rolux

Diversion of a plane carrying a head of state, to be precise.

But yeah, it's not easy to imagine how such decisions are made. Of course, it's one of the features of authoritarianism that the display of authority trumps "tactical mistakes". But it's people who give such orders, not "authoritarianism". The simplistic explanation would be to state they're "pissed off". But maybe reality is quite close to that. By arresting Greenwald's partner, the UK authorities primarily demonstrate, to themselves, that they still hold certain powers -- and I wouldn't underestimate the self-motivational dimension of such a demonstration.

> they were used on a relative of someone nothing to do with terrorism purely for the purpose of intimidation

Intimidation is the purpose of anti-terrorism legislation. This is not an abuse of some exceptional powers -- it's their most common use.

Quote:

"Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they feel threatened by."

Not sure if it's the beginning of the end. But of course, if you're a non-US corporation or government (or individual who wants to retain his or her privacy), then US-based cloud services are out. No Gmail, no iCloud, no Dropbox, no iOS or Android phones.

If you read German, also take a look at this: http://www.gulli.com/news/12565-nachruf-guenter-freiherr-von... (scroll down for paragraph about Kim Schmitz)

The basic idea would be that Megaupload looked very much like his mid-90s warez BBS scheme, just on a much larger scale.

> If I am digitising an old text of unknown origin, and on a page it says "January 12", and on the page after that it says "January 15", can I represent those with a reference to an implicit but unknown year? I don't know the year, but I do know that the January 12 instance comes before the January 15 instance on the next page. And at some future point, we might deduce from circumstantial evidence what year it was and the sequential ordering will still make sense. Relative dates would be useful here.

Of course, if the year is unknown, and could be before ~1918, and your dates are, say, the dates of two letters, you can't even be certain about the ordering of "January 12" and "January 15".

For other - often difficult, and sometimes surprising - problems with time, see Peter-Paul Koch's excellent essay "Making <time> safe for historians": http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_...

And someone please explain to me where the ~1.5 million dollars needed to defend oneself in a federal court actually end up.

It may be good to see this in the New York Times. But others (like, for example, Glenn Greenwald, both at salon.com and at guardian.co.uk) have made this point many, many, many times. And at least Greenwald I think would agree that one should strike one word from that headline. To be exempt from execution, at the sole discretion of the U.S. president, just because one happens to hold a U.S. passport, is still not a desirable position to be in.

So if that was the venture you wanted me to support ("convince voters to vote their interest, and thus for a very different type of president" - seems to be a venture with a "media" or "campaign funding" angle, and I agree, it's a hard problem), then my question would be:

How do you assure that president will not be corrupted or compromised as well? How will he be able to tell every single person who is invested in the laws you're trying to attack (from corporate interests that are so huge that they're usually awarded cabinet posts to the sheer drag of gigantic bureaucracies invested in existing career paths) to go away? How can he practically reach the most powerful political position without sacrificing this very ability?

Plus: Imagine what would be the smartest, most malicious attacks on your plan. How would you counter them?

(Edit: None of these are rhetorical questions, of course. I do believe these laws have to be attacked. But if you asked me, maybe I'd rather invest in something like the study of political tectonics, earthquakes. Why do they happen so rarely, what makes them so destructive, and how can one provoke them?)

I agree with your last point.

But just putting a temporary cap on Ortiz' career doesn't seem like a big win to me, in the grand scheme of things. I know nothing about Massachusetts politics. Who knows she's not the "good cop", compared to the person whose career, as a result, will advance faster?

"Doing her job and obeying the law" is not an excuse. "Doing her job" would have been to tell MIT (or whoever was responsible for this affair to end up on her desk) to go away. Even though I am aware that's not how becoming a "career prosecutor" in the US justice system works.

Remains the fact that none of the bright minds that congregate under news.ycombinator.com seems to have the slightest idea how "attacking the laws" is supposed to work. Apart from maybe a vague theory of erosion that appears far less convincing than pretty much anything most people here would dare to argue in the context of, say, a business plan.

Does anyone here seriously believe that she's going to be fired? And that Carmen Ortiz is such an exceptional case?

There are hundreds of prosecutors in the US who routinely - even though against predominantly non-white and non-prominent defendants - seek much harsher sentences for much lesser "crimes", often with much more dubious evidence, and much lower chances for defendants to ever have their personal situation considered in a public forum like this one.

The need to "start somewhere" doesn't exempt you from seeing things in proportion. ("Proportion" with regards to Ortiz. Aaron's death must not enter equations or comparisons. It's absolutely out of proportion.)

Sure. But what Ortiz is pulling here is not a Nuremberg Defense ("I was aware of the injustice, but my hands were tied"). She clearly states that she's completely fine with "severe punishment" in "appropriate cases", just that with regards to Aaron, it seemed somewhat inappropriate to her and her office. (I agree that her role, and the role of her office, in Aaron's prosecution suggests the exact opposite, but that's an entirely different question.)

That's a question you'd have to ask his lawyers.

If you look at other cases, from the Pirate Bay to Wikileaks, you'll see that there are always options. Aaron didn't see any. I'd find it almost disgusting to make a judgement. Abstract reasoning can completely break down when you're facing a concrete, threatening situation. And the prospect of becoming "some kind of folk hero" may look very different if that's supposed to be you.

> "At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law."

> Is a falsifiable claim. I'm looking forward to Aaron's lawyers' response to this statement.

I agree with previous posts on the matter, which argued that the system of insane maximum penalties + plea bargaining is the modern, "civilized" version of inquisition, i.e. producing guilty pleas under the prospect of torture.

If you translate Carmen Ortiz' statement to "At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – to break the defendant's kneecaps" (translation, not equation!), you may get a better idea of why her claim may be absolutely accurate, and still entirely missing the point.

Just a - friendly - reminder that the field that such ethics operate on isn't always symmetrical. At the other end of every "I'm right so I nuke you" you will find some "I'm right but they nuke me", and if you're looking for a rational explanation why rational people may consider "vigilante justice", you'll probably find it there.

> Nobody should gain monetarily from someone being sentenced to prison.

I agree with your sentiment, but... are you aware of the fact that a large part of the US prison system is run by private corporations that have clear profit motives, and even seek contractually guaranteed occupancy levels?

Edit, link: http://annarbor.com/news/opinion/passing-house-bill-will-wor...

Money quote: "In 2012, [the Corrections Corporations of America] sent a letter to 'prison officials in 48 states offering to buy prisons from these states in exchange for a 20-year management contract and a guaranteed occupancy rate of 90%.'"

> And there are many more esolangs out there with much wilder and more beautiful semantics than Brainfuck. Implementing those can be a really valuable learning experience.

Like, for example, INTERCAL with threading via `comefrom`: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~malcolmr/intercal/threaded.html

You're right. The bug described in the article is just of the "may fail under load / with multiple users / in real-life scenarios" variety.

In the zoology of bugs, that makes it a common Mandelbug (1), but not a rare Heisenbug (2). For an even more exotic species, see Schroedinbug (3).

(1) http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/mandelbug.html

(2) http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html

(3) http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/schroedinbug.html

As you can see in the example above, there are a few features that can make a Brainfuck developer's life less miserable, like source formatting, error handling or logging.

As any other Brainfuck interpreter, it shows that Brainfuck is a nice, simple, small language. Things become mildly more interesting when you write a transpiler, lets say to Scala.

See here for a sketch of a "Brainfuck IDE" that compiles to JavaScript (just click "load", then "compile"): http://rolux.org/brainfuck/

    From the article:

The best ad is indistinguishable from content

We can expect to see Facebook deemphasizing traditional advertising units in favor of promoted news stories in your stream. The reason is that the very best advertising is content. Blurring the lines between advertising and content is one of the most ambitious goals a marketer could have.

Bringing earnings expectations into this, the key to Facebook 'fixing' their mobile advertising problem is not to create a new ad-unit that performs better on mobile. Rather, it is for them to sell the placement of stories in the omnipresent single column newsfeed. If they are able to nail end-to-end promoted stories system, then their current monetization issues on mobile disappear.

    I still hope it's rather their users who will disappear.

The main problem with "illegal numbers" seems to be that for any illegal number a, which represents someone's intellectual property or trade secret A, I can easily create two original pieces of intellectual property B and C so that b + c = a.

No need to apologize. The meaning of "hacking" has changed over time, and of course you're free to contribute to that.

If you're asking me for a thesis, then I guess it would include the idea that what people should be willing to devote to politics is more than, and fundamentally different from, attention. Once politics become politics of attention, they become, quite precisely, the spectacle you're referring to: a real-time feed of gossip, gaffes and stats.

More specifically though, my impression was, quite simply, that obsession with details, as a mainstream phenomenon, often coincides with the inability or unwillingness to see the bigger picture. While I can't back this up with statistical data, I'm pretty sure there's a well-founded psychological term for it.

Insightful article that would have benefited from a less sensationalist headline. "Hacking the Y Combinator Application Process" makes a promise that you fail to deliver on.

While I don't think the post you're referring to offered any deep insights, it's definitely not a conspiracy theory to state that the ability of the US to sustain their deficit spending largely depends on the dollar remaining the default currency of the global oil trade, and that maintaining this status quo is one of the key missions of US foreign policy. As such, it's one of the factors that determine US military presence, or interventions.

Thanks for sharing that link, good article.

Still, its main concern seems to be the predictive value of forecast models, given that "stuff happens" -- while I'm more concerned with the fact that the obsession with polling and forecasts coincides (hard to tell if it's a cause or an effect) with widespread ignorance when it comes to massively undemocratic features of the US voting system.

Not being a US citizen, I'm always quite stunned by what I perceive as an obsession with polling results. Especially when fundamental flaws in the US voting system (see, for example, http://www.gregpalast.com/latinos-too-lazy-to-vote/) seem to get widely ignored.

Sites like http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ may be great in bringing insightful reflections on statistics to a larger audience, but by focusing exclusively on the maths of elections, they might actually reinforce this ignorance towards actual political issues.