Sorry - "QE2 was the size of..." leads to "When did we start talking about ocean liners here?" "No, wait, Queen Elizabeth - does he really mean Maggie Thatcher?" "Oh, right, Quantitative Easing, never mind":-)
They do have to authorize that debt. But by authorizing spending, without authorizing taxation to cover the spending, that's what they're doing. I did forget one other option the Treasury has, which was "Sell the gold in Fort Knox, just to annoy Ron Paul."
One of my list items was "- They could declare that the most recent Budget supersedes the older Debt Limit law." That's how you constitutionally ignore most of the debt limit law. On many other topics, I've wished that the President would use his Constitutional Scholarship powers to find what he has to do and do it, instead of using them to find loopholes or opportunities for delaying his responsibilities by wording his refusal to obey the Constitution in clever ways, but it's not like his predecessor was any better.
I did forget to put "Oh, Noes!!!" after the closing the Washington Monument bit, though:-)
No, it doesn't take a separate TLD, but at least some of the clueless or malicious people involved want to have a part of the Internet namespace where they can make the rules, and can then use that to gradually force more and more of the Internet to obey their rules.
Having physically separate private networks is an entirely different issue - they've got multiples of those (and in fact that's part of how we got the 10.x.x.x namespace that everybody uses for private addresses.)
Even Schengen's been having trouble recently - one result of the Arab Spring has been a lot of refugees from North Africa going to Italy, and countries like France are talking about reinstating border controls to keep Those People from moving on to France. (No comment on the EEA - Wikipedia knows more about it than I do.)
Texas is a part of the United States, and you can ignore the very small number of crazies who pretend it's not. There's a much larger group of annoying-but-not-necessarily-crazy types who say that because of the treaties by which Texas joined the US, Texas does have the legal right to secede, and also that it has the right to split into five smaller states if it wants to, both of which are technically true but not necessarily a good idea. As Xest says, that doesn't really correspond to Iceland at all.
Sure, the Democrats are scaremongering to say that they won't be able to pay the debt if the Republicans don't raise the debt limit (and taxes), but the Republicans are doing some scaremongering to say that there'll be a default if the Democrats don't agree to cut spending radically, because they're not going to cut the debt limit without it.
I really miss Alan Grayson, a loud-mouthed Florida Democrat who proposed the "War Makes You Poor Act", that required the government to either raise taxes or identify specific cuts in spending any time it spent money on a war, just to annoy the Republicans who did want new wars but didn't want to raise taxes to pay for them.
Schengen's not particularly relevant - that's about whether the countries are friendly enough with each other to demand passports when people travel between them. Iceland's not part of the Euro Zone, and is a candidate for membership in the EU but hasn't yet been admitted (and since it just lost a lot of economic stability, that may take a while). It is a part of the European Economic Area, so it gets to do relatively free trade with Europe.
This doesn't state or local government debt either, or money that politicians have promised people, like government employee pensions, future Social Security, or forty acres and a mule or pot for every chicken.
The Debt Ceiling is a law limiting how much money Congress authorizes the US Treasury to borrow for the various operations of the Federal government. Because Congress's budgets have been running large deficits for years, they're going to hit the limit they've authorized in about a month (technically, they hit it a few months ago, but the Treasury could play some games moving money from one pocket to another that let them stretch out until August.)
The US Constitution says the government isn't allowed to default on the debt. But the Debt Limit Law isn't in the Constitution - it's just a law that says that Congress doesn't authorize borrowing more than $X, and requires some actions if we hit that limit, including not spending more money than we're taking in. It's questionable whether it really even applies, because Congress has passed a budget law since the last Debt Limit Law update, and that budget says they're going to be spending more than they're taking in so they're going to be in more debt.
So what can the Executive Branch do when they hit the debt limit?
- They could stop paying back debts that come due, but that's not only unconstitutional, it's not going to help the deficit problem any.
- They could stop paying Federal employees (not sure if that's big enough to help.)
- They could stop paying Social Security checks, and try to make the Republicans take most of the blame for your grandma being thrown out on the streets, hoping that the Democratic Party leaders don't get stomped in the next election by upset Democrats.
- They could cut all the Republican Party's favorite programs, especially most of the military contracting boondoggles. (Unfortunately, some of those can't be done instantly, especially shutting down the wars, and Obama doesn't want to be accused of losing the wars for political reasons, and he seems to like the TSA and Homeland Security.)
- They could declare that the most recent Budget supersedes the older Debt Limit law.
- They could close the Washington Monument!
I'm guessing that they'll probably do a combination of politically unpopular spending cuts and Federal pay cuts and try to blame the Republicans, plus the Washington Monument's going to be doomed until there's a solution. I don't think they'll default on the debt, not just because it's unconstitutional, but because it seriously degrades their chances of borrowing any more money in the near future, which they want to be able to do - Obama's threatening that, but I think it's more of a political game of chicken.
Also, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I who liked the idea of having the government create a.secure domain seems to forget that the government's not exactly in charge of those decisions - they'll have to pony up $185K to ICANN and see if it gets approved.
Fitbits are about $100. They're not only useful for tracking your exercise, but also your sleep quality. I looked at them and several other products when I was having sleep issues a while back (I like Zeo, and built an Arduino-Thing) - and a year or two ago accelerometers were hitting the Dirt Cheap part of the price curve so all sorts of things are starting to get them besides iPhones. There are a few other startups doing motion-tracking watches, though I like the TI Chronos watch better (16-bit development microcontroller environment on your wrist!)
They do have to deal with the privacy question - how much of your info do you want to upload to cloud-based services, and do you want those services sharing info with your friends. They also have to compete with $1 iPhone apps and free Android apps, such as sleep-state-based alarm clocks. On the other hand, they've done a really good packaging job, so their frob is much easier to always have around than an iPhone.
She's got an Erdos number and I don't. I'd been going to suggest Sigourney Weaver before the other comments.
And Pelosi doesn't deserve all the negative flood of crap pointed at her - the Republican propaganda machine was doing that just because she was one of the two lead Democrats in Congress. She's really too conservative for her district, and didn't provide the tough leadership the Democrats needed to stand up to the Republicans when she was in charge (and neither did Reid, or Obama), but she's fairly bright and understands issues. I disagree with her a lot (she is a Democrat, after all), but being wrong doesn't make her a dummy.
IANA has given out all of its IPv4 space to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs.)
Some of the RIRs still have one or two/8s they haven't given out to ISPs and End-Users yet, and APNIC will probably run out this fall; they're all giving it out more slowly now.
Existing ISPs mostly have some space left to give out to End Users, and maybe they can get a bit more from their RIR, but not much, and small ISPs may be able to get a bit more from their upstream ISPs.
End Users will have a much harder time getting Provider Independent space from their RIRs, and may have to get Provider Assigned space from their ISPs instead. But many end users do have enough space for their existing sites, as long as they're not trying to open new sites.
No, you've only committed the crime of using a "hoax device" if you've put something somewhere intended to scare people. That doesn't mean that you won't be accused of the crime for doing something that somebody freaked out about, especially if they called the police who freaked out even more, and you might even be convicted of it, but that's a different question.
In England's case, there's enough history of Irish terrorism that there are actually some legitimate reasons people might freak out, unlike, say, the Mooninite invasion of Boston.
USB flash sticks definitely rock for running LiveCD versions - also, since it's hard to find anything as small as 1GB these days (:-), you've got room to install more software besides the minimal amount on the CDROMs.
If you've got a laptop with an SD card slot, you could also try installing the OS on that. I'm not sure how they compare with USB sticks for speed, but they're usually cheap and large, and you can just leave it there for whenever you want to boot into Linux.
LEO is 500x closer than the moon. Nah, you're right, they'd never:-)
Realistically, other than the silliness of it (and the atmospheric distortion), the camera only has a billion pixels (and really great optics). If they're trying to focus in really great detail, they can't cover that many people or that much area at once. 1000 people would be a megapixel each (so wear your hats, folks), but if you were building a spy satellite instead of one intended for deep astronomy pixels, you could probably do a good job of tracking individuals moving around.
Hydroelectric scales badly (as another posted pointed out "Got any more big rivers?"), but it's also the cause of really significant ecological damage, due to habitat destruction, changes in silt flow in rivers, and problems like that.
Nuclear power is only financially viable if the government gives it ridiculously low limits on damage from accidents, basically unlimited nearly-free insurance, and if the nuclear industry doesn't have to pay for storing dangerous radioactive wastes for hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, the US government also blocked construction of nuclear plants, so it's messed up in multiple directions.
Australia has some well-known prudes in their parliament who've been pushing movie and internet censorship for years. I don't remember if they're currently in the government or not, but some of them are at least in positions with enough power that they can't simply be ignored, though often it seems like they're in positions where they get to rant and rave loudly in public without actually getting to implement most of their latest great ideas, or their parties get to put them in charge of censorship policy in return for putting somebody more competent in charge of something more important.
Australia has rugged individualists, and socialists, and descendants of transported criminals, and imperialists, and sheep of various sorts, and is, after all, the place Rupert Murdoch came from. They've also traditionally had telecom monopolies who really really didn't get the Internet - they're the ones who gave us gigabytes-per-month usage caps - though there are rumors that they've been getting better.
This is in some ways a much better censorship system than some of the others they've tried to impose over the years. It's just DNS, not a Great Firewall of China that's constantly bogged down and overloaded by being a bunch of underpowered servers trying to filter every URL. So it doesn't disrupt service anywhere near as much, (and - shhh! -- it's easier to work around), and it's much more transparent because you can easily test that your query returns a real IP address from Google DNS and youre-not-allowed-to-read-that.telstra.net's IP address from Telstra or Optus.. (There are exceptions, such as other DNS services that block queries for malware domains or spammer domains, but usually you can tell.) Some years ago the Aussie censorship filter people were accused of blocking sites that were politically incorrect (as in "political content the party in power didn't like") in addition to just the pr0n they pretended to be blocking. And there have been filters that blocked all of terra.es, which was the Spanish flickr or geocities of its day, instead of going to the trouble of blocking just illegal material. There may not be enough transparency to prevent abuse, but there's enough to detect it and work around it.
I forget exactly what year it was, but I was a Unix newbie trying to learn security, and working at Bell Labs, and had an account that I thought I had gotten to be fairly secure. I got a call the next morning from somebody who did not immediately identify himself telling me what was in my "secure" file, and suggesting several different ways he could have broken in. RHM was department head for computer security at the time; a week later one of his folks did another attack on another threat I'd missed (though that only knocked me off my session by kicking my modem into loopback, but didn't actually break in.) I learned a lot from him - was it really ~30 years ago?
The "messier" comment wasn't about the visuals (I'm fine with (either) indentation or parentheses (having learned indentation on keypunch systems (and having used RPG-II and Fortrans 2,4,and Watfiv.))) The messiness is in all the special cases and nonorthoganality and other complexity - after hearing Pythonistas raving about their language for years, I was assuming it would be much neater than PERL, perhaps a Rob Pike or N.Wirth level of aesthetic purity (but still with a large number of pre-written modules.)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry - "QE2 was the size of..." leads to "When did we start talking about ocean liners here?" "No, wait, Queen Elizabeth - does he really mean Maggie Thatcher?" "Oh, right, Quantitative Easing, never mind" :-)
They do have to authorize that debt. But by authorizing spending, without authorizing taxation to cover the spending, that's what they're doing. I did forget one other option the Treasury has, which was "Sell the gold in Fort Knox, just to annoy Ron Paul."
Dude!! You win Teh Internetz for the day!
One of my list items was "- They could declare that the most recent Budget supersedes the older Debt Limit law." That's how you constitutionally ignore most of the debt limit law. On many other topics, I've wished that the President would use his Constitutional Scholarship powers to find what he has to do and do it, instead of using them to find loopholes or opportunities for delaying his responsibilities by wording his refusal to obey the Constitution in clever ways, but it's not like his predecessor was any better.
I did forget to put "Oh, Noes!!!" after the closing the Washington Monument bit, though :-)
No, it doesn't take a separate TLD, but at least some of the clueless or malicious people involved want to have a part of the Internet namespace where they can make the rules, and can then use that to gradually force more and more of the Internet to obey their rules.
Having physically separate private networks is an entirely different issue - they've got multiples of those (and in fact that's part of how we got the 10.x.x.x namespace that everybody uses for private addresses.)
Even Schengen's been having trouble recently - one result of the Arab Spring has been a lot of refugees from North Africa going to Italy, and countries like France are talking about reinstating border controls to keep Those People from moving on to France. (No comment on the EEA - Wikipedia knows more about it than I do.)
Texas is a part of the United States, and you can ignore the very small number of crazies who pretend it's not. There's a much larger group of annoying-but-not-necessarily-crazy types who say that because of the treaties by which Texas joined the US, Texas does have the legal right to secede, and also that it has the right to split into five smaller states if it wants to, both of which are technically true but not necessarily a good idea. As Xest says, that doesn't really correspond to Iceland at all.
Sure, the Democrats are scaremongering to say that they won't be able to pay the debt if the Republicans don't raise the debt limit (and taxes), but the Republicans are doing some scaremongering to say that there'll be a default if the Democrats don't agree to cut spending radically, because they're not going to cut the debt limit without it.
I really miss Alan Grayson, a loud-mouthed Florida Democrat who proposed the "War Makes You Poor Act", that required the government to either raise taxes or identify specific cuts in spending any time it spent money on a war, just to annoy the Republicans who did want new wars but didn't want to raise taxes to pay for them.
Schengen's not particularly relevant - that's about whether the countries are friendly enough with each other to demand passports when people travel between them. Iceland's not part of the Euro Zone, and is a candidate for membership in the EU but hasn't yet been admitted (and since it just lost a lot of economic stability, that may take a while). It is a part of the European Economic Area, so it gets to do relatively free trade with Europe.
This doesn't state or local government debt either, or money that politicians have promised people, like government employee pensions, future Social Security, or forty acres and a mule or pot for every chicken.
The Debt Ceiling is a law limiting how much money Congress authorizes the US Treasury to borrow for the various operations of the Federal government. Because Congress's budgets have been running large deficits for years, they're going to hit the limit they've authorized in about a month (technically, they hit it a few months ago, but the Treasury could play some games moving money from one pocket to another that let them stretch out until August.)
Aluminum foil doesn't do the same job - you need real tin.
The US Constitution says the government isn't allowed to default on the debt. But the Debt Limit Law isn't in the Constitution - it's just a law that says that Congress doesn't authorize borrowing more than $X, and requires some actions if we hit that limit, including not spending more money than we're taking in. It's questionable whether it really even applies, because Congress has passed a budget law since the last Debt Limit Law update, and that budget says they're going to be spending more than they're taking in so they're going to be in more debt.
So what can the Executive Branch do when they hit the debt limit?
I'm guessing that they'll probably do a combination of politically unpopular spending cuts and Federal pay cuts and try to blame the Republicans, plus the Washington Monument's going to be doomed until there's a solution. I don't think they'll default on the debt, not just because it's unconstitutional, but because it seriously degrades their chances of borrowing any more money in the near future, which they want to be able to do - Obama's threatening that, but I think it's more of a political game of chicken.
Also, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I who liked the idea of having the government create a .secure domain seems to forget that the government's not exactly in charge of those decisions - they'll have to pony up $185K to ICANN and see if it gets approved.
Hasn't this guy learned anything from his time at the NSA?
Fitbits are about $100. They're not only useful for tracking your exercise, but also your sleep quality. I looked at them and several other products when I was having sleep issues a while back (I like Zeo, and built an Arduino-Thing) - and a year or two ago accelerometers were hitting the Dirt Cheap part of the price curve so all sorts of things are starting to get them besides iPhones. There are a few other startups doing motion-tracking watches, though I like the TI Chronos watch better (16-bit development microcontroller environment on your wrist!)
They do have to deal with the privacy question - how much of your info do you want to upload to cloud-based services, and do you want those services sharing info with your friends. They also have to compete with $1 iPhone apps and free Android apps, such as sleep-state-based alarm clocks. On the other hand, they've done a really good packaging job, so their frob is much easier to always have around than an iPhone.
She's got an Erdos number and I don't. I'd been going to suggest Sigourney Weaver before the other comments.
And Pelosi doesn't deserve all the negative flood of crap pointed at her - the Republican propaganda machine was doing that just because she was one of the two lead Democrats in Congress. She's really too conservative for her district, and didn't provide the tough leadership the Democrats needed to stand up to the Republicans when she was in charge (and neither did Reid, or Obama), but she's fairly bright and understands issues. I disagree with her a lot (she is a Democrat, after all), but being wrong doesn't make her a dummy.
No, you've only committed the crime of using a "hoax device" if you've put something somewhere intended to scare people. That doesn't mean that you won't be accused of the crime for doing something that somebody freaked out about, especially if they called the police who freaked out even more, and you might even be convicted of it, but that's a different question.
In England's case, there's enough history of Irish terrorism that there are actually some legitimate reasons people might freak out, unlike, say, the Mooninite invasion of Boston.
USB flash sticks definitely rock for running LiveCD versions - also, since it's hard to find anything as small as 1GB these days (:-), you've got room to install more software besides the minimal amount on the CDROMs.
If you've got a laptop with an SD card slot, you could also try installing the OS on that. I'm not sure how they compare with USB sticks for speed, but they're usually cheap and large, and you can just leave it there for whenever you want to boot into Linux.
But the TSA itself is a pastiche of bad comic book plots, and their no-fly database was adapted from a bad imitation of Kafka.
LEO is 500x closer than the moon. Nah, you're right, they'd never :-)
Realistically, other than the silliness of it (and the atmospheric distortion), the camera only has a billion pixels (and really great optics). If they're trying to focus in really great detail, they can't cover that many people or that much area at once. 1000 people would be a megapixel each (so wear your hats, folks), but if you were building a spy satellite instead of one intended for deep astronomy pixels, you could probably do a good job of tracking individuals moving around.
Hydroelectric scales badly (as another posted pointed out "Got any more big rivers?"), but it's also the cause of really significant ecological damage, due to habitat destruction, changes in silt flow in rivers, and problems like that.
Nuclear power is only financially viable if the government gives it ridiculously low limits on damage from accidents, basically unlimited nearly-free insurance, and if the nuclear industry doesn't have to pay for storing dangerous radioactive wastes for hundreds of thousands of years. On the other hand, the US government also blocked construction of nuclear plants, so it's messed up in multiple directions.
Australia has some well-known prudes in their parliament who've been pushing movie and internet censorship for years. I don't remember if they're currently in the government or not, but some of them are at least in positions with enough power that they can't simply be ignored, though often it seems like they're in positions where they get to rant and rave loudly in public without actually getting to implement most of their latest great ideas, or their parties get to put them in charge of censorship policy in return for putting somebody more competent in charge of something more important.
Australia has rugged individualists, and socialists, and descendants of transported criminals, and imperialists, and sheep of various sorts, and is, after all, the place Rupert Murdoch came from. They've also traditionally had telecom monopolies who really really didn't get the Internet - they're the ones who gave us gigabytes-per-month usage caps - though there are rumors that they've been getting better.
This is in some ways a much better censorship system than some of the others they've tried to impose over the years. It's just DNS, not a Great Firewall of China that's constantly bogged down and overloaded by being a bunch of underpowered servers trying to filter every URL. So it doesn't disrupt service anywhere near as much, (and - shhh! -- it's easier to work around), and it's much more transparent because you can easily test that your query returns a real IP address from Google DNS and youre-not-allowed-to-read-that.telstra.net's IP address from Telstra or Optus.. (There are exceptions, such as other DNS services that block queries for malware domains or spammer domains, but usually you can tell.) Some years ago the Aussie censorship filter people were accused of blocking sites that were politically incorrect (as in "political content the party in power didn't like") in addition to just the pr0n they pretended to be blocking. And there have been filters that blocked all of terra.es, which was the Spanish flickr or geocities of its day, instead of going to the trouble of blocking just illegal material. There may not be enough transparency to prevent abuse, but there's enough to detect it and work around it.
I forget exactly what year it was, but I was a Unix newbie trying to learn security, and working at Bell Labs, and had an account that I thought I had gotten to be fairly secure. I got a call the next morning from somebody who did not immediately identify himself telling me what was in my "secure" file, and suggesting several different ways he could have broken in. RHM was department head for computer security at the time; a week later one of his folks did another attack on another threat I'd missed (though that only knocked me off my session by kicking my modem into loopback, but didn't actually break in.) I learned a lot from him - was it really ~30 years ago?
AC is correct.
The "messier" comment wasn't about the visuals (I'm fine with (either) indentation or parentheses (having learned indentation on keypunch systems (and having used RPG-II and Fortrans 2,4,and Watfiv.))) The messiness is in all the special cases and nonorthoganality and other complexity - after hearing Pythonistas raving about their language for years, I was assuming it would be much neater than PERL, perhaps a Rob Pike or N.Wirth level of aesthetic purity (but still with a large number of pre-written modules.)