I'm sorry, but no issue is black and white like that. There is a gray area because two human rights are in conflict on issues such as these: freedom of speech and freedom from discrimination. In most countries, including Australia, limitations are put on freedom of speech specifically to address this issue.
You can support laws such as these without being 'against freedom of speech'. After all, the very first article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." Both this and article 19 (freedom of opinion and expression) must be supported, and when they are in conflict, a balance must be found.
We all know that the UN is retarded. By increasing the penalties for crimes motivated by discrimination against selected groups, you imply that crimes motivated by discrimination against groups that haven't been so selected are less severe. If someone went around and started killing geeks because they hated us collectively, they'd be less heavily punished than if they were targeting a protected group, such as Christians. Is that fair?
The point of hate speech / hate crime laws isn't that crimes motivated by discrimination are worse. It's that they affect the whole group. If I kill you because I want your money, then you and your friends and family suffer the consequences. If I kill you because you're gay, Christian, black, Jewish, female, or whatever, then in addition to the effects on you and your friends and family everyone else who's part of the same group feels just that bit more afraid and that bit less able to be themselves; and everyone else who hates that same group gets just that bit more inspiration to go out and do likewise.
Unless you give this zero weight and think every reasonable person should do otherwise, then I do not think you have any excuse for saying that approving of hate-crime laws means being "against freedom of speech".
(Unless by "you are against freedom of speech" you mean "you think that there might be other considerations that sometimes justify limiting freedom of speech". In which case every reasonable person is "against" just about everything.)
There is no hate-crime legislation making it extra-bad to kill geeks because there aren't a bunch of malefactors out there killing geeks. It's arguable that hate-crime laws should be written in a more general way, instead of calling out particular discriminated-against groups, but if you'd accept that then congratulations, you're "against freedom of speech" in your own terms.
Well, for one, me. Racism even on a joke site is still racist. As far as I'm concerned, and I know I'm not alone, racism is not acceptable in any form.
Almost every joke relies on a some social preconception or stereotype... nationality and race are only some of the characteristics you can choose from. What can you find on that site that is worse than what you can see on South Park or any popular movies? It seems like a double standard that a page (which you have to look for) which contains obviously only bad jokes is somehow worse than half-serious stuff on TV (directly advertised and explicitly approved by a local company).
Jokes aren't racist just because they mention a 'race'. The 'race' in a particular article in the Encyclopedia Dramatica can easily be substituted by another, even an 'opposite', 'race' and the article would still make as much sense. If that is the case, the 'race' isn't an integral part of the joke and it isn't racism.
That's why you don't visit sites like that. No visitors means no money, unless someone is digging into their pockets to pay for the thing (quite possible, of course, and I have no idea how ED gets their money).
Please note RFC 2396, which defines URI's, and in particular section 1.5, which details the importance of a URI scheme that can be written on a paper napkin by hand.
Well, that's solved easily enough: upvote it, and if nothing changes, flag it away. It seems very unlikely that this has any merit, but since nobody else has posted the results I'll do it, in the name of science!
I'd guess that there are actually far more open source clients than closed-source. The author's asking in particular for a Cocoa email client, which Thunderbird is not, but I don't really see why that's an important factor.
MMORPGs and RTSs aren't directly comparable. Due to nature of the genre there's no long-term reward possible in RTSs outside of self-improvement, whereas this is generally the focus of RPGs, massive and online or not.
Choice quote: Ballmer reiterated the statement in an interview with Reuters. "We're attacked every day from all parts of the world and I think everybody else is too. We didn't see anything out of the ordinary," he told the news service. "There are attacks every day. I don't think there was anything unusual, so I don't understand"
It's an attempt to spin the discourse to one of "Google's can't handle the standard operating environment" rather than "Google took a principled stand." Nothing more, nothing less.
This post doesn't say anything. "Corporate America needs a centralized version control system because it needs [features of centralized version control systems]", but without explanation of why they need it.
