Obama is both incompetent as an executive at the levers of power, and also totally without principle as an administrator. So he repeatedly collapses on issues to the GOP, and gets nothing out of it for Americans at large, stabbing his electorate in the back over and over. But he gets to crow about having made a deal.
Clinton about halfway through his Presidency had a showdown with the GOP and said, "If you want to shut down the government, make my day", and the bullies backed off. I assumed that Obama would reach that point as well, but he's thoroughly proven that it's completely beyond his personality to get there. Politically, he's the great appeaser, and at no point has he not been the sniveling buddy to the GOP bad guys, pointing out what on his own side would be best to stomp down first.
The value-add is that the rockstar developer does a task in like 1/10th the time of a normal developer. So the task is doable by others, but granted that first-mover advantage is frequently everything from the business perspective, managers loved that rockstars where I worked because they solved problems overnight where other developers would take weeks.
Now, while the rockstars were doing that they were also crapping all over the codebase with broken interfaces, undocumented functionality, completely gibberish procedure and variable names, etc., and thus crippling the ability of all the other developers to get work done the next day. But managers can't see that, all they see is "Rockstar fast, others slow".
So while I'm not fond of rockstars, the argument is not over whether they can do task X. The argument is whether their speed at X is counterbalanced by their leaving so much debris behind and slowing down everyone else at the shop.
I'd be all for that, and for exactly the same reasons, but have Republicans even suggested the idea of impeachment? Obama is much more useful to them as a whipping boy. It's like all the GOP leadership with the ban-abortion promises, they'll never do it because it's too useful a platform every election. (But besides that, no one in the GOP is even whispering about impeachment.)
"A cell phone left on in a soldier's pocket during an operation led to the death of a half dozen marines when enemy combatants used the signal to figure out when they were leaving base... and they planned an ambush."
The truth is that those probabilities are just totally fabricated from whole cloth. Now on the one hand, it's true that business managers go through the day making decisions in exactly that way all the time. But engineers are more likely trained to base decisions and declarations on actual hard data (with several places of accuracy), and the cognitive dissonance of that same person just inventing numbers to win an argument may be too much to bear.
"The founders knew this. They understood that an individual with limited resources had no chance against the government who would have relatively unlimited resources (the government's resources is the country itself, so it really is Person vs. United States), and the only way to prevent, stop, or avoid such a scenario is for the government to check and balance itself. Those checks and balances have (mostly) failed. We as individuals have no recourse."
I totally agree with you. I think it takes some amount of courage to write that, and I thank you for it.
"...it meant every able-bodied male of military age..."
This definition of militia as every "free able-bodied white male citizen" was set by Congressional action in the Second Militia Act of 1792. So by referring to this definition, one accepts that Congress has the legislative power to expand or restrict those who count as being in the militia, as it sees fit.
Ouch. As a college statistics instructor, I'll confirm that GP is perfectly coherent and poses an interesting and well-defined question. I don't know who told you that you passed basic statistics, but they were lying. Look up "confidence interval" on Wikipedia, it's supposed to be THE core concept delivered in a basic statistics class.
I recently wrote a series of blogs analyzing Asimov's use of technology (esp. hyperspace and calculating jumps) in the original Foundation trilogy. The best it gets in the 3rd book is to have a room-sized computer that can project a picture of the galaxy and locate your position in space in only a half-hour ("the Lens"). Probably the two most jarring elements when re-reading these books is how all communication is still done on paper (stacks of paperwork, paper capsules for secure messaging, paper star charts for navigation), and that most everyone is smoking everywhere all the time. Follow-up would be the absence of women in any leadership or technical roles. This being set 50,000 years in the future.
You know, in 2008 the American public did vote in an executive who promised "the most transparent administration in history", among other things (with pretty high participation and voting rates). Granted that person immediately stabbed us in the back, expanding and fiercely defending the surveillance apparatus, it's difficult to see how the public would expect any light of hope, any feasible strategy for improvement, from the political system at this point.
No, not by original design. "It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision... you [jury members] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." -- John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Your average jury member is shockingly ignorant of the law or constitution, anyone who does evidence knowledge is drummed out of the jury pool, the possibility of jury nullification is kept strictly out of permitted court conversation, and some prosecutors have tried to bring intimidatory criminal cases against people who even tried speaking on the issue in the street to passerby.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama is both incompetent as an executive at the levers of power, and also totally without principle as an administrator. So he repeatedly collapses on issues to the GOP, and gets nothing out of it for Americans at large, stabbing his electorate in the back over and over. But he gets to crow about having made a deal.
Clinton about halfway through his Presidency had a showdown with the GOP and said, "If you want to shut down the government, make my day", and the bullies backed off. I assumed that Obama would reach that point as well, but he's thoroughly proven that it's completely beyond his personality to get there. Politically, he's the great appeaser, and at no point has he not been the sniveling buddy to the GOP bad guys, pointing out what on his own side would be best to stomp down first.
The value-add is that the rockstar developer does a task in like 1/10th the time of a normal developer. So the task is doable by others, but granted that first-mover advantage is frequently everything from the business perspective, managers loved that rockstars where I worked because they solved problems overnight where other developers would take weeks.
Now, while the rockstars were doing that they were also crapping all over the codebase with broken interfaces, undocumented functionality, completely gibberish procedure and variable names, etc., and thus crippling the ability of all the other developers to get work done the next day. But managers can't see that, all they see is "Rockstar fast, others slow".
So while I'm not fond of rockstars, the argument is not over whether they can do task X. The argument is whether their speed at X is counterbalanced by their leaving so much debris behind and slowing down everyone else at the shop.
Mod this up. Absolutely.
Which is provably impossible by mathematics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
I'd be all for that, and for exactly the same reasons, but have Republicans even suggested the idea of impeachment? Obama is much more useful to them as a whipping boy. It's like all the GOP leadership with the ban-abortion promises, they'll never do it because it's too useful a platform every election. (But besides that, no one in the GOP is even whispering about impeachment.)
I hereby nominate you for #1 full of bullshit on Slashdot in the current era.
Bonus points for militarized LEO warmongering.
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in the state of sin."
— John von Neumann (1951)
"A cell phone left on in a soldier's pocket during an operation led to the death of a half dozen marines when enemy combatants used the signal to figure out when they were leaving base... and they planned an ambush."
Citation?
The truth is that those probabilities are just totally fabricated from whole cloth. Now on the one hand, it's true that business managers go through the day making decisions in exactly that way all the time. But engineers are more likely trained to base decisions and declarations on actual hard data (with several places of accuracy), and the cognitive dissonance of that same person just inventing numbers to win an argument may be too much to bear.
"So do you want the NSA to break Syria's encryption about their chemical weapons attacks?"
I want the NSA to tell us exactly when you stopped beating your wife.
"The founders knew this. They understood that an individual with limited resources had no chance against the government who would have relatively unlimited resources (the government's resources is the country itself, so it really is Person vs. United States), and the only way to prevent, stop, or avoid such a scenario is for the government to check and balance itself. Those checks and balances have (mostly) failed. We as individuals have no recourse."
I totally agree with you. I think it takes some amount of courage to write that, and I thank you for it.
"...it meant every able-bodied male of military age..."
This definition of militia as every "free able-bodied white male citizen" was set by Congressional action in the Second Militia Act of 1792. So by referring to this definition, one accepts that Congress has the legislative power to expand or restrict those who count as being in the militia, as it sees fit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_Acts_of_1792
Not in the original Foundation trilogy (context as stated in GP).
None of which are in the original Foundation trilogy (context as stated in GP).
"I don't think that most US citizens are against intervention."
Reuters poll of from yesterday -- 56% oppose intervention in Syria, 19% support intervention.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/03/us-syria-crisis-usa-idUSBRE97T0NB20130903
"To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the Community." (p. 5)
... will he lie about this while the drug raids continue and even accelerate under his watch?
(GGP did somewhat misuse the phrase "confidence interval", but one should still be familiar with its use.)
Ouch. As a college statistics instructor, I'll confirm that GP is perfectly coherent and poses an interesting and well-defined question. I don't know who told you that you passed basic statistics, but they were lying. Look up "confidence interval" on Wikipedia, it's supposed to be THE core concept delivered in a basic statistics class.
"fewer than a hundred managed to pass the either the english"
I recently wrote a series of blogs analyzing Asimov's use of technology (esp. hyperspace and calculating jumps) in the original Foundation trilogy. The best it gets in the 3rd book is to have a room-sized computer that can project a picture of the galaxy and locate your position in space in only a half-hour ("the Lens"). Probably the two most jarring elements when re-reading these books is how all communication is still done on paper (stacks of paperwork, paper capsules for secure messaging, paper star charts for navigation), and that most everyone is smoking everywhere all the time. Follow-up would be the absence of women in any leadership or technical roles. This being set 50,000 years in the future.
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2013/07/scifi-saturday-asimov-on-hyperspace-pt-4.html
You know, in 2008 the American public did vote in an executive who promised "the most transparent administration in history", among other things (with pretty high participation and voting rates). Granted that person immediately stabbed us in the back, expanding and fiercely defending the surveillance apparatus, it's difficult to see how the public would expect any light of hope, any feasible strategy for improvement, from the political system at this point.
No, not by original design. "It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision... you [jury members] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." -- John Jay, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_v._Brailsford_%281794%29
Your average jury member is shockingly ignorant of the law or constitution, anyone who does evidence knowledge is drummed out of the jury pool, the possibility of jury nullification is kept strictly out of permitted court conversation, and some prosecutors have tried to bring intimidatory criminal cases against people who even tried speaking on the issue in the street to passerby.
Absolutely.