Suppose an agency of the state of Idaho gave out a tax deal to a corporation. There's several ways this deal could be illegal. It could be in conflict with some applicable Federal law or the state Constitution, or the agency simply may not have the authority to make such a deal. In such a case, the corporation would be liable for taxes as defined by Federal and Idaho law, regardless of what they'd been assured of. This is not a case of the law being changed retroactively, it's a case of the corporation misinterpreting the law existing at the time of filing taxes.
This is not the same as negotiating with another private party. If I buy something from a company, then the company and I together determine the price and make the deal. The company is not required by law to charge a certain price, and the law will protect neither me nor the company if the price is badly negotiated.
As far as the IRS goes, you owe your legally determined taxes, despite any mistakes anyone may have made. No auditor or regional office has the power to change the law, and there are no "deals" here.
Of course, if what you're doing is in line with what the IRS told you to do, you're not going to be dinged for fraud. That doesn't mean anything you can talk one of their auditors into is legal.
Velocity relative to me doesn't count here. What was the relative velocity? It sounds like it was a collision between a satellite at orbital velocity, and an incoming particle at roughly Earth escape velocity, but without the actual vectors it tells me little about the speed of impact.
The meter was originally as stated, the size to make it ten thousand kilometers from the equator to the North Pole through Lyons. After that measurement was determined, the meter became the distance between two scratches on a bar. Eventually, it and the second were determined by the speed of light in a vacuum and a very particular way of generating EM radiation.
The liter was originally supposed to be one cubic decimeter, and the kilogram was supposed to be the mass of a liter of water. They missed, and the liter is no longer exactly a cubic decimeter (although it is a kilogram of water). The kilogram is, last I checked, the only basic unit defined as an artifact, specifically a piece of metal massing (by definition) a kilogram. There's been talk of finding a reproducible way of determining it, but it has to be a practicable measurement that has at least as good accuracy as what we've got now.
One advantage of the metric system is that almost every country uses it, most in everyday use. The US is weird in that it normally uses certain units defined in relation to the metric system: for example, the legal definition of an inch in the US is 25.4mm. Another is that there's not more than one unit with the same name. A ton can be 2000 or 2240 pounds (a megagram is about 2204 tons, and is often referred to as a ton). There are different miles, the most commonly used ones being the statute and nautical miles. Then there's the obvious advantage that the calculations are a lot easier. Even though I know how many inches are in a statute mile, 63360 is not an easy number to do mental calculations with.
I don't see humanity changing from the metric system ever. There's no replacement system that would be significantly better.
You aren't aware that most of experimental psychology is the psychology of Western college freshmen taking psychology courses? (Yes, this is a big problem.)
Pre-OSX MacOS files had two four-byte identifiers, for file type and subtype. Applications (to be run) had 'APPL' in the file type and the application name in the subtype. Other files would have the application name that created them or would run them in the type, and what they individually were in the subtype. Post-OSX, file names did have extensions, but the extensions did not determine what could execute, that being determined by the permission bits.
It was a long time ago, but I believe CP/M figured that anything with a.COM extension was runnable, and MS picked up on that.
How about a situation where self-driving cars are known to be about twice as safe as regular? That would mean something like 15K traffic fatalities a year from self-driving cars, after the changeover. Your reply was not germane to GP's question.
Most things aren't commercially viable when invented. Most products have gone through phases like "This would be cool"..."this mostly works in the lab"..."we could probably sell this if we could get the price down"..."we've sold a few in test markets and these are the problems we're finding"..."this works well enough but it's still too expensive for large-scale merchandizing"..."this is ready for prime time"..."BUY IT USED AT JOE'S".
I live in Minnesota, and I have problems when I encounter black ice. It wouldn't take that much for a self-driving car to be better at handling it than I am.
Up until a few years ago, it was assumed that cars had drivers, and there might well be laws referring to "the driver" in ways that would require one to be present.
I have my own domain which I use for email. One very unpleasant week a spammer decided to use my domain name to allegedly send email from, using a very large numbers of fictitious accounts in that domain. I was hit with something on the order of four thousand backscatter spam messages in one day. If you have a first name that's not too rare in the US, there has been at least one email sent with your name @ my email domain.
What the FDA really needs to do is ease up on "me-too" products. The latest drug price scandals were not a result of drug patents, but because getting permission to sell something like an Epi-Pen takes a long time and is expensive. So, drug company A produces something, realizes it's got a monopoly, and raises the price a lot. Drug company B can take a year or three and spend lots of money and get permission to produce the same thing, and drug company A then drops the price to previous levels to hurt drug company B. Most countries do their own negotiation of drug prices, and have a lot of leverage, but the free market would do almost as well for out-of-patent drugs if it weren't for the friction in entering the market.
The problem is that we can't break GR and QM adequately with current experiments and observations. Until we can break a scientific theory, we can't replace it.
I'm most interested in their art, culture, philosophy, and religion. We have millennia of practice and study of human thought in these fields, and it would be fascinating to have something to compare it to.
To give one example: some people have spiritual experiences. These are either real or based on some oddities of brain evolution, and a completely different evolution situation would be unlikely to come up with the same oddities.
For all the complaining I see, the Democrats don't seem harder on the Second Amendment than Republicans in practice. The D gun crackpots spout different nonsense from the R gun crackpots, but I haven't seen much of a difference at the national level.
The Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states. The First Amendment therefore applies to all levels of government.
Zoning laws tend to restrict what can be built and what neighborhood impact is acceptable. The city's not going to come down on you for sitting in your home writing software or fiction or something. The city is going to say that you can't tear down your house and build an office building, or use your house in a residential zone as an office building. In this case, the city is trying to reserve some land for facilities other than office buildings for software companies, and not necessarily doing it in the best way.
It would take some pretty egregious zoning laws to violate the Bill of Rights (allowing Christian but not Muslim churches would qualify), and since zoning laws are not Federal laws many of the restrictions of the Constitution just don't apply.
My point is that I am using definitions that were solidly in existence before I was born. You're the one who is trying to limit science fiction to the point that most things called "science fiction" up through the 1960s don't qualify. You are rejecting most of Heinlein and Asimov, to name two. Asimov tossed off the term "positronic brain" just because he thought it sounded cool, and just assumed strong AI, which we're still a good distance from. His Lucky Starr juveniles tried to deal with real science in an environment of magic spaceships.
If you want to label your little corner something like "hard science fiction", that's more reasonable.
Of course C++ is a close descendant of C (and Simula 67, for that matter). However, it is a distinct language, and I will advise very different things for writing in C++ than I will for writing in C.
Get yourself a halfway reasonable C++ coding standard that can be enforced easily, and you eliminate most or all of the problems you're talking about. I haven't found a language I can't write screwed-up code in if I want to, so I'm not real interested when you talk about deliberately abusing languages. I've written bugs in every language I've tried seriously, so the question is not whether I can write bugs but how likely I am to write bugs. With modern C++, the likelihood is no greater than in other languages.
I've been working in this place for nearly nine years now, and we haven't done any of the things you suggest as ways to screw up. It's been much longer since I've written a delete statement, because there are easy ways to avoid the necessity now.
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Suppose an agency of the state of Idaho gave out a tax deal to a corporation. There's several ways this deal could be illegal. It could be in conflict with some applicable Federal law or the state Constitution, or the agency simply may not have the authority to make such a deal. In such a case, the corporation would be liable for taxes as defined by Federal and Idaho law, regardless of what they'd been assured of. This is not a case of the law being changed retroactively, it's a case of the corporation misinterpreting the law existing at the time of filing taxes.
This is not the same as negotiating with another private party. If I buy something from a company, then the company and I together determine the price and make the deal. The company is not required by law to charge a certain price, and the law will protect neither me nor the company if the price is badly negotiated.
As far as the IRS goes, you owe your legally determined taxes, despite any mistakes anyone may have made. No auditor or regional office has the power to change the law, and there are no "deals" here.
Of course, if what you're doing is in line with what the IRS told you to do, you're not going to be dinged for fraud. That doesn't mean anything you can talk one of their auditors into is legal.
I watch it. I'm old enough to not give a crap about whether something I like is age-appropriate.
Velocity relative to me doesn't count here. What was the relative velocity? It sounds like it was a collision between a satellite at orbital velocity, and an incoming particle at roughly Earth escape velocity, but without the actual vectors it tells me little about the speed of impact.
The meter was originally as stated, the size to make it ten thousand kilometers from the equator to the North Pole through Lyons. After that measurement was determined, the meter became the distance between two scratches on a bar. Eventually, it and the second were determined by the speed of light in a vacuum and a very particular way of generating EM radiation.
The liter was originally supposed to be one cubic decimeter, and the kilogram was supposed to be the mass of a liter of water. They missed, and the liter is no longer exactly a cubic decimeter (although it is a kilogram of water). The kilogram is, last I checked, the only basic unit defined as an artifact, specifically a piece of metal massing (by definition) a kilogram. There's been talk of finding a reproducible way of determining it, but it has to be a practicable measurement that has at least as good accuracy as what we've got now.
One advantage of the metric system is that almost every country uses it, most in everyday use. The US is weird in that it normally uses certain units defined in relation to the metric system: for example, the legal definition of an inch in the US is 25.4mm. Another is that there's not more than one unit with the same name. A ton can be 2000 or 2240 pounds (a megagram is about 2204 tons, and is often referred to as a ton). There are different miles, the most commonly used ones being the statute and nautical miles. Then there's the obvious advantage that the calculations are a lot easier. Even though I know how many inches are in a statute mile, 63360 is not an easy number to do mental calculations with.
I don't see humanity changing from the metric system ever. There's no replacement system that would be significantly better.
Actually, no. The majority of people believe in God*, but God is not normally envisioned as invisible or in the sky.
*A slight majority of humanity is Christian or Muslim, and there are some other monotheistic beliefs.
You aren't aware that most of experimental psychology is the psychology of Western college freshmen taking psychology courses? (Yes, this is a big problem.)
Pre-OSX MacOS files had two four-byte identifiers, for file type and subtype. Applications (to be run) had 'APPL' in the file type and the application name in the subtype. Other files would have the application name that created them or would run them in the type, and what they individually were in the subtype. Post-OSX, file names did have extensions, but the extensions did not determine what could execute, that being determined by the permission bits.
It was a long time ago, but I believe CP/M figured that anything with a .COM extension was runnable, and MS picked up on that.
In what way is this different from you just slapping in your own braking system?
How about a situation where self-driving cars are known to be about twice as safe as regular? That would mean something like 15K traffic fatalities a year from self-driving cars, after the changeover. Your reply was not germane to GP's question.
Most things aren't commercially viable when invented. Most products have gone through phases like "This would be cool"..."this mostly works in the lab"..."we could probably sell this if we could get the price down"..."we've sold a few in test markets and these are the problems we're finding"..."this works well enough but it's still too expensive for large-scale merchandizing"..."this is ready for prime time"..."BUY IT USED AT JOE'S".
I live in Minnesota, and I have problems when I encounter black ice. It wouldn't take that much for a self-driving car to be better at handling it than I am.
Up until a few years ago, it was assumed that cars had drivers, and there might well be laws referring to "the driver" in ways that would require one to be present.
I have my own domain which I use for email. One very unpleasant week a spammer decided to use my domain name to allegedly send email from, using a very large numbers of fictitious accounts in that domain. I was hit with something on the order of four thousand backscatter spam messages in one day. If you have a first name that's not too rare in the US, there has been at least one email sent with your name @ my email domain.
What the FDA really needs to do is ease up on "me-too" products. The latest drug price scandals were not a result of drug patents, but because getting permission to sell something like an Epi-Pen takes a long time and is expensive. So, drug company A produces something, realizes it's got a monopoly, and raises the price a lot. Drug company B can take a year or three and spend lots of money and get permission to produce the same thing, and drug company A then drops the price to previous levels to hurt drug company B. Most countries do their own negotiation of drug prices, and have a lot of leverage, but the free market would do almost as well for out-of-patent drugs if it weren't for the friction in entering the market.
The problem is that we can't break GR and QM adequately with current experiments and observations. Until we can break a scientific theory, we can't replace it.
I'm most interested in their art, culture, philosophy, and religion. We have millennia of practice and study of human thought in these fields, and it would be fascinating to have something to compare it to.
To give one example: some people have spiritual experiences. These are either real or based on some oddities of brain evolution, and a completely different evolution situation would be unlikely to come up with the same oddities.
For all the complaining I see, the Democrats don't seem harder on the Second Amendment than Republicans in practice. The D gun crackpots spout different nonsense from the R gun crackpots, but I haven't seen much of a difference at the national level.
Sounds to me like Palo Alto is restricting expansion of the software business, not removing it.
The Supreme Court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states. The First Amendment therefore applies to all levels of government.
Zoning laws tend to restrict what can be built and what neighborhood impact is acceptable. The city's not going to come down on you for sitting in your home writing software or fiction or something. The city is going to say that you can't tear down your house and build an office building, or use your house in a residential zone as an office building. In this case, the city is trying to reserve some land for facilities other than office buildings for software companies, and not necessarily doing it in the best way.
It would take some pretty egregious zoning laws to violate the Bill of Rights (allowing Christian but not Muslim churches would qualify), and since zoning laws are not Federal laws many of the restrictions of the Constitution just don't apply.
So what you're saying is that conservatives have no sense of humor, and can't comprehend sarcasm or irony?
My point is that I am using definitions that were solidly in existence before I was born. You're the one who is trying to limit science fiction to the point that most things called "science fiction" up through the 1960s don't qualify. You are rejecting most of Heinlein and Asimov, to name two. Asimov tossed off the term "positronic brain" just because he thought it sounded cool, and just assumed strong AI, which we're still a good distance from. His Lucky Starr juveniles tried to deal with real science in an environment of magic spaceships.
If you want to label your little corner something like "hard science fiction", that's more reasonable.
Of course C++ is a close descendant of C (and Simula 67, for that matter). However, it is a distinct language, and I will advise very different things for writing in C++ than I will for writing in C.
Get yourself a halfway reasonable C++ coding standard that can be enforced easily, and you eliminate most or all of the problems you're talking about. I haven't found a language I can't write screwed-up code in if I want to, so I'm not real interested when you talk about deliberately abusing languages. I've written bugs in every language I've tried seriously, so the question is not whether I can write bugs but how likely I am to write bugs. With modern C++, the likelihood is no greater than in other languages.
I've been working in this place for nearly nine years now, and we haven't done any of the things you suggest as ways to screw up. It's been much longer since I've written a delete statement, because there are easy ways to avoid the necessity now.