jdbernard

I still tend to use LaTeX for some long-form documentation, but I'll probably stick to HTML for my resume and I'm finding myself using HTML + Markdown a lot more for other authoring tasks too.

Anti-piracy: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling the sale of products because technology has radically reduced "manufacture" and distribution costs.

Anti-cheat: trying to address the lack of abuse of trust while scaling game coordination because tech. has made massive interconnectivity possible

Anti-cryptography: trying to address the lack or abuse of trust while scaling communication tools.

The "free" in "Free and Open Source Software" is free as in speech, not free as in beer. We'd like to think that decision to charge or not charge for the product is orthogonal to the decision to make the source code available. In practice there is some interrelation.

But FOSS was never "you can't charge for it."

Furthermore, this restraint tends to impact people unevenly. As ineffective as the government may or may not be, at least the goal is for all people to be considered equal in the eyes of the law. With technology the power lives with those who own and create the technology, who have even less oversight and accountability than those who make the laws.

If you organizationally cannot prioritize quality then nothing can help you.

I agree with you. I would rather the police have a principaled stand for freedom and privacy, and not murder people. Then if something big happens, as GP opined, we as a society need to not crucify them. The police are not and should not be a guarantee that bad things won't happen. We should hold them accountantable for what they do, not hold them responsible for preventing all evils.

Culturally we need to decide what our priorities are: do we sacrifice privacy and freedom for the appearance of safety or do we accept less promises of safety for more freedom and privacy.

You're right, we can't have it both ways.

This basic problem, assuming some base commonality that turns out to have a much larger variability within a "normal" population, seems to plague a lot of the results coming out of the social sciences. It's one of the primary reasons I don't put a lot of weight into the research in these fields. I often find my lived experience very different to what they find. Maybe it is a necessary step on the road to a fuller understanding (we've got to start somewhere), but I think we end up over-simplifying the complexities of what it can mean to be human.

None of this changes the fact that the removed tools where the primary means for most people to unencumber content they own.

You have one paragraph dismissing DMCA and copyright, but that's the primary issue here. The fact that it's Readium issuing the DMCA notice instead of Amazon is immaterial in my opinion. The effect is the same.

For example, recently I spent more time than I'd like finding out that we linked two incompatible versions of a library. All the visible dependencies were correct, but at some point someone bundled an old version in a fat jar and that got included transitively via another dependency. If you understand the details you know why you don't distribute libraries as fat jars. But if you're just following some guide it's easier to fat jar it than correctly specify your dependency tree.

If your education was really effective you recognize this is just the static/dynamic linking problem again in new clothes.

There are always going to be people who, for lack of time, effort, education, whatever, use simple tools wrong. That's not an argument against simplicity. It is a recurring and false hubris to think we can fully specify any system and be "done." In the real world the are always confounding factors that violate the assumptions and constraints of any system we design. When that happens, I vastly prefer the more adaptable, less codified, simple system.

The fact that even those people above can still get stuff done even when using the tools "incorrectly" is an argument for the simple approach, in my view.