Why privacy because a citizen has it and a slave does not. The freedom to keep yourself to yourself versus being slavishly continuously exposed to the inspection and judgement of others. Privacy is about the choice to be private, loss of privacy is the loss of that choice, that choice being denied and even worse the association with public humiliation and degradation that comes with that loss of choice.

Now, strangely enough challenge those with power enough and you have to abandon privacy otherwise they will forcefully invade it with the claims that your attempt to maintain privacy is an attempt to hide conspiracy and seek to expose you supposed conspiratorial secrets with a life threatening armed assault. So requiring you to abandon privacy to a degree to enable them to spy. This as a personal defence, as they then no longer have an excuse for a physical raid, something they will be looking for in order to punish you via corrupt prosecution as punishment, not conviction, just the abuse of the prosecutorial procedure.

The porn filter and protect the children thing is a straight up lie. It is all about censorship about blocking any ideas that compete with the false ideology of the rich and greedy, that ideology being they want more, more, more. It is all about accidental block sites, union sites, opposition (real opposition) political sites, real news sites, blogs basically anything at all. All so very accidental, then it takes months to unblock and costs thousands of dollars and then it gets accidentally blocked again.

Reality is, if they are serious about porn, they should simply strip sic it of copyright protection, cripple the ability of corporations to generate a profit from it and with out the profit there is no money to make more. Done and finished.

Of course it all has nothing what so ever to do with porn, that is a lie. All about blocking the majority from publishing anything and putting the power of publishing content back in the hand of a psychopathically greedy minority.

In other words, you are completely insane!

Saying it shouldn't be up to the goverment is saying anything should be allowed, so let in the lead paint. Surely the free market would never feed our children poison. It is not like they haven't done in numerous times before and continues to do so in counties with less regulation.

I disagree. "Lisp syntax" is almost a misnomer, as there's so little of it. Pretty much the only thing you're guaranteed is that () are for grouping, and spaces are separators (and even that is not necessarily true in CL). Everything beyond that is up to the DSL in question, and people can and do get overly "creative" with the syntax such that it's not simple or obvious to read at all.

Well. Good luck with running a test feeding suspected toxics to human test subjects. While the scientific way it is not how we do medical research since Mengele.

So you are advocating allowing untested chemicals in our food, and only ban it once people are dying?

Well. Fuck you!

Basically all that has happened is tech companies have replaced mining companies in pump and dump schemes because of course tech companies require much smaller capital investment.

So tech just like mines, the initial investors working in collusion with their financiers who get a cut, work to create an illusion of a massive pot of gold at the end of a deep capital hole in the ground, which they sell to others and often pension funds are the targets.

So why do investment analysts for pension funds make so many bad investments, quite simply they are paid to do so with the money deposited in off shore tax havens. So paying a hundred million in bribes works when you are selling a billion dollar cough cough investment when you only invested a couple of hundred million in it. To put the cheery on top for themselves, they also run up huge debts paying themselves grossly inflated salaries.

It is not the front people doing it, it is the financiers doing it all in the background lending them the money to do it, advising them how to do it, cashing in on it being done and the culprits earning the sales commission selling the rubbish investments whilst they pay purchasing commissions to corrupt pension fund managers.

Crack open those tax havens and wow, will a whole bunch of the rich and greedy end up in jail, as well as corrupt politicians. The pressure is mounting for justice and it will come.

This story of two minds variety. Whilst it might seem very much like corporations driving competition between minors by throwing them at each other, there is also a flip side. Basically the sport side, where this is already happening and promoted every where.

So this competition pushes learning to the fore and emphasises the geek/nerd ahead of the jock strap douche bag (you can easily tell where my biases lay). So a good thing possibly done in a harmful way?

Possible improvements, focus upon cooperation not just competition. Expand the learning parameters beyond just a focus on maths. A more interesting fun competition might be languages, not only English but multiple languages. Let's also not forget Physics and Chemistry. For the sake of controversy and really tweaking the noses of the conservative conspiracy theorists, socio-political sciences and their application.

It is good to see learning and education being publicly promoted and those most successful at it recognised, yes. Should competition be the focus no. Why, more harm then good, you are actively demoralising those students who were not born as skilled and teaching them to give up and become jealous jock strap douche bags. Reality is now matter how much you exercise that grey matter born with a genetic IQ disadvantage you will always be left behind and never able to compete. The majority can always work and practice to push ahead jock strap skills only a tiny minority could ever compete in the education olympics.

The space race is back on, which is really cool. India pulling away from Russia has very little to do with Russia and everything to do with India wanting it's place in the world or in the solar system. A lot of countries are catching up and wanting their presence in the space. So they will tend to go it alone some what, whilst working together with others in larger projects. Obviously if you do not have your own distinct space program, you will end up being treated like a poor orphan when it comes to participating in other countries space programs no matter how much you contribute to them. You must make your own independent contributions to the space race before you efforts will be genuinely recognised in shared programs and to ensure you are not treated like a beggar at the bottom of a gravity well.

What happened to Greece's finance. It got involved with US banks that crafted corrupt loans that get be kept off the books for years accumulating interests debt and this to fund tax cuts for the richest Greek and also hugely corrupt corporate subsidise. This then blew up, the corrupt Americans wander off with the profits from this blatant corruption after dumping the bad debts back on the EU via the IMF.

So a complete in depth investigation into the corruption going back a decade and so as too get by statutes limitations upgrade the crimes to treason and corporate espionage. The US government was in back of this with the purposeful intent of weakening the EU and to keep the funny money US dollar alive.

What you are using a Dick quote as something other than a joke? What are you, a moron?

Not really, and that is not the main issue. The German government is a lot more reliable than the Greek one, and have been running a balanced economy for a long time, not just when they were forced to. It is one of the prime examples that austerity is the only was to prosperity. Of course every other North European countries has done the same, and have similar strong economies, only those who tried to spend their way out of debt are in trouble.

An A.I. expert may know a lot about A.I., but you need a broader perspective to judge the impact of A.I. on humanity. A bit of economics, sociology, psychology... and in that light, I'd value the opinion of certain Science-Fiction writers higher than that of any of those 3 as they've already done some considerable philosophizing about the subject.

So we already stopped singling out winners for scholastic performance (or performance at sports, or whatever), with this "everyone's a winner" crap. And now we can't even give kids points for effort?!

Competition (meaning a race between two or more people, although this also applies to the economic meaning of the word) is healthy and good, and it is a powerful way to push people to excel. And recognizing effort helps disadvantaged children, they get bonus points for persevering where the advantaged kids "got everything handed to them on a silver platter" without having to try very hard, as one critic in that article puts it.