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Em. Thomas Paine, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin, John Marshall, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, René Descartes and many, many more wrote anonymously.

Some wrote anonymously because they wanted the words to speak for themselves, such as Madison, Hamilton and Jay writing the Federalist Papers.

Some did it because they thought their name might detract from the message - such as Franklin's writings when he was a teenager.

And some others did it to avoid consequences for their opinion - such as when Thomas Paine penned the case for American independence - literally treason. Even Paine's publisher, Benjamin Rush, remained anonymous!

The idea that free speech without responsibility wasn't a consideration seems contradicted by how utterly pervasive it was by classical liberal philosophers and founding fathers and how influential those writings were to the founding of the country and the creation and passage of the first amendment.


It's an xkcd reference. Sadly, not explicitly mentioning it is xkcd sends the exact opposite message to the one in the comic to those unaware of it.

https://xkcd.com/1053/


I'm not rich, but I'm still happy. I have little reason not to be.

I woke up today and the sun shining and birds chirping. I made myself and my partner breakfast, greeted people on my way to work. I got a good amount of work done, then had a nice lunch and now I'm taking a little break.

My life is better than it was growing up and substantially better than how bad it was for my ancestors.

Perhaps my expectations are lower than yours or perhaps I'm more focused on the present and my actual experiences rather than ruminating on whatever sensationalistic news story of the day is or what could happen, but while I can't say I'm happy about most of what you describe, they don't affect my day-to-day happiness. I'm not going to worry about things I can't change that may or may not affect me.


The FTC sued Adobe last year for subscription dark patterns.

https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/2...


Apple's "Europe" segment includes European countries (including those not in the EU), India, the Middle East and Africa.

> They feel incredibly safe and don't have to worry about being victims of crimes, having their packages stolen, walking around late at night alone, etc.

Em. I think feeling incredibly safe has more to do with the media telling people that no crime exists and all criminals are caught, rather than a reality of zero crime.

There is evidence that crime started being systematically under-recorded in China since they started assessing police on proportion of recorded crimes they solve.

https://archive.is/20250624235740/https://www.economist.com/...


Sorta yes and sorta no? You're factually correct; but practically missing the point a little bit. At my relative's place, which has many tall buildings around a hub, package delivery people leave all of the resident's packages on a very exposed and busy sidewalk. People walk by these packages all day and none of them are ever stolen. Could you imagine an Amazon delivery driver just leaving all of the packages for the Flatiron building on the sidewalk in NYC? It'd be a perverse Monty Python skit because the packages would all disappear before the delivery driver even left the area.

This sort of shared expectation of courtesy and safety is more common there; and it exists because of the surveillance state. I'm not advocating to live in a surveillance state; they're oppressive—the cons certainly outweigh the pros. There's no debating that. But the silver lining in that is borne of that cost is one that I think people there enjoy.


There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing in many places that don't have a surveillance state. Japan in large part is like this. It doesn't take a surveillance state to create an expectation of security.

This simply isn't true. If anything, constitutional protections have dramatically expanded since the amendment was passed.

This is because until the 14th Amendment and the incorporation doctrine, the Bill of Rights only restricted the Federal government, not the States. Prior to the that, state and local governments could (and did) restrict not just firearms, but other rights as well.

Hell, the Bill of Rights still hasn't been fully incorporated, so for instance, despite the 7th Amendment stating otherwise, you don't have the right to a jury trial in civil cases in every state nor the right to indictment by grand jury (5th Amendment).

Of course, some states copied parts of the constitution into their own and had some form of protection, but it was by no means universal. Massachusetts even had a state church until 1833.


Both the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data appear to have pretty big exemptions for government.

The right to private communications was modified by the ECHR to give an exemption for prevention of crime/protection of morals/etc.[1] and the right to protection of personal data exempts any legitimate basis laid down by law[2].

I imagine they'd be able to figure out some form of Chat Control that passed legal muster. Perhaps a reduced version of Chat Control, say, demanding secret key escrow, but only demanding data access/scans of those suspected of a crime rather than everyone.

Legal rulings also seem to indicate that general scanning could be permitted if there was a serious threat to national security, so once a system to allow breaking encryption and scanning is in place, then it could be extended to what they want with the right excuse.

[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/7-respect-privat...

[2] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/8-protection-per...


> I imagine they'd be able to figure out some form of Chat Control that passed legal muster. Perhaps a reduced version of Chat Control, say, demanding secret key escrow, but only demanding data access/scans of those suspected of a crime rather than everyone.

Isn't that pretty much excatly how it is done in Russia, which was ruled by ECHR to be illegal[0]?

https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854%...


It's just x % 7.

They started their example pattern with an citation number 984,946,606 they earlier said wasn't valid rather than 984,946,605 given initially (and shown in the image).


But why?

Because it means that 85.7% of all mistakes will be caught by very simple software checks before getting to your system. (85.7% == 6/7).

Check digits in your userdata is an old trick and is very useful in practice. Maybe modern systems should aim for something better than %7 but it's a good starting point as a system design concept.


Just a mistake, I imagine. Probably just typed the pattern out starting with the last number they wrote, which unfortunately was invalid.

> I was looking at ticket 984,946,605. When I type in 1 higher, 984,946,606, no ticket is found. ... So the ticket after 984,946,606 is actually 984,946,610


It is a check digit, but it's just: n % 7.

So ticket 98494660 has citation #984,946,605

Ticket 98494661 will have citation #984,946,616

(The example of the pattern mistakenly starts with an citation number #984,946,606 which they said does not exist, rather than #984,946,605 which is the one shown in the image)


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