Please show me the gun that's being used.

This delusional refusal to acknowledge that anything but outright violence could ever be coercive is the acid that's quickly dissolving whatever credibility capitalism still has left and exposing the grinning skull of feudalism beneath the mask of prosperity. I wonder what economic system will replace it, once people finally get tired of having structural flaws treated as unchangeable laws of nature or blamed on their victim's personal weaknesses?

The current climate is just like that which preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union: the prevailing myths are so much out of sync with reality people are running out of willing suspension of disbelief and losing their faith. No one believes anymore that hard work will be repaid with anything but layoffs, or that business success comes with a superior product rather than gaming the system, or that the rules are the same for everyone. The system has already lost its beating heart of credible mythology that can organize behaviour, it's just a matter of time before the necrosis of anarchy spreads everywhere.

At Wired, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has posted his take on net neutrality. He lays the problem at the feet of the large ISPs.

The argument was that the early progressives were not acting out of moral beliefs. I showed that's not true.

The Scotsman can't protect you from The Federalist's misrepresentation. It's funny that you would cite a logical fallacy in order to defend an ad hominem attack ("Progressives were never moral!")

At Wired, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has posted his take on net neutrality. He lays the problem at the feet of the large ISPs.

File this one under, "No Shit Sherlock".

Did I miss the part where the human race had a miraculous breakthrough in fusion technology?

Does it matter? Fusion is still nuclear power, so even if we had a working reactor right now we couldn't use it.

You do realize that settlements are basically private contracts right?

There is no such thing as a "private contract". A contract, by nature, is an agreement that the state will enforce. State actions are not private. If two people make an agreement and will never disclose that agreement to anyone else under any circumstances, then a court will never see it, and it is in no meaningful way a contract.

Of course that only goes double when one of the parties is a government agency. Nothing a government agency does is private.

Longer than that. Fusion power has been hyped since the 1950s. From the article:

Heard that one before.

Fusion power has some real problems. After half a century of trying, nobody has a long-running sustained fusion reactor, even an experimental one. The whole "inertial fusion" thing turned out to be a cover for bomb research. There's a lot of skepticism about whether ITER will do anything useful. It's not clear that a fusion reactor will be cost-effective even with a near-zero fuel cost. (Fission reactors already have that problem.) It's really frustrating.

Fusion reactors are a pain to engineer. They have a big vacuum chamber with high-energy particles reacting inside, and huge cryogenic magnets outside. This is far more complicated than a fission reactor, and is why the cost of ITER keeps going up.

Same is true in Oz, overall an Aussie family of 4 pays about 1/10th of the price they would pay in the US for health cover and yet the US has statistically inferior health outcomes.

The US health system is a (sad) laughing stock of the western world, and is by far the most expensive for individuals. But at the end of the day the irrational fear of "socialism" amongst average americans has given them the inefficient private system they demanded.

Unless this is Star Trek, where the entire biodiversity of the galaxy can be accounted for by face paint and is sexually interoperable with starfleet captains, we can make an overwhelmingly likely inference based on the chemistry. If its DNA and assorted important chemistry closely matches a terrestrial species it is very likely to be from around here.

Miniature giant space plankton, as it happens.

There is no "FarmBot". There is only a Kickstarter project to start a wiki to create a social network for talking about farming-related subjects, parhaps including talking about a FarmBot.

Integer overflow has been in the top five causes of CVEs for several years running. Buffer overflows, sadly, are still at the top.

If you can't call native code, you probably don't have a working JVM. The Oracle JDK and OpenJDK each include around a million lines of C in their standard libraries. That doesn't mean that you won't find it easier to write secure code in Java, it just means that you probably don't have much less C code in your TCB for a Java program than you do for a C one.

That would indicate to me that you are unfamiliar with either.

Have you ever written C code which uses a switch statement based on what type a struct/union is and calling the relevant code for it?

No. When I use structures as objects (which is often), they almost always contain a pointer to a block of general methods appropriate to that structure, as well as containing any methods unique to the object, all of which are called through the object/structure, so it would be unusual, at least, to be testing the object type in order to choose an object-specific procedure to call. However, I do mark each object type with a specific ID and serial as they are created, along with a tag indicating what procedure created them, as these things facilitate some very useful memory management and diagnostic mechanisms.

Have you ever used qsort?

I am aware of qsort. But I have my own multi-method sort library that I use. Most of them locate the comparison mechanisms they are to use through the procedures specified by the objects they are asked to sort. Likewise list management, memory management, certain types of drawing primitives and image processing primitives, image handling mechanisms, associative storage, basically anything I have run into that I thought likely I would need more than once. I am positively locked into the idea that if I write it, I can fix it, and the number of bugs and problems that fall into the "maybe they'll fix the library someday" class are greatly reduced. I'm a little less picky if I have the source code to a capability I didn't actually write and can supply my own version if and as needed. A good example of something like that is SQLite. Actually having the source code and compiling it in reduces my inherent paranoia to a somewhat duller roar.

Ha. Funny. Thank you, didn't know that.