joyfulmantis

  Location: USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Mostly Haskell and Flutter, but also experience in Scala, Java, and Python
  Résumé/CV: available upon request
  Github: http://github.com/joyfulmantis
  Email: joyfulmantis@gmail.com

This is a fork of iamadev's extension on github https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome . Is there a specific reason why that's not mentioned and what is different/better about this fork then the original?

Yes it is, no matter how good you think your values are the end never justifies the means

Here I would disagree, freedom of speech is an ideal, and the constitutional amendment was based on that ideal. Universal platforms for speech are somewhat of a new concept, but there is still some precedent against de-platforming, for example with John Adams and his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston massacare[1], a precedent that still holds (held) with attorneys defending very unsavory characters not because they ideologically support them but because the basis of a healthy society depends upon it.

John F. Kennedy famously said "We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." [2]

The time has come when America is afraid of it's own citizenry.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/boston-massacre-trial-john-adam...

[2] https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkvoiceofamerica.htm

In response to the first point most countries retain the right to prosecute their citizens for crimes committed overseas even if it wasn't a crime where it was committed. For the application of US law on US citizens abroad see https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/6503/are-there-an...

It is very hard to objectively judge laws specifically and political systems in general. The only way to do so is to look at their outcome, but with the large amount of variables, and the time it takes to draw conclusions, objective facts about them are hard to make.

The world in general has concluded that planned economies (communism) is strongly inferior to market economies, but during the early days of communism it was not so obvious. Even in modern times there are people that argue communism was implemented prematurely and would be able to thrive during "end-stage capitalism". You also have plenty of people who while disagreeing with a complete communist revolution would still support nationalisation of key companies or even the more radical "workers being in control of the means of production".

Free speech is even less clear. With america winning the cold war there was a recognition of the american way including the strong support of freedom of speech being the superior system. However lately, especially after 2016 the west seems to have lost confidence in the absolute freedom of speech. Challenging the supremacy of the freedom of speech is the idea that citizens are not capable of judging speech on it's own merit and "misinformation" "speech glorifying violence" etc should be banned. It's not really a clear cut issue, you can for example argue that limiting free speech leads to a more harmonious society (the position taken by China, and also lately the reason given by New Zealand for their decision to ban the Christchurch manifesto)

As an american you don't have the right while in mainland china to criticize the CCP. While there is no simple way to apply sovereignty to the internet, the decision to follow the laws of the participants countries seems relatively reasonable.

So are you saying that companies operating in New Zealand shouldn't follow New Zealand law to ban the Christchurch shooter's manifesto?

Free speech is a concept even the west is struggling with -- Twitter hiding Donald Trump's tweets for example, or New Zealand banning the terrorists manifesto. If even the bastion of free speech is starting to have second doubts about it, how can you claim the moral high ground when a third country wants to restrict free speech?

The idea that your country knows best and that your countries companies can feel free to ignore other countries laws while operating in them is -- imperialism.

If you read the zoom blog post they admit they made mistakes as they did not have the ability to block meetings by region. They have absolutely no desire to enforce chinese laws globally.

From their blog post

"We strive to limit actions taken to only those necessary to comply with local laws. Our response should not have impacted users outside of mainland China. We made two mistakes:

We suspended or terminated the host accounts, one in Hong Kong SAR and two in the U.S. We have reinstated these three host accounts.

We shut down the meetings instead of blocking the participants by country. We currently do not have the capability to block participants by country. We could have anticipated this need. While there would have been significant repercussions, we also could have kept the meetings running."

These were accounts that were holding meetings with large amount of mainland chinese users. Whatsmore they admitted the blocking was a mistake caused by their inability to prevent users from joining a meeting by region, a functionality which they are now developing because of this problem.

Following the local laws of countries where a company operates in is a fundamental condition necessary for globalization. The idea that the americans know best and don't need to follow local laws is really just another form of imperialism.

the offical blog post is at: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/06/11/improving-our-poli...

Was it wrong to suspend accounts outside of mainland china? Ultimately yes, but as they stress these were accounts that were holding meetings with mostly mainland chinese participants in it.

Any company operating globally needs to follow all the local laws where they operate in. Zoom's decision to develop technology to ban participants from specific countries joining meetings seems to be a good solution to this problem.

They are asking $50 for something that there are other open source solutions for. It would be interesting to find out how much of the original source code is the developers and how much is just repackaging of one of the multitude of open source X servers for Windows that are currently available.

Originally thinking it was another open source project, I looked at the website to see if there were some features that would be worth it to switch from VcXsrv. Mostly it talked about how there was a windowed mode that allowed seamless integration with Windows. Wow how revolutionary! /s

I was not referring to what you said about JavaScript, but rather your inclusion of a unrelated, unnecessary and highly polarizing political tangent.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for."

The laws are important if you want to implement these typeclasses in your own data type, but I feel for new comers who will only want to use them in other data types it is better to first focus on practical application. I feel that laws and formal definitions tend to drive away newcomers from a subject that need not be so hard to understand.