chroem

Still, though, the weak link remains that everyone has to trust these officials will actually uphold the constitution. Unless we can develop something more binding than swearing on a Bible, we're going to keep coming back to this same problem.

That's not to say I don't like the idea of a constitutional court, though. I just think we need to also add some sort of protections against blatantly unconstitutional actions.

Well, it can be seen and it can be used, but just not by everyone yet.

I have no idea where I'll go to do a beta now.

While I think it should apply to non-US citizens, the fact that it technically doesn't is irrelevant as long as they're still willfully violating the rights of US citizens too.

>The job of three-letters agencies is to find out all various enemies of the state.

Within the confines of the law and US constitution.

If all you care about is rooting out enemies of the state, then you're left with organizations like the SS or Stasi.

I'm actually kind of bothered by this.

I was about to release signups for a private beta of my current project, but apparently that no longer fits the formal criteria of "Show HN."

Disappointing to say the least.

Why not a fission fragment rocket? We could send a probe to the centauri system with current technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

This isn't 2004. The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works". I have yet to see an installation with driver problems. Not to mention that the battery life on my ThinkPad easily compares with, if not exceeds, that of a Windows installation.

Why should this even matter in the first place?

How can we be a supposedly post-racial society and yet have this level of scrutiny on the racial makeup of a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race? I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but this isn't far off from having political overseers at production facilities in the former Soviet Union.

>As production techniques for hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines improve, cost of access has dropped significantly, leading to increased use of these substances in children. Technological progress is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it and accept the fact that children will be using hard drugs from now on.

Of course, that's an extreme example of the argument that has been used on HN a lot lately in favor of data collection, but it still gets the point across. Just because there's an industry push towards something doesn't mean that it's right.

There has been a cultural shift lately from "Ha! Those people are nerds!" to "Man, those guys are going to make so much money.". I would argue it has a lot to do with this movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network

Also, as a student at the University of Washington, I would like to note that, anecdotally, the quality of CS students has dropped through the floor. I'm a mechanical engineering major, but I often find myself helping my roommate with his CS homework, even though he's probably in the top five percent of CS students here. These people don't even understand basic things like what bytecode is.

Well, in terms of package and code validation, there are definitely strong arguments to be made for source-based distribution models and FOSS-backed fuzzing operations. Although freely available source isn't perfect for combating government intrusions, it still is the gold standard since it's impossible to implement fully-featured, unobfuscated backdoors. Despite the fact that things like heartbleed are damaging, keep in mind that they're only a bugs rather than deliberate backdoors.

The answer to imperfect software freedom isn't no software freedom.

Well, RMS exclusively uses a Lemote Yeelong that has been formally verified to not contain backdoors, and he runs purely free software on it. If that's not enough, he never connects it directly to the internet by having another computer wget certain websites on a regular basis and also download/ upload emails, which get transferred to the Lemote via physical media.

There may still be vulnerabilities, but he's a whole lot more secure than your average person.

Richard Stallman?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

He's about free software as well. People that haven't started subscribing to his ideas post-leaks are part of the problem.

I realize it's not the most credible source, but there was a purported leaker a few months ago on 4chan that claimed Google is getting ready to turn Android into something like this. He even claimed to have a prototype device. I'm taking it with quite a bit of salt, but the supposed leaker seemed at least somewhat believable in conversation.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I have been absolutely terrified about for a while now. When you're being hired, companies often tell you that they're going to run a professional background check, and I am concerned this may mean they buy data from Google, Facebook, cell carriers, etc.

Unsavory political views? Get blacklisted.

Don't get along with a relative? Get blacklisted.

Indulge a porn habit more than the HR manager likes? Get blacklisted.

I cannot stress enough how dangerous this is.

Ugh, but Go is slow compared to Java and it's missing a lot of features.

Why not something like Mono? It's faster than their current Dalvik/ ART VM and it would allow for many more languages to be used natively than just Java or Go.

Do the epiphany cores have storage and network I/O access, or are they something more similar to a GPU?

In other words, could I write an epiphany webserver?

This is a red herring if I've ever seen one. Honestly, why should anyone care about how members of government sign documents when we have such dire problems as ballooning inequality or an ongoing push toward totalitarianism?

And water is still wet. Really, it doesn't make sense for robots to not be a net drain on employment.

As a thought experiment, let's say that a company fires n workers because it is in the process of automating their jobs. Now, let's also assume n workers get hired, at the same wage as before, producing the automated systems which had previously replaced them. How can it be economically viable to automate, if instead of only paying your original n workers, you are now indirectly paying n employees producing the equipment you are buying, plus the capital costs of automation? Since we know that it is in fact more cost effective to automate, then the only remaining possibility is that there are either fewer workers producing the automation equipment or they are being paid less.

Really? I picked up CSS in a few hours but I still can't begin to wrap my head around how to properly work with Android layouts.

I really wish Google would let people use HTML and CSS instead of that bizarre relational XML stuff.

>Elon ... is an engineer

Oh really? Where did he study engineering? When did he take the FE exam?

That's not a term that you can throw around all willy-nilly, especially in the context of hardware. Next, are you about to tell me that the CEO of Ford is also an engineer?

It seems like HN is mostly missing the point. Stallman's four essential freedoms are intended to fix proprietary software vendors abusing their users.

For example, let's say there's some "open source" software that allows you to read the code, but prevents you from distributing it. Well, what's stopping them from slipping in a nasty backdoor in their binaries if you're not allowed to compile your own clean version? I'm really shocked, and quite frankly disgusted, that you all can be so critical of free software after all that has come to light about the NSA.

I'm sorry, but no amount of Kony 2012-ing is going to fix this problem. People need to get off of their asses and start protesting.

Campaigns like this are just an embarrassment at this point.

So how is that NSA reform coming along? Good I hope?

Too bad God doesn't approve of a networking stack.

At risk of being called a crazy conspiracy theorist:

At some point you have to realize that politicians have been reduced to little more than actors and the deep state is now the entity that's really in control. What do I mean by that?

The Affordable Care Act is pretty much the primary political blockbuster over the course of the last several years. Still, it didn't do much beyond establish an online insurance exchange and eliminate discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. Not exactly what I would consider sweeping reform. Despite this, Republicans are constantly shouting to the public "Obamacare is destroying America!" and Democrats are saying "The ACA has made our nation infinitely better off", when the reality is that neither is true.

The grandiose televised presidential debates seem quite indicative that these people are just acting for the public in order to get elected. Romney and Obama tried to paint each other in such a dramatic way that it really bordered on absurdity.

Meanwhile, we have the three letter agencies getting into all sorts of trouble. Spying on the public, starting coups abroad, and all sorts of things that they will never be held accountable for. It seems far more likely to me that Obama was pressured into his present foreign policy by the members of these agencies, rather than him backing out on his promises so extensively. In the case of the NSA, and now apparently the CIA, they are in no way obligated to inform congress of their actions. They pretty much just do whatever the hell they want and then leave the politicians to rationalize it.

So, while Republicans and Democrats may argue over petty issues, there isn't a whole lot behind their talk. The critical decisions about which countries we enter into conflict with, what rights US citizens have, etc., are really being made behind the scenes by completely unelected people.

Well, it's illegal for them to fight the unionization of their workers. Normally when they do it, they say "but we're not anti-union" with a wink and a smile, and that makes it okay. However, if the leaked documents are legitimate, they may be evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Also, I'm troubled by the fact that this submission seems to have been deleted from the front page(s). It's only showing up on new submissions now.

Am I the only one here that's bothered by a further narrowing of the expected knowledge of students? A good engineer or programmer isn't a human calculator who can bang out hundreds of caclulations per minute or recite petty facts in a very specific area. Good programmers and engineers draw on their wide breadth of knowledge, and the deep understanding it generates, to solve complex and abstract problems.

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a substantial number, if not the majority, of CS students who can't code worth a damn, but got into the department solely because they did well in a small number of unrelated subjects.

While I'm not terribly concerned with the changes in the SAT, I am concerned about it adding more momentum to this trend.

That's exactly what I mean. Despite the content of the article, the title really shows that anything other than mass surveillance is just wishful thinking at this point.

How I wish that this title weren't presented as a question...