They exist in a legal grey area between POWs and war criminals.
POWs don't get a trial. They are held indefinitely until the end of hostilities. Given that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are still operating against the US and its allies, hostilities are clearly not over. The trouble is that with such a 'war' against a decentralized enemy that has already lasted 15 years, and could quite conceivably last decades more, it's clear that 'indefinite detention' can effectively become 'life imprisonment' and that we're venturing into territory not accounted for by the pre-existing legal framework.
It's not a simple situation. Obama, who ran on a policy of closing Gitmo, was forced to accept
>They exist in a legal grey area between POWs and war criminals.
Yeah, it is pretty normal for a repressive regime to come up with a legal theory for why it is perfectly OK to hold people indefinitely without trial. Normally such theories are only accepted by that particular regime...
I think Obama felt exactly the same way going into office, but quickly realized the people being sent to Gauntanamo Bay are as dangerous, ambitious and as hardened extremists as they had been saying. Releasing them would greatly increase the chances of a terrorist act on western countries. I'm not saying they shouldn't get some kind of trial, but the notion that they are very likely all at the very least future suicide bombers is often overlooked. Bush's administration had been saying it and I think Obama came to believe it first hand once he got into office.
We'd know what they were like, if they were allowed a trial and could defend themselves? As it is, we take the word of military police etc. Who have never made a mistake?
This whole WoT was an eye openner. Silly naive younger me, for example, was shocked to find out Geneva Conventions only apply to soldiers in uniforms. (I had assumed earlier it was because of human rights.) Turns out it is a gentlemen's agreement in context of playing war with their cannon fodder.
> You're underestimating their capability to shut down trade in bitcoin.
You overestimate the willingness of the police force to prove that they are willing to risk their lives and die for what they believe in. In fact, they won't. Ultimately, they count on the army to do that, who won't either.
Ultimately, all of this assumes that the IRS are willing to prove that they will risk their lives and die for what they believe in. They will not, because they expect the police force to do that, who in turn will not, because they expect the army to do that. And that is how it all went wrong so often in the past.
Why would the IRS need to risk their lives to conduct a legal investigation? If you're caught on a CCTV camera somewhere, they're going to be able to find out about it without getting killed.
And if somebody plans to kill IRS agents, well, that is going to bring out the heavy forces, and will not end well for the tax evader.
Free speech. First Amendment covers source code and similar expressions. Regulating free speech is virtually impossible. That is where the whole project stops.
That's already not the case. Lawyers can get in shit for giving bad advice, and architects have to sign off on blueprints for things that matter.
That doesn't mean that lawyers can't make jokes and architects can't draft blueprints for buildings that smoosh every occupant; it means their professional statements have legal weight.
There are regulations that affect the work of software engineers. PCI DSS is one that I am familiar with. Perhaps unfortunately, if your software interacts with the real world (like payments infrastructure), you have to heed regulation. This tends not to affect people who are casually writing software or working on many open source projects, but it does impact large companies like Google.
(I like to think of this as pretty similar to the Haskell IO monad. At some point you have to break out of your cozy side-effect free code and actually do something. At that point you have to deal with the messy real world.)
> (I like to think of this as pretty similar to the Haskell IO monad. At some point you have to break out of your cozy side-effect free code and actually do something. At that point you have to deal with the messy real world.)
And Haskell is excellent for dealing with the aforementioned messy real world. Better than any of the previous languages (for 1000+ loc) I've worked with.
"Basic English is enough for that" ?
I am amazed at the simplicity of the work you are referring to. Do they still pay a salary for that, or are these people supposed to work for free? Maybe they get paid through something like a Russian fiverr?
He is right. Give me a specialized collection of functions any time, aka, a library, but I will never again use a framework, which is a half-finished program, of which the users are supposed to figure out how to fill in the blanks. A framework imprisons your own code within confines and limitations of what will often turn out to be some kind of imbecilistan.
I think you might have another point here. If the framework wasn't a half-finished, but reasonably complete, program, then the criticism of the article wouldn't fly. It's perfectly OK for a finished program to be non-composable.
Emacs is a good example. It is a text editor first and framework second (although it's hard to believe, because people joke about it). It's not composable, merely extensible. Emacs has all faults that the article criticizes about frameworks; however, since it is usable on its own, it works out positively in the end.
