That's funny. It made several of my efforts (as a sysadmin) more stable, because it handles complex dependencies actually more gracefully than a bunch of intern-written half-functional init scripts did.
I've worked with (and specialized in) "ancient shit", and it's almost invariably just an extreme form of Michael's third case. What was once just a reliable piece of equipment has been part of the enterprise for so long that management has forgotten what it actually does.
To use your example, it's not just a plotter they see. It's the magical portal that turns designs into tangible drawings. Sure, it could be replaced by a new piece of equipment, but that's a big scary unknown. They'd have to replace the drivers, maybe the print server, certainly some cables... and that's just on the "input" side of the device. Then there's the slightly-different paper weight, ink, line width, gloss, and all the other trivial differences on the "output" side.
To a system engineer or sysadmin, those differences are minor, and simply open the door to further improvements. To a manager, they're all risks that can't be guaranteed to not disrupt operations. Their business case to keep the old device is that the risks are known, and have long since been mitigated with some well-established workaround procedures.
I've been involved in commercial software development for almost 20 years. I have yet to see any small vendor actually implement everything you list.
Usually, they'll have a few components with some simple impossible-to-fail tests, and say they do "full unit testing". They'll have a "QA tester" rubber-stamp a release because it isn't as buggy as the last one. They'll run code through Valgrind once, ignore the results, and take credit for using analysis tools. Then the development execs go out to a seminar on the latest best practice, and come back expecting a full transition to the latest shiny buzzword, and fire anyone whose progress-tracking spreadsheets aren't falsified enough.
If I thought commercial software actually underwent strict QA, I might be inclined to agree with you... but commercial vendors can conveniently hide their sins behind a wall of marketing materials, and by the time anyone bothers to call them out on their lies, they've been acquired by another company, and can blame everything on the old management while claiming that the product has a "solid core".
Superman character is concerned about humanity destiny. Dave becomes something that could be not interested at all in us.
I'd concur, with a bit more description: Dave becomes something that is above every current human conflict, both literally and figuratively. In the book, he is the star-child, the first human-derived citizen of a space-based civilization. Earth has its wars and governments and politicians who will all panic at his arrival, but they don't mean anything to him. He will be concerned with the issues of the galaxy and the destiny of the planet as a whole, just as the humans have stopped caring about the petty squabbles of the apes.
Subsidies reduce the investment cost (and thereby reduce the risk) of low-return investments that the legislature (or other subsidy-issuing authority) has determined are important for society to pursue.
Just one more question: Is it intentional or accidental that you're missing the point?
The "you can't use your exculpatory statements" claim is what's not a hard rule, because there are a number of implicit and explicit exceptions to it, to the extent that it legally does not usually factor into a suspect's rights, and is not necessary in the Miranda warning.
And cut it out with the incessant questioning. It's fucking lame and annoying when you bitch about other people not offering solutions when you're not offering shit yourself.
I'm still looking for an actual answer, beyond the higher-standard concept I actually mentioned in my first comment in this thread. So far, there's a lot of support for an anarchist position of "fuck the police", but nothing actually based in legal or political theory.
Anything you say to the police is inadmissible by the defense, because it is hearsay evidence. It CAN NOT be used by your attorney to help or exonerate you.
That's not entirely true. Exculpatory statements to the police cannot be admitted on their own, but once admitted for any reason they can be used and referred to by the defense. The reason they aren't generally admissible is because you can testify yourself, under oath, and present the same statements. From the perspective of justice, the only reason that would be problematic is if you had lied in the initial statement.
More to the point, it is an exemption to the hearsay exclusion rule to use statements to establish character or history. For example, postings in a psychology forum about something that could impact the safety of someones' children - regardless of being positive or negative - could be argued to show a character trait, and thus would be admissible. Once in the court, the sides would argue about whether the trait is a good or bad thing.
If you have kids, you need to teach them this, and you need to make sure they watch the video. The police are NOT THEIR FRIENDS and are NOT there to help them.
...and with that bias right from the start, you've condemned them to always have that fate. Personally, I'd rather teach them that the law matters, and it is my kids' responsibility to learn those laws before they find themselves in a situation where those laws could affect them.
All lovely quotes, but still no closer to a solution.
Basically, anything you say can and will be used against you but not for you.
You say that like it's a given rule, but yet it's part of your attorney's job to find the things said in your favor and argue for you. No, it's not the prosecutor's job to argue on your behalf. That's pretty inherent in having an adversarial justice system.
Your quotes also don't address the actual question at hand. You seem to advocate making investigators work for their results, but is that worth the risk to society if it's trivial to hide behind pseudonyms? Is absolute anonymity a freedom that's worth preserving? Why or why not?
...he'd sure run a lot less risk that way. You never know what kind of fanatic/lunatic will latch on to you and decide to make your life miserable.
Certainly true, but I'll note that he was murdered by civilians - not the courts. That is why I suggest that having pseudonyms is necessary, even if the courts can get to one's real identity.
I had a co-worker who posted online in a psychology forum using his real name. Some of those posts were used against him in family court, and he was denied custody of his children.
That's the problem, though. Using only the information you've given here (so not relating to your co-worker himself), let's consider the scenario objectively.
If he's saying something that is concerning enough to take children away, why would it be better if he could say those things anonymously or pseudonymously? Having an attached real identity doesn't change the factual basis of what he said, or the fact that he said it, or that whatever he said is concerning enough to make the court question the well-being of children in his custody.
While I do agree that having multiple disconnected identities is useful, and I dare say it's necessary, I would also argue that it's necessary to allow a court or law enforcement to pierce that veil, for the purposes of an investigation or discovery. Of course, the other side of that is that the judiciary must be trustworthy enough to only use that power for such limited purposes, which means the courts must show similar restraint in other areas as well. In turn, that means investigators must show restraint in what warrants they seek, so as to avoid embarrassment of the entire process.
The only resolution I can see is to have pseudonyms protected like wiretaps, requiring exceptional warrants and oversight before they can be pursued. I don't expect to see that happen anytime soon.
Everybody with whom you disagree is a Russian bot.
Now, that's not actually what I said at all. I said there are bots and sockpuppets on both sides, but they're focusing more on stirring up anger than having actual discussion. For example, one of the preferred tactics on both sides is "whataboutism", where they will bring up a completely unrelated subject like a recent court decision to steer the conversation away from rational analysis and towards partisan vitriol.
Did you know the Supreme Court, in effect, just destroyed public sector unions?
Oh look, there it is!
Why don't you focus on issues instead of the stupid Russian interference fantasy?
Foreign interference is an issue. It is probably the most important issue, because it undermines the legitimacy of every other democratic process.
Take your example, for instance. The SCOTUS has determined that collective bargaining is not necessarily always something a non-union worker wants (regardless of whether it's in their best interest), so under the First Amendment, non-union workers have the freedom to choose not to associate with the union.
Now, it's certainly easy to think this is a purely American problem. It's a case in an American court about American workers interpreting American laws governing American business practices. However, it's still a matter of international interest, as those American public-sector organizations are responsible for handling how the United States executes the duties of government, which in turn affects how the United States can compete globally with foreign efforts. If a foreign power can sway the American policy in a way that harms America's economic capabilities, they will create opportunities for their own advancement.
Similarly, American elections are vitally important for determining American policy. If a foreign government is able to promote a narcissistic President, for example, they would be able to sway any policy or political negotiations by simply rolling out red carpet and offering copious amounts of insubstantial flattery. It is imperative, then, that we fully investigate any allegation of impropriety during elections. Everything - from campaign funding to personnel selection, and beyond - should be open to scrutiny, even if nothing is ultimately found.
Even if the investigation ultimately finds no foreign influence, having a thorough investigation process itself deters foreign powers from trying to influence elections, as they can be sure the investigation will make such influence difficult to hide, at best.
As I understand, it's mostly private hobbyists and folks who care more about the prestige of running a radio station than about following the law.
These days, building a radio station costs under $1000 if you already have a suitable antenna location. You can get a $100 kit to do the interface, and a transmitter for about $500, then just a bit more for the antenna construction. It's well within the disposable income of many folks, who can then boast that they "own an independent radio station". Sometimes, that's enough motivation in itself, but there are also a good number of antagonists who will happily use radio to spread their message to the public.
Pirate radio is the modern evolution of flyposting. Anybody can do it, and it's only governed by some loosely-enforced rules, so the folks who don't care about rules aren't stopped.
There has actually been a good amount of research on this, by sources that I am admittedly far too lazy to find again on this lovely Monday morning.
Trump's apparent supporters include a large army of bot and sockpuppet accounts (spread through Twitter and Facebook, with notably similar trends on 4chan that are more difficult to track) that become active around 8-9AM every morning, post throughout the day, and stop activity at around 5PM. Their language reflects an education through high school, but they tend not to use allegory or references to pop culture (except for memes of their own creation), and very low engagement with credible experts on any given subject. They also show a curious lack of activity on certain holidays.
These patterns are also shown by an army of accounts attacking Trump. Same working hours, same linguistic style, and the same engagement patterns, with the only difference really being which names are being dog-whistled. Yes, it certainly appears there's somebody with a professional organization aimed primarily at creating controversy and unrest.
Now, the fun part of the analysis is that the pattern of work hours and holidays don't align with American time zones or American holidays. Instead, they mostly align with the work patterns in Moscow.
This is the correct solution, and I'm rather disappointed in/. that it's so far down the thread. There is no substitute for a proper risk analysis, which in this case would point to having redundancy.
Every time someone says "I moved all my infrastructure to (Google|AWS|OpenStack|Azure|closet servers)", it's invariably followed (perhaps years later) by "we lost just one little thing and our whole enterprise was crippled".
If your whole enterprise hangs on one credit card, one person, or one service, you have a significant risk that needs to be addressed.
I'd support having all such things (including scheduled days off, vacation, overtime/comp time, etc.) kept indefinitely, with maximum caps for each kind. If an employee leaves for any reason, including being fired, they get paid out whatever they haven't used.
I'm quite happy to help my team meet their goals and go the extra mile to deliver a quality product to our customer..... but I certainly expect that once that's done, I'll get to go spend time with my family.
That's pretty much what I see, too. I am very intimately familiar with Explorys and their pre-merger business.
When Explorys was a startup, they had a solid product offering. It may not have been fully functional, but it was a niche product capable of solving a very particular problem in about 1 millionth of the time required by existing solutions. Their target customer was pharmaceutical companies looking to do clinical trials, and their product promised to make those trials (which are a major part of the cost in developing medications approved for human use) far less expensive, and much faster to execute.
After the deal with IBM, Explorys fell off the map. They seem to have stopped developing their solutions for drug-related efforts, and moved to being a data source for Watson. This is rather surprising to me, because their data focused mostly on patients and patient histories (as would be applicable to a clinical trial) rather than abstract medical knowledge. There was some early pre-IBM effort to have the system infer medical knowledge from commonly-occuring comorbidities (like the fact that about 50% of people with the "early Alzheimers" condition also have the "male" condition), but that effort suffered from a distinct lack of understanding obviousness.
It's certainly possible that was the plan all along with IBM: IBM was interested in the data collection agreements, and they'd make the AI problems go away. However, there wasn't much movement on making a commercially-viable product out of Watson, especially using essentially-unproven AI capabilities to supplant doctors' existing knowledge bases.
Explorys was really good at what it was designed to do. Once it was bolted onto a Jeopardy!-playing AI, it seems to have been limited to playing Jeopardy!, which doesn't really have a significant market.
I was mostly-unemployed for a while, and spent some savings of about $10K for a year. I had a cheap rental house, no outstanding debt, and just enough income to cover groceries and expenses. I, too, was comfortable at the time.
Granted, I didn't take a vacation, or travel overseas, or and fortunately had no major medical expenses. I didn't eat fancy dinners, and I kept leftovers. I learned to be quite happy with a meal of ramen and sausage, and my old Nokia phone did its job as much as it was needed. To borrow a phrase from another engineer, I lived "simply".
Now, I'm not suggesting the lifestyle works for everyone. I have a family to support now, and they want to see the world and have clothes without patches. I enjoy steak a lot more than my arteries would prefer. My house is now a nice little two-story as the end of a private road. I've started looking at some major medical bills. A $10K income won't come close to being "comfortable" for me today.
Ultimately, it's a question of what you want from life. If you are comfortable and happy with what you have, why should anyone else expect you to have more?
I realize I am just feeding a troll, but if you really believe that, you really are an idiot.
Well, I can say the same thing, I suppose. Either way, here we go...
It is not an emolument for someone to stay in a hotel that Trump happens to own. Presidents are allowed to own businesses and stock and property and other things that might be accretive to their net worth.
That is true, but that's not what's causing complaints. Previous Presidents have taken steps to ensure that they are separated from the business operations while in office, so they would have no way to know who or what they're doing non-government business with. Yes, cash might come from a foreign country into a Presdent's account eventually, but he won't know where it came from, and couldn't verify it if a foreign dignitary tried to claim it.
Instead, President Trump is hosting guests directly at his properties, charging them the usual high rates, and sending it directly into accounts he controls. There is no attempt to appear like he's separating his personal business from his administration. To countries with looser standards on corruption and bribery, it appears that putting money in Trump's pocket is an easy way to get close to him. Even if he's being perfectly honest and doesn't accept bribes (such as by having the personal moral fortitude to not check his hotels' guest lists), it still appears to the rest of the world that he is. That damage to America's reputation is exactly what the emoluments clause is intended to prevent.
It is also not illegal to collude with a foreign government. In fact, it is the President's FUCKING JOB to collude with foreign governments, on many many things, from trade to aid to research to defense.
As others noted, yes, the President is authorized to collaborate on certain activities. However, one of the things expressly forbidden is foreign interference in elections. The other requirement is that such negotiations must be handled according to certain procedures, which the President has utterly neglected.
It's also notable that President Trump has already registered as a candidate for the 2020 election. That means he not only gets to do campaign fundraising, but also falls under campaign laws that also limit his dealings with foreign entities.
The far-left whackos who insist there was some conspiracy are just that: far-left whackos.
I agree with you here. It's unreasonable to insist there was a conspiracy involving Trump, just like it's unreasonable to insist that Hillary Clinton should be in jail. There is evidence of some abnormalities in Trump's campaign, and there have been several indictments and guilty pleas already. What is not proven (though it certainly seems likely) is that Trump himself was involved to the extent the law forbids.
However, that's not the extent of the alleged offenses. He's also pushed on several occasions to have the investigation terminated prematurely, which is itself an obstruction of justice. Trump could have been completely innocent of the original conspiracies with Russia (which could possibly, if unlikely, have been the efforts of overzealous campaign managers), but the use of his official capacity (including his official Twitter account) to disparage and direct the FBI away from performing an exhaustive investigation would itself likely be a crime.
Even if Trump did blatantly violate the law, it's nearly (though not completely) impossible to indict a sitting President. Instead, Mueller's report will go to Congress, who could determine that Trump should be impeached. If Congress removes Trump from office, then he could be indicted. Then he could be convicted, and then we could say factually that he committed a crime.
Until then, he enjoys the same innocent-until-proven-guilty status that Hillary Clinton does, as he continues to be the subject of a duly-commissioned investigation.
To be fair, third-world countries have a slight advantage in that their infrastructure is all new and mostly modern, whereas the US is trying to piggyback on a lot of old POTS and first-gen fiber infrastructure.
In a lot of cases, developing countries are completely skipping copper infrastructure, and building out wireless systems.
Critics say this will, in effect, require all internet platforms to filter all content put online by users
I run a forum. I already have to deal with the occasional spam that gets through the registration system, and now I have to check everything my users say to see if someone else has already said it? No, thanks.
I've also built a few web applications, some of which accept user-submitted content. Do I now need to integrate that with a third-party scanning tool to enforce filtering? I'd really rather not, just from a licensing and contracting perspective...
I also note this comes hot on the heels of the GDPR. I guess it's time for another new privacy policy update, to tell folks that the information they submit (which might possibly be personally-identifiable) will now be handed off to a copyright scanner and checked to see if they dared to have an unoriginal thought...
Yeah, I should have worded that a bit better... I meant that immediately after the war, the Republicans were literally social justice warriors. For a few years, they had fought and won for social equality. You are right, though, that the glory faded away pretty quickly and the Republicans focused on business. As I understand, that's why the Democrats were able to enact segregation with little cohesive opposition.
While the economic events around the turn of the century certainly didn't help the Republican party, they didn't cause it to implode like the Great Depression did. When the Great Depression hit its hardest, it came right at the end of three Republican presidencies, which had covered the "Roaring Twenties"... so the Republicans were blamed for taking all that nice prosperity and ruining it. The success of the Democrat-led New Deal then pushed a lot of the on-the-fence voters toward the Democrat side, and set in motion the rest of the 20th century's political changes.
When slavery was a major issue in the United States, the parties looked very different from what we have now. The Democrats and Republicans had a lot of dissent within the parties, on pretty much every issue except one: slavery.
It seems weird to say it, but prior to the founding of the Republican party, political movements were more like sports teams than they are today. There was heavy anti-federalist sentiment, so people would usually support their state's party at a national level, mostly just to promote their own state's interests. Handling important issues federally was a rarity.
Then the civil war broke out.
The newly-formed Republican party was literally started as a one-issue party. They wanted to end slavery. They also absorbed a lot of the old Whig supporters (mostly from northern states), who wanted strong business support and social reform. When the southern Congressmen left their offices to join the Confederacy, the Republicans took over, by wide margins.
Obviously, slavery didn't last very long. The Union won the war, leaving Republicans in charge as the heroes of social equality, which worked until the Democrats came back a decade later. That's when segregation and Jim Crow laws came in from the Democrat side, and the Republicans pushed the Whig legacy of strong business.
The next big shift came with the Great Depression. All of that business-central policy collapsed on the Republicans, and people started leaving the party. Notably, the folks mainly concerned with social reform ended up in the Democrat camp, slowly reversing the Democrats' position on social equality. By the 1960s, with still no major opposition on that front by the Republicans, the Democrats actually ended up pushing to reverse their own segregation policies.
That support for the civil rights movement was very unpopular among the traditional southern Democrats, so they left the Democrat party, just like the Republicans had 30 years earlier. They ended up in the Republican camp.
In short, through the middle of the 20th century, the two major parties swapped their positions on social policy, while keeping their position on economic policy. That's pretty much the situation we have today, where the Democrats push for strong social equality and small-business economics, and the Republicans want big business and try to ignore racism entirely.
To wit, then: Democrats have principles today, but the Democrats we have today aren't the Democrats we had when the Democrats supported slavery.
(For clarity, I mostly align with the Whig ideas, mixed with a bit of socialism and statism... I don't really care who you are or how you were born, but if you follow the law you should have an equal opportunity for success as anyone else)
Slashdot Mirror
That's funny. It made several of my efforts (as a sysadmin) more stable, because it handles complex dependencies actually more gracefully than a bunch of intern-written half-functional init scripts did.
I've worked with (and specialized in) "ancient shit", and it's almost invariably just an extreme form of Michael's third case. What was once just a reliable piece of equipment has been part of the enterprise for so long that management has forgotten what it actually does.
To use your example, it's not just a plotter they see. It's the magical portal that turns designs into tangible drawings. Sure, it could be replaced by a new piece of equipment, but that's a big scary unknown. They'd have to replace the drivers, maybe the print server, certainly some cables... and that's just on the "input" side of the device. Then there's the slightly-different paper weight, ink, line width, gloss, and all the other trivial differences on the "output" side.
To a system engineer or sysadmin, those differences are minor, and simply open the door to further improvements. To a manager, they're all risks that can't be guaranteed to not disrupt operations. Their business case to keep the old device is that the risks are known, and have long since been mitigated with some well-established workaround procedures.
I've been involved in commercial software development for almost 20 years. I have yet to see any small vendor actually implement everything you list.
Usually, they'll have a few components with some simple impossible-to-fail tests, and say they do "full unit testing". They'll have a "QA tester" rubber-stamp a release because it isn't as buggy as the last one. They'll run code through Valgrind once, ignore the results, and take credit for using analysis tools. Then the development execs go out to a seminar on the latest best practice, and come back expecting a full transition to the latest shiny buzzword, and fire anyone whose progress-tracking spreadsheets aren't falsified enough.
If I thought commercial software actually underwent strict QA, I might be inclined to agree with you... but commercial vendors can conveniently hide their sins behind a wall of marketing materials, and by the time anyone bothers to call them out on their lies, they've been acquired by another company, and can blame everything on the old management while claiming that the product has a "solid core".
Superman character is concerned about humanity destiny. Dave becomes something that could be not interested at all in us.
I'd concur, with a bit more description: Dave becomes something that is above every current human conflict, both literally and figuratively. In the book, he is the star-child, the first human-derived citizen of a space-based civilization. Earth has its wars and governments and politicians who will all panic at his arrival, but they don't mean anything to him. He will be concerned with the issues of the galaxy and the destiny of the planet as a whole, just as the humans have stopped caring about the petty squabbles of the apes.
"...underpinning long-shot start-ups."
That is precisely what subsidies are for.
Subsidies reduce the investment cost (and thereby reduce the risk) of low-return investments that the legislature (or other subsidy-issuing authority) has determined are important for society to pursue.
Just one more question: Is it intentional or accidental that you're missing the point?
The "you can't use your exculpatory statements" claim is what's not a hard rule, because there are a number of implicit and explicit exceptions to it, to the extent that it legally does not usually factor into a suspect's rights, and is not necessary in the Miranda warning.
And cut it out with the incessant questioning. It's fucking lame and annoying when you bitch about other people not offering solutions when you're not offering shit yourself.
I'm still looking for an actual answer, beyond the higher-standard concept I actually mentioned in my first comment in this thread. So far, there's a lot of support for an anarchist position of "fuck the police", but nothing actually based in legal or political theory.
Anything you say to the police is inadmissible by the defense, because it is hearsay evidence. It CAN NOT be used by your attorney to help or exonerate you.
That's not entirely true. Exculpatory statements to the police cannot be admitted on their own, but once admitted for any reason they can be used and referred to by the defense. The reason they aren't generally admissible is because you can testify yourself, under oath, and present the same statements. From the perspective of justice, the only reason that would be problematic is if you had lied in the initial statement.
More to the point, it is an exemption to the hearsay exclusion rule to use statements to establish character or history. For example, postings in a psychology forum about something that could impact the safety of someones' children - regardless of being positive or negative - could be argued to show a character trait, and thus would be admissible. Once in the court, the sides would argue about whether the trait is a good or bad thing.
If you have kids, you need to teach them this, and you need to make sure they watch the video. The police are NOT THEIR FRIENDS and are NOT there to help them.
...and with that bias right from the start, you've condemned them to always have that fate. Personally, I'd rather teach them that the law matters, and it is my kids' responsibility to learn those laws before they find themselves in a situation where those laws could affect them.
All lovely quotes, but still no closer to a solution.
Basically, anything you say can and will be used against you but not for you.
You say that like it's a given rule, but yet it's part of your attorney's job to find the things said in your favor and argue for you. No, it's not the prosecutor's job to argue on your behalf. That's pretty inherent in having an adversarial justice system.
Your quotes also don't address the actual question at hand. You seem to advocate making investigators work for their results, but is that worth the risk to society if it's trivial to hide behind pseudonyms? Is absolute anonymity a freedom that's worth preserving? Why or why not?
...he'd sure run a lot less risk that way. You never know what kind of fanatic/lunatic will latch on to you and decide to make your life miserable.
Certainly true, but I'll note that he was murdered by civilians - not the courts. That is why I suggest that having pseudonyms is necessary, even if the courts can get to one's real identity.
We certainly can do both, but why should we, when one "solution" has far-reaching negative impacts, and does nothing to help fix the actual problem?
If the real problem is how the the courts treat a particular condition, why is it better to just hide the evidence of the condition?
Shouldn't we instead seek to fix the court?
Never attribute to malice that which is explained by stupidity.
I had a co-worker who posted online in a psychology forum using his real name. Some of those posts were used against him in family court, and he was denied custody of his children.
That's the problem, though. Using only the information you've given here (so not relating to your co-worker himself), let's consider the scenario objectively.
If he's saying something that is concerning enough to take children away, why would it be better if he could say those things anonymously or pseudonymously? Having an attached real identity doesn't change the factual basis of what he said, or the fact that he said it, or that whatever he said is concerning enough to make the court question the well-being of children in his custody.
While I do agree that having multiple disconnected identities is useful, and I dare say it's necessary, I would also argue that it's necessary to allow a court or law enforcement to pierce that veil, for the purposes of an investigation or discovery. Of course, the other side of that is that the judiciary must be trustworthy enough to only use that power for such limited purposes, which means the courts must show similar restraint in other areas as well. In turn, that means investigators must show restraint in what warrants they seek, so as to avoid embarrassment of the entire process.
The only resolution I can see is to have pseudonyms protected like wiretaps, requiring exceptional warrants and oversight before they can be pursued. I don't expect to see that happen anytime soon.
Everybody with whom you disagree is a Russian bot.
Now, that's not actually what I said at all. I said there are bots and sockpuppets on both sides, but they're focusing more on stirring up anger than having actual discussion. For example, one of the preferred tactics on both sides is "whataboutism", where they will bring up a completely unrelated subject like a recent court decision to steer the conversation away from rational analysis and towards partisan vitriol.
Did you know the Supreme Court, in effect, just destroyed public sector unions?
Oh look, there it is!
Why don't you focus on issues instead of the stupid Russian interference fantasy?
Foreign interference is an issue. It is probably the most important issue, because it undermines the legitimacy of every other democratic process.
Take your example, for instance. The SCOTUS has determined that collective bargaining is not necessarily always something a non-union worker wants (regardless of whether it's in their best interest), so under the First Amendment, non-union workers have the freedom to choose not to associate with the union.
Now, it's certainly easy to think this is a purely American problem. It's a case in an American court about American workers interpreting American laws governing American business practices. However, it's still a matter of international interest, as those American public-sector organizations are responsible for handling how the United States executes the duties of government, which in turn affects how the United States can compete globally with foreign efforts. If a foreign power can sway the American policy in a way that harms America's economic capabilities, they will create opportunities for their own advancement.
Similarly, American elections are vitally important for determining American policy. If a foreign government is able to promote a narcissistic President, for example, they would be able to sway any policy or political negotiations by simply rolling out red carpet and offering copious amounts of insubstantial flattery. It is imperative, then, that we fully investigate any allegation of impropriety during elections. Everything - from campaign funding to personnel selection, and beyond - should be open to scrutiny, even if nothing is ultimately found.
Even if the investigation ultimately finds no foreign influence, having a thorough investigation process itself deters foreign powers from trying to influence elections, as they can be sure the investigation will make such influence difficult to hide, at best.
As I understand, it's mostly private hobbyists and folks who care more about the prestige of running a radio station than about following the law.
These days, building a radio station costs under $1000 if you already have a suitable antenna location. You can get a $100 kit to do the interface, and a transmitter for about $500, then just a bit more for the antenna construction. It's well within the disposable income of many folks, who can then boast that they "own an independent radio station". Sometimes, that's enough motivation in itself, but there are also a good number of antagonists who will happily use radio to spread their message to the public.
Pirate radio is the modern evolution of flyposting. Anybody can do it, and it's only governed by some loosely-enforced rules, so the folks who don't care about rules aren't stopped.
There has actually been a good amount of research on this, by sources that I am admittedly far too lazy to find again on this lovely Monday morning.
Trump's apparent supporters include a large army of bot and sockpuppet accounts (spread through Twitter and Facebook, with notably similar trends on 4chan that are more difficult to track) that become active around 8-9AM every morning, post throughout the day, and stop activity at around 5PM. Their language reflects an education through high school, but they tend not to use allegory or references to pop culture (except for memes of their own creation), and very low engagement with credible experts on any given subject. They also show a curious lack of activity on certain holidays.
These patterns are also shown by an army of accounts attacking Trump. Same working hours, same linguistic style, and the same engagement patterns, with the only difference really being which names are being dog-whistled. Yes, it certainly appears there's somebody with a professional organization aimed primarily at creating controversy and unrest.
Now, the fun part of the analysis is that the pattern of work hours and holidays don't align with American time zones or American holidays. Instead, they mostly align with the work patterns in Moscow.
This is the correct solution, and I'm rather disappointed in /. that it's so far down the thread. There is no substitute for a proper risk analysis, which in this case would point to having redundancy.
Every time someone says "I moved all my infrastructure to (Google|AWS|OpenStack|Azure|closet servers)", it's invariably followed (perhaps years later) by "we lost just one little thing and our whole enterprise was crippled".
If your whole enterprise hangs on one credit card, one person, or one service, you have a significant risk that needs to be addressed.
Then in the off years, we'd have layoffs.
People tend to like that even less.
In my field, year-long spikes are common.
I'd support having all such things (including scheduled days off, vacation, overtime/comp time, etc.) kept indefinitely, with maximum caps for each kind. If an employee leaves for any reason, including being fired, they get paid out whatever they haven't used.
I'm quite happy to help my team meet their goals and go the extra mile to deliver a quality product to our customer..... but I certainly expect that once that's done, I'll get to go spend time with my family.
That's pretty much what I see, too. I am very intimately familiar with Explorys and their pre-merger business.
When Explorys was a startup, they had a solid product offering. It may not have been fully functional, but it was a niche product capable of solving a very particular problem in about 1 millionth of the time required by existing solutions. Their target customer was pharmaceutical companies looking to do clinical trials, and their product promised to make those trials (which are a major part of the cost in developing medications approved for human use) far less expensive, and much faster to execute.
After the deal with IBM, Explorys fell off the map. They seem to have stopped developing their solutions for drug-related efforts, and moved to being a data source for Watson. This is rather surprising to me, because their data focused mostly on patients and patient histories (as would be applicable to a clinical trial) rather than abstract medical knowledge. There was some early pre-IBM effort to have the system infer medical knowledge from commonly-occuring comorbidities (like the fact that about 50% of people with the "early Alzheimers" condition also have the "male" condition), but that effort suffered from a distinct lack of understanding obviousness.
It's certainly possible that was the plan all along with IBM: IBM was interested in the data collection agreements, and they'd make the AI problems go away. However, there wasn't much movement on making a commercially-viable product out of Watson, especially using essentially-unproven AI capabilities to supplant doctors' existing knowledge bases.
Explorys was really good at what it was designed to do. Once it was bolted onto a Jeopardy!-playing AI, it seems to have been limited to playing Jeopardy!, which doesn't really have a significant market.
It's all in how you define "comfortably."
I was mostly-unemployed for a while, and spent some savings of about $10K for a year. I had a cheap rental house, no outstanding debt, and just enough income to cover groceries and expenses. I, too, was comfortable at the time.
Granted, I didn't take a vacation, or travel overseas, or and fortunately had no major medical expenses. I didn't eat fancy dinners, and I kept leftovers. I learned to be quite happy with a meal of ramen and sausage, and my old Nokia phone did its job as much as it was needed. To borrow a phrase from another engineer, I lived "simply".
Now, I'm not suggesting the lifestyle works for everyone. I have a family to support now, and they want to see the world and have clothes without patches. I enjoy steak a lot more than my arteries would prefer. My house is now a nice little two-story as the end of a private road. I've started looking at some major medical bills. A $10K income won't come close to being "comfortable" for me today.
Ultimately, it's a question of what you want from life. If you are comfortable and happy with what you have, why should anyone else expect you to have more?
I realize I am just feeding a troll, but if you really believe that, you really are an idiot.
Well, I can say the same thing, I suppose. Either way, here we go...
It is not an emolument for someone to stay in a hotel that Trump happens to own. Presidents are allowed to own businesses and stock and property and other things that might be accretive to their net worth.
That is true, but that's not what's causing complaints. Previous Presidents have taken steps to ensure that they are separated from the business operations while in office, so they would have no way to know who or what they're doing non-government business with. Yes, cash might come from a foreign country into a Presdent's account eventually, but he won't know where it came from, and couldn't verify it if a foreign dignitary tried to claim it.
Instead, President Trump is hosting guests directly at his properties, charging them the usual high rates, and sending it directly into accounts he controls. There is no attempt to appear like he's separating his personal business from his administration. To countries with looser standards on corruption and bribery, it appears that putting money in Trump's pocket is an easy way to get close to him. Even if he's being perfectly honest and doesn't accept bribes (such as by having the personal moral fortitude to not check his hotels' guest lists), it still appears to the rest of the world that he is. That damage to America's reputation is exactly what the emoluments clause is intended to prevent.
It is also not illegal to collude with a foreign government. In fact, it is the President's FUCKING JOB to collude with foreign governments, on many many things, from trade to aid to research to defense.
As others noted, yes, the President is authorized to collaborate on certain activities. However, one of the things expressly forbidden is foreign interference in elections. The other requirement is that such negotiations must be handled according to certain procedures, which the President has utterly neglected.
It's also notable that President Trump has already registered as a candidate for the 2020 election. That means he not only gets to do campaign fundraising, but also falls under campaign laws that also limit his dealings with foreign entities.
The far-left whackos who insist there was some conspiracy are just that: far-left whackos.
I agree with you here. It's unreasonable to insist there was a conspiracy involving Trump, just like it's unreasonable to insist that Hillary Clinton should be in jail. There is evidence of some abnormalities in Trump's campaign, and there have been several indictments and guilty pleas already. What is not proven (though it certainly seems likely) is that Trump himself was involved to the extent the law forbids.
However, that's not the extent of the alleged offenses. He's also pushed on several occasions to have the investigation terminated prematurely, which is itself an obstruction of justice. Trump could have been completely innocent of the original conspiracies with Russia (which could possibly, if unlikely, have been the efforts of overzealous campaign managers), but the use of his official capacity (including his official Twitter account) to disparage and direct the FBI away from performing an exhaustive investigation would itself likely be a crime.
Even if Trump did blatantly violate the law, it's nearly (though not completely) impossible to indict a sitting President. Instead, Mueller's report will go to Congress, who could determine that Trump should be impeached. If Congress removes Trump from office, then he could be indicted. Then he could be convicted, and then we could say factually that he committed a crime.
Until then, he enjoys the same innocent-until-proven-guilty status that Hillary Clinton does, as he continues to be the subject of a duly-commissioned investigation.
To be fair, third-world countries have a slight advantage in that their infrastructure is all new and mostly modern, whereas the US is trying to piggyback on a lot of old POTS and first-gen fiber infrastructure.
In a lot of cases, developing countries are completely skipping copper infrastructure, and building out wireless systems.
Critics say this will, in effect, require all internet platforms to filter all content put online by users
I run a forum. I already have to deal with the occasional spam that gets through the registration system, and now I have to check everything my users say to see if someone else has already said it? No, thanks.
I've also built a few web applications, some of which accept user-submitted content. Do I now need to integrate that with a third-party scanning tool to enforce filtering? I'd really rather not, just from a licensing and contracting perspective...
I also note this comes hot on the heels of the GDPR. I guess it's time for another new privacy policy update, to tell folks that the information they submit (which might possibly be personally-identifiable) will now be handed off to a copyright scanner and checked to see if they dared to have an unoriginal thought...
With all due respect, fuck that.
Yeah, I should have worded that a bit better... I meant that immediately after the war, the Republicans were literally social justice warriors. For a few years, they had fought and won for social equality. You are right, though, that the glory faded away pretty quickly and the Republicans focused on business. As I understand, that's why the Democrats were able to enact segregation with little cohesive opposition.
While the economic events around the turn of the century certainly didn't help the Republican party, they didn't cause it to implode like the Great Depression did. When the Great Depression hit its hardest, it came right at the end of three Republican presidencies, which had covered the "Roaring Twenties"... so the Republicans were blamed for taking all that nice prosperity and ruining it. The success of the Democrat-led New Deal then pushed a lot of the on-the-fence voters toward the Democrat side, and set in motion the rest of the 20th century's political changes.
Oh, goody! It's time for a history lesson!
When slavery was a major issue in the United States, the parties looked very different from what we have now. The Democrats and Republicans had a lot of dissent within the parties, on pretty much every issue except one: slavery.
It seems weird to say it, but prior to the founding of the Republican party, political movements were more like sports teams than they are today. There was heavy anti-federalist sentiment, so people would usually support their state's party at a national level, mostly just to promote their own state's interests. Handling important issues federally was a rarity.
Then the civil war broke out.
The newly-formed Republican party was literally started as a one-issue party. They wanted to end slavery. They also absorbed a lot of the old Whig supporters (mostly from northern states), who wanted strong business support and social reform. When the southern Congressmen left their offices to join the Confederacy, the Republicans took over, by wide margins.
Obviously, slavery didn't last very long. The Union won the war, leaving Republicans in charge as the heroes of social equality, which worked until the Democrats came back a decade later. That's when segregation and Jim Crow laws came in from the Democrat side, and the Republicans pushed the Whig legacy of strong business.
The next big shift came with the Great Depression. All of that business-central policy collapsed on the Republicans, and people started leaving the party. Notably, the folks mainly concerned with social reform ended up in the Democrat camp, slowly reversing the Democrats' position on social equality. By the 1960s, with still no major opposition on that front by the Republicans, the Democrats actually ended up pushing to reverse their own segregation policies.
That support for the civil rights movement was very unpopular among the traditional southern Democrats, so they left the Democrat party, just like the Republicans had 30 years earlier. They ended up in the Republican camp.
In short, through the middle of the 20th century, the two major parties swapped their positions on social policy, while keeping their position on economic policy. That's pretty much the situation we have today, where the Democrats push for strong social equality and small-business economics, and the Republicans want big business and try to ignore racism entirely.
To wit, then: Democrats have principles today, but the Democrats we have today aren't the Democrats we had when the Democrats supported slavery.
(For clarity, I mostly align with the Whig ideas, mixed with a bit of socialism and statism... I don't really care who you are or how you were born, but if you follow the law you should have an equal opportunity for success as anyone else)