Can anyone post links to all the current proxies here? That would be a good start. Is the IP address pool fixed for TPB? Anyone have the list? Perhaps our good friend APK has some advice on what to do with a list of IP addrs so that DNS-based censorship won't matter?
No, I'm just saying use basic adult judgement in assessing threats. I know that's a difficult request of the "special snowflake" generation, but life will force that on that crowd anyhow. If you know of someone specific who might want to harm you, then it's totally reasonable to assume an anonymous threat is just a mask for the person you already know, but if not, if it's just an internet slap fight, then just ignore the trolls. (It's different if you're a celebrity, and actually have anonymous stalkers you've never met IRL, but normal people don't have this problem.)
Life is not risk free, nor should it be. You need to have the judgement about risks, and whether a given risk is closer to the risk of driving, or the risk of being stuck by a meteor, to get through life.
So what you are saying is that if the person who threatens to kill me should be ignored until they kill me. Umm - no. That's crazy talk.
No, not at all. The system works like this: if you find the threat credible, talk to the police. If they find it credible they'll investigate. If the investigation reveals more than just speech, then there's an actual crime and someone goes to jail.
What I'm saying is we need to get better at ignoring threats that aren't credible. And the default for anything at all on the internet, especially anything anonymous should be "not credible". Sure, if the threat is detailed enough, and seems meant in earnest, and otherwise seems credible, then get the police involved.
If a threat is credible, the police should investigate it. If the investigation shows more than just speech, then there's an actual crime. That's the system and it works.
Where it goes wrong is where people freak out over non-credible threats, or worse the police do. By all means, if you think a particular threat is credible, involve the police. That's fine - still no freak-out required. But none of that justifies removing a forum for anonymous free speech.
Free speech only extends to hate speech. "Freedom of agreeable speech" is nonsense. It's only deeply offensive speech that needs "freedom of" in the first place.
Because, of course, it's your right to harass and threaten people! Just don't take it seriously and you'll see that my explicit description of violent acts towards you and your family are just jokes, really!
How many people have threatened to kill their boss in a moment of stress? It's not a credible threat. If my kid threatens your kid with the power of the One Ring, do you take that seriously (that was just last month, remember)? If I threaten to bring down the Moon to crash into your house, are you worried (I think that one was last year)? Most threats ever made are not credible, they're merely a stress blow-off. Credible threats rarely take the form of anonymous, over-the-top trolling.
Surely there's a difference between descriptions of violence within artistic works, and sending graphic descriptions of violence (sometimes accompanied with names and addresses) to specific people?
Oh, "artistic works", is it? As judged by whom? If a reasonable person would find a threat credible, that justifies further investigation, but the speech is still entirely protected. Unless there's an overt act to turn the words into criminal conspiracy, the speech should be protected. And maybe you should be less afraid of the world.
This is precisely my point, the bullshit that this gun lobby is pulling will undermine the advantages of C&C and 3D printing for the rest of us.
Gee, sorry that protecting fundamental freedoms is slightly inconvenient for you. But you might better focus your worry on the BS that will come with IP law and home manufacture - the MPAA/RIAA bullshit of the past few years is just the beginning. The "gun lobby" is at least trying to preserve a basic right.
Why shouldn't college be (mostly) vocational training, is the thing. That sounds like Universities wasting students time, if they don't actually learn any useful skills.
As I said upthread, it's fine if you also have universities for trust-fund babies who don't need any useful skills to inherit Daddy's business. That's a big chunk of Ivy League school students, after all.
But the rest of us will be working, and school should leave us prepared to work, ideally in a field that pays well (as pay is the signal not just of the value of the work to the community, but of the need for more people do do that work vs too many already). And most students, parents, and employers want just that: graduates who are much better prepared to contribute on being hired than non-graduates.
Let's be honest, an engineering degree may mean something about your work ethic and smarts, even in a different field, but a *Studies degree proves jack shit about your ability to get the job done - any job.
You are simply 100% against free speech, is the point.
Only deeply offensive speech needs protection - the freedom of agreeable speech is meaningless. There is no gap between "banning hate speech" and "ending free speech". The former is simply a euphemism for the latter.
Threats of violence are not covered.
Threats of violence are absolutely covered, if a reasonable person would not take the threat seriously. That's the part the speech-banners and fascists keep forgetting. It would be difficult to release a violent work of fiction otherwise (or would you like to ban those too? video games too maybe?).
We seriously need to stop being so scared all the time. That is the root of all this growing totalitarianism. Simple fear and cowardice.
I saw a very attractive woman at breakfast this morning. In that definition I self-censored myself from trying to engage in sex with her.
I saw one too, and did have sex with her! Dating is fun. But we were talking about free speech - you have to be on the kooky end of the left to conflate speech with rape, which I guess is what you meant?
It's not defeatism, it's the recognition we have a larger problem to solve. Perhaps we need a new party, or a new election process within one of the parties, or something, but we need a wholesale change in what government at the federal level looks like.
Darwin was quite some time ago, and while he had some remarkable deductions for his day, and deserves credit for establishing the field, he's practically speaking irrelevant to the science of evolutionary biology. Even in Darwin's day, however, before genetics, his theory made a remarkable prediction: that taxonomy would be cladistic (to use the modern term). That is, you could organize species in a hierarchy based on common features.
You can't do this with e.g vehicles: there are features common to all pick-up trucks, features common to all Fords, features common to all passenger vehicles made after a certain year, and so on: it's immediately obvious that you can't make any sort of hierarchy based on features with any predictive value. A pickup truck bed doesn't tell you who made the alternator, the Ford logo doesn't tell you whether a vehicle has airbags, and so on. Remarkably, you can do this with plant and animal species, and the millions of cataloged species all fit this model: extreme confirmation of the prediction made from the hypothesis of common ancestry.
But that's all old-school, pre-genetics naturalism: 19th century and early 20th century stuff.
"Evolution" means "the statistical distribution of alleles in a population changes over time". Evolutionary biology is about statistical models of dynamic systems: good, solid mathematical models used in research daily. There's even an engineering aspect, as it's sometimes preferred for research organisms to manipulate the genome without directly splicing genes, or to ensure a stable population with a given modification for long-term research.
TLDR: read the Talk.Origins FAQ I've linked to the best starting point, but there's a wealth of information there, that directly speaks to the claims of skeptics of evolution. The materials are 20 years old now, but they're very well written arguments with counter-arguments with all the flame wars removed.
You might try understanding evolution before deciding it's false. Evolution and general relativity are the two most-tested theories in science, yet for some reason they're the two people seem to have the hardest time believing. I blame the schools.
The basic fallacy you're committing is to argue "I'm not smart enough to understand how X could be true, therefore X is not true", which of all the fallacies is the one that makes you appear the least smart.
To your deeper point, science is about useful predictive models, not about philosophical certainty. Evolution, like general relativity, makes many useful and accurate predictions - it's quite a good tool. "God did it" makes a few vague predictions, so people look for better, in the sense of more practical, explanations.
You are confused sir. There is no fraud when someone willingly chooses poorly yet still receives a quality education in a field that is irrelevant. That's called personal choice.
I believe you're out of touch. There are people who genuinely believe that a "Women's Studies" degree, or an Anthropology degree, etc, will help them get a job and prosper, because they've been sold a bill of goods.
I'd love to see clear product labeling for degrees. "People with this degree make about the same in five years as people with no degree make at the same age", or "people in this field make above the median income, but few graduates with this degree from this college are working in this field".
We could at least provide the level of information easily available to a car shopper, no? Then perhaps market corrections would happen before the absurd sort of bubble we have today!
They charge whatever people are willing to pay.
As others have pointed out, that's distorted by subsidies. And, of course, all bubbles are build on "what people are willing to pay", just with a dose of deception about the value provided!
Choosing worthless and overpriced degrees is the responsibility of students and parents, not of universities.
It's unfair to expect someone to have the education to recognize they're being conned when it's the education system itself who are the con-men. Really, how are kids supposed to figure this out beforehand?
The bubble will pop when students come to their senses. Until then, it remains worthwhile to charge inflated amounts for useless degrees.
Ah, you're the kind who gives "libertarianism" a bad name. Fraud is fraud, and victim-blaming isn't appropriate. Sure, people should, in general, be more sophisticated shoppers and be harder targets for fraud, but that in no way changes the morality of fraud. When the education system itself it lying to kids about the necessity and value of a given degree, that's pure Evil.
It's time to boot, do your boot ROMs know where your disk controllers are?
