i know

The mods have spoken - he succeeded at funny.

What is the worst that could happen? Let's see...

"Children might buy drugs!" Their parents should really have talked to them about this.

"People might get high off drugs they buy online!" So what? They can do what they will with their bodies.

"People will get high from these drugs and commit crimes to fund their drug habit/because they're high and belligerent!" People who harm others should be prosecuted, regardless of whether they're on drugs or not.

"People will sell low-quality drugs online, advertising them as even something else entirely!" If you buy drugs online and you don't do a thorough check to make sure the seller is reputable or you're getting what you asked for, then you kind of have it coming to you.

Yes, it would require people to take more responsibility for their actions. But the benefit is that you wouldn't have the government-enforced pharmaceutical monopoly, which I think would benefit consumers far more than these other effects would hurt them.

A 'null pointer' is not a type - it's just a possible *value* for a pointer. Dereferencing a pointer is type-safe. Dereferencing a pointer whose value is null causes a run-time crash.

The idea with the 'end' is that 'end' would be a type. Your list elements would be U(T, end) - union of type T, and end. You won't be able to use a U(T, end) just like a T, cause you'll get type errors (as 'end' is not a subtype of any other type). You'll have to do some checking which the type-checker will verify. So you check for end, and in the True branch, the type is 'end', and in the False branch, the type is 'T'. It will be impossible (if a program passes type-checking and the type-checker is type-safe) to dereference an 'end' value.

See Haskell, which has no 'null', and to have a 'None' value you have to explicitly encode it with the Maybe monad.

that's the same meme, but GP's was funnier. INTERNET FAIL

The free market does not adjust itself overnight. But, had the DoJ not done anything, there is a good chance the situation would have changed in a few years. Why? Essentially, a certain group of X companies are colluding to keep employee salaries low. Say the market salary for an employee would be A, but it's reduced to D as a result of the collusion. This is an unstable situation for two reasons: first of all, it's possible that one of the X companies will start hiring employees for a slightly higher salary (C, where A > C > D). This would be to their individual advantage, as they would get A-level talent for only C, more so than the other companies in the collusion ring. Collusion is unstable.

But, more likely, there would just be tech companies that aren't one of those X companies, and they would simply hire employees at a higher rate (B, where A > B > D). This would get them better talent. Talent would just start bleeding out of the X companies towards the companies that are willing to pay more.

Government intervention seems to happen when people are way too impatient with the free market. If the government intervention produced the same result as a free-market adjustment that would take 10 years, but only in 1 year (or something like that), then that would be fine. The problem with government intervention is that it often has unintended consequences... which consequences are far harder to re-adjust as there is bureaucracy and what-not, and usually end up being worse than the problem they tried to fix in the first place (cf. minimum wage hurting unskilled workers the most).

An interesting follow-up question would be to look at who started this investigation in the first place. I haven't found the answer after a few minutes of googling, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else knows/can find out.

I can think of something else involving the sheep.

I saw the phrase at a glance and assumed it meant something without reading it in detail. Are you saying that's never happened to you? Happens when I read quickly.

On a side note, I find it funny my post and its replies take up almost 50% of the comments for the story so far.

No, it's more a matter of me having seen the phrase at a glance and having assumed it meant something without reading it in detail. Are you saying that's never happened to you?

Oh hah, thanks all. I misunderstood "until 6pm EST" as "for the rest of the night", or perhaps even "from 6pm EST on."