Any position of power is going to get abused by someone. Period. This is why we have checks and balances.

Checks and balances means that anyone in a long chain can "veto" use of force, and prevent it from being used:

0. The Constitution has to grant the legislature powers to propose a law
1. The legislature has to propose a law granting powers to the executive branch
2. The executive has to sign it into law
3. The treasurer has to put money towards enforcing the law
4. The sheriff has to begin enforcement of the law
3. The prosecutor has to decide to enforce the law
6. The judge has to be willing to hear a trail for the law (or can decline if any of the above has been done illegally, i.e. unconstitutionally)
7. The relevant parties (e.g. prisons) have to be willing to impose the judgments ordered

Ideally, checks and balances means that anyone in this system can say "Nope, I don't agree with that use of force" and veto, and the use of force dies. They shouldn't have to worry about losing their position: This is why Federal judges get life tenure.

Cost is defined as the value of the next-best alternative that was given up.

In major data centers, download is used very little, to the point of being free.

Upload to customers is what is costly, and since different channels are used for upload and download, the law of supply and demand dictates higher prices for upload in datacenters.

The inverse tends to be true (if not as much) for residential connections.

What you're proposing is eliminating these cost signals that help allocate capital, and keep usage of it efficient and allocated to the most urgently demanded uses.

s/man-made disasters/natural disasters/

Yes, we can deal with the consequences. If there's two things that are always true, it's (1) we always think things are getting worse, and (2) things are actually always getting better.

Deaths from man-made disasters have dropped greatly over the last century, something like 95%. In present day, the vast majority of deaths are from earthquakes and the effects they cause (especially tsunamis), and even then, only in poorly developed regions.

Imposing vast costs on the economy for the sake of delaying major effects by just a few years is pointless. Mitigating the effects is much more cost effective.

Climatologists only tell us what happens to the climate. If you want to find out what to do about it, you have to ask an economist: The chance that we lose our food supply, or the likelihood of natural disaster deaths going up, is virtually nil.

*headdesk*

The whole point of the GGGGP is that the number on the clock doesn't change when the sun goes down. It goes down 24 hours after the time it went down yesterday, +-1%.

DST only makes sense if you turn it on and off during the year as that 1% error builds up/down, but that's still an awful solution: If you want to drive home in the daylight, just drive home earlier.

So you're proposing criminalizing the re-publication of information that is true?

No. Just, no. On so many levels.

Haven't you heard of the Streisand Effect?

HTML5 isn't an operating system, it's a markup language.

File API is a different specification: http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/

You're welcome.

Nit: SSL 3.0 is deprecated and only supports lower-security algorithms. TLS 1.2 is the current, secure version of the standard.

Since a man-in-the-middle can negotiate TLS connections downward, SSL should be disabled entirely.

The majority of minimum wage workers are under 24. The average minimum wage worker is 35.

See what I did there?

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Why would you take a proposal that we KNOW hurts people, and continue to force it on them as if it's good for them? Ask any economist; minimum wage hurts the very people it's purported to help. It wasn't introduced to help the poor at all; it was introduced to price minorities out of the job market. That's right, minimum wage is fundamentally racist.

I'm pretty sure that's what Java was supposed to be.

In any event, the problem they're discussing isn't unique to JavaScript/ECMAScript, it would plague a bytecode solution too... They're deciding to send all the dependencies they could possibly need over the wire before they know they'll need them, instead of deciding which ones to send on the server-side when the page is requested.

At the very least, there was some sort of drama around it recently, regarding the DOM and such: DOM is supposed to be a generic data model and API for all XML vocabularies, implementable in a variety of programming languages, though it also defines an extension API for HTML, and SVG defines an extension API too. But someone decided the DOM spec was antiquated (true), and the way to fix that is to redefine it (uhhhh...). They've redefined DOM to be HTML-specific, causing API incompatibilities with generic XML parsers... it's a mess. Same thing for many JavaScript/ECMAScript APIs, merging them them into the single (already very bloated) document defining HTML. Because when all your products are about Web browsers, what's the difference?

Apparently to Google, the only kind of user agent (nay, software) is a Web browser. (Their crawler operating like an automated web browser, even.)

In the parts of the W3C I work in, they're awfully nice and very responsive. They communicate, consensus is a requirement for moving forward (with provisions for voting if and only if there's an impasse - I've never seen it used), and follow-ups will be made several weeks after you make an objection to verify the resolution stayed resolved. Some of the most helpful companies I've worked with recently have been, to my surprise, IBM, Adobe, PayPal, and Oracle (that is to say, their representatives are interested in consensus).

No, I'm talking specifically about Google (and Mozilla in many cases, I think due to being Google funded). I should have said them instead. Deciding to drop support features when it isn't relevant to their business model - accessibility features, the Link header, alternate stylesheets, new document DTDs, MathML, SVG, DANE, the "http://" in the address bar... Oh, but let's go all out on WebRTC, because that'll be useful to every website ever. Way more useful than DNSSEC (that's sarcasm, yes? You don't need TLSA records when you have your own Certificate Authority.). The problems seem to be caused when they don't get their way, they fork (or rewrite entirely) the relevant specification (like HTML), take all the credit, none of the responsibility (like the royalty-free patent requirement), and then all the blame lands on the WG.

Sure, I'll close a bug report after 30 days of waiting for a response, and do it with an invitation to re-open the issue if desired.

If I close a bug report because I think I fixed the issue, I'll follow up after 30 days and make sure that I really did, in fact, fix the person's problem.

These "asshat maintainers" don't bother with doing either.

I hope it's not just me, I don't really have a problem with the strong language or pointed critique. Linus only really employs it for smart people who should know better, and will actually engage in conversation, and he's typically constructive. And funny.

The asshats are the people like Pottering, GNOME, and certain figures editing the HTML spec who don't give a damn about users, authors, and/or developers. The people who can't possibly imagine any use-case outside themselves or their company.

They're the maintainers in Open Source who close your bug reports without any questions because they can't imagine how your use case could possibly be relevant to them. Come on guys, at least ask a question if you don't understand the bug report/feature request.

Um, the positions of the parties have been shifting more authoritarian, on average.

The USA was kind of founded on radical individual liberty and freedom. Today you can't find a party wanting to touch the war machine, drug laws, social security, or other massive programs that the Framers couldn't even have dreamt about.

Go back and look at the conflicts that the two parties fought over back then. It seems like a joke now. There was a time we actually fought over a centralized banking system? Light houses? Slavery?