There are legitimate reasons for the NSA's data access.
At times yes. Nobody argued otherwise. Problem is that they cannot seem to restrain themselves from listening in on people who they should need a warrant to listen to. It's not even a debate that they performed illegal and unjustified surveillance of US citizens.
The NSA and CIA are legally empowered by all three branches of the government to conduct surveillance operations to safe guard the security of the US.
That doesn't mean they get to step on my civil rights in the process. Their convenience does not supersede my Constitutional rights.
No, it isn't. "Other life interests" are not alternate recreational activities.
Yes it is. It's not JUST recreational activities but the term is sufficiently broad as to cover nearly every human endeavor. I understand that they probably mean the more critical life tasks but that isn't what they said. If "life interests" is some sort of secret code among researchers in addiction then they need to come up with a new term.
"Life interests" are things like going to your job or taking care of your children.
Life interests means a lot of things. Even for critical tasks like a job or caring for children there is a LOT of room for variation in performance before it really can be classified as an addiction problem. Let's not pretend that parents always prioritize their children over their own entertainment or that they always take their jobs seriously. I've had plenty of employees call in sick because they were out too late at a bar the night before. Lots of people are shit parents who value their own amusement over family.
When you buy a machine, it comes fully functional, and as long as the 100 million dollar device doesn't get hacked into the internet, and is instead run in a closed ecosystem, it can run forever.
Expecting a machine that runs a specific version of Windows to still be running 20 years later is extremely foolish. If the company that sold you the machine doesn't have access to the source code for everything on that machine then you are playing with fire. Maybe you'll get lucky but only a fool depends on luck with big capital purchases.
And it makes for a real interesting conversation for what you will use for your next generation machinery controllers.
Yeah I'm kind of amazed how little consideration purchasers of this expensive equipment typically give to these sorts of important questions. I run a manufacturing company and I'm SUPER careful about investing in software or hardware that I think even has a chance of not being supported in future years. If something runs Windows that's potentially fine if I'm only expecting the equipment to have a service life of 3-5 years. Anything longer than that and there had better be a very specific service contract involved or it needs to run a system that doesn't depend on a third party for support. The presses and other heavy equipment we use in our company have software written by and for the company that sells the press and they can support it 100% for the expected life of the device. No third parties are involved and that's to our benefit.
Microsoft has decided they don't have to offer support for as long as they say they do.
Which is a risk you take whenever you depend on a third party who is not a signatory to the equipment purchase. You're basically making an assumption unless someone who actually works for Microsoft is in the room and signs a commitment obligating Microsoft for support.
Agreed but the problem is how do you fairly evaluate a colleagues research at a global level when you do not work in that area?
You ask someone who does work in that area. I think that would be obvious. Merely having a paper published in a "prestigious" journal will not answer the question of whether they do good work in general or whether the specific work in question is actually valuable. Even the best journals with the highest reputations sometimes publish some shit science unintentionally. What determines the credibility of research is the quality of the work that builds from it.
If you really want to evaluate the work of a researcher you need to evaluate number of citations, and the quality of those citations. Influential and important works tend to have a lot of citations and the works based on them tend to be influential as well. Simply publishing a lot or being published in a particular journal doesn't really mean anything.
Given the need to do this high quality, peer-reviewed journals make sense since, if your colleague can get his/her work published in one then clearly the rest of their field also think their research is high quality.
Not sure how you could draw that conclusion. All it tells you is that a few "peers" felt the paper was potentially worthwhile. Maybe not even that much depending on how seriously they took their job. It doesn't mean they've done a deep dive to corroborate the research. Peer review does not mean the rest of the field respects their work.
Linux came out between versions 3.0 and 3.1 of Windows.
Linux was nothing more than a hobby project for several years though a promising one. I was in college when it came out and for desktop use it wasn't even remotely competitive until after Windows 95 dropped. The only people to touch it were the most serious of unix geeks who loved it. (myself among them) The earliest distros were useful but weren't even close to ready for use by the general public.
Lots of PCs were coming with Windows at that point, but most software was still DOS (since Windows was an app rather than an OS) and very few file formats required non-DOS software.
Windows after version 3.0 was not an application. To call it one really misrepresents how it worked. It was really an OS layer that ran on top of DOS. Calling Windows 3.1 an application layer is as incorrect as calling the World Wide Web the Internet. And if you think there wasn't a lot of Windows specific software in 1991 (when linux 0.1 dropped) then you weren't there.
I understand your point, but you should make it without revisionism.
Not a problem since there isn't any. I used some of the earliest versions of linux that came out when I was an undergrad. Linux was in no way, shape, or form ready to supplant Windows on the desktop at that time. By the time it was ready, Windows 95 had already dropped and the game was effectively over for control of the PC desktop from then on.
Embedded systems like MRI-machines that still run such old software should either not be networked (and thus not be updated so they're not affected by this move) or they should have been designed in a way that would easily allow upgrading any Pentium 3 to something not entirely ancient.
It's not a design problem. The problem is that the FDA only certifies the device for a very specific set of hardware and software so in most cases you really cannot change anything and still use the device. It's not a technical problem in most cases, it's a legal one.
And you really HAVE to network the device to do a lot of useful things unless you plan to do some sneakernet which is idiotic and wasteful. There are ways to do it which involve segmenting off the device to its own little private network but all of them are a pain in the ass.
You are forgetting about embedded systems. An MRI-machine, for example, has a lifetime of > 20 years.
The companies that make and operate such devices are more than capable of paying Microsoft for support so that isn't really the problem. The real hassle is that the FDA certification process makes supporting such devices problematic but that isn't a problem caused by Microsoft nor one that Microsoft can solve.
You responded far more politely than I would have to a person is a living, breathing example of the kind of fuckwit who for years helped to keep Linux from being widely accepted.
I have to assume you mean linux on the desktop because if you are talking anything besides desktop PCs it's hard to imagine how it could be more accepted since it provides the core of Android and quite a lot of other mobile, server, and IoT devices. And the reasons linux fails on the desktop are mostly due to network effects of installed bases than anything else. People generally need/want to use what the people they interact with need/use and on the desktop that became mostly Windows long before linux was a thing. I'm sure you know the history as well as I do.
The fact that there were a bunch of asshats who would should "RTFM" at newbies asking legitimate newbie questions was a real problem but pretty far down the list of reasons linux never conquered the desktop.
100 GW sounds a lot. By the time this is installed the population of India will be roughly 1 billion.
"Will be"? The current population of India is roughly 1.324 billion today. Are you thinking India will lose 300 million citizens in the near future?
So this gives each Indian roughly 100W of installed capacity.
Are you trolling or idiotic? They already consume 751W per capita. Using your (incorrect) math that would be an addition of over 11% to their generating capacity so that's far from trivial.
Wow, that's transformational.
Yes it is. It would provide stable power to a lot of people who don't already have access to reliable power. That is a LOT of people in India. 58% of India's population reportedly lives on less than $3.10 per day. If you actually knew anything about India you'd know they have some pretty severe infrastructure problems holding the country back, not the least of which is their power grid.
Now, fair enough, if you don't have a lightbulb and a fridge that sounds jolly nice, but it isn't exactly energy nirvana is it?
Only to an arrogant rich westerner with no clue how a large portion of the world actually lives.
defined addiction as a pattern of persistent gaming behaviour so severe it "takes precedence over other life interests.
That's the definition of a hobby. I have several hobbies in my own life that I strongly prioritize over other things I could be doing but that doesn't make them harmful. Quite the opposite actually. For it to be an addiction, with the negative implications one thinks of when using the word addiction, there needs to be some sort of measurable harm beyond mere opportunity cost.
I'm sure there are people who have a pathological interest in playing video games to the point where they start neglecting health, hygiene, relationships, work, bills, etc. Once you get to that sort of point then we can talk about addictions and mental health disorders. Not really different than any other sort of addiction in that regard. I'm not sure video game addiction is really measurably different from someone who simply watches WAY too much TV so I wonder if it is a pointless distinction.
Wouldn't "firearm recognition" be of more direct utility to preventing shootings?
Not unless you have a means to rapidly and decisively deal with the individual carrying the firearm. It will do nothing to prevent shootings. Best case it might marginally improve response times to shootings already in progress. Doesn't help those who are already dead though.
It's adorable how you think that condescendingly using words like "adorable" in a fit of lazy ad hominem to avoid the topic is somehow persuasive.
Fair enough. I think your arguments are badly flawed but you are right, that was unbecoming of me.
There is no such path for me to alter who sits in YOUR legislature or governor's office and sets/executes your local sales tax laws.
Sure there is. You think voting is the only or even the most effective means of changing policy? I'm perfectly free to wander into your state and to try to influence your election to my hearts content. Odds are it will actually have more effect than my vote. The notion that only my vote matters is manifestly absurd.
But YOU are making the choice to physically enter that state and subject yourself to those tax laws.
A distinction without a difference. Seriously, you fail to make any compelling argument why that should matter at all. There is literally no meaningful difference between that and "subjecting" myself to their local tax laws by having them ship the purchase to me instead of showing up in person. It's a useless distinction.
You are completely, 100% not understanding what this is about. It doesn't MATTER where the goods are warehoused.
Yes it does matter because the state where they are warehoused is going to want a cut of the tax revenue. This didn't matter a lot when people didn't buy much stuff from warehouses but now that it accounts for large percentages of total commerce it suddenly is very relevant. States were willing to forego a modest percentage of sales tax revenue but the amount is no longer modest so we have to rethink how we want to do things.
With this new situation, it's where you SHIP it to that suddenly becomes the issue.
That is incorrect. The problem we have is that we have separated the physical location of the buyer and seller. It used to be that they generally had to physically meet for most transactions so we could get away with ignoring the sales tax problem by saying it only applied to in-state purchases. This was an act of expediency, nothing more. States could afford to let this go because the volume of inter-state purchases was relatively small. That is no longer the case so now states are looking at how to structure taxation to account for the fact that transactions may not have buyer and seller physically co-located. Just because we've historically done it one way does not mean we have to continue to do the same thing no matter what.
The world has changed and now the laws have to catch up to the new reality.
Now recognize that there are over 10,000 taxing authorities you'll have to interact with, on millions of products that have different rules in each of them, and which also have the tax rules change on different days depending not on when you ship the goods, but on the day they are delivered.
Yep it's complicated. Which is why Congress will sooner or later HAVE to get involved so we don't have states and cities feuding over the problem. I'm an accountant so I understand the complexity better than most. But what probably will happen is that there will be some sort of computerized clearinghouse system to provide tax rates and shuffle the money where it needs to go. Some middleman corporation will basically make a killing maintaining and selling access to such a database. There are other possible solutions as well. Congress can make this simple but even if they don't it's a solvable (albeit big) problem. Probably the easiest thing to do (still not easy) would be to establish some sort of standard interstate tax rate which recovers most of the lost tax revenue for states and simplifies the transactions.
What is clear is that the old system of only paying tax on in-state transactions is probably going away for good sooner or later. We can get ahead of the problem or ignore it and reap the consequences.
Just wait until a school district has yet another shooting happen, which could have been prevented by facial recognition.
Please detail a plausible scenario where that could possibly happen. Since school shooters essentially never announce their intentions ahead of time it's unclear what value facial recognition would have in preventing such a scenario.
China is doing it right, as their cameras can tell emotions and get the school to step in if a student is depressed or always showing anger.
Ahh, trolling again I see... Well played.
This is what is needed here in the US. China doesn't have mass shootings for a good reason.
China doesn't have school shootings because few people have access to guns. Kind of hard to shoot up a school if you cannot get the gun in the first place.
Do you think facial recognition cameras belong in schools?
Short answer? Very rarely if ever.
Of course, it isn't all bad. Proponents of the system say it can be used to alert officials to whenever sex offenders, suspended students, fired employees, suspected gang members, or anyone else placed on a school's "blacklist" enters the premises.
I'm sure there are all sorts of corner cases that can be used to distract us from the big picture. Yes you can come up with unusual circumstances where facial recognition might help. But if you are worried about sex offenders or gang members coming onto school grounds you're going to need to secure the entrances and hire a guard anyway which renders the technology redundant and/or unnecessary. If a suspended student shows up I don't really see that as a huge problem worthy of violating the civil rights of the other students. Same with fired employees. This is massive and expensive overkill for what generally are non-existent or minor problems.
The real question is whether there is a compelling state interest to justify violating civil rights (4th amendment and others) of students, staff and others. Remember that most schools in the US are government funded so this isn't private property. My take on it is that there is no compelling state interest that would justify the cost or the rights violations that would ensue.
But you have elected representatives that can face that CA legislator in the house or senate and speak (and vote) on your behalf.
It's adorable that you actually believe the elected representatives in my municipality have any interest in speaking or voting on my behalf. In my state every branch of state government is controlled by a single political party and let's just say that we don't see eye to eye on very many issues. And the fact is I DO have an elected representative that can (in principle) deal with the issue because interstate commerce is regulated by CONGRESS and they are perfectly free to pass laws to deal with interstate sales taxes.
You do NOT have anyone representing you some other state house as that state sets up it's own rules for sales taxation that suddenly YOU are obliged to collect for them in your own state.
When I travel to another state in person they often charge sales tax on purchases I make while there and I didn't get any vote on that tax rate so I don't see any reason why it should be different in principle just because I'm buying something over the internet. If I don't like the price I'm perfectly free to decline to purchase. And honestly it kind of makes sense to allow states to tax both incoming and outgoing sales if we allow sales taxes at all. I suspect you'll see a lot of internet businesses start to warehouse products in states where there isn't a sales tax if states get too greedy.
Which should have exactly ZERO bearing on the constitutional issues involved.
Sure it does. Any time a new technology comes into play you have to take some time to figure out how it fits into the existing legal framework or if you need to revise laws to better deal with the new reality. You can't just automatically plug in the old legal framework for interstate commerce to something as game changing as the internet and assume it will be a perfect fit. Some new laws will have to be written and new legal rulings will have to be made to decide how the details should be handled going forward. You can keep the basic principles unchanged if desired but the details matter greatly when you try to ensure those principles are upheld.
The government doesn't get infringe on your right to speak, or assemble, or defend yourself - and not only when you only do it a little, or a lot. Those principles are one size fits all.
The principles don't have to change but the circumstances and technologies do and so the legal details necessarily must change to properly support the principles. The internet didn't exist when the Constitution was written so we have to figure out what free speech and free assembly and privacy etc means under the circumstances that arise. This isn't always obvious and prior precedents don't always make sense anymore.
Phoning, faxing, driving, mailing, or app-submitting an order to a retailer should have nothing whatsoever to do with whether that business is obligated to act as an agent of an out of state government where the business's owners don't even have a vote.
That's a reasonable statement of principle but you need to flesh out the details. The simple fact is that commerce via internet has introduced some new challenges to address and we need to come to a collective understanding of how they will be handled. States have a reasonable interest in taxing commerce that occurs within their state both incoming and outgoing. Our previous system (only tax the purchaser if in state) made sense both in principle and from a practicality standpoint prior to the rise of the web. But it's pretty easy to argue that while the principles still holdsthe practical realities in the face of the internet no longer make much sense in a lot of cases. So Congress sooner or later is going to have to get involved and work out some laws to address the day to day issues presented by internet commerce between states. This isn't a bad thing necessarily.
Did the internet change things, or the telephone? I also haven't read the text, but I never understood why internet orders are any different from telephone catalog orders.
Because catalog orders were always going to be a limited volume business. Ordering something by phone is actually quite a lot of work relatively speaking both for buyer and seller. It also requires distribution of expensive catalogs, having staff to take orders, and lots of other overhead and transactional friction. Therefore the rule about having a physical presence actually was a reasonable compromise given the realities of catalog shopping. The internet has made shopping FAR easier, faster, and spreads out the infrastructure all over the place. Instead of calling a single call center you might be dealing with servers in one state, payment processing in another, inventory in a third, and staff in a fourth.
The practical realities of internet shopping are actually quite a bit different than catalog shopping. Catalogs never were going to drive brick and mortar stores out of business.
While true on a technical level alone, does every state have to create a treaty with every other state in order to start expecting a tax?
Perhaps (yikes). That's why Congress might have to actually get off their ass and do something about the problem. I'm an accountant and this definitely has the potential to be a very expensive and complicated mess. There are ways to solve the problem but the best ones involve Congress not being a bunch of asshats only concerned with political infighting.
Are the states going to close their borders to open trade in response?
No they just have a lawsuit in federal court just like they do now. But this could really swamp the courts with needless litigation which is an obvious problem.
Remember this the next time Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch or Clarence Thomas talk about the following the original text of the constitution.
Heh... Yes this is a solid example of why originalists are so full of shit. It's almost always an excuse to justify some sort of behavior that is abhorrent under current social norms or to try stem the tide of political change that some people (usually conservatives) disapprove of. Originalists tend to ignore this principle when it is convenient for them but shout loudly about it when it helps whatever cause they are pushing at the time.
In this case internet commerce has changed the game dramatically and the laws were written in an earlier era with different circumstances. I haven't looked closely enough at this case to decide whether I agree with the decision but it seems clear enough that the old understanding regarding sales tax collection between states no longer makes much sense in the internet era. Change has to happen one way or another so such a decision isn't surprising even if it ultimately turns out to be a poor one. Maybe this will force Congress to actually address the elephant in the room and establish a new framework for States to collect sales tax that makes sense. (Dare to dream...)
States have no right to regulate interstate commerce.
That is NOT what the Commerce Cause of the Constitution says. It says [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes. This wording does not prohibit States from having regulations regarding interstate commerce, it just means that Federal laws regarding commerce shall prevail in the event of a dispute. How this clause is to be interpreted has been the subject of debate since the founding of the republic but there is quite a lot of wiggle room here.
This is not something that the supreme court should even have the power to decide.
This is EXACTLY the sort of thing the Supreme Court has the power to decide. The entire job of the Supreme Court is to interpret whether a dispute about the law is constitutional or not and how the law should be interpreted with respect to the Constitution.
Evolution takes place over thousands of generations.
No it does not require thousands of generations. Have you ever seen a purebred dog? Humans applied selective breeding and can develop a completely new breed of dog with just a few generations. Evolution CAN happen slowly but it does not have to. It can happen quite quickly given the proper evolutionary pressures.
Heck... it's hardly migration. "Deepening" differences are measured in ranges from 60 to 120 meters deep.
Evolutionary pressure don't not care about what you perceive to be a small difference in distance. All that matters is whether that difference in depth creates an advantage in reproduction. If the difference in depth causes a difference in reproductive rates within a population then voila, you have an evolutionary pressure.
I.e. Young and inexperienced fish don't know how to hide from the nets OR the easy picking food (bottom dwelling crabs and crustaceans) they're munching on isn't available that deep.
The ones that prefer the locations where they do not get hunted (the reasons why don't matter) are the ones that will be selected to breed again. Small fish that don't prefer the deep get removed from the gene pool before they reproduce and so they never become big fish. Do this enough times and you will have selected for fish that prefer deeper waters. That my friend is an evolutionary pressure at work and it happens all the time.
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There are legitimate reasons for the NSA's data access.
At times yes. Nobody argued otherwise. Problem is that they cannot seem to restrain themselves from listening in on people who they should need a warrant to listen to. It's not even a debate that they performed illegal and unjustified surveillance of US citizens.
The NSA and CIA are legally empowered by all three branches of the government to conduct surveillance operations to safe guard the security of the US.
That doesn't mean they get to step on my civil rights in the process. Their convenience does not supersede my Constitutional rights.
No, it isn't. "Other life interests" are not alternate recreational activities.
Yes it is. It's not JUST recreational activities but the term is sufficiently broad as to cover nearly every human endeavor. I understand that they probably mean the more critical life tasks but that isn't what they said. If "life interests" is some sort of secret code among researchers in addiction then they need to come up with a new term.
"Life interests" are things like going to your job or taking care of your children.
Life interests means a lot of things. Even for critical tasks like a job or caring for children there is a LOT of room for variation in performance before it really can be classified as an addiction problem. Let's not pretend that parents always prioritize their children over their own entertainment or that they always take their jobs seriously. I've had plenty of employees call in sick because they were out too late at a bar the night before. Lots of people are shit parents who value their own amusement over family.
When you buy a machine, it comes fully functional, and as long as the 100 million dollar device doesn't get hacked into the internet, and is instead run in a closed ecosystem, it can run forever.
Expecting a machine that runs a specific version of Windows to still be running 20 years later is extremely foolish. If the company that sold you the machine doesn't have access to the source code for everything on that machine then you are playing with fire. Maybe you'll get lucky but only a fool depends on luck with big capital purchases.
The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company's "extreme willingness to help."
Translation: AT&T is the NSA bitch...
And it makes for a real interesting conversation for what you will use for your next generation machinery controllers.
Yeah I'm kind of amazed how little consideration purchasers of this expensive equipment typically give to these sorts of important questions. I run a manufacturing company and I'm SUPER careful about investing in software or hardware that I think even has a chance of not being supported in future years. If something runs Windows that's potentially fine if I'm only expecting the equipment to have a service life of 3-5 years. Anything longer than that and there had better be a very specific service contract involved or it needs to run a system that doesn't depend on a third party for support. The presses and other heavy equipment we use in our company have software written by and for the company that sells the press and they can support it 100% for the expected life of the device. No third parties are involved and that's to our benefit.
Microsoft has decided they don't have to offer support for as long as they say they do.
Which is a risk you take whenever you depend on a third party who is not a signatory to the equipment purchase. You're basically making an assumption unless someone who actually works for Microsoft is in the room and signs a commitment obligating Microsoft for support.
Agreed but the problem is how do you fairly evaluate a colleagues research at a global level when you do not work in that area?
You ask someone who does work in that area. I think that would be obvious. Merely having a paper published in a "prestigious" journal will not answer the question of whether they do good work in general or whether the specific work in question is actually valuable. Even the best journals with the highest reputations sometimes publish some shit science unintentionally. What determines the credibility of research is the quality of the work that builds from it.
If you really want to evaluate the work of a researcher you need to evaluate number of citations, and the quality of those citations. Influential and important works tend to have a lot of citations and the works based on them tend to be influential as well. Simply publishing a lot or being published in a particular journal doesn't really mean anything.
Given the need to do this high quality, peer-reviewed journals make sense since, if your colleague can get his/her work published in one then clearly the rest of their field also think their research is high quality.
Not sure how you could draw that conclusion. All it tells you is that a few "peers" felt the paper was potentially worthwhile. Maybe not even that much depending on how seriously they took their job. It doesn't mean they've done a deep dive to corroborate the research. Peer review does not mean the rest of the field respects their work.
Linux came out between versions 3.0 and 3.1 of Windows.
Linux was nothing more than a hobby project for several years though a promising one. I was in college when it came out and for desktop use it wasn't even remotely competitive until after Windows 95 dropped. The only people to touch it were the most serious of unix geeks who loved it. (myself among them) The earliest distros were useful but weren't even close to ready for use by the general public.
Lots of PCs were coming with Windows at that point, but most software was still DOS (since Windows was an app rather than an OS) and very few file formats required non-DOS software.
Windows after version 3.0 was not an application. To call it one really misrepresents how it worked. It was really an OS layer that ran on top of DOS. Calling Windows 3.1 an application layer is as incorrect as calling the World Wide Web the Internet. And if you think there wasn't a lot of Windows specific software in 1991 (when linux 0.1 dropped) then you weren't there.
I understand your point, but you should make it without revisionism.
Not a problem since there isn't any. I used some of the earliest versions of linux that came out when I was an undergrad. Linux was in no way, shape, or form ready to supplant Windows on the desktop at that time. By the time it was ready, Windows 95 had already dropped and the game was effectively over for control of the PC desktop from then on.
Embedded systems like MRI-machines that still run such old software should either not be networked (and thus not be updated so they're not affected by this move) or they should have been designed in a way that would easily allow upgrading any Pentium 3 to something not entirely ancient.
It's not a design problem. The problem is that the FDA only certifies the device for a very specific set of hardware and software so in most cases you really cannot change anything and still use the device. It's not a technical problem in most cases, it's a legal one.
And you really HAVE to network the device to do a lot of useful things unless you plan to do some sneakernet which is idiotic and wasteful. There are ways to do it which involve segmenting off the device to its own little private network but all of them are a pain in the ass.
The key is that these machines are carefully isolated from the internet and are only able to communicate with their designated PACS and RIS servers.
If you are doing that then you are being FAR more careful than a lot of the hospital systems I've dealt were being. (And that is good)
You are forgetting about embedded systems. An MRI-machine, for example, has a lifetime of > 20 years.
The companies that make and operate such devices are more than capable of paying Microsoft for support so that isn't really the problem. The real hassle is that the FDA certification process makes supporting such devices problematic but that isn't a problem caused by Microsoft nor one that Microsoft can solve.
Why is it unreasonable to expect an OS to be supported until the date published by its developer a very long time ago?
It's not unreasonable but it might be ill advised.
You responded far more politely than I would have to a person is a living, breathing example of the kind of fuckwit who for years helped to keep Linux from being widely accepted.
I have to assume you mean linux on the desktop because if you are talking anything besides desktop PCs it's hard to imagine how it could be more accepted since it provides the core of Android and quite a lot of other mobile, server, and IoT devices. And the reasons linux fails on the desktop are mostly due to network effects of installed bases than anything else. People generally need/want to use what the people they interact with need/use and on the desktop that became mostly Windows long before linux was a thing. I'm sure you know the history as well as I do.
The fact that there were a bunch of asshats who would should "RTFM" at newbies asking legitimate newbie questions was a real problem but pretty far down the list of reasons linux never conquered the desktop.
100 GW sounds a lot. By the time this is installed the population of India will be roughly 1 billion.
"Will be"? The current population of India is roughly 1.324 billion today. Are you thinking India will lose 300 million citizens in the near future?
So this gives each Indian roughly 100W of installed capacity.
Are you trolling or idiotic? They already consume 751W per capita. Using your (incorrect) math that would be an addition of over 11% to their generating capacity so that's far from trivial.
Wow, that's transformational.
Yes it is. It would provide stable power to a lot of people who don't already have access to reliable power. That is a LOT of people in India. 58% of India's population reportedly lives on less than $3.10 per day. If you actually knew anything about India you'd know they have some pretty severe infrastructure problems holding the country back, not the least of which is their power grid.
Now, fair enough, if you don't have a lightbulb and a fridge that sounds jolly nice, but it isn't exactly energy nirvana is it?
Only to an arrogant rich westerner with no clue how a large portion of the world actually lives.
defined addiction as a pattern of persistent gaming behaviour so severe it "takes precedence over other life interests.
That's the definition of a hobby. I have several hobbies in my own life that I strongly prioritize over other things I could be doing but that doesn't make them harmful. Quite the opposite actually. For it to be an addiction, with the negative implications one thinks of when using the word addiction, there needs to be some sort of measurable harm beyond mere opportunity cost.
I'm sure there are people who have a pathological interest in playing video games to the point where they start neglecting health, hygiene, relationships, work, bills, etc. Once you get to that sort of point then we can talk about addictions and mental health disorders. Not really different than any other sort of addiction in that regard. I'm not sure video game addiction is really measurably different from someone who simply watches WAY too much TV so I wonder if it is a pointless distinction.
Wouldn't "firearm recognition" be of more direct utility to preventing shootings?
Not unless you have a means to rapidly and decisively deal with the individual carrying the firearm. It will do nothing to prevent shootings. Best case it might marginally improve response times to shootings already in progress. Doesn't help those who are already dead though.
It's adorable how you think that condescendingly using words like "adorable" in a fit of lazy ad hominem to avoid the topic is somehow persuasive.
Fair enough. I think your arguments are badly flawed but you are right, that was unbecoming of me.
There is no such path for me to alter who sits in YOUR legislature or governor's office and sets/executes your local sales tax laws.
Sure there is. You think voting is the only or even the most effective means of changing policy? I'm perfectly free to wander into your state and to try to influence your election to my hearts content. Odds are it will actually have more effect than my vote. The notion that only my vote matters is manifestly absurd.
But YOU are making the choice to physically enter that state and subject yourself to those tax laws.
A distinction without a difference. Seriously, you fail to make any compelling argument why that should matter at all. There is literally no meaningful difference between that and "subjecting" myself to their local tax laws by having them ship the purchase to me instead of showing up in person. It's a useless distinction.
You are completely, 100% not understanding what this is about. It doesn't MATTER where the goods are warehoused.
Yes it does matter because the state where they are warehoused is going to want a cut of the tax revenue. This didn't matter a lot when people didn't buy much stuff from warehouses but now that it accounts for large percentages of total commerce it suddenly is very relevant. States were willing to forego a modest percentage of sales tax revenue but the amount is no longer modest so we have to rethink how we want to do things.
With this new situation, it's where you SHIP it to that suddenly becomes the issue.
That is incorrect. The problem we have is that we have separated the physical location of the buyer and seller. It used to be that they generally had to physically meet for most transactions so we could get away with ignoring the sales tax problem by saying it only applied to in-state purchases. This was an act of expediency, nothing more. States could afford to let this go because the volume of inter-state purchases was relatively small. That is no longer the case so now states are looking at how to structure taxation to account for the fact that transactions may not have buyer and seller physically co-located. Just because we've historically done it one way does not mean we have to continue to do the same thing no matter what.
The world has changed and now the laws have to catch up to the new reality.
Now recognize that there are over 10,000 taxing authorities you'll have to interact with, on millions of products that have different rules in each of them, and which also have the tax rules change on different days depending not on when you ship the goods, but on the day they are delivered.
Yep it's complicated. Which is why Congress will sooner or later HAVE to get involved so we don't have states and cities feuding over the problem. I'm an accountant so I understand the complexity better than most. But what probably will happen is that there will be some sort of computerized clearinghouse system to provide tax rates and shuffle the money where it needs to go. Some middleman corporation will basically make a killing maintaining and selling access to such a database. There are other possible solutions as well. Congress can make this simple but even if they don't it's a solvable (albeit big) problem. Probably the easiest thing to do (still not easy) would be to establish some sort of standard interstate tax rate which recovers most of the lost tax revenue for states and simplifies the transactions.
What is clear is that the old system of only paying tax on in-state transactions is probably going away for good sooner or later. We can get ahead of the problem or ignore it and reap the consequences.
Just wait until a school district has yet another shooting happen, which could have been prevented by facial recognition.
Please detail a plausible scenario where that could possibly happen. Since school shooters essentially never announce their intentions ahead of time it's unclear what value facial recognition would have in preventing such a scenario.
China is doing it right, as their cameras can tell emotions and get the school to step in if a student is depressed or always showing anger.
Ahh, trolling again I see... Well played.
This is what is needed here in the US. China doesn't have mass shootings for a good reason.
China doesn't have school shootings because few people have access to guns. Kind of hard to shoot up a school if you cannot get the gun in the first place.
Do you think facial recognition cameras belong in schools?
Short answer? Very rarely if ever.
Of course, it isn't all bad. Proponents of the system say it can be used to alert officials to whenever sex offenders, suspended students, fired employees, suspected gang members, or anyone else placed on a school's "blacklist" enters the premises.
I'm sure there are all sorts of corner cases that can be used to distract us from the big picture. Yes you can come up with unusual circumstances where facial recognition might help. But if you are worried about sex offenders or gang members coming onto school grounds you're going to need to secure the entrances and hire a guard anyway which renders the technology redundant and/or unnecessary. If a suspended student shows up I don't really see that as a huge problem worthy of violating the civil rights of the other students. Same with fired employees. This is massive and expensive overkill for what generally are non-existent or minor problems.
The real question is whether there is a compelling state interest to justify violating civil rights (4th amendment and others) of students, staff and others. Remember that most schools in the US are government funded so this isn't private property. My take on it is that there is no compelling state interest that would justify the cost or the rights violations that would ensue.
But you have elected representatives that can face that CA legislator in the house or senate and speak (and vote) on your behalf.
It's adorable that you actually believe the elected representatives in my municipality have any interest in speaking or voting on my behalf. In my state every branch of state government is controlled by a single political party and let's just say that we don't see eye to eye on very many issues. And the fact is I DO have an elected representative that can (in principle) deal with the issue because interstate commerce is regulated by CONGRESS and they are perfectly free to pass laws to deal with interstate sales taxes.
You do NOT have anyone representing you some other state house as that state sets up it's own rules for sales taxation that suddenly YOU are obliged to collect for them in your own state.
When I travel to another state in person they often charge sales tax on purchases I make while there and I didn't get any vote on that tax rate so I don't see any reason why it should be different in principle just because I'm buying something over the internet. If I don't like the price I'm perfectly free to decline to purchase. And honestly it kind of makes sense to allow states to tax both incoming and outgoing sales if we allow sales taxes at all. I suspect you'll see a lot of internet businesses start to warehouse products in states where there isn't a sales tax if states get too greedy.
Which should have exactly ZERO bearing on the constitutional issues involved.
Sure it does. Any time a new technology comes into play you have to take some time to figure out how it fits into the existing legal framework or if you need to revise laws to better deal with the new reality. You can't just automatically plug in the old legal framework for interstate commerce to something as game changing as the internet and assume it will be a perfect fit. Some new laws will have to be written and new legal rulings will have to be made to decide how the details should be handled going forward. You can keep the basic principles unchanged if desired but the details matter greatly when you try to ensure those principles are upheld.
The government doesn't get infringe on your right to speak, or assemble, or defend yourself - and not only when you only do it a little, or a lot. Those principles are one size fits all.
The principles don't have to change but the circumstances and technologies do and so the legal details necessarily must change to properly support the principles. The internet didn't exist when the Constitution was written so we have to figure out what free speech and free assembly and privacy etc means under the circumstances that arise. This isn't always obvious and prior precedents don't always make sense anymore.
Phoning, faxing, driving, mailing, or app-submitting an order to a retailer should have nothing whatsoever to do with whether that business is obligated to act as an agent of an out of state government where the business's owners don't even have a vote.
That's a reasonable statement of principle but you need to flesh out the details. The simple fact is that commerce via internet has introduced some new challenges to address and we need to come to a collective understanding of how they will be handled. States have a reasonable interest in taxing commerce that occurs within their state both incoming and outgoing. Our previous system (only tax the purchaser if in state) made sense both in principle and from a practicality standpoint prior to the rise of the web. But it's pretty easy to argue that while the principles still holdsthe practical realities in the face of the internet no longer make much sense in a lot of cases. So Congress sooner or later is going to have to get involved and work out some laws to address the day to day issues presented by internet commerce between states. This isn't a bad thing necessarily.
Did the internet change things, or the telephone? I also haven't read the text, but I never understood why internet orders are any different from telephone catalog orders.
Because catalog orders were always going to be a limited volume business. Ordering something by phone is actually quite a lot of work relatively speaking both for buyer and seller. It also requires distribution of expensive catalogs, having staff to take orders, and lots of other overhead and transactional friction. Therefore the rule about having a physical presence actually was a reasonable compromise given the realities of catalog shopping. The internet has made shopping FAR easier, faster, and spreads out the infrastructure all over the place. Instead of calling a single call center you might be dealing with servers in one state, payment processing in another, inventory in a third, and staff in a fourth.
The practical realities of internet shopping are actually quite a bit different than catalog shopping. Catalogs never were going to drive brick and mortar stores out of business.
While true on a technical level alone, does every state have to create a treaty with every other state in order to start expecting a tax?
Perhaps (yikes). That's why Congress might have to actually get off their ass and do something about the problem. I'm an accountant and this definitely has the potential to be a very expensive and complicated mess. There are ways to solve the problem but the best ones involve Congress not being a bunch of asshats only concerned with political infighting.
Are the states going to close their borders to open trade in response?
No they just have a lawsuit in federal court just like they do now. But this could really swamp the courts with needless litigation which is an obvious problem.
Remember this the next time Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch or Clarence Thomas talk about the following the original text of the constitution.
Heh... Yes this is a solid example of why originalists are so full of shit. It's almost always an excuse to justify some sort of behavior that is abhorrent under current social norms or to try stem the tide of political change that some people (usually conservatives) disapprove of. Originalists tend to ignore this principle when it is convenient for them but shout loudly about it when it helps whatever cause they are pushing at the time.
In this case internet commerce has changed the game dramatically and the laws were written in an earlier era with different circumstances. I haven't looked closely enough at this case to decide whether I agree with the decision but it seems clear enough that the old understanding regarding sales tax collection between states no longer makes much sense in the internet era. Change has to happen one way or another so such a decision isn't surprising even if it ultimately turns out to be a poor one. Maybe this will force Congress to actually address the elephant in the room and establish a new framework for States to collect sales tax that makes sense. (Dare to dream...)
States have no right to regulate interstate commerce.
That is NOT what the Commerce Cause of the Constitution says. It says [The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes. This wording does not prohibit States from having regulations regarding interstate commerce, it just means that Federal laws regarding commerce shall prevail in the event of a dispute. How this clause is to be interpreted has been the subject of debate since the founding of the republic but there is quite a lot of wiggle room here.
This is not something that the supreme court should even have the power to decide.
This is EXACTLY the sort of thing the Supreme Court has the power to decide. The entire job of the Supreme Court is to interpret whether a dispute about the law is constitutional or not and how the law should be interpreted with respect to the Constitution.
Evolution takes place over thousands of generations.
No it does not require thousands of generations. Have you ever seen a purebred dog? Humans applied selective breeding and can develop a completely new breed of dog with just a few generations. Evolution CAN happen slowly but it does not have to. It can happen quite quickly given the proper evolutionary pressures.
Heck... it's hardly migration. "Deepening" differences are measured in ranges from 60 to 120 meters deep.
Evolutionary pressure don't not care about what you perceive to be a small difference in distance. All that matters is whether that difference in depth creates an advantage in reproduction. If the difference in depth causes a difference in reproductive rates within a population then voila, you have an evolutionary pressure.
I.e. Young and inexperienced fish don't know how to hide from the nets OR the easy picking food (bottom dwelling crabs and crustaceans) they're munching on isn't available that deep.
The ones that prefer the locations where they do not get hunted (the reasons why don't matter) are the ones that will be selected to breed again. Small fish that don't prefer the deep get removed from the gene pool before they reproduce and so they never become big fish. Do this enough times and you will have selected for fish that prefer deeper waters. That my friend is an evolutionary pressure at work and it happens all the time.