From RT:
http://rt.com/politics/177248-...

Such authors will now have to register with the state watchdog Roskomnadzor, disclose their real identity and follow the same rules as journalists working in conventional state-registered mass media.

  The restrictions include the demand to verify information before publishing it and abstain from releasing reports containing slander, hate speech, extremist calls or other banned information such as, for example, advice on suicide. Also, the law bans popular bloggers from using obscene language, drawing heavy criticism and mockery from the online crowd.

So.., now you're not legally allowed to lie to a large number of people or incite violence based on those lies. Gee. That's bad how? Might be nice to have something like that in the West, because right now it's perfectly legal for FOX News to outright lie to their viewers.

Russia, like any large nation the US hates, (see Venezuela) must defend against the standard CIA tactics used to de-stabilize governments and population bases through grass roots propaganda tactics. Forcing creeps and liars out of the game seems like a pretty good way to do this. You don't want to be forced out? Then follow the law and back up your claims with fact checking verification of what you are writing, don't use hate speech and don't incite violence. How hard is that?

There's a reason you're not allowed to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater, and this falls neatly beneath the same rubric.

Honestly, think of the gossips and cruel kids in school spreading lies in deliberate attempts to undermine healthy energies. Putin has the guts to whip the carpet out from under such types.

So now, once you reach 3000 readers, the Russian government says you are a news source with real pull and must start acting in a manner befitting such responsibility. Is 3000 the right magic number to have picked? I don't know, but it makes perfect sense to draw a line somewhere.

Of course, any law can be abused, but right now I don't see this as an abuse. I see it as a sensible measure as Russia is under increasing media attack by a truly psychopathic nation whose leadership is completely disconnected from objective reality, has a tail-spinning economy and seemingly bottomless war lust. Of course you have to take measures to protect your populace from that kind of sickness.

But naturally, this proactive move is being spun with wicked and/or childish glee in the West (depending on whether you are CIA or just ignorant and easily led).

Sweet Jesus, it's true.

And he even brought up that 97% turkey.

AGW True Believers are the quintessential "Correlation != Causation" offenders.

Except I wasn't talking about gas emissions from volcanoes.

I was talking about the basic frequency of volcanic and geologic activity. Let's just say "Earthquakes" so we can stay clear of preconceptions.

Earthquake frequency is steadily rising, and this, among the other non-emission related items indicated, are tightly linked to the climate change events we are experiencing today.

People are clinging to the belief that climate change MUST be our fault, and therefore is also within our power to fix.

It isn't.

As for reading about sun spots. . , I suggest you do some.

if you have a family going to the cinema is not going to cost 8$, it's going to be at least 24$, or more if you buy the overpriced snacks and drinks.

If you use https to write from the gmail web interface to another gmail account (read via https and the web interface) the email is already encrypted, and you can be sure that nobody except for google (and some governments) can read it. Even if google started to encrypt email sent to other providers you couldn't trust them not to read your email before encryption (and forward it to said governments, of course).

Or you could encrypt your email with e.g. gnupg or one of its frontends, and send it through any server knowing that nobody below the big-country/big-mafia level could read it, and those who can are going to spend money doing so, and thus should only do it if they really need it.

Not strictly true: if you wrote an elaborate statement to affirm that hydrogen is the element with the least mass you would probably have copyright *on the statement*, just not on the hydrogen fact. This is how you have copyright on e.g. science books, which are basically based on the explanation of facts (and why you can take said facts and put them on wikipedia, but you can't copy the actual phrasing of the book).

Actually, back then commoners tended to be able to read and write, at least to some extent (enough to scribble profanity on the walls, at least), and you even had many chances to hear many books read aloud, if you cared.

The Alexandria example is not applicable today, however, mostly because back then the act of copying was expensive (both in materials and time), while today it is extremely cheap, suggesting a totally different method of dissemination.

The problem I see with a 20 year copyright term instead of life of the author is that I worry about delayed (mass) publishing and expecially derivative works.

E.g. somebody writes a relatively successful book, which sells just enough to cover expenses and make a very modest living, and is then left to fade into oblivion; exactly 20 years later a blockbuster movie gets made, which also promotes further sales of the original book, but the original author doesn't see any money.

This is why I believe that there should be a short time (5-20 years from publication) of full copyright protection followed by a longer term (life of the author) of limited control that covers for-profit copying and derived works, but gives more permissions for non-profit activities, expecially for "abandonware" works.

To keep Disney happy, corporations and heirs may even be able to pay for extensions on the copyright protection for a work indefinitely, but at a progressively growing rate, and as long as they keep them available to the public, so that they can keep control of the few huge selling ones, but society gets to benefit from everything else.

My very dumb, 25€ phone features an alarm clock; it won't update itself for DST or timezone change, but it won't even fail every morning after a DST change, like certain other smart phones.
It also has a simple calculator, and a very useful led torchlight.
It has survived drops, being wet, consumes quite little (I recharge about once a week its 700mAh, 3.7V battery) and fits in every pocket.

On the other hand, I also usually have some other internet capable non-phone device with me: it used to be a netbook, now it is a pandora: those need more power, of course, but I'm able to turn them off when not in use (not just in a standby status that allows them to receive calls), and I can use them dry when needed, knowing that in any small emergency I still have the phone for important communcations.

It may be reasonable in a movie, expecially an older and/or low cost one: painting an actor blue is much easier than building and animating a credible model of an outworldy alien, expecially one that is not supposed to be just a ravaging monster.

Books, on the other hand, are another matter.

Not really, accordingly to the catholic church to marry you MUST be willing to have sex, since "entering marriage with the intention of never having children is a grave wrong and more than likely grounds for an annulment." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_marriage#View_of_Catholic_Church

Of course, the church position would be that you ONLY had sex with your spouse, which in theory would work in preventing the spread of HIV, but in practice has never been followed enough to prevente the spread of STD, and won't probably ever.

Not really. Horse is one of the few animals whose meat becomes softer with age and exercise; in the countries where horse is eaten the best cuts tended to come from racehorses who had to be killed because of injuries. I don't know if it is still possibile to eat them, however, because of the different regulation on medicinal use.

I'm too in the very rarely camp.

Most of my emails are sent to public mailing lists, so crypto wouldn't make sense, but I try to sign at least some of those, so that people know I have a gpg key.
A good percentage of the rest are trivial enough that there is no need to bother encrypting. I do take a point to send at least some encrypted message now and then, just so that the few really private ones don't stick out as much. Most of what I encrypt for that reason are mildly NSFW links sent to friends (and the encryption works as a nice NSFW reminder, bonus point).

The fact that lots of my friends are nerds, and a significant part is somewhat related to the debian project and thus have to have a key of course helps.

I use mutt, so I just had to create a key, configure it once and now I can choose to crypt and/or sign with just two keypresses (a graphical client whould use a pair of checkboxes). Sign check and decrypting is usually automatic (after I've entered a passphrase in the second case, of course), or rarely requires a single keypress.

For people who use webmail, there is a gpg implementation as a chrome extension at http://gpg4browsers.recurity.com/ which looks promising, and any other email client could implement an easy interface to gpg/pgp, if there was enough request.

This leaves out the scenario where you use a computer you don't own to check email, but you don't want to use it for confidential data anyway (and encrypting confidential messages would allow you to quickly check your other email with less worries).