mayanksinghal

Yes and they may use other avenues when required. As much as I sing songs about incompetence and ineptitude of most government offices (of my country), they do have a knack to survive (or competing forces are just as inadequate, take your pick).

Please do not comment when you don't have anything constructive to offer. You embarrass the whole bunch of us as it is going to just feed stereotypes and we know how hard it is to get rid of them.

I have no information of the case at hand, but that could the reason why the prosecutor went for hacking charges instead of harassment.

If you are from US, then you might as well because present UK at least seems less imperialistic. However, this could be simply because it wields less power than it did in past centuries.

I guess we can pick the alternative energy source of our liking and evangelize for it. We can also technologically, monetarily, electorally and emotionally support the people who are looking for and deploying these alternatives. At least temporarily switch to ecologically cheaper foods, so that species who are facing problems get a few decades of rest, and recommend your preference to others who might enjoy the change as well.

I don't know of any email clients that execute JS inside mails. I don't think we will see such clients anytime soon.

There is no way this can be called 'negative competition'. This could be considered grey if you count every single interaction between competitors as such. If this is petty than Mac-Windows ads must be categorized disgustingly so.

Try this:

  javascript:{v=document.createElement('style');v.innerHTML='blockquote{font-size:14px;width:500px}blockquote div{padding-bottom:8px}';document.body.appendChild(v)};void(0);

That describes why Brazil could have been a threat, if it were not so friendly, not why it should be described not-so-friendly now. Unless you want to say that any government with even the remotest socialistic roots, that trades with China and Russia more than the USA is being classified as Not-So-Friendly. While I have my doubts that it might actually be how USA administration classifies things, I hope it isn't true.

That quite a narrow definition of what it means to be civilized and what it means to understand other cultures. The tribes in mountains of Pakistan value their way of living, their religion, their ideologies, their decentralized governance, their barter economy, their local food production, their way of dressing and their way of dealing with internal feuds as much as you love your civilization. To claim that their ways are outdated or unfair to certain sections of their society is fine. But to claim that they have nothing to lose is so effing narrow sighted that I wonder if you being sarcastic.

And I say this being citizen of a country that has suffered from terrorism longer than most civilized countries and paid significantly higher costs.

Yes, I think it is quite appropriate to discuss what these drone strikes prevented as much as it is important to discuss what they caused. Elsewhere in the this thread, it is argued that drone strikes also create enough anguish that they end up creating more extremists than they have killed.

For instance, killing of children is not even the only cause of growing anger towards these drone strikes. It also hurts the sovereignty of these states and fuels to Anti-American patriotism in them. If I live in a failed state, it is still my state. Unless it is abundantly supported from people outside my country (and yours) and almost universally acceptable from people within mine, your government shouldn't be interfering.

Both studies were done by the same scientist who seems to have other stakes in the process than just academic curiosity.

Lasted ~2.5years. Got open sourced and now powers 2-3 startups.

Reader lasted 9 years!

> the standard definition of the term outside of obvious casual adaptations of the term like "office politics."

From my limited reading about the topic, that is not the case. According to wikipedia, politics is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level[1]. I have taken just one, very 101 like course on Governance and the most prominent theories that were discussed used politics in the broader sense (but detailed from a narrower perspective due to the scope of the class). Group theory[2], for instance, calls nearly all interactions between interest groups as political. Elite Theory [3], also used similar connotations.

  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_theory)
  [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
  [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_theory

> I don't consider other attempts to influence governments to be inherently political acts, like civil disobedience, participating in black markets, and other forms of counter-economics.

Then your definition of politics satisfies you assumption of what politics means but that doesn't mean that those acts are not political as understood by many if not most others. By your understanding of politics, only governments and those participating to elect/support them are political entities. Even if we take that definition, whatever system theoretical (or in some parallel universe, practical) society you envision there are going to be small pockets of political governance that sets rules and enforces them. It could be as small as a family or a pack of 15 travelers, or as large as a village. There will be pack leaders who will enforce the minimal rules that you have set up, probably using physical force and there will be rules to avoid physical force unless necessary. There will be clashes between packs, which is just going to be a decentralized version of current international politics and there is going to be protection money taken from the physically weak likes of me, so that I don't get killed in such clashes.

I prefer better politics (your definition of politics) than no politics.

May be I am ignorant, but anarchism doesn't appear to be very different from tribal societies. No large concentrations of power, no permanent authority, minimal rules and localized politics. It is definitely a political choice about choosing a small but (all) powerful association than a large but weak association. and not analogous to atheism, unless you want to force that association.

But shouldn't it be the case that if police is given a search warrant, we (as people, in general) want them to notice anything and everything there is to notice?

This is also something I would reply to your sibling comment as well, I think many would prefer a footage of their state instead of a description of it from a police officer who might be confused/distracted/filling-up-the-gaps. It is both more objective and more just. Jury should be allowed to see as it was and not just as it is displayed during the trial.

CoffeeScript is JS. And to be more honest and judgemental, CoffeeScript is the sweeter-but-poorly-documented Javascript.

The reason people are attempting to put javascript everywhere is because they can and because others enjoy it. And those who do enjoy JS, know what parts of JS are to be avoided at all costs. And I actually like it compared to other modern scripting languages for two reasons:(1) I don't have to worry about whether my end-user will have to worry about installing 100 dependencies to consume my code/service (2) I can choose how robust my setup is (Closure Compiler) or how sweet (CoffeeScript), and spend time sharing my setup with others who like the language instead of using proverbial sarcasm on topics about languages that I don't want to use.

Nobody is denying anyone's legal right to privacy. Eric Schmidt was setting expectations about it, when he made that statement. You would have known if gawker didn't (1) Made their own value judgement. (private => filth) and equate privacy to security (2) Quoted the entire statement, instead of the part that fits the story that they want to tell.

In case you have't read it a hundred times before, he continues to say "But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."

> Does it taste like despair?

Synthetic meat doesn't, at least, taste like screams.

How did Google kill Webkit now? Google was among the top contributors to the project till not too long ago. It then forked its branch to Blink and Opera went with it. It is an open source project, that has contributors from many organizations. The proceedings are public on blink mailing list. The proposals, changes everything is there.

RSS, by kill I assume you are hinting at how all the feeds were available through Google Takeout and Google Reader APIs that other SaaS applications used to very quickly get up to speed. And how it was recently reported (on Verge?) that these providers are doing great. Heck, I remember reading a Google blog post that even listed these alternatives. So as it was said elsewhere in this thread, stop spreading false information.

> Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data? Anonymity is not binary.

- What lower level of anonymity is acceptable? Is 1 in 30 acceptable?

- What about edge cases where it becomes much lower? Say only one person in a small county has an account to a web service because it is largely targeted at people elsewhere?

- What about academic improvements that keep decreasing anonymity by improving understanding of collected data? What time limit would NSA get to update its systems in case of such improvements? What happens if the speed of academic improvements is larger than the speed of updates in NSA systems? Is the system scrapped right away?

I agree that formal definitions seem lucrative. But these aren't simplified mathematical static models that we are talking about.

> The people working at Fort Meade are not evil. They truly believe they're doing a great service ...

That isn't really a strong argument. Firstly, their actions is supposed to reflect the ideology of the US citizens in general. If it doesn't, either they are not being administered as well as they should be or they are purposefully ignoring the will of the citizens. Secondly, the idea that because they truly believe that they are doing great service doesn't actually justify any of the actions. If we are forgoing the label of evil because they think that they are doing great work (and I am OK will that, I hate the label 'evil'. It is unconditionally partisan) then it does question whether Nazis/Soviet union deserved the label as well. Because I fear that they too believed in their actions.

> our legal framework is still grappling with that change

US legal framework does not seem to be struggling (I am not a native speaker, so I am assuming that is what you meant). It has expanded the power to monitor and interfere knowingly and willfully. Let's not blame this on misunderstanding or incompetence. While it is the first thing that this should attribute to, the people who have built this system seem highly skillful and knowledgeable. If you claim that decision makers do not understand the new world that has suddenly bubbled up, well it's your responsibility and that of the NSA employees who seem to be following orders without questioning, to either make them understand or replace them. And in all fairness, US voters did. The man even won a Nobel Peace Prize for some reason I cannot understand. But his actions behind the doors seem totally contrary to what his words have been in past. Not really the fault of the voters but it definitely raises questions if he truly understood the costs and still took the leap.

[Edit: grammar]

Given the level of adjectives and expletives that I have seen being used for anyone who has made even the slightest of remarks that don't aligned perfectly with the popular stand here, I can understand uhno's stance of saying stuff from a new account. And yes, it doesn't seem that MIT was neutral on this case. But I guess dropping the case wouldn't have been a neutral stance either.

Some of us actually do cook dinner at home. I come in to work quite late, stick around till 8PM but skip the dinner at Google. I have a few teammates who leave at 5PM, some others who leave at 6PM and the rest who leave around the same time as me. There is really no requirement to stay in late, but the availability of dinner for days when I am too bored to cook is a great thing.

It seems like http://golang.org/pkg/os/#pkg-constants has O_APPEND and searching for 'Append file Golang' gives http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13513375/how-to-append-te... fairly on top.

Well, if by few hundred years you mean at least ~2.2 millenia then yes, because Buddhism's dont-take-life preaching is at least that old.

And since when did the ethics and normalities of past become the standards by which our present should be governed? If animal slaughter is alright because it was okay a few hundred years ago then slavery, child marriage and hundred other nonsensical stuff should be alright as well. What we do now should be determined by how our society feels now and how it wants to invest in the future. Arguing that that our present actions should be governed by medieval ethics is lazy.

For me, it is the ability to control the TV from my cellphone, tab or mac without dealing with the terrible keyboards on the smart TV remotes (PS3 input is only slightly better).

I would argue that it has not worked reasonably well. The part that worked well, is that only nation states have access to the technology. The part that hasn't worked well is that only a few nations, most of them being allies to each other, have access to them. And the countries have gone to great lengths to keep their own enormous stockpile of weapons while aggressively forcing other nations to not work on militarized nuclear technology (and at times civil tech) on the argument that once they have it, they will be able to bully their neighbours.

And of course my stance is quite biased, because I am an citizen of one of the very few countries that has not signed NPT and agrees with the stand my government has made.