Those are a military secrets that actually righteous person would be inclined to keep secret, feeling he/she serves his country well.
Murdering innocent people is not this kind of secret (it's dangerous lunacy) and would need to involve murders to silence witesses.
People looks for excuses, and I suppose conflating different things like speed limits, copyright and cryptography is some way to nullify their possible importance. These are not on the same level:
* speeding and more generally, driving misbehaviour are directly responsible for deaths.
* Pirating software and music never killed anyone, but is about maximizing profits for some corporations.
* limiting cryptography is about government control, and is almost only a political matter.
Law can change the way people behave, notwithstanding their agreement :
Speed limits have been enforced much more severely in France in the past few years and guess what, people are speeding much less now. I, myself, changed too: I used to drive at 180 kph quite casually, and I don't anymore. In the same time, road casualties fell significantly, though of course this is for a large part because cars are much safer than they used to be (thank you to Euro-NCAP).
Almost everybody complains about the speed limits, the radars everywhere, higher fines, but it's hard to deny that the policy was efficient, and that it's good.
Now copyright is an entirely different matter. Copyright is only about maximizing profits; extremely tight and severely enforced copyright, or the absence of it, wouldn't change our lives that much, anyway.
In the United States speed limits are not enforced for safety. They are instead a revenue stream for local government.
Relative speed kills, and if police were really concerned about safety they would prevent people from driving too slowly for traffic conditions as well as too fast.
I'll give you a similar example from recent news. Over the last few years, many towns have installed red light cameras. However, many local governments have discovered that red light cameras work too well.
After people got used to them, they stopped running red lights, and the revenue from citations dried up.
Guess what happened? Towns started removing red light cameras even though they enforced safer driving.
The reason that more cities don't do this is because it leads to a massive drop in revenue. In fact here is an article on 6 cities that were caught shortening yellow light duration to increase revenue.
... Speed limits are laws that are set up by well-paid lies?
By whom? That all-too-powerful "Let's drive slow" lobby?
I'm with you on the "When the law hurts the very people it's meant to protect, it's the right and responsibility of the people to fight against it" angle...
There are lobbying groups in favor of slower speed limits, but he's probably talking about local governments that use speed limits to generate revenue.
The context was XHTML. It was more correct but it was wrong (now dead) path. XHTML created only problems, but was "more correct"
To be precise, XHTML promised that pages render faster, which turned out to be browsers fault, not markup. PyPy solves "render fast" problem for python2. What problem Python3 does solve? Unicode? No...
> To be precise, XHTML promised that pages render faster, which turned out to be browsers fault, not markup.
I'm not sure XHTML ever promised faster rendering, I'm sure many people (including me) _assumed_ it would render faster. The truth is that XHTML rendered considerably more slowly! This days XML parsers have improved, but for a long time XHTML made partial rendering while loading and other things harder which meant loading an XHTML page took much longer than the plain-old HTML version.
I doubt rendering XHTML will ever be faster, at best it is/will-be not measurably slower than HTML.
XHTML was poised to offer much more than "correctedness". Reliable validation, custom DTDs, extensions, better interoperability. It just wasn't meant for the general web, where you have a massive number of non-technical authors. I don't think this comparison has any place in this discussion.
Really debatable, xhtml only added "extensions" in the "XML dialects, RDF!!!" sense, in the effective sense HTML is extended all the time.
> better interoperability
At the cost of interop with the real world. And that better interop was restricted to markup (an issue being much better solved through HTML5 as browsers are moving towards spec-compliant HTML5 parsers), it left the "new" interop issues (CSS, JS, DOM, ...) in place.
And XHTML offered this better interop by... mandating source correctness...
> It just wasn't meant for the general web, where you have a massive number of non-technical authors.
Which, interestingly, is also an issue with Python: it's used a lot in scientific fields and as an extension language (though less so than it used to be), which I'd guess would qualify as "non-technical authors" as they're not computer technicians.
"""XHTML was poised to offer much more than "correctedness". Reliable validation, custom DTDs, extensions, better interoperability. It just wasn't meant for the general web, where you have a massive number of non-technical authors."""
You just retold the whole of his Python 3 argument in terms of XHTML. P3 was also poised to offer more than "correctedness", and also "wasn't meant for the general real world where you have a massive number of different systems".
"""I don't think this comparison has any place in this discussion."""
Actually it's the perfect analogy.
XHTML -> add correctness, some new features, idealistic, unsuitable for the real world, didn't catch on.
Python 3 -> add correctness, some new features, idealistic, unsuitable for the real world, didn't catch on.
"I don't think this comparison has any place in this discussion"
I agree. Comparing markup languages to programming languages is even worse than comparing js to assembly. But since we are on the topic... I am not quite sure i undestand what " xhtml is unsuitable for the real world" means. Xhtml is a contract between a content author and a browser. Why do we call the browser's failure to implement the contract "unsuitable for the real world"?
TL;DR: bubble is intentionally blown, so that certain people earn more money
Pumping bubble is intentional. Financial world knows and uses this technique for years. They KNOW we have a bubble and THEY pump it up.
They earn money on stocks rising while bubble rises.
The more they invest, the more people come to them with the money (for investment). They earn money on those people (commissions, investment credits, accounts, personal advisory). And as more and more money pours from the sky, the market rises. And they earn on stock rising.
Suckers (commoners like we) believe that they can catch a train with next Facebook and sell houses or use life savings in hope for a fortune. And financial world earns.
At the proper moment leaders of this mess bail out and we have a "crisis".
Most people decide to invest too late (for example now it's much too late) and also bail out MUCH too late (after few hours or days from bubble blowout).
But those managers and capital owners.. People cry, media report suicides and they just are buying another Ferrari and houses in the Canarian/Carribean. They smoke a cigar, drink whiskey and looking at the sky think: 'suckers, so long till next bubble'.
Works like charm for years. So sad that for example my country's currency ex ratio and stock exchange is so vulnerable to this.
Financial managers are not stupid. They are pragmatically cynical.
Know how to count? Count on yourself, not averages.
Every free capitalist democratic country gives great opportunities to be rich and have a lot of free time.
Especially for hackers.
PS: the site states that the less income inequalities, the better. Quite contrary is actually much better option for any country.
Also some of us are being paid to write bash scripts. I'm for example forced into bash because of AIX server. Learing bash is fun and profitable...