The meta-law would act to make such funds-direction aspects of a proposed bill invalid, not to be considered part of the bill when voted on or passed into law. Therefore it couldn't be superceded by a porkbarrel section of a newer bill, as those sections would be cut out before it became law. There would have to be a new law specifically modifying the meta-law passed to re-allow porkbarrelling.
I'd add - if you're making corporate and/or in-house software, allow the display-to-user error messages to be easily modifiable and overnight-pushable by the helpdesk or whoever is handling FPOC for when the application breaks. A small unchanging alphanumeric string followed by IT-department-defined text enables much better customisation of common errors, including incorporating a quick description of what has gone wrong, troubleshooting steps to try, and/or who to contact.
"Do not require that a system need more resources to install the product than to run it." Particularly obnoxious for utilities which can run entirely in the background but require a minimum video resolution to install - or a screen at all.
"Do not require that a system have external access in order to install software." A DVD or downloadable installer should contain all the files needed to install and configure the software. Don't use a 50K installer which then pulls down 20G of "updates" before the software even runs for the first time.
I'd make it that the point system applies to whoever was in Congress at the time the law was passed who voted for it. No point in penalising those who tried to vote against it originally or those who came along after it was made law.
However, I'd also have time limits on laws. New laws could only be valid for 12 months. Laws could be "refreshed" for 3 and then 12 years using the same process as passing a new law, but any alteration would define it as a new law, not a refresh. 12 years per refresh would be the maximum. Any congressperson who had been there for 12 years would therefore have voted on every law on the books at least once (unless they abstained).
I'd also make the points system apply to retired Congresscritters. Get to 10 points, even after retirement, and you lose your pro-rated pension and any other financial perks. Get to 15 and you lose everything, including secret service protection.
However, an unconstitutional law's date of applicability would only be the most recent time it was successfully refreshed. If a law stood for 50 years and was then struck down, only the politicians who voted on it at the last refresh would get a point against them.
Bonus: Do this with a very expensive house, then once you have the deed, sell it and move into a small, inexpensive house elsewhere. Use the rest of the money to either invest, or buy other properties to rent out, or simply tuck it away in long-term bonds as FU money.
As an ex-public servant myself, I'd say that given a choice, I would pretty much demand to be recorded every minute I was on the job. And for years, in some places, I was. Security cameras all over the ceiling, in a building off-limits to the public. The point of them being there was so that if I ever got accused of something, I could call up the security camera logs and the computer access logs in my defense.
Does that mean that the public should have been able to record me? Given that I was paid from the public purse, and was doing work which would eventually affect members of the public directly, I'd say hell yes - during the hours I was on the clock, anyway. And presumably with the caveat that any information of a sensitive nature (records of individuals etc) I had to look at in the course of my work would be blurred out or otherwise not appear in readable or decodable form on the video.
Not all public servants spend a lot of time outside the ivory towers, but on the occasions I did the public appearance thing, I would have been A-OK with people taping me. Sure, I'm no movie star, but if I was representing the Department then I was hardly going to being painting myself blue and streaking down Main Street towing a giraffe. And if I had been, then maybe I shouldn't have been getting paid out of the public purse for doing so, hmm?
So yeah. I'm all for recording cops - and other recipients of public funds - while they're clocked in and meant to be serving the public. If they don't like it, they're free to carry their own camcorders and record right back.
If being a spy, assume that things will go wrong at some point, and do not leave accurate passwords lying around where any passing Tom, Dick, or J. Edgar can read them.
The "how to use a computer" basics classes should honestly be part of home economics, just like being taught how to use an oven or any other common appliance. Some schools have beginner driving and auto repair classes - they're not Advanced Vehicle Engineering any more than how-to-use-a-browser is CS.
My guess would be that most of the professions you mention are traditionally lower-paid than the ones generally attached to the "getting more women into X" programs. The way to get more men into those professions would be to increase the associated salaries and/or perceived social status.
Not in the US, but not that many weeks ago I had a door-to-door salesthing trying to sell me cable. My response was basically "Sorry, I have an internet connection." They had absolutely no response for that. Not even "If you buy cable package X, it generally costs less per month than the equivalent bandwidth would." Nuthin'.
Honestly, broadband internet is fairly ubiquitous and mostly cheap. And if I want to watch actual TV shows, I can watch them whenever I want. I get no ads before, after, or during. I get no station breaks or identification. I can pause, rewind, fast-forward, and take computer screenshots and audio and video clips as desired. I can store as many episodes locally as I care to buy disk space for, and plug in a NAS box or USB drive if I need more. I can watch twenty shows at once at any resolution I want, in overlapping or tiled windows. I can send clips, shots, or entire episodes to any or all of my friends in seconds using URLs, FTP, or torrent links. I can even quickly shove a bunch of episodes on a jump drive for people who don't want to fiddle around with the internet or waste bandwidth.
I can rename episode files to whatever I think sounds good, I can store them in whatever structure I feel happiest with. If I don't like the player app interface, I can go download a thousand others or even, in some cases, have one custom-built fairly quickly and cheaply.
I can watch shows at double speed to get through them faster, and half speed to catch things I might otherwise miss. I can alter the AV files as I see fit. And if I really feel like getting off my butt, I can stream all the ad-free shows, episodes, windows, and whatever to the big-screen TV and control it with everything from the TV remote to an iPhone.
Finally, given the limited amount of TV programs I consider watchable, and the limit on my monthly bandwidth, I can pretty much do all of the above for FREE.
Honestly, when these salesthings trudge up to my door, do they notice a sign out front of my house which says "dead format storage"?
It's going to have a hard time costing the news organisations eyes if the federal employees are still able to read the documents from home.
Honestly, apart from people living in barracks and on deployment, who doesn't have access to an unfiltered feed at least five times a week? Are the news sites even going to notice the drop?
If you're going to have hardware hacking tools, at some point you will need a medkit. You may also want a landline phone with the physical address of the hackerspace next to it, so that anyone who needs to call emergency services for any reason will be able to give directions.
That aside, keep an eye on the cost of 3D printers and snag one once it comes into your price range. Additionally: don't forget to surge-protect your power sockets and be able to isolate your USB and network sockets both logically and physically - you never know what some people might plug into those things.
Slashdot Mirror
The meta-law would act to make such funds-direction aspects of a proposed bill invalid, not to be considered part of the bill when voted on or passed into law. Therefore it couldn't be superceded by a porkbarrel section of a newer bill, as those sections would be cut out before it became law. There would have to be a new law specifically modifying the meta-law passed to re-allow porkbarrelling.
"Your challenge is to eliminate stupidity in America. Good luck."
I'd add - if you're making corporate and/or in-house software, allow the display-to-user error messages to be easily modifiable and overnight-pushable by the helpdesk or whoever is handling FPOC for when the application breaks. A small unchanging alphanumeric string followed by IT-department-defined text enables much better customisation of common errors, including incorporating a quick description of what has gone wrong, troubleshooting steps to try, and/or who to contact.
"Do not require that a system need more resources to install the product than to run it." Particularly obnoxious for utilities which can run entirely in the background but require a minimum video resolution to install - or a screen at all.
"Do not require that a system have external access in order to install software." A DVD or downloadable installer should contain all the files needed to install and configure the software. Don't use a 50K installer which then pulls down 20G of "updates" before the software even runs for the first time.
I'd make it that the point system applies to whoever was in Congress at the time the law was passed who voted for it. No point in penalising those who tried to vote against it originally or those who came along after it was made law.
However, I'd also have time limits on laws. New laws could only be valid for 12 months. Laws could be "refreshed" for 3 and then 12 years using the same process as passing a new law, but any alteration would define it as a new law, not a refresh. 12 years per refresh would be the maximum. Any congressperson who had been there for 12 years would therefore have voted on every law on the books at least once (unless they abstained).
I'd also make the points system apply to retired Congresscritters. Get to 10 points, even after retirement, and you lose your pro-rated pension and any other financial perks. Get to 15 and you lose everything, including secret service protection.
However, an unconstitutional law's date of applicability would only be the most recent time it was successfully refreshed. If a law stood for 50 years and was then struck down, only the politicians who voted on it at the last refresh would get a point against them.
Bonus: Do this with a very expensive house, then once you have the deed, sell it and move into a small, inexpensive house elsewhere. Use the rest of the money to either invest, or buy other properties to rent out, or simply tuck it away in long-term bonds as FU money.
As it is, he seems to be merely looking at a charge of failing to keep things under wraps...
Or signs that you've voted in an American election?
What if a law was passed invalidating all porkbarrelling clauses in federal legislation, including retroactively?
As an ex-public servant myself, I'd say that given a choice, I would pretty much demand to be recorded every minute I was on the job. And for years, in some places, I was. Security cameras all over the ceiling, in a building off-limits to the public. The point of them being there was so that if I ever got accused of something, I could call up the security camera logs and the computer access logs in my defense.
Does that mean that the public should have been able to record me? Given that I was paid from the public purse, and was doing work which would eventually affect members of the public directly, I'd say hell yes - during the hours I was on the clock, anyway. And presumably with the caveat that any information of a sensitive nature (records of individuals etc) I had to look at in the course of my work would be blurred out or otherwise not appear in readable or decodable form on the video.
Not all public servants spend a lot of time outside the ivory towers, but on the occasions I did the public appearance thing, I would have been A-OK with people taping me. Sure, I'm no movie star, but if I was representing the Department then I was hardly going to being painting myself blue and streaking down Main Street towing a giraffe. And if I had been, then maybe I shouldn't have been getting paid out of the public purse for doing so, hmm?
So yeah. I'm all for recording cops - and other recipients of public funds - while they're clocked in and meant to be serving the public. If they don't like it, they're free to carry their own camcorders and record right back.
In 3,2,1...
If being a spy, assume that things will go wrong at some point, and do not leave accurate passwords lying around where any passing Tom, Dick, or J. Edgar can read them.
The "how to use a computer" basics classes should honestly be part of home economics, just like being taught how to use an oven or any other common appliance. Some schools have beginner driving and auto repair classes - they're not Advanced Vehicle Engineering any more than how-to-use-a-browser is CS.
My guess would be that most of the professions you mention are traditionally lower-paid than the ones generally attached to the "getting more women into X" programs. The way to get more men into those professions would be to increase the associated salaries and/or perceived social status.
Did either of these women actually expect Julian Assange to keep something under wraps?
...a company thinks it has any chance whatsoever of controlling what consumers do with things that they bought and now own.
The US government is FOR data-sharing now? Igor! Release the Assange clones!
Not in the US, but not that many weeks ago I had a door-to-door salesthing trying to sell me cable. My response was basically "Sorry, I have an internet connection." They had absolutely no response for that. Not even "If you buy cable package X, it generally costs less per month than the equivalent bandwidth would." Nuthin'.
Honestly, broadband internet is fairly ubiquitous and mostly cheap. And if I want to watch actual TV shows, I can watch them whenever I want. I get no ads before, after, or during. I get no station breaks or identification. I can pause, rewind, fast-forward, and take computer screenshots and audio and video clips as desired. I can store as many episodes locally as I care to buy disk space for, and plug in a NAS box or USB drive if I need more. I can watch twenty shows at once at any resolution I want, in overlapping or tiled windows. I can send clips, shots, or entire episodes to any or all of my friends in seconds using URLs, FTP, or torrent links. I can even quickly shove a bunch of episodes on a jump drive for people who don't want to fiddle around with the internet or waste bandwidth.
I can rename episode files to whatever I think sounds good, I can store them in whatever structure I feel happiest with. If I don't like the player app interface, I can go download a thousand others or even, in some cases, have one custom-built fairly quickly and cheaply.
I can watch shows at double speed to get through them faster, and half speed to catch things I might otherwise miss. I can alter the AV files as I see fit. And if I really feel like getting off my butt, I can stream all the ad-free shows, episodes, windows, and whatever to the big-screen TV and control it with everything from the TV remote to an iPhone.
Finally, given the limited amount of TV programs I consider watchable, and the limit on my monthly bandwidth, I can pretty much do all of the above for FREE.
Honestly, when these salesthings trudge up to my door, do they notice a sign out front of my house which says "dead format storage"?
Simpson's Individual Legionettes - Just the Right Size!
you can't saturate pipes that thick with a few bored teenagers.
"I heard a rumor Amazon is hosting porn but you have to pull 100GB off their servers before it'll unlock."
I'm a hippie lefty commie pinko tree-hugging freak.
Stick around another twenty years and that stuff will _be_ your clothing.
"Bureaucracy" ?
It's going to have a hard time costing the news organisations eyes if the federal employees are still able to read the documents from home.
Honestly, apart from people living in barracks and on deployment, who doesn't have access to an unfiltered feed at least five times a week? Are the news sites even going to notice the drop?
If you're going to have hardware hacking tools, at some point you will need a medkit. You may also want a landline phone with the physical address of the hackerspace next to it, so that anyone who needs to call emergency services for any reason will be able to give directions.
That aside, keep an eye on the cost of 3D printers and snag one once it comes into your price range. Additionally: don't forget to surge-protect your power sockets and be able to isolate your USB and network sockets both logically and physically - you never know what some people might plug into those things.