Please don't use the citation needed troll. Yes, the person you're responding to is a fairly typical brainwashed American, but that response implies that you are someone who doesn't believe anything, unless it comes to them second-hand.

You wouldn't want us to think that, would you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4O8byPw7g

Your comment caused me to go and look this song up, and listen to it. ;)

Assange was chosen because of his sociopathic personality.

Agreed. Assange is a melodramatic narcissist. As much as he might be railing about the fact that the film will portray him negatively, I can assure everyone here that he probably also masturbates on a regular basis, to the thought that anyone associated with the government has made a film about him at all.

Assange is an archetypical grey hat. I used to know a few of them on IRC in the mid to late 1990s. They are sociopathic vermin, and completely without any vague semblance of honour; but because of the dependence we now have on computers, they think they are God.

If you are wondering whether or not to view either Assange or Snowden as legitimate, then I can tell you one very important detail. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, becomes prominent, viral, or in any way noticed on the Internet by accident. It never happens. "Organic," or grassroots Internet publicity is a lie. The only reason why anyone like Assange or Snowden becomes well known, is because it is arranged by the psychopaths. They want you to believe that anyone can become known, but I can assure you that the opposite is true. If you want publicity, you can't afford to seriously offend anyone, because you want the big people and the psychopaths to spend money on getting fake YouTube views for you, and all of the other dirty tactics they use.

You have to be a complete sellout morally, and you also have to be someone who they will find useful in some way. If you have both of those characteristics, then yes, they will make you famous; but they will also own you, and they will destroy you if you do anything that they do not like.

...is the fact that while Americans condemn Islamic barbarity, their own society is quite literally the most degenerate in human history.

The emphasis is different, of course. Islam focuses on preservation of the collective, or society, at the expense of the individual. America focuses on the preservation of the individual, at the expense of the collective.

Both are imbalanced; but what I find distressing is the fact that, as usual, Americans are only capable of identifying what is wrong with other cultures, rather than acknowledging the fact that, in many cases, entirely equally pathological elements exist within their own.

You might not have judges handing out sentences like this, no; but you do have school and shopping center shootings. The end result is inhumanity, either way.

Inclusion of women in everything, entirely for its' own sake, is politically correct at the moment. We need to take that kind of prevailing bias into account, when reading about "research," like this.

There have been numerous female authors who've written revisionist history in a number of other areas, such as historical witch burning and the influence of women in paleolithic societies in other areas. Most of it is unfalsifiable at best, and garbage at worst.

Do not believe any scientific research which claims results that are consistent with prevailing social biases. The reason why, is because such research is unfalsifiable, by definition. You cannot prove whether or not said bias was not involved, in obtaining the result.

SR users are not being busted now, so much because they broke the law when they did.

They are being arrested in order to scare the people who might otherwise set up the next SR equivalent site.

The pigs can not usually arrest more than a maximum of 5% of any given group; whether it be filesharing, drugs, or whatever else. The reason why is simple logistics; there are literally millions of people motivated to break the law, for every one person there is motivated to enforce it.

So they're not trying to arrest everyone who does it. What they're trying to do, is arrest a sufficiently large number, that the majority who they can not arrest, are sufficiently scared, that they cease engaging in the behaviour in question. Publically at least, that worked wonders with file sharing; eMule died practically overnight, once Razorback, one of the main servers in the eDonkey network was raided. It was only a single server, yet it was a sufficiently well-known one, that it sent everyone into a panic, so they all started uninstalling eMule and no longer using it. That is exactly what the pigs want.

The moral of the story is not to be afraid. Do not selfishly hold the attitude that you should stop, because even though they can barely enforce the law itself, you might be one of the 1-5% who gets hit by the poison ball. The fact of the matter is, that the more people break the law, the safer everyone breaking it is; not less. If less people are infringing, that means that the percentage of the total group that the pigs can arrest, goes up. That in turn means that if you are one of the people who is still infringing, when most other people have stopped, you are now more likely to get busted than you were before.

So people need to make more Silk Road clones. There also need to be more clones of the Pirate Bay. We need so many people copying files, and buying and selling drugs, that the authorities end up being completely overwhelmed.

Possibly slightly offtopic; but is there any legal avenue that could be persued, towards the eventual goal of having the NSA abolished?

If there is one thing I'm becoming exceptionally tired of, where RPGs are concerned, it is this scenario where the end game is the only thing anyone talks about. I've spent some time on the Borderlands 2 forums. That has a fairly long levelling game. Not months long, but getting to UVHM took me probably a month, playing on and off; I've got about 270 hours logged on Steam, now.

In said forums, however, whenever newbies tried to get advice about weapons, the only thing that anyone would answer them with, was information about end-game named uniques or legendaries, for the most part. There was precious little info offered about the manufacturing corporations, the different elemental damage types, etc; stuff that people needed to know for the whole game. There was also the usual bullshit insistence that some character builds were not "viable," for end game content, when I've been going through UVHM with a Survival Commando, (probably the class/spec combo which attracts the largest amount of shit) with no problem at all.

We have a couple of different problems here. The main one, is that forums in particular, and possibly these games in general, end up infested with a certain type of person who does not actually enjoy the game, and who is not there purely in order to play said game, but is motivated purely by a desire to be viewed as good at the game, for the purposes of ego gratification. It got to the point in the WoW forums where people were admitting that fairly openly.

The second problem, as an extension of the first, is that you have a very large number of frankly terrible players, in terms of their actual level of ability, who criticise the developers for adding talent trees to the game which are supposedly not "viable;" when again, said trees are usually fine. It will be the players themselves who suck, not the trees.

I'm not saying that D3 in particular was not an attrocious game; although I haven't played it myself, everyone I've spoken to about it, has consistently said it was terrible. At the same time, however, it needs to be acknowledged that the above problems do occur; particularly on forums.

The real problem is the fact that, at least as far as intelligence or exercising genuine self-responsibility is concerned, 95%+ of human beings are literally not worth the oxygen they breathe.

Almost every single brainless, technophobic fucking moron out there uses Facebook, and various other forms of centralised social networking. Even Eric Raymond, not long ago, started advocating Google+, and dared to actually become *indignant* about people warning him of what a corporate abomination it was.

Stop using Facebook. Start re-using public key encrypted Usenet, and p2p DCC chat nets with IRC as an entry point, which is what used to be done in the old days.

The feds literally were not able to touch that, which is the entire reason why all three IRC nets were DDoSed in January 2001. It wasn't a technology which they could easily control or monitor, so they simply wanted to destroy it. Then we got Twitter. Do you really consider that a fucking coincidence?

You might have noticed the degree of rage in this post. I've been getting banned more recently from virtually every forum other than 4chan, and there is a reason for that.

I. CANNOT. STAND. the continual, brainless fucking stupidity and myopia of the rest of my species, at this point. I can't stand the fact that you are all craven, gutless, stupid Good Germans, who don't want anything other than a giant nanny state to change your nappies and microwave your bottle.

This situation is NOT because of Google. It is not because of the NSA. It is not because of Verizon. It is because of YOU. If you are someone who uses ANY form of social media, YOU are to blame. YOU are part of the problem. No one else. YOU.

Is Wayland interested in being truly portable, (as in offering support for the BSDs, and making things sufficiently and open that it can be potentially used with as-yet undeveloped operating systems) or are they committed to pretending that Debian Linux is the only alternative to Windows that exists, a la Freedesktop.org?

I could think of a couple of reasons.

a} A sane audio subsystem.
b} Generally a lot less crap running in the background, at least by default.
c} The BSDs are developed by adults, in general terms.

Before you respond to that last point critically, understand that I actually do know what I'm talking about. I've used Linux for ten years, and compiled both the Linux kernel and the GNU userland from source numerous times; and as a result, I am prepared to say with the authority that that gives me, that Linux is a steaming pile in technical terms, in comparison with FreeBSD.

Linus' foul mouth, more than anything else, is due to his consistent overestimation of his own importance. It's just arrogant, alpha wannabe bluster; and occasionally, as in the case with nVidia, it can be really destructive.

Is it sexist that male strippers exist?

If the answer is no, then it isn't sexist that booth babes exist either.

The problem is the fact that anything else gets said. If that is what the license requires, then that is what the license requires. The stuff about, "being a big believer in free and open," is extraneous, subjective garbage; and is exactly the issue, here.

If I do what I am legally required to do, then I should neither be applauded for being a member of the cult, or condemned if I am not a member of it. If I am legally in compliance, then I should not have to know or care about the opinion of "the community," one way or the other.

If the opinion of "the community," matters, then put it in the license as something I am legally required to do. Otherwise they can and should shut the fuck up.

As another point, when you say that this is basic ethics, you make it sound as though you're talking about something universal; when in fact, you are not. You're talking about the ideology of one specific group of people; and said ideology for the most part doesn't have anything in common with how the rest of the population thinks, at all.

So in other words, you're damn right that I'm going to be pedantic to the point of legalism, and demand anyone else engaging in this conversation to do likewise.

Then this should be made specific and overt. If a relevant or necessary demand is missing from the license, the license needs to be rewritten to include said demand.

The term, "spirit," by its' very nature, refers to something undefined, non-specific, and acorporeal. I'm surprised that anyone who identifies as an atheist in particular, would be comfortable with using it.

I say again; if there is a "spirit," or an "ethos," associated with the FSF or the GPL, and such has heretofore been implicit and "intuitive," then it should be made explicit, specific, and tangible, so that there can be no misunderstand, and no excuse.

My understanding of version 2 of the GPL, as the clearest example, was that if I modify the source code of a work governed by said license, I must make publically available, both the unmodified source code, AND the source code of my own modifications, to anyone who asks for it, as a condition of using/developing said work.

My understanding was not, however, that I am required to subscribe to any other belief, whether it be political, social, or in any other form, that may or may not be advocated by the Free Software Foundation.

In other words, if I use the GPL, I need to provide source with binaries. That's all.

I do not need to worship Richard Stallman as God. I do not need to subscribe to the philosophy of Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky in general terms. I don't need to believe Stallman's self-aggrandizing lies about how the very concept of source code availability supposedly originated with him, and did not exist before him. Hell, I don't even need to like him, or anyone else associated with the FSF, as people at all.

All I need to do, is provide source with binaries. That's it. Nothing else.