I agree with this distinction, and free speech and democracy are certainly not the same. Democracy in its most basal form is majority rule, e.g. distribution of power via some sort of election system. In a sense this is more than a "form of government", since it entails the rights to elect and to be elected.

However, political scientists generally agree that for democracy to have meaning there is a cluster of other rights that are needed to make sure that people can actually elect someone based on their preferences or interests, and these rights include freedom of speech, of organization/congregation, rule of law, some form of minority protection, etc. Of course, these rights are generally not seen as absolute, and no democratic society that I know allows you to falsely accuse someone in public of being a child molester or yell "fire" in a cinema without fear of persecution.

Moreover, history has shown us that free speech is most under threat in the less democratic countries. The first thing a modern dictator does is grab control over the "old" centralized media, and controlling new media is a logical next step for the more tech-savvy dictators. If you compare the "freedom of the press" and "freedom house" reports, it is hard not to see the correlation (e.g. http://imgs.ntd.tv/content/201... vs http://rsf.org/index2014/data/...)

In other words: yes democracy and freedom of speech are separate concepts, but they are very strongly related.

(also, the importance to democracy of platforms such as twitter is *vastly* overblown, but that is a different discussion :))

(note that geeks often have difficulty understanding non-absolute rights. There is a big difference between free speech in Russia and in Britain, even if Britain curbs free speech with strong libel laws. Interpreting and upholding the non-absolute rights requires strong institutions including independent judiciary, responsive politics, and critical media. No country has a fully independent judiciary, fully responsive politics, or fully critical media, but for the love of god go visit Russia (or Algeria, or Uzbekistan, or China) and tell me how much you appreciate the US/European judiciary, politics, and media. "Our" institutions go out of line sometimes, but there are strong mechanisms for keeping them in check if they wander too far from what is deemed acceptable)

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting tracking. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Trackers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop trackers for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(X) Requires too much cooperation from trackers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Trackeres don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of tracking
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with trackers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of trackers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

See http://idle.slashdot.org/comme..., I seems that most (including the one talked about) are not actually privatized.

That said, I also don't think Sovereign Immunity applies to local governments. In the Netherlands, it only applies to the State, and my reading of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... is that in the US it applies to State and Federal governments only. If it's a county prison I would guess that the local County is responsible, and hence that you can sue either the prison or the county.

You guys are just crazy

So to avoid the confusion between lbm and lbf, you make a new unit of mass that converts to the other unit of mass with the easy to remember value of 32.174049! Brilliant!

You're trolling, but anyway.

I'm from the Netherlands, a place with a relatively easy tax code and efficient IRS. "Normal" people (e.g. people with a salaried job) spend around 2 minutes doing their taxes: download the program, check the information is correct, click submit.

However, if you have a company, say a limited corp working company owned by a holding company to limit exposure, you suddenly have to choose between paying yourself salary as a manager, paying dividends to yourself as shareholder, keeping the money in the working company, or keeping the money in the holding company. It then also becomes interesting to put liabilities in the holding company, such as your car and your mortgage, but that has implications in terms of extra taxes and losing mortgage benefits compensated by paying for those things before income tax. Now, Mr. Martin probably sells his stuff in multiple countries, which means that you have income in different countries, and it is probably not the best choice to do that all from a corporation in your home country. So you set up multiple corporations to collect the income, possibly dividing those corporations over multiple countries to take advantage of different tax regimes. And then of course it is again an interesting question on where to keep the profit from the royalties: can you repatriate it without paying additional taxes? Can you build an offshore nest egg? Can you move some expenses to the profit instead of the other way around? etc. etc.

And mind, I'm not even an accountant, so I'm sure there is tons more to consider.

Ha-ha-ha. You European wage slaves and your mindless acceptance of the government taking all your money, heh-heh

Well if you're anti-religion I guess I can see the problem, but if you can accept that Christ becomes a character somewhere in between St Nicholas and the Big Bad Wolf I think you should be fine :-). In any case, understanding religion (as a sociological/psychological phenomenon) is quite important for understanding society/history, so seeing a bit of it up close and understanding that rational people can sometimes believe the darnedest things is not necessarily bad.

Just for another perspective: In the Netherlands, a constitutional deadlock between religious and liberal parties in the early 1900s resulted in a compromise with financing of religious schools and universal suffrage both constitutionally enshrined in 1917/1918.

The result is that anyone can start a school, and if it matches minimum quality requirements it has to be funded on the same (relatively generous) level as public schools. This lead to a lot of catholic and orthodox protestant schools being established, but also to Montessori, Jena and similar alternative schooling methods. The schools are under scrutiny of the government and they do need to teach a basic curriculum, but are free in teaching religion, values etc. and also in approaching the teaching the way they want it. Most bigger villages have a public primary school as well as one or more religious schools, and the religious ones are usually not very fundamentalist, many atheists have no problem sending their kid to a religious school if it is better or more convenient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Of course, this system has some serious problems as well. People are now choosing religious schools sometimes mainly because they are more "white", there are clashes with e.g. christian schools trying to block gay or non-christian teachers, and there were some issues of low quality teaching on Islamic schools.

See e.g. http://vorige.nrc.nl/internati...

You're probably trolling, but here goes:

Any continent will rise if the mass on top is reduced, because the mantle acts as a liquid on geological time scales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-glacial_rebound)

However, it's not the loss of mass or height of the antartcic that is causing sea levels to rise, but the movement of water from "long term storage" on top of the antarctic continent into the ocean. What the container does after the contents have been released is immaterial.

(for the arctic ice it is different because it is all floating, so melting it won't do anything to sea levels (it will to salinity and hence ocean currents) - and greenland has a lot of land ice, of course)

Fortunately, (1) more and more scientists (also non-CS) are using github repo's for development, as most of our stuff is public anyway; and (2) It is becoming quite common to release a github page as part of a publication and is also a selling point to the editors/reviewers.

which also doesn't necessarily mean anything...

I was contributing to a project and had a branch in my fork. Upstream liked the changes but wanted it split into two separate pull requests. So I made two new branches and cherry picked from my original branch. Then upstream merged in both branches by rebasing. So now I have three branches that are officially not merged back in (because not of the commits are merged, they are all cherry picked / rebased), but all changes from the three branches are in upstream and I can delete the three branches.)

I've had a friend here (the Netherlands) who married an Eastern European girl (before the EU expansion). They actually had to 'prove' that their relation was legit before she got her residence permit, showing things like pictures of holidays together, emails and chats (ICQ! ;-) ) exchanged, etc. It feels wrong that the government gets that close and personal, but I guess sham marriages are too easy otherwise...

Social scientist here. I wouldn't know what to do if it weren't for linux. My desktops run linux, my servers run linux, the cloud services I use without a doubt run linux (not even talking about the architecture between my computer and those cloud computers), and even my frigging phone runs linux.

The complete "scientific toolchain" or scipy/R/sweave/latex (+github/travis) is now free and open source. This is great because it saves a bit of money, but what it really does is enable you to inspect, modify, copy, and share every step from raw data to the pdf of the article.

(The last non-open part of science is the journals, which should be dealt with even more brutally than the recording industry.)

I'll bite :-)

I used csv and subversion back in the day, switched to hg, and now switched to git. I manage a smallish project with 5 or so contributors and contribute to some other projects.

Git/hg vs csv/svn is all about distributed vs centralized. With git/hg, you learn to love branching and merging, and commit as often as needed.

Git vs hg is more subtle, but I am strongly in the git camp now.

In my perception, hg et al are about lines of code. You contribute code and the code is checked in. git is all about commits. Your work is in commits, and commits can be rebased, squashed, amended, etc until they are just right to express your contribution. Git is not so much about communicating with yourself about how you got to your code; git is about communicating to the rest of the team what you are contributing. In a sense, you are not (just) writing code, you are writing a commit history.

That said, what I miss in git is the "version history" of commits. I would like to see some sort of "is-based-on" link between the 'final' commit and the commits it is amended, rebased, and/or squashed from. I would love to be able to 'expand' a final commit to see the history that went into it, because now you are sometimes choosing between commit elegance and keeping track of development history (aka in the choice to amend a silly type you choose elegance; in the choice to -no-ff merge a branch you choose history).

I would guess that there is a big difference between "guaranteed to survive a 1.2m drop onto concrete" or even "99% chance of surviving the drop" (which is probably what they offer) and the anecdotal "I dropped shit from longer distances and they were fine".

My S3 was seriously damaged by a much smaller drop. You can be lucky or unlucky with such devices. Military doesn't like that :)

I'm a scientist, but not in astrophysics or a (remotely) related discipline.

At some deep level, I "doubt" the big bang theory because it seems to me that it is not something that can really ever be tested, simulated, experimented with, so we have n=1 observational data at best, and building causal theories on n=1 observational data is tricky; and on another level I "doubt" the theory because I don't know the literature or even really understand the phenomenon and I have no clue what the scientific evidence for and against it are. "They" say that it is the currently accepted theory, but what does that even mean? Why would I not doubt it?

All that said, I don't believe that the theory is false, I just accept that "other scientists" know what they are doing so as a body they are probably right if they accept a model. But I don't like accepting things on authority, I like understanding why something would be the case, and I don't have that understanding for big bang theory.

[at least with other "grand theories" like tectonics or evolution I have some understanding of the process involved and the evidence that lead the scientific community to accept it (e.g. the magnetism 'bar code' for tectonics) and it can be observed somewhat in real life (the functioning of current species, the shape of continents. And let's not even talk about flat earth, young earth, intelligent design and other complete hogwash]