Exactly what I thought when I read the article. How long can the copyright on the design of a clock last? If it's 70 years, then it'll still be protected for 11 more years.

But then, it's also a trademark. I don't know swiss law, but trademarks are usually allowed to be renewed forever... If that's the case with this clock, then nobody will be able to ever make a clock that looks like this one without paying the Swiss Railway.

The problem is in your first statement: "with no bus service". If you had a bus service, then you wouldn't be wondering about public transit.

When "public transit" means fast trains for interurban and noiseless tramways for urban, with a joined fare so that you pay for the time you travel and not for the amount of different vehicles you use, you could perfectly take the tram to the train station, take the train and then again the tram to your parents house.

This works like a charm in Switzerland (and other european countries, but my best experience was in .ch). Tram times are synchronized with train times, so that you don't have to spend more than one or two minutes in the change of vehicle. You travel comfortably and fast from one or two blocks away or your house to one or two blocks away of your destination.

Many places currently do not have good public transportation, and people cannot even think of moving around without a car. It doesn't mean that good public transportation is impossible and that living without a car is always a show of being "poor".

Argentina? I'm failing to see the parallel.

There are some very dark times in Argentina's sort-of-recent history, when people against the government were illegally detained and made to disappear. However, that stopped with the return of democracy, almost 30 years ago.

10 years ago, there was an incident of protests and violence, when the president then was forced to resign. However that was an isolated event, and probably not what you are aiming at.

The current state of affairs regarding people thinking differently in the US has nothing to do with Argentina. Protestors here are not attacked by the police, their rights to protests are many and are respected. Any kind of repression like the one suffered by the Occupy movement would trigger governors/mayors resignations... Even maybe the president.

My thoughts exactly. Whenever I read about this story I think both of "I am Legend" and "Resident Evil" movies. Even if they are fantasy I think the "do not mess with viruses" message still holds true.

(P.S. I did check and the plural of virus is viruses not viri nor virii).

Given the current history of stupidity regarding harmless tweets, I seriously doubt that they have anything that really filters the good from the bad. If one of your tweets triggered them, then you are not welcome in the US.

I tried to find .gov sites with this flyer without success. However I DID find .gov or other sites with similar flyers, but for different cases:

On reno.gov, for hotels and motels (does not say FBI):
http://www.reno.gov/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=17584

Florida Self Storage Association, for cargo holders (says FBI, low quality scan)
http://www.floridassa.org/form/FBI-Indicators.pdf

The "Columbus, Ohio Police" site (not .gov, I don't know if it's legit or not) has quite a number of these flyers, although the Internet Cafe ones are not included:
http://www.columbuspolice.org/Units/Terrorism%20Early%20Warning.html

This page (supposedly the sheriff's office page for Osceola County, Florida) seems to have a compendium of all of them, in plain text:
http://www.osceola.org/sheriff/113-14385-19137/communities_against_terrorism.cfm

If it's someone trolling, they really did put A LOT of energy into making this look legit.

> I had a public school education, yet i know how this ends.

How? In a civil war/uprising like happened in Egypt? In a yet more oppressing tyranny like North Korea?

The whole wide word is going at a very fast speed towards giving more and more control to the governments. Some countries are further into it than others, but the whole world is going in that direction.

I'm afraid that the most likely outcome is a 1984-like world :-\

I've been unsuccessfully trying to find an official (.gov) site that has this flier.

The FBI site doesn't include any of the "Communities against terrorism" fliers.

In the Reno government site, I found one flyer, but a different one.

Does anyone have a link to an official version?

Amazing!

Thanks for sharing such a masterpiece against copyright. It's sad that those that came afterwards didn't have someone like Thomas Babington Macaulay to put into such excellent words the devil of copyright.

I don't think most women truly understand that the concept of a woman being able to take care of herself and her children without resorting to prostitution as a relatively recent societal construct.

I disagree. I think most women do understand it. The fact that it's a new possibility doesn't mean that we should still live like it isn't possible.

It has only been in the past 75 years (generously) that women could arguably do fine without a man.

[citation needed].

Just of the top of my head I can think of books like "Little Women" or "Jane Eyre" that happen about 150 years ago, where women are already able to work and support themselves, even if society is still not accepting it as "normal".

130 years ago, women were already accepted as university graduate students in the US.

100 years ago, Marie Curie earned her SECOND Nobel prize (1903 and 1911).

Yes, it's still fairly recent, but it's NOT 75 years. At least for some countries, I'd say women have been able to support themselves for 150 to 200 years. There are of course places where women still do not have this possibility.

It is actually only a fairly recent concept that marriage occurred with common folk

[citation needed], again. You describe how marriage was handled among nobility in Europe. That DOESN'T mean that marriage was handled the same way everywhere, for the "common folk", as you say. Maybe you are referring only to big weddings, and you are most probably forgetting what is called "Common law Marriage".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law_marriage

Note that sexual monogomy was originally only a constraint imposed on women, and that was to ensure the sire of any offspring the woman produces. Men had no such constraints.

Yet another [citation needed]. "Originally" where? when? under which laws?

Even in many countries today a man caught being unfaithful is punished with a fine while a woman being unfaithful is punished with death. This isn't mysogynistic, this is reality.

As already stated in another comment, reality can be misogynistic, and in many places in the world it is. This doesn't mean that you should accept it as valid, and that you shouldn't take a stand against it.

I find your comment completely misogynist and dumb.

Even if marriage WAS designed to protect women in the past, it doesn't mean that it cannot get a new significance with new times.

I agree that a lot of people get married for the wrong reasons. And that it'd be better if they didn't. I feel that you are mistaken in almost everything else you say, though.

Your statements are suprisingly dumb for a +5 comment... "I'll make a promise to this lady because I love her and I don't want her to ever worry about where her next meal is coming from" ... "I'm too weak to care for myself and I need some legal protection that makes it so he can't just run off to be with someone else without some form of legal and financial repercussion." ...

Marriage goes both ways. You fail to see that a man can also need the support of a woman. If a man is disabled for any reason (be it physical or psychological) then having a wife will mean having a person by his side to support him no matter what.

For me, marriage means: "I'm committed to you, I'll stand by your side, in the good times and the bad times, I'll respect you and care for you until death do us apart".

[I'm a married woman, I earn the same as my husband, I didn't marry him so he wouldn't run off, nor did I marry him so he would support me economically]