Legislative bodies grant the regulatory bodies the authority to write the regulations. The statutory laws that define the regulatory frameworks provide the limits of what can be done. It's why Congress occasionally gets worked up over something that the FCC does and changes the law to either rein in or expand the powers.
Regulatory bodies are there to allow people who are (presumably) dedicated to the field to follow the law with less political interference than would happen if the legislative body gets involved. If you feel that a regulatory body has overstepped its bounds, you can petition the legislative body that created it to remove those powers and the regulation itself.
I'm not especially fond of the TV decision. As has been pointed out, there's not really much of a point to it. I have sent notice to my representatives in the Assembly and Senate about it, but since the Democrats in Sacramento are applauding it, I doubt it will be overturned. It's just another reason why I want to leave the state.
Politicians are limited in what they can do only because the layout of the legislative districts locks in a Democrat majority just shy of being able to pass a budget on its own. However, there are plenty of places that can see changes that they're just not willing to make unless their backs are against the wall, like they were a few months ago. Now their backs are now inside the wall with another $21 billion gap over the next 19 months, the census is coming up, and the chances that the process used in 2000 to lay out legislative districts will hold up this time are close to nil. They made some severe cuts last time. The next round of cuts is almost certainly going to include things that should have happened the last time, including freezes on all capital expenditures not explicitly required by contract, suspension of new program implementations, and an overhaul of the commission system, many of which should be merged or phased out, and reduced to part-time status with commensurate pay.
Anonymous tips are sometimes used to put officers or detectives in the local area to look for clues, but they do need to have some substance. The tip can't just say, "Hey, go look at 1234 Elm St. I think criminals are there." Some description of the place or persons involved would need to be supplied, as well as information linking it to a crime. The justification is that had the officers been there randomly, they might have seen something similar. They're still limited to probable cause requirements in taking action once there, though courts can take anonymous tips into account in issuing a warrant if a common-sense review of the totality of circumstances indicates that evidence will be found by the search.
I understand the cynicism, but given their relatively independent nature, I'm more inclined to believe the princes on this one, especially since their stories were backed up by members of their units. Keep in mind that Prince Andrew served in a combat zone in the Falklands War over the objections of the military high command after they were overruled by the Queen. I suspect that had he been killed or captured, though, it wouldn't have been as bad as one of the heirs to the throne being captured by the Taleban or an al Qaeda-linked group.
It was for a service pack for Windows 2000, and I think was only a portion of that. No sane programmer admits looking at it because of employer concerns regarding fruit of the poisoned tree.
You might want to talk to the residents of Dresden circa 1945. While the war in Europe was not yet over, it wasn't far from completion, and most of the reasoning for bombing it look to have been retrospective and stretched. Even Churchill, rarely one to shy away from attacking the enemy to advance even small objectives, distanced himself from it after he realized what the effects were.
The princes wanted to be sent to combat zones. It was the high command that prevented it. They were worried that the princes might actually get hurt (or worse, captured). The princes accepted the risk. High command did not.
Web and mail filters where I work catch a good portion of the malicious binaries out there. However, they do not recognize source code. I can block users from connecting their flash drives, and I can block those malicious binaries (or a large portion of them, anyway), but the source code is a much more difficult thing to block.
Wow... And I thought the alleged existence of Delaware was significant in scope. That's just a small state; this is an entire country! Thank you for providing the proof to open my eyes.
It turns out that daemons packaged by Fedora are disabled by default, and require someone with root access to enable them. A package won't pass review if that's not the case.
As I mention in another post, there is a wide variety of packages that could be installed which make me uncomfortable. It's good that they can't install daemons, but what about dev environments? IM programs? Games? Workplace policies may prohibit the latter two, and dev environments bring about their own issues that I probably don't need to go into.
I may also have an issue with my users installing a dev environment. If they can do that, what's to stop them from bringing in or downloading code that they can compile which then takes advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities?
Even a program that seems innocuous, like IM, may be a problem if there's a policy against using IM in the workplace.
Trusting the repos has nothing to do with it. If I've got my users on Fedora as their desktops, I don't want them installing packages that I don't know about. Why should the average user have a web or FTP server running on the desktop? Default configurations have frequently been the location for vulnerabilities, and many users could install a service and then not be able to secure it properly because most of those configuration files require root or sudo access.
While the Fedora devs seem to think that Package-Kit should be removed from servers, this is, as one poster mentioned, a case where "should" has nothing to do with it. I have an expectation that I have to either use sudo or provide a root password to install even the smallest package. Changes like this render that expectation void without doing a proper job of notifying me, and there are a lot of relatively unsophisticated Linux admins out there. There's only a certain level of coddling that should be done to avoid oversimplifying things, but this breaks a fundamental premise of the Linux world, and I don't recall seeing anything in the installer saying that Package-Kit's installer would work differently.
Most aircraft-mounted guns used for anything other than anti-personnel (like troop-carrying helicopters) are significantly larger than.50BMG. If you're strafing, you're mostly using 20mm (M61 Gatling series on US fighters, M197 on Cobras), 25mm (GAU-12U on the Harrier), or 30mm (GAU-8A on the A-10, M230 on the Apache) rounds in most cases. AC-130 gunships primarily make use of 20mm, 25mm, 30mm, 40mm, and 105mm cannon.
Most ICBMs that I've seen are painted, presumably to help battle corrosion as their service lives may be measured in decades. The Minuteman III is painted, as are the Trident SLBMs. On the Russian side, every color picture of a current-service ballistic missile I can find shows that they are painted. Chroming them would probably be expensive and may add weight, a critical point to consider on a weapon where range is of primary concern.
That's not something that I wouldn't expect Germany to have, actually, considering the reasons for some of its other laws. But in the US, no, that's not legal. Most post-conviction, post-sentence limitations have trouble getting past judges because of due process concerns, though mandatory registration of sexual offenders and publishing the names and locations of certain sex offenders has been challenged pretty routinely.
We can say what we like about other people so long as it's not slander or libel. I disagree with a lot of the things that Germany does, and thing that they're wrong in how they go about it. I understand where their reasoning started for some of the things they do, but one can go too far in trying to not be linked to one's past.
Especially in the case of murder these people are examined to determine if they're still a threat for humanity. If they are, they don't go free.
If someone is sentenced to 20 years in prison and not paroled before the end of that, the person will be released from prison at exactly the 20-year mark if not convicted of any other crimes. Even if the person has severe anger problems and has a long record of prison discipline that landed him in solitary on a regular basis, once the sentence has been completed, there is no legal basis on which to continue the incarceration. Doing so violates due process rights.
I think that any law that's "open to a degree of interpretation" is a badly written law, and can be - no, IS abused.
It's very hard to write a law that is not open to a degree interpretation, or else you write loopholes in. For example, it's illegal to cross US borders with $10,000 or more in cash without declaring it, so small-time cash mules routinely carry ~$9900 so that if they get caught with a mass of cash, they can get by on a technicality. Laws that allow for a degree of interpretation also allow extenuating circumstances that may allow fairer justice. (Of course, it may also allow some tilting of justice, but that may be a price of the system.)
If you're going to get into bad analogies, it's more akin to blocking use of a road commonly used for street races, something that could be perfectly reasonable and rational. There are plenty of other places to drive, and plenty of other places to get free wireless internet access.
Of course they lost more in revenue than that. But did they lose more in profits? Perhaps. There's also the possibility of access to patents that they did not have before, though this seems to be a pattern wherein around the end of the cross-licensing agreements, AMD sues (or threatens to sue) Intel, leading to some media stories and eventually an agreement, from which AMD seems to get more practical use than does Intel.
It's neither semantics nor technicalities. A law is not a bill, nor is the reverse true. Your original statement is thus incorrect, though I do understand your original point.
There are a lot of things that can be done to reduce the costs of health care, in part by making sure that the right procedures are done. I've become a huge proponent of checklists with nurses given the right to stop a doctor that skips any step (intentional or not). There is some evidence to suggest that this could cut costs by a massive amount at a cost of under a dollar per patient.
Wikipedia's article on Aetna mentions $2 million spent on lobbying.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how much influence so little money can buy. For many years, I thought that lobbyists were spending tens of thousands per member of Congress per issue, but I later found that this is by far the exception, and some very bad laws can go in for as little as a few thousand for each member on the fence. I know it builds up over time and across an entire industry, but the return on investment for an individual company is actually exceptionally good.
Actually, they jack up their prices to pay for what the uninsured or underinsured cannot pay. Insurance companies have seen their costs go up in part because of this. Some negotiate certain treatment or prescription rates with providers (that's the "in-network" part of insurance plans), but the hospitals have some pretty serious negotiators on this, and it's not unknown to see hospitals stop taking certain insurance policies.
I forget exactly who the insurance company was, but the Sisters of St. Joseph Hospital and its doctor affiliate network in Santa Ana stopped accepting non-emergency patients with that company's health insurance because of low payment levels. This sent the insurance company scrambling to renegotiate rates more in the providers' favor. It wasn't just the poor press; not having those hospitals and doctors meant that tens of thousands of customers would be moving to another health insurance company at the next possible chance.
Canada has some pretty severe waiting list problems, but five years for a hip replacement? The averages I've seen for orthopedic surgeries (usually the worst) hover around 12 months. That is far too long (I'm used to turn-around times of two weeks or less, even under an HMO), but well short of the five-year mark.
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Legislative bodies grant the regulatory bodies the authority to write the regulations. The statutory laws that define the regulatory frameworks provide the limits of what can be done. It's why Congress occasionally gets worked up over something that the FCC does and changes the law to either rein in or expand the powers.
Regulatory bodies are there to allow people who are (presumably) dedicated to the field to follow the law with less political interference than would happen if the legislative body gets involved. If you feel that a regulatory body has overstepped its bounds, you can petition the legislative body that created it to remove those powers and the regulation itself.
I'm not especially fond of the TV decision. As has been pointed out, there's not really much of a point to it. I have sent notice to my representatives in the Assembly and Senate about it, but since the Democrats in Sacramento are applauding it, I doubt it will be overturned. It's just another reason why I want to leave the state.
Politicians are limited in what they can do only because the layout of the legislative districts locks in a Democrat majority just shy of being able to pass a budget on its own. However, there are plenty of places that can see changes that they're just not willing to make unless their backs are against the wall, like they were a few months ago. Now their backs are now inside the wall with another $21 billion gap over the next 19 months, the census is coming up, and the chances that the process used in 2000 to lay out legislative districts will hold up this time are close to nil. They made some severe cuts last time. The next round of cuts is almost certainly going to include things that should have happened the last time, including freezes on all capital expenditures not explicitly required by contract, suspension of new program implementations, and an overhaul of the commission system, many of which should be merged or phased out, and reduced to part-time status with commensurate pay.
Anonymous tips are sometimes used to put officers or detectives in the local area to look for clues, but they do need to have some substance. The tip can't just say, "Hey, go look at 1234 Elm St. I think criminals are there." Some description of the place or persons involved would need to be supplied, as well as information linking it to a crime. The justification is that had the officers been there randomly, they might have seen something similar. They're still limited to probable cause requirements in taking action once there, though courts can take anonymous tips into account in issuing a warrant if a common-sense review of the totality of circumstances indicates that evidence will be found by the search.
I understand the cynicism, but given their relatively independent nature, I'm more inclined to believe the princes on this one, especially since their stories were backed up by members of their units. Keep in mind that Prince Andrew served in a combat zone in the Falklands War over the objections of the military high command after they were overruled by the Queen. I suspect that had he been killed or captured, though, it wouldn't have been as bad as one of the heirs to the throne being captured by the Taleban or an al Qaeda-linked group.
It was for a service pack for Windows 2000, and I think was only a portion of that. No sane programmer admits looking at it because of employer concerns regarding fruit of the poisoned tree.
You might want to talk to the residents of Dresden circa 1945. While the war in Europe was not yet over, it wasn't far from completion, and most of the reasoning for bombing it look to have been retrospective and stretched. Even Churchill, rarely one to shy away from attacking the enemy to advance even small objectives, distanced himself from it after he realized what the effects were.
The princes wanted to be sent to combat zones. It was the high command that prevented it. They were worried that the princes might actually get hurt (or worse, captured). The princes accepted the risk. High command did not.
Web and mail filters where I work catch a good portion of the malicious binaries out there. However, they do not recognize source code. I can block users from connecting their flash drives, and I can block those malicious binaries (or a large portion of them, anyway), but the source code is a much more difficult thing to block.
Wow... And I thought the alleged existence of Delaware was significant in scope. That's just a small state; this is an entire country! Thank you for providing the proof to open my eyes.
As I mention in another post, there is a wide variety of packages that could be installed which make me uncomfortable. It's good that they can't install daemons, but what about dev environments? IM programs? Games? Workplace policies may prohibit the latter two, and dev environments bring about their own issues that I probably don't need to go into.
I may also have an issue with my users installing a dev environment. If they can do that, what's to stop them from bringing in or downloading code that they can compile which then takes advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities?
Even a program that seems innocuous, like IM, may be a problem if there's a policy against using IM in the workplace.
Trusting the repos has nothing to do with it. If I've got my users on Fedora as their desktops, I don't want them installing packages that I don't know about. Why should the average user have a web or FTP server running on the desktop? Default configurations have frequently been the location for vulnerabilities, and many users could install a service and then not be able to secure it properly because most of those configuration files require root or sudo access.
While the Fedora devs seem to think that Package-Kit should be removed from servers, this is, as one poster mentioned, a case where "should" has nothing to do with it. I have an expectation that I have to either use sudo or provide a root password to install even the smallest package. Changes like this render that expectation void without doing a proper job of notifying me, and there are a lot of relatively unsophisticated Linux admins out there. There's only a certain level of coddling that should be done to avoid oversimplifying things, but this breaks a fundamental premise of the Linux world, and I don't recall seeing anything in the installer saying that Package-Kit's installer would work differently.
Most aircraft-mounted guns used for anything other than anti-personnel (like troop-carrying helicopters) are significantly larger than .50BMG. If you're strafing, you're mostly using 20mm (M61 Gatling series on US fighters, M197 on Cobras), 25mm (GAU-12U on the Harrier), or 30mm (GAU-8A on the A-10, M230 on the Apache) rounds in most cases. AC-130 gunships primarily make use of 20mm, 25mm, 30mm, 40mm, and 105mm cannon.
Most ICBMs that I've seen are painted, presumably to help battle corrosion as their service lives may be measured in decades. The Minuteman III is painted, as are the Trident SLBMs. On the Russian side, every color picture of a current-service ballistic missile I can find shows that they are painted. Chroming them would probably be expensive and may add weight, a critical point to consider on a weapon where range is of primary concern.
That's not something that I wouldn't expect Germany to have, actually, considering the reasons for some of its other laws. But in the US, no, that's not legal. Most post-conviction, post-sentence limitations have trouble getting past judges because of due process concerns, though mandatory registration of sexual offenders and publishing the names and locations of certain sex offenders has been challenged pretty routinely.
We can say what we like about other people so long as it's not slander or libel. I disagree with a lot of the things that Germany does, and thing that they're wrong in how they go about it. I understand where their reasoning started for some of the things they do, but one can go too far in trying to not be linked to one's past.
If someone is sentenced to 20 years in prison and not paroled before the end of that, the person will be released from prison at exactly the 20-year mark if not convicted of any other crimes. Even if the person has severe anger problems and has a long record of prison discipline that landed him in solitary on a regular basis, once the sentence has been completed, there is no legal basis on which to continue the incarceration. Doing so violates due process rights.
It's very hard to write a law that is not open to a degree interpretation, or else you write loopholes in. For example, it's illegal to cross US borders with $10,000 or more in cash without declaring it, so small-time cash mules routinely carry ~$9900 so that if they get caught with a mass of cash, they can get by on a technicality. Laws that allow for a degree of interpretation also allow extenuating circumstances that may allow fairer justice. (Of course, it may also allow some tilting of justice, but that may be a price of the system.)
If you're going to get into bad analogies, it's more akin to blocking use of a road commonly used for street races, something that could be perfectly reasonable and rational. There are plenty of other places to drive, and plenty of other places to get free wireless internet access.
Of course they lost more in revenue than that. But did they lose more in profits? Perhaps. There's also the possibility of access to patents that they did not have before, though this seems to be a pattern wherein around the end of the cross-licensing agreements, AMD sues (or threatens to sue) Intel, leading to some media stories and eventually an agreement, from which AMD seems to get more practical use than does Intel.
It's neither semantics nor technicalities. A law is not a bill, nor is the reverse true. Your original statement is thus incorrect, though I do understand your original point.
There are a lot of things that can be done to reduce the costs of health care, in part by making sure that the right procedures are done. I've become a huge proponent of checklists with nurses given the right to stop a doctor that skips any step (intentional or not). There is some evidence to suggest that this could cut costs by a massive amount at a cost of under a dollar per patient.
Wikipedia's article on Aetna mentions $2 million spent on lobbying.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how much influence so little money can buy. For many years, I thought that lobbyists were spending tens of thousands per member of Congress per issue, but I later found that this is by far the exception, and some very bad laws can go in for as little as a few thousand for each member on the fence. I know it builds up over time and across an entire industry, but the return on investment for an individual company is actually exceptionally good.
Actually, they jack up their prices to pay for what the uninsured or underinsured cannot pay. Insurance companies have seen their costs go up in part because of this. Some negotiate certain treatment or prescription rates with providers (that's the "in-network" part of insurance plans), but the hospitals have some pretty serious negotiators on this, and it's not unknown to see hospitals stop taking certain insurance policies.
I forget exactly who the insurance company was, but the Sisters of St. Joseph Hospital and its doctor affiliate network in Santa Ana stopped accepting non-emergency patients with that company's health insurance because of low payment levels. This sent the insurance company scrambling to renegotiate rates more in the providers' favor. It wasn't just the poor press; not having those hospitals and doctors meant that tens of thousands of customers would be moving to another health insurance company at the next possible chance.
Canada has some pretty severe waiting list problems, but five years for a hip replacement? The averages I've seen for orthopedic surgeries (usually the worst) hover around 12 months. That is far too long (I'm used to turn-around times of two weeks or less, even under an HMO), but well short of the five-year mark.