Neural networks have shown some remarkable abilities to learn new information without having to be specifically programmed for every outcome.
As far as I know, this isn't quite right. NNs can deal with things they have not been explicitly programmed for because those things are implicit in what they have already learned. They're not learning anything new. Complex NNs that continuously self-modify in a successful manner haven't been demonstrated yet. Perhaps soon, though.:)
Practically speaking, the local jail (and all the rest of the imprisonment system combined) isn't large enough to handle the number of people that kind of outlook would bring if it becomes economically advantageous to any significant number of citizens. So I don't think what you're suggesting here is actually possible in any meaningful sense.
Something else would happen. Probably wouldn't be good, either.
You can emulate anything, pretty much. You need a high enough sample rate, enough bits, and a complete understanding of what the effect does, and how it is controlled, if indeed it is.
If you skimp, you'll get... something else other than the original effect.
Okay, we need to discuss classic amplification (IOW, not digital) and tube vs. transistor distortion. Applies to all audio reproduction systems - receivers, preamps, amps, headphone amps.
When run entirely in their linear range, which is to say, in class A amplification, where very expensive and/or high end analog musical system designs sometimes run, analog devices, be they tubes, fets or bipolar transistors, all follow the input signal faithfully, plus or minus total system noise and phase shifts -- no "warmth" or other characteristics are inherent in even a half-decent design, unless you add it yourself with tone controls or the like. *NONE*. For the record, tubes make the most noise, bipolar transistors next, various field effect transistor types the least. Analog integrated circuits tend to use bipolars and/or FETs; look the specific IC up to see, there's no telling otherwise.
So what you want, ideally, is the very minimum of distortion, noise, and as close to perfect signal reproduction as you can get. What goes in equals, as closely as possible, what comes out. But class A is an expensive and power-hungry way to do anything. So most reasonably priced tube and transistor linear amplifiers tend to run in class AB, which uses two devices or sets of devices at the high levek output, where one set amplifies the negative excursions of the signal, the other the positive set. The idea is that the devices are slightly on all the time, and when they begin to amplify their part of the signal, there won't be much distortion from moving into the linear part of their amplification curve from the non-linear, off, part, because the device isn't switching from off to on, it was already on. This works really well, and some very high end tube and transistor equipment works this way. Uses a little extra power, but it's a great compromise.
So what's different in a useful and interesting way between tubes and transistors? Well, when a tube is pushed into its nonlinear range, the gain transfer curve bends over comparatively smoothly so that what would be a sharply clipped (squared off) signal in a device like a bipolar transistor, turns first into a compressed signal, and even later down the curve, begins to evidence harmonic and other distortion that somewhat resembles that produce by hard clipping, but has, because of that still-somewhat-gentle curve, an entirely different set of dominant harmonics as compared to, for instance, a bipolar transistor at or near saturation. So the distortion, when the system is run so hard it distorts, sounds quite different.
That characteristic is why (knowledgeable) musicians who use distortion as a tonal tool often choose tubes; specifically because these musicians *do* run the tubes out of the linear area of the transfer curve, and the result is interesting -- and often pleasing. When the distortion is the result of a transfer curve that abruptly goes from highly linear to highly nonlinear, as is the case with bipolar devices, the result is most unpleasant. Edgy. Sharp. Dissonant. It isn't very often that such a thing is well received in a musical performance.
However, this choice does not *ever* hold true for a musical reproduction system based on tubes that isn't running in a range that will distort the music. You'd have to turn it up so far that one or more elements of the preamp or power amp is pushed past the linear part of its transfer curve, and then all of the music distorts -- and that's not a "warm" sound, that's a "hey, your system sounds awful, turn that thing down before I puke" sound.
So, for example, if I get out my Les Paul or my Strat and plug it into a tube amp and turn that bizatch up, I'm doing so because the amp's distortion is going to very significantly color the reproduction of what I play. I'm going to adjust the amp specifically so I *get* distortion. It'll sound fabulous. I'll get feedback, there will be awesome weirdnesses when I hit harmonics on my strings, pick and fretting artifacts will sound very different,
You don't need vacuum tubes. That's such a horrible audio myth. They glow in the dark and look nice. Aside from that, they produce more distortion, more noise, use more power, are more fragile, and have shorter lifetimes than solid state electronics. They do not sound better, given $X spent on whatever, presuming some reasonable amount of tech is returned per dollar.
OTOH, if you just want to make vacuum tubes because.... you want to make vacuum tunes... have at it:)
Only works if your family and friends constitute a majority.
Nonsense. That would mean the candidate(s) is/are otherwise getting 100% of the vote. How often does that happen?
What? How do you figure? A majority is anything over 50%. Including 51%. If you don't have a majority (which is not a requirement for 100%) with you, you can't set the path of a new ordinance by voting; and you generally can't set it at all by trying to reason with the town/city/whatever council, unless you create a petition with a significant impact -- all of which will always represent the will of the group as to what you are allowed to do as an individual to your own self, property, and possessions without physically damaging or stealing the person or property of others, so it's absurd from the very start. Shouldn't even come up. By the time you're fighting a liberty-intrusive ordinance, most times, you're defeated before you even write or speak a word.
Except for just a few historic districts, the government practically never sets restrictions on what color you can paint your property, while it's very common with HOAs
You're being far too specific. Government sets all kinds of house things in their mommy guise: how high off the floor electrical sockets have to be; how many windows you must have; how many cats you can keep in your home; where (if) (and which) you can park your vehicles on your own property; etc., etc.; etc. Including how tall, or whether, you can have an amateur radio tower. The government-imposed limit here, for instance, is 45 feet. Which, again, is absurd.
You need to pay more attention and/or learn how things actually work.
Congress often votes in a bi-partisan and broadly supportive manner when the actual effect of a bill is zero. That's the case here. The watered-down version of the bill they passed changes nothing significant to the HOAs, and offers nothing significant to those in the amateur radio service. HOAs can still arbitrarily say no, and when they do, you can get a lawyer, take them to court, and they can still say no, leaving you poorer and still without the antenna system you wanted. Hence... the "support."
If codes aren't being enforced, you let your city representatives know it's important to you, and your family and friends will vote them out next election if they don't make it a priority.
Only works if your family and friends constitute a majority. And since that is almost never the case, what you're saying here is basically nonsensical.
HOAs are just a bunch of busy-bodies deciding what color you can paint your bike shed, and taking your money so they can play like they're doing something important.
"Government is (among other things) a bunch of busy-bodies deciding what color you can paint your bike shed, and taking your money or throwing you in jail so they can play like they're doing something important."
I would add that rights are those things that cannot be taken away by a simple majority vote. If it can be taken away, it wasn't a right in the first place.
Unfortunately, that is a wholly optional construct, valid only in the context where those who hold power agree it is true.
Rights are things that are enforced by those with the power to enforce them. The instant that the power to enforce them is lacking or withheld, they are not rights - they are extra-societal acts, quite often crimes. You can elect to try to exercise what you perceive as a right, but if you are constrained, coerced, or killed when those in power become aware of it, you had nothing worth having.
The idea that government should respect rights as you describe them, as inherent to the human condition, is written into the US constitution. That defined the power that was, top-down, to codify and respect various important rights. The US congress and the supreme court have been working in concert, quite successfully, to water down or explicitly remove those inferences and stipulations.
The public has, and continues to, put up with it. That, in a nutshell, is how the constitutional intent for rights to be treated as inherent in the US became "just a piece of paper." There is no longer any power behind the idea; it is dead. The only right you have is the right to do what you're told. Because that, the government is consistently enforcing.
Exactly right. HOA's can impose all kinds of restrictions on what you do with your own property.
From my POV, the chain of logic that says "we can prevent you from buying if you don't sign our agreement" is invalid on first principles.
And I would not sign anything of the sort. But I have the ability to choose where I live. Not everyone does (jobs, family, illness, infirmity); and that makes this a problem. So a bill like this (not this version of the bill, certainly, because it is toothless) is needed to push back on the important things, of which this is one, until or unless the entire idea of "we can prevent you from buying if you don't sign our agreement" is somehow put down like the anti-liberty, oppressive POS it is.
Don't worry, it's a shit bill, stuffed to the gills with weasel words. The HOA can still just say "no", and your only option at that point is to spread your wallet wide open for a lawyer. And you still could end up with "no."
Totally shit bill. Watered down and mutated into a pro-HOA exercise in sycophancy.
You'll still need someone to define the solution set
Yes, that's what "training" would have to cover, among other things.
By the time you've answered all the relevant specification questions
Yes. But you only have to answer them once. Much (most, perhaps) programming is reinventing the wheel, or painting the rim a different color. The more you know, the easier that is, because you know the range of tools available and you can fit them to the problem, until you haven't done it in a while. Same thing will, I think, apply with LDNLS software generators: the more they know, the better they will get. But that whole "haven't done it in a while" thing isn't going to apply. it's just going to get better and better and better at the job. It won't get tired, it won't get distracted by the secretary's legs, it won't quit at 5pm, it won't need a vacation, it'll never get pregnant or have a sick kid, won’t need or want a cafeteria, a gym, breaks, a lunch hour, or stock options; it'll be immune to office romance, gossip, corporate espionage, complaints of mistreatment; have no interest in and will not require promotion, will never misuse company time, and will be replaceable the very moment something more effective is available without any consequences to social security charges, unemployment tithing, legal costs, or need for security personnel to walk the previous “employee” to the door.
And it won't need a paycheck.
Leaving the high schooler holding a rather empty bag. Probably the rest of us, too, but definitely entry level programmers.
The main problem I think we face is that we appear to be very near the tipping point where "programmer" won't be a job -- it'll be the result of an expert system.
These neural-like-systems are already picking the right thing out of an image, out of speech, out of all the go moves possible -- with training. How long do you really think it'll be before one of them is trained on a metric shit-ton of code, and then asked to pick the right code to solve the problem... and then succeed?
Driving, lawyers, customer service, fast food... and more. Those are all looking very iffy right now, human-employment-wise. I think programming is a pretty solid target for exactly this kind of system already; the training is probably all that has to be managed. And yes, I write software, among other things. A lot of code (and particularly a lot of the code most people would learn to grasp in a high school environment) is really pretty simple, once you know how. So the only question is, how long before one of these systems knows how? And how far might they go?
Smells like social and economic change to me. Really does.
Android phone user here. I own a lot of paid-for-up-front apps (couple hundred at least, just under Android.) Happy to pay for good stuff. But I stopped buying apps that:
A) are ad-saturated, and/or... B) turn into (not really) free PITA apps that nickle and dime me to death for DLC/enables
Everyone keeps telling me that's the popular way to go. I keep telling them it's not popular with me.:)
However, yes, I do have pretty much everything I really need, plus a bunch of useful / fun things. I'm good. So the devs that want to go with "free" + annoy-the-shit-out-of-the-customer, well, more power to them. I'll just watch.
I dumped Apple's iPhone because when developers stop paying, Apple tosses the apps from the app store. And the censorship. And the no-sideloading issue. Plus the whole slow-as-mud to respond to developer updates / fixes. And the no memory card thing... and the no radio thing... and Apple's habit of breaking old apps by incompatibly changing each new revision of iOS... yeah, it really was buh-bye by that point.
I still have my iPad, but I haven't bought a new app for it in over a year. Instead, I just watch the old apps break, one by one, as Apple upgrades (cough) iOS. It's still a good platform to play chess on, anyway. So far.
...and now there's no audio jack on the new iPhone... lol. What's next? I'm sure they'll find something else to screw up. They're consistent, if nothing else.
There's a lot of truth to that. Part of why we ended up where we are is because congress was too cowardly to actually act according to article 5 and make the changes that society needed, some of which were obvious and slam-dunk (excepting nuclear and biological weapons from the 2nd, for instance, wasn't likely to meet any significant resistance at all); instead, they chose fiat lawmaking, and SCOTUS went right along.
Some of the laws we have are very appropriate to our social structure. But they aren't constitutional.
What I wish, I can't have, because it would require going back in time and getting those foul fuckers in congress to do their jobs correctly.
So you would arrest everyone who instantiates a fire drill in a school then? Oh, wait -- the presumption is that people can be, and are, trained to deal with this. So no, it's not "just fine", instead, it's mommyism, and illegal mommyism at that.
If you want to do this legitimately, then article 5 is right there for you to make your changes. Until then, it's garbage law.
Which, again, is exactly what I was saying. They ignore their oaths, and do whatever they want. Just as congress and various state legislatures do.
SCOTUS has the unique distinction of having awarded themselves a pseudo article 5 fiat power to de facto amend the constitution via Marbury vs. Madison, and they've been radically out of hand ever since. Congress and the state legislatures simply act in defiance of their oaths without additional formalized justification. The fact that the public has let them get away with this while in possession of a tool (voting) that would let them prevent it is one of the key pillars supporting our current form of government, which is an oligarchy.
Do you see any of that as exceptions to protected speech in the constitution? No, you don't. No exceptions exist; speech is constitutionally given 100% blanket protection:
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
There. See? Not "except for this speech or that speech", but "speech." Not "this press or that press, but "press." Not "some law", but "no law."
The things you bring up are exactly what I meant when I said "invalid law." Law made in the face of an explicit prohibition to do so; law made in the face of oaths given to honor the constitution. Those laws are unequivocally are the result of oath-breaking, they are unconstitutional, and they are consequently invalid law in precisely the way I described it.
Try to keep up. You can object, but you really should read for content so you can object to what was actually said.
Information doesn't want to be free. You, and people like you, want it to be free. How many people get hurt in the process isn't important enough to you to alter your desire, or, it may be that you simply are unable to comprehend the damage such a desire often does.
This may well be one of the reasons you describe yourself as a "socially awkward geek." I wouldn't be proud of it, frankly. And, as I see you're posting AC, perhaps you are not.
Well, it's truly a shame that the world has become a place where you cannot escape your mistakes, large or small, if someone, anyone, is the least bit interested in seeing to it that you can't. No matter how hard you try, no matter how sincere you are, no matter what lengths you go to to adjust your behavior or act in ways to mitigate or reverse any damage you might have done, or have been perceived to have done.
It's part and parcel of the retribution over rehabilitation mindset, I think. Despicable, really.
Just to elaborate a bit, all speech is constitutionally protected in the US; anything other than that is simply the result of oath-breaking on the part of congress, and/or state legislatures, and justices, and wholly constitutes invalid law. Not that invalid law is any less unpleasant when the government uses it to commit violence upon your person. Which it does with grinding regularity.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI:
The "breaks" are what you're trying to avoid - getting broken. The brakes are what you engage to decelerate the vehicle.
As far as I know, this isn't quite right. NNs can deal with things they have not been explicitly programmed for because those things are implicit in what they have already learned. They're not learning anything new. Complex NNs that continuously self-modify in a successful manner haven't been demonstrated yet. Perhaps soon, though. :)
Practically speaking, the local jail (and all the rest of the imprisonment system combined) isn't large enough to handle the number of people that kind of outlook would bring if it becomes economically advantageous to any significant number of citizens. So I don't think what you're suggesting here is actually possible in any meaningful sense.
Something else would happen. Probably wouldn't be good, either.
You're welcome.
You can emulate anything, pretty much. You need a high enough sample rate, enough bits, and a complete understanding of what the effect does, and how it is controlled, if indeed it is.
If you skimp, you'll get... something else other than the original effect.
I write signal processing software pretty much every day. Here's my current obsession.
Okay, we need to discuss classic amplification (IOW, not digital) and tube vs. transistor distortion. Applies to all audio reproduction systems - receivers, preamps, amps, headphone amps.
When run entirely in their linear range, which is to say, in class A amplification, where very expensive and/or high end analog musical system designs sometimes run, analog devices, be they tubes, fets or bipolar transistors, all follow the input signal faithfully, plus or minus total system noise and phase shifts -- no "warmth" or other characteristics are inherent in even a half-decent design, unless you add it yourself with tone controls or the like. *NONE*. For the record, tubes make the most noise, bipolar transistors next, various field effect transistor types the least. Analog integrated circuits tend to use bipolars and/or FETs; look the specific IC up to see, there's no telling otherwise.
So what you want, ideally, is the very minimum of distortion, noise, and as close to perfect signal reproduction as you can get. What goes in equals, as closely as possible, what comes out. But class A is an expensive and power-hungry way to do anything. So most reasonably priced tube and transistor linear amplifiers tend to run in class AB, which uses two devices or sets of devices at the high levek output, where one set amplifies the negative excursions of the signal, the other the positive set. The idea is that the devices are slightly on all the time, and when they begin to amplify their part of the signal, there won't be much distortion from moving into the linear part of their amplification curve from the non-linear, off, part, because the device isn't switching from off to on, it was already on. This works really well, and some very high end tube and transistor equipment works this way. Uses a little extra power, but it's a great compromise.
So what's different in a useful and interesting way between tubes and transistors? Well, when a tube is pushed into its nonlinear range, the gain transfer curve bends over comparatively smoothly so that what would be a sharply clipped (squared off) signal in a device like a bipolar transistor, turns first into a compressed signal, and even later down the curve, begins to evidence harmonic and other distortion that somewhat resembles that produce by hard clipping, but has, because of that still-somewhat-gentle curve, an entirely different set of dominant harmonics as compared to, for instance, a bipolar transistor at or near saturation. So the distortion, when the system is run so hard it distorts, sounds quite different.
That characteristic is why (knowledgeable) musicians who use distortion as a tonal tool often choose tubes; specifically because these musicians *do* run the tubes out of the linear area of the transfer curve, and the result is interesting -- and often pleasing. When the distortion is the result of a transfer curve that abruptly goes from highly linear to highly nonlinear, as is the case with bipolar devices, the result is most unpleasant. Edgy. Sharp. Dissonant. It isn't very often that such a thing is well received in a musical performance.
However, this choice does not *ever* hold true for a musical reproduction system based on tubes that isn't running in a range that will distort the music. You'd have to turn it up so far that one or more elements of the preamp or power amp is pushed past the linear part of its transfer curve, and then all of the music distorts -- and that's not a "warm" sound, that's a "hey, your system sounds awful, turn that thing down before I puke" sound.
So, for example, if I get out my Les Paul or my Strat and plug it into a tube amp and turn that bizatch up, I'm doing so because the amp's distortion is going to very significantly color the reproduction of what I play. I'm going to adjust the amp specifically so I *get* distortion. It'll sound fabulous. I'll get feedback, there will be awesome weirdnesses when I hit harmonics on my strings, pick and fretting artifacts will sound very different,
You don't need vacuum tubes. That's such a horrible audio myth. They glow in the dark and look nice. Aside from that, they produce more distortion, more noise, use more power, are more fragile, and have shorter lifetimes than solid state electronics. They do not sound better, given $X spent on whatever, presuming some reasonable amount of tech is returned per dollar.
OTOH, if you just want to make vacuum tubes because.... you want to make vacuum tunes... have at it :)
What? How do you figure? A majority is anything over 50%. Including 51%. If you don't have a majority (which is not a requirement for 100%) with you, you can't set the path of a new ordinance by voting; and you generally can't set it at all by trying to reason with the town/city/whatever council, unless you create a petition with a significant impact -- all of which will always represent the will of the group as to what you are allowed to do as an individual to your own self, property, and possessions without physically damaging or stealing the person or property of others, so it's absurd from the very start. Shouldn't even come up. By the time you're fighting a liberty-intrusive ordinance, most times, you're defeated before you even write or speak a word.
You're being far too specific. Government sets all kinds of house things in their mommy guise: how high off the floor electrical sockets have to be; how many windows you must have; how many cats you can keep in your home; where (if) (and which) you can park your vehicles on your own property; etc., etc.; etc. Including how tall, or whether, you can have an amateur radio tower. The government-imposed limit here, for instance, is 45 feet. Which, again, is absurd.
You need to pay more attention and/or learn how things actually work.
Congress often votes in a bi-partisan and broadly supportive manner when the actual effect of a bill is zero. That's the case here. The watered-down version of the bill they passed changes nothing significant to the HOAs, and offers nothing significant to those in the amateur radio service. HOAs can still arbitrarily say no, and when they do, you can get a lawyer, take them to court, and they can still say no, leaving you poorer and still without the antenna system you wanted. Hence... the "support."
Only works if your family and friends constitute a majority. And since that is almost never the case, what you're saying here is basically nonsensical.
"Government is (among other things) a bunch of busy-bodies deciding what color you can paint your bike shed, and taking your money or throwing you in jail so they can play like they're doing something important."
FTFY
Unfortunately, that is a wholly optional construct, valid only in the context where those who hold power agree it is true.
Rights are things that are enforced by those with the power to enforce them. The instant that the power to enforce them is lacking or withheld, they are not rights - they are extra-societal acts, quite often crimes. You can elect to try to exercise what you perceive as a right, but if you are constrained, coerced, or killed when those in power become aware of it, you had nothing worth having.
The idea that government should respect rights as you describe them, as inherent to the human condition, is written into the US constitution. That defined the power that was, top-down, to codify and respect various important rights. The US congress and the supreme court have been working in concert, quite successfully, to water down or explicitly remove those inferences and stipulations.
The public has, and continues to, put up with it. That, in a nutshell, is how the constitutional intent for rights to be treated as inherent in the US became "just a piece of paper." There is no longer any power behind the idea; it is dead. The only right you have is the right to do what you're told. Because that, the government is consistently enforcing.
What's "normal" in an emergency?
Also, no.
Exactly right. HOA's can impose all kinds of restrictions on what you do with your own property.
From my POV, the chain of logic that says "we can prevent you from buying if you don't sign our agreement" is invalid on first principles.
And I would not sign anything of the sort. But I have the ability to choose where I live. Not everyone does (jobs, family, illness, infirmity); and that makes this a problem. So a bill like this (not this version of the bill, certainly, because it is toothless) is needed to push back on the important things, of which this is one, until or unless the entire idea of "we can prevent you from buying if you don't sign our agreement" is somehow put down like the anti-liberty, oppressive POS it is.
Don't worry, it's a shit bill, stuffed to the gills with weasel words. The HOA can still just say "no", and your only option at that point is to spread your wallet wide open for a lawyer. And you still could end up with "no."
Totally shit bill. Watered down and mutated into a pro-HOA exercise in sycophancy.
I don't know if its a bigger problem, but it certainly is a problem; and particularly for entry-level stuff. And older workers.
Someone should mod you up. I have points, but I can't; already posted with my ID above.
Yes, that's what "training" would have to cover, among other things.
Yes. But you only have to answer them once. Much (most, perhaps) programming is reinventing the wheel, or painting the rim a different color. The more you know, the easier that is, because you know the range of tools available and you can fit them to the problem, until you haven't done it in a while. Same thing will, I think, apply with LDNLS software generators: the more they know, the better they will get. But that whole "haven't done it in a while" thing isn't going to apply. it's just going to get better and better and better at the job. It won't get tired, it won't get distracted by the secretary's legs, it won't quit at 5pm, it won't need a vacation, it'll never get pregnant or have a sick kid, won’t need or want a cafeteria, a gym, breaks, a lunch hour, or stock options; it'll be immune to office romance, gossip, corporate espionage, complaints of mistreatment; have no interest in and will not require promotion, will never misuse company time, and will be replaceable the very moment something more effective is available without any consequences to social security charges, unemployment tithing, legal costs, or need for security personnel to walk the previous “employee” to the door.
And it won't need a paycheck.
Leaving the high schooler holding a rather empty bag. Probably the rest of us, too, but definitely entry level programmers.
The main problem I think we face is that we appear to be very near the tipping point where "programmer" won't be a job -- it'll be the result of an expert system.
These neural-like-systems are already picking the right thing out of an image, out of speech, out of all the go moves possible -- with training. How long do you really think it'll be before one of them is trained on a metric shit-ton of code, and then asked to pick the right code to solve the problem... and then succeed?
Driving, lawyers, customer service, fast food... and more. Those are all looking very iffy right now, human-employment-wise. I think programming is a pretty solid target for exactly this kind of system already; the training is probably all that has to be managed. And yes, I write software, among other things. A lot of code (and particularly a lot of the code most people would learn to grasp in a high school environment) is really pretty simple, once you know how. So the only question is, how long before one of these systems knows how? And how far might they go?
Smells like social and economic change to me. Really does.
Android phone user here. I own a lot of paid-for-up-front apps (couple hundred at least, just under Android.) Happy to pay for good stuff. But I stopped buying apps that:
A) are ad-saturated, and/or...
B) turn into (not really) free PITA apps that nickle and dime me to death for DLC/enables
Everyone keeps telling me that's the popular way to go. I keep telling them it's not popular with me. :)
However, yes, I do have pretty much everything I really need, plus a bunch of useful / fun things. I'm good. So the devs that want to go with "free" + annoy-the-shit-out-of-the-customer, well, more power to them. I'll just watch.
I dumped Apple's iPhone because when developers stop paying, Apple tosses the apps from the app store. And the censorship. And the no-sideloading issue. Plus the whole slow-as-mud to respond to developer updates / fixes. And the no memory card thing... and the no radio thing... and Apple's habit of breaking old apps by incompatibly changing each new revision of iOS... yeah, it really was buh-bye by that point.
I still have my iPad, but I haven't bought a new app for it in over a year. Instead, I just watch the old apps break, one by one, as Apple upgrades (cough) iOS. It's still a good platform to play chess on, anyway. So far.
...and now there's no audio jack on the new iPhone... lol. What's next? I'm sure they'll find something else to screw up. They're consistent, if nothing else.
Indeed. And there's this.
There's a lot of truth to that. Part of why we ended up where we are is because congress was too cowardly to actually act according to article 5 and make the changes that society needed, some of which were obvious and slam-dunk (excepting nuclear and biological weapons from the 2nd, for instance, wasn't likely to meet any significant resistance at all); instead, they chose fiat lawmaking, and SCOTUS went right along.
Some of the laws we have are very appropriate to our social structure. But they aren't constitutional.
What I wish, I can't have, because it would require going back in time and getting those foul fuckers in congress to do their jobs correctly.
Oh well. Long live the oligarchy.
So you would arrest everyone who instantiates a fire drill in a school then? Oh, wait -- the presumption is that people can be, and are, trained to deal with this. So no, it's not "just fine", instead, it's mommyism, and illegal mommyism at that.
If you want to do this legitimately, then article 5 is right there for you to make your changes. Until then, it's garbage law.
Which, again, is exactly what I was saying. They ignore their oaths, and do whatever they want. Just as congress and various state legislatures do.
SCOTUS has the unique distinction of having awarded themselves a pseudo article 5 fiat power to de facto amend the constitution via Marbury vs. Madison, and they've been radically out of hand ever since. Congress and the state legislatures simply act in defiance of their oaths without additional formalized justification. The fact that the public has let them get away with this while in possession of a tool (voting) that would let them prevent it is one of the key pillars supporting our current form of government, which is an oligarchy.
Do you see any of that as exceptions to protected speech in the constitution? No, you don't. No exceptions exist; speech is constitutionally given 100% blanket protection:
There. See? Not "except for this speech or that speech", but "speech." Not "this press or that press, but "press." Not "some law", but "no law."
The things you bring up are exactly what I meant when I said "invalid law." Law made in the face of an explicit prohibition to do so; law made in the face of oaths given to honor the constitution. Those laws are unequivocally are the result of oath-breaking, they are unconstitutional, and they are consequently invalid law in precisely the way I described it.
Try to keep up. You can object, but you really should read for content so you can object to what was actually said.
Information doesn't want to be free. You, and people like you, want it to be free. How many people get hurt in the process isn't important enough to you to alter your desire, or, it may be that you simply are unable to comprehend the damage such a desire often does.
This may well be one of the reasons you describe yourself as a "socially awkward geek." I wouldn't be proud of it, frankly. And, as I see you're posting AC, perhaps you are not.
Well, it's truly a shame that the world has become a place where you cannot escape your mistakes, large or small, if someone, anyone, is the least bit interested in seeing to it that you can't. No matter how hard you try, no matter how sincere you are, no matter what lengths you go to to adjust your behavior or act in ways to mitigate or reverse any damage you might have done, or have been perceived to have done.
It's part and parcel of the retribution over rehabilitation mindset, I think. Despicable, really.
Just to elaborate a bit, all speech is constitutionally protected in the US; anything other than that is simply the result of oath-breaking on the part of congress, and/or state legislatures, and justices, and wholly constitutes invalid law. Not that invalid law is any less unpleasant when the government uses it to commit violence upon your person. Which it does with grinding regularity.