Trump is trying to play this like zero sum game in which he wins and everyone else loses. In economics that's a really stupid way to do things because if everyone else loses who is buying all the stuff you're winning at making? No one. Oops, you collapse as well. Sure China has some rather aggravating trade practices and corporate espionage seems like a regular old Tuesday over there... but you can't just go slapping tariffs on everyone and everything without some serious repercussions that he seems incapable of grasping. China needs the same things it needed before the trade war, and it's going to start looking elsewhere for them, and set up new trade agreements with other countries for those things. And when the trade war settles and the dust clear and the US is exporting stuff again to them... are they going to buy it, or stick with their new trade partners? Historically it has always taken YEARS to re-enter a market that a trade war has pushed us out of. Or anyone for that matter. And since China seems more than happy to just sit and wait for Trump to rot, this is not going to end well for him.
By the time it's "that important" to the people who make the decisions, it will be too late to do much of anything about it. This is the sort of thing you have to be VERY proactive about. There are feedback loops that are incredibly difficult to reverse and crossing certain thresholds triggers those. It's like freeway repair. The longer you wait, because "it's not that bad yet" the more expensive and disruptive the fix becomes. Sure a few hundred million for some potholes and cracks sounds like a lot, but it sounds like very little compared to $1.5 billion to replace the entire roadbed. Same with global warming. Yeah, the changes we need to make sound like a lot and disruptive but compared to what it will take a mere 5 years from now, 10 years from now... it's nothing.
That's called clutter. Knowing that the median is grassy conveys nothing useful to a map user. Knowing where the lawn around a house is conveys nothing useful to a map user. When google highlights an area on a map it conveys information that is useful. This orange area here has a high concentration of shopping and restaurants. New to the city and looking for something to do? These are areas to focus on. Yeah, it's cool that their algorithm can pull out the detail like that... but it doesn't help the end user any, and as the article even said, becomes confusing in some areas.
Someone needs to translate this to a more appropriate terminology for our profession, this could prove hilarious while simultaneously providing more fodder for the SJWs to lose their collective shit over.
You know, not everyone who uses a mac is a whiny millennial. The problem here is that rather than admit to having a problem with their keyboard design and fixing it, the added band-aid, and lied about why they added it and didn't fix the problem in any way. And this is on a high-end luxury product line no less. It isn't isn't a feeling of entitlement so much as promised value for money spent. "It just works" is the byline of Apple products and clearly, the just don't.
My only guess here is that with a decrease in availability of the types typically used for animal feed, some used for other purposes would need to be co-opted leading to a shortage for the kind in beer? As for price increase, let's face it, that has never been a straight linear relationship. A 10 cent increase in a part leads to a multi-dollar increase in the final product. Happens all the time.
Kind of the whole point of the 10th amendment. Since the federal agency that would have the logical authority to regulate this has stated they do not have the legal authority to do so, the 10th amendment kicks in and reserves this to the states meaning the FCC doesn't have the right to block net neutrality regulations of any kind any more by their own legal defense.
The truly hilarious thing here is that the ISPs fought so hard to get rid of federal level regulations thinking this would make it easier for them, when in reality all it did was open the door for 50 completely different sets of regulations across the country, some maybe weak, but definitely some far more restrictive than what already existed. So instead of having to meet one standard, there will likely be multiple different standards. I'm willing to bet there are some people in the ISP industry wishing they had left well enough alone at this point. And you are completely correct. You can't claim you don't have authority, and then claim you have authority in the same breath. Either you do have the power to regulate, or you don't. You can't have both.
The ironic thing about this post being that SpaceX does it so much cheaper than the "socialist" option, that they are literally pissing the entire launch industry around the world off. I have a good friend who works range optics at Vandenberg and knows a lot of people from the various launch teams. He says the ULA people hate SpaceX. No matter how polite they are in press etc, they hate SpaceX. When a Falcon Heavy can lift nearly double the payload of a Delta IV Heavy and do it for 1/3 the cost... yeah.
I have no idea what the economics will be when BFR is up and running, but if they pull it off as envisioned, it will be even cheaper by far to lift significantly more payload. And if the idea of Earth to Earth pans out, and I really hope it does, his estimated price in an astronomical conference presentation was about the cost of a business class airline ticket. It comes down to scale and he envisions a huge scale up. They already account for a significant fraction of all annual launches globally.
SpaceX has never been about being a rich mans game. He is using sort of the same model he did with Tesla where you build the expensive one and use the money generated from the sales for that to fund the next round, and repeat, getting cheaper and scaling each time. So you get a really rich guy to fund R&D and take him around the Moon. That allows you to use the money to further develop without spending your own, etc. But their end goal has always been about making spaceflight options affordable for all. Roughly as affordable as airline travel is now.
I guess we'll see how it all plays out over the next decade or so, but so far he has stuck to the model and it is starting to pay off as they have a LONG waitlist of launch payloads and are ramping up production of Block 5 Falcon 9s as well as working hard to cut turn around time. They've already cut it from months to weeks. Again, stated end goal is same day relaunch.
Utah has a swath of cities that has been dubbed The Silicon Slopes because pretty much every tech company is now here. Microsoft has set up offices. Adobe. Facebook is building a gigantic new datacenter. The NSA has their massive data facility here. Along with more startups than I can keep track of. The construction of office parks and buildings along a 30 mile stretch of freeway is insane. Housing prices here are great, power is cheap as well which is attracting large datacenters. Access to infrastructure is also easy, and Utah is taking advantage of it dumping hundreds of millions into freeway expansion and other projects to attract the business. Park City has also seen a lot of tech and start up growth as well using the "ski culture" the way California used the surf culture. Hit the slopes before work etc.
I have to agree. Google has actually always informed in their agree to terms that they WILL be collecting and analyzing data about you. And I'm not talking about it being hidden either, they straight up say it. And you know what, of all the companies out there that do it, I get real value from it. They scan my emails and extract shipping numbers so that my Google Home can tell me about them. Or flight plans so that I get alerted when I need to leave wherever I am based on real time traffic data (also gathered by trackgin android phones) in order to make my flight. I know in the past Google has kept data in-house to inform their own services. Their own ad placement services, their on maps, their own email, and assistant software. If, and yes that is a big if because do we really know, but if it is staying within Google and just bouncing between services, I really don't care at that point. I would be curious to know what anonymized me looks like though, and it would be cool as a user to get a yearly report of how many times my anonymized data was used, etc.
Where as Facebook gleans tons of data about me and my likes, I get very little actual benefit from that. Google however simplifies my tasks, coordinates all the many actions I take during the day and places them at my fingertips like no one else. I'm at least getting real, tangible benefit for them having access to me.
You are aware that GTA V is on PC, right? And wasn't just a port either, included entirely new levels of detail because the PC could support it over the console versions, right?
There are two topics in the post. There's the example of the Pioneer plaque and the example of the Wikipedia edtors. And I agree in both instances... this is something that can't be overthought. In the case of Wikipedia, it's primary function is to provide information for humans... who know all about humans, so the picutre is really a formality. We all know about racial, cultural, socioeconomic differences, etc. So it really doesn't matter one little bit what photo is up there because it is just a placeholder for something we all know and understand.
As for the Pioneer plaque, on first contact all you want is the aliens to know it was the things that walk on two legs and look roughly like these pair that sent this. We just don't want them going to the giraffes or penguins, right? So again, complex human concepts are unimportant. In one case because we all understand them and it is meant for us, in the other because it isn't meant for us and they won't undertsand them anyway.
There is literally nothing more useful that you would want to launch on the maiden flight of a completely unproven rocket design. Most companies and governments send slabs of concrete or steel plates. They just need x amount of weight in the fairing. But why just launch concrete when you can have some fun with it and have the same effect? SpaceX gets its fake payload mass, free publicity is gained, people get to have good laugh and fun and dream a bit. I'm not seeing a problem here.
And on top of that, the Democrats claim that this memo cherry picks information and leaves out important details... but the GOP know the public would never know that and wouldn't ever look anything up to notice in the first place. Which gives them a free pass to say nearly whatever they want knowing their base will believe it 100% without question. The tyranny of the willing?
Of course fusion produces radioactive waste! It's a nuclear process. It just doesn't produce the same kind of waste that fission produces.
Very very high energy neutrons are released by fusion reactions, and whatever those things hit, and are ultimately absorbed by, will become radioactive over time, and will need to be disposed of. Right now they are just trying to get these dang things to turn on. But when they do, if they don't have some method to absorb the neutrons, then the infrastructure of the reactor itself is going to become radioactive over time and need to be disposed of, and a new reactor built.
We use Agile in our office and for the dev team it works pretty well. Our problem comes from the management not actually having a clue about software development, despite our best efforts to educate them. We still deal with insane feature creep from above and delivery promises before we've even been informed of the new feature.
In 16 years of working as a developer for more companies than I can count now, I have never been in a team that used Scrum until my current job. Also the first to use Agile in their process. I've been in small teams and large teams alike, and never had a need for it to meet deadlines. These guys live and breath and bleed agile and scrum. And the original author up above used some words that I think apply. It's a religion to some people. And it gets in the way of following the ideas behind it.
Really, Scrum is about communication. Bringing the team together for a quick, "here's what's up" from everyone. That can be really useful. As for sprints, they have been an utter disaster from my point of view. And that may be because management wants everything in the next sprint, but I also notice that the focus becomes the sprint rather than the development itself. It adds what I'm going to call, for lack of a better word, a distraction layer.
The article this post links too is a bit misleading. Read it, was horrified by it, decided to go and look around on Google Maps myself.
The city of Baotou does not have pipes all over the streets as the article stated. The streets are wide, paved, full of cars. The city looks pretty decent actually. If you could remove the massive polluting factories on the Western edge of the city, it would probably be pretty nice actually. It is only when you cross the canal into the industrial complex itself that the pipes and crap all start appearing. The article made it sound like the whole city was overrun with industrial piping and smoke stacks. It isn't. At all.
They also made the lake sound like some gigantic monster of a lake. It also isn't. It isn't tiny, by any means, but to say it stretched to the horizon is literary hyperbole. Standing on the shore of any lake it stretches to the horizon. NW to SE it is about 2500ft, and NE to SW it is probably a mile.
That's not to say that this place isn't an absolute mess. It is. The industrial complex is massive. The main portion is at least 5 miles N to S. It is a Gordian knot of factories and conduits and walkways. And the air in the entire region must indeed be foul beyond words. But the residents of the city aren't living in the middle of the industrial complex as the article made it feel. And the lake itself is far smaller than described and is surrounded by all the factories and plants, not out in the open in farmland as the article again made it seem. It may once have been farmland, but it is all surrounded by industrial complexes now. This is probably the superfund site to end all superfund sites, but they exaggerated quite a bit writing that article.
They only thing they can say is that the water didn't come from Comet 67/P. They look at the ratio of Hydrogen to Deuterium in the water on the comet and compare that ratio to what we find on Earth. The problem is, we find comets with similar ratios, and comets with nothing like it. It seems we still have a long way to go in understanding how comets formed and what that says about where/when they formed. Comets may still have delivered the water to Earth, but none of them may exist any more to study. Rosetta didn't really answer a question here, it just gave us yet another hint that comets are not all created equally and we have a lot more studying of them to do.
The Constitution can not violate itself either. Any law made in the United States, including constitutional amendments, must measure up to constitutional scrutiny.
The constitution guarantees the right of persons to be secure in the homes and effects unless a search warrant is duly procured that is specific as to the person to be searched and what is being searched for and is based upon probable cause. The interpretation by the FISC of Section 215 violates this. The searches have not been "particular," the word used by the Constitution, they have been dragnets both in terms of the persons searched and things seized. When you send an order to Verizon demanding ALL their customer data that is that is hardly particular. Nor would it meet the standards of probable cause. Probable cause can't not be applied to a massive group of millions by saying "one of them may have done something." Probable cause is a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent and cautious person's belief that certain facts are probably true. The vast majority of the people involved in these sorts of searches do not fall under that. There is no circumstantial support to the need to gather their information.
Constitutional amendments must also be constitutional, as must all laws passed by Congress, executive orders signed by the President. Even state and city laws must adhere to the laws passed above them all the way up to the Constitution. It is not just a piece of paper with words on it. It is the core beliefs underpinning the creation of all our other laws. It is a codified standard that has the backing of the force of law via the Supreme Court. Laws that are found to not measure up to the standard are overturned.
The argument the government is making is that "well, the law was passed by Congress, and it hasn't been challenged yet, therefore it is constitutional and can't be challenged." It is a ridiculous argument.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump is trying to play this like zero sum game in which he wins and everyone else loses. In economics that's a really stupid way to do things because if everyone else loses who is buying all the stuff you're winning at making? No one. Oops, you collapse as well. Sure China has some rather aggravating trade practices and corporate espionage seems like a regular old Tuesday over there... but you can't just go slapping tariffs on everyone and everything without some serious repercussions that he seems incapable of grasping. China needs the same things it needed before the trade war, and it's going to start looking elsewhere for them, and set up new trade agreements with other countries for those things. And when the trade war settles and the dust clear and the US is exporting stuff again to them... are they going to buy it, or stick with their new trade partners? Historically it has always taken YEARS to re-enter a market that a trade war has pushed us out of. Or anyone for that matter. And since China seems more than happy to just sit and wait for Trump to rot, this is not going to end well for him.
By the time it's "that important" to the people who make the decisions, it will be too late to do much of anything about it. This is the sort of thing you have to be VERY proactive about. There are feedback loops that are incredibly difficult to reverse and crossing certain thresholds triggers those. It's like freeway repair. The longer you wait, because "it's not that bad yet" the more expensive and disruptive the fix becomes. Sure a few hundred million for some potholes and cracks sounds like a lot, but it sounds like very little compared to $1.5 billion to replace the entire roadbed. Same with global warming. Yeah, the changes we need to make sound like a lot and disruptive but compared to what it will take a mere 5 years from now, 10 years from now... it's nothing.
That's called clutter. Knowing that the median is grassy conveys nothing useful to a map user. Knowing where the lawn around a house is conveys nothing useful to a map user. When google highlights an area on a map it conveys information that is useful. This orange area here has a high concentration of shopping and restaurants. New to the city and looking for something to do? These are areas to focus on. Yeah, it's cool that their algorithm can pull out the detail like that... but it doesn't help the end user any, and as the article even said, becomes confusing in some areas.
There does seem to be a rather extreme obsession with gutting useful in favor of thin.
Saint.
Someone needs to translate this to a more appropriate terminology for our profession, this could prove hilarious while simultaneously providing more fodder for the SJWs to lose their collective shit over.
You know, not everyone who uses a mac is a whiny millennial. The problem here is that rather than admit to having a problem with their keyboard design and fixing it, the added band-aid, and lied about why they added it and didn't fix the problem in any way. And this is on a high-end luxury product line no less. It isn't isn't a feeling of entitlement so much as promised value for money spent. "It just works" is the byline of Apple products and clearly, the just don't.
My only guess here is that with a decrease in availability of the types typically used for animal feed, some used for other purposes would need to be co-opted leading to a shortage for the kind in beer? As for price increase, let's face it, that has never been a straight linear relationship. A 10 cent increase in a part leads to a multi-dollar increase in the final product. Happens all the time.
Kind of the whole point of the 10th amendment. Since the federal agency that would have the logical authority to regulate this has stated they do not have the legal authority to do so, the 10th amendment kicks in and reserves this to the states meaning the FCC doesn't have the right to block net neutrality regulations of any kind any more by their own legal defense.
The truly hilarious thing here is that the ISPs fought so hard to get rid of federal level regulations thinking this would make it easier for them, when in reality all it did was open the door for 50 completely different sets of regulations across the country, some maybe weak, but definitely some far more restrictive than what already existed. So instead of having to meet one standard, there will likely be multiple different standards. I'm willing to bet there are some people in the ISP industry wishing they had left well enough alone at this point. And you are completely correct. You can't claim you don't have authority, and then claim you have authority in the same breath. Either you do have the power to regulate, or you don't. You can't have both.
The ironic thing about this post being that SpaceX does it so much cheaper than the "socialist" option, that they are literally pissing the entire launch industry around the world off. I have a good friend who works range optics at Vandenberg and knows a lot of people from the various launch teams. He says the ULA people hate SpaceX. No matter how polite they are in press etc, they hate SpaceX. When a Falcon Heavy can lift nearly double the payload of a Delta IV Heavy and do it for 1/3 the cost... yeah. I have no idea what the economics will be when BFR is up and running, but if they pull it off as envisioned, it will be even cheaper by far to lift significantly more payload. And if the idea of Earth to Earth pans out, and I really hope it does, his estimated price in an astronomical conference presentation was about the cost of a business class airline ticket. It comes down to scale and he envisions a huge scale up. They already account for a significant fraction of all annual launches globally. SpaceX has never been about being a rich mans game. He is using sort of the same model he did with Tesla where you build the expensive one and use the money generated from the sales for that to fund the next round, and repeat, getting cheaper and scaling each time. So you get a really rich guy to fund R&D and take him around the Moon. That allows you to use the money to further develop without spending your own, etc. But their end goal has always been about making spaceflight options affordable for all. Roughly as affordable as airline travel is now. I guess we'll see how it all plays out over the next decade or so, but so far he has stuck to the model and it is starting to pay off as they have a LONG waitlist of launch payloads and are ramping up production of Block 5 Falcon 9s as well as working hard to cut turn around time. They've already cut it from months to weeks. Again, stated end goal is same day relaunch.
Utah has a swath of cities that has been dubbed The Silicon Slopes because pretty much every tech company is now here. Microsoft has set up offices. Adobe. Facebook is building a gigantic new datacenter. The NSA has their massive data facility here. Along with more startups than I can keep track of. The construction of office parks and buildings along a 30 mile stretch of freeway is insane. Housing prices here are great, power is cheap as well which is attracting large datacenters. Access to infrastructure is also easy, and Utah is taking advantage of it dumping hundreds of millions into freeway expansion and other projects to attract the business. Park City has also seen a lot of tech and start up growth as well using the "ski culture" the way California used the surf culture. Hit the slopes before work etc.
I have to agree. Google has actually always informed in their agree to terms that they WILL be collecting and analyzing data about you. And I'm not talking about it being hidden either, they straight up say it. And you know what, of all the companies out there that do it, I get real value from it. They scan my emails and extract shipping numbers so that my Google Home can tell me about them. Or flight plans so that I get alerted when I need to leave wherever I am based on real time traffic data (also gathered by trackgin android phones) in order to make my flight. I know in the past Google has kept data in-house to inform their own services. Their own ad placement services, their on maps, their own email, and assistant software. If, and yes that is a big if because do we really know, but if it is staying within Google and just bouncing between services, I really don't care at that point. I would be curious to know what anonymized me looks like though, and it would be cool as a user to get a yearly report of how many times my anonymized data was used, etc. Where as Facebook gleans tons of data about me and my likes, I get very little actual benefit from that. Google however simplifies my tasks, coordinates all the many actions I take during the day and places them at my fingertips like no one else. I'm at least getting real, tangible benefit for them having access to me.
and realize they aren't the customer of companies like this... they are the product.
You are aware that GTA V is on PC, right? And wasn't just a port either, included entirely new levels of detail because the PC could support it over the console versions, right?
There are two topics in the post. There's the example of the Pioneer plaque and the example of the Wikipedia edtors. And I agree in both instances... this is something that can't be overthought. In the case of Wikipedia, it's primary function is to provide information for humans... who know all about humans, so the picutre is really a formality. We all know about racial, cultural, socioeconomic differences, etc. So it really doesn't matter one little bit what photo is up there because it is just a placeholder for something we all know and understand. As for the Pioneer plaque, on first contact all you want is the aliens to know it was the things that walk on two legs and look roughly like these pair that sent this. We just don't want them going to the giraffes or penguins, right? So again, complex human concepts are unimportant. In one case because we all understand them and it is meant for us, in the other because it isn't meant for us and they won't undertsand them anyway.
There is literally nothing more useful that you would want to launch on the maiden flight of a completely unproven rocket design. Most companies and governments send slabs of concrete or steel plates. They just need x amount of weight in the fairing. But why just launch concrete when you can have some fun with it and have the same effect? SpaceX gets its fake payload mass, free publicity is gained, people get to have good laugh and fun and dream a bit. I'm not seeing a problem here.
And on top of that, the Democrats claim that this memo cherry picks information and leaves out important details... but the GOP know the public would never know that and wouldn't ever look anything up to notice in the first place. Which gives them a free pass to say nearly whatever they want knowing their base will believe it 100% without question. The tyranny of the willing?
Of course fusion produces radioactive waste! It's a nuclear process. It just doesn't produce the same kind of waste that fission produces. Very very high energy neutrons are released by fusion reactions, and whatever those things hit, and are ultimately absorbed by, will become radioactive over time, and will need to be disposed of. Right now they are just trying to get these dang things to turn on. But when they do, if they don't have some method to absorb the neutrons, then the infrastructure of the reactor itself is going to become radioactive over time and need to be disposed of, and a new reactor built.
Foreign matter, not imaginary matter. ;)
We use Agile in our office and for the dev team it works pretty well. Our problem comes from the management not actually having a clue about software development, despite our best efforts to educate them. We still deal with insane feature creep from above and delivery promises before we've even been informed of the new feature.
In 16 years of working as a developer for more companies than I can count now, I have never been in a team that used Scrum until my current job. Also the first to use Agile in their process. I've been in small teams and large teams alike, and never had a need for it to meet deadlines. These guys live and breath and bleed agile and scrum. And the original author up above used some words that I think apply. It's a religion to some people. And it gets in the way of following the ideas behind it. Really, Scrum is about communication. Bringing the team together for a quick, "here's what's up" from everyone. That can be really useful. As for sprints, they have been an utter disaster from my point of view. And that may be because management wants everything in the next sprint, but I also notice that the focus becomes the sprint rather than the development itself. It adds what I'm going to call, for lack of a better word, a distraction layer.
The article this post links too is a bit misleading. Read it, was horrified by it, decided to go and look around on Google Maps myself. The city of Baotou does not have pipes all over the streets as the article stated. The streets are wide, paved, full of cars. The city looks pretty decent actually. If you could remove the massive polluting factories on the Western edge of the city, it would probably be pretty nice actually. It is only when you cross the canal into the industrial complex itself that the pipes and crap all start appearing. The article made it sound like the whole city was overrun with industrial piping and smoke stacks. It isn't. At all. They also made the lake sound like some gigantic monster of a lake. It also isn't. It isn't tiny, by any means, but to say it stretched to the horizon is literary hyperbole. Standing on the shore of any lake it stretches to the horizon. NW to SE it is about 2500ft, and NE to SW it is probably a mile. That's not to say that this place isn't an absolute mess. It is. The industrial complex is massive. The main portion is at least 5 miles N to S. It is a Gordian knot of factories and conduits and walkways. And the air in the entire region must indeed be foul beyond words. But the residents of the city aren't living in the middle of the industrial complex as the article made it feel. And the lake itself is far smaller than described and is surrounded by all the factories and plants, not out in the open in farmland as the article again made it seem. It may once have been farmland, but it is all surrounded by industrial complexes now. This is probably the superfund site to end all superfund sites, but they exaggerated quite a bit writing that article.
They only thing they can say is that the water didn't come from Comet 67/P. They look at the ratio of Hydrogen to Deuterium in the water on the comet and compare that ratio to what we find on Earth. The problem is, we find comets with similar ratios, and comets with nothing like it. It seems we still have a long way to go in understanding how comets formed and what that says about where/when they formed. Comets may still have delivered the water to Earth, but none of them may exist any more to study. Rosetta didn't really answer a question here, it just gave us yet another hint that comets are not all created equally and we have a lot more studying of them to do.
The Constitution can not violate itself either. Any law made in the United States, including constitutional amendments, must measure up to constitutional scrutiny. The constitution guarantees the right of persons to be secure in the homes and effects unless a search warrant is duly procured that is specific as to the person to be searched and what is being searched for and is based upon probable cause. The interpretation by the FISC of Section 215 violates this. The searches have not been "particular," the word used by the Constitution, they have been dragnets both in terms of the persons searched and things seized. When you send an order to Verizon demanding ALL their customer data that is that is hardly particular. Nor would it meet the standards of probable cause. Probable cause can't not be applied to a massive group of millions by saying "one of them may have done something." Probable cause is a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent and cautious person's belief that certain facts are probably true. The vast majority of the people involved in these sorts of searches do not fall under that. There is no circumstantial support to the need to gather their information. Constitutional amendments must also be constitutional, as must all laws passed by Congress, executive orders signed by the President. Even state and city laws must adhere to the laws passed above them all the way up to the Constitution. It is not just a piece of paper with words on it. It is the core beliefs underpinning the creation of all our other laws. It is a codified standard that has the backing of the force of law via the Supreme Court. Laws that are found to not measure up to the standard are overturned. The argument the government is making is that "well, the law was passed by Congress, and it hasn't been challenged yet, therefore it is constitutional and can't be challenged." It is a ridiculous argument.