The clone may still be walking around, but it won't be you any more - the two of you will have started diverging from the moment the clone was made.
It's a question of continuity. If the clone and the original are both active at the same time, then, as you say, they will diverge and in short order end up as two distinct individuals. However, if you create an indistinguishable clone of yourself which remains in stasis until something happens to you, who is to say that this "backup", once activated, isn't actually just you minus a few recent memories—akin to amnesia?
I've suggested this to the Master, but he just shrugged and was worried that someone might fall over the ship and drown in panic as they never had a drill during the night (or at sea for that matter...).
I hope you pointed out to the Master that this is exactly why you need to do a drill at sea during the night. Let everyone know that from now on you're going to run more realistic drills, if you must, but this is no reason to avoid the drill. What would happen if there was a real emergency under those conditions?
That sounds much more reasonable. Still, the issue isn't "preventable deaths" since "preventable" is a binary attribute, not a continuum, and in the end most deaths would qualify. Situations where literally nothing could have been done to prevent the death are extremely rare. The real issue is cost vs. benefit—some preventable deaths are more costly to prevent than others. Included in that analysis are other factors beyond the mere number of deaths, many of which have no easy answers; for example, how ought the life of one individual be weighed against the general well-being of many? Is it right to condemn one person, or more likely many, to a life of pain in order to prevent someone else from dying of an overdose? It is a more complex situation than most seem to assume, and I for one remain highly skeptical of any "simple" political solution.
If you say, "choose which option is mostly likely to be true," then the result is...
... it's a drill. 100% of all times they previously received any message, it was a drill.
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." The probability that the current situation is a drill is not determined solely by the ratio of drills among previous similar situations. If it were, this would prove that true missile alerts are impossible (0% probability), which would imply that the drills serve no purpose.
It's still more likely to be a drill, of course—just not a 100% probability. There are many factors which affect the probability aside from the history of drills, including enemy capabilities, the level of diplomatic tension, and ongoing current events. In the end you can't even completely eliminate the possibility that the odds of a real missile alert have always been high, and you've just been very lucky to only experience drills thus far.
Congress can pass any law they want if they think it makes governing easier.
Not sure where you get that idea. BTW, this view, that Congress can do pretty much whatever it wants without regard to the enumerated powers, was explicitly disclaimed by the author of the Constitution. Even without knowing that,
however, it is perfectly obvious that the list of enumerated powers was written into the Constitution for a reason, and the idea that "Congress can pass any law they want if they think it makes governing easier" would render the enumerated powers superfluous.
The actual interpretation of that fact by the Constitutional authority of the Supreme Court...
...proves only that one cannot rely on one branch of government, whose members are appointed and confirmed by the other two branches, to serve as a proper check on the ambitions of those other branches of the same organization. The SC is at best an internal watchdog, not the final authority on what is or is not constitutional. The government (including the SC) can restrict its own powers as much as it wishes, but has no authority to grant itself powers not present in the Constitution. Failure to obtain a SC ruling stating that an act of Congress or the Executive is unconstitutional does not imply that the act is, in fact, constitutional. It just means that the government has declined to self-regulate on that issue.
The case will be found in the ISPs favor because to do otherwise would be potentially trashing more than 75 years of case law based on Wickard v. Filburn.
Or, you know, they could do the right and sensible thing and trash Wickard v. Filburn instead.
It was a horrible decision at the time, and it hasn't gotten any better since. They shouldn't let mere inertia stand in the way of correcting their predecessor's mistake.
So you claim that all states' rights situations are exactly like any other states' rights situation?
No, of course not. But if the FCC has the authority to preempt regulations imposed by individual landowners within their respective domains, then it stands to reason that it also has the authority to preempt similar regulations by arbitrary groups of landowners, up to and including entire states.
Personally, I think the FCC should stick to setting technical (not content) guidelines for radio communication, where they at least have a plausible claim to be facilitating use of the spectrum (at least so long as the government fails to recognize actual property rights in this area, thus preparing the way for a "tragedy of the commons"). Wired communications, and any short-range wireless tech which doesn't pass through walls or otherwise interfere with other users at a distance, should be treated as entirely private matters and outside of the FCC's jurisdiction.
Yes, and a half million people will die from cancer.
The issues isn't deaths, the issue is preventable deaths.
Are you trying to say that deaths due to alcohol aren't preventable, while deaths due to opiods are? For that matter, even many deaths from cancer are preventable (or at least deferrable... which amounts to the same thing in the end if you can defer it long enough) with early enough detection and proper treatment.
So if someone yells "FIRE!" in a crowded theater and people get trampled to death while attempting to exit, you would let the yeller go and prosecute people whose shoeprints are found on the dead, correct?
Yes, exactly. The yeller caused a disruption and ruined the show, but isn't responsible for killing anyone. Those who trampled others in their haste to exit did that. This isn't a case of acting innocently on the basis of false information—trampling others is the wrong answer whether or not the fire is real.
Not to detract from your main point, but at least in the case of Haskell the significant whitespace is optional. This is just a consequence of the "layout rule": if you omit the braces and semicolons after certain keywords, the parser will insert them for you based on indentation. If you prefer C-style code with explicit braces and arbitrary whitespace, you can write it that way. (This is a great feature when writing code samples in forums where you can't count on whitespace being preserved.)
This [one-time-use addresses] stopped working in the current state of Bitcoin, because you pay a fee for the amount of data you use on the blockchain, and the more addresses you accumulate, the more horrible the fees become.
It makes no difference whether you use the same address or a different address. The fee is relative to the transaction size (in bytes); transaction size depends mainly on the number of inputs and outputs; and each time you receive funds, whether to an existing address or a new one, it creates a new output which requires a separate input in the spending transaction. If you make a payment using funds received in five previous transactions to the same address you pay exactly the same fees as you would if it had been five transactions to five different single-use addresses.
Also, your information on fees is outdated. Current fees are around $5 for a typical transaction, less if you use the new SegWit protocol. Not $15.
But neither insurance for basic health care nor for actually optional services.
People take out insurance for "optional" things all the time, and it works well—the key differences from "health insurance" (as it exists today) being that it's a voluntary arrangement for both parties and that it's priced competitively, not politically. Insurance work for almost any situation where you have a risk and wish to exchange it for a predictable cost. As a substitute for charity, or a payment intermediary for routine care, it functions abysmally.
ARPAnet did indeed originate from within DARPA (and the universities), albeit with plenty of help from private contractors.
However, the Internet isn't ARPAnet. Not even close. At most one might say that ARPAnet inspired the modern Internet, and laid some groundwork. The transition from a small, closed network of interest only to academics and the military to a worldwide telecommunications system relied on by billions every day is almost entirely due to private research and development. The designers of ARPAnet never intended that, and we're still dealing with the consequences (like 32-bit IP addresses, and zero concern for end-to-end security or privacy in most of the original core protocols).
Nice rant. If you sign up for a free UPS My Choice account you'll get much more control over how your packages are delivered, including (in most cases) the ability to "sign" for them in advance, online, rather than getting a note about a missed delivery. Other free options include redirecting the package to a neighbour or to a UPS location for pickup. You can also schedule a specific delivery window, though that isn't free. It's an invaluable service for anyone who doesn't generally have the option of waiting around at home to collect packages.
Experiences vary by location, of course. My local UPS Store in Iowa has proven very helpful, and is open until at least 7pm, whereas (excluding self-service kiosks) the USPS facility is only open 8am-5pm on weekdays—standard working hours, in other words—and 10am-12pm on Saturday morning. If a package must be shipped "signature required", I'd much rather collect it from UPS.
mises.org, the Austrian economics advocacy group? Sure.
Your opinion of the Mises Institute in particular or Austrian economics in general is irrelevant, as the data speaks for itself. Those median income figures are direct from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the regional price parity data is from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis—both very well-known (and not particularly Austrian) institutions.
Even more important is recognizing that the whole "fire in a crowded theater" line was a hypothetical scenario invented for the sole purpose of justifying restrictions on political speech (specifically, people protesting the draft). Why people insist on bringing it up is beyond me, unless—like the judges who originally came up with the idea—they are just clinging to any excuse, no matter how threadbare, to justify the infringement of others' freedom of speech.
The concern was supposedly that people might panic and trample each other in their haste to escape the "fire". That's a bad outcome, sure, but what part of that is the responsibility of the person who yelled "Fire!"? If a fire actually did exist, would that justify trampling anyone? No! Fire or no fire, if you trample someone in your haste to escape, the full responsibility for that injury or death is on you, not the person who said that there was a fire.
You don't get rolodex autocomplete (where you can cycle through the suggestions by pressing tab)
This is determined by your shell.
Or if you don't want to change shells, just bind Tab to the menu-complete command (in ~/.inputrc, or with the command: bind "Tab: menu-complete"). Presto, pressing Tab now cycles through all the possible matches.
autocomplete doesn't automatically fill in quotes for you for filenames with spaces
That's because it doesn't need to. At least in bash, which I assume is the shell you're using, it escapes characters that need to be escaped, so if a filename contains spaces they will be filled in preceded by a backslash.
But sometimes you don't want backslashes in the completion. No problem: the completion will respect whatever quoting style was already started.
Anyone who does significant work in Bash really should read through the manual page some time. There are a lot of useful features available beyond the basics "everyone" knows about.
The Internet was created by the government, so it was the other way around in this case.
The Internet you know owes way more to private development than to the government. Sure, the government was involved in the beginning, but don't give them too much credit—ARPANET was smaller than many modern company intranets and only linked a handful of military and educational institutions, with no expectation of expanding to serve the general public. It was the private commercial interests that developed it into a global telecommunications system benefitting billions of people every day.
What I find interesting is that so many people see that as some ort [sic] of socialism, but so few people see municipal roads as such.
As you say, there is little difference. They are both fine when done privately, respecting people's rights, as in a community co-op, and wrong when they depend on force. The average municipality is close enough to a co-op anyway that if we just said "that's enough, we're not going to allow anyone to get away with using force anymore, no exceptions" they could reorganize as co-ops (with rent and voluntarily accepted terms of service instead of property taxes and ordinances) and carry on almost as they did before—entirely unlike the county, state or federal levels of government. Municipalities have less power in general and are not as quick to resort to force to get things done. It's still a problem, but as priorities go there are more urgent issues to be addressed elsewhere.
Yet both are there for a similar reason when market forces just do not work...
Assuming facts not in evidence. Communities do exist with privately-owned local roads: gated communities, private college campuses, industrial parks, even certain towns where local residents are responsible for the portion of the street fronting their property in much the same way that many communities handle sidewalks. There is no so-called "market failure" inherent in municipal roads demanding political intervention.
It's $80/yr., not $80/mo., and the first year is free. Compared to the original $300 flat rate the breakeven point is around 4.75 years; if you change vehicles at least that often then the subscription model ends up being less expensive.
The fact that both the original $300 flat-rate and the new $80/yr. subscription are a bit excessive for just turning on a relatively trivial software feature—not including the necessary hardware, which was already included with the vehicle—is an entirely separate matter.
This analysis was based on median income (not mean or per capita income or GDP) to address concerns about wealth inequality, and takes into account social services, taxation, and cost-of-living. A glance at the second chart, the one adjusted for regional price parity, shows that adjusted median income in Louisiana—the poorest of the U.S. states—is higher than that in France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, half of the OECD member states of Western Europe (as defined by the CIA), and also higher than the median incomes in Spain and Portugal, the two OECD countries in Southwestern Europe. The exceptions are Belgium (5.1% by population), Luxembourg (0.2%), and the Netherlands (7.6%).
In other words, 87% of the population of the OECD countries of Western and Southwestern Europe live in a country with a lower median income (including tax-funded social services) than the poorest U.S. state, after adjusting for cost-of-living.
Based on the above statistics, I feel that the GP was actually quite generous in comparing the wealth of most Western European countries to Mississippi or Alabama.
So, the "flaw" is that the user forgot to set the lock?
No, the flaw is that there is an extra subsystem living within the CPU which is enabled by default, whether you want it or not, listening on all your network ports and waiting for someone to come along with the default password and take over the system.
If the system had to be enabled manually by someone with physical access (and the BIOS password, if one is set) then it would be reasonable to expect the administrator to change the access codes. The same applies if the remote management capability were the primary reason to choose this model over other designs, which would be closer to your document-safe example. However, being enabled by default out of the factory, including on systems which have no use for it, makes it an open backdoor. (Whether Intel or system integrators are responsible, it is clear that CPUs with this "feature" are being used in situations where remote management capabilities are more of a liability than an asset, and not something the end-user would have requested—unlike a combination on a safe.)
It actually flew out the window when they interpreted the interstate commerce clause to mean anything the owner might at some point in the future sell over state lines.
I think you meant anything for which an interstate market exists, regardless of whether commerce might occur. Seriously, Wickard v. Filburn (1942) was about preventing someone from growing their own wheat on their own land for their own consumption; the argument was that the entirely local action of simply growing one's own wheat and consuming it oneself could have an effect on the interstate wheat market. The regulations were justified on the basis of the "interstate commerce" clause but were applied to an action which did not even involve commerce, much less interstate commerce. The whole thing is a bad joke even before you consider that "to regulate interstate commerce", at the time it was written, meant "to make interstate commerce regular"—standardizing weights and measures, ensuring proper labeling, arbitrating disputes, and so forth. Not interfering with and preventing commerce for the purpose of social engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
The clone may still be walking around, but it won't be you any more - the two of you will have started diverging from the moment the clone was made.
It's a question of continuity. If the clone and the original are both active at the same time, then, as you say, they will diverge and in short order end up as two distinct individuals. However, if you create an indistinguishable clone of yourself which remains in stasis until something happens to you, who is to say that this "backup", once activated, isn't actually just you minus a few recent memories—akin to amnesia?
I've suggested this to the Master, but he just shrugged and was worried that someone might fall over the ship and drown in panic as they never had a drill during the night (or at sea for that matter...).
I hope you pointed out to the Master that this is exactly why you need to do a drill at sea during the night. Let everyone know that from now on you're going to run more realistic drills, if you must, but this is no reason to avoid the drill. What would happen if there was a real emergency under those conditions?
That sounds much more reasonable. Still, the issue isn't "preventable deaths" since "preventable" is a binary attribute, not a continuum, and in the end most deaths would qualify. Situations where literally nothing could have been done to prevent the death are extremely rare. The real issue is cost vs. benefit—some preventable deaths are more costly to prevent than others. Included in that analysis are other factors beyond the mere number of deaths, many of which have no easy answers; for example, how ought the life of one individual be weighed against the general well-being of many? Is it right to condemn one person, or more likely many, to a life of pain in order to prevent someone else from dying of an overdose? It is a more complex situation than most seem to assume, and I for one remain highly skeptical of any "simple" political solution.
If you say, "choose which option is mostly likely to be true," then the result is...
... it's a drill. 100% of all times they previously received any message, it was a drill.
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results." The probability that the current situation is a drill is not determined solely by the ratio of drills among previous similar situations. If it were, this would prove that true missile alerts are impossible (0% probability), which would imply that the drills serve no purpose.
It's still more likely to be a drill, of course—just not a 100% probability. There are many factors which affect the probability aside from the history of drills, including enemy capabilities, the level of diplomatic tension, and ongoing current events. In the end you can't even completely eliminate the possibility that the odds of a real missile alert have always been high, and you've just been very lucky to only experience drills thus far.
Congress can pass any law they want if they think it makes governing easier.
Not sure where you get that idea. BTW, this view, that Congress can do pretty much whatever it wants without regard to the enumerated powers, was explicitly disclaimed by the author of the Constitution. Even without knowing that, however, it is perfectly obvious that the list of enumerated powers was written into the Constitution for a reason, and the idea that "Congress can pass any law they want if they think it makes governing easier" would render the enumerated powers superfluous.
The actual interpretation of that fact by the Constitutional authority of the Supreme Court...
...proves only that one cannot rely on one branch of government, whose members are appointed and confirmed by the other two branches, to serve as a proper check on the ambitions of those other branches of the same organization. The SC is at best an internal watchdog, not the final authority on what is or is not constitutional. The government (including the SC) can restrict its own powers as much as it wishes, but has no authority to grant itself powers not present in the Constitution. Failure to obtain a SC ruling stating that an act of Congress or the Executive is unconstitutional does not imply that the act is, in fact, constitutional. It just means that the government has declined to self-regulate on that issue.
The case will be found in the ISPs favor because to do otherwise would be potentially trashing more than 75 years of case law based on Wickard v. Filburn.
Or, you know, they could do the right and sensible thing and trash Wickard v. Filburn instead. It was a horrible decision at the time, and it hasn't gotten any better since. They shouldn't let mere inertia stand in the way of correcting their predecessor's mistake.
So you claim that all states' rights situations are exactly like any other states' rights situation?
No, of course not. But if the FCC has the authority to preempt regulations imposed by individual landowners within their respective domains, then it stands to reason that it also has the authority to preempt similar regulations by arbitrary groups of landowners, up to and including entire states.
Personally, I think the FCC should stick to setting technical (not content) guidelines for radio communication, where they at least have a plausible claim to be facilitating use of the spectrum (at least so long as the government fails to recognize actual property rights in this area, thus preparing the way for a "tragedy of the commons"). Wired communications, and any short-range wireless tech which doesn't pass through walls or otherwise interfere with other users at a distance, should be treated as entirely private matters and outside of the FCC's jurisdiction.
Yes, and a half million people will die from cancer.
The issues isn't deaths, the issue is preventable deaths.
Are you trying to say that deaths due to alcohol aren't preventable, while deaths due to opiods are? For that matter, even many deaths from cancer are preventable (or at least deferrable... which amounts to the same thing in the end if you can defer it long enough) with early enough detection and proper treatment.
How much does UPS pay you, shill?
Nothing. I'm just a satisfied customer trying to be helpful. I guess there really is no pleasing some people.
So if someone yells "FIRE!" in a crowded theater and people get trampled to death while attempting to exit, you would let the yeller go and prosecute people whose shoeprints are found on the dead, correct?
Yes, exactly. The yeller caused a disruption and ruined the show, but isn't responsible for killing anyone. Those who trampled others in their haste to exit did that. This isn't a case of acting innocently on the basis of false information—trampling others is the wrong answer whether or not the fire is real.
Haskell has significant whitespace.
Not to detract from your main point, but at least in the case of Haskell the significant whitespace is optional. This is just a consequence of the "layout rule": if you omit the braces and semicolons after certain keywords, the parser will insert them for you based on indentation. If you prefer C-style code with explicit braces and arbitrary whitespace, you can write it that way. (This is a great feature when writing code samples in forums where you can't count on whitespace being preserved.)
This [one-time-use addresses] stopped working in the current state of Bitcoin, because you pay a fee for the amount of data you use on the blockchain, and the more addresses you accumulate, the more horrible the fees become.
It makes no difference whether you use the same address or a different address. The fee is relative to the transaction size (in bytes); transaction size depends mainly on the number of inputs and outputs; and each time you receive funds, whether to an existing address or a new one, it creates a new output which requires a separate input in the spending transaction. If you make a payment using funds received in five previous transactions to the same address you pay exactly the same fees as you would if it had been five transactions to five different single-use addresses.
Also, your information on fees is outdated. Current fees are around $5 for a typical transaction, less if you use the new SegWit protocol. Not $15.
But neither insurance for basic health care nor for actually optional services.
People take out insurance for "optional" things all the time, and it works well—the key differences from "health insurance" (as it exists today) being that it's a voluntary arrangement for both parties and that it's priced competitively, not politically. Insurance work for almost any situation where you have a risk and wish to exchange it for a predictable cost. As a substitute for charity, or a payment intermediary for routine care, it functions abysmally.
ARPAnet did indeed originate from within DARPA (and the universities), albeit with plenty of help from private contractors.
However, the Internet isn't ARPAnet. Not even close. At most one might say that ARPAnet inspired the modern Internet, and laid some groundwork. The transition from a small, closed network of interest only to academics and the military to a worldwide telecommunications system relied on by billions every day is almost entirely due to private research and development. The designers of ARPAnet never intended that, and we're still dealing with the consequences (like 32-bit IP addresses, and zero concern for end-to-end security or privacy in most of the original core protocols).
Nice rant. If you sign up for a free UPS My Choice account you'll get much more control over how your packages are delivered, including (in most cases) the ability to "sign" for them in advance, online, rather than getting a note about a missed delivery. Other free options include redirecting the package to a neighbour or to a UPS location for pickup. You can also schedule a specific delivery window, though that isn't free. It's an invaluable service for anyone who doesn't generally have the option of waiting around at home to collect packages.
Experiences vary by location, of course. My local UPS Store in Iowa has proven very helpful, and is open until at least 7pm, whereas (excluding self-service kiosks) the USPS facility is only open 8am-5pm on weekdays—standard working hours, in other words—and 10am-12pm on Saturday morning. If a package must be shipped "signature required", I'd much rather collect it from UPS.
mises.org, the Austrian economics advocacy group? Sure.
Your opinion of the Mises Institute in particular or Austrian economics in general is irrelevant, as the data speaks for itself. Those median income figures are direct from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the regional price parity data is from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis—both very well-known (and not particularly Austrian) institutions.
Even more important is recognizing that the whole "fire in a crowded theater" line was a hypothetical scenario invented for the sole purpose of justifying restrictions on political speech (specifically, people protesting the draft). Why people insist on bringing it up is beyond me, unless—like the judges who originally came up with the idea—they are just clinging to any excuse, no matter how threadbare, to justify the infringement of others' freedom of speech.
The concern was supposedly that people might panic and trample each other in their haste to escape the "fire". That's a bad outcome, sure, but what part of that is the responsibility of the person who yelled "Fire!"? If a fire actually did exist, would that justify trampling anyone? No! Fire or no fire, if you trample someone in your haste to escape, the full responsibility for that injury or death is on you, not the person who said that there was a fire.
You don't get rolodex autocomplete (where you can cycle through the suggestions by pressing tab)
This is determined by your shell.
Or if you don't want to change shells, just bind Tab to the menu-complete command (in ~/.inputrc, or with the command: bind "Tab: menu-complete"). Presto, pressing Tab now cycles through all the possible matches.
autocomplete doesn't automatically fill in quotes for you for filenames with spaces
That's because it doesn't need to. At least in bash, which I assume is the shell you're using, it escapes characters that need to be escaped, so if a filename contains spaces they will be filled in preceded by a backslash.
But sometimes you don't want backslashes in the completion. No problem: the completion will respect whatever quoting style was already started.
Anyone who does significant work in Bash really should read through the manual page some time. There are a lot of useful features available beyond the basics "everyone" knows about.
The Internet was created by the government, so it was the other way around in this case.
The Internet you know owes way more to private development than to the government. Sure, the government was involved in the beginning, but don't give them too much credit—ARPANET was smaller than many modern company intranets and only linked a handful of military and educational institutions, with no expectation of expanding to serve the general public. It was the private commercial interests that developed it into a global telecommunications system benefitting billions of people every day.
What I find interesting is that so many people see that as some ort [sic] of socialism, but so few people see municipal roads as such.
As you say, there is little difference. They are both fine when done privately, respecting people's rights, as in a community co-op, and wrong when they depend on force. The average municipality is close enough to a co-op anyway that if we just said "that's enough, we're not going to allow anyone to get away with using force anymore, no exceptions" they could reorganize as co-ops (with rent and voluntarily accepted terms of service instead of property taxes and ordinances) and carry on almost as they did before—entirely unlike the county, state or federal levels of government. Municipalities have less power in general and are not as quick to resort to force to get things done. It's still a problem, but as priorities go there are more urgent issues to be addressed elsewhere.
Yet both are there for a similar reason when market forces just do not work...
Assuming facts not in evidence. Communities do exist with privately-owned local roads: gated communities, private college campuses, industrial parks, even certain towns where local residents are responsible for the portion of the street fronting their property in much the same way that many communities handle sidewalks. There is no so-called "market failure" inherent in municipal roads demanding political intervention.
You can always represent rational numbers as integers. Just multiply all numbers by 10 until you have no more floating point.
What is the final result of this algorithm for the rational number 1/3? Go ahead and try it; I'll wait.
For BMW to charge $80/mo is pure larceny.
It's $80/yr., not $80/mo., and the first year is free. Compared to the original $300 flat rate the breakeven point is around 4.75 years; if you change vehicles at least that often then the subscription model ends up being less expensive.
The fact that both the original $300 flat-rate and the new $80/yr. subscription are a bit excessive for just turning on a relatively trivial software feature—not including the necessary hardware, which was already included with the vehicle—is an entirely separate matter.
The GP was probably referring to this analysis: If Sweden and Germany Became US States, They Would be Among the Poorest States.
This analysis was based on median income (not mean or per capita income or GDP) to address concerns about wealth inequality, and takes into account social services, taxation, and cost-of-living. A glance at the second chart, the one adjusted for regional price parity, shows that adjusted median income in Louisiana—the poorest of the U.S. states—is higher than that in France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, half of the OECD member states of Western Europe (as defined by the CIA), and also higher than the median incomes in Spain and Portugal, the two OECD countries in Southwestern Europe. The exceptions are Belgium (5.1% by population), Luxembourg (0.2%), and the Netherlands (7.6%).
In other words, 87% of the population of the OECD countries of Western and Southwestern Europe live in a country with a lower median income (including tax-funded social services) than the poorest U.S. state, after adjusting for cost-of-living.
Based on the above statistics, I feel that the GP was actually quite generous in comparing the wealth of most Western European countries to Mississippi or Alabama.
So, the "flaw" is that the user forgot to set the lock?
No, the flaw is that there is an extra subsystem living within the CPU which is enabled by default, whether you want it or not, listening on all your network ports and waiting for someone to come along with the default password and take over the system.
If the system had to be enabled manually by someone with physical access (and the BIOS password, if one is set) then it would be reasonable to expect the administrator to change the access codes. The same applies if the remote management capability were the primary reason to choose this model over other designs, which would be closer to your document-safe example. However, being enabled by default out of the factory, including on systems which have no use for it, makes it an open backdoor. (Whether Intel or system integrators are responsible, it is clear that CPUs with this "feature" are being used in situations where remote management capabilities are more of a liability than an asset, and not something the end-user would have requested—unlike a combination on a safe.)
It actually flew out the window when they interpreted the interstate commerce clause to mean anything the owner might at some point in the future sell over state lines.
I think you meant anything for which an interstate market exists, regardless of whether commerce might occur. Seriously, Wickard v. Filburn (1942) was about preventing someone from growing their own wheat on their own land for their own consumption; the argument was that the entirely local action of simply growing one's own wheat and consuming it oneself could have an effect on the interstate wheat market. The regulations were justified on the basis of the "interstate commerce" clause but were applied to an action which did not even involve commerce, much less interstate commerce. The whole thing is a bad joke even before you consider that "to regulate interstate commerce", at the time it was written, meant "to make interstate commerce regular"—standardizing weights and measures, ensuring proper labeling, arbitrating disputes, and so forth. Not interfering with and preventing commerce for the purpose of social engineering.