It's a prison where horrible things had to happen to prevent ever more horrible things from happening.

It's a prison where people did horrible things and tried to excuse them by saying they had to, in order to prevent ever more horrible things from happening, but in reality prompted yet more horrible things. See political martyr, and please stop believing that you put out a fire by pouring more fuel on it, or stop horrors by committing more horrors.

LessWrong AI worship(the idea of "friendly AI" was created by that site)

O RLY?

All I said was that China and Russia call him a patriot and asked if you could be a patriot for more than one country.

A patriot is someone who loves their country. Snowden is a patriot who loves the United States. If some folks in Russia and China correctly identified this fact, good for them. (Note that loving the United States has nothing to do with loving its government: as Thoreau said, "A very few- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.")

What happened to be "innocent until proven guilty"?

It went out of fashion in the 1990s. Because War On (some) Drugs.

Seriously, people, this civil forfeiture bullshit has been going on since the late 20th century. It's legal roots go back to the 1600s, but it was the U.S. in the 1990s where it started to get egregious.

Are y'all just learning about it? Start with the wik for a decent overview.

Or what? What are you going to do?

The Black Panthers had the only answer. The only thing that can stop a bad cop with a gun is a good citizen with a gun.

So, this is a voluntary thing, doesn't involve any certification, has no actual enforcement, and only exist in about half the US states or slightly less.

You're confusing certification with the status of a benefit corporation. Certification has no legal enforcement power other than revoking certification; OTOH, under the model legislation it just takes 2% of stockholders to initiate a benefit enforcement proceeding against a benefit corporation and have court enforce the public benefit provisions of its charter. (Your state may vary -- it looks like in NJ any stockholder can bring such action.)

So long as it exists in the state where Ello is incorporated (which is apparently does), it doesn't matter that not all states yet have benefit corporation legislation.

Yes, benefit corporations are new. If I was going to bet my life on questions of how courts will treat them I might be wary. But as a general matter they seem like they could be a useful way to reign in privacy violations by tech companies by providing a legally enforceable guarantee of behavior.

Well, you've not given a meaningful link since it's the same slashdot article we're all reading right now.

My bad on the HTML. I meant this.

It sounds good in principle, but is it really legally binding in any sense?

Yes. A corporation's charter is legally binding on it, and "benefit corporations" are a distinct type of legal entity.

In a Pew Research Center survey of 2,849 Internet users, one out of every four women between 18 years old and 24 years old reports having been stalked or sexually harassed online.

But if one actually follows the link, one reads that "Overall, men are somewhat more likely than women to experience at least one of the elements of online harassment, 44% vs. 37%. In terms of specific experiences, men are more likely than women to encounter name-calling, embarrassment, and physical threats." [emphasis added]

That blows are rather large hole in the thesis which the poster and many others seem to be implying, that internet harassment is primarily rooted in misogyny.

This is not to in any way justify the harassment of women. But if you want to know why there's a backlash, part of the cause (not a justification, a cause) may be the ongoing distortion of the facts about violence and harassment.

Because what the world truly needs is you telling women how they are and are not allowed to dress.

GP poster did not say anything about restricting how women are allowed to dress. He spoke about looking at women.

How about this: women (and men) get to wear whatever they like. And men (and women) are allowed to look at each other (in public, not talking about peeping toms here) as much as they like. It's your body, you get to put what you want on it. They're my eyeballs, I get to point them whatever direction I want. Autonomy and agency for all, hurrah.

If you think that the way a random woman is dressing in public means she wants to have sex with you, you're an idiot. If you think the way a random man is pointing his eyeballs in public means he wants to rape you, you're an idiot.

You gain no privacy or right-mindedness by not letting mail "stay" on their servers.

The law disagrees. Stored e-mail is different than e-mail that passes through a server.

The legacy of Bell Labs kind of runs contrary to this idea, because they were not only paid to come up with ideas, but also told to come up with ideas that would be profitable.

And yet C and Unix came about because someone wanted to play games.

How much mail do you really send that you are still buying stamps?

Outside of a dozen or two holiday cards, maybe three or four pieces a year.

I realize lots of businesses still send things out usps, but they are probably printing their own postage at this point anyway and not using actual stamps.

I've yet to see a solution suitable for home users.

It is a waste of precious resources to turn a woman into a computer programmer when she's a lot more valuable as a mother.

Ha ha! What a great satire of a shitheaded sexist troll you've done here. I especially like the bit about how any distraction, disruption or stress could cause a miscarriage. My doctor, a black belt in karate who trained up until her 8th month, would get a real belly laugh out of that. And my sensei, the EE, would surely get a chuckle out of the implication that she wasted her life by not being a baby machine. Keep polishing the satire and you could have a real career here.

(Assuming, of course, you're not serious. Because no one that stupid could survive.)

The government has no right to a monopoly on any weapon.

However, my neighbor storing atomic weapons in his garage is a reasonable threat to my safety and so should be heavily regulated. If he can meet the same safety standards as the government (maybe some billionaire collector could do this), the state has no legitimate authority to have nukes of its own while denying him one. Or, ya know, maybe nukes are an inherent threat to people and no one, state or otherwise, U.S. or Iran, can have them. But "we can have them, you can't" is not a logically defensible argument.

My neighbor storing machine guns or a typical shooter's supply of ammo in his garage (again, subject to safe storage requirements, no storing a loaded machine gun pointed at my house) is no more a threat to my safety than him having the usual home hardware and chemicals in there. (

Even a tank is not threat -- and indeed, for just $1175 you can spend a day driving one around.)