Well, SSD typically have speeds in the range of 100s of MB/s and graphics cards in 100s of GB/s so if it's 1000 times faster than NAND I'd say pretty close.

Even if it's a thousand times more durable than NAND it's not much in a loop, if you just write to the same memory location over and over with DDR4 you can write every 5 cycles @ 1.25ns/cycle = 160,000,000 writes/second. I would think the greatest advantage would be a write cache which could return ~1000 times faster from a flush() making sure it's committed to non-volatile memory. The SSD can then work "behind the scenes" to move it to slower SLC/MLC/TLC.

I did scraping before (and note that we aren't talking about screenscraping here, but rather website scraping) - I once wrote a scraper that presented an entire online forum as a newsgroup. Based on my experience with that, and on the layout of the RCW website, scraping this particular thing is absolutely trivial.

I agree that we shouldn't have to do that. I'm just saying that I find it doubtful that they do it to extract money from people, because I just don't see that working well when it's so easily scraped. If someone were to hire me to do that, it'd probably take me something like a few hours, and I wouldn't ask more than $200 for such a job.

The way the laws are laid out on that website, it would be trivial to scrape them into a single document. Even the URLs there are very predictable, making it particularly easy. For $615/year, I'm sure someone would do it.

Mainly he's confusing a project which uses an open source licence for a project that wants a community based development model. Google doesn't release the Chromium source so that they can get contributions, they do it to be open so that nobody can claim they're creating another proprietary web like IE did with their closed source, non-standard implementation. And that is all. I mean, he's talking about the source code to the world's most popular browser so it's obviously a very narrow definition of "failure", I doubt neither Google nor the users see it that way.

All I can say is that I regularly look up RCWs pertaining to different things where I have doubts or am just curious about it, and so far I haven't found any trouble finding the relevant bits.

From a lawyer's perspective, perhaps this all is still missing crucial bits. If providing, say, a single-page HTML download would be immensely useful, then sure, they should do it (especially as they already likely have some kind of script along these lines, as you do have a single-HTML option for individual chapters).

So far, all the people responding to my example have overlooked one crucial word in it: "force". Does Finland merely provide incentive for people to maintain a healthy lifestyle? Or do they actively force people into such a lifestyle. That's the main distinction here.

I would disagree with this. As has been proven by high rollers on both the right and left. You're immoral billionaire's money is just as good to these 'hoes as corporate money.

Because a billionaire is just as much a product of the system than a company is. Nobody makes a billion dollars through their own work, they make it by extracting value from other people's work. Which means their wealth is a product of and dependent on the system, thus they can be trusted to be utterly loyal to the system - slaves with golden chains, but slaves nonetheless.

Kings might have had it better than peasants, but neither could opt out of feudalism. It wasn't until capitalism - a new system - began making inroads that new opportunities opened up. And now capitalism is worn at the seams, at least in the developed world, and a seemingly neverending cascade of problems defy attempts to solve them through means acceptable to the system, which has caused a predictable retreat into fundamentalism - in this case free-market fundamentalism - for many who are heavily invested in the system. Whether this is the final crisis of capitalism, or whether it can ride out the storm once again by lifting the rest of the world to the developed status remains to be seen - but either way, it won't last forever any more than any previous system has.

Thank you for illustrating my point so eloquently. It's precisely because of people like you that this line of reasoning is so fraught with peril.

Um, the search is by keyword also (click on the "Search RCWs" link to see the full UI). And PDFs are refreshed once per year because paper publication of the complete thing is also once per year, it's not like they're deliberately slowing things down.

Here's a better example, then - Revised Code of Washington:
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/

Most recent version is searchable online HTML. It, and all the previous editions, are also available as downloadable PDFs, exactly as they are published on paper. All of these are free.

You are missing the point: none of these force you to exercise, merely encourage you to do so. But if your rationale is "general welfare", then literally forcing people to exercise is equally legitimate - it's for their own good!

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.

There are, but drones are only a small part of the armed forces easily reached by radio requiring powerful jammers that would be easy targets and they're usually support for people on the ground - not necessarily your people but affiliated forces. If you want to do a door-to-door search it would be extremely hard to do that by droid remote control, no matter how many operators you have. The goal of autonomous robots is genuine remote warfare, where you have the ability to run an occupation without having boots on the ground. Apart from AI sci-fi stories we do expect somebody to give the robots commands and accept their behavior even though the robot is working out the details of who to shoot itself.