Generally, they'll try really hard not to actually answer that question. You can also just ask "Am I free to go?" and if the answer is "no", or anything but "yes", you should assume that you are under suspicion and are being detained. That's a big clue that it's time to Shut Up.

What their protocol have that XMPP doesn't, or couldn't be extended to support?

It has TLS, which is a bad idea for chat. Unless you're taking a deposition, or something, where you want provable identity, most chat is expected to be ephemeral and reputable. Picture two people sitting quietly chatting in a secure room. That's the goal for most online chat.

You want to use OTR for most chat, not TLS. It offers repudiation as well as authentication, security, and perfect forward secrecy. It's even obnoxious about repudiation on the wire.

TLS is great for other stuff. It's just the wrong choice for online chat.

disclaimer: trusting the summary.

You're not smarter than the presenters in those videos, nor, unless you're a hot-shot constitutional attorney, are you smarter than a police apparatus that's trying to frame you. Here, in geek terms:

10 PRINT "DON'T TALK TO COPS"
20 GOTO 10

Don't confuse the actual lack of a right to compel you to share it with an imagined lack of a right to do what I please with it once I have gotten ahold of it.

What happens if I go back on my word and share it with others anyway? There's no privity, so they're not bound by the agreement. Your efforts to enforce it against them would be for naught. Now they've gotten access to your work, and they have a free speech right. If they publish it, they're within their rights to do so. I'll suffer a little for the breach, but breach of contract is far from the worst thing in the world.

Your post is full of errors -- misunderstanding the Copyright Act and the prima facie elements of an infringement action, failure to recognize the existence of a commons, your weird belief that you have to be aware of rights in specific things in order to merely passively possess them (being left property by long-lost relatives you didn't know you had is such a well-known concept that it's a cliche, for crying out loud!), and so forth -- but the main mistake you make is this:

You just don't believe that people have a natural right of free speech. Or of any other thing, for that matter. But it's a fact that we do, and this is widely recognized; you could do worse than to start by looking at the Declaration of Independence. Not all rights are of this sort -- copyright isn't, and due to its inherent conflict with free speech, never could be. But your refusal to accept that copyright is merely built on top of a more fundamental and universal right means that we really have nothing to say to one another. The standard model of copyright hinges upon this; rejecting it is like rejecting Kepler in order to stick with Ptolemy. And while I hope that no one finds you any more convincing than I do, I bear you no ill will and I hope you come to your senses soon.

For any objection presented for some course of action it is demonstrable that it is the outcome and not the action itself which presents a moral problem. So if the outcome is good, the action is good.

You failed to account for unintended consequences among other things.
1/10. Third grade level work.

The peak number has been sliding upwards during my lifetime so I've been dubious.

However, the "hans" guy on TED says we have reached a point where the average child born replaces one human who is dying. He has a nice video that explains it and shows that this will result in an increase from 7 billion to 10 billion.

Only problem is that since it was recorded the peak number has risen to 11 billion.
So apparently the birth rate isn't really down to 1baby:1old dying person yet.

Me?

I think that high breeders will come to dominate the population and low breeders will get selected out.

And so the population will continue going up until it breaks.

But I'll give Hans his due and say it will probably be slower than I had previously thought.

It certainly can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

Each new child born has multiple mutations.

If we were exposed to highly selective pressure (99% of humans die without this mutation) then we would evolve quickly.

In the case of these particular bacteria run 500 generations per 75 days.

That's like 10,000 years of human time-- almost 50,000 years of human time sacle evolution per human year.

Plastic has been common in the ocean for about four decades.

So that's like 50,000*10*4 = 2,000,000 years worth of human time scale evolution for these bacteria since plastic became common.

Laws don't change because "me and all my friends want them to change", unless you and all your friends are an oligarchy.

Just dead fucking opposite.

There is no excuse in America to outlaw gay marriage. There is no justification for it.

It's exactly the same situation with pot. The constitution is written on hemp, and prohibition requires a constitutional amendment. They just decided not to bother when they switched the target.

It doesn't matter what most people want because the people who wrote the Constitution went out of their way to make sure that this is not a Democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic.

Just because we have a long history of not being as good as our ideals doesn't mean we aren't expected to live up to them.

\

I should add at this point that i don't have a problem with small groups of very peaceful religious people (like the amish) whose religions have a strong tradition of non-violence.

And it's this:

"they were tying him to the stake (to burn him to death alive) a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell."

This is my problem with religion. They redefine it so it's okay to burn someone at the stake. You are being a *good* person if you can just force them to convert to your religion before they die.

http://askville.amazon.com/people-killed-Inquisition/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=3878676

According to public news reports the book's editor, Prof. Agostino Borromeo, stated that about 125,000 persons were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition, of which 1.8% were executed (2,250 people).

During the high point of the Spanish Inquisition from 1478-1530 AD, scholars found that approximately 1,500-2,000 people were found guilty. From that point forward, there are exact records available of all "guilty" sentences which amounted to 775 executions. In the full 200 years of the Spanish Inquisition, less than 1% of the population had any contact with it, people outside of the major cities didn't even know about it. The Inquisition was not applied to Jews or Moslems, unless they were baptised as Christians.

If we add the figures, we find that the entire Inquisition of 500 years, caused about 6,000 deaths.

That's the inquisition... now more generally.. you probably want this:
http://www.truthbeknown.com/victims.htm
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Now I'm skipping some of what I consider dubious examples where a war between nations is less strongly associated with religion than with a conflict between the people but it's fair to say that religion (the catholic/christian religion) was a factor to a major factor in these conflicts.
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Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) in 782 had 4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded. [DO30]
Peasants of Steding (Germany) unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes: between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women and children slain 5/27/1234 near Altenesch/Germany. [WW223]

Jerusalem conquered 7/15/1099 more than 60,000 victims (jewish, muslim, men, women, children). [WW37-40]
(In the words of one witness: "there [in front of Solomon's temple] was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes", and after that "happily and crying for joy our people marched to our Saviour's tomb, to honour it and to pay off our debt of gratitude")
The Archbishop of Tyre, eye-witness, wrote: "It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished." [TG79]

Battle of Askalon, 8/12/1099. 200,000 heathens slaughtered "in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ". [WW45]

1391 Seville's Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. [DA454] Their identification was made easy by the brightly colored "badges of shame" that all jews above the age of ten had been forced to wear.

1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee. [DO31]

Albigensians: the first Crusade intended to slay other Christians. [DO29]
The Albigensians...viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. [NC]
Begin of violence: on command of pope Innocent III (greatest single pre-nazi mass murderer) in 1209. Bezirs (today France) 7/22/1209 destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims (including Catholics refusing to turn over their heretic neighbours and friends) 20,000-70,000. [WW179-181]

As one of the culprits wrote: "So many Indians died that they could not be counted, all through the land the Indians lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous." [SH69]
The indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As "they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell." [SH70]
What happened to his people was described by an eyewitness:
"The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties ... They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the twelve Apostles... then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive." [SH72]
Or, on another occasion:
"The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts...Vasco [de Balboa] ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs." [SH83]
The "island's population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out." Eventually all the island's natives were exterminated, so the Spaniards were "forced" to import slaves from other caribbean islands, who soon suffered the same fate. Thus "the Caribbean's millions of native people [were] thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century". [SH72-73] "In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated." [SH75]
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But this was all in the distance past. Probably nothing like that in the last 100 years.
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20th Century Church Atrocities

        Catholic extermination camps
        Surpisingly few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943 also in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveli, a practising Catholic and regular visitor to the then pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children!

        In these camps - the most notorious was Jasenovac, headed by a Franciscan friar - orthodox-Christian serbians (and a substantial number of Jews) were murdered. Like the Nazis the Catholic Ustasha burned their victims in kilns, alive (the Nazis were decent enough to have their victims gassed first). But most of the victims were simply stabbed, slain or shot to death, the number of them being estimated between 300,000 and 600,000, in a rather tiny country. Many of the killers were Franciscan friars. The atrocities were appalling enough to induce bystanders of the Nazi "Sicherheitsdient der SS", watching, to complain about them to Hitler (who did not listen). The pope knew about these events and did nothing to prevent them. [MV]

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Well-- nothing like that in the last 65 years!
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Well if we count the 1990's rwandan catholic priests as lone gunmen, then certainly not.
(tho I'll grant there was a lot of ethnic conflict mixed in with that one. I really do picture those catholic murderers as not acting with the backing of the church).

Any idiot can write ignorance like spinning the Earth backwards to save a girl.

Uh, he didn't spin the earth backwards. He exceeded the speed of light to go back in time - the mythical reference frame of the camera on Superman saw the earth "spin backwards" as the direction of time reversed.

Has the church been associated with torture and mass murder for over a thousand years?

Yes or no?

Have religions of many kinds been generally associated with genocide, mass suicide, rape, , smashing of suckling babes on rocks, murder, mass murder, child abuse *as* organizations- *ordered by their deities* - not just as isolated human beings- yes or no?

Do many religious people believe that if their deity told them to do something that they would do it because if the deity says to do it, then it's right by definition?
yes or no?

For each of these the answer is yes.

If you say, "I'm going to think for myself- I don't care what my deity tells me to do" that's a VERY good first step to not committing atrocities because your religion tells you that your diety told you to.

I'm hardly saying that it's impossible(after all, 'Nylonase' enzymes were identified in 1975, for a compound that had only existed for ~40 years. Just that it's impressive. If anybody is going to be metabolizing plastics, it'll be bacteria, through sheer numbers and rapid mutation; but evolving, with no assistance, to attack novel compounds, designed for resilience, in less than a century after their introduction is pretty good work...