Round up all those non-connected people and lock them up. Let's start with all those losers without a Facebook account.. you must have something to hide if you're not regularly posting stupid pictures there.

Who should receive the putative fruits of economic spying by the government? Private companies? Which ones? In exchange for what? Paid to who? How has that been working out for us?

Ehr, seriously? That's easy. Since paying money for laws is perfectly legal in the US, you give private companies those secrets. Which ones? The ones that pay you the most. In exchange for what? More money of course.

As for how it is working out for you -- it is not, but it is for that elite 1% that owns all those companies.

You got Choice B wrong.

It is:

Choice B: Live in a less free country that pretends to be less vulnerable to a surprise attack.

I only drove the getaway car...

There'd be no NSA if people actually valued conscience over a fat paycheck. They didn't know? Now they do, yet I don't see masses of people leaving / striking either and simply let the NSA collapse under its own weight.

This is an internal function (private) that is not part of the API, although there are many similar functions that take a from/to index.

Programming languages only have a convenient relation to English. Programmers will write "toIndex" and actually mean "uptoButNotIncludingIndex". The name acts as a reminder of what it is, but the real details are in the specification of the function (the javadoc) that comes with every public API in Java.

Anyway, I've found it is quite common to have the "end" index mean upto but not including the end index when dealing with 0 based lists. This is because a very common case, where you want to do something all the way to the end of the list, you can just use the "length" of such a list as the end index without having to substract one from it.

Yeah, you can play fair (run the 100m), or you can play dirty (disable everyone else). Then it is just a matter of what is the easier feat to accomplish... training to become the fastest 100m sprinter or training to become the best dirt thrower.

I have a suspicion that dirt throwing is much easier.

As well-established companies, who are actually making money out of selling software, I'd say they stand to lose much more when API's become copyrighted.

You are right about a whole new industry arising. It just won't be in America.

...and its the reason why drivers shave before racing.

I was thinking more...

those who are not susceptible to disease ...pretty sure that can be quite a big category as well.

It be better if all those names were revealed.

Perhaps it will make people think twice about accepting questionable jobs. At this point the NSA apparently thinks it is god and can get away with them. Having half their spies brutally murdered is much more likely to actually have some impact -- and they'd fucking deserve it too.

It would scale just fine, assuming you make proper indexes for your queries.

Since the general use case is probably gonna be something like "pull up records for patient that is sitting infront of me and edit them", I think an index lookup + atmost a couple of dozen records pulled from related tables will be handled just fine.

Any other use cases that involve statistical analysis on all data can be handled by copying it to specialized DB's every few weeks.

Then we'll just create our own sharing network, or heck, our own internet (a darknet) or even a network over wifi or sneakers. Nothing short of installing camera's in homes and/or control chips in people's brains is going to stop this.

The delusion is that you can make people pay for goods (on a per use / per copy basis) that can be duplicated without cost and with little effort.

The second delusion is that if piracy did somehow get eliminated, that these industries will then be happy with their bottom line, and not raise prices, introduce more stringent region coding (as you can charge wealthier regions more) or make you pay per view/minute and force you to watch unskippable commercials and other propagenda... we've glimpsed that in the past already -- don't for a second think they've learned their lesson, their current stance will evaporate as soon as they manage to get complete control again over your eyeballs.

What the fuck is wrong with you? You think it is a good idea to hand over access to the internet to these kinds of companies, with their only motive being profit?

You do realize that if these companies are given a 100% monopoly on distribution again that soon they'll be doubling their prices, charging different prices based on time/region/income/sex/etc.. and whatever else they can get away with. The *only* thing that keeps them in check currently is piracy as they need to stay competitive with "free". If they ever manage to completely eliminate it, prices will go up, not down and their strangehold on our culture and artists will get worse.

So yes, we're crying wolf -- this is all about control, and how companies never can seem to get enough of it. Stay the fuck away from the open internet.

You know, when I boil a pot of water without the lid on, it takes longer to boil than with the lid on, despite putting the stove on a lower setting.

There are many other factors at play. The sun's input might be declining, but if the earth becomes more efficient at trapping heat, or reflects less heat (polar ice caps melting) then you may need to reduce the sun's input a lot more to stay at the current equilibrium. Just looking at one of these factors is a good way to deceive yourself.