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You should not free up resources in a c++ destructor. I guess that is exactly what Linus meant with his quote.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BewareO...
http://www.codingstandard.com/...
C++ destructors can be used to deallocate any memory, or do other stuff that cannot go wrong. But they cannot be used to release any resources, like sockets, streams, files, connections, etc.

I agree that there is an optimal level of regulation greater than zero. But anything beyond what's necessary to protect customers from private sector coercion is probably broken window fallacy, a handout to a legislator's cronies in the compliance industry. But then perhaps the core of political debate is simply trying to agree on how to define private sector coercion.

Consensus is the business of politics.

Exactly, darn it...

And yet, we are constantly bombarded with assertions that, though there are still perfectly valid debates in almost any other branch of science (dieting, economics, pedagogy, biology, and even computers — you name it — it is all in flux), the science of climate is "settled" and anybody doubting the line pushed by the governments must also believe, the Earth is flat.

And, for some reason, all measures proposed (and mandated) to solve the problems require the industrialized West to slow down, to not produce as much stuff, and to not enjoy themselves as much. And, for another mystery, all of the propositions lead to increased government control of both the industries and the individual lives.

Is it just, as Thomas Jefferson put it, "the natural process" of liberty yielding and government gaining ground? Or is there some foreign "help" leaning on Western academics to "settle" the branches of science, that would slow the West down and otherwise help the competing cultures prove, they aren't as inefficient as the history suggests?

Images themselves have no semantic value

I detect definition disagreement, and this thread can't usefully continue until we clear this up. I'm unfamiliar with the definition of "semantic value" that you're using. Is it from a standard? If so, which?

You wouldn't invent a redundant element for audio files

Except they did just that. The audio element allows specifying multiple otherwise equivalent sources, each in a source element, so that the browser can choose the most technically appropriate one. This allows letting the browser choose, say, an MPEG-family format if it's an Apple or Microsoft browser or a royalty-free format if it's a third-party browser.

You're moving the goalposts with this "No true Linux" thing.

I said GNU/Linux in #47550429 precisely to avoid "no true Linux".

if you buy an appliance-type computing device (which I gave multiple examples of already,

I must have missed where you named a make or model of appliance of using GNU/Linux, not a non-GNU userland on the Linux kernel. The point I was trying to get across in #47550429 was that GNU/Linux is less likely than other kinds of Linux-based operating system to come installed on an appliance locked down against its owner.

and smartphones are one)

As the GNU/Linux FAQ explains: "There are complete systems that contain Linux and not GNU; Android is an example. [...] What makes Android different from GNU/Linux is the absence of GNU." I think we're in violent agreement on the concept, just not on the terminology.

Wordstar!? You should use ed, because it is the standard: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EdIsThe...

It's all marketing, don't be such a sucker! In fact, I just call 'em al laptops, in the case net/utlra/bollocks-books, I just call 'em small laptops.

I too refer to this machine as a "10 inch laptop". It's just that someone else used "netbook", and I tried to head off useless debate by defining words in advance because the popular conception of a "netbook" is a laptop whose hardware qualifies or would have qualified under Microsoft's Windows XP-era ULCPC licensing program.

games-consoles (as they are usually hacked enough to have pretty much the same functionality as any other computer in the house)

Which country do you live in that allows that? I thought the United States had the DMCA, the European Union had national versions of the EUCD, and Canada had the digital lock bill.

It's like saying, there are only two numbers, "zero" and "many".

Some people believe that either something is secure or it's not, just like a woman is pregnant or she's not, or a dish is vegan or it's not. But to head off an imminent definition debate, let me explain your core idea in terms they'll understand:

Virtually all off-the-shelf software is insecure. People take out errors and omissions liability insurance ("E&O") to cover their behinds in case a vulnerability causes a noticeable problem. You may call software "more secure" if it has had its vulnerable surface reduced, and you may call software "acceptably secure" if it is more secure to the point where the cost of E&O doesn't eat up too much of your earnings.

The self-interest of commercial software developers like Microsoft involves ripping everything down and building it over again ever few years.

This is what happened with Smalltalk. It was getting better as long as they were discarding *everything* every two years (they used to call it the "burn the diskpacks" approach). But it *never* happened with Microsoft software, ever. They don't rebuild stuff, the accrete onto it.

I realize that there is an overlap between "document layout" issues and GUI issues, but believe that perhaps we have to separate these issues in order to focus on doing each well.

My draft GUI markup suggestion(s) uses HTML as a base because it's established and does initial layout "good enough". (Although I'd like an MDI option added: true sub-windows.) It's mostly the interaction between parts and pages that is lacking, such as drag-and-drop, scrolling tables, and value or element refreshing without re-rendering the entire page (AJAX-like without AJAX).

You can see some of these suggestions at: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GuiMark...

Everquest was niche.

That word is subjective, and people will spend days arguing over subjective definitions. Could you give a more objective criterion?

You need an Everquest subscription to play it.

And you needed an Xbox Live subscription and a copy of each game for each console to play Xbox Live.

People will find a way ... http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?Obfusca...

And web sites are breached all the time, exposing their users' private PII. Perhaps we're defining "contained" differently, and the discussion can't proceed until you or Grow Old Timber clears it up.

If you do FEC, you need to buffer on the transmitting end. Built in latency.

If you do any sort of compression, such as linear prediction or cosine transform, you likewise need to buffer. Match the size of your FEC packets to your codec packets.

and if you are losing 10 consecutive packets

I apologize for being unclear; I didn't mean 10 in a row, just any 10 out of 50.

how can FEC help you?

We appear to have lost sync, and we won't be able to progress until we renegotiate definitions. Is a packet considered "lost" if it contains a single bit error at the receiver?

And besides, you are wasting lots of bandwidth to add the redundant data needed for FEC

When the receiver detects excessive errors, that means the channel capacity (in Shannon's sense) has decreased, and the sender needs to use more bandwidth to push the same rate of information.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki if you want the URL. One of the oldest URLs in my memory that still works.

It's not neatly organised, but I find I go to check one thing and two hours later I start closing the tabs I've opened that I know I'm not going to get around to reading.

It predates, predicted and helped evolve the whole Agile development movement, and all the conversations and insights that led to current best practices are still there.

I think we're screwed.

Only if you keep on reelecting the same old crooked politicians over and over again. The NSA can't control who you vote for.

1) who knows how far NSA has its fingers into everything. If they've hacked the voting machines ... perhaps they *can* control who we vote for.

2) it doesn't have to be the NSA. They may have the most resources and the most support from our government, but China could do similar things. And the part about getting back doors into open source software doesn't require a government agency at all.

The most recent poster child of vulnerabilities that nobody noticed was of course Heartbleed, but who knows how many other problems either 1) have been detected but not reported to anybody, or 2) were deliberately added but made to look benign? And it's always possible that the vulnerabilities aren't where you think they are -- for example, the idea of hacking the C compiler to detect when it's compiling /bin/login and adding a back door if it is is decades old, and it's only one of oodles of possible scenarios.

[Nintendo products have] discrete directional controls and trigger buttons without having to buy a MOGA clip-on gamepad

im sure that if there is a TRUE demand for such a game, android and IOS would work out just fine

When people emphasize "real" or "true", I'm reminded of something. So let's clear up definitions first so that this discussion doesn't fall apart:

By "true demand", are you referring to demand that would encourage people to buy a $40 clip-on gamepad just for one game? Are there even any games like that?

Yup, that's pretty much what I meant. When I was young and far more starry eyed and way less pragmatic then I am now I tried, I really tried to like and use emacs. But when I found vi I never looked back, I've now had the opportunity to use it on a old 1980's mini computer ( with an 80 key keyboard! hjkl is now ingrained forever in my mind as the one true way to navigate a character at a time in four directions) all the way through to gvim that I use pretty much daily.

I get so geeky about vi that I was thrilled when I figured out Battle for Wesnoth actually has a command interface you bring up with :

Although I bow to those who acknowledge the standard text editor, I will stick with vim + plugins for pretty much everything text related.

The only thing [the App Store review process] should be screening for is malware.

A lot of arguments are won and lost on defining terms. The question you're implicitly asking is who gets to define malware. Apple thinks any application that can reconfigure your device's Wi-Fi settings is malware. But if you seek a tool to discover or troubleshoot Wi-Fi networks, then you disagree that it is malware. And this disagreement is why the WiFi-Where application is not available for iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad.

Fine, if you're going to be THAT literal

Sometimes I start out literal in order to clear up definitions so that the debate doesn't degenerate into talking past each other.

they are "special purpose personal computers. They don't HAVE to be general purpose.

The problem comes when one owns only specialized devices and suddenly wants to do something that needs a general-purpose PC. When someone discovers that a particular task requires buying a general-purpose device, he may end up just refraining from the task entirely after seeing the sticker shock of buying the first general-purpose device. See also betterunixthanunix's comment. And there's a precedent: the transition from Commodore 64 to Nintendo Entertainment System.

I disagree that brevity and readable are the same thing. Further, "structurally simple" is in the eye of the beholder. And, if one cannot find staff that can grok lots of heavy abstraction, then the organization gets stuck. Lower abstraction may cost more (less efficient), but is less likely to create outright "stuckage".

More on this kind of debate:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GreatLi...

I recommend "Design Patterns" by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

I have trepidation about recommending the GoF book. It's a great book, don't get me wrong, but I think it should be deferred until the reader has a non-trivial amount of real-world experience to dampen any excess of enthusiasm for the patterns. Perhaps what's best is that new software engineers read GoF but are strongly cautioned that they should use it primarily to recognize common patterns, rather than as a recipe book for how they should structure their software, at least until they have more experience.

It should also be coupled with serious study of anti-patterns. In fact, I'd say that for new professionals a study of anti-patterns is actually more useful than a study of patterns.

I've long wished we could find crypto libs that were well-engineered, both internally and in their APIs.

Have you looked at the Go standard library's crypto packages? I have not done any thorough examination of them and could NOT vouch for their quality - but they were written by security conscious folks (including Ken Thompson) at GOOG, and the code is fairly easy to read.

I never heard of the Fizz-Buzz test before, so I looked it up: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FizzBuz...

"Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”."

That seems pretty easy. So, here's my quick attempt in Applesoft BASIC. Why BASIC for the Apple II? Why not! It took a few minutes:

5 REM FIZZ-BUZZ IN APPLESOFT BASIC FOR THE APPLE II
10 FOR I=1 TO 100
12 REM F IS A FLAG VARIABLE
15 F=0
18 REM MOD IS NOT AVAILABLE IN APPLESOFT
20 IF I/3=INT(I/3) THEN PRINT "FIZZ";:F=1
30 IF I/5=INT(I/5) THEN PRINT "BUZZ":F=2
35 IF F=1 THEN PRINT
40 IF F=0 THEN PRINT I
45 REM TIME DELAY LOOP SO YOU CAN SEE THE NUMBERS BEFORE THEY SCROLL OFF THE SCREEN
50 FOR D=1 TO 100: NEXT D
60 NEXT I
70 END

To paraphrase Spock from Wrath of Khan, "I never took the Fizz-Buzz test. What do you think of my solution?" It's not the most elegant, IMO. I don't like using a flag variable, but after looking at the other results on the wiki page, I think I did OK. Had I realized that "FizzBuzz" would be divisible by 15, I could have made it more elegant. Oh well. I can't imagine anyone having a real hard time with this project. It took me a couple of minutes at most. It's rather worrisome that people in our field might have trouble with something so basic (pun intended).

Then it's a context object such as the "drawing contexts" from several graphics APIs, right?

I mentioned that people who call themselves Christians but then commit acts of violence, for flimsy reasons and without provocation, are not in fact practicing Christianity. Some fool cried "hehe I guss there is No True Scotsman then huh?!" while patting himself on the back fiercely.

If someone wrongfully accuses you of creating a no true Scotsman (NTS) fallacy when discussing hypocrisy among self-proclaimed Christians, here's how I'd reply: "I've always defined 'Christian' as someone who follows the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Anyone who claims Christianity but materially fails to practice it is something else: a 'hypocrite'. In Jesus's time, there were hypocrites in the leadership of Pharisaic Judaism, and he tore them a new anus in a speech recorded at Matthew 23." Clearly defining the goalposts early on shifts the debate from "you moved the goalposts" to "is this person really practicing?".

This infantile fevered-ego shit is killing Slashdot much faster than a shitty Beta redesign ever could hope to do. It's just far less trendy to protest it.

The NTS fallacy usually has roots in disputes over definitions. Even Scientology recognizes the problems that misunderstood words cause. One can prevent the fallacy by agreeing upon definitions before proceeding, such as "Christian == one practicing Jesus's teachings". This is an anti-NTS step that any Slashdot user can help stop, unlike forced beta for which the only cure is leaving Slashdot in favor of Soylent News or Pipedot. Right now, one can turn off beta, but once Slashdot forces it, the only course of action will be to follow reasoning analogous to Jesus's advice to body integrity identity disorder sufferers in Mark 9:45: "If [Slashdot beta] causes you to stumble, cut it off."

If it doesn't get you a low-level output, I stand by what I (sarcastically) said.

If your receiver has an effects processor in it already, it might even have compression under a name relating to "dynamics". It probably won't support the full control a standalone compressor will do, but it might work.

Unfortunately, I don't have a part number for a non-crappy receiver handy, but a while back I worked with a system that was 5.1-channel surround and offered both digital output and 6 analog RCA jacks on the back with low-level output. Those jacks came with preinstalled plugs that would bridge over to 6 corresponding analog inputs that went right to the amplifier. That amp then had the usual binding posts for the speakers. From a wiring perspective, it was really two separate components: the AV switch, and a 5.1-channel amplifier. I could connect all of my other requisite gear in between the two, supporting my processing and splitting needs.

I have a deep love for FORTH, but its time is pretty much past. You could make a case for using it on really resource-constrained embedded systems, I guess.

But FORTH lives on inside of Postscript, and thus inside of PDF. Something of FORTH will be with us for the foreseeable future.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ForthPostscriptRelationship

Fortran is far from dead, but I'm hoping that Python will take over its niche. Python itself is pretty slow, but you can use wonderful libraries to do powerful things at C speed (or at Fortran speed). The classic BLAS and LAPACK libraries are available in SciPy. So, the math calculations happen as fast as Fortran, but the glue code is a bit slower than Fortran... but you gain the elegance, convenience, and rapid development of the interpreted Python language.

I was able to attend the SciPy conference, and one of the keynotes was a guy from the Hubble space telescope project. He described how they have converted old "legacy" code in a language called IDL into SciPy code.

In science in general, and particularly in astronomy, as they walk away from legacy languages they are walking toward Python.

http://www.astrobetter.com/wiki/tiki-index.php?page=idl_vs_python

Personally I can't wait until Python kills MATLAB. Alas, that will not be tomorrow. But it will happen as surely as free web browsers killed Netscape's ability to charge $40 for Netscape Navigator.

Yes. This is an important distinction. "They also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Hoyle wasn't purely a crank, of course. He was a very good scientist, who had made major contributions to his field, but who just couldn't accept new ideas past a certain point, and thereby became a crank. This phenomenon isn't universal by any means, but it's sadly common.

AC wrote: "Some jobs are not possible to do with a never-ending flow of interns and indian mechanical turks. For some tasks you need dependable people who have years of insight into the business model of your company and who have the kind of intimate knowledge of your IT infrastructure that takes years to acrue."

This is so true. There is a lot of "domain knowledge" in many fields, even if the underlying programming issues may often be the same (how to write and maintain good code as part of a team). If you only know one or the other, it is hard to do the job well. And it takes time to learn both.

And a big danger for new people is they don't know what they don't know:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FourLev...
http://processcoaching.com/fou...

And for someone who has gone up the learning curve on both domain knowledge and technical & teamwork knowledge, it may take increasing or new challenges to keep things interesting. For whatever personal reasons, some people care more about certain problem domains at some moment than others. See Dan Pink on how the biggest motivation to do good work comes from a combination of purpose, mastery, and challenge:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Game psychology suggests a sense of "flow" is best achieved by matching the challenge to be only slightly more than the skill level:
http://www.jenovachen.com/flow...

On making work into play, Bob Black write about this in 1985 in The Abolition of Work", and Theodore Sturgeon in the 1950s in "The Skills of Xanadu":
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
http://books.google.com/books?...

Although E.F. Schumacher made a good point here too:
http://centerforneweconomics.o...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

There is some tension between Schumacher's point and Black's point, so resolving it may take a deeper level of analysis.

I think you know what he meant and are just being stupid.

I'm trying to be precise about the scope of the proposed limits, as this scope defines what kind of software can be made to run on such a device. A developer appealing a rejection will engage in exactly the same sort of nitpicking that I display in this comment. If precise is stupid, then I'm at a loss as to why engineers go to college in the first place.

Dalvik and V8 do not emulate an actual existing physical device unlike EMUya.

It'd be helpful if you could precisely define "an actual existing physical device". Case in point: The JVM emulates a device that executes Java bytecodes in hardware, such as any ARM processor with Jazelle DBX. Dalvik has similar semantics to the JVM, although with different implementation details, and it likewise has a hardware implementation, apparently as a hardware front-end to OpenSPARC's execution units. If you really want to be "the best kind of correct" (Futurama) about banning emulators, then you'll have to ban Dalvik because "an actual existing physical device" that executes it exists.

Let me attack it a different way: What technical measures would be used to "kill the emulators"? And what definition of "shovelware" would be used?

Ed is the standard text editor

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

Ruby Is Smalltalk Minus Minus

To keep this debate from collapsing into one of definitions, I'll offer some. In the retro-gaming community, an "emulator" simulates the operation of an entire computer, using an interpreter or dynamic recompiler to simulate the CPU. This emulator imposes a substantial performance penalty. For example, DOSBox and Bochs are emulators. Wine, on the other hand, is just a set of libraries that run on your existing machine; the application's code runs natively. VirtualBox and VMware are somewhere in the middle as "virtual machine monitors", which execute unprivileged code directly and recompile privileged code into the same instruction set but without use of privileged instructions.

Let me put it another way: If you think Wine is an emulator, then Qt is an emulator too if I install it on a GTK+ based distribution like Ubuntu or Xubuntu, and GTK+ is an emulator if I install it on Kubuntu.

To keep this debate from collapsing into one of definitions, you offered a specific definition of the term as used by a specific niche of people in a specific sector instead of the actual definition.

Emulator. Noun. One that emulates. See emulate.
Emulate. Verb. To rival.

WINE emulates an implementation of the Win32 API. Whether you use the actual definition (rivals) or the typically-accepted incorrect definition (imitates) it holds true. Even when you use the sector-specific jargon of a computer system implementing the functionality of another computer system, there is no stipulation that an emulator must be software and the emulatee must be hardware. All computer systems are ultimately a combination of hardware and software - the line is irrelevant and often blurred (see firmware).
WINE is an emulator.

To keep this debate from collapsing into one of definitions, I'll offer some. In the retro-gaming community, an "emulator" simulates the operation of an entire computer, using an interpreter or dynamic recompiler to simulate the CPU. This emulator imposes a substantial performance penalty. For example, DOSBox and Bochs are emulators. Wine, on the other hand, is just a set of libraries that run on your existing machine; the application's code runs natively. VirtualBox and VMware are somewhere in the middle as "virtual machine monitors", which execute unprivileged code directly and recompile privileged code into the same instruction set but without use of privileged instructions.

Let me put it another way: If you think Wine is an emulator, then Qt is an emulator too if I install it on a GTK+ based distribution like Ubuntu or Xubuntu, and GTK+ is an emulator if I install it on Kubuntu.

Cute, but no.

Spying on one uncooperative American company to help a favored American competitor wouldn't really help national security as much. The balance of economic power between nations would be unchanged.

Offhand, I don't know of any section of the Constitution that would be affected here. The Constitution doesn't actually afford any protection for foreign nations, but I'm sure the hordes of wishful thinkers will insist otherwise.

Isn't reactive programming essentially a repackaging of Table Oriented Programming?

First let's get the terminology straight so we don't end up talking past each other. To me, "consumption" means either A. an old name for tuberculosis or B. using something up. When you view a work of authorship created by someone else, you don't "consume" it; the work is still there.

Now the real problem here is one of upward mobility when one who currently views works decides to start creating them. Someone who already owns a PC, which is useful for both viewing works and creating them, can switch from viewing to creating with very little up-front cost. But someone who owns only a tablet that runs a locked-down mobile operating system must first buy a PC. This sticker shock could end up discouraging people from even starting to create.

the inflated market must shrink back to its previous levels before the sales numbers will stop falling.

With reduced economies of scale by selling PCs only to people who work for a living, prices are likely to rise to meet the previous prices, with a decade of inflation on top of that. This only makes the sticker shock of a viewer-to-author transition even worse.

You disagree that ownership of copyright in a work of authorship implies "ownership of the work" in any useful sense. But what is ownership? Wiktionary defines "owning" something as "hav[ing] rightful possession" of it as property, and its first non-circular, non-real-estate definition of "property" is in term of exclusive rights in a particular thing. But I understand that not everybody agrees with Wiktionary definitions. So to avoid us talking past each other, try telling me how you prefer to define "ownership" and "property", and I'll help you understand why people speak of "ownership of a work".

I'm pretty sure you're just trolling now. I might as well kill some time, though.

My goal is to establish the provable facts, not to defend or accuse anyone. By questioning my intent while invoking the NSA's name, you're distracting from the issue in exactly the same manner as a comparison to Hitler. The name now evokes an emotional response, undermining any logical evaluation.

Again, my goal is a logical progression, not anyone's opinion. Asking my personal opinion of the matter is also distracting from the question at hand (which, I note, is still unanswered), as is the oversimplified analogy which lacks the defining "mass" characteristic of "mass surveillance".

That is, in fact, one of the open questions regarding the NSA's surveillance. It has been established that targeted detailed surveillance of an individual requires a search warrant, but it has also been established that widespread general observation does not. Widespread detailed surveillance is new, and it's not yet clear how it should fit into the existing legal framework.

Unfortunately, law and logic do not often factor into discussions. Rather, anyone asking for a valid argument is merely insulted.

What exactly are you arguing for? Are you trying to defend the NSA? Do you really want to live in a glass house? Would it bother you if I (or anyone) installed surveillance equipment in every single part of your house with the intention of constantly reviewing all the footage, but not doing anything else with it?

I'm arguing for a logical discussion, rather that one steeped in bias and knee-jerk reactions. To that end, I've taken the liberty of highlighting the fallacious arguments in your statements.

The question of whether it's "inherently harmful" is completely different from the question of whether what the government is doing is constitutional, and anyone with a brain knows that it isn't.

Ewieling's claim is that surveillance is unconstitutional because it's a punishment. However, there are two questions to that claim that need proving: that surveillance is a punishment in itself, and that such a punishment is prohibited by the Constitution. I would accept "harmful" as a substitute for "punishment", but that's not proven, either.

What exactly are you arguing for? Are you trying to defend the NSA? Do you really want to live in a glass house? Would it bother you if I (or anyone) installed surveillance equipment in every single part of your house with the intention of constantly reviewing all the footage, but not doing anything else with it?

I'm arguing for a logical discussion, rather that one steeped in bias and knee-jerk reactions. To that end, I've taken the liberty of highlighting the fallacious arguments in your statements.

The question of whether it's "inherently harmful" is completely different from the question of whether what the government is doing is constitutional, and anyone with a brain knows that it isn't.

Ewieling's claim is that surveillance is unconstitutional because it's a punishment. However, there are two questions to that claim that need proving: that surveillance is a punishment in itself, and that such a punishment is prohibited by the Constitution. I would accept "harmful" as a substitute for "punishment", but that's not proven, either.

What exactly are you arguing for? Are you trying to defend the NSA? Do you really want to live in a glass house? Would it bother you if I (or anyone) installed surveillance equipment in every single part of your house with the intention of constantly reviewing all the footage, but not doing anything else with it?

I'm arguing for a logical discussion, rather that one steeped in bias and knee-jerk reactions. To that end, I've taken the liberty of highlighting the fallacious arguments in your statements.

The question of whether it's "inherently harmful" is completely different from the question of whether what the government is doing is constitutional, and anyone with a brain knows that it isn't.

Ewieling's claim is that surveillance is unconstitutional because it's a punishment. However, there are two questions to that claim that need proving: that surveillance is a punishment in itself, and that such a punishment is prohibited by the Constitution. I would accept "harmful" as a substitute for "punishment", but that's not proven, either.