Extremists? Is that what you call anyone who isn't a sexist like you? And what does SRS have to do with anything? I left reddit to get away from the r/mensrights freaks like you so you might want to keep your bullshit there.
If you're working as a company representative, either in retail or customer service or answering the NSA hotline, then listening to questions and complaints is exactly what you were hired to do. If you take those complaints personal then you should find another line of work.
>That Twitter would hand over your identifying information because they don't like the contents of your tweets?
Twitter refused to hand over the data until the French court forced them to.
>The idea that governments can prohibit the written expression of thoughts and ideas?
I have no problem with governments prohibiting hate speech. I have never felt suppressed by these laws because I have never felt the need to express hate speech online or offline.
> "But others who have just as much rights as you and do want to send out distasteful tweets DO feel suppressed."
Good. The majority of people in my country agree that living in a respectful society is more important than having the freedom to say things that you wouldn't want to say. You can find that overly restrictive but then so are traffic lights, queues at the supermarket, clothing, and doors.
>Or was it the distasteful tweets of some bigots (or perhaps more likely, just unfunny and immature people) about the jews?
We switched from Linode to http://www.cloudvps.com last year because they are in my home town here in The Netherlands and the prices are almost half of Linode's. We have some high traffic websites running with them and have had no problems so far.
According to their latest tax returns Facebook and Apple have a net loss in the US so if anything they should pay the government a commission for sending customers to their more profitable offices in Ireland and the Caribbean.
I don't believe ideas are inherently good or bad. A lot also depends on timing and execution. Twitter turned out to be a great idea, but I don't think there are many people who could have pulled it off the way Jack Dorsey and his cohorts did.
I think it's time we give up on the idea of communicating privately over a centralized network. Wiretapping was invented only a few years after the invention of the telephone[1]. It won't be stopped by technology and certainly not by legislation. People need to get used treating the Internet as a public space: cover your mouth when you cough, don't pick your nose in public and don't communicate sensitive information over the Internet.
The next big thing (hopefully soon) will be communication through a decentralized, infrastructure-less device.
We lack the budget because that's the government we voted for. And the reason we don't spend a third of our budget on defense is not because we can't but because we don't want to.
I'm glad we don't have a mass-surveillance system and I would like to keep it that way. I don't get this attitude of "we're no better so who cares". What the US government does in the US is their business and what ours does here is our business, but when a foreign government starts spying on me that pisses me off. I wonder what your reaction would be if it was China reading your emails.
Facebook and Google have always been the least transparent imaginable AND they're both in damage control mode AND they're obviously under some DHS gag order. So why anyone would give any credence to a word they say is beyond me.
>If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that.
Well then finally we can all agree that Monsanto is detrimental to the development of GMOs. No one is claiming that Monsanto is "waiting for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields", so that might explain why you can't find any evidence of it.
What people do have a problem with, is a patent troll and a litigious one at that. That's what Monsanto is and there are plenty of cases to prove it: