But that is only a small fraction of the cost. The REAL cost is in the TIME it takes to deal with all those things. Time is money in corporate speak, and their lax security measures is now directly resulting in these affected people to invest hours of their time setting up new credit monitoring, reviewing all recent credit reports (and future ones), replace their cards, change passwords, etc. If they were like a corporation, they would even hire consultants and remediation teams and charge their costs as part of the cost to be made whole when they (the corporation) sues the people responsible (look at what the City of San Francisco included in the charges/lawsuit against Terry Childs).
Exactly. The value of a person's time is the issue here, and that's something our society often doesn't handle well.
It seems like the legal profession has in the past followed a double standard.
The time of lawyers is valuable, therefore they must get paid lots of money for (almost) everything they do.
However, the time of the public is not, since if the law is structured in such a way as to be able to steal that time, then people will tend to hire lawyers to protect them from the their own legal system.
In short, this is a legal ethics issue. When they argue that there is no standing on matters like this, the lawyers representing the companies that have failed in their responsibilities, and any judges ruling in their favor, are engaging in unethical practice of law.
This contempt for the value of people's time is - in part - why we still have such obscene practices as junk mail, unsolicited sales or political calls, door-to-door solicitation, and so forth. The lawyers have little incentive to recognize the value of other people's time, so they do little to effectively protect that time.
Worse, it's been known since the 1950's that stress has negative physiological consequences. Expose mice to long term stress, and they develop plaques in the arteries, and have higher rates of heart attack! That means that wasting people's time is not just a matter of time and money, but also likely a matter of doing physical harm.
Certainly identity theft (and most other things that involve stealing a portion of a person's life) can be a lengthy and stressful experience (especially when dealing with incompetent bank officials who insist one owes a huge amount of money for a bogus account, almost certainly one created as a result of the bank's own negligence).
We can view kidnapping as stealing a portion of somebody else's life. Resolving an identity theft can take months (and essentially requires spending money on credit monitoring for the rest of one's life!), and the long term stress involved could lead to health issues such as a heart attack or stroke.
If one is wrong, the other must be as well.
In the USA, it follows that stealing a portion of somebody's life is a violation of fundamental rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th. It doesn't matter what type of negligence or misconduct resulted in the theft of that time.
As such, practices like sending junk mail, and the other items mentioned above, are violations of the highest law in the land. The same can be said for other things that waste time, such as excessive bureaucracy, whether on the part of private businesses or government. This includes a lot of the hassles that go on in the medical domain, such as the hoops one has to go through to deal with errors in bills.
Similarly, one has a right to expect reasonable competence on the part of businesses holding private data.
Yes a huge returning labor force taking advantage of major increases in production methods and materials research probably didn't factor in nearly as much as regulations, taxes, and government spending.
Entirely discounting having the only developed economy in the world that hadn't been bombed back 2 decades...
Not true.
Britain's industrial capacity was vastly greater after WW2 then it had been before. Large numbers of new factories were built during the war, and large numbers of people trained to work in them. British industrial production soared once German bombing stopped being effective (which was early in the Battle of Britain).
They were not in any sense "bombed back 2 decades", but actually far ahead of where they had been. Further, they were not only producing goods for the British war effort, they were also supplying the Soviets with huge amounts of critical industrial supplies!
Remember, Britain entered the war with a Victorian-era economy and an education system that heavily inherited from earlier systems that were largely run by the church (that's where we get the idea of "liberal arts" and "humanities" education - it was originally training for the priesthood). There were lots of inefficiencies caused by old equipment, and far too few scientists and engineers (though the ones they had were generally superb). A lot of the issues were corrected during the war.
British military historian Corelli Barnett has several books on this, such as The Audit of War, which are worth reading for the details.
Unfortunately for Britain, the experiment with socialism post-war undid most of their advantages.
Similarly, Australia had a developed economy, and that economy got far stronger as a result of wartime development.
Sweden also had a modern economy, and was never bombed. They were actually far better at producing some modern goods, such as ball bearings, an industrial good with very tight tolerances, then the British were during WW2. Both Britain and Germany would import large amounts of Swedish ball bearings during the war.
Not so. As a result of the dismal failure of the many 20th century socialist experiments, there have been attempts by modern socialists to distance themselves from the failures, and claims that the communist states were not actually socialist are one way that is being attempted. Unfortunately those claims founder on the definition of socialist.
For example, you can look at the Wikipedia definition:
"Socialism is a variety of social and economic systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production;[7] as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim at their establishment.[8] Social ownership may refer to forms of public, cooperative, or collective ownership; to citizen ownership of equity; or to any combination of these.[9] Although there are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them,[10] social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms."
Also, note the words "all socialist nations at one time" in the previous post.
The Soviet Union was certainly a socialist state at one point -- look at their rhetoric: the concept of the workers owning the means of production was central, and also look at their actions: they did seize private production and in theory the workers controlled it by means of their elected party representatives. Arguably, the Soviet state morphed into something else, but I expect most people would say that's inevitable in such cases. Power corrupts.
Much the same can be said of China and Vietnam.
In short, the communist system was one way of attempting socialism, one of many that were made in the 20th Century.
If you want a programming language analogy, think of socialism as a class, with communism as child class that specializes certain aspects of the parent class.
India, and some of the cases in Africa and South America were a bit different, but still failures.
I'm awfully sorry, this might come as a shock to you.. Sitting down? Comfy? "Regulated capitalism" is... socialism. It's exactly what all the "Social democratic" parties in Europe have been up to since the beginning of the 1900's.
Not true.
It has been known since Adam Smith published the first major work on capitalism (in 1776) that regulation is an essential part of capitalism. Go read his book, it's long been out of copyright, even by Disney standards.
If you read a biography on Adam Smith, you'll find that he was deeply troubled by the issue of slavery, which to some extent was funding the ongoing industrial revolution in Britain. Slavery is a prime example of the consequences of unregulated capitalism. In other words, unregulated capitalism is the same as allowing slavery. A reasonable level of regulation is a highly desirable thing for a society.
Socialism, on the other hand -- by definition -- means the workers control the means of production. It was tried lots of times during the 20th century, in Africa, South America, and Asia. It's never worked as the primary rule for any economy. When China, India, and the Soviet Union -- all socialist nations at one time -- experimented with allowed small, controlled capitalism, they found it was enormously more efficient, which is why they are no longer socialist.
From what I can tell -- I'm not a citizen of these countries -- even in Norway and Sweden, the majority of businesses are privately owned. Further, even those that are publicly held seem to be run in pretty similar ways to their private counterparts. If somebody out there can correct me on that, or elaborate on what I've said, then please do so...
Most people who label themselves as "socialist" are more concerned with reforming welfare systems then they are with having the workers own the means of production. A lot of people think that one implies the other (and would probably be shocked if they knew the real meaning of the word "socialist").
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where portions or the entirety of the Bible were translated in the years 1000-1500, and the Church didn't do anything to the translators. It only became a significant controversy after the whole Luther thing and the Counter-Reformation.
Translation of the Bible was a significant controversy in England, more then a century before Martin Luther started the ball rolling for the Protestant Reformation in 1517.
The Wycliffe translation of 1382 would eventually become associated with the Lollard Heresy.
The Oxford Convocation of 1408 banned further translations being made without approval.
The first person burned at the stake for heresy in England was a Lollard, in 1410.
Another point I forgot to mention is the issue of folks working Swing Shift. There are lots of IT people, grocery store workers, military, police, nurses, doctors, and so forth whose shifts are during the night. These folks tend to be asleep during part of the day (typically 8am-4am, or so), and are likely to be affected by daytime noise.
This poses a tough problem for society, since it wouldn't make sense to completely disallow things like lawn mowers and lots of other equipment that make noise. At the same time, it's not a good thing when a doctor working the emergency room at night isn't at his or her best because of daytime noise.
Better building standards help some of these people: many of the improvements to building codes over the past few decades - intended to get better heating/cooling performance - also help with reducing noise. Of course, those folks with forced air heating/cooling systems (which are pretty common in the USA these days) also have to deal with the noise of that system.
I've occasionally worked night shifts, and have friends who do it permanently. The typical solution to the noise problem is to try to talk with one's neighbors: considerate neighbors will generally be willing to accommodate shift restrictions. It complicates their life a bit, especially when somebody is trying to get work done before it rains.
I don't personally use a leaf blower, but I've never been bothered with the noise from two-stroke petrol leaf blowers. It's just a part of fall.
Other people are bothered by them. It's not just the noise that bothers people, it's the sociopathic mindset that leads some people to think they can do whatever they want without consequences, because other people aren't real to them. Many human beings do not react well to aggression or perceived aggression from sociopaths: this sort of thing seems to trigger defensive responses that can cause situations to escalate in ugly ways.
In general, noise is a big problem for society, and it is a problem that is fundamentally married to technology, which is why I'm pleased to see this discussion happening on Slashdot. You will likely find issues with respect to noise in any part of the world, first world or third. Our technology lets us easily produce sound levels that can (and do) damage hearing beyond possibility of repair. It's traditionally been a bigger problem in the third world, due to unregulated work conditions and industrial noise, but rates of hearing loss among children in the first world are up 30% today from even the 1980's and 1990's.
The traditional model is that sound amplitude and duration lead to permanent hearing loss (somewhere around 80dB), but the science behind this is sketchy IMHO.
Unfortunately, even this model is not being adhered to. I find that many DJs and club managers will play music that violate the US federal laws with respect to noise in the workplace: they're not just at the limits, they're way beyond the limits. Live bands are even worse - it seems like a lot of musicians are deaf enough they don't understand how loud they are being. A decent sound level meter will measure this: I've measured a live band at over 100db, from outside a building with the doors closed, which implies a maximum exposure of 15 minutes to be compliant with US law. Given that the sounds inside are probably at least 3dB higher, that drops to 7.5 minutes!
The club managers, restaurant managers, and so forth that are allowing this to happen on their watch are being really stupid, since not only are they potentially liable under federal law (a club is a workplace), but also probably liable under state laws regarding assault and battery. One could also make an argument against this in terms of fundamental rights, from a 9th Amendment perspective.
There is hearing protection available, but it isn't clear how well it works, especially over the long term. Worse, having to wear it can be a source of stress in itself. Further, most people don't automatically carry hearing protection with them to places like restaurants.
There is now evidence that lower levels of sound can lead to serious health risks. A 2008 study by Dr Lars Jarup and others in the EU measured blood pressure increases in response to both nighttime airplane noise, and road traffic, and developed a model that suggests long term exposure to much lower sound levels (even under 50 dB, the threshold at which most people wake up) can cause stress, hypertension, increased risk of heart attack or stoke, etc.
It's almost like the human animal evolved in a dangerous environment, and as a result monitors the surroundings even when we're asleep, and can trigger initial stages of fight or flight reactions (which come with the potential for the body doing long term damage to itself), whether we consciously realize it or not!
Even before this study, there was no doubt that many people find unwanted noise in their environment annoying and stressful, which is why many places around the world have noise ordinances in residential areas (55dB is fairly common at night). Evidence has been steadily accumulating since the 1950's that long term stress has physiological consequences, which is a fancy way of saying that exposing people to it isn't very different from punching them in the face.
In addition, it is not what you or I find reasonable. The Constitution spells out that it is what the court decides those words mean.
A common misconception.
We find in Article III Section 1: "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour". Also, we find in Article VI that they are required to swear oaths upholding the Constitution: "all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution".
Thus, there are limits on the ability of the court to decide what "those words mean". If in so deciding, they are either engaging a behavior that is not good, or in violation of the "Oath or Affirmation", then they are in fact not acting within their legal authority.
As the Bill of Rights provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" (9th Amendment), and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment), it follows that the people have a say in determining whether either of these conditions has been met.
Further, the mere existence of unspecified rights "retained by the people" inherently places limits on the authority of the Supreme Court. If the judges were to decide to ignore the 9th Amendment, then there would be no rights retained by the people. But that's a contradiction, and creating contradictions in the legal system is unethical practice of law, and certainly a violation of a fundamental and universal right in any society based on the rule of law. Think of this as the legal equivalent of a proof by contradiction, as you might find in Euclid.
This also follows from the early history of the Bill of Rights: if people were prepared to trust the entities defined by the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution, then there wouldn't be a need for a Bill of Rights. But the Supreme Court is one of those pre-Bill of Rights entities, and hence the Bill of Rights - by it's mere existence - must be viewed as also placing limits on the Supreme Court. They may be the Supreme Court, but they are not the Supreme Law of the Land.
For example of the "good behavior issue", if the way a law is implemented involves ethical conflict of interest with respect to the legal profession (this is true for many laws in existence today), and reasonable alternatives exist, then we can assert that allowing such a law to be implemented and enforced is unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals in federal office. Clearly unethical practice of law is not good behavior.
In the current political and legal climate, where most politicians are lawyers, most lobbyists are lawyers, and a lot of money is received by politicians from various organizations of lawyers in the form of campaign contributions, that creates an especially great burden on those persons selected for judicial office (by those same politicians) to recognize the importance of not allowing laws involving ethical conflicts of interest that work to the benefit of the legal profession.
The fact that this has been looked at and decided by the courts makes it constitutional.
Not true. There have been many Supreme Court decisions that were not valid. Some of these have been reversed. Others have not.
Classic historical examples such as the decisions that upheld slavery, and the Jim Crow Laws. Even at the time of the Constitutional Convention, everybody with a functioning brain knew that slavery was wrong (just go look at the speech by Morris of NY). So certainly the Supreme Court decisions that permitted slavery to continue were invalid.
Another thing to consider is the Nuremberg Precedent, which basically says that government officials have a responsibility to do the right thing in spite of what the law or their hierarchy says. Certainly a right to expect this can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, and as such, this creates an individual responsibility to do the right thing even when the judici
These are not the same carriers purchased twenty years ago - look at the available tech that they can now stuff into one.
20 years ago, I paid $3000 for a 133MHz computer, with 64MB of RAM. Today, I can buy a 3GHz computer, with 4GB of RAM, for $300.
There's a basic principle of economics that differs in the two cases. It's called economy of scale. Basically, if you can produce a lot of something, you can afford to charge less per item.
People (and businesses) have designed and produced millions upon millions of computers. It's not just laptops, netbooks, tablets, and desktop computers, either. In this day and age, almost every new car, cell phone, printer, microwave oven (and all manner of other appliances) has a computer of some sort embedded in it. There's a lot of overlap between these computer systems, which combines with the large numbers being produced to considerably reduce the costs.
There are some really high cost items involved in producing computers, but this isn't always obvious to the consumer, of course. A fab for producing chips typically costs at least a billion or so, and that doesn't count the ongoing costs to operate it. Even just a high quality oscilloscope or logic analyzer could be a substantial fraction of a million (if you want something reliable that can handle high frequencies). In the typical case, the high costs of the items (and people) needed to produce the computer are more than compensated for by the number of computers sold.
We can't afford to build millions of aircraft carriers. Even if we could, there wouldn't be any point in building them. What would we do with them? Put one in every back yard, in the kid's swimming pool?
Worse, these are staggeringly complex systems. Even a World War I warship is vastly more complex than most people can even begin to imagine (unless they've studied the design of those ships), but the modern stuff dwarfs the complexity of the older ships. In many ways, a warship is far more complex than a computer.
Worse, these ships need to be massively over-engineered, to handle the sea environment, to operate under all kinds of ridiculous conditions, to make the nuclear plants safe, to protect the crew from all the other dangerous stuff aboard, to handle battle damage, and so forth. The requirements on a ship that needs to be able to stay at sea for months at a time are very different from the requirements for a consumer computer. You're not just building a city at sea, but one where lots of complex specialized systems need to be able to interact with one another in situations and ways never dreamed of by engineers doing civilian design.
Secrecy can also add a lot to cost. Patents add to costs as well, and these are probably far more of a burden for the design of military systems than civilian, again because of the economy of scale issue (the patent owner has to collect as much as they can from a few customers, instead of a much smaller amount from many).
Also, you can't reduce many costs by using overseas resources: nobody wants their military dependent on services provided by some other country. The ability to do this in the civilian sector has a huge effect on reducing the price of items, such as computers: chips and other electronics are routinely designed in the USA, then manufactured and tested overseas.
The net effect is, to buy the ship, you have to pay enough to lots of different companies for lots of different components - very little of which can be used for anything else - to justify the complex engineering and manufacturing effort needed to build these things, plus all the overhead associated with any business (marketing, management, accounting, law, etc...). Even the overhead is probably far higher when building warships than it is for civilian products.
The demand for the engineering and manufacturing resources needed to do this doesn't necessarily scale with common measures of inflation, which are pretty nar
I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. All at least twice. Loved them. And still I have no quarrel with any of Jackson's movies.
I'm happy about what was left in, taken out, twisted or invented. I'm happy with how many films there were, and how long.
I'm not entirely happy, but on the whole it's clear that Jackson did a very professional job, appropriate to the medium. Like any good story-teller, he adjusted the story to the medium and the audience. Tolkien, as a good story teller himself, would no doubt have understood.
The decision to have 3 movies for the Hobbit was a good one: it's a long book by most standards (especially compared to the norm from that era), and there's a whole lot of material (even aside from all the extras that appear in the appendices to the Return of the King).
I haven't listened to the director's and actor's commentary for the Hobbit yet, but now that the extended edition is available I'm looking forward to doing that. The commentary for the LOTR was pretty informative, and I came away from it with a lot more respect for Peter Jackson. Perhaps the extended edition of the Hobbit will address some of the things I wasn't entirely happy about (much as happened with LOTR).
The County Judge dismissed based on the notion of protecting one's privacy, yet I'm not sure one has a reasonable expectation of privacy when outdoors
This is a common misconception.
If you hike, you are outdoors. You may need to relieve yourself, so you step behind the cover of some trees.
There is certainly a reasonable expectation of privacy there.
If a photographer were to follow a random stranger behind such a tree, then attempt to record them, they would be lucky to not get their camera thrown off the nearest cliff ("freedom of the press" and any laws to the contrary notwithstanding).
Some people would doubtless feel the photographer and not just the camera should go over the cliff (perhaps as an alternative to a long, costly, uncertain legal battle which would primarily work to the benefit of a frequently unethical legal profession).
If one steps behind a tree while hiking in a national forest, one not only has an expectation of privacy outdoors, but in a location that is a public place by definition.
Thus, an expectation of privacy can exist in public. You can doubtless find many other examples of this.
There are thus two fundamental issues with respect to all sensors and recording equipment: 1. When can this equipment be legitimately used? and 2. What can be done with any recordings that are made? (This topic includes specifying security precautions that must be taken with respect to such data.)
So far, there aren't clear rules in the USA, which leads to abuses like the current situation. As a result of the US Bill of Rights being open-ended (with unspecified rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment), a strong right to privacy can certainly be asserted under the highest law of the land. But, exactly what we mean by the word privacy needs to be fleshed out a bit, to help people to know what is - and is not - appropriate.
After all, D&D was really an interactive version of Tolkein's world to begin with, wasn't it?
No, though Tolkien's work had some influence and helped create a market for the game.
Gary Gygax was an avid war gamer, a published author of articles on wargames, and a developer of wargaming rules. The D&D game evolved out of wargaming rules for medieval-style battles - knights, archers, that kind of thing.
You can see this even in just the cover description from the early rules: my copy of Greyhawk says "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures". Similarly, if you read the history of the game you'll find references to the "Castle & Crusade Society", part of the International Federation of Wargaming. I believe GenCon - the convention people now associate with D&D - was originally the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention.
Gygax, a major bookworm, drew upon a wide variety of ideas in comic books and in early science fiction and fantasy (much of which predated Tolkien), as well as mythology (predating Tolkien by thousands of years). For example, I see gargoyles, chimera, griffins, and medusae in one of the early rule books (none of which are to be found in Tolkien).
Many people seem to think that Tolkien created fantasy, but there are many earlier and contemporary works in this genre. For example, the first "Conan the Barbarian" story (Robert Howard) was written in 1932, the characters "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" (Fritz Leiber) were created in 1934, and the Hobbit would only be published in 1937.
The key innovations that Gygax (and others) developed from earlier war games were to reduce the army size to focus on a small number of heros, to add fantasy and science fiction elements, and to have the idea of an ongoing game (the "campaign").
Dave Arneson, the other major participant in creating the game, was probably the first to add science fiction elements, as part of his Blackmoor campaign (which I understand grew out of his wargaming sessions). This, of course, was very different from anything in Tolkien.
You can still dig up copies of the old rules and see the wargaming elements (it helps if you're already familiar with old school wargaming). As the game evolved, the wargaming-style rules started to disappear. The use of miniature figures, for example, stopping being important, the wargamers had lots of these, and terrain to go with them, but as the game moved beyond wargaming it started to attract players that didn't have or want any of this stuff.
In today's RPGS, it's been my experience that we tend to get two different styles of play: some groups emphasize the role playing, others emphasize the gaming (rules and tactics). The latter approach is much closer to the original game, but both approaches can make for reasonable and enjoyable play sessions. Many current gamers are firmly wedded to one camp or the other, and this greatly complicates producing new or updated RPG rule sets, as the two groups want fundamentally different things in the rules they use. For example, to the groups that emphasize role playing, complex rules (a long tradition in wargaming) just get in the way, while to the groups that emphasize tactical play, these actually provide more freedom and opportunities for tactical creativity.
This story is about approximately 35 years old stuff. (I think Rogue came out in 1980)
The ADND Dungeon Master's Guide (a book first published in 1979) had a pretty complex random dungeon (and wilderness) generation system, so the idea is certainly nothing new. There may have been even earlier variants on this theme, I haven't read all the earlier books.
The ADND system was intended for use by a human, but I'm sure lots of people ended up writing computer variants (most of which probably never got published).
It's always nice to have people publish their versions of this kind on thing. There's still lots of room for innovation in this area.
Calculus and differential equations are need for doing simulations of physical processes
This is a bit outside my experience, as all I've done there is a 3D physics engine for a game. Even then, I suspect all you need to know are the equations and a few well-understood approaches to integration, actually understanding the math (or the physics) doesn't seem necessary. (Though I'll admit that it is helpful.)
I suspect that what the original poster is referring to is a bit outside your experience. A lot of simulation involves going far beyond cookie-cutter recipes, and you might have to do quite a bit of work to even get to the point where you can apply the recipe. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer (integration would be the hammer) than every problem looks like a nail...
In general, you can hack together simple models without really understanding math, and for many things that will work well, but you have to expect some serious bugs lurking in the underbrush. Numbers on computers can not necessarily be represented exactly (particularly for scientific or engineering simulation), and this can lead to compounding errors which will sooner or later torpedo your program (the integration will give the wrong answer, and your simulation goes wildly astray).
To understand and address this issue, you don't necessarily need to be able to read and understand a text on "Numerical Analysis" (which would require being able to read and do proofs, there's no other way to read a true math text), but you at least need to be able to read something like Ronald Mak's book on Numerical Computing (which is a great easy introduction to the topic, using programs to illustrate math ideas in place of proofs).
Simulation is hard in general, and tends to dive into math pretty quickly.
You don't necessarily, for example, need a Kalman filter to predict movement, but it sure comes in handy for some applications. If you don't understand how the filter works, you won't be able to assess it's strengths and weaknesses for particular applications. Eli Brookner's book goes into the details and many options, and the math isn't too bad, but it's definitely present.
This is part of the topic known as "digital signal processing", which is a major engineering specialization in its own right and just loaded with math. A lot of modeling relies on it: many real systems have feedback and understanding some DSP is fundamental to simulating many of those systems (you might have to dip into control theory as well). Richard G. Lyons book is a good start for getting your feet wet on the DSP: he makes the math about as easy as anybody can (and the first edition is probably still freely available from his web site).
Yet another issue arises from the fact that the real world is non-linear. To model this, you need to understand first what that means, and second how and when to linearize. Only then can you get to the point where an integration can (might!) be appropriate. For an example of this is done for electric circuits, Lawrence Pillage's book is a classic. There are direct techniques for doing non-linear modeling as well (as Thomas R. Turlington's book discusses) but the math gets very dense and these techniques have some major limitations.
In more general physical simulation situations, you tend to get into differential equations or even partial differential equations. Often the PDEs have no known exact solution technique (you can't come up with an equation that gives the solution, or what is called a "closed form", which means you can't apply your cookie cutter integration), so you'll have to resort to one of the many techniques that mathematicians and scientists have developed to work around that issue.
Even knowing which technique to pick (in terms of what is likely to succeed for your problem) is likely to involve quite a bit of math, let alone how to successfully implement it on a computer. There are often many possible models
So imagine using as precedent a case that was never even defended against. So what were the precedents established?
1.The Second Amendment protects only the ownership of military-type weapons appropriate for use in an organized militia.
2.The "double barrel 12-gauge Stevens shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches in length, bearing identification number 76230" was never used in any militia organization.
You missed the most important precedent. It's a subtle one, and most people miss it, but it is absolutely critical for understanding the current state of the US legal system.
By creating a ruling that directly contradicts the written text of the Bill of Rights the Supreme Court chose to put a major contradiction into US law.
For legal professionals to create contradictions in the law, or to be involved in writing or enforcing law that does this, is always unethical practice of law, without exception. Contradictions make the law harder for non-professionals to understand, and that creates a long term artificial demand for the services of legal professionals, hence the ethics issue.
Even the appearance of contradiction would have been a problem, and to make matters worse, the court ignored the well documented history behind the 2nd Amendment and ownership of arms in Colonial America.
It follows that the legal authority of the court in this case was actually limited to telling the government a constitutional amendment would be required before the law they had passed would be legal. That's inherent in the oaths the judges swear when they accept positions with the court.
Further, the right to ethical practice of law being one of the most important rights protected under the 9th Amendment (under any reasonable statement of such a right, even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided if alternatives exist), the judges not only violated their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, but by their example effectively gave carte blanche to the legal profession to ignore major ethics issues in the law. US law is now riddled with ethics problems, and while we can't blame all of that on Miller (Slavery, aside from the moral issues, was certainly ethically invalid, as were the Jim Crow laws), this case does serve as a very damaging precedent.
Worse, rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment, by definition, can not be taken away by any entity of government. That's the whole point of having the Bill of Rights be open ended! This was such as fundamental issue (and so critical to overcoming the opposition of the Anti-Federalists) that James Madison actually put it in the document twice, in the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and also in the 10th Amendment (which provides for unspecified rights reserved to the people). By ignoring the right to ethical practice of law, the court effectively created a second major contradiction in the law!
It's ironic, because less than a decade before the events at Nuremberg, the US legal hierarchy was effectively giving the US legal profession a precedent that would allow them to ignore the concept of individual responsibility with respect to major ethics issues, while claiming hierarchical absolution ("my superiors said it was ok"!), something that has largely remained true to this day.
This has certainly had a chilling effect on a wide variety of rights that can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment, such as the right to privacy, but there are broader implications. Not only do we now live in the "Land of the Lawsuit", but there are all kinds of other problems in US federal, state, and local law that trace directly to the willingness of the legal profession -- following the example of the Supreme Court set here and in other cases -- to ignore major ethics issues.
It's not an accident that, for example, the federal tax code is 2700 pages long, a length and complexity far beyond any reasonable size, allowing a lot of loopholes to be hidden in the law, l
If I were in a position of authority I would propose a gradual transfer of power from the private sector to a national central bank. Something like an increase on the fractional reserve ratio for all private enterprise by 2% per year until it hits 100. "New money" should then only be lent out by the central bank through private institutions acting as brokers. Profits from loans then go into the public treasury. Interest rates can then be controlled by a central authority who's core interest in is the welfare of the people, rather than shareholder profits. Periods of increased economic growth would result in increased social and public infrastructure spending, while periods of slower growth result in higher rates that help deflate bubbles and encourage saving.
There are fundamental problems with this scheme. The first is that a central authority is always far more subject to corruption than a large number of smaller entities. In many ways, centralizing things simply makes a bigger, easier target for the predators out there (some of whom usually end up in control of it).
The second is that no central authority knows what is best for the people. In many cases, nobody knows what's best. The world is a complex place, and there are many different viewpoints. A decentralized system has advantages here.
These will remain fundamental truths for the foreseeable future, and thus no central authority can be trusted to look out for the welfare of the people.
Humanity has had a really poor track record with central authorities. Study 20th century economic history for the gory details: there's the Soviet Union, India, China, and many smaller countries that have tried the central authority scheme and failed.
Further, you'll find examples on a smaller scale in the history of many countries, where bureaucracies functioning as central authorities, with respect to some particular economic aspect of society, have also failed to look out for the welfare of the people. Consider the history of water development in the USA, involving the US Army Corp of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, for lots of examples of how central authorities go wrong: Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert is a good introduction to this.
Similarly, we can see many examples of bad decision making in the history of large corporations: the executives in these organizations make a lot of really bad blunders because the organizations are too big and the executives too out of touch with the reality of their business (refer to the industrial psychology literature for examples). Any centralized authority will have the same kinds of problems.
Further, if you follow the history of invention and discovery, you'll see that a lot of things that ended up being really useful and important weren't predicted in advance. Having private access to funding is an often underrated benefit of the decentralized economy.
The outlook for any scheme involving massively increased central authority is dismal. There are better places to focus one's energy for those concerned with improving the public welfare. A vastly simplified tax system -- one that was truly progressive instead of just pretending to be -- would help a lot for nations like the USA. Cleaning up corporate law would help a lot as well.
Do advertisements add enough value to my existence to compensate me for the time lost? Not rhetorical, I think it's a good question.
It depends on whether or not you have opted in, but even then there are limits.
If you opt-in, then clearly you are willing to see some sort of ad. You've indicated that you value being exposed to an ad, even if you don't know what it will be. That's probably the only value measure we can make here.
But it is an entirely different manner when one obscures the landscape with over-sized billboards, puts flashing signs next to a road (or people waving signs), goes door to door (or calls somebody) to sell a product or religion or political candidate, sends somebody junk mail, and so forth (assuming one hasn't given the recipient of the marketing the chance to opt-in).
Drivers along a road do not have the chance to opt-in, and it is often very difficult even for people in their homes to prevent this kind of activity. Not everybody has the option to fence out the world, and no fence is perfect.
There are a number of potential rights in play here, but the most fundamental is that civilized societies shouldn't allow people to steal portions of another's life. The human lifespan is finite, and time lost is precious and irreplaceable and hence extremely valuable: not allowing others to steal a portion of our lives is simply a rational recognition of this universal truth. This is why we categorize things such as kidnapping, murder, or robbery as crimes. In the last case, the robbery steals a portions of a person's life because it steals money or goods which took time to accumulate (and will take time to replace, if they can be replaced). This is why only opt-in approaches to marketing make sense: anything else effectively involves stealing a portion of a person's life.
Further, as a society, we don't necessarily allow people to opt-in themselves (or their dependents) to some things. Hence, even an opt-in system will have limits.
For example, raising the volume on a commercial during a video (to attract the attention of the audience, as a marketing technique) could result in pain or hearing damage to the audience, especially if they are elderly and have to up the volume due to hearing loss just to make out words from the non-commercial content. This could and should be regulated (perhaps even requiring voice and non-voice audio on different "channels" that are defined such that AV equipment can apply different levels of volume to them), even if one has opted-in.
Only the sociopaths don't see this. By definition, a sociopath is a person to whom other people aren't real. By attempting to steal a portion of other people's lives, the people who try to force ads on others are demonstrating their contempt for others, and thus their belief that others are not real.
All the people who engage in the list of activities above, and many other variants, are sociopaths.
Having some commercials while watching TV may be the only reason I have something to watch on TV, I can appreciate that. But in the past decade or more, commercials have consumed such a large portion of the time of TV, that it was no longer worth the time investment to be constantly interrupted, taking 30 minutes of my time to watch a 15 minute show.
Even here, there is a critical issue that is often not acknowledged, namely that society is choosing to give some entity associated with the TV show an exclusive monopoly (possibly excepting fair use or other rights). Since this is an entirely artificial right -- a privilege really -- it is entirely reasonable to limit what can be done with that monopoly.
With today's technology we (society) could easily require these shows be released in two formats, with one ad-free, allowing that version to be at a higher price to make up for the loss of advertising revenue (perhaps according to some formula determined by law), as a condition for granting copyright. We might e
Irregardless of the cause, the wildfires do pose health risks.
Those who have been lucky enough to avoid one may not understand how much smoke exposure is possible here. During a fire, the roads can be completely jammed, forcing people evacuating to be exposed to high levels of smoke for many hours. Significant amounts of smoke can go right through the air sealing on cars: a good respirator for every family member belongs in one's evacuation kit if one lives in a fire-prone area. After the fire, the smoke can stay in the air at lesser but still potentially dangerous levels for months after the fire.
Nobody really understands what health impacts these two different types of exposure will have, but for some people they could be serious. Just going to work means breathing potentially toxic air throughout the day for months at a time, since most workplaces will not have good air filtering (private residences can use air cleaners, which help quite a bit in my experience). This exposure can potentially cause long term lung damage.
To make things worse, the smoke toxins may interact in a non-linear manner with other airborne toxins present in many workplaces. The cumulative health effect may be considerably greater than the exposure to any single toxin would cause. The safety standards for exposure to things like asbestos (common in many older buildings) almost certainly underestimate the danger thresholds because the standards did not take into account having multiple toxins present in the air at the same time.
It is likely asthmatics and others with existing lung damage will be particularly susceptible to further lung damage.
In all likelihood, though many people may be experiencing long-term work-related injury as a result of breathing toxic air in the workplace following wild fires, this will not be handled by existing laws that protect workers, or agencies such as OHSA. Rather then adding further fuel to the climate change debate -- basically political posturing that does more harm than good -- it would be nice if the president actually did his job and tried to do something about the potential problem of lung damage resulting from breathing toxic air.
If we don't have good test and measurement equipment for determining the impact of fire-related toxins on the lungs, we should be researching what needs to be done to make that equipment. If we don't know how to medically treat lung damage, then we should be researching that. Given that entire communities are affected by this issue, it seems appropriate that the government should have some major role here, rather then relying on every potentially impacted individual paying for their own health care (and any research that may be required to fix problems).
I think it's pretty clear that the intent behind the second amendment was the perceived need to have a well regulated militia. In other words, if you want to carry a guns, sign up to join the national guard.
This myth has been thoroughly debunked. There are numerous quotes from the key figures alive at the time that completely discredit this position. I'll let you do the research, since doing so will help you fill some gaps in your historical education.
Like it or not, individual ownership of firearms was accepted as an individual right at the time (and long after), and was associated with political freedom. This didn't mean weapons couldn't be taken from criminals, within reason.
There is also a long history behind this position, tracing back through British history. It's not an accident that most people in the Robin Hood stories are carrying weapons, and know how to use them. The audiences that heard these stories accepted this as normal and appropriate. In Britain, the traditions were different than they were in many other places (where only the nobility could carry arms). The British often saw themselves as superior to others in part because of this. Certainly, they were much freer than those in many parts of the world (particularly places where serfdom survived until the 19th century). These British traditions evolved into a belief or philosophy that ownership of arms was an integral part of being a free person, which would eventually be expressed by the US descendants of Britain in their Bill of Rights.
In US Colonial times, some jurisdictions required (by law) every household to not just have arms, but also to carry them to public meetings (including church services), to make sure that community was armed in the event of a surprise Indian attack.
For that matter, privately owned ships were routinely armed. In some cases, they were well enough armed to fight off warships.
If you wish to oppose the right to bear arms, do so for other reasons than a misunderstanding of the text and the history.
I don't know that this is entirely fair. While a lot rides on a judge's opinion, in the end, the judges are only supposed to interpret the law and precedents from higher courts, not make things up as they go along. If there had been no precedent (ie. the Clapper decision), he may have felt more free to define a better test for "imminent threat".
You've forgotten that this is the USA, where the highest law of the land is the Bill of Rights.
The Anti-Federalists opposed the original Constitution on many grounds, including a) there was no Bill of Rights, and b) any Bill of Rights would be incomplete.
During the ratification process, promises were made that this issue would be dealt with. James Madison wrote a Bill of Rights, and cleverly made it open-ended, by providing for unspecified rights retained by the people (9th Amendment) and reserved to the people (10th Amendment), allowing the future assertion of rights as needed.
Thus, interpreting the law, in this country, is supposed to mean the judges consider not just precedents by their peers, but also any rights the people might want to assert under the 9th or 10th Amendments. An oath to uphold the Bill of Rights requires this of judges (as it does of all legal professionals, in any aspect of the practice of law).
In practice, the US legal profession seems to find it convenient to ignore this aspect of the Bill of Rights whenever they think they can get away with it. Perhaps this is because one of the rights the people might want to retain to them is the right to ethical practice of law, a right that would necessarily force many changes to how law is practiced at present. Then there's the right to ethical government...
In this particular case, consider the following: 1. A claim was made by the lawyers for the defense of no injury, and thus, no standing. 2. For an identity theft victim to be forced to deal with credit card companies and online vendors as a result of this information breach takes time, and thus robs that person of an irreplaceable portion of their life, which is finite. 3. We consider kidnapping a crime in part because the same kind of theft (of a portion of a person's finite life) happens during kidnappings. Hence, an injury or damage has in fact occurred as a result of the information breach. 4. Legal professionals often work as intermediaries between private citizens and organizations or bureaucracies. People often hire them not because they have to, but rather because they don't want to deal with the hassle and potential loss of time associated with various situations. 5. A claim that "no damage" has been suffered can be expected to increase the demand for the services of legal professionals, as a class in society, in future situations involving identity theft (where they can be expected to function both as intermediaries, and in otherwise providing advice and assistance). Further, protecting the hiring of legal professionals in situations where people don't strictly need them is of interest to the profession. 6. The alternative, of course, would be to expect businesses to provide a reasonable level of security over the private information (something that would certainly be required under any 9th Amendment right to privacy -- nothing in the 9th Amendment limits its application to just government). Capitalism on the large scale necessarily requires some government regulation or other limitation on the conduct of business (quite of lot of Adam Smith's writing discusses this), and in the absence of competent direct regulation by government, rights arising under the 9th Amendment can be made to serve.
Note the ethical conflict of interest this situation poses for legal professionals, as a class in society. On the one hand, they increase their future business, and their job security, on the other hand they create a situation where the public might become more aware of the 9th Amendment and its implications (a very scary thing for the profession).
Battleships became obsolete beginning in World War 2. During that war the US Navy moved away from focusing their fleets around the big battleships and instead focused on building their carrier fleet supported by smaller destroyers.
Within 6-8 months after Pearl Harbor, the US Navy had raised most of the battleships sunk at Pearl, and moved a number of ships from the Atlantic fleet over to the Pacific. Significant upgrades were being done as well. By any reasonable standard, the battleship force was more powerful than it had been at the start of the war. The big problem was fuel: the Germans were sinking so many tankers that the Navy had to choose between the battleships and the carriers. The Europe-first grand strategy meant that many of the remaining tankers had to be reserved for Britain. The carriers were faster and considerably more fuel efficient than the old battleships, and somewhat more flexible, and perhaps this is why they ended up using them.
Destroyers were not at all ideal escorts, and the navy never focused on using them exclusively with the big carriers. This was because a) the destroyers had very poor anti-aircraft capabilities at that point in the war, and b) the destroyers had trouble keeping up with the fleet, especially in high seas (short ships are inherently less efficient at higher speeds). The destroyers were superb in the anti-submarine and rescue role.
Instead of thinking about a destroyer-centric escort force, it's more accurate to think "combined arms". The preferred escort paradigm for the big carriers was a combination of cruisers and battleships (particularly the fast battleship designs) with fleet destroyers (ships large enough to be considered cruisers by WWI standards, thus better able to keep up with the fleet, but officially classified as destroyers).
The battleships could throw up an enormous amount of flak. It has been suggested that one of the contributing factors to the US victory at Midway was the lack of a strong escort for the Japanese carrier group, resulting in a much weaker anti-air defense (and fewer eyes on the sky to spot the dive bombers coming in). The Japanese liked to split their forces, and in this case the decision hurt more than it helped.
Aircraft carriers make battleships obsolete because a carrier can destroy a battleship long before the Battleship could fire a shot at the aircraft carrier.
At least one aircraft carrier, the HMS Glorious, was sunk by capital ship fire, with horrendous casualties. The German ships were using radar controlled guns, with remarkable accuracy on their initial salvos (possibly the best shooting by any navy in the entire war).
In general, the carriers were quite vulnerable, and many of them were crippled or sunk. Typically, the allies would keep carriers in the battle near isolated islands, but were very careful with these ships when using them near potential land based air. This vulnerability meant that surface warships were left behind to support landings in situations where the carriers were deemed too exposed (resulting in many of the battles of the Solomon Islands, some of which involved battleships engaging other surface warships). The carrier certainly didn't make the surface warships obsolete.
In any cost-comparison of the effectiveness of different ship types, it's also worth considering the effects of pilot attrition. Training pilots is a long process, and heavy casualties make the air arm considerably less effective over the long term. The Germans and Japanese took very heavy pilot losses in their air attacks on the Allied forces. Neither nation could make up these losses. There are also negative implications for morale associated with high pilot losses. A simple linear comparison of the cost of a battleship, versus the cost of the planes required to sink it, does not consider either of these factors, and is thus misleading.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . "
We already have a law covering this.
The 4th Amendment alone does not cover this issue fully, since it leaves open the possibility that the government or the legal profession gets to decide what is reasonable.
The addition of the 9th and 10th Amendments (unspecified rights retained by and reserved to the people) is needed to close the loophole. This ensures that "reasonable" must also match what the people consider reasonable, not merely what members of two special interest groups consider reasonable.
This, of course, invalidates many of the searches or seizures that happen. Civil forfeiture, for example, is seen to be entirely invalid, as one of the rights arising under the 9th Amendment is the right to ethical government, which creates a requirement that even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when possible. A point police officers and federal agents might want to keep in mind, since their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights are preconditions for holding any position of public trust or responsibility...
Similarly, a right to privacy arises under the 9th Amendment. This right can and does apply even in public places. For example, hikers on public lands certainly expect privacy when they step behind a bush to relieve themselves, and public lands are public by definition.
In practice, the US legal profession likes to pretend the 9th Amendment doesn't exist. I suppose the last thing they want is the public asserting a 9th Amendment right to ethical practice of law, which means ignoring any 9th Amendment considerations whenever they can get away with it...
The major issue was the Susie safety nuts who felt that without telling people how fast was reasonable that it would confuse people, the court agreed.
When the government gets to tell people what is reasonable, you have lots of problems. You see, in this country, we have a Bill of Rights that provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" (9th Amendment), and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment). The highest law in the land says the people get to tell the government what is reasonable, not the other way around.
The "speed limit" should be instead taken as a "recommended speed", which should be based primarily on factors such as the engineering of the road, and the likelihood of animals or people being encountered. There will be circumstances when it is appropriate to drive faster than the recommended speed, and there are circumstances where it is appropriate to drive slower.
Let the police show that somebody is driving very differently than other people do on that road, and doesn't have a good reason for doing so (in the eyes of a typical person, informed of the facts, and with good judgement), then the government can take punitive action.
This approach is consistent with people driving at reasonable speeds, as defined by the people and not the government.
But the last thing the US legal profession wants is for people to realize the 9th Amendment exists, since that is the gateway into some very scary basic rights (for them), such as the right to ethical practice of law...
Far simpler (for the legal profession) to just move back to the status quo, where people -- in practice -- drive as if the speed limits were merely recommended speeds, and hope the police are being equally reasonable*. It's a really bad policy, and hugely unethical for the legal profession. By effectively forcing people to routinely ignore one part of the written law, they make many people scared of the legal system. They also send the message that people can not engage in reasonable conduct: the legal system can and will punish them even when they are being reasonable. These two factors create an artificial demand over the long term for the services of legal professionals to "protect" people from their own legal system. Welcome to the Land of the Lawsuit.
In short, the court was in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to this ruling, and did the wrong thing (something that happens an awful lot in US law: except in extreme cases, the legal profession looks out for its own).
*Defunding the police helps here and seems to be popular, but causes all kinds of other problems. Not a good solution. There's also the ethics issues associated with government trying to keep the money it gets from fines, which increases the amount of ticketing going on, is also a 9th Amendment violation, and creates contempt for the police that makes their jobs a lot harder, but that ethics problem is a subject for another day.
In 1936, Alan Turing famously showed that there is no general algorithm that can solve this problem.
All programs will halt, due to entropy. Turing was wrong. His proof only works in a fantasy world.
That's the nature of mathematics: we create fantasy worlds (with assumptions and axioms), then try to determine the properties of those fantasy worlds using equations and logic (lemmas and proofs).
Sometimes the real world provides a decent approximation for the fantasy world (in which case the results are useful: subjects such as physics or engineering provide lots of examples of this), but in other cases it doesn't.
In this particular case, the authors still have not shown a convincing application of the math. It's not clear they understand the distinction between fantasy and reality.
I'm Sr sysadmin for a medium sized company and I haven't encountered a single person - outside of a geologist or engineer that needs real power - who prefers a desktop to a laptop in many years.
CPU power is not the only issue.
Desktops can be made really quiet, far more so than laptops of comparable power. There are a number of clever solutions to achieve this, each addressing different aspects of computer noise, such as the huge "NoFan" heatsinks. The lack of machine noise can be very useful in many work environments. Artists, for example, often value silence when they work.
Also, desktops can run really high end graphics cards: nice if you want good performance while running multiple big monitors (i.e. 30"). I'd really hate to develop software on even the largest laptop screen, after getting used to the convenience of the large desktop screens. One doesn't have to be a power-user (or be doing work requiring a high end CPU) to appreciate the large screens. A high end laptop might be able to drive these screens, but probably not very well.
Some jobs generate or work with lots of data, without necessarily requiring a high end CPU (i.e. data access speed, not CPU speed, limits throughput). It's much easier (and quieter) to cool a multi-hard-drive array in a big case, leading to longer drive life and better performance. Some of the better cases have 200mm fans, which can spin a lot slower than smaller fans while generating far better cooling. Laptops can't even come close to this, either in terms of cooling or drive size. The case for the array doesn't necessarily have to be the same case as one's motherboard, of course. But if you need the big case anyway, it might make sense to put the motherboard in it (and you'll probably have fewer issues with the RAID controller).
Physical security with desktops is much easier to enforce than with laptops, for those sites with stringent security requirements.
From a home use perspective, you won't get good quality graphics on multiple screens using a flight simulator, without a big case and real full-size graphics cards - no laptop can do this. For that matter, you won't get good quality graphics on even single screens for high end games without a really high end laptop (and one that isn't all that portable), which makes the (much less expensive) desktop alternative pretty appealing.
Desktops are still far more upgradable than laptops. A good case and power supply can outlast many motherboards, and give a net cost savings compared to purchasing multiple laptops.
Laptops tend to fail more often than desktops, and are harder to repair.
In my experience, the overhead types like the managers and marketing people prefer the laptops for convenience, but the savvy technical folks often still like the desktops.
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But that is only a small fraction of the cost. The REAL cost is in the TIME it takes to deal with all those things. Time is money in corporate speak, and their lax security measures is now directly resulting in these affected people to invest hours of their time setting up new credit monitoring, reviewing all recent credit reports (and future ones), replace their cards, change passwords, etc. If they were like a corporation, they would even hire consultants and remediation teams and charge their costs as part of the cost to be made whole when they (the corporation) sues the people responsible (look at what the City of San Francisco included in the charges/lawsuit against Terry Childs).
Exactly. The value of a person's time is the issue here, and that's something our society often doesn't handle well.
It seems like the legal profession has in the past followed a double standard.
The time of lawyers is valuable, therefore they must get paid lots of money for (almost) everything they do.
However, the time of the public is not, since if the law is structured in such a way as to be able to steal that time, then people will tend to hire lawyers to protect them from the their own legal system.
In short, this is a legal ethics issue. When they argue that there is no standing on matters like this, the lawyers representing the companies that have failed in their responsibilities, and any judges ruling in their favor, are engaging in unethical practice of law.
This contempt for the value of people's time is - in part - why we still have such obscene practices as junk mail, unsolicited sales or political calls, door-to-door solicitation, and so forth. The lawyers have little incentive to recognize the value of other people's time, so they do little to effectively protect that time.
Worse, it's been known since the 1950's that stress has negative physiological consequences. Expose mice to long term stress, and they develop plaques in the arteries, and have higher rates of heart attack! That means that wasting people's time is not just a matter of time and money, but also likely a matter of doing physical harm.
Certainly identity theft (and most other things that involve stealing a portion of a person's life) can be a lengthy and stressful experience (especially when dealing with incompetent bank officials who insist one owes a huge amount of money for a bogus account, almost certainly one created as a result of the bank's own negligence).
We can view kidnapping as stealing a portion of somebody else's life. Resolving an identity theft can take months (and essentially requires spending money on credit monitoring for the rest of one's life!), and the long term stress involved could lead to health issues such as a heart attack or stroke.
If one is wrong, the other must be as well.
In the USA, it follows that stealing a portion of somebody's life is a violation of fundamental rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th. It doesn't matter what type of negligence or misconduct resulted in the theft of that time.
As such, practices like sending junk mail, and the other items mentioned above, are violations of the highest law in the land. The same can be said for other things that waste time, such as excessive bureaucracy, whether on the part of private businesses or government. This includes a lot of the hassles that go on in the medical domain, such as the hoops one has to go through to deal with errors in bills.
Similarly, one has a right to expect reasonable competence on the part of businesses holding private data.
Yes a huge returning labor force taking advantage of major increases in production methods and materials research probably didn't factor in nearly as much as regulations, taxes, and government spending.
Entirely discounting having the only developed economy in the world that hadn't been bombed back 2 decades...
Not true.
Britain's industrial capacity was vastly greater after WW2 then it had been before. Large numbers of new factories were built during the war, and large numbers of people trained to work in them. British industrial production soared once German bombing stopped being effective (which was early in the Battle of Britain).
They were not in any sense "bombed back 2 decades", but actually far ahead of where they had been. Further, they were not only producing goods for the British war effort, they were also supplying the Soviets with huge amounts of critical industrial supplies!
Remember, Britain entered the war with a Victorian-era economy and an education system that heavily inherited from earlier systems that were largely run by the church (that's where we get the idea of "liberal arts" and "humanities" education - it was originally training for the priesthood). There were lots of inefficiencies caused by old equipment, and far too few scientists and engineers (though the ones they had were generally superb). A lot of the issues were corrected during the war.
British military historian Corelli Barnett has several books on this, such as The Audit of War, which are worth reading for the details.
Unfortunately for Britain, the experiment with socialism post-war undid most of their advantages.
Similarly, Australia had a developed economy, and that economy got far stronger as a result of wartime development.
Sweden also had a modern economy, and was never bombed. They were actually far better at producing some modern goods, such as ball bearings, an industrial good with very tight tolerances, then the British were during WW2. Both Britain and Germany would import large amounts of Swedish ball bearings during the war.
You're conflating Socialism with Communism.
Not so. As a result of the dismal failure of the many 20th century socialist experiments, there have been attempts by modern socialists to distance themselves from the failures, and claims that the communist states were not actually socialist are one way that is being attempted. Unfortunately those claims founder on the definition of socialist.
For example, you can look at the Wikipedia definition:
"Socialism is a variety of social and economic systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production;[7] as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim at their establishment.[8] Social ownership may refer to forms of public, cooperative, or collective ownership; to citizen ownership of equity; or to any combination of these.[9] Although there are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them,[10] social ownership is the common element shared by its various forms."
Also, note the words "all socialist nations at one time" in the previous post.
The Soviet Union was certainly a socialist state at one point -- look at their rhetoric: the concept of the workers owning the means of production was central, and also look at their actions: they did seize private production and in theory the workers controlled it by means of their elected party representatives. Arguably, the Soviet state morphed into something else, but I expect most people would say that's inevitable in such cases. Power corrupts.
Much the same can be said of China and Vietnam.
In short, the communist system was one way of attempting socialism, one of many that were made in the 20th Century.
If you want a programming language analogy, think of socialism as a class, with communism as child class that specializes certain aspects of the parent class.
India, and some of the cases in Africa and South America were a bit different, but still failures.
I'm awfully sorry, this might come as a shock to you..
Sitting down? Comfy? "Regulated capitalism" is... socialism. It's exactly what all the "Social democratic" parties in Europe have been up to since the beginning of the 1900's.
Not true.
It has been known since Adam Smith published the first major work on capitalism (in 1776) that regulation is an essential part of capitalism. Go read his book, it's long been out of copyright, even by Disney standards.
If you read a biography on Adam Smith, you'll find that he was deeply troubled by the issue of slavery, which to some extent was funding the ongoing industrial revolution in Britain. Slavery is a prime example of the consequences of unregulated capitalism. In other words, unregulated capitalism is the same as allowing slavery. A reasonable level of regulation is a highly desirable thing for a society.
Socialism, on the other hand -- by definition -- means the workers control the means of production. It was tried lots of times during the 20th century, in Africa, South America, and Asia. It's never worked as the primary rule for any economy. When China, India, and the Soviet Union -- all socialist nations at one time -- experimented with allowed small, controlled capitalism, they found it was enormously more efficient, which is why they are no longer socialist.
From what I can tell -- I'm not a citizen of these countries -- even in Norway and Sweden, the majority of businesses are privately owned. Further, even those that are publicly held seem to be run in pretty similar ways to their private counterparts. If somebody out there can correct me on that, or elaborate on what I've said, then please do so ...
Most people who label themselves as "socialist" are more concerned with reforming welfare systems then they are with having the workers own the means of production. A lot of people think that one implies the other (and would probably be shocked if they knew the real meaning of the word "socialist").
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where portions or the entirety of the Bible were translated in the years 1000-1500, and the Church didn't do anything to the translators. It only became a significant controversy after the whole Luther thing and the Counter-Reformation.
Translation of the Bible was a significant controversy in England, more then a century before Martin Luther started the ball rolling for the Protestant Reformation in 1517.
The Wycliffe translation of 1382 would eventually become associated with the Lollard Heresy.
The Oxford Convocation of 1408 banned further translations being made without approval.
The first person burned at the stake for heresy in England was a Lollard, in 1410.
You're welcome.
Another point I forgot to mention is the issue of folks working Swing Shift. There are lots of IT people, grocery store workers, military, police, nurses, doctors, and so forth whose shifts are during the night. These folks tend to be asleep during part of the day (typically 8am-4am, or so), and are likely to be affected by daytime noise.
This poses a tough problem for society, since it wouldn't make sense to completely disallow things like lawn mowers and lots of other equipment that make noise. At the same time, it's not a good thing when a doctor working the emergency room at night isn't at his or her best because of daytime noise.
Better building standards help some of these people: many of the improvements to building codes over the past few decades - intended to get better heating/cooling performance - also help with reducing noise. Of course, those folks with forced air heating/cooling systems (which are pretty common in the USA these days) also have to deal with the noise of that system.
I've occasionally worked night shifts, and have friends who do it permanently. The typical solution to the noise problem is to try to talk with one's neighbors: considerate neighbors will generally be willing to accommodate shift restrictions. It complicates their life a bit, especially when somebody is trying to get work done before it rains.
I don't personally use a leaf blower, but I've never been bothered with the noise from two-stroke petrol leaf blowers. It's just a part of fall.
Other people are bothered by them. It's not just the noise that bothers people, it's the sociopathic mindset that leads some people to think they can do whatever they want without consequences, because other people aren't real to them. Many human beings do not react well to aggression or perceived aggression from sociopaths: this sort of thing seems to trigger defensive responses that can cause situations to escalate in ugly ways.
In general, noise is a big problem for society, and it is a problem that is fundamentally married to technology, which is why I'm pleased to see this discussion happening on Slashdot. You will likely find issues with respect to noise in any part of the world, first world or third. Our technology lets us easily produce sound levels that can (and do) damage hearing beyond possibility of repair. It's traditionally been a bigger problem in the third world, due to unregulated work conditions and industrial noise, but rates of hearing loss among children in the first world are up 30% today from even the 1980's and 1990's.
The traditional model is that sound amplitude and duration lead to permanent hearing loss (somewhere around 80dB), but the science behind this is sketchy IMHO.
Unfortunately, even this model is not being adhered to. I find that many DJs and club managers will play music that violate the US federal laws with respect to noise in the workplace: they're not just at the limits, they're way beyond the limits. Live bands are even worse - it seems like a lot of musicians are deaf enough they don't understand how loud they are being. A decent sound level meter will measure this: I've measured a live band at over 100db, from outside a building with the doors closed, which implies a maximum exposure of 15 minutes to be compliant with US law. Given that the sounds inside are probably at least 3dB higher, that drops to 7.5 minutes!
The club managers, restaurant managers, and so forth that are allowing this to happen on their watch are being really stupid, since not only are they potentially liable under federal law (a club is a workplace), but also probably liable under state laws regarding assault and battery. One could also make an argument against this in terms of fundamental rights, from a 9th Amendment perspective.
There is hearing protection available, but it isn't clear how well it works, especially over the long term. Worse, having to wear it can be a source of stress in itself. Further, most people don't automatically carry hearing protection with them to places like restaurants.
There is now evidence that lower levels of sound can lead to serious health risks. A 2008 study by Dr Lars Jarup and others in the EU measured blood pressure increases in response to both nighttime airplane noise, and road traffic, and developed a model that suggests long term exposure to much lower sound levels (even under 50 dB, the threshold at which most people wake up) can cause stress, hypertension, increased risk of heart attack or stoke, etc.
It's almost like the human animal evolved in a dangerous environment, and as a result monitors the surroundings even when we're asleep, and can trigger initial stages of fight or flight reactions (which come with the potential for the body doing long term damage to itself), whether we consciously realize it or not!
Even before this study, there was no doubt that many people find unwanted noise in their environment annoying and stressful, which is why many places around the world have noise ordinances in residential areas (55dB is fairly common at night). Evidence has been steadily accumulating since the 1950's that long term stress has physiological consequences, which is a fancy way of saying that exposing people to it isn't very different from punching them in the face.
Noise in the workplace is also a big concern: th
In addition, it is not what you or I find reasonable. The Constitution spells out that it is what the court decides those words mean.
A common misconception.
We find in Article III Section 1: "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour". Also, we find in Article VI that they are required to swear oaths upholding the Constitution: "all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution".
Thus, there are limits on the ability of the court to decide what "those words mean". If in so deciding, they are either engaging a behavior that is not good, or in violation of the "Oath or Affirmation", then they are in fact not acting within their legal authority.
As the Bill of Rights provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" (9th Amendment), and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment), it follows that the people have a say in determining whether either of these conditions has been met.
Further, the mere existence of unspecified rights "retained by the people" inherently places limits on the authority of the Supreme Court. If the judges were to decide to ignore the 9th Amendment, then there would be no rights retained by the people. But that's a contradiction, and creating contradictions in the legal system is unethical practice of law, and certainly a violation of a fundamental and universal right in any society based on the rule of law. Think of this as the legal equivalent of a proof by contradiction, as you might find in Euclid.
This also follows from the early history of the Bill of Rights: if people were prepared to trust the entities defined by the pre-Bill of Rights Constitution, then there wouldn't be a need for a Bill of Rights. But the Supreme Court is one of those pre-Bill of Rights entities, and hence the Bill of Rights - by it's mere existence - must be viewed as also placing limits on the Supreme Court. They may be the Supreme Court, but they are not the Supreme Law of the Land.
For example of the "good behavior issue", if the way a law is implemented involves ethical conflict of interest with respect to the legal profession (this is true for many laws in existence today), and reasonable alternatives exist, then we can assert that allowing such a law to be implemented and enforced is unethical practice of law on the part of the legal professionals in federal office. Clearly unethical practice of law is not good behavior.
In the current political and legal climate, where most politicians are lawyers, most lobbyists are lawyers, and a lot of money is received by politicians from various organizations of lawyers in the form of campaign contributions, that creates an especially great burden on those persons selected for judicial office (by those same politicians) to recognize the importance of not allowing laws involving ethical conflicts of interest that work to the benefit of the legal profession.
The fact that this has been looked at and decided by the courts makes it constitutional.
Not true. There have been many Supreme Court decisions that were not valid. Some of these have been reversed. Others have not.
Classic historical examples such as the decisions that upheld slavery, and the Jim Crow Laws. Even at the time of the Constitutional Convention, everybody with a functioning brain knew that slavery was wrong (just go look at the speech by Morris of NY). So certainly the Supreme Court decisions that permitted slavery to continue were invalid.
Another thing to consider is the Nuremberg Precedent, which basically says that government officials have a responsibility to do the right thing in spite of what the law or their hierarchy says. Certainly a right to expect this can be asserted under the 9th Amendment, and as such, this creates an individual responsibility to do the right thing even when the judici
These are not the same carriers purchased twenty years ago - look at the available tech that they can now stuff into one.
20 years ago, I paid $3000 for a 133MHz computer, with 64MB of RAM. Today, I can buy a 3GHz computer, with 4GB of RAM, for $300.
There's a basic principle of economics that differs in the two cases. It's called economy of scale. Basically, if you can produce a lot of something, you can afford to charge less per item.
People (and businesses) have designed and produced millions upon millions of computers. It's not just laptops, netbooks, tablets, and desktop computers, either. In this day and age, almost every new car, cell phone, printer, microwave oven (and all manner of other appliances) has a computer of some sort embedded in it. There's a lot of overlap between these computer systems, which combines with the large numbers being produced to considerably reduce the costs.
There are some really high cost items involved in producing computers, but this isn't always obvious to the consumer, of course. A fab for producing chips typically costs at least a billion or so, and that doesn't count the ongoing costs to operate it. Even just a high quality oscilloscope or logic analyzer could be a substantial fraction of a million (if you want something reliable that can handle high frequencies). In the typical case, the high costs of the items (and people) needed to produce the computer are more than compensated for by the number of computers sold.
We can't afford to build millions of aircraft carriers. Even if we could, there wouldn't be any point in building them. What would we do with them? Put one in every back yard, in the kid's swimming pool?
Worse, these are staggeringly complex systems. Even a World War I warship is vastly more complex than most people can even begin to imagine (unless they've studied the design of those ships), but the modern stuff dwarfs the complexity of the older ships. In many ways, a warship is far more complex than a computer.
Worse, these ships need to be massively over-engineered, to handle the sea environment, to operate under all kinds of ridiculous conditions, to make the nuclear plants safe, to protect the crew from all the other dangerous stuff aboard, to handle battle damage, and so forth. The requirements on a ship that needs to be able to stay at sea for months at a time are very different from the requirements for a consumer computer. You're not just building a city at sea, but one where lots of complex specialized systems need to be able to interact with one another in situations and ways never dreamed of by engineers doing civilian design.
Secrecy can also add a lot to cost. Patents add to costs as well, and these are probably far more of a burden for the design of military systems than civilian, again because of the economy of scale issue (the patent owner has to collect as much as they can from a few customers, instead of a much smaller amount from many).
Also, you can't reduce many costs by using overseas resources: nobody wants their military dependent on services provided by some other country. The ability to do this in the civilian sector has a huge effect on reducing the price of items, such as computers: chips and other electronics are routinely designed in the USA, then manufactured and tested overseas.
The net effect is, to buy the ship, you have to pay enough to lots of different companies for lots of different components - very little of which can be used for anything else - to justify the complex engineering and manufacturing effort needed to build these things, plus all the overhead associated with any business (marketing, management, accounting, law, etc...). Even the overhead is probably far higher when building warships than it is for civilian products.
The demand for the engineering and manufacturing resources needed to do this doesn't necessarily scale with common measures of inflation, which are pretty nar
I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. All at least twice. Loved them. And still I have no quarrel with any of Jackson's movies.
I'm happy about what was left in, taken out, twisted or invented. I'm happy with how many films there were, and how long.
I'm not entirely happy, but on the whole it's clear that Jackson did a very professional job, appropriate to the medium. Like any good story-teller, he adjusted the story to the medium and the audience. Tolkien, as a good story teller himself, would no doubt have understood.
The decision to have 3 movies for the Hobbit was a good one: it's a long book by most standards (especially compared to the norm from that era), and there's a whole lot of material (even aside from all the extras that appear in the appendices to the Return of the King).
I haven't listened to the director's and actor's commentary for the Hobbit yet, but now that the extended edition is available I'm looking forward to doing that. The commentary for the LOTR was pretty informative, and I came away from it with a lot more respect for Peter Jackson. Perhaps the extended edition of the Hobbit will address some of the things I wasn't entirely happy about (much as happened with LOTR).
The County Judge dismissed based on the notion of protecting one's privacy, yet I'm not sure one has a reasonable expectation of privacy when outdoors
This is a common misconception.
If you hike, you are outdoors. You may need to relieve yourself, so you step behind the cover of some trees.
There is certainly a reasonable expectation of privacy there.
If a photographer were to follow a random stranger behind such a tree, then attempt to record them, they would be lucky to not get their camera thrown off the nearest cliff ("freedom of the press" and any laws to the contrary notwithstanding).
Some people would doubtless feel the photographer and not just the camera should go over the cliff (perhaps as an alternative to a long, costly, uncertain legal battle which would primarily work to the benefit of a frequently unethical legal profession).
If one steps behind a tree while hiking in a national forest, one not only has an expectation of privacy outdoors, but in a location that is a public place by definition.
Thus, an expectation of privacy can exist in public. You can doubtless find many other examples of this.
There are thus two fundamental issues with respect to all sensors and recording equipment:
1. When can this equipment be legitimately used? and
2. What can be done with any recordings that are made?
(This topic includes specifying security precautions that must be taken with respect to such data.)
So far, there aren't clear rules in the USA, which leads to abuses like the current situation. As a result of the US Bill of Rights being open-ended (with unspecified rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment), a strong right to privacy can certainly be asserted under the highest law of the land. But, exactly what we mean by the word privacy needs to be fleshed out a bit, to help people to know what is - and is not - appropriate.
After all, D&D was really an interactive version of Tolkein's world to begin with, wasn't it?
No, though Tolkien's work had some influence and helped create a market for the game.
Gary Gygax was an avid war gamer, a published author of articles on wargames, and a developer of wargaming rules. The D&D game evolved out of wargaming rules for medieval-style battles - knights, archers, that kind of thing.
You can see this even in just the cover description from the early rules: my copy of Greyhawk says "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures". Similarly, if you read the history of the game you'll find references to the "Castle & Crusade Society", part of the International Federation of Wargaming. I believe GenCon - the convention people now associate with D&D - was originally the Lake Geneva Wargames Convention.
Gygax, a major bookworm, drew upon a wide variety of ideas in comic books and in early science fiction and fantasy (much of which predated Tolkien), as well as mythology (predating Tolkien by thousands of years). For example, I see gargoyles, chimera, griffins, and medusae in one of the early rule books (none of which are to be found in Tolkien).
Many people seem to think that Tolkien created fantasy, but there are many earlier and contemporary works in this genre. For example, the first "Conan the Barbarian" story (Robert Howard) was written in 1932, the characters "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" (Fritz Leiber) were created in 1934, and the Hobbit would only be published in 1937.
The key innovations that Gygax (and others) developed from earlier war games were to reduce the army size to focus on a small number of heros, to add fantasy and science fiction elements, and to have the idea of an ongoing game (the "campaign").
Dave Arneson, the other major participant in creating the game, was probably the first to add science fiction elements, as part of his Blackmoor campaign (which I understand grew out of his wargaming sessions). This, of course, was very different from anything in Tolkien.
You can still dig up copies of the old rules and see the wargaming elements (it helps if you're already familiar with old school wargaming). As the game evolved, the wargaming-style rules started to disappear. The use of miniature figures, for example, stopping being important, the wargamers had lots of these, and terrain to go with them, but as the game moved beyond wargaming it started to attract players that didn't have or want any of this stuff.
In today's RPGS, it's been my experience that we tend to get two different styles of play: some groups emphasize the role playing, others emphasize the gaming (rules and tactics). The latter approach is much closer to the original game, but both approaches can make for reasonable and enjoyable play sessions. Many current gamers are firmly wedded to one camp or the other, and this greatly complicates producing new or updated RPG rule sets, as the two groups want fundamentally different things in the rules they use. For example, to the groups that emphasize role playing, complex rules (a long tradition in wargaming) just get in the way, while to the groups that emphasize tactical play, these actually provide more freedom and opportunities for tactical creativity.
This story is about approximately 35 years old stuff. (I think Rogue came out in 1980)
The ADND Dungeon Master's Guide (a book first published in 1979) had a pretty complex random dungeon (and wilderness) generation system, so the idea is certainly nothing new. There may have been even earlier variants on this theme, I haven't read all the earlier books.
The ADND system was intended for use by a human, but I'm sure lots of people ended up writing computer variants (most of which probably never got published).
It's always nice to have people publish their versions of this kind on thing. There's still lots of room for innovation in this area.
Calculus and differential equations are need for doing simulations of physical processes
This is a bit outside my experience, as all I've done there is a 3D physics engine for a game. Even then, I suspect all you need to know are the equations and a few well-understood approaches to integration, actually understanding the math (or the physics) doesn't seem necessary. (Though I'll admit that it is helpful.)
I suspect that what the original poster is referring to is a bit outside your experience. A lot of simulation involves going far beyond cookie-cutter recipes, and you might have to do quite a bit of work to even get to the point where you can apply the recipe. As the saying goes, if all you have is a hammer (integration would be the hammer) than every problem looks like a nail...
In general, you can hack together simple models without really understanding math, and for many things that will work well, but you have to expect some serious bugs lurking in the underbrush. Numbers on computers can not necessarily be represented exactly (particularly for scientific or engineering simulation), and this can lead to compounding errors which will sooner or later torpedo your program (the integration will give the wrong answer, and your simulation goes wildly astray).
To understand and address this issue, you don't necessarily need to be able to read and understand a text on "Numerical Analysis" (which would require being able to read and do proofs, there's no other way to read a true math text), but you at least need to be able to read something like Ronald Mak's book on Numerical Computing (which is a great easy introduction to the topic, using programs to illustrate math ideas in place of proofs).
Simulation is hard in general, and tends to dive into math pretty quickly.
You don't necessarily, for example, need a Kalman filter to predict movement, but it sure comes in handy for some applications. If you don't understand how the filter works, you won't be able to assess it's strengths and weaknesses for particular applications. Eli Brookner's book goes into the details and many options, and the math isn't too bad, but it's definitely present.
This is part of the topic known as "digital signal processing", which is a major engineering specialization in its own right and just loaded with math. A lot of modeling relies on it: many real systems have feedback and understanding some DSP is fundamental to simulating many of those systems (you might have to dip into control theory as well). Richard G. Lyons book is a good start for getting your feet wet on the DSP: he makes the math about as easy as anybody can (and the first edition is probably still freely available from his web site).
Yet another issue arises from the fact that the real world is non-linear. To model this, you need to understand first what that means, and second how and when to linearize. Only then can you get to the point where an integration can (might!) be appropriate. For an example of this is done for electric circuits, Lawrence Pillage's book is a classic. There are direct techniques for doing non-linear modeling as well (as Thomas R. Turlington's book discusses) but the math gets very dense and these techniques have some major limitations.
In more general physical simulation situations, you tend to get into differential equations or even partial differential equations. Often the PDEs have no known exact solution technique (you can't come up with an equation that gives the solution, or what is called a "closed form", which means you can't apply your cookie cutter integration), so you'll have to resort to one of the many techniques that mathematicians and scientists have developed to work around that issue.
Even knowing which technique to pick (in terms of what is likely to succeed for your problem) is likely to involve quite a bit of math, let alone how to successfully implement it on a computer. There are often many possible models
So imagine using as precedent a case that was never even defended against. So what were the precedents established?
1.The Second Amendment protects only the ownership of military-type weapons appropriate for use in an organized militia.
2.The "double barrel 12-gauge Stevens shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches in length, bearing identification number 76230" was never used in any militia organization.
You missed the most important precedent. It's a subtle one, and most people miss it, but it is absolutely critical for understanding the current state of the US legal system.
By creating a ruling that directly contradicts the written text of the Bill of Rights the Supreme Court chose to put a major contradiction into US law.
For legal professionals to create contradictions in the law, or to be involved in writing or enforcing law that does this, is always unethical practice of law, without exception. Contradictions make the law harder for non-professionals to understand, and that creates a long term artificial demand for the services of legal professionals, hence the ethics issue.
Even the appearance of contradiction would have been a problem, and to make matters worse, the court ignored the well documented history behind the 2nd Amendment and ownership of arms in Colonial America.
It follows that the legal authority of the court in this case was actually limited to telling the government a constitutional amendment would be required before the law they had passed would be legal. That's inherent in the oaths the judges swear when they accept positions with the court.
Further, the right to ethical practice of law being one of the most important rights protected under the 9th Amendment (under any reasonable statement of such a right, even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided if alternatives exist), the judges not only violated their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights, but by their example effectively gave carte blanche to the legal profession to ignore major ethics issues in the law. US law is now riddled with ethics problems, and while we can't blame all of that on Miller (Slavery, aside from the moral issues, was certainly ethically invalid, as were the Jim Crow laws), this case does serve as a very damaging precedent.
Worse, rights retained by the people under the 9th Amendment, by definition, can not be taken away by any entity of government. That's the whole point of having the Bill of Rights be open ended! This was such as fundamental issue (and so critical to overcoming the opposition of the Anti-Federalists) that James Madison actually put it in the document twice, in the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and also in the 10th Amendment (which provides for unspecified rights reserved to the people). By ignoring the right to ethical practice of law, the court effectively created a second major contradiction in the law!
It's ironic, because less than a decade before the events at Nuremberg, the US legal hierarchy was effectively giving the US legal profession a precedent that would allow them to ignore the concept of individual responsibility with respect to major ethics issues, while claiming hierarchical absolution ("my superiors said it was ok"!), something that has largely remained true to this day.
This has certainly had a chilling effect on a wide variety of rights that can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment, such as the right to privacy, but there are broader implications. Not only do we now live in the "Land of the Lawsuit", but there are all kinds of other problems in US federal, state, and local law that trace directly to the willingness of the legal profession -- following the example of the Supreme Court set here and in other cases -- to ignore major ethics issues.
It's not an accident that, for example, the federal tax code is 2700 pages long, a length and complexity far beyond any reasonable size, allowing a lot of loopholes to be hidden in the law, l
If I were in a position of authority I would propose a gradual transfer of power from the private sector to a national central bank. Something like an increase on the fractional reserve ratio for all private enterprise by 2% per year until it hits 100. "New money" should then only be lent out by the central bank through private institutions acting as brokers. Profits from loans then go into the public treasury. Interest rates can then be controlled by a central authority who's core interest in is the welfare of the people, rather than shareholder profits. Periods of increased economic growth would result in increased social and public infrastructure spending, while periods of slower growth result in higher rates that help deflate bubbles and encourage saving.
There are fundamental problems with this scheme. The first is that a central authority is always far more subject to corruption than a large number of smaller entities. In many ways, centralizing things simply makes a bigger, easier target for the predators out there (some of whom usually end up in control of it).
The second is that no central authority knows what is best for the people. In many cases, nobody knows what's best. The world is a complex place, and there are many different viewpoints. A decentralized system has advantages here.
These will remain fundamental truths for the foreseeable future, and thus no central authority can be trusted to look out for the welfare of the people.
Humanity has had a really poor track record with central authorities. Study 20th century economic history for the gory details: there's the Soviet Union, India, China, and many smaller countries that have tried the central authority scheme and failed.
Further, you'll find examples on a smaller scale in the history of many countries, where bureaucracies functioning as central authorities, with respect to some particular economic aspect of society, have also failed to look out for the welfare of the people. Consider the history of water development in the USA, involving the US Army Corp of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, for lots of examples of how central authorities go wrong: Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert is a good introduction to this.
Similarly, we can see many examples of bad decision making in the history of large corporations: the executives in these organizations make a lot of really bad blunders because the organizations are too big and the executives too out of touch with the reality of their business (refer to the industrial psychology literature for examples). Any centralized authority will have the same kinds of problems.
Further, if you follow the history of invention and discovery, you'll see that a lot of things that ended up being really useful and important weren't predicted in advance. Having private access to funding is an often underrated benefit of the decentralized economy.
The outlook for any scheme involving massively increased central authority is dismal. There are better places to focus one's energy for those concerned with improving the public welfare. A vastly simplified tax system -- one that was truly progressive instead of just pretending to be -- would help a lot for nations like the USA. Cleaning up corporate law would help a lot as well.
Do advertisements add enough value to my existence to compensate me for the time lost? Not rhetorical, I think it's a good question.
It depends on whether or not you have opted in, but even then there are limits.
If you opt-in, then clearly you are willing to see some sort of ad. You've indicated that you value being exposed to an ad, even if you don't know what it will be. That's probably the only value measure we can make here.
But it is an entirely different manner when one obscures the landscape with over-sized billboards, puts flashing signs next to a road (or people waving signs), goes door to door (or calls somebody) to sell a product or religion or political candidate, sends somebody junk mail, and so forth (assuming one hasn't given the recipient of the marketing the chance to opt-in).
Drivers along a road do not have the chance to opt-in, and it is often very difficult even for people in their homes to prevent this kind of activity. Not everybody has the option to fence out the world, and no fence is perfect.
There are a number of potential rights in play here, but the most fundamental is that civilized societies shouldn't allow people to steal portions of another's life. The human lifespan is finite, and time lost is precious and irreplaceable and hence extremely valuable: not allowing others to steal a portion of our lives is simply a rational recognition of this universal truth. This is why we categorize things such as kidnapping, murder, or robbery as crimes. In the last case, the robbery steals a portions of a person's life because it steals money or goods which took time to accumulate (and will take time to replace, if they can be replaced). This is why only opt-in approaches to marketing make sense: anything else effectively involves stealing a portion of a person's life.
Further, as a society, we don't necessarily allow people to opt-in themselves (or their dependents) to some things. Hence, even an opt-in system will have limits.
For example, raising the volume on a commercial during a video (to attract the attention of the audience, as a marketing technique) could result in pain or hearing damage to the audience, especially if they are elderly and have to up the volume due to hearing loss just to make out words from the non-commercial content. This could and should be regulated (perhaps even requiring voice and non-voice audio on different "channels" that are defined such that AV equipment can apply different levels of volume to them), even if one has opted-in.
Only the sociopaths don't see this. By definition, a sociopath is a person to whom other people aren't real. By attempting to steal a portion of other people's lives, the people who try to force ads on others are demonstrating their contempt for others, and thus their belief that others are not real.
All the people who engage in the list of activities above, and many other variants, are sociopaths.
Having some commercials while watching TV may be the only reason I have something to watch on TV, I can appreciate that. But in the past decade or more, commercials have consumed such a large portion of the time of TV, that it was no longer worth the time investment to be constantly interrupted, taking 30 minutes of my time to watch a 15 minute show.
Even here, there is a critical issue that is often not acknowledged, namely that society is choosing to give some entity associated with the TV show an exclusive monopoly (possibly excepting fair use or other rights). Since this is an entirely artificial right -- a privilege really -- it is entirely reasonable to limit what can be done with that monopoly.
With today's technology we (society) could easily require these shows be released in two formats, with one ad-free, allowing that version to be at a higher price to make up for the loss of advertising revenue (perhaps according to some formula determined by law), as a condition for granting copyright. We might e
Irregardless of the cause, the wildfires do pose health risks.
Those who have been lucky enough to avoid one may not understand how much smoke exposure is possible here. During a fire, the roads can be completely jammed, forcing people evacuating to be exposed to high levels of smoke for many hours. Significant amounts of smoke can go right through the air sealing on cars: a good respirator for every family member belongs in one's evacuation kit if one lives in a fire-prone area. After the fire, the smoke can stay in the air at lesser but still potentially dangerous levels for months after the fire.
Nobody really understands what health impacts these two different types of exposure will have, but for some people they could be serious. Just going to work means breathing potentially toxic air throughout the day for months at a time, since most workplaces will not have good air filtering (private residences can use air cleaners, which help quite a bit in my experience). This exposure can potentially cause long term lung damage.
To make things worse, the smoke toxins may interact in a non-linear manner with other airborne toxins present in many workplaces. The cumulative health effect may be considerably greater than the exposure to any single toxin would cause. The safety standards for exposure to things like asbestos (common in many older buildings) almost certainly underestimate the danger thresholds because the standards did not take into account having multiple toxins present in the air at the same time.
It is likely asthmatics and others with existing lung damage will be particularly susceptible to further lung damage.
In all likelihood, though many people may be experiencing long-term work-related injury as a result of breathing toxic air in the workplace following wild fires, this will not be handled by existing laws that protect workers, or agencies such as OHSA. Rather then adding further fuel to the climate change debate -- basically political posturing that does more harm than good -- it would be nice if the president actually did his job and tried to do something about the potential problem of lung damage resulting from breathing toxic air.
If we don't have good test and measurement equipment for determining the impact of fire-related toxins on the lungs, we should be researching what needs to be done to make that equipment. If we don't know how to medically treat lung damage, then we should be researching that. Given that entire communities are affected by this issue, it seems appropriate that the government should have some major role here, rather then relying on every potentially impacted individual paying for their own health care (and any research that may be required to fix problems).
I think it's pretty clear that the intent behind the second amendment was the perceived need to have a well regulated militia. In other words, if you want to carry a guns, sign up to join the national guard.
This myth has been thoroughly debunked. There are numerous quotes from the key figures alive at the time that completely discredit this position. I'll let you do the research, since doing so will help you fill some gaps in your historical education.
Like it or not, individual ownership of firearms was accepted as an individual right at the time (and long after), and was associated with political freedom. This didn't mean weapons couldn't be taken from criminals, within reason.
There is also a long history behind this position, tracing back through British history. It's not an accident that most people in the Robin Hood stories are carrying weapons, and know how to use them. The audiences that heard these stories accepted this as normal and appropriate. In Britain, the traditions were different than they were in many other places (where only the nobility could carry arms). The British often saw themselves as superior to others in part because of this. Certainly, they were much freer than those in many parts of the world (particularly places where serfdom survived until the 19th century). These British traditions evolved into a belief or philosophy that ownership of arms was an integral part of being a free person, which would eventually be expressed by the US descendants of Britain in their Bill of Rights.
In US Colonial times, some jurisdictions required (by law) every household to not just have arms, but also to carry them to public meetings (including church services), to make sure that community was armed in the event of a surprise Indian attack.
For that matter, privately owned ships were routinely armed. In some cases, they were well enough armed to fight off warships.
If you wish to oppose the right to bear arms, do so for other reasons than a misunderstanding of the text and the history.
I don't know that this is entirely fair. While a lot rides on a judge's opinion, in the end, the judges are only supposed to interpret the law and precedents from higher courts, not make things up as they go along. If there had been no precedent (ie. the Clapper decision), he may have felt more free to define a better test for "imminent threat".
You've forgotten that this is the USA, where the highest law of the land is the Bill of Rights.
The Anti-Federalists opposed the original Constitution on many grounds, including a) there was no Bill of Rights, and b) any Bill of Rights would be incomplete.
During the ratification process, promises were made that this issue would be dealt with. James Madison wrote a Bill of Rights, and cleverly made it open-ended, by providing for unspecified rights retained by the people (9th Amendment) and reserved to the people (10th Amendment), allowing the future assertion of rights as needed.
Thus, interpreting the law, in this country, is supposed to mean the judges consider not just precedents by their peers, but also any rights the people might want to assert under the 9th or 10th Amendments. An oath to uphold the Bill of Rights requires this of judges (as it does of all legal professionals, in any aspect of the practice of law).
In practice, the US legal profession seems to find it convenient to ignore this aspect of the Bill of Rights whenever they think they can get away with it. Perhaps this is because one of the rights the people might want to retain to them is the right to ethical practice of law, a right that would necessarily force many changes to how law is practiced at present. Then there's the right to ethical government ...
In this particular case, consider the following:
1. A claim was made by the lawyers for the defense of no injury, and thus, no standing.
2. For an identity theft victim to be forced to deal with credit card companies and online vendors as a result of this information breach takes time, and thus robs that person of an irreplaceable portion of their life, which is finite.
3. We consider kidnapping a crime in part because the same kind of theft (of a portion of a person's finite life) happens during kidnappings. Hence, an injury or damage has in fact occurred as a result of the information breach.
4. Legal professionals often work as intermediaries between private citizens and organizations or bureaucracies. People often hire them not because they have to, but rather because they don't want to deal with the hassle and potential loss of time associated with various situations.
5. A claim that "no damage" has been suffered can be expected to increase the demand for the services of legal professionals, as a class in society, in future situations involving identity theft (where they can be expected to function both as intermediaries, and in otherwise providing advice and assistance). Further, protecting the hiring of legal professionals in situations where people don't strictly need them is of interest to the profession.
6. The alternative, of course, would be to expect businesses to provide a reasonable level of security over the private information (something that would certainly be required under any 9th Amendment right to privacy -- nothing in the 9th Amendment limits its application to just government). Capitalism on the large scale necessarily requires some government regulation or other limitation on the conduct of business (quite of lot of Adam Smith's writing discusses this), and in the absence of competent direct regulation by government, rights arising under the 9th Amendment can be made to serve.
Note the ethical conflict of interest this situation poses for legal professionals, as a class in society. On the one hand, they increase their future business, and their job security, on the other hand they create a situation where the public might become more aware of the 9th Amendment and its implications (a very scary thing for the profession).
Battleships became obsolete beginning in World War 2. During that war the US Navy moved away from focusing their fleets around the big battleships and instead focused on building their carrier fleet supported by smaller destroyers.
Within 6-8 months after Pearl Harbor, the US Navy had raised most of the battleships sunk at Pearl, and moved a number of ships from the Atlantic fleet over to the Pacific. Significant upgrades were being done as well. By any reasonable standard, the battleship force was more powerful than it had been at the start of the war. The big problem was fuel: the Germans were sinking so many tankers that the Navy had to choose between the battleships and the carriers. The Europe-first grand strategy meant that many of the remaining tankers had to be reserved for Britain. The carriers were faster and considerably more fuel efficient than the old battleships, and somewhat more flexible, and perhaps this is why they ended up using them.
Destroyers were not at all ideal escorts, and the navy never focused on using them exclusively with the big carriers. This was because a) the destroyers had very poor anti-aircraft capabilities at that point in the war, and b) the destroyers had trouble keeping up with the fleet, especially in high seas (short ships are inherently less efficient at higher speeds). The destroyers were superb in the anti-submarine and rescue role.
Instead of thinking about a destroyer-centric escort force, it's more accurate to think "combined arms". The preferred escort paradigm for the big carriers was a combination of cruisers and battleships (particularly the fast battleship designs) with fleet destroyers (ships large enough to be considered cruisers by WWI standards, thus better able to keep up with the fleet, but officially classified as destroyers).
The battleships could throw up an enormous amount of flak. It has been suggested that one of the contributing factors to the US victory at Midway was the lack of a strong escort for the Japanese carrier group, resulting in a much weaker anti-air defense (and fewer eyes on the sky to spot the dive bombers coming in). The Japanese liked to split their forces, and in this case the decision hurt more than it helped.
Aircraft carriers make battleships obsolete because a carrier can destroy a battleship long before the Battleship could fire a shot at the aircraft carrier.
At least one aircraft carrier, the HMS Glorious, was sunk by capital ship fire, with horrendous casualties. The German ships were using radar controlled guns, with remarkable accuracy on their initial salvos (possibly the best shooting by any navy in the entire war).
In general, the carriers were quite vulnerable, and many of them were crippled or sunk. Typically, the allies would keep carriers in the battle near isolated islands, but were very careful with these ships when using them near potential land based air. This vulnerability meant that surface warships were left behind to support landings in situations where the carriers were deemed too exposed (resulting in many of the battles of the Solomon Islands, some of which involved battleships engaging other surface warships). The carrier certainly didn't make the surface warships obsolete.
In any cost-comparison of the effectiveness of different ship types, it's also worth considering the effects of pilot attrition. Training pilots is a long process, and heavy casualties make the air arm considerably less effective over the long term. The Germans and Japanese took very heavy pilot losses in their air attacks on the Allied forces. Neither nation could make up these losses. There are also negative implications for morale associated with high pilot losses. A simple linear comparison of the cost of a battleship, versus the cost of the planes required to sink it, does not consider either of these factors, and is thus misleading.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . "
We already have a law covering this.
The 4th Amendment alone does not cover this issue fully, since it leaves open the possibility that the government or the legal profession gets to decide what is reasonable.
The addition of the 9th and 10th Amendments (unspecified rights retained by and reserved to the people) is needed to close the loophole. This ensures that "reasonable" must also match what the people consider reasonable, not merely what members of two special interest groups consider reasonable.
This, of course, invalidates many of the searches or seizures that happen. Civil forfeiture, for example, is seen to be entirely invalid, as one of the rights arising under the 9th Amendment is the right to ethical government, which creates a requirement that even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when possible. A point police officers and federal agents might want to keep in mind, since their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights are preconditions for holding any position of public trust or responsibility ...
Similarly, a right to privacy arises under the 9th Amendment. This right can and does apply even in public places. For example, hikers on public lands certainly expect privacy when they step behind a bush to relieve themselves, and public lands are public by definition.
In practice, the US legal profession likes to pretend the 9th Amendment doesn't exist. I suppose the last thing they want is the public asserting a 9th Amendment right to ethical practice of law, which means ignoring any 9th Amendment considerations whenever they can get away with it ...
The major issue was the Susie safety nuts who felt that without telling people how fast was reasonable that it would confuse people, the court agreed.
When the government gets to tell people what is reasonable, you have lots of problems. You see, in this country, we have a Bill of Rights that provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" (9th Amendment), and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment). The highest law in the land says the people get to tell the government what is reasonable, not the other way around.
The "speed limit" should be instead taken as a "recommended speed", which should be based primarily on factors such as the engineering of the road, and the likelihood of animals or people being encountered. There will be circumstances when it is appropriate to drive faster than the recommended speed, and there are circumstances where it is appropriate to drive slower.
Let the police show that somebody is driving very differently than other people do on that road, and doesn't have a good reason for doing so (in the eyes of a typical person, informed of the facts, and with good judgement), then the government can take punitive action.
This approach is consistent with people driving at reasonable speeds, as defined by the people and not the government.
But the last thing the US legal profession wants is for people to realize the 9th Amendment exists, since that is the gateway into some very scary basic rights (for them), such as the right to ethical practice of law ...
Far simpler (for the legal profession) to just move back to the status quo, where people -- in practice -- drive as if the speed limits were merely recommended speeds, and hope the police are being equally reasonable*. It's a really bad policy, and hugely unethical for the legal profession. By effectively forcing people to routinely ignore one part of the written law, they make many people scared of the legal system. They also send the message that people can not engage in reasonable conduct: the legal system can and will punish them even when they are being reasonable. These two factors create an artificial demand over the long term for the services of legal professionals to "protect" people from their own legal system. Welcome to the Land of the Lawsuit.
In short, the court was in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to this ruling, and did the wrong thing (something that happens an awful lot in US law: except in extreme cases, the legal profession looks out for its own).
*Defunding the police helps here and seems to be popular, but causes all kinds of other problems. Not a good solution. There's also the ethics issues associated with government trying to keep the money it gets from fines, which increases the amount of ticketing going on, is also a 9th Amendment violation, and creates contempt for the police that makes their jobs a lot harder, but that ethics problem is a subject for another day.
In 1936, Alan Turing famously showed that there is no general algorithm that can solve this problem.
All programs will halt, due to entropy. Turing was wrong. His proof only works in a fantasy world.
That's the nature of mathematics: we create fantasy worlds (with assumptions and axioms), then try to determine the properties of those fantasy worlds using equations and logic (lemmas and proofs).
Sometimes the real world provides a decent approximation for the fantasy world (in which case the results are useful: subjects such as physics or engineering provide lots of examples of this), but in other cases it doesn't.
In this particular case, the authors still have not shown a convincing application of the math. It's not clear they understand the distinction between fantasy and reality.
I'm Sr sysadmin for a medium sized company and I haven't encountered a single person - outside of a geologist or engineer that needs real power - who prefers a desktop to a laptop in many years.
CPU power is not the only issue.
Desktops can be made really quiet, far more so than laptops of comparable power. There are a number of clever solutions to achieve this, each addressing different aspects of computer noise, such as the huge "NoFan" heatsinks. The lack of machine noise can be very useful in many work environments. Artists, for example, often value silence when they work.
Also, desktops can run really high end graphics cards: nice if you want good performance while running multiple big monitors (i.e. 30"). I'd really hate to develop software on even the largest laptop screen, after getting used to the convenience of the large desktop screens. One doesn't have to be a power-user (or be doing work requiring a high end CPU) to appreciate the large screens. A high end laptop might be able to drive these screens, but probably not very well.
Some jobs generate or work with lots of data, without necessarily requiring a high end CPU (i.e. data access speed, not CPU speed, limits throughput). It's much easier (and quieter) to cool a multi-hard-drive array in a big case, leading to longer drive life and better performance. Some of the better cases have 200mm fans, which can spin a lot slower than smaller fans while generating far better cooling. Laptops can't even come close to this, either in terms of cooling or drive size. The case for the array doesn't necessarily have to be the same case as one's motherboard, of course. But if you need the big case anyway, it might make sense to put the motherboard in it (and you'll probably have fewer issues with the RAID controller).
Physical security with desktops is much easier to enforce than with laptops, for those sites with stringent security requirements.
From a home use perspective, you won't get good quality graphics on multiple screens using a flight simulator, without a big case and real full-size graphics cards - no laptop can do this. For that matter, you won't get good quality graphics on even single screens for high end games without a really high end laptop (and one that isn't all that portable), which makes the (much less expensive) desktop alternative pretty appealing.
Desktops are still far more upgradable than laptops. A good case and power supply can outlast many motherboards, and give a net cost savings compared to purchasing multiple laptops.
Laptops tend to fail more often than desktops, and are harder to repair.
In my experience, the overhead types like the managers and marketing people prefer the laptops for convenience, but the savvy technical folks often still like the desktops.