Funnily enough to, that didn't stop him owning hundreds of slaves and using them to work his plantations.
Jefferson neither bought nor sold a single slave.
He wound up finding himself the inheritor of his wife's family's slaves and estate.
His choices were to either not take them and then they and their families would be split up and sold, or take them in and allow them as good a life as possible.
Freeing them was against the law and a hanging offense at that time.
But of course, you don't really give a single shit about historical accuracy and what actually happened, you just want to bathe in cynicism and hate.
Hateful, partisan, and ignorant is no way to go through life, son.
In one of the early drafts of the DoI Jefferson ranted at the King for promoting the slave trade and for preventing the Colonies from outlawing slavery. The King and many in the English aristocracy were heavily invested in or owned many of the more profitable and successful shipping/trading companies and great houses that provided the slaves to the American Colonies and to buyers throughout much of Europe and beyond. England set mandatory minimum quotas for how many slaves the Colonies must buy and at what price.
It was not that the US Founders did not try to abolish slavery, they were prevented by the Royal Colonial Courts established and controlled by authority of the King. Also keep in mind that slavery began in the American Colonies almost a century before any of the Founders were born. They were no friends of slavery, but they were only human and men born of their time, a time with certain practices having been the norm for a century before they were born.
Jefferson's rant against the King for promoting and protecting the slave trade was edited out because of the Southern States' strong objections because the both were dependent on slave labor at the time and because many in the South leaned heavily Tory, and so concessions were made, as their joining the North in the revolution against England was necessary & essential to success.
Hence, at present, many governments in the USA are basically criminal organizations.
Governments are tough on crime because they hate the competition. This is true of all governments to a greater or lesser degree.
This is the reason why small and relatively weak central governments are necessary to maintaining a relatively free & open society along with a relatively non-corrupt government. Government corruption and authoritarianism grow in an exponential fashion in direct relation to the amount of money and power a government controls.
They're going after someone who walks down the virtual street pointing out things that are publicly accessible without a single functional access control mechanism. This isn't a "hacker," it's a person that points at something on the digital street that anyone could find and access anyway. This person has committed no crimes whatsoever in doing this.
He committed the worst crime imaginable in the eyes of the US Government.
He revealed the incompetence and ineffectiveness of a US Government security agency. To those in government, there are few crimes as onerous as revealing their incompetence and lawbreaking for all to see.
It appears that the NSA and other US TLAs have been too busy with US domestic mass surveillance, data-farming, and domestic political shenanigans to bother with piddly things like securing national infrastructure and other mundane tasks they were created to perform. Very sad.
From your link 'companies believed to be at higher risk for fraud and money laundering.' I'm pretty sure that fraud and money laundering aren't legal business...
Those were the reasons given but they were not the only reasons.
But the reasons are irrelevant to the fact that such threats by the federal government are blatantly unconstitutional as they attack legal businesses without any charges or due process involved. It is entirely unilateral with no judicial review or oversight nor authorized by any law or Act of Congress. The government cannot skirt the Constitution by using a monkey's paw.
's not nothing to do with moral policing. Credit card transactions are effectively loans. In large parts of the world you have a legal right to dispute any charge on your card as a result. Adult content has a high percentage of disputes (probably from guys who's wives/girlfriends notice the charge). Even if you can prove the charge is valid it's still expensive to do so. Hence why nobody wants to be involved in it.
It has little to do with disputed CC charges.
It has everything to do with government pressure applied to banks/CC companies to remove the ability to perform financial transactions from certain select legal businesses/individuals without due process or any proof of any crime. It was called "Operation Choke Point" under Obama and Holder.
The same tactics are being used selectively against many adult/sex-related industries as well as gun dealers/stores and others the government considers "unsavory" for whatever political/ideological/moral/financial/religious reasons they choose.
It was bad under Obama, it's bad under Trump. This should not be partisan at all. If the Rule of Law were still a thing in the US, those responsible would be seeing a prison cell, but sadly... .
Solar generation, including storage, has fallen to the point that it is often the cheapest option.
Nuclear would be cheaper to the point of out-competing solar/wind while being less damaging to the environment if only the anti-nuke nutjobs and NIMBYs didn't both prevent more modern and safer designs including breeder types from being built and force them to carry the costs of extreme over-regulation, much of which does not materially affect safety at all but are giveaways to political cronies that massively increasing cost.
Issues around nuclear power have become another set of perennial political footballs tossed out every election cycle like abortion and gun control. All the PACs are already formed, all the 501C(*)s are ready for another round with email lists in hands, they're in no hurry to dismantle large portions of that political infrastructure, build out and staff new organizations along with their individual funding networks.
BUT, if we used nukes for everything everywhere it makes sense (like almost everything except transportation), we'd be way better off than we are now. Imagine only using fossil fuels for transportation. Even that will be decreasing and cars and trucks go more and more electric.
One could almost say nukes are REQUIRED for a fully electric vehicle fleet.
But it leaves many large and powerful environmental/anti-pollution and similar political groups high & dry for primary issues to fund-raise with. Many politicians would lose a great number of issues on which to campaign. Issues are kept 'alive' by both sides for purposes of fund raising, elections, and general demagoguery. Besides, the many thousands of protest signs, flyers, ads, etc are already designed & printed, solving issues means new costs for the next issue.
On the other hand, whatever crisis that ends up being perpetuated by this sort of 'issue protection and maintenance' behavior is extremely unlikely to significantly affect the elite and their minions when the predictable happens due to their power and wealth. It also deepens divides between the people and ratchets up frustration and anger which generate more clicks for the media and fund raising money plus fanatical followers willing to go to extremes to 'win' for the political elite and the groups behind them.
All this means that there are powerful interests on both sides whose interests intersect in that they would rather keep nuclear power as an issue they can keep on using decade after decade. It will take immense pressure to change the political status quo relating to nuclear power as there are many in both parties who would rather keep it as an issue.
The problem with so many laws, regulations, etc is one of unintended consequences.
With such a law in place, if somebody out piloting a drone spots a wildfire starting, they may decide not to report the fire for fear of prosecution. So then any potential benefit from drone-related crowd-sourced wildfire data reporting is seriously impacted if not practically eliminated.
As more and more people fly drones, crowd-sourced early wildfire detection from drone pilot reports will become ever more useful. I'd think one would want to take special care that any laws enacted don't throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding privately owned drones, but then, we *are* talking about politicians here.
Does the proposed law make exceptions for the above scenario? Does this proposed law make a distinction between fires where firefighting/emergency aircraft are actually in use and fires where firefighting aircraft are not in use and/or cannot be used?
I understand the safety issues and the need to set out ground rules, but I also understand laws and regulations intended to increase safety often cut both ways and that blanket banning something because of a relatively rare danger can cause the loss of the far more common greater good that may come from a particular thing or activity like the operation of privately owned drones.
Any laws, regulations, and such need to be carefully thought out with secondary effects in mind and written with broad judicial discretion baked in and low thresholds for dismissal of charges. Let's not be quick to throw out the possible good with the bad by enacting hastily-written, poorly thought out, knee-jerk, political-grandstanding legislation. Sadly, we're stuck with such legislation far too often because politicians want their face-time on the 24-hr news cycle demagoguing their agendas and berating the opposition as slow to act and therefor ineffective.
I imagine that this grease will literally gum up the works.
There goes my dream of travelling between solar systems using interstellar hydrogen as fuel.
Nah, just use a spinning vortex to separate the hydrogen out from the grease by centrifugal force, and then you could use the grease to add to the exhaust so you can "roll coal" on nasty aliens parked along your trajectory and holding protest signs.
[I disagree ] I think the galaxy is a life distributing system.
More than that. I believe there's a good possibility that a "universe" (there may be more than one, ours) exists for the sole purpose of creating intelligent life that matures and advances to the point they have the ability to move outside that universe and exist there. They then create another universe and the cycle repeats. It's how extra-dimensional beings/species/civilizations "reproduce", if you will. I mean, what else do you do when you're effectively a God or Gods able to create a freaking *universe* FFS? Play Euchre?
There may already have been intelligent species that achieved "Ascendancy" long ago and are no longer here for us to easily find through signs of activity. We may be the first or the last in a long line of intelligent species or just one of many in the middle of that series of intelligent species. We just haven't "grown up" sufficiently to learn "the facts of "Life" yet.
Whether or not we survive long enough as a species to find out...?
who waste their life coming up with ways to fuck up other peoples' day by hacking their computer.
Pondscum basically. Or pathogenic bacteria. Take your pick. But such is life I guess.
There will always be a criminal element in any free and open society. That's really just human nature.
No, the real problem here are governments that insist people not be *too* secure in their data, communications, and with whom they associate (there is no freedom of association if all your associations are tracked, stored, and analyzed).
Not only authority to legally order large software companies to patch security holes, but prosecute them for some form of criminal negligence when they do things like marketing routers with hard-coded default admin/vendor-access passwords (and especially for not mentioning that little detail very plainly to potential buyers).
Who do they prosecute when another government agency either pays or orders exploits to be designed in?
Well, since we're "wish-listing" here as it's unlikely in the extreme that any of this unconstitutional behavior will see any serious repercussions anytime soon, I'd like to see every single government official, agent, etc etc, face prosecution that originated the orders to violate civil rights and those down the chain that followed them.
When your government officials and agencies become "too big to prosecute" it might be a sign that your government has grown far too large & powerful.
There should be 1 government organization responsible for computer security, and they should not also be in charge of spying as that deters foreign governments and corporations from fully cooperating with them. Giving them legal authority to force companies to patch security holes would also help.
Not only authority to legally order large software companies to patch security holes, but prosecute them for some form of criminal negligence when they do things like marketing routers with hard-coded default admin/vendor-access passwords (and especially for not mentioning that little detail very plainly to potential buyers). That sort of nonsense is not just ignoring security or even doing it badly, it's giving the entire concept of security the "Bronx cheer" and causes great financial and societal harm that affects everyone including people who are not their customers.
Do we get to see our entire medical records now, as HIPAA was supposed to specify? Can a communications provider refuse to share personal records with the government now, applying Apple-style encryption to them? For companies that did so, this could be a good selling point in a highly competitive market.
Any business/industry/etc the US government becomes really annoyed with but can't outlaw or ban for various reasons ranging from political/PR to legal/constitutional gets the "Operation Choke-Point" treatment where banks and financial institutions are pressured to refuse to do any business or perform any financial transactions for certain businesses like gun stores or else suffer endless audits and investigations by multiple agencies and departments.
I'd like to see the SCOTUS rule against that practice. Government agencies should not be used as partisan political weapons by anyone.
Predicting death is perfect for someone with a large enough wealth to retire on, and they need to spend down the amount just at the correct rate to use it all before they die. But what happens when the death predictor is off? Maybe like the parent post, the machine would just kill them...:-/
1) Predict when people will die so they know how fast to spend wealth 2) Insure that answer 3) ??? 4) Profit!
(The ??? would have to be: kill people when predictions are wrong.)
Why would anyone need Google for that? Just go wild and, when you run out of money, do it yourself.
Hell that's been the US government's national fiscal policy for over 60 years and counting!
Unless there is something VERY special about Norway, a wide-spread trend that cannot be attributed to education
TFS did not exclude "education". It excluded "parental education"...in other words home schooling...as a factor.
Bratsberg and Rogeberg discounted factors like parental education, family size, increased immigration, and genetics as significant causes.
IMHO in the US it's government-run public schools, the DoE, and the teacher's unions who are the chief causes (but not the only ones). The US spends more on education per student than anybody but the results suck the whole bag-full.
If the US is to have any chance of halting it's decline it must totally re-think the entire current education system, not just throw more money at it or make meaningless tweaks to a totally broken system.
Avoiding Uber technically complying while violating the intent of the rules.
Ah I see, when Uber violates the law they're bad, and when they comply with the law they're even worse.
The rest of your post is just hand-waving, strawmen, and attempting to take the high moral ground and not worth the time & trouble to bother refuting as those with less bias will see it for what it is while the kool-ade drinkers will never concede anything.
The problem is, any rules we put down will be gamed by Uber (since they don't want an employee).
"Gamed" meaning Uber will comply with the law and alter the driver agreements as needed to maintain their status as contractors. So then the government will change the law again to try to catch Uber out.
This is about government trying to all but eliminate individuals working for themselves as independents. Controlling people is made much harder when government can't simply go to a person's employer and 'suggest' they could see costly legal/regulatory problems in the near future if person 'X' is not fired because he voices opinions and talks about facts the government dislikes.
Governments want to run societies like ant colonies, and there are no "independent contractors" in an ant colony.
Kaspersky said the leak happened because the NSA agent took nation-state cyber-weapons home, which its software detected and uploaded to its servers for analysis.
The software did what it says it will do on the tin which many of it's competitors do as well (never mind that you can easily choose to have that functionality turned off), and because some idiot US TLA contractor commits an illegal act the developers would have no way to predict, the software and the company behind it are the 'bad guys'.
This is blame-shifting combined with propaganda meant to distract from US domestic issues regarding powerful people and government agencies run amok.
Since hacking is illegal, why are cops buying from Grayshift instead of raiding their offices?
Because in practice it's only illegal to hack those whom the State favors. Hacking those who are not in the State's (and the corrupt individuals in power's) good graces for whatever reason is A-OK, especially if the State gets the benefit of obtaining the data in readable form. The only real exception to this is if the hacker(s) in question are also not seen favorably by those in power.
Thank you for including the "/s", otherwise we'd have had no chance at identifying the sarcasm.
Yes, you and I can usually detect most sarcasm (in this case I understood yours without a tag).
However keep in mind that this *is* Slashdot, and many here to all appearances were born without the sarcasm-detection gene or at least without it being dominant. I doubt that you could not find at least one serious 'whoosh' of that sort in any 2 consecutive Slashdot story comment sections.
To mangle a famous quote; "Never underestimate the obliviousness of the average "Slashdotter"."
I mean, c'mon! Many never read TFS never mind TFA, hell it's almost a tradition here and memed to death, why would anyone expect them to read & comprehend subtleties like sarcasm in posts they reply to or even their own posts?
Slashdot is one of the reasons behind why the "sarc tag" became a thing.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist. That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
Yes Mr. Pedant, over a timescale of multiple tens and hundreds of thousands of years that's obviously true.
I thought it was understood that the time frame under discussion is the one which climate alarmists talk about which is the next few hundred to a thousand years following our relatively recent emergence from an ice-age.
Thanks for trying to muddy the waters though, that's what's needed for people to come together on rational strategies.
Slashdot Mirror
Funnily enough to, that didn't stop him owning hundreds of slaves and using them to work his plantations.
Jefferson neither bought nor sold a single slave.
He wound up finding himself the inheritor of his wife's family's slaves and estate.
His choices were to either not take them and then they and their families would be split up and sold, or take them in and allow them as good a life as possible.
Freeing them was against the law and a hanging offense at that time.
But of course, you don't really give a single shit about historical accuracy and what actually happened, you just want to bathe in cynicism and hate.
Hateful, partisan, and ignorant is no way to go through life, son.
Strat
In one of the early drafts of the DoI Jefferson ranted at the King for promoting the slave trade and for preventing the Colonies from outlawing slavery. The King and many in the English aristocracy were heavily invested in or owned many of the more profitable and successful shipping/trading companies and great houses that provided the slaves to the American Colonies and to buyers throughout much of Europe and beyond. England set mandatory minimum quotas for how many slaves the Colonies must buy and at what price.
It was not that the US Founders did not try to abolish slavery, they were prevented by the Royal Colonial Courts established and controlled by authority of the King. Also keep in mind that slavery began in the American Colonies almost a century before any of the Founders were born. They were no friends of slavery, but they were only human and men born of their time, a time with certain practices having been the norm for a century before they were born.
Jefferson's rant against the King for promoting and protecting the slave trade was edited out because of the Southern States' strong objections because the both were dependent on slave labor at the time and because many in the South leaned heavily Tory, and so concessions were made, as their joining the North in the revolution against England was necessary & essential to success.
Strat
Hence, at present, many governments in the USA are basically criminal organizations.
Governments are tough on crime because they hate the competition. This is true of all governments to a greater or lesser degree.
This is the reason why small and relatively weak central governments are necessary to maintaining a relatively free & open society along with a relatively non-corrupt government. Government corruption and authoritarianism grow in an exponential fashion in direct relation to the amount of money and power a government controls.
Strat
They're going after someone who walks down the virtual street pointing out things that are publicly accessible without a single functional access control mechanism. This isn't a "hacker," it's a person that points at something on the digital street that anyone could find and access anyway. This person has committed no crimes whatsoever in doing this.
He committed the worst crime imaginable in the eyes of the US Government.
He revealed the incompetence and ineffectiveness of a US Government security agency. To those in government, there are few crimes as onerous as revealing their incompetence and lawbreaking for all to see.
It appears that the NSA and other US TLAs have been too busy with US domestic mass surveillance, data-farming, and domestic political shenanigans to bother with piddly things like securing national infrastructure and other mundane tasks they were created to perform. Very sad.
Strat
From your link 'companies believed to be at higher risk for fraud and money laundering.'
I'm pretty sure that fraud and money laundering aren't legal business...
Those were the reasons given but they were not the only reasons.
But the reasons are irrelevant to the fact that such threats by the federal government are blatantly unconstitutional as they attack legal businesses without any charges or due process involved. It is entirely unilateral with no judicial review or oversight nor authorized by any law or Act of Congress. The government cannot skirt the Constitution by using a monkey's paw.
Strat
's not nothing to do with moral policing. Credit card transactions are effectively loans. In large parts of the world you have a legal right to dispute any charge on your card as a result. Adult content has a high percentage of disputes (probably from guys who's wives/girlfriends notice the charge). Even if you can prove the charge is valid it's still expensive to do so. Hence why nobody wants to be involved in it.
It has little to do with disputed CC charges.
It has everything to do with government pressure applied to banks/CC companies to remove the ability to perform financial transactions from certain select legal businesses/individuals without due process or any proof of any crime. It was called "Operation Choke Point" under Obama and Holder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The same tactics are being used selectively against many adult/sex-related industries as well as gun dealers/stores and others the government considers "unsavory" for whatever political/ideological/moral/financial/religious reasons they choose.
It was bad under Obama, it's bad under Trump. This should not be partisan at all. If the Rule of Law were still a thing in the US, those responsible would be seeing a prison cell, but sadly... .
Strat
Solar generation, including storage, has fallen to the point that it is often the cheapest option.
Nuclear would be cheaper to the point of out-competing solar/wind while being less damaging to the environment if only the anti-nuke nutjobs and NIMBYs didn't both prevent more modern and safer designs including breeder types from being built and force them to carry the costs of extreme over-regulation, much of which does not materially affect safety at all but are giveaways to political cronies that massively increasing cost.
Issues around nuclear power have become another set of perennial political footballs tossed out every election cycle like abortion and gun control. All the PACs are already formed, all the 501C(*)s are ready for another round with email lists in hands, they're in no hurry to dismantle large portions of that political infrastructure, build out and staff new organizations along with their individual funding networks.
Strat
BUT, if we used nukes for everything everywhere it makes sense (like almost everything except transportation), we'd be way better off than we are now. Imagine only using fossil fuels for transportation. Even that will be decreasing and cars and trucks go more and more electric.
One could almost say nukes are REQUIRED for a fully electric vehicle fleet.
But it leaves many large and powerful environmental/anti-pollution and similar political groups high & dry for primary issues to fund-raise with. Many politicians would lose a great number of issues on which to campaign. Issues are kept 'alive' by both sides for purposes of fund raising, elections, and general demagoguery. Besides, the many thousands of protest signs, flyers, ads, etc are already designed & printed, solving issues means new costs for the next issue.
On the other hand, whatever crisis that ends up being perpetuated by this sort of 'issue protection and maintenance' behavior is extremely unlikely to significantly affect the elite and their minions when the predictable happens due to their power and wealth. It also deepens divides between the people and ratchets up frustration and anger which generate more clicks for the media and fund raising money plus fanatical followers willing to go to extremes to 'win' for the political elite and the groups behind them.
All this means that there are powerful interests on both sides whose interests intersect in that they would rather keep nuclear power as an issue they can keep on using decade after decade. It will take immense pressure to change the political status quo relating to nuclear power as there are many in both parties who would rather keep it as an issue.
Strat
misdemeanour for endangering peoples lives?
The problem with so many laws, regulations, etc is one of unintended consequences.
With such a law in place, if somebody out piloting a drone spots a wildfire starting, they may decide not to report the fire for fear of prosecution. So then any potential benefit from drone-related crowd-sourced wildfire data reporting is seriously impacted if not practically eliminated.
As more and more people fly drones, crowd-sourced early wildfire detection from drone pilot reports will become ever more useful. I'd think one would want to take special care that any laws enacted don't throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding privately owned drones, but then, we *are* talking about politicians here.
Does the proposed law make exceptions for the above scenario? Does this proposed law make a distinction between fires where firefighting/emergency aircraft are actually in use and fires where firefighting aircraft are not in use and/or cannot be used?
I understand the safety issues and the need to set out ground rules, but I also understand laws and regulations intended to increase safety often cut both ways and that blanket banning something because of a relatively rare danger can cause the loss of the far more common greater good that may come from a particular thing or activity like the operation of privately owned drones.
Any laws, regulations, and such need to be carefully thought out with secondary effects in mind and written with broad judicial discretion baked in and low thresholds for dismissal of charges. Let's not be quick to throw out the possible good with the bad by enacting hastily-written, poorly thought out, knee-jerk, political-grandstanding legislation. Sadly, we're stuck with such legislation far too often because politicians want their face-time on the 24-hr news cycle demagoguing their agendas and berating the opposition as slow to act and therefor ineffective.
Strat
[I guess Bussard Ramjets are impossible ]
I imagine that this grease will literally gum up the works.
There goes my dream of travelling between solar systems using interstellar hydrogen as fuel.
Nah, just use a spinning vortex to separate the hydrogen out from the grease by centrifugal force, and then you could use the grease to add to the exhaust so you can "roll coal" on nasty aliens parked along your trajectory and holding protest signs.
Strat
[I disagree ] I think the galaxy is a life distributing system.
More than that. I believe there's a good possibility that a "universe" (there may be more than one, ours) exists for the sole purpose of creating intelligent life that matures and advances to the point they have the ability to move outside that universe and exist there. They then create another universe and the cycle repeats. It's how extra-dimensional beings/species/civilizations "reproduce", if you will. I mean, what else do you do when you're effectively a God or Gods able to create a freaking *universe* FFS? Play Euchre?
There may already have been intelligent species that achieved "Ascendancy" long ago and are no longer here for us to easily find through signs of activity. We may be the first or the last in a long line of intelligent species or just one of many in the middle of that series of intelligent species. We just haven't "grown up" sufficiently to learn "the facts of "Life" yet.
Whether or not we survive long enough as a species to find out...?
Strat
But how will we ever move fast enough to escape oceans rising at fractions of an inch a year? Wouldn't it look something like this?
https://youtu.be/YgJvgESR920
Strat
[The problem is the douchebag humans]
who waste their life coming up with ways to fuck up other peoples' day by hacking their computer.
Pondscum basically. Or pathogenic bacteria. Take your pick. But such is life I guess.
There will always be a criminal element in any free and open society. That's really just human nature.
No, the real problem here are governments that insist people not be *too* secure in their data, communications, and with whom they associate (there is no freedom of association if all your associations are tracked, stored, and analyzed).
Strat
Well, since we're "wish-listing" here as it's unlikely in the extreme that any of this unconstitutional behavior will see any serious repercussions anytime soon, I'd like to see every single government official, agent, etc etc, face prosecution that originated the orders to violate civil rights and those down the chain that followed them.
When your government officials and agencies become "too big to prosecute" it might be a sign that your government has grown far too large & powerful.
Strat
There should be 1 government organization responsible for computer security, and they should not also be in charge of spying as that deters foreign governments and corporations from fully cooperating with them. Giving them legal authority to force companies to patch security holes would also help.
Not only authority to legally order large software companies to patch security holes, but prosecute them for some form of criminal negligence when they do things like marketing routers with hard-coded default admin/vendor-access passwords (and especially for not mentioning that little detail very plainly to potential buyers). That sort of nonsense is not just ignoring security or even doing it badly, it's giving the entire concept of security the "Bronx cheer" and causes great financial and societal harm that affects everyone including people who are not their customers.
Strat
Do we get to see our entire medical records now, as HIPAA was supposed to specify? Can a communications provider refuse to share personal records with the government now, applying Apple-style encryption to them? For companies that did so, this could be a good selling point in a highly competitive market.
Any business/industry/etc the US government becomes really annoyed with but can't outlaw or ban for various reasons ranging from political/PR to legal/constitutional gets the "Operation Choke-Point" treatment where banks and financial institutions are pressured to refuse to do any business or perform any financial transactions for certain businesses like gun stores or else suffer endless audits and investigations by multiple agencies and departments.
I'd like to see the SCOTUS rule against that practice. Government agencies should not be used as partisan political weapons by anyone.
Strat
Hell that's been the US government's national fiscal policy for over 60 years and counting!
Strat
Unless there is something VERY special about Norway, a wide-spread trend that cannot be attributed to education
TFS did not exclude "education". It excluded "parental education"...in other words home schooling...as a factor.
Bratsberg and Rogeberg discounted factors like parental education, family size, increased immigration, and genetics as significant causes.
IMHO in the US it's government-run public schools, the DoE, and the teacher's unions who are the chief causes (but not the only ones). The US spends more on education per student than anybody but the results suck the whole bag-full.
If the US is to have any chance of halting it's decline it must totally re-think the entire current education system, not just throw more money at it or make meaningless tweaks to a totally broken system.
Strat
Avoiding Uber technically complying while violating the intent of the rules.
Ah I see, when Uber violates the law they're bad, and when they comply with the law they're even worse.
The rest of your post is just hand-waving, strawmen, and attempting to take the high moral ground and not worth the time & trouble to bother refuting as those with less bias will see it for what it is while the kool-ade drinkers will never concede anything.
Enjoy your UK police-state.
Strat
The problem is, any rules we put down will be gamed by Uber (since they don't want an employee).
"Gamed" meaning Uber will comply with the law and alter the driver agreements as needed to maintain their status as contractors. So then the government will change the law again to try to catch Uber out.
This is about government trying to all but eliminate individuals working for themselves as independents. Controlling people is made much harder when government can't simply go to a person's employer and 'suggest' they could see costly legal/regulatory problems in the near future if person 'X' is not fired because he voices opinions and talks about facts the government dislikes.
Governments want to run societies like ant colonies, and there are no "independent contractors" in an ant colony.
Strat
Kaspersky said the leak happened because the NSA agent took nation-state cyber-weapons home, which its software detected and uploaded to its servers for analysis.
The software did what it says it will do on the tin which many of it's competitors do as well (never mind that you can easily choose to have that functionality turned off), and because some idiot US TLA contractor commits an illegal act the developers would have no way to predict, the software and the company behind it are the 'bad guys'.
This is blame-shifting combined with propaganda meant to distract from US domestic issues regarding powerful people and government agencies run amok.
Strat
Since hacking is illegal, why are cops buying from Grayshift instead of raiding their offices?
Because in practice it's only illegal to hack those whom the State favors. Hacking those who are not in the State's (and the corrupt individuals in power's) good graces for whatever reason is A-OK, especially if the State gets the benefit of obtaining the data in readable form. The only real exception to this is if the hacker(s) in question are also not seen favorably by those in power.
Strat
Thank you for including the "/s", otherwise we'd have had no chance at identifying the sarcasm.
Yes, you and I can usually detect most sarcasm (in this case I understood yours without a tag).
However keep in mind that this *is* Slashdot, and many here to all appearances were born without the sarcasm-detection gene or at least without it being dominant. I doubt that you could not find at least one serious 'whoosh' of that sort in any 2 consecutive Slashdot story comment sections.
To mangle a famous quote; "Never underestimate the obliviousness of the average "Slashdotter"."
I mean, c'mon! Many never read TFS never mind TFA, hell it's almost a tradition here and memed to death, why would anyone expect them to read & comprehend subtleties like sarcasm in posts they reply to or even their own posts?
Slashdot is one of the reasons behind why the "sarc tag" became a thing.
Strat
A 128 GB machine will be ideal for a developer who has it for his/her daily driver
640GB should be enough for anybody.
I bet the chintzy bastages didn't even allow for upgrading the RAM either. At a piddly 128GB one might as well haul out the abacus. /s
Strat
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
That is wrong. They would swing back and forth, like they always did.
Yes Mr. Pedant, over a timescale of multiple tens and hundreds of thousands of years that's obviously true.
I thought it was understood that the time frame under discussion is the one which climate alarmists talk about which is the next few hundred to a thousand years following our relatively recent emergence from an ice-age.
Thanks for trying to muddy the waters though, that's what's needed for people to come together on rational strategies.
Strat