But finders keepers IS a legal argument! It has been repeatedly upheld in every playground in America, and no rational 2nd grader would argue otherwise!
Seriously though, I don't think Gizmodo is on the hook legally for anything here. The guy who found the phone might be guilty of theft, on the technicality of not following the law regarding how to return found property (I sure didn't know the legal requirements for that until this story broke, but I guess everyone in CA is a lawyer). So let's assume that was a theft, for the sake of argument. What did Gizmodo do wrong, exactly?
They paid $5k to take possession of a device that may or may not have been genuine, confirmed that it was, and then announced quite openly that they had Apple's device and would be happy to return it if Apple would care to claim it. I don't see how it matters that they paid to take possession of the device. They paid for a story, and examining the device was that story; they did not intend or expect to keep the prototype. As soon as Apple claimed it as theirs, it was returned.
Analogy time. Let's say someone breaks into my neighbor's house and steals his television. The next day I'm walking down the street and somebody offers to sell me for a TV out of the back of their van. I recognize it as being my neighbor's TV because of a distinctive scratch on the bezel or something. So I buy it for 50 bucks, take it home, and then call up my neighbor to say, "Hey, I think this dude just sold me your stolen TV, would you like to come over and get it back?"
The Apple support person who took his call even contacted Gizmodo and provided an account for the article. Basically, "We thought he was some crank, so we blew him off."
Actually (at least where I live) the pawnshops create an inventory of every item they receive, and supply it to the police on weekly basis. This goes into a "database," by which I am guessing they mean a Word document. If you report something stolen, they search the list to see if anyone pawned it. (I learned about this when my house was robbed a few years ago).
I doubt this is very effective, personally, and I don't think the shops are required by law to do it, but it keeps the pawnshop owners in the clear, and it allows the cops to say they've performed a cursory check for a stolen item without actually having to go around to all the pawnshops, which they would never have the time or inclination to do anyway.
Note that about 30% of our energy is expended to power our brain. That means that the heart (and other organs) would have to work 30% harder in order to maintain life. I suspect that would mean heart failure, and premature death in many cases.
I'm not sure that your second sentence follows logically from the first. An increase in energy requirements doesn't mean your organs are overclocked, it just means you need to consume approximately 30% more calories to support both.
Note that I am not saying you are wrong; I'm not sure that the oxygen capacity of your blood would support both brains without a trip to the lungs in between, for example. I'm just saying that additional raw calories needed to support another brain are easily supplied. Especially if you eat with both mouths at once.:)
The borrower is never 'safe'. All the verbose replies aside, the lender can call your debt because they don't like your shoes, as long as they *call it* something else.
Not in dispute. I said just that, so long as the "something else" is a legal reason.
If they want to call the loan, and the contract only allows certain conditions, the lender could easily manufacture said conditions.
The whole nature of our disagreement here revolves around how "easy" they could do so. My contention is that it is not so easy as to amount to being "any reason at all." That's it.
Devalued? The lender defines that with an appraiser they hire. Neglect? The lender defines that outright.
See this is just not so. Your mortgage agreement is not the only legal document in the world, and there are codified legal definitions of terms like devalued and neglect. The lender does NOT define them outright (unless the specific conditions that constitute neglect are spelled out in the agreement, in which case they can no longer "manufacture" them on demand). And while they can hire an appraiser, appraisers themselves are bound by volumes of law to ensure that their findings are objective. They may have some wiggle room to value your home near the bottom of the range for similar properties, but they can't magically make it worth half what it really is. (Again, we are talking LEGALLY here, in a way that is defensible in court). If you don't like the appraisal, you can always hire your own and dispute the findings.
Now, you could sue them, but who has that kind of money?
Two observations here. One, while it is certainly a fair point that corporations with deep pockets have the ability to legally bully regular folks who can't afford to fight back, that is a bit of a separate issue, and one that applies equally to all corporation vs. the little guy situations, not just this one. Secondly, is it easier to come up with the money to immediately pay back your entire mortgage? Unless you were close to paying the loan off anyway, I would wager that if you can afford NOT to fight it, you can afford to fight it. You're either out the amount of your loan balance or the amount of your legal fees.
Not saying I'm not curious, or even a little flattered, but that's not how I get down.
Well, about the pig thing; it was disrespectful of me, and deliberately so. You forfeit my respect when you set up a straw man argument about the unrelated issue of employment discrimination to mischaracterize my opinion. So go stick your head in a pig.
Yes, you caught me. I believe that abuses never occur and that nothing illegal ever happens. You win, good for you.
Look maybe you're trolling and I fell for it, or maybe you just feel like being contrary, but you seem to be trying very hard to make this into a bigger disagreement than it is.
I originally replied to your statement that they can call in a debt for any reason by pointing out that they can't legally do that. You clarified that you meant how it is in practice not how it is legally. Fine.
Our only point of contention is on whether the legal reasons available to them are so broad as to effectively provide the borrower no protection whatsoever. I still contend that they are not as broad as your rhetoric implies. They can't call in my debt for any reason whatsoever, they have to have legal reason to do so. That reason may not be their REAL reason for doing it, but they still have to have one.
They can't LEGALLY call in my debt just because they hate my shoes. They CAN legally call in my debt if they hate my shoes, AND have some other LEGAL reason to do so, such as if the house is now worthless. As long as no LEGAL justification exists, they can't call in the debt.
There is a stark difference between this situation and the employment discrimination scenario that you mentioned above. When calling in a debt, the legal reasons for doing it are enumerated, and all other reasons are illegal. When firing someone, the illegal reasons for doing so are enumerated, and all other reasons are legal. So yes, in practice, people get fired for being black or being a woman, because the employer can make up any justification they want. In the situation we were actually talking about however, the opposite is the case; only specific reasons are legal, and if none of those reasons apply, the borrower is safe.
So in fact, you are admit that I am right, and you were exaggerating to make a point. It is illegal to call the debt for "any reason whatsoever."
It remains legal to call the debt for specific reasons enumerated in the mortgage agreement, and in your opinion those are so broad that the hyperbole is justified. Very well. Our factual dispute is settled.
In my opinion there is a very great distance between very broad reasons and ANY reason. The specific reasons you cited don't seem particularly capricious to me; a mortgage is a secured loan with your house as collateral, so if it's value disappears, you no longer have collateral to secure the loan. (It would suck to be you, but it makes sense legally speaking). If your credit score is significantly reduced (and by the way, I'm sure the definition of "significant" is either codified in the lending laws or would be decided by a court if there was any dispute on that point) it probably means you've quit paying your other creditors. I don't see how calling the debt would help them if they think you can't pay, but it's still a far cry from any reason whatsoever.
They can't call the debt just because they don't like my face, because it rained on Tuesday, or because they need my money to remain solvent. Before the Great Depression, they actually could.
And I did read my mortgage agreement; I signed it, after all.
All real estate loans since forever ago allow the bank to 'call' the entire loan amount at any time for any reason. But they never actually do. They just was you to know they can.
Citation, please. I'm fairly certain that practice was outlawed in the 1930's, so long as the borrower has not missed any payments.
Wow. A lot of commenters at this point clearly haven't followed the story in any way and have no idea how the whole thing actually happened.
I'm not gonna take sides, and not gonna clue anybody in; I'm just saying maybe some folks should read the relevant material first, because most of the debate so far has been around the rightness or wrongness of imagined scenarios rather than the actual one.
Okay. I know I'm about to get into one of those hypothetical nerd arguments that nobody can win, but what the hell. I'm waiting for an utterly inadequate laptop to deploy a shamefully bloated enterprise app to a local instance of Websphere, so I've got 10 minutes to kill.
If we're assuming aliens that can live on Earth the assumption must be that Earth-like planets are common, why would the aliens risk starting interstellar war for resources that are apparently quite common
There is no reason to assume that interstellar travel is fast or inexpensive. Maybe it took the aliens a thousand years and 10 generations to get here, and they haven't got the resources to get to the next closest earth-like planet.
Second, aliens capable of interstellar travel would be capable of wiping us out with little to no effort.
What are you basing this on? Oh yes of course, the idea that "Technology" constitutes a single field, and that advancement in one area automatically means advancement in others. Where did everyone get this idea? If we invent a cure for cancer tomorrow, will we suddenly know how to build a matter teleporter? It is perfectly conceivable that a species could develop interstellar travel without inventing a way to instantly and selectively kill off a particular species on a planet. Saying it is laughable is like being surprised that we can put a man on the moon, but still can't cure the common cold. The two things have nothing to do with one another.
Have to agree with you about Jeff Goldblum -- in a single afternoon -- deciphering the alien equivalent of TCP/IP and hacking up a computer virus capable of running on alien hardware. Beyond ridiculous.
And if you know your family is at-risk as carriers of some lethal defect, it provides the data you need so you can purposefully marry an outcross (unrelated person) to reduce the chance of producing dead children.
I for one, already make it a point to marry only unrelated persons. Are you from the deep south?
whether a tree is organized democratically or under some other management and governance mechanism depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader.
Do you not see the absurdity in your above statement? If the manner in which a project is governed "depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader," than it is NOT democratic. Even if the dictator has chosen for the time being to abide by the will of the majority, he still has the power and authority to unilaterally discard that policy as soon as he and the majority disagree.
There were 8 results for my first and last name. Two of them were "me."
One "me" was at the address I lived prior to this one. It had my age and zodiac sign (seriously Spokeo?) correct, but had no information on my occupation, education, or hobbies, had my marital status wrong, and claimed that the estimated value of my home was greater than one million dollars. (Wow. I bought and sold that house for arround 250K. And Spokeo itself noted that the neighborhood was "below average" and had a median home value of 200K). The only things it said about my "lifestyle" were that I am not interested in politics and love shopping. . . both the opposite of true.
The other "me" was at my parent's address, where I have not lived since I was in high-school 15+ years ago. It listed me as being in my late 50's (I'm 32), married (I am, but sure wasn't when I lived there), the owner of that home (nope), and listed every single hobby and lifestyle interest you can think of, most of which have zero to do with me.
So. . . not so spooked out by Spokeo. If anything, it provides useful disinformation to protect me from the covert agents of the shadow government that is out to get me.
So instead, you are suggesting that they think 0x10 is the same as 10?
No, I am suggesting that person or group A developed a hardware clock that stores a set of values as binary-coded decimals, and person or group B, probably at an entirely different company, wrote firmware to read those values as binary numbers without verifying whether that was the correct format. Either someone didn't document it, or someone else didn't read the documentation.
I don't think that is much credit.
Hence my emphasis of the word little. It is certainly a more understandable path to failure than "Durrrr, leep yeers every 2 years i am a pogrammer, Yay!"
Regardless, the bug is not as trivial as someone getting the basic rules for when a leap year occurs wrong, but a result of the date being stored in one format by one module, and interpreted as a different format by another module, where the formats happen to be identical for values less than 10.
In the end, a bug is a bug, and the result is the same, but everyone seems to be assuming that Sony's programmers just don't know when leap years occur, and I think they deserve a *little* more credit than that.
Some older consoles (with a bug in their hardware clock chips that have a leap-year programmed every 2 years instead of every 4 years)
That is not the nature of the bug. (If so this would have happened on March 1, 2006 as well). The older consoles thought it was a leap year because they interpreted the date as a binary number instead of a binary coded decimal number. Essentially, they know which years are leap years, but they thought this was 2016.
Luckily, my country has a modern preferential voting system so we're not prone to these prehistoric ballot box conundrums. Hope to be live long enough to see the US at least catch up to the 20th century in this particular area, but, it's not looking too likely so far.
So you DO understand, despite your claim to the contrary. It is not some silly American idiocy that leads many of us to vote for the lesser of two evils -- it is in fact the only rational course of action given the constraints of our badly designed voting system.
If we had your system, the rules of the game would be different. But as they are, we are trapped. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to vote ourselves out of a bad voting system from within that very system. It's sort of like trying to replace a dictator by waiting for him to issue an edict removing himself from power. Our process for changing our process is the very process that needs changing.
I fear the only way to get a better voting system in place is violent revolution, and I'm really not feeling up to that today.
Well it isn't mind reading. You don't know what the ass hat is going to do, exactly. You just know that they are going to do something idiotic, and you stay well enough away from them that it doesn't matter what it is. It's when I find myself surrounded on all sides by people giving off the ass hat vibe that I start to worry.
Ah yes, the ability to anticipate an impending act of asshattery -- it is particularly well developed in those of us who spend most of our road time on a motorcycle.
Very well said. Predictability is the best measure of good driving. And that cuts both ways; by which I mean that I routinely encounter idiots who endanger me by driving too defensively as well as those who do so by driving too aggressively.
Example: people who yield when they have the right of way, forcing drivers behind them to hit the brakes. Or people like my old man, who feels the speed limits were correct back when they were no higher than 55 anywhere, and insist on driving 50 in a 75mph zone. When you are going 75 mph, and round a curve to come upon someone going 50mph, they might as well be parked on the road.
This is not an example of too defensive or too aggressive, but my biggest peeve lately is with roundabouts. The roundabouts themselves are great -- it would be nice if we had a lot more of them here in the U.S. But too many stupid U.S. drivers haven't a clue how they are supposed to work. I regularly see people barge onto them without yielding, cutting off drivers already in the roundabout -- and then stop once they are in the roundabout to yield to drivers that are waiting to enter. Arg!
It says the fuel is deuterium and tritium, how hazardous are those?
Oh, EXTREMELY hazardous. Both substances have similar properties to a highly volatile chemical that has in past resulted in some spectacular explosions. OH THE HUMANITY!;)
Yes, it would be passing laws. A group of people voting on whether or not the law goes into effect or gets shot down is passing laws. As in "We deem that this law may pass, and that one we strike down."
The only difference between this and the two chambers of Congress we have is that this one would not be proposing any of the laws. They would still be one more group of people who vote to decide if something should become the law of the land or not. Arguing semantics by arbitrarily calling the legislation a "law" (instead of a bill) once the first two chambers pass it, and a "nullified law" when it fails to pass the third doesn't change what is really happening.
The "Constitutional Council" you propose sounds pretty much like the Senate, as originally created by the Constitution. Each state gets two senators, and originally, they were chosen by that state's legislature.
A constitutional amendment later changed this so that the senators are elected by the people of the state. It seems to me that this largely defeats the purpose of having a bicameral legislature, but I don't think changing it back or adding a "Constitutional Council" would have any effect.
The two houses of legislature we already have should not be passing legislation that is unconstitutional, but they do. A council like you describe would just be a third house of legislature that shouldn't allow unconstitutional legislation to pass, but it would. Why would you expect the 100-150 members of this council to be any more rational or less corrupt than the other men and women already in Congress?
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But finders keepers IS a legal argument! It has been repeatedly upheld in every playground in America, and no rational 2nd grader would argue otherwise!
Seriously though, I don't think Gizmodo is on the hook legally for anything here. The guy who found the phone might be guilty of theft, on the technicality of not following the law regarding how to return found property (I sure didn't know the legal requirements for that until this story broke, but I guess everyone in CA is a lawyer). So let's assume that was a theft, for the sake of argument. What did Gizmodo do wrong, exactly?
They paid $5k to take possession of a device that may or may not have been genuine, confirmed that it was, and then announced quite openly that they had Apple's device and would be happy to return it if Apple would care to claim it. I don't see how it matters that they paid to take possession of the device. They paid for a story, and examining the device was that story; they did not intend or expect to keep the prototype. As soon as Apple claimed it as theirs, it was returned.
Analogy time. Let's say someone breaks into my neighbor's house and steals his television. The next day I'm walking down the street and somebody offers to sell me for a TV out of the back of their van. I recognize it as being my neighbor's TV because of a distinctive scratch on the bezel or something. So I buy it for 50 bucks, take it home, and then call up my neighbor to say, "Hey, I think this dude just sold me your stolen TV, would you like to come over and get it back?"
Am I now guilty of receiving stolen goods?
The Apple support person who took his call even contacted Gizmodo and provided an account for the article. Basically, "We thought he was some crank, so we blew him off."
Actually (at least where I live) the pawnshops create an inventory of every item they receive, and supply it to the police on weekly basis. This goes into a "database," by which I am guessing they mean a Word document. If you report something stolen, they search the list to see if anyone pawned it. (I learned about this when my house was robbed a few years ago).
I doubt this is very effective, personally, and I don't think the shops are required by law to do it, but it keeps the pawnshop owners in the clear, and it allows the cops to say they've performed a cursory check for a stolen item without actually having to go around to all the pawnshops, which they would never have the time or inclination to do anyway.
Note that about 30% of our energy is expended to power our brain. That means that the heart (and other organs) would have to work 30% harder in order to maintain life. I suspect that would mean heart failure, and premature death in many cases.
I'm not sure that your second sentence follows logically from the first. An increase in energy requirements doesn't mean your organs are overclocked, it just means you need to consume approximately 30% more calories to support both.
Note that I am not saying you are wrong; I'm not sure that the oxygen capacity of your blood would support both brains without a trip to the lungs in between, for example. I'm just saying that additional raw calories needed to support another brain are easily supplied. Especially if you eat with both mouths at once. :)
The borrower is never 'safe'. All the verbose replies aside, the lender can call your debt because they don't like your shoes, as long as they *call it* something else.
Not in dispute. I said just that, so long as the "something else" is a legal reason.
If they want to call the loan, and the contract only allows certain conditions, the lender could easily manufacture said conditions.
The whole nature of our disagreement here revolves around how "easy" they could do so. My contention is that it is not so easy as to amount to being "any reason at all." That's it.
Devalued? The lender defines that with an appraiser they hire. Neglect? The lender defines that outright.
See this is just not so. Your mortgage agreement is not the only legal document in the world, and there are codified legal definitions of terms like devalued and neglect. The lender does NOT define them outright (unless the specific conditions that constitute neglect are spelled out in the agreement, in which case they can no longer "manufacture" them on demand). And while they can hire an appraiser, appraisers themselves are bound by volumes of law to ensure that their findings are objective. They may have some wiggle room to value your home near the bottom of the range for similar properties, but they can't magically make it worth half what it really is. (Again, we are talking LEGALLY here, in a way that is defensible in court). If you don't like the appraisal, you can always hire your own and dispute the findings.
Now, you could sue them, but who has that kind of money?
Two observations here. One, while it is certainly a fair point that corporations with deep pockets have the ability to legally bully regular folks who can't afford to fight back, that is a bit of a separate issue, and one that applies equally to all corporation vs. the little guy situations, not just this one. Secondly, is it easier to come up with the money to immediately pay back your entire mortgage? Unless you were close to paying the loan off anyway, I would wager that if you can afford NOT to fight it, you can afford to fight it. You're either out the amount of your loan balance or the amount of your legal fees.
Not saying I'm not curious, or even a little flattered, but that's not how I get down.
Well, about the pig thing; it was disrespectful of me, and deliberately so. You forfeit my respect when you set up a straw man argument about the unrelated issue of employment discrimination to mischaracterize my opinion. So go stick your head in a pig.
Yes, you caught me. I believe that abuses never occur and that nothing illegal ever happens. You win, good for you.
Look maybe you're trolling and I fell for it, or maybe you just feel like being contrary, but you seem to be trying very hard to make this into a bigger disagreement than it is.
I originally replied to your statement that they can call in a debt for any reason by pointing out that they can't legally do that. You clarified that you meant how it is in practice not how it is legally. Fine.
Our only point of contention is on whether the legal reasons available to them are so broad as to effectively provide the borrower no protection whatsoever. I still contend that they are not as broad as your rhetoric implies. They can't call in my debt for any reason whatsoever, they have to have legal reason to do so. That reason may not be their REAL reason for doing it, but they still have to have one.
They can't LEGALLY call in my debt just because they hate my shoes. They CAN legally call in my debt if they hate my shoes, AND have some other LEGAL reason to do so, such as if the house is now worthless. As long as no LEGAL justification exists, they can't call in the debt.
There is a stark difference between this situation and the employment discrimination scenario that you mentioned above. When calling in a debt, the legal reasons for doing it are enumerated, and all other reasons are illegal. When firing someone, the illegal reasons for doing so are enumerated, and all other reasons are legal. So yes, in practice, people get fired for being black or being a woman, because the employer can make up any justification they want. In the situation we were actually talking about however, the opposite is the case; only specific reasons are legal, and if none of those reasons apply, the borrower is safe.
Now go stick your head in a pig, you ass.
So in fact, you are admit that I am right, and you were exaggerating to make a point. It is illegal to call the debt for "any reason whatsoever."
It remains legal to call the debt for specific reasons enumerated in the mortgage agreement, and in your opinion those are so broad that the hyperbole is justified. Very well. Our factual dispute is settled.
In my opinion there is a very great distance between very broad reasons and ANY reason. The specific reasons you cited don't seem particularly capricious to me; a mortgage is a secured loan with your house as collateral, so if it's value disappears, you no longer have collateral to secure the loan. (It would suck to be you, but it makes sense legally speaking). If your credit score is significantly reduced (and by the way, I'm sure the definition of "significant" is either codified in the lending laws or would be decided by a court if there was any dispute on that point) it probably means you've quit paying your other creditors. I don't see how calling the debt would help them if they think you can't pay, but it's still a far cry from any reason whatsoever.
They can't call the debt just because they don't like my face, because it rained on Tuesday, or because they need my money to remain solvent. Before the Great Depression, they actually could.
And I did read my mortgage agreement; I signed it, after all.
All real estate loans since forever ago allow the bank to 'call' the entire loan amount at any time for any reason. But they never actually do. They just was you to know they can.
Citation, please. I'm fairly certain that practice was outlawed in the 1930's, so long as the borrower has not missed any payments.
Wow. A lot of commenters at this point clearly haven't followed the story in any way and have no idea how the whole thing actually happened.
I'm not gonna take sides, and not gonna clue anybody in; I'm just saying maybe some folks should read the relevant material first, because most of the debate so far has been around the rightness or wrongness of imagined scenarios rather than the actual one.
Okay. I know I'm about to get into one of those hypothetical nerd arguments that nobody can win, but what the hell. I'm waiting for an utterly inadequate laptop to deploy a shamefully bloated enterprise app to a local instance of Websphere, so I've got 10 minutes to kill.
If we're assuming aliens that can live on Earth the assumption must be that Earth-like planets are common, why would the aliens risk starting interstellar war for resources that are apparently quite common
There is no reason to assume that interstellar travel is fast or inexpensive. Maybe it took the aliens a thousand years and 10 generations to get here, and they haven't got the resources to get to the next closest earth-like planet.
Second, aliens capable of interstellar travel would be capable of wiping us out with little to no effort.
What are you basing this on? Oh yes of course, the idea that "Technology" constitutes a single field, and that advancement in one area automatically means advancement in others. Where did everyone get this idea? If we invent a cure for cancer tomorrow, will we suddenly know how to build a matter teleporter? It is perfectly conceivable that a species could develop interstellar travel without inventing a way to instantly and selectively kill off a particular species on a planet. Saying it is laughable is like being surprised that we can put a man on the moon, but still can't cure the common cold. The two things have nothing to do with one another.
Have to agree with you about Jeff Goldblum -- in a single afternoon -- deciphering the alien equivalent of TCP/IP and hacking up a computer virus capable of running on alien hardware. Beyond ridiculous.
And if you know your family is at-risk as carriers of some lethal defect, it provides the data you need so you can purposefully marry an outcross (unrelated person) to reduce the chance of producing dead children.
I for one, already make it a point to marry only unrelated persons. Are you from the deep south?
whether a tree is organized democratically or under some other management and governance mechanism depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader.
Do you not see the absurdity in your above statement? If the manner in which a project is governed "depends on the whims and ideals of that particular project's leader," than it is NOT democratic. Even if the dictator has chosen for the time being to abide by the will of the majority, he still has the power and authority to unilaterally discard that policy as soon as he and the majority disagree.
I just tried it. It was . . . interesting.
There were 8 results for my first and last name. Two of them were "me."
One "me" was at the address I lived prior to this one. It had my age and zodiac sign (seriously Spokeo?) correct, but had no information on my occupation, education, or hobbies, had my marital status wrong, and claimed that the estimated value of my home was greater than one million dollars. (Wow. I bought and sold that house for arround 250K. And Spokeo itself noted that the neighborhood was "below average" and had a median home value of 200K). The only things it said about my "lifestyle" were that I am not interested in politics and love shopping. . . both the opposite of true.
The other "me" was at my parent's address, where I have not lived since I was in high-school 15+ years ago. It listed me as being in my late 50's (I'm 32), married (I am, but sure wasn't when I lived there), the owner of that home (nope), and listed every single hobby and lifestyle interest you can think of, most of which have zero to do with me.
So. . . not so spooked out by Spokeo. If anything, it provides useful disinformation to protect me from the covert agents of the shadow government that is out to get me.
So instead, you are suggesting that they think 0x10 is the same as 10?
No, I am suggesting that person or group A developed a hardware clock that stores a set of values as binary-coded decimals, and person or group B, probably at an entirely different company, wrote firmware to read those values as binary numbers without verifying whether that was the correct format. Either someone didn't document it, or someone else didn't read the documentation.
I don't think that is much credit.
Hence my emphasis of the word little. It is certainly a more understandable path to failure than "Durrrr, leep yeers every 2 years i am a pogrammer, Yay!"
Touche'.
Regardless, the bug is not as trivial as someone getting the basic rules for when a leap year occurs wrong, but a result of the date being stored in one format by one module, and interpreted as a different format by another module, where the formats happen to be identical for values less than 10.
In the end, a bug is a bug, and the result is the same, but everyone seems to be assuming that Sony's programmers just don't know when leap years occur, and I think they deserve a *little* more credit than that.
Some older consoles (with a bug in their hardware clock chips that have a leap-year programmed every 2 years instead of every 4 years)
That is not the nature of the bug. (If so this would have happened on March 1, 2006 as well). The older consoles thought it was a leap year because they interpreted the date as a binary number instead of a binary coded decimal number. Essentially, they know which years are leap years, but they thought this was 2016.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Year_2010_problem
Luckily, my country has a modern preferential voting system so we're not prone to these prehistoric ballot box conundrums. Hope to be live long enough to see the US at least catch up to the 20th century in this particular area, but, it's not looking too likely so far.
So you DO understand, despite your claim to the contrary. It is not some silly American idiocy that leads many of us to vote for the lesser of two evils -- it is in fact the only rational course of action given the constraints of our badly designed voting system.
If we had your system, the rules of the game would be different. But as they are, we are trapped. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to vote ourselves out of a bad voting system from within that very system. It's sort of like trying to replace a dictator by waiting for him to issue an edict removing himself from power. Our process for changing our process is the very process that needs changing.
I fear the only way to get a better voting system in place is violent revolution, and I'm really not feeling up to that today.
I offer no claims to the contrary, as asshattery knows no bounds. Ass hats on two wheels though usually eliminate themselves more readily.
Well it isn't mind reading. You don't know what the ass hat is going to do, exactly. You just know that they are going to do something idiotic, and you stay well enough away from them that it doesn't matter what it is. It's when I find myself surrounded on all sides by people giving off the ass hat vibe that I start to worry.
Ah yes, the ability to anticipate an impending act of asshattery -- it is particularly well developed in those of us who spend most of our road time on a motorcycle.
Very well said. Predictability is the best measure of good driving. And that cuts both ways; by which I mean that I routinely encounter idiots who endanger me by driving too defensively as well as those who do so by driving too aggressively.
Example: people who yield when they have the right of way, forcing drivers behind them to hit the brakes. Or people like my old man, who feels the speed limits were correct back when they were no higher than 55 anywhere, and insist on driving 50 in a 75mph zone. When you are going 75 mph, and round a curve to come upon someone going 50mph, they might as well be parked on the road.
This is not an example of too defensive or too aggressive, but my biggest peeve lately is with roundabouts. The roundabouts themselves are great -- it would be nice if we had a lot more of them here in the U.S. But too many stupid U.S. drivers haven't a clue how they are supposed to work. I regularly see people barge onto them without yielding, cutting off drivers already in the roundabout -- and then stop once they are in the roundabout to yield to drivers that are waiting to enter. Arg!
It says the fuel is deuterium and tritium, how hazardous are those?
Oh, EXTREMELY hazardous. Both substances have similar properties to a highly volatile chemical that has in past resulted in some spectacular explosions. OH THE HUMANITY! ;)
Yes, it would be passing laws. A group of people voting on whether or not the law goes into effect or gets shot down is passing laws. As in "We deem that this law may pass, and that one we strike down."
The only difference between this and the two chambers of Congress we have is that this one would not be proposing any of the laws. They would still be one more group of people who vote to decide if something should become the law of the land or not. Arguing semantics by arbitrarily calling the legislation a "law" (instead of a bill) once the first two chambers pass it, and a "nullified law" when it fails to pass the third doesn't change what is really happening.
The "Constitutional Council" you propose sounds pretty much like the Senate, as originally created by the Constitution. Each state gets two senators, and originally, they were chosen by that state's legislature.
A constitutional amendment later changed this so that the senators are elected by the people of the state. It seems to me that this largely defeats the purpose of having a bicameral legislature, but I don't think changing it back or adding a "Constitutional Council" would have any effect.
The two houses of legislature we already have should not be passing legislation that is unconstitutional, but they do. A council like you describe would just be a third house of legislature that shouldn't allow unconstitutional legislation to pass, but it would. Why would you expect the 100-150 members of this council to be any more rational or less corrupt than the other men and women already in Congress?
Yes, but it will be changed to indicate that you are poking them with a stick.