asocial

The NRA is against anything which gets in the way of a patriot and their duty. RFID and similiar 'safety' features can be used by the government to identify gun owners, confiscate weapons and suppress the public's right to revolt against their tyranny. Americans have a sacred right enshrined into the Constutition to be able to bear arms in order to respond to the presence of government with deadly force.

It's no different the the argument people here sometimes make that black markets and TOR are necessary for freedom of speech and civil liberties, even if having them means enabling criminal activity - because the greater threat is always the threat of a government which can't be spoken up against. In the case of guns, the greater threat is always a government which can't be put down.

I can't seem to find any description of the service it provides anywhere on the site. I had to find the twitter account to even know what it does:

    Easy database backends with powerful analytics 
    for your mobile, game or web development. 

1) sure why not.

2) MIT

Even if you only run eBay for cats, you probably secretly believe you can become the equivalent of Facebook in your particular space, and feel that what you need is a room full of the eBay for cats version of Mark Zuckerberg, making the billion dollar magic happen on the cheap.

Probably because it's advertising.

I don't think the CIA cares about our jeebs.

No it isn't, it's the way open source is supposed to work. There being 92 pages of routers doesn't stop anyone from picking the most popular and well-maintained one. Almost anyone who actually cares is going to pick one of the large frameworks (which probably use Symfony) or use nikic's FastRoute. If you're worried about small packages being maintained into the future, that's what forking is for. If you want to write your own, you can.

Also, to be fair to your argument, Composer will load packages from outside Packagist, and VCS systems other than git, so the actual universe of available routers is probably much, much bigger. I'd suggest this as another example of how not conforming to a standard (Packagist as the de facto PHP repository) is a benefit. You don't even have to care about Packagist and Composer still works just fine.

That's not a problem, that's a feature.

Competition between frameworks and libraries ensures that there are multiple solutions to meet multiple needs, and also that consensus, where it exists, exists due to the popularity of a package, not the dictate of someone setting an arbitrary "standard" for the community. You can guarantee that Laravel is going to be updated because people use it and contribute to it, not because it's the only option.

And there's no guarantee that a single solution is going to keep backwards-compatibility. That is always entirely at the whim of the developer. Removing room to innovate only guarantees stagnation, it doesn't guarantee the standard.

Uber's entire premise seems to be that a regulated market is by definition a corrupt one, that the "crime" lies in following the laws, not breaking them. One person's "organized crime" is another's "free market enterprise".

Their argument, and their attitude, fails when they encounter cultures which don't share the US' antipathy towards labor and consumer rights. There are places where the taxis manage to not be terrible, and where people prefer services to be regulated beyond "caveat emptor." Insane, I know.

Apparently PHP is now verbose enough that people feel the need to write code templates for it

It isn't though. PHP is many things but overly verbose isn't one of them * . Although there does seem to be a drive by some developers to make PHP look and act as much like Java as possible. Maybe this comes from discomfort at PHP not being structured or strict enough out of the box for their liking. If you've only ever dealt with well-engineered languages which have a certain, coherent set of patterns and paradigms baked in, and which demand you write your code a certain way, and you approach PHP, you're going to have a problem.

I don't know why a tool like this would be useful, but it wouldn't be because of the language. PHP exposes its own token parser - you can generate PHP code with much less abstraction than this.

*classes like IteratorIterator aside...

That doesn't mean it's ridiculously easy to attach a transaction to a specific person. If it were, sites like Silk Road would never even exist.

Which would you rather have? Police enforcing the laws, or police enforcing whatever they personally felt was right?

If you disagree with the morality of a law, fine - but your assertion that enforcing drug laws is as immoral as enforcing slavery laws is debatable

What proof is there that the police are not putting any effort into tracking down the perpetrators?

That is completely true.

But the police don't arrest people for breaking ethical principles, they arrest people for breaking laws.

So also, in context, not entirely relevant.

    The “police have been devoting a huge amount of resources to track down peaceful people engaged in voluntary trade     
    like Charlie Shrem and the operators of the Silk Road Market,” Ver says, “while evil hackers were busy terrorizing 
    quadriplegic Hal Finney and his family.”

This is meant to suggest that the police were harassing innocent people while completely ignoring the actual crimes described, of course playing up the typical Bitcoin narrative of the violent, thuggish and incompetent police state.

Left completely unmentioned, is the fact that Bitcoin is designed, and intended, to make it infeasible to track users and enforce laws against transactors. It's an explicitly anarcho-capitalist system. Extortion rackets around Bitcoin are not a bug, they're a feature.

To the degree that people believe it exists, it's real. I've met some people I would consider 'brogrammers', they ran a Bitcoin-based startup no one will have ever heard of, and they definitely fit the template. They're out there.

I think the 'success' was being able to delay the crack long enough for Christmas sales. Although whether the crack would have affected those sales considerably might be debatable.

Not all of it. Some of it, maybe. And given that they've forked PHP maybe even less than some.

PHP sometimes doesn't get the credit it deserves for what can be accomplished with it, particularly modern PHP... but i'm not entire sure it deserves credit for this in any reasonable way.