wnoise

But the instructions weren't "it's not okay to crush the competition", they were "it's not okay to talk about crushing the competition".

Or measuring torque in Watt-hours (or any other unit of energy -- joules, calories, BTUs...).

This strongly reminds me of a scene from season 3 of The Wire. A bunch of gang leaders are making plans together -- by way of a meeting trying to be run by Robert's Rules of Order. A subordinate is taking notes -- have to have minutes according to the rules. Eventually the leader notices and asks "is you takin' notes on a criminal fuckin' conspiracy?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly82nabRRYc

> Knowing that something is definitely a breaking change because an API was removed or modified in an incompatible way will still save you time.

Iff it's a part of the API you use directly or indirectly. Sometimes you're only using part of it, and changes to the rest don't matter.

I had thought that the argument was that bundling was more using Windows (near monopoly) to prop up IE usage, rather than vice-versa. If in 2001 (with no smartphones), IE only runs on Windows, it's kind of hard to have IE have a _higher_ share of the market than Windows.

Qualified immunity only applies to civil suits.

It is explicitly trying to optimize for measuring/inculcating military performance.

Well, latitude, or longitude at the equator.

That's over three times too big though.

That suggests making the top level (document as a whole?) have an implicit dir="auto". Alternately, the default dir="auto" is overridden by any parent with an explicit dir="..." setting.

In addition to lexicographic, lexigraphic is a word, which would sound quite similar in most dialects.

Why isn't this the default?

"Just trust me bro" is not a convincing argument. What are those issues, and why is 702 needed, rather than other approaches?

> FISA 702 is key in the ability of the FBI to collect intelligence on those who seek to harm the United States.

[citation needed]

The spammers were actually spammers though.

Because the variance (or any other measure of spread) is a useful explanatory variable that is ignored and left on the floor. Switching from mean to median, while more "robust" doesn't actually capture something new, just something old slightly better.

> police by consent

It's a lovely idea, but Peelian principles are currently only paid lip-service. People are trying to drag it back to something approaching that, but it's not the current actual situation, particularly in London. (Kettling, etc.)

> are operationally independent of HM government,

> the police literally are not the government,

> do not spy for the government,

Again, in the sense of "political party currently in control of Parliament", yes. But they're literally the enforcers of the law -- and their meaning of the law. People not in Parliamentary systems have a broader, and far more useful meaning of "government" -- those governing, determining what is going to be punished and what won't. If you're actually stuck on term "government" in the partisan meaning, please give me some other term to refer to the coherent actions of the state. The bureaucracy and enforcement arms actually do govern, regardless of whether they're doing so at the behest of particular partisan guidance (though sure, that's worse in terms of being able to politically course correct). An arrest and detention whilst CPS sorts out taking to the next level is actually a punishment. Hence the quote "You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride."

> do not routinely surveil the population; their surveillance powers are limited and regulated.

Hah. Hah. Hah. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa... .

You could have said "sex-segregated" instead of "women-only" and not drag in the definitional arguments. Or, at least less so.

Which means they get all the downsides, and none of the upsides...

It's not assuming a surveillance mechanism, it's _describing_ one. Individual police keeping their eyes open _is_ a surveillance mechanism. Admittedly, just about the most banal one possible, but the anti-social behavior it's catching is also the most harmless. But the bad law does actually make it a problem.

> The police aren't the government

Not in the ridiculous "party controlling parliament" sense, no. But they are absolutely the enforcement arm of the state, which is more on point.

I do. I want my hardware to do exactly what it gets told to do, and nothing else. A pity that that's basically impossible these days.

Heat pumps can work both ways.

Allies spy on each other all the time.

* https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2013/10/28/241384089/...

* https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9bp8/us-spies-allies-south...

And good faith and intent is not a sufficient guard.

Intent makes a difference, but it's not magic. It only makes a meaningful difference if it changes what data gets collected and stored. The data gets collected either way. Data breeches happen, and intent isn't stable (or even fully coherent in companies. You might trust them now, but you probably shouldn't trust them a few years down the line. Look at how different google of today acts than the google of 2000.

For the case in point, that data includes "The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself, Includes universal plug and play devices and devices that broadcast information to your computer on a local area network: for example, smart TV model and vendor information, and video streaming devices.", so far more than "data about how my product is used in order to make it better". That's some other purpose. We already have evident of bad intent. Bad faith is not at all uncommon with large companies. You do remember the sony rootkit[0], right?

And even with good intent it's easy to overcollect data, because of the fear of missing out on something useful. It really could be useful be useful to see if crashes correlate with other running software, various registry settings, etc, but collecting that absolutely should be considered way beyond the line. (That rootkit was packed with telemetry too, collecting e-mail addresses and listening habits)

Telemetry we _know about_ tends to be documented, however there's an unknown amount of sampling bias. Further, secrecy is not binary, things can be poorly disclosed. I'd argue they often are, with documents that are neither obviously visible nor transparent about what is collected. This is in no way surprising. Disclosure doesn't directly help any bottom line, it just guards against possible reputation and legal damage if it is discovered.

As you say, users mostly don't care. We live in an age of mass surveillance and have raised generations who think it normal.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

Just because spying is useful for someone doesn't make it not spying.

True, but they don't recover themselves automatically.

> I'm not sure why this is the default behavior,

Um. You said the answer earlier:

> because the parser treats the literal as a double

BigFloats aren't built in to the syntax of the language (and probably should't be, so you need to escape the parser somehow -- either pass a string to the constructor, or use the @big_str macro to get a non-standard string parsed into a BigFloat.

No, it's really not. An index variable has very little details to it -- there's nothing to communicate.

Auxiliary functions are complex behavior that should be reflected in the name.

You're not doing what the parent definition promises though -- if you were you'd leave out the parent definition and the where, and just write the go definition with the true name.

Go is instead doing something similar to the parent that is easily transformed to the right thing (i.e. accumulated in reverse or something), or more general that does the right thing when called with specific arguments. Communicating how and why the function does what it does and works in conjunction with the top level wrapper actually matters.

Yes. Where is often lovely -- I want to delegate details, and not think about them yet, but keep that delegation scoped to the function that needs the relevant details.

But calling auxiliary functions "go" is almost always bad naming.