This was a response to the mentions about libertarianism and slavery in that conversation. That I also mentioned suicide in it was an example of how small the difference between "employed" and "enslaved" has become for many people - when suicide is actually more attractive than resignation.

As for my position on the main topic:
Personally - I don't believe suicide should be illegal per se - but then I also believe that providing those who attempted it with appropriate psychiatric care is a valid burden on society (or if you are so inclined: a sensible investment as many of them could go back to being productive members of society with the right depression treatment) and currently the laws against it is the means by which this is achieved.
I think it could be achieved better but I would hesitate to scrap the current laws until this "better" version is already in place because we ARE talking about people dying in the meantime.

Actually a great many American libertarians while claiming to hate slavery and indeed claiming their entire philosophy is built on preventing it- fully support indentured servitude, because apparently if you are truly free you should be free to be allowed to become a slave.

Which is why they oppose any and all regulation or worker-protection laws... you know the only difference BETWEEN most jobs and indentured servitude.

Us more leftist anarchist look at this and wonder how anybody can fail to see that a job you cannot AFFORD to resign from because the only alternative is to starve is no DIFFERENT from slavery on ANY practical level - and that this IS indentured servitude.
Indeed... this explains why Foxxcon's workers chose to commit suicide in such numbers that the company put safety nets around the buildings. This didn't solve ANY problems - the workers still hated their jobs so much that they would rather die and still chose a quick death by falling over a slow death by starving (aka - quitting their jobs) - they just couldn't do it on company premisses anymore...
Now in a world where business still had any shred of humanity left... if your company was having workers KILL themselves rather than work for you anymore (and genuinely felt that "better" work simply couldn't exist for them) - you would improve your working conditions - EVEN IF that meant making less money yourself.

>There's no technical reason why something like this can't be done. There's lots of other reasons, though.

You mean like the fact that "submerged floating" is an oxymoron ?

>So in your opinion terrorists get a pass on murdering civilians because they have a justifiable grievance?

Where do you draw the line between terrorist and freedom fighter ? As it happened the ANC won in South Africa and did so with the full support of the entire international community including the USA.

Are you not a freedom fighter rather than a terrorist if what you are fighting against is a brutal regime that denies you any human rights whatsoever and have removed any and all legal forms of protest ?

Do I agree with targeting civilians ? No - but the reality is America has killed more civilians in Iraq (and that's just the accidental ones) than the ANC in their entire 30 year campaign.

I would argue that the form their armed struggle took actually prevented their revolt from turning into a full-scale civil war, which would have killed far more people (including many more civilian collateral casualties) - and probably have made it impossible to reach the peaceful negotiated settlement we ultimately did.
Was it a good thing ? No. Was it justified ? Maybe. Was it the least harmful among a lot of bad choices ? Yes.

If you were referring only to the "share intelligence" bit - then yes, I know. I am sure I didn't intend THAT line to be speculative.
If you mean the whole idea - if you have proof that they do I would not be surprised but I haven't seen any conclusive claims to this effect. But then, i'm neither American nor British - I live in a small country in Africa. I cannot be expected to read EVERY American headline.

So pretty much the same stuff that Allied soldiers from the US did in Europe and Japan during World War 2 ?
And again in Nicaragua and Vietnam and Korea and Brazil and ... oh before 9/11 you had deposed 53 different democratically elected governments and replaced them with puppet dictators in various parts of the world and there has yet to be a single war where American soldiers did not make themselves guilty of crimes like rape. Nothing special about you on the latter part- you put a boatload of young boys together, give them guns and fill them with macho-bravado and extreme "do not dare to have a brain" discipline - you will BREED at least a few mad-ass rapist and cold-blooded killers in the process - every military does.

Since 9/11 you made a refreshing change from the past, just to be different, and to show how much feminism has advanced your society - you had soldiers both male and female committing torture and sexual assault against MALE prisoners of war in places like Abu Ghraib.

Sorry pal - but while there is a LOT wrong with the Saudis and there was plenty wrong with Satan Hussain - you'll do a lot better if you focus on stuff that your own actually do BETTER.

Seriously - you saying that is like if me (a South African white who lived through the 1980's) start complaining because the ANC used to bomb restaurants and ignore the fact that they only started doing that because the NP government liked to arrest anybody who spoke against the apartheid policies and most of those arrested were tortured and killed in prison (which rather removed the desirability of peaceful protest).

It's like pointing out the Church street bomb and forgetting about Steve Biko.

The real simple truth: fundamentalism in all forms is a grave evil: this INCLUDES the fundamentalism of honor, duty and discipline hammered in by EVERY military force ever.

There's no such thing as an honorable army - the very concept is a contradiction in terms - such a thing does not and CANNOT ever exist. The best you ever get in wars is where one REGIME is so evil that whatever atrocities your army commits on the way to destroying theirs and the regime could be considered an acceptable loss because the other side would be so much WORSE if they win. That's what you had in such extremely rare cases as World War 2.

Of course they TELL you that about EVERY war, but in all but the rarest of cases - it's just not true.

In the entire 20th century Carter was your ONLY president who didn't find an excuse to bomb SOMEBODY. That's ONE - in a hundred years !

Here's the way I would do it if I was them - and I would be surprised if they didn't. I'm simplifying a bit but include the pieces like "without a court order" and such for yourself.

MI6 isn't allowed to spy on British citizens.
The NSA isn't allowed to spy on Americans.
But Britain and America are allies.
So MI6 let's the NSA spy in Britain and looks the other way.
The NSA lets MI6 spy in America and looks the other way.
Afterwards, like good allies, they "share intelligence" and now MI6 has all the surveillance data the NSA gathered in Britain, and the NSA has everything MI6 gathered in the USA.

Repeat for all US allies (and any other government they can strong-arm).

Result: massive world-wide surveillance of all citizens in virtually all countries -all without a single agency every breaking the "do not spy on your own citizens" rules if they have them.

I can vouch for this - I'm one of those people.

For some odd reason... I haven't been phoned by a telemarketer in months. I can't imagine why.

Not to mention the original linux kernel was written in Finland.
Many other free software projects are likewise non-American. Hell OpenBSD is developed by a South African living in Canada.

All the time.
In fact - I've seen three different species of them on a regular basis.

Then again - I live in Africa where there are three living wild bovine species that are all doing just fine and in no current danger of extinction.

We have a one-time-password generator in our customer machines, so that tech support can get root access but the customers themselves can not (part of the SLA - we agree to keep the boxes up no matter what, they agree not to fuck around with root)

I won't deny that it happens in some places, but it certainly doesn't happen here. In fact we take those default settings and hard-code them to make this even less likely.
We even have a bootscript that locks root on every reboot, and another hook in our build-scripts to relock it everytime you build our code, basically - even if people unlock it, it won't be unlocked for long - and if somebody changes that, well git blame means it won't be a secret...

Most desktop Linux distros (the kind most coders who run it use) no longer HAVE a root account enabled, it's generally locked by default, and you would have to forceably go and set one to use it.

I can't speak for other people but I have only ever done this in very specific scenarios on my machine where I CANNOT use sudo (i.e. I want to move my /home to a new larger hard drive - this means I need to be able to unmount it - which means my normal account cannot be logged int)... considering it's "sudo passwd root", move mountpoint, remount, passwd -l root, exit or I have to "THE HORROR" reboot my machine after updating fstab ... yeah, I consider that an acceptable risk.

Which is what the parent poster was assuming, and I was trying to disprove.

Actually - cattle, pigs, chickens and sheep exist today in far greater numbers than they would have without farming.
Conclusion: being tasty to humans is an evolved survival trait (from the point of view of the species, not the individual)