@CowperKettle I would have given this guy the job

lol

that was wonderful

Word of the day: form, fit and function

Isn't that three words? :)

Russia's largest grocery retail chain is opening a shop without cashiers. Are there many such shops already in the USA?

@Lambie Yes, but it's a kind of a set phrase))

I hope nothing bad happened to SnailPlane.

I have too little money now to send her a letter, it costs quite a penny here. A paper letter.

@CowperKettle I don't know SnailPlane ///Nope, no cashier-less shops around here.

The creator of this chatroom

@CowperKettle No, I didn't realize that. :)

John Clare of the day:

Nice,but who is mari??

Mari?

Lambieeeeeeeeee

@M.A.R. Information that is available if you know the right keys to press shouldn't be hidden away by not telling someone who is asking which keys they should press. The people who know how to press the keys are not inherently more responsible than those who don't.

Keeping people ignorant is what tyrants do. If that information is so problematic, no-one should have access to it.

If it's OK for some people to be able to find it, telling more people how to find it shouldn't be a problem.

If it's a secret, it should be classified and treated as such with proper access controls.

@ColleenV I don't think this argument holds much water. Users can, with a sophisticated enough SEDE query, find out how they can, say, evade detection of serial voting, or even voting rings. That doesn't mean we should show them the way.

Lawyers can find legal leeway to do some shady business, that doesn't mean the loopholes should be explained to the general populace so they can abuse it too.

I dunno if it's what tyrants do or don't do, but it's definitely how things work in real life.

Especially in community-run projects like SEDE, this 'informational barrier' is mostly what keeps a horde of new users from wrecking havoc on the main site. Yet at the same time it's never obscured, it has tutorials and what on how to run simple queries in mysql, and if one looks hard enough, SEDE questions are all over meta.SE, maybe even some dangerous ones.

I guess then, what tyrants would do would make that information inaccessible. And we don't. Users can find out about SEDE easily enough, and know enough mysql in a few hours of effort to run most of the queries they can. And if someone already knows the language, I think that's the power of knowledge and respectfully disagree that it ever comes close to tyranny.

@Lambie Mari-Lou-A? An ELU member I guess, nothing more, nothing less.

BUT WHO'S THIS

@Lambie That's Cowp for you. Word of the day "amperometric determination of gentamicin and metabolites in zinc and folate deficiency"

@CowperKettle Obviously, you corrected your typo. You had a typo, it's no big deal. Just admit it and don't make it look like I said something stupid.

Huh, what's that about o.o