Well, I may be a moron, but I'm a moron who understands the difference between a budget, and authorization and an appropriation bill. The system is designed, among other things, to restrain presidential power and to force the government to work out its spending priorities in advance. I don't know if *you* are a moron too, but you're certainly an ignoramus.
What Trump wants is off-budget spending to be put into a routine appropriations bill, without a formally authorized program that will prevent that spending for being diverted to other uses. What are his alternatives? Well he's wanted the wall for years, so he could put the five billion in his FY2020 request, which means shovels could be in the ground on October 1 of 2019.
Authorizations bills on discretionary spending are only for the current fiscal year. Also, you can't spend money because it's authorized. This is part of a belt and suspenders system that prevents Presidents overspending the budget (by dribbling out money in appropriations) or shifting appropriated money to uses Congress does not intend (by appropriating for a specific *authorized* program).
What, putting five billion unbudgeted dollars into an appropriation bill is reasonable? For a project with no corresponding authorization bill?
But you probably don't understand what any of that means, so how about this: Congress asked the president for a detailed breakdown of how he intended to spend the money and he only itemized 1.7 billion, meaning he's demanding 3.2 billion that he could spend any way he likes.
If you think government spending is out of control, wait until this becomes the new normal.
You can trademark bags of plain, ordinary sand if you wanted to. Let's say you called it "WackySand". That wouldn't stop anyone else from selling bags of sand, but it sure would stop them from selling bags of sand labelled "WackySand" or even "WackeeSand". Anything that might make people think the "WackySand" company endorses a bag of sand is off-limits.
The sand itself you're selling can be completely generic. It doesn't have to be special to be trademarked.
Now if people start calling all bags of sand "WackySand", then yes, you lose your exclusive right to that name. But if you're a sand vendor who *thinks* that "WackySand" has gone generic, but it hasn't been tested in court, guess who gets to be the guinea pig in the first test?
Speed cameras are obviously something a police state would endorse, but in themselves they do not police state make.
Speed cameras, restricted to stretches of road with histories of speed-related accidents, are entirely reasonable and legitimate. But ubiquitous speed cameras are manifestation of a certain brand of anti-government politics that's all for cutting taxes but balks at actually cutting spending enough to live within the reduced revenues. Genuine libertarianism is a respectable political philosophy, but this kind of half-assed pseudo-libertarianism posturing leaves municipalities little choice but to monetize law enforcement.
There are municipalities in the US that get a large chunk of their operating revenues from police fines -- 10,12, even 15% or more. If you want to contest that fine, you do it in a municipal court that gets its funding entirely from fines. There are towns with barely a thousand residents that run their own municipal courts, because that's where get the majority of their revenue. In that court, the judge who hears your case today and the lawyer who is representing the city will often be switching roles tomorrow in a different town's municipal court. In other words, the system is rigged.
The people who live in these places think of government as a hostile, predatory force, and they're right. But they don't see how their unwillingness to either do without or pay for government services makes that happen. Sitting here in my high tax state, in my town that gets less than 1% of its revenue from police fines, sure; I'd like my taxes to be lower. But we don't have traffic cameras everywhere; if a cop pulls me over for a violation and I'm reasonably polite and what I did wasn't too bad, I'll probably get a friendly warning. If I do get a ticket and I contest it, I'll get a hearing in front of an actual judge who had to be approved by the legislature, and if it happens to be in a "municipal" court that court is actually run by the state, and gets none of its funding from the fines it is adjudicating.
Sure I'd like a tax cut, but if you offered me a chance to pay *no* taxes in return for becoming prey for a predatory police force, the answer would be no, thank you.
It actually wouldn't be so bad if those politicians were just pro-corporation. But what they are is pro-their-donors, which makes them pro status quo. It is in their interests to protect their donors against the entry of new competitors to the market.
Many years ago I was CTO in a small startup and every so often someone would come into my office and say, "Hey, listen to this. There's this patent..."
And I'd stop him right there. "STOP. This is going to be some bullshit patent where they took stuff people have been doing for years with LORAN, but do it with GPS instead or something like that."
"Well, yeah. So what they did was..."
And I'd have to stop him again. "STOP. I can't hear this. If this is something we're already doing and they find out, we'll have to negotiate a settlement. But if I've heard what this patent does, we'll have to negotiate while facing treble damages."
Software patent examiners were so bad, they frequently enabled trolls and entrenched players block new competitors from using long established practices in conjunction with commonplace new technologies. And they remained bad for so many years, not despite stifling new competition. If politicians were pro competition that problem would have been fixed immediately.
This made looking at patents an extremely risky for a working software engineer. That undermines the whole basis of the patent system, which isn't there to benefit only inventors. The patent system is at its root a deal: you the inventor get a limited time, government enforced monopoly on your invention in return for disclosing how the invention works. That disclosure means that at the conclusion of the patent the ideas go into the public domain as common knowledge.
I don't doubt making them smart makes the cheaper to purchase -- because you become the product they're selling to someone else. But the idea that they'er so well made. Maybe 11 years ago, but I've taken them apart and their build quality is crap.
Just because people misuse the word "troll" doesn't mean trolls don't exist.
I think what's going on here is the spread of a lazy, intellectually flabby cynicism that takes it for granted *everyone's* trolling, all the time. Politicians, sure, but also journalists and even scientists. Everybody's playing an angle.
The great thing about adopting this stance is that you feel clever while being a fool; powerful when you're just a pawn. You can immediately feel right in anything you say or do without having to do anything that resembles mental work. You don't have to worry about facts, which are often inconvenient; or evidence, which is always full of nasty twisty traps. You'll never be troubled by uncertainty, guilt or shame again. Just figure out which side any statement is on then get behind it or push back.
If anybody offers anything less than an easy and unassailable certainty, that makes them untrustworthy. But lying is actually OK, as long as you're on the right side. You can tell when someone's caught this disease because they don't mind when their leaders are caught lying. They take it for granted everything is a lie.
This disease, by the way, has a name. It's called "authoritarianism".
Yep. Body parts work their way to the surface, which is still a familiar pop-culture image. Almost always there are reports of small holes through which the revenant supposedly magically issues, but which are very likely animal burrows.
So you call the local priest, who is probably one of the few people who can read but has no more understanding of anatomy, microbiology or forensics than you do. He has you dig up the grave and gee, the corpse doesn't look rotted, but it sure looks weird. Worse yet, it makes weird sounds, very likely fixed by stake through the thorax. Cutting off the head and putting it between the legs would certainly be an impressive and memorable operations that would make its way into the folklore, regardless of the actual results.
The other trick is you rebury the corpse face down, or backwards (switching the position of head and feet). Unless I miss my mark, I'm guessing most corpses that got this treatment also got an extra deep grave. You're not going to bury a monster under a foot of loose earth.
There's a kind of research institution called a "body farm", where scientific investigations take place on what happens to human bodies when they're disposed of in various ways (e.g. left in a locked car trunk, dismembered and left in plastic bags, piled in mass graves, or simply left out on the forest floor). The primary purpose of these laboratories is to make forensic evaluations of remains more accurate.
There are a half dozen such institutions in the US alone; apparently they're quite horrible to the uninitiated. That doesn't mean they should be *stopped*. People donate their bodies to these places to bring future murderers and war criminals to justice.
We put corpses in a metal casket, put that in a concrete sarcophagus, and then cover that with material in the expectation that the remains will stay there, on their own, until the end of time. Until fairly recently, you'd have to be a pharaoh to get that kind of treatment.
In most pre-modern cities there was an institution called "the charnel house". They'd bury you in the graveyard for a couple of years to get your bones cleaned up, then after a few years they'd dig them up. If you were an abbot or other notable they'd go into a box called an ossuary and put in a place of honor in a church. If you were a saint, your bones be divvied up and put into the relic trade. But if you were an ordinary person what was left of you got chucked into a vault called a "charnel house", probably sorted by part for efficient packing: skulls here, femurs there. Some of the more artistic charnel houses (also called "ossuaries") are now tourist attractions.
In effect the graveyard was used to compost the soft tissues, rendering the bones clean, compact, and safe to handle.
Now the situation was different in small towns and rural communities. I have a couple of friends who are successful urban fantasy authors, so I've got interested in the folkloric origins of the vampire and werewolf tropes. Revenant legends were common in medieval times up well into the 20th Century, but they don't occur in large well-organized cities, and the individual involved (Dracula tropes notwithstanding) are never high status individuals. They were always poor rural villagers or remote farmstead occupants. There's not a lot of direct documentary evidence on burial practices for this class, but evidently they were simply wrapped in a shroud and buried in shallow graves. I times of stress, like during epidemics, the grave would be *very* shallow.
It's not hard to draw a connection from that to the details of vampire legend.
Anyhow, throughout most of human history, almost everybody has been composted in some way. We've just never made a conscious effort to do anything specific with the nutrients in the human remains; we just let them filter into the ecosystem.
Sure, but the fact that *somebody* has to be first doesn't necessarily justify a project you can't really afford.
Everything the Big Dig tried to do -- reconnecting the city to its waterfront, extending and improving certain public transit facilities -- was desirable. But that doesn't make the project good engineering, economics, or public policy, because all of those things have to take *cost* into account. Especially opportunity costs.
If we'd put the same amount of money, roughly 21 billion in todays terms, into public transit, then simply *knocked down* the old elevated highway, not only would that have been better for the city, the whole country would have got more for its contribution. The entire East Coast rail network ends at Boston's South Station. A mile away at North Station is the start of an entirely separate and unconnected network which brings Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Eastern Canada within reach... of Boston's North End. Crossing that mile with a much cheaper rail tunnel would connect the rest of the US to Northern New England and eastern Canada.
An Earth 2C or even 4C warmer or cooler isn't inherently more or less hospitable to humans. What is inhospitable to our economy and the vulnerable people in it is any kind of change that is too fast for them to cope with. If over the course of a thousand years the southern Great Plains becomes a desert, nobody would even notice. If it happens in a hundred years, you will be looking at a series of refugee crises.
Insofar as any disruptive change is the result of our actions, we should worry about it. Rapid cooling is not in the cards in the lifetime of anyone now alive, but it could be on the table if we adopt drastic geoengineering measures to deal with warming.
The Big Dig was the most expensive mile of road ever constructed. It replaced the 1950s era elevated highway that cut off Boston from its waterfront. Which is nice, but the problem (aside from the astronomical cos) is that it violated the Clean Air Act.
So the state cut a deal: they'd mandate the extension of the MBTA (the mass transit system for Boston and its suburbs) along with a number of facilities improvements like parking lots. That's nice too, except there was no funding for these things, forcing the MBTA to pay for these improvements out of money that would have gone to maintenance and replacing rolling stock.
Consequently, the MBTA has some nice new facilities, but their core commuter services are old and breakdown-prone. They're particularly notorious for stranding commuters in extreme cold weather. The MBTA is also saddled with 125 million dollars a year in debt service to pay for stuff it had to build to make the highway possible.
Sure, if you don't need any of the features that Gimp has an Paint.NET does not. Not having the same feature set isn't a criticism of Paint.NET, if it floats your boat, then great. Same goes for MS Paint.
Saying that Paint.NET is easier for what you do isn't a very convincing criticism of GIMP; saying that Photoshop is easier for what you do is a more substantial criticism, especially if you've actually spent some time using GIMP rather than marveling at how odd it's UI is.
Actually, I'd say citizenship for dreamers is well worth five billion. As for giving Trump the win, it probably wouldn't matter because it'd split the Republican coalition.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I may be a moron, but I'm a moron who understands the difference between a budget, and authorization and an appropriation bill. The system is designed, among other things, to restrain presidential power and to force the government to work out its spending priorities in advance. I don't know if *you* are a moron too, but you're certainly an ignoramus.
What Trump wants is off-budget spending to be put into a routine appropriations bill, without a formally authorized program that will prevent that spending for being diverted to other uses. What are his alternatives? Well he's wanted the wall for years, so he could put the five billion in his FY2020 request, which means shovels could be in the ground on October 1 of 2019.
Authorizations bills on discretionary spending are only for the current fiscal year. Also, you can't spend money because it's authorized. This is part of a belt and suspenders system that prevents Presidents overspending the budget (by dribbling out money in appropriations) or shifting appropriated money to uses Congress does not intend (by appropriating for a specific *authorized* program).
Libertarians generally aren't morons, but plenty people who think they're libertarians are.
What, putting five billion unbudgeted dollars into an appropriation bill is reasonable? For a project with no corresponding authorization bill?
But you probably don't understand what any of that means, so how about this: Congress asked the president for a detailed breakdown of how he intended to spend the money and he only itemized 1.7 billion, meaning he's demanding 3.2 billion that he could spend any way he likes.
If you think government spending is out of control, wait until this becomes the new normal.
You can trademark bags of plain, ordinary sand if you wanted to. Let's say you called it "WackySand". That wouldn't stop anyone else from selling bags of sand, but it sure would stop them from selling bags of sand labelled "WackySand" or even "WackeeSand". Anything that might make people think the "WackySand" company endorses a bag of sand is off-limits.
The sand itself you're selling can be completely generic. It doesn't have to be special to be trademarked.
Now if people start calling all bags of sand "WackySand", then yes, you lose your exclusive right to that name. But if you're a sand vendor who *thinks* that "WackySand" has gone generic, but it hasn't been tested in court, guess who gets to be the guinea pig in the first test?
Speed cameras are obviously something a police state would endorse, but in themselves they do not police state make.
Speed cameras, restricted to stretches of road with histories of speed-related accidents, are entirely reasonable and legitimate. But ubiquitous speed cameras are manifestation of a certain brand of anti-government politics that's all for cutting taxes but balks at actually cutting spending enough to live within the reduced revenues. Genuine libertarianism is a respectable political philosophy, but this kind of half-assed pseudo-libertarianism posturing leaves municipalities little choice but to monetize law enforcement.
There are municipalities in the US that get a large chunk of their operating revenues from police fines -- 10,12, even 15% or more. If you want to contest that fine, you do it in a municipal court that gets its funding entirely from fines. There are towns with barely a thousand residents that run their own municipal courts, because that's where get the majority of their revenue. In that court, the judge who hears your case today and the lawyer who is representing the city will often be switching roles tomorrow in a different town's municipal court. In other words, the system is rigged.
The people who live in these places think of government as a hostile, predatory force, and they're right. But they don't see how their unwillingness to either do without or pay for government services makes that happen. Sitting here in my high tax state, in my town that gets less than 1% of its revenue from police fines, sure; I'd like my taxes to be lower. But we don't have traffic cameras everywhere; if a cop pulls me over for a violation and I'm reasonably polite and what I did wasn't too bad, I'll probably get a friendly warning. If I do get a ticket and I contest it, I'll get a hearing in front of an actual judge who had to be approved by the legislature, and if it happens to be in a "municipal" court that court is actually run by the state, and gets none of its funding from the fines it is adjudicating.
Sure I'd like a tax cut, but if you offered me a chance to pay *no* taxes in return for becoming prey for a predatory police force, the answer would be no, thank you.
Traffic engineering is a better approach to doing that.
It actually wouldn't be so bad if those politicians were just pro-corporation. But what they are is pro-their-donors, which makes them pro status quo. It is in their interests to protect their donors against the entry of new competitors to the market.
Many years ago I was CTO in a small startup and every so often someone would come into my office and say, "Hey, listen to this. There's this patent..."
And I'd stop him right there. "STOP. This is going to be some bullshit patent where they took stuff people have been doing for years with LORAN, but do it with GPS instead or something like that."
"Well, yeah. So what they did was..."
And I'd have to stop him again. "STOP. I can't hear this. If this is something we're already doing and they find out, we'll have to negotiate a settlement. But if I've heard what this patent does, we'll have to negotiate while facing treble damages."
Software patent examiners were so bad, they frequently enabled trolls and entrenched players block new competitors from using long established practices in conjunction with commonplace new technologies. And they remained bad for so many years, not despite stifling new competition. If politicians were pro competition that problem would have been fixed immediately.
This made looking at patents an extremely risky for a working software engineer. That undermines the whole basis of the patent system, which isn't there to benefit only inventors. The patent system is at its root a deal: you the inventor get a limited time, government enforced monopoly on your invention in return for disclosing how the invention works. That disclosure means that at the conclusion of the patent the ideas go into the public domain as common knowledge.
I don't doubt making them smart makes the cheaper to purchase -- because you become the product they're selling to someone else. But the idea that they'er so well made. Maybe 11 years ago, but I've taken them apart and their build quality is crap.
This is what I saw when I was skimming:
Mark Zuckerberg challenged himself to create an AI assassin for his home
.
Just because people misuse the word "troll" doesn't mean trolls don't exist.
I think what's going on here is the spread of a lazy, intellectually flabby cynicism that takes it for granted *everyone's* trolling, all the time. Politicians, sure, but also journalists and even scientists. Everybody's playing an angle.
The great thing about adopting this stance is that you feel clever while being a fool; powerful when you're just a pawn. You can immediately feel right in anything you say or do without having to do anything that resembles mental work. You don't have to worry about facts, which are often inconvenient; or evidence, which is always full of nasty twisty traps. You'll never be troubled by uncertainty, guilt or shame again. Just figure out which side any statement is on then get behind it or push back.
If anybody offers anything less than an easy and unassailable certainty, that makes them untrustworthy. But lying is actually OK, as long as you're on the right side. You can tell when someone's caught this disease because they don't mind when their leaders are caught lying. They take it for granted everything is a lie.
This disease, by the way, has a name. It's called "authoritarianism".
But then, neither is sugar.
Are you really that fragile.
Yep. Body parts work their way to the surface, which is still a familiar pop-culture image. Almost always there are reports of small holes through which the revenant supposedly magically issues, but which are very likely animal burrows.
So you call the local priest, who is probably one of the few people who can read but has no more understanding of anatomy, microbiology or forensics than you do. He has you dig up the grave and gee, the corpse doesn't look rotted, but it sure looks weird. Worse yet, it makes weird sounds, very likely fixed by stake through the thorax. Cutting off the head and putting it between the legs would certainly be an impressive and memorable operations that would make its way into the folklore, regardless of the actual results.
The other trick is you rebury the corpse face down, or backwards (switching the position of head and feet). Unless I miss my mark, I'm guessing most corpses that got this treatment also got an extra deep grave. You're not going to bury a monster under a foot of loose earth.
There's a kind of research institution called a "body farm", where scientific investigations take place on what happens to human bodies when they're disposed of in various ways (e.g. left in a locked car trunk, dismembered and left in plastic bags, piled in mass graves, or simply left out on the forest floor). The primary purpose of these laboratories is to make forensic evaluations of remains more accurate.
There are a half dozen such institutions in the US alone; apparently they're quite horrible to the uninitiated. That doesn't mean they should be *stopped*. People donate their bodies to these places to bring future murderers and war criminals to justice.
We put corpses in a metal casket, put that in a concrete sarcophagus, and then cover that with material in the expectation that the remains will stay there, on their own, until the end of time. Until fairly recently, you'd have to be a pharaoh to get that kind of treatment.
In most pre-modern cities there was an institution called "the charnel house". They'd bury you in the graveyard for a couple of years to get your bones cleaned up, then after a few years they'd dig them up. If you were an abbot or other notable they'd go into a box called an ossuary and put in a place of honor in a church. If you were a saint, your bones be divvied up and put into the relic trade. But if you were an ordinary person what was left of you got chucked into a vault called a "charnel house", probably sorted by part for efficient packing: skulls here, femurs there. Some of the more artistic charnel houses (also called "ossuaries") are now tourist attractions.
In effect the graveyard was used to compost the soft tissues, rendering the bones clean, compact, and safe to handle.
Now the situation was different in small towns and rural communities. I have a couple of friends who are successful urban fantasy authors, so I've got interested in the folkloric origins of the vampire and werewolf tropes. Revenant legends were common in medieval times up well into the 20th Century, but they don't occur in large well-organized cities, and the individual involved (Dracula tropes notwithstanding) are never high status individuals. They were always poor rural villagers or remote farmstead occupants. There's not a lot of direct documentary evidence on burial practices for this class, but evidently they were simply wrapped in a shroud and buried in shallow graves. I times of stress, like during epidemics, the grave would be *very* shallow.
It's not hard to draw a connection from that to the details of vampire legend.
Anyhow, throughout most of human history, almost everybody has been composted in some way. We've just never made a conscious effort to do anything specific with the nutrients in the human remains; we just let them filter into the ecosystem.
It's OK. You still have my permission to feel superior to me. Just have a nice day.
Meltdown affect POWER and some ARM processors too.
I don't know where you get your information. The IPCC predicted some slowdown but of a magnitude that would be offset by general warming.
The IPCC models do not predict a catastrophic change there, although of course they could be wrong.
Sure, but the fact that *somebody* has to be first doesn't necessarily justify a project you can't really afford.
Everything the Big Dig tried to do -- reconnecting the city to its waterfront, extending and improving certain public transit facilities -- was desirable. But that doesn't make the project good engineering, economics, or public policy, because all of those things have to take *cost* into account. Especially opportunity costs.
If we'd put the same amount of money, roughly 21 billion in todays terms, into public transit, then simply *knocked down* the old elevated highway, not only would that have been better for the city, the whole country would have got more for its contribution. The entire East Coast rail network ends at Boston's South Station. A mile away at North Station is the start of an entirely separate and unconnected network which brings Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Eastern Canada within reach... of Boston's North End. Crossing that mile with a much cheaper rail tunnel would connect the rest of the US to Northern New England and eastern Canada.
An Earth 2C or even 4C warmer or cooler isn't inherently more or less hospitable to humans. What is inhospitable to our economy and the vulnerable people in it is any kind of change that is too fast for them to cope with. If over the course of a thousand years the southern Great Plains becomes a desert, nobody would even notice. If it happens in a hundred years, you will be looking at a series of refugee crises.
Insofar as any disruptive change is the result of our actions, we should worry about it. Rapid cooling is not in the cards in the lifetime of anyone now alive, but it could be on the table if we adopt drastic geoengineering measures to deal with warming.
The Big Dig was the most expensive mile of road ever constructed. It replaced the 1950s era elevated highway that cut off Boston from its waterfront. Which is nice, but the problem (aside from the astronomical cos) is that it violated the Clean Air Act.
So the state cut a deal: they'd mandate the extension of the MBTA (the mass transit system for Boston and its suburbs) along with a number of facilities improvements like parking lots. That's nice too, except there was no funding for these things, forcing the MBTA to pay for these improvements out of money that would have gone to maintenance and replacing rolling stock.
Consequently, the MBTA has some nice new facilities, but their core commuter services are old and breakdown-prone. They're particularly notorious for stranding commuters in extreme cold weather. The MBTA is also saddled with 125 million dollars a year in debt service to pay for stuff it had to build to make the highway possible.
Sure, if you don't need any of the features that Gimp has an Paint.NET does not. Not having the same feature set isn't a criticism of Paint.NET, if it floats your boat, then great. Same goes for MS Paint.
Saying that Paint.NET is easier for what you do isn't a very convincing criticism of GIMP; saying that Photoshop is easier for what you do is a more substantial criticism, especially if you've actually spent some time using GIMP rather than marveling at how odd it's UI is.
Actually, I'd say citizenship for dreamers is well worth five billion. As for giving Trump the win, it probably wouldn't matter because it'd split the Republican coalition.