ColanR

It seemed pretty obvious to me when I wrote the original content that I was referring to the American revolution as the 'holding Britain accountable'.

> If they were willing to do that, do you think they'd enforce penalties of jail against themselves for their violations? The Constitution itself isn't going to leap out of its case to arrest them.

The people will, though. As I mentioned elsewhere, the final authority in the US are the people who chose their representatives in the government. If the highest level of government decides to break the law, then the people themselves enforce it.

> No regular people voted on the Constitution.

Nitpick. The people who were sent as representatives from each state to help write and ratify the constitution were chosen by the people of that state. So technically, through representative democracy, the regular people did agree to the constitution because their representatives agreed on it.

Absolutely agreed that it is a very last resort. The declaration of independence actually does a good job of outlining just how much of a last resort the american revolution actually was.

I was referring to the American Revolution. The 'holding accountable' was the revocation of Britain's authority over the colonies.

> stands to reason that a document as old as the Constitution should be updated more often than it has been

That constitution was based off of about 2000 years of legal and political theory stretching back at least as far as the Roman Republic, and even the Greek democracies, and written with most of the intervening political history in mind. To say that 200 years makes that much of a difference needs a lot more justification than "it stands to reason".

People say technology is a factor in why we should update the document: I would respond that the human nature which necessitated the clauses assembled in that document haven't changed. Technology has simply accelerated the negative (and positive) effect of the same human tendencies the constitution is already attempting to protect against.

I would suggest that the maxim that's been mentioned on here recently, "don't tear down a fence until you understand why it's been put up" would apply. And the understanding of why the constitution is the way it is requires a breadth of reading that includes Seneca, Plato, and many others. Not to mention the documented discussions between the folks who wrote it.

> because there's no higher authority to appeal to for enforcement

Technically, that higher authority is the people themselves. Bear in mind that the Constitution was written in a context where the governed people successfully held their government accountable at the business end of their hunting rifles.

What no one seems to mention is that Magic Wormhole depends on the maintainer's server to negotiate transmission between clients. I don't like that requirement. Better to GPG encrypt and use bittorrent for a direct transfer. At least then we're using public trackers instead of some private server.

How would your citizenship be verified without identification?

Then the comments should be flagged, not the article. There wasn't anything wrong with the article, and apparently it was interesting to the hn crowd - which according to the guidelines is exactly what makes it acceptable.

EDIT: to respond to your edit, there was an entire thread discussing this in the article discussion. The article should be flagged if there's a problem with the article, and comments should be flagged if there's a problem with the comments.

Apparently quite a lot of HNers disagree with you, and liked it well enough to save it. That should be enough to indicate the article is appropriate for hn.

Notice that the 19th most favorited post is also flagged. ("Those People We Tried to Cancel? They’re All Hanging Out Together"). To me, that indicates the flagging mechanism on hn is broken.

I thought the website was well laid out and easy to read. uBlock Origin makes a huge difference.

You're right, I confused the two.

> retired developer who is now a science writer

Unless there's some unmentioned specific expertise, that's not a very high bar, relative to what he's trying to discuss.

Multiple citations, but this one seems to be what's referenced by the title: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8

Interesting to note that it is a discussion of models and general implications, but is not actually a study of itself.

I think you were being "inaccurate and hyperbolic".

> Linux is not "forcing adoption of HDCP" (it's just something Linux has a driver for)

What they actually said in the article:

> Historically, some features began as optional ones until they reached total functionality. Then they became forced and difficult to patch out. Even if this does not happen in the case of HDCP, we remain cautious about such implementations.

I was thinking about something similar recently - if the hardware drivers could somehow be abstracted from the rest of the linux kernel (as if...), then suddenly a ton of experimental kernels could have widespread hardware availability.

It would probably shake up the OS ecosystem to no small degree, but I imagine the fresh ideas that could be experimented with by non-experts would be hugely beneficial. Isn't that the big argument against so many new projects? "It looks cool, but the hardware support isn't there."

FreeBSD might be a better target though, since that's specifically designed to be compatible with everything.

The problem is, that lucky guy can take an indefinitely long time to show up.

I heard recently about the Scythe Project. Apparently, the scythe was never invented in some places, including India. That's a long time for the lucky guy to never show up.

That's really easy to say in retrospect, just like it's easy to say any major discovery was inevitable after we've already discovered it.

> It would be great if this billionaires would also launch scientific satellites payed from their pocket to compensate, then I would change my mind.

They don't owe you anything.

Has anyone talked about the possibility of putting our astronomy tools in orbit? Seems like as it becomes feasible to put megaconstellations in orbit, it also becomes feasible to put more telescopes in orbit. Wouldn't that solve the problem?

I don't think that's quite fair. I greatly doubt that successful preventions would be willingly associated with questionably legal surveillance. In the US, "parallel construction" is used specifically to hide how information was obtained and I'm sure similar motivations exist here.

As I said earlier, you're espousing an outlook that has already given up. As other commentators have pointed out, checks and balances are unreliable at best, futile at worst.

If you are interested in negotiating for minor concessions with entities who have demonstrated a willingness to work outside the law (and write new laws where needed), then your pragmatism will boil you slowly.

That's a semantic difference that doesn't bear any relevance to what I'm saying. To "realize" that it can be reasonable is to accept the underlying premise - that surveillance is not necessarily (logic term there) unacceptable.

I am specifically arguing that we do not (should not) accept a priori the premise that surveillance is not necessarily bad.

To do so is to capitulate the entire argument against surveillance, and reduce our fight for privacy to nothing more than weighing lesser evils.

> important that we all take a second to realize that surveillance can be a reasonable apparatus of a well maintained democracy

No, I don't think we should just "realize" that. By all means, let's have a discussion; but to accept a priori that some form of surveillance is acceptable reeks of an outlook that has already given up. We should not be fearful and dependent, but rather willing to accept danger as the price of no one looking over our shoulders.

It sure would be nice if the memory leaks would be fixed. On some of the long-running machines I use, I have to use chrome because Firefox would eventually fill up the RAM.

Yeah, and then the "average joe" makes the decision which opinion and treatment to go with, if either. Not the doctor.

> Your average joe doesn’t get to just decide what treatment they get.

That is flat wrong. Ever heard of getting a second opinion?

Like that paradox for self-help groups: anyone in the forum who was actually successful in self-help wouldn't be on the forum anymore. The people who never got out would be the ones who looked at the wrong things.