>ignorant much ? You should take a look in the mirror.
>why do you want it back as fossil fuels? Maybe because that at least has a chance of actually happening.
>have you heard of photosynthesis? it takes far less time than "millions of years" for plants to remove CO2 from atmosphere Eeeeehhh wrong. Plants are carbon neutral. Every single atom of carbon a plant removes from the air with photosynthesis gets bonded back with Oxygen and turned back into CO2. Every plant gets eaten, some things eat parts while it's alive (like monkeys eating fruit and caterpillars eating leaves) and the rest get eaten by bacteria when it dies. These creatures burn the carbon from eating the plant, and breath CO2 back out. Breathing is carbon neutral BECAUSE plants are carbon neutral. They all have a nett-zero effect on the total CO2 level of the atmosphere. The only thing that can change is burning carbon that was previously trapped in solid form outside the natural cycles, such as fossil fuels which were burried a very long time ago when the composition of the atmosphere was very, very different (and humans could NOT have survived or - indeed - existed. It was a great time if you were a 3ft long arachnid though).
While you are rightish in generalization many of those statements have specific exceptions. A good example is essential fatty acids. A key requirement for brain cells. They are also "essential" because we have to eat them - our bodies cannot make them from food that does not already contain them. The richest source of essential fatty acids is seafood and everything else has thousands of times less. So seafood really is brainfood - especially in childhood.
In 1978 DEC was the biggest computer company on earth. In 1979 they were bankrupt. Yes apple is as viable as any tech company. No tech company is ever very viable. Of course those that have huge cash supplies can stave off demise longer but they all die in the end. Apple is not special. Their demise will come. So will microsoft, google, oracle and yes even redhat and canonicle. Never be wed to one tech supplier. They all die.
>Obama's justice department never prosecutes senior members of his administration for criminal conduct
Except that nobody in this article is a senior member of his administration, in fact none of them are or were members of his administration at all. These events all occurred during the Bush years and these were senior members of Dubya's administration, not Obama's. A few of them were still employed there into the first year or two of Obama's first term but they all move along long ago. Halbrooks for example now works for a private lawfirm.
We are talking about events that happened circa 2006, ten years ago, long before Obama under Bush and Cheney.
Here's the problem: A two-person election in November, Hillary will almost certainly win. Indeed, if history is anything to go by - it will be a massive landslide - every time Republicans have nominated an angry demagogue like Trump in the past the democrats got a landslide victory (see Barry Goldwater for example).
But if it's a three person election - then Trump may very well win, regardless who the third person is. Lets say Bernie Sanders decides to run as an independent. While he lost on maths, the man got a LOT of votes, and even in the states where lost his margins were narrow. One could easily see him taking several states that would otherwise have gone to Hillary, and just one or two states could make all the difference. I would prefer Bernie over Hillary but right now I hope he drops out after the convention - because if he runs then Trump wins. Now what if say Kassich or Rubio runs ? You know, classic establishment republicans ? Well the landslide is definitely off the the table - since a lot of the independents who will gladly choose Hillary over Trump would not choose either over Kassich or Rubio. That would take votes from both of them - and the maths will get very complicated. It's unlikely this mainstream republican candidate could win but which of the other two does is suddenly a gamble, and Trump's odds look a lot better. Okay, what if we one of the republican crazies ran ? Cruz or Paul maybe ? Well the trouble with those guys are - they always only appealed to the same brand of wingnuts that Trump drew... and he is better at it than they are. But a lot of independents will, yet again, choose their brand of crazy over Hillary - and that may be enough to give Trump a victory.
That's the problem right now - you got the republicans having gone full retard and nominated a man whose speeches are identical to those of fascist leaders and nazi's through the ages - but the democrats responded by nominating the woman with the worst unfavorables in years. Trump is probably the only candidate in history so terrible that Hillary could beat him (I don't think she could have won against either McCain or Romney... well maybe McCain if he had kept Palin). But that ability to beat him utterly depends on a two-candidate race. Any third candidate who splits the vote and the orangutang son of the NAZI gets the nuclear launch codes.
This pattern has been prevalent for a while. Quite a few candidates have lost because a third-party got just enough votes they would otherwise have gotten to cost them a win (Gore for example). But I think this is the most stark example ever. So the question is, how badly do you NOT want a world where Goldwater won ? Can you imagine if that froth at the mouth lunatic had been president during the Bay of Pigs ? When the world was on the verge of a nuclear war, most of the credit for it not happening came down to a president who managed to keep his cool. JFK earned respect that day. Trump is the goldwater of our generation and make no mistake, there will be Bay of Pigs like events in the next 8 years, there always is... when they come, you need somebody making the calls who is known for acting calmly and keeping his cool and making careful, calculated decisions. You do not want an angry demagogue who never thinks before he speaks, let alone acts.
>They were built to help the people of the US. The trouble is that it is very easy for good ideas to get turned to nefarious purposes, and this is doubly true of wartime ideas when peace comes. The CIA was born out of the wartime OSS. Not so very long after that, JFK disbanded the CIA as he recognized the threat of having such an organisation outside of the war. During the war the enemy was clear, the need was clear -and the risks of what would happen if they failed kept them focused on the right stuff. Outside the war - the combination of power and secrecy was a deadly threat. Of course, in one of his very first acts in office, LBJ undid that and reinstated the CIA. This bit of history is revealing - and it's part of the reason why JFK's death has been the subject of so many conspiracy theories, there were just too many people who stood to lose power and privilege as a result of him disbanding the CIA. I don't know if there's any truth to any of them (real conspiracies do happen after all, but most conspiracy theories are bullshit) but I can see how this confluence of events would inspire suspicions.
Either way - JFK's reasoning for disbanding the CIA was solid. There was no reason for the CIA to exist in peacetime - even with the cold war ongoing. The same could be said of the NSA. The FBI, not being military was a lesser threat and I would argue has actually improved over time. Hoover's FBI had files on *everybody* today's FBI is a lot more restrained. You could argue it should be even moreso, or maybe even that it should not exist, but it's the one case where the trend seems to have been towards greater transparency and less intrusive behavior - perhaps because the FBI's very mandate is to deal with citizens, they operate more in the public eye and under public scrutiny. Their targets also get a day in court where flagrant 4th amendment violations are case-losers. Instead, you see a different kind of corruption there - like FBI lab-techs flagrantly lying to courts over the strength of DNA evidence for example.
In all cases, government organisations ought to be kept tightly focused and face real and serious repercussions for bad behavior, in some cases (like a wartime intelligence operation) these can come from circumstances, in the rest it must be written into legislation... and some of them should never exist.
I wonder sometimes, how much better a country the USA would not be, if defense budget was cut to 1/6th of what it is (which would still be 3 times bigger than any other country) - and that money spent instead on scientific research and the social safety net (which in total amounts to less than 0.05% percent of government spending yet we are constantly told is unaffordable).
I don't see how that's useful at all actually. We've had FreePascal for almost 20 years now, which is complete, has replacements for every signficant TP library and even a complete replacement for the Delphi libraries (with full comprehension of the ObjectPascal dialect) which has been used to implement Lazarus - a complete free Delphi replacement.
Now I have't coded with any of these things for well over 10 years but they do exist and frankly if you need them (for example to port an old TP or Delphi app to a new platform) they are right there for the downloading. They give you everything the TP source does, plus everything you would have gotten out of the Delphi source and a huge deal more (since FP can link to C libraries so you effectively have access to every shared library out there). Porting an old DOS program to Linux with that is ridiculously easy.
On this point... whatever happened to BOA Constructor ? I guess RAD never really appealed to the python crowd since it seems to have died a quiet death.
>These days, most of those folks have moved on to Python.
Somehow I doubt that. The people who mostly used VB were not *just* looking for an easy language, they were looking for an easy language to write Windows GUI apps in. Python is decidedly difficult to do GUI work in as you need to learn a GUI library, and there is no common standard [well there's tikinter but nobody actually uses that and with good reason]. So you could use QT which works on all platforms but unless you want to GPL your code that costs a pretty penny, or GTK - and each time you're fighting with a library designed for a different language and badly integrated. Ubuntu had some project to try and make easy python GUI programs with but that only ran on Ubuntu desktops so... meh. There is WX which is a wonderfully lovely library to code with - and has one of the most horrifying build and dependency chains I have ever had the horror of dealing with. KiVY has some of the ugliest interfaces I've ever coded to, tough it does have the advantage of being portable to the extent that you can write python apps for android with it (though in theory you could also do that with QT).
Of course, of all the platforms python runs on - the one it is *hardest* to write a GUI app for is Windows. If you want multiplatform you'll have to bundle your chosen library. Coding directly to the Win API in python is.... weakly supported at best, the runtime environment isn't present in general and in fact, it's so badly supported that most python devs who DO want to ship something for windows end up using a compiler that builds their entire application as well as the python interpreter into a self-contained EXE just to spare their users the horror of trying to install dependencies where every concept of a package manager is a badly designed bolt-on like NPM.
Simply put... for all it's wonders (I love python), it's a terrible fit if your goal is to write windows GUI programs. The language per se may be fine for it, but the support structures to make that easy simply does not exist. I suspect most former VB coders (and the people who followed in their footsteps) are coding in C# actually. That's the easy language to write a windows app in today, and if you're a diligent and disciplined coder you could even make it run in Linux with Mono. Not that many people do, mono isn't even installed by default by any distros I know about anymore (though most still include the open-source Java), but it at least exists and it did lead to things like the Unity engine being cross-platform.
Every ecig I ever owned had safety circuits to shut down power if the overdraw. Now perhaps some cheaply made ones lack this but those are decidedly not "typical".
You dont even have the right country so all your assumptions are laughable. And if you expect a full day of work as opposed to a projecct finished on time you are a fool. You are punishing your best workers for being better fucks sake. Work hours only make sense on an assembly line where one person cannot produce faster than the line. It makes no sense for knowledge work where no two people will ever produce at the same rate.
But you were the one declaring that you are owed gratitude for creating jobs.
Oh and if you are anti-union then that makes you a hypocrite in the extreme. You claim to be about free contract but you oppose workers making free contracts with each other for collective bargaining. So you really only want free contracts when you have the stronger negotiating position so you can enforce your terms. You cannot bear the thought of signing free contracts with people who actually negotiate with you as equals and can set *their* terms as well. You dont care about freedom of contract. You want freedom to exploit and so you oppose anything that intrudes on that whether its labour laws or workers choosing to bargain collectively. Businesses sign cooperation agreements all the time. All over the world there are buyers clubs where consumers band together to negotiate better prices from retailers. A worker is a business that sells labour to other businesses. Its also the only type of business most people can have so it is the absolute most important one in the economy. The economy does not exist to make anybody rich. That it can is a side effect. The entire point of having an economy is to feed the population. So if the most common business is not profitable the entire economy is a failure. A union is just a bunch of those small businesses that decided to merge into a cooperation (like a corporation but employee owned). In every sphere of tge economy there is value in mergers and forming corporations. Yet you oppose this one kind ? You oppose only the kind that reduces your capacity to exploit ? For you to claim you believe in freedom of contract after admitting that is laughable. The lie is exposed. The hipocracy revealed.
At least be honest with yourself. Oh and the person who is worth less than minimum.wage does not exist but if he did he would be the boss who avoids paying it.
The fact that you thought "India" of all places just proves the extremity of your ignorance. But then you did say "form opinions without help" so I guess your ignorance is willfull. India has terrible labour laws and is one of the hotbeds of modern slavery. How did you get India from me championing my country's good labour laws ?
Well I do not live in America and never said 6 times American minimum wage. I considee my countries minimum wage too low. Studies have proven that to have any chance of ever escaping poverty somebody here needs to earn r4500 a month at least. Minimum wage for cleaners is r750. I pay r4500 and increase it by r100 per year.
That said it definitely can be done in the USA. There was a whole slew of stories recently on/. About an American company that adjusted salaries so nobody earned less than 70k. Like me that guy based the figure on studies of minimum income required to improve your quality of life. There was also a follow up showing his company profits quadrupled after doing that. Its an old business lesson only the smart people learn: to be the richest company you need to be the one that pays the most. Henry Ford proved it in the past as well. Its simple economics. Pay your people more than anybody else gets and they do not strike. They do not complain. They become your best customers and they give you tons of free marketing by telling their friends and family what a great boss you are - encouraging those people to buy from you and tell their friends in turn. A boss who pays best will get a large chunk of it back in new business he otherwise would never have had.
But here is the other side of the coin. There are more slaves in the world right now than the total ever transported in the transatlantic slave trade. 70% off all chocolate are made from beans picked by children kidnapped and forced to work themselves to death. Nearly all the world's granite is mined by forced labour. I could go on and on. Everywhere that strong labour laws are not in place and not enforced that is what happens. Some of histories most brutal slaveholders were key figures in the very idea of individual liberty. Frankly I have no doubt that if you could get away with it you would be one too. In fact I fear telling you this may inspire you to relocate to one of those countries in order to do so. People like you do that if we let them. Thats why we need laws against people like you. You want gratitude for giving jobs ? Fuck you. Gratitude is reserved for things you do to benefit only somebody else. Things you do to benefit yourself do not qualify even if you think somebody else also benefits - because that is not the motovation. Gratitude is for gifts and charity. It is for when you harm yourself to help others. Using others to make yourself richer deserves the rxact opposite of charity.
Not to mention all the oddities of "SHC" like melted bones can be explained quite satisfactorily by the wick effect, as experiments have repeatedly proven. When there IS a perfectly viable scientific explanation for the evidence you found, then claims of an unexplained phenomenon become extremely suspect. And the evidence mostly consists of bodies found in states of burning that suggest far higher heat than normal. Nothing to suggest it was spontaneous or extraordinary... all you need is to be wearing tight clothing or have a blanket wrapped around you, anything that can soak up fat when it starts to melt and form a wick so you burn out really slowly over many, many hours.
Even without a GFI the risk is extremely close to zero. Electricity always takes the shortest route. If that powerstrip falls in the water, the shortest route is a direct short circuit from live to neutral. A tub of water can't hold charge and even if it could charge can't kill you - no current would be flowing through the pool. Hell even if by some miracle current did flow through the pool it still wouldn't harm a human in the water - it would flow around the person since water (especially chlorinated water) is far, far lower resistance than human skin.
The only real danger actually is removing the thing at the end, if your hands are still wet - or the powerstrip got wet you risk creating a short circuit that DOES run through your body. It's very unlikely (and even more unlikely to run through more than your thumb) but it's at least theoretically possible, unlike the "powerstrip fell in the pool and electrocuted him" idea, that only works in murder movies, in the real world you would almost certainly not even be injured. It's the high-tech version of ground-glass-in-food - as a method of killing somebody, it's so close to impossible to succeed that you would be better off just wishing the guy would get hit by lightning.
People have a lot of paranoia about electricity based on really not understanding it. Human skin has incredibly high resistance and so even if you are a short circuit it mostly runs outside the body. The risk comes in when the voltage heats you up. Clamped to the cable long enough the heat burns skin away - and electricity gets really dangerous when it hits the bloodstream. Directly through the bloodstream - 1v is more than enough to kill you. The calculations have been done, one volt in the blood -hits the heart with a stronger current than the electrical signals from the brain... and it obeys what it sees as a regulatory signal and basically shuts down. Instant heart attack (like a defibrillator in reverse).
But the powerstrip on the pool ? Nah. That's really not a high risk situation, you take a much higher risk every time you drive a car.
As trainers not active duty. If an FBI agent tries to arrest me in my home country I have every right to use deadly force against him because outside US jurisdiction it is not a legal arrest. It is kidnapping and shooting him is self defense. No sane judge would convict me.
>Are corporations so big they can play off one jurisdiction against another to do whatever they want?
Yes. A great many of them are. Which effectively makes them entirely lawless organisations - and that's exactly why corporations can be far more dangerous than governments. Governments all have to answer to somebody, even the dictators end up answering to other governments (too much bad press and you end up with UN soldiers showing up to "relieve you of duty"). Corporations only answer to shareholders - none of whom single-handedly holds enough sway for any moral concerns to influence behavior and can and do commit any atrocity that can somehow save or make them money - by simply going somewhere it's legal to do.
The only way you will end that is if governments start saying "If you do business here you must comply with our laws EVERYWHERE, otherwise you are free to NOT do business here". But that will never happen, and I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it as there would be nothing stopping Iran and North Korea from doing the same. It may be worth allowing for certain very narrow legal areas - like labour law and tax law, provided we put in place enough checks and balances to prevent scope creep.
Currently - corporations are the most brutal and murderous entities on the planet but VERY recently that title belonged to governments. We do need to take care that our response to the current problem does not aggravate the former one. It's not like governments ever got LESS brutal, corporations just managed to overtake them.
> However, what happens if a French citizen requests they be forgotten by Google while US investigators are looking into that same person on suspicion of terrorism and have a court order demanding preservation of the data?
No problem. There is nothing in the right to be forgotten that requires Google to delete data, it only needs to delete the data PUBLICLY. Remove it from search results, nobody will check if they deleted the entry from the database or just flagged it for "do not display".
It's a ridiculously easy problem to solve.
But it's interesting how your basic assumption begs the question: what the fuck makes you think US investigators have the right to investigate somebody in another country ? He is NOT subject to their authority. Unless he commits a crime IN the US they have no right to be doing that investigation in the first place. If he does, their right ends when he crosses the border and they are supposed to hand the investigation over to Interpol and work with the authorities in the country the person is in now through this interpol. If the person was planning a terrorist attack in another country, then the authority to investigate him lies EXCLUSIVELY with the law enforcement of that country. You bet your ass no sane court would grant a right-to-be-forgotten request if it's opposed by legitimate law enforcement. US investigators do not have the right to investigate non-US citizens who are not currently in the US. We didn't vote for the US government, we get no say in your laws and we are not required to comply with them and your investigators have no right to so much as know our names. We have our OWN investigators thank you very much and we will investigate and prosecute our own criminals. No country has yet invited the FBI to come investigate their criminals for them and no country is likely to ever do so. Countries do sometimes invite highly successful investigators from other countries (the FBI is frequently one) to come TRAIN their local investigators and bring some of those skills across, but the authority to USE them belongs to the local government. The US government's authority to do anything ends at your own borders and it's high time Americans figure that out.
Not to mention, as I recall (and memory could be faulty) the original court case that led to this law in the first place - was brought by somebody who was entirely innocent of the bad behavior which was showing up in a google search from a defamation piece false written by a third party. If I recall he was also suing said aleged defamer but I don't know the outcome of that case.
The point is - not everything that is on the net about your is automatically relevant or useful information, much of it may not even have a shred of truth to it. Look at the many cases world wide of people having their credit records ruined because some credit agency confused them with somebody else who just happens to have the same name. We even had a case here in my country where it happened to an airforce intelligence officer. Those guys are literally legally prohibited from ever having bad debts - it would create too much of an incentive for things like bribery andyou seriously do not want high-level military personnel who handle classified data to be easily tempted people. But a credit agency confused him with somebody else, from the opposite end of the country who had the same name and a bunch of bad debts. Took years to clear his record. Cases like that happen all the time.
There are plenty of perfectly legitimate times when what information is available about you could be utterly false. The EU's laws in this regard are addressing a very real problem that seriously impacts on citizens liberty and lives - the only thing wrong about these laws is that they do not have equivalents in EVERY free country like the seriously ought to.
The law is NOT being enforced externally at all. Nobody on the ECJ is going to give Google any grief if they ignore a request by me to be forgotten - I'm not a European citizen and my country does not have such a right.
But Google has to comply with the laws of the countries it operates in, in so far as it concerns data about people from those countries. By Google's reasoning, if you kidnap somebody and take them to a country where kidnapping is legal - you cannot be prosecuted ? Their right not to be kidnapped dissappeared after you took them to a country that doesn't recognize it ? Of course not. They are still citizens from a country where that is a right - and their government still has a duty to protect that right, even if they are not currently within it's borders. I see no reasonable reason why a person's data should be any different.
Slashdot Mirror
>ignorant much ?
You should take a look in the mirror.
>why do you want it back as fossil fuels?
Maybe because that at least has a chance of actually happening.
>have you heard of photosynthesis? it takes far less time than "millions of years" for plants to remove CO2 from atmosphere
Eeeeehhh wrong. Plants are carbon neutral. Every single atom of carbon a plant removes from the air with photosynthesis gets bonded back with Oxygen and turned back into CO2. Every plant gets eaten, some things eat parts while it's alive (like monkeys eating fruit and caterpillars eating leaves) and the rest get eaten by bacteria when it dies. These creatures burn the carbon from eating the plant, and breath CO2 back out. Breathing is carbon neutral BECAUSE plants are carbon neutral. They all have a nett-zero effect on the total CO2 level of the atmosphere. The only thing that can change is burning carbon that was previously trapped in solid form outside the natural cycles, such as fossil fuels which were burried a very long time ago when the composition of the atmosphere was very, very different (and humans could NOT have survived or - indeed - existed. It was a great time if you were a 3ft long arachnid though).
Found the zealot.
I GPL everything I write. But I was thinkking of typical windows devs not speaking for myself. Many of them (amd their bosses) are quite anti-GPL.
While you are rightish in generalization many of those statements have specific exceptions. A good example is essential fatty acids. A key requirement for brain cells. They are also "essential" because we have to eat them - our bodies cannot make them from food that does not already contain them. The richest source of essential fatty acids is seafood and everything else has thousands of times less. So seafood really is brainfood - especially in childhood.
In 1978 DEC was the biggest computer company on earth. In 1979 they were bankrupt. Yes apple is as viable as any tech company. No tech company is ever very viable. Of course those that have huge cash supplies can stave off demise longer but they all die in the end. Apple is not special. Their demise will come. So will microsoft, google, oracle and yes even redhat and canonicle. Never be wed to one tech supplier. They all die.
>Obama's justice department never prosecutes senior members of his administration for criminal conduct
Except that nobody in this article is a senior member of his administration, in fact none of them are or were members of his administration at all. These events all occurred during the Bush years and these were senior members of Dubya's administration, not Obama's. A few of them were still employed there into the first year or two of Obama's first term but they all move along long ago. Halbrooks for example now works for a private lawfirm.
We are talking about events that happened circa 2006, ten years ago, long before Obama under Bush and Cheney.
Here's the problem:
A two-person election in November, Hillary will almost certainly win. Indeed, if history is anything to go by - it will be a massive landslide - every time Republicans have nominated an angry demagogue like Trump in the past the democrats got a landslide victory (see Barry Goldwater for example).
But if it's a three person election - then Trump may very well win, regardless who the third person is. Lets say Bernie Sanders decides to run as an independent. While he lost on maths, the man got a LOT of votes, and even in the states where lost his margins were narrow. One could easily see him taking several states that would otherwise have gone to Hillary, and just one or two states could make all the difference. I would prefer Bernie over Hillary but right now I hope he drops out after the convention - because if he runs then Trump wins.
Now what if say Kassich or Rubio runs ? You know, classic establishment republicans ? Well the landslide is definitely off the the table - since a lot of the independents who will gladly choose Hillary over Trump would not choose either over Kassich or Rubio. That would take votes from both of them - and the maths will get very complicated. It's unlikely this mainstream republican candidate could win but which of the other two does is suddenly a gamble, and Trump's odds look a lot better.
Okay, what if we one of the republican crazies ran ? Cruz or Paul maybe ? Well the trouble with those guys are - they always only appealed to the same brand of wingnuts that Trump drew... and he is better at it than they are. But a lot of independents will, yet again, choose their brand of crazy over Hillary - and that may be enough to give Trump a victory.
That's the problem right now - you got the republicans having gone full retard and nominated a man whose speeches are identical to those of fascist leaders and nazi's through the ages - but the democrats responded by nominating the woman with the worst unfavorables in years. Trump is probably the only candidate in history so terrible that Hillary could beat him (I don't think she could have won against either McCain or Romney... well maybe McCain if he had kept Palin). But that ability to beat him utterly depends on a two-candidate race. Any third candidate who splits the vote and the orangutang son of the NAZI gets the nuclear launch codes.
This pattern has been prevalent for a while. Quite a few candidates have lost because a third-party got just enough votes they would otherwise have gotten to cost them a win (Gore for example). But I think this is the most stark example ever.
So the question is, how badly do you NOT want a world where Goldwater won ? Can you imagine if that froth at the mouth lunatic had been president during the Bay of Pigs ? When the world was on the verge of a nuclear war, most of the credit for it not happening came down to a president who managed to keep his cool. JFK earned respect that day. Trump is the goldwater of our generation and make no mistake, there will be Bay of Pigs like events in the next 8 years, there always is... when they come, you need somebody making the calls who is known for acting calmly and keeping his cool and making careful, calculated decisions. You do not want an angry demagogue who never thinks before he speaks, let alone acts.
>They were built to help the people of the US.
The trouble is that it is very easy for good ideas to get turned to nefarious purposes, and this is doubly true of wartime ideas when peace comes. The CIA was born out of the wartime OSS. Not so very long after that, JFK disbanded the CIA as he recognized the threat of having such an organisation outside of the war. During the war the enemy was clear, the need was clear -and the risks of what would happen if they failed kept them focused on the right stuff. Outside the war - the combination of power and secrecy was a deadly threat.
Of course, in one of his very first acts in office, LBJ undid that and reinstated the CIA. This bit of history is revealing - and it's part of the reason why JFK's death has been the subject of so many conspiracy theories, there were just too many people who stood to lose power and privilege as a result of him disbanding the CIA. I don't know if there's any truth to any of them (real conspiracies do happen after all, but most conspiracy theories are bullshit) but I can see how this confluence of events would inspire suspicions.
Either way - JFK's reasoning for disbanding the CIA was solid. There was no reason for the CIA to exist in peacetime - even with the cold war ongoing. The same could be said of the NSA.
The FBI, not being military was a lesser threat and I would argue has actually improved over time. Hoover's FBI had files on *everybody* today's FBI is a lot more restrained. You could argue it should be even moreso, or maybe even that it should not exist, but it's the one case where the trend seems to have been towards greater transparency and less intrusive behavior - perhaps because the FBI's very mandate is to deal with citizens, they operate more in the public eye and under public scrutiny. Their targets also get a day in court where flagrant 4th amendment violations are case-losers. Instead, you see a different kind of corruption there - like FBI lab-techs flagrantly lying to courts over the strength of DNA evidence for example.
In all cases, government organisations ought to be kept tightly focused and face real and serious repercussions for bad behavior, in some cases (like a wartime intelligence operation) these can come from circumstances, in the rest it must be written into legislation... and some of them should never exist.
I wonder sometimes, how much better a country the USA would not be, if defense budget was cut to 1/6th of what it is (which would still be 3 times bigger than any other country) - and that money spent instead on scientific research and the social safety net (which in total amounts to less than 0.05% percent of government spending yet we are constantly told is unaffordable).
I don't see how that's useful at all actually. We've had FreePascal for almost 20 years now, which is complete, has replacements for every signficant TP library and even a complete replacement for the Delphi libraries (with full comprehension of the ObjectPascal dialect) which has been used to implement Lazarus - a complete free Delphi replacement.
Now I have't coded with any of these things for well over 10 years but they do exist and frankly if you need them (for example to port an old TP or Delphi app to a new platform) they are right there for the downloading. They give you everything the TP source does, plus everything you would have gotten out of the Delphi source and a huge deal more (since FP can link to C libraries so you effectively have access to every shared library out there). Porting an old DOS program to Linux with that is ridiculously easy.
>At least smallpox doesn't always cause permanent brain damage.
Some would argue that death is a form of permanent brain damage... though less severe than what VB causes.
On this point... whatever happened to BOA Constructor ? I guess RAD never really appealed to the python crowd since it seems to have died a quiet death.
>These days, most of those folks have moved on to Python.
Somehow I doubt that. The people who mostly used VB were not *just* looking for an easy language, they were looking for an easy language to write Windows GUI apps in. Python is decidedly difficult to do GUI work in as you need to learn a GUI library, and there is no common standard [well there's tikinter but nobody actually uses that and with good reason]. So you could use QT which works on all platforms but unless you want to GPL your code that costs a pretty penny, or GTK - and each time you're fighting with a library designed for a different language and badly integrated. Ubuntu had some project to try and make easy python GUI programs with but that only ran on Ubuntu desktops so... meh.
There is WX which is a wonderfully lovely library to code with - and has one of the most horrifying build and dependency chains I have ever had the horror of dealing with. KiVY has some of the ugliest interfaces I've ever coded to, tough it does have the advantage of being portable to the extent that you can write python apps for android with it (though in theory you could also do that with QT).
Of course, of all the platforms python runs on - the one it is *hardest* to write a GUI app for is Windows. If you want multiplatform you'll have to bundle your chosen library. Coding directly to the Win API in python is .... weakly supported at best, the runtime environment isn't present in general and in fact, it's so badly supported that most python devs who DO want to ship something for windows end up using a compiler that builds their entire application as well as the python interpreter into a self-contained EXE just to spare their users the horror of trying to install dependencies where every concept of a package manager is a badly designed bolt-on like NPM.
Simply put... for all it's wonders (I love python), it's a terrible fit if your goal is to write windows GUI programs. The language per se may be fine for it, but the support structures to make that easy simply does not exist. I suspect most former VB coders (and the people who followed in their footsteps) are coding in C# actually. That's the easy language to write a windows app in today, and if you're a diligent and disciplined coder you could even make it run in Linux with Mono. Not that many people do, mono isn't even installed by default by any distros I know about anymore (though most still include the open-source Java), but it at least exists and it did lead to things like the Unity engine being cross-platform.
>A discarded napkin?
Personally I find discarded TP to have a higher throughput but that may be limited to MySQL post-Oracle.
Every ecig I ever owned had safety circuits to shut down power if the overdraw. Now perhaps some cheaply made ones lack this but those are decidedly not "typical".
You dont even have the right country so all your assumptions are laughable. And if you expect a full day of work as opposed to a projecct finished on time you are a fool. You are punishing your best workers for being better fucks sake. Work hours only make sense on an assembly line where one person cannot produce faster than the line. It makes no sense for knowledge work where no two people will ever produce at the same rate.
But you were the one declaring that you are owed gratitude for creating jobs.
Oh and if you are anti-union then that makes you a hypocrite in the extreme. You claim to be about free contract but you oppose workers making free contracts with each other for collective bargaining. So you really only want free contracts when you have the stronger negotiating position so you can enforce your terms. You cannot bear the thought of signing free contracts with people who actually negotiate with you as equals and can set *their* terms as well. You dont care about freedom of contract. You want freedom to exploit and so you oppose anything that intrudes on that whether its labour laws or workers choosing to bargain collectively. Businesses sign cooperation agreements all the time. All over the world there are buyers clubs where consumers band together to negotiate better prices from retailers. A worker is a business that sells labour to other businesses. Its also the only type of business most people can have so it is the absolute most important one in the economy. The economy does not exist to make anybody rich. That it can is a side effect. The entire point of having an economy is to feed the population. So if the most common business is not profitable the entire economy is a failure.
A union is just a bunch of those small businesses that decided to merge into a cooperation (like a corporation but employee owned). In every sphere of tge economy there is value in mergers and forming corporations. Yet you oppose this one kind ? You oppose only the kind that reduces your capacity to exploit ? For you to claim you believe in freedom of contract after admitting that is laughable. The lie is exposed. The hipocracy revealed.
At least be honest with yourself. Oh and the person who is worth less than minimum.wage does not exist but if he did he would be the boss who avoids paying it.
The fact that you thought "India" of all places just proves the extremity of your ignorance. But then you did say "form opinions without help" so I guess your ignorance is willfull.
India has terrible labour laws and is one of the hotbeds of modern slavery. How did you get India from me championing my country's good labour laws ?
Well I do not live in America and never said 6 times American minimum wage. I considee my countries minimum wage too low. Studies have proven that to have any chance of ever escaping poverty somebody here needs to earn r4500 a month at least. Minimum wage for cleaners is r750. I pay r4500 and increase it by r100 per year.
That said it definitely can be done in the USA. There was a whole slew of stories recently on /. About an American company that adjusted salaries so nobody earned less than 70k. Like me that guy based the figure on studies of minimum income required to improve your quality of life. There was also a follow up showing his company profits quadrupled after doing that.
Its an old business lesson only the smart people learn: to be the richest company you need to be the one that pays the most. Henry Ford proved it in the past as well. Its simple economics. Pay your people more than anybody else gets and they do not strike. They do not complain. They become your best customers and they give you tons of free marketing by telling their friends and family what a great boss you are - encouraging those people to buy from you and tell their friends in turn. A boss who pays best will get a large chunk of it back in new business he otherwise would never have had.
But here is the other side of the coin. There are more slaves in the world right now than the total ever transported in the transatlantic slave trade. 70% off all chocolate are made from beans picked by children kidnapped and forced to work themselves to death. Nearly all the world's granite is mined by forced labour. I could go on and on.
Everywhere that strong labour laws are not in place and not enforced that is what happens. Some of histories most brutal slaveholders were key figures in the very idea of individual liberty.
Frankly I have no doubt that if you could get away with it you would be one too. In fact I fear telling you this may inspire you to relocate to one of those countries in order to do so.
People like you do that if we let them. Thats why we need laws against people like you.
You want gratitude for giving jobs ? Fuck you. Gratitude is reserved for things you do to benefit only somebody else. Things you do to benefit yourself do not qualify even if you think somebody else also benefits - because that is not the motovation.
Gratitude is for gifts and charity. It is for when you harm yourself to help others. Using others to make yourself richer deserves the rxact opposite of charity.
Not to mention all the oddities of "SHC" like melted bones can be explained quite satisfactorily by the wick effect, as experiments have repeatedly proven. When there IS a perfectly viable scientific explanation for the evidence you found, then claims of an unexplained phenomenon become extremely suspect. And the evidence mostly consists of bodies found in states of burning that suggest far higher heat than normal. Nothing to suggest it was spontaneous or extraordinary... all you need is to be wearing tight clothing or have a blanket wrapped around you, anything that can soak up fat when it starts to melt and form a wick so you burn out really slowly over many, many hours.
Even without a GFI the risk is extremely close to zero. Electricity always takes the shortest route. If that powerstrip falls in the water, the shortest route is a direct short circuit from live to neutral. A tub of water can't hold charge and even if it could charge can't kill you - no current would be flowing through the pool. Hell even if by some miracle current did flow through the pool it still wouldn't harm a human in the water - it would flow around the person since water (especially chlorinated water) is far, far lower resistance than human skin.
The only real danger actually is removing the thing at the end, if your hands are still wet - or the powerstrip got wet you risk creating a short circuit that DOES run through your body. It's very unlikely (and even more unlikely to run through more than your thumb) but it's at least theoretically possible, unlike the "powerstrip fell in the pool and electrocuted him" idea, that only works in murder movies, in the real world you would almost certainly not even be injured. It's the high-tech version of ground-glass-in-food - as a method of killing somebody, it's so close to impossible to succeed that you would be better off just wishing the guy would get hit by lightning.
People have a lot of paranoia about electricity based on really not understanding it. Human skin has incredibly high resistance and so even if you are a short circuit it mostly runs outside the body. The risk comes in when the voltage heats you up. Clamped to the cable long enough the heat burns skin away - and electricity gets really dangerous when it hits the bloodstream. Directly through the bloodstream - 1v is more than enough to kill you. The calculations have been done, one volt in the blood -hits the heart with a stronger current than the electrical signals from the brain... and it obeys what it sees as a regulatory signal and basically shuts down. Instant heart attack (like a defibrillator in reverse).
But the powerstrip on the pool ? Nah. That's really not a high risk situation, you take a much higher risk every time you drive a car.
that e-cig batteries are more likely to catch fire than any other rechargeable electronic device ?
As trainers not active duty. If an FBI agent tries to arrest me in my home country I have every right to use deadly force against him because outside US jurisdiction it is not a legal arrest. It is kidnapping and shooting him is self defense. No sane judge would convict me.
>Are corporations so big they can play off one jurisdiction against another to do whatever they want?
Yes. A great many of them are. Which effectively makes them entirely lawless organisations - and that's exactly why corporations can be far more dangerous than governments. Governments all have to answer to somebody, even the dictators end up answering to other governments (too much bad press and you end up with UN soldiers showing up to "relieve you of duty"). Corporations only answer to shareholders - none of whom single-handedly holds enough sway for any moral concerns to influence behavior and can and do commit any atrocity that can somehow save or make them money - by simply going somewhere it's legal to do.
The only way you will end that is if governments start saying "If you do business here you must comply with our laws EVERYWHERE, otherwise you are free to NOT do business here". But that will never happen, and I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it as there would be nothing stopping Iran and North Korea from doing the same.
It may be worth allowing for certain very narrow legal areas - like labour law and tax law, provided we put in place enough checks and balances to prevent scope creep.
Currently - corporations are the most brutal and murderous entities on the planet but VERY recently that title belonged to governments. We do need to take care that our response to the current problem does not aggravate the former one. It's not like governments ever got LESS brutal, corporations just managed to overtake them.
> However, what happens if a French citizen requests they be forgotten by Google while US investigators are looking into that same person on suspicion of terrorism and have a court order demanding preservation of the data?
No problem. There is nothing in the right to be forgotten that requires Google to delete data, it only needs to delete the data PUBLICLY. Remove it from search results, nobody will check if they deleted the entry from the database or just flagged it for "do not display".
It's a ridiculously easy problem to solve.
But it's interesting how your basic assumption begs the question: what the fuck makes you think US investigators have the right to investigate somebody in another country ? He is NOT subject to their authority. Unless he commits a crime IN the US they have no right to be doing that investigation in the first place. If he does, their right ends when he crosses the border and they are supposed to hand the investigation over to Interpol and work with the authorities in the country the person is in now through this interpol. If the person was planning a terrorist attack in another country, then the authority to investigate him lies EXCLUSIVELY with the law enforcement of that country. You bet your ass no sane court would grant a right-to-be-forgotten request if it's opposed by legitimate law enforcement. US investigators do not have the right to investigate non-US citizens who are not currently in the US. We didn't vote for the US government, we get no say in your laws and we are not required to comply with them and your investigators have no right to so much as know our names. We have our OWN investigators thank you very much and we will investigate and prosecute our own criminals.
No country has yet invited the FBI to come investigate their criminals for them and no country is likely to ever do so. Countries do sometimes invite highly successful investigators from other countries (the FBI is frequently one) to come TRAIN their local investigators and bring some of those skills across, but the authority to USE them belongs to the local government. The US government's authority to do anything ends at your own borders and it's high time Americans figure that out.
Not to mention, as I recall (and memory could be faulty) the original court case that led to this law in the first place - was brought by somebody who was entirely innocent of the bad behavior which was showing up in a google search from a defamation piece false written by a third party. If I recall he was also suing said aleged defamer but I don't know the outcome of that case.
The point is - not everything that is on the net about your is automatically relevant or useful information, much of it may not even have a shred of truth to it. Look at the many cases world wide of people having their credit records ruined because some credit agency confused them with somebody else who just happens to have the same name. We even had a case here in my country where it happened to an airforce intelligence officer. Those guys are literally legally prohibited from ever having bad debts - it would create too much of an incentive for things like bribery andyou seriously do not want high-level military personnel who handle classified data to be easily tempted people. But a credit agency confused him with somebody else, from the opposite end of the country who had the same name and a bunch of bad debts. Took years to clear his record. Cases like that happen all the time.
There are plenty of perfectly legitimate times when what information is available about you could be utterly false. The EU's laws in this regard are addressing a very real problem that seriously impacts on citizens liberty and lives - the only thing wrong about these laws is that they do not have equivalents in EVERY free country like the seriously ought to.
The law is NOT being enforced externally at all. Nobody on the ECJ is going to give Google any grief if they ignore a request by me to be forgotten - I'm not a European citizen and my country does not have such a right.
But Google has to comply with the laws of the countries it operates in, in so far as it concerns data about people from those countries. By Google's reasoning, if you kidnap somebody and take them to a country where kidnapping is legal - you cannot be prosecuted ? Their right not to be kidnapped dissappeared after you took them to a country that doesn't recognize it ? Of course not. They are still citizens from a country where that is a right - and their government still has a duty to protect that right, even if they are not currently within it's borders.
I see no reasonable reason why a person's data should be any different.