austerity

Is there a reason to believe such case would have a chance of succeeding? I thought DMCA clearly protects the ISP as long as they forward the complaints to the offending customer?

I wonder what's in it for them? Sending an email should be enough to comply with DMCA. Are they paid by some copyright groups or just being a pushover?

Also that would probably greatly simplify key management as opposed to having 10 apps all wanting you to use their own mechanism every time you move to another device.

Unfortunately so far things are moving in the opposite direction. After Chrome dropped Java support it appears there's no cross-browser way to do reasonably reliable crypto right now.

Somewhat. However there are some marginal benefits such as SSL supporting stronger encryption than what Tor provides, availability of extended validation and the browser being aware of the encryption (secure cookies, same-origin policy, etc.).

Government engages in mass surveillance against its citizens and the only one getting in any trouble whatsoever is the whistleblower who made it publicly known. Checks and balances at work.

How anyone can say with a straight face that Snowden should've stayed and challenged the system via the legal channels when even after the whole thing came to light the "system" shows no sign of remorse much less willingness to change?

I was merely using an example that seemed relevant to this community. The point is someone has decided to use his time to the benefit of others. It seems to me that the fair reward in this case should be proportional to the benefit produced as perceived by the person/people benefiting and not depend in any way on what it took the "provider" to produce.

If you argue that fairness is subjective and utility is king you've already rejected the entire argument about genetic advantage. I would point out though that to define utility you'd still need a definition of what's "good" and with it, very likely, what's "fair" and we are back to square one.

No. I am saying I don't see what it means for this advantage to be fair or unfair.

Even without the author's counterargument the assertion that one's genetics is an unfair advantage strikes me as absurd. Your genetics is not something you've got, but literally a part of what you are. Questioning whether one deserves to be oneself is like asking what's north of the North Pole - just because you can put these words together in a sentence doesn't mean it it makes any sense. Furthermore, intelligence is not a "good" in itself. You earn ("deserve") goods by being useful to others. If a "gifted" individual invents a technology that makes life more comfortable for the unintelligent, does he not deserve a reward regardless of what enabled him to do so?

On a different note, I don't understand how anyone can consider equality of outcome desirable, regardless of whether it's achievable or not. If your outcome is guaranteed to be equal to that of others then it by definition doesn't depend on your own choices. If it's not the ultimate unhuman antiutopian existence I don't know what is.

Why do you think punishing the advertisers is any better? They seem to be even less deserving of it.

Why do people who use the "face the consequences of his actions" argument consider it so self-evident? Accepting an unjust punishment for your good deeds isn't somehow more noble than escaping it. And not just an unjust punishment but an unjust punishment in the hands of the very institution whose corruption you exposed.

Government lecturing us on proper civil disobedience is ironic to put it very mildly.

I've read my share of stuff on SSRI discontinuation, not in the last because I was experiencing it first hand. My point stands. Nothing you mentioned constitutes an addiction.

> Also lack of craving is a ridiculous justification for effectively prescribing substance abuse

What? The justification is improvement of patient's quality of life which is often unacceptably low without the treatment. Blinded by the anti-drug dogma you are unable to see that sometimes the only available alternative is endless suffering.

> these cravings do not qualify these activities as substance abuse.

Strawman. Substance abuse? No. Addictions? Absolutely.

> Drug dependency on SSRI's is a very real thing - I honestly don't see how its any better than an opiate addiction.

Where are you getting this from? Withdrawal syndrome is a minor component in any real addition and is nothing without craving for the substance which is not present with SSRIs. As someone who has experienced both reasonably severe SSRI withdrawal and nicotine addiction I find your comparison ridiculous (no exp with opiates, but it seems safe to assume they aren't better than nicotine).

People looking to set up their own VPN server are missing the point. Your run-off-the-mill hoster is not any more trustworthy than a run-off-the-mill VPN provider so you aren't gaining anything security-wise. In fact you are losing (slightly) by having your traffic exiting the tunnel stick out where with a shared IP extra effort (potentially non-trivial) would be required to tell your traffic apart from that of other users. A subscription with a reputable VPN provider costs less or as much as a VPS with a reputable VPS provider, so you aren't gaining anything cost-wise either.

If you do it for the skillz, sure, but otherwise it's completely pointless.

Edit: Just to make it clear, that wasn't directed at the project here, but at some of the comments in this and other VPN-related threads. Another VPN protocol and implementation is always cool. (although Windows users need love too)

Google customer support is designed to discourage you from using using customer support. I guess that's true for many companies, but Google is excelling at making it a torture.

I am not a native speaker FWIW but "upper" is exactly what I wanted to say. My point was that if you replace football with golf and working class with upper class the whole idea of cultivating interest in sport to fit with some social group starts to sound really cheesy. And that author's "noble" intent is a fig leaf on what sounds like a rather pointless exercise to me. Although I cannot pinpoint exactly why.

(btw, I am not the one who downvoted you. HN got really trigger-happy lately)

I cultivated interest in golf to build rapport with the upper class. That didn't sound right, did it? Now is there any real difference between that and what the author is saying? I don't see one.

They are very clear and upfront about it and there are many cases where their simplest offering (the one with no encryption behind edge server) is good enough.

Have you just compared Comcast to KKK?

The reason you don't understand my argument after reinterpreting it is because you have for some reason excluded a few important words from it: "inherently", "should" (as in "should encourage") and "willingly". I am inclined to think your confusion is intentional and therefore explaining myself will be a waste of time.

> Aren't organizations built for maximizing profits inherently on a lower moral ground than non-profit organizations[1]?

No, certainly not inherently. Even if we define moral ground as the degree of altruism of motives (which is way too narrow in my opinion), non-profits do not inherently pursue altruistic goals, but rather non-monetizable goals.

But if we define it as something that the society should encourage because it's beneficial to the society then for-profits are arguably on a higher ground since they are demonstrably beneficial to people who are willingly giving them money while all some non-profits can show in their defense is abstract ideas. KKK is a non-profit.

Imperfect as it is, money is the best available measurement of usefulness of a product or service to other people. There's nothing wrong with doing useless things for the hell of it, but attempting to put it on a morally high ground is ridiculous.

So she was already reading while driving and then started reading compulsively. That's some serious book addiction.

I'm an exact opposite of the author: can never pick a book because of fear it won't be "worth my time" and end up looking at pictures of cute animals instead.

I don't understand your analogy to medical service. Surely I can assess the quality of taxi service I just received to the highest degree imaginable. And we now have fantastic systems in place to spread this information (e.g. Yelp, Facebook, etc.).

Why should I care about the relative wealth of the rich instead of absolute wealth of the poor?

Ireland - everyone speaks English as their first language, but Irish is mandatory in schools

Belarus - everyone speaks Russian, but Belorussian is mandatory in schools

Ukraine - a vast number of people (maybe not majority but too many to be called a minority) speaks Russian as their first language but Ukrainian is mandatory in schools and all attempts to give Russian some sort of official status were meet with fierce opposition for no other reason than to preserve national identity

Tatarstan (not so sure about this one, also not a country) - Tatar is mandatory in schools for all the same reasons

Yes, all of these majority languages where once forced on the peoples of colonies by the empires. But all the people who were forced to learn them are now dead. So the current generations are forced to learn those original languages in the name of historical justice and other bullshit.

And what studies do you need for negative effects? The time learning those languages involuntarily is obviously not spent doing anything else. Is that not negative enough for you?

With regard to the first argument, the author's virtual opponent explicitly states that it's about voluntarily abandoning one's "native" language. Of course no one should ever be forced to do that.

As for the second argument, I agree with it. I just think the burden of studying and preserving the languages should be on those who chose to dedicate their lives to studying them, i.e. scientists like the author or enthusiasts. Not some random dude who just happened to be born in the wrong place.

But I admit I might have given this a political angle it didn't originally have.

If I read the article correctly the author says he came to believe the idea of language defining/affecting worldview is false or at least unproven.

It's a rather shallow statement really. Without efficiency life becomes about hard work in the field from sunrise till sunset.

I've never argued for forced assimilation and nor did "the man in the back row". And there definitely shouldn't be any group in charge with a power to decide that. What I'm arguing against is forced preservation in the name of saving some abstract entity called identity.

Yeah, maybe I assigned some of my own meanings to what he said. It just so happened that I only hear about "saving a language" in the context of shoving it down the kids' throats in schools and giving official status to dead or near-dead languages for the purpose of creating "strong national identity".

Why shouldn't I use terms like efficiency? Because it's exactly about efficiency. Or ease of collaboration and communication if the e-word offends you for some reason. The languages are a barrier to distribution of knowledge. Yes you can learn a second language (I did that), but it takes lots of time and energy that could be spent elsewhere (and this doesn't really depend on where you live).