Just to level-set, do you find camps where undesirables (defined however you like) can be sent creepy, and morally dubious?

Ah, this sort of Linux-inspired "you'll never figure it out, a friend has to tell you" stuff annoys me. Well, thanks for telling me!

Tabs suck - switching between explorers using the task bar (when set up properly to not combine windows on the taskbar) is good.

What explorer has lacked since Windows 3.1 is two panes in explorer, to simplify moving/sorting stuff between directories. Yeah, you can snap an explorer to each side of the desktop these days but that only works properly if you have just 1 monitor. If I could easily tile explorers on one monitor in a multi-mon setup, that would be far less annoying.

Man, there's straw everywhere. Who's going to clean this mess up?

The only time I ever see "women are stupid and bad at coding! " on /. is when SJWs construct a new strawman to thrash.

There are still bills I pay with paper. (Some companies still charge for the "privilege" of paying online, which pisses me off even though the amount doesn't matter.)

I occasionally deposit checks via mail. Even if I trusted my phone enough to put banking software on it (which would be a silly thing to do), that only works for some kinds of checks.

Some companies respond to customer complaints via paper mail much better than they do via the net.

Sometimes I send checks to family members who aren't technologically sophisticated enough for there to be another way.

Maybe all of those reasons will disappear eventually, but I doubt that will be in my lifetime. It's also worth remembering that you can still send some mail anonymously - frankly, I'm surprised you still can, as there's nothing a totalitarian state hates more than anonymous communication.

So you're argument, as I understand it is: "I don't care that it wasn't actually illegal, because this is really about why Bush was bad"? Or was it "I'm going to insist on my own private definition of illegal and yell at anyone who uses the normal meaning"?

You don't find the idea of fertilizing an egg just so you can harvest the embryo creepy, and morally dubious? Seems creepy to me - if the problems can be solved a different way, lets do that.

Where the Hell do you work? Sounds like a terribly crappy company - name and shame! Then change to a less crappy one (which may involve learning not-Ruby). I've been a dev for 20-mumble years in 4 states, and I've never seen a culture like that.

Or was that a list of imaginary problems?

Almost everything you do in Amazon is by region - certainly any EC2 servers you use directly are. Scaling up to thousands of servers in a region is easier than you think with the tools available now - EC2 is a mature ecosystem these days. Plus there's this, which you may have heard of.

Want a front-end behind a load balancer that adds servers as load grows, and gives them back when is shrinks? There's hardly any coding involved. If you have non-transactional data, like TFA, you just use their NoSQL DB and, seriously, just type the IOPS you need into a box (though it's hard to make that part elastic). For "year make and model"-indexed recall data, that data will all fit in memory on cache servers, so just stand up some memcached (or something more modern) in front of the DB.

This stuff is only hard if you're on a really tiny budget.

You seem intent on missing the point that it doesn't matter what system you come up with, that system must be performed by people, and people are very corruptible. If you need the opinion of scientists, then completely complicit scientists will be found or created. There's ultimately no way to makes laws other than "those in power decide," as every system is really that system under the covers - by the definition of "power."

Anyhow, on the subject of obscenity laws, if you haven't seen this yet you'll appreciate it: http://www.lehighvalleylive.co...

To a court, what is "scientifically valid" other than the testimony of scientists as to what's valid?

The puritanical obscenity laws were backed with "scientific studies" showing that society would collapse if people watched porn, or some such BS. Ultimately, the court just injected its own personal opinions. The current extreme laws against CP (beyond obscenity laws) are based on just such an argument of direct harm due to the content - an argument the SCOTUS bought. Are those arguments actually compelling enough to justify banning CP under obscenity laws (a lower bar)? I dunno, I didn't spend that much time looking into it, but it's not unreasonable to think it might be so. Does that extend to drawings? I'm highly skeptical.

Sure, which keeps coming back to "who decides" what's true harm. That's the heart of all government corruption - the power given to the decider. As much as the US does some screwy stuff from time to time, our systems for deciding have proven pretty robust, relative to all the systems we know about. If the system occasionally spits out stuff like obscenity laws, well, there are far worse failure modes, like what just happened in the UK.

A great many laws in the USSR were "backed by scientifically valid studies and scientific consensus". Amazing what consensus you can get when all the scientists' families have guns pointed at them, and you have firm control over universities and who's allowed to be a scientist. I believe we're quite far along in the latter problem in the US today.

You can't substitute one kind of oligarchy for another and come out ahead.

Finally, common ground. I'd note that selling a product isn't pure speech either (especially advertising, or other avenues for fraud). Neither is a disruptive protest that blocks streets etc. When a government argues that allowing X would cause real harm to the person or liberties of others, there must be some process to arbitrate that claim. Life is never simple.

It's not about "bad", it's about "likely to cause harm in this measurable way". I think obscenity laws are pretty silly, but that's just my opinion. As has often been said, democracy is the worst form of government, other than everything else that's ever been tried. If the local government can convince a court that there's a compelling state interest ("throwing a brick through a window clearly damages property and may cause injury") and that the least restrictive method was chosen ("we're not banning the words on the note, just the part where the brick flies through the window"), then I'm OK with that process, as much as it sometimes ends in particular places I disapprove of.

That rarely comes up in law, is the thing, other than the occasional attempt to redefine pi. Almost all law is banning stuff people simply don't like, backed by studies justifying that opinion. Everything's a trade-off. What's the right tradeoff? What's the best speed limit? Where to set the testing bar for a new drug? Metric or imperial? Free trade or protectionism? Nudity or burkas?