They've been broken for decades, especially the FDA. They most likely prevent food products from being labeled in "kcal" and insist on it being labeled in "Calories".
It really doesn't matter if you call it a Calorie or a Floogle or a Blortch. It's a reference value. It's an invented unit. There is nothing physically magic about raising the temperature of one cc of water one degree C. Had the circumference of the earth been larger or smaller, the calorie (and Calorie) would have been larger or smaller, too. Had the creator of the centigrade scale not tied 0 and 100 to freezing/boiling, the calorie would be different.
What's important is using it as a reference value. If you eat a 2000 Calorie diet and can't lose weight, cut back to 1500. It doesn't matter how big a calorie is. You know that 1500 is 3/4 of 2000. It doesn't matter what the efficiency of your digestive system is, cutting intake by 25% is still cutting intake by 25%.
Anyone who sees the proclamation that a normal adult male requires a 2000 Calorie diet, and then thinks "well, my digestive system is 50% efficient, and my intestinal flora help add back 10%, and I always eat my steak well done so that doubles things", and then goes through the twisty little maze of passages, all alike, to determine "I must eat 3284 Calories per day" is a moron.
Except he is using GPS as a very precise 10MHz signal, not a clock. The private rubidium clock (about 1500USD from memory) will provide that very nicely.
$1500 clock vs. $100 clock. Hmmm. And how do you know the shift was 13.7ms as TFA reports unless you know which clock is right?
and freezes you from the trouble of getting the GPS signal into your lab, which for most labs I know is going to be a right pain in the backside because GPS signals don't extend indoors.
I understand they're developing a solution to that problem, and it will be distributed once the patent has been issued. They're taking a wire, surrounding it with some insulation, then around that goes a mesh of copper to make a second conductor, and then around that all more insulation. I hear they're calling it cropaxial cable or something like that. They claim, but I don't believe it, that you can actually put the GPS antenna outside the building while having the receiver inside! What will they think of next?
I guess the point is that until recently using GPS was a valid way to get a very high precision reference frequency,
Still is.
I've been running a GPS in the lab for almost two decades. Maybe I need to file with the patent office showing "prior art"?
In regards to WAAS, I think you're talking about something else. WAAS was developed for the FAA to allow the use of GPS in all stages of flight, including precision landing.
No, I was describing WAAS. A network of ground stations determining corrections. I didn't deny it was implemented by FAA.
A GPS clock comes with the time already set. Your private rubidium clock needs someone to tell it what time it is, which is probably going to be GPS-based anyway.
I'll expand on that a bit. The orbital data is called the ephemeris, and it takes (or used to take when I had to deal with such things) about ten minutes to download. This is a mandatory bit of information for high accuracy GPS since the actual location of the space vehicles (SV) have to be known with high accuracy.
The status of each SV is also part of the datastream, and all it takes to "turn off" an errant SV is to set the flag in the data stream that says it is unusable.
WAAS doesn't know about atmospheric corrections. What WAAS does is use a network of fixed ground stations that detect deviations in position and generate data to correct those deviations. The assumption is that the WAAS receiver isn't moving, so any deviations are from propagation errors. This is the same kind of thing that has been used by surveyors and other high accuracy GPS users for decades. At the highest level of accuracy it is called realtime kinematic GPS, and it uses both the correction data and actual carrier phase information to give centimeter level accuracy. There is also "differential", which makes use of the correction data to get multi-cm level accuracy. Both were very big issues when selective availability was on.
Do these people not understand that these two statements are not contradictory? Does anyone here understand that? The question "who is right" is trivial to answer. Both are.
A cyber attack could be catastrophic, albeit rare. And squirrel outages, due to the comparatively high rate of occurrence combined with the level of damage, are a bigger risk.
My point is that if something tiny is flying below the height of nearby buildings anyways,
You claimed that FAA regulates "navigable airspace" only, which is patently false. You also claimed that they do not regulate below 500' (with some magical exemption "within a very small distance from an airport", or something like that). That is also patently false.
Your new argument that it is flying "below the height of nearby buildings", well, the FAA regulates that airspace, too. Thankfully so. Imagine some nitwit deciding to fly around the city of Portland or San Francisco at low altitude, trying to claim that it's unregulated airspace because the FAA has no jurisdiction "below the heights of nearby buildings".
Now, you can argue what those regulations should be, but the argument that FAA has no jurisdiction is a waste of everyone's time.
As you yourself pointed out, FAA regulates to the ground. That airspace surrounding airports is "surface", as are TFRs and things like flight restrictions around Division I NCAA stadiums that contain more then 30,000 people during, before and after football games. The "mode C veil" extends from the surface to 10,000' for a 30 nm radius from a class B airport. Surface.
I don't know how anyone can look at the existing FARs and think that FAA has no jurisdiction down to the surface. Only by ignoring all the "surface up to" rules can you even begin to think they are hobbled like that.
because it may crash into tall buildings.
Which is why FAA regulations prohibit flight below certain minimum altitudes. If they regulate only "navigable airspace", then how can they prohibit flight outside that airspace? You say they have no jurisdiction there -- and yet they do.
FAA has jurisdiction from the ground up within a prescribed and fairly small range of any airport, outside of that range the FAA's jurisdiction has not ever extended to anything below 500 feet.
For FAA to be able to regulate to the ground their jurisdiction has to extent to the ground. TFRs often (almost always?) extend from the ground up -- and TFRs are almost never within "a fairly small range of any airport".
This is not an issue of whether FAA has authority to regulate from the ground up, it is an issue of California requiring registration and identification of aircraft. FAA already requires registration and marking of UAV except those below a certain weight (and has much more stringent registration rules for commercial and heavy ones). CA is being redundant in requiring "license plates".
But they are joining other states that require registration and duplication of existing FAA activities. Oregon, for example, has had a long-standing pilot registration requirement, and has just enacted a registration for UAV. Idiots.
Just what I was thinking. A cushy job with a great title ("Planetary Defense Officer") that doesn't do anything.
It reminds me of the ad by LifeLock where the guy in a bank in a security officer uniform tells people lying on the floor that he's not a security guard, he's just a security notifier. "I'm just here to tell people there's a robbery. There's a robbery".
"I'm not here to defend you people against asteroids about to hit the earth, I'm just here to tell you to duck. Duck."
Imagine in ten years this morphs into the Planetary Security Agency, with PSA agents and x-ray machines and anyone who jokes about an asteroid gets his asteroid inspected as a terrorist.
...says the clown who has obviously never watched the show.
I know you haven't. It's clear.
Ramsey isn't an ass with the kids like he is with the nincompoops on Hell's Kitchen.
No, he isn't, but it doesn't take the same level of abuse to make a nine year old cry as it does a 39 year old. It's odd that the other hosts don't seem to have the same effect on the kids that he does. They an manage to get the message "you didn't do this right" across without histrionics, and he cannot.
The entire reason that medical records are kept confidential in the first place is because of the privacy rights of the patient.
That's very nice. That may be why the law was written to exempt them from FOIA requests. It doesn't matter. The law doesn't include an option for a decision based on "who might object" or "who has privacy rights". It says that medical records are exempt from FOIA requests.
I've asked you a couple of times now if you want some bureaucrat making decisions about the release of your medical records based on their guess as to whether anyone would object to it. "Hmm, mark-t is dead, so he can't object. I don't know of any relatives who have standing to object. I guess I'll release the records as requested." I don't want them making that determination. If you do, that's ok for you, but the law doesn't allow it.
A dolphin does not have, and never has had any privacy rights.
And if you think that the training that the bureaucrat got regarding the laws covering FOIA and medical records talked about dolphin records, you're deluded. "What's excluded:... C. Medical records." If you think the following Powerpoint said "What about dolphin medical records?", that's loony.
So, the autopsy looks like a medical record, whether you want to call it that or not. Here's a request for that medical record under FOIA. Medical records are exempt from FOIA requests. Therefore, the answer is "no". The letter even quoted the section of the Executive Order specifying the reason. It takes no conspiracy theory to figure out why the answer was "no". That's the point I'm making. There's nothing "fishy" about this. The official policy of the state of New Jersey regarding release of medical records is spelled out; the bureaucrat followed that guidance, which came from a Governor before Christie.
Is it a tempest in a teapot? Should an appeal of the decision grant the release? Go argue with someone else about that, because my point is that there is no conspiracy here. It's following the law and the training about that law that someone got. That's it.
My point is not merely that someone wouldn't object, my point is that someone *COULDN'T* object,
You overlook the animal rights activists. But the real point is, the LAW does not speak about the decision to release medical data being based on CAN anyone object. It talks about specific types of data.
If you die and have no known relatives, should your medical data become public information? Should a bureaucrat in some office in the state capitol decide that "nobody could object"? Is that their responsibility to decide? Do you want it to be?
And the point is, it doesn't take any wacko conspiracy theory to understand why the decision was made the way it was. All you have to do is consider what kind of training the person who makes the decision would have, and that nobody would waste training time talking about whether the "patient" is human or not, because the situation never arose before and wasn't anticipated.
Oh, no, we can't shut down or even offer to defund a state park that sees 20 visitors a year. We have to defund the schools.
This behavior is not the fault of the bureaucrats or politicians. It is learned behavior fully ingrained by years of conditioning from the voters. If you close things nobody cares about, nobody will vote for the next tax levy. If you threaten to close the library, the public pool, and the senior center, you will have a ready and willing base of voters more than happy to increase taxes upon everyone to support the things they want.
Specifically by firing teachers, not the 3rd vice principal.
1. Children interact with teachers, and therefore parents (voters) interact with them, too. "Those bastards" cannot fire the best teacher little Billy has ever had! Vote for the next tax levy!
2. Students don't like assistant principals, so parents (voters) don't care if one of them is fired.
3. The teacher's union is stronger than the vice principal's union, so there is going to be more "grass-roots" support for a tax levy to fund keeping teachers vs. vps.
The dictionary definition is irrelevant in legal space.
Not every word in a law has only a legal definition, and not every bureaucrat reads every word in a law in the purely legal sense.
It's kinda like "depends on what your definition of 'is' is."
Also, as I pointed out elsewhere, it is very likely that any limitation of the law to "individual" as "human person" was omitted in the training that this person got regarding exempt data. "What is exempt"? "C. Medical data".
Do you expect every government bureaucrat to be a legal scholar?
You do realize that the training which listed possible results of incorrect decisions would not be about specific requests, don't you? A classroom bullet point that says there is a potential for a lawsuit if a request is approved improperly wouldn't be considering that a dolphin would file the lawsuit.
A decision based on training that says "medical records are exempt" stands alone; it is well outside the job description of the person making the decision to try to guess who might object and who might file a lawsuit. Would you like your records released to me because some low-level bureaucrat didn't think you would object? And would you like to bet your job that some nutcase animal rights group wouldn't sue to try to make a point?
It's pretty simple. The easy choice is obvious. There is no conspiracy necessary.
I am not ordinarily one to speculate on conspiracy theories, but something just doesn't seem right about this.
It's not that complicated. You're an entry-level public employee who has been given the job of answering FOIA requests. There's a training class or two, perhaps live, perhaps online, where they try to cover the laws that are relevant. They certainly cannot spend the time to do so word by word, delving into the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, that is the law. There are probably Powerpoints with bullet points. "Things that are exempt from release". "C. Medical records".
Also probably front loaded into the classes (before everyone goes to sleep) are a couple of pages of "consequences of making a mistake". Such as, "lawsuit for improper release of private data".
It doesn't seem so out of pale that the request for a "medical record" would be denied like this. What are the consequences? Releasing it by mistake could mean lawsuits and job loss. Not releasing it means the requester takes it higher up the chain -- no longer my decision.
It is above the pay grade of the low level bureaucrat to make the distinction between animal and human (if there is one).
If you read TFA, it shows the section of law that exempts this information from FOIA requests. It uses the term "individual". Miriam Webster lists several definitions of that word, one of which is: "of, relating to, or existing as just one member or part of a larger group". It does not specify "human" in that definition. Surely, this one dolphin was just one member of the larger group, and it certainly behaved in ways that would individuate itself from that group.
Of course, when the law was written the situation of autopsying a dolphin wasn't considered. But in this case "other animal" vs. "human" wasn't a distinction the law makes. The bureaucrat didn't need to make that decision.
So basically, the only way to avoid the bastard is to turn off automatic updating,
When the unknown notification started showing up in my task bar, the first thing I did was see what the executable behind it was and... delete it and the entire directory that contained it. Pretty easy, except for the two-stage permission change so I could nuke it.
Banning cell phones on airplanes has nothing to do with safety.
Actually, it does. And it has to do with the band allocations for cell phone use (FCC issue). You'd be hard pressed to claim that transmitters haven't gotten better over time, since the regulations prohibiting their use on aircraft without the operator's permission were enacted.
Neither does granting flight attendants unlimited "fuck you, do as I say or I'll make the other passengers hog tie you and when we land you'll head straight to the rape room" powers over passengers.
Actually, that regulation, too, is based on safety. The fact it may be over-used at times doesn't change the basic reason it is there.
The captain has overall authority over the flight. The flight crew are acting under his authority. If the captain, or the flight crew, doesn't tell you to sit down and buckle in when they know turbulence is about to hit, it's their responsibility when you get hurt. If you are a "you aren't the boss of me" numbskull and don't do it, then it's on you.
And who is going to sit there and hold and hit those stamps with a hammer?
There is a classic cartoon scene in which Bugs Bunny is working on the artillery shell assembly line as quality inspector. His job is to whack each shell on the tip and if it doesn't go off he marks it as a dud.
It's funny how people are absolutely convinced that there's no way to store chemical energy
You know when you see someone go to such absurd levels of hyperbole to put words in other people's mouths that they have absolutely no rational argument to make to support their own view.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, an average human burns about 2 Giga calories which is 2 kilo Calories which is equivalent to 2000 Calories ...
Hmmm. 2000 Calories is 2000 * 1000 calories, which would be 2 megacalories.
They've been broken for decades, especially the FDA. They most likely prevent food products from being labeled in "kcal" and insist on it being labeled in "Calories".
It really doesn't matter if you call it a Calorie or a Floogle or a Blortch. It's a reference value. It's an invented unit. There is nothing physically magic about raising the temperature of one cc of water one degree C. Had the circumference of the earth been larger or smaller, the calorie (and Calorie) would have been larger or smaller, too. Had the creator of the centigrade scale not tied 0 and 100 to freezing/boiling, the calorie would be different.
What's important is using it as a reference value. If you eat a 2000 Calorie diet and can't lose weight, cut back to 1500. It doesn't matter how big a calorie is. You know that 1500 is 3/4 of 2000. It doesn't matter what the efficiency of your digestive system is, cutting intake by 25% is still cutting intake by 25%.
Anyone who sees the proclamation that a normal adult male requires a 2000 Calorie diet, and then thinks "well, my digestive system is 50% efficient, and my intestinal flora help add back 10%, and I always eat my steak well done so that doubles things", and then goes through the twisty little maze of passages, all alike, to determine "I must eat 3284 Calories per day" is a moron.
Except he is using GPS as a very precise 10MHz signal, not a clock. The private rubidium clock (about 1500USD from memory) will provide that very nicely.
$1500 clock vs. $100 clock. Hmmm. And how do you know the shift was 13.7ms as TFA reports unless you know which clock is right?
and freezes you from the trouble of getting the GPS signal into your lab, which for most labs I know is going to be a right pain in the backside because GPS signals don't extend indoors.
I understand they're developing a solution to that problem, and it will be distributed once the patent has been issued. They're taking a wire, surrounding it with some insulation, then around that goes a mesh of copper to make a second conductor, and then around that all more insulation. I hear they're calling it cropaxial cable or something like that. They claim, but I don't believe it, that you can actually put the GPS antenna outside the building while having the receiver inside! What will they think of next?
I guess the point is that until recently using GPS was a valid way to get a very high precision reference frequency,
Still is.
I've been running a GPS in the lab for almost two decades. Maybe I need to file with the patent office showing "prior art"?
In regards to WAAS, I think you're talking about something else. WAAS was developed for the FAA to allow the use of GPS in all stages of flight, including precision landing.
No, I was describing WAAS. A network of ground stations determining corrections. I didn't deny it was implemented by FAA.
A GPS clock comes with the time already set. Your private rubidium clock needs someone to tell it what time it is, which is probably going to be GPS-based anyway.
The status of each SV is also part of the datastream, and all it takes to "turn off" an errant SV is to set the flag in the data stream that says it is unusable.
WAAS doesn't know about atmospheric corrections. What WAAS does is use a network of fixed ground stations that detect deviations in position and generate data to correct those deviations. The assumption is that the WAAS receiver isn't moving, so any deviations are from propagation errors. This is the same kind of thing that has been used by surveyors and other high accuracy GPS users for decades. At the highest level of accuracy it is called realtime kinematic GPS, and it uses both the correction data and actual carrier phase information to give centimeter level accuracy. There is also "differential", which makes use of the correction data to get multi-cm level accuracy. Both were very big issues when selective availability was on.
At this point you sound like someone whining that the LTS release doesn't have the cutting edge features you want.
Sounds to me like he's "whining" about an LTS that has added overly restrictive features that he doesn't want.
Do you call it "whining" when you do it, or is it only for other people?
"The biggest risk is squirrels."
Do these people not understand that these two statements are not contradictory? Does anyone here understand that? The question "who is right" is trivial to answer. Both are.
A cyber attack could be catastrophic, albeit rare. And squirrel outages, due to the comparatively high rate of occurrence combined with the level of damage, are a bigger risk.
My point is that if something tiny is flying below the height of nearby buildings anyways,
You claimed that FAA regulates "navigable airspace" only, which is patently false. You also claimed that they do not regulate below 500' (with some magical exemption "within a very small distance from an airport", or something like that). That is also patently false.
Your new argument that it is flying "below the height of nearby buildings", well, the FAA regulates that airspace, too. Thankfully so. Imagine some nitwit deciding to fly around the city of Portland or San Francisco at low altitude, trying to claim that it's unregulated airspace because the FAA has no jurisdiction "below the heights of nearby buildings".
Now, you can argue what those regulations should be, but the argument that FAA has no jurisdiction is a waste of everyone's time.
FAA regulates "navigable airspace"....
As you yourself pointed out, FAA regulates to the ground. That airspace surrounding airports is "surface", as are TFRs and things like flight restrictions around Division I NCAA stadiums that contain more then 30,000 people during, before and after football games. The "mode C veil" extends from the surface to 10,000' for a 30 nm radius from a class B airport. Surface.
I don't know how anyone can look at the existing FARs and think that FAA has no jurisdiction down to the surface. Only by ignoring all the "surface up to" rules can you even begin to think they are hobbled like that.
because it may crash into tall buildings.
Which is why FAA regulations prohibit flight below certain minimum altitudes. If they regulate only "navigable airspace", then how can they prohibit flight outside that airspace? You say they have no jurisdiction there -- and yet they do.
FAA has jurisdiction from the ground up within a prescribed and fairly small range of any airport, outside of that range the FAA's jurisdiction has not ever extended to anything below 500 feet.
For FAA to be able to regulate to the ground their jurisdiction has to extent to the ground. TFRs often (almost always?) extend from the ground up -- and TFRs are almost never within "a fairly small range of any airport".
This is not an issue of whether FAA has authority to regulate from the ground up, it is an issue of California requiring registration and identification of aircraft. FAA already requires registration and marking of UAV except those below a certain weight (and has much more stringent registration rules for commercial and heavy ones). CA is being redundant in requiring "license plates".
But they are joining other states that require registration and duplication of existing FAA activities. Oregon, for example, has had a long-standing pilot registration requirement, and has just enacted a registration for UAV. Idiots.
It reminds me of the ad by LifeLock where the guy in a bank in a security officer uniform tells people lying on the floor that he's not a security guard, he's just a security notifier. "I'm just here to tell people there's a robbery. There's a robbery".
"I'm not here to defend you people against asteroids about to hit the earth, I'm just here to tell you to duck. Duck."
Imagine in ten years this morphs into the Planetary Security Agency, with PSA agents and x-ray machines and anyone who jokes about an asteroid gets his asteroid inspected as a terrorist.
...says the clown who has obviously never watched the show.
I know you haven't. It's clear.
Ramsey isn't an ass with the kids like he is with the nincompoops on Hell's Kitchen.
No, he isn't, but it doesn't take the same level of abuse to make a nine year old cry as it does a 39 year old. It's odd that the other hosts don't seem to have the same effect on the kids that he does. They an manage to get the message "you didn't do this right" across without histrionics, and he cannot.
Hey, check out one of the new reality tv shows.
Masterchef Junior. It's a hoot seeing Gordon Ramsey make nine year old girls cry.
The entire reason that medical records are kept confidential in the first place is because of the privacy rights of the patient.
That's very nice. That may be why the law was written to exempt them from FOIA requests. It doesn't matter. The law doesn't include an option for a decision based on "who might object" or "who has privacy rights". It says that medical records are exempt from FOIA requests.
I've asked you a couple of times now if you want some bureaucrat making decisions about the release of your medical records based on their guess as to whether anyone would object to it. "Hmm, mark-t is dead, so he can't object. I don't know of any relatives who have standing to object. I guess I'll release the records as requested." I don't want them making that determination. If you do, that's ok for you, but the law doesn't allow it.
A dolphin does not have, and never has had any privacy rights.
And if you think that the training that the bureaucrat got regarding the laws covering FOIA and medical records talked about dolphin records, you're deluded. "What's excluded: ... C. Medical records." If you think the following Powerpoint said "What about dolphin medical records?", that's loony.
So, the autopsy looks like a medical record, whether you want to call it that or not. Here's a request for that medical record under FOIA. Medical records are exempt from FOIA requests. Therefore, the answer is "no". The letter even quoted the section of the Executive Order specifying the reason. It takes no conspiracy theory to figure out why the answer was "no". That's the point I'm making. There's nothing "fishy" about this. The official policy of the state of New Jersey regarding release of medical records is spelled out; the bureaucrat followed that guidance, which came from a Governor before Christie.
Is it a tempest in a teapot? Should an appeal of the decision grant the release? Go argue with someone else about that, because my point is that there is no conspiracy here. It's following the law and the training about that law that someone got. That's it.
My point is not merely that someone wouldn't object, my point is that someone *COULDN'T* object,
You overlook the animal rights activists. But the real point is, the LAW does not speak about the decision to release medical data being based on CAN anyone object. It talks about specific types of data.
If you die and have no known relatives, should your medical data become public information? Should a bureaucrat in some office in the state capitol decide that "nobody could object"? Is that their responsibility to decide? Do you want it to be?
And the point is, it doesn't take any wacko conspiracy theory to understand why the decision was made the way it was. All you have to do is consider what kind of training the person who makes the decision would have, and that nobody would waste training time talking about whether the "patient" is human or not, because the situation never arose before and wasn't anticipated.
Oh, no, we can't shut down or even offer to defund a state park that sees 20 visitors a year. We have to defund the schools.
This behavior is not the fault of the bureaucrats or politicians. It is learned behavior fully ingrained by years of conditioning from the voters. If you close things nobody cares about, nobody will vote for the next tax levy. If you threaten to close the library, the public pool, and the senior center, you will have a ready and willing base of voters more than happy to increase taxes upon everyone to support the things they want.
Specifically by firing teachers, not the 3rd vice principal.
1. Children interact with teachers, and therefore parents (voters) interact with them, too. "Those bastards" cannot fire the best teacher little Billy has ever had! Vote for the next tax levy!
2. Students don't like assistant principals, so parents (voters) don't care if one of them is fired.
3. The teacher's union is stronger than the vice principal's union, so there is going to be more "grass-roots" support for a tax levy to fund keeping teachers vs. vps.
The dictionary definition is irrelevant in legal space.
Not every word in a law has only a legal definition, and not every bureaucrat reads every word in a law in the purely legal sense.
It's kinda like "depends on what your definition of 'is' is."
Also, as I pointed out elsewhere, it is very likely that any limitation of the law to "individual" as "human person" was omitted in the training that this person got regarding exempt data. "What is exempt"? "C. Medical data". Do you expect every government bureaucrat to be a legal scholar?
Who could file such a lawsuit?
You do realize that the training which listed possible results of incorrect decisions would not be about specific requests, don't you? A classroom bullet point that says there is a potential for a lawsuit if a request is approved improperly wouldn't be considering that a dolphin would file the lawsuit.
A decision based on training that says "medical records are exempt" stands alone; it is well outside the job description of the person making the decision to try to guess who might object and who might file a lawsuit. Would you like your records released to me because some low-level bureaucrat didn't think you would object? And would you like to bet your job that some nutcase animal rights group wouldn't sue to try to make a point?
It's pretty simple. The easy choice is obvious. There is no conspiracy necessary.
I am not ordinarily one to speculate on conspiracy theories, but something just doesn't seem right about this.
It's not that complicated. You're an entry-level public employee who has been given the job of answering FOIA requests. There's a training class or two, perhaps live, perhaps online, where they try to cover the laws that are relevant. They certainly cannot spend the time to do so word by word, delving into the maze of twisty little passages, all alike, that is the law. There are probably Powerpoints with bullet points. "Things that are exempt from release". "C. Medical records".
Also probably front loaded into the classes (before everyone goes to sleep) are a couple of pages of "consequences of making a mistake". Such as, "lawsuit for improper release of private data".
It doesn't seem so out of pale that the request for a "medical record" would be denied like this. What are the consequences? Releasing it by mistake could mean lawsuits and job loss. Not releasing it means the requester takes it higher up the chain -- no longer my decision.
No conspiracy necessary.
It is above the pay grade of the low level bureaucrat to make the distinction between animal and human (if there is one).
If you read TFA, it shows the section of law that exempts this information from FOIA requests. It uses the term "individual". Miriam Webster lists several definitions of that word, one of which is: "of, relating to, or existing as just one member or part of a larger group". It does not specify "human" in that definition. Surely, this one dolphin was just one member of the larger group, and it certainly behaved in ways that would individuate itself from that group.
Of course, when the law was written the situation of autopsying a dolphin wasn't considered. But in this case "other animal" vs. "human" wasn't a distinction the law makes. The bureaucrat didn't need to make that decision.
So basically, the only way to avoid the bastard is to turn off automatic updating,
When the unknown notification started showing up in my task bar, the first thing I did was see what the executable behind it was and ... delete it and the entire directory that contained it. Pretty easy, except for the two-stage permission change so I could nuke it.
Never came back. gwx.exe.
Banning cell phones on airplanes has nothing to do with safety.
Actually, it does. And it has to do with the band allocations for cell phone use (FCC issue). You'd be hard pressed to claim that transmitters haven't gotten better over time, since the regulations prohibiting their use on aircraft without the operator's permission were enacted.
Neither does granting flight attendants unlimited "fuck you, do as I say or I'll make the other passengers hog tie you and when we land you'll head straight to the rape room" powers over passengers.
Actually, that regulation, too, is based on safety. The fact it may be over-used at times doesn't change the basic reason it is there.
The captain has overall authority over the flight. The flight crew are acting under his authority. If the captain, or the flight crew, doesn't tell you to sit down and buckle in when they know turbulence is about to hit, it's their responsibility when you get hurt. If you are a "you aren't the boss of me" numbskull and don't do it, then it's on you.
And who is going to sit there and hold and hit those stamps with a hammer?
There is a classic cartoon scene in which Bugs Bunny is working on the artillery shell assembly line as quality inspector. His job is to whack each shell on the tip and if it doesn't go off he marks it as a dud.
The modern meme is "whoosh".
It's funny how people are absolutely convinced that there's no way to store chemical energy
You know when you see someone go to such absurd levels of hyperbole to put words in other people's mouths that they have absolutely no rational argument to make to support their own view.