Perhaps I missed it, but, uh, did this actually happen? Look at the video of one of the supposed-attackers after-the-supposed-fact.

a) Why is the supposed knife he is holding blurred out?
b) Why does he look so damn calm?
c) Why is nobody else freaking out? An old lady just walks right in front of the guy who supposedly just murdered a guy and still has blood on his hands. Two young girls go up to him and try talking to him. Is that a reasonable thing to do with a still-bleeding corpse on the ground not a few feet away from the guy who just killed him?

I'm just left thinking 'wtf?'

Um. Kim's actual twitter message was "Google, Facebook, Twitter, I ask you for help. We are all in the same DMCA boat. Use my patent for free. But please help funding my defense." That's not really threatening to sue, that's asking for help. Yellow journalism much?

Would you care to be more specific? I was referring to this argument here, mentioned in that very article (I'll admit it wasn't my original idea, but then again almost nobody has any original ideas when politics is concerned):

Oh I thought you were saying that people don't act in their own self-interest, so we need regulation to ensure that people do (act in their own self-interest). I see now that you also mentioned that people don't act in *others'* self-interest, so we need regulation to ensure that people don't act in a way detrimental to *others'* self-interest. Two different arguments, yes?

About the former, my question still stands. Why would the government know better than a particular person what is in that particular person's best interest for them to do?

About the latter, I agree with some obvious things like murder. Murder should be.. um.. disincentivized. The question is, where do you draw the line? It's a far cry from murder to "you shouldn't be allowed to build an apartment here, this area is for commercial zoning only". I think the line should be in a different place than you do. I don't know what the best would be, but a good starting point is property rights & the right to your own body - thus theft & rape & assault & murder should be 'regulated', though I dislike using that term because it conflates obvious heinous crimes like rape with something that someone decided shouldn't be done (like paying somebody $6/hour instead of $7/hour).

+1

I agree, people can be irrational - sometimes predictably so. But then that applies to the people who make the laws, and the people who enforce them, also, does it not? The question is, why would one group of people (the regulators) be better at deciding what another group of people should do (those who are being regulated)? I could see an argument that those regulators would specialize in making laws, but then you additionally have to trust that they are not acting in their self-interest, but rather, the self-interest of those they are regulating... and that is certainly not a given. More often than not it's just a large corporation lobbying for the law to be changed in their favor (and to their competitors'/customers' detriments). Why do you think our tax code is so convoluted?

To put it differently: you're advocating that politicians should have control over how common resources are managed. How much do people complain about politicians, again?

Yea there is always that option - use force to ensure that the commons is not destroyed. This is not a cure-all, though. Now instead of having the owners of the land deriving direct benefit from the land and thus protecting the property out of self-interest, you have a third party who is protecting the property but not deriving direct benefit from it, and are thus protecting it "for the good of the people"... but the latter are far more corruptible are they not?

That is, it's not the people making the short-term decisions that are incompetent - they're acting in their own rational (albeit greedy) self-interest - it's the people who put them into a position of power without tying the results of their actions to their compensation that are incompetent in this scenario.

Yea I never understood why some corporate structures are set up that way. I think that falls into the b) category - incompetence on a larger scale.

Just because those projects began with government money does not mean they wouldn't have been produced without it. It's like saying there would be no roads if the government didn't build them. Yes, there would be, because roads are useful, so people would get together and build them.

Well, if you own a fishery, it's not really in your interest to kill all the fish, is it? That would destroy your source of income. Rather it makes more sense to ensure you will have fish for a long time to come. Problems arise when:
a) tragedy of the commons - nobody owns the fishery, thus nobody is responsible, thus it's in each person's best interest to take as much as they can from the fishery, and then it gets destroyed, or
b) the people who own the fishery are incompetent.
Ideally there would be a way to solve b) before the environment gets destroyed, but doing it by removing ownership/giving ownership to a disinterested party leads to a), which sucks too.

True. Subtyping makes it less straightforward. If you really need to have the variable typed as the superclass, then you can specify it explicitly. But when you don't then it saves a lot of time - both thinking, typing, and reading - to have `var`, I think.

Gordamnit. That should have read:

HashMap<Integer, String> intNames = new HashMap<Integer, String>();

The &lt; is another example of something superfluous.

Non-superfluous doesn't necessarily mean not precise or not well-defined. It means using context clues more than explicit declarations where the context gives you everything you need to know.
For example, 'var' in C# was brilliant, IMO, and I am upset that Java doesn't have one. `var x = ...` gives you 100% of the information you need to know what the type of `x` is, because the language is statically typed so the right-hand side has a statically determinable type. It also saves a ton of needless typing. Which looks better:

var intNames = new HashMap();

or:

HashMap intNames = new HashMap();

Is the former any less precise than the latter?

Speaking of superfluous, having to insert <br> in my post here is superfluous. Stackoverflow does a brilliant job of formatting my question, answer, or comment well without needing such markup. And it's not any less precise. It's just more concise.