Sounds like you and the post you're replying to might have the answer to a question I've wanted to ask a real spreadsheet power user for some time. I'm a MS detractor in general but have fallen deeply for Excel in the last decade as I learned VBA, creating whole small applications with same, pivot tables, database access via ODBC and OLE - sometimes Excel is my whole work environment, hitting on huge databases, downloading chunks into pivot tables, using spreadsheet calcs to create masses of UPDATE statements that then change the same database.
Does ANY of that work in OOo ? I know it has some kind of database connection, but it seemed pretty lame by comparison; I know it has a macro language of its own, but unlike VBA there aren't six thick books on it and mega-lines of code to steal from the Net - so I'd anticipate a huge drop in capability if I switched.
This isn't about whether the (very) widespread claims that current evidence supports 'global warming', it's about whether Mann committed scientific fraud.
For instance, George Bush's commander really did think of Bush the way a fake letter (put forth by CBS as real) said he did; presumably the faker was frustrated by his inability to get that fact in the news, so he resorted to fraud, no doubt thinking that the real truth made it morally OK. But he still committed fraud, and the news that the secretary who would have typed the letter if it were real, said it was the commander's opinion, even as she debunked the letter was quite lost in the scandal over the fraud.
So global warming could be real, and Mann still a fraud, or it could be all a huge mistake by thousands of scientists, and Mann NOT a fraud, simply in possession of data that was mistaken or didn't mean what he thought.
Steyn is no doubt happy about the trial, because it will give him grounds to subpoena great heaps of Mann's work, looking for the same thing that the climategate E-mail thieves looked for: any kind of out-of-context quote they can find that they cam drum up into a "scandal" - a fraudulent one, of course...
In an environment with truly open competition, prices must be driven down to the costs of production, plus whatever profit pays for the seller's own work and risk. Anybody charging more is outpriced by somebody willing to accept that minimum.
Every service provision has capital and operating components. Connection to any network - water, gas, power, comms - has a fixed price whether you use it or not, and an incremental price proportional to usage. Keeping a network to a whole city running costs a good $25/month, flat - but then incremental water, power, whatever, are often pretty cheap. Blended rates per-unit only work where everybody consumes in the same order of magnitude at most. (Many get around this because the high consumers can be identified and "commercial rates" for water or whatever are lower per-unit.)
And we know the answer on gigabytes: Netflix pays something under a nickel each. Since bandwidth purchases differ by well over an order of magnitude, the bill will always screw somebody to benefit another unless it breaks out the costs: $35/month plus a dime a gigabyte, (or something similar)
For a while, I found the registry stuff that switched caps-lock and CTRL, and of course on Linux it's just an xmodmap tweak - and I carried around files for both on a key so that I could swap 'em on any machine I was using. For an emacs user in particular, this is huge.
THEN came Windows 7, which I was compelled to use at work - and it won't let users reprogram keys at user-level; you have to do it with Admin access at the whole-system level and compel all users to do the same....not that my work lets me have Admin access. I was stumped, so I switched back.
The irony is that while I'm hating on MS for this, I have to admit that their MS Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 is the One True Faith for me. It has a bunch of idiot key along the top I ignore; the main thing is the spacing, size, and 3D curved shape that matches the hand better than any other. That's the funny thing about MS: a hate-worthy software* company that makes fine hardware...the MS Mouse was the best of its time, too, until it spawned a number of great imitators; but the Ergo 4000, no rivals - instead we get the gimmicky keyboards that this article rightfully complains about.
*with apologies to Excel, Pivot Tables, and VBA, which have saved my job more times than I can count. Credit where due.
>A portion of the government wants as many people on food stamps as possible, because as soon as you condition a person to free handouts you get power over them.
I've heard that before - indeed almost exactly the same words - but I don't understand. It's so vague. 1) Which portion of the government? Are you talking about some federal or state employees, or are you referring to politicians? After that, can you get even more specific and give examples of persons doing this conditioning and then exercising power?
2) What do these employees or politicians DO with this power over some poor people? Do the government employees make them come over to mow their lawn? It can't be politicians saying "You must vote for me or I'll cut off your food stamps" because we have a secret ballot. The most that could be done is "if you stop putting me in, the Republicans will probably cut off everybody's food stamps, including yours"...but that applies to every public-spending decision. "Vote Republican or those Democrats will raise your taxes" is exactly the same proposition, and seems to be pretty legitimate. You might as well say "if you condition people to tax cuts, that gives you power over them".
If that sounds sarcastic or something, sorry... I'm not trying to pick a fight, it's just the whole statement doesn't compute for me. I'll take up the same position if you've got some specific examples or something.
Except that the public inquiry and publicity crushed their careers and lives in general. Ask anybody who was on the Hollywood blacklist for expressing their political views.
...I admit 1984 was even worse, they had a "Junior Anti-Sex League". Our anti-sex league is at least mostly beyond the age of burning desire themselves.
I love how this stuff exposes the "anti-abortion" forces as actually being "anti-sex". If you were only anti-abortion, you'd be strongly pro-contraceptive. But no, they don't want women's ancient disincentive to sex taken away: if you have sex, you should be punished by bearing children in pain and caring for them for two decades. Then you should mourn how your life was ruined by all the opportunities for education and earning lost to childcare, and mourn how your child started off life at a disadvantage. You should suffer for your sins, the sin of having sex. And you should think about all that before having sex outside of marriage, and Just Not Do It.
All that used to be quite openly stated, you can find grandparents around today who remember lectures with just that rhetoric. Now they cover themselves with victimhood, but they're only "victims" in having their power to dictate women's sex lives taken away by technological advances in medicine. It's particularly sidesplitting that they base their objection to the loss of this power with complaints about a large organization imposing fascist controls on individual behaviour.
Charlie admits that Judaism is still alive and MULTICS is not. He should have gone with Zoroastrianism, even older. (Actually, writer Paul William Roberts found a tiny community of Zoroastrians in Iran a few decades back.) But then a few of us still remember MULTICS with some affection and it still affects our designs. The University of Calgary was sucked into the belief that MULTICS was a great future back in the 70s and ran one of the largest-ever installations of it, in user-count at least. (They were also taken in by ADA and ran some courses and assignments in it for a while.)
MULTICS was the only system I ever used that had the very cool and effective accounts/login design of two-parts to your login: your personal ID and your project ID. Your personal ID stayed permanently, but might lack all resources for years; your compiler course would come with one project-ID that would give you enough resources for that course; your database course would be a different project ID. Your access levels to various files, etc might change with which project ID you used, but your home directory was always yours because of your personal ID. It was cool. There were a few babies tossed with the bathwater when MULTICS was simplified down to Unix...
You should have quoted some of the article, you'd get modded up as "funny"....few realize what a comedian Eco can be. My favourite bit was how, if Mac was Catholicism - because there's this clear set of rituals you go through to reach salvation (or at least the moment your document prints) and anybody can get there; and if DOS is Protestantism - much more flexible about ritual but also much more demanding and takes for granted not all can reach salvation; then Anglicanism is Windows: it LOOKS like Catholicism(Mac)...but you can always sneak out to DOS to change things you don't like.
The good ship "Paul Ryan", which will anchor safely off the ice pack and send them pictures of the sailors aboard enjoying fine meals and swimming pools to give them incentive to break free of the ice on their own! We do these people no favours, killing them with kindness by "helping" them out of the jam they got themselves in. We can't have these ships oppressing us with their pleas of imminent personal disaster....and you thought that this one topic surely couldn't be dragged into American political crank-fests. My next post: how all this relates to gun control.
Thanks for that. The 1972 decision seems quite specific in that it applies to foreign surveillance, not domestic, where a warrant is still required. It still strikes me as "in the tank" for the government to fail to go on at that point to subject the prima facie* claim of foreign-ness to a review by this branch of government, since both of the other two seem willing to take the NSA's word for it. Does "we program our computers to review anything with what, in our sole judgement, seems to be a 51% of having a foreign endpoint" count? Does it count to actually tap every phone, but only check the logs if the 51% is estimated to be true? Does it count as breaking the law to have policies of control over these log-checkings run by the same information staff that let Snowden walk out with gigabytes?
All of these would have been cool things for the court to consider, and would have lent great legitimacy to the program if these burning issues sucking up so much cable news airtime were found to actually be minor issues, or well-handled at least. Instead he basically said, "My read of Keith says they're within the Constitutional limits since they say they're just checking out foreigners, and their word on that is good enough for me".
One hopes that will be a basis for appeal.
*See, I know two words of Latin. So I must be right.
TFA didn't appear to go into the matter of law - does the program violate the 4th or not, and why. The decision must have done so. It's little short of bizarre that a judge went on about matters not of law - how the program is valuable or a "counter punch" for 9/11 or whatever. Surely such talk is all about an end justifying a means. I'm not allowed to break the law just because I've got a valuable end in mind; the government, the same, one would think. If the end justified the means, then, heck , allow cops to search every house at will for evidence of child-molestation.
The NYT article says specifically that he ruled that the 4th does not apply to information given to 3rd parties. TFA notes that he went on about how we give info to 3rd parties all the time so that they can profit from them. What the heck voluntarily and openly giving over information to vendors in return for free services or whatever has to do with the government taking information non-voluntarily and without notification, he doesn't seem to have explained.
So one comes back to the "end justifies the means" parts of his comments. There seems to be capture of the 3rd-branch "regulator" here: he believes the program is saving lives, or something, whereas the judge two weeks ago noted that he was cleared for all possible secrets, yet was shown no cases where they'd averted a crime that would otherwise have occurred. So much for the "54" terrorist plots averted.
Feeling too much Xmas spirit to dig up the stats again, but I recall looking into the Canada vs US figures and spotting that we Canadians kill each other just as much with long guns (rifles, shotguns) as Americans do. It's just our murder rate with handguns as the weapon that really diverges from them. (I believe we are also just as deadly with blunt objects and sharp ones, etc...that it was handguns ALONE where the rates were completely different.)
Not offering an opinion about why or whatever, just observing that the weapon of choice seems to be a statistical driver.
I've worked with a number of challenged people; the ones who were frank about their issues made it way easier; the ones who were in active denial, way harder.
While you're discussing it, recommend the TV show "Perception" - hell, hand out free AVI files. The show's character may have little in common with your particular issues; likely he is far worse, since it shows him having long conversations with hallucinated people - but the point is, the show provides an example of somebody with a very serious schizophrenic problem who is nonetheless good at his job. And a nice guy to know. Heck, he turns out to be a kind of detective on the side.
This is an entirely new level of acceptance for most people - because people talk more frankly now, we all know we're working with manic-depressives, clinical depressives, anxiety- and panic-attack victims...minor mental illnesses are pretty common. But most people's image of a "schizophrenic" is still of the Bad Guy in some crazed-killer movie. The new TV show stresses that it's just another mental challenge that can be overcome with understanding and/or medication.
You may have to stress that you can't solve any murders, should they become fans.
Yeah, number 16, right behind Italy, Lichtenstein, and Botswana.
But seriously, it's not about hiding America's faults, it's about America's virtues. I can't think exactly where in the canon of PJ O'Rourke this story comes from, but it was one of his middle-east trips, probably back in the 80's. O'Rourke questions a, young, ummm, Palestinian, I think, street protester, about his radical politics. The teen gives him about 15 straight minutes of all the many terrible faults of America, its support of Israel, its general weight-throwing-around foreign policy, its suppression of the poor everywhere. O'Rourke finally has enough material and tries to change the subject to something upbeat: "So, you're young and just finishing school, what are your plans, do you have a career dream?"
The kid gets all excited, lighted up happy, and says: "My cousin is at the University of Chicago, and he thinks he can get me a green card!"...at least, America has a lot of job-finding virtues if you're Palestinian and half the people you know - 80% of the kids - have no job prospects...
An individual expression of the 10 can - unless you do your own version, must - be explicitly Jewish or Catholic or Protestant. The division of the list into 10 things differs. Importantly, the Jewish version makes "I am... God" a whole commandment on its own, and "have no other" is relegated to 2. And the Catholic version just skips the whole "no graven images" thing. So you *can't* post the ten without immediately picking a side, not just Jews vs Christians, but Protestant vs Catholic. Yikes. Beliefnet has a comparison chart of the three versions.
The sidesplitting thing about the whole Judge Roy Moore putting The Rock into the courthouse - and going on tour with The Rock as a speaker - was that he tried to have it both ways: The Rock has ELEVEN commandments on it. Easy to check me. Google moore and "the rock" and of course commandments and hit images - there's one big enough to read the surface. It has the Jewish number one, but then all the Protestant ones, for a total of eleven.
It's a great example of the reason WHY you want separation - we have centuries of experience of this kind of issue leading to riots and warfare.
...is to turn the question around. There are two electrical generation utilities connected by a wire: your solar panels and their big fossil plant. Their problem is that they are *required* to buy power from yours when yours happens to be generating, whether they need any power or not. They *have* to turn down or shut off their big plant whenever your system feels like doing some output.
How would most of us feel about being *required* to buy electrical power whenever their plant is underutilized and needing some extra work? Plus, they can build it up all they want and thus make you buy more?
It all imposes costs and they're attempting to recover them. That said, all profit-making utilities love to exaggerate their costs to regulators so as to be allowed higher income, all such claims need to be checked, and the budget for the checking - and the internal information made available to the checkers - needs to be as much as the utility had for the request to the regulator.
With that caveat, there's nothing wrong with this; the system imposes a cost, they deserve compensation. Any contrary view is really based on a belief that solar power people are inherently "good" and the utility is inherently "bad" by using fossil fuels and thus deserve to be punished for their sins.
...wasn't the whole "dot bomb" crash about doing stupid things (pets.com) in an expensive way (all those Aeron chairs) and throwing more money at the problem to fix it? The notion that "government" is a worse bureaucracy than other large bureaucracies like, oh, a healthcare insurer, say... has never clicked with me; I've tried to get service from (or worked in) too many large private bureaucracies.
You're darn right I won't be put in charge of such - not without a gun to my head. I'd want to de-scale anything down to a size where you could reasonably spec and test it. As the article says, "test, test, test". A formative experience in my programming was FORTH, a language that strongly rewards small incremental experiments, compiling as you go, building from small functions up to large ones. I'm not saying use FORTH, but the philosophy of getting the basics working and building up has really worked for me for a whole career.
By contrast, all the large-scale projects I've worked on have all taken a philosophy like building a skyscraper or 747 - no one person can comprehend it, design everything before the first screwdriver is picked up, so the design process goes on for months and years, etc. And then you have "crunch time" from then on as the fond beliefs of the design team smack into reality, and the specs are proven to not match needs. Incremental building and testing tends to reveal these problems.
The fear that drives these philosophies is that you'll have the thing mostly built...and discover it doesn't meet every need and can't without some huge rebuild, because you didn't think of everything up front. Rather like an old system that's been patched to death and has to be tossed because it just can't keep up with changes. I think the fear exaggerated, particularly if the design-build team is at least roughly aware of the whole project dimensions.
The advantage of more-incremental projects that are never large because you take one part at a time is you develop in priority order. The 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of the clients will want about 20% of the options available - so get 20% of the offering working, and working well, first.
"Soldiers" includes officers and non-coms - right down to teenage corporals - who send their human friends and colleagues out of cover to maybe get killed. The ability to do so is a primary burden of soldiering, harder, most say, than going over the top yourself.
It's terrific if they have such humanity that they hate doing it to dogs and even robots - but they either have to be able to do it, or belong at home.
Depends on "believed" - Oklahoma City is generally *described* as "terrorism", but while the first para of McVeigh's wikipedia article says "terrorism" repeatedly, the second says it was revenge for Waco/Ruby-Ridge and in the hope of inspiring some kind of uprising against the federal government. And I never heard of citizens or government talk about "they won't scare us into, umm, not sending federal agents to compounds full of guns", or anything like that. Seems like it wasn't intended, or taken, as an attempt at manipulating the public or government via fear.
I think your definition is solid, but that example shows how the word "terrorism", in practice, means "theatrical use of violence against a random, or at least institutional, target".
It's even used for attacks on *military* targets: Ft. Hood, and the word was much used for attacks on soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan...as long as the attacker hit soldiers at other times than open, pitched battle. I'm not sure if Lawrence of Arabia would qualify as a terrorist for blowing up train tracks and ambushing the train in the movie; some of the usages during the recent wars smacked of "No fair hiding a bomb on our patrol road, you cowardly terrorist - come out and die like a man from our vastly superior weaponry"
The Idiran War was in our 1200's, about, and the others, more like now, ("State of the Art" was of course 1970's, with them watching "ET"...) But it has to be noted that The Culture had discovered darn near all the tech there was to discover, settled into its mores and patterns millenia before. So 800 years for their society changed things probably no more than 8 years for us today. So if Phlebas was a 1945 war/spy caper, Surface Detail and it's cool tattoo technology is still only 1953.
Oh, I can call them complacent on the National Security State. Just not one of their issues until they imagined themselves a target of it.
Yes, imagined. The IRS asked them to fill out some forms. That's got very little to do with all the surveillance of mosques and so forth by people actually hunting terrorists and everything to do with the IRS looking out for a few thousand in loose change.
You can bet if the IRS were subjecting mosques to all kinds of close examination and removing the tax-free status from various Muslim charities, the Tea Party would be expending zero effort to ensure their civil rights.
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Sounds like you and the post you're replying to might have the answer to a question I've wanted to ask a real spreadsheet power user for some time. I'm a MS detractor in general but have fallen deeply for Excel in the last decade as I learned VBA, creating whole small applications with same, pivot tables, database access via ODBC and OLE - sometimes Excel is my whole work environment, hitting on huge databases, downloading chunks into pivot tables, using spreadsheet calcs to create masses of UPDATE statements that then change the same database.
Does ANY of that work in OOo ? I know it has some kind of database connection, but it seemed pretty lame by comparison; I know it has a macro language of its own, but unlike VBA there aren't six thick books on it and mega-lines of code to steal from the Net - so I'd anticipate a huge drop in capability if I switched.
This isn't about whether the (very) widespread claims that current evidence supports 'global warming', it's about whether Mann committed scientific fraud.
For instance, George Bush's commander really did think of Bush the way a fake letter (put forth by CBS as real) said he did; presumably the faker was frustrated by his inability to get that fact in the news, so he resorted to fraud, no doubt thinking that the real truth made it morally OK. But he still committed fraud, and the news that the secretary who would have typed the letter if it were real, said it was the commander's opinion, even as she debunked the letter was quite lost in the scandal over the fraud.
So global warming could be real, and Mann still a fraud, or it could be all a huge mistake by thousands of scientists, and Mann NOT a fraud, simply in possession of data that was mistaken or didn't mean what he thought.
Steyn is no doubt happy about the trial, because it will give him grounds to subpoena great heaps of Mann's work, looking for the same thing that the climategate E-mail thieves looked for: any kind of out-of-context quote they can find that they cam drum up into a "scandal" - a fraudulent one, of course...
And there's a punchline in the third sentence:
And the attorney general reiterated that the United States was not willing to offer clemency to Mr. Snowden
"Clemency", kind or merciful treatment of one who deserves harsh punishment, says the dictionary.
So the full offer is: "We'll talk if you come back, plead guilty and are punished to the fullest extent of the law."
It's like some kind of Woody Allen line, "My lawyer plea-bargained my sentence down to death".
In an environment with truly open competition, prices must be driven down to the costs of production, plus whatever profit pays for the seller's own work and risk. Anybody charging more is outpriced by somebody willing to accept that minimum.
Every service provision has capital and operating components. Connection to any network - water, gas, power, comms - has a fixed price whether you use it or not, and an incremental price proportional to usage. Keeping a network to a whole city running costs a good $25/month, flat - but then incremental water, power, whatever, are often pretty cheap. Blended rates per-unit only work where everybody consumes in the same order of magnitude at most. (Many get around this because the high consumers can be identified and "commercial rates" for water or whatever are lower per-unit.)
And we know the answer on gigabytes: Netflix pays something under a nickel each. Since bandwidth purchases differ by well over an order of magnitude, the bill will always screw somebody to benefit another unless it breaks out the costs: $35/month plus a dime a gigabyte, (or something similar)
Oh, lordy, Amen.
For a while, I found the registry stuff that switched caps-lock and CTRL, and of course on Linux it's just an xmodmap tweak - and I carried around files for both on a key so that I could swap 'em on any machine I was using. For an emacs user in particular, this is huge.
THEN came Windows 7, which I was compelled to use at work - and it won't let users reprogram keys at user-level; you have to do it with Admin access at the whole-system level and compel all users to do the same....not that my work lets me have Admin access. I was stumped, so I switched back.
The irony is that while I'm hating on MS for this, I have to admit that their MS Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 is the One True Faith for me. It has a bunch of idiot key along the top I ignore; the main thing is the spacing, size, and 3D curved shape that matches the hand better than any other. That's the funny thing about MS: a hate-worthy software* company that makes fine hardware...the MS Mouse was the best of its time, too, until it spawned a number of great imitators; but the Ergo 4000, no rivals - instead we get the gimmicky keyboards that this article rightfully complains about.
*with apologies to Excel, Pivot Tables, and VBA, which have saved my job more times than I can count. Credit where due.
>A portion of the government wants as many people on food stamps as possible, because as soon as you condition a person to free handouts you get power over them.
I've heard that before - indeed almost exactly the same words - but I don't understand. It's so vague.
1) Which portion of the government? Are you talking about some federal or state employees, or are you referring to politicians? After that, can you get even more specific and give examples of persons doing this conditioning and then exercising power?
2) What do these employees or politicians DO with this power over some poor people? Do the government employees make them come over to mow their lawn? It can't be politicians saying "You must vote for me or I'll cut off your food stamps" because we have a secret ballot. The most that could be done is "if you stop putting me in, the Republicans will probably cut off everybody's food stamps, including yours"...but that applies to every public-spending decision. "Vote Republican or those Democrats will raise your taxes" is exactly the same proposition, and seems to be pretty legitimate. You might as well say "if you condition people to tax cuts, that gives you power over them".
If that sounds sarcastic or something, sorry ... I'm not trying to pick a fight, it's just the whole statement doesn't compute for me. I'll take up the same position if you've got some specific examples or something.
Except that the public inquiry and publicity crushed their careers and lives in general. Ask anybody who was on the Hollywood blacklist for expressing their political views.
...I admit 1984 was even worse, they had a "Junior Anti-Sex League". Our anti-sex league is at least mostly beyond the age of burning desire themselves.
I love how this stuff exposes the "anti-abortion" forces as actually being "anti-sex". If you were only anti-abortion, you'd be strongly pro-contraceptive. But no, they don't want women's ancient disincentive to sex taken away: if you have sex, you should be punished by bearing children in pain and caring for them for two decades. Then you should mourn how your life was ruined by all the opportunities for education and earning lost to childcare, and mourn how your child started off life at a disadvantage. You should suffer for your sins, the sin of having sex. And you should think about all that before having sex outside of marriage, and Just Not Do It.
All that used to be quite openly stated, you can find grandparents around today who remember lectures with just that rhetoric. Now they cover themselves with victimhood, but they're only "victims" in having their power to dictate women's sex lives taken away by technological advances in medicine. It's particularly sidesplitting that they base their objection to the loss of this power with complaints about a large organization imposing fascist controls on individual behaviour.
Charlie admits that Judaism is still alive and MULTICS is not. He should have gone with Zoroastrianism, even older. (Actually, writer Paul William Roberts found a tiny community of Zoroastrians in Iran a few decades back.) But then a few of us still remember MULTICS with some affection and it still affects our designs. The University of Calgary was sucked into the belief that MULTICS was a great future back in the 70s and ran one of the largest-ever installations of it, in user-count at least. (They were also taken in by ADA and ran some courses and assignments in it for a while.)
MULTICS was the only system I ever used that had the very cool and effective accounts/login design of two-parts to your login: your personal ID and your project ID. Your personal ID stayed permanently, but might lack all resources for years; your compiler course would come with one project-ID that would give you enough resources for that course; your database course would be a different project ID. Your access levels to various files, etc might change with which project ID you used, but your home directory was always yours because of your personal ID. It was cool. There were a few babies tossed with the bathwater when MULTICS was simplified down to Unix...
You should have quoted some of the article, you'd get modded up as "funny"....few realize what a comedian Eco can be. My favourite bit was how, if Mac was Catholicism - because there's this clear set of rituals you go through to reach salvation (or at least the moment your document prints) and anybody can get there; and if DOS is Protestantism - much more flexible about ritual but also much more demanding and takes for granted not all can reach salvation; then Anglicanism is Windows: it LOOKS like Catholicism(Mac) ...but you can always sneak out to DOS to change things you don't like.
The good ship "Paul Ryan", which will anchor safely off the ice pack and send them pictures of the sailors aboard enjoying fine meals and swimming pools to give them incentive to break free of the ice on their own! We do these people no favours, killing them with kindness by "helping" them out of the jam they got themselves in. We can't have these ships oppressing us with their pleas of imminent personal disaster. ...and you thought that this one topic surely couldn't be dragged into American political crank-fests. My next post: how all this relates to gun control.
Thanks for that. The 1972 decision seems quite specific in that it applies to foreign surveillance, not domestic, where a warrant is still required. It still strikes me as "in the tank" for the government to fail to go on at that point to subject the prima facie* claim of foreign-ness to a review by this branch of government, since both of the other two seem willing to take the NSA's word for it. Does "we program our computers to review anything with what, in our sole judgement, seems to be a 51% of having a foreign endpoint" count? Does it count to actually tap every phone, but only check the logs if the 51% is estimated to be true? Does it count as breaking the law to have policies of control over these log-checkings run by the same information staff that let Snowden walk out with gigabytes?
All of these would have been cool things for the court to consider, and would have lent great legitimacy to the program if these burning issues sucking up so much cable news airtime were found to actually be minor issues, or well-handled at least. Instead he basically said, "My read of Keith says they're within the Constitutional limits since they say they're just checking out foreigners, and their word on that is good enough for me".
One hopes that will be a basis for appeal.
*See, I know two words of Latin. So I must be right.
TFA didn't appear to go into the matter of law - does the program violate the 4th or not, and why. The decision must have done so. It's little short of bizarre that a judge went on about matters not of law - how the program is valuable or a "counter punch" for 9/11 or whatever. Surely such talk is all about an end justifying a means. I'm not allowed to break the law just because I've got a valuable end in mind; the government, the same, one would think. If the end justified the means, then, heck , allow cops to search every house at will for evidence of child-molestation.
The NYT article says specifically that he ruled that the 4th does not apply to information given to 3rd parties. TFA notes that he went on about how we give info to 3rd parties all the time so that they can profit from them. What the heck voluntarily and openly giving over information to vendors in return for free services or whatever has to do with the government taking information non-voluntarily and without notification, he doesn't seem to have explained.
So one comes back to the "end justifies the means" parts of his comments. There seems to be capture of the 3rd-branch "regulator" here: he believes the program is saving lives, or something, whereas the judge two weeks ago noted that he was cleared for all possible secrets, yet was shown no cases where they'd averted a crime that would otherwise have occurred. So much for the "54" terrorist plots averted.
Feeling too much Xmas spirit to dig up the stats again, but I recall looking into the Canada vs US figures and spotting that we Canadians kill each other just as much with long guns (rifles, shotguns) as Americans do. It's just our murder rate with handguns as the weapon that really diverges from them. (I believe we are also just as deadly with blunt objects and sharp ones, etc...that it was handguns ALONE where the rates were completely different.)
Not offering an opinion about why or whatever, just observing that the weapon of choice seems to be a statistical driver.
I've worked with a number of challenged people; the ones who were frank about their issues made it way easier; the ones who were in active denial, way harder.
While you're discussing it, recommend the TV show "Perception" - hell, hand out free AVI files. The show's character may have little in common with your particular issues; likely he is far worse, since it shows him having long conversations with hallucinated people - but the point is, the show provides an example of somebody with a very serious schizophrenic problem who is nonetheless good at his job. And a nice guy to know. Heck, he turns out to be a kind of detective on the side.
This is an entirely new level of acceptance for most people - because people talk more frankly now, we all know we're working with manic-depressives, clinical depressives, anxiety- and panic-attack victims...minor mental illnesses are pretty common. But most people's image of a "schizophrenic" is still of the Bad Guy in some crazed-killer movie. The new TV show stresses that it's just another mental challenge that can be overcome with understanding and/or medication.
You may have to stress that you can't solve any murders, should they become fans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate
Yeah, number 16, right behind Italy, Lichtenstein, and Botswana.
But seriously, it's not about hiding America's faults, it's about America's virtues. I can't think exactly where in the canon of PJ O'Rourke this story comes from, but it was one of his middle-east trips, probably back in the 80's. O'Rourke questions a, young, ummm, Palestinian, I think, street protester, about his radical politics. The teen gives him about 15 straight minutes of all the many terrible faults of America, its support of Israel, its general weight-throwing-around foreign policy, its suppression of the poor everywhere. O'Rourke finally has enough material and tries to change the subject to something upbeat: "So, you're young and just finishing school, what are your plans, do you have a career dream?"
The kid gets all excited, lighted up happy, and says: "My cousin is at the University of Chicago, and he thinks he can get me a green card!" ...at least, America has a lot of job-finding virtues if you're Palestinian and half the people you know - 80% of the kids - have no job prospects...
An individual expression of the 10 can - unless you do your own version, must - be explicitly Jewish or Catholic or Protestant. The division of the list into 10 things differs. Importantly, the Jewish version makes "I am... God" a whole commandment on its own, and "have no other" is relegated to 2. And the Catholic version just skips the whole "no graven images" thing. So you *can't* post the ten without immediately picking a side, not just Jews vs Christians, but Protestant vs Catholic. Yikes. Beliefnet has a comparison chart of the three versions.
The sidesplitting thing about the whole Judge Roy Moore putting The Rock into the courthouse - and going on tour with The Rock as a speaker - was that he tried to have it both ways: The Rock has ELEVEN commandments on it. Easy to check me. Google moore and "the rock" and of course commandments and hit images - there's one big enough to read the surface. It has the Jewish number one, but then all the Protestant ones, for a total of eleven.
It's a great example of the reason WHY you want separation - we have centuries of experience of this kind of issue leading to riots and warfare.
...is to turn the question around. There are two electrical generation utilities connected by a wire: your solar panels and their big fossil plant. Their problem is that they are *required* to buy power from yours when yours happens to be generating, whether they need any power or not. They *have* to turn down or shut off their big plant whenever your system feels like doing some output.
How would most of us feel about being *required* to buy electrical power whenever their plant is underutilized and needing some extra work? Plus, they can build it up all they want and thus make you buy more?
It all imposes costs and they're attempting to recover them. That said, all profit-making utilities love to exaggerate their costs to regulators so as to be allowed higher income, all such claims need to be checked, and the budget for the checking - and the internal information made available to the checkers - needs to be as much as the utility had for the request to the regulator.
With that caveat, there's nothing wrong with this; the system imposes a cost, they deserve compensation. Any contrary view is really based on a belief that solar power people are inherently "good" and the utility is inherently "bad" by using fossil fuels and thus deserve to be punished for their sins.
...wasn't the whole "dot bomb" crash about doing stupid things (pets.com) in an expensive way (all those Aeron chairs) and throwing more money at the problem to fix it? The notion that "government" is a worse bureaucracy than other large bureaucracies like, oh, a healthcare insurer, say... has never clicked with me; I've tried to get service from (or worked in) too many large private bureaucracies.
It's pushing 20 years since I first saw an academic study showing that IT project failure probability increases dramatically - the latest was 2005:
The Challenges of Large-Scale IT Projects
You're darn right I won't be put in charge of such - not without a gun to my head. I'd want to de-scale anything down to a size where you could reasonably spec and test it. As the article says, "test, test, test". A formative experience in my programming was FORTH, a language that strongly rewards small incremental experiments, compiling as you go, building from small functions up to large ones. I'm not saying use FORTH, but the philosophy of getting the basics working and building up has really worked for me for a whole career.
By contrast, all the large-scale projects I've worked on have all taken a philosophy like building a skyscraper or 747 - no one person can comprehend it, design everything before the first screwdriver is picked up, so the design process goes on for months and years, etc. And then you have "crunch time" from then on as the fond beliefs of the design team smack into reality, and the specs are proven to not match needs. Incremental building and testing tends to reveal these problems.
The fear that drives these philosophies is that you'll have the thing mostly built...and discover it doesn't meet every need and can't without some huge rebuild, because you didn't think of everything up front. Rather like an old system that's been patched to death and has to be tossed because it just can't keep up with changes. I think the fear exaggerated, particularly if the design-build team is at least roughly aware of the whole project dimensions.
The advantage of more-incremental projects that are never large because you take one part at a time is you develop in priority order. The 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of the clients will want about 20% of the options available - so get 20% of the offering working, and working well, first.
Canada has this story of medical records: http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/10/0124227/open-source-could-have-saved-ontario-hundreds-of-millions /. covered it, "open source" would have saved 95% of project costs, but I think it was also about the open-source development was in small increments, no large projects.
As
Good background would include:
- Environmental officer for a West Virginia mountaintop-removal coal company
- Human rights officer for the Syrian Army
- Risk Management officer for Lehman Brothers
- PhD from the Sorbonne in empty gestures
"Soldiers" includes officers and non-coms - right down to teenage corporals - who send their human friends and colleagues out of cover to maybe get killed. The ability to do so is a primary burden of soldiering, harder, most say, than going over the top yourself.
It's terrific if they have such humanity that they hate doing it to dogs and even robots - but they either have to be able to do it, or belong at home.
Depends on "believed" - Oklahoma City is generally *described* as "terrorism", but while the first para of McVeigh's wikipedia article says "terrorism" repeatedly, the second says it was revenge for Waco/Ruby-Ridge and in the hope of inspiring some kind of uprising against the federal government. And I never heard of citizens or government talk about "they won't scare us into, umm, not sending federal agents to compounds full of guns", or anything like that. Seems like it wasn't intended, or taken, as an attempt at manipulating the public or government via fear.
I think your definition is solid, but that example shows how the word "terrorism", in practice, means "theatrical use of violence against a random, or at least institutional, target".
It's even used for attacks on *military* targets: Ft. Hood, and the word was much used for attacks on soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan...as long as the attacker hit soldiers at other times than open, pitched battle. I'm not sure if Lawrence of Arabia would qualify as a terrorist for blowing up train tracks and ambushing the train in the movie; some of the usages during the recent wars smacked of "No fair hiding a bomb on our patrol road, you cowardly terrorist - come out and die like a man from our vastly superior weaponry"
The Idiran War was in our 1200's, about, and the others, more like now, ("State of the Art" was of course 1970's, with them watching "ET"...) But it has to be noted that The Culture had discovered darn near all the tech there was to discover, settled into its mores and patterns millenia before. So 800 years for their society changed things probably no more than 8 years for us today. So if Phlebas was a 1945 war/spy caper, Surface Detail and it's cool tattoo technology is still only 1953.
Oh, I can call them complacent on the National Security State. Just not one of their issues until they imagined themselves a target of it.
Yes, imagined. The IRS asked them to fill out some forms. That's got very little to do with all the surveillance of mosques and so forth by people actually hunting terrorists and everything to do with the IRS looking out for a few thousand in loose change.
You can bet if the IRS were subjecting mosques to all kinds of close examination and removing the tax-free status from various Muslim charities, the Tea Party would be expending zero effort to ensure their civil rights.