I guess I deserve that. What I mean is that the national government will have to crack down on local government corruption if they want to keep the local governments in line. They probably will eventually do this, as it was done in the US. Unfortunately, there is no government level above that to rein in corruption at the national level. You can see this at work in the US.

I have to disagree with that. YouTube is a much friendlier and saner place since the integration. The integration did increase the noise on Google+, but all in all I think it's better.

What's to "come clean" about? Their privacy policy says they aggregate information about you from all your uses of their services. There you go. That's it. What else do you want to know? What they'll use it for? For providing you services, and for selling ads which they display to you.

Seems pretty obvious and straightforward to me.

(Disclosure: It's not really relevant to the content of my comment, but I'm a Google employee. I'm not, however, a Google spokesperson. The above is my own words and opinions only.)

You can also plead no contest, which has the same result as pleading guilty, but without admitting guilt.

As for the point about Microsoft not being a defendant, you're right that third parties don't have the same options... but they also don't have the same justification for refusal, since compliance will not implicate them in anything, unless, of course, it would implicate them in something else, in which case they can negotiate a deal for qualified immunity.

http://www.sublimetext.com/for... gives you a good start. But really; the best way to find out is to fire Sublime up and see; it's pretty self-explanatory for much of it (although having the vi mode plugin disabled by default can be a bit jarring until you figure out how the plugin system works).

Why not just use ed? It should already be there....

Not true -- I've been in many situations where 'which vi' has returned nothing.

Now ed is always there -- any environment that doesn't contain ed is not worth being in. It's been the default since 1971, unlike newcomers such as vi that didn't show up until 1976.

Off his lawn?!?!?

He said nano -- the bastard child of pico.

Nano is the notepad of the POSIX world -- it eats line endings, messes up indentation, and makes a mess of config files -- just like pico did back in the day.

I still remember using elm with pico integration; it was great for writing an email, horrible for coding. I used emacs for that, until it started getting too unwieldy.

Now if I'm in a lightweight environment, I'll use ed. If I'm in a graphical environment, I'll use Sublime. If I'm in a terminal, I'll use vim. ...so the GP can get off MY lawn.

I use Sublime with vim bindings turned on. It has features I use every day that vi/vim doesn't have, and doesn't get in the way of my vim muscle memory. It also doesn't get in the way of my ed muscle memory, nor my Mac muscle memory. In fact, pretty much whatever legacy text editor my muscle memory thinks I'm using, Sublime will interpret the commands correctly and let me get the job done.

I've used all the listed editors, and eventually settled on the vim/Sublime combo, as they accomplish everything the others do, and then some.

And to think that 20 years ago, I was a diehard emacs user. I liked my macros, but Sublime can do all that too; it just prefers python over LISP.

Well, yes. I mean, I'd prefer if everyone signed the treaty but I can certainly see why they chose not to. Same with India and Pakistan.

Indeed -- and it's also the issue of short-term gain vs. long-term gain. People will hand over their Facebook passwords in exchange for chocolate. Just because an individual is short sighted shouldn't mean that their entire social community has to suffer in the long term because of it.

I'd disagree to your first part: there's not much difference between one President and another when you come right down to it; they are heavily restricted in their actions by policy makers. Plus, your municipal vote for the president has almost no effect on the result, compared to municipal elections where one interest group can sway the entire outcome. Mayors and aldermen have huge amounts of leeway, and their decisions affect your life directly.

I'd rather someone discovers a president was fraudulently elected than a mayor. But I'd rather that they found out the mayor too, if there was fraud involved. This is much easier to do with offline voting than with online voting.

The second half has already been responded to, so I'll tackle this bit.

If you have malware on your machine, that's likely your own fault (most likely through ignorance). Unfortunately, everyone on your network, on your social network, and on the malware's distribution chain is penalized for your stupidity.

So let's back up one level...

Online voting makes life easier, agreed.

Unfortunately, abuse of online voting doesn't just affect the person not using it to vote, but also affects everyone in the municipality.

You can't have it both ways: either the upstream has to think of the privacy and security concerns, or the end operator (citizen) does.

As "online" implies global, it means that unlike mail-in, where abuse is likely limited to people who are actually a part of the municipality plus a few external interested parties, suddenly abuse is open to the entire world, where statistics indicate that a 0.001% of the 7 billion population = 70,000 actors likely to attempt to abuse the system for reason X instead of the 0.15 of a person who is likely to abuse the system for reason X locally.

The main way to ensure best security is to limit scope: only expose a function to the actors that need to access it. "On the Internet" does the inverse.

And that's just one reason it's a bad idea; there are plenty of others. All of them have solutions, but all the solutions are going to run afoul of statistics when you move a system that's been exposed to 15,000 people into an arena where it's exposed to 7 billion people.

You have the former option as well, if you prefer. You can simply stipulate in court to the prosecution's allegations regarding the evidence. Where this is tantamount to pleading guilty, you can do that, too.

Perhaps, but any such exploration and the resulting tools have to beat the baseline of a decent text editor, a decent version control system, a decent scripting language, and starting to write code within a minute of deciding the project is ready to begin.

For a long-running project with many developers and other contributors performing repetitive or error-prone tasks, maybe it will be worth investigating, selecting and adopting some external tools to automate some of that work, at some stage in the project when you know where the pain points are. But if your development team aren't newbies, they will be perfectly capable of building their code manually at first, they will surely already know their universal Big Three tools very well, and importantly, they will just code up any basic automation on the fly as the project grows and the needs become apparent.

IME, that turns out to be a surprisingly tough standard to beat. I've seen many, many projects get bogged down in their own infrastructure because they felt they should use some type of tool and forced themselves to do it, not because they necessarily needed that tool or found it useful in practice. Of course good tools can be useful, and of course sometimes it is better to bring in help from outside the project rather than being too NIH about everything, but it's important to stay focussed on the goal and not to forget that tools are only means to an end.