As to your point about The Oatmeal not being funny anymore, that's pretty subjective to be honest, I tend to find his stuff funny but that's comedy, I'm not a Bill Hicks fan and yet millions miss him dearly, I love Steven Wright and many disagree! My point is there is no way of objectively saying whether something is funny or not. I'm with you on FunnyJunk though, just seems like a 4chanish hole for unpleasant crap by the one like I clicked from another commenter in this thread.

Because the right to free speech is enumerated in the Bill Of Rights whereas public transit is not. Public transit is a locally provided service that is a convenience, one that many have come to rely on in large metropolitan areas like the Bay Area, but a convenience nonetheless. It is _NOT_ a right.

I thought the same. There should be some rocky sea features between the Ubuntu/Fedora hemisphere's and the Gentoo, Slack, Arch etc area. Also the Slack island should be a fair amount smaller (and I say that as a _long_ time Slack user).

I don't care about bad taste jokes, being a South Park fan, but get your facts straight if you're going to make a joke. Plural Marriage has been banned in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since 1890 and those choosing to ignore this ban (very rare) are subject to excommunication.

Probably because of your blatant double standards. Your argument implies that you have no problem with the government having a monopoly over a certain system but you do have a problem with private corporations having the same. Please don't give me the argument that government is accountable for its failures because they are elected and can be kicked out if they do something you don't like that's just bullshit, bureaucratic monopolies that administer such industries are untouchable no matter who is in office.

True but that does not mean that just because subsidies may have been given to create the infrastructure that we have any right to determine how it's controlled. The same argument could be used for public highways "because I paid my taxes that means that this company who maintains and administers this road can't charge me a toll" this isn't how the real world works. The government has nothing to do with the day to day running of the various companies that administer the infrastructure of the internet and should stay out of onerous, overbearing regulation of said infrastructure.

As for Berners-Lee and his assertion of web access being a human right he must have gone nuts. The internet, like any other service is a privilege not a human right. Human rights are enumerated (in the United States) by the US Constitution and The Bill of Rights and nowhere in said documents is this "right" stated nor anything comparable to it that could be applied to a technology unforeseeable by the Founders. Human rights that are protected by the laws of the land should be limited to keep the size of government and intrusion of said institution into the private lives of the citizenry. "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness" not the guarantee.

I couldn't disagree more. As an immigrant to the USA from Europe it is these freedoms and the positive and negative responsibilities and consequences associated with these freedoms that attracted me. The fact that in my country of origin (the United Kingdom) I could be prosecuted for saying something the government du jour considers hate speech or libelous even though it is stated as an opinion (not the case with these kids, I know) is a key reason why the US is more advanced in cause of individual liberty than the vast majority of the rest of the world. Yes, freedom can be scary but give it a try, I am certain you'll like it!

That's an over reaction, they should be punished but destroying their lives (an expulsion on their record could severely hamper their future) is not a fitting punishment for them _almost_ destroying this teachers life. The washroom stall analogy is not applicable because you do not have to log in to a washroom using private information you are compelled to use (a password) to view the offending message and while one can be accused of writing something like "Mr Whoever is a bi-polar pedophile rapist" there is no name likely to be associated so proof is hard to come by. Could someone have logged in to this girl's account and achieved the same goal? absolutely but this still does not forgive the teacher abusing their position as a care giver (in loco parentis goes both ways) by forcing the student to log in to her account. Again, what they did was wrong and they should certainly be punished but the issue of their privacy still is a moral factor even though it may not be a legal one.

You may be (and from the above posts, probably are) legally correct but I have an enormous moral issue with forcing someone to log in to their Facebook account against their will. There could be all sorts of private or personal information exposed and it is extremely abusive for someone in a position of power over children to do this. Yes they are acting in loco parentis but they are not the child's parent and have no right, IMHO, to have access to the ins and outs of the personal lives of students. What these kids did was dumb, bratty and by no means justifiable and I agree that they should be punished for their actions but the means by which the school went about collecting the evidence should not stand up in court. As someone who has worked in digital forensics I can say for certain that if we or the police collected evidence in such a way it would be thrown out immediately and rightfully so.

Unrelated to the topic but I had a similar moment with eBay yesterday. While listing my Schecter Blackhawk for sale I thought I'd include the usual blurb about no Western Union and all that stuff. Turns out the page you submit the auction through parses looking for such keywords and won't allow you to start tour auction until you remove all references to such verboten services and lacks the logic to differentiate between saying "I won't accept this" and "I will scam you with this". So my auction now says I won't take payment from "Eastern Guild" or similar services!

That's a completely fair point if you have the fiscal means to make the switch. It means buying new hardware rather than downloading and installing new software and that's a cost many people either can't or won't bear. I agree that the Apple experience is a delightful one but I like my thinkpad and I don't especially like Windows so my options are, pretty much, a flavor of Linux or BSD.

It's also a good idea to take your hard drives out of the machine once in a while and shake them with the port ends facing down to ensure that any lazy data that has been stuck at the bottom of the drive gets cleaned out.

I honestly think that people (myself included), lack the ability to be objective when assessing the bias of news sources. /. is, for the most part, a pretty center-left place so it is unsurprising that the comments above are outraged that Apple would partner with a source the perceive as biased toward a side they do not agree with. As someone who is more conservative/libertarian leaning I see left wing bias in MSNBC's coverage all the time but this could easily be a product of my political persuasion. I think that if all of you spitting vitriol above about evil liars and biased coverage on Fox would take the time to assess your opinion taking into account your political leanings you may come to the same conclusion.

To summarize, I am not saying Fox is not biased but you can't conclude that they are the only one with a bias. It's just a bias in a direction diametrically opposed to yours.

I flashed on that thought but then looking at the numbers on Distrowatch the top 2 are Ubuntu and Mint (a, IMHO, crappy Ubuntu derivative) then Fedora. Unless they want to bump Fedora below OpenSUSE what would be the point?