In theory. In practice, is every single policy that our government upholds currently popular with the majority of people?
It's possible to have government policies that the majority of people disagree with, that remain for complicated reasons related to apathy, lobbying, party ideology, or just because those issues get drowned out by more important debates.
Government is an extension of the will of the people, but the farther out that extension gets, the more divorced from the will of the people it's possible to be. That's not to say that businesses are immune from that effect either -- there are markets where the majority of people participating in them aren't happy with what the market is offering. All of these systems are abstractions, they're ways of trying to get closer to public will, and they're all imperfect. But government is particularly abstracted, especially because the US is not a direct democracy.
I'm personally of the opinion that this discussion is moot, because I think that people have a fundamental Right to Delegate[0], and I include web scraping public content under that right. But ignoring that, because not everyone agrees with me that delegation is right, allowing the government to unilaterally rule on who isn't allowed to access public information is still particularly susceptible to abuse above and beyond what the market is capable of.
i suppose it depends on the details, but if you're asked for state-issued identification when processing a return, and you present a falsified document that purports to be state-issued, that's a almost certainly a crime. (even the creation of such a falsified document is likely a crime.)
I presume that the parent post refers not to forged documents but to obtaining legitimate identification under a different name/alias - which is generally allowed in common law countries, where you can choose and use any name you wish, as long as you are not trying to defraud someone (e.g. here's a case example from Massachusets http://masscases.com/cases/sjc/320/320mass448.html "If acting for an honest purpose, one may lawfully use a name other than his legal name without procuring a change of name").
The question there is whether avoiding a ban on returns would count as a honest purpose; arguably it would not. A standard example for inappropriate name change is changing the name to avoid seekers of debt repayment using the previous name, this seems similar in intent.
avoiding a ban on returns should certainly be considered fraudulant - you're banned by the store's policy, which you would have agreed to when purchasing.
Here's what Oracle says[0]: "Technically, nothing prevents your program from calling into sun.* by name." And I don't think I ever accessed sun.* when writing Java. So the example seems both ill-suited and far-fetched to me.
One of the first things I did in Elm was writing a tiny JS snippet to get a missing piece from the browser. It was something I needed and my site wouldn't have worked without it. I later switched to the Elm implementation once that became available.
Now given the stated goals of the Elm project, I will be unable to repeat this. Which means I expect I'd be stuck if I again wanted to access the browser API before the Elm people got around to implement that part. And that wholly changes my view of the project.
I'm using Elm for a toy project. If I'm blocked, I go do something else. What a pity though.
> Criticizing Golang here in HN will get me banned for causing flamewar
that's either reductive or a strawman, if not both. afaict golang doesn't lack for criticism on hn, but most people do so without being insulting or hostile.
the public's "decision" on things like this is made manifest by government policy, no?