forgettableuser

While they certainly enjoyed the conventions English law afforded them, it was always understood that these rights are natural rights born with their humanity. To lead a revolution and form a new government, they understood that this could not be justified if they had to appeal to the King's law. Instead they argued based on the natural rights of man and drew upon bodies of political philosophy and thinking such as John Locke which gave the legal basis.

These ideas are all over the Declaration of Independence:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth,"

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,"

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government"

The bottom 2/3's of the Declaration of Independence are a list of specific grievances against the King and how "He" violated their rights. While most school children are only introduced the preamble to the Declaration, the drafters felt that the actual important part was the list at the bottom because this was considered both a moral and legal document, justifying revolution. Trying to argue in only technical legal terms within the King's law would give them neither which is why the political philosophy of natural rights is embraced.

It is worth reminding that the freedom of speech was understood at the time as one of our unalienable rights as individuals. Notice the phrasing of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging _the_ freedom of speech

The article "the" before "freedom" was deliberate. "The" freedom of speech is an absolute given. And it is not that Congress authorizes or allows freedom of speech. It is "Congress shall make no law".

Part of the debate on writing the Bill of Rights was not that rights needed to be granted to the people and the states, but that it was not necessary because it was understood that these rights already exist and come from our humanity and cannot be denied. A document like the Bill of Rights could be misconstrued and abused to flip the tables and make people assume their rights are granted as a privilege of the ruling government, instead of a truth that it is inherently in every person and they delegate their powers to the government.

David Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature" was published anonymously.

It is worth remembering that The Federalist Papers were written under pseudonym Publius. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay believed in the importance of anonymity as a tool for public discussion. A surveillance state can destroy this tool as well.

As somebody who has written to companies about bugs in their products (and almost always ignored), I would really appreciate a response even if it was some form letter thing to the effect of "I just make a small component that happens to be used in your car, kind of like the people who make the screws in your car. Please contact your car manufacturer directly."

I personally just like knowing somebody read my letter instead of going into a black hole. And I kind of expect these things to go into black holes, so it's actually kind of heart warming when I receive any kind of response.

And this response would at least tell me to try a different contact. (I know in this case who Daniel Stenberg is and know what curl is so I wouldn't make this specific mistake, but sometimes hunting for support contact information returns things that are vague.)

If the customer gets angry at the response, it's fine because it just means they don't understand, which means they are just getting angrier at the car company. The car company deserves that since they made it so hard to contact them.

Interesting. Now you got me thinking more about what things might change with self-driving cars.

Will cars offer an "orbiting" mode where they keep driving in a circle until you are ready to be picked up.

Will stores offer a driving ring where cars can drive around in circles off the main street in the case where no parking slots are available?

Will cars be able to drop you off, and park themselves when a space becomes available? Will the cars notify you where they parked, or will they always come to your location? (And what if you are standing in an area that is impossible to drive to...where does the car go?)

I can't wait for self-driving cars. This will be a lot of fun to see how the world changes in both the large and small.

I knew a guy in college who rented a house that didn't have any outlets with a ground plug.

This became such a problem, he made his own ground by using a big metal pipe outside the house that was already deep in the earth, and running a wire from it to where he kept all his equipment.

Then he used stuff like in that picture to make sure he could ground all his equipment.

I also suspect CUPS remains pretty active. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) started a long time ago and is used by pretty much all the Unix platforms. Apple bought the project in 2007. The license remains GPL2/LGPL2 and all the platforms still use it as far as I know.

I know from personal experience that at least LLVM, Clang, Swift, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore have daily activity and also include non-Apple commit reviewers.

I am now a victim of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for because you might just get it".

I hated Flash. I either avoided installing it or used a Flash blocker. So I always managed to avoid the auto-playing problem when the Internet primarily used Flash for everything annoying.

Now that Flash is about dead and everything is HTML5 now, neither of these techniques work any more to avoid auto-playing.

All the ones I listed are the ones where they are significant contributors.

The much larger set of where they are mostly users, like the BSD userland tools, curl, Python, Perl, Tcl, Ruby, and so forth, I omitted. There are just too many.

The only thing that has doubled down here is the marketing of the fact they are contributing to open source. They have both been large users and contributors to open source since the switch to OS X (NeXT acquisition).

Just off the top of my head, projects they have had a large hand in: WebKit & JavaScriptCore, Objective-C, CUPS, LLVM, Clang, Bonjour/Zeroconf, Darwin, launchd, libdispatch, CoreFoundation, dtrace.

And more recently Apple Lossless Encoder, LZFSE compression, and of course Swift.

And this is only a tiny fraction of what they are users of.