What chemical process is converting the CO2, into not-CO2? He's not burying that carbon deep enough to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few days. Best case for him, perhaps some nitrogen compounds in the exhaust are ending up in the soil, but otherwise, this sounds like a gimmick.
If your network access is linear, then it's buggy. If the protocol specifies a linear stream, then it's buggy. I'm only half-joking -- by the time we get around to fixing these problems (how much do we have invested in TCP/IP?) they will bite hard and people will commit vile ugly hacks to get around them.
I think it happens all the time. Even in dinky town meetings, what gets passed (which often looks like a bunch of context diffs) is the law; we may discuss it in terms of what it looks like with the diffs applied, and we may catch errors in the diffs and correct them before we vote, but what we vote on is the official thing. Sometimes we have to vote again, a few months later, to correct what are clearly clerical errors, and the clearly clerical errors, if they can easily be ignored in the interim, are ignored, but nobody pretends that they aren't law.
It does sometimes happen that the people in charge of enforcing the law, do not understand what is intended, or perhaps the law is not written clearly; at a recent public meeting the town planning and economic development manager professed not to know what the phrase "six or zero" meant for side setback, when it had been repeatedly described as intended to mean "a minimum of six feet, except that zero is also allowed" (which is perhaps how it ought to be phrased, but it was patched into one of those tables with a column titled "minimum"). The idea is that if buildings are not actually abutting, then the alley between them must be usefully wide enough to allow trash removal, etc.
No, you're owed what the judge says you are owed. The programmers draw the lines, the judge makes the calls, and the lawyer makes your case to the judge.
Nope, he wasn't a big-time developer. Thought he was going to retire and die before 60, just like his father, uncles, grandfathers, etc, but instead he lived into his 90s (so did his brothers, one cousin lived to 100+, another made it to 110) and took up citrus growing.
He wrote his memoirs in his 80s, it is very interesting to contrast How Things Were to How Things Are.
Well, think about Venice. Think about the Netherlands. We might spend quite a lot. One of the big problems with the uncertainty of just what the future holds, is that we don't know whether money spent on flood mitigation is sensible or futile. For anyone who takes a reasonably long view (50 years or more) and is about to spend money on buildings and/or infrastructure, I think this matters (our town's high school is not too high above sea level, and it is due for a major renovation or rebuild in the next decade. So, should we spend extra money to elevate the foundation a few feet? How much money? How many feet? Or should we simply move it, just in case?)
Note, also, that we already spend a lot on bridges. Have a look at Pinellas County, Florida (I grew up there). There are 7-8 roads connecting the county to the rest of the state -- US 19, SR 582, SR580/584, Courtney-Campbell Causeway, Gandy Bridge, Howard-Franklin Bridge, Sunshine Skyway. So on the one hand, they stand to lose a lot if sea level goes up a meter (the non-bridge roads are also pretty close to sea level), on the other hand, they built those bridges once, they can build them again. They've already rebuilt the Sunshine Skyway once, after a ship hit the old one, and they've renovated the Courtney-Campbell since I was a kid -- oy, just now remembered something else from my younger days -- when the water table rises under your road, the roadbed goes all to heck, and just a few trucks turn it into crumbly asphalt soup. File that one under stupid developer tricks, but it was fun to watch.
I am not too keen on the whole vilify-the-fatties thing, because this is NOT 100% an issue of individual actions. We are influenced by our friends, we are influenced by physical cues. We also subsidize fat in various ways, everything from relatively low taxes on gasoline (easier to drive than to walk/bike or walk to transit) to crazy farm policies. This stuff didn't just happen in a vacuum.
Agreed, really poor choice of colors. I'm not sure what Tufte says about this particular problem -- the snap answer is to say that "zero" and a region around it should be some distinct, neutral color (white? but what about my monitor's color balance?) with clearly different colors for + and -. But you'd like to mix some sort of an area measure in, too -- if the whole continent had declined uniformly at a rate of.1 meters/annum, that would be alarming, even though.1 is well within the "cannot tell WTF color that is" range.
By-the-way, speaking of presentation critiques, notice how the legend under the colors is "ma-1", even though there was plenty of room to write "meters/annum" or even "meters per year"? Human factors, they matter. It costs you nothing to communicate to a wider audience, slightly more quickly and clearly.
Whereas we can totally trust profit-seeking industry to give us the straight talk? Nuh-uh. Game/economic theory says that if spewing disinformation results in a net profit, it will happen, otherwise they are not treating their shareholders right. They're not supposed to be moral or ethical; they are supposed to turn a profit, on whatever timescale their investors think is appropriate.
Neither "side" is necessarily trustworthy, but one side has clear motives to be untrustworthy.
Note, also, that the power-seeking politicians generally tend to be motivated by more tangible graft, and not abstractions like "carbon tax" or "cap-and-trade". The stuff I am familiar with, is bribes for regulatory favors, sweetheart government contracts for friends and family, and (ahem) hikes on the Appalachian trail, high-priced call girls, and plain old nepotism.
It would be a bit more comforting to see some numbers to accompany your estimate. I say this, because, on the one hand I know that in the space of 100 years Florida when from barely populated to what it is today (my great-grandfather moved there there in the early 1920s, now it is 6% of the US population), but on the other hand, in the town I live in today (some miles inland, but in the Charles and Mystic river watersheds), there's a thousand or so houses too close to sea level. One town, a thousand homes, $.5M/home, pretty soon we are talking about real money.
How we plan to cope is what I find interesting. If you figure that there is a range of human expectations (optimist to pessimist), you can well imagine that optimists will push for drainage infrastructure and personally invest in better sump pumps ("swamps can be drained" and lots of Houston, including Rice U., used to be a marsh). Pessimists already own property quite a few meters above sea level (would you believe I checked this in 1994? I did.)
The problem for some coastal places, in particular Florida, is that the rising sea will not only make land uninhabitable, it will also reduce groundwater resupply. Simply reducing the surface area of the state, will reduce the amount of rain that falls on it, and reduce its natural water supply. There's workarounds for that, too -- Tampa already has a desalinization plant, and last I heard, there was much discussion of whether they should take the money saving step of recycling sewage instead of seawater (it's cheaper, less dissolved salts).
But making it sound like it was literally (liberally!) dampened, could be fun. "Gurgle, sploosh, bloop."
I think I need this for my bicycle. It's very quite.
I run LEDs, permanently attached to my bicycle, which sits outdoors year-round, and is wired to be on whenever the bicycle is moving. Heat/cold/rain/snow/vibration have not killed them yet. I have them on my kid's bikes too, including some that I recycled from earlier versions of my bike lights. I have nine in my kitchen under cabinets, running near continuously (at 11watts, they are the first lights on, and the last lights off). How do you think your bathroom compares? The tenth one (cheaper in bulk) sits on my night-time bike helmet
The electronics are efficient switching power supplies, and are potted in epoxy.
LEDs (what the original article was about, not that anyone seems to care) reach full brightness as fast as you get the power to them, give or take a few microseconds. Biggest delay in all the LEDs that I use is (for some of them) the low quality of the switching wall-wart that powers them. The ones on my bike, and on my helmet, are instant-on.
For at least one combination of LED and motion detector, yes, because I am doing just that for an outdoor light.
LEDs have no particular problem with being turned on and off quickly -- for dimming below about 1/2 power, it is recommended that you chop them, typically at frequencies above several hundred Hertz (so as to avoid visible flicker).
LEDs have no particular sensitivity to the cold; they are more efficient and last longer when cold. Too hot, they become less efficient and it shortens their lifetime (which is nominally 50-100K hours, depending on the LED).
No, many people, especially those in cars, follow the laws.
inspired me to make my first Youtube video. After reading our claim, on my way home from work, I recorded one minute of traffic at a stop sign (one take, no retries). 6 cars, no full stops, 3 blatant runs, and nobody "stopping" at the stop line. (And the first car, the one that mostly nearly stopped, did so because it was impeded by a car in front of it that did not make the take.) I will admit, this is not a large statistical study, but 0 for 6 would be pretty unusual if even 50% of the cars on the road "stopped at all stop signs".
You might well argue that it ought not be a stop sign, but it IS a stop sign.
And if you ever drive on the interstates, at least those in Massachusetts, you will observe that, outside of traffic jams, about 90-95% of the cars on the road are exceeding the speed limit. Unless we get to pick and choose which laws are important in which situations, I'd say that we're all living in glass houses.
Money IS part of the object of this bill; one hope is that if we move to a system similar to the rest of the OECD countries, we might (like them) not only deliver better and universal care, but also save money. Some of the spending might be shifted from "payroll deductions (health insurance)" to "payroll deductions (tax)", but overall, every other country on the planet spends less per capita, and less as a percentage of GDP. Because we're a wealthy country, it's not unusual that we spend a lot per capita, but it is unusual that (as a wealthy country) we spend such a large portion of our GDP, especially when we deliver such inferior (life expectancy, infant mortality) results.
Note that the sense that we are a "wealthy country" has changed in the last few decades; despite continuing increases in productivity, very little of that (adjusted for inflation) has trickled down to most people. We've had a more progressive tax code in the past; it didn't kill us, or the economy.
It is possible to oppose the bill but not oppose reform, but what we've got so far, is the bill. The pattern thus far from reform opponents (who are in the political minority, at least at the moment, and must work carefully) is this sort of dodgy nitpicking -- concern trolling on a grand scale. Thus, opposition to reform is indistinguishable from opposition to the bill. And it's possible that the author meant nothing of the sort and had some other message in mind, but if he intends to communicate that message, he needs to know about this mistake. As a counter-concern-troll, I am doing my earnest best to let him know that there are better ways to illustrate the problems posed by the way we write laws. In particular, if he took an existing law that has had some unintended consequences, he could demonstrate how the way the bill was written, led to problems in the law. Health care reform, though topical, does not allow him to demonstrate this, since it hasn't happened yet.
My understanding is that the bill does not suck too badly, though yes, it could be better (this is generally true of laws, software, healthcare, etc). It moves us towards a Bismarck-style system (Germany, Switzerland -- you still buy health insurance, but the companies are heavily regulated), and that the advantage to this is that it is a minimal change for those people who have employer-provided health care (which is already somewhat regulated). HOWEVER, considering other countries costs and outcomes, it is likely that we would save more money if we either went to a national insurance plan (Canada) or national health service (England) -- both choices that should be completely adequate, based on their measured life expectancy and infant mortality. This compromise, between minimum change for people who are already "in" a working system, and getting an overall better (more affordable, better outcomes, universal) place, is part of what leads to the complexity. I'd rather have attainable+better than wait for unattainable+perfect.
Consider, if you will, COBRA. A Kennedy-sponsored half-measure, nothing like real health reform, it passed through that dreaded "budget reconciliation process" (that's the B and R in COBRA). I have this sick fear that the spaghetti language in ordinary bills, looks like blended spaghetti made into sausage after "reconciliation". Nonetheless, a damn good thing to have when you lose your job, especially if you have a kid on the way -- and even though I am sure that the bill looked horrible, I can understand the resulting law pretty well, at least as it has related to me through two job changes.
Ditto that. Laws are long, written in English, and sometimes written in this incremental-edit style. I've seen it done with by-laws in town meeting, so this is not that surprising.
I think that this actually tends to inhibit change -- the gripe about "not understanding" is somewhat misplaced, because anything that scores too high on not-understanding is less popular when it comes time to vote. "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/whatever" is essentially a statement that the status quo is safe, so why vote for something that you are not pretty sure you know the effects of? Certainly at the town level, if the subject of a vote looks too convoluted or tricky, it tends to attract fewer votes. At least in our town, I think this is causing actual problems (example: the zoning rules are clearly wrong, because existing structures, that people claim to like, could not be rebuilt under the current rules, and when houses are scraped-and-replaced with conforming structures, people complain about the size and the "loom". I've seen zoning rules that reduce "loom" -- in Palo Alto, for example -- and those are complex and scary, compared to the nice, simple, broken rules we have now. So, because complexity is scary, we stick with simple and broken.)
At the town level, complexity is dealt with somewhat by caucusing and discussing the measures before hand ("what's this for? did anyone thing about XYZ?"), and by pinging people who pay attention to particular areas of the law (I know who to ask about historical districts, affordable housing, special ed, and sewers, without even stopping to think hard). It is definitely not the case that each town meeting member sits down and tries to understand this stuff on their own. Note also that the "law" that emerges is not the bill that created it -- once the edits are applied, you get a single document, and sometimes the people who are working to understand the law before it is voted on, review the resulting document, and not just the diffs from current. You're not "required to understand" the diffs, you're required to understand the result that emerges.
I don't recommend reading TFA, or any of its sequelae. Given recent history of manufactured teapot-tempests, I think this is just more anti-health-reform trollery. Sorry if I'm mistaken, but if so, the author picked a particularly poor time/way to make the point that he intended to make -- if he intended to communicate a particular point, and that communication was important to him, the health-care tie-in distracts from the intended message.
Right, except that worse is better only when the "market" is not already large and crowded. Imagine C getting traction in a world of programmers who were already experienced in (choose your modern poison) Java, Clojure, Python, and Haskell. This Unix-philosophy browser could just be an elaborate joke to see how many people they can sucker into using it. (Be sure that one of the "developers" isn't Ickday Abrielgay.)
And thinking of C, I surely imagine that this browser would have no built-in protections against Bad Guys playing tricks with Unicode in domain names -- for example duy.com (love to know how THAT displays later) -- you could write a plug-in to deal with it, so doesn't need to be part of the browser.
First, damage to property is not violence. The proper response is to seize the assets of anyone connected with the plot, and prosecute the case as a crime.
Looks like we are discussing the law here (seize, prosecute), not some dictionary definitions. I responded in that context. I also find it somewhat offensive that people here so easily and glibly conflate "violence" against property and violence against people, and inflate every antisocial act into "terrorism". No, not. Get your facts straight, get your logic straight, and check your hyperbole against the (lack of) dead bodies.
I notice you have no arguments with my facts or logic.:-)
Didn't say that they were moral, smart, admirable, or anything better than vandals with delusions of grandeur. But they're a different category of "terrorist" than the kind that kills and/or threatens people with harm, and I think that's an important distinction.
Give it up. Nuclear weapons may be "intended" to destroy property, but they directly and indirectly kill scads of people. ELF didn't "intend" to kill anyone by knocking out the EBS system (a side-effect of knocking out the radio tower), so you aren't even doing an apples-to-apples (intent-to-intent) comparison here, never mind that the number of expected deaths from a temporary EBS knockout is tiny, never mind that your description of the "intent" of nuclear weapons is ludicrous.
There are legal distinctions here, and though ELF may have broken a batch of laws, I don't think that they've committed any official "crimes of violence", meaning battery, torture, rape, or murder.
ELF does not fit the "kills people" definition of terrorist, so they do not fit "every definition" of terrorist.
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What chemical process is converting the CO2, into not-CO2? He's not burying that carbon deep enough to keep it out of the atmosphere for more than a few days. Best case for him, perhaps some nitrogen compounds in the exhaust are ending up in the soil, but otherwise, this sounds like a gimmick.
If your network access is linear, then it's buggy. If the protocol specifies a linear stream, then it's buggy. I'm only half-joking -- by the time we get around to fixing these problems (how much do we have invested in TCP/IP?) they will bite hard and people will commit vile ugly hacks to get around them.
by Connie Willis. (A book I like very much). Time travel to the past is fine, but you can't change the past in ways that would change history.
So overall, yes, they did improve stability.
I think it happens all the time. Even in dinky town meetings, what gets passed (which often looks like a bunch of context diffs) is the law; we may discuss it in terms of what it looks like with the diffs applied, and we may catch errors in the diffs and correct them before we vote, but what we vote on is the official thing. Sometimes we have to vote again, a few months later, to correct what are clearly clerical errors, and the clearly clerical errors, if they can easily be ignored in the interim, are ignored, but nobody pretends that they aren't law.
It does sometimes happen that the people in charge of enforcing the law, do not understand what is intended, or perhaps the law is not written clearly; at a recent public meeting the town planning and economic development manager professed not to know what the phrase "six or zero" meant for side setback, when it had been repeatedly described as intended to mean "a minimum of six feet, except that zero is also allowed" (which is perhaps how it ought to be phrased, but it was patched into one of those tables with a column titled "minimum"). The idea is that if buildings are not actually abutting, then the alley between them must be usefully wide enough to allow trash removal, etc.
No, you're owed what the judge says you are owed. The programmers draw the lines, the judge makes the calls, and the lawyer makes your case to the judge.
Nope, he wasn't a big-time developer. Thought he was going to retire and die before 60, just like his father, uncles, grandfathers, etc, but instead he lived into his 90s (so did his brothers, one cousin lived to 100+, another made it to 110) and took up citrus growing.
He wrote his memoirs in his 80s, it is very interesting to contrast How Things Were to How Things Are.
Well, think about Venice. Think about the Netherlands. We might spend quite a lot. One of the big problems with the uncertainty of just what the future holds, is that we don't know whether money spent on flood mitigation is sensible or futile. For anyone who takes a reasonably long view (50 years or more) and is about to spend money on buildings and/or infrastructure, I think this matters (our town's high school is not too high above sea level, and it is due for a major renovation or rebuild in the next decade. So, should we spend extra money to elevate the foundation a few feet? How much money? How many feet? Or should we simply move it, just in case?)
Note, also, that we already spend a lot on bridges. Have a look at Pinellas County, Florida (I grew up there). There are 7-8 roads connecting the county to the rest of the state -- US 19, SR 582, SR580/584, Courtney-Campbell Causeway, Gandy Bridge, Howard-Franklin Bridge, Sunshine Skyway. So on the one hand, they stand to lose a lot if sea level goes up a meter (the non-bridge roads are also pretty close to sea level), on the other hand, they built those bridges once, they can build them again. They've already rebuilt the Sunshine Skyway once, after a ship hit the old one, and they've renovated the Courtney-Campbell since I was a kid -- oy, just now remembered something else from my younger days -- when the water table rises under your road, the roadbed goes all to heck, and just a few trucks turn it into crumbly asphalt soup. File that one under stupid developer tricks, but it was fun to watch.
Whoa. Fat kid step on your puppy or something?
I am not too keen on the whole vilify-the-fatties thing, because this is NOT 100% an issue of individual actions. We are influenced by our friends, we are influenced by physical cues. We also subsidize fat in various ways, everything from relatively low taxes on gasoline (easier to drive than to walk/bike or walk to transit) to crazy farm policies. This stuff didn't just happen in a vacuum.
Agreed, really poor choice of colors. I'm not sure what Tufte says about this particular problem -- the snap answer is to say that "zero" and a region around it should be some distinct, neutral color (white? but what about my monitor's color balance?) with clearly different colors for + and -. But you'd like to mix some sort of an area measure in, too -- if the whole continent had declined uniformly at a rate of .1 meters/annum, that would be alarming, even though .1 is well within the "cannot tell WTF color that is" range.
By-the-way, speaking of presentation critiques, notice how the legend under the colors is "ma-1", even though there was plenty of room to write "meters/annum" or even "meters per year"? Human factors, they matter. It costs you nothing to communicate to a wider audience, slightly more quickly and clearly.
Whereas we can totally trust profit-seeking industry to give us the straight talk? Nuh-uh. Game/economic theory says that if spewing disinformation results in a net profit, it will happen, otherwise they are not treating their shareholders right. They're not supposed to be moral or ethical; they are supposed to turn a profit, on whatever timescale their investors think is appropriate.
Neither "side" is necessarily trustworthy, but one side has clear motives to be untrustworthy.
Note, also, that the power-seeking politicians generally tend to be motivated by more tangible graft, and not abstractions like "carbon tax" or "cap-and-trade". The stuff I am familiar with, is bribes for regulatory favors, sweetheart government contracts for friends and family, and (ahem) hikes on the Appalachian trail, high-priced call girls, and plain old nepotism.
It would be a bit more comforting to see some numbers to accompany your estimate. I say this, because, on the one hand I know that in the space of 100 years Florida when from barely populated to what it is today (my great-grandfather moved there there in the early 1920s, now it is 6% of the US population), but on the other hand, in the town I live in today (some miles inland, but in the Charles and Mystic river watersheds), there's a thousand or so houses too close to sea level. One town, a thousand homes, $.5M/home, pretty soon we are talking about real money.
How we plan to cope is what I find interesting. If you figure that there is a range of human expectations (optimist to pessimist), you can well imagine that optimists will push for drainage infrastructure and personally invest in better sump pumps ("swamps can be drained" and lots of Houston, including Rice U., used to be a marsh). Pessimists already own property quite a few meters above sea level (would you believe I checked this in 1994? I did.)
The problem for some coastal places, in particular Florida, is that the rising sea will not only make land uninhabitable, it will also reduce groundwater resupply. Simply reducing the surface area of the state, will reduce the amount of rain that falls on it, and reduce its natural water supply. There's workarounds for that, too -- Tampa already has a desalinization plant, and last I heard, there was much discussion of whether they should take the money saving step of recycling sewage instead of seawater (it's cheaper, less dissolved salts).
So, interesting times (probably) ahead.
But making it sound like it was literally (liberally!) dampened, could be fun. "Gurgle, sploosh, bloop." I think I need this for my bicycle. It's very quite.
I run LEDs, permanently attached to my bicycle, which sits outdoors year-round, and is wired to be on whenever the bicycle is moving. Heat/cold/rain/snow/vibration have not killed them yet. I have them on my kid's bikes too, including some that I recycled from earlier versions of my bike lights. I have nine in my kitchen under cabinets, running near continuously (at 11watts, they are the first lights on, and the last lights off). How do you think your bathroom compares? The tenth one (cheaper in bulk) sits on my night-time bike helmet
The electronics are efficient switching power supplies, and are potted in epoxy.
LEDs (what the original article was about, not that anyone seems to care) reach full brightness as fast as you get the power to them, give or take a few microseconds. Biggest delay in all the LEDs that I use is (for some of them) the low quality of the switching wall-wart that powers them. The ones on my bike, and on my helmet, are instant-on.
For at least one combination of LED and motion detector, yes, because I am doing just that for an outdoor light.
LEDs have no particular problem with being turned on and off quickly -- for dimming below about 1/2 power, it is recommended that you chop them, typically at frequencies above several hundred Hertz (so as to avoid visible flicker).
LEDs have no particular sensitivity to the cold; they are more efficient and last longer when cold. Too hot, they become less efficient and it shortens their lifetime (which is nominally 50-100K hours, depending on the LED).
Your amusing assertion:
inspired me to make my first Youtube video. After reading our claim, on my way home from work, I recorded one minute of traffic at a stop sign (one take, no retries). 6 cars, no full stops, 3 blatant runs, and nobody "stopping" at the stop line. (And the first car, the one that mostly nearly stopped, did so because it was impeded by a car in front of it that did not make the take.) I will admit, this is not a large statistical study, but 0 for 6 would be pretty unusual if even 50% of the cars on the road "stopped at all stop signs".
See for yourself if you don't believe me
You might well argue that it ought not be a stop sign, but it IS a stop sign.
And if you ever drive on the interstates, at least those in Massachusetts, you will observe that, outside of traffic jams, about 90-95% of the cars on the road are exceeding the speed limit. Unless we get to pick and choose which laws are important in which situations, I'd say that we're all living in glass houses.
Except, damage to road is not linear in weight, it is some polynomial of degree I think higher than two.
Money IS part of the object of this bill; one hope is that if we move to a system similar to the rest of the OECD countries, we might (like them) not only deliver better and universal care, but also save money. Some of the spending might be shifted from "payroll deductions (health insurance)" to "payroll deductions (tax)", but overall, every other country on the planet spends less per capita, and less as a percentage of GDP. Because we're a wealthy country, it's not unusual that we spend a lot per capita, but it is unusual that (as a wealthy country) we spend such a large portion of our GDP, especially when we deliver such inferior (life expectancy, infant mortality) results.
Note that the sense that we are a "wealthy country" has changed in the last few decades; despite continuing increases in productivity, very little of that (adjusted for inflation) has trickled down to most people. We've had a more progressive tax code in the past; it didn't kill us, or the economy.
It is possible to oppose the bill but not oppose reform, but what we've got so far, is the bill. The pattern thus far from reform opponents (who are in the political minority, at least at the moment, and must work carefully) is this sort of dodgy nitpicking -- concern trolling on a grand scale. Thus, opposition to reform is indistinguishable from opposition to the bill. And it's possible that the author meant nothing of the sort and had some other message in mind, but if he intends to communicate that message, he needs to know about this mistake. As a counter-concern-troll, I am doing my earnest best to let him know that there are better ways to illustrate the problems posed by the way we write laws. In particular, if he took an existing law that has had some unintended consequences, he could demonstrate how the way the bill was written, led to problems in the law. Health care reform, though topical, does not allow him to demonstrate this, since it hasn't happened yet.
My understanding is that the bill does not suck too badly, though yes, it could be better (this is generally true of laws, software, healthcare, etc). It moves us towards a Bismarck-style system (Germany, Switzerland -- you still buy health insurance, but the companies are heavily regulated), and that the advantage to this is that it is a minimal change for those people who have employer-provided health care (which is already somewhat regulated). HOWEVER, considering other countries costs and outcomes, it is likely that we would save more money if we either went to a national insurance plan (Canada) or national health service (England) -- both choices that should be completely adequate, based on their measured life expectancy and infant mortality. This compromise, between minimum change for people who are already "in" a working system, and getting an overall better (more affordable, better outcomes, universal) place, is part of what leads to the complexity. I'd rather have attainable+better than wait for unattainable+perfect.
Consider, if you will, COBRA. A Kennedy-sponsored half-measure, nothing like real health reform, it passed through that dreaded "budget reconciliation process" (that's the B and R in COBRA). I have this sick fear that the spaghetti language in ordinary bills, looks like blended spaghetti made into sausage after "reconciliation". Nonetheless, a damn good thing to have when you lose your job, especially if you have a kid on the way -- and even though I am sure that the bill looked horrible, I can understand the resulting law pretty well, at least as it has related to me through two job changes.
Ditto that. Laws are long, written in English, and sometimes written in this incremental-edit style. I've seen it done with by-laws in town meeting, so this is not that surprising.
I think that this actually tends to inhibit change -- the gripe about "not understanding" is somewhat misplaced, because anything that scores too high on not-understanding is less popular when it comes time to vote. "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/whatever" is essentially a statement that the status quo is safe, so why vote for something that you are not pretty sure you know the effects of? Certainly at the town level, if the subject of a vote looks too convoluted or tricky, it tends to attract fewer votes. At least in our town, I think this is causing actual problems (example: the zoning rules are clearly wrong, because existing structures, that people claim to like, could not be rebuilt under the current rules, and when houses are scraped-and-replaced with conforming structures, people complain about the size and the "loom". I've seen zoning rules that reduce "loom" -- in Palo Alto, for example -- and those are complex and scary, compared to the nice, simple, broken rules we have now. So, because complexity is scary, we stick with simple and broken.)
At the town level, complexity is dealt with somewhat by caucusing and discussing the measures before hand ("what's this for? did anyone thing about XYZ?"), and by pinging people who pay attention to particular areas of the law (I know who to ask about historical districts, affordable housing, special ed, and sewers, without even stopping to think hard). It is definitely not the case that each town meeting member sits down and tries to understand this stuff on their own. Note also that the "law" that emerges is not the bill that created it -- once the edits are applied, you get a single document, and sometimes the people who are working to understand the law before it is voted on, review the resulting document, and not just the diffs from current. You're not "required to understand" the diffs, you're required to understand the result that emerges.
I don't recommend reading TFA, or any of its sequelae. Given recent history of manufactured teapot-tempests, I think this is just more anti-health-reform trollery. Sorry if I'm mistaken, but if so, the author picked a particularly poor time/way to make the point that he intended to make -- if he intended to communicate a particular point, and that communication was important to him, the health-care tie-in distracts from the intended message.
Right, except that worse is better only when the "market" is not already large and crowded. Imagine C getting traction in a world of programmers who were already experienced in (choose your modern poison) Java, Clojure, Python, and Haskell. This Unix-philosophy browser could just be an elaborate joke to see how many people they can sucker into using it. (Be sure that one of the "developers" isn't Ickday Abrielgay.)
And thinking of C, I surely imagine that this browser would have no built-in protections against Bad Guys playing tricks with Unicode in domain names -- for example duy.com (love to know how THAT displays later) -- you could write a plug-in to deal with it, so doesn't need to be part of the browser.
From the someone saying:
First, damage to property is not violence. The proper response is to seize the assets of anyone connected with the plot, and prosecute the case as a crime.
Looks like we are discussing the law here (seize, prosecute), not some dictionary definitions. I responded in that context. I also find it somewhat offensive that people here so easily and glibly conflate "violence" against property and violence against people, and inflate every antisocial act into "terrorism". No, not. Get your facts straight, get your logic straight, and check your hyperbole against the (lack of) dead bodies.
I notice you have no arguments with my facts or logic. :-)
Didn't say that they were moral, smart, admirable, or anything better than vandals with delusions of grandeur. But they're a different category of "terrorist" than the kind that kills and/or threatens people with harm, and I think that's an important distinction.
Give it up. Nuclear weapons may be "intended" to destroy property, but they directly and indirectly kill scads of people. ELF didn't "intend" to kill anyone by knocking out the EBS system (a side-effect of knocking out the radio tower), so you aren't even doing an apples-to-apples (intent-to-intent) comparison here, never mind that the number of expected deaths from a temporary EBS knockout is tiny, never mind that your description of the "intent" of nuclear weapons is ludicrous.
There are legal distinctions here, and though ELF may have broken a batch of laws, I don't think that they've committed any official "crimes of violence", meaning battery, torture, rape, or murder.
ELF does not fit the "kills people" definition of terrorist, so they do not fit "every definition" of terrorist.