GP never said anything about the US being a paragon of free speech protections.

Well, somebody should have said it — and I applaud you for saying it fairly well. Thank you.

The US is a paragon of free speech — not because there is no room for improvement, but because all (certainly most) other societies are worse in this regard. And though various Illiberals do come up from time to time with seductively-sounding proposals to ban "hate" speech, and even claim, the Constitution is outdated and "people can’t really protest like that anymore", the prevailing opinion remains, that any speech should be allowed and countered only with one's own speech.

Back to the question about UK, that country is certainly sliding farther away from liberty — along with the rest of the Western world. When a fatwa was issued calling for death of Salman Rushdie, for example, over his insulting Islam in an otherwise unremarkable book, the man received police protection and other support from his government. Nobody — except, maybe, that valiant Illiberal Jimmie Carter — blamed the victim for "deserving" the danger.

Years later, reaction to Mohammed-mocking cartoons is rather more mixed. And while it is still legal to burn American flag, if you decide to burn Koran, everybody from local to federal authorities will be on your case pressuring you to abandon your exercise of free speech.

No, pinning only makes MITM attacks harder. It does nothing for my actual issue which you have ZERO solution for...

Do you even know what my primary complaint was about this encryption scheme? I've been pretty clear, but your comment about pinning makes it clear to me that you haven't been paying attention.

So here is a simple pass/fail test:

What is my primary problem with the current encryption scheme and why does pinning do literally nothing to address it?

You either answer that question correctly or you're either too stupid to have this conversation or just talking to yourself because you're not reading anything I am writing.

These discussions must be interactive or they just turn into stupid insult fights because one side or the other can't be bothered to fucking read what the other party is saying.

Except for it is because women were never excluded from technical education in the last 20 years or so.

And even RIGHT NOW they are not taking these courses.

So are universities sexist? The same universities that passed "yes means yes"?

The unis are if anything biased towards women which can be shown through a large number of statistics. If women wanted to do computer science, they would.

They don't.

Here you have the option of turning tail and scurrying away or backing up that "ignorance" charge. I assure you, if you stay put long enough, I will nail a dunce cap to your pointy little head. ;-)

Your move, chester.

Either force women to join the tech industry by law or there will always be a gender gap... oh unless you lobotomize men so they can't even do it if they want to do it.

Short of that... gender gap is forever. Women don't want to do it - so they don't.

It is the same problem really. Batshit crazy government making things impossible.

If for one stopped caring, when "RSVP" became not only a verb, but a noun too!...

"hates on Obama" isn't the same as someone who "hates Obama"

Neah, the slang "hate on" (according to your own link) still has the same meaning: "To ridicule, insult, or act hatefully [emphasis mine] toward," — as the regular "hate". That otherwise well-written and spoken people would denigrate their speech to slang is just what I was referring to. I'm glad, it passed...

"He hit the girl" and "He hit on the girl"

Well, here the word "hit" has a completely different and unrelated meaning. A "hit" of something (like cocaine) is yet another unrelated meaning. That's not like "hate (on)" at all...

i forgot about that! Yes I cant tell you how many people think my number is disconnected. Its even better when i get repeat spammers I can save them in my phone under a funny or explicit name. When they call it will answer "hello dickweed, so and so is unavailable.... etc etc",

you are forgetting the 30 seconds it took to connect to voicemail

oh the lights bother me, i disable notifications as soon as I get them, I want to see the light to let me know something is there, but once i know as much, i want the lights to stop

my father is in his 50s and is the same way

I use youmail for my VM provider. its great because I get texts if i want, transcripts if i want, emails if i want. I tend to stick with the emails (texts before my smart phone). I for the life of me cannot tell you the last time i actually listened to a VM, if i see you called, and i want to talk to you, i call you back.

Im sure other companies offer the same features, i know google does but to this 29 year old, this is spot on information

... the repubs didnt want it pulled...

No that was not my solution.

My solution was to replace the existing system with a theoretically sound system.

Do I intend as part of that disbanding the current shit system? Yes. That is however not me saying we should just got totally naked in the meantime.

Please assume I am not stupid because I am not stupid. It wastes time, makes you sound like you're trying to straw man me, and it is generally counter productive.

As there being limited space, the pole lease fees if they exceed what the poles can pay for can pay for a conduit system to replace it.

As to long term based leasing, that is just an admission of the government being lazy and not especially interested in managing the system. Which is an argument for my suggestion of farming it out to a private contractor.

As to private contractors half assing it, that is entirely based on whether the contract is handed to a friend of one of the politicians or whether it is opened up to competition. You don't have to farm the entire network out to one company either. You can break it up on a block by block basis and let smaller companies do it. That way if one of them does a bad job you can just fire them. It is this insistence on too big to fail design that is getting us in so much trouble.

Too big to fail is not only an accident waiting to happen, it is also slow, anti democratic, and anti innovation. It is a dumb way to do things. Lets stop doing it.

As to city workers being irrelevant, I disagree. Anyone that has had to deal with road workers know that they are very relevant.

That is another service that should be farmed out to private contractors. Take a pot hole. What if rather then the government fixing it, they instead put a work order out to fix it. Licensed contractors could go out there, put up some traffic cones during proscribed hours, and then just do it.

Give them a bonus for doing it at night and 100 percent of it will be done at night. You'd never see another pot hole sit there for weeks on end again.