True. In general I prefer talking to well-informed people. It just so happens that certain kinds of information has negative value. In the sense that if someone *doesn't* know it, they're actually more likely to have a clue in general and be more interesting to talk to.
If someone *doesn't* know who Robbie Williams is currently dating, I consider that a plus.
It's completely sane to simply encrypt entire drives.
For example, you may worry that repair-techs will search trough your files if your computer or drive ever needs warranty-repair. Or you may prefer gigabytes of personal photos not to be lost if your laptop is stolen, even if most of them *aren't* nudiepics of your SO.
I have my entire data-disk encrypted. Yes, sure, it makes access somewhat slower, and adds the extra step of entering the passphrase on boot. But that's a price I'm willing to pay. I ain't worried about lost data though, because unlike the idiot above, I keep backups. The backups are encrypted to, so if I ever lose the passphrase I'm fucked. Which is one reason why there's a printed copy of the passphrase in my safety deposit box in the bank. (the other reason is that if something should happen to me, I *do* want my children to be able to access all of the family-pictures, for example)
True enough. But the right to Free Speech never included the right to have your statements be without consequence, or never to be critisised for statements you make.
So, while you may be in your full right to say whatever the hell you want, other people are equally allowed to state that they do not wish to share a forum with people that say certain things, and prefer leaving.
Also, free speech never included the right to have other people and/or companies host your statements. Facebook are perfectly allowed to delete whatever groups they care to delete. Not saying that's nessecarily a *wise* thing for them to do, just that they could. It's their servers afterall.
The code appears at first glance fine. I do however question the wisdom of sticking well over 25000 lines of code all into a single gigantic file. It'd probably be better organized and easier to get an overview over if it was split up more than that.
I agree that USA is falling on many global rankings and that in many areas it is correct to call you a "has-been" superpower.
But you still are, and more so than ever before, in one important area. Military.
USA now enjoys the dubious priviledge of spending more money on its military than the rest of the world combined. Of the *total* military spendings in the world, aproximately 52% of it is USA-spendings. Don't take my word for it, the numbers are from your very own CIA "world factbook", go check if you doubt it, I'll wait. (you need to multiply spendings as percent of GDP with GDP to arrive at the answer)
That is, frankly, shocking. It gets worse when there's a demonstrated, persistent will to use that power agressively and globally. I'm not arguing in favor of or against any particular war, just pointing out that it's a demonstrated fact that the USA can and will send soldiers and bombs to any country on the planet.
Even if you're the opinion that *every* war where USA has participated, you've been 100% in the right, it'd still have been more comforting to have a larger number of more equal partners in these operations. The way it is, there's essentially no control if/when USA oversteps or is just plain wrong. The US public can, and does, stop their administration from waging certain wars, but that control ain't sufficient. The US public can be wrong too.
The bug is a consequence of integer overflow. Which is a perfectly common type of bug in languages where "int" and thelike overflow. But really, in most cases it's insane to expose messy internal details of the representation and computer to the programmer.
Yes, sometimes you need to. But most of the time you should be using a language and/or library that encapsulates details like that so that you can say "some integer" and have the language and/or library take care of whatever mess needs to be dealt with to present the abstraction: an integer.
In C, when you say "int", the thing you get only vaguely behave like the stuff called "integer" in maths. integers don't "overflow", and you sure as hell don't get a negative result if you add two positive parts.
So, nearly all binary searches and mergesorts that are written in a language that exposes the guts of the machine, without properly abstracting even simple stuff like integers, are broken. I bet most mergesorts and binary searches written in any saner language, or using any sane library, is free of this bug. And the next half-dozen bugs to be discovered in the C one.
Meanwhile, mergesorts and binarysearches written in Python, Ruby, Perl, or any other higher-level language are immune to this, and many other classes of bugs that has literally been haunting the low-level messies for half a century.
Did you get the part where it specifies mathemathical formulas in a way that is flat-out *wrong* ? I think that's even more funny. Almost as silly as the US state that almost ended up legislating that pi equals 4. (the bill was ultimately unsuccessful, but was introduced and debated upon in all seriousness.)
Got more to do with dictatorship versus democracy and how strong controls are in place than with Socialism versus Capitalism.
It's not as if Saudi-Arabia (capitalist) has less corruption than for example Norway (socialist).
Money are stolen whenever a small elite has the power to steal them, and the public at large has inadequate controls in place to discover and prevent it. Socialism as such doesn't really enter into it. Lack of public control does.
Sure, some socialist countries have been, essentially, dictatorships. But there's lots of capitalist dictatorships too, and they're no better.
I don't refer to any one report, but rather to the general impression after having followed their (and others) coverage over the last decades.
OK, so fine, one can argue if the situation in china is "bad and standing still" or "bad and sligthly improving", fine.
I don't think many will disagree though, that the situation in USA is "reasonable, but deteriorating", which should worry people a lot more than it does.
The problem with multiple choice though, is that it doesn't allow the knowledgeable student to *correctly* point out the weaknesses in the question and to give the actual correct answer (which in several of these questions are "none of the given"), this makes it even more crucial with multiple-choice that one (and ONLY one if you're supposed to make one cross) answer is unquestionably correct.
That ain't the case for this test. Atleast 5-6 of the 40 questions either have *MORE* than one answer that can reasonably be argued as "correct", or it has -zero- answers which are correct. If it was freeform replies it wouldn't be quite as bad, because the knowledgeable student could point this out. That doesn't work with multiple-choice.
Actually, I based my statement mostly on information from Amnesty International, which I do trust to in general give a fair and balanced overall picture of human-rights. Thanks for playing. If I'd believed the chinese govt, I obviously wouldn't have stated, like I clearly did, that the situation there is horrible.
Yeah. Why not ? A mesh-network is ideal in many parts of the world with poor infrastructure. Sure, the mesh needs to connect to the internet at *some* point, if internet-access is desired, but it's sufficient for a small portion of the nodes in the mesh to have internet-connection that can then be shared with the others.
You're not that much screwed. Taxes are always a *part* of your income (or gift or whatever) so you're never worse off than you where beforehand.
If you win a million bucks, and end up having to pay a quarter of it in taxes, you're still 750.000$ richer than you where before winning. But yeah, if the prize is some valuable object, and you can't pony up the needed cash for the taxes, you may have to borrow money for paying the taxes.
For this reason, it'd be more clever to let people win, say, a $750.000 house, plus $250.000 in cash rather than a $1million house.
no, b is wrong. Digital does not, in general, carry more information than analogue. The sound is analogue at the source, at best the sampling-process preserves all the information that is there (atleast the part the human ear is capable of hearing) but the sampling-process certainly doesn't add new information that wasn't there in the analogue input. (if it did, we'd call that 'noise')
There are advantages offcourse, no idea why they didn't mention one of them. For example: digital sound can be transported, stored and manipulated by computers. digital sound does not degrade aslong as the transmission and storage-systems are adequate. digital sound is unsesnitive to noisy electric environments, aslong as the noise is under bit-error levels. You can use error-correcting on digital sound. CDs, DVDs and DAB-radios all do. digital sound is independent of media and can be moved from one media to another without quality-loss.
It's not as if it'd been hard to come up with a real advantage rather than the bogus ones....
The example test given is horribly stupid. It is a mixup of easy trivial answers, with a few where arguably more than one answer is correct, and some are outrigth wrong.
for example, you're asked what kind of radiation will damage eyes and cause skin-cancer. Now obviously they want UV as the "rigth" answer, but infact xray will *also* cause that in the rigth dosis. so both are correct.
Or how about this gem: (question 19)
What is the advantage of using digital signals in radio-broadcast ? a) digital signals travel quicker than analogue. b) digital signals carry more information than analogue. c) analogue signals travel more quickly than digital. d) analogue signals can carry more information than digital.
The "correct" answer is a), digital signals travel quicker. Which is complete bullshit. A analogue or digital signal sent down say an electrical cable will both travel at the speed of C in that material, simple as that. Boggles the mind.
If this shows the competence of the teachers, no wonder the pupils end up ignorant of science....
That also wan't my point. When you talk of china and usa in the same paragraph, a lot of people feel personally attacked and tend to knee-jerk a lot of responses of the type "we're lots better than China".
I was just pointing out that this is COMPLETELY besides the point, as my point wasn't about the relative positions of the two countries at all, but about the relative *DIRECTION*.
Freedom is being lost in the USA currently. That is worrisome. It is worrisome regardless of if you are more or less free than any other country in the world. That was my point. Sorry if I was being unclear.
The situation in China is, as you point out, still very bad.
I still think it's justified to say it's improving though. First, China is a lot more open than it used to be. Sure, there are draconian internet-filters and arbitrary shutdowns of in-china sites that the government doesn't like. But being on the internet at all is still, by itself, a huge step forward, as we all know a *LOT* of stuff leaks trough even the most paranoid of filters.
Chinese are now able to start and own businesses, which didn't use to be the case.
China has now put into its constitution that people have a rigth to have their human rigths respected. They don't live up to it, not even close, but still, including it in the constitution has to be seen as a step in the rigth direction.
Equal rigths are for women and men are improving. Over 35% of the officials in China are now female, which is a lot better than some years ago.
Death-penalty is now put under review by the supreme court. China claims the result is a 10% decline in its use, though I wouldn't trust the numbers really.
There's more. Much more.
Still, I agree that China isn't making even *close* to as much progress as we'd like. There are even areas where the situation is worsening, like how a lot of people in Tibet are being treated.
On the whole though, I think it's fair to say that the human-right-situation in China today is somewhat better than it was 10, or 20, or 30 years ago.
Dunno. Quite possibly. I wouldn't know how to objectively compare "ahead" or "behind", I'm guessing you're ahead in some areas, behind in others. (and I'm no expert on the UK anyways)
In any case, my point wasn't that the US is in such a bad position. You're not.
I guess I should be flattered -- I would've thunk that having english as my third language made it rather obvious from my writing alone that I'm not, but I guess not.:-)
I'm Norwegian. Which is completely irrelevant by the way.
In capitalism you are as much free as how good lawyers you can hire and as healthy as how good medical care, food and recreation you can buy.
In absolutely pure capitalism, this is close to the truth. So it's a good thing we ain't got that in any country on earth. There needs to be some elements of socialism mixed in with the capitalism to get a good end-result. Much of current politics is about finding the correct mix.
Urge to amass wealth is not consequence of greed as much as it is the consequence of fear. Somewhere along the your life's path wealth means difference between life or death or between freedom or imprisonment (or death too).
Nah. It's just to get babes (or attractive men if you're female or gay). And to get nice/fun/enjoyable stuff and experiences, and to be freed of drudgework and boring stuff. That my wealth will ever buy my life or save me from prison is actually quite uncommon (sure, it happens, it just ain't very common), but what it most certainly *will* buy is a comfortable life with less drudgework and more fun, together with an attractive woman. (well, I've got that one down pat, still working on the rest though)
You ignore the role of politics and law in freedom. A Norwegian and an American with the same wealth ain't equally free. There are some areas where the Norwegian is considerably more free, and some areas where the American is significantly more free. This ain't the result of the wealth as such, but a result of the different politics.
The capitalism has no protection from absolutist plutocracy - no protection is moneyproof.
True in pure capitalism, yes. Which is one of the many reasons that is a bad idea. Capitalism is an excellent method of generating wealth. But it is a sucky system for (among other things) distributing wealth, ensuring equality for the law, avoiding externalities and taking care of stuff that doesn't show on the bottom-lines. So, we need a combination. Basically everyone agrees to that anyway, the argument is just about *where* to put the dividing line.
The thing about "emergency" laws though, is that they're not *actually* repelled even nearly as often as you would like them to be. There are strong forces that *want* such laws, permanently, and whatever emergency pops up is a welcome excuse to push them trough rapidly. If the laws are still there 20 years later, who will even remember?
If the "emergency" part was seriously meant, the laws would come with an automatic expiry-date. "This law expires automatically in 3 years, unless extended by congress", but none of them tend to do that. Which makes whomever suggests canceling them look like the bad guy. Let's face it, it doesn't make much political capital to be the guy making the suggestion to remove so-called "anti-terror" laws, for example.
A practical example ? TWA 800 broke up and exploded shortly after take-off headed for Paris from Kennedy airport. FBI argued for, and got, new wiretap-powers, meant to assist them in investigating the supposed terrorist-attack. This was in 1996. The end report from the FBI concluded that the explosion was the result of a mechanical error in the plane, and that there is no indication any criminal activity was involved. The laws ? Still in effect til this very day.
Sure. *some* is reversed. But really, for every one step in the direction of freedom in american law the last decade or two, there's been atleast 5 steps in the oposite direction. So the net result is degradation.
Yeah, because a company with $40,000,000,000 in the bank could not have just hired people to make a standard people want to use.
Sure they could. But you're missing the point: They don't want to!. They would've prefered no standards at all and the status quo of being allowed to essentially define the standard -- the standard is whatever the latest office does. Only as it became obvious that people would no longe accept that did they go for a standard at all. And now they're doing their best to make a "standard" that nevertheless makes it impossible to create competing products that support the "standard" like they do.
From the POV of Microsoft the extreme pagecount, the lack of specification, the uncompleteness, the conflicting statements are features, not bugs. The proposed standard is as it is not because they can't afford to improve it. It is like it is because they want it that way.
Slashdot Mirror
True. In general I prefer talking to well-informed people. It just so happens that certain kinds of information has negative value. In the sense that if someone *doesn't* know it, they're actually more likely to have a clue in general and be more interesting to talk to.
If someone *doesn't* know who Robbie Williams is currently dating, I consider that a plus.
It's completely sane to simply encrypt entire drives.
For example, you may worry that repair-techs will search trough your files if your computer or drive ever needs warranty-repair. Or you may prefer gigabytes of personal photos not to be lost if your laptop is stolen, even if most of them *aren't* nudiepics of your SO.
I have my entire data-disk encrypted. Yes, sure, it makes access somewhat slower, and adds the extra step of entering the passphrase on boot. But that's a price I'm willing to pay. I ain't worried about lost data though, because unlike the idiot above, I keep backups. The backups are encrypted to, so if I ever lose the passphrase I'm fucked. Which is one reason why there's a printed copy of the passphrase in my safety deposit box in the bank. (the other reason is that if something should happen to me, I *do* want my children to be able to access all of the family-pictures, for example)
True enough. But the right to Free Speech never included the right to have your statements be without consequence, or never to be critisised for statements you make.
So, while you may be in your full right to say whatever the hell you want, other people are equally allowed to state that they do not wish to share a forum with people that say certain things, and prefer leaving.
Also, free speech never included the right to have other people and/or companies host your statements. Facebook are perfectly allowed to delete whatever groups they care to delete. Not saying that's nessecarily a *wise* thing for them to do, just that they could. It's their servers afterall.
The code appears at first glance fine. I do however question the wisdom of sticking well over 25000 lines of code all into a single gigantic file. It'd probably be better organized and easier to get an overview over if it was split up more than that.
I agree that USA is falling on many global rankings and that in many areas it is correct to call you a "has-been" superpower.
But you still are, and more so than ever before, in one important area. Military.
USA now enjoys the dubious priviledge of spending more money on its military than the rest of the world combined. Of the *total* military spendings in the world, aproximately 52% of it is USA-spendings. Don't take my word for it, the numbers are from your very own CIA "world factbook", go check if you doubt it, I'll wait. (you need to multiply spendings as percent of GDP with GDP to arrive at the answer)
That is, frankly, shocking. It gets worse when there's a demonstrated, persistent will to use that power agressively and globally. I'm not arguing in favor of or against any particular war, just pointing out that it's a demonstrated fact that the USA can and will send soldiers and bombs to any country on the planet.
Even if you're the opinion that *every* war where USA has participated, you've been 100% in the right, it'd still have been more comforting to have a larger number of more equal partners in these operations. The way it is, there's essentially no control if/when USA oversteps or is just plain wrong. The US public can, and does, stop their administration from waging certain wars, but that control ain't sufficient. The US public can be wrong too.
"nearly all" is an overstatement.
The bug is a consequence of integer overflow. Which is a perfectly common type of bug in languages where "int" and thelike overflow. But really, in most cases it's insane to expose messy internal details of the representation and computer to the programmer.
Yes, sometimes you need to. But most of the time you should be using a language and/or library that encapsulates details like that so that you can say "some integer" and have the language and/or library take care of whatever mess needs to be dealt with to present the abstraction: an integer.
In C, when you say "int", the thing you get only vaguely behave like the stuff called "integer" in maths. integers don't "overflow", and you sure as hell don't get a negative result if you add two positive parts.
So, nearly all binary searches and mergesorts that are written in a language that exposes the guts of the machine, without properly abstracting even simple stuff like integers, are broken. I bet most mergesorts and binary searches written in any saner language, or using any sane library, is free of this bug. And the next half-dozen bugs to be discovered in the C one.
Meanwhile, mergesorts and binarysearches written in Python, Ruby, Perl, or any other higher-level language are immune to this, and many other classes of bugs that has literally been haunting the low-level messies for half a century.
Did you get the part where it specifies mathemathical formulas in a way that is flat-out *wrong* ? I think that's even more funny. Almost as silly as the US state that almost ended up legislating that pi equals 4. (the bill was ultimately unsuccessful, but was introduced and debated upon in all seriousness.)
Some of it is actually worse than that, it's "DoLineWrappingLikeWord97OnNT4RunningOnAlpha".
Got more to do with dictatorship versus democracy and how strong controls are in place than with Socialism versus Capitalism.
It's not as if Saudi-Arabia (capitalist) has less corruption than for example Norway (socialist).
Money are stolen whenever a small elite has the power to steal them, and the public at large has inadequate controls in place to discover and prevent it. Socialism as such doesn't really enter into it. Lack of public control does.
Sure, some socialist countries have been, essentially, dictatorships. But there's lots of capitalist dictatorships too, and they're no better.
I don't refer to any one report, but rather to the general impression after having followed their (and others) coverage over the last decades.
OK, so fine, one can argue if the situation in china is "bad and standing still" or "bad and sligthly improving", fine.
I don't think many will disagree though, that the situation in USA is "reasonable, but deteriorating", which should worry people a lot more than it does.
The problem with multiple choice though, is that it doesn't allow the knowledgeable student to *correctly* point out the weaknesses in the question and to give the actual correct answer (which in several of these questions are "none of the given"), this makes it even more crucial with multiple-choice that one (and ONLY one if you're supposed to make one cross) answer is unquestionably correct.
That ain't the case for this test. Atleast 5-6 of the 40 questions either have *MORE* than one answer that can reasonably be argued as "correct", or it has -zero- answers which are correct. If it was freeform replies it wouldn't be quite as bad, because the knowledgeable student could point this out. That doesn't work with multiple-choice.
true. Or atleast the same information, if it is the same you'd have 50% bit-error and no content in the digital channel whatsoever though.
Actually, I based my statement mostly on information from Amnesty International, which I do trust to in general give a fair and balanced overall picture of human-rights. Thanks for playing. If I'd believed the chinese govt, I obviously wouldn't have stated, like I clearly did, that the situation there is horrible.
Yeah. Why not ? A mesh-network is ideal in many parts of the world with poor infrastructure. Sure, the mesh needs to connect to the internet at *some* point, if internet-access is desired, but it's sufficient for a small portion of the nodes in the mesh to have internet-connection that can then be shared with the others.
You're not that much screwed. Taxes are always a *part* of your income (or gift or whatever) so you're never worse off than you where beforehand.
If you win a million bucks, and end up having to pay a quarter of it in taxes, you're still 750.000$ richer than you where before winning. But yeah, if the prize is some valuable object, and you can't pony up the needed cash for the taxes, you may have to borrow money for paying the taxes.
For this reason, it'd be more clever to let people win, say, a $750.000 house, plus $250.000 in cash rather than a $1million house.
It's a wrong way of spelling right.
no, b is wrong. Digital does not, in general, carry more information than analogue. The sound is analogue at the source, at best the sampling-process preserves all the information that is there (atleast the part the human ear is capable of hearing) but the sampling-process certainly doesn't add new information that wasn't there in the analogue input. (if it did, we'd call that 'noise')
There are advantages offcourse, no idea why they didn't mention one of them. For example:
digital sound can be transported, stored and manipulated by computers.
digital sound does not degrade aslong as the transmission and storage-systems are adequate.
digital sound is unsesnitive to noisy electric environments, aslong as the noise is under bit-error levels.
You can use error-correcting on digital sound. CDs, DVDs and DAB-radios all do.
digital sound is independent of media and can be moved from one media to another without quality-loss.
It's not as if it'd been hard to come up with a real advantage rather than the bogus ones....
The example test given is horribly stupid. It is a mixup of easy trivial answers, with a few where arguably more than one answer is correct, and some are outrigth wrong.
for example, you're asked what kind of radiation will damage eyes and cause skin-cancer. Now obviously they want UV as the "rigth" answer, but infact xray will *also* cause that in the rigth dosis. so both are correct.
Or how about this gem: (question 19)
What is the advantage of using digital signals in radio-broadcast ?
a) digital signals travel quicker than analogue.
b) digital signals carry more information than analogue.
c) analogue signals travel more quickly than digital.
d) analogue signals can carry more information than digital.
The "correct" answer is a), digital signals travel quicker. Which is complete bullshit. A analogue or digital signal sent down say an electrical cable will both travel at the speed of C in that material, simple as that. Boggles the mind.
If this shows the competence of the teachers, no wonder the pupils end up ignorant of science....
That also wan't my point. When you talk of china and usa in the same paragraph, a lot of people feel personally attacked and tend to knee-jerk a lot of responses of the type "we're lots better than China".
I was just pointing out that this is COMPLETELY besides the point, as my point wasn't about the relative positions of the two countries at all, but about the relative *DIRECTION*.
Freedom is being lost in the USA currently. That is worrisome. It is worrisome regardless of if you are more or less free than any other country in the world. That was my point. Sorry if I was being unclear.
The situation in China is, as you point out, still very bad.
I still think it's justified to say it's improving though. First, China is a lot more open than it used to be. Sure, there are draconian internet-filters and arbitrary shutdowns of in-china sites that the government doesn't like. But being on the internet at all is still, by itself, a huge step forward, as we all know a *LOT* of stuff leaks trough even the most paranoid of filters.
Chinese are now able to start and own businesses, which didn't use to be the case.
China has now put into its constitution that people have a rigth to have their human rigths respected. They don't live up to it, not even close, but still, including it in the constitution has to be seen as a step in the rigth direction.
Equal rigths are for women and men are improving. Over 35% of the officials in China are now female, which is a lot better than some years ago.
Death-penalty is now put under review by the supreme court. China claims the result is a 10% decline in its use, though I wouldn't trust the numbers really.
There's more. Much more.
Still, I agree that China isn't making even *close* to as much progress as we'd like. There are even areas where the situation is worsening, like how a lot of people in Tibet are being treated.
On the whole though, I think it's fair to say that the human-right-situation in China today is somewhat better than it was 10, or 20, or 30 years ago.
Dunno. Quite possibly. I wouldn't know how to objectively compare "ahead" or "behind", I'm guessing you're ahead in some areas, behind in others. (and I'm no expert on the UK anyways)
In any case, my point wasn't that the US is in such a bad position. You're not.
My point was, you're moving in a bad *direction*.
Why would you think I'd be a brit ?
:-)
I guess I should be flattered -- I would've thunk that having english as my third language made it rather obvious from my writing alone that I'm not, but I guess not.
I'm Norwegian. Which is completely irrelevant by the way.
In capitalism you are as much free as how good lawyers you can hire and as healthy as how good medical care, food and recreation you can buy.
In absolutely pure capitalism, this is close to the truth. So it's a good thing we ain't got that in any country on earth. There needs to be some elements of socialism mixed in with the capitalism to get a good end-result. Much of current politics is about finding the correct mix.
Urge to amass wealth is not consequence of greed as much as it is the consequence of fear. Somewhere along the your life's path wealth means difference between life or death or between freedom or imprisonment (or death too).
Nah. It's just to get babes (or attractive men if you're female or gay). And to get nice/fun/enjoyable stuff and experiences, and to be freed of drudgework and boring stuff. That my wealth will ever buy my life or save me from prison is actually quite uncommon (sure, it happens, it just ain't very common), but what it most certainly *will* buy is a comfortable life with less drudgework and more fun, together with an attractive woman. (well, I've got that one down pat, still working on the rest though)
You ignore the role of politics and law in freedom. A Norwegian and an American with the same wealth ain't equally free. There are some areas where the Norwegian is considerably more free, and some areas where the American is significantly more free. This ain't the result of the wealth as such, but a result of the different politics.
The capitalism has no protection from absolutist plutocracy - no protection is moneyproof.
True in pure capitalism, yes. Which is one of the many reasons that is a bad idea. Capitalism is an excellent method of generating wealth. But it is a sucky system for (among other things) distributing wealth, ensuring equality for the law, avoiding externalities and taking care of stuff that doesn't show on the bottom-lines. So, we need a combination. Basically everyone agrees to that anyway, the argument is just about *where* to put the dividing line.
The thing about "emergency" laws though, is that they're not *actually* repelled even nearly as often as you would like them to be. There are strong forces that *want* such laws, permanently, and whatever emergency pops up is a welcome excuse to push them trough rapidly. If the laws are still there 20 years later, who will even remember?
If the "emergency" part was seriously meant, the laws would come with an automatic expiry-date. "This law expires automatically in 3 years, unless extended by congress", but none of them tend to do that. Which makes whomever suggests canceling them look like the bad guy. Let's face it, it doesn't make much political capital to be the guy making the suggestion to remove so-called "anti-terror" laws, for example.
A practical example ? TWA 800 broke up and exploded shortly after take-off headed for Paris from Kennedy airport. FBI argued for, and got, new wiretap-powers, meant to assist them in investigating the supposed terrorist-attack. This was in 1996. The end report from the FBI concluded that the explosion was the result of a mechanical error in the plane, and that there is no indication any criminal activity was involved. The laws ? Still in effect til this very day.
Sure. *some* is reversed. But really, for every one step in the direction of freedom in american law the last decade or two, there's been atleast 5 steps in the oposite direction. So the net result is degradation.
Yeah, because a company with $40,000,000,000 in the bank could not have just hired people to make a standard people want to use.
Sure they could. But you're missing the point: They don't want to!. They would've prefered no standards at all and the status quo of being allowed to essentially define the standard -- the standard is whatever the latest office does. Only as it became obvious that people would no longe accept that did they go for a standard at all. And now they're doing their best to make a "standard" that nevertheless makes it impossible to create competing products that support the "standard" like they do.
From the POV of Microsoft the extreme pagecount, the lack of specification, the uncompleteness, the conflicting statements are features, not bugs. The proposed standard is as it is not because they can't afford to improve it. It is like it is because they want it that way.