AFAICT, that argument is nonsense. The US Federal government gets its power from the Constitution. If the Constitution does not apply to a situation, the Feds can't do anything about it. (I admit that there have been some pretty awful stretches of Constitutional language.) If the US Constitution doesn't apply in Gitmo, the US cannot operate it.

When have women and children been considered not persons? They have not necessarily had the same rights and responsibilities as adult men, but AFAIK they've always been persons. At which times were blacks not considered persons? Slaves had no rights in the US, and were not considered persons, but it was never the case that all blacks were slaves.

And from here we get to the right to arm bears.

Animals don't have responsibilities, so why should they have rights? We do have laws against mistreating animals. These aren't perfect or perfectly enforced, but what would be changed by "animal rights" laws?

Yeah. The older cars will come through crashes better. What happens to the occupants is another story entirely.

A modern car is designed to have crumple zones that absorb impact energy and reduce the deceleration in a head-on collision. Do a head-on in one of those old tanks, and the car will maintain its shape much better. This also means that the impact energy is passed back to the humans straight, and the deceleration is really really fast, and there's an excellent chance the driver winds up impaled on the steering wheel column.

FYI, I first saw a French fry robot in a McDonald's decades ago. I'm not sure how well it worked out, but we could do a lot better and cheaper today.

In some societies, a middle class was formed agriculturally. People who owned their own farms and were wealthy enough to have some leisure were, basically, middle class. This had advantages. During the wars between England and France, English strongly encouraged their middle class to take up archery, while when France tried to build archery on the same basis it caused too much unrest in the lower classes.

My definition of middle class is someone who has a reasonably stable income, or expectation of income, and some leisure, and something significant to lose if society goes kablooie, but still has to work for a living.

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.