When you might ask? How about in terms of macroeconomics? It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again. Yet it goes against our values to not take care of our most vulnerable who are unable to care for themselves.
In my mind, that step from equation ("expected economic utility of society investing in someone") to judgement ("don't provide welfare") is a value judgement, not a scientific one. With another grant, you'd get an equation for "expected emotional utility of society for taking care of people who are otherwise unable to take care for themselves".
It also makes little scientific sense to protect individual rights to the extent that we do. My friends over in Europe and Asia often point out that the banning of hate speech has a demonstrable effect on reducing bigotry. Yet our non-scientific culture values free speech.
Again, that step from equation (expected bigotry level for [permitted|banned] hate speech) to judgement ("ban hate speech") is a value judgement. Science can't tell you which to choose unless you have a particular goal in mind. (And even that's an oversimplification because science cannot guarantee that it understands how everything will interact in the end.) Incidentally, notice that there are two values here... free speech and anti-bigotry... so this is really a question of what value should get priority.
If science makes any values judgements, it's about how we acquire, treat, analyze, and share data. Science is a philosophy about how we go about learning and understanding things. So I suggest a better example of when philosophy/morality should trump science is when the process of carrying out science involves unethical experimentation (see Nazi Germany).
But I agree with your basic point: policy should (1) rely on science to provide accurate facts/models of the world and (2) then apply value judgements
Of course... the tricky part is that science can inform value judgements. You might think needle-exchange programs "condone sin", but reviewing the research might lead you to weigh one value (purity) against others (harm/care). [Neither Wikipedia or I know a whole lot about the effectiveness of needle-exchange, so I use this just as an example.] Regrettably, this is the point where most people find it easier to attack the science than re-think their values.
So even though they literally, by scientific standard, discovered FTL particles, they explicitly state that they don't actually think they did because it disagrees with existing theories. This is *biased* experimental physics.
Yes, but it's biased towards scientific ideals of objective, consistent, well-verified, well-developed explanations of the world. I find it odd that anyone would bet on this single series of experiments (involving lots of complex math, machinery, and people) over a theory with 90-something years of very rigorous and very thorough experimental verification behind it. I highly doubt that they're trying to appease some rage-prone scientists... they're giving an honest self-assessment about the likelihood of their result.
BTW, we all have a hierarchy of beliefs ranging from "indifferent guess" to "strong suspicion" to "confident belief" to "fundamental unshakeable tenet". We all have limited time, interest, energy, and resources for updating and modifying our beliefs. Being open-minded isn't about lowering the barrier to acceptance of new beliefs (per se), it's more about being willing to re-examine the existing beliefs you use to accept or reject that new belief with. In other words, it's about pushing yourself to dig a little further into that hierarchy (resisting ego, mental dissonance, etc.). And that's what you see happening here... relativity is pretty close to a "fundamental tenet" of science, but CERN's results were good enough to prompt investigation by Fermilabs and doubtless many others. Give it 5-10 years and we'll start to know something...
Property tax is possibly the most unfair there is.
Your property does not exist without the ongoing functions of government (probate, traffic & sanitation, environmental regulations, police/fire protection, etc.) for both yourself and your vicinity (you need to supplies, right?). Civilization isn't a one-time service, so you don't pay a one-time price.
First, companies don't pay taxes. Their customers do. To put it simpler, when you tax a company, they raise prices to pay that tax.
This is an oversimplification. Instead of translating a tax hike into a direct tax increase, a company might choose to pay its shareholders less or leave the business altogether. Similarly, there's no guarantee that a tax drop will be passed onto customers either.
A sales tax is the only fair tax. Rich people spend more money, thus pay more in taxes. Poor people spend less money, thus less in taxes.
This is also an oversimplification... a greater percentage of the money that poor people spend goes to meeting basic necessities. Is it fair to tax that at the same rate? Many places exempt food and medication to make it easier for people to make ends meet. Of course, a very different mindset would argue that the only fair tax is a poll tax where everybody pays the same... but this isn't practical. And a third mindset would argue that wealth should be repetitively taxed like we do land, RF spectrum, etc... some countries have a "wealth tax" that works in terms of your total net worth.
Ultimately, tax policy must balance a mixed (and sometimes conflicting) set of objectives. Nobody's ever going to invent a tax code that is fair, enforceable, meets revenue goals, spurs the economy, accelerates social justice, and is simple all at the same time.
money will get spent eventually, meaning it will get taxed eventually
People pay dearly to have money now instead of eventually.
What Sun did was write down a list of things bad in C++ and make sure they were gone in Java.
I feel operator overloading is one of those features that is mis-categorized as being fundamentally bad when in fact it was only temporarily bad. I suspect that a lot of people got giddy when the feature was popularized by C++ and wrote a lot of bad code as a result, but with time and maturity people have learned how to handle this feature sensibly. My evidence? C# supports operator overloading and I've never seen it abused, despite all the other bad C# I've seen.
Operator overloading is like your word processor's font capabilities... when people first discovered that they could have multiple fonts in the same document, you'd see all sorts of crazy font/styling overuse. But nobody in the publishing world does this even more (not even Wired), and even your Aunt has figured out that you don't need to put 5 different typefaces in the same document.
Plain wrong. C# is a platform-agnostic language with a standards-defined specification. The CLR and CIL specifications are also 100% platform independent.
Agreed, but only in a theoretical sense and only if you're talking about the language specifically. Microsoft's.NET efforts were focused on Windows (at least until XNA and compact framework came along). That's reflected in the API and development tools (hello VisualStudio). You've got to think that Sun might have spent more energy on innovation if they hadn't got bogged down in standardization and "platform purity".
Mono does a half-decent keep-up job (unlike several other open source "cloning" efforts), but it's still just a keep-up job. It will always be behind (no WPF planned, for instance). Pragmatically speaking, C# is not a platform-agnostic language suitable for general programming in the same way that, for instance, Java+Eclipse are.
Take a screenshot of the desktop when the user selects shutdown. Throw up that screenshot as the boot splash screen. Presto - "booting" in just a second.
I think you just invented iOS
He just invented the Canon Cat. It was basically a 17 pound text editor that showed a screenshot of your current document about 1-2 seconds after turning it on (if I'm remembering Raskin's description correctly). Most users never noticed that it took about 10 seconds for the boot to finish and the screen to "unfreeze".
While your statement is appealingly righteous, the downside is that the unscrupulous run up costs for the rest of us, no matter what intelligence level they target. I'd rather they not get away with it, even if it spares people the hard-knocks education you advocate. For a society to function anywhere near optimal, the vast majorities of its transactions must be conducted in good faith by all parties.
You are not getting best practices....Looking at someones code you will get the good stuff mixed with the half drunk, or just a bad day.
Best practices are good, but reading code is its own education. Reading forces you to think and care about how the code communicates its own organization and intent. In turn, this spurs you to really think about what your own code means instead of just what it does. While books and articles on best practices can teach you a lot about code formatting, language-specific idioms, platform-specific techniques, design patterns, packaging/delivery, etc, they usually do so separately: you have to look at actual working code to see how all of these techniques work at once.
In my opinion, struggling to understand real code (with plenty of successes and failures--the failures are important too) steps you closer to learning the gestalt of style... you gain skills that help you critically evaluated someone's "best practice" and determine where it is and is not efficacious to use it.
In nearly all cases, the question of who made a certificate is not of any real use to the end-user. All they need to know is that the server they connected to yesterday (their bank, Facebook, GMail, or whoever) is the same server they tried to connect to yesterday.
While I believe Schiener made a similar argument, the problem is that I really do want to know that the server I'm talking to is owned by the entity I think I'm talking to. Maybe it doesn't matter for a site like slashdot, but it sure as heck matters for my bank, gmail, etc. This necessitates some sort of PKI or web-of-trust model.
Maybe if you'd gone to them with "This is a bad idea, it has a xx% chance every month we're doing it of costing us $$$ in direct fees and around $$$ in indirect bad press. I can rectify it for $ plus $ per month," they'd have taken you up on the suggestion?
Being able to speak the language of your target audience is a great success skill, especially when that audience is management. What strikes me, however, is that managers should know this better than techies. They (or the appropriate project manager) should be helping to illicit this sort of thought into cost/risk tradeoffs from their subordinates and using this to make sound business decisions. Ultimately, the obligation to identify business risks and implement mitigations lies on management.
I know more than enough to understand that there are people with a vested interest in perpetuating any narrative that casts CO2 as the enemy of man.
Do you know enough to understand that there's an even larger vested interest in preventing that narrative?
I've stayed away from climate change discussions, but it always seems that this argument is always applied one way -- towards the scientist who do the research. In actuality, it seems like ALL stakeholders (scientist, business leaders, investors, politician) have a major economic bias in how they would have others perceive it. Of course, it's the people who come after us who have the largest economic incentive of all, but they haven't been born yet, so... if climate change is real, they're probably doomed.
What about Python makes it unsuitable as an extension language?
He said that it was less suitable than Lua, not that it was unsuitable. His reasoning was that Lua is purpose-built to be embedded whereas Python isn't. Since both languages seem to be proven real-world choices, I suspect the technical tradeoffs are less unilateral than the grandparent post implies, but it's easy to Google up a comparative list (like this one) and make your own decision. (Though I suspect this tendency to compare and analyze to be a bit deceptive... if you know one language well already, go with it and get something done already.)
Indeed, there should be a strict separation between documents (things you merely view and possibly edit) and programs (things which do something).
There aren't just two buckets (documents and programs). There is an entire spectrum that starts with documents (what I'd call declarative knowledge) and ends with programs (imperative knowledge). In between are things like SQL and Regular Expressions and so forth. The middle of that spectrum is actually pretty interesting because you start to gain a lot of functional power with these quasi-programs (which let you transfer power and creativity to end users without having to re-involve the original developers/standards committee each time), but you don't get so close to Turing completeness that you lose analytic power... the ability to think and reason about that piece of knowledge. There's a sweet spot, in other words... once you go full-imperative, you lose the ability to make several types of guarantees and transformations.
So that's one view in which a strict separation doctrine seems a bit a naive, which wouldn't come as a surprise to any Lisp programmer: data is code and code is data. You can really see this interplay with things like JPEG or PNG or other compression formats... nominally it's just a bunch of bytes that the parser needs to do some math on. But the math is really complex, and sometimes a document can trick the parser into executing those bytes on its behalf. To ultimately defend against such threats you need additional measures -- good user interface design, good automatic updates, use of well established libraries, good security testing and code auditing, ASLR, NX bit, and so forth.
But yes, it would be nice to see a little more restraint in arbitrarily adding functionality to existing document formats (PDF's and HTML can do 3D now for crying out loud ^%#$%^!).
"I don't recall" work great for Ronald Reagan. I'm sure there is precedent that it is acceptable under oath.
Second, and this is a technical solution, we need a forked compression system, where two different passwords give you two different sets of contents. Where encrypted data looks like empty space on the faux system. When the faux system is engaged, the encrypted data is destroyed. Hopefully one uses backup.
First, lying to a federal officer in the execution of their duties is a federal offense. IANAL, but if you are guilty your best strategy is to make no claims whatsoever.
Second, while deniable encryption already exists, actively destroying the encrypted data would be highly undesirable after the forensics expert has made a disk image. Not only is it ineffective, but they'd probably be able to prove that you used the deniable encryption feature of your encryption product, which sort of defeats the point. OTOH, if they let you enter the password at the time of inspection (prior to making a disk image), then this strategy might be feasible.
Finally, none of this really matters if your concern is civil liberties. You can't fix a political problem with a technological band-aid (unless the band-aid is your own private orbital ion cannon) on a long-term basis.
Amazon wants developers to cough up $100 for the privilege of being listed on their site.... this seems like a deliberate barrier to stop all those scumbags with their free apps and open source ports from bothering listing on the service at all.
Possibly: that would certainly make the store more appealing to commercial developers. However, it's also possible that they also see it as (1) a funding decision [you gotta cover the per-developer overhead of account management, application review, etc.] and (2) a quality barrier [e.g., to weed out the sourceforge-style wasteland of incomplete projects].
But anyone who sends me HTML mail gets a reprimand anyway. Does anyone really uses HTML in emails? I mean seriously?
I used to be like you (reprimanding people for not living in my black-and-white monospaced world) until I realized that colors, hyperlinks, inline images, and weighted fonts of varying sizes are helpful in communicating clearly and getting one's message across.
At one time these features were new (not readable by all recipients) and dangerous (not sandboxed appropriately), but that was years ago... it's time to leave the people using mutt and Outlook Express 5.5 behind.
Blah blah I hate the black status bar at the top WHAT THE HECK WERE THEY THINKING ARGhh blarghfla flagh flarh...
Okay... now that we got the obligatory b*tch & moan out of the way that people seem to do over the trivialist of changes, perhaps we can focus on interesting topics, such as Google's endgame for this redesign, or how they expect to use WebGL.
Someone needs to start dropping USB sticks that physically destroy hardware when plugged in.... Maybe then people will realise that You Do Not Fucking Do This.
How good is your backup system? Aren't you being a little slow about making full off-site copies? Maybe someone needs to set fire to your house/apartment/parent's basement so that you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This.
How well do you operate your vehicle? Do you follow your manufacturer's instructions for shifting into neutral and setting the parking brake everytime you park? Maybe someone should file down your parking pawl so that--next time you park on a hill--you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This.
How correct is your tax return? Did you properly report all out-of-state purchases that sales tax were not collected on? Maybe someone should haul you in for mandatory audits for the next 5 years so that you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This.
How serious are you about nutrition? How many times did you eat fast food last week? Maybe someone needs to spike your Whopper Jr. so that you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This. (And your health? Way more important than some dumb computer.)
It speaks really poorly of the slashdot community that you were modded +5... seriously, what entitles us--with our massive investment in using, tinkering with, and learning about computers--to so harshly judge those who have developed expertise elsewhere? Civilization requires specialization... we can't all learn all there is to know about vehicle maintenance, animal husbandry, boilermaking, etc., so it is incumbent on the specialist to target his deliverables to the skills and qualifications of the recipients.
So, what's to stop one from just going to the next town over and buying a pet there?
Getting the law passed may not be their true objective here: instead, they may just be playing for media attention and mindshare. (We are, after all, here talking about it on slashdot, even if we're pretty unanimous that it's batsh*t crazy.)
Of course, in the best case they get a toe-hold in SanFran through this law, put a few breeders out of business, prevent a few casual pet purchases... and from that victory, they raise more funding, more public awareness, and more momentum to spur the troops into launching similar legislation effort elsewhere. At some point (in their fantasies), a critical mass of influencers come to perceive the inherit justice of the cause and all pile into help realize the glorious ideal.
I know this is probably going to go down in flames, but exactly how do creationists deal with this sort of finding? Answers from actual creationists preferred.
Creationists accept that DNA mutates but reject the idea that this can lead to meaningful speciation. They distinguish between microevolution* (small inter-species changes) and macroevolution (the idea that one species can turn into another). They would see this finding as lending weight against evolution because the mutation rate is slower than what previous estimates presumably** needed to fit a certain timeline.
Footnotes
* The creationist use of the microevolution/macroevolution distinction is quite different from the traditional use of those terms. For creationist, the terms refer to the amount of speciation being proposed; for an evolutionist, the terms refer to the timescale or resolution being used by various approaches to studying evolution.
** I have no idea how the previous mutation rate was estimated, but the idea that evolutionist have to jump through hoops to adjust timelines is well embedded in young-earth creationist thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
In my mind, that step from equation ("expected economic utility of society investing in someone") to judgement ("don't provide welfare") is a value judgement, not a scientific one. With another grant, you'd get an equation for "expected emotional utility of society for taking care of people who are otherwise unable to take care for themselves".
Again, that step from equation (expected bigotry level for [permitted|banned] hate speech) to judgement ("ban hate speech") is a value judgement. Science can't tell you which to choose unless you have a particular goal in mind. (And even that's an oversimplification because science cannot guarantee that it understands how everything will interact in the end.) Incidentally, notice that there are two values here... free speech and anti-bigotry... so this is really a question of what value should get priority.
If science makes any values judgements, it's about how we acquire, treat, analyze, and share data. Science is a philosophy about how we go about learning and understanding things. So I suggest a better example of when philosophy/morality should trump science is when the process of carrying out science involves unethical experimentation (see Nazi Germany).
But I agree with your basic point: policy should (1) rely on science to provide accurate facts/models of the world and (2) then apply value judgements
Of course... the tricky part is that science can inform value judgements. You might think needle-exchange programs "condone sin", but reviewing the research might lead you to weigh one value (purity) against others (harm/care). [Neither Wikipedia or I know a whole lot about the effectiveness of needle-exchange, so I use this just as an example.] Regrettably, this is the point where most people find it easier to attack the science than re-think their values.
Yes, but it's biased towards scientific ideals of objective, consistent, well-verified, well-developed explanations of the world. I find it odd that anyone would bet on this single series of experiments (involving lots of complex math, machinery, and people) over a theory with 90-something years of very rigorous and very thorough experimental verification behind it. I highly doubt that they're trying to appease some rage-prone scientists... they're giving an honest self-assessment about the likelihood of their result.
BTW, we all have a hierarchy of beliefs ranging from "indifferent guess" to "strong suspicion" to "confident belief" to "fundamental unshakeable tenet". We all have limited time, interest, energy, and resources for updating and modifying our beliefs. Being open-minded isn't about lowering the barrier to acceptance of new beliefs (per se), it's more about being willing to re-examine the existing beliefs you use to accept or reject that new belief with. In other words, it's about pushing yourself to dig a little further into that hierarchy (resisting ego, mental dissonance, etc.). And that's what you see happening here... relativity is pretty close to a "fundamental tenet" of science, but CERN's results were good enough to prompt investigation by Fermilabs and doubtless many others. Give it 5-10 years and we'll start to know something...
Your property does not exist without the ongoing functions of government (probate, traffic & sanitation, environmental regulations, police/fire protection, etc.) for both yourself and your vicinity (you need to supplies, right?). Civilization isn't a one-time service, so you don't pay a one-time price.
This is an oversimplification. Instead of translating a tax hike into a direct tax increase, a company might choose to pay its shareholders less or leave the business altogether. Similarly, there's no guarantee that a tax drop will be passed onto customers either.
This is also an oversimplification... a greater percentage of the money that poor people spend goes to meeting basic necessities. Is it fair to tax that at the same rate? Many places exempt food and medication to make it easier for people to make ends meet. Of course, a very different mindset would argue that the only fair tax is a poll tax where everybody pays the same... but this isn't practical. And a third mindset would argue that wealth should be repetitively taxed like we do land, RF spectrum, etc... some countries have a "wealth tax" that works in terms of your total net worth.
Ultimately, tax policy must balance a mixed (and sometimes conflicting) set of objectives. Nobody's ever going to invent a tax code that is fair, enforceable, meets revenue goals, spurs the economy, accelerates social justice, and is simple all at the same time.
People pay dearly to have money now instead of eventually.
I feel operator overloading is one of those features that is mis-categorized as being fundamentally bad when in fact it was only temporarily bad. I suspect that a lot of people got giddy when the feature was popularized by C++ and wrote a lot of bad code as a result, but with time and maturity people have learned how to handle this feature sensibly. My evidence? C# supports operator overloading and I've never seen it abused, despite all the other bad C# I've seen.
Operator overloading is like your word processor's font capabilities... when people first discovered that they could have multiple fonts in the same document, you'd see all sorts of crazy font/styling overuse. But nobody in the publishing world does this even more (not even Wired), and even your Aunt has figured out that you don't need to put 5 different typefaces in the same document.
Agreed, but only in a theoretical sense and only if you're talking about the language specifically. Microsoft's .NET efforts were focused on Windows (at least until XNA and compact framework came along). That's reflected in the API and development tools (hello VisualStudio). You've got to think that Sun might have spent more energy on innovation if they hadn't got bogged down in standardization and "platform purity".
Mono does a half-decent keep-up job (unlike several other open source "cloning" efforts), but it's still just a keep-up job. It will always be behind (no WPF planned, for instance). Pragmatically speaking, C# is not a platform-agnostic language suitable for general programming in the same way that, for instance, Java+Eclipse are.
How in the hell does acquiring a company like this result in MORE competition?
Why it's obvious... they are increasing the number of competitors from 4 to 3!
He just invented the Canon Cat. It was basically a 17 pound text editor that showed a screenshot of your current document about 1-2 seconds after turning it on (if I'm remembering Raskin's description correctly). Most users never noticed that it took about 10 seconds for the boot to finish and the screen to "unfreeze".
Awesome... I had to friend you for that post.
We're all stupid at something no matter how much knowledge and experience we acquire. (In fact, it's a well known adage that smart people are the most likely to fall for a scam".)
While your statement is appealingly righteous, the downside is that the unscrupulous run up costs for the rest of us, no matter what intelligence level they target. I'd rather they not get away with it, even if it spares people the hard-knocks education you advocate. For a society to function anywhere near optimal, the vast majorities of its transactions must be conducted in good faith by all parties.
Best practices are good, but reading code is its own education. Reading forces you to think and care about how the code communicates its own organization and intent. In turn, this spurs you to really think about what your own code means instead of just what it does. While books and articles on best practices can teach you a lot about code formatting, language-specific idioms, platform-specific techniques, design patterns, packaging/delivery, etc, they usually do so separately: you have to look at actual working code to see how all of these techniques work at once.
In my opinion, struggling to understand real code (with plenty of successes and failures--the failures are important too) steps you closer to learning the gestalt of style... you gain skills that help you critically evaluated someone's "best practice" and determine where it is and is not efficacious to use it.
Ah... you got me there. :O
And how would you implement transparent backwards-compatibility for 32-bit apps?
While I believe Schiener made a similar argument, the problem is that I really do want to know that the server I'm talking to is owned by the entity I think I'm talking to. Maybe it doesn't matter for a site like slashdot, but it sure as heck matters for my bank, gmail, etc. This necessitates some sort of PKI or web-of-trust model.
Being able to speak the language of your target audience is a great success skill, especially when that audience is management. What strikes me, however, is that managers should know this better than techies. They (or the appropriate project manager) should be helping to illicit this sort of thought into cost/risk tradeoffs from their subordinates and using this to make sound business decisions. Ultimately, the obligation to identify business risks and implement mitigations lies on management.
Do you know enough to understand that there's an even larger vested interest in preventing that narrative?
I've stayed away from climate change discussions, but it always seems that this argument is always applied one way -- towards the scientist who do the research. In actuality, it seems like ALL stakeholders (scientist, business leaders, investors, politician) have a major economic bias in how they would have others perceive it. Of course, it's the people who come after us who have the largest economic incentive of all, but they haven't been born yet, so... if climate change is real, they're probably doomed.
He said that it was less suitable than Lua, not that it was unsuitable. His reasoning was that Lua is purpose-built to be embedded whereas Python isn't. Since both languages seem to be proven real-world choices, I suspect the technical tradeoffs are less unilateral than the grandparent post implies, but it's easy to Google up a comparative list (like this one) and make your own decision. (Though I suspect this tendency to compare and analyze to be a bit deceptive... if you know one language well already, go with it and get something done already.)
There aren't just two buckets (documents and programs). There is an entire spectrum that starts with documents (what I'd call declarative knowledge) and ends with programs (imperative knowledge). In between are things like SQL and Regular Expressions and so forth. The middle of that spectrum is actually pretty interesting because you start to gain a lot of functional power with these quasi-programs (which let you transfer power and creativity to end users without having to re-involve the original developers/standards committee each time), but you don't get so close to Turing completeness that you lose analytic power... the ability to think and reason about that piece of knowledge. There's a sweet spot, in other words... once you go full-imperative, you lose the ability to make several types of guarantees and transformations.
So that's one view in which a strict separation doctrine seems a bit a naive, which wouldn't come as a surprise to any Lisp programmer: data is code and code is data. You can really see this interplay with things like JPEG or PNG or other compression formats... nominally it's just a bunch of bytes that the parser needs to do some math on. But the math is really complex, and sometimes a document can trick the parser into executing those bytes on its behalf. To ultimately defend against such threats you need additional measures -- good user interface design, good automatic updates, use of well established libraries, good security testing and code auditing, ASLR, NX bit, and so forth.
But yes, it would be nice to see a little more restraint in arbitrarily adding functionality to existing document formats (PDF's and HTML can do 3D now for crying out loud ^%#$%^!).
First, lying to a federal officer in the execution of their duties is a federal offense. IANAL, but if you are guilty your best strategy is to make no claims whatsoever.
Second, while deniable encryption already exists, actively destroying the encrypted data would be highly undesirable after the forensics expert has made a disk image. Not only is it ineffective, but they'd probably be able to prove that you used the deniable encryption feature of your encryption product, which sort of defeats the point. OTOH, if they let you enter the password at the time of inspection (prior to making a disk image), then this strategy might be feasible.
Finally, none of this really matters if your concern is civil liberties. You can't fix a political problem with a technological band-aid (unless the band-aid is your own private orbital ion cannon) on a long-term basis.
Possibly: that would certainly make the store more appealing to commercial developers. However, it's also possible that they also see it as (1) a funding decision [you gotta cover the per-developer overhead of account management, application review, etc.] and (2) a quality barrier [e.g., to weed out the sourceforge-style wasteland of incomplete projects].
I used to be like you (reprimanding people for not living in my black-and-white monospaced world) until I realized that colors, hyperlinks, inline images, and weighted fonts of varying sizes are helpful in communicating clearly and getting one's message across.
At one time these features were new (not readable by all recipients) and dangerous (not sandboxed appropriately), but that was years ago... it's time to leave the people using mutt and Outlook Express 5.5 behind.
Blah blah I hate the black status bar at the top WHAT THE HECK WERE THEY THINKING ARGhh blarghfla flagh flarh...
Okay... now that we got the obligatory b*tch & moan out of the way that people seem to do over the trivialist of changes, perhaps we can focus on interesting topics, such as Google's endgame for this redesign, or how they expect to use WebGL.
How good is your backup system? Aren't you being a little slow about making full off-site copies? Maybe someone needs to set fire to your house/apartment/parent's basement so that you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This.
How well do you operate your vehicle? Do you follow your manufacturer's instructions for shifting into neutral and setting the parking brake everytime you park? Maybe someone should file down your parking pawl so that--next time you park on a hill--you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This.
How correct is your tax return? Did you properly report all out-of-state purchases that sales tax were not collected on? Maybe someone should haul you in for mandatory audits for the next 5 years so that you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This.
How serious are you about nutrition? How many times did you eat fast food last week? Maybe someone needs to spike your Whopper Jr. so that you realize You Do Not Fucking Do This. (And your health? Way more important than some dumb computer.)
It speaks really poorly of the slashdot community that you were modded +5... seriously, what entitles us--with our massive investment in using, tinkering with, and learning about computers--to so harshly judge those who have developed expertise elsewhere? Civilization requires specialization... we can't all learn all there is to know about vehicle maintenance, animal husbandry, boilermaking, etc., so it is incumbent on the specialist to target his deliverables to the skills and qualifications of the recipients.
Getting the law passed may not be their true objective here: instead, they may just be playing for media attention and mindshare. (We are, after all, here talking about it on slashdot, even if we're pretty unanimous that it's batsh*t crazy.)
Of course, in the best case they get a toe-hold in SanFran through this law, put a few breeders out of business, prevent a few casual pet purchases... and from that victory, they raise more funding, more public awareness, and more momentum to spur the troops into launching similar legislation effort elsewhere. At some point (in their fantasies), a critical mass of influencers come to perceive the inherit justice of the cause and all pile into help realize the glorious ideal.
Creationists accept that DNA mutates but reject the idea that this can lead to meaningful speciation. They distinguish between microevolution* (small inter-species changes) and macroevolution (the idea that one species can turn into another). They would see this finding as lending weight against evolution because the mutation rate is slower than what previous estimates presumably** needed to fit a certain timeline.
Footnotes
* The creationist use of the microevolution/macroevolution distinction is quite different from the traditional use of those terms. For creationist, the terms refer to the amount of speciation being proposed; for an evolutionist, the terms refer to the timescale or resolution being used by various approaches to studying evolution.
** I have no idea how the previous mutation rate was estimated, but the idea that evolutionist have to jump through hoops to adjust timelines is well embedded in young-earth creationist thinking.