rms_returns

A brilliant idea! I hope this actually gets implemented some day in a legal system of any country.

This is the one I can think of:

  function sayBadWords(message) 
  {
     alert(message);
  }
  sayBadWords("You scumbag and a^^hole, can't you use an older version of firefox?");

> otherwise honest people have to resort to clickbait tactics to compete with the worsening signal-to-noise ratio

Exactly. Imagine that you are a pristine expert in your subject and want to share your knowledge. Now, you want to write a well-researched article and post it on your blog, think what title will you give it?

If its a plain old title like "Acme stock is down by 5%", that won't be doing justice to your well-researched article. Maybe, you have got insights about technical/fundamental analyses about Acme stock that the rest of the professionals don't? Unless you give it a catchy title like "10 reasons to avoid Acme stock" or "Unpredictable mess lie ahead of Acme", no one is going to read your article (although it deserves to be read by millions).

tldr; Even a good product needs marketing sometimes.

Another problem is how do you decide that something is clickbait without clicking it? Agreed that most of the catchy headlines are actually clickbaits, but there could be always some that are genuine.

Think of clickbaits as a marketing tactic. On the way to your workplace, you see hundreds of those salesmen trying to sell you something by telling tall tales. Your impression would be like, "Hey, not these stupid fellas again. Next time one comes near me, I'll start a war on them!".

However, if you think about it, a substantial portion of those salesmen (at least 20-30%) are genuine people who are just earning their livelihoods. You know that even after accounting for some of their exaggerations, their products are sometimes actually useful to you!

> User happiness just happens to not be be necessary for Facebook to be a successful business.

Agreed. But the anti-thesis of that is that along with tech companies (like Facebook and Goolge), the average user is evolving too. In other words, sooner or later, the average user will start thinking exactly what you are thinking now. And thats when the user will start ditching Facebook for something open source and WhatsApp for something like Telegram.

Yeah, with that kind of advancement in technology, the "Captain America vs Iron Man" debate is going to be sprung soon. In other words, the debate between Individual Freedom vs Individual Safety.

Giving incorrect medicine is borderline to criminal negligence. If this had happened in India, the said doctor's license to practice would have been revoked. I'm astounded how come a developed country like USA can tolerate this!

Can you please state the name of the hospital and the doctor? The least we can do is blacklist that hospital in our friend circles and defame it on FB, twitter, etc.

That depends on how well the obfuscator works and scrambles your code. Does it rename ALL classes, variables, methods and constants to gobbledygook? Does it add redundant code every now and then to add more confusion? If you do all that, then it becomes very difficult to crack even for advanced hackers. But ultimately it should be possible as obfuscation is based on a human logic (though executed by machines) - but it will certainly increase the needed difficulty and dedication to a considerable degree.

> Do all of these things really need a separate program?

Indeed. This is one of the reasons why the unixy "One app does one thing" philosophers dislike the C++ language so much. C++ is built for creating precisely the kind of apps you are describing - Classes are a well-defined compartment or component that does this "one thing" business while the app co-ordinates their working towards a common good.

C, on the other hand, pertains much to their "one thing" philosophy and they like it very much.

Whats really interesting is that despite all its flaws and a million things that could go wrong, the systems designed by humans actually work.

Despite open source is developed by a bunch of hackers who keep delivering buggy code, you can still close your eyes and install Ubuntu and it will usually work in 95% of cases.

Even if you go to the most popular fast food outlet during the busiest of hours, you usually get to eat that tasty pizza even the humans did not all procedures. You see, they are humans, they may err but they have an uncanny judgment that comes from practice which is capable of finding and fixing their errors before they are delivered.

> They will keep trying until they get the precedent.

Don't they already have a precedent when they shut down Truecrypt some years ago?

The least that should happen in this case is the courts should ask the FBI exactly how did they found an alternative method to crack the iphones. If they don't, its unfair to Apple since they were potentially about to be ordered by the state to exploit a vulnerability themselves. IANAL of course, this is just my informed view based on existing facts.

> Basically it would imagine a society without state or authority, which to me is the return to an uncivilized world.

That will be the case ONLY IF absolute power comes in the hands of one or few individuals (or capitalists). Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Hence, in an ideal world, there should be no state authority, but the authority/power should be DECENTRALIZED within a vast number of individuals not a single or few capitalists with vested interest.

I'm a Software Developer and as an implementation of this decentralization, I can think of open source projects. In large open source projects like Linux or Debian or Java, one might imagine that a few elite programmers can control everything like you say. But there is no return to the uncivilized world, because the power to influence the development is decentralized into millions of contributers, testers, security researchers and auditors across the world! As Eric Raymond says in on of his famous writings, "if there are enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I think this same aphorism applies to the real world too if you replace bugs with general societal problems.

A much cheaper way is to get it tested from freelancers on Upwork/Elance who have OSX!

Even if the licensing terms were liberal, are you going to use an OS that hasn't been issued system updates since ages? It will be riddled with malware the moment you connect to the Internet!

Certainly, they will have to prove somehow that their app was ultimately removed owning to a competitor's pressure. If they can do that, then the monopolies act and everything will come into the picture. I'm not insinuating that any competitor is doing this to Uber, but that's pretty natural and apparent in this case. Naturally, the store is Apple's business and app publishing is a means of income. No sane business will refuse a business prospect on the grounds of "I don't like you". The only reasoning here is that a competitor is involved. But yeah, proving that in a court of law is a different thing altogether which Uber has to manage.

> 1. They are not competitors, but Apple's arbitrary removal of the app from its AppStore without giving a valid reason will certainly make a legal case against them (unless Apple specifically mentions they can do so in their store's T&C which I don't know much about).

>2. Yes, they would. In 2016, android is fully feature equivalent to Apple's iDevices, only reason you may not switch is that you are too lethargic and don't want to unlearn the iOS way of things.

>3. Whether they will do it or not will depend on the negative publicity vis-a-vis impact on profits/bottom lines. If your bottom-lines hit the floor as no one is using an app to place cab booking orders, the last thing you will worry about is negative publicity. Apple, on the other hand, will worry about this publicity since it has a lot to loose from it.

"Everything seems to be running on stock Ubuntu VMs nowadays" -

More of different linux variants actually. Amazon, for instance, provides their own version called "Amazon Linux" which is based on RHEL/CentOS for their aws servers. I've also seen many use Debian for their servers (In fact, Debian/Ubuntu doesn't differ much technically on the server side, but Debian's simplicity and FOSS-friendliness drives many towards it).

> Every government slides into tyranny.. It is inevitable.

That's why the constitutional framework on which a government was formed upon is very essential. And the strange thing is that America has the needed provisions in the constitution to prevent such tyrannical abuse in future. The Fourth Amendment[1] clearly states that:

> Amendment IV to the United States Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and requires any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause.

So you see, the government is blatantly violating the fourth amendment by invading its citizens' privacy, but the point is that the constitution doesn't allow it and nor is it common for governments to do this thing.

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

How trivial it is to send/accept pull-requests with Gitlab? This is one Github feature which I'm highly dependent on. Unlike Mr. Torvalds, we all aren't experts in sending and managing signed pull-requests by emails. Maybe, I'll learn that one day, but Github's features have made me quite lethargic!

True. But the way Github has designed their interface is also not too bad, especially considering that it is supposed to be used by both laymen as well as programmers.

> but you can't do the job without being good at working with people and getting them do the thing you need them to do

Basically, the "merit-based" structure of an open-source project ensures that people can get away with bare-minimum communication skills. If I'm a BDFL, all I need to convince people to join my project is a good, working product (and Linus had that - Linux). As an enthusiastic programmer, all you need to contribute is ability to send a pull-request.

There are matters like internal politics, but beyond a certain expansion, it becomes almost impossible to justify doing a fork just for egoistical reasons (and most people know that, even the less "people-friendly" or "more geeky" people).

All in all, it is the community/hacker culture that drives an open source project development and takes a life of its own, matters like personal communication skills seem insignificant in front of that larger force.

Another reason Linus could get away with lesser people skills was perhaps because he followed the bazaar style of development which invites literally everyone into the project. This way, if one particular geek didn't agree with Torvalds, he could replace him/her with someone else as the bazaar model ensured a good competition among the geeks.

Richard Stallman, however, followed the cathedral style of development for creating emacs and gnu utils. This model involves just Stallman's chosen few geeks or programmers, so communication and people skills matter a lot here. If you have only a few programmers to do your job, you can't afford to call them bad names and lose them, can you!

"I can't do it to save my life. If I was stranded on a desert island and the only way to get off was to create a pretty UI I would die there,"

Now I understand why Linus isn't too fond of Github!

I think the biggest plus of Reddit is its simplicity and minimalism with regards to content. For people for whom the written word is enough to understand and work with things, Reddit is an ideal platform. In case of the other platforms, the platform has to reach out to the user by including stuff like flashy animations, banners, embedded images, ajax, etc. which is always slow and unnecessary.

Twitter is for corporates to make announcements. Facebook is for people to socialize and get in touch. Linkedin is for professionals to collaborate. Google Plus is just a general purpose communication platform. HN and Reddit are for hackers and power users to discuss things.

Personally, I think Reddit/HN when combined with imgur.com serves all purposes in the world, there is no need for the other bloated stuff. But unfortunately, non-techies are going to be non-techies, they will never understand what is minimalism and elegance, may God help them see the light of truth, amen.

I once had to call my bank a few years ago to disable my debit card. The reason was that I inserted it in an ATM and the ATM had chosen that exact moment to malfunction and shut down!

The operator on the line asked me a ton of questions starting from my user-id (but not password), date of birth, full name, father's name, place of birth, type of account and many others that I don't remember now. Only after I correctly answered all these questions, did he start acting on my instructions.

> Samsung, whomever can and do modify the code -- those modifications aren't generally open source.

That will certainly change quite soon. In the earlier days, FOSS was not a concept that masses were aware of, but now is different. There is increasing competition in the smart-phone world and if one of the other manufacturers (say ASUS) makes their Android modifications open-source, they will see a drastic increase in Sales. To keep up with competition, Samsung, etc. will also have to do the same. In other words, competition will ensure the success of open source.

Actually, there is a third business model which doesn't exploit its users' privacy, nor does it have to resort to closed-source licensing (but selling add-on services like support and customization). This is the model adopted by companies like Red Hat, Canonical and to some extent Google (in a few products).

The future, in fact, belongs to this third business model that helps a business earn profits without hurting its users in any manner. Ultimately, all the IT companies will have to embrace this model in order to stay in the market and survive. Competition will ensure that they will.

But you can always root your phone and install Cyanogenmod from scratch, right? Agreed that this is not too trivial right now because of standardization issues, but it could be done if you really care about privacy.