Agreed; by then, Germany had really run off the rails. I also feel we did right by Japan, when we rebooted their society after the war and turned them into a Western-style state that is vastly more free and efficient than it was.

Very good. Now tell us *why* all humans possess those rights.

The definition doesn't help, either... a political right is defined as "A behavior which you may practice, and anyone who tries to stop you is automatically wrong." No information there about where the right springs from.

The answer, that most people will not agree with, is: rights are the those behaviors that humans must practice if they seek to establish a pro-human society, where 'pro-human' means a society whose primary goal is the long-term production of safety, comfort, and pleasure. Any other society is automatically wrong, in the sense of "illogical for humans to seek".

I used "regulatory capture" because it points to a solution, at least in principle. Whereas for the more general problem of "corruption", no one has any idea how to fix it. Religion used to be the answer ("The invisible old man in the sky who loves you will torture you forever!!!11!"), but that has lost all credibility these days. And with the college curriculum passionately certain that certainty is impossible (i.e. Skepticism), there is no alternative in sight.

Yep. Not to mention all of the banana republics in South America, who had their approximately-democratic governments violently toppled by the CIA acting on behalf of American produce companies.

America has never been The Good Guy, it has just been a typical state out to get ahead at any cost... any cost, that is, short of allowing its citizens to discover that it is not The Good Guy.

That's why the diplomatic cable leaks are such a Big Deal, and the reason why Bradley Manning will get no popular sympathy. His revelations cause American citizens to feel cognitive dissonance ("We aren't the Good Guy? Really?")... and people deeply hate those who cause them cognitive dissonance.

I'm an American citizen and I feel ashamed about the degree to which my country has fallen to regulatory capture.

Yep, it launched my entire career. C64 handed down from my brother, wrote my first horrible games... then a Tandy 1000TL (XT286 clone from Radio Shack) handed down from my father, ran my first BBS... then Pascal in High School CS, and you know the rest. Wow. I wish I could shake the hands of the C64's designers.

I still have mine, it's in the attic now, but it still works.

Have you looked at the inductive charging pads? There are several brands out there, and you can place pads on each of your desks plus one on your car dashboard. You could even contrive one inside the driver's seat of your car where it will press against your phone while it is in your pocket.

The handset's transmit power is regulated by the tower, based on how well the tower can hear the handset. Most handsets can do up to 0.6W of transmit power if so requested... but naturally they will use less power whenever possible.

Remember back when cellphones used a frequency that caused dit-dit-dit-daaaaaa-dit-dit interference on your car stereo? Ever noticed that sometimes the dits were really loud, other times very faint? That variance was the handset using different power levels, under orders from the tower.

So, the bottom line is, if you want to reduce handset power consumption, you need more towers (i.e. smaller cells) and/or more sensitive tower receivers. Yes, I realize that greater sensitivity will at some point require going below the noise floor... but that can be accompli$hed.

Since the beginning of this debate, twenty years ago when we were all still using 1.44MB floppy disks, I have been firmly in the "thou shalt not copy" camp. I never, ever pirated software or music. Occasionally I copied MP3s from a friend, then re-bought them if I ended up listening to them more than once or twice. And I still felt guilty.

Last month was my change of heart.

I was trying to Do The Right Thing, and download Terry Pratchett's Discworld audiobooks using iTunes. Each audiobook costs $20, but I was willing to pay it. I splurged and bought the first three. The download of the third one failed, and there is no way to resume it (in order to get the rest of the audiobook, I only received the first 42 minutes), because of Audible.com's license restrictions. I'm facing an hour on the phone with iTunes tech support.

But even THAT was acceptable. Until I found out, the hard way, that my audiobooks can't be listened to on my other iOS devices. I can listen to them on the iPhone I purchased them on, but not on my iPad (same iTunes) account or my sons' iPads (same iTunes). WTF?

So I decided that Audible.com and iTunes have colluded to defraud the consumer. And I got gypped $60 before I figured it out. I therefore conclude that I am free of my moral obligation to pay them for the content they control. And suddenly, the world, and this whole piracy conversation, looks very different to me.

You ask us to become single-issue voters. I consider other problems to be far more grave -- specifically: restoring the adversarial relationship between the SEC and the companies it regulates, and putting teeth into laws against white-collar crime. I'm a long-time libertarian who, thanks to this recession and its causes, has only recently become so cynical about human nature that I consider these reforms to be important.

In fact I think they are so important that if we don't follow through, the gloriously productive pattern of our society will be wrecked.

Yes I agree that copyright reform is important too... but if I write more than one letter to my congresspeople per quarter, or threaten to vote against them over more than one or two issues, they will just tune me out.

Depends on your definition of 'omit'. At this point in my career, I find that I have finite energy for any given task / bug / refactoring crusade, and it is far better to spend that energy renaming things (for clarity), and preening the whitespace, than on writing comments that nobody reads because everyone knows that code comments are misleadingly outdated.

That said, I think we both agree with the GP post that comments are needed when the reader will need information about why the code does what it does. I presently do a lot of work bugfixing code that was cranked out by our company's low-priced Indian counterparts, and sometimes I would kill for even one sentence of explanation, with which I can proceed to fix up all the variable and function names.

You can also spread your application out into layers. From your request I assume you will be collecting and/or publish sensitive data. It may be possible to divide that process into sections, and spread the seconds over three different machines, with custom-written interfaces between them. That way, when (not if, but when) your world-facing server gets pwned, the pwners will probably be unable to immediately pull anything useful out of the second section (on the second machine), since it isn't using any ordinary method (e.g. HTTP on port 80) to publish data. This arrangement, like a bank vault, is not perfect defense, but it does give you more time to notice the breach and react.

Yep, a clever choice of alias.

According to TFA, the Cutwail guy's real name is supposedly Dmitry Sergeyvich Nechvolod, phone number +7-916-4444474.

You're half right. Serious wine people are routinely unable to distinguish $8/bottle wine from $800/bottle wine in double-blind tests.

Yeah yeah, I know that part of the wine/stereo experience is knowing that the thing cost a grand... but luckily for me, my brain is sufficiently well-programmed that I do not enjoy that sort of experience.

They may have supposed the war would be short, but the desired effects of the war were (presumably) long-term. I don't know all of the goals, and neither do you, since we don't have access to the classified information that would give a full understanding of the situation. Single facts can greatly change our evaluation of a decision.

I do know that the publicly available facts are misleadingly deficient; my husband was there.

In any case, we can be certain that the warhawks' goals included: Iran, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its planned oil bourse; Iraq, its simmering civil war, its oil, and its pipelines; Afghanistan; Kuwait; OPEC; Israel; al Qaida; Syria; the black market in military hardware; the US, its unemployment rate (re: enlistment), its economy, and its recently sallied reputation as somebody you don't want to mess with; and all the unknown unknowns. There are so many variables, so many political figures, and so much non-public information, you just sound like a child when you assert that the deciders were "stupid and flat out wrong".

Yep, I'm moving too. Looks like HostGator is a good choice for where to move. I'm looking forward to my "Cancel my accounts, I think your organization is evil" phone call to GoDaddy, those are always fun.