I personally believe (and I accept that I cannot prove this) that a great many people who are currently speaking in favour of Charlie Hebdo's right to deliberately offend a "them" would take offense to the Sia video and would be denouncing her right to incidentally offend the "us".

How many of those people you imagine exist do you imagine would change their tune if the people who worked on the video were all shot in the head?

sounds like you're the one with the problem. Its simple - if you insult a person, expect them to respond. If you greatly insult a person, expect them to respond greatly. Your actions have consequences, same as anyone else. If you your a man, man up and accept them.

Is there an upper limit on what "greatly" means for the response? Arson? Murder? Nuclear war? Destruction of your planet and its three nearest neighbors?

Boy, that didn't come across clearly or nicely. Americans and US government agencies actually own most of US federal debt. The breakdown for the debt that's held by foreigners is here. Looks like China is the biggest holder of about 7% of our total debt and about 20% of our total foreign debt. Japan is a very close second, but for some reason they stopped being a major bogeyman sometime in the 90s.

No, it doesn't.

That really only works if your rational explanation isn't another basically omnipotent being. If I say, "We found your DNA on the knife," and you say, "That's also consistent with an inconceivably advanced alien beaming my DNA into the vial," I suppose that's true, but by that standard, can anything at all be proven?

Sure, it's not possible for us to distinguish between an omnipotent being revealing itself and a slightly-less-than-omnipotent being messing with you, but you can't meaningfully distinguish between *any* observation and a slightly-less-than-omnipotent being messing with you. So unless you want to put the word "prove" away on the shelf for good, I don't think the "Can I tell if it's a nearly omnipotent alien messing with me?" test is a useful metric for provability.

If you want to go that route, at some point you just throw up your hands and say nothing can be proven, which is OK, but it kind of makes the word "proven" useless in general conversation. I mean, the flu may be caused by advanced aliens as well, but we're OK with calling the germ theory of disease more or less proven.

Being able to cut deals like that would definitely be cool. But from the looks of it, being able to cut those deals will come with other baggage, like major ISPs picking and choosing winners in the content industry, squeezing out competition in favor of their own products, and extracting monopoly rents not just from their own customers but from profitable media suppliers as well. So you have efficient taylored packages like what you describe on one hand, and on the other hand you have the potential for an Internet future that looks a lot like buying channel packages from your cable company. I don't see a lot of cool deals like the one you described being cut, but I am starting to see examples of the monopoly abuse stuff.

So on the balance, it seems like until we can figure out a way to de-monopolize the ISP business, the net neutrality vs custom bandwidth contracts debate is just another case of, "This is why we can't have nice things."

Seems like seizing and selling the car they were driving illegally is one reasonable option. They could keep doing it, but most people will eventually run out of cars.

And as for the analyst who was spying on her spouse, she's damn lucky she got a slap on the wrist. She could have gotten much, much worse for that.

That's kind of the problem. She could have and should have gotten much worse. The fact that she didn't indicates a serious dysfunction in the system. And it's the type of dysfunction that sounds a lot like the type of arrogant, "The rules don't apply to us," and, "If you're not police, you're nobody," attitude you get from dangerously corrupt police forces in countries we sneer at. That's not good. Not good at all.

Given that, I have a very hard time buying the idea that these people take their jobs seriously at all. Anybody who took that job seriously would have immediately stomped down on that person, drummed her out of the service, and immediately made changes to make sure it didn't happen again.

I think he's saying that a restaurant reviewer who goes into a burger joint and shits all over it in his review because they didn't have sushi is probably not adding much useful information to the review-o-sphere.

I don't like most childrens movies because I'm an adult and I find them childish. But if somebody was paying me to write informative reviews and I had to review a kids' movie, I wouldn't spend a lot of time bemoaning the simplistic plot line, limited charater development or overly bright color pallette. Complaining that the latest Disney Princess movie didn't have the same set of elements that made No Country for Old Men appealing sort of misses the point. It's not even sensible enough to be considered wrong.

As somebody living in one of the expensive tech commute areas, I feel ya on the expensive house thing, but let's be realistic. Telling people, "Sure, I make a lot of money, but after I spend it on expensive things that you can't have like a house in a nice neighborhood and a car to commute with, you and I have about the same amount of money," is a bit tone deaf. It's like eating a hearty dinner and then saying to the guy eating scraps, "See, my plate is empty too. Solidarity!"

Yes, the story of the heavily unionized car sales businesses turning the screws on the plucky non-union auto manufacturers certainly rings true to me.

Alas, in the USA, we vote for a candidate, NOT A PARTY!

And the best part about it is that once we're finished voting for those individual candidates, they go off to the legislature and join up with their parties and vote in lockstep anyway. Strict party discipline has kind of made the whole "I'm a trustworthy and wise leader with good ideas" schtick kind of irrelevant.

Most of everything that involves people happens in the cities.

It's also not so great for employers who have to weed through piles of trash applicants with shiny fake resumes in order to find people who can actually do the job. The cost of even a phone screening interview is nonzero.