It also lets you pick up a few new facebook friends, some of whom get leveraged into real friends or industry connections.
In terms of the story, everyone seems to be making a big deal out of the fact that its numbers went down by six million--My guess is most of that's the school crowd, who normally are on facebook in class, while doing schoolwork, etc...; summer jobs aren't the kind of environment where people do that. Growth may be flattening, but the decrease likely isn't sustained.
The security council resolution authorizes the use of force. It would not "override the constitution," it would delegate an enumerated power by implication. I consider it an argument that would fail, but an interesting one. Also, I do not see anything in the Constitution indicating the war making power is given to Congress *exclusively*, although I wouldn't be surprised if notes from the founders reflected that.
But it had to do with what you call a shovel--i.e. the flexibility of language.
There's a better quote often attributed to Lincoln (I am not sure offhand if the attribution is correct) asking "How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?"
Harold Koh is one of the big lawyers supporting the air strikes for the Administration. He condemns Republicans for going to war without authorization when in academia, but was brought into the Administration with President Obama, and since has changed his tune a bit. It should be interesting to see (1) if a Republican president keeps him on whenever one next gets elected and (2) whether he will return to academia and try to walk back his current position.
There are some interesting theories as to whether the air strikes are legal or not. The question isn't whether they are hostile, it's whether they are "hostile" as that word is used in a particular context--probably the war powers resolution, IIRC. But there are some interesting end-runs you could potentially do around that, such as through the UN--maybe Congress approved the UN charter, which validates the security council resolution authorizing the action, for example. That shouldn't work--there are limits that the Supreme Court puts on how far Congress can delegate its powers, and there's no way they can delegate the declaration of war, particularly if they do so ambiguously.
Ultimately, if the House wants to stop it, they can always cut the funding.
On the upside, $10M a day is going mostly to our military industrial complex, which pumps some money into the economy. Also on the upside, getting rid of tyrants.
Still, I get the image of a big freeciv display in the situation room...
It's also a substantial change to what has been a cardinal fact of American politics--ethanol subsidies are untouchable because of the Iowa primaries. This is odd, and probably reflects the fact that everyone is recognizing the need to begin campaigning nationally early now. The early primaries are still important, but they're less important.
There are political nerds too. And we, as nerds, should care about some politics--because we like to see things done well, and sometimes political action makes a difference. We should be the people who correct people who think foreign aid is a huge percentage of the budget, or it does no good. (See, e.g., our anti-malarial programs.) We should be the people to counter the fear of anything nuclear. We should know stuff, and help make the world a little better. Being a nerd is about knowing stuff. And growing up on Quantum Leap or Star Trek or Heinlein or Tolkien or other nerd fare is about helping people.
No and Yes--people often refer to House Members as Congressmen and Senators as Senators. This is basically because "Senator" is a more significant title, and because the word "Member" is awkward while "Representative" is both pentasyllabic and less specific than Congressman.
It has been ridiculous, I agree. There really are a lot of crooks, but per capita it may not be too bad.
I still think there are a lot, though--the media is just terrible at finding the crooks, and the FBI is good, but they tend to use very limited techniques. When was the last time you heard of a sting where cops tried to buy, for example, a Congressman's vote or a local variance? Cops go after drug dealers, and money laundering, and the like, but they rarely go after real corruption unless they get strong information about it first.
> If the government in the UK is anything like ours in the US they're just a bunch of shameful crooks baselessly wasting money to further their own agenda while completely ignoring their citizens.
Our government in the US is huge. There are crooks and there are crooks, and there are also good people of varying degree. Some spend their lives in public service because they like helping people. Have you ever met a defense attorney good enough to get a much better job, for example?
There are also a lot of functionaries, some of whom are useless and some of whom are trying to do the right thing and some of whom are trying to improve the system.
And yes, there are a lot of crooks. More crooks on the local level, bigger crooks on the national level. There are places in the US you can't get a water meter or approval of good architectural plans without a bribe.
> I'm not sure why someone would interact in this way with any organization: Wikileaks, the Wall Street Journal, or the local newspaper without first masking any information that could identify them unless the publishing organization demands proof of authenticity.
Most people don't have the technical skill to report things (electronically) in a truly untraceable fashion, even assuming no SIGINT, etc... There are plenty of ways to reverse engineer whistleblowers' identities. What is the information they leaked? How many people had access to it? How many live in the geolocation of the reporting IP or, if the ISP is helping, who owned the IP? Of the people who had access to the information, how many use the sentence structure patterns associated with the submission? How many use the particular subdialect of English? etc...
I've never had a reason to submit something truly anonymously--but it's a nontrivial problem, though admittedly trivial solutions might work.
> Aspiring 3D artists will go through spindles of DVDs either for making demo reels to find work and/or to back up gigs of data they generated to make those reels. These days hard disc space is generous enough to not really rely on removable media, but it wasn't that long ago where you needed DVD-Rs to maintain the output.
Fair point, although I'd be surprised if local buying was cheapest for that. I find piracy by far the more likely possibility, although there are legal non-infringing uses.
> They could be telling him to his face that they're downloading movie rips of stuff they've never seen or paid for before and he still wouldn't be in the wrong for selling him those spindles. The only real thing he did wrong was he made assumptions about what they were up to.
That's a harder sell. If we accept the idea that copyright infringement is illegal, even criminal (as it is when certain conditions are met), and we also accept that selling someone things we know they will use to commit a crime is wrong, then selling spindles to someone who tells you they're pirating with them is also wrong. In an extreme example, selling someone a gun they say they'll use to shoot their wife would not be permissible. Does the magnitude of the crime they say they will commit with the item you sell them matter in determining whether you should sell it to them?
>> "I know, because those parasitic bastards would come to my store every few days for a spindle of my cheapest DVD media."
> It sounds more like you *assumed*, because those parasitic bastards etc. etc. Unless one of them came right out and told you that's what they were for.
I'm sure they were coming into his store every few days for a spindle of cheap DVDs in order to take more video of their family dog.
Although if they're parasites, what is he who makes money on the parasites?
> I doubt you can collide subatomic particles in a controlled environment in your backyard.
Of course I can. That's where I keep my old dryer. I have long hypothesized that the Higgs Boson is responsible for the disappearance of my socks... it is an interesting particle, ineffective against sock/antisock pairs, leaving unpaired socks in its wake, explaining the unaccounted for shortage of antisocks in the universe.
When agreeing to a plea bargain, you have to say not only that you agree to the bargain, but that you are doing so because you actually are guilty. This is coercing a lie from innocent people who simply can't risk adding to their jail time if they have a weak case.
> I don't get it. Do/.ers not understand the basics of the U.S. legal system (a rhetorical question...)?
Of course they don't. We don't teach law in our school system, for the most part. If you ask someone how a bill becomes a law, they will say it has to be approved by a majority of congress and signed by the president--but the reality is a lot more politics, industry groups, committee activity, anonymous holds, riders, earmarks, comments, a lot of meaningless fluff to be sound bytes, a lot of time on the phone to donors, congressional approval (not necessarily majority vote), and then presidential signing. And that's just for the stuff that comes out of Congress--we have a lot of other law, through rule-making and regulatory authority and through the court system, and on the state and local level.
You could cover a huge amount of it in a semester or year with good students, in a decent survey course, but we don't.
> Exactly. This law is going to exist until someone, anyone, brings it to trial for any reason. Any judge is going to take one look at this and strike it down.
Yes.
Did the people who voted for or signed the law ever take an oath to protect, preserve, or defend a Constitution including freedom of speech?
Your solution is entirely possible provided there is an existing privacy law covering the situation, if the appropriate agency is notified.
However, your "simple solution" of holding businesses accountable *requires* someone to hold them accountable. That means the government, which means the appropriate agency, as I referred to. Writing to your Congressperson about the problem may be for more legislation (to create the "existing" privacy laws you do not actually identify), or it may be they can help you by referring you to the appropriate agency--which they sometimes do.
Piping everything to/dev/null makes the user's life easier but does not address the underlying problem.
Write to your Congresspeople asking them to create a law requiring businesses to address the problem, sort of like a second anti-SPAM act. Write to the Consumer Protection Bureau (if it gets off the ground), the FTC, or whatever other jurisdiction the sender may fall under. Write articles to your local paper--if you write well, it's an interesting enough problem they may well publish it.
> Actually it is procedural screw ups ARE medical malpractice. They are a major cause of death which is why there is a growing movement of getting hospitals to follow check lists during procedures.
True strictly speaking. Check lists aren't just appropriate for procedures--there should be protocols for everything. Otherwise patients get the wrong meals delivered to their room, for example, which can be a major medical problem. A simple series of steps that people follow prevents a huge number of deaths--a hospital should be as methodical as a laboratory, with less experimentation.
It will absolutely do a better job than a bad human. This should make a major difference in the long tail--i.e. things that aren't the obvious problem to the doctor, notably in second and third-rate hospitals. It will make procedural screw-ups a bigger cause of death and hospital problems as compared to medical malpractice. (I'm not sure what the ratio is now.)
It will also make humans more dumb and less thoughtful over time. That is, diagnostic skills will go down as diagnosis becomes done more and more by computer. The excellent doctors will still be excellent, but there will be even *less* requirement to really *think* about a problem than there is now.
> So where does that anti-US sentiment come from... I wonder...
A variety of places. Some of it is legitimate and other parts are not. For example, if someone is bitter at the United States because it allies itself with wretched hives of scum and villainy, as we do on occasion, that is legitimate. Similarly if its people are mistreated by its soldiers. While it would be best to direct the hatred at the individuals responsible, the nation still bears responsibility and gets stigma.
Other parts are not. For example, the Arab-Israeli conflict is an incredibly polarized one in which pretty much nobody thinks with a clear head--everyone involved views facts in a highly slanted way and sees those facts as confirming their suspicions and distrust of anyone on the other side or whoever helps the other side. The United States blocks numerous Arab actions against Israel in the UN, and people hate the US in part because of that. That is less legitimate.
A lot of people also dislike the US because, frankly, the US makes an easy target--it is easy to rally people against it. It is a large abstraction that plays a role in many regions, and it can be painted easily as an enemy, an "other" because it is visually different from many parts of the world in race and is socially different from the other parts of the world. Again, that is not legitimate, but people use it to solidify their own power bases.
Some people like the US because of the work it does--anti-malarial work in Africa. Some people like it because they remember, still, Pearl Harbor, and the sense of hope it gave to the free world to have America finally enter WW2. Some people dislike it because of the Iraq War--although all of the major world powers are guilty of it, for signing the UN resolution designed to both authorize it and not authorize it depending on which politician was speaking.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
It also lets you pick up a few new facebook friends, some of whom get leveraged into real friends or industry connections.
In terms of the story, everyone seems to be making a big deal out of the fact that its numbers went down by six million--My guess is most of that's the school crowd, who normally are on facebook in class, while doing schoolwork, etc...; summer jobs aren't the kind of environment where people do that. Growth may be flattening, but the decrease likely isn't sustained.
Really? When they were in power they got congressional approval, and followed the law.
What are you talking about?
> I, a city dweller, get to pay more. If you don't want green, then pay the real costs of your cheap roads and cheap gas. Otherwise STFU.
You are paying more to live someplace more desirable. That place would rapidly become less desirable if the interstate system stopped working.
We should be spending at least a few hundred million a year replanting non-peak forests. (I say "at least" because of real estate costs.)
Related thought, how are yards as carbon sinks compared to forests?
If the Republicans had been in power, the government would have taken the same position. This has nothing to do with the Obama administration.
The security council resolution authorizes the use of force. It would not "override the constitution," it would delegate an enumerated power by implication. I consider it an argument that would fail, but an interesting one. Also, I do not see anything in the Constitution indicating the war making power is given to Congress *exclusively*, although I wouldn't be surprised if notes from the founders reflected that.
But it had to do with what you call a shovel--i.e. the flexibility of language.
There's a better quote often attributed to Lincoln (I am not sure offhand if the attribution is correct) asking "How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?"
He answered, "Four."
Harold Koh is one of the big lawyers supporting the air strikes for the Administration. He condemns Republicans for going to war without authorization when in academia, but was brought into the Administration with President Obama, and since has changed his tune a bit. It should be interesting to see (1) if a Republican president keeps him on whenever one next gets elected and (2) whether he will return to academia and try to walk back his current position.
There are some interesting theories as to whether the air strikes are legal or not. The question isn't whether they are hostile, it's whether they are "hostile" as that word is used in a particular context--probably the war powers resolution, IIRC. But there are some interesting end-runs you could potentially do around that, such as through the UN--maybe Congress approved the UN charter, which validates the security council resolution authorizing the action, for example. That shouldn't work--there are limits that the Supreme Court puts on how far Congress can delegate its powers, and there's no way they can delegate the declaration of war, particularly if they do so ambiguously.
Ultimately, if the House wants to stop it, they can always cut the funding.
On the upside, $10M a day is going mostly to our military industrial complex, which pumps some money into the economy. Also on the upside, getting rid of tyrants.
Still, I get the image of a big freeciv display in the situation room...
It's also a substantial change to what has been a cardinal fact of American politics--ethanol subsidies are untouchable because of the Iowa primaries. This is odd, and probably reflects the fact that everyone is recognizing the need to begin campaigning nationally early now. The early primaries are still important, but they're less important.
There are political nerds too. And we, as nerds, should care about some politics--because we like to see things done well, and sometimes political action makes a difference. We should be the people who correct people who think foreign aid is a huge percentage of the budget, or it does no good. (See, e.g., our anti-malarial programs.) We should be the people to counter the fear of anything nuclear. We should know stuff, and help make the world a little better. Being a nerd is about knowing stuff. And growing up on Quantum Leap or Star Trek or Heinlein or Tolkien or other nerd fare is about helping people.
No and Yes--people often refer to House Members as Congressmen and Senators as Senators. This is basically because "Senator" is a more significant title, and because the word "Member" is awkward while "Representative" is both pentasyllabic and less specific than Congressman.
It has been ridiculous, I agree. There really are a lot of crooks, but per capita it may not be too bad.
I still think there are a lot, though--the media is just terrible at finding the crooks, and the FBI is good, but they tend to use very limited techniques. When was the last time you heard of a sting where cops tried to buy, for example, a Congressman's vote or a local variance? Cops go after drug dealers, and money laundering, and the like, but they rarely go after real corruption unless they get strong information about it first.
> If the government in the UK is anything like ours in the US they're just a bunch of shameful crooks baselessly wasting money to further their own agenda while completely ignoring their citizens.
Our government in the US is huge. There are crooks and there are crooks, and there are also good people of varying degree. Some spend their lives in public service because they like helping people. Have you ever met a defense attorney good enough to get a much better job, for example?
There are also a lot of functionaries, some of whom are useless and some of whom are trying to do the right thing and some of whom are trying to improve the system.
And yes, there are a lot of crooks. More crooks on the local level, bigger crooks on the national level. There are places in the US you can't get a water meter or approval of good architectural plans without a bribe.
> I'm not sure why someone would interact in this way with any organization: Wikileaks, the Wall Street Journal, or the local newspaper without first masking any information that could identify them unless the publishing organization demands proof of authenticity.
Most people don't have the technical skill to report things (electronically) in a truly untraceable fashion, even assuming no SIGINT, etc... There are plenty of ways to reverse engineer whistleblowers' identities. What is the information they leaked? How many people had access to it? How many live in the geolocation of the reporting IP or, if the ISP is helping, who owned the IP? Of the people who had access to the information, how many use the sentence structure patterns associated with the submission? How many use the particular subdialect of English? etc...
I've never had a reason to submit something truly anonymously--but it's a nontrivial problem, though admittedly trivial solutions might work.
> Aspiring 3D artists will go through spindles of DVDs either for making demo reels to find work and/or to back up gigs of data they generated to make those reels. These days hard disc space is generous enough to not really rely on removable media, but it wasn't that long ago where you needed DVD-Rs to maintain the output.
Fair point, although I'd be surprised if local buying was cheapest for that. I find piracy by far the more likely possibility, although there are legal non-infringing uses.
> They could be telling him to his face that they're downloading movie rips of stuff they've never seen or paid for before and he still wouldn't be in the wrong for selling him those spindles. The only real thing he did wrong was he made assumptions about what they were up to.
That's a harder sell. If we accept the idea that copyright infringement is illegal, even criminal (as it is when certain conditions are met), and we also accept that selling someone things we know they will use to commit a crime is wrong, then selling spindles to someone who tells you they're pirating with them is also wrong. In an extreme example, selling someone a gun they say they'll use to shoot their wife would not be permissible. Does the magnitude of the crime they say they will commit with the item you sell them matter in determining whether you should sell it to them?
>> "I know, because those parasitic bastards would come to my store every few days for a spindle of my cheapest DVD media."
> It sounds more like you *assumed*, because those parasitic bastards etc. etc. Unless one of them came right out and told you that's what they were for.
I'm sure they were coming into his store every few days for a spindle of cheap DVDs in order to take more video of their family dog.
Although if they're parasites, what is he who makes money on the parasites?
> I doubt you can collide subatomic particles in a controlled environment in your backyard.
Of course I can. That's where I keep my old dryer. I have long hypothesized that the Higgs Boson is responsible for the disappearance of my socks... it is an interesting particle, ineffective against sock/antisock pairs, leaving unpaired socks in its wake, explaining the unaccounted for shortage of antisocks in the universe.
When agreeing to a plea bargain, you have to say not only that you agree to the bargain, but that you are doing so because you actually are guilty. This is coercing a lie from innocent people who simply can't risk adding to their jail time if they have a weak case.
> I don't get it. Do /.ers not understand the basics of the U.S. legal system (a rhetorical question...)?
Of course they don't. We don't teach law in our school system, for the most part. If you ask someone how a bill becomes a law, they will say it has to be approved by a majority of congress and signed by the president--but the reality is a lot more politics, industry groups, committee activity, anonymous holds, riders, earmarks, comments, a lot of meaningless fluff to be sound bytes, a lot of time on the phone to donors, congressional approval (not necessarily majority vote), and then presidential signing. And that's just for the stuff that comes out of Congress--we have a lot of other law, through rule-making and regulatory authority and through the court system, and on the state and local level.
You could cover a huge amount of it in a semester or year with good students, in a decent survey course, but we don't.
> Exactly. This law is going to exist until someone, anyone, brings it to trial for any reason. Any judge is going to take one look at this and strike it down.
Yes.
Did the people who voted for or signed the law ever take an oath to protect, preserve, or defend a Constitution including freedom of speech?
Perhaps; I was simply invoking it by analogy because it was another law having to do with email spam (albeit a different kind of email spam).
Your solution is entirely possible provided there is an existing privacy law covering the situation, if the appropriate agency is notified.
However, your "simple solution" of holding businesses accountable *requires* someone to hold them accountable. That means the government, which means the appropriate agency, as I referred to. Writing to your Congressperson about the problem may be for more legislation (to create the "existing" privacy laws you do not actually identify), or it may be they can help you by referring you to the appropriate agency--which they sometimes do.
Piping everything to /dev/null makes the user's life easier but does not address the underlying problem.
Write to your Congresspeople asking them to create a law requiring businesses to address the problem, sort of like a second anti-SPAM act. Write to the Consumer Protection Bureau (if it gets off the ground), the FTC, or whatever other jurisdiction the sender may fall under. Write articles to your local paper--if you write well, it's an interesting enough problem they may well publish it.
> Actually it is procedural screw ups ARE medical malpractice. They are a major cause of death which is why there is a growing movement of getting hospitals to follow check lists during procedures.
True strictly speaking. Check lists aren't just appropriate for procedures--there should be protocols for everything. Otherwise patients get the wrong meals delivered to their room, for example, which can be a major medical problem. A simple series of steps that people follow prevents a huge number of deaths--a hospital should be as methodical as a laboratory, with less experimentation.
It will absolutely do a better job than a bad human. This should make a major difference in the long tail--i.e. things that aren't the obvious problem to the doctor, notably in second and third-rate hospitals. It will make procedural screw-ups a bigger cause of death and hospital problems as compared to medical malpractice. (I'm not sure what the ratio is now.)
It will also make humans more dumb and less thoughtful over time. That is, diagnostic skills will go down as diagnosis becomes done more and more by computer. The excellent doctors will still be excellent, but there will be even *less* requirement to really *think* about a problem than there is now.
> So where does that anti-US sentiment come from... I wonder...
A variety of places. Some of it is legitimate and other parts are not. For example, if someone is bitter at the United States because it allies itself with wretched hives of scum and villainy, as we do on occasion, that is legitimate. Similarly if its people are mistreated by its soldiers. While it would be best to direct the hatred at the individuals responsible, the nation still bears responsibility and gets stigma.
Other parts are not. For example, the Arab-Israeli conflict is an incredibly polarized one in which pretty much nobody thinks with a clear head--everyone involved views facts in a highly slanted way and sees those facts as confirming their suspicions and distrust of anyone on the other side or whoever helps the other side. The United States blocks numerous Arab actions against Israel in the UN, and people hate the US in part because of that. That is less legitimate.
A lot of people also dislike the US because, frankly, the US makes an easy target--it is easy to rally people against it. It is a large abstraction that plays a role in many regions, and it can be painted easily as an enemy, an "other" because it is visually different from many parts of the world in race and is socially different from the other parts of the world. Again, that is not legitimate, but people use it to solidify their own power bases.
Some people like the US because of the work it does--anti-malarial work in Africa. Some people like it because they remember, still, Pearl Harbor, and the sense of hope it gave to the free world to have America finally enter WW2. Some people dislike it because of the Iraq War--although all of the major world powers are guilty of it, for signing the UN resolution designed to both authorize it and not authorize it depending on which politician was speaking.