The NRA is against anything which gets in the way of a patriot and their duty. RFID and similiar 'safety' features can be used by the government to identify gun owners, confiscate weapons and suppress the public's right to revolt against their tyranny. Americans have a sacred right enshrined into the Constutition to be able to bear arms in order to respond to the presence of government with deadly force.
It's no different the the argument people here sometimes make that black markets and TOR are necessary for freedom of speech and civil liberties, even if having them means enabling criminal activity - because the greater threat is always the threat of a government which can't be spoken up against. In the case of guns, the greater threat is always a government which can't be put down.
Even if you only run eBay for cats, you probably secretly believe you can become the equivalent of Facebook in your particular space, and feel that what you need is a room full of the eBay for cats version of Mark Zuckerberg, making the billion dollar magic happen on the cheap.
There are lots of things that are posted on HN that are purely to advertise, though. Most products that appear are advertising.
I posted this because I found it interesting. Partly because I like the page's design, and also because of the work some people have achieved using purely mobile (admittedly, Apple) products.
Competition between frameworks and libraries ensures that there are multiple solutions to meet multiple needs, and also that consensus, where it exists, exists due to the popularity of a package, not the dictate of someone setting an arbitrary "standard" for the community. You can guarantee that Laravel is going to be updated because people use it and contribute to it, not because it's the only option.
And there's no guarantee that a single solution is going to keep backwards-compatibility. That is always entirely at the whim of the developer. Removing room to innovate only guarantees stagnation, it doesn't guarantee the standard.
No it isn't, it's the way open source is supposed to work. There being 92 pages of routers doesn't stop anyone from picking the most popular and well-maintained one. Almost anyone who actually cares is going to pick one of the large frameworks (which probably use Symfony) or use nikic's FastRoute. If you're worried about small packages being maintained into the future, that's what forking is for. If you want to write your own, you can.
Also, to be fair to your argument, Composer will load packages from outside Packagist, and VCS systems other than git, so the actual universe of available routers is probably much, much bigger. I'd suggest this as another example of how not conforming to a standard (Packagist as the de facto PHP repository) is a benefit. You don't even have to care about Packagist and Composer still works just fine.
Composer makes dependencies flat , and PHP isn't module based,but namespace and class based.
Which makes libraries way more stable,unlike the nodejs galaxy of packages for instance.
And by the way,most of the packages listed aren't routers.
If you only search the word "router",you'll get only 21 pages,roughly 300 packages.
now go on npm.org and type in router you'll get more than 1600 packages.
Where do you think the problem is ? is nodejs a module based language with dependency trees , or PHP , class and namespace based language with flat dependencies?
Uber's entire premise seems to be that a regulated market is by definition a corrupt one, that the "crime" lies in following the laws, not breaking them. One person's "organized crime" is another's "free market enterprise".
Their argument, and their attitude, fails when they encounter cultures which don't share the US' antipathy towards labor and consumer rights. There are places where the taxis manage to not be terrible, and where people prefer services to be regulated beyond "caveat emptor." Insane, I know.
>Apparently PHP is now verbose enough that people feel the need to write code templates for it
It isn't though. PHP is many things but overly verbose isn't one of them * . Although there does seem to be a drive by some developers to make PHP look and act as much like Java as possible. Maybe this comes from discomfort at PHP not being structured or strict enough out of the box for their liking. If you've only ever dealt with well-engineered languages which have a certain, coherent set of patterns and paradigms baked in, and which demand you write your code a certain way, and you approach PHP, you're going to have a problem.
I don't know why a tool like this would be useful, but it wouldn't be because of the language. PHP exposes its own token parser - you can generate PHP code with much less abstraction than this.
The “police have been devoting a huge amount of resources to track down peaceful people engaged in voluntary trade
like Charlie Shrem and the operators of the Silk Road Market,” Ver says, “while evil hackers were busy terrorizing
quadriplegic Hal Finney and his family.”
"voluntary trade" makes it sound like said trade wasn't actually illegal (in other words, like something the police are actually supposed to stop, peaceful or otherwise.)
This is meant to suggest that the police were harassing innocent people while completely ignoring the actual crimes described, of course playing up the typical Bitcoin narrative of the violent, thuggish and incompetent police state.
Left completely unmentioned, is the fact that Bitcoin is designed, and intended, to make it infeasible to track users and enforce laws against transactors. It's an explicitly anarcho-capitalist system. Extortion rackets around Bitcoin are not a bug, they're a feature.
Try and launder a 1Billion to 10 Billion dollor transaction with bitcoin and that's going to fall flat.
PS: For comparison you can fedex ~170,000$ worth of gold in a vary inconspicious 15 LB box. Shipping ~60,000 lb of gold (1Billion$) is much easier to track and more risky.
There is no possible way to make gold inconspicuous. The density simply prohibits it: gold reflects easy-to-send parts of the EM spectrum that most anything else will pass.
Your assuming there is a test in place to detect gold in FedEx packages. That's not acutally a hard thing to test and I would be interested in the results.
"voluntary trade" makes it sound like said trade wasn't actually illegal (in
other words, like something the police are actually supposed to stop, peaceful
or otherwise.)
No it doesn't make it sound like that. "Voluntary" is not synonymous with "legal". The quality of voluntary trade is that both parties to it want to be in it: it's consensual. Many consensual actions are illegal, and some would argue that is oppressive.
Left completely unmentioned, is the fact that Bitcoin is designed, and intended,
to make it infeasible to track users and enforce laws against transactors.
Yet they tracked Ulbritch, who was using Bitcoin and Tor. If they dedicated the same amount of resources to catching this extortionist, I think it's pretty likely he would be found.
> But the police don't arrest people for breaking ethical principles, they arrest people for breaking laws.
...Unless the police officer has ethical principles, in which case they will refuse to obey unfair laws. I remember watching an interview with a Danish cop that refused to arrest someone for smoking marijuana inside their own house. I think it's fair to say the government police system encourages unethical people to become cops.
Last time I checked extortion and making a false police report was against the law. I think context was that the police are participating in the SWATings while not putting in any effort to track down the perpetrators and at the same time they're putting a disproportionate amount of effort into shutting down otherwise peaceful markets.
Right, but the police do not decide which laws to ignore and which to enforce. They are the enforcement arm, not the legislative. No one should be alarmed that people when people are arrested for peddling illegal drugs.
> the police do not decide which laws to ignore and which to enforce
They absolutely do. For example, police in Seattle explicitly made marijuana enforcement the lowest possible priority years before Washington legalized it. It was a common sight to see policemen standing right next to people openly smoking pot on the street and completely ignoring them.
The police actually have a huge amount of leeway, and it can be a big problem. They often decide who to prosecute and who to ignore, and their decisions are often driven by race, revenue concerns, or other issues that have little to do with justice.
That's true, but marijuana was still illegal, and some people were still prosecuted. Ultimately the ones deciding who would be arrested and who would be ignored on a case-by-case basis were the police.
You're correct. My point was directed more towards people, like the parent I was replying to, who defend government actions simply because something is illegal. It would be equivalent to defending people who returned escaped slaves back in the day because it was the law to do so at the time.
Well, the likely continued impunity of the practitioners of "enhanced interrogation" means that it's a legal precedent that applies only to evil Nazis.
To the degree that people believe it exists, it's real. I've met some people I would consider 'brogrammers', they ran a Bitcoin-based startup no one will have ever heard of, and they definitely fit the template. They're out there.
It's no different the the argument people here sometimes make that black markets and TOR are necessary for freedom of speech and civil liberties, even if having them means enabling criminal activity - because the greater threat is always the threat of a government which can't be spoken up against. In the case of guns, the greater threat is always a government which can't be put down.