Why is leaving bear traps next to each window legally actionable?
Its not.
Injuring someone with bear traps left next to the window, OTOH, usually is.
It isn't legally actionable if no burglar ever breaks into your house, so why should it be when a burgler does?
Its also probably not legally actionable most places if I swing a baseball bat in the middle of a public park with my eyes closed -- if no one happens to be walking through the path of the swing when I do it. OTOH, if someone walks through the path of the swing, it will suddenly become very much actionable. Often, what makes something actionable (whether criminally or civilly) isn't just an act, but the injury resulting from the act.
It's not like you're actively hurting the burglar.
Yes, actually, its exactly like that. Now, if someone else put the bear traps there without your knowledge, and when you discovered them yourself you simply failed to remove them, you might have a point. But that's a pretty weird hypothetical.
in essence the Corps of Engineers is an extension of government
No, its not true that the Corps is "in essence... and extension of government". The Army Corps of Engineers -- and the Department of the Army itself -- is an integral part (not an extension) of the executive branch of the federal government, which is why some of the claims against them regarding Katrina -- filed before the same judge -- were barred by sovereign immunity. However, where sovereign immunity applies and where it doesn't is controlled by law, and this particular cause of action was held to be outside of the area where sovereign immunity applies under the law.
In essence the people of the United States are suing themselves.
No, one narrow subset of the people of the United States are suing the government of the United States. Confusing that with the people of the United States suing themselves is confusing one small part with the whole.
Higher courts will dump this law suit and claim sovereignty as an excuse.
While it is, I suppose, possible that higher courts would disagree with the District Court here on whether sovereign immunity applies (though its not clear that that's even an argument the government intends to press on appeal), nothing in your post provides any reason to believe that either the Court of Appeals that would hear this case or the US Supreme Court would be inclined to do so.
From what I remember the Corp has been begging since 1965 for money to make the changes.
That's my understanding, too, but a corporation doesn't stop being legally liable for an action or omission for which it otherwise would be liable because doing what was required to do would have required action by the board of directors, which failed to act, even though the firm's management was begging the board to act.
Similarly, the Army Corps of Engineers -- or, more accurately, the US Government -- doesn't stop being liable for an action or omission for which it would otherwise be liable because the executive branch identified the action required to avoid the liability but Congress never funded that action.
Well they still have to work with Microsoft to do it... Xbox live is an incredibly closed platform...
So are cable TV networks, and all kinds of other systems on which existing emergency alerts are carried in whatever way the government specifies, because the government has adopted regulations which require those networks to carry them.
No, the problems are overconsumption and overproduction of waste. Population, of course, is to an extent a driver of both of those, but the fact that consumption of resources and production of waste are higher per capita than they have been in the past is a factor, as well. Technology is a driver in that, in that the easiest, cheapest (in the short-run) way to realize improvements in quality of life from technology is to use it in ways which require consuming more resources and producing more waste.
and even if you do cut back energy usage, you can't economize fast enough to keep up with geometric population growth.
Population growth isn't geometric. In organisms which don't progressively develop technology (e.g., everything but humans) growth that is roughly logistic (fairly similar to geometric initially, but slowing when reaching a resource or other constraint) seems to be pretty common, human population growth seems to follow a descriptively similar trend, with some models suggesting logistic growth, and some suggesting that it grew at a more rapidly accelerating rate before nearing constraints, approximating hyperbolic growth through the 1970s, and gradually slowing thereafter.
Everyone assumes that microsoft would do this the same way as the government...
Um, Microsoft isn't doing this, the (New York State) goverment is. From TFA: "Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and Nintendo operate online networks that allow players to compete against each other over the Internet. Under the state's plan, authorities would tap those networks to broadcast warnings about natural or man-made disasters."
Expecting the government to do it (on gaming consoles) the same way the government does it (in every other medium government uses for emergency alerts) is different than expecting Microsoft to do it the same way as the government has.
Uhh... really? It's an *EMERGENCY*. I think when someone tries to go attack New York again, people will be willing to miss a few headshots to get the best possible warning they can. Its not like these announcements are sent out often.
At least in some areas, emergency notification systems are used to, e.g., publish Amber Alerts from fairly distant locations.
Its not like these announcements are sent out often.
Back when I got TV service over something other than the internet, they actually weren't all that uncommon.
Pros don't use red-eye functions either, instead they point the flash so that it reflects onto the subject on an angle, for example off the ceiling, rather than going straight to the subject (hence directly into the eye) and straight back.
Or they light (whether continuous or flash) from some point other than "mounted on the camera", or they just don't use a flash or similarly intense light at all (with a decent camera--even a decent point-and-shoot--set up properly, you don't need, and often get better pictures without, flash even in many conditions where if you leave the camera in auto-everything mode it would use the flash.)
or we start treating it like a war instead of a police action
It would be a lot easier to treat what is going on in Iraq or Afghanistan like a war instead of a police action if they were actions conducted between states with distinct geographic bases rather than an efforts to suppress the elements of populations which are dissatisfied to the point of violence with the regimes established over the regions in which those populations exists.
I doubt we could have won WW2 under the rules we use now
Yes, its generally difficult to win an interstate war if you treat it as a counterinsurgency action. Of course, the reverse is also true. Applying the methods used to win WW2 to the operations in Afghanistan or Iraq wouldn't end the insurgency in either place.
It makes perfect sense and entirely appropriate for home/personal use.
No, actually, it doesn't. It makes perfect sense and is entirely appropriate in exactly the same circumstances as always running as admin makes perfect sense and is entirely appropriate, i.e., just about none. Obviously, its less disruptive to other people when done in a single-user environment, but non-corporate home use is often not a single-user environment.
"The government is good to me, therefore I will serve it and give it my money and my labor."
GP doesn't say that. It addresses a specific argument that Amazon shouldn't collect and pay sales taxes in states from which it derives no benefits the operation of state government by pointing out that Amazon and similar retailers benefit from the actions of state governments in precisely those states where it has customers, which are the only ones where it is suggested that Amazon should pay taxes, so that while the argument to which it responds may be valid as a general statement, it has no relevance to the actual controversy.
In reality the government is the servant and the citizens the master. The citizens don't owe the government anything; the government owes the citizens for allowing it to exist.
That might perhaps be accurate if by "citizens" you instead mean "natural persons" (citizenship is a creation of law, and hence of government, so "citizens" don't exist except in relation to a government.) And that might, perhaps, be the the source of interesting discussion on the taxation of commerce conducted directly between natural persons who receive no special direct benefit from government. But Amazon, whose liability for taxation is the subject of this thread, isn't a natural person, it is a corporation -- an entity with no natural existence that is purely a creation of law (and so, of government) which serves to provide special benefits (most particularly, limitations on liability) at public expense to a group of people (its shareholders). As such, Amazon owes (or more particularly, its shareholders owe) its existence to the government that chartered it, and likewise the government of every jurisdiction in which it operates for the privilege of allowing to operate as a corporation, with all the privileges and protections of that status.
"The problem is that we don't train people in the fine art of critical thinking -- mostly because doing so would challenge the intellectually lazy's of mainstream religions"
"lazy" isn't a noun.
If it was a noun, the plural would probably be "lazies" or maybe, if it were odd, "lazys", but "lazy's" would be possessive, which wouldn't make sense here.
And we do, in fact (at least, at each the public middle school, high schools, community college, and four year university I attended, YMMV) train people in critical thinking. OTOH, outside of the context of formal instruction in the subject, we frequently punish people for exercising it -- not because it threatens "mainstream religions" or even its "intellectual lazy's" as you refer to them, but because it threatens the position of the individual people who end up doing the punishing, who are often in positions of authority and don't like to be questioned. Some of those people may be intellectually lazy, but many of them intellectually quite capable and active, and just arrogant with those they see as beneath them. Likewise, some of them may be in positions of religious authority -- whether in mainstream religions are not, there is nothing special about mainstream religions in this regard -- but more of them are in positions of political, commercial, or other secular authority.
Can we still rag on TFS for being precocious by using words like "penultimate?"
I'm not sure why you'd "rag on" something for being precocious ("unusually advanced or mature in development, esp. mental development"), but, sure, knock yourself out.
It seems to me that 750 joules of kinetic energy in a bullet would do a lot more damage to a target than 750 joules of electromagnetic energy.
That's going to depend primarily on how the energy is distributed (both in space and time). The particular hypothesized device here would deliver the 750J over a much longer time than the firearm it is being compared to (nothing is said about the area in which it would be concentrated), but there is nothing inherent in lasers which means that this would necessarily always be the case.
Strangely enough, I agree with this. I'm definitely not against taxes in general and sales tax specifically, but it doesn't make sense to me that a retailer should be required to lift a finger to help a state government from which it gets nothing in return.
An online or mail order retailer gets something in return from any state government into whose territory it ships goods on public roads (or through publicly operated or subsidized airports, or through publicly operated or subsidized ports, or...), since (as just one area of benefit) its shipments into the state (and, therefore, its ability to profit by selling to buyers in the state) are subsidized by the public infrastructure spending of that state.
So, while I might agree with your statement as a matter of abstract principle, I don't see how it applies to any real controversy.
No, the "ultimate" contract "for what is intended to be a jet-mounted laser cannon" would be the contract for a jet-mounted laser cannon. The contract described here as "penultimate" is for "a full-power ground prototype" intended as to "be the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter" and which is, therfore, correctly described by TFS as being "the penultimate contract for what is itended to be a jet-mounted laser cannon".
There is lots of misguided pedantry here ragging on TFS for using "penultimate" correctly.
penultimate: last but one in a series of things; second to the last
[At risk of being modded redundant (but since none of the three posts I've seen making the same criticism of TFS have been yet, maybe not)]
This is exactly the sense in which it is used here, as is indicated by the language from TFA quoted in TFS: "the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter."
So, in the series in which the last (or "ultimate") stage is the contract for a laser-armed jet fighter, the contract for the ground-based prototype is the second to last (or "penultimate") stage.
So, great job of knowing what "penultimate" means, but next time work on reading and understanding the post in which it is used before accusing someone of using it wrong.
"Penultimate" means "second to last" and nothing else.
Which is exactly the sense in which it is used here, as is indicated by the language from TFA quoted in TFS: "the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter."
So, in the series in which the last (or "ultimate") stage is the contract for a laser-armed jet fighter, the contract for the ground-based prototype is the second to last (or "penultimate") stage.
So, great job of knowing what "penultimate" means, but next time work on reading and understanding the post in which it is used before accusing someone of using it wrong.
Depends which drachma you are referring to: if you are referring to the silver coin of ancient Greece traded for its metal value with a weight around 4.3 grams, then about USD 2.67.
Now, that is very roughly an order of magnitude less purchasing power than when it was minted, but a single drachma, invested 1% interest compounded annually over 2,500 years would still be worth around $700 billion, even given the decline in the purchasing power of silver. Most people would consider this a sizable fortune.
The real problem that would make it worthless isn't that the currency in which the entitlement is denominated has become worthless, but that neither a legal system that would enforce the contract entered into 2,500 years ago, nor any party against which the debt could be enforced even if any legal system would do so, exists now.
Financial investments are social constructs dependent on the continued existence of social institutions.
Actually, the more general solution on Windows is to increase the DPI setting for the display, which scales up more than just text. This works fairly well from at least Windows XP.
Oh, right, yet another valiant effort at demolishing a strawman of the Waterfal Model... which never really meant the carricature opposed by the "agile" crowd, and wasn't applied that way.
Certainly, in many times and places, the waterfall model is (and, in some particularly backwards places, still is, IME) applied in largely the way portrayed by the Agile crowd.
Ever heard of iterations? Right. Apparently the agile crowd still never heard that anyone else uses those.
Certainly, most of the writings I've read on Agile methodologies by practitioners/advocates of those methodologies have acknowledged that Agile methodologies are largely codifications of best practices developed in places that were working with internal modifications of some older methodology, mostly the basic Waterfall Model, and that iterations are certainly one of those practices. The fallacy of you seem to be describing seems to be more of an anti-Agile crowd strawman of the Agile position than an pro-Agile strawman of the pre-Agile status quo.
Strictly speaking your examples are talking about dumb-asses who didn't properly structure their businesses or scams to be successful. If you do it right you win unless the governemnt finds you, and that is only if it is an illegal operation. (I'm not condoning, just giving facts)
Those aren't "facts", those are semantic games to carefully redefine terms in unusual ways so your original claim is true by definition, creating a nice, tight circular argument that means nothing.
Except this seems to be the only place that doesn't acknowledge the usefulness of fat binaries.
What usefulness? Fat binaries take all the work of producing individual platform-specific binaries to create, and present little advantage in use compared to having an installer or packaging system that installs the right binary from the set for the given platform.
Even for the few environments (such as where you share a filesystem with executable binaries between systems with different architectures) where they might be useful, on any system where executable interpreted scripts can be made indistinguishable from the end-user perspective to actual binaries, they offer no advantage over having a set of installed binaries for the various architectures with an executable launcher script.
SSL at least in the context of web browser is not only to secure our communication, but authenticate that the web site is the web site we really want to be at.
SSL/TLS, used properly, doesn't just authenticate one end of the connection.
Slashdot Mirror
No, its not true that the Corps is "in essence ... and extension of government". The Army Corps of Engineers -- and the Department of the Army itself -- is an integral part (not an extension) of the executive branch of the federal government, which is why some of the claims against them regarding Katrina -- filed before the same judge -- were barred by sovereign immunity. However, where sovereign immunity applies and where it doesn't is controlled by law, and this particular cause of action was held to be outside of the area where sovereign immunity applies under the law.
No, one narrow subset of the people of the United States are suing the government of the United States. Confusing that with the people of the United States suing themselves is confusing one small part with the whole.
While it is, I suppose, possible that higher courts would disagree with the District Court here on whether sovereign immunity applies (though its not clear that that's even an argument the government intends to press on appeal), nothing in your post provides any reason to believe that either the Court of Appeals that would hear this case or the US Supreme Court would be inclined to do so.
That's my understanding, too, but a corporation doesn't stop being legally liable for an action or omission for which it otherwise would be liable because doing what was required to do would have required action by the board of directors, which failed to act, even though the firm's management was begging the board to act.
Similarly, the Army Corps of Engineers -- or, more accurately, the US Government -- doesn't stop being liable for an action or omission for which it would otherwise be liable because the executive branch identified the action required to avoid the liability but Congress never funded that action.
So are cable TV networks, and all kinds of other systems on which existing emergency alerts are carried in whatever way the government specifies, because the government has adopted regulations which require those networks to carry them.
No, the problems are overconsumption and overproduction of waste. Population, of course, is to an extent a driver of both of those, but the fact that consumption of resources and production of waste are higher per capita than they have been in the past is a factor, as well. Technology is a driver in that, in that the easiest, cheapest (in the short-run) way to realize improvements in quality of life from technology is to use it in ways which require consuming more resources and producing more waste.
Population growth isn't geometric. In organisms which don't progressively develop technology (e.g., everything but humans) growth that is roughly logistic (fairly similar to geometric initially, but slowing when reaching a resource or other constraint) seems to be pretty common, human population growth seems to follow a descriptively similar trend, with some models suggesting logistic growth, and some suggesting that it grew at a more rapidly accelerating rate before nearing constraints, approximating hyperbolic growth through the 1970s, and gradually slowing thereafter.
Um, Microsoft isn't doing this, the (New York State) goverment is. From TFA: "Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and Nintendo operate online networks that allow players to compete against each other over the Internet. Under the state's plan, authorities would tap those networks to broadcast warnings about natural or man-made disasters."
Expecting the government to do it (on gaming consoles) the same way the government does it (in every other medium government uses for emergency alerts) is different than expecting Microsoft to do it the same way as the government has.
At least in some areas, emergency notification systems are used to, e.g., publish Amber Alerts from fairly distant locations.
Back when I got TV service over something other than the internet, they actually weren't all that uncommon.
Or they light (whether continuous or flash) from some point other than "mounted on the camera", or they just don't use a flash or similarly intense light at all (with a decent camera--even a decent point-and-shoot--set up properly, you don't need, and often get better pictures without, flash even in many conditions where if you leave the camera in auto-everything mode it would use the flash.)
It would be a lot easier to treat what is going on in Iraq or Afghanistan like a war instead of a police action if they were actions conducted between states with distinct geographic bases rather than an efforts to suppress the elements of populations which are dissatisfied to the point of violence with the regimes established over the regions in which those populations exists.
Yes, its generally difficult to win an interstate war if you treat it as a counterinsurgency action. Of course, the reverse is also true. Applying the methods used to win WW2 to the operations in Afghanistan or Iraq wouldn't end the insurgency in either place.
No, actually, it doesn't. It makes perfect sense and is entirely appropriate in exactly the same circumstances as always running as admin makes perfect sense and is entirely appropriate, i.e., just about none. Obviously, its less disruptive to other people when done in a single-user environment, but non-corporate home use is often not a single-user environment.
No, its not.
GP doesn't say that. It addresses a specific argument that Amazon shouldn't collect and pay sales taxes in states from which it derives no benefits the operation of state government by pointing out that Amazon and similar retailers benefit from the actions of state governments in precisely those states where it has customers, which are the only ones where it is suggested that Amazon should pay taxes, so that while the argument to which it responds may be valid as a general statement, it has no relevance to the actual controversy.
That might perhaps be accurate if by "citizens" you instead mean "natural persons" (citizenship is a creation of law, and hence of government, so "citizens" don't exist except in relation to a government.) And that might, perhaps, be the the source of interesting discussion on the taxation of commerce conducted directly between natural persons who receive no special direct benefit from government. But Amazon, whose liability for taxation is the subject of this thread, isn't a natural person, it is a corporation -- an entity with no natural existence that is purely a creation of law (and so, of government) which serves to provide special benefits (most particularly, limitations on liability) at public expense to a group of people (its shareholders). As such, Amazon owes (or more particularly, its shareholders owe) its existence to the government that chartered it, and likewise the government of every jurisdiction in which it operates for the privilege of allowing to operate as a corporation, with all the privileges and protections of that status.
"lazy" isn't a noun.
If it was a noun, the plural would probably be "lazies" or maybe, if it were odd, "lazys", but "lazy's" would be possessive, which wouldn't make sense here.
And we do, in fact (at least, at each the public middle school, high schools, community college, and four year university I attended, YMMV) train people in critical thinking. OTOH, outside of the context of formal instruction in the subject, we frequently punish people for exercising it -- not because it threatens "mainstream religions" or even its "intellectual lazy's" as you refer to them, but because it threatens the position of the individual people who end up doing the punishing, who are often in positions of authority and don't like to be questioned. Some of those people may be intellectually lazy, but many of them intellectually quite capable and active, and just arrogant with those they see as beneath them. Likewise, some of them may be in positions of religious authority -- whether in mainstream religions are not, there is nothing special about mainstream religions in this regard -- but more of them are in positions of political, commercial, or other secular authority.
I'm not sure why you'd "rag on" something for being precocious ("unusually advanced or mature in development, esp. mental development"), but, sure, knock yourself out.
"Pacific Tech" from Real Genius was modelled on (very closely, in many areas) Caltech, not MIT.
That's going to depend primarily on how the energy is distributed (both in space and time). The particular hypothesized device here would deliver the 750J over a much longer time than the firearm it is being compared to (nothing is said about the area in which it would be concentrated), but there is nothing inherent in lasers which means that this would necessarily always be the case.
An online or mail order retailer gets something in return from any state government into whose territory it ships goods on public roads (or through publicly operated or subsidized airports, or through publicly operated or subsidized ports, or...), since (as just one area of benefit) its shipments into the state (and, therefore, its ability to profit by selling to buyers in the state) are subsidized by the public infrastructure spending of that state.
So, while I might agree with your statement as a matter of abstract principle, I don't see how it applies to any real controversy.
No, the "ultimate" contract "for what is intended to be a jet-mounted laser cannon" would be the contract for a jet-mounted laser cannon. The contract described here as "penultimate" is for "a full-power ground prototype" intended as to "be the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter" and which is, therfore, correctly described by TFS as being "the penultimate contract for what is itended to be a jet-mounted laser cannon".
There is lots of misguided pedantry here ragging on TFS for using "penultimate" correctly.
[At risk of being modded redundant (but since none of the three posts I've seen making the same criticism of TFS have been yet, maybe not)]
This is exactly the sense in which it is used here, as is indicated by the language from TFA quoted in TFS: "the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter."
So, in the series in which the last (or "ultimate") stage is the contract for a laser-armed jet fighter, the contract for the ground-based prototype is the second to last (or "penultimate") stage.
So, great job of knowing what "penultimate" means, but next time work on reading and understanding the post in which it is used before accusing someone of using it wrong.
Which is exactly the sense in which it is used here, as is indicated by the language from TFA quoted in TFS: "the final stage prior to America's first raygun-equipped jet fighter."
So, in the series in which the last (or "ultimate") stage is the contract for a laser-armed jet fighter, the contract for the ground-based prototype is the second to last (or "penultimate") stage.
So, great job of knowing what "penultimate" means, but next time work on reading and understanding the post in which it is used before accusing someone of using it wrong.
Depends which drachma you are referring to: if you are referring to the silver coin of ancient Greece traded for its metal value with a weight around 4.3 grams, then about USD 2.67.
Now, that is very roughly an order of magnitude less purchasing power than when it was minted, but a single drachma, invested 1% interest compounded annually over 2,500 years would still be worth around $700 billion, even given the decline in the purchasing power of silver. Most people would consider this a sizable fortune.
The real problem that would make it worthless isn't that the currency in which the entitlement is denominated has become worthless, but that neither a legal system that would enforce the contract entered into 2,500 years ago, nor any party against which the debt could be enforced even if any legal system would do so, exists now.
Financial investments are social constructs dependent on the continued existence of social institutions.
Actually, the more general solution on Windows is to increase the DPI setting for the display, which scales up more than just text. This works fairly well from at least Windows XP.
Certainly, in many times and places, the waterfall model is (and, in some particularly backwards places, still is, IME) applied in largely the way portrayed by the Agile crowd.
Certainly, most of the writings I've read on Agile methodologies by practitioners/advocates of those methodologies have acknowledged that Agile methodologies are largely codifications of best practices developed in places that were working with internal modifications of some older methodology, mostly the basic Waterfall Model, and that iterations are certainly one of those practices. The fallacy of you seem to be describing seems to be more of an anti-Agile crowd strawman of the Agile position than an pro-Agile strawman of the pre-Agile status quo.
Those aren't "facts", those are semantic games to carefully redefine terms in unusual ways so your original claim is true by definition, creating a nice, tight circular argument that means nothing.
What usefulness? Fat binaries take all the work of producing individual platform-specific binaries to create, and present little advantage in use compared to having an installer or packaging system that installs the right binary from the set for the given platform.
Even for the few environments (such as where you share a filesystem with executable binaries between systems with different architectures) where they might be useful, on any system where executable interpreted scripts can be made indistinguishable from the end-user perspective to actual binaries, they offer no advantage over having a set of installed binaries for the various architectures with an executable launcher script.
SSL/TLS, used properly, doesn't just authenticate one end of the connection.
Of course, SSL/TLS is usually not used properly.