Actually no, they believe it has a meaning that should be obeyed, and that if you don't like it you should lawfully amend it rather than ignoring it and claiming unlimited power to do what you want.
Edison and Tesla, two of the greatest scientists and inventors in American history, were both businessmen looking for profit and working for large corporations. And much of their work looked beyond immediate applications to whole new fields of technology.
A few years ago, MIT's "Technology Review" wrote about these amazing nifty "quant" investors who used brilliantly-derived equations to predict stock prices, and were cleaning house. Somehow I'm skeptical of the latest incarnation of formulaic investment strategy. Of course it's helpful to look at all the available data about a company, but aren't short-term news analysis tools doomed to unpredictable behavior once more than one person is using them?
By the way, without getting into the rants above, the people criticizing "the free market" above ought to read about the Community Re-Investment Act (which forced banks to make bad loans) and the federally-created banks (which existed to promote house sales beyond what a free market would justify). As recently as a few years ago, Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide Financial (and of the "Friends of Angelo" in Congress) publicly told his colleagues they should ignore their own financial risk analysis, ie. rational self-interest, in favor of altruism towards the poor. There's room for regulation, but what we've got is not a free market. There's massive government regulation existing to manipulate the market and reward failure, rather than to just curb the most dangerous and useless behavior.
How can we plausibly restrict the sale of malware if the seller can point to the smoke shops for comparison? Seems like they only have to wink and say "don't tell us you plan to do anything illegal with it".
Well, it's like what we hear out of China. "The Chinese people don't want the freedom to look at dissenting political opinions. That's why there needs to be a massive censorship filter and widespread intimidation and oppression to stop any specific Chinese people who disagree." If there were really a consensus, there'd be no need for such a law.
Actually, American citizens are extremely generous as individuals. They give huge amounts of their effort and wealth to foreigners as charity, and sign up for voluntary military service knowing they'll be dropped into inept hellhole nations around the world, not even counting the benefits of American businesses to the world. We simply don't like having some gang of self-appointed do-gooders order us to be "social" in ways that involve granting them unlimited power over us.
"Efforts to put a more political spin" on textbooks? The article's summary assumes that before this round of meddling, the curriculum was perfectly objective and definitely uninfluenced by politics.
When asked what Constitutional authority she had for ordering us to buy insurance, Nancy Pelosi's reply was, "Are you serious!? Are you serious?!" CNS News covered a bunch of other Congressmen who were similarly stunned or indifferent to the question. If they'd been smarter, maybe they would have listened to you and used your argument -- but they didn't. They just declared they have "essentially unlimited" authority to impose "requirements" on Americans to do things and "fines" to punish them for disobedience. (Their words.)
That's why multiple states are already nullifying the illegal health care law and others are suing over it. If we let this law stand, then logically we accept that the feds can order us to do pretty much anything, and the 10th Amendment is even deader than it's been since FDR. My favorite example is that you'd have to accept a 99% income tax on any American who won't move to a collective turnip farm. "It's just a tax to cover our estimate of the costs you're imposing on society by not participating in our five-year plan!"
According to the actual text of the bill, no, the "penalty" for disobeying the (unconstitutional) "requirement" to buy insurance applies to anyone who refuses to buy. Regardless of whether they claim to have "opted out" of any government system or later "want back in"; the rule is just "Didn't buy what we ordered? You get punished." If you want to search for it in the actual bill, look for the terms "shared responsibility" and "requirement".
Back to the original Berkeley article: doesn't it say that there's to be a series of lectures on healthy living for those who choose not to hand over their DNA? Sounds like an attempt to start harassing those who disobey. At least it's less coercive than what this government is doing, by claiming what Pelosi called "essentially unlimited" power to give whatever orders she wants.
"And it's also about Nintendo, which was the first to require that all apps be approved by the device manufacturer."
That line points out that this battle for content control goes back to before Net-based software. In Nintendo's case the company relied on hardware controls such as the "10NES" system to (try to) prevent unauthorized cartridge games. But that was a dedicated gaming system (despite half-hearted marketing hype and a short-lived Famicom modem service in Japan), not something that was marketed as the Ultimate Amazing Shiny Computer Device.
Basically, I think we're grumping here that the iDevices are shiny, but that we want assurance that devices with more owner freedom aren't going to get crowded out of the market by the majority (?) that'll be content with locked-down gadgets. Nintendo was never really in the position to marginalize the computer market that way.
I've heard of various other approaches -- to two different things, and I'm not sure which one the researchers are mainly going for. Is the goal here to produce a useful vision system for AI, or to get a better understanding of how the brain works? It seems like while these are compatible goals, it's helpful to distinguish them and decide which you care more about.
Although that's a neat idea, it doesn't quite apply to American laws. If I understand right, you're thinking of a standard set of federal laws all states follow by default, with states just changing them a bit. But the legal system we had under the Constitution inherently had independent legal entities with different authority, state vs. federal. Federal laws wouldn't cover the same subjects, for the most part, so topics like labor law and pollution control would be stand-alone state laws rather than changes to a master federal law.
As another comment notes, the "Restatement of Torts" (and Contracts, &c.) series do that. It's important to note that those documents aren't just a "restatement" but an attempt to reshape the law. (See also the politics of the DSM in medicine...) That's grounds for eyeing those things with some skepticism, since the Restatements are slightly different from what you might think they are. Not just a helpful summary but a push in a particular direction, that is.
There are also a "Uniform Commercial Code" and "Model Penal Code". These are proposed laws developed by US legal scholars based on existing laws stretching back to English common law. The UCC and MPC themselves aren't law, but I believe every state has adopted some version of each. These things are explicitly offered as replacements for previous laws, while retaining the same concepts and cleaning up confusion. For instance, the MPC gives a standard scale of culpability definitions like "intentionally", "knowingly", "recklessly", "negligently", and "general liability". It also explicitly establishes that nothing is illegal unless there's a specific law against it -- very important in preventing oppression. And the UCC codifies older concepts about the default terms in a contract and how it's interpreted, like how a conflict between "I'll sell you 500 red widgets" and "Okay, send me 500 blue widgets" is resolved.
He's saying we're going to seriously pencil in a Mars flyby, a mere 25 years from now, right? Sounds like a vague, very-long-term goal, especially coupled with cancellation of the manned rocket program we already were working on. Constellation wasn't very popular even within NASA, so it's not too bad to see that program canceled, but there was at least one successful early test of it. Now we've got nothing, and we're still going to have nothing for many years to come. There's also Obama's short-lived idea during the campaign to get more money for schools by putting Constellation off for five years. (Reach for the stars, kids!) So while not every detail of the plan is a bad idea, I read it as this president punting on space exploration. Bush at least tried to get us to the moon by 2020, with a specific eye on Mars after that.
What I'd do to make a worthwhile version of the proposal is say, "Time out. Cancel Constellation. Take five years off for basic tech development, like perfecting a nuclear rocket. But after that we're going to do a 10-year program to get humans on the way to Mars." It's within our power to do that, if the feds aren't busy trying to take over the economy and claim Pelosi's "essentially unlimited power" for Obama's stated purpose of "spreading the wealth around".
"irrationally afraid of communists"? You mean, other than the track record that two of the main communist nations murdered millions of their own people just last century, and have an ideology that preaches expanding their system worldwide? And the fact that both of those countries (despite the fall of official communism in Russia) also have nukes which are probably, right now, aimed at American cities?
Well, for starters, Obama has continued Bush's warrantless wiretapping policy. Second, he's continued the tradition of re-authorizing the ongoing state of national emergency which has existed, continuously, since at least 1979. (Each President has issued executive orders, publicly available, declaring that a "state of emergency" exists because of the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, not to mention other extreme emergencies like diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone.)
I wouldn't be too upset about these, because the assault on the Constitution is now mostly open rather than secret.
I've been dabbling in AI myself, and gotten bored talking with people about "chatbots" like ELIZA. There's a group of people devoted to making more in that vein, following pattern-recognition rules... and claiming in some cases that this strategy is going to lead to real AI if they just make the conversation-fakery detailed enough. I see that as a dead end even though it does have a few applications.
Game AI in general also strikes me as a dead end. I recently read a book on the subject that emphasized how AI for a game should be a like a babysitter that plays hide-and-seek -- by stumbling around saying "I can't see you!" and losing in an entertaining way. Almost pointless for the goal of developing an AI that can one day work in the real world.
What I suggest is that if we don't want to work with the fiddly details of actual robot hardware (like "how do I control all these motors?"), we should work with little video-game worlds that are almost nothing like video games. More like enhanced versions of SHRDLU instead. I've already been messing with a little sim I built that has tile-based, turn-based movement and objects to pick up, nothing fancy.
The post talks about minor bugs being the ones that are hard to reach, but that's not necessarily the case. There was a piece of radiation-beam hardware used for cancer treatment (the Therac-25), that became a case study in engineering because of a literally fatal flaw. It was possible to mis-configure the machine so that it struck the patient with a much more powerful radiation beam than was normally allowed. The relevant point was, this situation only happened if the operator did some obscure, seemingly unlikely combination of actions that would result in a lead plate getting misaligned or something. Yet it happened at least six times, killing at least two people. The fact that the bug was caused by this particular sequence of actions made it that much harder to identify -- and it was not a minor bug worth ignoring.
Actually, they ended up not doing the "deem and pass" move, once people found out about it and raised a stink. Even so, since the feds now claim the authority to take and control anything they please, they're a threat to all of us.
The Constitution is not the effective law of the land in the US anymore. Our leaders have stated that they have what Ms. Pelosi calls "essentially unlimited" power, and they express shock when asked what constitutional authority they have for their actions. They do not believe themselves bound in any important way by the Constitution. Maybe they think they can't outright kill citizens, but they do think they can take anything they want anytime they want. The government's actions make more sense if you read them that way.
The question is whether the Supreme Court is still willing to strike down blatantly illegal acts, or whether it's now owned by the "living Constitution" crowd that thinks the document is meaningless. (Based on recent case law, they're split about 4.5-4.5 on that point.) We're going to see that by 2014 or sooner because of the illegal, unprecedented federal health care mandate.
The US Constitution was last amended in 1992, a scant 18 years ago. You seem to be saying that it's not as easy as you like to amend it, even though you know it can be and is amended legally, so you choose to violate its terms. That's why multiple states are starting to say outright, "No, we're not going to obey certain federal orders, because they go against the contract." See eg. the Tennessee and Montana Firearms Freedom Acts, and Virginia's new pre-emptive nullification of any order for all citizens to buy health insurance.
Why, yes, you might be able to force your way on everyone, but since you're already saying you advocate "working around" the basic laws of the country, aren't you admitting you're legally in the wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually no, they believe it has a meaning that should be obeyed, and that if you don't like it you should lawfully amend it rather than ignoring it and claiming unlimited power to do what you want.
Edison and Tesla, two of the greatest scientists and inventors in American history, were both businessmen looking for profit and working for large corporations. And much of their work looked beyond immediate applications to whole new fields of technology.
A few years ago, MIT's "Technology Review" wrote about these amazing nifty "quant" investors who used brilliantly-derived equations to predict stock prices, and were cleaning house. Somehow I'm skeptical of the latest incarnation of formulaic investment strategy. Of course it's helpful to look at all the available data about a company, but aren't short-term news analysis tools doomed to unpredictable behavior once more than one person is using them?
By the way, without getting into the rants above, the people criticizing "the free market" above ought to read about the Community Re-Investment Act (which forced banks to make bad loans) and the federally-created banks (which existed to promote house sales beyond what a free market would justify). As recently as a few years ago, Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide Financial (and of the "Friends of Angelo" in Congress) publicly told his colleagues they should ignore their own financial risk analysis, ie. rational self-interest, in favor of altruism towards the poor. There's room for regulation, but what we've got is not a free market. There's massive government regulation existing to manipulate the market and reward failure, rather than to just curb the most dangerous and useless behavior.
How can we plausibly restrict the sale of malware if the seller can point to the smoke shops for comparison? Seems like they only have to wink and say "don't tell us you plan to do anything illegal with it".
Well, it's like what we hear out of China. "The Chinese people don't want the freedom to look at dissenting political opinions. That's why there needs to be a massive censorship filter and widespread intimidation and oppression to stop any specific Chinese people who disagree." If there were really a consensus, there'd be no need for such a law.
So it's basically "The Elder Scrolls: Texas"?
Under what clause of the Constitution would you justify federal control over education standards?
Actually, American citizens are extremely generous as individuals. They give huge amounts of their effort and wealth to foreigners as charity, and sign up for voluntary military service knowing they'll be dropped into inept hellhole nations around the world, not even counting the benefits of American businesses to the world. We simply don't like having some gang of self-appointed do-gooders order us to be "social" in ways that involve granting them unlimited power over us.
"Efforts to put a more political spin" on textbooks? The article's summary assumes that before this round of meddling, the curriculum was perfectly objective and definitely uninfluenced by politics.
When asked what Constitutional authority she had for ordering us to buy insurance, Nancy Pelosi's reply was, "Are you serious!? Are you serious?!" CNS News covered a bunch of other Congressmen who were similarly stunned or indifferent to the question. If they'd been smarter, maybe they would have listened to you and used your argument -- but they didn't. They just declared they have "essentially unlimited" authority to impose "requirements" on Americans to do things and "fines" to punish them for disobedience. (Their words.)
That's why multiple states are already nullifying the illegal health care law and others are suing over it. If we let this law stand, then logically we accept that the feds can order us to do pretty much anything, and the 10th Amendment is even deader than it's been since FDR. My favorite example is that you'd have to accept a 99% income tax on any American who won't move to a collective turnip farm. "It's just a tax to cover our estimate of the costs you're imposing on society by not participating in our five-year plan!"
According to the actual text of the bill, no, the "penalty" for disobeying the (unconstitutional) "requirement" to buy insurance applies to anyone who refuses to buy. Regardless of whether they claim to have "opted out" of any government system or later "want back in"; the rule is just "Didn't buy what we ordered? You get punished." If you want to search for it in the actual bill, look for the terms "shared responsibility" and "requirement".
Back to the original Berkeley article: doesn't it say that there's to be a series of lectures on healthy living for those who choose not to hand over their DNA? Sounds like an attempt to start harassing those who disobey. At least it's less coercive than what this government is doing, by claiming what Pelosi called "essentially unlimited" power to give whatever orders she wants.
"And it's also about Nintendo, which was the first to require that all apps be approved by the device manufacturer."
That line points out that this battle for content control goes back to before Net-based software. In Nintendo's case the company relied on hardware controls such as the "10NES" system to (try to) prevent unauthorized cartridge games. But that was a dedicated gaming system (despite half-hearted marketing hype and a short-lived Famicom modem service in Japan), not something that was marketed as the Ultimate Amazing Shiny Computer Device.
Basically, I think we're grumping here that the iDevices are shiny, but that we want assurance that devices with more owner freedom aren't going to get crowded out of the market by the majority (?) that'll be content with locked-down gadgets. Nintendo was never really in the position to marginalize the computer market that way.
I've heard of various other approaches -- to two different things, and I'm not sure which one the researchers are mainly going for. Is the goal here to produce a useful vision system for AI, or to get a better understanding of how the brain works? It seems like while these are compatible goals, it's helpful to distinguish them and decide which you care more about.
Although that's a neat idea, it doesn't quite apply to American laws. If I understand right, you're thinking of a standard set of federal laws all states follow by default, with states just changing them a bit. But the legal system we had under the Constitution inherently had independent legal entities with different authority, state vs. federal. Federal laws wouldn't cover the same subjects, for the most part, so topics like labor law and pollution control would be stand-alone state laws rather than changes to a master federal law.
At least, that's how it used to be.
As another comment notes, the "Restatement of Torts" (and Contracts, &c.) series do that. It's important to note that those documents aren't just a "restatement" but an attempt to reshape the law. (See also the politics of the DSM in medicine...) That's grounds for eyeing those things with some skepticism, since the Restatements are slightly different from what you might think they are. Not just a helpful summary but a push in a particular direction, that is.
There are also a "Uniform Commercial Code" and "Model Penal Code". These are proposed laws developed by US legal scholars based on existing laws stretching back to English common law. The UCC and MPC themselves aren't law, but I believe every state has adopted some version of each. These things are explicitly offered as replacements for previous laws, while retaining the same concepts and cleaning up confusion. For instance, the MPC gives a standard scale of culpability definitions like "intentionally", "knowingly", "recklessly", "negligently", and "general liability". It also explicitly establishes that nothing is illegal unless there's a specific law against it -- very important in preventing oppression. And the UCC codifies older concepts about the default terms in a contract and how it's interpreted, like how a conflict between "I'll sell you 500 red widgets" and "Okay, send me 500 blue widgets" is resolved.
He's saying we're going to seriously pencil in a Mars flyby, a mere 25 years from now, right? Sounds like a vague, very-long-term goal, especially coupled with cancellation of the manned rocket program we already were working on. Constellation wasn't very popular even within NASA, so it's not too bad to see that program canceled, but there was at least one successful early test of it. Now we've got nothing, and we're still going to have nothing for many years to come. There's also Obama's short-lived idea during the campaign to get more money for schools by putting Constellation off for five years. (Reach for the stars, kids!) So while not every detail of the plan is a bad idea, I read it as this president punting on space exploration. Bush at least tried to get us to the moon by 2020, with a specific eye on Mars after that.
What I'd do to make a worthwhile version of the proposal is say, "Time out. Cancel Constellation. Take five years off for basic tech development, like perfecting a nuclear rocket. But after that we're going to do a 10-year program to get humans on the way to Mars." It's within our power to do that, if the feds aren't busy trying to take over the economy and claim Pelosi's "essentially unlimited power" for Obama's stated purpose of "spreading the wealth around".
In other news, "Skunk Announces It Won't Spray In Self-Defense". Also coming up: "Skunk Eaten".
"irrationally afraid of communists"? You mean, other than the track record that two of the main communist nations murdered millions of their own people just last century, and have an ideology that preaches expanding their system worldwide? And the fact that both of those countries (despite the fall of official communism in Russia) also have nukes which are probably, right now, aimed at American cities?
For consistency's sake, you also want Obama impeached for continuing the policy, right?
Well, for starters, Obama has continued Bush's warrantless wiretapping policy. Second, he's continued the tradition of re-authorizing the ongoing state of national emergency which has existed, continuously, since at least 1979. (Each President has issued executive orders, publicly available, declaring that a "state of emergency" exists because of the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, not to mention other extreme emergencies like diamond smuggling in Sierra Leone.)
I wouldn't be too upset about these, because the assault on the Constitution is now mostly open rather than secret.
I've been dabbling in AI myself, and gotten bored talking with people about "chatbots" like ELIZA. There's a group of people devoted to making more in that vein, following pattern-recognition rules... and claiming in some cases that this strategy is going to lead to real AI if they just make the conversation-fakery detailed enough. I see that as a dead end even though it does have a few applications.
Game AI in general also strikes me as a dead end. I recently read a book on the subject that emphasized how AI for a game should be a like a babysitter that plays hide-and-seek -- by stumbling around saying "I can't see you!" and losing in an entertaining way. Almost pointless for the goal of developing an AI that can one day work in the real world.
What I suggest is that if we don't want to work with the fiddly details of actual robot hardware (like "how do I control all these motors?"), we should work with little video-game worlds that are almost nothing like video games. More like enhanced versions of SHRDLU instead. I've already been messing with a little sim I built that has tile-based, turn-based movement and objects to pick up, nothing fancy.
The post talks about minor bugs being the ones that are hard to reach, but that's not necessarily the case. There was a piece of radiation-beam hardware used for cancer treatment (the Therac-25), that became a case study in engineering because of a literally fatal flaw. It was possible to mis-configure the machine so that it struck the patient with a much more powerful radiation beam than was normally allowed. The relevant point was, this situation only happened if the operator did some obscure, seemingly unlikely combination of actions that would result in a lead plate getting misaligned or something. Yet it happened at least six times, killing at least two people. The fact that the bug was caused by this particular sequence of actions made it that much harder to identify -- and it was not a minor bug worth ignoring.
Actually, they ended up not doing the "deem and pass" move, once people found out about it and raised a stink. Even so, since the feds now claim the authority to take and control anything they please, they're a threat to all of us.
The Constitution is not the effective law of the land in the US anymore. Our leaders have stated that they have what Ms. Pelosi calls "essentially unlimited" power, and they express shock when asked what constitutional authority they have for their actions. They do not believe themselves bound in any important way by the Constitution. Maybe they think they can't outright kill citizens, but they do think they can take anything they want anytime they want. The government's actions make more sense if you read them that way.
The question is whether the Supreme Court is still willing to strike down blatantly illegal acts, or whether it's now owned by the "living Constitution" crowd that thinks the document is meaningless. (Based on recent case law, they're split about 4.5-4.5 on that point.) We're going to see that by 2014 or sooner because of the illegal, unprecedented federal health care mandate.
The US Constitution was last amended in 1992, a scant 18 years ago. You seem to be saying that it's not as easy as you like to amend it, even though you know it can be and is amended legally, so you choose to violate its terms. That's why multiple states are starting to say outright, "No, we're not going to obey certain federal orders, because they go against the contract." See eg. the Tennessee and Montana Firearms Freedom Acts, and Virginia's new pre-emptive nullification of any order for all citizens to buy health insurance.
Why, yes, you might be able to force your way on everyone, but since you're already saying you advocate "working around" the basic laws of the country, aren't you admitting you're legally in the wrong?