That's it really. Tripping. Or a religion.

So you jumped on the bed, caused a huge frigging volcanic eruption and managed to get away with it all. Nicely played.

If you can work from your car, you can probably work from home. Yes yes, sometimes people need to meet. Funkelectric's rule of work: You need to meet less often than you think, even taking into account Funkelectric's rule of work.

The social nature can go many ways. It has often become ugly throughout history, but it can be a beautiful thing too. I know quite a few people whose beliefs I may not share (but then, beliefs are private), whose outlook on life and most importantly, the deeds of whom I greatly admire. Happily, they seem content to take strength from their faith in private without the need to ostracise.

My personal epiphany was the observation that religion and place of birth are highly correlated. It seemed fairly arbitrary at the age of 10 and still does. It has not made me into an atheist though. People from many walks of life are on a righteous road.

No, what you are old enough to remember is a media scare based on amplifying the predictions of a few scientific papers, and one that didn't even make sense given that most of the scientific papers coming out at that time predicted warming . The moral of this story is not that climate science is untrustworthy but that that you should not rely on the media for news about science.

Sure, but that's irrelevant to my point that it is an abuse of the term "rob" to say that someone is asking to be "robbed" merely because they are asking to pay more in taxes in exchange for (theoretically) better government services.

Given that the word "rob" implies that something is being taken involuntarily, referring to people voluntarily calling for themselves to pay more in taxes as asking themselves to be "robbed" doesn't imply that you are old and cynical so much as senile.

The ICC has no jurisdiction to judge people in Israel and the U.S. because they are not parties to the treaty founding it.

The focal question in your previous post seemed to be At what point, exactly, do I cross the line on what I say?. That is an impossible question to answer. Libel and slander and parody and indeed abusive verbiage cannot be unambiguously defined, they need to be seen in context, and yes, a lot of that is and will (especially when concerning online behaviour) be tackled in common law. That is an ongoing process, but will never lead to a nice leaflet of bullet points to guide one through lilfe. One needs to be a fairly abusive person however to cross enough gray area in order to go to jail. So, it is not about crossing a line, it is about crossing a sufficient amount of gray area. Similar arguments can be made regarding stalking. When is behaviour stalking? There is no straight answer. And no, you would never go to jail for saying that Clegg is a bastard. On Slashdot there seems to be a sentiment that any repercussions following from abusive online behaviour somehow represent an assault on free speech. It seems to be a geek impediment of all-or-nothing binary thinking. I am not equating your post with this view, but it ties in with the gray areas. It is OK to protest/get angry/slam/mock/whatnot online. But downright abusiveness and targeted bullying is not. As an aside, my remark "how hard is that grasp" did not contribute to the debate - apology.

Yes, there are gray areas. How hard is that to grasp? In the very dark-gray areas one is bound go get in trouble, in the light-gray areas one is not. The light-gray area is likely a waste of the judicial process, the dark-gray area quite likely is not. It's just like real life, no wait, it is real life. Parody and mockery are allowed. Abuse is something else. Slander and libel are something else. There is no hard-cast algorithm to decide which is which, that's why people get involved.

If you are a weirdo disturbing a memorial in a public square, you might be held accountable and face the consequences. Seriously, why do people assume a right to behave like a dog on the internet?

Indeed, that single quote in the context of the situation has told me enough about Skype to prevent me from even thinking about ever working there in the future.

Making it clear that you will screw over employees who will not stay with you indefinitely since you are out to "win" is not only a horrible attitude towards life, it isn't even a good way to attract "the best and the brightest people to build great products" because most such people get bored working on the same products for a few years and will want to move on to new challenges, so if you make it clear that anyone who decides to move on will be screwed over then you are basically saying, "If you are the best and brightest then don't work here because we don't want the likes of you!"