Is the story here that they are censoring something or that they are not? Because if it were the latter, I'd be sad. Do we assume that for social networks to censor communications on recent politically grave events is the default now?
I'm sorry to beat a dead horse, but I had a couple of arguments against your initial post that I still find valid, and that haven't been made yet. So please, pardon my late and probably obsolete commentary. My points are two:
1) While you were arguing for the 'safety of your children,' you don't see that the only threat against your children is being abused by the neighbours. They could just as easily be abused by the state. Given your (hypothetical) 15-year old daughter posts nude pictures of herself on the Net (as it is pretty common, I hear) your (hypothetical) 18-year old son decides to have sex with a 16-year old class or school mate or any other relatively innocent action. You would consider the first a 'parenting problem' I guess, but not the police officer/judge. They would put your children on this list, and that's were their names will always be. Googleable, on the list. Is this protecting your children? Maybe they won't be raped, but they will carry a mark of shame — their entire life long.
2) As a European, I am so totally shocked at how Americans can villify people on the sole basis on their past. Say, a person has some sort of mental disorder, or any other kind of illness or social circumstance that played a large part of their decision in, say, raping a woman. They've been to jail now, they're on meds now, they're trying to immerse into society. Trying to be normal people. The sex-offender list is the best way to prohibit just that. They won't get a flat in a decent neighbourhood, they will have a hard time finding a job. But without these two premises, how they ever going to change? Living in a shoddy neighbourhood, working on a shoddy job, how are you going to not believe that you are a social outcast, that this society has done nothing for you, and you owe it nothing in return? In essence: this will make rehabilitation for them somuchharder. Thus, instead of becoming functional members of society, they stay sick; maybe their mental disorder will grow worse, and then they're not a time bomb in your neighbourhood. They're off the leash in your entire town.
The key to safety is rehabilitation of ex-criminals, and making them feel like a member of society again. Not demonizing them and putting them on a social landfill.
Awful, be cause it looks awful. Well designed, because that's gotta be one of the most clearly laid out sites I've ever seen on the Internet. You can find everything you want and that is of relevance to start getting involved in Perl 6. The download button is right there, but surrounded by things you ought to know first (about the Perl 6 community, documentation, and current efforts.) All in all, the site looks incredibly inviting to new people, and represents a nice 'odd-one-out' from the typical stuff you see on the web. You know, stuff that tries to look fancy, or cramp as much irrelevant information as possible into site.
Given that what Perl 6 now needs is new guys to work on the project, this site is nicely done.
Congratulations, Perl 6, if the language looks anything like the site, it will still look just as awful as Perl 5, but it will be much nicer to read and understand.
How about withholding the name still, but offering a way to 'opt-out' from voting. You don't see the name until you either vote up or opt out. After you've withheld your voice, you can't go vote again on that submission/comment.
I think the point of the article was not that he earned a bad reputation for griefing - it was more that people reverted to a rather medieval behaviour when confronted with such a situation. Earning a bad reputation and being denounced as a pedophile are two entirely different things.
If someone farts in your face repeatedly and you go on to punch them or harass them in any way that is considered inappropriate by society, would you say that your actions were 'justified?' To me, that would seem rather biblical, in the negative sense: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
So the point is: we're still in the biblical era of social behaviour: if someone harasses us, we harass back. Though I wouldn't know how to respond 'properly' and in a 'civilized' fashion to such a situation, even though I'm an online gamer myself. In WoW, there's the anti-social practice of 'corpse-camping' someone, and thus killing them repeatedly. In such cases I just log off and play an alt, and let the camper waste his time.
People also weren't obstructed by the computer so much, and the smiley wasn't even invented yet. What I mean by the former is, that I found older books to contain all kinds of very curious typography. Not that I know a lot about it, but I think that the typesetter would in that case just make a custom piece, whereas the early computers certainly didn't have an easy way of embedding arbitrary symbols in text, thereby creating the 'need' for emoticons.
EDIT: that said, I was probably wrong with most of what I said. There's been typographical variants of 'faces' since 1881 or so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley#Typographical_smileys
But note how these differ a lot from what we are 'used' to. And I still doubt they'd been used in that way anyway.
While I haven't really used this particular service, I disagree with your general premise.
I love graphviz, for example. Graphviz is actually quite awesome. I can draw dependency graphs, or any other kind of graph, without touching the mouse. I don't have to care about the layout, and I don't want to, since I'm no designer. Actually I'm quite bad at layouting stuff - and the algorithm gets it right most of the time.
I can quickly change things, insert or delete an element, without having to worry about re-layouting everything myself. So, cut a long story short: doing visual tasks text-based is not a bad thing per se.
Again, I haven't really given this thing a try for long enough, but right now, the text-based interface seems OK for me. But maybe that's just me, being a very text-driven person.
Neat. I'm addicted to vim partly because of its great and very flexible folds. For example, you can completely rewrite the way folds look. I like my folded code to look like its first line would normally look, without any dashes, preserving indentation. So I just rewrote the function (here's a blog post about it: http://a-dimit.blogspot.com/2008/07/folding-in-vim.html)
If you like the semantic nature of these workspace layouts, maybe tiling window management is for you. Pretty much the same thing as screen in terms of how windows get arranged. Try [xmonad](http://xmonad.org) or [dwm/wmii](http://suckless.org)
I find myself using only very few screen sessions because my WM takes care of most of the work, and only use it for persistent applications when I need to shut down X or launch irssi on a remote server, etc.
Nietzsche also hinted at the way moral rules get enforced: you aren't ashamed of your own thoughts, only of someone finding out about them. Basically, this is fear of being exposed.
In our (the Western) society, this is most true for sexual and/or violent thoughts, as well as anti-government or anti-religious thoughts. Particularly when it comes to sexual thoughts, I cannot find a reason for holding back any of them.
> In my Linux days I'd just make a copy of /etc and my home directory and that was always enough to get a new machine, install Debian, run a few aptitude commands, restore /etc and move on.
Even better: go make a VCS-repo for your /etc. It's absolutely great.
I have /etc in a git repo, and an hourly cron job to commit whatever there is to be committed (I should probably use icrod instead of cron, but right now, I'm too lazy.) That way you can fix mistakes that got introduced sometime in the past, and you can see the diffs between different versions of your configuration. Of course, it has the same benefit of being able to just clone the configuration on another machine.
EXCEPT, you also get to set up different branches for different hosts, if you need that, but that might be overdoing it already.
Seriously, try keeping more stuff under VCS. I use it for my ~/, my most important dotfiles, and /etc. Great thing.
(Sorry for blatant OT)