"Hmm... I saw it somewhere, but not really sure. I think it's around the corner over there."
Considering there's a Quebec Street in DC, did the reporter consider the possibility that they were talking to someone who wasn't a life-long resident who thought they were talking about a "Canada Street?"
Buy me a fancy new thermostat that will turn off my Floridian a/c during the times I'm not home and I might sign on. Oh, and check with my landlord to see if I'm allowed to replace the old one.
"Despite sitting on the tropic of Capricorn, Queenslanders want DST. Stupid, but thats how it is."
Queensland is still physically attatched to the rest of Australia and still does a great deal of overland trade with states south. It's similar to how Mexico observes DST (but not Sonora because they border Arizona) but Hawaii doesn't.
"I don't believe there is any legal backing to the claim lawyers are officers of the court."
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right(...) to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor
In order for defense attorneys to exercise this compulsory power ("Show up or be arrested"), they have to be granted executive powers, making them de facto officers.
Constitutional requirements for due process also require certain rules to be followed by both sides. Defense attorneys aren't allowed to coax people into perjuring themselves, withold information on future crimes, etc.
As I understand it (from my education-by-TV), a defense attorney is only really obliged to come forward when their client is planning a future crime (as opposed to, say, the crime they hired the attorney for to begin with). They can't say "He killed his wife," but they have to say "He's now planning to kill her lover."
Seriously, I think this stuff has the potential to be the next Big Thing on reality television or something similar, right on up there with Spanish language soap operas. We could call it "How the Other Tenth Lives."
As you yourself said, nobody down here has any idea what you folks talk about during your spare time up there. We could be all like "Quebec is having another secession referenda next month, that hussy!"
"Since they do not make consumer hardware it's hard to claim they offer suerior connectivity with anything."
With each other. I don't believe they'll get as many 360 Live subscribers as they say they are, but their reliance on it gives them something to say about their work other than "It's just like the PS3, only not!"
"They do actually have Blu-Ray players out in Japan already, and are proceeding ponderously towards the PS3 launch at the same pace they always were."
So what? It's a data format, and the only difference consumers are going to see between HD-DVD and BluRay is the need to look at the label before they buy a movie. In many ways, both sides need their respective consoles out there in order to get a decent toehold in the movie player market, because the consoles provide something to do other than play movies.
I hear that a lot from down here, but it seems that Ontario and Quebec are still so opposed to one another that Ottawa's need for a "hands-off" approach to dealing with one or the other gives the other seven trickle-down benefits of federalism.
In many ways I envy you guys, and it's not about healthcare or your stance on Iraq.
Re:FFS, what a fucking dreadful summary
on
Tier One ISPs Dying
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"No, of course not, you blithering imbecile. L3 had a 2 hour global routing meltdown. Now, it's fixed."
However, L3 has been having "issues" this month that have left a lot of lower-tier ISPs in the uncomfortable position of explaining to their customers "We know the internet is down but there's nothing we can do about it." This outage really can't be good for their reputation, and I can see more potential customers taking their money elsewhere because of this.
Just because the technical issues have been fixed doesn't mean their finances have been fixed as well.
"Aa you say, according to California law the reporter who tested a user name and password and then reported the issue is guilty."
That may be true, but with something like this, the district attorney who prosecutes the reporter for reporting this is out of a job. Californians have a long history of distrust of their government (why do you think their constitution looks like it was written by Tolstoy?) and turning a blind eye towards vigilantism.
Looking at how Microsoft is pushing the 360 while Sony seems to be resting on its laurels with the PS3 (much in the same way they seem to be doing with the PSP), I'm not so sure Sony is going to be able to drive their standard through to adoption, at least through video game consoles. Microsoft may not be Nintendo when it comes to innovation, but they are working on their strengths, such as interconnectivity, and seem to be working on that and their image as a console manufacturer instead of just releasing hardware that will render forearm hair.
As a Nintendo fanboy, I'm more interested in the 360 than the PS3, and I don't own an Xbox.
"the article you referenced said that "sundial time" varies from "clock time" by as much as 16 min, 33 sec. That's not what I said, though: I said that time is constant. And it is: time marches forward one second every second, regardless of what angle the earth is at relative to the sun."
Well, if you'd rather talk special relativity, I can do that as well.
But time that "marches forward one second every second" doesn't matter to people as much as you seem to think. It is the sun, not cesium isotopes, that our biology is designed to follow, and because of our strong ties to the solar cycle, humans are fundamentally more interested in solar time than atomic time. If clocks do not at least try to resemble sundials, people will abandon clocks in favor of sundials.
Or have the efforts to put Linux on the desktop taught you people nothing?
"Second, of course there's no end to pi. I was referring to this attempt at passing a law."
I was attempting to use your analogy and make it my own. You seem to be against any consession for the sake of functionality and usability, wanting to abandon 3.14159 just as much as you want to abandon 3 because "they're not really pi."
Just as changing the definition of pi doesn't change the ratio of circumferences to diameters, changing the definition of time to cesium isotopes doesn't change the position of the sun in the sky. Most people don't use mechanical timepieces because they're better than solar time, they use clocks because they resemble solar time. A nice, round integer like 3 is better than the true definition of pi, but we don't use 3 because what we get don't resemble circles.
"I don't see why we can't all use UTC. People in the southern hemisphere don't change months to match the seasons. January in Sydney is Summer, and January in London is Winter."
What you're proposing is that Australians call July "summer," in spite of all the snow on the ground, because that's what season it is in Greenwich. Time zones are similar to what we see instead, allowing people to adjust their clocks so that "noon" (or "afternoon," "morning" and "night," for that matter) more closely corresponds to where the sun is in the sky over their own heads rather than where it is according to Greenwich.
What we're talking about here is physical human perception. Your calendar analogy doens't hold up well because the Gregorian Calendar's track record for predicting weather is sketchy as it is without crossing the Equator. But where the sun is in the sky over the course of a given day is far more regular and far easier to perceive, and while it may have taken millennia for Western culture to devise a solar calendar that nails down the vernal equinox to two days in March, noon has always been noon.
"after doing UTC and Daylight Saving Time conversions for the past 12 months at work, it would be SO much easier if everyone just used UTC."
I'm not saying it wouldn't be easier for you, but it certainly wouldn't be easier for most of the planet.
Secondly, our own biology dictates that the position of the sun overhead is more important to us than an arbitrary mechanical time standard. Mechanical time has to attempt to work with solar time or else it will be ignored.
"and then base your locality's start/stop work times on your sunrise/sunset."
Carrying that line of thinking to its logical conclusion leaves us all using sundials and completely ignoring atomic time.
Time zones and DST are both compromises on the part of mechanical timekeeping, keeping it acceptably close to solar time for the sake of both usability and promoting adoption.
"But changing the time? That's like declaring that pi is 3."
There is no end to pi. There has to be a point where you truncate it to a manageable number of digits so that you can actually use it.
"I mean if we're changing time around why not the measurements as well."
The Constitution gives Congress the power to set standards (e. g. "meter means 39.37 inches" or the later "foot means 0.3048 meter"), but nothing's in there about the power to compell people to use them. This is why parts of the country ignores Daylight Saving Time to begin with.
On the other hand, there's really nothing in th Constitution preventing the states from compelling metric usage, but I give it a week before somebody challenges it in federal court on Interstate Commerce grounds.
"The Globe and Mail reported "China beats out Canada as top exporter to U.S." on September 15th, quoting July trade figures."
First off, I'm too cheap to give them money to read the article, but from what I've seen in the first link and what they're showing before sale, I find it interesting that they're specifying "exporter of goods," as if there's other information that might keep Canada's rank in terms of raw dollars.
At any rate, however, I doubt what Canada sends to the US is anything to sneeze at, and I suspect the US is still Canada's (and especially Ontario's) top export destination.
"Bush probably still thinks Japan or Mexico are number one, though."
They never were. Mexico eventually overtook Japan's place as #2 exporter to the US after NAFTA, but neither ever really challenged Canada's dominance.
"There are going to be millions of VCRs and other hard coded devices designed to change to the old DST law, meaning many will auto-adjust to the wrong time."
The federal government is not responsible for poor design in consumer goods, or else we should have passed a "Y2K Saving Time" law stating that the year after 1999 is 1900 again.
If you can put a longwave receiver in my watch to tell it when DST starts or stops, you can put one in a VCR.
"Airlines and other businesses that depend on time are going to have to reprogram many things, and thus this will impact their bottom line."
Again, the federal government is not responsible for poor design.
Besides, the change to Daylight Time and back is technically not a change of clocks so much as a change in time zones ("Eastern Daylight Time" is just a fancy name for "Atlantic Standard Time"). And if airlines can't handle changing time zones, they've got problems beyond DST.
"If we legislated that vehicles must achieve twice the MPG rating they have today,"
The Interstate Commerce Clause has been strained to the breaking point as it is, thankyouverymuch. The Weights and Measures Clause, on the other hand, works just fine and has yet to infringe on, say, Arizona's right to ignore DST entirely (and, coincidentally, the Mexican state of Sonora has chosen to ignore DST because of its shared border and commerce with Arizona)
No thanks, where the sun is in relation to the meridian I'm standing on is far more important to me than where it is in relation to Greenwich (unless I'm actually in Greenwich). I'll offer you a compromise, though, and keep the time difference between Greenwich and myself down to integer hours.
Neither. You're instead taking two hours of daylight from the morning and putting it into the afternoon. Daylight Saving Time is intended to shift the gain in sunlit hours after the vernal equinox primarily to the hours after noon.
"But you said it yourself: the economy of scale means that the federal government can do it more efficiently than the states can."
Do the ends justify the means, though?
A good deal of socialist reform at the federal level cannot be accomplished without changing the federal constitution in some manner, either through the amendment process or through a judicial process that effectivley changes the meaning of the words (e. g. Dormant Commerce Clause). More often than not, the latter route is chosen, but once such a compromise is made for one goal or set of goals, other special interests will come through and demand that similar concessions are made for their own agendas ("The Second Amendment should be incorporated through the Fourteenth!"), and you start losing the benefits federalism entirely, such as the protection of minority interests through partitioning.
Even if such social reform is ultimately a national interest, what is natinonal isn't always federal. Part of the federalism established by the US Constitution is the ability for multiple states to agree to work together towards a common goal outside of the federal government proper. The only real thing lost by taking such a route is the ability to use the power of the federal government to compel other states to play along; all carrot and no stick.
If the system works, wouldn't it benefit the character of the system if it's implementation came through the constitutional amendment process, explicitly declaring once and for all the ability of the federal government to make such reforms?
"Fundamentally this is an ideological issue. Libertarianism works in theory, socialism works in practice. "
Be that as it may, the people who hold libertarian ideals are still people and still need to be included in law-making process at some level, and ultimately it seems you desire to compel them to follow an ideology they do not wish to follow. I admit that it is not always correct to protect minority interests, but we have federal mechanisms for getting around such obstacles, and I don't see why "arbitrarily expanding federal powers" should be included in such mechanisms.
"the government which set up the support structures, from educational systems"
Consider: The larger the role the federal government plays in education, the easier it becomes for the federal government to say "School science curriculums must include Intelligent Design." Today, ID can corrupt the school systems only of particular states, but tomorrow the corruption could spread nationwide and be even more difficult to undo. Once you expand the role of the federal government for one agenda, you do so for all agendas, and you end up with Gonzales v. Raich.
"If the huge large banana corporation doesn't have competition it means the customers are happy! If not, someone will always make medium and small bananas."
"Happy" is a relative term. The Wal-Mart that sells only large bananas has the benefit of economies of scale to sell their large bananas at prices lower than start-ups can hope to sell medium and/or small bananas. It is not that people suddenly decide they like large bananas on their own merits, only that they feel that putting up with large bananas is better than paying more for the bananas they prefer.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this calls for mixing Matt Groening references:
I for one welcome our new British mutant atomic supermen!
"Hmm... I saw it somewhere, but not really sure. I think it's around the corner over there."
Considering there's a Quebec Street in DC, did the reporter consider the possibility that they were talking to someone who wasn't a life-long resident who thought they were talking about a "Canada Street?"
Buy me a fancy new thermostat that will turn off my Floridian a/c during the times I'm not home and I might sign on. Oh, and check with my landlord to see if I'm allowed to replace the old one.
"Despite sitting on the tropic of Capricorn, Queenslanders want DST. Stupid, but thats how it is."
Queensland is still physically attatched to the rest of Australia and still does a great deal of overland trade with states south. It's similar to how Mexico observes DST (but not Sonora because they border Arizona) but Hawaii doesn't.
Constitutional requirements for due process also require certain rules to be followed by both sides. Defense attorneys aren't allowed to coax people into perjuring themselves, withold information on future crimes, etc.
As I understand it (from my education-by-TV), a defense attorney is only really obliged to come forward when their client is planning a future crime (as opposed to, say, the crime they hired the attorney for to begin with). They can't say "He killed his wife," but they have to say "He's now planning to kill her lover."
Woah, a Canadian flame war! Pass the popcorn!
Seriously, I think this stuff has the potential to be the next Big Thing on reality television or something similar, right on up there with Spanish language soap operas. We could call it "How the Other Tenth Lives."
As you yourself said, nobody down here has any idea what you folks talk about during your spare time up there. We could be all like "Quebec is having another secession referenda next month, that hussy!"
(I am so going to Hell)
"Since they do not make consumer hardware it's hard to claim they offer suerior connectivity with anything."
With each other. I don't believe they'll get as many 360 Live subscribers as they say they are, but their reliance on it gives them something to say about their work other than "It's just like the PS3, only not!"
"They do actually have Blu-Ray players out in Japan already, and are proceeding ponderously towards the PS3 launch at the same pace they always were."
So what? It's a data format, and the only difference consumers are going to see between HD-DVD and BluRay is the need to look at the label before they buy a movie. In many ways, both sides need their respective consoles out there in order to get a decent toehold in the movie player market, because the consoles provide something to do other than play movies.
I hear that a lot from down here, but it seems that Ontario and Quebec are still so opposed to one another that Ottawa's need for a "hands-off" approach to dealing with one or the other gives the other seven trickle-down benefits of federalism.
In many ways I envy you guys, and it's not about healthcare or your stance on Iraq.
"No, of course not, you blithering imbecile. L3 had a 2 hour global routing meltdown. Now, it's fixed."
However, L3 has been having "issues" this month that have left a lot of lower-tier ISPs in the uncomfortable position of explaining to their customers "We know the internet is down but there's nothing we can do about it." This outage really can't be good for their reputation, and I can see more potential customers taking their money elsewhere because of this.
Just because the technical issues have been fixed doesn't mean their finances have been fixed as well.
Why don't Australians help carry the load and download Customs@home?
"Aa you say, according to California law the reporter who tested a user name and password and then reported the issue is guilty."
That may be true, but with something like this, the district attorney who prosecutes the reporter for reporting this is out of a job. Californians have a long history of distrust of their government (why do you think their constitution looks like it was written by Tolstoy?) and turning a blind eye towards vigilantism.
Looking at how Microsoft is pushing the 360 while Sony seems to be resting on its laurels with the PS3 (much in the same way they seem to be doing with the PSP), I'm not so sure Sony is going to be able to drive their standard through to adoption, at least through video game consoles. Microsoft may not be Nintendo when it comes to innovation, but they are working on their strengths, such as interconnectivity, and seem to be working on that and their image as a console manufacturer instead of just releasing hardware that will render forearm hair.
As a Nintendo fanboy, I'm more interested in the 360 than the PS3, and I don't own an Xbox.
"Some of you younger kids may not remember Ultima Online, but you could spend 12 hours a day mining, or logging, among many other things."
:)
Find me somebody that's come down with black lung as a result of playing Ultima Online and I'll relent.
"the article you referenced said that "sundial time" varies from "clock time" by as much as 16 min, 33 sec. That's not what I said, though: I said that time is constant. And it is: time marches forward one second every second, regardless of what angle the earth is at relative to the sun."
Well, if you'd rather talk special relativity, I can do that as well.
But time that "marches forward one second every second" doesn't matter to people as much as you seem to think. It is the sun, not cesium isotopes, that our biology is designed to follow, and because of our strong ties to the solar cycle, humans are fundamentally more interested in solar time than atomic time. If clocks do not at least try to resemble sundials, people will abandon clocks in favor of sundials.
Or have the efforts to put Linux on the desktop taught you people nothing?
"Second, of course there's no end to pi. I was referring to this attempt at passing a law."
I was attempting to use your analogy and make it my own. You seem to be against any consession for the sake of functionality and usability, wanting to abandon 3.14159 just as much as you want to abandon 3 because "they're not really pi."
Just as changing the definition of pi doesn't change the ratio of circumferences to diameters, changing the definition of time to cesium isotopes doesn't change the position of the sun in the sky. Most people don't use mechanical timepieces because they're better than solar time, they use clocks because they resemble solar time. A nice, round integer like 3 is better than the true definition of pi, but we don't use 3 because what we get don't resemble circles.
"I don't see why we can't all use UTC. People in the southern hemisphere don't change months to match the seasons. January in Sydney is Summer, and January in London is Winter."
What you're proposing is that Australians call July "summer," in spite of all the snow on the ground, because that's what season it is in Greenwich. Time zones are similar to what we see instead, allowing people to adjust their clocks so that "noon" (or "afternoon," "morning" and "night," for that matter) more closely corresponds to where the sun is in the sky over their own heads rather than where it is according to Greenwich.
What we're talking about here is physical human perception. Your calendar analogy doens't hold up well because the Gregorian Calendar's track record for predicting weather is sketchy as it is without crossing the Equator. But where the sun is in the sky over the course of a given day is far more regular and far easier to perceive, and while it may have taken millennia for Western culture to devise a solar calendar that nails down the vernal equinox to two days in March, noon has always been noon.
"after doing UTC and Daylight Saving Time conversions for the past 12 months at work, it would be SO much easier if everyone just used UTC."
I'm not saying it wouldn't be easier for you, but it certainly wouldn't be easier for most of the planet.
"I think the idea is, keep time constant (because it fucking is )"
First off, it isn't.
Secondly, our own biology dictates that the position of the sun overhead is more important to us than an arbitrary mechanical time standard. Mechanical time has to attempt to work with solar time or else it will be ignored.
"and then base your locality's start/stop work times on your sunrise/sunset."
Carrying that line of thinking to its logical conclusion leaves us all using sundials and completely ignoring atomic time.
Time zones and DST are both compromises on the part of mechanical timekeeping, keeping it acceptably close to solar time for the sake of both usability and promoting adoption.
"But changing the time? That's like declaring that pi is 3."
There is no end to pi. There has to be a point where you truncate it to a manageable number of digits so that you can actually use it.
"I mean if we're changing time around why not the measurements as well."
The Constitution gives Congress the power to set standards (e. g. "meter means 39.37 inches" or the later "foot means 0.3048 meter"), but nothing's in there about the power to compell people to use them. This is why parts of the country ignores Daylight Saving Time to begin with.
On the other hand, there's really nothing in th Constitution preventing the states from compelling metric usage, but I give it a week before somebody challenges it in federal court on Interstate Commerce grounds.
"The Globe and Mail reported "China beats out Canada as top exporter to U.S." on September 15th, quoting July trade figures."
First off, I'm too cheap to give them money to read the article, but from what I've seen in the first link and what they're showing before sale, I find it interesting that they're specifying "exporter of goods," as if there's other information that might keep Canada's rank in terms of raw dollars.
At any rate, however, I doubt what Canada sends to the US is anything to sneeze at, and I suspect the US is still Canada's (and especially Ontario's) top export destination.
"Bush probably still thinks Japan or Mexico are number one, though."
They never were. Mexico eventually overtook Japan's place as #2 exporter to the US after NAFTA, but neither ever really challenged Canada's dominance.
"There are going to be millions of VCRs and other hard coded devices designed to change to the old DST law, meaning many will auto-adjust to the wrong time."
The federal government is not responsible for poor design in consumer goods, or else we should have passed a "Y2K Saving Time" law stating that the year after 1999 is 1900 again.
If you can put a longwave receiver in my watch to tell it when DST starts or stops, you can put one in a VCR.
"Airlines and other businesses that depend on time are going to have to reprogram many things, and thus this will impact their bottom line."
Again, the federal government is not responsible for poor design.
Besides, the change to Daylight Time and back is technically not a change of clocks so much as a change in time zones ("Eastern Daylight Time" is just a fancy name for "Atlantic Standard Time"). And if airlines can't handle changing time zones, they've got problems beyond DST.
"If we legislated that vehicles must achieve twice the MPG rating they have today,"
The Interstate Commerce Clause has been strained to the breaking point as it is, thankyouverymuch. The Weights and Measures Clause, on the other hand, works just fine and has yet to infringe on, say, Arizona's right to ignore DST entirely (and, coincidentally, the Mexican state of Sonora has chosen to ignore DST because of its shared border and commerce with Arizona)
No thanks, where the sun is in relation to the meridian I'm standing on is far more important to me than where it is in relation to Greenwich (unless I'm actually in Greenwich). I'll offer you a compromise, though, and keep the time difference between Greenwich and myself down to integer hours.
Neither. You're instead taking two hours of daylight from the morning and putting it into the afternoon. Daylight Saving Time is intended to shift the gain in sunlit hours after the vernal equinox primarily to the hours after noon.
"Last time I checked, both Canada and the US did trade with countries other than each other."
But Canada and the United States are easily each other's biggest trading partners.
"Some of these are in other time zones."
But very few are on the same meridians and also north of the Equator.
"3h discepancy between here (BC) and Ontario,"
Not your province, not your problem. Gotta love federalism. You should be happy that it's Toronto talking about doing this and not Ottawa.
"But you said it yourself: the economy of scale means that the federal government can do it more efficiently than the states can."
Do the ends justify the means, though?
A good deal of socialist reform at the federal level cannot be accomplished without changing the federal constitution in some manner, either through the amendment process or through a judicial process that effectivley changes the meaning of the words (e. g. Dormant Commerce Clause). More often than not, the latter route is chosen, but once such a compromise is made for one goal or set of goals, other special interests will come through and demand that similar concessions are made for their own agendas ("The Second Amendment should be incorporated through the Fourteenth!"), and you start losing the benefits federalism entirely, such as the protection of minority interests through partitioning.
Even if such social reform is ultimately a national interest, what is natinonal isn't always federal. Part of the federalism established by the US Constitution is the ability for multiple states to agree to work together towards a common goal outside of the federal government proper. The only real thing lost by taking such a route is the ability to use the power of the federal government to compel other states to play along; all carrot and no stick.
If the system works, wouldn't it benefit the character of the system if it's implementation came through the constitutional amendment process, explicitly declaring once and for all the ability of the federal government to make such reforms?
"Fundamentally this is an ideological issue. Libertarianism works in theory, socialism works in practice. "
Be that as it may, the people who hold libertarian ideals are still people and still need to be included in law-making process at some level, and ultimately it seems you desire to compel them to follow an ideology they do not wish to follow. I admit that it is not always correct to protect minority interests, but we have federal mechanisms for getting around such obstacles, and I don't see why "arbitrarily expanding federal powers" should be included in such mechanisms.
"the government which set up the support structures, from educational systems"
Consider: The larger the role the federal government plays in education, the easier it becomes for the federal government to say "School science curriculums must include Intelligent Design." Today, ID can corrupt the school systems only of particular states, but tomorrow the corruption could spread nationwide and be even more difficult to undo. Once you expand the role of the federal government for one agenda, you do so for all agendas, and you end up with Gonzales v. Raich.
"If the huge large banana corporation doesn't have competition it means the customers are happy! If not, someone will always make medium and small bananas."
"Happy" is a relative term. The Wal-Mart that sells only large bananas has the benefit of economies of scale to sell their large bananas at prices lower than start-ups can hope to sell medium and/or small bananas. It is not that people suddenly decide they like large bananas on their own merits, only that they feel that putting up with large bananas is better than paying more for the bananas they prefer.