dodedo's comments

You went from "Child porn is not really a hazily defined legal gray area."

to

"Anything that vaguely smells of child porn is no longer allowed."

Do you see that "anything that vaguely smells of X" is the very definition of a grey area? For example, is this a problem? http://www.reddit.com/r/toddlersandtiaras

The reddit announcement was very clear: They have always banned child pornography. They even linked to the guidelines they use to do so: http://www.missingkids.com/missingkids/servlet/PageServlet?P...

What happened today was not reddit banning child pornograpy -- it was reddit banning non-child-porn content which was overwhelmingly unpopular.

Well, that's not what he's saying, did you read the article? His point is that these employment questionnaires are designed to filter out people who tell the truth about fairly common drug activities, which creates a bias towards hiring liars.

The title "Honest People Might Be Dangerous" is sarcastic and tongue in cheek. He did not argue that they are actually dangerous.

I realize this isn't quite the point of the article, but I have a $29.99 Nokia phone I've been using for years and I'm pretty sure I can resell it for at least $20. Non-smart phones hold their value best of all.

To be fair, exposing a snake oil salesman is a morally sound undertaking.

Very insightful comparison, thank you.

The push is not only coming from the IFPI, however. There is also the movie industry, which is a much larger industry. I can't find exact numbers offhand, but this article places global box-office receipts at $31bn -- and that's not including media sales or rental revenue. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/0...

I agree, and I think it's worth pointing out that this isn't limited to Hollywood interference and corruption.

Remember: the charges and extradition demands against Julian Assange are coming from the Swedish court system as well.

You seem to be saying that if I write and record a song and put it on a dropbox public folder, then issue a DMCA takedown for another user who has copied my files, dropbox should delete my files as well.

That makes no sense, whatsoever.

Only for MU; not from a third party such as the federal government. The ToS is a private contract between MU and their customers. It is completely inapplicable to any issue between their customers and the federal government.

That said, the users will likely never see a dime because the government's sovereign immunity prevents anyone from suing the federal government over damages relating to law enforcement seizing evidence of a crime.

This immunity is what enables the executive branch of the government to abuse this authority and treat seizure as a form of extra-judicial punishment without going through the courts.

This is precisely why there is a separation between the executive and judicial branches of government. Unfortunately I do agree they're not as separate as we might wish.

The MU takedown was ostensibly justified in terms of seizing evidence. Why would Carpathia and Cogent not be subject to the same process of seizing the storage as evidence?

It very much looks like the seizure process is being used as a directed punitive measure and not merely as an evidence gathering process. We need better laws in the US to protect against seizure being used as non-judiciary, extra-legal punishment.

A salt only protects against pre-computed dictionary attacks (rainbow tables). It does not offer any additional protection in this scenario.

'My CS teacher also resolved many difficulties with the = sign by always reading code like "a = b" as "a gets b"'

This is one of the great things about Pascal. The := sign is used for assignment, and the equals sign alone is used for equality. It's very natural to call := 'gets' and keep a clear distinction between assertions and assignments.

If you're not selling it, not making it available yourself, you shouldn't be controlling it.

It'd be nice if copyright law were amended to properly capture its justification as a tool to promote the progress of science and useful arts -- it should be illegal to use copyright without attempting to reach those ends.

This is not a question of license, which a user may or may not have agreed to participate in. By simply purchasing media I obtain all fair use rights -- I can make a backup of it without ever engaging in a license agreement.

Leap years are defined by a known algorithm: If the year is evenly divisible by 4, then it's a leap year, unless it's divisible by 100, unless it's divisible by 400. This defines all future leap years. Because of this, we /do/ know how much time will be between two particular dates. Leap years can be calculated in advance as they represent a well-known, fixed skew between the gregorian calendar and the actual calendar.

Contrast this with leap seconds, which represent a variable skew and cannot be predicted by algorithm. Leap seconds are determined by measurement of the solar cycle and are merely announced at 6 month intervals. Because of this we cannot use solar time with seconds-granularity more than 6 months into the future, and a table of past leap-seconds is needed to accurately calculate time in the past. Worth noting: POSIX time functions do none of this for you.

There is another system of time, TAI, which is used for scientific measurements which rely on seconds-granularity at arbitrary intervals. TAI is skewed from solar time and will eventually not match the 24 hour solar cycle.

"But Britain, along with Canada and China, would like to keep the current keeping system, arguing that, in the 40 years that leap seconds have been gracefully inserted in our midst — most recently in 2008 — there have been no problems to speak of, and the worriers have greatly exaggerated the potential for havoc. Remember Y2K?"

No problems? He must not be aware of the 2008 adjtimex() bug in the linux kernel: https://lkml.org/lkml/2009/1/2/389

This bug brought down nearly 100k systems for my employer at midnight UTC, worldwide, in unison. It was not a fun evening.

Do you also believe that non-profits and churches should be able to freely lobby? Currently both are severely curtailed in their political speech, unlike for-profit corporations. This is why there are two ACLU organizations: http://www.aclu.org/american-civil-liberties-union-and-aclu-...

Those are not divisions, they are shares in entirely separate, publicly traded companies. The valuation is market valuation -- not a number made up by Yahoo.

Your statement about the law is for the most part not true. There's a much more in-depth discussion of this at this older HN posting: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227980

I agree with you that yahoo should have sold to microsoft, by the way. But the legal duty to maximize value bit is just not accurate.

I think the point that it's more about the notions of the wealthy family than of the girl. Wealth allows families to transcend or disregard social norms. In this case it is clear that her family chose to raise her a particular way, and give her particular opportunities that, as you point out, would not be available to most Pakistani women.

This is precisely the point raised above, that this story is primarily about the opportunity provided by the family. But you are right, it's important to note that her family was evidently both wealthy and progressive.