Let me rephrase that. It could be used as a justification of such a law, yes. My point is that it doesn't have to be, and we're better off not doing that because that would have undesirable legal side effects down the line.

"General well-being of the people" is a very vague notion that can be used as a justification for too many things, most of which you probably wouldn't like at all. Of specific note is that it doesn't require any outside actor - they could just as well limit your own activities that are potentially harmful to yourself, even statistically speaking (i.e. not harmful to you personally, but universally banning them would prevent enough people from exercising them in a harmful way that it would improve "general well-being"

It's far better to go with some more concrete justifications, such as specific measurable harm that is inflicted by the actor to other parties. It's not exactly hard to do with pollutants, either, because the emissions are measurable, and so are their effects. It's still collective harm, since it's pretty hard to quantify the individual damage you get from e.g. AGW (though still possible in some cases, and I'd love to see the polluters pay compensation and damages specifically to people they hurt whenever we can trace it), but then at least it's about harm, not some nebulous "it could be better that way".

I see the difference. The point is that it's not about "general well-being of the populace" at all.

What extent of "encouraging" do you find acceptable? For example, should we tax people higher if they don't exercise enough, and then use that money to give everyone else free gym passes?

Well, why are we punishing people who earn money through hard work? Why is sweat-of-the-brow taxed higher than rent?

As long as you have one rate set higher than the other, you can make that argument either way. Why not set a single flat rate on all kinds of income? Isn't it only fair?

I'm fine with that, so long as said flat tax also extends to capital gains. We could even just take the present budget, measure the current taxation income, and work out a flat tax rate for personal+corporate+capital, and see what it'd need to be to maintain the same level of it. I'm pretty certain that the end result would end up way better for the 99%. Which is exactly why such a thing would never pass in DC.

You might want to be careful with that line of thinking. For example, forcing you to exercise would also measurably lengthen your life; do you want the government to be able to mandate such a thing?

No respect for the American judicial system, you mean? That's quite different from society as a whole. I think if you ask random people whether they believe that the judicial system in question genuinely represents them, you might find that distinction to be quite visible.

Which is, frankly, ridiculous, because it circumvents the entire notion of constitutionally protected rights. You don't need to get rid of the First Amendment, for example - you just need to enact laws that make most people felons, and then you can selectively strip them of their rights as needed. And this all can be done with a simple legislative majority.

If you believe that everyone who doesn't wear a shirt "looks like a hobo", you're a part of the problem. Stop being judgmental towards people who choose convenience in their clothing over some rather arbitrary and outdated criteria based solely on looks.

It is absurd on its face to suggest that a policeman should be able to take you into custody without being able to tell you what law you broke (because it doesn't exist). To suggest otherwise allows any policeman anywhere in the US to take anyone into custody for any reason ("I didn't know that sitting on your porch drinking lemonade was not a crime, my bad").

I agree with you that we have too many laws and that no one (no matter what legal experience they may have) can know them all. However, in a JUST system, the outcome of this is that the police do not enforce laws they are ignorant of, or that they do not understand, rather than enforcing "laws" that do not exist.

Your rant is dead on, but the above portion of it is accurate in even more ways than you might suspect--for example, the Supreme Court recently said that it;s OK for a police officer to arrest you, because of something that he THINKS is illegal, even if it isn't, because (and to quote Dave Barry here, "I am not making this up") it is unreasonable to expect a police officer to know all the laws they are enforcing.

So if you, Joe Citizen who has no training in law or any intersection with it, do something illegal that you did not know it was illegal, you can be charged, because "ignorance of the law is no excuse." If Joe Policeofficer arrests you for sitting on your lawn when that activity was perfectly legal, that's ok, because police can't be expected the know the law.

Honestly, the US today is like Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and George Orwell all got together and wrote a manual called "How to Fuck Up Democracy" and some assholes in government made it required reading.

The problem is that it's already a crowded market. And furthermore, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all discovered it, and now want their slice - and they all already have solid cloud compute platforms to use as a backend; so it's going to get even more crowded in short order.

(Full disclosure: I'm on the MS team that is working on the Azure IPython/Jupyter notebook service that just went live on PyData, which is one piece of that.)

If you get software and don't pay for it, guess what- it's free. To you.

Microsoft "shared source" licenses were actually more restrictive than that, as they had only allowed read-only access to the code, even for private and personal use without redistribution - i.e. fixing a bug and building your own version would already be a violation of the license.

If that is really what is meant by "accessing the source code" by the article submitter, then this is the way to go. You can just use MS-RSL verbatim for that. Just, please, don't call it "open source". Even Microsoft, back in the day when it was still doing this kind of thing and calling GPL a "virus", had the decency to not appropriate the term and use "shared source" instead.

And note how this has largely failed for Microsoft. Very few people actually bothered to do anything with those "shared source" projects, and there was no community to speak of as a consequence (and as you rightly note, it's a misnomer anyway). I don't think there are still any MS projects shipping under any of these licenses anymore; pretty much everything is either AL 2.0 or MIT now, including things like CLR that used to be "shared source".