Well, at least users won't have to download a ZIP and extract several JARs into the JVM path in order to have it work. Not that I'm bitter about JCE or anything.

'Non-state actors' should be feared more than states? Give me a break. States have killed more than two hundred million of their own subjects in the last two hundred years. I'm pretty sure that non-state criminals and cults have a fair way to go before approaching that tally.

WTF? Seriously? Have you not read the news - eight year old girls filing for divorce in Saudi Arabia, & Imams throughout the world fighting Governments that are trying to introduce minimum ages of consent?

A few seconds' Googling turned up this gem:

Sanaâ(TM)a (AsiaNews) - Some Yemeni religious figures have launched a "fatwa" against the law recently approved by Parliament that sets the minimum age for marriage at 17. The statement, signed by the rector of Al-Eman University, Sheikh Abdul-Majid al-Zindani, and by representatives of the party Islamic Islah, is aimed at eliminating the minimum age limit.

The question of the minimum age for marriage in Yemen was brought to the attention of world public opinion last April, following the case of Nojud Mohammed Ali, an 8-year-old girl who requested and obtained a divorce after being forced to marry a 30-year-old man.

I fear you've been drinking the 'moderate Islam' kool-aid, Mart.

Thanks for the correction.

And this trial isn't just because he called Mohammed pedophile.

So would you be okay with him being charged if that was all he'd done?

agitating people against a certain sect [in this case, immigrants] of society

That's pretty broad. It doesn't look like he's inciting anyone to violence; in fact the document he links to that explains the tenets of Islam says (apologies for the Google Translation - the original is in Finnish):

Note! ... Most of today's Muslims identifioituvista both in Finland and elsewhere, it is passive and ignorant about Islam and they do not follow Allah shari'aa, but want to live in peace without causing anyone harm.

So, do you disagree with the statement that Aisha was aged six when Mohammed married her, & nine when the marriage was consummated? Is your view considered to be orthodox amongst Sunnis?

So why are people being prosecuted for bringing it up?

Because various Islamic groups and authorities - as well as individual radicals - want to prohibit the examination of the religion by the West.

There are several reasons for this, but the primary political motivation is stealth jihad.

Even without a statutory definition of the age of consent, it was still rape. My reasoning is as follows:

  - rape is sex without informed consent
  - a nine year old is incapable of giving informed consent to sex by virtue of his or her age
  - Mohammed had sex with Aisha when she was nine
  - therefore, I conclude that Mohammed raped Aisha

I think it's good that an age of consent be formalized in statutes - objective law itself being a good thing - but I don't think you need a law to tell you that what happened between Mohammed and Aisha was rape.

Yes. And Pharohs married their sisters, ancient Spartan's were all pederasts and George Washington kept slaves.

Yep. And the thing is that you and I reject all of those practices. We recognise them as immoral nowadays.

However - and this is the crux of the matter as far as blasphemy laws go - Islamic teaching is that Mohammed is the ideal role model. Because he was a Prophet, he was ipso facto incapable of committing any but the most minor category of sin (see the thread on Turn to Islam that I linked to for a detailed explanation of how that works).

This is why Mohammed's personal life is - sadly - relevant to discussions about Islam today.

So in your opinion, rape is purely a legal term?

That is, if there were no law to prohibit me from doing so, I could have sex with someone without his or her consent, and it wouldn't be rape?

It's not just Bukhari though - as you can see from the quote from JihadWatch. AFAICT you can utterly reject Bukhari, and still come up with ages of 6 and 9.

(It's interesting to see that I've already been modded flamebait. Slashdot's equivalent to blasphemy, I guess :-) )

A Finnish MP is being prosecuted because he had the temerity to point out that Mohammed had sex with a nine-year old girl called Aisha, whom he married when she was aged six - details here.

The fact is, he's right. From the JihadWatch article:

The collection of traditions of Muhammad that Muslims consider most reliable, Sahih Bukhari, affirms in no less than five places that Aisha was six when Muhammad took her and nine when he consummated the marriage (vol. 5, bk. 58, no. 234; vol. 5 bk. 58 no. 236; vol. 7 bk. 62 no. 64; vol. 7 bk. 62 no. 65; and vol. 7 bk. 62 no. 88). It is also in Sunan Abu Dawud (bk. 41 no. 4915), another of the Sahih Sittah, the six hadith collections Muslims accept as most reliable.

So, the man that is considered by Islam to be the ideal role model, capable only of 'human errors in judgment in minor things with good intentions', was also a child rapist.

The reason that Islamic groups worldwide are pushing for blasphemy laws - and using them when they're available - is to silence people who point out facts like that.

If you restrict your thinking this much, you will not give yourself all the chances you might have. I am conducting my own experiments in related areas.

packet-in.org I presume? I'll check it out.

I have never seen this claim made by him. That it is unethical (or something similar) for someone to do this, perhaps, but not that you should not have the legal right to do this unethical thing.

Well, he makes that claim in an essay published on gnu.org. His statement seems pretty clear:

I shouldn't have the power to tell you not to do these things. No one should.

What an interesting idea - I can see how that would work in the case of custom software development, but the issue with shrinkwrapped software is that it's tailored towards redistribution; all it would take would be one enterprising person to buy a licence, and then resell it themselves (possibly in modified form) without any financial benefit to my company.

Maybe a better approach for shrinkwrap would be something like the Qt licence (if memory serves correctly) - free for use in free software, but must be licensed for use in commercial software?

Why would anyone in the marketplace with this valuable knowledge give you this knowledge for no cost? Why would anyone make such a license available to the public at no cost?

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I'd release such a licence in order to encourage other people to use it. I don't like the kind of restrictions on end-users that many publishers impose (e.g. the jailed iPhone) and would like to make it easier for publishers of proprietary software to do the right thing by their customers.

Well, I guess we disagree on this point.

Can you give me an example of software that is freely redistributable that is profitable solely by sales of licences? I'd be more than happy to be convinced otherwise, but I just don't see any real-world examples.

That would be a free market in action, with the government granted monopoly in the mix, the free market is out the window.

That's the anarcho-capitalist view of copyright I believe; I've read a bit about it here. Can't say I agree with it though, despite being a hard-core capitalist & libertarian.

And the GPL goes against this how exactly?

The GPL doesn't go against this at all, provided people are free to choose or reject it for their projects. My objection was to Stallman claiming that no-one should have the right to ask people to accept a EULA that restricts redistribution:

I shouldn't have the power to tell you not to do these things. No one should.