Freedom of speech is not dead in Germany. The constitution just put a different (higher) weight on personality rights.

In this case, googleing the name "Bettina Wulff" of the first lady would autocomplete to things like "escort" and "prostitute", because some people wrongfully tried to make a past life as a prostitute stick to her public image (which has been shown is just nonsense).

Now, I would agree that it is perfectly reasonable to put a higher weight on the right of free speech. But personality rights, and the right to be protected from libel are also important. Those are two legally protected values that have to be carefully balanced.

According to this report, the movie depicts an area of 45 x 25 nanometers. I use the body of the stickman to approximate pixels, which gives me about 30 pixels in height. Which translates to 3 * 10^7 DPI. Which will be in your iPhone 71's über-retina display (assuming dpi grows exponentially). Although it's really debatable if your eye is capable of making use of such a high resolution.

Let me quote from a blog post that paints an even darker picture than the original story I submitted on /.

Can you imagine the pressure they put this volunteer through? Threatening him with five years of prison if he does not immediately comply and delete the article in the intelligence agency's offices? You think that doesn't matter?

In this case the problem was not that Wikipedia was centralized. The Wikimedia Foundation in the US did not comply with the agency's demands.

The problem was that the administrator's real name was publicly known (he's a public figure and it's his username) so that they were able to find someone under French jurisdiction. Most admins and non-admins use pseudonyms and are thus immune to real-life pressure.

All in all, I'd say the system worked. The admin had to give in to the immense pressure, but he was sensible enough to publicly announce what he did, thus enabling foreign users to reinstate the article. Now, the really threatening cases are those with gag orders, such as given by US intelligence agencies.

I'm using Mullvad. It's 5 Euro per Month (about $6.5) and is quite fast – I couldn't notice a loss in bandwidth, although naturally the ping is slightly higher. Oh, and they have their servers in Europe (Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands) which obviously is not perfect for Americans. If you're extremely paranoid, Mullvad offers the ability to pay by cash sent through snail mail or bitcoins.

Other than that, IPredator seems to be a well-known VPN provider based in Sweden. It's about the same price.

As a student, a large part of my work involves remembering. I have found that I need 8 hours of sleep – if I sleep less than that, I'm useless all day: I have trouble concentrating and usually don't get any studying done.

Others however, seem to be off fine sleeping only 3 or 4 hours a day. Sure, they are tired, but it doesn't impact their ability to concentrate in the same way. Any biologist / neuroscientists here who can explain this?

I think they do replicate DBs to Florida (the former main data center), because they wrote it's a hot failover. The other data centers are just caches, because that's most of the requests.

Virginia has had 90% of all requests anyway already, they are serving bits.wikimedia.org (JS, CSS, ...), upload.wikimedia.org (images and media) and I guess also Squid+Varnish. The "only" thing missing is the actual mediawiki software, databases and things like memcached. Here's the checklist

While probably somewhat known among Slashdotters, I think it is worthwhile to remind people of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician, WWII code breaker and father of computer science (as well as being a victim of cruel injustice by the state).

He's unfortunately by far less recognized than people like Steve Jobs (probably because turing machines don't have rounded corners by design). It's a bit like the story of Tesla vs. Edison. One was a genius scientist, the other one an asshat making lots of money, without contributing nearly as much to the field, but still being more famous and celebrated.

There's a ToS;DR campaign to end unreadable ToS/Eulas or provide ways of getting useful summaries of them. Check out their List of ToS.

Don't just stop at not building them in your country: Why not make an international treaty banning killer robots globally? Hell, it worked with landmines (except some savage countries like the US and Russia still haven't signed it.)

The issue with killer robots is that once you introduce them, you won't be able to let the decisions be made by humans. At some point robots will fight robots and at that point it just matters who shoots first. Quick reactions matter and a human will always be slower than AI. So you end up with autonomous killing machines and sure enough they will also kill humans in the process.

The incident to which the AC is referring is about a poppy burning which was in the news just a few days ago. A man was arrested for burning the poppy on Remembrance day.

This is probably similar to the flag burning controversy in the US. (See also the excellent Futurama episode on why it makes not sense to defend freedom of expression by abolishing it)

Saying something stupid is not a crime. The simple fact that you are not telling the truth does not constitute a crime, nor does your ignorance in making false statements.

What you were probably referring to is saying something offensive or insulting. I think you're right insofar as free speech is indeed under attack in a lot of countries, but that should be all the more reason to defend it. It has been proven numerous times that in practice it is impossible to outlaw insulting statements without harming free speech.

For example, in the UK, a teenager was arrested for calling the "Church" of Scientology a cult. You can't tell me that this is not a ludicrous undermining of free speech laws.

In the UK you can get arrested for all kinds of things you say: Calling a police horse gay, for example. If someone feels like something you say could insult someone, you get arrested. Now, not all of these (ludicrous) charges are successful, but still I think there already is a bad chilling effect.

Listen to Rowan Atkinson's (Mr. Bean) excellent 10 Minutes speech on the topic and why he is part of the campaign "Feel free to insult me".