The idea is in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. First line of the second paragraph: "... that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, ... " (http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/)

Several states already do not tax food: NH has no sales tax. MA (at least when I lived there) does not tax food or clothing. SC just, a few years ago, increased the overall sales tax by one percent (to 6) and stopped taxing food and, I think, clothing. I'm sure there are other states that do not tax food and clothing as well.

(In my experience, the "food" tax exemption does not apply to restaurants.)

I agree that taxing the "essentials" is a bad approach. South Carolina even has "Tax Holidays" near the beginning of the school year when certain other items are not taxed in order to make preparing for school a little more affordable. (These "other items" include computers.)

Your proposal is interesting, but I can see some potential problems with it with regard to the overall concept of free expression.
Let us consider a page on Facebook that is critical of Islam. Who would be considered appropriate to moderate that page? Most (if not all) Muslims would mark it inappropriate or offensive because it offends their beliefs, yet to Christains or others it may be considered informative and appropriate.
As a conservative Christian (I am not saying you are), would you want your 13-year-old to have access to page that actively promotes the homosexual lifestyle? I know many conservative Christians, given that I live in the "deep south", and I know they would find such a page offensive. Who is best to moderate those pages?
The idea is good to try to have people judging the page be those more likely to care, but you have to draw the line somewhere or you will have too much censorship because people don't like their prophet being insulted or something like that.

This seems like a good idea, except that it could still allow a "mob rule" effect. I would contend that having Facebook employees metamoderate, at least in disputed cases, would be a more effective approach overall. Your approach, however, could easily seed the system.

That is why the metamoderation is done by Facebook employees, who should be familiar with the TOS. It should work itself out eventually, with obvious abusers being given low reputations so that they are never asked to moderate again.

Hello everyone,

This is a much more difficult problem than it seems at first glance. Some other posters have already pointed out the problem of the "jury of your peers" concept with the example of the country Turkey. A similar problem arises if it is simply approached as "what is considered offensive in the host country" (in this case, the USA, since Facebook is based in the USA). Heck, there are pictures of my daughter in her soccer uniform that would be banned in Saudi Arabia because you can see her knees, never mind her ankles. Scandalous!

It is difficult to conform to all nations' "sensibilities" with regard to what is "inappropriate" without falling to the harshest restrictions, such as Sharia law or the Thai ban on any criticism of the Thai royal family.

Spotted Kangaroo (message 35830238 in this thread) has an interesting idea with using "trustworthy" members. I'm not sure how that "trustworthyness" would be calculated other than using a metamoderation system similar to Slashdot's. By using supposedly trustworthy members, and then allowing the Facebook staff to "metamoderate", especially in the instance of appeals against complaints, I think it could work reasonably well. It would take a while and considerable effort for shill accounts to build up enough "trustworthyness" to be able to have any impact since the shill accounts would have to show activity and not just longevity.

I like the "jury" system, though. It's better than letting people comment only on topics about which they have strong feelings. Given the large number of churches that use Facebook as the electronic bulletin board for their youth groups, I could see a disproportionate number of people moderating pro GLBT groups and pages down because it offends their beliefs. We need a random selection mechanism that still works fairly, such as trusting people to list languages understood honestly. I'd be useless in moderating a page in Turkish, for example.

Just a few thoughts. I hope that if someone notices a flaw in my reasoning that you could post a polite explaination of the flaw and propose a better solution. I'm not interested in the $100, so I thought I'd just toss a few ideas out for folks to use.

T-Mobile is the only provider that I've found in the USA that does not truncate the high bit on text messages. I can send text messages in Chinese and Japanese with my unlocked iPhone on T-Mobile. AT&T and Sprint clip the high bit. I hope AT&T won't screw up T-Mobile's network.

French government-controlled-monopoly wants money from successful American companies instead of fixing their failed business models and economic systems.
If you offer people unlimited data, then that's what you get. If you are making people pay for data by KB, MB, or GB or whatever, then your end customers are already paying for the bandwidth. It looks like France Telecom simply is unwilling to upgrade their network on their own and wants to stick someone else with the bill.

The real plan is more subtle and the real goal is more insidious. The ultimate goal is to make Islam the dominant religion in the world, and make sharia law the primary legal system. The plan is to destabilize economies or just let them fall apart on their own (such as in many African countries today) and then move in with massive quantities of money to build infrastructure, revitalize the economy, etc. all in the name of Islam. The Islamic benefactors will then be viewed as benefactors and will gain influential positions in government, eventually in positions where they can enact their legal "reforms" to bring the country's laws closer and closer to sharia law and bring society closer to their ideal as defined by Islam. It will be a slow process so as not to cause alarm, though in smaller and less influential countries the changes may be done more rapidly because, I hate to say, the majority of the world simply won't care what happens to some really, really poor African country that is not even a tiny blip on the economic or political radar. Read the quote that Schneier had about one Al Quaeda "dollar" spent "defeating" millions of US dollars. The point is to cause economic instability and then have Islamic "benefactors" come in and save the day, at the cost of altering our culture to meet their requirements. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to explore the potential implications that this could have on US, Mexican, and Canadian societies. (Canada and Mexico will eventually be targets, my friends - they're just going after us first because we have more economic and political power, but I doubt they'll be satisfied until they control everything, and Canada and Mexico both have so much to offer that they should be fairly high on the list of next targets.)

In China, they already have pre-nudie-scanner airport-like security at the train stations - at least for the longer distance trains like Hong Kong to Guangzhou or to Shenzhen. They don't have these in the Guangzhou Metro yet, though. I've seen these at long distance bus stations too (HK to GZ again, for example). They even have them at the entrances to certain museums, the Guangzhou Science Center (which is an amazing science museum), and other similar attractions. No taking off your shoes, though. You just pass your bags through the x-ray machine and walk through the metal detector just like at an airport, but no metal-detector wand and pat-down like at the airports.

http://xkcd.com/695/ But this time it will be people...

(posted again because it seems the first time didn't work.) I guess the reverse is true too given the number of slashdotters who claim no Facebook use.

I guess the reverse is true, too, given the number of slashdotters who make it clear that they never use Facebook.

But it wasn't that great, apparently. Eccentrica Gallumbits said that Zaphod Beeblebrox was "the best bang since the big one."

There is a difference between precognition and predestination. There is a difference between knowing what someone will do (precognition) and making it such that the individual has no choice in the matter and will do what you have predetermined that the individual will do (predestination). The Bible makes it clear that everything is predestined. That is one major problem that most people have with Christianity. If you take the Bible to its logical conclusion, God created a certain number of souls for the ultimate purpose of subjecting them to eternal torment. Is this a loving and kind god?