I wasn't familiar with the Reid Technique, but once I learned what it was, it struck me as an incredibly unfair and abusive interrogation technique. It's also the technique we see often on a lot of those police investigation television shows: There's a presumption of guilt, all of the questions are loaded. I never knew it had a name, I always called it, "The Asshole Interrogation Technique," because you have to be an asshole to use it.

For those who are interested, the Wikipedia has a short article but The New Yorker has a much more interesting one.

It's also important to remember that being offended is a choice. In a sense, there's nothing you can do to offend someone, even if you want to, if that person doesn't find your actions as offensive. So the responsibility of being offended really does lie at the person who feels the offense.

No, this isn't a "blame the victim" argument, because there is no victim here. There is no harm done. Someone printing a cartoon of Mohummad having anal sex doesn't hurt anyone. The only reason people get all pissed off about it is because they decide that they should be pissed off.

One always chooses one's reaction to any situation (unless you're of the school of thought that none of us have any choice in anything that we do because we're completely molded by genetics and environment, in which case one can argue that nobody is really responsible for anything that they do).

And then there is context to take into account, which is a whole other discussion.

Because when one single man has the ears of 1.1 billion people, what that man says has importance.

It doesn't matter if you are Catholic or not. 1.1 billion other people are, and many of them adjust their thinking and therefore their actions and their lives based on what this one man says.

Unless you find the politicians to be so pathetic as to be funny, if only unintentionally.

Do you know how much better you could make the world if you go volunteer instead of post on Slashdot?

That can often run into many thousands of pages, and they can change literally every single day. Regulated industries often have employees whose sole job it is to ensure that they're in compliance with the regulations. [...] This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Congress aren't experts in the domain.

And when you have thousands of pages of regulations, so many that you need compliance experts, that drives up costs for the business and ultimately the end consumer. It raises the barrier of entry for new companies, and tilts things in the favor of large, established corporations, reducing potential competition. Want to help the entrenched monopolies? Pass regulations.

Don't get me wrong - not all regulations are bad. We need some regulations (don't dump radioactive waste into the water supply, for example), but our government goes crazy with them and we end up with a tangled mess.

I believe that regulations (which are just laws passed by an agency) should be voted on by congress. No, I don't expect congress to be an expert in internet communications, but they don't have to be an expert if we really do need them to do something. They don't need to know the contents of the header of an IP packet and they don't need to know what a subnet is. They just need to have the gasp of general concepts (communications carrier, content provider, etc.) that your average joe already understands (or can understand), and write some basic, simple laws.

I do believe that it can be that simple. No law or regulation should be so complicated and so complex that your average person is unable to understand what it means, and it shouldn't be so long that it spans a thousand pages or more. It sure as hell shouldn't be passed without being read on the floor. It's endemic of a serious problem in general in our legislative process.

What I think I'm arguing for, in essence, is a refactoring of our existing laws (to make them far fewer and more simple) and forcing them to be talked about and passed in the open, where it's easy to see what is happening, where the common person can (and should) be able to understand what is being proposed and offer input.

This does not mean that domain experts shouldn't be involved - of course they should be - but the end result should be short and simple and voted upon.

Okay, I'm going back to my world where politicians actually give a crap about the country. Bye!

I believe you need a slight correction: Conservatives believe in the free market. Many republicans are not conservatives.

Cymbals are even worse when you're listening to orchestras, and then there's gongs and whatnot. Encoding has gotten a LOT better over the years, but even today you need to encode at 192kbps at least for it to have an okay sound. Certain instruments just don't encode very well.

I also don't "get" Reddit. The pages give me a headache, it's a mess. The moderation system also sucks (just up and down) and looking at what gets modded up there... Slashdot is still way, way better.

I remember sending mail to America Online requesting their installation disks. They had that hole removed so that you couldn't write to them, meaning you weren't able to use their disks for whatever you wanted.

Worked great - until I fetched a roll of tape. ~(o:

BlackBerry phones are still the de facto gold standard for international travel. You can go just about anywhere and it will work. Those who travel between North America and Europe know what I'm talking about. If you're somewhat high level in the government I'd imagine there is a fair amount of international travel, so it's nice to have something that will "just work" when you head overseas.

I know, BlackBerry isn't considered trendy or sexy or cool or hipster, but their products work.

One can have a little humor without making it into a political war, which I hadn't, nor was I intending to do so.

Breathe.

Smile.

Relax.

It's okay.

I hope the rest of your day goes well.

...then it is good enough for us. Right?

11? You are way, way off. 18 is the latest.

It's very nice that they released a report. Maybe the next move will be a very strongly worded letter!