Er, no. The Tenth Amendment reserves rights to the states, it doesn't bind the states to follow the Constitution beyond requirements made specifically to the states. There are articles of the Constitution that specifically address responsibilities and requirements of the states, and the founder no doubt foresaw amendments which may further extend those requirements and responsibilities. However the Bill of Rights, as it was written and interpreted at the time, was not among them. It was not until the 14th Amendment and the subsequent adoption of the "incorporation doctrine" in how the Supreme Court interpreted said Amendment that it began to be required for states to respect the rights granted to people as part of Federal Law (including the Bill of Rights). You just have to read the 10th Amendment, and all the preceding Amendments to see that.
10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
So states are allowed to do what they are not forbidden to do, fair enough.
1st Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So Congress, not the states, is forbidden from making laws abridging various freedoms. New Jersey could totally have made that law (except that I believe their state constitution forbids it).
You've quoted three men, two of whom were not even Convention Delegates (though they were important political figures of the time). There were 55 Delegates to the Convention, and more still member of the first Congress that ratified the Bill of Rights. The Coxe quote, particularly, strikes me as a response to the suggestion by another party that the right to bear arms was linked to the existence of and need for militias rather than an individual mandate. Indicating that the argument presented by many now (that the right to arms is linked to a well regulated militia) was already being presented at the time, probably by another "Founding Father". Sure, cherry picking quotes you can find a "Founding Father" who strongly advocated for all kinds of interpretation of all the rights enumerated. Much like today the intent and opinion of every individual founder was different.
The First Amendment freedom of religion clause is a great on for this too. I've seen Christian Conservatives argue that the Founders *really* meant only Christian religions, but didn't see the need to clarify since they were all Christians and assumed everyone would be for perpetuity. They can come up with support quotes of course. So can the people who argue the opposite. Amazingly enough, with more than 100 men who more or less fall into the cannon of "Founders", many of whose opinions grew or changed throughout their own lives, you can find a "Founder" quote support just about any position.
Actually our Founding Fathers (since we're getting all technical here) had no opinion at all on what laws states could or could not enact. In 1800 it would have been totally cool and legal from a federal point of view for say, the State of New Jersey to enact a law saying "The right of freedom of speech pisses us off, and you don't have that shit here." It probably would have violated the state constitution, but the feds would only have been able to look on in concern. It wasn't till after the Civil War (the 14th Amendment I believe) that the states were required to follow the same constitutional restraints as the Federal Government. That was deliberate by the way, many states had laws that violated many of the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and didn't particularly want to change them. You'll notice the prevalence in early amendments for phrases like "*Congress* shall make no laws..."
The "spirit" of amendments is also *much* less clear than many people seem to believe. If you look at the primary source documentation like letters and pamphlets and the debates in congress; the opinions of the legislators then were as varied and convoluted then as they are now. Many of the Bill of Rights amendments have vague or difficult wording, and they're like that specifically for the reason that most laws today get vague or difficult wording. They were compromises. People have a funny idea that the Founding Fathers were far more united in purpose and opinion than they actually were. They shared certain principles, certainly, just as we today generally share certain principles, but also like us they differed wildly in opinion on many issues.
I'm not that paranoid. I just give them the passphrase. I rotate it every 6 months or so so to prevent it being guessed by an outsider, but I don't assume that everybody who comes to my house is trying to steal mah wirelsses.
It's not much less of a pain, but unlike MAC filtering it's actually reasonably secure. I don't mind something being an annoyance if it works, but it seems stupid to add yet more effort on top of the existing effort while adding no real value. Besides with a bit of effort a password (really a passphrase) can be long and non-trivial, but still be memorable. I can type my WPA key from memory, I don't make a habit of memorizing MAC addresses.
Unless his corporate network was pathetically set up (a possibility, I'll grant you), even with access to the guy's wireless network corporate network should have been safe without a lot more effort. Ideally connections to work should have been VPNed, but at the very least they should have been HTTPS, or an encrypted e-mail protocol.
MAC filtering is, in my opinion, a pain in the ass for little gain. Every time you want to add a new device you gotta add the device's MAC to your filter list.Yes it's usually trivial to do, but it's a pain when family or friends come to visit. If it added a significant amount of security I'd consider it worth the annoyance, but it's trivial for anyone who even vaguely knows what they're doing to bypass. I use WPA2 with a long non-trivial password. If someone gets past that I think I can legally argue that did due diligence in keeping my network safe.
Because they can't force the issue. At least not effectively. Sales on Vista sucked, not many people upgraded until 7. Lots of businesses are still on XP (I'm typing this from my XP box at work, we're going to move to 7 in the next three months).
Thanks. I actually know how to check, but the Mac is up with my wife in Boston and I keep forgetting to look when I visit (or to ask her to do it, which is a little more complicated). Unless something falls through in the next few days though I'll be on my way up permanently in a few weeks
Gotta say, you're doing something wrong. Windows 7 runs fine on anything remotely resembling new hardware. It's not going to run on the earliest XP era hardware, but anything from say 2005-2006 on seems to be fine (you want at least a gig and half to two gigs of RAM, but that's both cheap and trivial to upgrade). I love a good MS bash as much as the next guys, but they did OK with Windows 7. It would have been better if Vista had been as capable, but they got 7 more or less right. There's stuff to complain about; but as a regular user of Linux, MacOS, and Windows going back 15 years or so, there's always *something* to complain about.
It'd be nice if they adopted Apple's more recent model for OS upgrades. They are relatively more frequent than they used to, less revolutionary than evolutionary, and extremely inexpensive for upgraders ($35 or so). There's nothing so OMG Awesome about Lion that I have to have it, but it's got a few nice features, and for less than the price of most app software I'll upgrade the Macbook (once I figure out if it's second gen or first gen Intel). Similarly I doubt Windows 8 is revolutionarily different from Windows 7, but if it's got a decent number of useful upgrades and is only going to cost me $30-50, I'll do it. If it's going to cost $150, forget it till they force the issue.
There's a serious problem with Pascal's Wager (which you are positing the essentials of here). It assumes that you're worshiping the right God(s). The problem is not binary. There are a vast and continuously morphing number of sects, religions, cults, and belief systems; very many of which assume that if you don't believe what they do you will go to something more or less like Hell. It's not enough, according to most major and a many minor religions, to believe in God(s) you have to believe in the right one(s) and follow the right (often ambiguous) moral code. You could be a very devote Muslim and still be wrong according to many Christians, or vice versa. Break down further into Baptist vs. Catholic, Sunni vs Shiite, blah, blah, blah, and the chances that even if you chose to believe in God(s) you pick the right one and the right way to worship Him (/Her/Them) aren't that good. It's like the lottery, you can't win if you don't play, but playing hardly makes you a winner.
Personally I'm not an Atheist (though I'm also not a Christian by any stretch), but not becasue I worry that my all caring and all merciful Gods might toss into a Lake of Fire for all eternity (Apparently Gods get to have completely different definitions of "good", "caring", and "merciful").
"Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise" -- Wernher von Braun
NASA could really do with a man like him again. Not that he was a saint, far from it as anyone who was on the receiving end of a V-2 would surely tell you, but he had the essential characteristics that made him hugely successful in selling space. He was an scientist who understood what must be done, a visionary who saw the need to do it, and a media savvy and inspiring person who could sell the package to government and the public.
Of course his efforts were also helped immensely by the Soviet decision to give us someone to race with. Everything always seems just a bit more important when your rival is trying to beat you at it.
Because if it's written with an eye only towards effectiveness, and not towards standards and readability by others; then by the standards of any project larger than "A script I use to clean up my home directory" it's crappy. He's being kind of an arrogant ass about it, but his overall point is completely valid. If you quit or get run over by a bus tomorrow, and I (for a value of "I" that indicates a competent peer familiar with your company's standards and the language in question) can't pick up your project/module and continue development/support then it's not "good" code no matter well it works. That doesn't mean you can't be creative and awesome in your implementation, it just means you have to write the shit so someone else can read it; and in a pinch finish/fix it. That's what standards are for.
And this is exactly what's wrong with open source software practices in a broad and general way. Not that you aren't right that this thread has moved beyond the original intent of the article (though the OP did so deliberately, he was trying to expand the conversation, not misunderstanding the point); but the attitude that UI and user testing is "crap" is a huge and ongoing problem. Not all commercial software vendors get it right by any means; but FOSS developers, in a broad and obviously not universal generalization, seem particularly hostile to the idea that UI and interface development or testing are important. Here's the thing. Underlying code and algorithms are hugely important. If the software doesn't work, no one wants to use it. Equally so, if no one can figure out the UI, or get the software to do what they want it to, no one wants to use it. "UI crap" is every bit as important as underlying design for success of a project or product. At least if we measure "success" as "anyone but the author cares to ever use the damned thing"
Which is why I said that it's not as reliable as POTS, but still fairly reliable. The VOIP land line solutions are weaker still. Plus the cell towers could easily be made better by the simple expedient of legally requiring it. There's a fairly finite number of towers, which already have some level of disaster protection built in, and they are controlled by relatively well regulated companies. It'd be a lot more complicated to get all the various VOIP vendors to ensure power to all the various moving parts needed for their systems. I don't think high reliability is even on the radar for MagicJack, let alone a priority.
That seems odd. When the power went out to Northern Alabama for nearly a week in April it took almost 24 hours for the cell towers to start dying. They have pretty substantial battery backups. Within 12 hours or so of the towers starting to die, someone from AT&T seemed to realize that the power wasn't coming back anytime soon; and they either set up a battery rotation schedule or put generators on the towers. All in all the system was only really dead for about 12-14 hours of the week long outage. I used my car to keep my phone running and had internet/phone service for almost the whole experience. Honestly I don't think POTS would have been much better. My Vonage phone on the other hand was completely useless. I was awful glad I had my cell.
That's the bigger issue in my opinion. Cell phones are fairly reliable in power outages. Not quite as good as POTS, but fairly reliable. VOIP solutions on the other hand very quickly become useless. If you take POTS away from people who live outside of cell range (not hard to do in the mountains northeast of here) they need something at least as reliable as cellular. Making sure everyone has access to broadband is all well and good, but VOIP solutions, even with a battery backup, aren't as reliable as cell systems in a power outage, let alone as reliable as POTS.
"Illegal" implies that he was arrested. "Stazi" implies that he was arrested by secret police and probably abused. Neither of these things appear to have happened. There does not even appear to have been a significant investigation. Suspicious activity was observed (and yes, this was "suspicious" activity in Britain. It was not very many years ago at all that this exact sort of drop was a precursor to an IRA bomb explosion), the police were called. They blew the package to be on the safe side, then asked, quite politely, for people to be more careful and considerate about dropping cache items. No arrest, no beatings, barely even a blip on the radar. Yeah, that's totally on par with a secret police force that can cause you to vanish in the night for saying the wrong thing.
You may not have noticed, but this is mostly a technology site. I'm not primarily a developer either, but lots of people here are. This is a pretty useful and interesting article to them I'm sure. Maybe the next article will be of interest to you. Dismissing the entire article out of hand as irrelevant ignores a huge chunk of the site's user base as irrelevant. You are either remarkably self centered or a complete troll.
Intriguingly the article was written by an Irishman and refers exclusively to Ireland. Which, last I checked, was a long-standing member of the EU. Not that it doesn't happen in the US, but let's not turn this into a "my country is more civilizeder than your country" debate. The fact is that this happens in many if not most countries. Often there are special exception to labour laws for interns to either be unpaid, or more poorly paid than normal employees. I imagine that some EU countries have tighter laws than others, and I know some US states have more stringent requirements than the Federal ones, but neither block is completely immune to this sort of practice.
This is an interesting site. I wish it were able to give charts for previous years but it doesn't seem to. You are correct that I severely underestimated how large welfare currently is (and to an extent I was exaggerating to begin with), but it does seem that Welfare expenses have grown considerably since 2006, where it appears to have been a mush smaller percentage of the budget (still not quite as small as I was saying, but in the 3-5% range). I think it's safe to say that Welfare is so large right now becasue so many people are still out of work from the recession.
Walmart does need to worry about exactly the same things as Amazon, because they sell online. As does Target, Sears, and more stores than I care to name. Since they have a physical presence in every state, they have to collect taxes from online sales. Since they do not (yet) have a location in every possible taxable locality, they must figure out, based on your location not the store's location, what to tax you. It's exactly the same situation as Amazon. Yet they make it work. Walmart doesn't send out a delivery truck from the local store when you order from walmart.com, they ship you a product, just like Amazon. That product could be almost anything, just like Amazon. They have to charge you taxes based on your delivery locality, just like Amazon (would have to if it paid any sales taxes).
I didn't say I could write this in an hour, or even a day. Obviously it's a complicated problem. Actually the harder part is just the huge amounts of data entry. The algorithms themselves, while somewhat complicated, could be hashed out in a few weeks by a competent group of programmers and a good DBA I'm sure. Which, I believe, was the time frame and team size I mentioned in my first post. All of which assumes that there isn't, as I suggested earlier, an off the shelf product or service willing to handle the details for you. Give the number of companies that likely need this stuff, it wouldn't surprise me.
Determining locality based on zip code and street address is pretty trivial by the way, there's databases of that stuff already. You ever notice that when you go to the post office or the UPS store they ask you for street address and zip? They figure out town and state from that.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm using Firefox 5 and get exactly the same symptoms he is. I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong.
Er, no. The Tenth Amendment reserves rights to the states, it doesn't bind the states to follow the Constitution beyond requirements made specifically to the states. There are articles of the Constitution that specifically address responsibilities and requirements of the states, and the founder no doubt foresaw amendments which may further extend those requirements and responsibilities. However the Bill of Rights, as it was written and interpreted at the time, was not among them. It was not until the 14th Amendment and the subsequent adoption of the "incorporation doctrine" in how the Supreme Court interpreted said Amendment that it began to be required for states to respect the rights granted to people as part of Federal Law (including the Bill of Rights). You just have to read the 10th Amendment, and all the preceding Amendments to see that.
10th Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
So states are allowed to do what they are not forbidden to do, fair enough.
1st Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
So Congress, not the states, is forbidden from making laws abridging various freedoms. New Jersey could totally have made that law (except that I believe their state constitution forbids it).
Looks fine on FF5 Windows. Either they fixed it or it's some kind of Browser specific problem.
You've quoted three men, two of whom were not even Convention Delegates (though they were important political figures of the time). There were 55 Delegates to the Convention, and more still member of the first Congress that ratified the Bill of Rights. The Coxe quote, particularly, strikes me as a response to the suggestion by another party that the right to bear arms was linked to the existence of and need for militias rather than an individual mandate. Indicating that the argument presented by many now (that the right to arms is linked to a well regulated militia) was already being presented at the time, probably by another "Founding Father". Sure, cherry picking quotes you can find a "Founding Father" who strongly advocated for all kinds of interpretation of all the rights enumerated. Much like today the intent and opinion of every individual founder was different.
The First Amendment freedom of religion clause is a great on for this too. I've seen Christian Conservatives argue that the Founders *really* meant only Christian religions, but didn't see the need to clarify since they were all Christians and assumed everyone would be for perpetuity. They can come up with support quotes of course. So can the people who argue the opposite. Amazingly enough, with more than 100 men who more or less fall into the cannon of "Founders", many of whose opinions grew or changed throughout their own lives, you can find a "Founder" quote support just about any position.
Actually our Founding Fathers (since we're getting all technical here) had no opinion at all on what laws states could or could not enact. In 1800 it would have been totally cool and legal from a federal point of view for say, the State of New Jersey to enact a law saying "The right of freedom of speech pisses us off, and you don't have that shit here." It probably would have violated the state constitution, but the feds would only have been able to look on in concern. It wasn't till after the Civil War (the 14th Amendment I believe) that the states were required to follow the same constitutional restraints as the Federal Government. That was deliberate by the way, many states had laws that violated many of the freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights, and didn't particularly want to change them. You'll notice the prevalence in early amendments for phrases like "*Congress* shall make no laws..."
The "spirit" of amendments is also *much* less clear than many people seem to believe. If you look at the primary source documentation like letters and pamphlets and the debates in congress; the opinions of the legislators then were as varied and convoluted then as they are now. Many of the Bill of Rights amendments have vague or difficult wording, and they're like that specifically for the reason that most laws today get vague or difficult wording. They were compromises. People have a funny idea that the Founding Fathers were far more united in purpose and opinion than they actually were. They shared certain principles, certainly, just as we today generally share certain principles, but also like us they differed wildly in opinion on many issues.
I'm not that paranoid. I just give them the passphrase. I rotate it every 6 months or so so to prevent it being guessed by an outsider, but I don't assume that everybody who comes to my house is trying to steal mah wirelsses.
It's not much less of a pain, but unlike MAC filtering it's actually reasonably secure. I don't mind something being an annoyance if it works, but it seems stupid to add yet more effort on top of the existing effort while adding no real value. Besides with a bit of effort a password (really a passphrase) can be long and non-trivial, but still be memorable. I can type my WPA key from memory, I don't make a habit of memorizing MAC addresses.
Unless his corporate network was pathetically set up (a possibility, I'll grant you), even with access to the guy's wireless network corporate network should have been safe without a lot more effort. Ideally connections to work should have been VPNed, but at the very least they should have been HTTPS, or an encrypted e-mail protocol.
MAC filtering is, in my opinion, a pain in the ass for little gain. Every time you want to add a new device you gotta add the device's MAC to your filter list.Yes it's usually trivial to do, but it's a pain when family or friends come to visit. If it added a significant amount of security I'd consider it worth the annoyance, but it's trivial for anyone who even vaguely knows what they're doing to bypass. I use WPA2 with a long non-trivial password. If someone gets past that I think I can legally argue that did due diligence in keeping my network safe.
Because they can't force the issue. At least not effectively. Sales on Vista sucked, not many people upgraded until 7. Lots of businesses are still on XP (I'm typing this from my XP box at work, we're going to move to 7 in the next three months).
Thanks. I actually know how to check, but the Mac is up with my wife in Boston and I keep forgetting to look when I visit (or to ask her to do it, which is a little more complicated). Unless something falls through in the next few days though I'll be on my way up permanently in a few weeks
Gotta say, you're doing something wrong. Windows 7 runs fine on anything remotely resembling new hardware. It's not going to run on the earliest XP era hardware, but anything from say 2005-2006 on seems to be fine (you want at least a gig and half to two gigs of RAM, but that's both cheap and trivial to upgrade). I love a good MS bash as much as the next guys, but they did OK with Windows 7. It would have been better if Vista had been as capable, but they got 7 more or less right. There's stuff to complain about; but as a regular user of Linux, MacOS, and Windows going back 15 years or so, there's always *something* to complain about.
It'd be nice if they adopted Apple's more recent model for OS upgrades. They are relatively more frequent than they used to, less revolutionary than evolutionary, and extremely inexpensive for upgraders ($35 or so). There's nothing so OMG Awesome about Lion that I have to have it, but it's got a few nice features, and for less than the price of most app software I'll upgrade the Macbook (once I figure out if it's second gen or first gen Intel). Similarly I doubt Windows 8 is revolutionarily different from Windows 7, but if it's got a decent number of useful upgrades and is only going to cost me $30-50, I'll do it. If it's going to cost $150, forget it till they force the issue.
I wouldn't mind an invite at (trevor dot antczak attat me com) Thanks!
There's a serious problem with Pascal's Wager (which you are positing the essentials of here). It assumes that you're worshiping the right God(s). The problem is not binary. There are a vast and continuously morphing number of sects, religions, cults, and belief systems; very many of which assume that if you don't believe what they do you will go to something more or less like Hell. It's not enough, according to most major and a many minor religions, to believe in God(s) you have to believe in the right one(s) and follow the right (often ambiguous) moral code. You could be a very devote Muslim and still be wrong according to many Christians, or vice versa. Break down further into Baptist vs. Catholic, Sunni vs Shiite, blah, blah, blah, and the chances that even if you chose to believe in God(s) you pick the right one and the right way to worship Him (/Her/Them) aren't that good. It's like the lottery, you can't win if you don't play, but playing hardly makes you a winner.
Personally I'm not an Atheist (though I'm also not a Christian by any stretch), but not becasue I worry that my all caring and all merciful Gods might toss into a Lake of Fire for all eternity (Apparently Gods get to have completely different definitions of "good", "caring", and "merciful").
"Late to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise" -- Wernher von Braun
NASA could really do with a man like him again. Not that he was a saint, far from it as anyone who was on the receiving end of a V-2 would surely tell you, but he had the essential characteristics that made him hugely successful in selling space. He was an scientist who understood what must be done, a visionary who saw the need to do it, and a media savvy and inspiring person who could sell the package to government and the public.
Of course his efforts were also helped immensely by the Soviet decision to give us someone to race with. Everything always seems just a bit more important when your rival is trying to beat you at it.
Because if it's written with an eye only towards effectiveness, and not towards standards and readability by others; then by the standards of any project larger than "A script I use to clean up my home directory" it's crappy. He's being kind of an arrogant ass about it, but his overall point is completely valid. If you quit or get run over by a bus tomorrow, and I (for a value of "I" that indicates a competent peer familiar with your company's standards and the language in question) can't pick up your project/module and continue development/support then it's not "good" code no matter well it works. That doesn't mean you can't be creative and awesome in your implementation, it just means you have to write the shit so someone else can read it; and in a pinch finish/fix it. That's what standards are for.
"Not UI crap, or testing in general."
And this is exactly what's wrong with open source software practices in a broad and general way. Not that you aren't right that this thread has moved beyond the original intent of the article (though the OP did so deliberately, he was trying to expand the conversation, not misunderstanding the point); but the attitude that UI and user testing is "crap" is a huge and ongoing problem. Not all commercial software vendors get it right by any means; but FOSS developers, in a broad and obviously not universal generalization, seem particularly hostile to the idea that UI and interface development or testing are important. Here's the thing. Underlying code and algorithms are hugely important. If the software doesn't work, no one wants to use it. Equally so, if no one can figure out the UI, or get the software to do what they want it to, no one wants to use it. "UI crap" is every bit as important as underlying design for success of a project or product. At least if we measure "success" as "anyone but the author cares to ever use the damned thing"
Which is why I said that it's not as reliable as POTS, but still fairly reliable. The VOIP land line solutions are weaker still. Plus the cell towers could easily be made better by the simple expedient of legally requiring it. There's a fairly finite number of towers, which already have some level of disaster protection built in, and they are controlled by relatively well regulated companies. It'd be a lot more complicated to get all the various VOIP vendors to ensure power to all the various moving parts needed for their systems. I don't think high reliability is even on the radar for MagicJack, let alone a priority.
That seems odd. When the power went out to Northern Alabama for nearly a week in April it took almost 24 hours for the cell towers to start dying. They have pretty substantial battery backups. Within 12 hours or so of the towers starting to die, someone from AT&T seemed to realize that the power wasn't coming back anytime soon; and they either set up a battery rotation schedule or put generators on the towers. All in all the system was only really dead for about 12-14 hours of the week long outage. I used my car to keep my phone running and had internet/phone service for almost the whole experience. Honestly I don't think POTS would have been much better. My Vonage phone on the other hand was completely useless. I was awful glad I had my cell.
That's the bigger issue in my opinion. Cell phones are fairly reliable in power outages. Not quite as good as POTS, but fairly reliable. VOIP solutions on the other hand very quickly become useless. If you take POTS away from people who live outside of cell range (not hard to do in the mountains northeast of here) they need something at least as reliable as cellular. Making sure everyone has access to broadband is all well and good, but VOIP solutions, even with a battery backup, aren't as reliable as cell systems in a power outage, let alone as reliable as POTS.
"Illegal" implies that he was arrested. "Stazi" implies that he was arrested by secret police and probably abused. Neither of these things appear to have happened. There does not even appear to have been a significant investigation. Suspicious activity was observed (and yes, this was "suspicious" activity in Britain. It was not very many years ago at all that this exact sort of drop was a precursor to an IRA bomb explosion), the police were called. They blew the package to be on the safe side, then asked, quite politely, for people to be more careful and considerate about dropping cache items. No arrest, no beatings, barely even a blip on the radar. Yeah, that's totally on par with a secret police force that can cause you to vanish in the night for saying the wrong thing.
You may not have noticed, but this is mostly a technology site. I'm not primarily a developer either, but lots of people here are. This is a pretty useful and interesting article to them I'm sure. Maybe the next article will be of interest to you. Dismissing the entire article out of hand as irrelevant ignores a huge chunk of the site's user base as irrelevant. You are either remarkably self centered or a complete troll.
Intriguingly the article was written by an Irishman and refers exclusively to Ireland. Which, last I checked, was a long-standing member of the EU. Not that it doesn't happen in the US, but let's not turn this into a "my country is more civilizeder than your country" debate. The fact is that this happens in many if not most countries. Often there are special exception to labour laws for interns to either be unpaid, or more poorly paid than normal employees. I imagine that some EU countries have tighter laws than others, and I know some US states have more stringent requirements than the Federal ones, but neither block is completely immune to this sort of practice.
This is an interesting site. I wish it were able to give charts for previous years but it doesn't seem to. You are correct that I severely underestimated how large welfare currently is (and to an extent I was exaggerating to begin with), but it does seem that Welfare expenses have grown considerably since 2006, where it appears to have been a mush smaller percentage of the budget (still not quite as small as I was saying, but in the 3-5% range). I think it's safe to say that Welfare is so large right now becasue so many people are still out of work from the recession.
Walmart does need to worry about exactly the same things as Amazon, because they sell online. As does Target, Sears, and more stores than I care to name. Since they have a physical presence in every state, they have to collect taxes from online sales. Since they do not (yet) have a location in every possible taxable locality, they must figure out, based on your location not the store's location, what to tax you. It's exactly the same situation as Amazon. Yet they make it work. Walmart doesn't send out a delivery truck from the local store when you order from walmart.com, they ship you a product, just like Amazon. That product could be almost anything, just like Amazon. They have to charge you taxes based on your delivery locality, just like Amazon (would have to if it paid any sales taxes).
I didn't say I could write this in an hour, or even a day. Obviously it's a complicated problem. Actually the harder part is just the huge amounts of data entry. The algorithms themselves, while somewhat complicated, could be hashed out in a few weeks by a competent group of programmers and a good DBA I'm sure. Which, I believe, was the time frame and team size I mentioned in my first post. All of which assumes that there isn't, as I suggested earlier, an off the shelf product or service willing to handle the details for you. Give the number of companies that likely need this stuff, it wouldn't surprise me.
Determining locality based on zip code and street address is pretty trivial by the way, there's databases of that stuff already. You ever notice that when you go to the post office or the UPS store they ask you for street address and zip? They figure out town and state from that.