Well, every generalization has its corner cases that require careful thought. So while I agree that trolling per se shouldn't be outlawed, there may be certain uses of trolling that should be criminalized.

Take the libelous component of cyberstalking. At the very least this could be an aggravating factor in impersonation. Also, the law already recognizes libel as wrong, but it requires the harmed person take civil action. The Internet exposes more people than ever to reputation harm, but not all those people have the money to hire a lawyer. Social media have created a whole new vista for defamation, much of which is *practically* immune from any consequences.

So I do not in principle object to a law that criminalizes *some* forms of defamation, particularly against people who are not protected by the current laws. But I'd have to look at the the specific proposed law carefully. Just because people *claim* a new law would do something doesn't mean it does, or that's all it does.

Well, there's a big difference between saying something won't ever happen because it's never happened yet, and saying that a claim that you've done something is presumptively not credible unless you can meet certain stadnards of proof.

Check out this graph.

The nuimbers of prisoners has not declined significantly since 2009. This doesn't mean the bubble hasn't burst, the nature of the bubble resists bursting. People can leave the housing market, but prisoners can't leave the prison market.

Still, anyone who invested big-time in prisons back in 2008 or so on the basis of 30 years of exponential prison population growth was just stupid. We were approaching 1% of the Amercian population incarcerated, how much higher did they expect that to go?

I have no sympathy with a town that bet its financial future on prisons while its schools rate minimally acceptable.

"You're so full of FUD that I can only wonder which energy conglomerate you're shilling for. Care to tell us?"
He is not he is a green.
You see the truth is that there are a good number of "activists" that make a living telling people that "you never know".
The will spout off about solar and ignore the problems like storage and the fact that solar peak is not the same as usage peak. They will just use buzzwords like "smart grid" and then complain about the cost of nuclear being greater than natural gas but ignore the cost of solar and wind being higher than natural gas.
It has become a religion and if you dare to be pro-nuclear your friends and the other people you self identify with will shun you.

It is simple.
If you know you are guilty they will offer you a chance to take a deal, save the courts a lot of time and effort, and rewards the guilty party for choosing to be honest. Yes it is honest for a reward but still being honest.
If you are caught and you know that you are actually guilty of breaking the law but try to get out of it they will make you an example.

Orlando is not in south Florida it is in central Florida.

In the US criminal records are public records the exception is for juveniles. Once you are an adult you are expected to follow rules.
What I do not get is this statement. "i spent 22.5 months in Florida prison's, all because I got caught with some MDMA and weed at a rave in Orlando, FL in 2001."
If it was that guys first conviction and he did not have "a lot" of MDMA and weed aka amounts that make it look like you are dealing. Up to 20 grams is only a misdemeanor. MDMA is another story but unless he refused a plea deal or resisted arrest he should not have gotten anything but some community service and probation.

When I was in college I took several courses from the famous scholar of Japanese literature, Howard Hibbet. In one of the classes there was student who liked to talk about Japanese culture's "Samurai values". The professor listened politely to this student, until one day he said somethign that has stuck with me for thirty years: "You should be careful about uncritically accepting the way a culture likes to present itself."

I have found this to be very true, even of corporate cultures.

Many years ago there was a brief vogue among a few companies for psych testing potential employees. So I paid to have myself tested so I'd know what my potential employers "knew". Among other things, the tests informed me that I have an IQ that is 4.3 standard deviations above the mean.

This got me thinking. Which is more likely, that I'm smarter than 99.999% of the population, or that the test score was bogus? It should be obvious that it's far more likely that my test results were bogus!

Just because we can assign a single number to a person's intelligence the way we can to that person's height or weight doesn't mean that that number is as objective as height or weight is. What IQ tests purport to measure *cannot be observed directly*, and therefore cannot be measured directly. So we must not lose sight of the fact that IQ tests are *devised* by psychologists to correlate with something. How do they do this? By comparing a test's scores against something easy to measure -- rank in school for example. An IQ test that correlates poorly to performance in school would be considered "faulty", but one that correlates strongly to performancve in school would be considered "accurate".

In other words, IQ tests are only as meaningful as the outcomes they're deisgned to correlate with. An IQ test correlated to school success doesn't necessarily correlate precisely with "street smarts", many components of which are evolutionarily important (e.g. reading facial expressions).

Another thing to consider about how the test are calibrated is that the result is bound to be reliable ONLY near the mean, simply because confirmatory data out on the tails of the distribution is necessarily rare. So while I'd lend considerable credence to the 20 point spread between a 90 IQ and aa 110 IQ, I wouldn't lend the same credence to a difference between 140 and 160. I'd lend no credence whatsoever to the difference between a 140 and 160 IQ.

Basically, I consider distinctions betwen IQs over 125 unreliable, and distinctions between IQs over 135 as absolutely meaningless. There's no epistemological justfication for ranking people's intellectual abilities by IQ at that level. It's entirely possible that John Sunnunu would score 2.6 standard deviations higher than Stephen Hawking, but that's an artifact of the test, not reality.

You must be too young to remember the uproar over the Kane & Lynch/Gamespot incident from a few years back.

I don't, probably because it wasn't as rage-filled and rooted in misogyny as this roundabout is.

There have been plenty of other similar explosions over the years, and none of them involved sexism that I recall.

They weren't nearly as hateful or accompanied by vitriolic attack campaigns against small handfuls of individuals who had the temerity to point out the piss poor behavior of those on the "gamergate" side.

But you keep believing all the embarrassed game journalists who keep saying "The ethics of game journalism are just fine, no need to...HEY LOOK OVER THERE, IT'S SEXISM!!!!"

Gamergate was horribly sexist and misogynistic the moment it appeared, and harped on an indie developer in was they never ripped into an AAA developer.

But please, keep defending a (loosely knit) group who so far has rape and death threats under their belt, who whine about "censorship" then engage in abusive campaigns to silence those who point out that "hey, you're being horrible to other people for no real good reason."

Take two people, put them in a room, one guy has a net worth of $100 and the second has a net worth of $5000. What harm is the second person doing? We're talking about a factor of 50x here.

Idle examples are pointless.

Take away the room, let them live their lives, what harm is that second guy perpetuating? Make the difference a factor of 1000 or a 1,000,000, and where do we see him doing harm?

At a factor of a million here he's probably able to exploit loopholes that reduce his effective tax burden well below what the guy with way less money has to deal with. He's probably also wining and dining politicians to get his way. Likely he's also contributing to the continual depression of wages to ensure that his own wealth goes up at the expense of others.

When I hear folks talking about this, what I really hear is, "since one person doesn't need that much money to live, the government should take the difference and use it to make MY life better,"

Money is, currently, pooling at the top of the income ladder. The problem isn't so much that they have high wealth so much as it doesn't move. This is bad for the economy as a whole.

because from where I'm standing in a first world country, it seems to be just so much complaining over sour grapes.

That just means you're myopic. 90% of a nation's wealth being held by less than 10% isn't healthy, particularly when they're complaining about how consumers aren't buying.

Your observation would be insightful if holding a software patent demosntrated ability in the field.

It's about unethical journalists.

But only when a game designer's jilted ex-boyfriend posts hearsay about it. AAA publishers were doing worse shit all the times but there was no uproar of this intensity. Now Gamergate is about fueling a false persecution complex and attacking anyone who points out how horrible they're being.

Those same journalists have been trying for weeks now to deflect this focus away from them and pretend it's about sexism, changing gamer culture, etc.

No, "gamergaters" instantly made it that when they began their hate campaign and harassment.

they themselves don't have to answer for a decades-long games journalism tradition of "journalists" being in bed with the very companies they're supposed to be covering (through advertising, bribes, press releases disguised as "previews," etc.)

And where was the unbridled hatred and rage towards EA over the whole Shadow of Mordor controversy? Oh, right, it was virtually nonexistent because that's not the point anymore. The point now is solidarity against whatever enemy-du-jour that is seen as "attacking gamers" or other such delusional bullshit.

They used 8 for a number of reasons. The biggest was because they didn't want to spend money on a reactor that was so big it could only be used on a carrier.

Sad little person.
Spysats and spy aircraft save lives. The have prevented more wars than you can count. Sorry that that world is not all fairy farts and unicorn poop but the reality is that Lockheed's spy planes and spysats are what allowed the first arm limitation treaties and later arms reduction treaties.
Lockheed's greatest planes the U-2 and SR-71 never fired a single shot in anger.