I do not agree. What happens is you stop working for solutions and just become a tool. Time and time again people forget that the ends do not justify the means it does is give power to those that make power and wealth to those that are talking heads and professional activists who have no incentive to solve anything. That groups egos are stroked and pockets lined by conflict not solutions.

I think that is the reason why we do not have a single programing language.
Cobol or Ada is for code that must work 24/7 365 perfectly.
Javascript for code that must work today.

A better question is who complained?
Was it, "I was looking this web page because.....

Really so Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Feed the Children, St. Jude Children's Hospital, and the United Way are all evil?
""Good" is when you donate to charity, not when you manipulate people"

Is it good to manipulate people to donate to your charity?

It is the free market. It is a variation of buying local.
Frankly a completely free market is a terrible idea anyway as it will almost always lead to monopoly that is bad for the consumer.

The way that the system needs to work is for the market to be free enough to allow competition while being regulated enough to prevent abuses. In this case the regulations look to be slanted to give an unfair advantage. The problem is ULA also has plants in the same states as SpaceX so they seem to be staying out of it. So now the correct tactic is publicity to bring this to light and for people to write their congress people to not let it happen. There is just no need to get too worked up about it or shocked. It is the way the system works and if you want it to work properly people need to give it some guidance.

Actually I did make an error and left out pro nuclear in the list.
I am actually very fond of Open Source, Solar, and Wind as well as Nuclear.
And yes I find the right wing nuts just as annoying as the left wing nuts. If you want me to fill out the list there was the guy that when I tried to explain the benefits of bringing the US missionaries with Ebola to the US for treatment some one replied that they hoped the plane carrying them would crash on take off and kill them.

You can be pro many things but when you take to fanatic things go bad. A little bit of cost for being a nut job might just make online a better place.

Actually I am pro both. Solar makes a good source of opportunistic power. It is terrible as baseload. WInd is much better as a baseload replacement but it still needs backing plants using natural gas.
I support reducing carbon output by replacing coal baseload plants with nuclear and wind with natural gas backing plants, and using solar to help reducing peaking loads during daylight hours.

But what does the opinion matter? Is one side or the other of the discussion worthy of threats of physical harm?

"I would normally agree that people get offended too easily, but that's only when people express their honest opinion. "
It isn't just disagreeing. You may disagree with me all you want. The problem is that for a lot of people things like solar power, antinuclear, open source, and many other subjects seem to have taken the place of a religion for people.

I once had a commenter on slashdot say that they wanted to lock me in their basement and rape me. "I did reply that I was happily married and that was really not my thing".
The subject of the discussion was Solar vs Nuclear as a baseload solution!
Being a 49 year old male programer that threat was easy for me to dismiss. Had I been a 17 year old girl or boy that had been a victim of sexual assault in the past it would have been terrifying.

You may disagree all you want.
The difference is when you get into threats of physical violence which has happened on slashdot to me. Throw in all sorts of pro Nazi and Klan comments and you can have a pretty hostile environment.

It is a tradeoff. I feel the good that ACs bring is far outweighed by the garbage they bring.
As too needing to grow a thicker skin, take a look at my id number. I have been on Slashdot for a very long time so my skin is pretty thick.

Doesn't really matter. Frankly CNN's comment section makes me want to throw up.
The solution is simple. Make people have an ID that is sticky. I would like to see Slashdot not allow real ACs but instead allow people that want to post as ACs hide their ID but still take the Karma hit.

For most forums I really do not want to read what people will not stand by.
Of course not every forum needs to follow this rule. It would be up to the owners. Is the value of ACs worth the cost of ACs.

Sorry I worked for a company that built Stenomachines and wrote software for Court Reporters.
1. Learning to write Steno is hard. It is very hard. A lot of full time students never break 180, 225 is what you need to graduate.
2. The market is small.
3. You have several companies that have been in the market for decades. Stenograph, Advantage Software, ProCat, and Stenovations are probably the market leaders.
4. The requirement for support is super high.
5. The market is shrinking.

" in order to protect established industries in their own states"
That is what Congress people do. Nobody wants to see nice high paying jobs to go bye bye.
Heck my Democratic congress person fought long and hard to make the Navy keep the USS Forrestal when the Navy wanted to scrape it to save money. The reason was simple jobs in Jacksonville.
A congress person doing this is not evil but a part of the give and take of government. That is why mission control was moved to Houston from Florida. It is expected that every member of congress will fight to put jobs into their state and it is up to the group to work out a good compromise. What you want is for your congress people to fight this to save tax money from their folks.

"2 - It stops working forever if I'm dead."
That is what I am worried about. I would like my wife to have access to my online accounts if for no other reason than to say good bye for me.

"The simplest course of action would be for the major search engines, i.e. Google (there are some others, I'm told) to simply cut those spanish newspapers out of it's web-crawlers and search functions. If there are no links to the newspapers in question, there can be no tax to pay."
True but it would mean cutting off links to all spanish newspapers! The law makes the payment mandatory to prevent any forward thinking papers from having an unfair advantage.

"t. Do they really want Google telling the government who owns guns, who visits anti-government websites, what they say on their hangouts about campaigning against the president etc?"
None of those things are illegal.
How do you feel about making contributions public knowledge. You could get drummed out of a job at liberal tech company just for supporting a law that passed a public vote but that they didn't like!