Yes, spitting on someone is illegal.

Fun game: stand on a busy street corner and spit on everyone who walks by. If you're arrested before you're crippled, you win.

Anyway I stand corrected.

There are no physical consequences to being spat on by a healthy person (if they are sick and do so knowingly to infect you, that is completely different). It is an insult, a grotesque one, but an insult none the less, and should be treated as such by law.

That is not necessarily true. Commission of verbal assault can land a person in jail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words_doctrine#United_...

The fighting words doctrine, in United States constitutional law, is a limitation to freedom of speech as granted in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In its 9-0 decision, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), the U.S. Supreme Court established the doctrine and held that "insulting or 'fighting words,' those that by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" are among the "well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech [which] the prevention and punishment of...have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem."

the test for battery is that you harmfully or offensively touched someone or something on them

i think spitting would fall under both for most juries..

From the HN guidelines:

"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

Would you prefer to be spat on instead?

I'm beginning to suspect my writing style is prone to misunderstanding, though. C'est la vie.

You've been bravely standing behind your words, even in the face of the "public shaming" of so many downmods. That's respectable.

Besides, should a downvote be used to express mere disagreement, or reserved for posts that one thinks are really inappropriate or maybe jarringly stupid?

In any case, I agree that insulting someone or calling them names should not be a crime, and that spitting on someone shouldn't be considered an "assault" (with the provisions you mentioned).

Under some interpretations of US law, a 22 year old taking nude photo's of them self could be prosecuted for creating child porn if they look 16.

I think if you asked a thousand people off the street:

Is that accurate? Is that moral? Is that a travesty of justice? Is that reasonable?

You would get yes, no, and sort of to all of those questions and it's not really a "major" hot topic.

I do wish those guidelines had something about why to mod up or down, though. Modding something down or up simply because you happen to agree, regardless of the quality or validity of the argument presented, will also lead to boring reading - the majority view, endlessly repeated, since it's the only "safe" thing to post.

To the trusting souls who upvoted this show of sincerity: what he did next was write a program to spam the site with 545 identical comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Arrington

In defense of the site though, your initial downmodded comment was rather condescending and showed a lack of knowledge of the area. Responding to someones idea with "Huh? You really think that?" isn't very respectful and it shows a certain amount of arrogance. Arrogance is frowned upon pretty heavily here. It doesn't add anything to the discussion when you are correct and is just plain obnoxious when you are wrong. Be humble about what you know, ask questions about what you don't, and provide logical arguments for what you think. That's a big part of what sets this site apart from a lot of the other sites like it.

I assume you're a moderator - although they're much appreciated by myself, these well-written tips will just get lost in the noise here. You might consider adding them to the FAQ yourself : )

For example, saying: "I can't believe you people are downmodding me." will most likely just cause people to pile on and punish you.

But saying: "To those downmodding me, if you think I meant this, I really meant that." or "Just to clarify, I meant it this way." will often defuse a misunderstanding and cause people to at least put you back up to 1.

Really the key is to be civil. It's rare that someone gets dogpiled just for dissenting. However, if you dissent in a rude manner, people are tempted to see how negative one comment can get.

Spot on about the expedient solution to seeing something you don't like, though.

As noted it is illegal in most countries.

"I don't understand what you mean, anyway. [...] What would he have to do to make you finally relinquish your sympathy?"

Something a great deal worse than writing articles that do not much interest me. I find it incomprehensible that someone could find a matter of mere taste to be sufficient justification for a crime.

"And one more thing - the man who spat in his face may be contemptible, but it doesn't doesn't fit my model of how "cowards" behave either."

Your definition of bravery is not one I have any respect for then.

I don't remember defining bravery anywhere? I simply said that in my opinion, most "cowards" don't consummate their cowardice by walking up to big guys (Arrington is a big guy) and spitting on them.

Anyone motivated enough to take an "extreme" action against someone else (eg spitting on them) could be argued that they are not necessarily in a right frame of mind and more or less going to do it regardless of circumstances.

Exhibit A - the guy who threw shoes at then President Bush.. there were secret service all over that place.

Without knowing who did it, or for what reason, I'd be fairly confident in betting that at no point did Michael's size come into the equation.