I remember back on 2004. My girlfriend in Japan had 100/100Mb fibre and it cost her about ã20/month.

I don't believe you (about the "girlfriend" part, not the "fiber" part).

Yeah, but voters are getting big government anyway! It's just that it's the even worse kind of big government -- the kind that spends all its money unaccountably on the military-industrial complex (and increasingly, the prison-industrial complex) instead of providing services to constituents.

There are more than two parties. The trick is that you have to care about them at the local level first in order for them to become relevant at the national level later.

How'd you get a blank post past the lameness filter?

My point is that the "year of the Linux desktop" won't be because of "normal" Linux, but rather Chrome OS.

I output Toast.

...pooh-pooh the entire idea, but then I realized a recent project of mine was putting various aspects of my salt aquarium's systems on my LAN using an RPi+.

So I'll just crawl back in my hole now.

At least I became aware of a new (to me) acronym. :)

I was saying that it makes a lot of sense for Facebook not to allow pictures of Mohammad in Turkey. Just like they don't allow boobies in the USA.

It doesn't "make sense", it simply retards social progress by keeping neurotics from considering the darker corners of their own thought processes. I mean, seriously. "Boobies bad"? That's just... pitiful. I am perfectly ready to describe anyone who isn't pleased by the sight of a nice pair of boobies in any neutral, humorous, peaceful, appreciative or loving context as a broken human being. One for whom I have sympathy and pity, but in no way does this engender any urge to force the world into a form that serves to insulate them from the toxic processes of their own twisted psyches.

As for drawing Mohammad, your assertion that there is no purpose but offense is wrong out of the gate. Art is one reason, political commentary is another, historical illustration is another, simple choice is another, and yes, offense is one but that doesn't make it an invalid use.

What offends you may not offend me. And vice-versa. What serves no purpose for you, may serve a purpose for me. Be it intended offense, or otherwise, or both at once.

No one in the USA has the "right to not be offended." Being offended is subjective. It has everything to do with you as an individual, or as part of a particular group; it varies due to your moral conditioning, your religious beliefs, your upbringing, your education; what offends one person or group (of any size) may not offend another, nor a person of another grouping; and in the final analysis, it requires one person to attempt to read the mind of other persons they do not know in order to anticipate whether a specific action will cause offense in the mind of another.

And no, codifying an action in law is not in any way sufficient... it is well established that not even lawyers can know the law well enough to anticipate what is legal, and what is not -- any more than you can guess what is offensive to me, or not.

Sane law relies on the basic idea that we try not to risk or cause harm to the bodies, finances and reputations of others without them consenting and being aware of the risks. It does not rely on the idea that we "must not cause offense."

Law that bans something based upon the idea that some individual or group simply finds the behavior objectionable is the very worst kind of law, utterly devoid of consideration or others, while absolutely permeated in self-indulgence.

Yeah, it's an awful system, but the point is, you can't live in such a society without playing the game. And is it then immoral because you play the game, and don't go live in a cave?

i stopped reading there

And I stopped reading there. See how that works?

"if the majority of the collective wanted to blah blah blah, the US government would be beyond their abilities in making these laws."

Not really, because if they were determined enough the majority could push through a constitutional amendment to make it happen.

Now, I grant you that most an entire generation having grown up with the idea that it's ok to steal IP, and the toxic idiocy of the "information wants to be free" crowd additionally muddying the waters, and the proliferation of people who just can't seem to keep their word, one might have reason to be cynical about this.

You've gone off the rails here. The "information wants to be free" crowd thinks as such precisely because information naturally (i.e., without the interference of law) is in the Public Domain to begin with. Creating a strawman argument claiming that they'd somehow twist that position to justify stealing from the Public Domain is not only offensive, but patently absurd.

Oh, and if you think a dumb terminal solves it, firstly these days terminals are never dumb. Even dumb terminals (does anybody still actually buy them?) probably run something like Linux underneath.

And if you can find a truly dumb terminal and solve all those problems, then you can stick a little thumb drive sized linux server between the ethernet port of the terminal and the rest of the network. Then it can put up the fake login screen whenever it wants, and at other times just pass through the packets.

This could be solved by requiring the terminal to use encryption with the key securely input into the terminal, but who is actually using such a scheme? I doubt anybody is.

That's great, but if the terminal you're logging in with is compromised by the old fake login, then all your keystrokes into your super trusted proprietary app or browser session can be logged and then your passwords into THAT system are now compromised, not to mention screen grabbers which might have sucked down whatever secrets you were trying to keep. Your theory about supposedly "pushing security further into the system" is a mere placebo. There is nothing inherently more secure about a browser than about an operating system.