The election is over. The criminal slimeball you have a hard-on for lost, so you can be happy now. Hillary is no longer relevant.
Unfortunately, in the process of Hillary losing, Trump won. That sucks but oh well. He's done a couple good things, maybe he'll do more. Anyway, the election is over and he's President for the next four years.
In three years it'll be time to talk about candidates again. Hopefully we'll have a good one. Until then, let's talk about news for nerds, stuff that matters.
The circuit court cited the due process clause in respect to lawful permanent residents. The White House had issued instructions that the policy doesn't apply to lawful permanent residents. The district court indicated that the White House might, in the future, change that policy, and if they changed it there would potentially be a due process issue. That sounds like twisted reasoning to me - stay the actual, existing order because some other order which could be issued in the future might be wrong.
By that reasoning, they should block enforcement of the tax laws because at some future time Congress might pass an unconstitutional tax.
The court explicitly declined to comment on the establishment of religion clause. An establishment claim would be interesting- the President also blocked a country which happens to be majority Christian - is that discrimination against Christians? If the majority of the country affected happen to be tall, would that be discrimination against tall people? Interesting.
Btw I think Trump is a jackass, and I voted against him twice. I also think the law, as written, very clearly allows him to have this policy, even *if* it's a dumb policy. (I know nothing about Yemen, so I can't say whether or not the government there is unwilling or unable to provide documentation for screening).
> the Judicial Branch may override such acts. > This isn't difficult to understand - it used to be taught to every schoolchild under the subject heading "Civics".
You seem to have forgotten something from your childhood civics class. The role of the judicial branch is to *interpret* the law, not *override* it.
There is little to know interpretation required of this law - it's wording is quite clear.
What *can* override a federal law is the *Constitution*. If you wish to make a claim that the Constitution overrides this law I'd be glad to discuss that with you. If so, which article of the Constitution do you have in mind?
Fyi here is the actual text of the law at issue in the case of Trump's travel order:
-- Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate --
In the long run, the question before the courts is "does that law permit the President to deny entry to people coming from countries that the Obama adminstration identified asterrorism risks, because their governments can't or won't assist in vetting applicants?" It seems to me the wording of the law is plain - the President may "suspend the entry of... or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate". Seems straightforward. The law may be bad or it may be good, but it's clear. It does give the President full discretion.
While I agree with you it's pretty clear Congress explicitly granted the President discretion to block entry by whatever criteria he deemed prudent, Robart is consistent between the two cases in holding that the plaintiff may have a non-frivilous case. That's the question before Robart in both cases - is it possible that the plaintiffs may be right, so their interests should be protected as the case is allowed to proceed.
Robart didn't rule that Trump's actions were illegal, he ruled that the question merits a full hearing. He's done the same in this case.
So go back to two years ago? Internet carriers were classified as common carriers on February 26th, 2015.
The companies vigorously fought that decision. Common carrier regulation isn't something you "loose" (or lose), it's something inflicted upon a company. Companies don't like being classified as common carriers.
> loose its common carrier status... Let them be liable for all copyright infringement they happen to route.
Oh I see, you think common carrier classification has something to do with their copyright safe harbor. The copyright safe harbor in under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which says they are not liable for user's infringement if the carrier follows certain procedures in handling complaints.
if you have an interest in this topic, I'd certainly recommend doing some reading about it. It's an interesting topic and with just an hour or so of reading you get some understanding - at least enough to know the vocabulary so you can post on Slashdot without saying the exact opposite of what you intended to say.
The backbones used to null-route and de-peer far more often. Frequently it was around spam. When one ISP had too much spam coming from their network, other backbones would cut them off.
Cogent themselves didn't route Telia traffic for several weeks in 1999. (Telia is one of the world's largest ISPs).
This stuff happened often enough at a MUCH larger scale than Pirate Bay, and the internet not only survived, it's even grown a bit since then.
> You think eliminating 1000 trucks didn't cost some jobs? > So then why do they need to hire more people or raise wages when they SAVED MONEY?
At first glance that seems rather counter-intuitive, doesn't it? There is a suprise waiting around the corner.
This has been studied over and over, so even the very fine details are well understood now, but pretty much all economists and most business majors. Here's a clear example that makes the big idea clear:
Suppose it cost UPS $20/pound to make deliveries, so they charge $30/pound. How many books would people have ever ordered from Amazon? Roughly zero, because who wants to pay $30 shipping for a book.
Suppose it costs UPS $1/pound, so they charge $1.50/pound. How many people order books from Amazon? A shitload. Giving Amazon the ability to expand into a million other products. How many people order stuff from Amazon now, with shipping costs low? A shitload. How many people are hired to deliver all the things people order from Amazon? A shitload.
The general idea is that when costs are reduced, more people buy it. When more people buy something, that creates more jobs in the industry.
In the early 1980s, mobile phones cost $3,995. Hundreds of people were employed in the mobile phone industry, selling hundreds of phones. Today you can get a mobile phone for $29, so millions of people get mobile phones, creating an industry with millions of jobs.
> It seems like some US unions (the UAW in particular) are a lot more powerful than any of our unions or even all of them combined
Perhaps so. The joke is that the UAW isn't doing as well as it once was, they had a layoff and laid off four the senators who work for them.
The most powerful unions are probably some public-sector unions, like teachers' unions, because they literally pay the people they are nominally negotiating against. It goes a bit like this:
The teachers' union donates $250,000 to a certain candidate for governor.
Two months later, they sit down with the new governor and demand that he give them $2 million of taxpayers' money.
A couple years later, the governor is up for re-election.
The teachers' union meets with the governor again and says: We'd like to discuss two things with you. First, you remember we gave you $250,00 for your last election - we're considering giving you $250,000 again for this election. Secondly, we'd like you to give us $3 million of taxpayer money.
The negotiation is between a union who wants taxpayer money and a politician who is being paid by the union. Nobody in that negotiation represents the people who are paying for it, the taxpayers.
Also, the teachers and firefighters hold a very powerful endorsement. "Think of the children", they can easily say, "Your childrens' education and future depend on you voting for candidate Greenbacks", and many, many voterd are influenced by that endorsement. The fact is, whoever is elected will help decide how money the members of the teachers' union get, and how much the union itself gets. Their self-interest is very much affexted. One should fully expect that that effect on their pay will influence their endorsement.
Programming projects very rarely get smaller (unless a genius points out that rather than writing a new system, you can just transform the inputs and feed the data to an existing system*).
I forgot to expand that asterisk in a footnote. When you're planning an eight-week project and one developer says "no need for all that, I can do it in two days by just running Foo on it, then sending it to the existing Bar tool", that person is either a genius who will save you lots of time and money, or a complete hack suggesting duct tape and baling wire, the "easy way" that will come back to haunt you. Figure out which. That person should probably be either promoted or fired, depending on whether their "simpler ways" are actually correct and robust or not.
Certainly one can create a large and unintuitive, meaningless jumble of folders. If just the *names* of the folders aren't meaningful to other programmers, that's a bad sign - even before you know what's in the folders.
That said, smaller projects have an amazing tendency to grow larger. Programming projects very rarely get smaller (unless a genius points out that rather than writing a new system, you can just transform the inputs and feed the data to an existing system*). Because projects tend to get much bigger over time, I much prefer more organization than less. You'll be very glad for the organized structure as your 1,000-line program evolves into a 100,000-line system.
While most projects grow, not shrink, I'm thinking specifically of some projects I worked on which ended up being literally 1000X larger than originally planned.
For the same reason, I prefer a slightly more powerful programming language over a slightly simpler one - a shell script may work for *todays* needs, but next month we'll have to rewrite it in Perl or Python to handle some new requirement cleanly, or else end up with a giant, unmaintainable, fragile shell script. Similarly, a very small shop should start using version control *now*, not *after* they become a big business and much of the history of the code has already been lost.
You might find the opinion in United States vs Nixon interesting. Essentially it said:
a) In general the president doesn't have to turn over his communications. b) But the courts (and Congress) have a legitimate need to investigate serious crimes. c) Therefore, to avoid a subpoena in a serious criminal case, the President must communicate some reason that releasing them would impair his exercise of his Constitutional powers.
Had Nixon, on those tapes, talked about Russia as well as whatever else, he could avoid disclosure, based on the court's reasoning.
If you're not surw whether I'm right, look at the positions taken by UAW and other large unions still today. They are still against updating tooling, which would results in higher-paying, but fewer jobs. (Aka automation)?
They still don't seem to understand that it's not a choice between automated US factories and non-automated US factories. It's a choice between automated US factories amd automated Japanese factories.
> So unions decided not to re-tool and just keep on rolling the same sort of crap down decaying production lines
Yes. Modern tooling replaces some (union) jobs that (union) humans did in the 1960s with machines that do the same job, better. That scared the crap out of the unions. Understandably, they fought tooth and nail against modernization, insisting on contracts that retained outdated jobs.
Other countries used the machines to produce more, better cars, faster, thereby growing their automotive sector and increasing overall employment in the automotive industry, while reducing the *per car* head count.
It's totally understandable why the unions did this, but as it turned out, they shot themselves in the foot.
I'll add a few thoughts. First, this is a very, very hard thing to do. In all likelihood, there is no truly effective way to "measure" the effectiveness of a programmer, we're looking for hints, traits that good programmers often have.
You may have much less desire to measure anything about the programmer, though, if each person is responsible for a specific area. If one person is responsible for building and the maintaining the UI for product ABC, while another person does the UI for product XYZ, you can answer a simple question. Does the UI for ABC suck? If the UI he built sucks, he might suck at building UIs. Unless of course he told management ahead of time that no, you can't build a good UI under the constraints he was given (time, tooling, etc.) Of course you can do that only if your programmers specialize in particular areas (which also allows them to become more expert in what they are actually doing).
Other than that, there are heuristics, hints about who might be good. Does the person ask questions about the requirements, making sure to build what users actually need? A lot of really good programmers spend a lot of time to fully understand and document exactly what is needed. A lot of bad programmers run off and build something that doesn't fit the need. (Obviously this fails if you TELL the programmer "your next raise will be based on how many questions you ask).
Do other programmers come to this person for advice? If so, not only is that a compliment, but by giving good advice he's probably making other programmers more productive.
Do they enter useful comments in the ticket system, close issues when they complete them, and generally be a responsible adult about following processes? This *can* be misleading, but generally, people who are careful to do a good job are careful to do a good job. Someone who marks issues as "closed" when they are supposed to and completes their annual compliance training in time *might* be someone who validates their inputs when they are supposed to and completes their coding work on time. (Or not, it's just a hint).
Even if you're not a programmer, you can actually get a slight hint by looking at the code. When you see a Slashdot comment that is a wall of text with no line breaks, no punctuation, and no capital letters, you might suspect that the writer is less conscientious than someone who uses paragraphs, punctuation, etc. This is even more true of code. If you squint so the characters are blurry, good code tends to look like a diagram of itself. Bad code tends to look like a blob. This is hard to express, though it's easy to do. The Linux kernel source is good example of good code (in most cases). Indentation sets of clear logical blocks, etc, so the code resembles a diagram.
Heck even without opening any code file, you can look at the names and organization of the files the programmer creates. The newbie/bad programmer may have one giant file, called "myprogram". The expert is more likely to have one small file and two or three subdirectories at the top of the project. He might have directories (folders) called "libs/", "logic/", and "ui/". Under libs/ might be two subdirectories, say network/ and db/. That's a great sign because programming well is largely a process of organizing ideas. If a programmer has organized the task into understandable parts, that is a good indicator.
I could go on, but the point is there are lots of hints you can look at. Like buying a used car, you can't look inside the engine to see what condition it's in, but you can reason that if someone let the tires go completely bald and the interior is covered with coffee stains, it it obviously hasn't been vacummed in the last six years, they may have also skipped an oil change or two.
The Constitution grants the Supreme Court the power to decide cases between parties, Congress the power to make laws on 16 listed topics, and the President the power to command the military and conduct foreign affairs.
May Congress make a law saying "SCOTUS may not hear any cases regarding the first amendment"? No, the powers of SCOTUS come directly from the Constitution (as clarified by Marbury v Madison) and Congress has no authority to interfere. May the president, by executive order, order that no funds be expended to pay Congressional staff? No, the president has no authority interfere with Congress in the exercise of their Constitutional duties. Similary, Congress has no authority to "regulate" the President's exercise of his Constitutional duties.
> Clearly the Constitution allows for Congress to regulate the Presidential office.
Please take 5 minutes to read *anything* the founders or SCOTUS wrote about separation of powers. No matter which SCOTUS decision you choose or which writing of the founders, you'll probably find the word "co-equal". There is hardly anything more clear than their intention to have three co-equal branches of government - none is beneath, or regulated by, any other. (Though SCOTUS arguably grabbed a piece of that in Marbury v Madison, claiming the right to decide if a law is Constitutional or not.)
> There is an impeachment process
Spend five minutes reading about that. When the President is accused of a *crime*, such as murder or burglary, they are exempted from the normal indictment process and impeachment *replaces* indictment. It's for *crimes*, it's not a mechanism for controlling White House procedures or policy. You may note no President has ever been removed by that process. Jackson and Clinton were impeached, neither was convicted. Clearly it's not a mechanism to generally "regulate" the President - if it were, it would be a terribly ineffective one, having *never* removed any President.
Clinton was impeached for perjury. He made a written admission that he committed the perjury and agreeing to pay a fine and lose his law license, yet *still* he wasn't convicted by the Senate.
It is also common for the Congress and the White House to compromise on this issue. Congress says "we want to see these 14 documents". The White House responds "we'll give you these six." Congress accepts those six and doesn't pursue the other eight. Or, Congress asks for a specific document and the White House provides a heavily redacted copy. This allows both branches to avoid a major showdown, with neither side "losing".
That's an interesting argument. It was resolved quite some time ago. The counter-argument is of course that because the President is empowered to fulfill his duties as he sees fit, one method he may use is to hire staff to assist him in his duties. The White House staff operates under the Constitutional authority of the President, as agents of the President. Their authority doesn't come from the Congress. Further, interfering with the White House staff *is* interfering with the President's conduct of his Constitutional duties. This is the reasoning the Supreme Court has mostly used - Congress may not generally interfere with the President's conduct of diplomacy*, and because the President conducts diplomacy by using his staff, interfering with staff *is* interfering with the President's powers.
Not only can Congress not specify a particular means of communication, they can not even *look* at internal White House memos if the President indicates that doing so would interfere with his Constitutional duties. This is called "executive privilege" and it was first invoked by George Washington. In 1796, Presiden Washington refused to comply with a request by the House of Representatives for documents related to the negotiation of the Jay Treaty. Many, many Presidents since Washington have invoked executive privilege, and most of the time they've won.
A major turning point in executive privilege was Nixon. The Nixon administration refused to turn over documents related to Watergate, saying "executive privilege". The Supreme Court ruled that while a President may keep White House communications private, in a criminal investigation of that magnitude he had to give more explanation than just saying "executive privilege". Given the gravity of the situation and the legitimate interest in the papers, he would need to say "turning over the papers would interfere with my Constitutional powers because...", SCOTUS said. While technically the court ruled against Nixon, they stressed that generally the White House *may* choose not to reveal their communications to Congress or the courts - in criminal cases of major public interest, they just need to state a *reason* they aren't turning over the communications.
For 25 years after Nixon no President lost an executive privilege claim. The Clinton administration claimed executive privilege a record fourteen times, and lost only once.
So yeah that is an interesting argument you've made. That argument has not been the successful argument throughput history.
* Aside from ratification of treaties by the Senate only.
Most government agencies, such as the FCC, FTC, and FBI, act on the authorization of *Congress*. Congress made a law creating the FCC, and granted the FCC certain powers. Congress can do that because the Constitution gives them that power. When Congress created the FCC, they also put limits on it. The a law, passed by Congress, that says "the FCC can regulate phone companies, and when they do, they must preserve their records according to a, b, and c. So these federal agencies created by Congress have to operate the way Congress specifies. Congress can create records retention rules for the agencies they create.
On the other hand, the Presidency was *not* created by Congress. The President gets his authority directly from the Constitution. The Constitution gives the President the power to control the military, to conduct international relations, etc - without asking Congress for permission. Because the Constitution gives the President certain powers, Congress has no authority to say "you can't do that unless you do it our way". The President can conduct his Constitutional authority in any way he sees fit. The Constitution says he's commander in chief of the military, so Congress has no authority to say that he must send all military orders using this system or that system.
Other Presidential powers *are* granted by Congress, and can therefore be regulated by Congress, so *in theory* they could regulate how he uses those powers, but the courts, the Congress, and the President traditionally are leery of interfering with *how* the other branch internally conducts their business. They argue about policy, the fight about what laws to make across the nation, but the vice-president (officially the president of the Senate) doesn't comment on the Senate rules of how they operate internally, and the President doesn't tell the courts how to publish rulings, and Congress doesn't tell the president which messaging system to use.
Picking a fight about that stuff internal to another branch is wasteful and counter-productive. If Congress decided to tell the President which messaging apps to use, he could turn around and have VP Pence, who is Constitutionally President of the Senate, start picking at the Senate's internal process. It's not worth it.
> *right now* and automated farming is coming on line *right now*...
Farming automation was a long time ago, in the US and other developed countries. Farms today employ 94% fewer people per output than they did in 1945. (USDA)
Factories were automated in the 1960s-1980s, with the process being competed around 2006-2007. They haven't gotten significantly more automated in the last ten years. (Brookings)
A huge portion of middle class jobs in bookkeeping, drafting, printing, writing, and all forms of processing information were replaced by computers in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't have the statistics on that handy, but it was somewhere around half of middle class jobs - what a single computer does today used to take a room full of people.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of fear and debate about the issues you mentioned. You mentioned the book Manna - another book titled Manna was written in 1984, also a dystopian view of the industrial revolution. Because the change happened in the 1960s-1980s, today we get to actually see what the results were, we don't have to predict. What happened is that as people no longer needed to work on farms, food costs fell and they instead worked making Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters, and they spend their money on Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters. Most likely, you are employed in a job that didn't exist in 1960, or at least didn't exist in the same form. My job didn't exist in 1960. My grandfather was a bookkeeper - his position has been replaced by a computer. That computer needs to be secured, which created a new position for me making three times as much money as my grandfather made (inflation adjusted).
You're predicting the past. Spoiler because I've already seen it - it turns out pretty good.
> pretty much every social media app that emerges on the face of the Earth is able to gain more users and figure out a better business plan than the decade-old Twitter.
Hardly. Even the almighty Google barely managed a tenth the number of active users that Twitter has. Now, Oompa Loompa in chief is putting Twitter in the headlines every day.
Their business model is a different issue, but they have users.
> I would rather have a site be able to nuke its own files, but stay isolated to that uid/gid, than be able to read files in other accounts.
Sounds like you understand the trade-off. For me, I know that 99.99% of files in document_root are there for the express purpose of being made available to the public - that's why they are on the web site. Therefore I'm not TOO worried that people who have FTP/ssh access on the server can read those files. I'm *much* more concerned that visitors can add malware to the pages. I've seen far, far more problems caused by files being writeable than being readable.
> Proper offsite backups make this a non issue for my situation.
That's great that you have proper offsite backup which you test on a regular basis, and retain several copies of backups from different times, so you can restore to a copy that was made *before* the malware was added, the site deleted, etc. Since you have that, you may be able to fairly easily have the backup process report which files changed, filtering out the files that are supposed to change regularly. That way you won't be serving up malware for more than a day without knowing about it.
That's certainly true, Congress has ceded power by writing vague, broad laws and allowing executive agencies to write huge amounts of laws, which they call regulations.
For their part, Presidents have been more than happy to accept more power. One recent President even publicly said that *because* Congress chose not to give him the changes he wanted in immigration law, that justified ignoring the law and writing orders effectively crossing out the parts of the law he didn't like and replacing them with whatever he wanted. Basically implying that Congress is supposed to be under the direction of the President, and when Congress doesn't do what the president wants he can just override them at will. The shift in power has become so accepted that few people took much notice of his strange "justification".
Surprisingly, perhaps, the new Oompa Loompa in Chief is giving up some of that power. For example, you pointed out how much law is made by executive agencies as regulations. Trump's order that any new regulations be offset by getting rid of two old regulations (unless an exception is granted by the cabinet member) means less regulation (law) from the executive, thereby handing the ball back to Congress to make these laws. Personally I think Trump is a jackass, but that EO is good, to the extent that it puts lawmaking authority back on Congress and the states, where it belongs.
Slashdot Mirror
The election is over. The criminal slimeball you have a hard-on for lost, so you can be happy now. Hillary is no longer relevant.
Unfortunately, in the process of Hillary losing, Trump won. That sucks but oh well. He's done a couple good things, maybe he'll do more. Anyway, the election is over and he's President for the next four years.
In three years it'll be time to talk about candidates again. Hopefully we'll have a good one. Until then, let's talk about news for nerds, stuff that matters.
The circuit court cited the due process clause in respect to lawful permanent residents. The White House had issued instructions that the policy doesn't apply to lawful permanent residents. The district court indicated that the White House might, in the future, change that policy, and if they changed it there would potentially be a due process issue. That sounds like twisted reasoning to me - stay the actual, existing order because some other order which could be issued in the future might be wrong.
By that reasoning, they should block enforcement of the tax laws because at some future time Congress might pass an unconstitutional tax.
The court explicitly declined to comment on the establishment of religion clause. An establishment claim would be interesting- the President also blocked a country which happens to be majority Christian - is that discrimination against Christians? If the majority of the country affected happen to be tall, would that be discrimination against tall people? Interesting.
Btw I think Trump is a jackass, and I voted against him twice. I also think the law, as written, very clearly allows him to have this policy, even *if* it's a dumb policy. (I know nothing about Yemen, so I can't say whether or not the government there is unwilling or unable to provide documentation for screening).
> the Judicial Branch may override such acts.
> This isn't difficult to understand - it used to be taught to every schoolchild under the subject heading "Civics".
You seem to have forgotten something from your childhood civics class. The role of the judicial branch is to *interpret* the law, not *override* it.
There is little to know interpretation required of this law - it's wording is quite clear.
What *can* override a federal law is the *Constitution*. If you wish to make a claim that the Constitution overrides this law I'd be glad to discuss that with you. If so, which article of the Constitution do you have in mind?
Fyi here is the actual text of the law at issue in the case of Trump's travel order:
--
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate
--
In the long run, the question before the courts is "does that law permit the President to deny entry to people coming from countries that the Obama adminstration identified asterrorism risks, because their governments can't or won't assist in vetting applicants?" It seems to me the wording of the law is plain - the President may "suspend the entry of ... or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate". Seems straightforward. The law may be bad or it may be good, but it's clear. It does give the President full discretion.
While I agree with you it's pretty clear Congress explicitly granted the President discretion to block entry by whatever criteria he deemed prudent, Robart is consistent between the two cases in holding that the plaintiff may have a non-frivilous case. That's the question before Robart in both cases - is it possible that the plaintiffs may be right, so their interests should be protected as the case is allowed to proceed.
Robart didn't rule that Trump's actions were illegal, he ruled that the question merits a full hearing. He's done the same in this case.
> Cogent should loose its common carrier status
So go back to two years ago? Internet carriers were classified as common carriers on February 26th, 2015.
The companies vigorously fought that decision. Common carrier regulation isn't something you "loose" (or lose), it's something inflicted upon a company. Companies don't like being classified as common carriers.
> loose its common carrier status ... Let them be liable for all copyright infringement they happen to route.
Oh I see, you think common carrier classification has something to do with their copyright safe harbor. The copyright safe harbor in under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which says they are not liable for user's infringement if the carrier follows certain procedures in handling complaints.
if you have an interest in this topic, I'd certainly recommend doing some reading about it. It's an interesting topic and with just an hour or so of reading you get some understanding - at least enough to know the vocabulary so you can post on Slashdot without saying the exact opposite of what you intended to say.
The backbones used to null-route and de-peer far more often. Frequently it was around spam. When one ISP had too much spam coming from their network, other backbones would cut them off.
Cogent themselves didn't route Telia traffic for several weeks in 1999. (Telia is one of the world's largest ISPs).
This stuff happened often enough at a MUCH larger scale than Pirate Bay, and the internet not only survived, it's even grown a bit since then.
> You think eliminating 1000 trucks didn't cost some jobs?
> So then why do they need to hire more people or raise wages when they SAVED MONEY?
At first glance that seems rather counter-intuitive, doesn't it? There is a suprise waiting around the corner.
This has been studied over and over, so even the very fine details are well understood now, but pretty much all economists and most business majors. Here's a clear example that makes the big idea clear:
Suppose it cost UPS $20/pound to make deliveries, so they charge $30/pound. How many books would people have ever ordered from Amazon? Roughly zero, because who wants to pay $30 shipping for a book.
Suppose it costs UPS $1/pound, so they charge $1.50/pound. How many people order books from Amazon? A shitload. Giving Amazon the ability to expand into a million other products. How many people order stuff from Amazon now, with shipping costs low? A shitload. How many people are hired to deliver all the things people order from Amazon? A shitload.
The general idea is that when costs are reduced, more people buy it. When more people buy something, that creates more jobs in the industry.
In the early 1980s, mobile phones cost $3,995. Hundreds of people were employed in the mobile phone industry, selling hundreds of phones. Today you can get a mobile phone for $29, so millions of people get mobile phones, creating an industry with millions of jobs.
Now we know why NASCAR cars burn gas so fast - it's all the left turns.
> Let's eliminate left turns from government policy as well.
Agreed.
The UAW says they fight automation, and they take credit for deals that reduce automation. Are they lying?
> It seems like some US unions (the UAW in particular) are a lot more powerful than any of our unions or even all of them combined
Perhaps so. The joke is that the UAW isn't doing as well as it once was, they had a layoff and laid off four the senators who work for them.
The most powerful unions are probably some public-sector unions, like teachers' unions, because they literally pay the people they are nominally negotiating against. It goes a bit like this:
The teachers' union donates $250,000 to a certain candidate for governor.
Two months later, they sit down with the new governor and demand that he give them $2 million of taxpayers' money.
A couple years later, the governor is up for re-election.
The teachers' union meets with the governor again and says:
We'd like to discuss two things with you. First, you remember we gave you $250,00 for your last election - we're considering giving you $250,000 again for this election. Secondly, we'd like you to give us $3 million of taxpayer money.
The negotiation is between a union who wants taxpayer money and a politician who is being paid by the union. Nobody in that negotiation represents the people who are paying for it, the taxpayers.
Also, the teachers and firefighters hold a very powerful endorsement. "Think of the children", they can easily say, "Your childrens' education and future depend on you voting for candidate Greenbacks", and many, many voterd are influenced by that endorsement. The fact is, whoever is elected will help decide how money the members of the teachers' union get, and how much the union itself gets. Their self-interest is very much affexted. One should fully expect that that effect on their pay will influence their endorsement.
I said:
Programming projects very rarely get smaller (unless a genius points out that rather than writing a new system, you can just transform the inputs and feed the data to an existing system*).
I forgot to expand that asterisk in a footnote. When you're planning an eight-week project and one developer says "no need for all that, I can do it in two days by just running Foo on it, then sending it to the existing Bar tool", that person is either a genius who will save you lots of time and money, or a complete hack suggesting duct tape and baling wire, the "easy way" that will come back to haunt you. Figure out which. That person should probably be either promoted or fired, depending on whether their "simpler ways" are actually correct and robust or not.
Certainly one can create a large and unintuitive, meaningless jumble of folders. If just the *names* of the folders aren't meaningful to other programmers, that's a bad sign - even before you know what's in the folders.
That said, smaller projects have an amazing tendency to grow larger. Programming projects very rarely get smaller (unless a genius points out that rather than writing a new system, you can just transform the inputs and feed the data to an existing system*). Because projects tend to get much bigger over time, I much prefer more organization than less. You'll be very glad for the organized structure as your 1,000-line program evolves into a 100,000-line system.
While most projects grow, not shrink, I'm thinking specifically of some projects I worked on which ended up being literally 1000X larger than originally planned.
For the same reason, I prefer a slightly more powerful programming language over a slightly simpler one - a shell script may work for *todays* needs, but next month we'll have to rewrite it in Perl or Python to handle some new requirement cleanly, or else end up with a giant, unmaintainable, fragile shell script. Similarly, a very small shop should start using version control *now*, not *after* they become a big business and much of the history of the code has already been lost.
You might find the opinion in United States vs Nixon interesting. Essentially it said:
a) In general the president doesn't have to turn over his communications.
b) But the courts (and Congress) have a legitimate need to investigate serious crimes.
c) Therefore, to avoid a subpoena in a serious criminal case, the President must communicate some reason that releasing them would impair his exercise of his Constitutional powers.
Had Nixon, on those tapes, talked about Russia as well as whatever else, he could avoid disclosure, based on the court's reasoning.
If you're not surw whether I'm right, look at the positions taken by UAW and other large unions still today. They are still against updating tooling, which would results in higher-paying, but fewer jobs. (Aka automation)?
They still don't seem to understand that it's not a choice between automated US factories and non-automated US factories. It's a choice between automated US factories amd automated Japanese factories.
> So unions decided not to re-tool and just keep on rolling the same sort of crap down decaying production lines
Yes. Modern tooling replaces some (union) jobs that (union) humans did in the 1960s with machines that do the same job, better. That scared the crap out of the unions. Understandably, they fought tooth and nail against modernization, insisting on contracts that retained outdated jobs.
Other countries used the machines to produce more, better cars, faster, thereby growing their automotive sector and increasing overall employment in the automotive industry, while reducing the *per car* head count.
It's totally understandable why the unions did this, but as it turned out, they shot themselves in the foot.
That's a pretty good answer.
I'll add a few thoughts. First, this is a very, very hard thing to do. In all likelihood, there is no truly effective way to "measure" the effectiveness of a programmer, we're looking for hints, traits that good programmers often have.
You may have much less desire to measure anything about the programmer, though, if each person is responsible for a specific area. If one person is responsible for building and the maintaining the UI for product ABC, while another person does the UI for product XYZ, you can answer a simple question. Does the UI for ABC suck? If the UI he built sucks, he might suck at building UIs. Unless of course he told management ahead of time that no, you can't build a good UI under the constraints he was given (time, tooling, etc.) Of course you can do that only if your programmers specialize in particular areas (which also allows them to become more expert in what they are actually doing).
Other than that, there are heuristics, hints about who might be good. Does the person ask questions about the requirements, making sure to build what users actually need? A lot of really good programmers spend a lot of time to fully understand and document exactly what is needed. A lot of bad programmers run off and build something that doesn't fit the need. (Obviously this fails if you TELL the programmer "your next raise will be based on how many questions you ask).
Do other programmers come to this person for advice? If so, not only is that a compliment, but by giving good advice he's probably making other programmers more productive.
Do they enter useful comments in the ticket system, close issues when they complete them, and generally be a responsible adult about following processes? This *can* be misleading, but generally, people who are careful to do a good job are careful to do a good job. Someone who marks issues as "closed" when they are supposed to and completes their annual compliance training in time *might* be someone who validates their inputs when they are supposed to and completes their coding work on time. (Or not, it's just a hint).
Even if you're not a programmer, you can actually get a slight hint by looking at the code. When you see a Slashdot comment that is a wall of text with no line breaks, no punctuation, and no capital letters, you might suspect that the writer is less conscientious than someone who uses paragraphs, punctuation, etc. This is even more true of code. If you squint so the characters are blurry, good code tends to look like a diagram of itself. Bad code tends to look like a blob. This is hard to express, though it's easy to do. The Linux kernel source is good example of good code (in most cases). Indentation sets of clear logical blocks, etc, so the code resembles a diagram.
Heck even without opening any code file, you can look at the names and organization of the files the programmer creates. The newbie/bad programmer may have one giant file, called "myprogram". The expert is more likely to have one small file and two or three subdirectories at the top of the project. He might have directories (folders) called "libs/", "logic/", and "ui/". Under libs/ might be two subdirectories, say network/ and db/. That's a great sign because programming well is largely a process of organizing ideas. If a programmer has organized the task into understandable parts, that is a good indicator.
I could go on, but the point is there are lots of hints you can look at. Like buying a used car, you can't look inside the engine to see what condition it's in, but you can reason that if someone let the tires go completely bald and the interior is covered with coffee stains, it it obviously hasn't been vacummed in the last six years, they may have also skipped an oil change or two.
Here's a bit more information and history for you, but the summary is that this was decided during George Washington's administration:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
The Constitution grants the Supreme Court the power to decide cases between parties, Congress the power to make laws on 16 listed topics, and the President the power to command the military and conduct foreign affairs.
May Congress make a law saying "SCOTUS may not hear any cases regarding the first amendment"? No, the powers of SCOTUS come directly from the Constitution (as clarified by Marbury v Madison) and Congress has no authority to interfere. May the president, by executive order, order that no funds be expended to pay Congressional staff? No, the president has no authority interfere with Congress in the exercise of their Constitutional duties. Similary, Congress has no authority to "regulate" the President's exercise of his Constitutional duties.
> Clearly the Constitution allows for Congress to regulate the Presidential office.
Please take 5 minutes to read *anything* the founders or SCOTUS wrote about separation of powers. No matter which SCOTUS decision you choose or which writing of the founders, you'll probably find the word "co-equal". There is hardly anything more clear than their intention to have three co-equal branches of government - none is beneath, or regulated by, any other. (Though SCOTUS arguably grabbed a piece of that in Marbury v Madison, claiming the right to decide if a law is Constitutional or not.)
> There is an impeachment process
Spend five minutes reading about that. When the President is accused of a *crime*, such as murder or burglary, they are exempted from the normal indictment process and impeachment *replaces* indictment. It's for *crimes*, it's not a mechanism for controlling White House procedures or policy. You may note no President has ever been removed by that process. Jackson and Clinton were impeached, neither was convicted. Clearly it's not a mechanism to generally "regulate" the President - if it were, it would be a terribly ineffective one, having *never* removed any President.
Clinton was impeached for perjury. He made a written admission that he committed the perjury and agreeing to pay a fine and lose his law license, yet *still* he wasn't convicted by the Senate.
It is also common for the Congress and the White House to compromise on this issue. Congress says "we want to see these 14 documents". The White House responds "we'll give you these six." Congress accepts those six and doesn't pursue the other eight. Or, Congress asks for a specific document and the White House provides a heavily redacted copy. This allows both branches to avoid a major showdown, with neither side "losing".
That's an interesting argument. It was resolved quite some time ago. The counter-argument is of course that because the President is empowered to fulfill his duties as he sees fit, one method he may use is to hire staff to assist him in his duties. The White House staff operates under the Constitutional authority of the President, as agents of the President. Their authority doesn't come from the Congress. Further, interfering with the White House staff *is* interfering with the President's conduct of his Constitutional duties. This is the reasoning the Supreme Court has mostly used - Congress may not generally interfere with the President's conduct of diplomacy*, and because the President conducts diplomacy by using his staff, interfering with staff *is* interfering with the President's powers.
Not only can Congress not specify a particular means of communication, they can not even *look* at internal White House memos if the President indicates that doing so would interfere with his Constitutional duties. This is called "executive privilege" and it was first invoked by George Washington. In 1796, Presiden Washington refused to comply with a request by the House of Representatives for documents related to the negotiation of the Jay Treaty. Many, many Presidents since Washington have invoked executive privilege, and most of the time they've won.
A major turning point in executive privilege was Nixon. The Nixon administration refused to turn over documents related to Watergate, saying "executive privilege". The Supreme Court ruled that while a President may keep White House communications private, in a criminal investigation of that magnitude he had to give more explanation than just saying "executive privilege". Given the gravity of the situation and the legitimate interest in the papers, he would need to say "turning over the papers would interfere with my Constitutional powers because ...", SCOTUS said. While technically the court ruled against Nixon, they stressed that generally the White House *may* choose not to reveal their communications to Congress or the courts - in criminal cases of major public interest, they just need to state a *reason* they aren't turning over the communications.
For 25 years after Nixon no President lost an executive privilege claim. The Clinton administration claimed executive privilege a record fourteen times, and lost only once.
So yeah that is an interesting argument you've made. That argument has not been the successful argument throughput history.
* Aside from ratification of treaties by the Senate only.
I think what GP means is this:
Most government agencies, such as the FCC, FTC, and FBI, act on the authorization of *Congress*. Congress made a law creating the FCC, and granted the FCC certain powers. Congress can do that because the Constitution gives them that power. When Congress created the FCC, they also put limits on it. The a law, passed by Congress, that says "the FCC can regulate phone companies, and when they do, they must preserve their records according to a, b, and c. So these federal agencies created by Congress have to operate the way Congress specifies. Congress can create records retention rules for the agencies they create.
On the other hand, the Presidency was *not* created by Congress. The President gets his authority directly from the Constitution. The Constitution gives the President the power to control the military, to conduct international relations, etc - without asking Congress for permission. Because the Constitution gives the President certain powers, Congress has no authority to say "you can't do that unless you do it our way". The President can conduct his Constitutional authority in any way he sees fit. The Constitution says he's commander in chief of the military, so Congress has no authority to say that he must send all military orders using this system or that system.
Other Presidential powers *are* granted by Congress, and can therefore be regulated by Congress, so *in theory* they could regulate how he uses those powers, but the courts, the Congress, and the President traditionally are leery of interfering with *how* the other branch internally conducts their business. They argue about policy, the fight about what laws to make across the nation, but the vice-president (officially the president of the Senate) doesn't comment on the Senate rules of how they operate internally, and the President doesn't tell the courts how to publish rulings, and Congress doesn't tell the president which messaging system to use.
Picking a fight about that stuff internal to another branch is wasteful and counter-productive. If Congress decided to tell the President which messaging apps to use, he could turn around and have VP Pence, who is Constitutionally President of the Senate, start picking at the Senate's internal process. It's not worth it.
> *right now* and automated farming is coming on line *right now* ...
Farming automation was a long time ago, in the US and other developed countries. Farms today employ 94% fewer people per output than they did in 1945. (USDA)
Factories were automated in the 1960s-1980s, with the process being competed around 2006-2007. They haven't gotten significantly more automated in the last ten years. (Brookings)
A huge portion of middle class jobs in bookkeeping, drafting, printing, writing, and all forms of processing information were replaced by computers in the 1970s and 1980s. I don't have the statistics on that handy, but it was somewhere around half of middle class jobs - what a single computer does today used to take a room full of people.
In the 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of fear and debate about the issues you mentioned. You mentioned the book Manna - another book titled Manna was written in 1984, also a dystopian view of the industrial revolution. Because the change happened in the 1960s-1980s, today we get to actually see what the results were, we don't have to predict. What happened is that as people no longer needed to work on farms, food costs fell and they instead worked making Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters, and they spend their money on Blu-Ray players and Raspberry Pi and quadcopters. Most likely, you are employed in a job that didn't exist in 1960, or at least didn't exist in the same form. My job didn't exist in 1960. My grandfather was a bookkeeper - his position has been replaced by a computer. That computer needs to be secured, which created a new position for me making three times as much money as my grandfather made (inflation adjusted).
You're predicting the past. Spoiler because I've already seen it - it turns out pretty good.
> pretty much every social media app that emerges on the face of the Earth is able to gain more users and figure out a better business plan than the decade-old Twitter.
Hardly. Even the almighty Google barely managed a tenth the number of active users that Twitter has. Now, Oompa Loompa in chief is putting Twitter in the headlines every day.
Their business model is a different issue, but they have users.
> I would rather have a site be able to nuke its own files, but stay isolated to that uid/gid, than be able to read files in other accounts.
Sounds like you understand the trade-off. For me, I know that 99.99% of files in document_root are there for the express purpose of being made available to the public - that's why they are on the web site. Therefore I'm not TOO worried that people who have FTP/ssh access on the server can read those files. I'm *much* more concerned that visitors can add malware to the pages. I've seen far, far more problems caused by files being writeable than being readable.
> Proper offsite backups make this a non issue for my situation.
That's great that you have proper offsite backup which you test on a regular basis, and retain several copies of backups from different times, so you can restore to a copy that was made *before* the malware was added, the site deleted, etc. Since you have that, you may be able to fairly easily have the backup process report which files changed, filtering out the files that are supposed to change regularly. That way you won't be serving up malware for more than a day without knowing about it.
That's certainly true, Congress has ceded power by writing vague, broad laws and allowing executive agencies to write huge amounts of laws, which they call regulations.
For their part, Presidents have been more than happy to accept more power. One recent President even publicly said that *because* Congress chose not to give him the changes he wanted in immigration law, that justified ignoring the law and writing orders effectively crossing out the parts of the law he didn't like and replacing them with whatever he wanted. Basically implying that Congress is supposed to be under the direction of the President, and when Congress doesn't do what the president wants he can just override them at will. The shift in power has become so accepted that few people took much notice of his strange "justification".
Surprisingly, perhaps, the new Oompa Loompa in Chief is giving up some of that power. For example, you pointed out how much law is made by executive agencies as regulations. Trump's order that any new regulations be offset by getting rid of two old regulations (unless an exception is granted by the cabinet member) means less regulation (law) from the executive, thereby handing the ball back to Congress to make these laws. Personally I think Trump is a jackass, but that EO is good, to the extent that it puts lawmaking authority back on Congress and the states, where it belongs.