Looking at the actual text of the law rather than the Providence Journal's story, actually, not "ludicrously and patently" unconstitutional.
It is, of course, ordinarily unconstitutional under First Amendment case law to regulate (including by differential licensing or taxation) based on content.
But this bill explicitly references RI Â 11-31-1 to define the content being regulated, and that is the bit of Rhode Island law that outlaws obscenity (not merely sexually-explicit material), in the same words that Supreme Court precedent holds obscenity to be unprotected by the First Amendment.
So, this law, as written, seems to only restrict access to such online content that, under the existing laws of the United States and the State of Rhode Island, would currently be illegal for someone in Rhode Island to possess on, say, DVD.
There's still potential "chilling effect" and "as applied" challenges to be made, of course, but whoever drafted this had a solid understanding of what would at least facially stand up in court.
It's setting up that story in a world where human expansion makes war with aliens inevitable, that's the problem. And the war-crime stuff. He could have set up his war-needing-environment with a need for pure defense of home, and outlined some rules of war descended from Geneva Conventions rather than the chapter "Caesar Chastens Gaul" of his memoir.
Well, sure, he could have done all that, if he was preaching a pure morality tale of the unimpeachable nobility of the foot soldier. Or if he was trying to preach that the best possible government was a representative government made entirely of and elected entirely by veterans.
But, here's the thing. Heinlein was smart enough that if that had been his goal, he could have done something like that. Instead, he gives us a world where the government is explicitly waging a war for liebensraum, and does order atrocities that a not-particularly-vile main character goes ahead and commits. Do you actually think that was an accident?
We get the entire story from the perspective of a young, incurious boy who just stumbled his way into the military as much to impress a girl as for any other reason, who barely noticed (while training to be a soldier!) that his polity moved from peace to war, who fights for his buddies with no broader horizon, and who finally swallows the justifications for the war given to him in his propaganda (I'm sorry, History & Moral Philosophy) class at the academy -- and we get his conclusions, not the actual arguments for them (beyond the same basic Malthusian justification Hitler gave for the need to conquer the lands of the Slavs).
Someone who thinks about what he reads, rather than simply swallowing it, will notice that we're never given an "objective" in-story reason to think that Rico's on the side of right. The only things that tend to drag us along is that we're seeing the world through Rico's eyes, and that the enemies are aliens. Sure, the aliens attack and kill a bunch of people on Earth; that doesn't tell us whether they're the Nazis bombing London, or the Allies bombing Dresden.
Now, if Heinlein's books all gave us that same basic perspective, it would be reasonable to believe Rico's views are Heinlein's perspective, and the Heinlein is as blind as Rico. But, for example, Double Star didn't have its hero cleansing Mars to make it safe for human colonization -- it instead had a low-horizons incurious anti-Martian bigot becoming the greatest human political advocate for Martian civil rights. So, the only logical conclusion is that we're supposed to notice that Rico is a basically-decent kid, showing courage and other soldierly virtues, while committing atrocities in what is quite possibly a war of aggression.
So, yeah, the only real problem with Starship Troopers, the book? It doesn't cater to people who want moral lessons stridently shouted at the audience. Which, I'll grant, is a niche that Paul Verhoeven excels at catering to.
The fundamental problem people have with Heinlein is a mental defect that renders them unable to appreciate the difference between someone extrapolating a "what if" and someone declaiming a "we should".
If you make them confront the fact that the same guy wrote (for example) Double Star, Starship Troopers, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, they suffer serious cognitive dissonance, which they can only resolve by retreating from reality into a fantasy simple enough for them to comprehend.
From that safe fantasy world they then lash out at the scary author they cannot comprehend.
Under California law, it is explicitly illegal to fire someone for his political opinions, but perfectly legal to fire someone to avoid creating a hostile work environment (indeed, if no lesser measures suffice to prevent/cure a hostile work environment, it's effectively obligatory).
Therefore, whatever the actual motive for the firing, Google is going to say it was about a hostile work environment, not political opinions. There's a pending lawsuit, after all.
Don't you know that higher temperatures cause deserts?
That's why you start in the really wet polar regions, go to the drier temperate regions, then reach the great dry deserts of the subtropics . . . and if you venture beyond them to the tropics, you reach the Lifeless Ring of Eternal Fire.
Looks to me like the applicable charge for the shooting cop is voluntary manslaughter under Kansas law -- "Voluntary manslaughter is knowingly killing a human being committed . . . upon an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified use of deadly force . .."
The defense would pretty much have to argue that the call made the cop's belief "reasonable" even in the absence of any confirming evidence.
It's a state-by-state thing, like most US criminal law. Kansas's version is limited by statute to a specific list of "inherently dangerous felonies". Which doesn't include this case, as I understand it.
Had GNUStep been used for GNOME (it was the GNU project's official toolkit in 1996) and the work put in to complete it:
1) Linux vendors' resources wouldn't have been wasted in all the work of developing three major versions of GTK plus Bonobo, rather than delivering a better user experience.
2) The API instability for application developers caused by the three major versions wouldn't have happened.
3) The Apple resurgence would have helped by creating a bunch of desktop software reasonably practical to move to Linux, what with Linux providing the same OpenStep-and-POSIX APIs as the Mac.
4) Gnome UI designs would have been constrained by expectations evolved around the developed-for-Macintosh apps, preventing unusable idiocy from UI "innovation".
Oh, wait, I forgot, we're all supposed to pretend Gabon's independent.
Sure, French relations with Gabon are still managed out of the old colonial office rather than from the ministry of foreign affairs, and France's treasury backs their currency, and there are a bunch of French troops permanently stationed in the country, and (now deceased) Gabonese president Omar Bongo said "Gabon without France is like a car with no driver. France without Gabon is like a car with no fuel." But Gabon is an independent country, you bet.
If I wanted to read interminable posts, I'd be using an RSS reader to follow their blogs or whatever. The whole damn value of Twitter was that it forced the posters to be brief. What they should be doing is adding tools that block twitstorms, not ones that enable them.
Fringe benefits are generally included in an employeeâ(TM)s gross income (there are some exceptions). The benefits are subject to income tax withholding and employment taxes. Fringe benefits include cars and flights on aircraft that the employer provides, free or discounted commercial flights, vacations, discounts on property or services, memberships in country clubs or other social clubs, and tickets to entertainment or sporting events.
In general, the amount the employer must include is the amount by which the fair market value of the benefits is more than the sum of what the employee paid for it plus any amount that the law excludes. There are other special rules that employers and employees may use to value certain fringe benefits. See Publication 15-B, Employers' Tax Guide to Fringe Benefits, for more information.
If you dig in further into Publication 15-B, an employee discount on the services provided by the employer to the general public is taxed at only 80% of the price charged the general public. But, it is taxed at 80% of the price.
So, if you work for anybody other than a college, and your employer gives you a coupon for the services it provides to the general public, you have to pay tax on 80% of the coupon.
Now, of course, there's also the category of "Educational Assistance" in Publication 15-B. For benefits in that category, the first $5,250 is tax-free, and everything after that is subject to income and employment taxes.
So, if you work for anybody other than a college, and they give you free college tuition, you have to pay tax on every cent of the tuition in excess of $5,250.
In short, treating tuition discounts from an employing college as taxable income would be, in fact, just treating colleges like everybody else.
Most inmates are convicted of non-violent offenses, and are not a physical threat to other people
Not true. 54% of persons incarcerated in the US are there for violent crimes. A number of the rest are in there for things like drunk driving, which may not be a violent crime, but certainly presents a physical threat to other people.
If he had said "Plus of course you are not poisoning people with as many toxic exhaust fumes", or any other actually-accurate claim of electric car superiority to internal combustion, I wouldn't have called him out. Because, of course, there would have been nothing to call him out on.
And if you think the only thing that gets out of the smokestack of a power plant, even with filters and scrubbers, is CO2, well, you're sadly misinformed.
Plus of course you are not poisoning people with toxic exhaust fumes.
Riiiight. Because the 53% of locally-generated electrical power and the 42.88% of all consumed electrical power in California that came from burning coal, gas, oil, and biomass in 2016 was all using the secret California technique that doesn't involve emissions.
Hmm? Microsoft and IBM knew exactly why IBM put it on the new keyboard for the PC/AT -- to signal "CP-DOS"/"Advanced DOS"/"286 DOS"/"MT DOS"/"DOS 5", the new OS that was going to take full advantage of the 286's protected mode, through whatever program might happen to be running. Because one thing that was sure was that no pre-AT software was going to be listening for a key that didn't exist, while any other key or key combo might have already been hijacked.
And if you can get your hands on one of the pre-May 1987 internal development copies of what became OS/2, and manage to get it to run, you'll find that, in fact, that's just what SysRq does. (Some people have, in fact, done just that.)
Now, if you want to ask why the key was abandoned for this task and replaced by Ctrl+Esc in the SDK release of OS/2, well, that I can't answer.
But the bigger issue here is that maybe a unified bar is better.
Yeah, lots of people were saying that back when Firefox 1.0 was released, and the unified address/search input area that was in Mozilla 1.7 and all other major browsers of that era went away in favor of the separate boxes paradigm, too.
Of course, back then, the Mozilla organization was telling the people that favored the unified approach that they were wrong, that two separate boxes was superior for usability. Now Mozilla is reversing itself. Interestingly, they've never presented proper UI testing data on the issue either time, meaning they are likely as full of shit now as they were last time.
Not 17 years, 27 years. As the article says, "Good computer UI uses affordances, too. About ten years ago, most push buttons went âoe3Dâ. Using shades of grey, they appear to pop out of the screen. This is not just to look cool: itâ(TM)s important because 3D buttons afford pushing." Windows 3.0 (1990) replaced Windows 2.1's flat buttons with shaded "3D" buttons specifically because the UI testing labs proved the 3D buttons worked better.
But, despite that, idiots decided that UIs should be reworked to act like hidden object games.
And yet, as Mozilla tries more and more to cater to "the general public", its market share declines. On the other hand, when it emphasized things of concern to the "Slashdot IT elite", like standards support, lots of configuration options, and development frameworks that beyond mere extensions (XPCOM, XUL), its market share grew.
It's almost as if the general public pays so little attention to software that they'll use whatever happens to be installed on their machine, rather than even look at your offering. And thus that if you don't have Microsoft or Google-level muscle to push your browser, the only alternative is making something that appeals to the "Slashdot IT elite" in hopes they'll install it on the computers of their friends and family for you. And if you piss them off by taking a power saw to the features that attracted them, the "Slashdot IT elite", your market share will collapse.
Nah. The people who have been driving Firefox market share down for the last five years surely know what they're doing. Keep cheerleading all the way into the ground, thegarbz!
even if we were able eventually to create a superintelligence, there is no reason to believe it would be bent on world domination, unless this were for some reason programmed into the system.
Yeah, see, nobody, to a first approximation, is worried about a superintelligence having "world domination" as its intrinsic value. They're worried about a superintelligence adopting world domination as an instrumental value to achieve the end actually programmed into it. If whatever goal actually implemented by programmers and trainers in the superintelligence's code (bugs in implementation and all) is most easily achieved after eliminating the ability of humans to thwart it, then a sufficiently-smart AI carrying out that programmed goal will try to eliminate the ability of humans to thwart it.
The worry is not that AI will be evil, or even directed to do evil by its creators. It's that programmers are notoriously bad at writing complex code that has no unanticipated behaviors, and superintelligent AI will inherently be complex code.
And unless superintelligent AI turns out to be intrinsically impossible, the only question is when, not if, we have to deal with the problem of writing safe superintelligent AI.
Seriously, we already tried federal funding of broadband expansion. All it did was fill the pockets of telecoms; the problem still exists. Why would you expect another attempt to do particularly better? Because Trump's people will do it right?
If you're going to do anything, don't even consider the supply side at all. Set up a program on the demand side where sufficiently-rural addresses can apply for subsidies toward Internet access. That'll make fundraising for the OneWeb and SpaceX constellations easier while letting the individuals get on with HughesNet and Exede right now.
Ah, yes, who can forget about how all those angry Tea Party protesters, which of course included people with anger issues, resulting in all sorts of rioting.
Oh, wait. Apparently it's actually possible to have protests that don't descend into riots. It's not natural or inevitable, it's just an effect of whether the "protesters" are decent people or scum.
If rioting breaks out at a protest, it's because the "protestors" are choosing to aid and abet violence. There are no innocents at a riot, just co-conspirators. Lock up all the scum.
California has mountains, sure. But in order to pump water up mountains, you don't just need mountains; you also need water. California has regular shortages of water -- for example, the years 2012-2016.
Because, you know, it's a totally worthwhile capital investment to make massive desalination capacity that you run a tiny percentage of the time with no relationship to the demand for water. Tell me, are we also going to pay the workers to stand idle, or will we just expect there to be a bunch of trained unemployed people living nearby that we can hire to staff it when the power's available?
Why is google all of a sudden making absurd, terrible design decisions in its news division?
I assume that they got a new design team in, people who neither actually read news nor remember what a mess last redesign (2010-2011) was. The inability to tell the difference between clutter and information density proves the first (news is not a program UI, it's a presentation of data), and stripping all the features that had to be laboriously re-implemented last time indicates the second.
The real question to me is whether the previous redesign team was the more stupid & arrogant (they tested their new version a while, discovered everybody opted out of the test for the old one, and then decided to impose the new one without opt-out because they were sure it was just getting people used to it rather than major deficiencies), or if this redesign (imposing the new one without testing that would have told them people didn't like the feature-stripping) is more stupid & arrogant.
I guess that question will be decided by if and how quickly the new team restores article snippets, whitespace-sacrificing higher information density layout, real two-column view of news, turning off the sidebars, allowing standard Google search from the input field, and otherwise bringing forward all the first-implementation Google News features the second-iteration design idiots discovered too late that they had to add back.
Will they listen? I don't know. Last time they screwed up News this badly (2011), they eventually listened to the angry people (including me) and added enough features back to make it as useful as the previous version. And the reaction on their product support forums has been next-to uniformly negative, just like last time.
On the other hand, the fact that they did this without noticing they were making the same mistake as last time, without an extended period of a/b testing, makes me wonder if they're too arrogant or stupid to listen to feedback this time. Do they have no institutional memory whatsoever, or did they go ahead in spite of institutional memory?
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the actual text of the law rather than the Providence Journal's story, actually, not "ludicrously and patently" unconstitutional.
It is, of course, ordinarily unconstitutional under First Amendment case law to regulate (including by differential licensing or taxation) based on content.
But this bill explicitly references RI Â 11-31-1 to define the content being regulated, and that is the bit of Rhode Island law that outlaws obscenity (not merely sexually-explicit material), in the same words that Supreme Court precedent holds obscenity to be unprotected by the First Amendment.
So, this law, as written, seems to only restrict access to such online content that, under the existing laws of the United States and the State of Rhode Island, would currently be illegal for someone in Rhode Island to possess on, say, DVD.
There's still potential "chilling effect" and "as applied" challenges to be made, of course, but whoever drafted this had a solid understanding of what would at least facially stand up in court.
It's setting up that story in a world where human expansion makes war with aliens inevitable, that's the problem. And the war-crime stuff. He could have set up his war-needing-environment with a need for pure defense of home, and outlined some rules of war descended from Geneva Conventions rather than the chapter "Caesar Chastens Gaul" of his memoir.
Well, sure, he could have done all that, if he was preaching a pure morality tale of the unimpeachable nobility of the foot soldier. Or if he was trying to preach that the best possible government was a representative government made entirely of and elected entirely by veterans.
But, here's the thing. Heinlein was smart enough that if that had been his goal, he could have done something like that. Instead, he gives us a world where the government is explicitly waging a war for liebensraum, and does order atrocities that a not-particularly-vile main character goes ahead and commits. Do you actually think that was an accident?
We get the entire story from the perspective of a young, incurious boy who just stumbled his way into the military as much to impress a girl as for any other reason, who barely noticed (while training to be a soldier!) that his polity moved from peace to war, who fights for his buddies with no broader horizon, and who finally swallows the justifications for the war given to him in his propaganda (I'm sorry, History & Moral Philosophy) class at the academy -- and we get his conclusions, not the actual arguments for them (beyond the same basic Malthusian justification Hitler gave for the need to conquer the lands of the Slavs).
Someone who thinks about what he reads, rather than simply swallowing it, will notice that we're never given an "objective" in-story reason to think that Rico's on the side of right. The only things that tend to drag us along is that we're seeing the world through Rico's eyes, and that the enemies are aliens. Sure, the aliens attack and kill a bunch of people on Earth; that doesn't tell us whether they're the Nazis bombing London, or the Allies bombing Dresden.
Now, if Heinlein's books all gave us that same basic perspective, it would be reasonable to believe Rico's views are Heinlein's perspective, and the Heinlein is as blind as Rico. But, for example, Double Star didn't have its hero cleansing Mars to make it safe for human colonization -- it instead had a low-horizons incurious anti-Martian bigot becoming the greatest human political advocate for Martian civil rights. So, the only logical conclusion is that we're supposed to notice that Rico is a basically-decent kid, showing courage and other soldierly virtues, while committing atrocities in what is quite possibly a war of aggression.
So, yeah, the only real problem with Starship Troopers, the book? It doesn't cater to people who want moral lessons stridently shouted at the audience. Which, I'll grant, is a niche that Paul Verhoeven excels at catering to.
The fundamental problem people have with Heinlein is a mental defect that renders them unable to appreciate the difference between someone extrapolating a "what if" and someone declaiming a "we should".
If you make them confront the fact that the same guy wrote (for example) Double Star, Starship Troopers, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, they suffer serious cognitive dissonance, which they can only resolve by retreating from reality into a fantasy simple enough for them to comprehend.
From that safe fantasy world they then lash out at the scary author they cannot comprehend.
Under California law, it is explicitly illegal to fire someone for his political opinions, but perfectly legal to fire someone to avoid creating a hostile work environment (indeed, if no lesser measures suffice to prevent/cure a hostile work environment, it's effectively obligatory).
Therefore, whatever the actual motive for the firing, Google is going to say it was about a hostile work environment, not political opinions. There's a pending lawsuit, after all.
Don't you know that higher temperatures cause deserts?
That's why you start in the really wet polar regions, go to the drier temperate regions, then reach the great dry deserts of the subtropics . . . and if you venture beyond them to the tropics, you reach the Lifeless Ring of Eternal Fire.
Looks to me like the applicable charge for the shooting cop is voluntary manslaughter under Kansas law -- "Voluntary manslaughter is knowingly killing a human being committed . . . upon an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified use of deadly force . . ."
The defense would pretty much have to argue that the call made the cop's belief "reasonable" even in the absence of any confirming evidence.
It's a state-by-state thing, like most US criminal law. Kansas's version is limited by statute to a specific list of "inherently dangerous felonies". Which doesn't include this case, as I understand it.
Had GNUStep been used for GNOME (it was the GNU project's official toolkit in 1996) and the work put in to complete it:
1) Linux vendors' resources wouldn't have been wasted in all the work of developing three major versions of GTK plus Bonobo, rather than delivering a better user experience.
2) The API instability for application developers caused by the three major versions wouldn't have happened.
3) The Apple resurgence would have helped by creating a bunch of desktop software reasonably practical to move to Linux, what with Linux providing the same OpenStep-and-POSIX APIs as the Mac.
4) Gnome UI designs would have been constrained by expectations evolved around the developed-for-Macintosh apps, preventing unusable idiocy from UI "innovation".
Oh, wait, I forgot, we're all supposed to pretend Gabon's independent.
Sure, French relations with Gabon are still managed out of the old colonial office rather than from the ministry of foreign affairs, and France's treasury backs their currency, and there are a bunch of French troops permanently stationed in the country, and (now deceased) Gabonese president Omar Bongo said "Gabon without France is like a car with no driver. France without Gabon is like a car with no fuel." But Gabon is an independent country, you bet.
If I wanted to read interminable posts, I'd be using an RSS reader to follow their blogs or whatever. The whole damn value of Twitter was that it forced the posters to be brief. What they should be doing is adding tools that block twitstorms, not ones that enable them.
Well, let's quote the IRS on this:
If you dig in further into Publication 15-B, an employee discount on the services provided by the employer to the general public is taxed at only 80% of the price charged the general public. But, it is taxed at 80% of the price.
So, if you work for anybody other than a college, and your employer gives you a coupon for the services it provides to the general public, you have to pay tax on 80% of the coupon.
Now, of course, there's also the category of "Educational Assistance" in Publication 15-B. For benefits in that category, the first $5,250 is tax-free, and everything after that is subject to income and employment taxes.
So, if you work for anybody other than a college, and they give you free college tuition, you have to pay tax on every cent of the tuition in excess of $5,250.
In short, treating tuition discounts from an employing college as taxable income would be, in fact, just treating colleges like everybody else.
Most inmates are convicted of non-violent offenses, and are not a physical threat to other people
Not true. 54% of persons incarcerated in the US are there for violent crimes. A number of the rest are in there for things like drunk driving, which may not be a violent crime, but certainly presents a physical threat to other people.
If he had said "Plus of course you are not poisoning people with as many toxic exhaust fumes", or any other actually-accurate claim of electric car superiority to internal combustion, I wouldn't have called him out. Because, of course, there would have been nothing to call him out on.
And if you think the only thing that gets out of the smokestack of a power plant, even with filters and scrubbers, is CO2, well, you're sadly misinformed.
Plus of course you are not poisoning people with toxic exhaust fumes.
Riiiight. Because the 53% of locally-generated electrical power and the 42.88% of all consumed electrical power in California that came from burning coal, gas, oil, and biomass in 2016 was all using the secret California technique that doesn't involve emissions.
Hmm? Microsoft and IBM knew exactly why IBM put it on the new keyboard for the PC/AT -- to signal "CP-DOS"/"Advanced DOS"/"286 DOS"/"MT DOS"/"DOS 5", the new OS that was going to take full advantage of the 286's protected mode, through whatever program might happen to be running. Because one thing that was sure was that no pre-AT software was going to be listening for a key that didn't exist, while any other key or key combo might have already been hijacked.
And if you can get your hands on one of the pre-May 1987 internal development copies of what became OS/2, and manage to get it to run, you'll find that, in fact, that's just what SysRq does. (Some people have, in fact, done just that.)
Now, if you want to ask why the key was abandoned for this task and replaced by Ctrl+Esc in the SDK release of OS/2, well, that I can't answer.
Yeah, lots of people were saying that back when Firefox 1.0 was released, and the unified address/search input area that was in Mozilla 1.7 and all other major browsers of that era went away in favor of the separate boxes paradigm, too.
Of course, back then, the Mozilla organization was telling the people that favored the unified approach that they were wrong, that two separate boxes was superior for usability. Now Mozilla is reversing itself. Interestingly, they've never presented proper UI testing data on the issue either time, meaning they are likely as full of shit now as they were last time.
Not 17 years, 27 years. As the article says, "Good computer UI uses affordances, too. About ten years ago, most push buttons went âoe3Dâ. Using shades of grey, they appear to pop out of the screen. This is not just to look cool: itâ(TM)s important because 3D buttons afford pushing." Windows 3.0 (1990) replaced Windows 2.1's flat buttons with shaded "3D" buttons specifically because the UI testing labs proved the 3D buttons worked better.
But, despite that, idiots decided that UIs should be reworked to act like hidden object games.
And yet, as Mozilla tries more and more to cater to "the general public", its market share declines. On the other hand, when it emphasized things of concern to the "Slashdot IT elite", like standards support, lots of configuration options, and development frameworks that beyond mere extensions (XPCOM, XUL), its market share grew.
It's almost as if the general public pays so little attention to software that they'll use whatever happens to be installed on their machine, rather than even look at your offering. And thus that if you don't have Microsoft or Google-level muscle to push your browser, the only alternative is making something that appeals to the "Slashdot IT elite" in hopes they'll install it on the computers of their friends and family for you. And if you piss them off by taking a power saw to the features that attracted them, the "Slashdot IT elite", your market share will collapse.
Nah. The people who have been driving Firefox market share down for the last five years surely know what they're doing. Keep cheerleading all the way into the ground, thegarbz!
Yeah, see, nobody, to a first approximation, is worried about a superintelligence having "world domination" as its intrinsic value. They're worried about a superintelligence adopting world domination as an instrumental value to achieve the end actually programmed into it. If whatever goal actually implemented by programmers and trainers in the superintelligence's code (bugs in implementation and all) is most easily achieved after eliminating the ability of humans to thwart it, then a sufficiently-smart AI carrying out that programmed goal will try to eliminate the ability of humans to thwart it.
The worry is not that AI will be evil, or even directed to do evil by its creators. It's that programmers are notoriously bad at writing complex code that has no unanticipated behaviors, and superintelligent AI will inherently be complex code.
And unless superintelligent AI turns out to be intrinsically impossible, the only question is when, not if, we have to deal with the problem of writing safe superintelligent AI.
Seriously, we already tried federal funding of broadband expansion. All it did was fill the pockets of telecoms; the problem still exists. Why would you expect another attempt to do particularly better? Because Trump's people will do it right?
If you're going to do anything, don't even consider the supply side at all. Set up a program on the demand side where sufficiently-rural addresses can apply for subsidies toward Internet access. That'll make fundraising for the OneWeb and SpaceX constellations easier while letting the individuals get on with HughesNet and Exede right now.
Ah, yes, who can forget about how all those angry Tea Party protesters, which of course included people with anger issues, resulting in all sorts of rioting.
Oh, wait. Apparently it's actually possible to have protests that don't descend into riots. It's not natural or inevitable, it's just an effect of whether the "protesters" are decent people or scum.
If rioting breaks out at a protest, it's because the "protestors" are choosing to aid and abet violence. There are no innocents at a riot, just co-conspirators. Lock up all the scum.
California has mountains, sure. But in order to pump water up mountains, you don't just need mountains; you also need water. California has regular shortages of water -- for example, the years 2012-2016.
Because, you know, it's a totally worthwhile capital investment to make massive desalination capacity that you run a tiny percentage of the time with no relationship to the demand for water. Tell me, are we also going to pay the workers to stand idle, or will we just expect there to be a bunch of trained unemployed people living nearby that we can hire to staff it when the power's available?
I assume that they got a new design team in, people who neither actually read news nor remember what a mess last redesign (2010-2011) was. The inability to tell the difference between clutter and information density proves the first (news is not a program UI, it's a presentation of data), and stripping all the features that had to be laboriously re-implemented last time indicates the second.
The real question to me is whether the previous redesign team was the more stupid & arrogant (they tested their new version a while, discovered everybody opted out of the test for the old one, and then decided to impose the new one without opt-out because they were sure it was just getting people used to it rather than major deficiencies), or if this redesign (imposing the new one without testing that would have told them people didn't like the feature-stripping) is more stupid & arrogant.
I guess that question will be decided by if and how quickly the new team restores article snippets, whitespace-sacrificing higher information density layout, real two-column view of news, turning off the sidebars, allowing standard Google search from the input field, and otherwise bringing forward all the first-implementation Google News features the second-iteration design idiots discovered too late that they had to add back.
Will they listen? I don't know. Last time they screwed up News this badly (2011), they eventually listened to the angry people (including me) and added enough features back to make it as useful as the previous version. And the reaction on their product support forums has been next-to uniformly negative, just like last time.
On the other hand, the fact that they did this without noticing they were making the same mistake as last time, without an extended period of a/b testing, makes me wonder if they're too arrogant or stupid to listen to feedback this time. Do they have no institutional memory whatsoever, or did they go ahead in spite of institutional memory?