It is sort of a Catch-22 for the providers. They get money from the ad networks, who are all compromised, but have no way of stopping what is served themselves. So, the right solution is to block ads.
However, if the ad blockers aren't turned off, they get no money from the ad networks.
Ultimately it is the ad networks who are responsible, and no one is able to hold them accountable except maybe some top flight content providers.
It would be better for the content providers if they could just shut off ads and find another way to pay for creating their content, but no one wants to reach into their wallets and pay money to do so.
The one thing that the ad networks do is that they do tend to make getting money to content providers a more simple matter than attempting to obtain and keep subscribers. Subscribers aren't sticker shocked for paying $10 for a site that they just wanted to read one story on, so the general public is paying indirectly by buying products and paying into a pool of advertising money.
As other have pointed out, that could be a nice event for some friends and family. You do need a decent sound system and screen or you are missing out on the movie to some degree, but I have to admit that I know many people that live in relative hovels who have nonetheless taken great care to have a huge TV and sound system. So, my objection may not actually hold much water for most people.
I just don't know that I want to pay $50 for something like this. I don't like paying $50 for a movie and snacks at the theater, but at least I know it is supporting a local business and a few jobs in the area. Here, I'm just paying through the nose for the privilege of seeing it at home, which I already know is cheap to distribute to, and on the day of the release, which is just an upcharge for priority.
That's true. We need to remember to socialize the long term costs of diabetes into the price of candy.
I think we also need to do a carbon contribution assessment of the snacks and add a surcharge. Especially for the chili dogs. That has got to be causing the massive release of methane into the environment.
This could be valuable for movies as big as Star Wars was, since the theaters were packed and you *might* see a die-hard fan who wanted to be absolutely certain they would get a screening that very day.
But I don't see enough of those sorts of movies out there to make the $50 price tag a good price point for this.
I mean, all I did was stop looking at the Internet for a week or so, and I went to a matinee on a day off a week later. It was still a little crowded, but I don't feel like I missed anything by not seeing it that very day.
Moreover, those people who do go same day, they're probably there for the whole experience, which includes standing in line, in costume, hanging out with everyone else. They might not actually want to see it at home, in some cases.
As for Blu-Ray, yeah, if you're not interested enough to see it in a theater, you're not going to need this service. I'd *hope* that they did understand that much when they created this new service.
Or they could just barter intelligence deals with German intelligence to have *them* hand over the information directly.
These are government intelligence agencies here. The NSA certainly could social engineer themselves the information, or induce faults on a case by case basis, but why do that when you can just cut a deal or two? The NSA has so much juicy information that German intelligence would be happy to trade for.
Sorry, what? German intelligence would never do that? Yes... sorry... I'm not laughing, that's just a lot of coughing. That's the ticket.
I'm guessing that anyone who surprises us with a nuclear detonation, or more probably a radiological attack like a dirty bomb, is going to *tell us that they did it*, because you don't just set off nuclear bombs or dirty bombs and run away and go "tee hee".
It's not like someone had to figure out who flew the planes into the WTC towers, right?
And people will still use Bitcoin, but while it is illegal, you won't be able to avoid using government currency for just about everything that the government might notice. That is them winning.
You could always get and use pot. It's never been particularly hard to get. That's not the point. The point was to drive it underground and make all activities associated with it into something you could charge people with.
Yes, they didn't intend to have the War on Drugs become something to throw people in jail for, but it became a very quickly useful means of throwing people in jail for offenses where the police could not get eyewitness accounts out of neighbors in inner cities. If you have a possession charge, then no one had to see you be a gang member, and with the moral outrage about drugs, it was easy to get more and more money and equipment and penalties so you could throw people in jail.
As a white person from the suburbs, I never partook of it myself, but I certainly knew who was doing it and even some of the small time dealers. None of them have ever been busted for anything. That's because drug crime is one of those crimes where the cops basically trundle it out as a proxy crime for something they think that some gang member did, but they have no way to prove it. But they do have that small bag of mostly harmless plant material right in front of them.
BitCoin is not a danger to governments any more than pot was. It's all under control. And now, it's another way to bust you for a crime that they can't prove you committed. Sure, your BitCoin purchase was anonymous, so they have no idea it was you who bought those drugs or other contraband. Too bad that your possession of BitCoins is sufficient to throw you in jail, so now it's irrelevant that they can't prove it. They just moved the goal posts back to a place where they could make an easy win.
Are you saying that the people who run chip fabs do not like yachts or hookers? Because I'm guessing that's probably not it. There is probably a difference in the situations which is more likely to be the reason.
I'm not saying that energy company execs are innocent, I'm just wondering how chip fab execs are somehow different. I'm guessing that they aren't, they just don't have the same risks to deal with. That or they hide their problems better.
Now, if they are better, we should recruit fab execs to run oil companies and nuclear plants. Problem solved.
I was more commenting on the point that you are talking about a 500 foot tall tsunami. The one that happened at Fukushima was only 49 ft tall. A tsunami ten times that size would inflict so much damage that I doubt you could do much to realistically mitigate that. But a 500 ft wave is unknown in human history. The tallest wave known was 100 ft tall at Lituya Bay in 1958.
It's not about whether it could happen, because its probably not impossible. However there is an assessment of risk that has to happen here.
Are you going to suggest that nuclear power is unsafe because it might fail in circumstances that have not been seen in all of history? You might as well suggest that it might have a reactor meltdown if it was hit by a meteor large enough to touch off an extinction event. At that point, who cares? We're all dead anyway. If anyone lives long enough to die of cancer from a busted nuclear plant 30 years after that, they probably lived a charmed life.
There is nothing wrong with having a nuclear reactor in this region. It just needs to be built to fail-safe. This plant in particular was not appropriately built to that standard.
And honestly, if there was a 500 foot tsunami, Japan's going to have other things to worry about. I mean, yeah the homes all around will be irradiated, but since they will have been flattened already and anyone left inside dead, irradiation of their dead bodies is probably just going to slow down decomposition at that point.
Perhaps, but it's not like a government automatically does any better.
Note that the #1 nuclear accident in the world was a government reactor for the now defunct Soviet Union. If we're simply going by how bad reactor events have been, we should probably still be more afraid of government control.
That's not really true. The War on Drugs hasn't failed at all.
The War on Drugs has been a *huge* success... for those people who want a ready made excuse to throw people in jail.
Guess what the War on Bitcoin will provide?
The goal of the law isn't to *end* Bitcoin, it is merely to keep it from overtaking the ruble for most purchases. In this, it will totally succeed.
Also, by insuring that you can only buy criminal things with now-criminal crypto-currency, it will ensure that Bitcoin never gets a reputation as being useful for normal business. Just having a Bitcoin will equate you with all sorts of drug runners, terrorists, and child pornography sorts all by association. I can already envision the judges and jury recoiling from you with a look of fear and disgust on their faces for your dirty crimes.
Bitcoin threat averted. And here you thought that they were failing....
I will say this, though. There are two things to consider.
Yes, SF can probably raise tax revenues to let people live in the city. That will probably have a bit of a chilling effect on the businesses there, but it could be done.
However, it probably wouldn't have to have raised taxes as much if SF had allowed development in the first place. SF is trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want business and they want to keep development out. The reason for high prices is the tech business, sure, but it is also because SF has prevented sufficient development over time to to accommodate those growing numbers.
It honestly sounds to me like many people in SF just want tech to go away so they can go back to the SF of the 70s and 80s. Since I don't live there, I really don't get a say in it, but from all I have read, there are people in SF on both sides who don't seem to want to share.
So, when you lived there, did anyone give a thought to how the city might develop? If you didn't, you're the equivalent of moss or lichen in the whole plant succession chain. You're making the place better for the asshole grasses and trees, and they're going to come in and take over the place.
The only way to ensure you don't get fucked over in that situation is to either ensure you protect your environment (which may mean that tech would have gone elsewhere), or to work out how to take advantage of the situation, or even just taking your scads of money and getting out so you can go to the next artist colony somewhere else. There's really no point in suggesting that people should stay away from a nice place to live.
I think that there is a state interest in making sure that people are able to feel secure in their homes.
However, I think when you talk about renting that you need to ensure that the ownership rights are balanced with the right of people to be secure. I think there is a reasonable solution for people that needs to be found. There should be a long term ability for owners to be able to sell, and people living in those places should see it coming a mile away.
Of course, I think that being in SF is a giant bubble. They're either going to destroy the city with forcing everyone but the tech people out, or they're going to start pricing people who need to be in tech out of the market, thus hitting a limit on how many people they can get for new businesses.
Personally, I have no desire to live or work in SF. I've been there, its decent and all, but it's not a place I'd pay 5K a month to live in.
Yes, it was a marketing blast. That should have been obvious from the first few words.
However, since it was about a report about OpenStack, it would seem the mentions were pertinent. It's not like they wrote an article about CPU design and threw the references in.
TL;DR: OpenStack is not for everyone, but if you want it, you need to pay Talligent lots of money because your IT staff are idiots. And private cloud.
Well, you can't blame them for pitching what they do.
On the other hand, having seen certain DIY cloud implementations, you probably do need someone who knows how to set it up if you actually want to use it. If you don't have that in house, then you need someone who can come in and drop it in.
I'm sure it is great if you have sufficient need and sufficient resources to make an actual private cloud something worth running so that the overhead is worth it, but there is definitely overhead to operating and administering it in such a way that you didn't just install a lot of software to just get some virtual machines and shared storage out of it.
However, again, the equipment would have to be in the pursuit of a criminal who was being pursued by actual LEO. I don't believe that such a robot would be able to be used autonomously, for instance. There would have to be some factor where the LEO are controlling the engagement, and I could see how a court might suggest that part of a LEO's training and duties is actual apprehension. If the apprehension were done by the actual military robot, I am not sure that would be legal.
It does say that the law was specifically meant to preclude the use of actual troops in active enforcement. Since a robot is not a member of the armed forces, it might be considered to be okay to use. That doesn't mean that using a military robot to directly aid in a more active role would be considered legal. Those active roles are:
"Based upon the clear intent of Congress, this Court holds that the clause "to execute the laws", contained in 18 U.S.C. 1385, makes unlawful the use of federal military troops in an active role of direct law enforcement by civil law enforcement officers. Activities which constitute an active role in direct law enforcement are: arrest; seizure of evidence; search of a person; search of a building; investigation of crime; interviewing witnesses; pursuit of an escaped civilian prisoner; search of an area for a suspect and other like activities. Such use of federal military troops to "execute the laws", or as the Court has defined the clause, in "an active role of direct law enforcement", is unlawful under 18 U.S.C. 1385 and therefore is relevant and material to disprove the third element of 18 U.S.C. 231(a) (3), i. e., that law enforcement officers were lawfully performing their duties."
So... I think that the intent is that the military does not do the take downs or the actual face to face apprehension or search work, however, the ruling and the law clearly did not envision robots. It would be my opinion that a court *could* find that an active role for military robots is illegal, unlike drone surveillance which is passive, but that this is by no means certain and specific legislation should definitely be introduced to clarify that matter. I would not rely on the courts for a desirable ruling.
Agreed. Since they are required to replicate data to ensure high availability anyway, the major cost is not the quality of the medium, but rather the costs of raw storage. For quality considerations to overcome capacity, they would need a medium that is utterly reliable, which is a very, very hard thing to prove. That means that dropping quality by some low percentage, if it reduces the price of storage appreciably, is an acceptable trade off.
As an individual, we do not expect to buy a lot of storage, and sometimes we accept only one drive to store our material. For many, if not most individuals, quality would be priceless because we aren't going to necessarily want to create a RAID array of our disks. Providers of storage and cloud services have not choice. RAID is already expected, so they might as well let the price and quality drop. After all, the worst that happens is that you use the RAID capabilities more often, instead of having a RAID setup which is never used because the disks are extremely reliable.
The military can be called on to assist law enforcement efforts in a support role, such as operating equipment like this. What they absolutely may not do is run these flights under their own authority or for their own purposes and without the direct supervision of a Federal law enforcement agency.
These are not military flights, they are FBI flights "contracted out" to the military for their ability to operate the equipment. The FBI still has to follow the law for their recon activities and the military still cannot do any of this in the US without civilian LEO involvement.
"It is clear from the legislative history of 18 U.S.C. 1385 and the above cases, the intent of Congress in enacting this statute and by using the clause "uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise", was to prevent the direct active use of federal troops, one soldier or many, to execute the laws. Congress did not intend to prevent the use of Army or Air Force materiel or equipment in aid of execution of the laws."
More specifically:
"Activities which constitute a passive role which might indirectly aid law enforcement are: mere presence of military personnel under orders to report on the necessity for military intervention; preparation of contingency plans to be used if military intervention is ordered; advice or recommendations given to civilian law enforcement officers by military personnel on tactics or logistics; presence of military personnel to deliver military materiel, equipment or supplies, to train local law enforcement officials on the proper use and care of such material or equipment, and to maintain such materiel or equipment; aerial photographic reconnaissance flights and other like activities. Such passive involvement of federal military troops which might indirectly aid civilian law enforcement is not made unlawful under 18 U.S.C. 1385 and therefore is not relevant or material and not admissible to disprove the third element of the 18 U.S.C. 231(a) (3) charge against the defendants."
Well, as someone else said, this was a small car manufacturer who was basically asking the government to tax his competition. You need look no further than that.
The only question is whether this owner has more pull with the Party than the big car makers.
The answer is... they double tax it because they can.
The government will tax what it thinks it can get away with. As long as it doesn't show up on a voter's direct tax bill, they can get away with it unless someone looks for it and notices.
In that way, taxes actually make things at least a little more expensive for us without us even noticing. Make no mistake, that tax increase your elected representative is voting for on some company or group that you don't know anything about is affecting how much you pay, they're just passing it on to you in the price.
Where does the Budapest Memorandum require us to use nuclear weapons to do anything? You've given me a link that doesn't actually contradict anything I have said.
What part of, "Seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, "if Belarus/Kazakhstan/Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used"...sounds to you like we will promise to nuke Russia if they did any of that?
Also, from the same Wikipedia entry you posted:
"The Budapest Memorandum was negotiated at political level, though it is not entirely clear whether the instrument is devoid entirely of legal provisions. It refers to assurances, but it does not impose a legal obligation of military assistance on its parties."
In other words, it was a serious document, but it doesn't even obligate the US to do anything militarily, let alone start a nuclear exchange over Ukraine.
The Soviets were pretty much working hard to start the Winter War. They even shelled their own troops to provide the excuse. I'm going to have to say that I don't see the Finns in any light but self-defense against a country like Stalin's Soviet Union. The fact that they managed to even remain independent in that situation was nothing more than astounding.
Yeah, if you're fighting with the Nazis, you are totally in a bizarre place, but we need to remember that what Germany in regard to Jews and minorities was doing was not completely known at the time, especially in a place like Finland. And the Finns were very careful to limit their involvement to purely fighting the Soviets on their own front with German aid. They did not subscribe to any of that bullshit and were quite well aware of the very precarious situation they were in.
Slashdot Mirror
It is sort of a Catch-22 for the providers. They get money from the ad networks, who are all compromised, but have no way of stopping what is served themselves.
So, the right solution is to block ads.
However, if the ad blockers aren't turned off, they get no money from the ad networks.
Ultimately it is the ad networks who are responsible, and no one is able to hold them accountable except maybe some top flight content providers.
It would be better for the content providers if they could just shut off ads and find another way to pay for creating their content, but no one wants to reach into their wallets and pay money to do so.
The one thing that the ad networks do is that they do tend to make getting money to content providers a more simple matter than attempting to obtain and keep subscribers. Subscribers aren't sticker shocked for paying $10 for a site that they just wanted to read one story on, so the general public is paying indirectly by buying products and paying into a pool of advertising money.
As other have pointed out, that could be a nice event for some friends and family. You do need a decent sound system and screen or you are missing out on the movie to some degree, but I have to admit that I know many people that live in relative hovels who have nonetheless taken great care to have a huge TV and sound system. So, my objection may not actually hold much water for most people.
I just don't know that I want to pay $50 for something like this. I don't like paying $50 for a movie and snacks at the theater, but at least I know it is supporting a local business and a few jobs in the area. Here, I'm just paying through the nose for the privilege of seeing it at home, which I already know is cheap to distribute to, and on the day of the release, which is just an upcharge for priority.
That's true. We need to remember to socialize the long term costs of diabetes into the price of candy.
I think we also need to do a carbon contribution assessment of the snacks and add a surcharge. Especially for the chili dogs. That has got to be causing the massive release of methane into the environment.
This could be valuable for movies as big as Star Wars was, since the theaters were packed and you *might* see a die-hard fan who wanted to be absolutely certain they would get a screening that very day.
But I don't see enough of those sorts of movies out there to make the $50 price tag a good price point for this.
I mean, all I did was stop looking at the Internet for a week or so, and I went to a matinee on a day off a week later. It was still a little crowded, but I don't feel like I missed anything by not seeing it that very day.
Moreover, those people who do go same day, they're probably there for the whole experience, which includes standing in line, in costume, hanging out with everyone else. They might not actually want to see it at home, in some cases.
As for Blu-Ray, yeah, if you're not interested enough to see it in a theater, you're not going to need this service. I'd *hope* that they did understand that much when they created this new service.
Or they could just barter intelligence deals with German intelligence to have *them* hand over the information directly.
These are government intelligence agencies here. The NSA certainly could social engineer themselves the information, or induce faults on a case by case basis, but why do that when you can just cut a deal or two? The NSA has so much juicy information that German intelligence would be happy to trade for.
Sorry, what? German intelligence would never do that? Yes... sorry... I'm not laughing, that's just a lot of coughing. That's the ticket.
I'm guessing that anyone who surprises us with a nuclear detonation, or more probably a radiological attack like a dirty bomb, is going to *tell us that they did it*, because you don't just set off nuclear bombs or dirty bombs and run away and go "tee hee".
It's not like someone had to figure out who flew the planes into the WTC towers, right?
And people will still use Bitcoin, but while it is illegal, you won't be able to avoid using government currency for just about everything that the government might notice. That is them winning.
You could always get and use pot. It's never been particularly hard to get. That's not the point. The point was to drive it underground and make all activities associated with it into something you could charge people with.
Yes, they didn't intend to have the War on Drugs become something to throw people in jail for, but it became a very quickly useful means of throwing people in jail for offenses where the police could not get eyewitness accounts out of neighbors in inner cities. If you have a possession charge, then no one had to see you be a gang member, and with the moral outrage about drugs, it was easy to get more and more money and equipment and penalties so you could throw people in jail.
As a white person from the suburbs, I never partook of it myself, but I certainly knew who was doing it and even some of the small time dealers. None of them have ever been busted for anything. That's because drug crime is one of those crimes where the cops basically trundle it out as a proxy crime for something they think that some gang member did, but they have no way to prove it. But they do have that small bag of mostly harmless plant material right in front of them.
BitCoin is not a danger to governments any more than pot was. It's all under control. And now, it's another way to bust you for a crime that they can't prove you committed. Sure, your BitCoin purchase was anonymous, so they have no idea it was you who bought those drugs or other contraband. Too bad that your possession of BitCoins is sufficient to throw you in jail, so now it's irrelevant that they can't prove it. They just moved the goal posts back to a place where they could make an easy win.
Are you saying that the people who run chip fabs do not like yachts or hookers? Because I'm guessing that's probably not it. There is probably a difference in the situations which is more likely to be the reason.
I'm not saying that energy company execs are innocent, I'm just wondering how chip fab execs are somehow different. I'm guessing that they aren't, they just don't have the same risks to deal with. That or they hide their problems better.
Now, if they are better, we should recruit fab execs to run oil companies and nuclear plants. Problem solved.
I was more commenting on the point that you are talking about a 500 foot tall tsunami. The one that happened at Fukushima was only 49 ft tall. A tsunami ten times that size would inflict so much damage that I doubt you could do much to realistically mitigate that. But a 500 ft wave is unknown in human history. The tallest wave known was 100 ft tall at Lituya Bay in 1958.
It's not about whether it could happen, because its probably not impossible. However there is an assessment of risk that has to happen here.
Are you going to suggest that nuclear power is unsafe because it might fail in circumstances that have not been seen in all of history? You might as well suggest that it might have a reactor meltdown if it was hit by a meteor large enough to touch off an extinction event. At that point, who cares? We're all dead anyway. If anyone lives long enough to die of cancer from a busted nuclear plant 30 years after that, they probably lived a charmed life.
There is nothing wrong with having a nuclear reactor in this region. It just needs to be built to fail-safe. This plant in particular was not appropriately built to that standard.
And honestly, if there was a 500 foot tsunami, Japan's going to have other things to worry about. I mean, yeah the homes all around will be irradiated, but since they will have been flattened already and anyone left inside dead, irradiation of their dead bodies is probably just going to slow down decomposition at that point.
Chernobyl was an explosive event, yes, but considerably less than fukishima on all honest accounts
That is a demonstrably false statement.
Do you even know what happened at Chernobyl?
Perhaps, but it's not like a government automatically does any better.
Note that the #1 nuclear accident in the world was a government reactor for the now defunct Soviet Union. If we're simply going by how bad reactor events have been, we should probably still be more afraid of government control.
That's not really true. The War on Drugs hasn't failed at all.
The War on Drugs has been a *huge* success... for those people who want a ready made excuse to throw people in jail.
Guess what the War on Bitcoin will provide?
The goal of the law isn't to *end* Bitcoin, it is merely to keep it from overtaking the ruble for most purchases. In this, it will totally succeed.
Also, by insuring that you can only buy criminal things with now-criminal crypto-currency, it will ensure that Bitcoin never gets a reputation as being useful for normal business. Just having a Bitcoin will equate you with all sorts of drug runners, terrorists, and child pornography sorts all by association. I can already envision the judges and jury recoiling from you with a look of fear and disgust on their faces for your dirty crimes.
Bitcoin threat averted. And here you thought that they were failing....
I will say this, though. There are two things to consider.
Yes, SF can probably raise tax revenues to let people live in the city. That will probably have a bit of a chilling effect on the businesses there, but it could be done.
However, it probably wouldn't have to have raised taxes as much if SF had allowed development in the first place. SF is trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want business and they want to keep development out. The reason for high prices is the tech business, sure, but it is also because SF has prevented sufficient development over time to to accommodate those growing numbers.
It honestly sounds to me like many people in SF just want tech to go away so they can go back to the SF of the 70s and 80s. Since I don't live there, I really don't get a say in it, but from all I have read, there are people in SF on both sides who don't seem to want to share.
So, when you lived there, did anyone give a thought to how the city might develop? If you didn't, you're the equivalent of moss or lichen in the whole plant succession chain. You're making the place better for the asshole grasses and trees, and they're going to come in and take over the place.
The only way to ensure you don't get fucked over in that situation is to either ensure you protect your environment (which may mean that tech would have gone elsewhere), or to work out how to take advantage of the situation, or even just taking your scads of money and getting out so you can go to the next artist colony somewhere else. There's really no point in suggesting that people should stay away from a nice place to live.
I think that there is a state interest in making sure that people are able to feel secure in their homes.
However, I think when you talk about renting that you need to ensure that the ownership rights are balanced with the right of people to be secure. I think there is a reasonable solution for people that needs to be found. There should be a long term ability for owners to be able to sell, and people living in those places should see it coming a mile away.
Of course, I think that being in SF is a giant bubble. They're either going to destroy the city with forcing everyone but the tech people out, or they're going to start pricing people who need to be in tech out of the market, thus hitting a limit on how many people they can get for new businesses.
Personally, I have no desire to live or work in SF. I've been there, its decent and all, but it's not a place I'd pay 5K a month to live in.
Yes, it was a marketing blast. That should have been obvious from the first few words.
However, since it was about a report about OpenStack, it would seem the mentions were pertinent. It's not like they wrote an article about CPU design and threw the references in.
TL;DR: OpenStack is not for everyone, but if you want it, you need to pay Talligent lots of money because your IT staff are idiots. And private cloud.
Well, you can't blame them for pitching what they do.
On the other hand, having seen certain DIY cloud implementations, you probably do need someone who knows how to set it up if you actually want to use it. If you don't have that in house, then you need someone who can come in and drop it in.
I'm sure it is great if you have sufficient need and sufficient resources to make an actual private cloud something worth running so that the overhead is worth it, but there is definitely overhead to operating and administering it in such a way that you didn't just install a lot of software to just get some virtual machines and shared storage out of it.
Strictly speaking, you may be right.
However, again, the equipment would have to be in the pursuit of a criminal who was being pursued by actual LEO. I don't believe that such a robot would be able to be used autonomously, for instance. There would have to be some factor where the LEO are controlling the engagement, and I could see how a court might suggest that part of a LEO's training and duties is actual apprehension. If the apprehension were done by the actual military robot, I am not sure that would be legal.
It does say that the law was specifically meant to preclude the use of actual troops in active enforcement. Since a robot is not a member of the armed forces, it might be considered to be okay to use. That doesn't mean that using a military robot to directly aid in a more active role would be considered legal. Those active roles are:
"Based upon the clear intent of Congress, this Court holds that the clause "to execute the laws", contained in 18 U.S.C. 1385, makes unlawful the use of federal military troops in an active role of direct law enforcement by civil law enforcement officers. Activities which constitute an active role in direct law enforcement are: arrest; seizure of evidence; search of a person; search of a building; investigation of crime; interviewing witnesses; pursuit of an escaped civilian prisoner; search of an area for a suspect and other like activities. Such use of federal military troops to "execute the laws", or as the Court has defined the clause, in "an active role of direct law enforcement", is unlawful under 18 U.S.C. 1385 and therefore is relevant and material to disprove the third element of 18 U.S.C. 231(a) (3), i. e., that law enforcement officers were lawfully performing their duties."
So... I think that the intent is that the military does not do the take downs or the actual face to face apprehension or search work, however, the ruling and the law clearly did not envision robots. It would be my opinion that a court *could* find that an active role for military robots is illegal, unlike drone surveillance which is passive, but that this is by no means certain and specific legislation should definitely be introduced to clarify that matter. I would not rely on the courts for a desirable ruling.
Agreed. Since they are required to replicate data to ensure high availability anyway, the major cost is not the quality of the medium, but rather the costs of raw storage. For quality considerations to overcome capacity, they would need a medium that is utterly reliable, which is a very, very hard thing to prove. That means that dropping quality by some low percentage, if it reduces the price of storage appreciably, is an acceptable trade off.
As an individual, we do not expect to buy a lot of storage, and sometimes we accept only one drive to store our material. For many, if not most individuals, quality would be priceless because we aren't going to necessarily want to create a RAID array of our disks. Providers of storage and cloud services have not choice. RAID is already expected, so they might as well let the price and quality drop. After all, the worst that happens is that you use the RAID capabilities more often, instead of having a RAID setup which is never used because the disks are extremely reliable.
The military can be called on to assist law enforcement efforts in a support role, such as operating equipment like this. What they absolutely may not do is run these flights under their own authority or for their own purposes and without the direct supervision of a Federal law enforcement agency.
These are not military flights, they are FBI flights "contracted out" to the military for their ability to operate the equipment. The FBI still has to follow the law for their recon activities and the military still cannot do any of this in the US without civilian LEO involvement.
This is not illegal under Posse Comitatus. The District Court ruled in US. v. Red Feather (1975): http://law.justia.com/cases/fe...
"It is clear from the legislative history of 18 U.S.C. 1385 and the above cases, the intent of Congress in enacting this statute and by using the clause "uses any part of the Army or the Air Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise", was to prevent the direct active use of federal troops, one soldier or many, to execute the laws. Congress did not intend to prevent the use of Army or Air Force materiel or equipment in aid of execution of the laws."
More specifically:
"Activities which constitute a passive role which might indirectly aid law enforcement are: mere presence of military personnel under orders to report on the necessity for military intervention; preparation of contingency plans to be used if military intervention is ordered; advice or recommendations given to civilian law enforcement officers by military personnel on tactics or logistics; presence of military personnel to deliver military materiel, equipment or supplies, to train local law enforcement officials on the proper use and care of such material or equipment, and to maintain such materiel or equipment; aerial photographic reconnaissance flights and other like activities. Such passive involvement of federal military troops which might indirectly aid civilian law enforcement is not made unlawful under 18 U.S.C. 1385 and therefore is not relevant or material and not admissible to disprove the third element of the 18 U.S.C. 231(a) (3) charge against the defendants."
Well, as someone else said, this was a small car manufacturer who was basically asking the government to tax his competition. You need look no further than that.
The only question is whether this owner has more pull with the Party than the big car makers.
The answer is... they double tax it because they can.
The government will tax what it thinks it can get away with. As long as it doesn't show up on a voter's direct tax bill, they can get away with it unless someone looks for it and notices.
In that way, taxes actually make things at least a little more expensive for us without us even noticing. Make no mistake, that tax increase your elected representative is voting for on some company or group that you don't know anything about is affecting how much you pay, they're just passing it on to you in the price.
Where does the Budapest Memorandum require us to use nuclear weapons to do anything? You've given me a link that doesn't actually contradict anything I have said.
What part of, "Seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, "if Belarus/Kazakhstan/Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used" ...sounds to you like we will promise to nuke Russia if they did any of that?
Also, from the same Wikipedia entry you posted:
"The Budapest Memorandum was negotiated at political level, though it is not entirely clear whether the instrument is devoid entirely of legal provisions. It refers to assurances, but it does not impose a legal obligation of military assistance on its parties."
In other words, it was a serious document, but it doesn't even obligate the US to do anything militarily, let alone start a nuclear exchange over Ukraine.
The Soviets were pretty much working hard to start the Winter War. They even shelled their own troops to provide the excuse. I'm going to have to say that I don't see the Finns in any light but self-defense against a country like Stalin's Soviet Union. The fact that they managed to even remain independent in that situation was nothing more than astounding.
Yeah, if you're fighting with the Nazis, you are totally in a bizarre place, but we need to remember that what Germany in regard to Jews and minorities was doing was not completely known at the time, especially in a place like Finland. And the Finns were very careful to limit their involvement to purely fighting the Soviets on their own front with German aid. They did not subscribe to any of that bullshit and were quite well aware of the very precarious situation they were in.