Can you give me a specific example of a design decision that enables Agile development more than it enables other development paradigms?
I can certainly name design decisions that appear to be directed at enabling Agile development (or, perhaps more specifically, iterative development around evolving specifications) -- migrations, scaffolding, and much of the "convention over configuration" approach which is are all obvious examples.
These things that reduce the workload to get something working when some aspect of the intended behavior is specified and others aren't, and which keep the cost of change was something is working low, is essential to agile development, but less essential (up front) in some other approaches (particularly big-bang waterfall development.)
OTOH, I would say that in the end they are Agile-specific, because Agile development is, itself, largely an outgrowth of the observation that adaptability to change is essential in real systems, so that is something that should be baked-in from early in the development process. But the necessity of that doesn't go away if you use a different development methodology, though the importance of the features that reduce the cost of change may get pushed out to the maintenance & operations phase of the traditional lifecyle as opposed to the development phase.
Maybe know [sic] they'll change their focus to adult stem cells - you know, the ones that have actually led to productive therapies.
Then again, maybe not. Because of the federal policies which blocked most funding to hESC research prior to the Obama policy, there's already been far more funding available to adult stem cell research, which is why research in that area is more developed, even though the basic research that has been done on both suggests that embryonic stem cells have greater utility and are easier to leverage for many uses. As there has been no barrier to funding for research around adult stem cell research, its unlikely that people with high-value ideas for adult stem cell research have been suppressing them to focus on lower-value embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, its more likely that the reverse has been the case, historically.
But, even with the funding differential, enough research has been done with hESC-based therapies that at least one is in clinical trials.
Embryonic stem cells are said to have a lot of "potential". Strange, by this time I would think they would have come up with something for all the hype made over them.
Your argument would make perfect sense if basic research to develop potential therapies, plus research to test those therapies in model organisms, plus human clinical trials are all essentially free, so that the availability of funding makes no difference to the pace of progress.
In the real world, though, that doesn't seem to be the case.
So when will they put a halt to all IVF treatments that destroy embryos?
Usually, IVF treatments don't receive direct federal funding, unlike, e.g., NIH-funded hESC research.
Since the law at issue doesn't prohibit destroying embryos, it prohibits federal funds from being used to destroy embryos, IVF treatments in general are not similarly situated to hESC research.
Agile and Rails do not necessarily have anything to do with each other.
Other than the fact that the main purpose of Rails around which many design decisions are made is enabling Agile web development, sure, they don't have anything to do with each other.
Sure, you can use any toolkit with any development approach, but that doesn't mean that the toolkit is approach agnostic.
I'm not the parent; but statements to the effect by 37 Signals that they "don't hire people unless they use a Mac" probably have a lot to do with this.
That immediately alienated what, 90, 85 percent? I forget the market share stats; but it alienated a lot of people.
37signals is a business. They do Mac-based development. Not hiring people that don't use Macs may not be the best business decision (simple litmus tests usually aren't), but its not an insane one, to be sure, and it has just about nothing to do with Rails, since even though there are personnel overlaps between Rails and 37signals, the two aren't the same thing.
Yeah, I really want to spend extra money for a proprietary white box so I can be cool like you.
Unless you are looking for a job with 37signals, I don't see how their preference for hiring Mac users affects you at all. And making something a job qualification isn't the same as making it part of the definition of "cool".
Even if it weren't for the 'tude; I still wouldn't be interested. You pay a high performance price for the dynamic nature of Ruby whether you need it or not.
That's a legitimate concern, though there are good reasons that performance of the runtime isn't the overwhelming concern when choosing a platform for a project, but the speed with which something can be developed, tested, and deployed is more critical, and the Ruby ecosystem and Rails have features that lots of people find attractive in that direction.
Combine that with the "tragicly hip" air of the community, and a lot of people find themselves just wishing Rails/Ruby would go away.
AFAICT, the "tragicly hip" air of "the community" is something that exists largely in the minds of people who have minimal if any active contact with either the Rails community or the broader Ruby community (often, people who fail to recognize that the two groups are distinct), and who therefore see only the interactions in the community that create controversies visible outside of the community.
I do think that the 'feel good about yourself by donating to starving children' drive of the last 60-70 years is shortsighted in this respect, but of course it's much easier to feed even large numbers of starving people than it is to set up a modern government and economy in some of these African countries, assuming even that you have the right to try and do so (which is a big assumption).
Actually, its not all that much easier: efforts to feed starving people in Africa that are conducted in places without effective governments and decent infrastructure tend to work fairly poorly, because of problems with distribution (often including troops loyal to local warlords highjacking food shipments and using them to reinforce their control of the local populace.)
What is notably easier about it is that its easier to sell the idea to donors, because "peopler are starving, send food" resonates well with people's mental model of the world with simple stimulus and simple response.
Yes, the 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt make backups"
Unfortunately, it was on the third tablet...
More likely, it was implicit in the two tablets referred to in the text: as I understand it, the two tablets would have been understood by contemporary readers to be a reference to the practice of producing two identical copies of important documents, not to be 5 commandments per tablet.
Re:It's a nice framework
on
Rails 3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Rail is a nice framework.
The major problem with Rails is that it's tied to Ruby. Historically, Ruby's interpreters have not exactly been speed demons.
That hasn't been the only big problem with Rails. Rails. Indeed, one of the problems with (pre-3.0) Rails is that was particularly inefficient in many key areas of how it used Ruby; one of the big motivations for the myriad other Ruby web frameworks that came out after Rails was using Ruby more efficiently than Rails (Rails 3.0 incorporates many of those lessons into Rails, so that should be less of a problem going forward.)
Rail, pre-3.0, actually had on its own the same kind of problems as pre-1.9.x Ruby had.
when ever you scroll, tabs on the left would be a win
Increasing the width of a window containing a comfortably-sized viewing area for text is bad any time I want more than one thing on the screen at once.
Other than on my netbook -- which is light enough that I often rotate both the device and the display so its 9:16 rather than 16:9 -- I don't think I'd get a lot of use out tabs-on-the-left. Really, for reading large things as the only thing on the screen, I'd rather have a "two-column" mode that used the left half of the window width to display as much as would fit, and then flowed into the right half. That, to me, is a much better way use the real estate on a large widescreen monitor.
OTOH, again, I like the idea of an option to move tabs to the side -- I'd probably use it occasionally, though it wouldn't be my default, and some people would use it all the time. All I was saying was that it makes sense to have an option, not to switch from top-with-no-choice to side-with-no-choice.
Php became the #1 web server language in 2002 [lwn.net] - and that hasn't changed since, and isn't likely to.
The article you link says it became the number one server side scripting language in 2002. While there isn't a really clear boundary of what is and isn't a "scripting" language, Java isn't included in any of the definitions generally used for that category, so in a discussion of Java, PHP's position among "scripting" languages -- server side or otherwise -- is pretty much irrelevant.
These days most screens are wider than they are taller.
Most screens have been wider than tall since well before the first web browsers.
And text still reads better vertically.
Text reads better in columns narrower than most screens are wide at the typical viewing distance, but its often convenient to have more than one block of text on the screen. Tabs take up more room on the side than on the top, and do more on the side to hurt the ability to have more usable windows on the screen.
Tabs on the side are useful for some people in all circumstances, and for other people in certain circumstances, and (I suspect) for some people in no circumstances. So, if Chrome allows the user to move the tabs to the side, that's good.
If Chrome just moves the tabs to the side, thats bad.
WTF? BSD is 100% GPL compatible. Thats why lots of BSD (under a BSD license) stuff gets taken over to the Linux kernel but not the other way round.
BSD contains requirements (retention of the original copyright notice, conditions, and disclaimer) that are not in the GPL (either v2, nor v3) and are not permitted as additional terms in the GPL v2 (v2 doesn't allow any additional terms, one of the changes in the GPL v3 was to allow specific terms of specifically this sort.)
So, no, strictly speaking BSD-style licenses are not GPLv2 compatible.
How exactly do you put something into public domain legally, such that you can legally protect them to be in public domain? Really, serious question.
In the US at least, you can't, AFAIK, since there is no provision of law that allows a work that would be eligible for copyright in the first place to be out of copyright and in the public domain other than by expiration of the copyright (which, as a practical matter, is probably never going to happen for any work currently in copyright, until Congress breaks the habit of extending copyright without bound.)
Anything that purports to dedicate a work to the public domain is effectively just a very broad gratuitous copyright license.
OTOH, because of promissory estoppel, there is very little benefit to be gained by revoking such a dedication even though it is almost certainly, in theory, revocable at will, as all gratuitous licenses are.
So, a simple dedication to the public domain by the creator like that used by SQLite is probably effective for most practical purposes, though strictly speaking the work is not, actually, out of the control of the original creator who remains the copyright holder.
Face it, the 10-20% of keen kids that you can really do something with are going to pick up more skills faster from YouTube. High school shop isn't what you're looking for. By necessity the school has got to gear to the slowest.
Schools can and do (or, at least, did, both when I attended and when I worked in them, though the former was two decades and more ago and the latter a decade ago) have classes geared much more narrowly than the top 10% to 20% of the student body. When I went to high school, in a school of 1000 students, there were plenty of advanced classes that would only have one section and about 15-30 students (not counting independent study classes.)
So its certainly not impossible just because the audience is small. It may not be in line with current dominant education policy guided by NCLB, but that's a whole different discussion.
It has already been pointed out, by Schneier I think, that this misfeature allows anybody doing simple traffic analysis to discover exactly what you typed. That is because the reply traffic from typing 'a' is a slightly different size than the reply traffic from typing 'b', and so forth.
The problem with that concept is that, given the way Google works, the reply traffic from typing 'a' at one point in time will be different in size from the reply traffic from typing 'a' at a different point in time (and, will also be different from the reply traffic from typing 'a' using a different Google account at the same time, and possibly a different size than typing 'a' at the same time, from the same Google Account, from a different computer), which makes determining search keystrokes by traffic analysis impractical under any reasonable set of circumstances. You might be able to determine with some minimal degree of confidence the keystroke sequences being used on an HTTPS search by traffic analysis if you could capture enough nearly-simultaneous cleartext HTTP searches and their responses and compare them, but even then it only works if, starting from first character in the search, to the extent you have the same sequence from the first character in one of the HTTP searches as is used in the HTTPS search.
OTOH, the more common the HTTPS search is among web searches, the less useful information is gleaned from knowing you made it.
So, I'd say, the proposed attack is unlikely to ever work, and is even more unlikely to work anytime when it would matter.
There's a lot more risk that an attacker could just MITM your HTTPS search than that they could discover it by traffic analysis.
While you are correct in general, ordinarily speaking the citizens of the US by default have the powers of law enforcement, through the common law concept of posse comitatus.
Posse comitatus is not the concept that citizens ordinarily have the power of law enforcement, its the concept that law enforcement officials have, in addition to the power to enforce the law directly themselves and with their regular subordinates, the power to conscript ordinary citizens to do enforce the law. It is a power of government that is closely linked, historically, with the power to conscript citizens for military service. (Indeed, its early attested uses in "law enforcement" were against the forces of opposing sides in the English Civil War.)
You may be confusing the posse comitatus with the "hue and cry", though even that was an universal obligation of the citizenry upon either witnessing a crime or witnessing the fact that someone else had initiated the hue and cry, and not a discretionary power of individuals.
There simply is no valid basis for saying that "citizens of the US by default have the powers of law enforcement".
Yup. Just to add some international touch to it: here in central Europe we have 240-250V outlets, which is radically different from the U.S., so putting amperage even with implied voltage is at least confusing and entirely unscientific and shows a lack of understanding about even the most basic principles of unit notations.
Even just in the US, its common to have both 110V and 220V (or is it 120V and 240V? I've seen both numbers used and I remember once reading why, but I don't remember and its mostly irrelevant here), with 110V being typical for most uses, but 220V commonly used for large appliances.
They've heard of Netflix. And if they are charging more per unit viewed than Netflix, they can return more to the copyright holder than Netflix can, which gives the copyright holder a reason to prefer them over Netflix.
So, if people are willing to pay for this, expect more shows to not be available for Netflix streaming, and to be available only on this or similar pay-per-view systems. Or, perhaps, to be delayed in getting to Netflix and similar services for a period, where they are available on pay-per-view systems like this, and then later move to Netflix.
Scalia, Thomas and Alito are the ones you want on this kind of a case.
Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, while they are big, at least in words, on narrowly construing the federal Constitution, are quite apt to find outs for pro-law-enforcement authoritarianism even where the federal government is involved (Scalia perhaps somewhat less so than the others), and all of them are even more likely to read broadly the police powers of the States (or, as they would put it, to read narrowly the federal Constitutional limits on the police powers of the States.)
Which is insanely screwed up. The most liberal court is ruling in favor of less freedom
There is very little evidence that the Ninth Circuit is "the most liberal court" among the US Circuit Courts of Appeal. When there is a split between the circuits on an issue, the Ninth Circuit is often not on the side associated with "liberal" ideology, where there is a left/right split on an issue.
There have been a lot of cases that come up through the Ninth Circuit that have involved liberal challenges to government actions popular with conservatives, probably because the Ninth Circuit's geographic domain includes a lot of the most liberal parts of the country.
Because Government is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
This is a popular but extraordinarily bad definition, since many governments expressly do not claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, as well as not exercising such a monopoly.
Any government which, by its overt rules, allows even the slightest use of force by citizens where it is neither punished nor mandated by government clearly does not claim such a monopoly; any government which, by its actions (independently of its overt rules) allows such does not exercise such a monopoly.
The "police" have no special powers other than exactly what statutes give them under special circumstances (arrest, crime in progress, etc). Since I do not know of any statute granting GPS powers, the only way the police can do this legally is because everyone can.
This is an important distinction between the American & British (&other systems): In the US, the government derives its' powers by delegation from The People.
The fact that government powers, in theory, derive from popular consent does not mean that the powers of government do not include the power to exclude individuals from exercise of the powers granted to government.
You seem to confusing a whole bunch of different concepts here: 1. The idea of popular soveriegnty, which is indeed a norm that the governments, state and federal, are based on; 2. The idea of government limited to expressly delegated powers, which the US federal Constitution embraces (via the 9th and 10th Amendments, for instance), but State Constitutions often do not, 3. The idea that government agents, outside of expressly delegated powers, have only the privileges of private individuals, which is a corollary to #2 and generally is applicable only to the extent that #2 is.
Of course developers should be able to pull real-life data off production to re-load onto development and test environments.
I don't think that's an "of course". In some environments, that makes sense. In some environments, it makes sense for the people responsible for the production system to evaluate developers request for production data and make it available on an as-needed basis when no other alternative is available that allows the problem to be diagnosed.
Of course developers should not be allowed to deploy code to production. But there are always emergencies, and there are times when the development team lead needs to put a finger on production to unjam it, so to speak -- utilizing knowledge only a developer would have and executed, due to ($) urgency, that precludes a developer communicating the steps to an authorized admin. By "unjam" I mean clearing out queues, deleting temporary files, etc., not deploying new code.
If your administrator doesn't have the knowledge to do these kinds of tasks, and the documentation of the system doesn't provide the necessary information that would allow a competent administrator without the specific knowledge the ability to do it, there are at least two critical problems besides the ones that the developers are "putting a finger" on production to fix.
As a developer I can tell you that it's impossible to test programs properly and thoroughly without access to production data. However, developers should NOT be granted access to production logins/sites - production data should be copied into development work areas so that developers have an appropriate "sandbox" in which to work/test.
And, even then, perhaps only on an as-needed basis. If your production support people can do a reduced test case replicating the problem without production data, you don't need prod data in that case. If your production data includes sensitive data, minimizing exposure of it to the minimum necessary is desirable (and, in certain cases -- HIPAA comes to mind -- legally mandatory, as well.)
Of course, in addition to what kind of data you are handling, the scale of the operation matters. If you are small enough, "dev" and "production support" may be two hats worn by the same person.
The thing I don't get is that they don't have any support for SIP (well, there is Gizmo, which is closed to just about everybody). They're inventing fancy web-interfaces for voice calls (anybody know if they work without flash?)
AFAIK, the Google web interfaces are all HTML+CSS+JS.
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I can certainly name design decisions that appear to be directed at enabling Agile development (or, perhaps more specifically, iterative development around evolving specifications) -- migrations, scaffolding, and much of the "convention over configuration" approach which is are all obvious examples.
These things that reduce the workload to get something working when some aspect of the intended behavior is specified and others aren't, and which keep the cost of change was something is working low, is essential to agile development, but less essential (up front) in some other approaches (particularly big-bang waterfall development.)
OTOH, I would say that in the end they are Agile-specific, because Agile development is, itself, largely an outgrowth of the observation that adaptability to change is essential in real systems, so that is something that should be baked-in from early in the development process. But the necessity of that doesn't go away if you use a different development methodology, though the importance of the features that reduce the cost of change may get pushed out to the maintenance & operations phase of the traditional lifecyle as opposed to the development phase.
Then again, maybe not. Because of the federal policies which blocked most funding to hESC research prior to the Obama policy, there's already been far more funding available to adult stem cell research, which is why research in that area is more developed, even though the basic research that has been done on both suggests that embryonic stem cells have greater utility and are easier to leverage for many uses. As there has been no barrier to funding for research around adult stem cell research, its unlikely that people with high-value ideas for adult stem cell research have been suppressing them to focus on lower-value embryonic stem cell research. Indeed, its more likely that the reverse has been the case, historically.
But, even with the funding differential, enough research has been done with hESC-based therapies that at least one is in clinical trials.
Your argument would make perfect sense if basic research to develop potential therapies, plus research to test those therapies in model organisms, plus human clinical trials are all essentially free, so that the availability of funding makes no difference to the pace of progress.
In the real world, though, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Usually, IVF treatments don't receive direct federal funding, unlike, e.g., NIH-funded hESC research.
Since the law at issue doesn't prohibit destroying embryos, it prohibits federal funds from being used to destroy embryos, IVF treatments in general are not similarly situated to hESC research.
Other than the fact that the main purpose of Rails around which many design decisions are made is enabling Agile web development, sure, they don't have anything to do with each other.
Sure, you can use any toolkit with any development approach, but that doesn't mean that the toolkit is approach agnostic.
37signals is a business. They do Mac-based development. Not hiring people that don't use Macs may not be the best business decision (simple litmus tests usually aren't), but its not an insane one, to be sure, and it has just about nothing to do with Rails, since even though there are personnel overlaps between Rails and 37signals, the two aren't the same thing.
Unless you are looking for a job with 37signals, I don't see how their preference for hiring Mac users affects you at all. And making something a job qualification isn't the same as making it part of the definition of "cool".
That's a legitimate concern, though there are good reasons that performance of the runtime isn't the overwhelming concern when choosing a platform for a project, but the speed with which something can be developed, tested, and deployed is more critical, and the Ruby ecosystem and Rails have features that lots of people find attractive in that direction.
AFAICT, the "tragicly hip" air of "the community" is something that exists largely in the minds of people who have minimal if any active contact with either the Rails community or the broader Ruby community (often, people who fail to recognize that the two groups are distinct), and who therefore see only the interactions in the community that create controversies visible outside of the community.
Actually, its not all that much easier: efforts to feed starving people in Africa that are conducted in places without effective governments and decent infrastructure tend to work fairly poorly, because of problems with distribution (often including troops loyal to local warlords highjacking food shipments and using them to reinforce their control of the local populace.)
What is notably easier about it is that its easier to sell the idea to donors, because "peopler are starving, send food" resonates well with people's mental model of the world with simple stimulus and simple response.
More likely, it was implicit in the two tablets referred to in the text: as I understand it, the two tablets would have been understood by contemporary readers to be a reference to the practice of producing two identical copies of important documents, not to be 5 commandments per tablet.
That hasn't been the only big problem with Rails. Rails. Indeed, one of the problems with (pre-3.0) Rails is that was particularly inefficient in many key areas of how it used Ruby; one of the big motivations for the myriad other Ruby web frameworks that came out after Rails was using Ruby more efficiently than Rails (Rails 3.0 incorporates many of those lessons into Rails, so that should be less of a problem going forward.)
Rail, pre-3.0, actually had on its own the same kind of problems as pre-1.9.x Ruby had.
Increasing the width of a window containing a comfortably-sized viewing area for text is bad any time I want more than one thing on the screen at once.
Other than on my netbook -- which is light enough that I often rotate both the device and the display so its 9:16 rather than 16:9 -- I don't think I'd get a lot of use out tabs-on-the-left. Really, for reading large things as the only thing on the screen, I'd rather have a "two-column" mode that used the left half of the window width to display as much as would fit, and then flowed into the right half. That, to me, is a much better way use the real estate on a large widescreen monitor.
OTOH, again, I like the idea of an option to move tabs to the side -- I'd probably use it occasionally, though it wouldn't be my default, and some people would use it all the time. All I was saying was that it makes sense to have an option, not to switch from top-with-no-choice to side-with-no-choice.
The article you link says it became the number one server side scripting language in 2002. While there isn't a really clear boundary of what is and isn't a "scripting" language, Java isn't included in any of the definitions generally used for that category, so in a discussion of Java, PHP's position among "scripting" languages -- server side or otherwise -- is pretty much irrelevant.
Most screens have been wider than tall since well before the first web browsers.
Text reads better in columns narrower than most screens are wide at the typical viewing distance, but its often convenient to have more than one block of text on the screen. Tabs take up more room on the side than on the top, and do more on the side to hurt the ability to have more usable windows on the screen.
Tabs on the side are useful for some people in all circumstances, and for other people in certain circumstances, and (I suspect) for some people in no circumstances. So, if Chrome allows the user to move the tabs to the side, that's good.
If Chrome just moves the tabs to the side, thats bad.
BSD contains requirements (retention of the original copyright notice, conditions, and disclaimer) that are not in the GPL (either v2, nor v3) and are not permitted as additional terms in the GPL v2 (v2 doesn't allow any additional terms, one of the changes in the GPL v3 was to allow specific terms of specifically this sort.)
So, no, strictly speaking BSD-style licenses are not GPLv2 compatible.
In the US at least, you can't, AFAIK, since there is no provision of law that allows a work that would be eligible for copyright in the first place to be out of copyright and in the public domain other than by expiration of the copyright (which, as a practical matter, is probably never going to happen for any work currently in copyright, until Congress breaks the habit of extending copyright without bound.)
Anything that purports to dedicate a work to the public domain is effectively just a very broad gratuitous copyright license.
OTOH, because of promissory estoppel, there is very little benefit to be gained by revoking such a dedication even though it is almost certainly, in theory, revocable at will, as all gratuitous licenses are.
So, a simple dedication to the public domain by the creator like that used by SQLite is probably effective for most practical purposes, though strictly speaking the work is not, actually, out of the control of the original creator who remains the copyright holder.
Schools can and do (or, at least, did, both when I attended and when I worked in them, though the former was two decades and more ago and the latter a decade ago) have classes geared much more narrowly than the top 10% to 20% of the student body. When I went to high school, in a school of 1000 students, there were plenty of advanced classes that would only have one section and about 15-30 students (not counting independent study classes.)
So its certainly not impossible just because the audience is small. It may not be in line with current dominant education policy guided by NCLB, but that's a whole different discussion.
The problem with that concept is that, given the way Google works, the reply traffic from typing 'a' at one point in time will be different in size from the reply traffic from typing 'a' at a different point in time (and, will also be different from the reply traffic from typing 'a' using a different Google account at the same time, and possibly a different size than typing 'a' at the same time, from the same Google Account, from a different computer), which makes determining search keystrokes by traffic analysis impractical under any reasonable set of circumstances. You might be able to determine with some minimal degree of confidence the keystroke sequences being used on an HTTPS search by traffic analysis if you could capture enough nearly-simultaneous cleartext HTTP searches and their responses and compare them, but even then it only works if, starting from first character in the search, to the extent you have the same sequence from the first character in one of the HTTP searches as is used in the HTTPS search.
OTOH, the more common the HTTPS search is among web searches, the less useful information is gleaned from knowing you made it.
So, I'd say, the proposed attack is unlikely to ever work, and is even more unlikely to work anytime when it would matter.
There's a lot more risk that an attacker could just MITM your HTTPS search than that they could discover it by traffic analysis.
Posse comitatus is not the concept that citizens ordinarily have the power of law enforcement, its the concept that law enforcement officials have, in addition to the power to enforce the law directly themselves and with their regular subordinates, the power to conscript ordinary citizens to do enforce the law. It is a power of government that is closely linked, historically, with the power to conscript citizens for military service. (Indeed, its early attested uses in "law enforcement" were against the forces of opposing sides in the English Civil War.)
You may be confusing the posse comitatus with the "hue and cry", though even that was an universal obligation of the citizenry upon either witnessing a crime or witnessing the fact that someone else had initiated the hue and cry, and not a discretionary power of individuals.
There simply is no valid basis for saying that "citizens of the US by default have the powers of law enforcement".
Even just in the US, its common to have both 110V and 220V (or is it 120V and 240V? I've seen both numbers used and I remember once reading why, but I don't remember and its mostly irrelevant here), with 110V being typical for most uses, but 220V commonly used for large appliances.
They've heard of Netflix. And if they are charging more per unit viewed than Netflix, they can return more to the copyright holder than Netflix can, which gives the copyright holder a reason to prefer them over Netflix.
So, if people are willing to pay for this, expect more shows to not be available for Netflix streaming, and to be available only on this or similar pay-per-view systems. Or, perhaps, to be delayed in getting to Netflix and similar services for a period, where they are available on pay-per-view systems like this, and then later move to Netflix.
Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, while they are big, at least in words, on narrowly construing the federal Constitution, are quite apt to find outs for pro-law-enforcement authoritarianism even where the federal government is involved (Scalia perhaps somewhat less so than the others), and all of them are even more likely to read broadly the police powers of the States (or, as they would put it, to read narrowly the federal Constitutional limits on the police powers of the States.)
There is very little evidence that the Ninth Circuit is "the most liberal court" among the US Circuit Courts of Appeal. When there is a split between the circuits on an issue, the Ninth Circuit is often not on the side associated with "liberal" ideology, where there is a left/right split on an issue.
There have been a lot of cases that come up through the Ninth Circuit that have involved liberal challenges to government actions popular with conservatives, probably because the Ninth Circuit's geographic domain includes a lot of the most liberal parts of the country.
This is a popular but extraordinarily bad definition, since many governments expressly do not claim a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, as well as not exercising such a monopoly.
Any government which, by its overt rules, allows even the slightest use of force by citizens where it is neither punished nor mandated by government clearly does not claim such a monopoly; any government which, by its actions (independently of its overt rules) allows such does not exercise such a monopoly.
The fact that government powers, in theory, derive from popular consent does not mean that the powers of government do not include the power to exclude individuals from exercise of the powers granted to government.
You seem to confusing a whole bunch of different concepts here:
1. The idea of popular soveriegnty, which is indeed a norm that the governments, state and federal, are based on;
2. The idea of government limited to expressly delegated powers, which the US federal Constitution embraces (via the 9th and 10th Amendments, for instance), but State Constitutions often do not,
3. The idea that government agents, outside of expressly delegated powers, have only the privileges of private individuals, which is a corollary to #2 and generally is applicable only to the extent that #2 is.
I don't think that's an "of course". In some environments, that makes sense. In some environments, it makes sense for the people responsible for the production system to evaluate developers request for production data and make it available on an as-needed basis when no other alternative is available that allows the problem to be diagnosed.
If your administrator doesn't have the knowledge to do these kinds of tasks, and the documentation of the system doesn't provide the necessary information that would allow a competent administrator without the specific knowledge the ability to do it, there are at least two critical problems besides the ones that the developers are "putting a finger" on production to fix.
And, even then, perhaps only on an as-needed basis. If your production support people can do a reduced test case replicating the problem without production data, you don't need prod data in that case. If your production data includes sensitive data, minimizing exposure of it to the minimum necessary is desirable (and, in certain cases -- HIPAA comes to mind -- legally mandatory, as well.)
Of course, in addition to what kind of data you are handling, the scale of the operation matters. If you are small enough, "dev" and "production support" may be two hats worn by the same person.
AFAIK, the Google web interfaces are all HTML+CSS+JS.