There have been a lot of problems with private contractors handling parking enforcement, hence the relatively recent changes in England prohibiting clamping on private land etc. It seems this was mainly prompted by lots of small-scale car parks who would hire guys to drive around with wheelclamps and lock up any car that infringed on the rules even slightly (half an inch over a bit of white paint, overstayed by 1 minute, that kind of thing) with absurdly high fees charged for subsequent release.
I've heard a few nightmare stories about the supermarket car park cameras (and some frankly feeble excuses from the supermarket management teams) too, though. In at least one case involving someone close to me, the parking goons tried to slap a ticket on a car when there was no reasonable way the victim could have known about certain "rules" (which weren't displayed clearly in the area in question) and the parking was entirely reasonable (car in a shopping centre car park for an extended period, while shopping there throughout). If memory serves, it never actually went to court because the shopping centre management stepped in as soon as they heard about the way an actual customer was being treated, but there wasn't much doubt about who would have won in court anyway as there were photos showing that no nearby signs explained the "rules" and a money trail proving that the victim really was shopping in the centre during that time.
In your case, I suspect you would done better to contact the police (on a non-emergency number, obviously) and ask if they could help. We've had problems on my (narrow) road with people who don't have off-road drives parking their cars so close to driveways that the people who do park off road can't get in or out. We did contact our local police about this after a particularly bad spell of thoughtless parking, and they told us that while it obviously wouldn't be a priority at their busy times, obstructing access to property is a legitimate complaint and they could and would remove an obstructing vehicle if there was anyone free to handle it at the time. I know the legal rules have changed somewhat since that conversation, but as far as I'm aware there is still provision for them to remove a vehicle that is actually causing an obstruction at the time.
In any case, please be very careful if you want to take any action yourself, via contacting the DVLA or otherwise, because there are all kinds of things you're not allowed to do these days if you're not appropriately registered with the authorities, and AIUI you can actually be committing a criminal offence yourself if you try.
Sure, the code you gave there would obviously be a bad example. But that's partly due to the obvious redundancy and partly due to awkward syntax that tries to give different names to essentially the same result ("I know the answer now") in different contexts.
What would you think of code in a hypothetical language that looked something like this (apologies for the syntax; I have no idea how to get trendy modern Slashdot to do basic things like not screw up the formatting for a source code listing):
function find values target: ..for (index, value) in enumerate values: ....if value = target: ......result FoundAt index ..result NotFound
...
match find colours Orange with: ..FoundAt index -> doSomethingWith index ..NotFound -> doSomethingElse
I haven't said anything about return codes or exceptions there, because I don't think it matters. The important thing is that the find function either results in finding the value at a certain index or it doesn't, not the mechanics we happened to use to tell the code asking the question what the answer is.
Speed is another reason why current exception handling mechanisms are insufficient.
Why?
Whether I'm aborting due to an error or exiting early from an intricate recursive graph processing algorithm, I'm still only doing it once.
On the other hand, adding extra conditions on every pass around a nested loop to check whether a flag is set to cause an early exit creates code you're going to run lots of times (but only actually helps once).
And in any case, for reasons I explained in my first post to this subthread, exceptions can actually be faster than relying on things like flags and error codes in both exceptional and non-exceptional code paths, obviously depending on your language's implementation strategy.
Normally exceptions should be used in exceptional cases, not in normal control flow.
People keep saying that, but I've yet to find someone who can defend the position with a logical argument.
Fundamentally, you run some code to do a job. There are two ways it can finish early: either it succeeded, and we did all the work/figured out whatever information we were asked for, or it failed, and maybe we want to report this along with some related information. Either way, there is nothing useful left to do except hand control back to the higher level code that asked for the work to be done, along with the outcome of that work, as efficiently as possible without leaving anything in a mess as a side effect.
Exceptions, as provided in many mainstream programming languages today, could serve either purpose just fine. The semantics work the same way in each case. The performance implications are the same in each case. Aside from the unfortunate name "exception", which we could replace with something like "outcome" or "result" just as easily, and the commentary of certain commentators, whose arguments are rarely more than an appeal to their own authority, there is no difference between the two cases semantically or in terms of the code I want my computer to run.
So, why should exceptions be used only in exceptional cases, apart from dogma or convention? They're just a tool, like variables or functions.
Exceptions are usually quite expensive, especially in C++ compared to just returning an error code.
I'd like to see your profiling results to back up that claim. I've got a few years of working on high performance code that suggests most compilers from the past decade or more use some variant of table-based dispatch to handle exceptions. That means they will not need to manually unwind the stack step-by-step in the case where the exception is thrown/raised; they can just run any necessary clean-up handlers and otherwise skip over everything between throwing the exception and catching it. It also means there will be less error checking code required all the way up the call stack in every other case. In other words, this model runs faster and it does does so whether or not an exception is thrown. The overhead is in the space for storing the jump tables and the compiler's effort to generate them (both of which can be unpleasantly large) but not in the run-time speed.
Oh, I'm not that worried that the government will do so carelessly.
I am. I was once a victim of mistaken identity, after someone made a trivial error in a tax office and screwed up my records. It took months to get that sorted out, and those months were extremely stressful both due to the effort of getting things put right and the more mundane concern of not having money that was mine and I needed.
This obviously biases my viewpoint, but sadly I'm hardly alone here. On a simple statistical basis, I am far more worried about a government that lacks adequate checks and balances to put right the very personal damage done to individuals by a very impersonal system than I am about any sort of armageddon scenario where our democracy falls apart overnight and some ruthless dictator gets installed at 10 Downing Street. The latter is big and obvious and said dictator would be removed by the other 60+ million of us fairly quickly one way or another. The former is small enough that no-one but the victim needs to care, but scales to many individual victims, and that's why it's such a nasty problem in modern societies where governments see you primarily as a primary key in a database table.
That's often not how the system works in the UK. With limited police resources available, for better or worse, semi-automatic processes like issuing parking tickets are often delegated to local authorities, such as the councils mentioned in TFA. That leaves warranted police officers free to do work that actually requires a warranted police officer instead of paperwork. You can still challenge such a parking ticket in court, and things like pulling someone over on suspicion still require a police officer.
There is a genuine screw-up in the justice system that if you're mistakenly identified and issued a ticket by some authority on the far side of England, it could cost more time and money to go to court and contest the case than it would cost to pay the fine, so some innocent people wind up in a lose/lose situation even though they didn't do anything wrong. But that's a separate issue, and would still happen if the police issued a ticket to someone because someone else cloned their plates and then broke the law.
The information held by the DVLA is what you use to identify the people who are parking illegally so you can prosecute them.
As someone whose city is stuck with unfortunately weak transport infrastructure for historical reasons (Cambridge) I can tell you that parking "illegally" all too often comes with a "dangerously" attached, too. If there's no sensible justification (such as dealing with a medical emergency, or a vehicle that has broken down and is awaiting recovery) then I have no problem with penalising those people.
This story seems like exactly how the system is supposed to work to me: some parts of government (councils, and even at least one area's police force according to TFA) are trying to overstep the authority they were given for one good reason to use the same facility for other less good reasons, and another part of government that is guardian of sensitive personal data (the DVLA) is telling them to take a hike.
I take your points, but I don't think all your examples are the same.
For example, the tax case is pretty much the only instance where government necessarily assesses everyone's life across a broad range of economic activities (as far as taxation is ever ethically legitimate, but let's take it as a necessary evil for the purposes of this discussion). The information collected is provided by a range of sources who each have only a part of it and for a sensible reason, and there is a genuine reason to consolidate it in that way. I don't mind people having information about me as long as it's for a valid reason and the safeguards are solid, so I don't personally object to this one, but I also wouldn't object to making tax records inadmissible in any court case except a primarily tax-related one or making it a criminal offence to leak such information if you have access to it.
In contrast, I have serious reservations about your examples 2, 3 and 5. Aside from the question of tax and obviously any use for actually criminal purposes, I tend to think that people's money is their own to spend as they deem appropriate, and how they spend it is no-one's business but theirs and the recipients'. If governments think some activity is bad they should criminalise it and punish those responsible, pure and simple. (And if the people disagree with the government's assessment of that activity, they should vote them out of office, equally purely and simply.) I think you tend to wind up with bad laws if you legislate either things with too much discretion on the part of any official -- outside of a court whose purpose is to consider all the details of a case, impartially, and as presented by both sides in a controlled environment -- or with arbitrary economic limits; such laws are often made with the good intentions that pave the road to hell, particularly if you're the guy who is -- or appears to be -- on the borderline, even though in reality your actions are perfectly legitimate.
Likewise, I see little justification for keeping any identifying data in your example 4 beyond the immediate time period when it is relevant. Once you've passed the final speed camera of an average speed detection area, either you broke the law (in which case, fine, keep the data as evidence for the prosecution) or you didn't (in which case retaining the data should be forbidden).
Here in Europe the business interests are regulated more, but the government itself is eroding privacy fast, your privacy now very much depends on promises on how they'll not use your data.
And the problem with that is that most governments are so big that when things do go wrong, it can magically be no-one's fault and no-one's responsibility to make things right, even though the consequences for the innocent victim can be severe. My sig says what it says for a reason...
I'm genuinely interested to know which areas you think the US is better in. As someone who lives in Europe, my perception is that neither the US government (any of its three branches) nor US big business has any interest at all in protecting the privacy of its own citizens, or pretty much any rights at all for anyone other than its own citizens.
This perception is based on a seemingly endless series of measures taken by those government arms (under whichever party/parties at the time) and businesses that seem to erode anything resembling individual rights in favour of the almighty state and/or corporate profit-making, regardless of any international standards, formal treaties, or in many cases even the obvious intent of the US Constitution.
I find the US to be a world leader in invading privacy. The sooner they stop exporting things like intrusive security theatre at airports and universal monitoring of citizens' communications to the rest of us, the better. (Of course, they only succeed in doing that because our own leaders are so spineless that they often accept it, citing nonsense like "special relationships" or the usual root keys to human rights law like terrorism or child abuse. I'm an equal opportunity government critic in this area, I just think the US often seems to cave to special interests first chronologically.)
I think the fundamental problem here is an assumption that how we describe code and how it executes should be the same. There is no reason they should be, other than mechanical ease of translation by compilers and similar tools from one to the other. But the job of a good compiler/optimizer is precisely to allow me as programmer to express my intent in a convenient form, and to turn that into an efficient representation of that intent that my hardware can execute.
In other words, just because I described an algorithm in parallel terms using say fork/join semantics or a message passing/event system, the compiler should still be free to implement it using full threading, green threads, or even some sort of single-threaded super-efficient state machine thing, and ideally I shouldn't need to know or care which it used. Similarly, just because I described an algorithm iteratively, ideally the programming model/language semantics would be expressive enough for a compiler to figure out how much sequential behaviour actually mattered and what was just coincidental, and if necessary to generate parallel execution paths under the hood.
We don't really have tools that do these sorts of transforms very well at all yet, probably in part because we haven't really figured out which theoretical models for describing programs actually let us write compilers to do those conversions in practical situations yet either.
Thank you for your response to our legal position.
As you have not complied, your assets across the EU have been frozen, and any executive who sets foot in any EU nation is subject to arrest and criminal prosecution.
Love and hugs, The guys who actually still make the laws over here
I think when the EU starts fining them substantial amounts and/or issuing arrest warrants, Facebook will notice. Contrary to common belief on US-centric forums like Slashdot, the EU does actually have teeth when it comes to US tech firms taking liberties, and has been known to bite.
In case anyone thinks this is just hyperbole, consider that the EU (both citizenry and government) is getting very fed up with the US (both corporations and government) thinking that it can dictate how everyone else's legal systems and business regulations should work. Anything that screws Facebook while strengthening the EU data protection/privacy position and generating income for the EU via fines is basically a political/economic win/win proposition for the people who are going to be driving the process. Pretty much the only potential downside is losing favour with the US government with consequences elsewhere, but right now the US government is pretty unpopular with everyone so that probably doesn't matter much.
I'm sorry to be trollish, but you seem to be talking down to the rest of us as if we just don't understand, with comments about how you understand the problem space, we couldn't afford you, and so on. However, at this point, it's abundantly clear that you don't even recognise the problem we're considering. Frankly, I'm not convinced you even looked at TFA either, or understood it at all if you did.
What you're describing is the stuff we all considered decades ago. Designing an algorithm to solve a simple, embarrassingly parallel problem is relatively easy. Implementing that algorithm using a primitive threading+locking model is also fairly easy, though even then the evidence to date suggests that such programming models are usually too error prone for critical uses even in the hands of experts, hence the exploration of alternatives such as actor-based models with minimal or no shared state, message passing for inter-process communication, and so on.
What the rest of us are talking about is automatic parallelisation, either on a small scale as a kind of micro-optimisation (such as auto-vectorising a loop to use SIMD type instructions) or even on a medium/large scale as a systematic transformation from an algorithm expressed sequentially into one that exploits parallelism implicitly where it is cost-effective in performance terms to do so.
Unfortunately, as Desler correctly said in the post you first replied to in this subthread, compilers are mostly still quite poor at employing these automated transforms even in the simpler, localised cases. Research into the more powerful but challenging cases is barely out of its infancy, and some of the smartest guys in the industry are working on it. TFA is interesting because it suggests potentially interesting developments in the field.
It may just be that your "thing" isn't really all that threadable. Some things aren't. But it should also be very obvious when they aren't.
Should it? Do you really want to bet that you understand a modern CPU, the related hardware architecture, and a production quality compiler for that platform, all well enough to predict reliably when it's worth running a few instructions in parallel and when it isn't, taking into account the inevitable overheads of fork/join operations vs. the potential performance gains of concurrency? Can you really analyse the global structure of a 1,000,000+ line project and reliably identify algorithms that are expressed sequentially but in fact could be transformed losslessly into parallelised equivalents?
Implementing efficient algorithms for embarrassingly parallel computations is (relatively) easy. Implementing efficient algorithms for basically independent parallel operations, such as a web server, is (relatively) easy. Implementing efficient algorithms for problems that might admit some asymmetric parallelism as long as all interactions are coordinated safely and where it might be worth implicit generation of some parallel code paths as long as the benefits outweigh the overheads... Well, if that doesn't seem hard to you, I look forward to reading your papers, because you just outsmarted a lot of researchers who have been investigating this problem for years.
I think that was the point made in this story. Microsoft has worked hard over the years to make its systems not interoperable with others', so that customers had to buy the whole collection of enterprise services from just them.
In fairness, they have also developed (directly or via acquisitions) a lot of the best software on the market over an extended period, and for much of that time they have also invested a huge amount in supporting developers at other software companies whose products would therefore get built on Microsoft platforms. One could debate how successfully they still perform either of those roles today, but their dominant position didn't happen by accident, and I don't believe for a moment that it's entirely or even mostly down to the much criticised indiscretions that led to antitrust proceedings and the like either.
The thing is, while sticking with Microsoft platforms may bring benefits to businesses, sooner or later the cost will become too high and start to outweigh those benefits. Other things being equal, Microsoft still has the best software products in many of the markets it operates in, but other things aren't equal and apparently they're going to be even less equal now. On the other hand, maybe MS have done their homework, and rather than this being some sort of act of desperation, they have simply concluded that these products really are worth that much more than what they've been charging for them so far and by implication than any alternatives that might be available.
It is just cheaper and more expedient to have a few spare ones and strip their parts.
Only once your office has reached a certain size. For many small businesses in tech fields, it doesn't work that way. Those small businesses are also more likely IME to be the ones getting a custom spec for each member of staff that takes into account their specific needs, as they won't qualify for volume purchasing deals. With a limited budget, it does make sense to spend a bit of time customising to make everyone as productive as possible with what you've got.
If this story is really true, it seems a very odd strategic move from Intel at a time when they're dominant in their markets. It's opening the door for people like gamers, geeks and small businesses to move to a competitor (AMD being the obvious candidate) in order to keep their flexibility, and the people I mentioned there are trend-setters for a very significant chunk of the desktop PC industry. And anyone who thinks desktop PCs are dead because everyone is using tablets, laptops, etc. these days just isn't paying attention.
I can only see this ending one of three ways: there's a huge deal with one or more major hardware manufacturers that we don't know about yet (for example to ship process/mobo combinations as a single unit but with significantly better price/performance as a baseline to make up for the loss of flexibility/upgradability), there's about to be an HP-esque sharp U-turn as soon as Otellini is out the door and his successor finds the plot again, or Intel are about to take a big hit with a resurgent AMD being the likely beneficiary.
That sort of tool is great as long as there are pre-packaged builds available for whatever versions you need. But if you're looking at a package-based model on Linux, things can get a lot more complicated as soon as you're not just working with packages that are part of your distro.
For example, suppose you want to run Python 2.7 on Debian stable, which is so stable that unfortunately its preferred Python version is still 2.6 (which was written some time around the Dark Ages). Assuming you aren't able to find someone who's conveniently bundled up a suitable package already because this is a somewhat common case, how would you go about integrating this with the likes of Puppet?
If there's any universal solution that doesn't involve at least looking through the makefiles to work out exactly what gets compiled and where it gets installed when you build from source so you can manually create your own package file, I haven't found it yet. (If anyone knows something I don't, I'd love to learn about it, so links etc. are very welcome.)
In the unlikely event I stumble upon your embarrassing "e-foible", I do not judge, and will soon forget.
That doesn't work past the point (which we've already reached) where it's not real human beings considering personal data and causing significant consequences to the subject of that data, but automated systems that can essentially check everyone for everything they have data about.
If there are no systems in place to limit the decisions that can be made by such automated systems without human review, or inadequate checks and balances to put things right when the machines make a mistake, real people wind up suffering real consequences, yet mysteriously no other real people are ever responsible any more so there's no-one to hold to account, to compel to fix what they broke (if that's possible), or to force to change their ways.
Letting computers make these important decisions automatically just because we can leads to a world where no-one under 30 can afford insurance to drive, no-one with a family history of some unfortunate medical condition can enjoy any activity where it might be risky if they have the same condition, you can't travel if you have the same name as a wanted criminal and once lived in the same city, no-one who put a photo on-line of themselves drunk as a student can get a good job when they graduate, all the muslims get shot because they're obviously terrorists, you're likely to get several months of your life wasted complying with a tax investigation because you once filed the wrong form (or you filed the right form but the OCR software misread it), and so on. Do you really want to live in that kind of world?
You're trying to change the basis of the discussion. We were talking about whether certain behaviour was ethical and/or should be legal, and whether money could compensate for any harm done by that behaviour, the point being that such harm would be avoidable by not behaving in such a way in the first place. This comes directly from your original argument that any penalty for abusing an absolute right of free speech should be civil rather than criminal. That is itself is an odd position ethically, by the way, because if you can be punished for exercising a right then it's not really a right at all, or if the punishment is financial, it's arguably a right that is granted only to those people rich enough that they can afford to enjoy it.
In any case, that is a completely different scenario to things like your example of a government not spending money on expensive treatments, because that expensive treatment has a direct opportunity cost in that it means for example that maybe two other people can't have a treatment that costs half as much but might save both of their lives instead. Medical ethics is a complicated field.
And yes, I do think life and quality of life are priceless. Obviously you can't always save everyone no matter how much you might want to, but sacrificing lives or allowing suffering needlessly and pretending that a few pieces of paper with some dead guy's picture on them can somehow make up for it is asinine. (And yes, I do put my money where my mouth is on this issue by supporting organisations that help people who don't have the luxuries that we take for granted, and yes, I always have even when I haven't had much money myself. Your repeated ad hominem attacks against me not only fail to support any logical argument you might want to make about the ethics of this situation, they are objectively also completely wrong.)
But again, this is all twisting away from the original point. Loss of life is one possible consequence of allowing absolute freedom of speech (say, if I tell a hit man that I'll pay him to kill you, or if I tell a group of violent white supremacists that you're sleeping with a black girl) but it's relatively unlikely. It's far more likely that, for example, someone's character and reputation would be irreparably damaged, perhaps resulting in spending the rest of their life in hiding, or losing their job/marriage/house/friends, after being wrongly branded some kind of sex offender/fraudster/whatever other unpleasant character that no-one wants to be associated with. This is why courts hearing defamation cases can typically order more than mere financial remedies, but even then the judges sometimes observe in rulings that no order they can make could adequately compensate the victim. And if you go to the next step, where the speech is actively inciting some sort of crime, particularly a violent one, in many jurisdictions you'll cross into criminal territory at that point.
Compared to this, damaging people's feelings or reputations to allow for free speech is a very low price to pay.
That might be your personal opinion, but I'm aware of no legal system in the modern world that agrees with you. As far as I can see, you still haven't made any sort of argument for why someone should be able to cause substantial harm to others with impunity in the case of free speech, when as a general legal principle this is rarely if ever the case under any other circumstances. You've just stated that the law should agree with you, because.
That's not compensation in the usual sense of the word, though, it's just the closest approximation you can achieve when the only tool at your disposal is money.
Trying to make an ethical argument that such "compensation" is adequate in any more general sense is like being the guy arguing that a company can do whatever it likes because it has a solid legal shield. Sure, maybe if someone dies as a result of their negligence, the executives have no personal liability and there are limited funds that can be awarded in a judgment before the legally responsible entity goes bankrupt. However, the guy who makes the decision not to implement proper safety procedures that could have saved that life because the cost of doing so was greater than the expected cost of paying the compensation in the resulting legal case is still the scum of the earth.
Compensation is just that, compensation. Its intent is to give back something to a damaged part, not to rewind time.
compensate, v. tr.
1. To offset; counterbalance
2. To make satisfactory payment or reparation to; recompense or reimburse
You can't counterbalance a human life with any amount of money, nor make a satisfactory payment or reparation for destroying someone's quality of life with any amount of money.
By our society laws compensation is done by money, period.
You're conflating laws with ethics, or worse, implying that ethics are dictated by laws. This is always a dangerous argument, and any reasonable legal system works on the opposite basis.
You're also defeating your own original argument in a way, because by our society's laws you also don't have an absolute right to freedom of speech anywhere in the world AFAIK.
Nobody is saying that money will bring the dead back, but after they are dead it is what can be done.
Right, so maybe we should try to avoid killing people (or, more likely given the subject at hand, destroying their lives) in the first place? We could, for example, introduce meaningful penalties as a deterrent for people who might otherwise do that. We could call those people "criminals", and specify the penalties in "laws". It's a radical idea, but people have been trying it with other unwelcome activities for a little while and so far it's had pretty good results. Unfortunately, it's also fundamentally incompatible with your idea that you should be able to knowingly and wilfully commit an act that will be damaging to another party with complete impunity.
The problem is that there is rapidly becoming no default vendor for industrial-scale general purpose computing. We've become complacent, assuming that if nothing else we can always order another 25 workstations and 5 server boxes from Dell/HP/whoever and stick the latest Microsoft OS on the workstations and whatever server software we wanted on the rest. Even if companies don't upgrade voluntarily, sooner or later the current generation of hardware will start to fail.
But what happens if Microsoft do fall and the only people left to replace them are the likes of Apple (assuming they do any better, since their downward slide seems to have started as well)? If the biggest game in town is some new guy's locked-in software platform, the big name hardware vendors are likely to fall in line, as we've already seen with Apple appearing to lock up the entire supply chain of certain key components for their signature devices so developing competing products is difficult. If you just want to build your own PC and run Linux, you might still be able to (at a premium price, probably), but if the mainstream is moving in a completely different direction then the value of any such system will be greatly reduced.
Ultimately, any computing platform is only worth as much as you can do with it. If you can't access the content you want, connect to the communications channels everyone else is using, play the games you want, run the creative software you want, and so on, the fact that you're running on an "open" hardware platform and OS isn't worth very much at all.
Anything can be compensate by money in our society. Even deaths are compensated by mere money.
I don't even know how to argue against such an absurd position. It is self-evident that no amount of money can compensate someone whose life has been taken or whose quality of life has been destroyed, because no amount of money can undo the damage.
That said, the reason why there is no country that has absolute free speech laws has nothing to do with what can or cannot be compensate, but with governments wanting to control and limit what people think and know in order to maintain their status quo.
Well, I'm glad you have sufficient insider knowledge of every government in the world to explain their reasoning to the rest of us.
Does it not even occur to you that some people might rationally believe that an absolute right to say whatever you like, no matter how damaging or unfair, without any adverse consequences should not outweigh every other basic right and freedom?
Which is interesting, because the UK is still subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, article 10 of which guarantees freedom of expression subject only to certain specific limitations. I find the action of the arrested person in this case distasteful, but I'm not sure under which of those limitations article 10 would not apply.
Just for the record, this isn't the government that anyone in the UK chose. And in any case, the conduct of police officers in most parts of the UK is not subject to oversight by anyone directly elected to serve in that capacity by the general population (at least until this Thursday, that is).
Not that concealment's point here makes much sense anyway. The major benefit of legally protecting certain individual rights at constitutional level is precisely to avoid mob rule, or slightly indirect versions of mob rule such as treating people differently according to what is politically expedient in the short term for administration of the day. As the saying goes, a perfect democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner.
If you slander somebody, for example, the person should be able to sue you and get adequate compensation, but nobody should be able to prevent you from doing the slandering.
The trouble with that argument is that there are far too many things someone could say that lead to damage you can never compensate with mere money. That's why no country in the world really has absolute free speech protected under the law, and in many places saying certain things is a criminal act.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been a lot of problems with private contractors handling parking enforcement, hence the relatively recent changes in England prohibiting clamping on private land etc. It seems this was mainly prompted by lots of small-scale car parks who would hire guys to drive around with wheelclamps and lock up any car that infringed on the rules even slightly (half an inch over a bit of white paint, overstayed by 1 minute, that kind of thing) with absurdly high fees charged for subsequent release.
I've heard a few nightmare stories about the supermarket car park cameras (and some frankly feeble excuses from the supermarket management teams) too, though. In at least one case involving someone close to me, the parking goons tried to slap a ticket on a car when there was no reasonable way the victim could have known about certain "rules" (which weren't displayed clearly in the area in question) and the parking was entirely reasonable (car in a shopping centre car park for an extended period, while shopping there throughout). If memory serves, it never actually went to court because the shopping centre management stepped in as soon as they heard about the way an actual customer was being treated, but there wasn't much doubt about who would have won in court anyway as there were photos showing that no nearby signs explained the "rules" and a money trail proving that the victim really was shopping in the centre during that time.
In your case, I suspect you would done better to contact the police (on a non-emergency number, obviously) and ask if they could help. We've had problems on my (narrow) road with people who don't have off-road drives parking their cars so close to driveways that the people who do park off road can't get in or out. We did contact our local police about this after a particularly bad spell of thoughtless parking, and they told us that while it obviously wouldn't be a priority at their busy times, obstructing access to property is a legitimate complaint and they could and would remove an obstructing vehicle if there was anyone free to handle it at the time. I know the legal rules have changed somewhat since that conversation, but as far as I'm aware there is still provision for them to remove a vehicle that is actually causing an obstruction at the time.
In any case, please be very careful if you want to take any action yourself, via contacting the DVLA or otherwise, because there are all kinds of things you're not allowed to do these days if you're not appropriately registered with the authorities, and AIUI you can actually be committing a criminal offence yourself if you try.
Sure, the code you gave there would obviously be a bad example. But that's partly due to the obvious redundancy and partly due to awkward syntax that tries to give different names to essentially the same result ("I know the answer now") in different contexts.
What would you think of code in a hypothetical language that looked something like this (apologies for the syntax; I have no idea how to get trendy modern Slashdot to do basic things like not screw up the formatting for a source code listing):
I haven't said anything about return codes or exceptions there, because I don't think it matters. The important thing is that the find function either results in finding the value at a certain index or it doesn't, not the mechanics we happened to use to tell the code asking the question what the answer is.
Speed is another reason why current exception handling mechanisms are insufficient.
Why?
Whether I'm aborting due to an error or exiting early from an intricate recursive graph processing algorithm, I'm still only doing it once.
On the other hand, adding extra conditions on every pass around a nested loop to check whether a flag is set to cause an early exit creates code you're going to run lots of times (but only actually helps once).
And in any case, for reasons I explained in my first post to this subthread, exceptions can actually be faster than relying on things like flags and error codes in both exceptional and non-exceptional code paths, obviously depending on your language's implementation strategy.
Normally exceptions should be used in exceptional cases, not in normal control flow.
People keep saying that, but I've yet to find someone who can defend the position with a logical argument.
Fundamentally, you run some code to do a job. There are two ways it can finish early: either it succeeded, and we did all the work/figured out whatever information we were asked for, or it failed, and maybe we want to report this along with some related information. Either way, there is nothing useful left to do except hand control back to the higher level code that asked for the work to be done, along with the outcome of that work, as efficiently as possible without leaving anything in a mess as a side effect.
Exceptions, as provided in many mainstream programming languages today, could serve either purpose just fine. The semantics work the same way in each case. The performance implications are the same in each case. Aside from the unfortunate name "exception", which we could replace with something like "outcome" or "result" just as easily, and the commentary of certain commentators, whose arguments are rarely more than an appeal to their own authority, there is no difference between the two cases semantically or in terms of the code I want my computer to run.
So, why should exceptions be used only in exceptional cases, apart from dogma or convention? They're just a tool, like variables or functions.
Exceptions are usually quite expensive, especially in C++ compared to just returning an error code.
I'd like to see your profiling results to back up that claim. I've got a few years of working on high performance code that suggests most compilers from the past decade or more use some variant of table-based dispatch to handle exceptions. That means they will not need to manually unwind the stack step-by-step in the case where the exception is thrown/raised; they can just run any necessary clean-up handlers and otherwise skip over everything between throwing the exception and catching it. It also means there will be less error checking code required all the way up the call stack in every other case. In other words, this model runs faster and it does does so whether or not an exception is thrown. The overhead is in the space for storing the jump tables and the compiler's effort to generate them (both of which can be unpleasantly large) but not in the run-time speed.
Oh, I'm not that worried that the government will do so carelessly.
I am. I was once a victim of mistaken identity, after someone made a trivial error in a tax office and screwed up my records. It took months to get that sorted out, and those months were extremely stressful both due to the effort of getting things put right and the more mundane concern of not having money that was mine and I needed.
This obviously biases my viewpoint, but sadly I'm hardly alone here. On a simple statistical basis, I am far more worried about a government that lacks adequate checks and balances to put right the very personal damage done to individuals by a very impersonal system than I am about any sort of armageddon scenario where our democracy falls apart overnight and some ruthless dictator gets installed at 10 Downing Street. The latter is big and obvious and said dictator would be removed by the other 60+ million of us fairly quickly one way or another. The former is small enough that no-one but the victim needs to care, but scales to many individual victims, and that's why it's such a nasty problem in modern societies where governments see you primarily as a primary key in a database table.
That's often not how the system works in the UK. With limited police resources available, for better or worse, semi-automatic processes like issuing parking tickets are often delegated to local authorities, such as the councils mentioned in TFA. That leaves warranted police officers free to do work that actually requires a warranted police officer instead of paperwork. You can still challenge such a parking ticket in court, and things like pulling someone over on suspicion still require a police officer.
There is a genuine screw-up in the justice system that if you're mistakenly identified and issued a ticket by some authority on the far side of England, it could cost more time and money to go to court and contest the case than it would cost to pay the fine, so some innocent people wind up in a lose/lose situation even though they didn't do anything wrong. But that's a separate issue, and would still happen if the police issued a ticket to someone because someone else cloned their plates and then broke the law.
The information held by the DVLA is what you use to identify the people who are parking illegally so you can prosecute them.
As someone whose city is stuck with unfortunately weak transport infrastructure for historical reasons (Cambridge) I can tell you that parking "illegally" all too often comes with a "dangerously" attached, too. If there's no sensible justification (such as dealing with a medical emergency, or a vehicle that has broken down and is awaiting recovery) then I have no problem with penalising those people.
This story seems like exactly how the system is supposed to work to me: some parts of government (councils, and even at least one area's police force according to TFA) are trying to overstep the authority they were given for one good reason to use the same facility for other less good reasons, and another part of government that is guardian of sensitive personal data (the DVLA) is telling them to take a hike.
I take your points, but I don't think all your examples are the same.
For example, the tax case is pretty much the only instance where government necessarily assesses everyone's life across a broad range of economic activities (as far as taxation is ever ethically legitimate, but let's take it as a necessary evil for the purposes of this discussion). The information collected is provided by a range of sources who each have only a part of it and for a sensible reason, and there is a genuine reason to consolidate it in that way. I don't mind people having information about me as long as it's for a valid reason and the safeguards are solid, so I don't personally object to this one, but I also wouldn't object to making tax records inadmissible in any court case except a primarily tax-related one or making it a criminal offence to leak such information if you have access to it.
In contrast, I have serious reservations about your examples 2, 3 and 5. Aside from the question of tax and obviously any use for actually criminal purposes, I tend to think that people's money is their own to spend as they deem appropriate, and how they spend it is no-one's business but theirs and the recipients'. If governments think some activity is bad they should criminalise it and punish those responsible, pure and simple. (And if the people disagree with the government's assessment of that activity, they should vote them out of office, equally purely and simply.) I think you tend to wind up with bad laws if you legislate either things with too much discretion on the part of any official -- outside of a court whose purpose is to consider all the details of a case, impartially, and as presented by both sides in a controlled environment -- or with arbitrary economic limits; such laws are often made with the good intentions that pave the road to hell, particularly if you're the guy who is -- or appears to be -- on the borderline, even though in reality your actions are perfectly legitimate.
Likewise, I see little justification for keeping any identifying data in your example 4 beyond the immediate time period when it is relevant. Once you've passed the final speed camera of an average speed detection area, either you broke the law (in which case, fine, keep the data as evidence for the prosecution) or you didn't (in which case retaining the data should be forbidden).
Here in Europe the business interests are regulated more, but the government itself is eroding privacy fast, your privacy now very much depends on promises on how they'll not use your data.
And the problem with that is that most governments are so big that when things do go wrong, it can magically be no-one's fault and no-one's responsibility to make things right, even though the consequences for the innocent victim can be severe. My sig says what it says for a reason...
I'm genuinely interested to know which areas you think the US is better in. As someone who lives in Europe, my perception is that neither the US government (any of its three branches) nor US big business has any interest at all in protecting the privacy of its own citizens, or pretty much any rights at all for anyone other than its own citizens.
This perception is based on a seemingly endless series of measures taken by those government arms (under whichever party/parties at the time) and businesses that seem to erode anything resembling individual rights in favour of the almighty state and/or corporate profit-making, regardless of any international standards, formal treaties, or in many cases even the obvious intent of the US Constitution.
I find the US to be a world leader in invading privacy. The sooner they stop exporting things like intrusive security theatre at airports and universal monitoring of citizens' communications to the rest of us, the better. (Of course, they only succeed in doing that because our own leaders are so spineless that they often accept it, citing nonsense like "special relationships" or the usual root keys to human rights law like terrorism or child abuse. I'm an equal opportunity government critic in this area, I just think the US often seems to cave to special interests first chronologically.)
I think the fundamental problem here is an assumption that how we describe code and how it executes should be the same. There is no reason they should be, other than mechanical ease of translation by compilers and similar tools from one to the other. But the job of a good compiler/optimizer is precisely to allow me as programmer to express my intent in a convenient form, and to turn that into an efficient representation of that intent that my hardware can execute.
In other words, just because I described an algorithm in parallel terms using say fork/join semantics or a message passing/event system, the compiler should still be free to implement it using full threading, green threads, or even some sort of single-threaded super-efficient state machine thing, and ideally I shouldn't need to know or care which it used. Similarly, just because I described an algorithm iteratively, ideally the programming model/language semantics would be expressive enough for a compiler to figure out how much sequential behaviour actually mattered and what was just coincidental, and if necessary to generate parallel execution paths under the hood.
We don't really have tools that do these sorts of transforms very well at all yet, probably in part because we haven't really figured out which theoretical models for describing programs actually let us write compilers to do those conversions in practical situations yet either.
Dear Facebook,
Thank you for your response to our legal position.
As you have not complied, your assets across the EU have been frozen, and any executive who sets foot in any EU nation is subject to arrest and criminal prosecution.
Love and hugs,
The guys who actually still make the laws over here
I think when the EU starts fining them substantial amounts and/or issuing arrest warrants, Facebook will notice. Contrary to common belief on US-centric forums like Slashdot, the EU does actually have teeth when it comes to US tech firms taking liberties, and has been known to bite.
In case anyone thinks this is just hyperbole, consider that the EU (both citizenry and government) is getting very fed up with the US (both corporations and government) thinking that it can dictate how everyone else's legal systems and business regulations should work. Anything that screws Facebook while strengthening the EU data protection/privacy position and generating income for the EU via fines is basically a political/economic win/win proposition for the people who are going to be driving the process. Pretty much the only potential downside is losing favour with the US government with consequences elsewhere, but right now the US government is pretty unpopular with everyone so that probably doesn't matter much.
I'm sorry to be trollish, but you seem to be talking down to the rest of us as if we just don't understand, with comments about how you understand the problem space, we couldn't afford you, and so on. However, at this point, it's abundantly clear that you don't even recognise the problem we're considering. Frankly, I'm not convinced you even looked at TFA either, or understood it at all if you did.
What you're describing is the stuff we all considered decades ago. Designing an algorithm to solve a simple, embarrassingly parallel problem is relatively easy. Implementing that algorithm using a primitive threading+locking model is also fairly easy, though even then the evidence to date suggests that such programming models are usually too error prone for critical uses even in the hands of experts, hence the exploration of alternatives such as actor-based models with minimal or no shared state, message passing for inter-process communication, and so on.
What the rest of us are talking about is automatic parallelisation, either on a small scale as a kind of micro-optimisation (such as auto-vectorising a loop to use SIMD type instructions) or even on a medium/large scale as a systematic transformation from an algorithm expressed sequentially into one that exploits parallelism implicitly where it is cost-effective in performance terms to do so.
Unfortunately, as Desler correctly said in the post you first replied to in this subthread, compilers are mostly still quite poor at employing these automated transforms even in the simpler, localised cases. Research into the more powerful but challenging cases is barely out of its infancy, and some of the smartest guys in the industry are working on it. TFA is interesting because it suggests potentially interesting developments in the field.
It may just be that your "thing" isn't really all that threadable. Some things aren't. But it should also be very obvious when they aren't.
Should it? Do you really want to bet that you understand a modern CPU, the related hardware architecture, and a production quality compiler for that platform, all well enough to predict reliably when it's worth running a few instructions in parallel and when it isn't, taking into account the inevitable overheads of fork/join operations vs. the potential performance gains of concurrency? Can you really analyse the global structure of a 1,000,000+ line project and reliably identify algorithms that are expressed sequentially but in fact could be transformed losslessly into parallelised equivalents?
Implementing efficient algorithms for embarrassingly parallel computations is (relatively) easy. Implementing efficient algorithms for basically independent parallel operations, such as a web server, is (relatively) easy. Implementing efficient algorithms for problems that might admit some asymmetric parallelism as long as all interactions are coordinated safely and where it might be worth implicit generation of some parallel code paths as long as the benefits outweigh the overheads... Well, if that doesn't seem hard to you, I look forward to reading your papers, because you just outsmarted a lot of researchers who have been investigating this problem for years.
I think that was the point made in this story. Microsoft has worked hard over the years to make its systems not interoperable with others', so that customers had to buy the whole collection of enterprise services from just them.
In fairness, they have also developed (directly or via acquisitions) a lot of the best software on the market over an extended period, and for much of that time they have also invested a huge amount in supporting developers at other software companies whose products would therefore get built on Microsoft platforms. One could debate how successfully they still perform either of those roles today, but their dominant position didn't happen by accident, and I don't believe for a moment that it's entirely or even mostly down to the much criticised indiscretions that led to antitrust proceedings and the like either.
The thing is, while sticking with Microsoft platforms may bring benefits to businesses, sooner or later the cost will become too high and start to outweigh those benefits. Other things being equal, Microsoft still has the best software products in many of the markets it operates in, but other things aren't equal and apparently they're going to be even less equal now. On the other hand, maybe MS have done their homework, and rather than this being some sort of act of desperation, they have simply concluded that these products really are worth that much more than what they've been charging for them so far and by implication than any alternatives that might be available.
It is just cheaper and more expedient to have a few spare ones and strip their parts.
Only once your office has reached a certain size. For many small businesses in tech fields, it doesn't work that way. Those small businesses are also more likely IME to be the ones getting a custom spec for each member of staff that takes into account their specific needs, as they won't qualify for volume purchasing deals. With a limited budget, it does make sense to spend a bit of time customising to make everyone as productive as possible with what you've got.
If this story is really true, it seems a very odd strategic move from Intel at a time when they're dominant in their markets. It's opening the door for people like gamers, geeks and small businesses to move to a competitor (AMD being the obvious candidate) in order to keep their flexibility, and the people I mentioned there are trend-setters for a very significant chunk of the desktop PC industry. And anyone who thinks desktop PCs are dead because everyone is using tablets, laptops, etc. these days just isn't paying attention.
I can only see this ending one of three ways: there's a huge deal with one or more major hardware manufacturers that we don't know about yet (for example to ship process/mobo combinations as a single unit but with significantly better price/performance as a baseline to make up for the loss of flexibility/upgradability), there's about to be an HP-esque sharp U-turn as soon as Otellini is out the door and his successor finds the plot again, or Intel are about to take a big hit with a resurgent AMD being the likely beneficiary.
That sort of tool is great as long as there are pre-packaged builds available for whatever versions you need. But if you're looking at a package-based model on Linux, things can get a lot more complicated as soon as you're not just working with packages that are part of your distro.
For example, suppose you want to run Python 2.7 on Debian stable, which is so stable that unfortunately its preferred Python version is still 2.6 (which was written some time around the Dark Ages). Assuming you aren't able to find someone who's conveniently bundled up a suitable package already because this is a somewhat common case, how would you go about integrating this with the likes of Puppet?
If there's any universal solution that doesn't involve at least looking through the makefiles to work out exactly what gets compiled and where it gets installed when you build from source so you can manually create your own package file, I haven't found it yet. (If anyone knows something I don't, I'd love to learn about it, so links etc. are very welcome.)
In the unlikely event I stumble upon your embarrassing "e-foible", I do not judge, and will soon forget.
That doesn't work past the point (which we've already reached) where it's not real human beings considering personal data and causing significant consequences to the subject of that data, but automated systems that can essentially check everyone for everything they have data about.
If there are no systems in place to limit the decisions that can be made by such automated systems without human review, or inadequate checks and balances to put things right when the machines make a mistake, real people wind up suffering real consequences, yet mysteriously no other real people are ever responsible any more so there's no-one to hold to account, to compel to fix what they broke (if that's possible), or to force to change their ways.
Letting computers make these important decisions automatically just because we can leads to a world where no-one under 30 can afford insurance to drive, no-one with a family history of some unfortunate medical condition can enjoy any activity where it might be risky if they have the same condition, you can't travel if you have the same name as a wanted criminal and once lived in the same city, no-one who put a photo on-line of themselves drunk as a student can get a good job when they graduate, all the muslims get shot because they're obviously terrorists, you're likely to get several months of your life wasted complying with a tax investigation because you once filed the wrong form (or you filed the right form but the OCR software misread it), and so on. Do you really want to live in that kind of world?
You're trying to change the basis of the discussion. We were talking about whether certain behaviour was ethical and/or should be legal, and whether money could compensate for any harm done by that behaviour, the point being that such harm would be avoidable by not behaving in such a way in the first place. This comes directly from your original argument that any penalty for abusing an absolute right of free speech should be civil rather than criminal. That is itself is an odd position ethically, by the way, because if you can be punished for exercising a right then it's not really a right at all, or if the punishment is financial, it's arguably a right that is granted only to those people rich enough that they can afford to enjoy it.
In any case, that is a completely different scenario to things like your example of a government not spending money on expensive treatments, because that expensive treatment has a direct opportunity cost in that it means for example that maybe two other people can't have a treatment that costs half as much but might save both of their lives instead. Medical ethics is a complicated field.
And yes, I do think life and quality of life are priceless. Obviously you can't always save everyone no matter how much you might want to, but sacrificing lives or allowing suffering needlessly and pretending that a few pieces of paper with some dead guy's picture on them can somehow make up for it is asinine. (And yes, I do put my money where my mouth is on this issue by supporting organisations that help people who don't have the luxuries that we take for granted, and yes, I always have even when I haven't had much money myself. Your repeated ad hominem attacks against me not only fail to support any logical argument you might want to make about the ethics of this situation, they are objectively also completely wrong.)
But again, this is all twisting away from the original point. Loss of life is one possible consequence of allowing absolute freedom of speech (say, if I tell a hit man that I'll pay him to kill you, or if I tell a group of violent white supremacists that you're sleeping with a black girl) but it's relatively unlikely. It's far more likely that, for example, someone's character and reputation would be irreparably damaged, perhaps resulting in spending the rest of their life in hiding, or losing their job/marriage/house/friends, after being wrongly branded some kind of sex offender/fraudster/whatever other unpleasant character that no-one wants to be associated with. This is why courts hearing defamation cases can typically order more than mere financial remedies, but even then the judges sometimes observe in rulings that no order they can make could adequately compensate the victim. And if you go to the next step, where the speech is actively inciting some sort of crime, particularly a violent one, in many jurisdictions you'll cross into criminal territory at that point.
Compared to this, damaging people's feelings or reputations to allow for free speech is a very low price to pay.
That might be your personal opinion, but I'm aware of no legal system in the modern world that agrees with you. As far as I can see, you still haven't made any sort of argument for why someone should be able to cause substantial harm to others with impunity in the case of free speech, when as a general legal principle this is rarely if ever the case under any other circumstances. You've just stated that the law should agree with you, because.
That's not compensation in the usual sense of the word, though, it's just the closest approximation you can achieve when the only tool at your disposal is money.
Trying to make an ethical argument that such "compensation" is adequate in any more general sense is like being the guy arguing that a company can do whatever it likes because it has a solid legal shield. Sure, maybe if someone dies as a result of their negligence, the executives have no personal liability and there are limited funds that can be awarded in a judgment before the legally responsible entity goes bankrupt. However, the guy who makes the decision not to implement proper safety procedures that could have saved that life because the cost of doing so was greater than the expected cost of paying the compensation in the resulting legal case is still the scum of the earth.
Compensation is just that, compensation. Its intent is to give back something to a damaged part, not to rewind time.
compensate, v. tr.
1. To offset; counterbalance
2. To make satisfactory payment or reparation to; recompense or reimburse
You can't counterbalance a human life with any amount of money, nor make a satisfactory payment or reparation for destroying someone's quality of life with any amount of money.
By our society laws compensation is done by money, period.
You're conflating laws with ethics, or worse, implying that ethics are dictated by laws. This is always a dangerous argument, and any reasonable legal system works on the opposite basis.
You're also defeating your own original argument in a way, because by our society's laws you also don't have an absolute right to freedom of speech anywhere in the world AFAIK.
Nobody is saying that money will bring the dead back, but after they are dead it is what can be done.
Right, so maybe we should try to avoid killing people (or, more likely given the subject at hand, destroying their lives) in the first place? We could, for example, introduce meaningful penalties as a deterrent for people who might otherwise do that. We could call those people "criminals", and specify the penalties in "laws". It's a radical idea, but people have been trying it with other unwelcome activities for a little while and so far it's had pretty good results. Unfortunately, it's also fundamentally incompatible with your idea that you should be able to knowingly and wilfully commit an act that will be damaging to another party with complete impunity.
The problem is that there is rapidly becoming no default vendor for industrial-scale general purpose computing. We've become complacent, assuming that if nothing else we can always order another 25 workstations and 5 server boxes from Dell/HP/whoever and stick the latest Microsoft OS on the workstations and whatever server software we wanted on the rest. Even if companies don't upgrade voluntarily, sooner or later the current generation of hardware will start to fail.
But what happens if Microsoft do fall and the only people left to replace them are the likes of Apple (assuming they do any better, since their downward slide seems to have started as well)? If the biggest game in town is some new guy's locked-in software platform, the big name hardware vendors are likely to fall in line, as we've already seen with Apple appearing to lock up the entire supply chain of certain key components for their signature devices so developing competing products is difficult. If you just want to build your own PC and run Linux, you might still be able to (at a premium price, probably), but if the mainstream is moving in a completely different direction then the value of any such system will be greatly reduced.
Ultimately, any computing platform is only worth as much as you can do with it. If you can't access the content you want, connect to the communications channels everyone else is using, play the games you want, run the creative software you want, and so on, the fact that you're running on an "open" hardware platform and OS isn't worth very much at all.
Anything can be compensate by money in our society. Even deaths are compensated by mere money.
I don't even know how to argue against such an absurd position. It is self-evident that no amount of money can compensate someone whose life has been taken or whose quality of life has been destroyed, because no amount of money can undo the damage.
That said, the reason why there is no country that has absolute free speech laws has nothing to do with what can or cannot be compensate, but with governments wanting to control and limit what people think and know in order to maintain their status quo.
Well, I'm glad you have sufficient insider knowledge of every government in the world to explain their reasoning to the rest of us.
Does it not even occur to you that some people might rationally believe that an absolute right to say whatever you like, no matter how damaging or unfair, without any adverse consequences should not outweigh every other basic right and freedom?
British law does not offer such protection.
Which is interesting, because the UK is still subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, article 10 of which guarantees freedom of expression subject only to certain specific limitations. I find the action of the arrested person in this case distasteful, but I'm not sure under which of those limitations article 10 would not apply.
Just for the record, this isn't the government that anyone in the UK chose. And in any case, the conduct of police officers in most parts of the UK is not subject to oversight by anyone directly elected to serve in that capacity by the general population (at least until this Thursday, that is).
Not that concealment's point here makes much sense anyway. The major benefit of legally protecting certain individual rights at constitutional level is precisely to avoid mob rule, or slightly indirect versions of mob rule such as treating people differently according to what is politically expedient in the short term for administration of the day. As the saying goes, a perfect democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what's for dinner.
If you slander somebody, for example, the person should be able to sue you and get adequate compensation, but nobody should be able to prevent you from doing the slandering.
The trouble with that argument is that there are far too many things someone could say that lead to damage you can never compensate with mere money. That's why no country in the world really has absolute free speech protected under the law, and in many places saying certain things is a criminal act.