No, because we in the west are engaging in a race to the bottom by expecting western industries to compete with industries in countries which have none of the basic environmental and labour protections that we have worked to achieve for over a century. You apparently advocate competing by stripping these away, rather than penalising imports from countries which simply ignore these issues and thereby punishing our own workers for our desire to have minimum standards.

I live in Australia. We have what you Americans call a "single payer" healthcare system in Australia. We also have private health insurance, private hospitals, etc. Everyone is protected by minimum entitlements to state provided healthcare, but anyone who has money and chooses to spend it on private medical services is free to do so. It works very well and I don't know a single person who would advocate getting rid of it.

Most developed countries other than the US have significant unemployment benefits which allow people to live a reasonable life even if they don't have a job. There is ample evidence that this helps people escape the "poverty trap" and makes it more likely that they will get back to work sooner. Again, I'm in Australia and our relatively generous unemployment system is yet to cause social collapse.

That's because you are bigoted, then. Again, outside of the US public universities are generally as good or better than private ones.

Your entire argument relies on the random chance that we will run out of oil before we totally fuck up the environment. There is no guarantee that this will happen. The "market" ignores a number of significant variables, like environmental damage and the risks associated with dependence on the middle east.

No offence, but having visited the USA a couple of times your infrastructure ranges from impressive to prehistoric. There are plenty of things you could upgrade and improve.

I won't bother to go through the rest of your stuff, because it can be summarised thus: "We should do exactly what we are already doing, perhaps with a bit of a Republican-style tweak to a few policies, and anyone who suggests otherwise is crazy and impractical despite the ample evidence from around the world that alternatives can and do work well."

This seems to sum up your philosophy in one sentence. I'm going to guess that you're a white male in his late 20s to late 30s in the middle class.

So the extremely minor inconvenience of your nice day out in the park being "spoiled" trumps the right of some very upset people to protest about fundamental issues facing our civilization?

Interesting perspective.

Sort of like how "balance" in the US media means that viewpoints with the backing of logic and substance must be "balanced" against irrational, trivial bullshit.

No. Go and do some actual reading. Communism aims to achieve a stateless society in which the means of production are owned by all and the government withers away as a consequence of its irrelevance.

How is a protest a protest if it's controlled by the people who are the target of the protest?

And how are park rules (no doubt set arbitrarily by some bureaucrat) more important than free speech rights?

Interestingly, you've just described arbitrary dictatorship rather than the rule of law.

Define "improving". They're getting richer, but the Chinese aren't getting any more free. They still murder their citizens, they are still censoring as much speech as possible, they are still committing genocide in Tibet.

The US is sliding, no question. But it has a loooooooooooooong way to go to be anywhere near China's level of totalitarianism, which shows no signs of improvement whatsoever.

Total BS.

If you have a trademark over "Apple" in the context of computers/music, you DO NOT have to sue a restaurant with the word "Apple" somewhere in its name to protect it.

Whereas I don't care about human civilization, I care about keeping it at a temperature that allows as much of the rest of the ecosystem to survive as possible. Humans will survive pretty much anything, whereas the rest of nature is not so lucky.

You need to read up on the defence of justifiction, aka substantial truth...

In a civil context enforcement of foreign judgments is perfectly possible and commonplace. They can easily make a law creating private civil rights which are then likely to be enforceable in most foreign jurisdictions.

In a criminal context, they can potentially extradite you.

Right now, if I am in France and you are in Venezuela, and you post a highly defamatory article about me on a server in New York, and someone else in the UK reads it... I can sue you in the UK for defamation. The law focuses on the place of publication, which at the moment is treated as the place where the material is accessed and read (arguable I can sue you in multiple places... see here: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/it&law/c10_main.htm). So long as I have some reputation in the UK and you cause harm to that reputation by publishing 'into' that jurisdiction, I can sue you there. This is a huge problem with internet defamation law at the moment.

There is no reason why the UK government can't make laws in relation to anything accessed from the UK, even if it's stored elsewhere.

It's important to understand that in the UK (and Australia... and Canada... and many other places) there are much, much stronger legal principles surrounding defamation than you are used to in the US. The idea is that you are free to say anything - but not free to cause harm to others without compensating them. So if you publish something which alleges that a particular individual is a child molester (and they aren't), they are entitled to come after you to recover in dollars the harm you have caused to their reputation.

There are scenarios in which both the US and common law systems seem perverse. In the common law world, defamation often becomes the tool of the rich and powerful to silence criticism or discussion about them. A country like Singapore demonstrates what happens when common law defamation is abused to the fullest extent. But in the US, people at times appear to have liberty to destroy reputations without consequence under the guise of "free" speech.

So to consider this, you have to start from the proposition that if someone publishes something which is defamatory of someone else, that person has a prima facie right to sue and recover damages. Another principle of common law defamation is that anyone involved in the publication process, or republication, is potentially liable along with the person making the defamatory statement. Including, for example, the operator of a website.

Right now, without any reform, it is already the case in many common law countries that a person who has been defamed on-line may pursue the website operator for disclosure of information about the original poster of the defamatory publication. In the context of anonymous publications, it already makes sense for the website to collect as much info as they can get away with about their users in order to protect them in this scenario. Where I live (Australia) this happens almost by default - anonymous posting is rare, and most sites make at least a token attempt to get your name and email address. I can also guarantee that any Australian website hit with a threat about a defamatory third party comment they are carrying will pull the comment instantly.

So the real question is, should defamatory anonymous on-line posting be regarded as similar to defamatory graffiti on a toilet door, where although someone is strictly speaking liable for it, there is general acceptance that to find them would be impossible? Or should it be regarded as something closer to a newspaper or television station which republishes someone's defamatory comments? In that scenario, the newspaper/TV station along with the person who made the comments would all be potentially liable.

Personally, I favour the "Wild West" view of the net. The almost absolute freedom of speech it provides in a practical sense also results in a corresponding decrease in the credibility accorded to any one posting on-line. Not too many people are dumb enough to read user comments on a website and take them with anything less than a shovel full of salt. However, I suspect our parliamentary and judicial overlords will see it rather differently, and this type of proposal will eventually make it into law...

End rant... if anyone's still reading.

You touch on the real reason to use folders: even you don't always know exactly what you're looking for. Human memory doesn't work like a computer's memory. So if you are in a busy work environment with thousands of emails flying around, and you suddenly remember that you got an email that might be relevant to something to do with a particular project approximately 4-5 months ago from one of a half-dozen people, how are you going to search for it?

Nicely organised folders are superior for this task. Instead of tapping away at search terms trying to figure out a combination that works, you simply jump to the appropriate folder, flick back about 4-5 months and have a look through emails from that period of time relating to that project. Using folders saves you from sifting through piles and piles of unrelated crap - it's a broad brush way of reducing the complexity of the task. Sure you could probably achieve this via a search, but it's quicker IMHO to jump into the folder and then browse.

In other words, search is good if you know exactly what you are after. Browsing folders is good if you want to... browse.

They're not fond of rules

Apart from:

- you must use itunes to sync your ipod and iphone
- you must register and activate your hardware via our central database
- you must use apps approved by Apple
- you must use proprietary cable formats we approve
- you may not run whatever software you want on your own device
- you may not replace your own battery
- you may not make products vaguely similar to our products
- you may not purchase media which does not have localised price-gouging ...etc.

Seriously, this is sad, but the guy was primarily part of a private company which exists to make money for its shareholders. He didn't cure disease or invent the internal combustion engine or walk on the moon. He took good ideas (generally thought up by other people) and refined them to maximise their commercial capabilities.

So sad: yes. Was Jobs a significant figure in his field?: yes. Is it over the top to act like Einstein or Leonardo Da Vinci or JFK just died?: yes.

In unrelated news, a squirrel in Central Park was this morning observed to be installing small devices on acorns which prevented other squirrels from eating those acorns without permission. The squirrel was quoted as saying that it wished to "streamline the acorn experience" for other squirrels in order to remove the "distraction" of being able to eat acorns however they wanted to.