Most people - yes, even Wall Street - use public transit in NYC. The subway is way faster than a car. There is a reason that they are building a new 2nd Ave line, and it isn't for the poor people.

My issue with the trains is that we are in 2013 and they are still putting new cars out with conductors! Yes, a person paid (and paid more than a cop IIRC) to stand in a little booth and close the doors on the train. I won't even get into why they still have drivers, they can't even get rid of the conductor.

Have you considered the expense to the economy of a 15-minute NYC subway delay during rush hour? If a person can help any one of the bazillion little situations that arise, then the numbers out of the red pretty quickly.

Yeah, it's totally ignorant to rip on Americans when their political incompetence - of the people, not the politicians - when this idiocy is holding the world ransom.Show yourself as a thinking nation and stop re-electing the Republicans who do this shit, then we'll talk about ripping on America being "ignorant".

As long as the comments are clearly delineated from editorial content, I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to hold the paper responsible for the content of the comments.

How do you figure comments differ from the opinion column of newspapers, which have always very much been the editor's responsibility?

Newspapers are fundamentally different from forums like Slashdot or Reddit - they have a well-defined role in society not as bulletin boards, but as authorities, and part of why that is, is exactly that they have skilled journalists choosing what is fit to print. And this is why editors are public figures.

But there's better ways to prevent that than holding newspapers legally liable for comment content.

Yes, but they are not liable because incentivizing responsibility us a good way to deal with bile, they are liable for the content because their editor is publishing it on their site, a point which bears making.

Not to mention that Facebook had some pretty severe growing pains for aperiod of more than a year, with frequent downtime - and remember how godawful Facebook Chat used to be? Ugh.

Comments are a source of income to newspapers, because it causes repeat traffic to the same articles.

Whether or not it is profitable is a concern for the newspaper, not everyone else.

A blog with the heading "Monitoring and combating antisemitism, and the assault on Israel's legitimacy, at the Guardian (...)" is definitely going to be a useful source in this discussion.

The editor legally responsible for what their paper prints. This is a perfectly logical extension of that.

No; what this does is hold newspaper editors legally responsible as editors for what they choose to include in their publication.

This is more likely to mean that anonymity (unless explicitly agreed in advance) in the comments fields will disappear.

This is a Good Thing, because those fields are cesspools, and online papers show little to no interest in preventing that. As long as they can have the angry idiots coming back to vent their spleen, they get ad revenue.

Essentially, the courts have forced newspapers to act more like journalistic institutions and less like businesses. I'm totally down with that.

"Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development."

Quoth an open letter by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, both of whom must be considered "founding fathers" of the Internet.

The full file is here: http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt

He did not do the engineering bit, nobody would think so. But... the internet was a government research project, FFS. If a politician said he took initiative to the creating a road, would he ever be confronted with people insisting on interpreting his statement to mean that he claimed to have built the road?

Giving the line that significance is frankly stupid. This trend of purposefully misunderstanding people is doing some serious damage to the intelligence of politics.

The administration at the time consisted almost wholly of Norwegian Nazis; an "administrative council" led by Vidkun Quisling.

It was, of course, a puppet regime - but I still believe that my formulation was more precise.

There are scenarios where exile is the best decision.

One example from these parts: When Norway was invaded by the Nazis, the King of Norway fled to London to help lead the Resistance in cooperation with the rest of the legal government in exile in London.

The King refused to stay in a country where he might be exploited or forced to legitimize the Nazi administration.

His actions have to my knowledge never been criticized in Norway, in what remains an uncommonly popular royal family.

Don't say that - we love the Norwegian summer. I think most people feel it's the best day of the whole dang year!

(for those who might not have picked up on it: this is largely a joke.)

Because when the town was originally built, the topography was ideal for hydroelectric power generation.

Since this was a good while before the social democrats and organized labour gained any real power, keeping the workers in literal (and not just figurative) darkness was not considered an issue.

(The higher classes were literally so, and did not live in the shade.)

Rjukan is also the site of the museum of industrial labour, which is located in Vemork. In addition to being a very early heavy water plant which was sabotaged by the Resistance during the second world war to hinder the Nazi nuclear bomb project, it also currently hosts an exhibit of what is probably the world's only remaining Univac 1108 mainframe.

That's an absurd notion, and very close to the archetype of what the guy in TFA was arguing against. History, religion, literature and psychology are integral and indispensible areas of knowledge if you want to take responsibility for your society by participating in it as a thinking person, rather than isolating yourself in the cubicle and leaving decision-making to someone else.

Education is supposed to be more than teaching you your job. It's also supposed to be basic training in democracy.