Yes, it's called the "non-delegation doctrine", which follows from Article One of the US Constitution. The Supreme Court first visited the topic in Wayman v. Southard in 1825, so it is a well-established legal principle. Congress may delegate some small authority, but it has to be severely limited in scope, i.e., simple rulemaking. E.g., the EPA is allowed to determine what constitutes a "pollutant". This was the subject of a recent Court decision. The Chief Executive is also given a little leeway when it comes to national security, see Executive Orders.
Ha ha, wait... New Hampshire... progressive?!!! New Hampshire is the best combination of stodgy New Englander with Tea Party conservatism. In short... not progressive. That DMV law has to be some weird example of conservatism getting so whacked-out it wraps back around to being liberal (like the "minimal government" folks wanting to legalize pot because it's none of the gov't business).
I haven't played Civ IV myself, having found Civ III to be a nice improvement over Civ II (man, can we just get a new Alpha Centauri already?!), but I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop. The game got rid of some nice gameplay elements and expanded on others (diplomacy). That may be your kind of game-- after all, I loved the original Railroad Tycoon and intensely disliked the follow-up, but my opinion runs contrary to the masses there. But hopefully they've learned from their mistakes in Civ IV.
Anyway, the way is see it is: Sid Meier is a fucking genius. I will buy anything he makes. If that makes me a Sid Meier fanboy, so be it. He's the only game maker who has consistently kept my attention over the years (Pirates!, Civ series, F119/F117A Stealth Fighter, Railroad Tycoon series, and so on). His games have HUGE replay value.
I dunno, man. I don't think real life is boring at all. While a video game that makes you weld might be boring, I can assure you that I would absolutely jump at the opportunity to be a real space welder.
Think about it this way: why is climbing Everest so exciting? Because if you look at it on paper, they have a lot of tedious jobs (study maps, pack bags, unpack bags, check gear, run safety lines, shuttle equipment back and forth, follow checklists). The "exciting" jobs are: 1) walking and 2) attempting to breathe. Sounds a lot like being in space (minus the walking part).
The scenery is clearly a big plus for both jobs, but I think the real draw is: accomplishing something that even experts get killed doing. Let's face it: "being there" is definitely not as important as "having been there".
Anyway, I think there's a role for educational games that aren't all bitched up with fictions. Ever use a flight simulator? Not exactly action-packed. But to a great extent, they're still fun, because I get a glimpse of something that I probably will never be able to do in my lifetime.
As an interesting example of government working the other way (i.e., more access), you are now able again to walk around freely in the Massachusetts State House. When I was in college (in the 90's), I worked for a catering company that regularly did State House events, and we pretty much had free run of the place. During the downtime when we did those events (usually when some politician was making some long-winded speech), we would "sled" on the food dollies down the long, beautifully flat marble floors. We were once tsk-tsked by a State Police officer who caught us doing this, but he couldn't hide his smirk, and that was the worst that ever happened.
Then 9/11 happened and-- the whole place was closed off. They even welded the front gates shut. All visitors, who had to have a reason for coming, were sent through a quasi-militarized checkpoint, with armed police and metal detectors.
My brother visited me last fall, and we were in the neighborhood, and were pleasantly surprised that you can now enter the building freely again. You still have to walk through a metal detector, but gone are the "must have valid reason" restriction and the conspicuously armed guards. Which is good-- the State House has a whole variety of really interesting Colonial- and Civil War-era artifacts, and the flag room is pretty cool too.
Ditto, particularly since there's an Amazon MP3 downloader for Linux. Requires a little finagling if you're running 64-bit, but it works. I have downloads going straight into Rhythmbox, and thence to my iPod.
I think you bring up some an important point:/. is not about breaking news. It may have been back in the earlier days (when tech reporting was still largely on paper), but I don't think that ever was the focus. The thing that still draws me here, after ten years of reading, is the community.
The NYT article contends that/. has lost traffic without providing a single shred of evidence to support this. Ten years ago, social media was largely unheard of, except for the few geeks who came from places like USENET or BBS scene. I think/.'s base is still largely those people. So the site doesn't draw the crowds. BFD. That's why I come here. I like that narrow focus. The instant./ tries to follow in Digg's footsteps, I'm outta here. Anyway not growing and losing are two completely different things, NYT!
We've probably lost a few great commentators over the years, but it's likely not because./ isn't trendy enough for them. It's because the stories aren't nerdy enough anymore. Hey editors: we want more science stories. Challenge us. I'd personally like to see./ pick up more cutting-edge research (like computer science and computer engineering journal articles), because that's when the broad base of knowledge in the readership really shows, and where./'s value is head and shoulders above the other "social media" sites out there.
Well, I dunno-- "reliable in general use" might have some conditions that make it completely unreliable or otherwise unacceptable in certain use-cases. E.g., many modern filesystems cannot detect latent sector errors that are not otherwise detected by the hardware itself. Depending on how your filesystem is implemented, a latent sector error could wipe out your critical disk structures (ala ReiserFS) or do nothing at all (ala ZFS). The only meaningful way to interpret a new filesystem's capabilities is to compare it against the theoretical best performer. Otherwise, you may find that your new filesystem is "better" than your old one, but still inappropriate for your particular application.
I had Star Trek on my TI-99/4A, with the speech synthesizer module. My cousin got a PCjr with the then-incredible King's Quest, but the fact that Star Trek actually read out coordinates in plain English made him green with envy. Of course, I probably would have sacrificed a limb for the kind of graphics his machine could do.
Your notion that we only have the rights the majority deems worthy of bestowing upon us is frightening and authoritarian.
I don't want to put words in spun's mouth here, but that's not at all what he's saying. You know that old Jeffersonian quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."? Rights are derived from agreements that a backed by force. It works both ways. We fought the British in order to establish a new government. Shays' Rebellion was fought to remind that new government that we expected to actually receive the rights we just fought for.
Algorithmic efficiency also matters in the mobile space as designers get closer to building low-power systems that harvest energy directly from their environments. Just yesterday I was speaking with a researcher who had worked on animal tracking devices (e.g., for turtles) that collected power from small solar arrays. Any efficiencies that they could take advantage of, they used, from smart scheduling of their GPS units (don't madly run the unit if you don't have the power) to a delay-tolerant networking protocol (only phone home when you have the resources) to a programming language that informed the operating system which computations were power-hungry and should be performed later.
Interestingly enough, during Prohibition, this is how alcohol was legally obtained. The Walgreen's drug store chain survived the Great Depression rather well, and not just because of milkshakes.
Interestingly enough, this is what ruled me out. After high school, I was being hounded on the telephone by an army recruiter (I was not interested). I tried various responses (Me: "I'm gay", Him: "Our modern military takes all kinds!"), but when I finally gave up and started answering his interview questions in earnest, and mentioned that I had asthma, the calls stopped immediately. This was c.1997.
Huh, well, I've been in mourning since the Tom Baker era. He was uniquely quirky. The Doctor who followed him was terrible.
That said, I haven't really given any of the more modern Doctors a fair shake, so they may be great. I watched one episode that featured an angry Tennant basically just running from zombies. Kind of boring. I should probably watch from the beginning.
All they ever do is add; that's a key reason why taxes go up, freedoms narrow, and law-books only get heavier.
Yes, there are many unfunded mandates passed by Congress. This, in itself, it a serious problem. But it's not true that Congress only adds-- many laws repeal, modify, or simplify existing law. The Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, was a great simplification of the laws surrounding commercial transactions in the United States. The UCC is also "done right", in that the code itself is simply a list of recommended laws, that are then legislated at the state level. This allows states to retain control of commerce in their own borders while providing a strong incentive to play nice with other states.
I am OK with taxing internet commerce. Mom and pop stores have largely suffered in the era of e-commerce. They simply cannot leverage the same economies of scale that Amazon, NewEgg, WalMart, and others can take advantage of, while having the additional burden of having to pay local sales tax. Internet retailers take advantage of public services just the same as everyone else, but are exempted from contributing back? That doesn't sound like the kind of environment that would encourage good ol' American entrepeneurship.
For me, a big part of it was that it was a movie about computers, back when computers didn't really enter most people's consciousnesses. As someone who was totally obsessed with them (I'm about a decade younger than you), I was completely captivated by it. It also didn't hurt that frisbee was my favorite sport at the time.
LoTR was probably the first movie where I didn't consider the CGI to be so distracting that I couldn't concentrate on the plot. I personally don't hate CGI across the board, but I don't think it looks realistic. I prefer the old hand-painted miniatures approach, ala the original first few Star Trek movies. Their special effects have aged well, but other early CGI has not.
I think one of the reasons that the original Tron still looks so good is because most of the effects are not CGI.
It's pretty simple. A book stays in the distribution channels until it is no longer profitable. There is a clearly defined cutoff that warehousing/operations people have-- these things are precalculated before the book even hits the shelves.
The whole business of book distribution is complicated. Did you know that book sellers get to return unsold copies to the publisher? Publishers are legally obligated to take these back and revise their sales figures-- this means the risk is on the publisher, not the book seller. But this also means that publishers know exactly where the break even points are.
On-demand publishing is changing this somewhat, because publishers can't print smaller quantities and still be profitable, but they still have to deal with all the aforementioned stuff. Nearly every publishing house that isn't a mom & pop operation does a great deal of market research to determine demand. It's not perfect, but-- it's the best they can do short of printing a shitload of books and losing money on them. Losing money is bad.
Actually, I think you could make the case that the Nazi party's rise to power (and Hitler's in particular) was illegal, or at least extralegal, given that most of the power shifts were the result of late-night coups and street shootings. On the other hand, the Enabling Act, which essentially dissolved Parliament, was passed through in a legal manner. I suspect that most leaders, either famous for their goodness or infamous for their evil, work outside of the law to make their agendas happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's called the "non-delegation doctrine", which follows from Article One of the US Constitution. The Supreme Court first visited the topic in Wayman v. Southard in 1825, so it is a well-established legal principle. Congress may delegate some small authority, but it has to be severely limited in scope, i.e., simple rulemaking. E.g., the EPA is allowed to determine what constitutes a "pollutant". This was the subject of a recent Court decision. The Chief Executive is also given a little leeway when it comes to national security, see Executive Orders.
Ha ha, wait... New Hampshire... progressive?!!! New Hampshire is the best combination of stodgy New Englander with Tea Party conservatism. In short... not progressive. That DMV law has to be some weird example of conservatism getting so whacked-out it wraps back around to being liberal (like the "minimal government" folks wanting to legalize pot because it's none of the gov't business).
(written by an oh-so-urbane Masshole)
I haven't played Civ IV myself, having found Civ III to be a nice improvement over Civ II (man, can we just get a new Alpha Centauri already?!), but I think the consensus was that Civ IV was a flop. The game got rid of some nice gameplay elements and expanded on others (diplomacy). That may be your kind of game-- after all, I loved the original Railroad Tycoon and intensely disliked the follow-up, but my opinion runs contrary to the masses there. But hopefully they've learned from their mistakes in Civ IV.
Anyway, the way is see it is: Sid Meier is a fucking genius. I will buy anything he makes. If that makes me a Sid Meier fanboy, so be it. He's the only game maker who has consistently kept my attention over the years (Pirates!, Civ series, F119/F117A Stealth Fighter, Railroad Tycoon series, and so on). His games have HUGE replay value.
I dunno, man. I don't think real life is boring at all. While a video game that makes you weld might be boring, I can assure you that I would absolutely jump at the opportunity to be a real space welder.
Think about it this way: why is climbing Everest so exciting? Because if you look at it on paper, they have a lot of tedious jobs (study maps, pack bags, unpack bags, check gear, run safety lines, shuttle equipment back and forth, follow checklists). The "exciting" jobs are: 1) walking and 2) attempting to breathe. Sounds a lot like being in space (minus the walking part).
The scenery is clearly a big plus for both jobs, but I think the real draw is: accomplishing something that even experts get killed doing. Let's face it: "being there" is definitely not as important as "having been there".
Anyway, I think there's a role for educational games that aren't all bitched up with fictions. Ever use a flight simulator? Not exactly action-packed. But to a great extent, they're still fun, because I get a glimpse of something that I probably will never be able to do in my lifetime.
As an interesting example of government working the other way (i.e., more access), you are now able again to walk around freely in the Massachusetts State House. When I was in college (in the 90's), I worked for a catering company that regularly did State House events, and we pretty much had free run of the place. During the downtime when we did those events (usually when some politician was making some long-winded speech), we would "sled" on the food dollies down the long, beautifully flat marble floors. We were once tsk-tsked by a State Police officer who caught us doing this, but he couldn't hide his smirk, and that was the worst that ever happened.
Then 9/11 happened and-- the whole place was closed off. They even welded the front gates shut. All visitors, who had to have a reason for coming, were sent through a quasi-militarized checkpoint, with armed police and metal detectors.
My brother visited me last fall, and we were in the neighborhood, and were pleasantly surprised that you can now enter the building freely again. You still have to walk through a metal detector, but gone are the "must have valid reason" restriction and the conspicuously armed guards. Which is good-- the State House has a whole variety of really interesting Colonial- and Civil War-era artifacts, and the flag room is pretty cool too.
Ditto, particularly since there's an Amazon MP3 downloader for Linux. Requires a little finagling if you're running 64-bit, but it works. I have downloads going straight into Rhythmbox, and thence to my iPod.
I think you bring up some an important point: /. is not about breaking news. It may have been back in the earlier days (when tech reporting was still largely on paper), but I don't think that ever was the focus. The thing that still draws me here, after ten years of reading, is the community.
/. has lost traffic without providing a single shred of evidence to support this. Ten years ago, social media was largely unheard of, except for the few geeks who came from places like USENET or BBS scene. I think /.'s base is still largely those people. So the site doesn't draw the crowds. BFD. That's why I come here. I like that narrow focus. The instant ./ tries to follow in Digg's footsteps, I'm outta here. Anyway not growing and losing are two completely different things, NYT!
./ isn't trendy enough for them. It's because the stories aren't nerdy enough anymore. Hey editors: we want more science stories. Challenge us. I'd personally like to see ./ pick up more cutting-edge research (like computer science and computer engineering journal articles), because that's when the broad base of knowledge in the readership really shows, and where ./'s value is head and shoulders above the other "social media" sites out there.
The NYT article contends that
We've probably lost a few great commentators over the years, but it's likely not because
Well, I dunno-- "reliable in general use" might have some conditions that make it completely unreliable or otherwise unacceptable in certain use-cases. E.g., many modern filesystems cannot detect latent sector errors that are not otherwise detected by the hardware itself. Depending on how your filesystem is implemented, a latent sector error could wipe out your critical disk structures (ala ReiserFS) or do nothing at all (ala ZFS). The only meaningful way to interpret a new filesystem's capabilities is to compare it against the theoretical best performer. Otherwise, you may find that your new filesystem is "better" than your old one, but still inappropriate for your particular application.
I had Star Trek on my TI-99/4A, with the speech synthesizer module. My cousin got a PCjr with the then-incredible King's Quest, but the fact that Star Trek actually read out coordinates in plain English made him green with envy. Of course, I probably would have sacrificed a limb for the kind of graphics his machine could do.
Your notion that we only have the rights the majority deems worthy of bestowing upon us is frightening and authoritarian.
I don't want to put words in spun's mouth here, but that's not at all what he's saying. You know that old Jeffersonian quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."? Rights are derived from agreements that a backed by force. It works both ways. We fought the British in order to establish a new government. Shays' Rebellion was fought to remind that new government that we expected to actually receive the rights we just fought for.
Disclosure: I drive a year 2000 Jeep Cherokee and also use an SSD. The TV is still 2D.
Holy crap, that's me. I don't remember posting this.
Algorithmic efficiency also matters in the mobile space as designers get closer to building low-power systems that harvest energy directly from their environments. Just yesterday I was speaking with a researcher who had worked on animal tracking devices (e.g., for turtles) that collected power from small solar arrays. Any efficiencies that they could take advantage of, they used, from smart scheduling of their GPS units (don't madly run the unit if you don't have the power) to a delay-tolerant networking protocol (only phone home when you have the resources) to a programming language that informed the operating system which computations were power-hungry and should be performed later.
GP obviously has units confused.
Did your battery run out?
There's no reason why you can't support both causes.
Interestingly enough, during Prohibition, this is how alcohol was legally obtained. The Walgreen's drug store chain survived the Great Depression rather well, and not just because of milkshakes.
Interestingly enough, this is what ruled me out. After high school, I was being hounded on the telephone by an army recruiter (I was not interested). I tried various responses (Me: "I'm gay", Him: "Our modern military takes all kinds!"), but when I finally gave up and started answering his interview questions in earnest, and mentioned that I had asthma, the calls stopped immediately. This was c.1997.
Huh, well, I've been in mourning since the Tom Baker era. He was uniquely quirky. The Doctor who followed him was terrible.
That said, I haven't really given any of the more modern Doctors a fair shake, so they may be great. I watched one episode that featured an angry Tennant basically just running from zombies. Kind of boring. I should probably watch from the beginning.
All they ever do is add; that's a key reason why taxes go up, freedoms narrow, and law-books only get heavier.
Yes, there are many unfunded mandates passed by Congress. This, in itself, it a serious problem. But it's not true that Congress only adds-- many laws repeal, modify, or simplify existing law. The Uniform Commercial Code, for instance, was a great simplification of the laws surrounding commercial transactions in the United States. The UCC is also "done right", in that the code itself is simply a list of recommended laws, that are then legislated at the state level. This allows states to retain control of commerce in their own borders while providing a strong incentive to play nice with other states.
I am OK with taxing internet commerce. Mom and pop stores have largely suffered in the era of e-commerce. They simply cannot leverage the same economies of scale that Amazon, NewEgg, WalMart, and others can take advantage of, while having the additional burden of having to pay local sales tax. Internet retailers take advantage of public services just the same as everyone else, but are exempted from contributing back? That doesn't sound like the kind of environment that would encourage good ol' American entrepeneurship.
"with whom"
Just trying to keep us competitive. Cheers!
For me, a big part of it was that it was a movie about computers, back when computers didn't really enter most people's consciousnesses. As someone who was totally obsessed with them (I'm about a decade younger than you), I was completely captivated by it. It also didn't hurt that frisbee was my favorite sport at the time.
Great idea! They *should* remake Tron as the A-Team! What do you mean de-rez, sucka?
I think you meant 'than'.
LoTR was probably the first movie where I didn't consider the CGI to be so distracting that I couldn't concentrate on the plot. I personally don't hate CGI across the board, but I don't think it looks realistic. I prefer the old hand-painted miniatures approach, ala the original first few Star Trek movies. Their special effects have aged well, but other early CGI has not.
I think one of the reasons that the original Tron still looks so good is because most of the effects are not CGI.
It's pretty simple. A book stays in the distribution channels until it is no longer profitable. There is a clearly defined cutoff that warehousing/operations people have-- these things are precalculated before the book even hits the shelves.
The whole business of book distribution is complicated. Did you know that book sellers get to return unsold copies to the publisher? Publishers are legally obligated to take these back and revise their sales figures-- this means the risk is on the publisher, not the book seller. But this also means that publishers know exactly where the break even points are.
On-demand publishing is changing this somewhat, because publishers can't print smaller quantities and still be profitable, but they still have to deal with all the aforementioned stuff. Nearly every publishing house that isn't a mom & pop operation does a great deal of market research to determine demand. It's not perfect, but-- it's the best they can do short of printing a shitload of books and losing money on them. Losing money is bad.
(Disclaimer: I work for a publisher)
Actually, I think you could make the case that the Nazi party's rise to power (and Hitler's in particular) was illegal, or at least extralegal, given that most of the power shifts were the result of late-night coups and street shootings. On the other hand, the Enabling Act, which essentially dissolved Parliament, was passed through in a legal manner. I suspect that most leaders, either famous for their goodness or infamous for their evil, work outside of the law to make their agendas happen.