Yet Americans are wrong when they say free education doesn't exist in some countries. They're free since you don't have to pay for education. Identically, there's free meals in schools, since you don't have to pay for them. Identically, there's free healthcare, since you don't have to pay for it. Identically, you can loan books for free from libraries.

No sensible person would claim that they're not free, and to loan a book from a library requires a fee. Sure, these services have to be funded somehow, but that doesn't make them free. Identically, Gmail is free to use. Nobody would claim that you need to pay a fee to use Gmail. *Identically*, Gmail is being funded somehow. No sensible person person would claim you need to pay money to use Gmail.

Therefore, education is free, and so are libraries, and school meals, and Gmail, and roads. Voting is also free. But voting creates costs and somehow the costs have to be covered. But that doesn't mean you need to pay money to vote.

It doesn't get any simpler than this.

Saying that free education is not free since it's paid in taxes, is like saying you need to pay money to use roads in the USA. You can't have it both ways.

Pie.

The global pirate movement is only starting to gather momentum. This particular organization hasn't been very important for a few years now. For example, the Pirate Party of Finland has good chances to elect a member to the parliament in the elections next year.

There's also a documentary coming up about gene patents, as corporations already seem to own 20% of the human genes. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1305236092/your-genes-have-been-patented-a-feature-documentar

$53 000 is a reasonable cost. It also has everything to do with the wishes of the deceased. And yes, there's a concrete chance of revival. I could answer your arguments against cryonics, but sadly you didn't provide any. And that's how cryonics debates usually go. You should probably read about a rabbit kidney which was cryopreserved, then thawed and implanted to a living rabbit. Of course, this is fact is in disagreement with your dishonest worldview, so you ignore it.

There's a new project called Diaspora which is just this. They already have more than $10 000 funding for an free software project, and 4 guys will start working on it full time over the summer. http://joindiaspora.com/project.html

I know slashdot readers don't bother to read the article, but not reading the comment you're replying to is taking it to far. I specifically never said anything about videos, I was talking about the news and therefore the article itself.

Well, I live in Finland, and http://www.southparkstudios.com/news/3878 gets redirected to some .fi site which just gives an error "Due to copyright and other legal reasons, South Park video content cannot be viewed outside the United States.". So basically I can't even read their news section or TFA. Anyone have a mirror?

One reason is that Linux is mostly written in C, which is not something that most young developers are familiar with. They're usually familiar with higher level languages like Java or Python. Another is that developing the linux kernel requires high technical knowledge on things that young developers are not familiar with anymore, as programming tends to be more and more abstracted nowadays.

It's the first outside Europe to be officially registered as a political party.

It actually seems they view pirate parties as legitimate, and do participate in debates with them.

Why does it matter when a) they've been elected to the European Parliament and b) even the copyright lobby belives it's a "cool" name? It would be a near political suicide to try to change the name. There was a short lived "information society party" in Finland but that didn't go anywhere.

Because it all started from copyright. The Green Party (atleast in Finland) also has a broad range of issues they wan't to deal with. But they also started with the conservation of nature and such.

Many countries (including Finland for example) have a cassette tax (which applies to CD's etc), but still have strict copyright laws. Besides, pirate parties have a broad range of issues from civil liberties to privacy, patents etc. Copyright is only a rather small part of our agenda.