A more relevant example would be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_and_Muhammad_al-Zery which details Swedens participation in illegal rendition to torturing countries, an act clearly illegal both in treaties Sweden is a signatory to and in Swedish law. Unsurprisingly, nobody has been held accountable.

Sweden cannot be trusted with human rights as it takes nothing more than the right opportunity for brownnosing for its politicians to ignore the law.

Well, Excession does touch on those subjects to a degree. The way I've understood the Culture it really lacks the cohesion to have what would be recognized as some sort of formal decision making process, so most likely SC ends up doing what SC does because a decent sized group of minds feel like it and nobody can stop them (or feels strongly enough about it to make any significant attempt).

In Excession you see the same thing happening on multiple levels. You have the Interesting Time Gang deciding on and taking action. You have the faction entraping the Affront. You have the GCU Grey Area engaging in its own brand of contact work. Apart from social pressure, when dealing in pretty much infinitely powerful entities it's very hard to enforce norms even when significant aberrations occur.

There is nothing you can possibly say that will be beneficial for you. Even if you're honest and have done nothing wrong and truthfully say you were nowhere near where a crime was committed you're just one honest but mistaken witness away from looking like you're lying about not being near the crime scene.

So shut up or even in the best case someone can claim you're lying. Which can be enough to get you in trouble.

The gp was of course joking. However, the correct action when selling more of something is indeed to raise the price or you're not maximizing your profit. (You don't raise prices because you need to, you raise them because you can).

In a free market someone else would then enter the market, undersell you and take part of the profit. In a monopoly market with copyrights that won't happen, which means you can keep raising prices, preferably combined with sinking a lot of the revenue into marketing which will be much more valuable as there is no competition.

Personally I have no objection to GMO crops per se, although I consider the particular application of engineering herbicide resistant strains that are intended to be drenched in herbicides during normal use to be a particularly dubious idea that should probably be banned from the human food chain. Not because it's GMO, but because it's subjected to and creates incentive for excessive use of herbicides.

However, we're talking about Monsanto. Considering their corporate history, I suspect that if they researched two strains of wheat of which one gave people cancer and the other one was more profitable, they'd market the carcinogenic one. The company is the posterboy for corporate death penalty. As long as they exist and remain a significant player in the field of GMO I fully support bans against GMO foods. Not because GMO foods can't be safe, but because Monsanto isn't.

Somehow I don't think the parents leaving their ammo and guns around their kids will be the ones buying safe guns. On the other hand, it might be a good excuse for a responsible person to get such a gun so they can leave it lying around for the kids to play with.

And really, trying to create a safety sensitive to fingerprints is overengineered idiocy. A safety incorporating, for example, a combination lock would accomplish the same thing for most purposes and it could be trivially made as a simple and highly reliable mechanical feature without any need for complex electronics and power.

There are many such search engines already. The technology certainly exists to both make them close to free to run through partial or full distribution. And the free copying crowd certainly is vastly beyond large enough to finance a whole ecosystem of services and sites without a large economic input from outside sources. With the expansion of cryptographic currencies it's also certain that applying any pressure through the payment systems will only result in a more rapid expansion of uncontrollable credit systems (which will result in utterly screwing the last 50 years of anti-laundering work which may actually be more serious than the pissant whining copyright industry).

And seriously, as TFA suggested, guilting advertisers out of appearing on piracy sites? A small sampling of such advertisers will most likely indicate that advertising on piracy sites would be the least offensive part of their business.

Frankly I'd be a bit iffy about the medical field. It has advantages with the guild like features keeping wages high in some positions and there are some obstacles to off-shoring, but it's also a field that will likely come under increasing pressure from AI and robotics in the not too far future. The gains to be made are simply so compelling and anything from diagnostics to surgery is potentially better done by machines (which in turn, due to the nature of the field, means that having an actual human doing either will basically be malpractice.)

Trade jobs that are hard to offshore and difficult to cost-effectively automate are probably a good choice. I'd stay away from the transportation sector as that too is likely to get automated to a significant degree within our life time.

I know I won't see it in a theatre, I simply don't have the patience for watching mindnumbing cgi+action without being able to fast forward anymore. I assume the movie will probably last about 10 minutes if you skip the meaningless bling so I'd probably be better served if someone cut together a summary and put on youtube.

A diagnosis may also be less useful when the problem is a natural reaction to a social environmental situation and lead to attempting to 'cure' the patient rather than fix the problems causing the reaction. Trying to treat of depression or anxiety caused by stress with long term use of medications is likely to lead to eventual failure of the medication or in the case of anti-anxiety drugs lead to addiction and problems from that, leaving the patient in an even worse situation than before.

I have yet to see any compelling argument that the human brain isn't 100% deterministic. The fact that it's complex does not necessarily make it non-deterministic and the underlying physics and chemistry founding the neural networks in the brain are not necessarily less deterministic than a neural network built out of silicon.

So if we create robots so sophisticated that their apparent sentience level is indistinguishable from a human it would be unethical not to afford them the same right. That, however, is quite far off still.

Yeah, and broken bones are most commonly a symptom of sports so obviously sports should be classified as a cluster of diseases.

And of course, if failure to produce offspring was actually some form of harm, the catholic priesthood should probably be diagnosed. Atheism, at least in the form of secular humanism, in general does not concern itself with where folks stick their parts or argue any moral obligation to reproduce.

If you're using the appropriate tools for doing this sort of thing, why do you need the password to be visible?

See, works both ways.

The real issue is that when the end user needs to input a password it simply should not be visible by default as there is no way to tell if the user is in a situation where the password can be observed during input. As the user cannot be expected, without major flashing red alerts all over the screen, to assume that the Fedora installer will work different from close to every other password field in every application available they cannot be expected to take appropriate precautions which will lead to security issues where the decision to make Anaconda 'special' will be entirely at fault.

I assume you have yet to find employment in todays average workplace?

Because corporate offices and many small company offices are notoriously lacking in privacy and the only time there's 'nobody in the room with you' is if you're doing your installations on christmas eve.

Having the (Fedoras) install process work different than basically everything else is a bad choice in itself. And changing everything else would be utter idiocy; there are many cases like classes, presentations, user assistance, etc, etc when passwords are entered with observers watching the screen. One would basically have to move to one-time passwords to bypass the issue.

Needlessly displaying passwords without significant compelling reasons is simply atrociously bad design. The only time it is ever even remotely justified in common practice is when very, very bad input devices make it difficult to know which character actually got entered.

Well, considering that Forbes in TFA claims "We donâ(TM)t really know how this coin is created. You canâ(TM)t have a functional money without a basic transparency. " I would argue that the actual problem is Steve Forbes lack of understanding of bitcoin. I doubt any other currency in the world is as transparent about how it works is created.

It's a pity as there are reasonable arguments (like yours and the GP's) for the short term, but his are merely uninformed.