Idiotic argument. The problem isn't the criminals having the card numbers per se. The problem is that these numbers can then be used to steal your money - as in actually steal because you won't have the money afterwards.

Read the booklet - apparently I'm a terrorist. Or would be if I were in America.

* Concerned about privacy, attempts to shield the screen from others. Sure am concerned about privacy, and I find it rude if others look at my screen, so yes, I prefer to position my computer so that others don't see the screen as easily.

* Use of multiple cellphones. Yeah. I recently moved to another country, so I have two phones, one with a SIM from the old country and one from the current one. Very convenient.

* Anonymizers, etc. Well, I run some anonymity plugins in the browser, also have Tor installed, though I almost never use it.

* Suspicious or coded writings. Ah yes. I like encryption, codes and the like. I also like languages and writing systems, I came up with my own back in school and still sometimes use it. I may also be found reading/writing something in languages with non-Latin scripts, which is, I guess, suspicious.

* Encryption or data hiding. I'm currently doing research on the latter, in fact. Very interesting subject area.

* Communicating through a PC game. What is this about? Sure I've communicated in games. How is that even slightly more suspicious than communicating in Skype or IRC?

* Downloading information about military or defensive tactics. I like tactical games, and there are aspects of tactics I find very interesting intellectually. I don't read about that a lot, but occasionally I certainly do.

* Downloading information about electronics. As just about everyone else with a computer science degree, I also had to study some electronics. It's something I found difficult and very far from intuitively clear, so I did check some online information about electronic circuits and components.

Ah well, it's still good to know that the booklet has small print that says the behaviour may have an innocent explanation...

Sadly, it's almost as PGP doesn't exist. Encrypted email is very rare even among the computer literate, and good luck having the average user read an encrypted email you sent them.

Really? How's this for influence. The PP of course has people in the European Parliament, which is indeed not a very important institution, but it does stand over the European Commission so it's not exactly a high-school council. Next, they did manage to have 7.1% of the vote in European Parliament elections, which is a number indicative of some actual support and not just a fad.

Rick Falkvinge, basically an unknown guy a few years ago, has become prominent enough to be named one of the top global thinkers along with major political figures and 2011 Arab revolutionaries.

Something else that typically gets overlooked by those dismissive of the PP is that it has significant support among youth, people in their early 20s. And of course PP members are young. This is crucial - as someone else said in a recent /. discussion on copyright, these are the people who started using the Internet a decade ago in their early teens, and who were using the early popular filesharing programs (remember Napster or Kazaa?). These people are now old enough to vote, and they're having kids that they bring up with also a very liberal attitude to copyrights.

No, I do not see the PP becoming a major political force in Sweden before the next election, but I fully expect support for them to rise, where soon enough mainstream politicians will also have to realize that the copyright issue is a very important one to a segment of voters.

It is strange to see the argument that "we aren't going to provide everyone with a computer" every time the subject of the Internet as a right gets brought up. "A right to the Internet" should obviously not mean that. It should mean two things:

1. That anyone has the right to use an Internet connection, whether it be through a public library, getting a subscription at home, using prepaid mobile broadband or whatever other way to get online.

2. That anyone who is using such an Internet connection has the right to freely utilize it without government censorship or blocking, and to use the connection to exercise their other rights, such as free speech (including anonymous speech), political activism, etc.

Having recently started living in Sweden, I familiarized myself with the Pirate Party a bit more closely. The claim that they want to abolish copyright is simply false - they are proposing a reform, although admittedly one that curbs copyright very significantly. They do want to get rid of patents entirely, believing they hinder innovation. What they want to do with copyrights is to reduce them to 5 years, after which works get released into the public domain. 5 years is a short period, but it differs very significantly from the idea of abolishing copyright.

Not much to tell you about. People in the country are very passive politically, one of the lowest participation rates in Europe. The provision was last used some 3 years ago - the people proposed a constitutional amendment that would give them the power to dissolve the parliament. The proposed amendment went to the parliament, they voted against it, so a referendum took place but failed due to insufficient turnout (50% of eligible voters have to turn up for a referendum to be valid). See what I said about low participation rates.

Currently, the process has been initiated for another proposal, a constitutional amendment that would declare Russian to be a state language. Remains to be seen whether that will gain enough signatures to go to the parliament.

There's something like that in Latvia. The constitution explicitly gives legislative power to both the parliament and the people. There's a provision that states that the people may prepare a proposed law or constitutional amendment, and if it's signed by 10% of the voters, the parliament is obliged to vote on the proposed law/amendment. If the parliament votes against it, then it must go on a nationwide referendum where the people can override the parliament's vote and have the law passed.

Stallman helped the free software movement and a lot, and 30 years ago, was perhaps one of the best people who could be at the forefront of it all. Today, with everyone using computers in some form, everything software-related receives publicity and attention. This is why Stallman, in the 21st century, is one of the worst possible mouthpieces for the free software movement.

Most things he says reinforce the strange nerd stereotype. RMS doesn't care, of course. But his speeches and articles are somewhat "out there", he tends to ignore social norms and customs. And to the world's non-nerd population, it just gives the impression that free software is for socially inept bearded types.

Stallman's ideal vision of a world where every user is a programmer that reprograms their devices at will isn't happening for too many reasons to list. And in today's reality, for free software to advance, the movement could really do with another mouthpiece. Someone who can speak to the masses in a way that suits them, showing how free software is superior for practical reasons (not ideological ones), and someone who can break the perception that only big multibillion companies produce software that are fit for the average person to use.

Sad news. I don't own Apple products and the last time I used one, there was no OS X yet, but I have a deep respect for Jobs. I admire his spirit, his constant desire and drive to innovate and push things forward, and his efforts in making technology more accessible.

So RIP Steve Jobs, a man with profound impact on personal computing.

I know the example of Gestapo is somewhat exaggerated/controversial, but I still believe it to be an apt comparison. I said Gestapo and not the SS or somesuch because I actually see similarities - Gestapo, especially before the war, wasn't only a torture and murder organization. They were an organization where incriminating information about citizens was delivered, and it's scary how many Germans were perfectly willing to inform on others. The Gestapo didn't really come across information by itself so often, it was mostly thriving on tipoffs.

Of course Facebook does not kill and torture, and won't, but there are similarities in the information-gathering sense. And I would not be surprised at all if Facebook cooperates with governments or government agencies that have plans more sinister than targeted advertising.

This may not be a popular viewpoint, but I think it's a very relevant issue, and I do not use Facebook. I believe its very existence is an ethical issue though. Facebook represents a truly evil company, not in the unethical-business-practices sense, but a whole different order of that, I'd say they're rapidly approaching Gestapo-evil. Facebook stores enough information to learn a lot about specific individuals, and Facebook is conditioning people to give up their privacy. It might just be one of the most useful tools for an oppressive government or unethical intelligence organization to blackmail someone or, better, ruin their public image.

Facebook is not run by idiots. Those people know what they're doing, they know they're storing even "deleted" data and they know they're building very detailed profiles on every user. They also, unlike most of actual Facebook users, probably have the intelligence and foresight to imagine how it all may be used for horrible things, so there's no way I can see them as morally innocent.

Yeah right... the use of GNU/Linux is an ideological term for RMS, no way he's going to stop doing that. He'll stick to the term just like he sticks to the ideal of everything running free (in the RMS/GNU sense) software and users reprogramming their software.

According to their ideas, though, GNU/Linux is the name for the full OS such as most distros. Linux is the name for the kernel. Android doesn't use all GNU components that Linux distros typically do. It doesn't support glibc and probably makes little, if any, use of GNU software.

In the first Deus Ex, it was mentioned specifically that one of the reasons nano-augs are superior is that they're rather easily disguised and so do not lead to the same social rejection as mech augs. As for mech augs, well, it's hard to hide a pair of huge metallic arms with hydraulic joints.

cheap proles, reprogrammable remotely, are the way to go for now

While a typo, it's absolutely brilliant in how Orwellian it sounds!