination? Are you able to judge the toxic level of all chemicals used in those products? Do you know the medications given to the animal whose meat you're buying, all the herbicides and fertilizers used for those vegetables, how many kid's slave labor is involved in the production of that t-shirt and how many m of fresh water have been contaminated during the mining of these rare earth used in your new gadget?

No, the parent was correct: free market (as defined by Smith) does not exist. Not even close these days.

Last I checked, people get paid decent money and can move to new jobs and places. You don't have that under feudalism.

You should check your facts again. The fast majority of people in this world don't get paid decent money. Hwll, most of them don't even have enough to eat. And that's mainly because a few people like you and me get paid decent. We're basically living off of their lives in our "glory capitalism world".

I agree. I don't know German either, but you watch his speeches and suddenly want to join in whatever it is he is talking about. You have to wonder if anyone with that capability has ever been on the good guys team? Churchill was inspirational but not in the same fuck yeah way as Hitler.

Funny/intersting how speaking the language (natively) seems to make a fundamental difference. For me as a German, I find Hitler's speechs adhorent. Most likely because I also understand what he's saying.

Churchill OTOH is rather impressive to me with his sonor, cold-blooded but nonetheless emotional voice. And that by just listening to the sound of his voice, without spending any attention to what he's saying.

They are also the reason most websites on the Internet are free.

Not sure how old you are, but lots of us do remember the internet from long before Big Corporation Overlords discovered this "new-fangled web thingy". And it was always free ("free" both as in "free beer" and "free of ads"), although hosting did cost a shitload of money compared to nowadays. But people ("people", mind ya, not "money-grabbing corporations") put up free content nonetheless. Because they enjoy sharing stuff.

Remember: the same people that complain about ad-blockers are the people that make money off of the free contribution of others. That's the Facebook model: let users provide free content - we collect the money by selling their souls.

Excuse me using extrem vocablary, but this is utter bullshit!

Here's a quick run-down from the man responsible for the (media-created) "global cooling" of the 70s.

Besides the excellent explanation of what went wrong in the first place, how he found out about it and published his new findings immediately, the part I especially like about that article is the the final paragraph:

Ironically, inside the scientific world, this switch of sign of projected effects is viewed as precisely what responsible scientists must do when the facts change. Not only did I change my mind, but published almost immediately what had changed and how that played out over time. Scientists have no crystal ball, but we do have modeling methods that are the closest approximation available. They can't give us truth, but they can tell us the logical consequences of explicit assumptions. Those who update their conclusions explicitly as facts evolve are much more likely to be a credible source than those who stick to old stories for political consistency. Two cheers for the scientific method!

The Red Cross knew about the concentration camps in Germany during WWII, but did nothing to help them.

The Red Cross is strictly apolitical. Only this allows them to go and help everywhere. As soon as they would take sides in a conflict, they're out of (their) business. The more lunatic a leader is (think e.g. Assad/Syria these days), the more likely he would deny the RC to enter his country and help. And most of the time (the people in) these countries need help the most.

While I get a nag screen for being unable to connect (anyone know how to turn that off?)

Haven't tried that in a long time, but it used to be:

• Have internet connection and start Steam
• In Steam, select "Offline mode" (or "Go offline", can't remember the exact phrase)
• Exit Steam
• Disconnect internet connection and start Steam again. It should remember it's offline setting.

The admittedly weird and counter-intuitive thing is to be online to go offline ...

Not even that. For many text field, e.g. the Slashdot comment field, SQL statements can be a completely valid input. I coult be explaining to someone how to solve a problem in SQL, or I could be re-posting a "Little Bobby Tables" joke. All very valid, nothing malicious.

I'd say it depends on the page's content. I really can't think of a valid reason for SQL statements or Javascript snippets in pages dealing about celebrity A or pet B or most other fields of interest outside of IT.

They want to build it upon XMPP, according to the Ars article I read earlier this day.

Making these two operators the same symbol just leads to developer confusion and a complicated context-sensitive parser. See also: any BASIC programmer that ever tried to learn C.

Not true. Assignment in BASIC is Let (or Set) A = B, whereas comparison is A = B.

I agree that the unfortunate fact, that for most current BASIC dialects the 'Let' is optional, results in the confusion you were referring to. But you can't blame a language for terrible/lazy programmers.