No, it isn't. The Constitution does not provide authority for a standing army, and it's quite clear from the writings of the Founding Fathers that maintaining a standing army was considered outside the authority of the federal government.
As others have noted, they're not filtering any results. They're just not suggesting piracy-related terms in the autocomplete, along with some other filtered terms like sex-related terms. Probably a prudent decision, because while returning search results for a query the user entered is fairly safe legally, prompting the user with something illegal that they didn't actively look for might be more questionable. Not sure if they could actually be liable, but it at least is less solid.
It'd be interesting to make those maps for various regions, actually. For example: Greek-owned, Jewish-owned, and Turkish-owned land in central Istanbul, 1900-2011.
Well, it's usually considered unethical to trick someone into sex under false pretenses. It's a bit impractical to actually make that illegal in most cases. But one might still want agents of the government to avoid doing it as part of their official duties.
True, but if the threshhold is "significantly affected", wouldn't it be better to test for that somehow? Plenty of things besides alcohol can have that effect, like being sleep-deprived.
1. Did public roads exist in the 18th century, when the Constitution was drafted and adopted?
2. If yes, what do you think the framers of the Constitution would have thought about an implied-consent exception to Constitutional liberties while traveling on them?
If people aren't noticeably impaired by the alcohol, isn't that sort of not a problem then? The reason for BAC limits is just because we need something objective that correlates reasonably well with impairment, not because high BAC is inherently bad.
If we administered actual "impairment" tests, different people would probably have different BAC threshholds, depending on physiology, tolerances, etc. Perhaps we should go in that direction, and make people do some sort of hand-eye coordination task, instead of testing alcohol levels...
"A Mathematician's Lament", an article that's been making the rounds among mathematicians since 2002 (but was only published in 2008), expresses some similar views, and is also a good read.
Well, they previously opened under an "open source it but make the open-source version a pain-in-the-ass to use" business model. You got a random code dump that wasn't even buildable. However, there was code there, and it was possible to fix it up, which is what the FreeNX and OpenNX projects did (along with adding a few things). With no GPL release of the core libraries, it's no longer possible to even use it as a base for a cleaned-up open-source release--- either projects will have to independently develop a fork of the previous version, or come up with something else.
Yeah, that's the part I'm missing as well. What reason are they giving for wanting this data, if they claim it should never have been collected? We can maybe guess at the real reason, but what's the official reason? Blumenthal doesn't seem to be explaining anything here.
The "low" (green) and "guarded" (blue) levels have never actually been used, and probably won't ever be, so they're only really there in theory.
Perhaps a more realistic version would've had the cutout for those two levels, but not bothered to install the color backing, because the switch would be rigged so selecting them is impossible.
There's some truth to that, I agree. I think one major reason for the changeover, though, was a period in which there was no great centralized solution. By the late 1990s, and especially early 2000s, the centralized big-iron stuff that many universities ran was just not that impressive compared to commodity x86: we could buy a relatively cheap x86 server for $2000 that ran circles around the UltraSPARC behemoth that the department was still maintaining. But virtualization and clustering on commodity hardware circa 2001 was not that great, so it wasn't particularly easy for central IT to switch. I mean, their UltraSPARC was slow, but it had 64 gigs of RAM and could support dozens of simultaneous users, something that was hard to replicate on a 2001-era x86 machine. So there was a period when everyone just bought a Dell machine and stuck it under their office desk, as the easiest upgrade path.
It's not clear to me that's still the optimal solution, though. If I just want some server that's always on and has decent hardware, we're back again at the point where central IT can fairly easily provide it to me, by giving me a VM. Or I can buy that VM myself from Amazon or some VPS provider if I want. I'm sympathetic to the argument that everything old is new again, but for my needs, the Dell-under-the-desk approach to server provisioning just doesn't seem optimal currently, though there were a few years where it was.
We're moving this way in academia as well: it used to be that every research group doing anything of note with computers had to have its own servers, but the vast majority just sit idle all the time, and the maintenance overhead and potential for maintenance disruptions is very large (if your one main server has a hard drive failure, everything is on hold until you scramble to fix it). The trend has been to virtualize those, unless you're a research group with particularly high or specific computational needs, like doing cluster-computing or systems research.
The main open question is whether the virtualization will go mainly internally or externally. Should we just buy some EC2 instances from Amazon? Or should the department (or school, or university) maintain some compute resources that individual research groups can request virtual-machines on?
Oh, interesting, sorry for the mis-labeling then. It worked for me, but I'm on a campus that subscribes to Springer journals, which are usually paywalled, so I assumed it was paywalled.
It looks like Naturwissenschaften is part of a "Springer OpenChoice" program where authors can choose to make their paper open-access by paying Springer $3,000, which these authors must've done I guess? I rarely see anyone pay those fees in my field (computer science), but I've heard that in biology grants are more willing to pay such fees.
Perhaps gender has something to do with it, but it seems likely to be more complex than this narrative of, "well most gamers used to be boys, who love dragons and shooting things, but now most gamers are girls who love cooking food and growing crops". (Actually, isn't farming a traditionally male occupation, anyway?)
The biggest confounding factor is that the technology setting is completely different. It's not very easy to put Doom inside Facebook in a way that makes any sense or gets people coming back. Facebook lends itself to games that need a little bit of interaction here and there, several times a day perhaps, but easily interruptible. People also seem to like it when stuff happens when they aren't playing, because it keeps them coming back to see what's changed. That style of gameplay naturally lends itself to "some mostly mundane stuff in the real world" types of games. You plant some crops, and over a few hours they grow, and you come back periodically. Your restaurant gets some customers coming in and out. You move your tow truck around to find cars who parked too long. That sort of thing.
While it doesn't have as much detail as this book, the FLOSSmanuals manual on Blender is a quite good introduction that's a bit more concise and to the point (and free).
A related variant: "I have a great product, I just need a marketing guy to sell it!" Sometimes the product actually isn't that great, or it solves a need that almost nobody has.
I agree, but I think that's more of a problem with the idea... I don't really agree with the analysis in the original article that it's mostly an issue of the idea person not knowing how to code. Someone with a really vague idea, and no clue about the field that idea is supposed to be in, does indeed have a lot of problems. Their problems aren't that they don't know enough C++ or Ruby or whatever to hack things up, though. It's that they don't know enough about how computers work in general to actually come up with something that would approach a "good idea": they don't have any idea what might work and what might not work, what problems are likely to come up, what the broad outlines of solutions to those problems could be, etc.
You can actually do that without knowing how to code. Freeman Dyson, for example, has some really good ideas about spaceship designs, even though he has never attempted to build any of them, and is not an expert on materials engineering (or welding). What distinguishes his ideas from those of other people who have really lame ideas about spaceship designs isn't any better or worse "development": neither Dyson nor the lame-os are capable of building any of their spaceship designs. But Dyson has a much better idea about how, hypothetically, one might do so, because he understands the domain.
Maybe it's different in areas other than tech, but in technology, both in industry and in academia, there isn't much correlation between the productivity of a worker and their tendency to "misuse the internet". There are plenty of very productive people who also post on Twitter a few times a day, take a brief detour while googling for an answer to a tech question to answer a question on StackOverflow that came up in the search, glance at a few mailing lists, and check their personal gmail compulsively. Especially for people under 35 or so, it might actually correlate positively with productivity: the kinds of people who can't keep themselves from answering StackOverflow questions, reading / posting on mailing lists, etc., are often much more proactive and plugged into many parts of the tech scene, compared to the people who just keep their head down and put in their 8 hours.
I think they'll probably go along with it. Facebook has an increasing awkwardness problem with the accounts of dead people, and has made some efforts to mitigate it via things like "memorializing" pages. To the extent that someone wants to make "figure out what to do with the dead person's Facebook account" part of the estate-resolution process, it basically takes the problem off Facebook's hands and passes it to someone else.
The main stumbling block I can think of is how to set up a procedure for handing off an account. You have to verify that the person in question really is authorized to execute the deceased's estate, and that procedure might vary from state to state or country to country, which might cause some administrative hassles for Facebook.
As with many things, making it much easier and more widespread does sometimes make a qualitative difference, so I don't think the "online" part is just a trivial implementation detail. There has always been a lot of personal information you can go down to the county courthouse to request from public records, for example, but when that information is put in an online, searchable database, things get considerably different.
Perhaps the shift from mail-order to online retail doesn't have quite the same qualitative difference, but Amazon in 2010 is definitely different than mail-order goods in even 1980, mainly because it's a much larger proportion of the total retail goods market.
That isn't the issue here. If you read the article summary, the issue is Amazon not collecting sales takes in states where they actually operate and have employees.
They're doing that via some ridiculous loopholes, which I'm surprised actually stand up to scrutiny. The main one is that they claim many of their warehouses aren't actually "Amazon" warehouses, and the employees aren't "Amazon" employees, because they're owned and operated by subsidiaries. Their Texas operations, for example, are owned and operated by Amazon.com.kydc, Inc., which they assure you is not the same business as Amazon.com, Inc., so they don't collect Texas sales taxes.
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No, it isn't. The Constitution does not provide authority for a standing army, and it's quite clear from the writings of the Founding Fathers that maintaining a standing army was considered outside the authority of the federal government.
Sounds like a good argument for eliminating BART fares as well!
As others have noted, they're not filtering any results. They're just not suggesting piracy-related terms in the autocomplete, along with some other filtered terms like sex-related terms. Probably a prudent decision, because while returning search results for a query the user entered is fairly safe legally, prompting the user with something illegal that they didn't actively look for might be more questionable. Not sure if they could actually be liable, but it at least is less solid.
It'd be interesting to make those maps for various regions, actually. For example: Greek-owned, Jewish-owned, and Turkish-owned land in central Istanbul, 1900-2011.
Well, it's usually considered unethical to trick someone into sex under false pretenses. It's a bit impractical to actually make that illegal in most cases. But one might still want agents of the government to avoid doing it as part of their official duties.
True, but if the threshhold is "significantly affected", wouldn't it be better to test for that somehow? Plenty of things besides alcohol can have that effect, like being sleep-deprived.
Two questions:
1. Did public roads exist in the 18th century, when the Constitution was drafted and adopted?
2. If yes, what do you think the framers of the Constitution would have thought about an implied-consent exception to Constitutional liberties while traveling on them?
If people aren't noticeably impaired by the alcohol, isn't that sort of not a problem then? The reason for BAC limits is just because we need something objective that correlates reasonably well with impairment, not because high BAC is inherently bad.
If we administered actual "impairment" tests, different people would probably have different BAC threshholds, depending on physiology, tolerances, etc. Perhaps we should go in that direction, and make people do some sort of hand-eye coordination task, instead of testing alcohol levels...
"A Mathematician's Lament", an article that's been making the rounds among mathematicians since 2002 (but was only published in 2008), expresses some similar views, and is also a good read.
Well, they previously opened under an "open source it but make the open-source version a pain-in-the-ass to use" business model. You got a random code dump that wasn't even buildable. However, there was code there, and it was possible to fix it up, which is what the FreeNX and OpenNX projects did (along with adding a few things). With no GPL release of the core libraries, it's no longer possible to even use it as a base for a cleaned-up open-source release--- either projects will have to independently develop a fork of the previous version, or come up with something else.
Yeah, that's the part I'm missing as well. What reason are they giving for wanting this data, if they claim it should never have been collected? We can maybe guess at the real reason, but what's the official reason? Blumenthal doesn't seem to be explaining anything here.
The "low" (green) and "guarded" (blue) levels have never actually been used, and probably won't ever be, so they're only really there in theory.
Perhaps a more realistic version would've had the cutout for those two levels, but not bothered to install the color backing, because the switch would be rigged so selecting them is impossible.
There's some truth to that, I agree. I think one major reason for the changeover, though, was a period in which there was no great centralized solution. By the late 1990s, and especially early 2000s, the centralized big-iron stuff that many universities ran was just not that impressive compared to commodity x86: we could buy a relatively cheap x86 server for $2000 that ran circles around the UltraSPARC behemoth that the department was still maintaining. But virtualization and clustering on commodity hardware circa 2001 was not that great, so it wasn't particularly easy for central IT to switch. I mean, their UltraSPARC was slow, but it had 64 gigs of RAM and could support dozens of simultaneous users, something that was hard to replicate on a 2001-era x86 machine. So there was a period when everyone just bought a Dell machine and stuck it under their office desk, as the easiest upgrade path.
It's not clear to me that's still the optimal solution, though. If I just want some server that's always on and has decent hardware, we're back again at the point where central IT can fairly easily provide it to me, by giving me a VM. Or I can buy that VM myself from Amazon or some VPS provider if I want. I'm sympathetic to the argument that everything old is new again, but for my needs, the Dell-under-the-desk approach to server provisioning just doesn't seem optimal currently, though there were a few years where it was.
We're moving this way in academia as well: it used to be that every research group doing anything of note with computers had to have its own servers, but the vast majority just sit idle all the time, and the maintenance overhead and potential for maintenance disruptions is very large (if your one main server has a hard drive failure, everything is on hold until you scramble to fix it). The trend has been to virtualize those, unless you're a research group with particularly high or specific computational needs, like doing cluster-computing or systems research.
The main open question is whether the virtualization will go mainly internally or externally. Should we just buy some EC2 instances from Amazon? Or should the department (or school, or university) maintain some compute resources that individual research groups can request virtual-machines on?
Oh, interesting, sorry for the mis-labeling then. It worked for me, but I'm on a campus that subscribes to Springer journals, which are usually paywalled, so I assumed it was paywalled.
It looks like Naturwissenschaften is part of a "Springer OpenChoice" program where authors can choose to make their paper open-access by paying Springer $3,000, which these authors must've done I guess? I rarely see anyone pay those fees in my field (computer science), but I've heard that in biology grants are more willing to pay such fees.
It's unfortunately paywalled, but in case anyone has access to a library with a subscription, the journal article this news article is about is:
Plotkin et al. (2010). Solar energy harvesting in the epicuticle of the oriental hornet (Vespa orientalis). Naturwissenschaften 97(12): 1067-1076.
Perhaps gender has something to do with it, but it seems likely to be more complex than this narrative of, "well most gamers used to be boys, who love dragons and shooting things, but now most gamers are girls who love cooking food and growing crops". (Actually, isn't farming a traditionally male occupation, anyway?)
The biggest confounding factor is that the technology setting is completely different. It's not very easy to put Doom inside Facebook in a way that makes any sense or gets people coming back. Facebook lends itself to games that need a little bit of interaction here and there, several times a day perhaps, but easily interruptible. People also seem to like it when stuff happens when they aren't playing, because it keeps them coming back to see what's changed. That style of gameplay naturally lends itself to "some mostly mundane stuff in the real world" types of games. You plant some crops, and over a few hours they grow, and you come back periodically. Your restaurant gets some customers coming in and out. You move your tow truck around to find cars who parked too long. That sort of thing.
In theory it seems that more competition should be good for prices, but not so far: everything I looked up is priced identically to the Kindle price.
While it doesn't have as much detail as this book, the FLOSSmanuals manual on Blender is a quite good introduction that's a bit more concise and to the point (and free).
A related variant: "I have a great product, I just need a marketing guy to sell it!" Sometimes the product actually isn't that great, or it solves a need that almost nobody has.
I agree, but I think that's more of a problem with the idea... I don't really agree with the analysis in the original article that it's mostly an issue of the idea person not knowing how to code. Someone with a really vague idea, and no clue about the field that idea is supposed to be in, does indeed have a lot of problems. Their problems aren't that they don't know enough C++ or Ruby or whatever to hack things up, though. It's that they don't know enough about how computers work in general to actually come up with something that would approach a "good idea": they don't have any idea what might work and what might not work, what problems are likely to come up, what the broad outlines of solutions to those problems could be, etc.
You can actually do that without knowing how to code. Freeman Dyson, for example, has some really good ideas about spaceship designs, even though he has never attempted to build any of them, and is not an expert on materials engineering (or welding). What distinguishes his ideas from those of other people who have really lame ideas about spaceship designs isn't any better or worse "development": neither Dyson nor the lame-os are capable of building any of their spaceship designs. But Dyson has a much better idea about how, hypothetically, one might do so, because he understands the domain.
Maybe it's different in areas other than tech, but in technology, both in industry and in academia, there isn't much correlation between the productivity of a worker and their tendency to "misuse the internet". There are plenty of very productive people who also post on Twitter a few times a day, take a brief detour while googling for an answer to a tech question to answer a question on StackOverflow that came up in the search, glance at a few mailing lists, and check their personal gmail compulsively. Especially for people under 35 or so, it might actually correlate positively with productivity: the kinds of people who can't keep themselves from answering StackOverflow questions, reading / posting on mailing lists, etc., are often much more proactive and plugged into many parts of the tech scene, compared to the people who just keep their head down and put in their 8 hours.
I think they'll probably go along with it. Facebook has an increasing awkwardness problem with the accounts of dead people, and has made some efforts to mitigate it via things like "memorializing" pages. To the extent that someone wants to make "figure out what to do with the dead person's Facebook account" part of the estate-resolution process, it basically takes the problem off Facebook's hands and passes it to someone else.
The main stumbling block I can think of is how to set up a procedure for handing off an account. You have to verify that the person in question really is authorized to execute the deceased's estate, and that procedure might vary from state to state or country to country, which might cause some administrative hassles for Facebook.
As with many things, making it much easier and more widespread does sometimes make a qualitative difference, so I don't think the "online" part is just a trivial implementation detail. There has always been a lot of personal information you can go down to the county courthouse to request from public records, for example, but when that information is put in an online, searchable database, things get considerably different.
Perhaps the shift from mail-order to online retail doesn't have quite the same qualitative difference, but Amazon in 2010 is definitely different than mail-order goods in even 1980, mainly because it's a much larger proportion of the total retail goods market.
That isn't the issue here. If you read the article summary, the issue is Amazon not collecting sales takes in states where they actually operate and have employees.
They're doing that via some ridiculous loopholes, which I'm surprised actually stand up to scrutiny. The main one is that they claim many of their warehouses aren't actually "Amazon" warehouses, and the employees aren't "Amazon" employees, because they're owned and operated by subsidiaries. Their Texas operations, for example, are owned and operated by Amazon.com.kydc, Inc., which they assure you is not the same business as Amazon.com, Inc., so they don't collect Texas sales taxes.