mdpopescu

Seriously, stop with this crap. The people on this forums are some of the people who have the know-how to actually DO something about the internet. If they can't discuss these things, we get the situation that your company seems to like - SV decides what's allowed on the internet and what's not. Those of us outside of the US don't like it very much, and we'd prefer to - you know - talk about it.

> But the answer is not to stop having laws.

Why?

Serious question. When are laws too many? (According to some history, 10 laws were too many and most people were ignoring them.)

Are a trillion laws too many? A billion? A million? A thousand? What if we had a thousand laws, but each law had a million pages?

(I'm pretty sure we're at over a billion pages of laws if we take into account all the laws in the world - as multinational companies are supposed to do.)

When, exactly, should we say "this is excessive"?

Almost right. On the basis of their political affiliation, mostly.

And yet, the number of otherwise informed, intelligent people I've talked to who believe that the frequently-used image of the Covid virus is an actual picture is astonishing.

Yes. The reason is the most people are idiots. Like a ruler says in one of our books, "stupid, but many".

All blackmail involves exposing something that someone doesn't want exposed - usually because the "something" is illegal. And yet, blackmail itself is illegal.

Most countries have a culture against whistleblowers, starting from childhood ("don't be a tattletale", "don't be a rat").

He went against the consensus. You cannot go against the consensus.

There are a lot of use cases. For example, I have 17 applications running on a system that need a connection string. When I need to change that connection string, I can 1) change 17 config files; 2) change 17 shortcuts containing command-line arguments; 3) change one env variable.

It's difficult :)

The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious efforts at political organizing (they actually called Zuckerberg in front of Congress because Facebook was not censoring enough people! Facebook! That was freaking mind-blowing.)

Yep, the difference is amazing.

Eh, unlimited data plans might still be valuable to someone.

Really? So I can send anyone I want to jail, as long as they have one of these? Wow, that's definitely not going to cause problems!

Huh. Almost as if a company would provide a guarantee and only get paid if they kept the servers running for at least 99.999% of the time.

Weird, huh?

> ... but the counter incentive is the free market.

Yes. Which is why the free market is ILLEGAL in the medical system, in the police system, in the educational system, in the judiciary system...