It seems they want to make a feature film of it and need support. So, go and buy it or something. Now.

What with all the news of web and media restrictions currently in Iran I have temporarily unblocked my Web Proxies in solidarity. (Usually I block Iranian IP addresses as they eat up resources and there is no ad revenue to be had). It’s always possible my proxies are now blocked by their government, but we’ll see.

In other thoughts, some kind of peer to peer wireless network is needed to prevent Iran and other countries (who knows what idiocy will be thought up by the British government and other so called “free” countries in the name of counter-terrorism) from censoring information. Complete decentralisation is required. Terranet were in the news at one point, but they haven’t really taken off, and I’m not sure what their goals really are.

Such a network would undoubtedly be slow as treacle (have you ever used Freenet?), but provided the main content is pure text, and nodes do plenty of caching, something should be possible. And anything is better than nothing! Heck, even if messages and text pages took a few hours to trickle through and download, it’s still uncensored information.

Maybe currently existing tech can be subverted. A new mobile phone firmware, perhaps, if they are capable of phone-to-phone communications. Maybe some kind of long range wifi.

Having said that, for widespread adoption, you really want something incredibly simply to use, a dedicated gadget, not a hacked mobile that only a geek can set up. Mass production of self contained hardware nodes is required.

I guess too, if these devices had a use in the western world, and become indispensable here, they would eventually trickle through to other countries too. The obvious selling point would be the absence of a subscription fee – no cabling, no satellite, no nothing required. Free information, information for free.

[Maybe I have missed something though, I'm happy to be corrected. *scared of being called racist*]

So as far as I can see, this “racism” label seems to be mostly media frenzy, and a distraction from some of their other policies:

We support the re-introduction of corporal punishment for petty criminals and vandals, and the restoration of capital punishment for paedophiles, terrorists and murderers as an option for judges in cases where their guilt is proven beyond dispute, as by DNA evidence or being caught red-handed.

Corporal punishment? They want to return Britain to the middle ages?

And reintroduce the death penalty? A person who in cold blood, can sentence another to death, can have no ability of empathy. To sentence a person to death is the ultimate absence of compassion.

If you cannot consider another person’s feelings or viewpoint, you should not be in government.

Not to mention the many other reasons against the death penalty.

But really, for all those reasons listed on that link by amnesty, for me it boils down to:

Someone who supports the death penalty can kill in cold blood.

And is not just able to club someone over the head who did not expect it, but would sentence someone to wait on death row for months or years, to contemplate their upcoming death. Then to chain someone down, with no hope of escape or redemption, while a lethal injection or electrocution or some such is administered. If it was carried out by a crazed psycho in a horror movie it would be considered sick and twisted. Torture.

So do death penalty supporters simply lack empathy, the ability to imagine themselves in such a situation? Or are they able to empathise, yet support this torture anyway?

You get questions written in bad grammar with lots of spelling mistakes, where the person uses a roundabout route and the wrong terms to ask how to do something. But that’s not a dumb question; this person is just a bad typist and is not all that technically inclined.

The dumb question is that one short sentence phrased in perfect English. Asking how to do the obvious, the one thing that the entire interface is streamlined to make as simple and easy as possible.

“Hi, how do I record my voice?”

(at least provide some information about how you have failed in your attempts so far… grr!)

“Most of the cleverest people I ever met were the ones who did middling but despised the system”

Not implying anything, of course. Ho hum.