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  1. Re:Where in the US Constitution..... on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    So far, all the people responding to my example have overlooked one crucial word in it: "force". Does Finland merely provide incentive for people to maintain a healthy lifestyle? Or do they actively force people into such a lifestyle. That's the main distinction here.

  2. Re:Where in the US Constitution..... on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    Thank you for illustrating my point so eloquently. It's precisely because of people like you that this line of reasoning is so fraught with peril.

  3. Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. on Georgia Lawmakers Sue Carl Malamud For Publishing Georgia Law · · Score: 1

    Um, the search is by keyword also (click on the "Search RCWs" link to see the full UI). And PDFs are refreshed once per year because paper publication of the complete thing is also once per year, it's not like they're deliberately slowing things down.

  4. Re:The article should use "ridiculous" 0 times. on Georgia Lawmakers Sue Carl Malamud For Publishing Georgia Law · · Score: 1

    Here's a better example, then - Revised Code of Washington:
    http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/

    Most recent version is searchable online HTML. It, and all the previous editions, are also available as downloadable PDFs, exactly as they are published on paper. All of these are free.

  5. Re:Where in the US Constitution..... on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    You are missing the point: none of these force you to exercise, merely encourage you to do so. But if your rationale is "general welfare", then literally forcing people to exercise is equally legitimate - it's for their own good!

  6. Re:Where in the US Constitution..... on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    Let me rephrase that. It could be used as a justification of such a law, yes. My point is that it doesn't have to be, and we're better off not doing that because that would have undesirable legal side effects down the line.

    "General well-being of the people" is a very vague notion that can be used as a justification for too many things, most of which you probably wouldn't like at all. Of specific note is that it doesn't require any outside actor - they could just as well limit your own activities that are potentially harmful to yourself, even statistically speaking (i.e. not harmful to you personally, but universally banning them would prevent enough people from exercising them in a harmful way that it would improve "general well-being"

    It's far better to go with some more concrete justifications, such as specific measurable harm that is inflicted by the actor to other parties. It's not exactly hard to do with pollutants, either, because the emissions are measurable, and so are their effects. It's still collective harm, since it's pretty hard to quantify the individual damage you get from e.g. AGW (though still possible in some cases, and I'd love to see the polluters pay compensation and damages specifically to people they hurt whenever we can trace it), but then at least it's about harm, not some nebulous "it could be better that way".

  7. Re:Where in the US Constitution..... on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    I see the difference. The point is that it's not about "general well-being of the populace" at all.

  8. Re:Where in the US Constitution..... on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    What extent of "encouraging" do you find acceptable? For example, should we tax people higher if they don't exercise enough, and then use that money to give everyone else free gym passes?

  9. Re:Or let us keep our hard-earned money on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    Well, why are we punishing people who earn money through hard work? Why is sweat-of-the-brow taxed higher than rent?

    As long as you have one rate set higher than the other, you can make that argument either way. Why not set a single flat rate on all kinds of income? Isn't it only fair?

  10. Re:Or let us keep our hard-earned money on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 1

    I'm fine with that, so long as said flat tax also extends to capital gains. We could even just take the present budget, measure the current taxation income, and work out a flat tax rate for personal+corporate+capital, and see what it'd need to be to maintain the same level of it. I'm pretty certain that the end result would end up way better for the 99%. Which is exactly why such a thing would never pass in DC.

  11. Re:Where in the US Constitution..... on Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It has everything to do with the general well-being of the populace. "Life" is referenced a few times in the constitution.

    You might want to be careful with that line of thinking. For example, forcing you to exercise would also measurably lengthen your life; do you want the government to be able to mandate such a thing?

  12. Re:Ironic on Police Shut Down Anti-Violence Fundraiser Over Rapper's Hologram · · Score: 1

    No respect for the American judicial system, you mean? That's quite different from society as a whole. I think if you ask random people whether they believe that the judicial system in question genuinely represents them, you might find that distinction to be quite visible.

  13. Re:Yes they probably could... on Police Shut Down Anti-Violence Fundraiser Over Rapper's Hologram · · Score: 2

    Which is, frankly, ridiculous, because it circumvents the entire notion of constitutionally protected rights. You don't need to get rid of the First Amendment, for example - you just need to enact laws that make most people felons, and then you can selectively strip them of their rights as needed. And this all can be done with a simple legislative majority.

  14. Re: So what? on HP R&D Starts Enforcing a Business Casual Dress Code · · Score: 1

    If you believe that everyone who doesn't wear a shirt "looks like a hobo", you're a part of the problem. Stop being judgmental towards people who choose convenience in their clothing over some rather arbitrary and outdated criteria based solely on looks.

  15. Re:You'll most likely die anyway on Ask Slashdot: Building an Open Source Community For a Proprietary Software Product? · · Score: 1

    I personally would throw open the entire codebase and monetize your product as a service.

    The problem is that it's already a crowded market. And furthermore, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all discovered it, and now want their slice - and they all already have solid cloud compute platforms to use as a backend; so it's going to get even more crowded in short order.

    (Full disclosure: I'm on the MS team that is working on the Azure IPython/Jupyter notebook service that just went live on PyData, which is one piece of that.)

  16. Re:So sick of trite sound bite on Ask Slashdot: Building an Open Source Community For a Proprietary Software Product? · · Score: 0

    If you get software and don't pay for it, guess what- it's free. To you.

  17. Re:Shared Source License on Ask Slashdot: Building an Open Source Community For a Proprietary Software Product? · · Score: 1

    Microsoft "shared source" licenses were actually more restrictive than that, as they had only allowed read-only access to the code, even for private and personal use without redistribution - i.e. fixing a bug and building your own version would already be a violation of the license.

    If that is really what is meant by "accessing the source code" by the article submitter, then this is the way to go. You can just use MS-RSL verbatim for that. Just, please, don't call it "open source". Even Microsoft, back in the day when it was still doing this kind of thing and calling GPL a "virus", had the decency to not appropriate the term and use "shared source" instead.

  18. Re:qmail and Microsoft on Ask Slashdot: Building an Open Source Community For a Proprietary Software Product? · · Score: 1

    The reason there are open source communities is because by making the source open, it belongs to everybody in the community. This is not so with "shared" source (aka Microsoft's "look but don't share" approach).

    And note how this has largely failed for Microsoft. Very few people actually bothered to do anything with those "shared source" projects, and there was no community to speak of as a consequence (and as you rightly note, it's a misnomer anyway). I don't think there are still any MS projects shipping under any of these licenses anymore; pretty much everything is either AL 2.0 or MIT now, including things like CLR that used to be "shared source".

  19. Re:qmail and Microsoft on Ask Slashdot: Building an Open Source Community For a Proprietary Software Product? · · Score: 2

    Thing is, given that Python and R have set the bar to F/OSS effectively (at least for the "core" that's necessary to run things, if not the associated tooling), anything less than that will quite rightly be seen as deficient. Whether they have something else to offer that could compensate is another question, but from my experience talking to people in that community, it's a fairly major point that I doubt they can easily compensate for.

  20. For the scientific community, this has actually been more important recently as people want to be able to reproduce other people's experiments. Which is part of the reason why why F/OSS tools like scipy and IPython/Jupyter have been growing very fast.

  21. Re:Why? on France To Reduce Reliance On Nuclear Power · · Score: 1

    There is a very big difference between just dumping things into the oceans as is (which is what the article you've linked to is about), and encasing them into a strong protective shell that prevents leaking, and picking specific places that are studied in advance to guarantee enduring safety and proper long-term disposal.

    There are some valid objections to using subduction zones for this, but everything that I've read indicates that it is, at worst, an engineering problem that could be solved if desired, not a dead end. The only reason why it's not seriously explored is because of the treaty prohibiting it, and the treaty was originally intended to deal with exactly the kind of thing you've linked to.

  22. Re:Not that big of a mystery. on Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One · · Score: 1

    To see the actual minimums, look at the lowest-end devices that are sold with 8.1 preinstalled. These would be the 8" Atom tablets, like Asus VivoTab Note. Most of those are 1.6-8 GHz CPU and 2Gb RAM. That's the lowest end of the "comfort zone".

  23. Re:A return to performance? on Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One · · Score: 1

    Remember that 8 (well, RT, but it's basically slightly trimmed 8) had to run on ARM tablets. So 7 -> 8 also had a lot of optimizations done for sheer necessity of it.

  24. Re:Why? on France To Reduce Reliance On Nuclear Power · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Political problems are self-induced. When there's a genuine engineering or scientific challenge to be overcome, we have an excuse for not doing it just yet. But when all that stops us is some form of NIMBY or "la la la it's not happening" or "I just don't care", there's no excuse, just stupidity. Same goes for AGW denialists, anti-vax etc.

  25. Re:Surprise? on Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One · · Score: 1

    The standard C++ library for multithreading is <thread> - <threads.h> is a C thing (which is still available in C++, but not preferred).