So after decades and decades of diminishing racism all of a sudden America becomes a nazi state? Puh-leese Boris.
I don't think America changed all of a sudden, and I think that racism has been diminishing... but I think we've discovered over the last year that it hasn't diminished nearly as much as we thought it had. Most of the diminishment has been real, especially in the younger generations, but it appears that a significant amount of it has just gone underground. Trump's racist, sexist, anti-Islam, etc. comments signaled that it was okay to be a bigot, and that caused a lot of the underground bigotry to surface. Whatever you think about this particular report based on Google searches, there's lots and lots of evidence of an apparent resurgence of bigotry in the US.
I also think a lot of the resurgence started before Trump got on his bully pulpit, and in fact that resurgence is a big part of what made his candidacy viable. What caused it? I think it was mostly Obama. Not that Obama did much, if anything, to stoke racial resentment (many conservatives disagree with me on this, including my wife), but the mere fact of his presidency was a signal to black Americans that a corner had been turned on racial issues and that in turn encouraged them to complain more loudly about long-standing, ongoing, systematic racism, especially in the justice system. Thus, the election of a black (well, brownish) man as president apparently provoked loud and occasionally violent complaints about racial oppression of blacks. To people who were oblivious to the remaining systematic oppression, it looked like Obama's election created racial tension that wasn't there before. But it was, it was just hidden.
The "newly-discovered" racial tension increased discussion and debate of racial issues, highlighting more of them, resulting in more white people being told that they need to change to fix problems they didn't see, resulting in more racial tension, etc. And many people found Trump to be an outlet for their frustration, whether because they were closet racists who suddenly felt freed to say what they really thought, or because they were not-really-racists who had been unknowingly benefiting from systematic racism and were tired of being called racists for it.
Some of my conservative friends argue that this is a bad thing, that it would have been better to let the simmering, sub-rosa racial tension remain below the surface. Some of my liberal friends argue that this is fantastic, that we're finally outing the racists they knew were there. Personally, I think it's a mixed bag. Clearly, there are still significant racially-based problems in America, and if we can't talk about them, they aren't going to get fixed. Systemic oppression isn't just going to go away on its own. On the other hand, I think there is some potential to actually harden resistance, to encourage some percentage of the young population to defiantly adopt open racism. Letting it simmer for another generation or so could have made the problems much easier to handle, especially since the country is headed for whites becoming a minority. But, letting it simmer would be very unfair to all of the people who get systematically oppressed while we all ignore the issue.
So, on balance, I think I end up siding with the liberals (though still being annoyed with their shrill self-righteousness) and agreeing that bringing the festering infection to the surface is a good thing. But it's not going to be pleasant.
The test for racism really needs to include intent, when the intent of an action is to oppress, belittle, cause pain, or exclude; an act may be racist if it is otherwise racially motivated as well.
Absolutely.
Where that intent does not exists, it might be insensitive and maybe the affected person has a right ask someone not to do that but its unfair to brand that person a racist.
Agreed, but with the caveat that the way someone reacts to being asked not to do that can often betray racism -- or at least a degree of insensitivity that is indistinguishable from racism. For example, among much of Southern White culture it has been common to say "That's mighty white of ya" to mean, depending on context, that the person has done something particularly kind, or generous, or sometimes even wise. While to the speaker this may be said without racist intent, just a customary turn of phrase, it clearly has deep racial origins and it's quite legitimate for non-whites to ask that the phrase not be used, because it's both offensive and serves to reinforce the remaining racism in the culture.
When a person who uses this phrase is asked to stop, they can react in many ways. The best is to pause, reflect, note the clear racial origin of the phrase, and decide not to use it any more, apologizing for any slipups. But a common response, especially in online contexts or other situations where the requester isn't physically present, is to complain about "political correctness" and how the speaker cannot be told how they should and should not speak. Now, is that because the speaker is racist, and actually believes that kindness, generosity and wisdom are white racial characteristics not generally held by blacks, etc., or is that because the speaker is an insensitive jerk?
There's no way to tell without broader analysis of the speaker's behavior, and it's perfectly reasonable, IMO, to call someone who can't be distinguished from a racist, a racist. If they don't like it, they should stop acting like a racist.
Umm, Jim Crow laws were for the most part passed by Democrats, not Republicans
Which makes sense because until the middle of the 20th century Republicans were the progressive party and Democrats the conservative party, particularly with respect to social issues.
Okay - so why is the NRA never making [the argument that it's wrong to ban personal nuclear weapons]?
Because the NRA is not stupid, in three ways. First, the NRA is not stupid enough to *want* people to have personally-owned nukes. Second, the NRA knows that making such a stupid argument would turn basically everyone against them. Third, the NRA knows that such an argument would never fly in court; personal nuclear weapons bans could trivially survive even the strictest constitutional scrutiny.
Because they NRA only REALLY represent gun sellers
This is a common misconception. The NRA is overwhelmingly funded by individual members, not by gun manufacturers. They publicly report their accounts; you can look it up.
The fact that there is absolutely no possible way you can conceivably use a nuclear weapon in a legal manner anyway
Nuclear bombs could be useful for mining, dredging and other large-scale earthmoving projects.
you WILL kill innocent bystanders no matter what
Not necessarily, if detonated in a sufficiently-remote area. However, unless the bomb was incredibly (impossibly?) clean it would leave significant radioactive residue which would fall afoul of anti-pollution laws. Good luck getting your environmental impact statement signed off.
Should you have the right to own private nukes for deer hunting ?
If not - why is THAT a legitimate restriction on the right to bear arms but a fully automatic is not ?
SCOTUS hasn't defined a standard of scrutiny for 2A issues yet, but to be consistent with the other core rights in the Bill of Rights, the only standard that makes sense is strict scrutiny. Strict scrutiny says that rights may only be restricted (1) if there is a compelling government interest, (2) if the restriction is narrowly tailored, and (3) if the restriction is the least restrictive means possible.
Taking the case of nuclear weapons, the compelling interest is clear. So what kinds of restrictions would be narrowly-tailored and minimally-restrictive? Well, banning possession of a complete, fully-assembled nuclear bomb is narrow and minimally-restrictive. Banning possession of electronic components which could be used to construct highly-accurate timers needed to initiate the precise detonation sequence required would not, since that restriction is not narrowly tailored; such timers can be used for other things. Banning knowledge of nuclear physics would similarly not be either narrowly tailored or the least restrictive means possible. Restriction of access to highly-radioactive material and the conventional explosives needed to make a nuclear bomb are also pretty easy to justify on their own, completely aside from nuclear bomb building.
Similar logic must be applied to each case.
With regard to fully-automatic weapons, let's look first at the question of compelling government interest, in two different situations: the one that existed before the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the one that has existed since.
Prior to the NFA, there were a significant number of gangland murders committed with automatic weapons, which was the motive for enacting it. The NFA did not ban automatic weapons entirely, but required purchasers to jump through some legal hoops to purchase a $200 tax stamp ($200 was a lot of money in 1934). The constitutionality of this part of the law has never been tested, though it seems possible that it will withstand strict scrutiny. It might fall the "compelling interest" test, unless the government can show sufficient historical, pre-1934 evidence that murders with automatic weapons were a serious problem. I think that evidence is thin, but it might hold up. Regarding narrow tailoring, the law is fairly narrowly tailored, as evidenced by the fact that it actually doesn't cover bump-fire stocks and other innovations that enable pseudo-automatic fire. On the question of least restriction, it's also quite good, since it's only necessary to prove that one is not a felon, etc., and pay a $200 tax. That's not very restrictive, since any law-abiding citizen who really wants one can get one.
Post-NFA, however, it seems virtually impossible for the government to meet the compelling interest hurdle. The number of murders committed with full auto weapons is vanishingly small. Moreover, any law that attempted to reduce those murders by further restricting lawful ownership would be completely unable to meet the narrow-tailoring requirement, because the very few murders that are committed with fully-automatic weapons are committed with illegally-imported guns. No restriction of lawful purchase in the US could affect illegal importation.
Similarly, given the presence of the NFA it seems very unlikely that state-level bans on automatic weapons, such as the one in California, could survive strict scrutiny.
Where do you think the line should be drawn - and why should I trust YOUR line over anybody else's?
I think the strict scrutiny rule established for other core rights provides a very good line, for exactly the same reasons it was adopted for other core rights.
The prohibition wasn't fulfilled, the contract obligating the Israelites to obey it was. However, Jesus replaced it with a higher law, whose core is "love thy neighbor as thyself".
Leviticus 19:18. Hardly replaced.
Meh. In context that reads more like a hint at the higher law than actual law. Certainly there's little evidence that the Israelites took loving their neighbor as a serious commandment. Of course, one could argue that Christians also seem to find it difficult, but that is the law according to Christ.
I really do think that 2FA and controlling permissions is about the only viable password solution if you want reasonable security but can't spend a huge amount of time educating and testing employees and enforcing serious consequences for security breaches.
That, plus there's little evidence that education, testing or enforcement actually work.
It's not that 2FA is overly secure, it's simply that given how insecure user passwords will inevitably be and how forcing password changes just means employees use predictable sequences it couldn't be less secure than just passwords.
I'd say it differently; good passwords mitigate one set of threats and 2FA mitigates a different set. Password rotation policies are primarily intended to close the window of vulnerability caused by password disclosure due to social engineering or phishing. 2FA addresses those threats in a different and more effective way, which would make it better than rotation even if rotation didn't have the side effect of weakening passwords (and thereby reducing their effectiveness against the threats that passwords are intended to block).
What exactly does it even mean "to fulfill" a law?
Sorry, I should have been more precise. It's not the law that's fulfilled, it's the covenant which includes the law. The covenant, like any contract, had two sides. On the one hand Israelites committed to obey the law spelled out for them, and on the other hand Jehovah committed that they would be his chosen people, have his protection and guidance, and that he would eventually send a messiah. The arrival of Jesus, as that messiah, fulfilled the terms of the contract and closed it out.
The prohibition against theft, for example, how would it be fulfilled?
The prohibition wasn't fulfilled, the contract obligating the Israelites to obey it was. However, Jesus replaced it with a higher law, whose core is "love thy neighbor as thyself". Christ's law doesn't stop at commanding you not to steal your neighbor's stuff, it requires you to treat your neighbor with kindness and generosity -- in a word, love -- which obviously implies not ripping him off.
The use of the term "law" to denote both the law and the covenant that included it is automatic to me, since I learned all this as a child. Taking a step back and removing that makes this interpretation of the verse is less clear, though still not unreasonable.
Enforce a single-sign-on long and complex password.
That you rarely (years) require to be changed.
Also, require 2FA with a convenient hardware token. Something like a Yubikey Nano.
The problem with passwords alone, even long and complex ones, is that it's too easy for an attacker to acquire the password via phishing or social engineering. Adding the hardware token eliminates remote phishing attacks, and makes social engineering dramatically harder. It's odd, but people are much more reluctant to share a physical object than a password, even when they believe the the requester is legitimate. And even if they do share it, they want it back.
A 2FA token is amazingly effective at mitigating those attacks, but to get the full benefit, it needs to be required for every login which means you need something that's also extremely convenient. Having to get a number from your phone or something doesn't cut it. Just having to touch a tiny bit of metal sticking out of your USB port is very usable and adds a great deal of security.
What are they trying to say, that selling a million Pixel phones is somehow a failure?
FWIW, the number announced in the recent earnings call was 2.6M devices. I don't know what the download count of the Pixel Launcher on the Play Store means, but it clearly doesn't correlate with devices sold, because Pixel devices don't need to download the Pixel Launcher; it's pre-installed. Upgrades, maybe? But I don't think upgrades count as downloads. Even if they did, if the launcher is very infrequently updated and devices typically leave the factory with the latest version, only the earliest-sold devices would need to have upgraded.
I'm not sure what that number actually means, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what Ars thinks it means.
I doubt the mainstream market consumers would want to buy a Pixel phone when it only will be supported up to two years after it's initial launch.
Three years. However, I'd like to see you point me to the support commitment made by any other OEM. Any at all. As far as I can tell, Google is the only one that even bothers to tell you what you can expect. Not even Apple makes any commitments, though in practice they do generally give you four or five years, rather than three. But if they were to decide not to, you have no recourse.
Yes. It could be strongly typed if it weren't so trivial to completely subvert the type system -- in many cases accidentally. Worse, C almost requires programmers to regularly subvert the type system. C++ technically has the same problems, but C++ written in a modern style that eschews all old-style casts and takes advantage of template metaprogramming to build very precise custom type semantics can easily avoid all of those issues.
So was Snowden lying when he said the NSA could look up phone, e-mail and other private communication?
I don't know about Facebook, but with respect to Google, other bits of Snowden's information pointed to wiretaps of fiber connections between Google data centers. So the NSA did have access, and Google was telling the truth when it said it didn't cooperate or provide access. Facebook could be in the same situation. In fact Google responded by encrypting all data in transit -- inside as well as between data centers. It would be very interesting to see another data dump, to find out if that countermeasure has been successful.
However, in this case the information was sent direction to a government agent, so no inside access would be relevant. Also, it's Pakistan, not the NSA.
Yeah, those astrophycisist types, the best in the world at looking at stars, but we all know they suck at adding up numbers right ?
Apparently I wasn't clear. It was the comparison with C, which is very weakly typed and absolutely worse than Python for building complex systems, that I was criticizing, not the astrophysicists. They were comparing C vs Python on the basis of performance, and I'm sure that Python is a better choice than C for them, for exactly the reason they state: the performance gained by using the weakly-typed C language would be far more than offset by the stronger type safety and higher abstraction level provided by Python.
If they were comparing Python to Java or C++, and if their problem were complex enough to require many millions of lines of code, then I'd say they were wrong. But they weren't, it isn't, and they aren't.
That said, at various points in my career I've worked with brilliant physicists, and they're generally not terribly good at writing software. Not that their code doesn't work, but it lacks the discipline needed in large, complex systems. That's okay, though, because they don't generally try to build and maintain large, complex systems. Scientific and engineering software work, though very sophisticated in many respects, generally focuses on relatively small problems. There are exceptions, of course, but in those cases the teams generally hire some software engineers to free the physicists up to focus on physics.
how come during the election season Obama said, flat-out and public, that there was no interference going on and that everything was fine?
Two reasons. A) it would have created confusion and panic in our voting system as to whether votes were being correctly recorded (with electronic voting we don't know, but that's another issue)
It's worth pointing out that when the election is very close, it's far more important for democracy that people have confidence in the accuracy of the election result than that it actually be accurate. That may seem like a bizarre thing to say, but think about it. If the election is very close, it's because the electorate does not have a clear preference. This isn't to say that individual voters don't have clear preferences, but the electorate as a whole, under the system we use for determining the will of the people, doesn't have a clear preference.
Since the people don't have a clear will the election can go either way without going against the will of the people. In fact, in very close elections the result can go either way based on various random factors which in an ideal world shouldn't have any effect. Stuff like the weather. This means that the actual result of a close election cannot undermine the legitimacy of the democracy.
What can, and does, undermine democracy is when people say "Not my president", and in a very close race it takes very little to create enough doubt to enable people to say that. Of course, even in a landslide victory it's always possible for the supporters of the loser to take this tack, but in doing so they're demonstrating contempt for the very notion of democratic process. When it's very close, though, it's easy for people to make the argument that their guy/gal lost only because of X, Y or Z inaccuracies in the electoral process, and so the elected officeholder is illegitimate, not because democracy isn't the proper way to choose government.
To be clear, I despise Donald Trump with a purple passion, but he is my president and I will absolutely continue to honor the office and respect his legal and proper actions within that office (while retaining the right to criticize vociferously any I disagree with, and to encourage investigation, impeachment and possibly prosecution in the event of any illegal and/or improper actions). This attitude with regard to the office (and every other elected office) is, IMNSHO, exactly what all Americans need to hold if we're to avoid undermining our nation.
So, IMO, Obama did exactly the right thing in trying to fight Russian interference on the one hand, and keeping it quiet on the other, because fear about the legitimacy of the electoral process would have severely undermined the legitimacy of whoever won... and in a close election legitimacy is distinct from and more important than accuracy. That said, we absolutely do need to investigate any identified weaknesses in the electoral processes, and fix them lest we find ourselves in a situation where the electorate does have a clear preference and the processes deliver a contrary result.
True. I tend to discount Ada because I've never actually seen it outside of an academic environment, but it definitely provides very powerful typechecking.
Though I don't work in your field so I hesitate to offer an opinion, I think there would be really significant value in C++. If you haven't, you should take a look at the classic Barton & Nackman book on Scientific and Engineering C++. They use a bit of template magic to construct a system of types that essentially teaches the compiler to perform unit analysis. Multiply a mass times a distance and try to assign it to a force variable? Compiler will balk. Try to multiply matrices of incompatible dimensions, compiler will flag it. I don't know if it would solve actual problems, but its pretty cool.
Others who agree with you wrote mypy which is basically a lint-style checker for type.
Cool. I'll have to check that out.
However, I think my biases incline me in the opposite direction. Rather than dynamic typing with static type-linting, I prefer strong static typing with ubiquitous type inference. The code ends up looking much the same, I think, but I think the latter is always likely to be more thorough. Plus, it eliminates the need for most run-time typechecking. That's a minor to trivial issue in practice, but I hate systematically wasting cycles.
What Python doesn't have is strong type enforcement.
Actually, it does - Python is a strongly typed language, what it isn't, is statically typed.
Which means that you have no idea that you passed a dingus instead of a wackadoodle until some codepath that exercises the difference... and then you only find out at run-time, when your production system crashes. Sure, you can argue that this just means your automated tests were deficient, but that's always going to be the case, even when you apply great effort to get to 100% coverage. And you can argue that static typing isn't a perfect solution either, and I would never claim otherwise.
But the combination of TDD and static typing catches more defects than TDD alone, and static typing often enables errors to be caught at the time when they're easiest to fix, compilation. Judicious use of strong static typing enables us to write code that cannot compile unless it's correct. It's unfortunate that the very best popular-language example of this comes from the most powerful footgun language, C++, but that doesn't make it any less true. The C++ templating system, combined with static typing, makes it fairly easy to build infrastructure that allows the compiler to catch huge classes of likely errors. Haskell is an even better example of the tremendous error-correction power of strong and thorough static typing, though it's not likely ever to become popular.
Python is great for rapid prototyping and small scripts, but for large, complex systems I want both TDD and strong typing. At present, Java is probably the best language for such systems, when you consider availability of experienced staff, tooling and native features.
In fact, they are. You haven't paid attention the last few months.
They set goals 20 years into the future to begin with because they know that technology is already on its way to making these changes.
When the Paris Accord was written, China did indeed set low goals for itself. But more recently -- especially since Trump's election -- China has reconsidered and begun investing heavily in green energy production both domestically and around the world.
The rest is just a grab for cash.
Actually, you're on to something there. China seems to have recognized that it can offer significantly-subsidized Chinese-made green energy infrastructure to the developing world and thereby accomplish two goals at once. First, it can comply with (and exceed) its commitments under the Paris Accord. Second, and much more important, it can become the provider of (and in many cases owner of) core energy infrastructure throughout the developing world, positioning itself to reap huge economic rewards as those regions' economies develop. Along the way it will obtain tremendous political influence, both in the developing nations where Chinese goods and services will be so important to their economic progress, and throughout the developed world where it will be seen as the nation that stepped up to solve the problem while America dithered.
China's climate change response looks likely to position it as the leader of a new world order that will replace the one established by the US in the aftermath of WWII. The US established itself as the leader of the world by stepping in and solving big problems that affected the whole world, first by defeating the Axis militarily, and then by funding much of the cleanup. China appears to have realized that there's a chance for them to use the climate change situation to repeat that trick, and American voters seem to want to let them.
Slashdot Mirror
So after decades and decades of diminishing racism all of a sudden America becomes a nazi state? Puh-leese Boris.
I don't think America changed all of a sudden, and I think that racism has been diminishing... but I think we've discovered over the last year that it hasn't diminished nearly as much as we thought it had. Most of the diminishment has been real, especially in the younger generations, but it appears that a significant amount of it has just gone underground. Trump's racist, sexist, anti-Islam, etc. comments signaled that it was okay to be a bigot, and that caused a lot of the underground bigotry to surface. Whatever you think about this particular report based on Google searches, there's lots and lots of evidence of an apparent resurgence of bigotry in the US.
I also think a lot of the resurgence started before Trump got on his bully pulpit, and in fact that resurgence is a big part of what made his candidacy viable. What caused it? I think it was mostly Obama. Not that Obama did much, if anything, to stoke racial resentment (many conservatives disagree with me on this, including my wife), but the mere fact of his presidency was a signal to black Americans that a corner had been turned on racial issues and that in turn encouraged them to complain more loudly about long-standing, ongoing, systematic racism, especially in the justice system. Thus, the election of a black (well, brownish) man as president apparently provoked loud and occasionally violent complaints about racial oppression of blacks. To people who were oblivious to the remaining systematic oppression, it looked like Obama's election created racial tension that wasn't there before. But it was, it was just hidden.
The "newly-discovered" racial tension increased discussion and debate of racial issues, highlighting more of them, resulting in more white people being told that they need to change to fix problems they didn't see, resulting in more racial tension, etc. And many people found Trump to be an outlet for their frustration, whether because they were closet racists who suddenly felt freed to say what they really thought, or because they were not-really-racists who had been unknowingly benefiting from systematic racism and were tired of being called racists for it.
Some of my conservative friends argue that this is a bad thing, that it would have been better to let the simmering, sub-rosa racial tension remain below the surface. Some of my liberal friends argue that this is fantastic, that we're finally outing the racists they knew were there. Personally, I think it's a mixed bag. Clearly, there are still significant racially-based problems in America, and if we can't talk about them, they aren't going to get fixed. Systemic oppression isn't just going to go away on its own. On the other hand, I think there is some potential to actually harden resistance, to encourage some percentage of the young population to defiantly adopt open racism. Letting it simmer for another generation or so could have made the problems much easier to handle, especially since the country is headed for whites becoming a minority. But, letting it simmer would be very unfair to all of the people who get systematically oppressed while we all ignore the issue.
So, on balance, I think I end up siding with the liberals (though still being annoyed with their shrill self-righteousness) and agreeing that bringing the festering infection to the surface is a good thing. But it's not going to be pleasant.
The test for racism really needs to include intent, when the intent of an action is to oppress, belittle, cause pain, or exclude; an act may be racist if it is otherwise racially motivated as well.
Absolutely.
Where that intent does not exists, it might be insensitive and maybe the affected person has a right ask someone not to do that but its unfair to brand that person a racist.
Agreed, but with the caveat that the way someone reacts to being asked not to do that can often betray racism -- or at least a degree of insensitivity that is indistinguishable from racism. For example, among much of Southern White culture it has been common to say "That's mighty white of ya" to mean, depending on context, that the person has done something particularly kind, or generous, or sometimes even wise. While to the speaker this may be said without racist intent, just a customary turn of phrase, it clearly has deep racial origins and it's quite legitimate for non-whites to ask that the phrase not be used, because it's both offensive and serves to reinforce the remaining racism in the culture.
When a person who uses this phrase is asked to stop, they can react in many ways. The best is to pause, reflect, note the clear racial origin of the phrase, and decide not to use it any more, apologizing for any slipups. But a common response, especially in online contexts or other situations where the requester isn't physically present, is to complain about "political correctness" and how the speaker cannot be told how they should and should not speak. Now, is that because the speaker is racist, and actually believes that kindness, generosity and wisdom are white racial characteristics not generally held by blacks, etc., or is that because the speaker is an insensitive jerk?
There's no way to tell without broader analysis of the speaker's behavior, and it's perfectly reasonable, IMO, to call someone who can't be distinguished from a racist, a racist. If they don't like it, they should stop acting like a racist.
Umm, Jim Crow laws were for the most part passed by Democrats, not Republicans
Which makes sense because until the middle of the 20th century Republicans were the progressive party and Democrats the conservative party, particularly with respect to social issues.
Okay - so why is the NRA never making [the argument that it's wrong to ban personal nuclear weapons]?
Because the NRA is not stupid, in three ways. First, the NRA is not stupid enough to *want* people to have personally-owned nukes. Second, the NRA knows that making such a stupid argument would turn basically everyone against them. Third, the NRA knows that such an argument would never fly in court; personal nuclear weapons bans could trivially survive even the strictest constitutional scrutiny.
Because they NRA only REALLY represent gun sellers
This is a common misconception. The NRA is overwhelmingly funded by individual members, not by gun manufacturers. They publicly report their accounts; you can look it up.
The fact that there is absolutely no possible way you can conceivably use a nuclear weapon in a legal manner anyway
Nuclear bombs could be useful for mining, dredging and other large-scale earthmoving projects.
you WILL kill innocent bystanders no matter what
Not necessarily, if detonated in a sufficiently-remote area. However, unless the bomb was incredibly (impossibly?) clean it would leave significant radioactive residue which would fall afoul of anti-pollution laws. Good luck getting your environmental impact statement signed off.
Should you have the right to own private nukes for deer hunting ? If not - why is THAT a legitimate restriction on the right to bear arms but a fully automatic is not ?
SCOTUS hasn't defined a standard of scrutiny for 2A issues yet, but to be consistent with the other core rights in the Bill of Rights, the only standard that makes sense is strict scrutiny. Strict scrutiny says that rights may only be restricted (1) if there is a compelling government interest, (2) if the restriction is narrowly tailored, and (3) if the restriction is the least restrictive means possible.
Taking the case of nuclear weapons, the compelling interest is clear. So what kinds of restrictions would be narrowly-tailored and minimally-restrictive? Well, banning possession of a complete, fully-assembled nuclear bomb is narrow and minimally-restrictive. Banning possession of electronic components which could be used to construct highly-accurate timers needed to initiate the precise detonation sequence required would not, since that restriction is not narrowly tailored; such timers can be used for other things. Banning knowledge of nuclear physics would similarly not be either narrowly tailored or the least restrictive means possible. Restriction of access to highly-radioactive material and the conventional explosives needed to make a nuclear bomb are also pretty easy to justify on their own, completely aside from nuclear bomb building.
Similar logic must be applied to each case.
With regard to fully-automatic weapons, let's look first at the question of compelling government interest, in two different situations: the one that existed before the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the one that has existed since.
Prior to the NFA, there were a significant number of gangland murders committed with automatic weapons, which was the motive for enacting it. The NFA did not ban automatic weapons entirely, but required purchasers to jump through some legal hoops to purchase a $200 tax stamp ($200 was a lot of money in 1934). The constitutionality of this part of the law has never been tested, though it seems possible that it will withstand strict scrutiny. It might fall the "compelling interest" test, unless the government can show sufficient historical, pre-1934 evidence that murders with automatic weapons were a serious problem. I think that evidence is thin, but it might hold up. Regarding narrow tailoring, the law is fairly narrowly tailored, as evidenced by the fact that it actually doesn't cover bump-fire stocks and other innovations that enable pseudo-automatic fire. On the question of least restriction, it's also quite good, since it's only necessary to prove that one is not a felon, etc., and pay a $200 tax. That's not very restrictive, since any law-abiding citizen who really wants one can get one.
Post-NFA, however, it seems virtually impossible for the government to meet the compelling interest hurdle. The number of murders committed with full auto weapons is vanishingly small. Moreover, any law that attempted to reduce those murders by further restricting lawful ownership would be completely unable to meet the narrow-tailoring requirement, because the very few murders that are committed with fully-automatic weapons are committed with illegally-imported guns. No restriction of lawful purchase in the US could affect illegal importation.
Similarly, given the presence of the NFA it seems very unlikely that state-level bans on automatic weapons, such as the one in California, could survive strict scrutiny.
Where do you think the line should be drawn - and why should I trust YOUR line over anybody else's?
I think the strict scrutiny rule established for other core rights provides a very good line, for exactly the same reasons it was adopted for other core rights.
The prohibition wasn't fulfilled, the contract obligating the Israelites to obey it was. However, Jesus replaced it with a higher law, whose core is "love thy neighbor as thyself".
Leviticus 19:18. Hardly replaced.
Meh. In context that reads more like a hint at the higher law than actual law. Certainly there's little evidence that the Israelites took loving their neighbor as a serious commandment. Of course, one could argue that Christians also seem to find it difficult, but that is the law according to Christ.
I really do think that 2FA and controlling permissions is about the only viable password solution if you want reasonable security but can't spend a huge amount of time educating and testing employees and enforcing serious consequences for security breaches.
That, plus there's little evidence that education, testing or enforcement actually work.
It's not that 2FA is overly secure, it's simply that given how insecure user passwords will inevitably be and how forcing password changes just means employees use predictable sequences it couldn't be less secure than just passwords.
I'd say it differently; good passwords mitigate one set of threats and 2FA mitigates a different set. Password rotation policies are primarily intended to close the window of vulnerability caused by password disclosure due to social engineering or phishing. 2FA addresses those threats in a different and more effective way, which would make it better than rotation even if rotation didn't have the side effect of weakening passwords (and thereby reducing their effectiveness against the threats that passwords are intended to block).
What exactly does it even mean "to fulfill" a law?
Sorry, I should have been more precise. It's not the law that's fulfilled, it's the covenant which includes the law. The covenant, like any contract, had two sides. On the one hand Israelites committed to obey the law spelled out for them, and on the other hand Jehovah committed that they would be his chosen people, have his protection and guidance, and that he would eventually send a messiah. The arrival of Jesus, as that messiah, fulfilled the terms of the contract and closed it out.
The prohibition against theft, for example, how would it be fulfilled?
The prohibition wasn't fulfilled, the contract obligating the Israelites to obey it was. However, Jesus replaced it with a higher law, whose core is "love thy neighbor as thyself". Christ's law doesn't stop at commanding you not to steal your neighbor's stuff, it requires you to treat your neighbor with kindness and generosity -- in a word, love -- which obviously implies not ripping him off.
The use of the term "law" to denote both the law and the covenant that included it is automatic to me, since I learned all this as a child. Taking a step back and removing that makes this interpretation of the verse is less clear, though still not unreasonable.
Enforce a single-sign-on long and complex password.
That you rarely (years) require to be changed.
Also, require 2FA with a convenient hardware token. Something like a Yubikey Nano.
The problem with passwords alone, even long and complex ones, is that it's too easy for an attacker to acquire the password via phishing or social engineering. Adding the hardware token eliminates remote phishing attacks, and makes social engineering dramatically harder. It's odd, but people are much more reluctant to share a physical object than a password, even when they believe the the requester is legitimate. And even if they do share it, they want it back.
A 2FA token is amazingly effective at mitigating those attacks, but to get the full benefit, it needs to be required for every login which means you need something that's also extremely convenient. Having to get a number from your phone or something doesn't cut it. Just having to touch a tiny bit of metal sticking out of your USB port is very usable and adds a great deal of security.
What are they trying to say, that selling a million Pixel phones is somehow a failure?
FWIW, the number announced in the recent earnings call was 2.6M devices. I don't know what the download count of the Pixel Launcher on the Play Store means, but it clearly doesn't correlate with devices sold, because Pixel devices don't need to download the Pixel Launcher; it's pre-installed. Upgrades, maybe? But I don't think upgrades count as downloads. Even if they did, if the launcher is very infrequently updated and devices typically leave the factory with the latest version, only the earliest-sold devices would need to have upgraded.
I'm not sure what that number actually means, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean what Ars thinks it means.
I doubt the mainstream market consumers would want to buy a Pixel phone when it only will be supported up to two years after it's initial launch.
Three years. However, I'd like to see you point me to the support commitment made by any other OEM. Any at all. As far as I can tell, Google is the only one that even bothers to tell you what you can expect. Not even Apple makes any commitments, though in practice they do generally give you four or five years, rather than three. But if they were to decide not to, you have no recourse.
You think C is weakly typed..? o_O
Yes. It could be strongly typed if it weren't so trivial to completely subvert the type system -- in many cases accidentally. Worse, C almost requires programmers to regularly subvert the type system. C++ technically has the same problems, but C++ written in a modern style that eschews all old-style casts and takes advantage of template metaprogramming to build very precise custom type semantics can easily avoid all of those issues.
...because?
Look at history, at the countries that banned all religion, and at how that went.
Then you are certainly qualified to explain how Matt 5:17-20 fits into this.
You don't need anyone to explain that. It's right there in verse 17. "I come ... to fulfil". Old law, fulfilled. New law, established. Done.
So was Snowden lying when he said the NSA could look up phone, e-mail and other private communication?
I don't know about Facebook, but with respect to Google, other bits of Snowden's information pointed to wiretaps of fiber connections between Google data centers. So the NSA did have access, and Google was telling the truth when it said it didn't cooperate or provide access. Facebook could be in the same situation. In fact Google responded by encrypting all data in transit -- inside as well as between data centers. It would be very interesting to see another data dump, to find out if that countermeasure has been successful.
However, in this case the information was sent direction to a government agent, so no inside access would be relevant. Also, it's Pakistan, not the NSA.
Yeah, those astrophycisist types, the best in the world at looking at stars, but we all know they suck at adding up numbers right ?
Apparently I wasn't clear. It was the comparison with C, which is very weakly typed and absolutely worse than Python for building complex systems, that I was criticizing, not the astrophysicists. They were comparing C vs Python on the basis of performance, and I'm sure that Python is a better choice than C for them, for exactly the reason they state: the performance gained by using the weakly-typed C language would be far more than offset by the stronger type safety and higher abstraction level provided by Python.
If they were comparing Python to Java or C++, and if their problem were complex enough to require many millions of lines of code, then I'd say they were wrong. But they weren't, it isn't, and they aren't.
That said, at various points in my career I've worked with brilliant physicists, and they're generally not terribly good at writing software. Not that their code doesn't work, but it lacks the discipline needed in large, complex systems. That's okay, though, because they don't generally try to build and maintain large, complex systems. Scientific and engineering software work, though very sophisticated in many respects, generally focuses on relatively small problems. There are exceptions, of course, but in those cases the teams generally hire some software engineers to free the physicists up to focus on physics.
I don't buy it. Well, sure, I buy the comparison with C, but not with (modern) C++ or Java.
how come during the election season Obama said, flat-out and public, that there was no interference going on and that everything was fine? Two reasons. A) it would have created confusion and panic in our voting system as to whether votes were being correctly recorded (with electronic voting we don't know, but that's another issue)
It's worth pointing out that when the election is very close, it's far more important for democracy that people have confidence in the accuracy of the election result than that it actually be accurate. That may seem like a bizarre thing to say, but think about it. If the election is very close, it's because the electorate does not have a clear preference. This isn't to say that individual voters don't have clear preferences, but the electorate as a whole, under the system we use for determining the will of the people, doesn't have a clear preference.
Since the people don't have a clear will the election can go either way without going against the will of the people. In fact, in very close elections the result can go either way based on various random factors which in an ideal world shouldn't have any effect. Stuff like the weather. This means that the actual result of a close election cannot undermine the legitimacy of the democracy.
What can, and does, undermine democracy is when people say "Not my president", and in a very close race it takes very little to create enough doubt to enable people to say that. Of course, even in a landslide victory it's always possible for the supporters of the loser to take this tack, but in doing so they're demonstrating contempt for the very notion of democratic process. When it's very close, though, it's easy for people to make the argument that their guy/gal lost only because of X, Y or Z inaccuracies in the electoral process, and so the elected officeholder is illegitimate, not because democracy isn't the proper way to choose government.
To be clear, I despise Donald Trump with a purple passion, but he is my president and I will absolutely continue to honor the office and respect his legal and proper actions within that office (while retaining the right to criticize vociferously any I disagree with, and to encourage investigation, impeachment and possibly prosecution in the event of any illegal and/or improper actions). This attitude with regard to the office (and every other elected office) is, IMNSHO, exactly what all Americans need to hold if we're to avoid undermining our nation.
So, IMO, Obama did exactly the right thing in trying to fight Russian interference on the one hand, and keeping it quiet on the other, because fear about the legitimacy of the electoral process would have severely undermined the legitimacy of whoever won... and in a close election legitimacy is distinct from and more important than accuracy. That said, we absolutely do need to investigate any identified weaknesses in the electoral processes, and fix them lest we find ourselves in a situation where the electorate does have a clear preference and the processes deliver a contrary result.
True. I tend to discount Ada because I've never actually seen it outside of an academic environment, but it definitely provides very powerful typechecking.
Though I don't work in your field so I hesitate to offer an opinion, I think there would be really significant value in C++. If you haven't, you should take a look at the classic Barton & Nackman book on Scientific and Engineering C++. They use a bit of template magic to construct a system of types that essentially teaches the compiler to perform unit analysis. Multiply a mass times a distance and try to assign it to a force variable? Compiler will balk. Try to multiply matrices of incompatible dimensions, compiler will flag it. I don't know if it would solve actual problems, but its pretty cool.
Others who agree with you wrote mypy which is basically a lint-style checker for type.
Cool. I'll have to check that out.
However, I think my biases incline me in the opposite direction. Rather than dynamic typing with static type-linting, I prefer strong static typing with ubiquitous type inference. The code ends up looking much the same, I think, but I think the latter is always likely to be more thorough. Plus, it eliminates the need for most run-time typechecking. That's a minor to trivial issue in practice, but I hate systematically wasting cycles.
Are you asserting that it's OK if it compiles?
Obviously not. Did you read my post?
I just corrected your assertion. Python *is* strongly typed.
RabidReindeer's assertion, not mine.
What Python doesn't have is strong type enforcement.
Actually, it does - Python is a strongly typed language, what it isn't, is statically typed.
Which means that you have no idea that you passed a dingus instead of a wackadoodle until some codepath that exercises the difference... and then you only find out at run-time, when your production system crashes. Sure, you can argue that this just means your automated tests were deficient, but that's always going to be the case, even when you apply great effort to get to 100% coverage. And you can argue that static typing isn't a perfect solution either, and I would never claim otherwise.
But the combination of TDD and static typing catches more defects than TDD alone, and static typing often enables errors to be caught at the time when they're easiest to fix, compilation. Judicious use of strong static typing enables us to write code that cannot compile unless it's correct. It's unfortunate that the very best popular-language example of this comes from the most powerful footgun language, C++, but that doesn't make it any less true. The C++ templating system, combined with static typing, makes it fairly easy to build infrastructure that allows the compiler to catch huge classes of likely errors. Haskell is an even better example of the tremendous error-correction power of strong and thorough static typing, though it's not likely ever to become popular.
Python is great for rapid prototyping and small scripts, but for large, complex systems I want both TDD and strong typing. At present, Java is probably the best language for such systems, when you consider availability of experienced staff, tooling and native features.
They aren't exceeding their goals.
In fact, they are. You haven't paid attention the last few months.
They set goals 20 years into the future to begin with because they know that technology is already on its way to making these changes.
When the Paris Accord was written, China did indeed set low goals for itself. But more recently -- especially since Trump's election -- China has reconsidered and begun investing heavily in green energy production both domestically and around the world.
The rest is just a grab for cash.
Actually, you're on to something there. China seems to have recognized that it can offer significantly-subsidized Chinese-made green energy infrastructure to the developing world and thereby accomplish two goals at once. First, it can comply with (and exceed) its commitments under the Paris Accord. Second, and much more important, it can become the provider of (and in many cases owner of) core energy infrastructure throughout the developing world, positioning itself to reap huge economic rewards as those regions' economies develop. Along the way it will obtain tremendous political influence, both in the developing nations where Chinese goods and services will be so important to their economic progress, and throughout the developed world where it will be seen as the nation that stepped up to solve the problem while America dithered.
China's climate change response looks likely to position it as the leader of a new world order that will replace the one established by the US in the aftermath of WWII. The US established itself as the leader of the world by stepping in and solving big problems that affected the whole world, first by defeating the Axis militarily, and then by funding much of the cleanup. China appears to have realized that there's a chance for them to use the climate change situation to repeat that trick, and American voters seem to want to let them.