reginaldjcooper

I hope everyone takes the time to read through this because it is spot on.

(I have a US perspective, this may not apply) I think a start to the solution is to increase the number of politicians per citizen. The original numbers would have a much larger congress than what is in place now. Gerrymandering should be illegal, if a district goes out to sea and back at high tide that needs to be a crime. First-across-the-fence voting needs to go[1]. None of that will ever happen, however.

[1] Although UIAM Australians have a separate system and that's still not good enough.

> should the people at the FEC who engaged in the enforcement action have been criminally charged, tried, and punished?

Ideally, yes! We would have far fewer "good Germans" for the internet to Godwin about.

Pragmatically, no, anyone other than a judge or lawyer cannot be expected to know what is constitutional or not.

Honestly what would help the most would be renouncing your citizenship and becoming a citizen of a different country. They don't give a shit about your protests, your votes, or (lately) your rights. They will give a shit when the best programmers and engineers start an exodus. Or if some of the ultra wealthy decided to get out and bring their portions of the economy with them, that would wake up some congressmen.

Especially because when English is less expressive than a Romance language, we steal those words from the Romance language until we're at least as expressive.

For a second I forgot how poor, compared to us, machine vision and planning is. Forgive me.

Can't they be? I read the autopilot can land a plane in an emergency, and engineers have got them to fly model planes with a whole wing broken off.

> Overall, people living in poverty do not have the same opportunities as the wealthy.

This is the basic issue every argument against any social program needs to address.

The last time basic income came up I saw a poster strawmanning it by claiming that the "producers" would be financing everyone else to have daily parties. Actually nobody is suggesting that we give enough money for people to throw parties every day. The suggestion is to give people enough money to survive in a way that eliminates government waste on the program. Then we will see what sort of jobs or tasks they create for themselves. The majority will not be content to watch TV all day.

> forcibly taking the resources from producers and redistributing them by political whim

The producers are actually the poor bastards working 40+ hours a week on the factory floor. The entities forcibly taking resources from them are the wealthy, by controlling the means of production, increasing CEO salaries, and colluding with legislators to provide more tax cuts and loopholes that only the wealthy can take advantage of. The political whim is that congressmen get more dollars from corporations after Citizen's United.

It's fucking ridiculous to be an Objectivist. You can continue to assert that poors are able to fight their way into the "producer" class by "not being lazy" or whatever. But the reality is when you can barely support your housing, food, transportation, and healthcare you don't have many rational options for aggressive advancement.

But why is this preferable to an either monad? The majority of the time when a subfunction fails with error, I return the error from the function calling it, so I'd rather just have a do notation or something take care of that for me.

Supporting your suggestion; I find that GDB is the best weapon in my arsenal. I am also fond of assertions that end the app and squawk loudly if a constraint is unmet.

I say SO on Ars is not blogspam because unlike, say, most everything on Lifehacker, the content on Ars is not a thin veneer of bullshit/fluff designed to position an ad between the user and actual content.

There was a wire and some fraud? Prosecutors love to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks, it also helps them extort a plea bargain when the choice is between argue your way out of 1000 years in prison or take 5.

If you have the option to choose between a hammer that will hit your own finger and one that will stop short when it detects that (with no false positives), all other considerations being the same; and you willingly choose the first hammer, you are a fool.

Basically the true idiot is not one that makes mistakes, but one that assumes only idiots make mistakes.

Yep. NDA = pay me. Non-compete = pay me. Anything that reduces my ability to make money means you compensate me for it or I don't agree.

or better yet just don't share links from Quora, let them die their shameless death, and instead post answers to things that want to be and remain open like Stack Overflow or your own blog.

I would love to see the resulting class action lawsuit from that.

This sounds reasonable so the eventual ruling will probably be something totally orthogonal.

When they find a bag of white powder they have probable cause to believe it might be cocaine (who carries flour in plastic bricks?) and it's also reasonable at that point that they would pursue a warrant for the home. But when they find a cell phone they have no reason to suspect the phone contains evidence of a crime. There should be a separate warrant for the phone. The phone has all your information on it, they can look through your emails using it -- to my mind that's like getting a free pass to search a home because someone was arrested for something unrelated (like a drunk and disorderly or something).

Actually my philosophy is that the prosecution is wildly out of line, charging criminals with way more than what is appropriate, so we need fewer laws and a stronger Fourth and Fifth amendments if anything. Suppose they find a black humor joke on your FB wall via your phone? Now you're charged with felony thoughtcrime and your bail is half a million dollars.

And in general, if you give the government enough rope they will start hanging everyone with it. For example, downloading PDFs or CSVs from a public server using a fake User-Agent or changing your MAC allows the government to pursue decades-long sentences under the CFAA. That's bullshit.

So I don't support searching the phone during an arrest, they should be required to get a separate warrant for that.

No I mean the platforms from Apple and Google are too convenient to ignore, which causes a feedback loop that is good for individuals but bad for the group.

I agree that download over the internet is better as in more libre, but then developers and users lose the convenience of having a simple way to pay and a simple CDN and update system that developers don't need to deal with. The users buy less and it makes less sense for developers to distribute software that way.

If you want to see "good" targeted ads, go to Amazon. They have a vested interest in having you return again, so they put effort into finding a product that you will actually enjoy.

I highly doubt the average advertiser online cares if you return or not after the initial purchase. Their motivation is not to match you with something you want or will even like, but with something you will buy. It is therefore in their interests to use the targeting information to craft as manipulative an ad as possible for something your demographic can be tricked into purchasing.

That's why, when ABP fails, I always see half-naked swordswomen advertising yet another click-and-wait castle building "game". It's definitely not something that I would enjoy; it's a slot machine with virtual payouts that costs real money. If I payed $10 into it, would I be happy with myself the week after? Compared to e.g., a novel I might like, spend as much time on, but have a decent memory or experience that adds to my life.

If I thought advertisers would use my information to find me things that are useful or actually a good experience, I'd be more receptive to it. I'd still refuse because I hate all this data collecting stuff, and there's no way to get your information back out, but I would feel like it was an okay deal for people that opted into it.

We need a distributed third-party platform that is technologically unable to force a single payment portal. I don't know what that would look like technologically but I'd like to have it.

If it is their server you are definitely committing a CFA to change the content. If it is your server, it's probably fine due to they haven't paid you so they broke whatever contract was in place.

Mobile apps are such a shitty situation; it seems like one either has to submit to the ridiculous walled garden approach or stand constant vigil against every app one installs.

All OSs need fine(r)-grained permissions, they need to supply fake data to apps that refuse to run without permissions, and in general make it deleterious to abuse the user's trust.

My ideal vision is sandboxed applications that can reach out to shared data stores or open external apps via some kind of intents; but only if the user allows them to. Also apps should be signed and the user should have the option of installing third-party CA certificates.

Obama: let's just cut to the end and make using a computer a felony.

I love that feature the most. Every phone and computer should have a feature like that. And permissions should be fine-grained and it should be possible to turn them off.

I always have a chuckle when Android users say it's open source and free. iPhone is worse, of course, but still. We all really need an actual FOSS phone that is liberated from the carriers. Maybe Canonical's (modulo Amazon results when searching contacts).

I would not be surprised in the least if they are A/B testing which prisoners return. The whole system of for-profit prisons is perverse.

Yeah, it's going to take a lot more than debt to come anywhere near equalling slavery.

But in fairness, let's note that declaring bankruptcy does not nullify student loans, so it is somewhat like an indentured servitude once you've got them.

This is truly great. Maybe Latvia will be able to offer asylum to the next kid charged for downloading with intent to share.

Yes. Apple renders them as little colorful pictures.