failbuffer

It's not cool they are seemingly terminating a service I've already paid for. I say seemingly because their FAQ pressures you to opt-in to their new mail service as soon as possible and is vague on whether or not GandiMail will remain usable after November. That's BS to me; I'll transfer out even if it means paying more elsewhere.

Source? Seems like an Elon Musk- or Fusion research proposal-type timeframe

For the most part yes, but for market arbitrage, the milliseconds saved by communicating thru the planet might be worth figuring out how to oscillate an extremely large weight very rapidly.

If an art student was able to gain those abilities, would you then argue they couldn't legally create art?

You're discounting the deterrent effect. Defrauding investors has a huge negative impact on society, to say nothing of bogus blood test results, deceiving regulators, and ruthlessly threatening legal actions against whistleblowers and journalists.

It was a fantastic gamble IMO. Low chance of success, but enormous payoff if it had succeeded. Imagine a commercially viable alternative to iPhone and Android with multiple manufacturers and a completely open platform. Ultimately, I think they came to market too late and Android moved into the niche (low end market) they were targeting.

The government has been pushing for more power since... forever? Since the civil war at least. National security letters. Secret FISA court. Extraordinary rendention. Data taps on all major social media platforms, all telecos, and who knows what else. Warrantless searches within 50 miles of borders, shorelines, and international airports. Enhanced interrogations. Very few people in politics seem interested in curbing it.

Yet what repression do you see in the Jan 6th cases? Wouldn't you expect to get arrested for breaking into any (super important) federal building and disrupting any (super important) government meeting? Is the government taking excessive action beyond fines and a few year's imprisonment?

Moreover, from a geopolitical and law/order standpoint, wouldn't you see it as imperative for the government to take legal action in the wake of insurrections? Hasn't this been a weakness of costal cities (like with CHAV)? While I'm all for restraining government power, there are situations where it must be used or you effectively have anarchy.

"complexity merchants" - I love this term. It aptly describes beneficiaries of earlier IT fads. Remember UML? Remember WS-*? One could come up with a long list of technologies that were a bonanza for billing consultant hours but no so great for getting to solutions.

Except for the part where Amazon (software) agents break into your home and steal your books.

Yep, it's a perennial. Naieve entrepreneurs and investors love the romance of these vessles, but they will never carry enough payload fast enough to compete with the vast array of existing options. All they're good for is suckering grant money and writing clickbait.

Also Billy Mitchell of Fyre Festival... wire fraud instead of bilking his concert attendees.

Fair, but my point was that it /should/ be. That the justice system is content to chew thru thousand of man hours (police, lawyers, prosecution, court officials, etc) instead of just laughing is indicative of the administrative bloat that prevades our institutions.

If I were a WY legislator, I'd propose an implied 5ft public access easement on all such crossings.

De minimis non curat lex - the law does not deal in trifles. Unless a multi-millionaire pharmaceutical businessman wants to make life difficult for someone, apparently.

It's silly to see the law chewing up so much time and talent for a prosecution so at odds with the public interest.

Not per se, no. But there are many overbearing/controlling parents out there. It's easy to imagine scenarios where parental access to GDPR data could be a bad thing (and yet other scenarios where it could be a good thing).

Yeah, caught this on Fox News tonight, and the hypocrisy of their breathless hand-wringing about the "threat to democracy" really burned me up. Not because they're right wing, but because they coordinate a top-down propaganda machine and have spurred other news organizations (like MSNBC) to do the same. The magnitude of their crime and the devastating rifts it has helped widen in our country is so much greater in scope than what the Google employees were talking about doing.

Wilson reminds me somewhat of right-to-die advocate Dr. Kevorkian, in that the passion of his advocacy eventually led him to cross some bright red lines. Kevorkian assisted several chronically-ill patients with their suicides, and juries repeatedly let him off the hook because of the patients' videotaped testimonials expressing their suffering and desire to control how they died. Eventually, though, Jack took it to far and injected a patient himself (instead of waiting for them to push the button), and got sent to prison at age 70.

Maybe the lines weren't quite so bright red with Williams, but that pushing and pushing to the point where you lose sight of the bigger picture seems characteristic of many "solo" advocates (expanding the word "solo" to include not just loners but maybe also founders of non-profits who don't give up the leadership reigns, like Stallman at FSF).

By contrast, really great advocates can look beyond their cause and keep the wider world in perspective. Nelson Mandela is a good example of this (since he focused on uniting post-apartheid South Africa instead of seeking vengeance on the White gentry like his wife and many others wanted to do).