That's partly my point. Societies have always held someone in high esteem. Currently, it's entertainers, including those who entertain with sports. However, there's never really been a time where society was so enamored with research that professional scientists became celebrities as a matter of course.
Of course, there have been a few famous scientists through the years, but they're the exception, not the norm. Right now, the NFL has about 1700 players, but I doubt any roster of famous scientists would reach 1700 names. A quick search lists only 338.
Consider the quote from the OP:
Ours is a world in which football players, reality TV stars and talentless singer bimbos earn hundreds of times more than Nobel prize-winning scientists, and represent what young people aspire to become when they grow up.
My argument is that, while the precise careers have changed as society has, there has never been a time where a scientist could succeed enough to become a celebrity on par with the more popular careers.
Or to put it another way, only those who were rich enough by other means could afford intellectual pursuits. Now we've established industries so anyone can become an intellectual, and get paid for it. Frankly, I'd say that's for the better.
GDP is a measurement of economic strength because it measures how much value is transferred in transactions. Standing at an arcade console increases GDP, because he's using electricity and paying the utility company for it. He's digesting food, for which money was paid to the farmers, bakers, processors, packagers, distributors, and retailers. Those companies then spend their income on other things, further raising GDP.
He certainly could have done something with his time that might have led to even more addition to GDP, but there are very few ways in which someone can actually reduce GDP.
That's a key detail, that is often lost on Slashdotters. You can't buy votes. You can buy attention and reputation, and that may lead to votes, but that connection is not guaranteed, and any attempt to ensure that votes are bought is illegal.
If only it could be boiled down to a simple number. That'd make life easy.
The source for your linked article hints at much deeper insight:
Socio-economic background has a significant impact on student performance in the United States, with some 15% of the variation in student performance explained by this, similar to the OECD average. Although this impact has weakened over time, disadvantaged students show less engagement, drive, motivation and self-beliefs.
This is further elaborated on in other pages of the report. Basically, there are a number of factors, starting with the US having a higher percentage of disadvantaged students and schools. While those schools have equally-qualified teachers, their educational environment is less conducive to learning. There is also an observed correlation between teacher morale and student performance.
One interesting point in the study is that Common Core would likely improve things:
The analysis suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA. The prominence of modeling in U.S. high school standards has already influenced developers of large-scale assessments in the United States. If more students work on more and better modeling tasks than they do today, then one could reasonably expect PISA performance to improve.
Considering Slashdot's hatred of Common Core, I suggest that anyone commenting on this matter actually read the standards.
In short, we can spend all the money we want on making prison-like schools, but US education isn't going to improve until we make the schools a learning-oriented environment. Curently, we spend a lot of "education" money on making a big show of security to look like we're keeping our children safe, when that money would perhaps be better spent on community programs to improve those disadvantaged areas.
People today are ignorant and uneducated. But what's new is, they are proud of it.
No, people today are, as always, proud of what they think they are. For instance, you seem to think of yourself an intellectual, and are jumping at the chance to denigrate those you see as different.
Ours is a world in which football players, reality TV stars and talentless singer bimbos earn hundreds of times more than Nobel prize-winning scientists, and represent what young people aspire to become when they grow up.
How, exactly, is that different from the the last century? Come to think of it, when exactly did scientists make more than non-scientist celebrities? There are a lot of professions out there, and very few of them fall into any kind of "science" classification. For most of human history, those pure-science careers have always been academic, having no practical application that would affect most peoples' lives. When your job is to move a load of cargo to a different continent to support a colony, you don't care about the amount of redshift in the starlight by which you're navigating. On the other hand, having a widespread reputation that your city is the best at some particular popular sport provides a conversation for a salesman, opening new opportunities for business.
As I see it, after the atomic bomb brought immediate public attention to scientists, pure science has been getting more celebrated. Today we have more college graduates than ever before, and that number is still rising. We have more STEM careers and more STEM jobs than ever before, and we're even starting to see an increasing number of scientist celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson (Whose Twitter account, I'll note, appears second in a Google search for "Neil", below only Wikipedia.)
In a world of self-satisfied, militant, openly avowed crassness...
...which is so much different from a world where we publicly post such intellectual statements as "Phileros is a eunuch", "Epaphra, you are bald!", or "Lesbianus, you defecate and you write, ‘Hello, everyone!’".
...writing equations onboard a plane instead of watching the latest episode of Game of Throne on one's tablet is seen as suspicious. That's more than a little sad.
What's sad is the pervasive suspicion that caused it. This time, it was math equations. Next time, it could be a poet writing in Arabic. Recognizing it as Arabic would be less "ignorant and uneducated", but it'd be just as bad, and would probably result in even more delay. It's the paranoia that's the problem, not stupidity.
In 2014, Budovsky and several coworkers were arrested in Spain. Then Budovsky was extradited to the United States to face trial for money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.
He had legal problems in several countries, including the US, Costa Rica, and Spain. The US just got to be the ones to try him, though.
No, that's kind of my point. The Constitution is the source of authority for the laws that he broke. By leaking, he's defied the Constitution himself.
"Getting nowhere internally" is exactly what he's allowed to do under the Constitution. He has the right to protest, but he does not have the right to release classified information. Thus there is a classified channel for such protests. However, the Constitution does not guarantee that one's protests will actually affect anything, and if indeed nothing changes, there is still no right granted to break other laws.
Perhaps he did. We don't actually know what oaths he may have taken or legal contracts he may have signed.
He held a clearance. To do so, it was required that he make several legally-binding promises. Among them, he would have promised (in no particular order):
to protect the integrity of the information with which he was entrusted
to prevent any unauthorized persons from obtaining that information
to follow the Constitution and laws of the United States of America
and if he discovered a matter that raises an ethical or legal question, he would report it through the appropriate channels.
There is no wiggle room. If he thought that PRISM was a threat to the general public, he had a duty to report it to the oversight committees. They may or may not agree with him, but even if they don't, it does not permit him to release the information. He swore to uphold the Constitution, which empowers Congress to make laws, and those laws say the information cannot be released.
Let's not forget the government promised to abide the constitution - our legislators, justices and executives have all taken oaths on record, and in most cases, in public.
They have, though. The fact that you may not like a given law does not itself make the law invalid. For that, the Constitution empowers the Supreme Court to judge the constitutionality of a law... and as yet, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has not been overturned.
Naivete aside, this world is not perfect. You're not going to like every law that Congress passes, but the fact of the matter is that we the people voted those folks into office. You don't have to like the laws they pass, and you are free to vote against them next time. That is your First Amendment-guaranteed right to protest. Congress shall make no law abridging your ability to (otherwise lawfully) try to persuade the country to act differently. Alas, your opinion on the matter does not override the legislative majority that continually reauthorizes the surveillance programs.
So which came first? Government violations of the constitution or the Snowden leaks?
As of yet, there's no final determination on whether the government actually violated the Constitution. Similarly, there is no final conviction of Snowden for his alleged acts of treason and espionage. There have been many unofficial opinions on constitutionality, but most don't actually matter. The one that did (Klayman v. Obama) has been sent back to court on appeal, as the whole case may be invalid. On the other hand, Snowden has openly admitted to unlawfully releasing information, and has been charged for it. As soon as he deigns to return to the US to face the consequences of his actions, we can actually get a decision.
As it stands now, the surveillance programs are still authorized (indirectly, through Congress) by the Constitution, and Edward Snowden is still a fugitive who broke several of his legally-binding promises.
I suspect it won't matter. If the choice comes down to being between somewhat-disliked Clinton and outspoken-bigot Trump, a left-leaning voter will still pick Hillary, just to keep things from getting too bad.
The Clintons have a PR problem. Bill was friendly, and eventually that was a liability. Hillary has had mostly bad PR since becoming a controversial Secretary of State, and the Republican party has consistently amplified that controversy, exaggerating real problems and inventing conspiracies. However, Hillary's stated policy positions aren't too bad. Sure, she has ties to the right, and isn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders, but if she gets the nomination, she's still a Democrat.
In the general election, though, that's exactly what would happen. It will become us-versus-them, and both sides will be sure to keep that in the public eye. If you're a Republican and you don't vote for Trump, the dirty Democrats will win. If you're a Democrat and you don't vote for Clinton, the rotten Republicans will win. I expect mud-slinging all around.
The "they" to which you refer are investigators who have better things to do with their time than make numbers look worse. Remember, the investigators' job is to build a case that the court won't reject. A rejection means the investigators are actually trying to violate someone's legal rights. Thus far, no court has actually found these requests unconstitutional, so there's no reason for rejection.
The definition of the word "produce" is important. If the evidence already exists (as encrypted data on the hard drive), then the court can compel someone to produce (deliver) it to the investigators.
The 5th Amendment protection is to intended to prevent the court from forcing confessions. To that effect, the court is not allowed to compel a defendant to produce (create) evidence against themselves that did not already exist.
As an analogy, the court cannot compel you to write a confession. If you already wrote one and put it in a safe, they can compel you to give them the combination to the safe.
I figured I would when I wrote it... It's worded very poorly.
To contrast with "generally having less interaction with the government's pesky rules", a better phrase would be a "consensus-based life". The left-leaning folks are more likely to take the consensus of an expert group (such as scientists) and apply it as the rule for everyone else. On the other hand, the right-leaning folks feel they should be able to decide what's best for themselves, and others' opinions don't really hold any authority.
Of course, we should remember that the expert opinion at one point gave us eugenics programs, and individual opinions give us religion-based education curricula.
When did "slots in this bathroom" and "tabs in that bathroom" get sooooo controversial?
I know someone who was born with a slot and a tab, and a 50% mix of cells for each... where do they go? The bushes?
For about the first 14 years, the "tab" was dominant, and he was a mostly-healthy boy, starting to form the preferences that boys do at that age. Then puberty struck hard, and the "slot" parts started making hormones that would have been lethal to suppress, so he became she, and her "tab" is now in the process of being suppressed so it can eventually be cut off completely.
So now there are many complicated questions to be asked. She still has both kinds of parts, has adjusted to looking and behaving like a "slot", prefers to be assembled with other "slots", and eventually will have only a "slot". What bathroom would she be comfortable in? In which bathroom would her presence make others uncomfortable? Does any of that coincide with her (tab-indicating) driver's license, or her (duality-indicating) birth certificate, or her (slot-indicating) recent medical records?
On an unrelated note, I am hereby starting a petition to revoke your euphemism privileges.
Last I knew, the fundamental belief of the right was that individual liberty is preferred over being beholden to a collective. Most of the Republican complaints you mention are variations on the theme of wanting lower taxes, less regulation, and generally having less interaction with the government's pesky rules. To the right, those goals are more important than the left-wing preferences for social welfare, demographic equality, and a science-based life.
If the "regime" to which I refer were purely a democratic state, ideally with many unproductive committees, that's be a good start to a right-wing tale, but it's far more likely to be an oligarchy or dictatorship where a very limited number of people abused their individual liberty to get more power for themselves. It could be a government, corporation, headless militia, or even disorganized marauders, but the key is that it's oppressing one one group more than another, increasing its own hegemony.
Ignoring any bias in the demographic itself, it seems to me that it's just harder to write right-wing sci-fi.
It's easy to write about an enemy that has all of the money, power, and control, providing a convenient struggle for the protagonist. It's much more difficult to write (and thus, more rare to find) a good story where the enemy is given the same circumstances as the protagonist, and both are given the same life choices. Sure, you can say that the antagonist was given too much freedom... but then you have to establish why he chose that way, and if you try to use any variation on "because he's evil", your story goes from being a thought-provoking philosophical adventure to being a heavy-handed morality essay.
You could more generally make a strong leftist state be the enemy. That's the dystopian road blazed by sci-fi in the 1960s, and several movies since the 1970s, notably Logan's Run and Soylent Green. It's a time-honored genre, but that's also the problem. It's old. Dystopian fiction dates back a few centuries, and combining it with science is hardly groundbreaking.
For a while, a popular trend was to base such stories on real people and events, who could be suitably framed for conflict while keeping their political slant. Of course, the reading audience quickly grew tired of every Nazi and Soviet alternate-history piece, and those have waned in recent years.
To more directly address your point, consider the alternative: Writing left-wing sci-fi is easy.
The plot is simple: An underdog wants freedom for himself against the oppressive regime of the evil overlord, who had freedom and used it to oppress others. What makes the underdog different is that he will stand for justice for everyone, show kindness to everyone the audience could identify with, and never miss a chance to help others. Relying on teamwork and everyone's unique (identifiable and presence-justifying) abilities, the protagonist establishes a utopian foothold, where all of the characters that the audience identifies with are loved and cared for.
In fiction, that plot is sufficient for a story. In reality, things are much more complicated. What happens if one of the protagonist's allies was really only following because his girlfriend was? What if the rules of the protagonist's new state really screw some of the wealthier folks? What if the protagonist himself is genuinely a right-wing capitalist who just wants to make money and retire in obscurity?
You're right - Political strife isn't where really good fiction comes from. The best sci-fi works are ones where every character has their own motivations, and they don't boil down to "be good" or "be evil". Rather, they reduce to things like "sleep safely", "get back to stability" or "avoid the consequences of a mistake". One particularly good sci-fi space opera work, itself nominated a few times for Hugo awards, has spent nearly two decades dealing with the indirect results of a mistake. Characters have come and gone through the series, and politics has been an issue, but by that time every character had their own long-established reasons to hold their preferences. At no point was the story ever purely about morality, even when the "definitely evil" characters were introduced - they eventually got their own motivations.
Those deep-rooted, long stories that take the time to establish characters and motivation are great sci-fi, and can avoid bias toward either political slant.
A machine that would commonly (audio / visual production installs) be rack mounted in a different room to the operator.
Sonnet makes some very nice rackmount kits for new Mac Pros. There are also shelves, rails, and hangars from other vendors to mount it in pretty much any orientation. What's your point?
The response is the same today as it was then. Standard connectors have are different from Apple's designs. Which one is better is mostly subjective at this point, and Apple's chosen to follow the path that best aligns with its business model.
Consider, for example, USB-C cables. They're a great idea, and have so much promise... until a faulty one fries your device. To engineers, that's the cable's fault. To an average user (Apple's target market, mind you), a cable is just a cable, and the now-dead device is just unreliable. Another example is a MicroSD card slot. There are fast cards and slow cards, and Apple has absolutely no way to control the quality of what could impact their reputation.
The old sales tactic is to not just sell a product, but an experience. Apple is actually following through on that. For years, they didn't just sell a computer. They sold a computer and the promise that all of your hardware upgrades would be compatible and correct, because they would come directly from Apple... for a price. For the customers who weren't technically-inclined, that's precisely what they wanted.
You show up on time, do your job as best you can, and try to get done in 40 hours. If it's not going to happen, tell your manager that the choice is overtime or failure. Either way, it's his call.
I've had managers choose failure. I've had managers tell me that I should consider all overtime approved until certain deadlines are hit. I've never had a (long-lasting) manager tell me to break corporate policy, and most prefer to know early what the outcome of the week will be, rather than be surprised on Monday when schedules slip.
Now, what's being overlooked, of course, is the scientific merit of such a feat. This is one of those cases where we have an opportunity to gather data at very little additional cost, and it may reveal new insight that may assist future work.
If we ever do leave Earth for a significant length of time, running on a treadmill is one of the often-proposed mechanisms for maintaining muscle during the long trip, and possibly for the long stay at an extraterrestrial outpost. Unfortunately, we haven't really had much success with treadmills so far. Even with rigorous exercise, astronauts have typically lost up to 0.4-1% of their bone density per month in space, and when we're talking about trips of several years, that's a significant health hazard. This run provides a rare insight: what if the astronauts do more than just "rigorous exercise"? What if they routinely do what would be extreme on Earth?
During the run, Peake's body was monitored, and of course routine measurements will continue. This may provide a promising avenue for future research, or it may not. It may indicate against future research in this direction. Either way, the expense to do it now is only a few hours of time, rather than the millions or billions of dollars to run a specialized experiment.
Don't think of it as spending money to run a marathon in a spectacular war. We already spent the money to put people in space, and now we're getting every bit of data we can for that money.
Slashdot Mirror
That's partly my point. Societies have always held someone in high esteem. Currently, it's entertainers, including those who entertain with sports. However, there's never really been a time where society was so enamored with research that professional scientists became celebrities as a matter of course.
Of course, there have been a few famous scientists through the years, but they're the exception, not the norm. Right now, the NFL has about 1700 players, but I doubt any roster of famous scientists would reach 1700 names. A quick search lists only 338.
Consider the quote from the OP:
Ours is a world in which football players, reality TV stars and talentless singer bimbos earn hundreds of times more than Nobel prize-winning scientists, and represent what young people aspire to become when they grow up.
My argument is that, while the precise careers have changed as society has, there has never been a time where a scientist could succeed enough to become a celebrity on par with the more popular careers.
Or to put it another way, only those who were rich enough by other means could afford intellectual pursuits. Now we've established industries so anyone can become an intellectual, and get paid for it. Frankly, I'd say that's for the better.
How exactly would he have "consumed" GDP?
GDP is a measurement of economic strength because it measures how much value is transferred in transactions. Standing at an arcade console increases GDP, because he's using electricity and paying the utility company for it. He's digesting food, for which money was paid to the farmers, bakers, processors, packagers, distributors, and retailers. Those companies then spend their income on other things, further raising GDP.
He certainly could have done something with his time that might have led to even more addition to GDP, but there are very few ways in which someone can actually reduce GDP.
That's a key detail, that is often lost on Slashdotters. You can't buy votes. You can buy attention and reputation, and that may lead to votes, but that connection is not guaranteed, and any attempt to ensure that votes are bought is illegal.
If only it could be boiled down to a simple number. That'd make life easy.
The source for your linked article hints at much deeper insight:
Socio-economic background has a significant impact on student performance in the United States, with some 15% of the variation in student performance explained by this, similar to the OECD average. Although this impact has weakened over time, disadvantaged students show less engagement, drive, motivation and self-beliefs.
This is further elaborated on in other pages of the report. Basically, there are a number of factors, starting with the US having a higher percentage of disadvantaged students and schools. While those schools have equally-qualified teachers, their educational environment is less conducive to learning. There is also an observed correlation between teacher morale and student performance.
One interesting point in the study is that Common Core would likely improve things:
The analysis suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA. The prominence of modeling in U.S. high school standards has already influenced developers of large-scale assessments in the United States. If more students work on more and better modeling tasks than they do today, then one could reasonably expect PISA performance to improve.
Considering Slashdot's hatred of Common Core, I suggest that anyone commenting on this matter actually read the standards.
In short, we can spend all the money we want on making prison-like schools, but US education isn't going to improve until we make the schools a learning-oriented environment. Curently, we spend a lot of "education" money on making a big show of security to look like we're keeping our children safe, when that money would perhaps be better spent on community programs to improve those disadvantaged areas.
People today are ignorant and uneducated. But what's new is, they are proud of it.
No, people today are, as always, proud of what they think they are. For instance, you seem to think of yourself an intellectual, and are jumping at the chance to denigrate those you see as different.
Ours is a world in which football players, reality TV stars and talentless singer bimbos earn hundreds of times more than Nobel prize-winning scientists, and represent what young people aspire to become when they grow up.
How, exactly, is that different from the the last century? Come to think of it, when exactly did scientists make more than non-scientist celebrities? There are a lot of professions out there, and very few of them fall into any kind of "science" classification. For most of human history, those pure-science careers have always been academic, having no practical application that would affect most peoples' lives. When your job is to move a load of cargo to a different continent to support a colony, you don't care about the amount of redshift in the starlight by which you're navigating. On the other hand, having a widespread reputation that your city is the best at some particular popular sport provides a conversation for a salesman, opening new opportunities for business.
As I see it, after the atomic bomb brought immediate public attention to scientists, pure science has been getting more celebrated. Today we have more college graduates than ever before, and that number is still rising. We have more STEM careers and more STEM jobs than ever before, and we're even starting to see an increasing number of scientist celebrities like Neil deGrasse Tyson (Whose Twitter account, I'll note, appears second in a Google search for "Neil", below only Wikipedia.)
In a world of self-satisfied, militant, openly avowed crassness...
...which is so much different from a world where we publicly post such intellectual statements as "Phileros is a eunuch", "Epaphra, you are bald!", or "Lesbianus, you defecate and you write, ‘Hello, everyone!’".
...writing equations onboard a plane instead of watching the latest episode of Game of Throne on one's tablet is seen as suspicious. That's more than a little sad.
What's sad is the pervasive suspicion that caused it. This time, it was math equations. Next time, it could be a poet writing in Arabic. Recognizing it as Arabic would be less "ignorant and uneducated", but it'd be just as bad, and would probably result in even more delay. It's the paranoia that's the problem, not stupidity.
In 2014, Budovsky and several coworkers were arrested in Spain. Then Budovsky was extradited to the United States to face trial for money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.
He had legal problems in several countries, including the US, Costa Rica, and Spain. The US just got to be the ones to try him, though.
Then Slashdotters would whine about the bloat of government, and how very much money was wasted on what was effectively a joke.
So let me get this straight...
You've never called the cops, and your source for information is "said and believed by most kids these days".
Please, do keep telling us how you think it's the police who are prejudiced.
Yes, I know they got a court order, but it would be a safe bet that...
In other words, the "government is evil" narrative works so much better if you add a few more facts.
No, that's kind of my point. The Constitution is the source of authority for the laws that he broke. By leaking, he's defied the Constitution himself.
"Getting nowhere internally" is exactly what he's allowed to do under the Constitution. He has the right to protest, but he does not have the right to release classified information. Thus there is a classified channel for such protests. However, the Constitution does not guarantee that one's protests will actually affect anything, and if indeed nothing changes, there is still no right granted to break other laws.
Perhaps he did. We don't actually know what oaths he may have taken or legal contracts he may have signed.
He held a clearance. To do so, it was required that he make several legally-binding promises. Among them, he would have promised (in no particular order):
There is no wiggle room. If he thought that PRISM was a threat to the general public, he had a duty to report it to the oversight committees. They may or may not agree with him, but even if they don't, it does not permit him to release the information. He swore to uphold the Constitution, which empowers Congress to make laws, and those laws say the information cannot be released.
Let's not forget the government promised to abide the constitution - our legislators, justices and executives have all taken oaths on record, and in most cases, in public.
They have, though. The fact that you may not like a given law does not itself make the law invalid. For that, the Constitution empowers the Supreme Court to judge the constitutionality of a law... and as yet, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has not been overturned.
Naivete aside, this world is not perfect. You're not going to like every law that Congress passes, but the fact of the matter is that we the people voted those folks into office. You don't have to like the laws they pass, and you are free to vote against them next time. That is your First Amendment-guaranteed right to protest. Congress shall make no law abridging your ability to (otherwise lawfully) try to persuade the country to act differently. Alas, your opinion on the matter does not override the legislative majority that continually reauthorizes the surveillance programs.
So which came first? Government violations of the constitution or the Snowden leaks?
As of yet, there's no final determination on whether the government actually violated the Constitution. Similarly, there is no final conviction of Snowden for his alleged acts of treason and espionage. There have been many unofficial opinions on constitutionality, but most don't actually matter. The one that did (Klayman v. Obama) has been sent back to court on appeal, as the whole case may be invalid. On the other hand, Snowden has openly admitted to unlawfully releasing information, and has been charged for it. As soon as he deigns to return to the US to face the consequences of his actions, we can actually get a decision.
As it stands now, the surveillance programs are still authorized (indirectly, through Congress) by the Constitution, and Edward Snowden is still a fugitive who broke several of his legally-binding promises.
I suspect it won't matter. If the choice comes down to being between somewhat-disliked Clinton and outspoken-bigot Trump, a left-leaning voter will still pick Hillary, just to keep things from getting too bad.
The Clintons have a PR problem. Bill was friendly, and eventually that was a liability. Hillary has had mostly bad PR since becoming a controversial Secretary of State, and the Republican party has consistently amplified that controversy, exaggerating real problems and inventing conspiracies. However, Hillary's stated policy positions aren't too bad. Sure, she has ties to the right, and isn't as far to the left as Bernie Sanders, but if she gets the nomination, she's still a Democrat.
In the general election, though, that's exactly what would happen. It will become us-versus-them, and both sides will be sure to keep that in the public eye. If you're a Republican and you don't vote for Trump, the dirty Democrats will win. If you're a Democrat and you don't vote for Clinton, the rotten Republicans will win. I expect mud-slinging all around.
Let's not forget that Snowden promised to keep secret the information he leaked.
Why waste "their" time?
The "they" to which you refer are investigators who have better things to do with their time than make numbers look worse. Remember, the investigators' job is to build a case that the court won't reject. A rejection means the investigators are actually trying to violate someone's legal rights. Thus far, no court has actually found these requests unconstitutional, so there's no reason for rejection.
If they suspect enough to get a valid warrant, that's "known to exist" enough for the court order.
A warrant doesn't say the cops know they will find anything, but it says they have the right to look.
No.
The definition of the word "produce" is important. If the evidence already exists (as encrypted data on the hard drive), then the court can compel someone to produce (deliver) it to the investigators.
The 5th Amendment protection is to intended to prevent the court from forcing confessions. To that effect, the court is not allowed to compel a defendant to produce (create) evidence against themselves that did not already exist.
As an analogy, the court cannot compel you to write a confession. If you already wrote one and put it in a safe, they can compel you to give them the combination to the safe.
I figured I would when I wrote it... It's worded very poorly.
To contrast with "generally having less interaction with the government's pesky rules", a better phrase would be a "consensus-based life". The left-leaning folks are more likely to take the consensus of an expert group (such as scientists) and apply it as the rule for everyone else. On the other hand, the right-leaning folks feel they should be able to decide what's best for themselves, and others' opinions don't really hold any authority.
Of course, we should remember that the expert opinion at one point gave us eugenics programs, and individual opinions give us religion-based education curricula.
When did "slots in this bathroom" and "tabs in that bathroom" get sooooo controversial?
I know someone who was born with a slot and a tab, and a 50% mix of cells for each... where do they go? The bushes?
For about the first 14 years, the "tab" was dominant, and he was a mostly-healthy boy, starting to form the preferences that boys do at that age. Then puberty struck hard, and the "slot" parts started making hormones that would have been lethal to suppress, so he became she, and her "tab" is now in the process of being suppressed so it can eventually be cut off completely.
So now there are many complicated questions to be asked. She still has both kinds of parts, has adjusted to looking and behaving like a "slot", prefers to be assembled with other "slots", and eventually will have only a "slot". What bathroom would she be comfortable in? In which bathroom would her presence make others uncomfortable? Does any of that coincide with her (tab-indicating) driver's license, or her (duality-indicating) birth certificate, or her (slot-indicating) recent medical records?
On an unrelated note, I am hereby starting a petition to revoke your euphemism privileges.
Last I knew, the fundamental belief of the right was that individual liberty is preferred over being beholden to a collective. Most of the Republican complaints you mention are variations on the theme of wanting lower taxes, less regulation, and generally having less interaction with the government's pesky rules. To the right, those goals are more important than the left-wing preferences for social welfare, demographic equality, and a science-based life.
If the "regime" to which I refer were purely a democratic state, ideally with many unproductive committees, that's be a good start to a right-wing tale, but it's far more likely to be an oligarchy or dictatorship where a very limited number of people abused their individual liberty to get more power for themselves. It could be a government, corporation, headless militia, or even disorganized marauders, but the key is that it's oppressing one one group more than another, increasing its own hegemony.
Ignoring any bias in the demographic itself, it seems to me that it's just harder to write right-wing sci-fi.
It's easy to write about an enemy that has all of the money, power, and control, providing a convenient struggle for the protagonist. It's much more difficult to write (and thus, more rare to find) a good story where the enemy is given the same circumstances as the protagonist, and both are given the same life choices. Sure, you can say that the antagonist was given too much freedom... but then you have to establish why he chose that way, and if you try to use any variation on "because he's evil", your story goes from being a thought-provoking philosophical adventure to being a heavy-handed morality essay.
You could more generally make a strong leftist state be the enemy. That's the dystopian road blazed by sci-fi in the 1960s, and several movies since the 1970s, notably Logan's Run and Soylent Green. It's a time-honored genre, but that's also the problem. It's old. Dystopian fiction dates back a few centuries, and combining it with science is hardly groundbreaking.
For a while, a popular trend was to base such stories on real people and events, who could be suitably framed for conflict while keeping their political slant. Of course, the reading audience quickly grew tired of every Nazi and Soviet alternate-history piece, and those have waned in recent years.
To more directly address your point, consider the alternative: Writing left-wing sci-fi is easy.
The plot is simple: An underdog wants freedom for himself against the oppressive regime of the evil overlord, who had freedom and used it to oppress others. What makes the underdog different is that he will stand for justice for everyone, show kindness to everyone the audience could identify with, and never miss a chance to help others. Relying on teamwork and everyone's unique (identifiable and presence-justifying) abilities, the protagonist establishes a utopian foothold, where all of the characters that the audience identifies with are loved and cared for.
In fiction, that plot is sufficient for a story. In reality, things are much more complicated. What happens if one of the protagonist's allies was really only following because his girlfriend was? What if the rules of the protagonist's new state really screw some of the wealthier folks? What if the protagonist himself is genuinely a right-wing capitalist who just wants to make money and retire in obscurity?
You're right - Political strife isn't where really good fiction comes from. The best sci-fi works are ones where every character has their own motivations, and they don't boil down to "be good" or "be evil". Rather, they reduce to things like "sleep safely", "get back to stability" or "avoid the consequences of a mistake". One particularly good sci-fi space opera work, itself nominated a few times for Hugo awards, has spent nearly two decades dealing with the indirect results of a mistake. Characters have come and gone through the series, and politics has been an issue, but by that time every character had their own long-established reasons to hold their preferences. At no point was the story ever purely about morality, even when the "definitely evil" characters were introduced - they eventually got their own motivations.
Those deep-rooted, long stories that take the time to establish characters and motivation are great sci-fi, and can avoid bias toward either political slant.
That's hard, though.
A machine that would commonly (audio / visual production installs) be rack mounted in a different room to the operator.
Sonnet makes some very nice rackmount kits for new Mac Pros. There are also shelves, rails, and hangars from other vendors to mount it in pretty much any orientation. What's your point?
The response is the same today as it was then. Standard connectors have are different from Apple's designs. Which one is better is mostly subjective at this point, and Apple's chosen to follow the path that best aligns with its business model.
Consider, for example, USB-C cables. They're a great idea, and have so much promise... until a faulty one fries your device. To engineers, that's the cable's fault. To an average user (Apple's target market, mind you), a cable is just a cable, and the now-dead device is just unreliable. Another example is a MicroSD card slot. There are fast cards and slow cards, and Apple has absolutely no way to control the quality of what could impact their reputation.
The old sales tactic is to not just sell a product, but an experience. Apple is actually following through on that. For years, they didn't just sell a computer. They sold a computer and the promise that all of your hardware upgrades would be compatible and correct, because they would come directly from Apple... for a price. For the customers who weren't technically-inclined, that's precisely what they wanted.
You do exactly what the handbook says.
You show up on time, do your job as best you can, and try to get done in 40 hours. If it's not going to happen, tell your manager that the choice is overtime or failure. Either way, it's his call.
I've had managers choose failure. I've had managers tell me that I should consider all overtime approved until certain deadlines are hit. I've never had a (long-lasting) manager tell me to break corporate policy, and most prefer to know early what the outcome of the week will be, rather than be surprised on Monday when schedules slip.
Now, what's being overlooked, of course, is the scientific merit of such a feat. This is one of those cases where we have an opportunity to gather data at very little additional cost, and it may reveal new insight that may assist future work.
If we ever do leave Earth for a significant length of time, running on a treadmill is one of the often-proposed mechanisms for maintaining muscle during the long trip, and possibly for the long stay at an extraterrestrial outpost. Unfortunately, we haven't really had much success with treadmills so far. Even with rigorous exercise, astronauts have typically lost up to 0.4-1% of their bone density per month in space, and when we're talking about trips of several years, that's a significant health hazard. This run provides a rare insight: what if the astronauts do more than just "rigorous exercise"? What if they routinely do what would be extreme on Earth?
During the run, Peake's body was monitored, and of course routine measurements will continue. This may provide a promising avenue for future research, or it may not. It may indicate against future research in this direction. Either way, the expense to do it now is only a few hours of time, rather than the millions or billions of dollars to run a specialized experiment.
Don't think of it as spending money to run a marathon in a spectacular war. We already spent the money to put people in space, and now we're getting every bit of data we can for that money.