And if it was a man, he'd find refuge in audacity and just get to be a trolling asshole. The people hating him would only add to his mystique. Women can't do that, but they can play on paternalism to make you feel sorry for them. Kind of a sad trade, if you ask me.

Hey, those trolls that targeted the overweight kid? Nobody cared about him. Those trolls that targeted the successful woman professional? She has an enormous support network, an enormous professional network, and is well known and well loved. Nobody said the first wasn't a victim of "real" trolling (except you). But it's only understandable that the first story will sink into the depths of obscurity while the second creates an entire social campaign against trolling.

If the trolls are smart, they'll figure out that socially connected woman professionals are not particularly good targets and stick to the people nobody else cares about. But as we all know trolls are not exactly smart; we can only hope they're too dumb to target their trolling better and just give it up entirely.

The First Amendment to the US Constitution is designed to keep the government from censoring unpopular speech. It's not because it's a slippery slope. It's because free speech is the underpinning of democracy, and allowing a democratically-elected government to limit it allows the government to alter the basis of its own existence. In essence, the threat is that corrupt politicians would alter the balance of power in their own favor.

With that as the basis of our right to free speech, the government does still have the power to punish certain speech in very focused situations. For example, you will go to jail if you shout "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater. That situation is limited to "causing immediate panic likely to result in injury to others", and with that limitation the law does not infringe upon our right to express our opinions.

Harassment is not expressing an opinion, it's expressing that you're an asshole. If speech were expressed with paint on canvas, harassment would be throwing the paint in someone else's face. The only way that the right to free speech protects assholes is that it forces prosecutors to prove they are really just being assholes. That's a good thing; there's a difference between throwing paint and painting a picture with it, even if the picture is on someone else's face. But that doesn't mean that shouting "SHITCOCK!" just to piss people off is somehow protected.

So there are two people involved that might be liable: the bot maker (or firearm/automobile manufacturer), and the bot user (or shooter/drunk driver). In two of these three situations, the product was made and marketed for what it was used for. Using an abuse bot to abuse people is not a "misuse" of the product; it is the correct use of a product that shouldn't exist. Similarly, some classes of firearm have no legitimate purpose besides indiscriminate murder in the hands of a lone civilian (but would have legitimate purpose in the hands of the same civilian as part of a "well-regulated militia").

As for the drunk driver, well the car has a legitimate purpose besides crashing into things. It isn't sold to crash into things the way a gun is sold to shoot things. Now, if the car had a "Roman chariot spikes" rim option, they should probably be held at least somewhat liable for customers using their rim spikes to pop other people's tires.

Web hosting is still sold much the same way as over 10 years ago: multiple clients sharing a host, or a dedicated server for much more. Now we have virtual servers too, which have a lot of access and security benefits but are ultimately the same as the first option for load balancing. And if you want anything more, get multiple dedicated servers and a dedicated sysadmin. It's an awful lot of money for the mere possibility of way more web traffic than you've ever imagined would visit at once (note: your statement was broadly directed at all web sites, not just the government, so I'm broadly directing at all web sites too).

Technology gets better all the time, but economics still mostly stay the same.

Why would a web browser have ext3 support in the first place? Are you one of those people that like to make everything confusing by dropping random words from otherwise meaningful statements? Like "Free as in [Free] Beer"? Um, does that mean freedom because beer is liberating? Well, don't "let the cat out [of the bag]" on that one. It might bring home a mouse. Anyway, maybe I shouldn't "judge a book [by its cover]". As in, never judge a book, ever, for any reason, because clearly your English is better than mine. Why, I could hire you to write my Slashdot comments for me and "kill two birds [with one stone]". Not sure what I would do with the two birds, but then I could at least be an asshole on the internet without ever needing to read what the other assholes have to say.

Anyway, as we all know, once you go Boolean, you never go back. Amen brotha.

This. Notice my "scare quotes" around "better for society". mattack2 has hit on the head exactly what I would have said if it wouldn't have distracted from my point. There's no way to perfectly determine what is best for society, but we do have mostly-good-most-of-the-time ways.

Notice the air quotes around "better for society". I would rather avoid discussing whether that's true, because that discussion is happening elsewhere.

What I want is a a "truly agnostic search engine". That would mean nobody can mess with the search results, not by law and not by hacking. Perhaps I didn't make this clear, but I don't expect Google will ever be that again.

I feel like musing a bit on what would satisfy this desire. There are a few problems with search results: 1) They lack context; 2) They are easily manipulated; 3) They aren't good at translating what we say we want into what we think we want. These three problems are usually alleviated in society by human minds being context-driven and by getting multiple opinions from multiple sources. The natural solution would seem to be for the "search engine" to engage us not with a simple text box, but in some sort of conversation. The search engine would then consult a network of other search engines and try to deliver what looks like the best result. What's the best result? Depends on the conversation, the context, and the value of the results.

All three of those things seem to be beyond the grasp of Google. For one, the closest you'll get to a conversation is its asinine suggestions that are based on what query the other meatbags thought would get Google to spit out the right result, and is just as likely to include pop culture references as whatever you are actually looking for. For two, Google may warn you when a link has been paid for, but otherwise it provides no context about where that page came from, what other things it's good for, what perspective informs it, and how credible it probably is (which is a shame, because I'm pretty certain Google does usually know these things). And for three, while Google might know certain measures of value (but won't tell you because it it doesn't provide context), it has no idea exactly which measure you're interested in right now.

Say you look up the term "global warming". Are you interested in an objective history of the concept? Are you looking for pure data and research? Are you looking for the politics surrounding it? Are you looking for a place to start a fight? Are you looking to join a community of people who think like you on the issue? Knowing how to get what you want means knowing the measures of value yourself. Maybe you know by now that Wikipedia is the most likely place to find objectivity. It usually takes a college education to know where to find (and how to read) good scholarly material. Politics is even trickier: since every author has a viewpoint (and Google either has no viewpoint, an SEO-hacker biased viewpoint, or your viewpoint, and it won't tell you which), the only way you can get an unbiased view is to somehow survey all viewpoints and figure out for yourself how they fit together and which are most common. Community is even harder. How is Google supposed to know the best places to troll? If you're lucky you'll find a laser-targeted clickbait titled "Top 11 Places to Troll Global Warming Believers/Deniers". Even worse, how is Google supposed to know if you will like any particular community? It's easier to find places ripe for conflict than places you'll actually fit into.

Web search is a hard problem. Google took a shortcut that got us most of the way there: they take the entire internet and filter the results according to your query, then they order them by a search ranking determined by how many other web sites link to that web site. In essence, Google's shortcut to human-like social intelligence is to crowd-source the intelligence to actual humans. Because those humans have motivations other than helping Google, that leaves Google vulnerable to manipulation. Ever since Google became the de facto standard of finding shit on the internet, they've been contending with that manipulation every day. It works...usually. Or at least sometimes. At least it's better than not having Google. But nobody out there has yet figured out how to do provide web search without relying on human beings for search rankings.

I'd like to think a search engine that provides meaningful context, is not easily manipulated, and actually understands what I want would be good for society. Mainly because I have faith that free and effective spreading of information is good for society. What we have now is a biased and ineffective means of spreading information, so without my ideals to fall back upon determining what is or is not "good for society" is much muckier and more complicated.

Truly sorry about that, but I don't see how patent reform would solve your problem. The way I see it, your problem is that they "withdrew the original from the market". Not that they invented a slightly different version. They may have done it because it enabled them to charge more for the newer drug sold for the same purpose, but you can't force a company to make what you want. Without the original patent, they may not have ever been able to sell either drug anyway.

Drug combinations are a strange beast that probably should not be patentable the same way as the individual compounds. Personally I prefer to buy the individuals and combine them myself. It certainly helps when I have a cough and sinus swelling, but not a runny nose or a fever or any sort of pain, so I really don't want to be taking an antihistamine or a pain killer in some all-in-one. It also helps to avoid phenylephrine, the "fake" sudafed that doesn't work but can't be used to make meth so it's easier to sell. They put that shit in everything. Anyway, I really hope that the "something else" in your preferred drug is available on its own.

Combining A+B and C may not be easy, but it is obvious. This is actually the main problem I see with software patents: idea C is "with a computer", and A+B is some existing invention. Newspapers - on a computer! Alarm clocks - on a computer! Bank transactions - on a computer! Sure it was hard to program them. It's still obvious. But if securing the bank transactions requires new innovations in security technology to glue the pieces together, those innovations could merit patent D. Does not and should not prevent anybody else from making their own secure bank transactions with a different security method because somebody got an A+B+C patent covering the obvious part.

Really not understanding your point about pharmaceuticals. How is the benzene ring different from "including a library or function in a program [which] should have an absolutely predictable result"? I do agree though that pharmaceuticals are a bit different than other patent issues, but for a different reason: selling a drug requires round after round of expensive clinical trials because of the FDA. Without exclusivity, there may not be enough incentive for drug companies to pay for those trials if a generic manufacturer can reverse engineer the same drug and sell it on the cheap without paying for the trials. Maybe the FDA should have its own special exclusivity granting system so we can peel off one of the complications of patent law.

Google is not an agnostic search system. Google is the king of search, and everyone is trying to hack around their algorithms to boost their search rankings. Is it really so terrible that Google itself should be outright asked to prefer search results that are "better for society"?

Don't get me wrong. I want a truly agnostic search engine. Badly. I want to be able to find the best source for what I'm looking for, not a couple dozen support forums with great SEO and an actual honest-to-goodness answer buried on page 47 of the search results. Google used to be the closest we could get to that, but that was a long time ago. Now they're basically a public utility, much like the internet itself. Although since so many people are stealing from it and its customers, I'd say it's more like cable TV.