Okay, I'll help you out. Let's go to Joseph Story, a Supreme Court justice appointed by James Madison and author of Commentaries on the Constitution.
The importance of this article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them. And yet, though this truth would seem so clear, and the importance of a well regulated militia would seem so undeniable, it cannot be disguised, that among the American people there is a growing indifference to any system of militia discipline, and a strong disposition, from a sense of its burthens, to be rid of all regulations. How it is practicable to keep the people duly armed without some organization, it is difficult to see. There is certainly no small danger, that indifference may lead to disgust, and disgust to contempt; and thus gradually undermine all the protection intended by this clause of our national bill of rights.
So what I get here is that some amount of organized militia is necessary for the 2nd amendment to really make sense, and that militias were supposed to the exclusion of an organized, central military. Does that sound anything like the context we're in now?
Now, if I want to spend more time copying and pasting, we'll find dozens of different opinions on what the right to bear arms meant, but we'll find repeatedly that organized state-level militias were intended to preclude the need for a central military. However, there was already a lot of concern about the situation as early as 1794 after an insurrection of Pennsylvanian farmers. The militia mindset is also a large part of the reason the United States got its ass handed to it during the early portion of the War of 1812, and then subsequently moved towards an organized military.
Really, the important thing, and the reason for my question in the first place, is that even as far back as when the framers were still drafting the amendment, there wasn't universal agreement. The amendment itself was written something like 7 times before it got to its final, adopted form. The arrogance required to tell people that they are either ignorant or dishonest for not seeing the issue as simple is amazing, and I think it should be clear to anyone reading that you are either ignorant or dishonest yourself for making the claim.
And yes, now that you mention it, also a cocksucker.
I'm not sure I get it. If I am supposed to have access to weapons of the type used by our soldiers, I still don't see how that means I don't get to build an H-Bomb in my back yard. The military has them. Is the difference the number of people that operate the weapon? Fine, I'll put one big red button that lets me set it off myself. Is it that I can't carry it around? What if I fit nuclear weapon in a suitcase? Then am I allowed to have it?
So as long as they rewrite it over the course of a couple years, over-riding each individual clause one at a time instead of all at once, they're good? You think you're somehow making a clever distinction, but you are really not. There is no part of the Constitution that is immune to amendment, and therefore the whole thing has a built-in mechanism for change, whether it is all at once or over time. There might be a discussion to be had over whether that would actually be the right thing to do, but hell, they can just amend the treason clause out first if you think somehow rewriting the document would count.
It isn't a straight line because there might be network infrastructure there beyond a single wire. In many cases, I could probably even draw it all out, but because I want my graph to be informational, I leave it out so that only the the data I wish to convey is described in any detail. It's a way of saying that there is likely additional complexity here, but for the purposes of this graph, you can treat it as a hub and spoke network with a single hub. There is no uptime guarantee or any notion of actually storing data there, unless otherwise enumerated.
That's pretty a pretty cool strawman. Here, let me play, too. Can you find one that says "The right to bear arms shall also include keeping instruments of death in your pocket where nobody can see it even though I've never seen anything like that before"?
Who would have had no idea that there would ever be such a thing as a nuclear bomb. Clearly there is some upper limit to what weapons we want me to have in my back yard, as most people would say no to my building an H-Bomb. What does the constitution or the letters say about where that line falls?
Err, what? The amendment process allows the government to amend any part of the constitution. If the government were to go through the proscribed process to rewrite the constitution, how would that be the least bit treasonous?
Which is also true of The Cloud. You have one point of access, but the content/processing is spread across distinct regions of the world in multiple datacenters. Outages at any given location, or even multiple outages, have no effect on service as far as the end user is concerned.
Okay cool. So we're in agreement that "The Cloud" is just a hijack of cloud computing terminology turned into a nebulous buzzword.
In a network diagram the cloud represents an abstract entity that sends and receives bits, nothing more. The Cloud is the same, you send your request, and you get a response back. Going back to my first point, it is represented as a cloud instead of distinct wires because its ability to never fail because of localized outages. It always works, no matter how bad a datacenter is failing at a given time.
Damn. Nevermind, I guess.
And you couldn't be more wrong about what that cloud on a network diagram means. If there are no explicit notes on a cloud in a network diagram, it just means that it is abstracted away network infrastructure, and is usually used to either indicate connection to the internet at large or at least to a network that you know will transport your data without having control or knowledge of the specific network topology. There is no implication of any redundancy. There is no relation to distributed computing. It just represents wires that you can't or won't draw because they don't add useful information to your network diagram.
The bottom line is that you can spew rainbows and lollipops at me all day (which business's marketing department did you say you work in again?), but that won't change the fact that a bunch of people in some marketing department someplace stole some perfectly good terminology and ruined it.
The goal of Cloud Computing is similar to the goals that marketers trumpet The Cloud to achieve, but The Cloud encompasses much more.
Not really at all. Cloud computing is about putting a layer of abstraction between a logical server and its hardware and then running distributed hardware as your physical host. Its design goal has nothing to do with syncing content between clients, or web hosted applications, or whatever else "The Cloud" is supposed to be doing for us. It's (very specific) goals are to provide easy scalability of a logical server and to remove hardware and localized network outages as points of failure.
It is about the entire stack, including the computers (which might utilize Cloud Computing), the network infrastructure, and the software. This is also what the cloud on a network diagram represents. It is a random void that sends and receives bits. If you have to concern yourself with how it works, you are not accessing the Cloud.
That's also crap. The cloud on a network diagram only has to do with software insofar as it relates to network connectivity. The only thing that little piece of clipart relates to is actual data connectivity. The cloud in that picture can't store data, it doesn't manage syncing, and really, it does absolutely nothing on the application layer. It provides layer 3 connectivity from each device connected to all of the others. This is again completely and utterly different from the horrible mishmash term that has arisen in the past couple of years, and the only source for an etymological link is people trying to revise history.
Maybe my phrasing is unclear. I specifically meant that donating money to the government outside of the obligated tax payments doesn't make sense from a game theory perspective, not that any taxation was ever a donation.
I always hate when people say things like that. The whole reason we have a government from a economic game theory perspective is to act as a mutually accepted arbiter to enforce cooperation to avoid a Tragedy of the Commons scenario for shared resources. The economically rational choice is always to not take the cooperative action unless you can ensure everybody else is going to.
Donating to charities might still make sense because you aren't doing it necessarily in the context of rational self-interest, but the government is specifically a mechanism to leverage people's rational self-interest. There's no way to get away from that context. It therefore never makes sense to tell people to donate tax money except in the childish "if you love the government so much why don't you marry it" sense.
I know the fight is already lost. I just took issue with GGP's implication that somehow people who knew what cloud computing was before the cloud became a buzzword were somehow incapable of grasping the new, crappy, nebulous term and were therefore trying to alter it.
Not to say my blood doesn't boil every time I see that commercial that somehow implicates "The Cloud" as the means by which some lady is editing digital photos, but I do know better than to spend a lot of effort trying to resist the decay of language clarity when nobody else gives a crap.
That's retroactive etymology. Yes, network diagrams have used clouds to represented abstracted away network architecture and/or the Internet for a really long time. But storing things on a/the cloud originally referred to storing it on a cloud computing cluster. The term was just hijacked by a bunch of people in marketing departments and then retconned by apologists into a term originating from unrelated clouds on network diagrams.
Bullshit. Cloud computing has had a very specific meaning for a very long time; specifically, it is when you have one virtualized, logical machine that is is running on some arbitrary number of physical hosts. Just because a bunch of asstards have come in and turned it into some almost meaningless buzzword that means vaguely Software as a Service doesn't mean it's always been that way. You assholes should have picked a term that wasn't already in use if you didn't want there to be confusion.
Yes, Opera has the built in functionality to identify as either IE or Firefox or mask as them (whatever that means). It also stores these preferences on a site by site basis.
Or, we can just leave the hardware keys in on all of the computers in a corporate environment. All of you important data resides externally on a server anyway, right? If I need to re-image you machine, it shouldn't even cause you to bat an eye.
I am an Opera user. I personally love the number of sites that outright refuse to even try to serve me their content when my browser identifies as Opera. I sometimes even get redirected to people's mobile sites.
My favorite anecdote is trying to do streaming with Netflix with my preferred browser. I log in to the site, pick a movie, and tell it to play. Netflix pops up a page telling me that I needed to have a supported browser like IE, Firefox, or Chrome to stream content. So of course, I did what every other Opera user does in this situation: I tell my web browser to lie and claim it in Firefox when I request pages from Netflix. It then lets me know that I need to install Silverlight to play movies... so I head on over to Microsoft's site and get told once again that there is no way that they could possibly install Silverlight so that it would work with my stupid non-supported browser. 6 seconds later, the page is reloaded and my browser is identifying on the Silverlight install page as IE, and bam, it installs just fine.
In a matter of a few minutes, I ran into two different pages that refused to give me the content I was requesting, even though it installed and ran without a single hitch. The moral of this story is that it isn't just that Microsoft and other developers don't develop for browsers they don't want to, it is that they specifically lock me out of otherwise working content with no way to click through to see if it would work even with an unsupported browser.
I, of course, realize that my browser choice is far from mainstream. But all I really want is the ability to get a warning letting me know that my browser hasn't been tested by the developers of the page I am trying to view and therefore would receive no support if it didn't work and the ability to click through and try to view it anyway. Is that really so much to ask?
Less so as the years go by and carriers consolidate. If he needs any chance at rural coverage at all, his alternatives after T-Mobile gets bought are AT&T and Sprint?
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, they are trying to kick all of those out.
I have not.
The importance of this article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them. And yet, though this truth would seem so clear, and the importance of a well regulated militia would seem so undeniable, it cannot be disguised, that among the American people there is a growing indifference to any system of militia discipline, and a strong disposition, from a sense of its burthens, to be rid of all regulations. How it is practicable to keep the people duly armed without some organization, it is difficult to see. There is certainly no small danger, that indifference may lead to disgust, and disgust to contempt; and thus gradually undermine all the protection intended by this clause of our national bill of rights.
So what I get here is that some amount of organized militia is necessary for the 2nd amendment to really make sense, and that militias were supposed to the exclusion of an organized, central military. Does that sound anything like the context we're in now?
Now, if I want to spend more time copying and pasting, we'll find dozens of different opinions on what the right to bear arms meant, but we'll find repeatedly that organized state-level militias were intended to preclude the need for a central military. However, there was already a lot of concern about the situation as early as 1794 after an insurrection of Pennsylvanian farmers. The militia mindset is also a large part of the reason the United States got its ass handed to it during the early portion of the War of 1812, and then subsequently moved towards an organized military.
Really, the important thing, and the reason for my question in the first place, is that even as far back as when the framers were still drafting the amendment, there wasn't universal agreement. The amendment itself was written something like 7 times before it got to its final, adopted form. The arrogance required to tell people that they are either ignorant or dishonest for not seeing the issue as simple is amazing, and I think it should be clear to anyone reading that you are either ignorant or dishonest yourself for making the claim.
And yes, now that you mention it, also a cocksucker.
I'm not sure I get it. If I am supposed to have access to weapons of the type used by our soldiers, I still don't see how that means I don't get to build an H-Bomb in my back yard. The military has them. Is the difference the number of people that operate the weapon? Fine, I'll put one big red button that lets me set it off myself. Is it that I can't carry it around? What if I fit nuclear weapon in a suitcase? Then am I allowed to have it?
So as long as they rewrite it over the course of a couple years, over-riding each individual clause one at a time instead of all at once, they're good? You think you're somehow making a clever distinction, but you are really not. There is no part of the Constitution that is immune to amendment, and therefore the whole thing has a built-in mechanism for change, whether it is all at once or over time. There might be a discussion to be had over whether that would actually be the right thing to do, but hell, they can just amend the treason clause out first if you think somehow rewriting the document would count.
It isn't a straight line because there might be network infrastructure there beyond a single wire. In many cases, I could probably even draw it all out, but because I want my graph to be informational, I leave it out so that only the the data I wish to convey is described in any detail. It's a way of saying that there is likely additional complexity here, but for the purposes of this graph, you can treat it as a hub and spoke network with a single hub. There is no uptime guarantee or any notion of actually storing data there, unless otherwise enumerated.
Well, you go ahead and explain why the amendment talks about militias, then. Did they just put that in for shits and/or giggles?
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State
That's pretty a pretty cool strawman. Here, let me play, too. Can you find one that says "The right to bear arms shall also include keeping instruments of death in your pocket where nobody can see it even though I've never seen anything like that before"?
Which arms? Can I make a dirty bomb in my garage?
Who would have had no idea that there would ever be such a thing as a nuclear bomb. Clearly there is some upper limit to what weapons we want me to have in my back yard, as most people would say no to my building an H-Bomb. What does the constitution or the letters say about where that line falls?
Err, what? The amendment process allows the government to amend any part of the constitution. If the government were to go through the proscribed process to rewrite the constitution, how would that be the least bit treasonous?
Which is also true of The Cloud. You have one point of access, but the content/processing is spread across distinct regions of the world in multiple datacenters. Outages at any given location, or even multiple outages, have no effect on service as far as the end user is concerned.
Okay cool. So we're in agreement that "The Cloud" is just a hijack of cloud computing terminology turned into a nebulous buzzword.
In a network diagram the cloud represents an abstract entity that sends and receives bits, nothing more. The Cloud is the same, you send your request, and you get a response back. Going back to my first point, it is represented as a cloud instead of distinct wires because its ability to never fail because of localized outages. It always works, no matter how bad a datacenter is failing at a given time.
Damn. Nevermind, I guess.
And you couldn't be more wrong about what that cloud on a network diagram means. If there are no explicit notes on a cloud in a network diagram, it just means that it is abstracted away network infrastructure, and is usually used to either indicate connection to the internet at large or at least to a network that you know will transport your data without having control or knowledge of the specific network topology. There is no implication of any redundancy. There is no relation to distributed computing. It just represents wires that you can't or won't draw because they don't add useful information to your network diagram.
The bottom line is that you can spew rainbows and lollipops at me all day (which business's marketing department did you say you work in again?), but that won't change the fact that a bunch of people in some marketing department someplace stole some perfectly good terminology and ruined it.
Er, you do know that there have been some very public geographic outages of specifically Amazon's cloud services, right?
The goal of Cloud Computing is similar to the goals that marketers trumpet The Cloud to achieve, but The Cloud encompasses much more.
Not really at all. Cloud computing is about putting a layer of abstraction between a logical server and its hardware and then running distributed hardware as your physical host. Its design goal has nothing to do with syncing content between clients, or web hosted applications, or whatever else "The Cloud" is supposed to be doing for us. It's (very specific) goals are to provide easy scalability of a logical server and to remove hardware and localized network outages as points of failure.
It is about the entire stack, including the computers (which might utilize Cloud Computing), the network infrastructure, and the software. This is also what the cloud on a network diagram represents. It is a random void that sends and receives bits. If you have to concern yourself with how it works, you are not accessing the Cloud.
That's also crap. The cloud on a network diagram only has to do with software insofar as it relates to network connectivity. The only thing that little piece of clipart relates to is actual data connectivity. The cloud in that picture can't store data, it doesn't manage syncing, and really, it does absolutely nothing on the application layer. It provides layer 3 connectivity from each device connected to all of the others. This is again completely and utterly different from the horrible mishmash term that has arisen in the past couple of years, and the only source for an etymological link is people trying to revise history.
Maybe my phrasing is unclear. I specifically meant that donating money to the government outside of the obligated tax payments doesn't make sense from a game theory perspective, not that any taxation was ever a donation.
I always hate when people say things like that. The whole reason we have a government from a economic game theory perspective is to act as a mutually accepted arbiter to enforce cooperation to avoid a Tragedy of the Commons scenario for shared resources. The economically rational choice is always to not take the cooperative action unless you can ensure everybody else is going to.
Donating to charities might still make sense because you aren't doing it necessarily in the context of rational self-interest, but the government is specifically a mechanism to leverage people's rational self-interest. There's no way to get away from that context. It therefore never makes sense to tell people to donate tax money except in the childish "if you love the government so much why don't you marry it" sense.
I know the fight is already lost. I just took issue with GGP's implication that somehow people who knew what cloud computing was before the cloud became a buzzword were somehow incapable of grasping the new, crappy, nebulous term and were therefore trying to alter it.
Not to say my blood doesn't boil every time I see that commercial that somehow implicates "The Cloud" as the means by which some lady is editing digital photos, but I do know better than to spend a lot of effort trying to resist the decay of language clarity when nobody else gives a crap.
That's retroactive etymology. Yes, network diagrams have used clouds to represented abstracted away network architecture and/or the Internet for a really long time. But storing things on a/the cloud originally referred to storing it on a cloud computing cluster. The term was just hijacked by a bunch of people in marketing departments and then retconned by apologists into a term originating from unrelated clouds on network diagrams.
Bullshit. Cloud computing has had a very specific meaning for a very long time; specifically, it is when you have one virtualized, logical machine that is is running on some arbitrary number of physical hosts. Just because a bunch of asstards have come in and turned it into some almost meaningless buzzword that means vaguely Software as a Service doesn't mean it's always been that way. You assholes should have picked a term that wasn't already in use if you didn't want there to be confusion.
Yes, Opera has the built in functionality to identify as either IE or Firefox or mask as them (whatever that means). It also stores these preferences on a site by site basis.
Or, we can just leave the hardware keys in on all of the computers in a corporate environment. All of you important data resides externally on a server anyway, right? If I need to re-image you machine, it shouldn't even cause you to bat an eye.
I am an Opera user. I personally love the number of sites that outright refuse to even try to serve me their content when my browser identifies as Opera. I sometimes even get redirected to people's mobile sites.
My favorite anecdote is trying to do streaming with Netflix with my preferred browser. I log in to the site, pick a movie, and tell it to play. Netflix pops up a page telling me that I needed to have a supported browser like IE, Firefox, or Chrome to stream content. So of course, I did what every other Opera user does in this situation: I tell my web browser to lie and claim it in Firefox when I request pages from Netflix. It then lets me know that I need to install Silverlight to play movies... so I head on over to Microsoft's site and get told once again that there is no way that they could possibly install Silverlight so that it would work with my stupid non-supported browser. 6 seconds later, the page is reloaded and my browser is identifying on the Silverlight install page as IE, and bam, it installs just fine.
In a matter of a few minutes, I ran into two different pages that refused to give me the content I was requesting, even though it installed and ran without a single hitch. The moral of this story is that it isn't just that Microsoft and other developers don't develop for browsers they don't want to, it is that they specifically lock me out of otherwise working content with no way to click through to see if it would work even with an unsupported browser.
I, of course, realize that my browser choice is far from mainstream. But all I really want is the ability to get a warning letting me know that my browser hasn't been tested by the developers of the page I am trying to view and therefore would receive no support if it didn't work and the ability to click through and try to view it anyway. Is that really so much to ask?
I personally tend to not eat dog food, no matter the owner.
Less so as the years go by and carriers consolidate. If he needs any chance at rural coverage at all, his alternatives after T-Mobile gets bought are AT&T and Sprint?