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Comment by 01Michael10 | Hacker News Reader

The EFF rocks! It kills me that 90% of the public has little understanding of most things the EFF does for them...

I am thinking of making a new donation to the EFF today to help with this great cause ---> https://supporters.eff.org/donate <--- Who is joining me?

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-NSA

It does seem like just a matter of time before the EFF becomes a "known terrorist organization" like WikiLeaks is about to become.

IANAl but my understanding is that the current lines are drawn at active collaboration or directed communications to a designated foreign terrorist organization. I don't know whether this means that Brandenburg v. Ohio would come out differently today (remember, Brandenburg was accused of advocating terrorism at a domestic terrorist organization's meetings-- the domestic terrorism organization being the KKK, and yes the word terrorism occurred in the statute).

Under lines drawn in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project you can blog all day and night about how groups like Hamas could adopt nonviolent means of resistance and be more successful, but if you directly talk to Hamas and make such a recommendation, then the court has declined to say that is protected.

Worse, there is reason to think that is not protected. In Citizens United v. FEC the court said that independent expenditures were protected and corporations had a right to speak on election issues, but that speech coordinated in any way with candidates was not protected, because that makes it into a gift in kind that has the same effect, in essence, of a bribe. The idea that Citizens United and Holder v. HLP draw this funny line at who you talk to vs what you say strikes me as dangerous.

But at least it isn't hard for the EFF to stay on the right side of that line.

Maybe not a "known terrorist organization" but part of the "associated forces". The more vague the name in the law, the better, because they can catch anyone like that.

Apparently, the NSA is already spying on all of us...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4259441

I've been wondering why humorous comments are so rare on HN, and this one just got downvoted. Is there a rule that comments should be serious?

Anyway this was at least half serious so not a good example I suppose.

I think that many people post jokes here because on other similar sites they're an easy way to get (often quite a lot of) upvotes, and a lot of us here dislike that mentality.

My criteria for upvoting a joke are generally the same as my criteria for upvoting any other comment: if I feel it adds something to the discussion, it gets an upvote. If I feel like it contributes nothing at all, it gets a downvote, because reading it is a waste of someone's time.

Most of the jokes posted here are surface humor. They are relatively obvious and add nothing to the discussion, and so I downvote quite a lot of them.

Occasionally someone will use humor to make a good point, and then I will upvote them. In general I'd discourage it, though--it's usually much easier and clearer to just say what you mean, and people here are usually receptive to well-argued points.

There's a post from pg that I wish I could find where he says something along the lines of "the greatest enemy of intelligent discussion is not the outright troll but the witty one-liner". There's no rule against humour that I know of, but there is a culture that believes it's often detrimental to the discussion.

Because it's not funny - it's just a silly, hyperbolic meme.

I've had funny comments upvoted (and a few I thought were funny downvoted, but c'est la vie).

( I always liked this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=458155 )

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