There's a phrase that one should never stoop to the level of an idiot, because they will go on to beat you with experience. So I am going to try and resist saying something about wishing the foreign civilians that you and your family are to most of the world are killed by not your government or military. You wouldn't be concerned of course, because it is moral and justified.

Or is it that as long as it isn't your tribe being hurt, it is moral and justified?

Attacking civilians is not justifiable. And once you do justify it to yourself, it is easy to just declare a section of your society some kind of non-citizen and wage a war on them. I wonder if you can think of any events in history that might correspond with the kind of thing you are advocating?

The jingle from the CrackDonalds adverts that goes "du du du da da, I'm lovin' it" also fits perfectly with "du du du da da, There's cum in it". And is probably much more descriptive.

Hell, a mate of mine swears a local SmackDonalds was closed down after Trading Standards found semen in food from the place (allegedly 7 different peoples'). I have tried to track the story down, but there doesn't seem to have been anything in the press about it, so I count it as an urban legend.

But I bet there are rumours like that about WhackDonalds all over the world! And lets be honest, WankDonalds is hardly the kind of place where employees are likely to have job satisfaction, and so someone ejaculating into a FuckMuffin is more than plausible.

If that puts civilians at risk, then the obvious solution is to not bomb. But I guess that isn't a possibility for warmonger-apologists like you?

The only reason putting civilians in the way is an effective strategy for some groups is because imperialists still proceed to drop bombs or otherwise open fire when there are civilians in the way!

Apart from the real biggie - everywhere but Parliament Square. And on the pavement on the same side of the road as that weapons manufacturer in Brighton. And anywhere else where organisations have taken out injunctions against people who's opinions stand in the way of their profits or agenda.

Our pigs these days appear to like to practice kettling - the boxing in of protests and then moving them out the way. The principle is pretty much the same as free speech zones[1], and both methods are probably effective, from the bourgeois' point of view.

Protesters need to come up with some methods of defeating kettling. Perhaps sitting down where they are as soon as kettling begins, so the police have to use force if they want people to move? Perhaps protests should be smaller, but lots of them. Ketting works because the pigs box in the whole protest, so will not work if the protesters surround the police, or the police can't surround the protesters.

Many small protests would be hard to manage, but if a small protest starts getting kettled, other protests can move towards the first, hopefully breaking the police lines. Protests would need some excellent coordinating, because the reason the kettling works now is due to the police's organisation and coordination. Perhaps protesters need some police spotters about the place, updating an on line resource so protesters can keep track of the police? Just don't host that resource behind a .uk! (Whew, got the rant back on topic!).

[1] Such a stunningly Orwellian name!

And a side business can be run selling rings, bracelets, and watches! The operation funds itself, perfect policy for politicians who want to be seen doing something.

• Spelling mistakes or habits
• Grammar mistakes or habits
• Talking about certain topics, or when a discussion goes OT, you go OT too with some topics
• The promotion of the same political or economic ideas.
• The use of certain bits of slang, and the exclusion of other bits
• Themes in your usernames. Unless you truly randomly select a word for a username, you are probably saying something about yourself - even if it just what you can see out the window.

Like I have said elsewhere in this thread, I think correlating users on line, anon users on line, users of things off line (eg government services, corporate services), with individuals IRL is or is going to be a major frontier for some groups, like spooks and data-rapists.

But there isn't true competition. Most insurance companies are public corporations, and so shareholders in different companies will overlap. And most of the shareholders will be investment banks and the like (not middle-class share dabblers), and they will want to see maximum returns as soon as possible, and they don't care how it happens. Suddenly very similar pressures are on different companies, so the odds of the different companies making the same decisions shoot up.

Even if shareholders don't overlap, if companies don't tend to do the same kinds of things as the other players in the market, then their share price will fall.

Collusion to maximise profits is not somehow impossible in the insurance business too, and so cannot be dismissed.

Shit, here in the UK some insurance companies like to pretend there is much more competition in the market than there is. There are some car insurance comparison web sites that are heavily advertised on TV, and at least one of them is owned by an insurance company (looks to be comparethemarket.com). Funnily enough, that site tends to offer their own insurance as the cheapest, from the accidental run-in I have had with it. There are also many insurance companies that are all members of large umbrella companies, and often the seemingly independent insurers will be underwritten by one of the big boys - so are tied to the business practices of the big boys.

And the insurance quotes made on comparison sites are not available if you go directly to the insurer! There are obviously affiliate payments made to the comparison sites based on lead referrals, and they must be the right amount such that if you ring an insurer direct, they will not match a price quoted elsewhere, for seemingly the same fucking service! This shows that the customer is not the most powerful person in the transaction, but if there was true competition, the customer would be able to get a better deal when they try for it.

You say you have never linked them, but I think that linking those IDs is a current thing corporations and the spooks are doing, or will be a future Next Big Thing.

If a user signs up to many forums, or sites with comment systems, with different usernames, if they ever use the same email address then the users can be cross referenced (trivially, if the site publicly publishes those addresses). If the user adds IM details to a profile, they can be cross referenced (ever tried Googling an ICQ number? It can be very revealing). Many forums and sites ask for a location, and those could be used as an indicator of the same person, especially if they publish their date of birth too.

With those things though, it is clear when you are giving away your own privacy. I feel there is other stuff that could be used to cross reference different users on line though. I think though that in the future (or now, and we^W I don't know about it), The Man will use some kind of AI to cross reference different users on line, anonymous users on line, and people IRL. People tend to comment on the stuff that interests them, peoples' points of view tend not to change, no matter what they call themselves. People's spelling, grammar, or other language habits will be pretty consistent. The same person will probably phrase the same subject material in very similar ways, and at some point spotting that could be automated.

I do assume that web users are being profiled these days. The likes of security services or corporations could write parsers for web discussion systems, like phpBB, Slash, vBulletin, etc., and other discussion systems like usenet. Businesses like Facebook or Google make their money off data on their users, so with the right contacts or money you can get at their data (In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, invested in Facebook, so I think it is safe to assume they have full access to the FB databases). If captchas are routinely broken by spammers, fully automated forum-parsing is not out of reach of the spooks or data-raping companies. Shit, if companies will pay people to astroturf their products, then they would pay people to sign up to forums and make a few posts so an account can be used by a bot to trawl the site, whilst still looking like a normal user.

So yeah, whilst consciously not linking identities is possible, I think there are things that those who would like to know about the different identities can do to spot various IDs. But we have counter measures, though I doubt they are perfect. We can find a random web user, and copy their identity for use on some sites. We can use the spell checker sometimes, and not other times. Perhaps change the language in the spell checker to be different to your native version, like en-AU instead of en-US, Canadian French (fr-CA?) instead of fr-FR. Hell, write a post, and run it forwards and backwards though translation software. In fact, here is this post Babelfished to Italian and back:

Apart from not making much sense, that does obscure many of my writing habits!

(Score:1, Flamebait)

As predicted.....

To me, you are an immense hypocrite - like all the self-righteous who advocate the death penalty.

What you are saying is that to demonstrate it is wrong to kill someone, we should should kill people. Hmmm. And you go a step further saying that extreme violence should be dealt with with greater violence.

Way to build respect for the justice system! Though perhaps those that like to punish, rather than try to rehabilitate, want a disrespected justice system so that people are more likely to break laws, and so the punisher gets to punish? Fucking bullies.

Of course I will be modded down for this. I have had conversations with people from my country who think we should have the death penalty (usually justified with "think of the children"-type rhetoric, or other appeals to emotion), and when the hypocrisy of capital punishment is pointed out they tend to get irrationally pissed off. On /., this manifests itself as -1, Troll, or similar.

Even if you don't give a shit about other human beings (ie are a psychopath yourself) then the financial costs of building and maintaining an execution facility, the extra legwork necessary to prove undoubtedly that the accused is a killer (I hope you do that), the payouts necessary for when the innocent get killed, etc. are probably very similar to the costs of just locking the seriously fucked-up for life. Actually, I have no idea. I'm not going to look into it either, as an economic argument could never justify human lives to me.

Shit, murderers can contribute to the slave labour that US prisoners are used for too. You can't want to deny struggling international corporations some extra profit by killing killers? What are you, a commie?

That's lucky then, because astronauts are notorious for being at the bottom of their classes all through their education, and often tend to fail when they get to the end. They are well known as stupid, so an ipad would go well with their no brains.

They'd weigh the same? A laptop can be closed to protect it when it inevitably floats off one day?

User friendliness is essential as astronauts aren't trained at all, they are just stuck on a rocket, blasted into space, and left to figure it out. If the tools they are sent up with are user friendly, they they stand a much better chance of being able to use the tools, and that will progress man's exploration of space quite considerably.

Yeah, that is only possible on ipads. It is well know that general purpose computers cannot be used for any purpose that generally needs computing.

Absolutely. The ISS doesn't have any computers built into it, and all flight computing, life support control, etc. is done on the same computers that the astronauts use for their email, so computational power is paramount.

I'd mod you up, but I've posted elsewhere in this discussion. Might as well do what I can and make your comment appear at 2 (whereas if I +modded it, you'd only get one point).

What it sounds like is what you have done: misrepresented one quote so as to be able to make them equal.

Mr. Chamber's quote is longer than what you said, and so has more to it.

The point is though, seeing as you have missed it by choice, is that the airport gag was one guy claiming to want to do something that is clearly very difficult, if not impossible, for an individual to do. The second is someone who has not insignificant amounts of power in society requesting that a journalist is stoned (and not in the good way).

If you can't see the difference between someone stating they want to do something improbable, and a politician making a threat to a journalist (ignoring religions, genders, events that are more likely to occur in some parts of the world, etc.), then you come across to me as truly stupid. Or perhaps you are an authoritarian who thinks that those in powerful positions shouldn't be held to account for things they do in those powerful positions?

It isn't just leaders, it is anyone who wants to "win" an argument, and doesn't care how they do it. Or is lacking logic and reasoning skills, and doesn't realise what they are doing.

We see similar quite frequently on /.: someone will make a statement, and then someone will seemingly take the statement totally out of context. Which is very likely to distract others from the point initially being made, or make the original statement seem incorrect.

It happens in the media very frequently, and even more so in political and economic debates (though politics and economics are very closely linked, and people will advocate differing political points of view based on economic positions, and vice versa).

It is similar to why it can be frustrating to argue or debate with some people. Some people will just do things like constantly change the subject, or interrupt just as you are coming to your point, or ask silly and pointless question as you are approaching your point. Anything at all to stop you making your point, or to make you not present your point how you would like to.

This trait isn't exclusive with leaders, it seems to be common amongst authoritarians. Most of those who rise to the top though tend to be authoritarians, but they probably wouldn't have much support or stay there long if it weren't for other plonkers in society who don't see the misrepresentation due to manipulated context and literal presentation.

All direct X 10 software? But not for the kind of reasons something didn't work in Ubuntu 2 versions ago, but because Microsoft didn't want it to work on that older version of Windows.

And the fact that DX10 could be hacked to work on XP shows that MS were not providing what the users might actually want. MS's business decision clearly came before the user desires.

That is my biggest problem with proprietary software: the author's desires come first in the design of a product, with the user's needs further down the line. With Free software, the user's desires can be placed first. They aren't always - hence this debate about Linux directly competing with Windows - but the desires stand a much greater chance of being placed first.