I am not the official, so whether I would try to stop or not is quite different from whether society should stop them. But yes, if and when spanking is illegal, police should stop it; this should be obvious to everyone. Police is there to enforce the laws.

And your argument of "parent vs societal" is a strawman argument -- choice is between individuals, parent and child. Parents do not have absolute rights to risk lives of their children; parental rights do not outrank rights of children. Especially not "parents right to choose" over "child's right to stay alive".

I don't agree, we have to allow those who don't have common sense to suffer the consequences.

If this was about adults themselves declining vaccinations, maybe (just maybe because of reduced herd immunity, i.e. public hazard for others). But it is not, it is about irresponsible adults putting their children directly in harm's way. There are child-protection laws that allow society to take custody of children for protection; and this is a simple example where parental control should be overridden.

At least I can not see that educational value of an innocent child dying just to "teach" common-sense-less adults the right way.

Wait, doing shit like that means you are autistic?

No, diagnosis by doctors confirms you are. Just because he didn't say he has been diagnosed does not mean he hasn't. I would assume implication is that there is the diagnosis. Or are you thinking he is just bragging about being autistic?

Yes.

I don't know where you get the idea that individuals or corporations should publish everything. WikiLeaks model is that others publish dirty laundry government wants to hide. By same token, isn't surfacing of this report EXACTLY like things are to work -- someone "leaked" the document (which is even better since WL is, alas, not an impartial party for documents that pertain to legal actions relating to its founder).

I think it is bit more than that, given that newspapers can be sued, and in case of UK, succesfully so. Meaning that if it was found that journalist fabricated claims of having read said document(s), paper in question would be liable for damages if sued. I agree in that publishing a copy would be more credible, but I would not completely discount article just due to lack of such disclosure.

Really? I do not know exacty statistics of Swedish sex crimes, but I am familiar with policies of other Nordic: these are rather lax compared to countries like US. So first-timer getting even 2 years of obligatory jail time would be highly unusual. I agree in that getting just a fine would also be unusual; most likely punishment would be somewhere in between.

The ONLY way to stop corporate control of something by a small group of companies with lobbying power is not to regulate it. End of story.

Based on... ? Your religious libertarian beliefs?

Yes, Gov't created TCP/IP and the Internet as a whole. It was private inividuals that made HTML, FTP, SMTP and all the other protocols you use over your IP based network.

Individuals, many of who worked for institutions (universities) or DARPA projects, both of which are funded by the government. In case of HTML, european government(s), granted (via CERN). And only a total tool would claim that TCP/IP by itself is worthless.

No one claimed that government invented any of those things (not even TCP/IP, FWIW), but critically it did fund initial and continuing research. If it was left up to private enterprises, none of that would have been developed as early as it was done. There was no money in it for couple of decades.

It's basically the same situation that happened with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. They were "new" and "trendy" technologies that got a lot of hype. Smart people saw that Ruby was basically Perl with a slightly more readable (but less powerful) syntax, and that Rails was nothing but yet another web development framework.

If that was all they saw, I would not exactly call them "smart"... While I am not a RoR fanboy, it actually acted much like a cult band, influencing development on many other platforms, especially ones that were more static like Java server-side development. Specifically, convention-over-configuration became mainstream, when observation was made along the lines of "gee, maybe having to name my methods certain way is less painful than writing tons of XML configuration files".

As to Ruby being "just like Perl", it's like saying that USA is just like India, just slightly different. They ain't. Ruby is not less powerful than Perl, nor is it syntax its strongest points (description might fit Python better, although even for Python it'd be rather inaccurate).

Does 'on duplicate key' have many use cases beyond typical "UPSERT" functionality (aka MERGE etc etc) that almost every other DB engine also happens to implement (just using different name and syntax)? That is, ability to either modify (UPdate) existing row, or if none exists, to add (inSERT) one.

1. Over two or three years, Oracle can merge mysql into their Express edition. That'll basically require adding a mysql API onto it. They can probably do that over a few weeks, but why hurry?

Surely you are jesting here. Getting anything done at Oracle goes at glacial speeds, in general; but change you are talking about is not exactly trivial (at too many levels to enumerate).

If you are comparing TV broadcast ads to online ads you are doing apples-to-oranges comparison however: with sites, adding ads has negligible cost increase so even with low revenue it is very hard to actually lose money, as compared to not including ads. My blog for example earns just couple of dollars a month via adsense, but adding those ads does not add cost to site hosting, so it is "extra" money, if a very low amount.

Yeah, I am eagerly awaiting what "Seattle Sam" (counterpart of Bagdad Bob) might be saying about these alleged acts of censorship. :-)

(see http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/jokes/bljoke-iraqinfominister.htm for background)

Should have used Amazon's EC cloud to attack Amazon itself, morons.

Yeah, that would be REALLY cost-effective -- pay AWS for cpu time and traffic (Amazon.com itself is not within AWS realm so traffic between EC2 and Amazon.com is not free) in order to try to hurt the retail web site. Doing that would have been colossally stupid; and quite profitable for Amazon.

I guess this is based on common mis-conception that Amazon.com itself runs on AWS systems. This is not true; ask any Amazonian and they can explain separation (which is due to historical reasons more than anything else; but there are strong security concerns too).