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> That isn’t a simple question, is it.

What about it isn't simple?

> At best it is loaded

What about it is loaded?

> and unnecessarily complex.

What about it is unnecessarily complex?

> Yes, of course I have agreed to contracts without that level of investigation.

OK.

So, suppose in one of those contracts there was a clause that you weren't aware of that said that you would be required to hand over all or any of your property to the other party on request.

Do you think that that should be enforceable? If you think it shouldn't, why not? Especially so considering that you were free to not enter into that contract, therefore you, arguably, would not be forced to hand over your property when this clause is being enforced.

> Because the substantive truth of the theology isn’t dispositive of whether family members have a right (in the social, not legal, sense) to criticize each other from departing from certain norms and practices.

Yes, it most definitely is!

> Just because someone might conclude that advice is wrong, does that mean family members are out of bounds for giving that advice?

No. But "just" because your "advice" is completely unsubstantiated, which you would notice if you cared to exercise a minimum of skepticism, that does mean that giving that advice is out of bounds.

The equivalent of pushing religion is not "breast feeding is healthy", the equivalent is "you should not vaccinate because that causes autism". Outright bullshit is not the same thing as possibly not 100% perfectly reliable science.

> Or that people shouldn’t have to graciously accept it?

We are obviously talking about a situation where someone in the family has made a conscious decision to leave the religion behind. That is obviously not a situation where they should be expected to graciously accept any further pestering on religion, because that is obviously overstepping a known boundary of that person.

(Note that that is different from trying to talk to them about religion, where there is genuine interest in understanding their position, rather than just the intent to convince them to come back--that is perfectly fine as long as the person does not explicitly state otherwise.)

I have one simple question for you:

Do you always, without exception, study every single line of terms and conditions of every purchase you make and every service you use until you have completely understood the legal implications of all of them before you actually enter into a contract? Or have you ever agreed to a contract without that level of investigation?

Could you explain why you think that the fact that you only want to buy services from Apple (or by extension products from people who only buy services from Apple) should be a reason to force everyone else to only buy services from Apple?

This is not about whether you are allowed to find out whether a phone was repaired by Apple and then potentially refuse to buy it, this is about whether other people are allowed to have their phone repaired by parties other than Apple if that is what they would like to do.

That's a terrible idea. For one, RFC1918 addresses are perfectly fine IP addresses, and as such are perfectly fine to put into DNS, but also, if your security depends on this, you are not secure, because rebinding attacks work just as well with non-RFC1918 addresses if that's what you happen to be using on your local network, so devices and software have to be secured against rebinding attacks with a non-filtering DNS anyway.

Plus, it just breaks things. More than once have I had the problem of trying to serve files to other devices on a LAN I was visiting, only for their idiotic local resolver to helpfully refuse resolving the host name of my laptop because, oh surprise, it resolved to an address on that LAN!

No, it isn't. You can't be "in on" a properly constructed election system, because all relevant steps are open to the public for any interested party to watch. Which is exactly the problem with digital voting: They can not be transparent while also preserving secrecy of the ballot.

That is not a property of paper ballots, that's just the property of a broken election system.

No, we can't. The attack scenarios for all of the above are nothing like elections. Elections have to protect both against unauthorized voting (so every person has only one vote) and against determining how anyone voted, including by those running the election (so people can not sell votes/be pressured into voting a certain way).

And not only do these properties have to be guaranteed, it is also an absolute must that the vast majority of citizens can verify that that is the case, both because of the amount of power that is controlled by elections (the entire taxes of a country, control of the military, ...), so there is a significant risk that someone could be able to corrupt any group of experts that isn't a significant proportion of the population, but also for rasons of political stability: Even if the election system is in fact counting correctly, it's a major political risk if people suspect that things are rigged and have no way to really find out.

> That's fine. Many public policy advocates throw around the term 'settled science'. But based on what you said, is there such a thing?

Yes, there is. Just because there is no absolute certainty, doesn't mean it's all just baseless speculation. Just because, as a matter of scientific methodology, atomic theory is not absolutely certain (i.e., we could hypothetically find evidence that contradicts the model), doesn't mean someone just made it up and it has no predictive power.

> Code doesn't break, overheat, or wear out, so it's not something you'd expect to see in a service manual.

But the purpose of a schematic is not to identify a broken component, it's to enable you to understand the system and thus diagnose malfunction, which is exactly what you would need the code for as well. When it's obvious what component is broken (like, a blown cap or a burned resistor or whatever), you don't need a schematic to figure out the fix. You need a schematic to understand all the stuff around the actual defect in order to be able to locate it--and code would be equally useful for that. The fact that there is no wear to repair in the code itself is secondary--there is no (problematic) wear in most of the circuit that you study to find the fault either.

Also, even if there is no wear to repair, there could still be opportunities to modify things either for repair or for diagnostic purposes. Like, make the software produce test signals that you can trace through the circuit. Or "rewire" I/O pins in the software to work around broken hardware. Exactly what you would use schematics for as well: It's not always about replacing a broken part, sometimes you also just modify some other parts of the circuit to restore function or to diagnose a problem, and the same could potentially be done in the software as well.

> ASICS can (and do) break, unfortunately, and schematics continue to be helpful in diagnosing and repairing those sorts of problems.

Well, yeah, sure. But my point is that many defects are in other parts of the circuit, and knowing the internals of the ASIC could still be helpful in diagnosing and fixing those problems.

> Ultimately XHMTL is better suited to epub's use case, which is static documents that are written once and not dynamically generated by templating languages or libraries.

That's backwards. Relying on software to assign random meaning to broken input is never a good solution to anything, neither for static documents nor for dynamically generated documents. It's just that HTML allows you to get away with it, kindof (i.e., no scary error messages, just subtle breakage everywhere), which is why people built templating systems that didn't bother with correctness either. If the web had been XHTML from the beginning, templating systems would have been built in a way that makes it hard to generate broken documents in the first place, because the error messages would have created the incentive to do so, thus avoiding a lot of the subtle breakage as well.

> It was true that management became less engineering-driven in the 1980s-1990s period, which was both unfortunate and avoidable, but it's also true that over the same timeframe he's referring to, companies like Tektronix and HP had to migrate to custom ASICs and software-heavy architectures that were inherently less user-serviceable.

Why do you think that? What about ASICs and software-heavy makes devices less user-serviceable? I mean, software has schematics you, we usually call those "source code", but it's the same thing, so the assumption would be that devices would come with the source code for the software. With ASICs, I can see a problem when the ASIC itself is broken and you can't buy it anymore, but then I'd think that's probably not the most common failure mode?

> No, you're not misunderstanding. I guess I made that statement with the implicit trust of AWS so I didn't think to qualify it.

But that doesn't change that you are trusting a third party?! I mean, if that were to count as "you don't have to trust a third party", then anything does. Use gmail, so you don't have to trust a third party (except for the implicitly trusted Google)! Use Facebook, so you don't have to trust a third party (except for the implicitly trusted Facebook)!

There is nothing necessarily wrong with trusting any one of those. But then you don't get to claim "no trust in third parties required!"

> You're absolutely right that if AWS is a bad actor it has access to all the information, but I'm working on the assumption that it's more profitable to AWS to be a good actor than bad.

Well, for one, see above. But also: is it? Is it really more profitable to keep your data safe than to give the NSA access and in return get some of the good government contracts, say? Plus, trust isn't just about them not screwing you over intentionally, it's also about incompetence.

> Unless you physically own a server you have to put your data somewhere, whether that somewhere is Digital Ocean, some shared hosting provider, AWS, or whatever else. You're still more in control of your data than you would be using a closed third-party product.

The claim was not "you are more in control than with a closed third-party product". The claim was "No [...] having to trust a third-party company with your data.". When you have to use AWS, then you evidently have to trust a third-party company with your data, unless you happen to be AWS. And not only do you have to trust a third party, you even have to trust one particular third party with no alternative if they misbehave somehow. That's pretty close to using a closed third-party product, if you ask me. I mean, really, you are using a closed third-party product--it just happens to be the infrastructure that you build on.

> Sure it would be nice to have other options in addition to AWS, but I don't think those two statements are contradictory.

So, AWS is either not a third party or could not access your data, no matter how much they wanted to? Or what other alternative do you see to make those statements not contradictory?

> Also, I don't know if it is, but the data stored on AWS could be encrypted by the app, in which case you're really not trusting AWS.

Wut? Am I just completely misunderstanding what this does? This uses SES, a service by AWS that handles your emails, right? As in: That speaks SMTP for you, and thus sees the plain text of the emails, right? And then, somewhere there is code that handles those emails that runs on machines that AWS has physical access to, right? As in: Code that AWS can trace and modify however they like, right? As in: Code where AWS trivially could extract any possible encryption keys from, right?

Unless I am completely misunderstanding this ... what would possibly stop AWS from reading all your emails if they wanted to?

> With Heimdall, you completely own and manage your data and the service. No feature limitations or having to trust a third-party company with your data.

> Pre-requisites: You need to own a domain and have an AWS account. For reasonable use cases, you should not exceed AWS's free tier (which is very generous).

Erm ... wut?

> For instance, a doctor who doesn't want to perform a sex change operation or administer hormones to young children, because they think it is harmful to them, would be considered transphobic by many advocates.

You are leaving out the important bit: The justification. The problem isn't a doctor refusing because they think it is harmful, the problem is a doctor refusing because they think it is harmful against established science with no science to back up their own position--i.e., where the actual motivation for the refusal is their personal dislike of giving trans people the opportunity to transition according to their own wishes rather than genuine concern for the patient.

... or fatal if the direction is bad. And as authoritarianism tends to coincide with corruption, chances are the direction is bad quite often.

Possibly, they shot themselves in the foot by creating demand for pushing everything "into the cloud"? If the telco demands monopoly prices for hooking up your servers on premise, chances are you move your servers to a datacenter where there is actual competition, or use services of someone who does.

> 0.1 + 0.2: Produces 0.30000000000000004

No, it doesn't. It produces 0.3000000000000000444089209850062616169452667236328125.

> 1.40 * 165: produces 230.99999999999997

No, it doesn't. It produces 230.999999999999971578290569595992565155029296875.

> round(2.675, 2) produces 2.67

No, it doesn't. It produces 2.6699999999999999289457264239899814128875732421875.

> This is because 2.675 is actually 2.6749999999999998

No, it isn't. For one, 2.675 obviously is not 2.6749999999999998, but it also isn't converted to 2.6749999999999998 to be stored as a floating point number, it is converted to 2.67499999999999982236431605997495353221893310546875.

> round(2.665, 2) which produces 2.67

No, it doesn't. It produces 2.6699999999999999289457264239899814128875732421875.

> However, in floating-point numbers, it is above the halfway point (0.00500000000000000097)

Well, it is above the halfway point, but it's actually 0.0050000000000000009714451465470119728706777095794677734375.

> I am not a theoretician and have not proven that this is actually correct.

So, all the numbers are wrong, you have no clue whether your wrong results generalize, but you use that as the basis for advice to other people? I only can hope that you don't write software for other people to use.

> Look at the history of things banned and tell me that that saw a reduction in crime as it don't - again....drugs.

I can't see any survivorship bias at all!

Also, you might want to distinguish "banning common people from doing something they easily can do with local resources for their pleasure" and "banning large organizations from doing something on a global scale for profit".

How does any of that make your original statement true?

Also:

> If we are going to talk about government derailing and doing as they wish then no piece of paper can protect anyone. At that point it becomes about guns and blood.

No, it doesn't, if there is sufficient consensus for authoritarianism. I mean, except for the few people who don't agree, maybe.

> That scenario is very, very far from reality in the US for more reasons than one.

That seems very naive to me if you look at all the efforts to undermine those rights, including by the president himself.

> The US is one of the few (well, I don't think I know of any other) where you can tell a police officer to go to hell and stop harassing you in a public space due to the rights recognized by the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution.

Then ... you are badly informed?

> That happens because, at the end of the day, this society is based on a legal set of rules that everyone tends to follow, particularly the important ones. That's the difference.

So ... you are agreeing then that it's about the consensus, not about the piece of paper?

> I know someone is going to bring up the topic of cops doing bad things. Guess what? There are bad cops, bad engineers, bad dentists and bad ice skaters. Humans are not a uniform blob of meat with the same brain. When someone behaves badly, more often than not, they face the consequences of their behavior. This includes violating others' rights.

And also, more often than not, they don't. But more importantly, you are making the argument against your original claim yourself here. What matters is the consensus, not the piece of paper. What matters is whether consequences are enforced on those who violate rights, not whether some piece of paper says "recognize" or "grant". What matters is whether society at large and government in particular consider those rights important or not, not whether some piece of paper says "recognize" or "grant".

> I know that if you are not in the US the above can be incomprehensible. And that's OK, there's nothing I can say to make you see this realty. It's like a bird trying to explain to a fish what it is like to fly. The lack of context is too extreme.

Erm ... yeah, sure! I gather that it is perfectly comprehensible to you what it is like to live anywhere else, though, right?

The point is that your original statement that these rights don't require government in order to exist ist just false. These rights require that they are taken seriously by everyone, from citizens to the heights of government in order to exist in any meaningful sense. It may well be that having them written down in such a clear form as the Bill of Rights helps in forming that consensus, but in the end, the consensus is what determines whether those rights exist or not, not whether these rights are written down or which exact words were used.

And the further point is that there are plenty of people working to undermine those rights, and they don't need to change those words to be successful, they can also change how they are interpreted and how seriously they are taken in order to achieve their goal of undermining those rights, and that is what they usually do.

> No, it isn’t, in a country of laws these things have weight and meaning.

What is your point? Even if noone cares about what that piece of paper says, it still has "weight and meaning"? Or are you just repeating what I said using slightly different words, i.e., in a country where people care about what that piece of paper says, what that piece of paper says has weight and meaning?

> If, on the other hand, we are talking about complete anarchy and the end of laws as our guiding principles then, yes, sure, in that case words on paper do not matter. Until then...

So ... a dictatorship is complete anarchy then? Or are you saying that it is inherently impossible for a government to selectively ignore individual laws or sections of the law? Or is it just yet another rephrasing of what I said, i.e., only if sufficiently many people act to recognize, demand, and enforce the rights, will there be rights?

> Rights, in the US, are not GRANTED by government, they are RECOGNIZED by the US Constitution to exist OUTSIDE OF GOVERNMENT (upper case is for emphasis only). In other words, these rights don't require government in order to exist. We are recognized to have them and government can't do a thing about it other than to respect and protect them.

Imagine a bakery puts out a sign that says "the bread you can buy here was not baked by a bakery, it was only recognized to be bread". Does that mean that the bread that comes out of their oven that they earlier stuck dough into was indeed not baked by them?

How does the fact that a piece of paper says something make what it says a fact? It is obviously nonsense that rights could exist without a structure to enforce them. Whether you call it "recognized" or "granted" is completely irrelevant, the fact of the matter is: If the government decides to act as if the right did not exist, then the right does not exist, and governments in general are very well capable of acting as if rights did not exist, and the fact that some piece of paper says "recognize" does not inherently change that, governments in general are also very well capable of ignoring pieces of paper.

The only thing that protects rights is sufficiently many people acting to protect them.

Well, but then, you also get noise from CCD readout, so it's not like you can just take 18000 100ms exposures and stack them to get the same result as a 30 minute exposure minus the "broken frames". Stacking frames is a workaround for disturbances, but it comes at a cost in the form of readout noise. The shorter you make the exposures, the more disturbances you can filter out without wasting observing time, but the more readout noise you get. So, if you have more disturbances, you either need more telescope time so that you still have enough frames left to see your signal after you have thrown out all the bad frames, or you need to reduce exposure times so you can throw out frames as higher granularity, but then you have to accept more readout noise, which makes it harder to see the signal.

So, you clear your CCD, collect photons for 30 minutes, then some satellite sprays you with a multiple of the number of photons collected thus far, and then ... what?

Based on what definition exactly?

If you have a billion dollars, there is nothing irrational about spending 100k on a car you don't really need. Those 100k have barely any utility for you, so it doesn't matter that the car also has barely any utility.

No, we are talking about hundreds of fires.

> Is it possible some other climate factors, other than climate change, caused dry forests and fires?

That's not just possible, it is obviously the case. But that's simply the wrong question.

> Are you saying without climate change, this Australia wildfire would never have happened?

No, I am obviously not saying that, and it is again the wrong question.

The whole error here is thinking that there is one single cause. There isn't. Tons of factors contribute to in the end the fires that we are seeing now. As is unavoidably the case in such situations, you essentially never can directly relate any small aspect of the result to any particular causing factor. But that does not make it wrong to say "X caused Y".

Smoking causes lung cancer. It is nonsensical to reply to that "Is it possible some other health factors, other than smoking, cause lung cancer?" or "Are you saying without smoking, we would not have any lung cancer?" Just because it is hypothetically possible that in some random year all lung cancer cases could have causes other than smoking, which we would never know, does not make it wrong to state that smoking causes lung cancer. We know statistically that smoking causes lung cancer, and we know statistically how many lung cancer cases we can avoid by not smoking. Whether any particular case of lung cancer was caused by smoking is simply completely irrelevant.