Still, though, the weak link remains that everyone has to trust these officials will actually uphold the constitution. Unless we can develop something more binding than swearing on a Bible, we're going to keep coming back to this same problem.
That's not to say I don't like the idea of a constitutional court, though. I just think we need to also add some sort of protections against blatantly unconstitutional actions.
While I think it should apply to non-US citizens, the fact that it technically doesn't is irrelevant as long as they're still willfully violating the rights of US citizens too.
This isn't 2004. The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works". I have yet to see an installation with driver problems. Not to mention that the battery life on my ThinkPad easily compares with, if not exceeds, that of a Windows installation.
How can we be a supposedly post-racial society and yet have this level of scrutiny on the racial makeup of a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race? I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but this isn't far off from having political overseers at production facilities in the former Soviet Union.
>As production techniques for hard drugs like cocaine and methamphetamines improve, cost of access has dropped significantly, leading to increased use of these substances in children. Technological progress is inevitable, so we might as well embrace it and accept the fact that children will be using hard drugs from now on.
Of course, that's an extreme example of the argument that has been used on HN a lot lately in favor of data collection, but it still gets the point across. Just because there's an industry push towards something doesn't mean that it's right.
There has been a cultural shift lately from "Ha! Those people are nerds!" to "Man, those guys are going to make so much money.". I would argue it has a lot to do with this movie:
Also, as a student at the University of Washington, I would like to note that, anecdotally, the quality of CS students has dropped through the floor. I'm a mechanical engineering major, but I often find myself helping my roommate with his CS homework, even though he's probably in the top five percent of CS students here. These people don't even understand basic things like what bytecode is.
Well, in terms of package and code validation, there are definitely strong arguments to be made for source-based distribution models and FOSS-backed fuzzing operations. Although freely available source isn't perfect for combating government intrusions, it still is the gold standard since it's impossible to implement fully-featured, unobfuscated backdoors. Despite the fact that things like heartbleed are damaging, keep in mind that they're only a bugs rather than deliberate backdoors.
The answer to imperfect software freedom isn't no software freedom.
Well, RMS exclusively uses a Lemote Yeelong that has been formally verified to not contain backdoors, and he runs purely free software on it. If that's not enough, he never connects it directly to the internet by having another computer wget certain websites on a regular basis and also download/ upload emails, which get transferred to the Lemote via physical media.
There may still be vulnerabilities, but he's a whole lot more secure than your average person.
I realize it's not the most credible source, but there was a purported leaker a few months ago on 4chan that claimed Google is getting ready to turn Android into something like this. He even claimed to have a prototype device. I'm taking it with quite a bit of salt, but the supposed leaker seemed at least somewhat believable in conversation.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I have been absolutely terrified about for a while now. When you're being hired, companies often tell you that they're going to run a professional background check, and I am concerned this may mean they buy data from Google, Facebook, cell carriers, etc.
Unsavory political views? Get blacklisted.
Don't get along with a relative? Get blacklisted.
Indulge a porn habit more than the HR manager likes? Get blacklisted.
Ugh, but Go is slow compared to Java and it's missing a lot of features.
Why not something like Mono? It's faster than their current Dalvik/ ART VM and it would allow for many more languages to be used natively than just Java or Go.
This is a red herring if I've ever seen one. Honestly, why should anyone care about how members of government sign documents when we have such dire problems as ballooning inequality or an ongoing push toward totalitarianism?
And water is still wet. Really, it doesn't make sense for robots to not be a net drain on employment.
As a thought experiment, let's say that a company fires n workers because it is in the process of automating their jobs. Now, let's also assume n workers get hired, at the same wage as before, producing the automated systems which had previously replaced them. How can it be economically viable to automate, if instead of only paying your original n workers, you are now indirectly paying n employees producing the equipment you are buying, plus the capital costs of automation? Since we know that it is in fact more cost effective to automate, then the only remaining possibility is that there are either fewer workers producing the automation equipment or they are being paid less.
What an awesome week this has been.