I see where you are coming from, and even admire it in a way, but I feel compelled to point out another side of the issue (one other side, there are probably 20 more). Online bullys don't usually just make speech involving insults and putdowns. There's a high degree of these being accompanied by false accusations that can easily count as libel, and by misinformation which is often damaging in other ways. (In fact, for cases where bullying goes on for over 3 months, the chance of one or more of these other actions approaches unity). We've seen cases where, for example, the bully has progressed to claiming that a victim is HIV+, and then giving out a lot of misinformation about HIV in general, falsely claiming to be a doctor or to have gotten the information from one, an/or claiming to having hacked their victim's medical information. These things are generally criminal in and of themselves, and/or have other negative impacts (such as triggering security audits of medical records keeping to make sure the bully's claim isn't genuine), Protecting teens against insults and put downs is a mixed bag, but when you add in protecting them from bad medical and legal advice, and false claims that they can't protect their records if they see a doctor, and so many other things, any sane society is going to opt for some limitations, at least with regard to minors.
          This form of bullying has many interrelated bad effects: Laws get passed, because existing laws don't seem to be stopping the problem behavior. Free speech becomes hard to protect when the test cases are such unsympathetic types - even the ACLU sometimes declines to take a case where the jury is likely to be looking for any chance to convict on anything remotely applicable. Even if a politician actually cares about free speech (I know, I know, but some of them actually do.). The ones that actually try to live up to the Constitution, the UN declaration of rights, or other such inspirational ideas are also the ones who really want to stop these other related abuses, so even they will look to compromise (and for the ones who are just pandering to whatever group will get them elected, that sort of compromise is a no-brainer). Let a creep get away with enough, and everybody wants to see some sort of blowback, and if it looks like that creep is just hiding behind a first amendment claim, then the first amendment starts to be called a "technicality".It takes more character than most have to defend Vlad Adolph McKnife-wielding-Psycho. That's why there are phrases such as "Online Stalker" - behavior analogous to real world stalking, not just insults.
        My feeling is, even if we should let kids naturally develop tougher skins and reognize that free speech includes just the sorts of speech we find ourselves half wishing there was a law against, there's too many real creeps on the net for it to happen. The best way to stop it would be for the laws against slander, libel, and impersonation to be enforced so the things that are not just speech are what we are regulating, but we don't seem to do that, so bad laws WILL get passed instead.

So if it's a representation of the community, why would you believe it has anything to do with affirmative action? The "point" of the GPP was that black people are "takin' ar jerbs".

Not unfeasible at all, unless they need actual identites. For example here in Norway all phone numbers must have an owner identified with our version of an SSN, even unlisted and prepaid numbers. So an easy way to have an "id" is to send a one time code to the cell during registration. That account is now linked to my phone number which links to my id. If they're hacked, all they have is phone numbers. Many discussion boards already do that to reduce spam and make bans more effective

Uh... no. If I wanted to play games, I would have invested in an actual decent FX card rather than the cheapest POC I could find that would allow me to run D3D. I use Windows for three small applications whose authors never bothered to write Linux software or ensure Wine compatibility. Two of the three are pieces of software that came bundled with specialty USB devices.

As for me being a "Linux whore," I don't pay for Linux, and Linux certainly doesn't pay me, so I think that analogy fails.

Not as simple as saying that 'everyone' is all people. What is 'all people'? All Chinese residents? All people on this planet? All people that are paying taxes and who will actually be force to pay for this, or is it maybe all consumers of the goods that will have higher prices on them (and likely fewer choices of products) due to these 'heavy restrictions'?

Does 'everyone' include those, who are still in poverty in China (plenty more people are still very poor) and who want to move up in class but who will be prevented if prices for everything go up due to all the new regulations, licensing, taxes and generally growth of government that 'heavy restrictions' assumes?

It's not as simple as saying 'continue reducing pollution in the air'. In the USA when Lyndon Johnson came out with the 'Great Society' crap the level of poverty was very low and falling, then the government stepped in and reversed that trend categorically. The free market was working towards reducing poverty, there was no need for anything called 'Great Society' (and as always, there is no truth in advertising that comes from government, less truth in government advertising than in any other).

Free market capitalism works towards improving the standard of living of the market participants, but a poor economy cannot fix pollution, only a wealthy economy can and you do not make an economy into a wealthy one with 'heavy restrictions'.

Poor economies do not let people even to get their heads up, never mind thinking about such rich problems as not burning coal but instead going nuclear. Interestingly enough, while China is burning plenty of coal (so does USA) but China is building up nuclear power plant capacity and USA is not.

China will fix its pollution by following free market capitalist principles of searching for cheaper sources of energy and nuclear will be the cheapest source.

"Less then the medical cost, and loss of habitat costs." - how living a life of poverty, does not count as a cost to a society? I say it does. A life of poverty doesn't help you with medical costs and habitat costs either.

- nothing is free, people are paying for the energy, food, water and all other products that they consume and the prices that they pay reflect the economy they are in. By adding 'heavy restrictions' to the economy you are not helping to fix anything, you are ensuring that the economy will be poorer than it could otherwise and thus preventing the fixes, not promoting them.

- it is not ironic at all, USA is destroying its economy with all the government and destruction of individual freedoms and China allows individual freedoms and mostly free market capitalism to work its way towards prosperity, which is crucial to having pollution free environment.

Uh... I do not support the present Russian politics at all (even though I am a citizen). What I'm saying is that the separatists themselves - and many Russians - believe that they are not getting enough support from Russia, and blaming that on "traitors". "Enough support" here generally equates to moving the troops in openly.

I'm certainly not relishing the thought of an all-out military conflict between Russia and the West, either.

- take a look at what you wrote. This sentence is self-contradictory and at best you just didn't understand it.

It would be 'cheaper for everyone' to 'fix pollution' by putting 'heavy restrictions'.

Ok, who is 'everyone', what does it mean to 'fix pollution' and how much do 'heavy restrictions' cost to everyone?

This guy put together a 'low cost solution for everyone' who wants to 'fix pollution' and he didn't force any 'heavy restrictions' on anybody either. So anybody who is actually worried about the pollution can now pay for it to be fixed for themselves.

Now, of-course this doesn't fix overall pollution, but it is a distributed method of fixing pollution locally on a voluntary basis that is provided by free market capitalism (private property ownership and operation without government interference).

As a society progresses from pre-industrial (China before 1970s) to industrial (the last 40 years) its residents become wealthier and more affluent and as they become wealthier and more affluent they can now afford to start thinking about their environment and the best way to fix environment is to allow free market enterprise to market the fixes straight to the public, which then will decide whether it wants to pay anything at all (or more or less) for any such fixes, be it fixes on large scale or small distributed local fixes like this one.

To put 'heavy restrictions on emissions' means to restrict wealth generation in the country that was able to move 350,000,000 people out of poverty over the last 40 years (while the rest of the globe has been moving hundreds of millions into poverty by destroying individual freedom and thus destroying capitalism, destroying the free market).

China will be fine, it will fix its environmental problems and it will do so without advice from the economic failures that scold it here.

I have seen many such sites, but they're all hugely out of date, and often review exactly the same software as each other. All they end up achieving is a slightly differently skewed marketplace.

I don't want distribution channels singlehandedly pricing things. That power only leads to abuses as well.

eBooks should be priced by the "maker", but private people should be able to sell their copy, to provide pressure on the market kinda like used cars do to new cars. Personally I think ebooks would be well served at 2.99 or so a for the average book, instead of pricing them as if they still had to support large book stores and all the inbetweens from there back to the printer plus disposing of unsold copies.

Some books have to be expensive for the author to recoup their cost for a limited audience who won't care if the book is $100 or $125. You know, studies of the dung of wood beetles devouring maple flooring complete with color pics, etc. And at $5, it's not going to sell any more copies and we just get the tyranny of the mainstream, where everyone shoots for a piece of the bellcurve near the middle.

At the same time, the textbook market would collapse for the most part if most institutions went the way of the japanese and printed 6 week sheets to give to HS and undergraduate college students. Since these subjects don't change all that much, it would be trivial if all the highschools in one state banded together to get this done. And then have that effort domino effect.

He thought that because the limited japanese phonetic system (46 sounds more or less iirc) allows for that name and it doesn't sound particularly european.

It wouldn't be dishonest. Right now, a lot of the recommendations are things you've probably already heard of anyway. A policy of "discovery" recommendations would be no bad thing.

And given that Amazon allegedly don't pay developers for their free app of the day, it does very little to sort the balance of power in app land....

you mean like the magazines we all read in the 80s and 90s to tell us what was worth buying? Just what I was going to say. The problem is... who's going to pay for it? Computer mags were full of ads, but who's going to pay to advertise when either A) your site tells people their software is rubbish or B) your site tells people that they should buy the software anyway.

For decades, computer games manufacturers have put out limited demos to encourage people to buy the full thing. Some even experimented with DRM to give time-limited access to the full thing. The App Store and iOS give 99.9% security (most iOS users don't jailbreak) so why haven't Apple given the developers a toolkit for time-limited demos? Why are free and paid-for versions listed as separate apps? As an iPad user, I want a proper try-before-you-buy that lets me see exactly what I'm going to get, and if I had that, I'd certainly spend more money. (I could even say the same about Steam, actually...)

The app store model doesn't reward the best - there's a lot of luck involved in getting into the charts, and being in the charts is self-sustaining.