Democracy is rule by the people. It may or may not have a constitution, and that constitution may have more or less protections for minorities, and may be easier or harder to amend.

In the US, a sufficiently well-distributed majority could easily have two-thirds of each house of Congress, and two-thirds of state legislatures. That's enough to do anything, starting with changing the Constitution to enable selling people who don't understand any political science into slavery.

There is a major difference between a democracy and a republic: they describe entirely different things.

A democracy is a government where the people rule. A republic is a country without a hereditary monarch. It's a less useful concept than it used to be, with the massive dismantling of monarchies in the past century, so most countries are republics, and monarchs rarely have much real power.

The United States is a democracy and a republic. The United Kingdom is a democracy and a monarchy. The Soviet Union was not a democracy but was a republic. North Korea is not a democracy, and is de facto a monarchy.

The existence and strength of a constitution is another orthogonal concept.

I miss Buckley. I read what he wrote for years, and I think I actually agreed with him twice, but he was entertaining and thought-provoking.

If it's just for one phone, all telecommunication providers in the US have to, by law, provide full "tapping" ability. What's the advantage of the Stingray then?

BTW, would a blanket search warrant even be Constitutional? The Fourth Amendment says that warrants must be specific.

I seem to remember a complaint from Cuvier that he'd like to put humans in with other Great Apes, but thought he'd never hear the end of it from priests.

People in general don't care about security. If they did, we'd have more of it. FreedomBox is a niche product at best.

Assuming they cared, it looks like they're targeting Debian, which is an OS segment that very few people are in. Sure, Ubuntu is a great distro for the newcomer, but most people run Windows and most of the ones who don't run MacOSX. I'm not real optimistic about this running on MS Windows any time soon. "Windows" doesn't appear in the FAQ.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and suggest that their goal of making FreedomBox as easy as using a smartphone might not be realized.

I'm not trying to knock FreedomBox, but it's not going to drive mass adoption of anything.

If you can come up with a use for a home server that runs on Windows, offers something most people want, and is easy to install and run, I'd love to hear about it.

In C++, use smart pointers with a little intelligence and discipline. That's what they're there for.

C++ has got a fairly nasty learning curve if you want to do things right, but it's extremely powerful and extendable. The syntax is frequently ugly, but there's a lot you can do with it. Perhaps more importantly, there's a lot of really powerful stuff that takes one guru to write and is reasonably easy to use thereafter.

All other things being equal, terseness is good in a programming language. Verbosity means things are harder to type, and display less actual code in a given screen area. I'm a very good typist, but I'd get frustrated at typing longer keywords unless there was an advantage.

In C++, you can write "auto x =", and if you initialize it with a string then it's a string variable. You can't use "auto" unless the compiler can deduce the type.

It's useful in several ways. It allows templates to be much more type-flexible. It makes loop syntax much cleaner. There are things in C++ where it's difficult or impossible to write the type (such as lambdas), and "auto" allows assignment in those cases.

Why do you think that would never happen in C? It looks like a lot of bad design went into that, and C++ is easier to do strings well in.

I haven't looked at Swift yet, but are the Swift features better than the C++ equivalents? "for (auto i: foo)" is about as simple as iteration syntax gets, tuples were added in the library, and C++11 introduced inferred types.

Stroustrup made C with Classes as a version of C that had Simula classes. He liked Simula, but had to rewrite stuff into C for performance. I don't know Simula, so I can't comment on how transparent it was compared to C with Classes, but for Stroustrup it was a performance issue.

"Han shot Jar-Jar first!" - at least it sounds good.

I don't see GP as badmouthing illegal immigrants so much as wanting to avoid creating a privileged class of people who get to avoid the bureaucracy and complications just by breaking the law in the first place. GP says some harsh things about some illegal immigrants, and also about some people who are here legally.

The immigration problem is a real mess, due at least in part to selective law enforcement. I don't think there is a good solution.