cbd1984

Haskell has exceptions and monads. Either can be used for error handling; monads are, admittedly, unusual, but the error-handing type monads (as opposed to side-effect-handling type monads) are easy to understand in terms of wrapping values (or the potential for a lack of value) such that the type system can be used to both enforce a certain level of care and enable a certain insensitivity to errors.

For example, the Maybe monad is the simplest way to handle a function which might not return a usable value: A value wrapped in a Maybe monad has a type of either (Just a) (with a being any type at all) or Nothing. Here's a trivial example, straight from the ghci REPL:

    > let mdiv x y = if y == 0 then Nothing else (Just (x / y))
    > let foo x = (Just (x + 5))
    > let bar y = (Just (y / 2))
    > mdiv 5 6 >>= foo >== bar
    Just 2.9166666666666665
    > mdiv 5 0 >>= foo >>= bar
    Nothing

See? Complete insensitivity to errors until the last possible moment. Much less noisy than the C equivalent would be, although in this specific example I suppose the Inf semantics of the IEEE floating point standard would be equivalent.

> Analog TV sets tended to emit loudly at the local oscillator frequency. The UK used to drive around with "television detector" vans to find people who didn't pay their TV tax, which funds the BBC. But tuners quieted down years ago, as they became tiny RF-tight sealed units.

CRTs used to emit the picture on their screen well enough you could receive it over a nontrivial distance. This is called Van Eck phreaking.

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

OTOH, being able to receive a signal and being able to nail down where it's coming from and who's broadcasting it are two very different things, and the location part is substantially harder. Using the Van Eck technique, or any other, to crack down on people not paying the BBC license fee would have cost more than the fee was worth. Psychological ploys with faked-up vans, however, are a lot cheaper, and can be fairly effective.

Any gear which makes battery life a selling point will look hard at every RF emanation it makes and cut the noise.

I'd look at things plugged into walls before anything running off a battery.

Yes, which raises one possible way of fighting it: Make electronics manufacturers adhere to power efficiency ratings. The moment they have to care about how power efficient their gear is, they'll look at everywhere power's being wasted by, I don't know, being broadcast into the air for absolutely no good reason.

Sorry to be anal, but saying "GNU/Linux" devalues the contributions of people who are associated with neither the GNU Project nor the Linux kernel, such as the X.Org team, the Apache team, the Mozilla Firefox team, and so on. The OS as we know it would not exist without a large number of individual teams not captured in the "GNU/Linux" name.

Therefore, the only solution is to metonymically use the name of the kernel as the name of the entire system, which is, happily, common practice anyway.

> Carbohydrates in excessive amounts, yes.

That's the definition of 'excessive', yes.

Eh, literally everything can be a buzzword. "Email" has been a buzzword in the past, as has "Internet" and "mobile phone" and so on.

The Civil Rights Era wouldn't exist but for an active Federal Government overruling state and local governments. Same with Obergefell and similar pro-GLBTQ laws and rulings.

Countries need a strong central government to overrule local governments ruled by prejudice. To think otherwise is historically illiterate.

> Have you read the ingredients list, its insane!

It literally contains dihydrogen monoxide!

More seriously: Unless you actually understand what's on the list, just slamming it because it looks "insane" is ignorant.

To expand on your point:

Hobbes was wrong on one count: Human life in a state of nature isn't nasty, brutish, short, or any of the other War Of All Against All nonsense he proposed unless there's been a serious disaster in the recent history, such as a plague or famine or invasion. In short, humans don't live like Mad Max or Walking Dead or Night Of The Living Dead unless their actual society was just destroyed and they haven't built a new one yet.

In a state of nature, humans live as hunter-gatherers, usually, which is not terribly bad most of the time. However, hunter-gatherer societies still have rules and ways to enforce those rules and hierarchies which are not fair by modern standards of fairness. Strict gender roles are usually enforced, for example.

My point is, humans naturally have a government of some kind, and definitely have rules which you can't opt out of if you expect to keep living with that group of humans. And it is entirely correct that humans raised in that society won't spontaneously recapitulate Locke and Jefferson. But they will have something, and they won't look kindly on people who expect to live outside of their rules and continue to interact with them.

And they certainly won't agree on which "rights" humans "naturally" have. Not even the right to live: A number of ancient societies practiced infanticide, for example.

A larger government is less likely to be ruled by the prejudices endemic to a single region.

As a practical matter, you can evade US taxes if you have no financial contact with the US; the IRS can deem you liable for any amount of taxes and it won't have any effect on you if they're unable to collect them.

Except without a higher authority to prevent it, majoritarianism is exactly what ends up happening. It isn't a strawman if it's inevitable.

It's impossible to have a society without laws, written or unwritten, and the Constitution is the underlying legal document which all laws must be in accordance with.

(A society without written laws is anarchistic, or despotic. A society without any laws at all is impossible.)

> the power of the state envisioned gets smaller and more directly accountable to citizens.

Pure majoritarianism doesn't work, you know. It leads to grossly immoral systems which destroy the rights of minorities. There needs to be larger governments, governments not ruled by the local majority, which can step in to curb the abuses an unchecked majoritarian government would otherwise get away with.

I've read it and I think it's juvenile.

If you want to opt out of a society, wonderful. Leave it. Most governments will allow you to leave, and I certainly agree that those which do not are tyrannical.

However, if you try to opt out and refuse to leave, you're a free rider, getting the benefit from the society without agreeing to the rules which helps make it work. It is immoral to benefit from clean air if you refuse to abide by the laws limiting air pollution. It is immoral to benefit from a functional banking system if you refuse to abide by the laws regulating that banking system.

Yes, there are a lot of immoral people in the world. However, waving your immorality around like a flag by saying you don't agree to the system you benefit from is a level to which most of the immoral will not stoop. If you are going to do wrong, at least have the decency to admit you're doing wrong, and attempt to change the system in a constructive way, instead of trying to paint free riding as a moral alternative.

> I take offense to the idea of the "golden age fallacy".

That doesn't mean it's false.

> Roman democracy the golden age was so and so centuries -- no ifs and buts about it

Historiography is always changing.

You're not being cynical, that's actually a pretty fair reaction to these people and their ideas.

The ideas all share one common feature: They're just not worth it. They're complex, contradictory, and utterly frivolous, in that they have no bearing on reality and will never be of any practical use to anyone but the "gurus" who sell them to the gullible. The "legal arguments" are a con artist's patter and misdirection, impressive to the people who the huckster is about to fool but so much hot air and nonsense to everyone else, especially the real courts. To anyone who understands the law, this crap is painfully transparent and obviously stupid.

It's all nonsense, bluster, and castles in the sky. The only reality is the money and time the gullible lose and the legal penalties they face if they attempt to take this stuff too far.

In adult land, the terms "legal" and "lawful" are completely synonymous.

Anyone you hear saying otherwise is living in a fantasy world, and/or wants to sell you tickets to a fantasy world.

> Larry Becraft Jr, an attorney who has fought the IRS

Becraft doesn't want to pay income tax and has developed some lunatic theories which, to his mind, allow him to not pay income tax. He's done time in prison because, surprise of surprises, his nutball theories don't change the actual law. He "fought the IRS" in much the same way as an ant might "fight" a ten-pound sledgehammer.

> According to the US Code, the United States organic law is comprised of the Declaration of Independence(1776), the Articles of Confederation (1777), the Northwest Ordinance (1787) and the Constitution (1787).

"Organic law" apparently does not mean what you think it means:

The Declaration of Independence does not have the force of law and it never has. It was a justification for the rebellion, and that's it.

The Articles of Confederation have not had the force of law since they were replaced by the Constitution, so saying they have force of law along with the Constitution is incoherent. The latter totally superseded the former.

The Northwest Ordinance was an act of the Congress under the Articles of Confederation which was subsequently recognized as valid law by the courts after the ratification of the Constitution. As an act of Congress, however, it can be modified by further acts of Congress and by the courts. It is not on an equal footing with the Constitution by any means.

> While mainstream academia says these have no legal or constitutional force, I'd disagree.

It isn't just the academics which disagree with you, but the government itself, and the government gets to decide what law is. You lose.

BeOS doesn't run on my hardware, I'm pretty sure, even though it was ported to x86 eventually.

It works fine as in "I can listen to audio on my laptop from multiple programs at once, with a centralized way to control audio volume on a per-application or per-sound-device basis." I literally cannot imagine any audio system doing better than that given the hardware I have to work with.

It made more sense when you could assume each machine was tended by a sysadmin who was responsible for running it, so having a quick way to reach that person in the Net's distributed "phone book" was a fairly obvious thing to do. Spam... existed, actually, but it was solved by social mechanisms. ("Hey, tell that loser to knock it off or AUP him off your system, wouldja?") DNS is old.

We no longer think of DNS as a "phone book" style directory system, and we no longer assume that every reachable machine is cared for individually.

Audio on Linux works fine in my experience.

Macs are nowhere near as usable as Linux systems in any respect, especially at the GUI level. The Mac GUI is just, fundamentally, a mistake Apple made in the 1980s and never moved on from. Even Jobs recognized the Mac's error when he made NeXT, which now lives on in WindowMaker.

It works just fine.

You can run KDE on Ubuntu, you know.

They say it's public domain so it is, indeed, license-free. AFAIK, the public domain dedication makes the rest of the section chaff.

Tying profiling to political correctness means you want racial profiling or similar, which would have such a huge false negative and false positive rate as to be worse than useless. Besides, I'm sure the TSA already de facto does it, because sentiments like yours are so common.

If you want to profile, ignore political correctness and do it based on something other than race, religion, or national origin.

Maybe if you went to more than two places in the US you'd get a different picture.