Even recent history is littered with examples of the biggest military machine on the planet (and it's cronies) having much more trouble with "inferior" forces than they should.

Define "trouble"? Recent history is littered with examples of the US military immediately and utterly crushing the armies and rebel groups in any country they invade. The rabble that remain and try to resist occupation cannot inflict any conventional military damage, which is why they resort of extreme tactics like suicide bombings. Tactics that don't work, but between soldiers, drones, warplanes, and NSA surveillance they have no better ideas that might work.

Likewise, the chances of any US citizens successfully engaging in armed resistance against the US government is zero. Here's what would happen:

1) If you decide to take your gun and resist oppression alone you will be gunned down within minutes or seconds, reported in the press as having mental health problems and everyone will have forgotten your name within a couple of days

2) If you try to find other like minding people and raise a resistance group the FBI and/or NSA will learn of your plot before it happens, and you will be arrested before you have any chance to make real progress with your plan. You will be charged with domestic extremism, terrorism, or some variant thereof, and disappear for the rest of your adult life into a Supermax.

In no situation does having a gun allow you to resist even very petty government corruption or abuse. You simply stand no chance at all, you will always lose. The only way to seriously change a government is through the ballot box, which is why every country except the USA doesn't pretend an armed populace has anything to do with freedom.

Thankyou for your polite reply.

I am sure that if one were to carefully analyze the situation, some of the deaths caused by the police are due to the fact that Americans are more likely to be armed. But I do not believe that is the exclusive or even majority cause of so much violence by our police.

Why not, though? In the UK virtually all police are unarmed. It's very hard to get shot by the police due to a misunderstanding or otherwise. In the USA all police are armed and there has been a steady stream of stories, videos and even civil unrest triggered by on-the-spot police executions.

Those things aren't happening because someone might be carrying a gun.

Then why are they happening and why do the statistics suggest levels of police violence in the USA are wildly different to otherwise very similar countries?

I know ownership of weapons in America is a highly contentious topic so I fully expect to get modded down aggressively for this post. I want to try out the argument anyway. Please humour me.

Let us imagine two different countries: Macroland and Microland. The governments of the two countries are mostly similar, with two notable exceptions.

The government of Macroland punishes resistance to its rule heavily. It jails approximately 0.7% of its population. Its enforcement troops kill about 60 of its own people each month.

The government of Microland is dramatically less aggressive. It jails only 0.1% of its population, but more importantly, it virtually never kills its own citizens no matter what they did or how strongly they resist the government's rule. It took Microland about a quarter of a century to kill as many people as Macroland did in just one month.

Which country has the most oppressed people? Microland or Macroland?

I think most reasonable people would say that the citizens of the country that kills them the most often are the most heavily oppressed. After all, what's the basic power that lies behind abusive government oppression? What's the basic mechanism governments use to remove people's freedoms? It's violence. The country that dishes out the most against its own people would seem to be the most oppressive.

You have, of course, already figured out that the statistics given above are real. Macroland is the USA. Microland is (just for comparison) the United Kingdom.

Americans have the US Constitution and it is a mighty document. The Constitution has always been a vital part of protecting the freedoms of ordinary Americans from overreach by government. Yet the Constitution is flawed in one terribly dramatic way. By allowing and even encouraging a heavily armed society, it fails to strike any blows for freedom - as police have always had and always will have better access to top grade weaponry and armour. The chances of ordinary US citizens successfully mounting an armed uprising against the government is zero. And yet it simultaneously gives those same police a cast iron excuse for arming themselves to the teeth, as they are expected to enforce the law against an exceptionally dangerous population.

The result is that whilst Americans and British people have very little differences in their levels of freedom, they have enormous differences in their chances of being executed by their own governments ..... or by random mental patients.

I am British and I would like to see the UK adopt a US-style constitution. But not if it included a copy of the second amendment. Real data from today's world seems to suggest it makes no real difference to freedom but does make the world a vastly more dangerous place.

Free/illegal speech is about government restrictions, not restrictions on speech in private forums.

The ruling is now established for all similar cases, no?

The problem with articles like this one is that they tend to under-represent the benefits of static analysis. Products like PVS-Studio are designed to work with C++ and because they have to run in a big compile job, they get run in batch at the end of each day.

This is a problem because (a) C++ is very hard to statically analyse so performance is often poor and (b) the most critical time when you need/want static analysis feedback is when you're actually writing the code itself.

So let me insert a plug here for IntelliJ IDEA by JetBrains. Up until I used this (free, open source) program I didn't really appreciate static analysis. I mean, I appreciated it in a theoretical way, but my experience was that running it tends to generate thousands of spurious warnings that rarely reveal serious bugs. But that was because by the time the analysis got to run it was on code that had long since crashed in production, been debugged, unit tested, etc. So there was little meat left to harvest.

IntelliJ has a thing called the Inspector, which runs constantly in the background on spare CPU cores. It scans for hundreds of different kinds of bugs and when it spots one it highlights the bogus code in yellow, right in the editor. What impressed me most about this is that often the editor can highlight very complex bugs within seconds of you writing them, long before any time has been spent on unit testing or in a debugger. It can do this partly because the languages the inspector supports (things like Java, Kotlin, Scala etc) are much easier to parse and analyse than C++. You don't need to invoke a full blown compiler. Also the use of annotations to give the analysers more information is widespread.

But the best thing about IntelliJ is that when it does find a bug (and it frequently does), you can just press a hotkey and get a menu that lets you either suppress the warning ....... or automatically fix it, right there in the editor! So not only does IntelliJ find brainfarts like writing an if statement that will always yield true, but it can do it in real time and then it can often even fix it for you! This video I recorded a while ago shows a few seconds of this feature in action.

holding someone liable for refusing to take down illegal speech hosted by them is not a free speech violation

That's rather a contradiction in terms, isn't it. Refusing to take down illegal speech is not a free speech violation. How can you have both free speech and illegal speech simultaneously?

I think this case sums up one of the most glaring problems with the ECHR which is obvious the moment you read the document they are interpreting. This list of rights is nothing like the American Bill of Rights. The BoR is quite specific, clear and the rights are fairly tightly defined, arguments about the meaning of "well regulated militias" notwithstanding.

The European equivalent (and I say this as a European) is a complete clusterfuck. It lists many rights that directly contradict each other, with no way to prioritise between them. Every "right" has exceptions. It is written so vaguely that anyone could reach any conclusion at all based on it. The fact that nobody knew about this so-called right to be forgotten before it was "found" in the text by a court ruling is indicative of the deep-rooted problems with the document. It's a design-by-committee wishlist written by people with no strong principles.

For instance Article 2 supposedly grants a right to life. It says governments may not engage in "unlawful killing". Except suppressing insurrections by killing the rebels is explicitly allowed. And lawful executions were also totally OK, meaning of course the entire article disappeared into a puff of contradiction as any execution at all could be considered lawful if the government so wished it. Eventually the absurdity of that one became too much even for the ECHR and there was a "protocol" passed (sort of like an amendment) that barred the death penalty. Of course, this article does not stop ECHR members from going to war either.

Article 4 forbids slavery and forced labour. Unless you're a prisoner. Or it's the draft. Or unless it's a part of your "civic duties".

Article 8 gives the famous right to privacy ...

except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others

In other words you get a right to privacy unless someone deems it inconvenient for almost any purpose. This article is such a joke it may as well not exist.

But article 10 is the best. The First Amendment and it's interpretation by the US Supreme Court is quite clear: freedom of speech and freedom of the press are highly protected. Article 10 in the European equivalent says:

Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.

LOL! But it gets worse:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

So freedom of speech can be subject to penalties if they "are necessary in a democratic society" for example "for the protection of morals". Oh yes, exposing state secrets is also included.

What kind of idiots actually write such things? Why say there is a right to freedom of speech and then specifically exempt almost every situation in which someone might actually want to use it?

The ECHR is barely worth the paper it's printed on: a creature of governments that wanted to look good but couldn't find it in themselves to actually trust their own people with basic things, like the ability to say what they think.

The European Court of Human Rights is not actually an EU institution, regardless of the similarities in naming. It's more like a court that countries submit to
voluntarily. I saw quite an interesting presentation about it from some human rights lawyers a year or two ago. Apparently it does some good work, especially in addressing more run-of-the-mill rights violations in former Soviet bloc countries.

Regardless, this is now the second time that some EU court has fucked up extremely basic internet related rulings. First there was the idiotic "right to be forgotten" ruling that makes it effectively impossible for anyone to make a search engine unless they have a vast human army of lawyers and money for lawsuits. Now they want to make websites responsible for everyone who comments on them? Like someone who runs a party should be responsible for anything anyone says whilst there?

It's quite clear that the judges at this place must either be interpreting extremely vague and piss poor laws, or have never used the internet, or both.

At the moment the Tory government in the UK is wanting to pull out of the ECHR, partly because it keeps blocking deportation of various 'undesirables' on the grounds of their right to a family life. They want to replace it with a British-specific bill of human rights. I don't really trust the Tories on this matter, their track record of upholding civil liberties is pretty terrible lately, but every time the ECHR produces a disastrous ruling like this I think - you know, maybe there's something in it.

How about sons outed as gay to their parents by their browsing history being used to target advertisements to the same IP address?

Citation needed. No ad network I know of targets anything by IP address, exactly because they are so often shared.

I know I've also heard of one pregnant girl outed in the same way.

Prove it. Then go ahead and explain why the fix for this is Belgium and not, say, user profiles on the computer in question.

It's not some nebulous thing that should require victim lawsuits before anything is done.

It's extremely nebulous, poorly defined and yes - generally we would hope to see actual victims before punishing someone for a so far quite literally victimless crime.

Straw man - I didn't say financial harm. I said ANY meaningful kind of harm. Embarrassment, family problems, whatever.

There have been a bunch of blowups like this over the years. The worst "harm" that anyone has been able to demonstrate was that some people, somewhere (who are nameless as none of them filed any complaints) might have seen a better targeted advert.

No, not yay for Belgium.

Don't these privacy regulators have anything else to do? Where is their input in the Snowden affair, for example? Suspiciously missing in action.

Here's a good place to start when evaluating the utility of these investigations: a list of people who have been objectively harmed in some way by the alleged action. Can't find anyone who has been harmed by Facebook's actions in an entire countries worth of people? Then maybe that suggests the taxpayer money is better spent elsewhere.

It was all over the British press. The BBC did run it but yes, they showed a great deal more skepticism and quoted other skeptical people. The BBC gets ragged on a lot but I tend to find it's still a lot more obviously neutral than newspapers are.

Oops, I forgot something important.

There is a simple web based IDE that you can use to experiment and learn the language at try.kotlinlang.org. For me it seems there's a layout issue with Chrome right now, but it works fine in Safari.

Is Swift suitable for writing applications for all? If not, developers would be writing for a limited, albeit popular platform, but limited to a certain subset nonetheless.

No, it's Apple specific. However that's OK because there's a language which is much like Swift, except it runs on pretty much every device you might have.

That language is new. It's called Kotlin, and it is from JetBrains, the makers of the highly popular IntelliJ series of IDEs (+ WebStorm, PHPStorm, RubyMine, PyCharm etc).

Kotlin targets the JVM and JavaScript. It interops perfectly with Java. That means code written in it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. Additionally, via the RoboVM project, JVM bytecode can be compiled to native ARM iOS/OSX binaries. There is no JIT compiler. RoboVM provides bindings to all Objective-C APIs on iOS so you can build native UIs and access all the same functionality as a native app. Programs written this way are on the app store, so Apple is cool with the technique.

Kotlin has a clean, concise syntax and many modern features that match those in Swift. For example it has nullability/optionality integrated with the type system. It has Markdown comments. It has extension functions. It has some support for pattern matching. It has named parameters. It has the ability to define "data classes" that have easy immutability, content equality, hashcodes, serialization etc all in a single line of code. It has type inference and compile-time inlined lambdas, so you can do high performance functional programming with it. It has features to support complex DSLs. It has a full IDE with many built in refactorings, online static analysis, and via the JVM it has high quality CPU/memory profilers and debugging support.

In short, programming with Kotlin is much like programming with Swift, except you have better tools, an IDE at least as strong as Xcode and in my experience stronger, and you can write apps with it that are indistinguishable from native iOS and Android apps.

google really throws a hissy fit when I send email from my home (on a vpn) using imap. mostly they grey list me and time me out. but this anti-vpn concept annoys me. I don't believe it rejects fraud.

It does reject fraud. I know this because I designed the system at Google that is rejecting your logins, back when I worked there. There's a blog post about the system here. Obviously location (actually: geographical coordinates) are not the only thing that is used, it's just a signal that's carefully blended with others.

The main reason location works as a useful anti-fraud signal is that the datasets that hackers are working off are very sparse. Normally only usernames and passwords. So they don't know where in the world you live, meaning that they have to guess. It's almost like a second password. And mostly their guess will be wrong, leading to an ID verification check.

Now if you use VPNs or Tor or whatever that actually move you around the world constantly, then you're in a tiny minority of people that this heuristic doesn't work for. That's not so great. But here's a tip - if you enable 2-step verification on your Google account and then give your IMAP client an "app specific password" you shouldn't see rejected logins anymore, as is documented in the Google support pages. If your IMAP client knows how to use OAuth to log in, that would also work, but most don't.