Although all part of Western civilization, United Kingdom is NOT France nor the United States of America when it comes to law and its just execution. When it comes to offensive and hate speech, UK is far more stringent, limiting and consistent in tackling from my observations.

It's important to recognize the human bias when evaluating the venom and criminality of speech. Empathizing or the lack there of with the offended is subjective.

I'd like to draw three distinctions in such affairs:

First is the philosophical belief in freedom of offensive, non-popular speech very much at the core of Western civilization. Those who do believe in it ought to believe in it regardless of whether you empathize with those offended or not. Otherwise, you are a hypocrite. Don't come here defending freedom of press/speech when it comes to anti-Muslim rhetoric, but throw the book at those whose actions offended you and vice-versa.

Second is, based on philosophy, the crafting of legislation to combat/protect particular speech. Bias can and at times does creep into legislation where one form of speech deemed offensive towards a small group is legal, while speech that might offend the majority is deemed illegal by law. Simply regurgitation "the law says so, therefore it shall be" isn't a good justification. Law can be wrong, discriminating and amended.

Third, is the execution of law by the authorities. Authorities must address each offending according to law objectively. The size of the population offended, or one's subjective views should not creep in when it comes to enforcing the law. Furthermore, making up legal technicalities in order to make the arrest based on your core bias is unjust and corrupt in my opinion.

Even though I am critical of and find freedom of speech in England to be very limiting , I respect their just interpretation of the law in a variety of cases including this one. Unlike Britain, USA I feel has much more ground to make up when it comes to drafting of legislation and its just, fair execution. There is a reason why one out of every three African-Americans will be incarcerated in their lifetime and it isn't because they are inherently criminal.

I can live with laws I might disagree with, I can use my democratic rights as a citizen to protest and influence (through voting) to amend them. However, I can't live with biased laws and those that are subjectively and selectively applied and enforced.

You might find my rant off-topic perhaps, but the message I want to convey is:
If you were here supporting freedom of expression in cases such as the cartoons of Mohammed, don't let your bias and empathy treat this issue differently.

Right on! You forgot to add the Internet Service Providers.

ISPs get the benefit of less bandwidth usage and grounds on which they can throttle your connection to a grade above dial-up and/or suspend services all the while you pay them your monthly contract/non-contract fee. It's a win-win for all scumbags, everyone gets thrown a bone.

This is very true. A working man/woman simply doesn't have the time and resources and has much more to risk to dissent over such matters. More importantly, fear is the reason of not challenging such abuse of personal liberty. As civilized as we are, we all know deep down that if we dissent enough, we'll be dealt with, ultimately by force.

For the most part I agree agree with you in sentiment. However, there are those who want to control the internet, specifically governments and multi-national corporations whose sole business is built on IP and corporations who want even greater control over the physical infrastructure they currently maintain. With the dawn of something precious comes the vultures who want all of it under their control. This is mankind's nature. Through fear, propaganda, lobbying and sometimes force these vultures will eventually get their way. Cyber-attacks, piracy, SOPA, lack of bandwith, child pornography, ... It's all power grab.

Cyber-attacks - The door of company/gov't entity A was open and thieves stole X amount of value, therefore, everyone should send in their keys so we can protect you all, or better yet, we'll build one big door out front and decide who gets to come in and who does not. FUCK YOU, fix your security holes

Piracy - We push digital formats of IP that we own into the public domain with insufficient security and oversight. We are neither going to acknowledge our short-comings in protecting our IP nor are we going to adapt to the changing times and seek out new creative outlets for our products (i.e. rock band), instead we are going to lobby hard for the uber-privilege of regulating all content on the world wide web. FUCK YOU either evolve or don't publish your IP if you can't protect it.

In both of these instances, their fault is spun into request for greater control through fear (economical and national security). I draw a clear distinction between regulation of content and infrastructure. I too wish the internet to remain a "persistent stateless anarchy", however, there needs to be regulation and oversight of infrastructure, NOT content, when appropriate; i.e. detect/protect against DOS attacks, DNS spoofing, etc... But don't tell me what content I can consume and what content I can't.

Like you, I refuse the choose the lesser of the two evils.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHEDXzOfENI
Aforementioned video is very informative and talks about the electoral college system in the event of a tie.

To become the president you need a majority (270) of the 538 electoral college votes. Under the current two-party electoral system, dilution of votes by a significant third party will result in more "ties" whereupon the election of the president becomes even less democratic and more corrupt.

Amending the electoral college system is a pre-requisite to having a significant third party. Good luck!

If you are playing a game of basketball. Unlike a game that ends, when it comes to never ending foreign-policy, the consequences of such attitude will echo far into the future.

You are making huge leaps of assumptions and narrow predictions of the future. If we are going to attack in the name of defense, let the evidence be legitimate, concrete and reputable. Given the many possible outcome the future may hold, for me to to bet the house on one particular outcome, the evidence better be good. Given the odds of such fruition, I'll be wiser to short your position. Needless to say, I don't buy the evidence presented.

I believe in letting systems run their natural organic course along a stable equilibrium and only interfering and manipulating it when harmful and volatile. We pre-maturely got pressured/lobbied into interfering with the self-determination of a sovereign nation. And what is our course of action? Regime change through deprivation. How did that work out first time around? I don't see this ending well.

Those who don't listen to us will feel our wrath. Example Iran. This may seem off topic but I think it's relevant to the underpinning factors of this piece of foreign policy. I'm going to be pragmatic and honest rather than ideal here.
It's my opinion that land and its resources belongs those who conquer it. Who ever gave anyone ownership of oil and/or land? No one, you conquer it then you defend it. I don't care if your God gave/promised it to you, or that you have been there for centuries/millenia. History has shown this time and time with European colonization of Africa and Americas, the mongol conquest of central Asia, the Islamic conquest of Northern Africa and Europe, the Israeli settlement of Palestine. In this regard, Palestine, Saudi oil, etc. all are up for grabs if you ask me, if you wish to take up the conquest.
As an American, I have no problem supporting a questionable foreign policy as long as it serves OUR national interest. I don't have a problem with double-standards, forcing our will, nor do I care whether it is fair, just, and righteous. What does bother me is the masses eating up the propaganda fed to them by our gov't and media and regurgitating it as the noble path. What we are doing to Iran is immoral, unfair and an act of war. Save me the BS of "spreading democracy", "doing the right thing", or speaking of this "world's/international community's" which is only made up of a minority group of nations.
Patriotism/nationalism is irrational, ideological and dangerous and it's running wild in the USA more than ever. The whole society/political spectrum has shifted to the right, xenophobia, intolerance and attacks on secularism are on the rise. Combine this with our hostile approach and disregard to just about any country save a few, we are perpetuating our own decline.
This choke hold on Iran to me, is doing the bidding of our ally Israel based on fickle evidence that is at best propaganda. In addition, we are also doing the bidding of the Saudis and other satellite Saudi kingdoms . I see this as the USA outsourcing its might. I don't believe this serves our national interest. The damages of our hostile actions will hurt us economically, politically and make us less safe. We are walking a tight rope over stagflation should the oil prices rise not to mention of sending more Americans in harms way.

OK, you are just asking for an ego beating.

Congrats on being a glorified janitor, clearly a big ego booster for you to fix shitty outsourced code and jump ship.
"Actual professionals" know that unless you are building the next web browser, standards are standards and that browser implementation is king when it comes to building high-throughput responsive web trading platforms, implement openId/oAuth APIs, cross-document/domain messaging solution web APIs. This professional makes lots of dollars doing this. This professional is humble enough to look up reference on w3schools.com and see its usefulness in teaching newcomers. Furthermore, this professional doesn't jerk off to his superior knowledge, but rather shares his knowledge and mentors those in need.

When fixing bad HTML or rewriting a crappy JavaScript function doesn't do it for you any more and you are ready to architect something truly professional, come see me because we are hiring. One last thing, drop the attitude.

Diaspora is a group of inexperienced kids selling an utopian verbal solution of a decentralized social network without having written a single line of code.

Call me a pessimist, but, having lived in the NYC, the Big Apple is the capital of hype and bull-shitting hustlers. With that said, I'd like nothing more than for these kids to succeed as a decentralized social network would be awesome. However, with every passing day it seems that they've opened their mouths too soon.

Hmmm, lets see...
1. Snub w3schools for not diving into advanced topics as to not overwhelm newcomers.
2. Not acknowledge the cases where alert and confirm dialogs are sufficient solutions.
3. Criticize w3schools.com for lack of giving explanation while you yourself don't give an explanation.
4. Advocating the use of console.log while knowing that console object isn't supported by all browsers.

I seriously question the web expertise of anyone who snubs w3schools as a "terrible", "painful" resource for web development. If you are looking for a copy-paste reference of best practices, w3schools isn't it. Nor is w3schools.com a definitive guide. However, there isn't a resource that is more user-friendly than w3schools on many of the web topics.
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/obj_location.asp V https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/window.location

Moreover, w3schools.com does a fantastic job in maintaining the big picture of web development by separating its components in its reference pages; DOM, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc..
Anyone stating otherwise is full of it. The tutorials, layout, and "Try it Out' execution environment are quick and fantastic for those not interested in reading a blog. 95% of the reference needed w3schools.com has. The other 5%, as a seasoned web developer you should see blog entries, quirksmode, msdn, mdn, etc. and/or investigate in an execution environment such as firebug.
The subtle nuances, nit-picky details, over-simplification, or the lack of mention of say "getBoundingClientRect" doesn't invalidate the awesomeness of w3schools, and it certainly doesn't make it suck. Mastering a topic shouldn't turn you into a snob.
I strongly recommend w3schools.com to anyone who wants to get a good grasp of web development without diving into the advanced topics or anyone who wants a quick reference look up.

Just my two cents!

heyJavaScript = (function (whatYouSay) {
  var theFactIs = "You can't touch this! ";
  return function (freeLesson) {
    freeLesson = "I'm your global daddy!";
    setTimeout(function(){
      self.heyJavaScript = null;
      delete self.heyJavaScript;
      alert("So long sucker!");
    }, 0);
    alert(whatYouSay + theFactIs + freeLesson);
  }
})("You talkin to me? ");

heyJavaScript("How about a makeover?");
heyJavaScript("Listen to me man!");

Disclosure: I'm by all means not an Apple fan boy nor do I own a single Apple product.

My gf was looking to buy a Mac Book pro and sought my advice. I lobbied hard for the Mac Book air with the SSD. The price was the same for the two 13 " models. Mac Book Pro had 500 GB vs the 128GB SSD of the Air. The pro had a faster CPU and couple other differences which I won't get into.

Considering she doesn't need massive hard disk storage, my selling point was the start-up speed as well as the speed of opening files (this includes application start-up). Sure enough the Air started-up a around 10 sec vs the 45-60 sec of the Mac Book Pro. Elements application started up quicker on the Air as well. Needless to say she was sold.

The time she'll save on each start-up and file location will far outweigh the the time saved on say doing CPU-heavy CAD operations she'll perform 0.000001% of the time. I think far too often people will place disproportionally heavy emphasis on outlier user-cases. You don't need a sword if you are slicing apples 99.9% of the time. Of course, ultimately the decision lies in the needs of the user.

Iranian productivity just doubled lol

"Liberals" aren't banning you from sodas nor the size of sodas you can drink. They are restricting business establishments from serving single large portions of soda to the public. This doesn't outlaw you buying a 32oz cup and pouring your soda into it and drinking it on the streets. You just can't conduct business and serve those portions.

Considering the diabetes epidemic, this is exactly what I want my government to regulate. It takes your body very little time to break down high fructose syrup (one part glucose and one part glucose) resulting in massive sugar spikes. This is responsible legislation.