First, no, it is not completely irrelevant at all, because, for one thing, people assume a lot of things about people based on their parties, things which are not necessarily so. Plenty of people's party loyalties were developed before their parties flipped all over the place on their stances. As the post I was replying to astutely pointed out, the modern parties in the U.S. are better described as shifting coalitions than as consistent interest groups. I think it is extremely relevant to the current political landscape that people realize how inconsistent and short-lived the meanings of "Republican" and "Democrat" are, because one of the huge problems right now in the United States is blind party loyalty, along with unwillingness to hear or believe anything good about people who wear the other party's badge.

Second, "liberal" has its own problems with shifting meaning, but I do regularly remind people that the Republicans, even more recently, when their hero Ronald Reagan was President, believed that torture was something done by evil, communist regimes like the USSR, and that their beloved America was, back then, in their eyes heroic because it wasn't like those awful countries on the other side of the iron curtain with their secret prisons and indefinite detention of tortured prisoners. (And that they were right back then, and shouldn't have changed their mind about keeping the moral high ground just because an infinitely weaker enemy than the Soviet Union ever was has now taken center stage.)

Well said, though I'd add the caveat that the broad southern affinity for the Republican Party is a more recent development. The South was more Democratic until only recently. The Dixiecrats were a major force in their party's, and the nation's politics not very long ago, and that stems all the way back to opposition to Lincoln's party. So the Southern attempts to block civil rights advancements were mostly coming from the Democratic Party (which is a fact that most people under 30 seem completely unaware of). So the internal inconsistency of the two parties that you mention is actually surprisingly strong.

When I was a kid, I kind of liked stations that did anounncer-read commercials, because they were less annoying than other commercials. It wasn't until I became an adult that it even occurred to me that this was a failure of integrity. I'm glad I'm not the only person who has noticed there is a problem with that model.

I have been hoping for this outcome, but there is a lot of reason to believe it is unlikely. One reason is that, when it comes to mass social media-developed stories, the brokers are everyone, and honest news sources can be overwhelmed and lost in the noise. To prevent this, every person has to regard him- or herself as a journalist with an obligation to check things before posting them, tweeting them, or otherwise passing them along. Given how well this has worked with all of the incredibly unbelievable urban legends that continue to be propagated via email despite easy fact checking, I have a feeling a lot more people find it easier to click "share" than to take time to look something up carefully.

The other reason I worry about this is that reputations themselves hold value and therefore are regularly sold off just like any other assets. How many companies are there that have developed a reputation for high quality, over many years, and then someone realized that if they put the same brand name on a lesser product, they could sell more of it at lesser cost. Sure, it diminishes the brand, but that takes time, and the profits are immediate. Furthermore, our culture (at least in the U.S.) has gradually devalued actual honesty (the foundation of a reputation) in favor of branding (the imagery of a reputation). Most troubling, personal honesty itself is not considered important. What is a paid endorsement, really? It is putting up your reputation for sale. Yet this is accepted without question as the best way to cash in on one's status as a trusted person. To see this in action out in the masses, how many bloggers, after building up a following, begin accepting "sponsored posts"? Vast numbers of them, and many have probably never even realized there is a moral dimension to this at all, it's just a way to earn money. If they have thought about it, they probably have never taken it seriously enough to actually refuse to do it, because looking at it as a form of dishonesty would be a "fringe" view in our present culture, and therefore easily dismissed regardless of its accuracy. So what I worry about is that, unless we somehow foster an actual cultural change, we'll wind up with just a continued bombardment of unchecked "facts" mixed with an endless succession of people and institutions that build up a trusted reputation and then cash out.

There is nothing wrong with this. This entire discussion thread has taken failing to read the article to a new level. This section of the bill in question affirms that violence commenced via the Internet falls under the same rules as violence with regular guns, and thus it is subject to the laws of war and the War Powers Resolution. It is not a declaration of war, it is not permission to "fire at will." Nor is it an affirmation of pre-emptive strikes. Offensive use of force in defense of the nation is not a new or strange concept. The President has been, since the beginning of the republic, authorized to conduct offensive operations with the military to defend the United States, subject to Constitutional and Congressional limitations and the laws of warfare. This section effectively says, "cyberspace is an arena in which this may also occur." Nothing more. In that regard, it is actually an assertion that there are limits on Presidential use of the Internet for violent acts, although exactly how to apply the established laws regarding warfare to cyber-warfare is obviously a really big question.

Most definitely not, and the reason is that anything which is truly a right can never be taken away by someone other than the owner of that right. It doesn't matter one whit whether the persons taking rights are part of a majority or not. You can only waive your own rights, you can't vote away someone else's.

Oh no! We better drill a hole to the center of Jupiter and explode a nuclear bomb to fix it, because that makes sense!

I meant that you are confusing copyrights with patents by suggesting that the latter allows you to rest on your laurels and forever accumulate riches (and use the government to protect them) from long-ago inventions. Patent law needs to be updated to apply to fast-moving technologies differently than to old-style, mechanical inventions by having a much shorter protection period, because both the returns on investment and the speed at which one generation of innovation is superseded by another are faster, but even the over-long protection doesn't cause things to work completely the way you suggest, because the profitable period on a 486 chip completely runs its course in under 20 years. Protecting it that long is silly, but the ownership of that property at year 19, when you can't even sell it anymore, isn't exactly "accumulated wealth".

Do you inhabit the minds of all those who create new things thus that you can declare, for all of them, that they have no fear of copying? I have heard plenty of creative people express concern about whether they will be able to get the rewards for their work or whether someone else will. Where unfettered, free copying is allowed, it is not the most creative people who will succeed, it is the people with the biggest marketing budgets. A few rare individuals will come up with brand new things and hit the jackpot before better-funded competitors can duplicate their work, but most creators will be outdone in profits by someone who has a fully funded team, an existing factory, and a standing army of salesmen ready to hit the market worldwide before the original inventor can get known by anyone or build a relationship with more than a handful of retailers.

Also, you seem to have a strange notion that the world is divided into "people who can create" and "people who can only copy," where people who can create have some infinite store of inventions or writings and an unending, Godlike power of creation, that at a moment's notice they can spit out a new, improved version of whatever someone else just copied, thereby holding some kind of perpetual lead based on a pure and complete mental superiority over all competitors. It is more accurate to say that many people have occasional points where they come up with a really good idea, and that working out the way these ideas can be put into practice is a difficult process. To imagine that someone who once innovates successfully is guaranteed to be able to generate an infinite stream of successfully implemented new ideas, each abandoned to competitors as quickly as those competitors can implement the same, is to dream of people having a different sort of nature than they really do. (Ayn Rand happened to have much the same misunderstanding, but it is nevertheless a misunderstanding.)

Countries and companies who have no intellectual property protections are "on the way up" in the same sense that, in a complete free-for-all, dog-eat-dog system, the dogs on the eating end are benefiting. Nobody can claim that it is not at the expense of other dogs or that those on the rise are doing anything whatsoever to introduce new calories into the food chain.

Nonsense. Patents only protect the new, which means it is only active innovators who stand to gain from their existence. One cannot "hold onto [one's] accumulated wealth and power even once [one is] no longer earning it" with patents, they don't work that way. They are useful to innovation in the same way that government enforcement of contracts allows one to safely pour money into developing a leased property into a business establishment; you can fail by doing poorly, but not by someone else simply walking off with your investment. They then expire, after the inventor has had a chance to reap his or her reward and incentive for taking risks and innovating, so that they can benefit the whole public. You seem to be confusing patents with copyrights, which are theoretically there for more or less the same reason, protecting new works, but which have been elongated and degraded into more or less everlasting protectionism.

In other words, race is more or less a social construct, as opposed to one with a great deal of accuracy or usefulness in science. The genetic variation within African blacks is greater than the genetic variation of all other people combined, which means that people of the "black race" are actually in many cases far less closely related to one another than, say, European whites and south Asians. To say that differently, people of different races are often more similar genetically than people of the same race. Which makes race a very rough descriptor, an imprecise and a proxy of limited usefulness for the actual differences among people. It isn't a completely silly term, as it is useful to be able to distinguish among groups of people with different visual characteristics and different regional ancestry, but it is foolish to think it is more than a vague term, scientifically speaking.

Dividing people by color is therefore kind of like dividing foods by color. There are some generalities that one can find, like green ones are made of plant matter, and a chef concerned with artistic presentation of the food on the plate may well find color a useful concept, but nutritionally, biologically, or compositionally, is a green bell pepper more like an asparagus or a watermelon than it is like a yellow bell pepper? Is it reasonable to put turnips and fish in the same food group and call that a meaningful category? Obviously not.

Where are these bunnies you speak of?

YM every other browser that, if I accidentally forget and leave it open with a few tabs on different websites overnight, will have become unresponsive and eaten half of my system memory by the time I come back in the morning? FF is noticeably different than any other browser when it comes to in-use resource consumption, in my experience, not that it has much to do with the original story.

No, it's not, more like blaming a stalker services company for packaging their stalking services and selling them to Nike. Your response is like excusing them because they offer to Nike-- but not to you-- the option that their stalkers could stand in plain view rather than hiding in the bushes when stalking customers and look the other way when asked nicely. The whole idea is inappropriate to begin with, and only more so when the opt-out option is taken away. And opt-out? Since when should a total activity surveillance program be opt-out, rather than opt-in? The only appropriate use for this type of software is for cell phone manufacturers and providers to use themselves for development, diagnostics, and testing. It should not be included on customer phones at all. Maybe reasonable would be some cut-down version that allows a customer, when actively dealing with customer service, to purposefully boot the phone into a diagnostics mode to help determine the cause of trouble, but that is completely unlike what we're dealing with here.

Nope. Read the original published findings. Can log basically every event on your phone, including every keypress.