I jailbreak my IOS device for one very important reason: /etc/hosts. This is VERY important to me. If I access an internet resource, there's nothing stopping it from telling my device, "Hey, also get this other resource without asking the user for permission!" In other words, it speaks on my behalf. My right to free speech also means freedom from compulsory speech. /etc/hosts means that I can control which resources are accessed on my behalf.

Apple (and all other money-making enterprises) hate this notion because it interferes with their potential profit. This is why we have to rely on jailbreaking to restore these free speech rights. My IOS5 device is jailbroken, but I cannot get an untethered jailbreak for IOS6.

IANAL. Doesn't matter. This is a philosophical issue.

Does anyone want Facebook? How is it that Facebook is free?

When users want "privacy", they want to make sure that their location isn't tracked ... until they want to be able to share that with their friends and know where there is an available parking space. To say that by sacrificing our privacy we will have a much richer lifestyle is a tautology by this point. For example, it's happened more than once that I found someone on the Internet using a service that they didn't expressly consent to, and they were delighted that I found them because they had been looking for me and were unable to find me. What was more important -- that I respected their privacy, or that we have a newly-kindled friendship?

When RMS talks about "privacy", keep in mind the monk-like lifestyle he leads. http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

I'd be willing to accept an "apples and oranges" rejoinder.

I understand "sobbery" to mean "using one's experience or preferences as an excuse to abuse or patronize". There is no excuse; hence, I despise snobbery.*

The worst kinds of snobbery exist in things where the experience cannot be proven; i.e., it relies solely on taking the person's word and social proof. The number one candidate for this kind of behavior would be wine. There have been many scientific experiments performed on wine drinkers and even wine tasters and it proves that what people taste is money, not the "subtle nuances of crushed fruit". The "art" of "coffee appreciation" is still in its infancy when compared to that of wine, but it exists nonetheless.

The most important aspect of coffee is that it simply not taste bad. I drink it black, so I cannot tolerate any flavors of like dirt, mold, gym sock, or charcoal. But beyond that, I think most of the good flavors that people "detect", "get", or "pick up" are indistinguishable from the purely imaginary flavors that people "detect", "get", or "pick up". Expresso? French press? Whatever, as long as it doesn't taste bad.

* I have to own up to one kind of snobbery of which I am very proud: I am a snob snob. That is, I am a snob of other snobs. A snobboisseur, if you will. So far, I have found all other snobs deficient. Not a single one of them is good enough for the likes of me.

If you do something stupid, such as leave your laptop in an unsecured location, then will your best friends steal it?

If you just change a few specifics, but not the tenor, in your argument, you'll get a drastically different result. To wit:

"Leaving her hotel room dressed like such a slut was a stupid and idiotic move on *her* part. And yes, I know that this sounds like blaming the victim, but there is a point where you have to take responsibility for your own actions."

Meanwhile, in Greece...

You can't fix stupid. So they will fail in every attempt to "solve homelessness". But OP wasn't talking about homelessness. Bitsy Boffin was talking about America and how much he hates it. The homelessness tack is incidental.

Indeed! "What about the chiiiiiiiiildren?" It works for both conservatives and liberals.

There are millions of stories of stupid, lazy people doing stupid, lazy things that screw up their own lives and the lives of their victims. And then, once in a blue moon, one of these losers spawns a genius. It is the proverbial pearl in a mountain of shit. But if you stare deeply into that pearl, allowing it to fill your vision entirely, then you can feel inspired enough to write a heartwarming human interest story. Maybe that story will be so powerful that you will inspire people to say, "But what about the chiiiiiiiildren?" and ignore the masses of stupid, lazy people out there making life worse for everyone.

Yes, it sucks that other kids had a trust fund and we didn't. (Likewise, it also sucks that we were born in the US as opposed to, say, North Korea or Uganda, but let's stay focused on our first-world problems.)

How would you imagine "fixing" this problem? Ignore for the time being that you can no longer bequeath your wealth to your children, or to anyone else that you like, for that matter. When someone dies, all of their wealth is sized by the government to be "spread equally" among ... who exactly? Everyone? How do you imagine that working out in practice? Well, since we will elect angels, not fallible humans, to government positions, then they will be perfect and show absolutely no favoritism or individual biases about what is most worthy of "investment", right? Of course not, because angels don't exist, power corrupts, and we're talking about pigs who now have a individual's wealth to divvy up as best as they see fit. This is actually a much faster method of turning the US into a neo-feudal society, with all wealth from someone seized when someone dies (accidentally?) and spread out as best as our rulers see fit (Now! With GULAG!).

Maybe you should re-read the book _Animal Farm_ knowing that it was written by a socialist. Notice how I used the word "pigs" to describe our rulers? It wasn't a throwaway insult. It's a reference to that book.

Just don't call it "class warfare"!

You can't. The pathway between the body cavity and the scrotum is dark.

On the one hand, you say it's a "canard" that government is force. On the other hand, you say that government "needs" force, and that's a good thing. Which is it?

Of course government is force. That's what makes it government. The only difference between government and any other individual or group is that the government has the legal right to use deadly force to achieve its goals. That's what government is, period. The discussions of how is is moral or not that this force will be used is called "politics".

And I hate your claim that if it weren't for government then we would all be "anarchist barbarians killing and raping and stealing at will". I resent the notion that I would go out and kill, rape, and steal if it weren't for your blessed God Government telling me not to. If suddenly government told you that it wasn't going to enforce those laws, would you immediately go out and rape a baby to death? You sound like a conservative who claims that we would all be shooting up heroin if it weren't for God Government telling us not to do it. I am completely capable of determining for myself what is right, what is wrong, and what is appropriate conduct toward other people, and anyone who insists otherwise is an asshole!

Go read "The Tragedy of the Commons". You might also consider that farming lions is the best way to save the species. Disagree? Consider the populations of cows and chickens compared to the populations of lions and zebras. Common property doesn't work. Either someone owns it or nobody does.

Bull feathers and hen's teeth. Socialism, like Christianity, is entirely about denying self-ownership. In Socialism, you belong to "society" through a "social contract" (Accept it or DIE!). In Christianity, you are "made in God's image" and are "God's child". Both evil ideologies hate the notion of individualism and say that selfishness is evil, where "selfishness" means "not doing what I told you to do". As long as I am not depriving any other individual of their life, liberty, or property, then nothing I do is wrong or should be illegal. And it's rich of you to accuse other of "controlling public thought" when you know very well that socialism wants to control the way people think, act, spend, and live. For the good of "society" and the "social contract". You're no better than a fundamentalist Christian. It's the same evil nanny state with a different stupid God and the connected party members living high on the graft. You suck! I can't tell if you're a Boxer or an aspirant pig -- and go read _Animal Farm_ if you don't know what I'm talking about. Either way, I hate you.

How's that ROI going? Well, if the "R" in question is votes, then it's probably going pretty well.

This will come as a shock to many Boxers (but not many pigs or aspirant pigs -- read _Animal Farm_ to know what I'm talking about), but paying people not to work will incentivize them not to work.

"...should be required reading"? Check.
Freshly-graduated from college? Check.
What's good for me is good for everybody? Check.
What I don't prefer is excrement? Check.
Dismissive and angry in general? Check.

Yes, I bash (the shell, not the petulant behavior). Yes, I know regexes. Yes, I used E16. Yes, I was a zealot of class-A caliber. I see me in you. An angry, condescending, spiteful me. Slashdot is a back-slapping, high-fiving cesspool of that kind of me. It's why your very hackneyed post was modded up as "insightful": it validates very common anti-social, us-versus-them attitude that permeates this place. It's why my own post will be modded down as "flamebait", because I am refusing to validate this very same spiteful, self-satisfied group of people, as hungry for validation as I used to be. Am I better than that now? Somehow superior? No. Just less angry. More accepting of myself and different preferences in others. Less needy of punishing and feeling self-satisfied for having done so. More aware that happiness it the birthright and responsibility of every individual, and that computer UIs are a preference which exist solely to serve humanity's needs, and only after that are a technical (not moral) issue. Maybe when you see your two year-old child working an iPad you'll feel a little bit more merciful, but something tells me that parenthood is light-years away from your radar.

These kinds of stories sicken me. "No link". "No correlation". So what if there was? Correlation does not imply causation.

Yet "linked" and "correlated" appear everywhere in medicine. Why is our culture like this? I think it must be a kind of secular religion -- kind of like the faith we have in peer review.