Read the e-mail. He said that he believes Minsky did it, but that the underage victim may have been, quote, "entirely willing", and so it wasn't sexual assault.

RMS has been tone-deaf and unnecessarily confrontational before and I've always been willing to look past it, because of all the things he's done in the past, but this is too much. Really.

Thank you for an insightful comment. I think history has shown that RMS is probably somewhere along the autism scale.

The question is if it is very beneficial for the Free Software movement to have a figurehead who can't seem to stop himself from saying incredibly tone-deaf things.

I mean, in a way it's admirable that he wanted to defend Minsky. But to say that the child Minsky had sex with may have been "entirely willing" is -- unintentionally, I'm sure -- cruel and nauseating and an extremely inappropriate thing to say, and even if there is a mental disability that explains it, you can't be an effective spokesperson for a community when you do that kind of thing.

He did not choose "due process". Just read his e-mail. He wrote that he sees no reason to disbelieve that Minsky has sex with a trafficked child.

He then goes on to claim, weirdly, that the child may have been "entirely willing". Which I find sickening.

Also I don't think it's particularly effective for the leader of the Free Software community to volunteer opinions like that from out of nowhere.

I think RMS has said and written brilliant things, but you can't be an effective representative of Free Software and at the same time defend child abuse, and put a sign on your office door about "hot ladies". There is no way that that combination works.

What facts? He said 200 plugs would cost a million dollars. If I had to guess I'd say he is confusing regular chargers with superchargers.

How on earth would that cost a million dollars?

My charging station cost less than $1000, fully installed. Which I am making back because people pay to use it (about double what I pay for the power).

All you need is some financing to pay the $1000 up front if you don't have it.

And as for public spaces -- London is adding connectors to streetlights. Two plugs on every streetlight. Wires are already there. Easy.

Indeed. Not coincidental, I think, is the fact that this "investigation" is clearly a partisan political move to try to shift blame to Democratic state governors.

All so cynical. If only they had spent as much energy on fighting this thing, as they are on shifting blame and pointing fingers.

DoH as implemented by Firefox is a bad idea. They are "stopping local and intermediate eyes from prying" by sending the good stuff directly to an untrusted third party (Cloudflare).

This is not an improvement, and, if you are in a jurisdiction with better privacy protection than the US, it is a significant privacy deterioration.

What's baffling is why Mozilla chose to give this gift to Cloudflare. Hopefully they got something in return.

Wow. You still believe this?

Even if you take the political chaos caused by social media disinformation out of the equation -- are you OK with all the people getting medical advice from fraudsters on Facebook?

I used to believe it too, back in the day. Unfettered free speech for everybody would lead to a great society where truth was available to all.

Turns out, truth is drowned out in a sea of bullshit. And it hurts. It's dangerous. We absolutely need to move away from giving everyone the same megaphone. There are too many evil people and too many stupid people to make it work.

Comparing these numbers will only make sense after all the dead are counted. By all appearances, the USA is just behind the curve and is set to be hit by a pretty big wave of cases.

That's a pretty weak distinction. What was it about the "Democrat response" that was a hoax? Their correct claim that this was serious and the president needed to do something?

Crying "Fake News" only goes so far. He was saying these things literally on twitter.

Scroll back to March 9, less than three weeks ago, when he was still saying the flu was worse and it was all no big deal.

You are deflecting criticism of Trump by calling it "frothing at the mouth with hate".

IMHO Trump is a uniquely bad president who is clearly in it for himself, and himself only. Also, he is not very smart, so he gets caught lying and stealing a lot. So yes, there is a non-stop stream of criticism, but that is not blind hatred, it is, mostly, valid criticism.

Seriously? He called the virus a hoax, cooked up by the Democrats and the Chinese to harm his re-election.

He encouraged people to go out and ignore the virus. He called it "just like the flu". He is threatening to withhold help from states whose governors criticize him personally.

Now, he is saying the country will be open again by Easter. In other words, he is signalling to people not to take this seriously ALL THE TIME. Many deaths will result.

Enough for you?

This is called "fake independence" and laws have been created to deal with that, too.

And, of course, promote some posts over others is exactly what they do, and they should not enjoy those protections. I don't regard them as a simple carrier and there is an urgent need to regulate, especially Facebook which is a threat to society in its current form.

Should Facebook be liable when millions of people take dangerous medical advice from some quack's Facebook page that Facebook has been repeatedly notified of but refused to take down --- and that they show prominently because it is so popular?

I think they should.