Chinese internet filtering is justified publicly by stating that it is done to help Chinese people avoid inadvertent violations of the law, and that is how it is seen by most Chinese. The real purpose of the censorship there is to facilitate prosecution of dissidents by making it impossible to violate laws against anti-government speech and unlawful assembly inadvertently.

In general, lone inventors don't benefit much from patents.

I used to work for $BIG_COMPANY where we had a process where a team of lawyers and engineers would evaluate everything someone thought remotely patentable, and they would consider whether the patent was worth the time and money (usually several thousand dollars even though they used in-house counsel and did thousands of these a year). The analysis was based not only on the validity of the patent and the value of the innovation covered, but also the difficulty of creating a comparable innovation that is non-infringing, and the difficulty of detecting infringement (One of the problems with software patents is that it is often difficult to detect whether infringement has occurred in a closed-source competing implementation, which makes the patent unenforceable in practice).

Most of their patents were never worth anything, even with all the vetting. The valuable ones were core innovations in emerging industries where the product gets sold in consumer quantities, not some way to make a better forklift.

Somebody explain to me how this is different from someone selling Avon, or selling at the local farmers' market, or moonlighting as a musician at the local dive bar, or any other similar wellspring of unemployment stupidity?

I consider gambling an immoral business due to the immense social cost and the fact that people who gamble do not understand the probability and psychology involved. It is truly an exploitative business despite the industry's attempts to appeal to entertainment aspects and libertarian sentiments we all share. I would question the values of anyone involved in that industry, and would probably not hire such a person unless there were extenuating circumstances.

In contrast I'd be happy to hire someone who had been involved in IT work for the sex industry, unless they were doing something really immoral like spamming people.

Well, the whole point behind a distro is that everything -- the kernel, a bunch of loadable kernel modules, the libraries, the userland, any X Window system you might choose to run, and various other stuff -- is assembled and tested by others, and some sort of effort is made to evaluate interdependencies and resolve them in a sensible way. It isn't a trivial job.

Sure, you could take an older Debian distro or one of the other distros, remove Linux, add FreeBSD, and you might get it to work. But I can guarantee that at least *some* of the packages will be broken. What Debian are doing is treating those problems as release-critical, so that they will fix them either on the kernel side or in the affected packages themselves before issuing the distro.

News Flash: 10,000 Slashdot accounts compromised in phishing scam. Most common passwords were 31415 and 0xdecafbad.

Affected users have been placed on an isolated network where they can't do anything but post whinges about Microsoft and Apple to a web server that runs SSL using a self-signed certificate and actually follows the RFCs.

Sounds like a copyright violation to me. After all, it's not a parody, it's a remake.