We get a new barrage of online anti-bullying laws. While at the same time, nobody gives half a shit about real life bullying.

Ya know what I'm talking about. The kind where REAL people REALLY hurt you and your feelings. Starts in school, doesn't even end in the workplace. And? Zilch. Nada.

Could it be that the ones making the laws ARE the offline bullies? And just unable to retaliate otherwise when their targets fight back with weapons that require more brain cells to employ?

"Collinsworth" just doesn't have the same ring to it, how do you hang a franchise on that?

So what we need is a newsreader which implements a web of trust. People sign their messages. You assign scores to people, when you do the system automagically downloads their pubkey, and their scoring file which contains pubkeys for the people they've scored. Their scores get weighted by your score for them and incorporated into your scoring system... And you could have multiple webs so you could have different experiences. Seems relatively straightforward, so the community should cook up a bodgy implementation in a decade or so

What they fail to understand and when they fail to understand it is that the community doesn't give a shit about them and right away. The community just wants a host to infest.

See? This is why reddit was good. These people associated their identities with logins over there. Over here, they just stain their pants with pee.

Well, it may interest you to know that courts judging "emotional distress" is not some new Internet fad. In the year 1348 an innkeeper brought suit against a man who had been banging on his tavern door demanding wine. When the innkeeper stuck his head out the doorway to tell the man to stop, the man buried the hatchet he was carrying into the door by the innkeeper's head. The defendant argued that since there was no physical harm inflicted no assault had taken place, but the judged ruled against him [ de S et Ux. v. W de S (1348)]. Ever since then non-physical, non-financial harm has been considered both an essential element of a number of of crimes, a potential aggravating factor in others, and an element weighed in establishing civil damages.

This does *not*, however, mean that hurt feelings in themselves constitute a crime. It's a difficult and sometimes ambiguous area of the law, but the law doesn't have the luxury of addressing easy and clear-cut cases only.

As to why a new law is need now, when the infliction of emotional distress has been something the law has been working on for 667 years, I'd say that the power of technology to uncouple interactions from space and time has to be addressed. Hundreds of years ago if someone was obnoxious to you at your favorite coffeehouse, you could go at a different time or choose a different coffeehouse. Now someone intent on spoiling your interactions with other people doesn't have to coordinate physical location and schedule with you to be a persistent, practically inescapable nuisance.

Does this mean every interaction that hurts your feelings on the Internet is a crime? No, no more than everything that happens in your physical presence you take offense at is a crime.

That could be, or they could have actually known there was a concentration of Jews in the opposing faction in their area. We can't tell from here. Given that this is the internet we're talking about, I'd give about even odds.

I miss fatpeoplehate, because any time someone said something good about it, I knew they were a piece of shit. I don't know enough about Reddit to know which boards to have that opinion of, so I just have that opinion of all of 'em now... because Reddit is home to big collections of jackholes, and they're proud.

What, did Madden finally kick the bucket?

Because it was in fact the whole point of this action.

And, like, everyone else in the arena?

I don't question it being competitive. Or requires training and skill. Hell, I even don't question that it's a sport. Or rather, I don't want to get into a discussion about it because, well, it's useless. There still is a reason why your playing of DOTA or whatever else the game du jour is will replace Superbowl Sunday any time soon: It's boring to watch.

And sadly that's true for ALL so called eSports. It simply isn't interesting to watch someone play a computer game. Yes, maybe due to novelty some people will wanna know what the hubub is about, but as soon as the novelty factor wears off, it's back to "meh". It's simply no fun to watch people play a computer game when you can play it yourself instead.

But, really, there has to be a degree of cognitive dissonance between the hope you'll do well and be super rich ... and the actual reality that, it's a tough slog, you might not get there, and you might have to trade away some equity to someone else to get there ... in which case your payout might not be as big as you hoped.

The difference between con-man and entrepreneur can be a thin line.

I've known a few people who fancied themselves the latter, but had worked themselves into such a feverish pitch trying to get there ended up as the former.

Sometimes people convince themselves things really are going to work out OK, even when completely unfounded. The human brain doesn't always like lying to itself.

Yes, that's exactly what I want on my phone. I can use whatever I want on my desktop. On my phone, I want a reduced email client.