The Constitution of the United States is the law of the nation, not of the entire world and everyone in it. My understanding of the legal history is that it applies to US citizens (hopefully), and to non-citizens inside our borders. It does not fully apply to foreign citizens in foreign countries, and certainly not to people making war against the US.
The Constitution applies to the United States Government, and as such, it's authority extends exactly as far as the activities of the US Government. So it doesn't matter if you are talking about Richmond, Virginia, or an orbit around Jupiter. If the United States Government is doing something, then the Constitution applies.
Regardless, of the semantics, it's a serious problem that we allow such fine-tuned taxation as it basically grants the government the power over everything.
Set tax rate to 100% Provide credits and deductions for government approved behavior. Result: A government which has total control over you without passing a single 'ban'.
It's interesting when you get down to it and consider it using Occam's Razor.
1. A very old bloody gourd with very old blood, has a DNA match to a very old mummified head thought to be person Y 2. A modern person claiming to be related to person Y has DNA which does NOT match the blood in the gourd or the mummified head.
Which seems more likely:
A: The random chance that some 200+ yr old piece of bloody cloth just happens to match the DNA of a very specific 200+ yr old mummified head. But actual origins of those items were false and it was just random chance that the blood happened to match the forgery head DNA. In addition, the records surrounding the tomb that the mummified head was kept in were wrong. In addition, the records and accounts of the geneological history of the modern person they tested against was perfectly recorded. B: At sometime in the past 250 years, someone lied about the paternity of a child.
I'm kind of thinking that the least convoluted explanation is B.
The problem is a question of volume. In most sane regulations, there are exemptions for people who stay below a certain threshold of behavior. The idea being that if problems do occur, low volume keeps it from being a problem of the scope that impacts vast numbers of people. It's the balance that is missing from the current equation.
Allowing for exemptions from regulations for low volume activities can be much more beneficial than requiring that everyone follow the exact set of regulations/licenses. A good example of this is the craft beer industry. The craft industry allows part-time/hobbyist level of activity which allows people to develop the experience and skills in brewing. Without this craft industry, I doubt that the micro-brewery industry would be even 1/10th the size it is today.
One size fits all regulation which covers both true industry and home-garage sized businesses really doesn't work, and that's why we see all these conflicts with services like AirBNB and Uber and the like.
I fail to see how any organization is going to influence Bloomberg.
That includes organizations which serve to protect the public as well. And the idea that a rich person can't be bought or influenced is nonsense. How do you think they got rich in the first place?
One of their safety guys forgot to eat breakfast that morning. He relied on his backup reserve of stored fat to get him through until lunchtime, but that's not good enough, he could have kept forgetting to eat and what then? He runs out of stored reserves and starves to death, right there in the middle of conducting a safety examination.
Why if enough of the safety guys forgot to eat, every single one of them could die, and then there would be NONE left. No way in hell am I relying on a backup system that was designed by trial and error evolution.
How are critical systems only protected by a single button?
Shouldn't it be a mechanically complex task, or be password/switch position controlled action?
It wasn't protected by a single button. It was also protected by a backup system of pumps (and likely more). It might have been a mechanically complex task, or controlled as well.
Lots of things can have complex steps and safety checks, but they matter for little if the person going through the checks doesn't realize he is flipping the wrong switch.
It could have been a failure way up the communication chain as well.
Mgr: Go turn off Pump Room #4 Worker: OK. *Goes off and gets the keys to the power box, unlocks the box, goes through his checklist to verify that he is turning off Pump Room #4* Worker: OK boss, Pump Room #4 is turned off like you asked. Mgr:... wait, didn't I tell you Pump Room #3?
I think it's a story in that it apparently only takes a single mistake to toggle off the cooling pumps. Even standard rack servers have bezels that keep you from accidentally powering them down unless you really mean to get to that part of the server.
It very likely did. What happened is that the worker was intentionally shutting down the power to some systems, but accidentally turned off the pumps. He could have been trying to turn off Pump Room #2 and accidentally flipped the switch for Pump Room #3. If he got the switches confused, a faceplate or bezel isn't going to stop it.
Yeah, but who needs the idea to switch off the friggin' cooling pumps easily in the first place? I mean, unless one lives happily in hell the main risk of "spent" fuel rods is not that they do freeze over...
Well, do you want to be able to shut them down quickly when something goes wrong and instead of refilling the coolant they are pumping the radioactive water out of the cooling towers? Think of a swimming pool and its pump. A hose on the outside breaks, and instead of recirculating out and back into the pool, you just have something pumping water OUT of the pool.
Or what happens when your sensors pick up noise in the pumps. Do you want to shut them down quickly so that damaged bearing can be replaced and get the pump back to full functionality in a day or so? Or do you want to take a few extra minutes while the pump grinds itself into a fuzed hunk of steel due to a fractured bearing? Now you have to replace the entire pump (these are not tiny sump pumps), and you will be operating on your backup pumps for a long time while the old primary pump is replaced, and a huge inspection needs to take place.
Basically, sometimes there are very good reasons for wanting a system to shut down quickly.
I think the point is not that no disaster occurred, it is that a failure of the primary system happened for whatever reason. Remember that the backup generators failed during the tsunami. On a different day, this inadvertent power off might have been worse.
Ideally you have no unexpected failures, and at least one redundant backup.
I think the bigger point here is that even though someone pressed the wrong button, the system didn't go into a catastrophic failure mode. You can't expect that every failure possiblity be prevented, only that no single failure leads to a catastrophic failure.
So if I'm concerned about security, I should switch over to an OS that I know even less about, and will probably blindly follow guides on the internet about how to configure it and get it working for what I want.
ie: Telling people to not use Windows.... ever, doesn't really tell us the reasons why we should never use windows, and anyone blindly following such advice is likely running something unsecure or setup incorrectly.
It's a great way to keep robots in check. When designing an AI for robots; make sure that every single one of them has a craving to have human friends, companionship, and to be remembered and recognized as "important" or "special" in a positive way.
Yeah, that sounds good, until a type has every single robot 'craving to have human fries'.
If my experience with trackpad controls on phone games is anything to go by, I think it's a very bad idea.
where those phone games, "built around a new generation of super-precise haptic feedback, employing dual linear resonant actuators"? no? then your experience is invalid.
That's a pretty way to say: Magnets will bounce in the controller corresponding to motion in the game.
Unless those "super-precise haptic feedback, employing dual linear resonant actuators" are actuating my thumb back to the center of the trackpad, I kind of think my concern is still valid.
If my experience with trackpad controls on phone games is anything to go by, I think it's a very bad idea. Incorporating a trackpad isn't necessarily a bad idea, but I can't stand the 'virtual D-pads' in mobile games. I'm constantly losing my 'center' and my thumbs slip out of the 'zero' position and I'll have to constantly reposition my thumbs back onto the center of the virtual D-pad. I've given up on many games (some of which are console ports) because I just can't stand that style of interface for directional movement.
I hope that I'm wrong, because I don't like how my xbox360 controller behaves on my computer and would love an alternative, but I have really strong reservations about their plan.
I highly doubt the person wanting to visit a foreign country will be praising the fact they have excellent programming skills at age 17, and yet find they cannot communicate.
When I was in Germany, I had just finished my degree in Computer Engineering so programming was fresh in my mind. I was also fluent in Spanish. Communication was done in English and 'Bitte Danke Bitte, der Rechnung bitte' since I didn't meet a single person in Germany who knew Spanish.
Right. Because as every parent will tell you, all you have to do is explain the logic to a preschooler and bam! You have instant recognition and the child will follow you request.
As the parent of a 4 yr old, you just need to know how to do it in a way that 'tricks' them into learning. Preschoolers have tons of urges to do things, they just don't know how yet. That's why they seem holy terrors trying to get your attention. They know there are lots of things to do, but they are currently limited in their ability to actually do those things.
So if a 4 yr old wants to watch 'Jake and the Neverland Pirates', I don't put it on for them. I sit down with them and ask them what we need to do. I get them to tell me that we need to turn on the television. Ok, then what? "Now we get the 'bemote'." Where is it? "I don't know." Where did you last use it? "On the beanbag chair." OK, should I look for it in the couch? "No, it's over here near the beanbag." Ok, now what do you do with the remote? "I press OK on the red box (netflix icon on Roku)" OK, what now? "I pick 'Jake' and press ok."
Yeah, that sounds pretty mundane, but even something as simple as putting on a children's show can be used as a process for walking through a problem in a step-by-step manner, and steps like asking where they might have last used the missing remote, and then suggesting we look in the 'wrong' location to get them to understand the deductive process and elimination of impossible options.
That's how you you start it.
Then, when you trust them more, get them to help you in the kitchen. Cooking is the ultimate in 'introductory programming'.
Yeah I know this is ever so slightly big brother like but
As a general rule, if you ever preface a statement with with the following: "I'm not a racist, but" You can feel pretty confident that the person making that statement is probably racist.
So when you say that it is 'ever so slightly big brother like' I'm pretty sure that it's not slightly big brother-like, but full blown victory gin and increased chocolate rations big brother-like.
Slashdot Mirror
The Constitution of the United States is the law of the nation, not of the entire world and everyone in it. My understanding of the legal history is that it applies to US citizens (hopefully), and to non-citizens inside our borders. It does not fully apply to foreign citizens in foreign countries, and certainly not to people making war against the US.
The Constitution applies to the United States Government, and as such, it's authority extends exactly as far as the activities of the US Government. So it doesn't matter if you are talking about Richmond, Virginia, or an orbit around Jupiter. If the United States Government is doing something, then the Constitution applies.
Regardless, of the semantics, it's a serious problem that we allow such fine-tuned taxation as it basically grants the government the power over everything.
Set tax rate to 100%
Provide credits and deductions for government approved behavior.
Result: A government which has total control over you without passing a single 'ban'.
You say they are the engines for progress, but quite often, they are the roadblocks as well.
It's interesting when you get down to it and consider it using Occam's Razor.
1. A very old bloody gourd with very old blood, has a DNA match to a very old mummified head thought to be person Y
2. A modern person claiming to be related to person Y has DNA which does NOT match the blood in the gourd or the mummified head.
Which seems more likely:
A: The random chance that some 200+ yr old piece of bloody cloth just happens to match the DNA of a very specific 200+ yr old mummified head. But actual origins of those items were false and it was just random chance that the blood happened to match the forgery head DNA. In addition, the records surrounding the tomb that the mummified head was kept in were wrong. In addition, the records and accounts of the geneological history of the modern person they tested against was perfectly recorded.
B: At sometime in the past 250 years, someone lied about the paternity of a child.
I'm kind of thinking that the least convoluted explanation is B.
God that one annoys me tremendously.
The problem is a question of volume. In most sane regulations, there are exemptions for people who stay below a certain threshold of behavior. The idea being that if problems do occur, low volume keeps it from being a problem of the scope that impacts vast numbers of people. It's the balance that is missing from the current equation.
Allowing for exemptions from regulations for low volume activities can be much more beneficial than requiring that everyone follow the exact set of regulations/licenses. A good example of this is the craft beer industry. The craft industry allows part-time/hobbyist level of activity which allows people to develop the experience and skills in brewing. Without this craft industry, I doubt that the micro-brewery industry would be even 1/10th the size it is today.
One size fits all regulation which covers both true industry and home-garage sized businesses really doesn't work, and that's why we see all these conflicts with services like AirBNB and Uber and the like.
I fail to see how any organization is going to influence Bloomberg.
That includes organizations which serve to protect the public as well. And the idea that a rich person can't be bought or influenced is nonsense. How do you think they got rich in the first place?
, it just feels like Bloomberg and the rest of the town council, have done nothing but create a hostile environment for everyone.
For everyone that isn't already established or has the $$$ to pay so they can play.
One of their safety guys forgot to eat breakfast that morning. He relied on his backup reserve of stored fat to get him through until lunchtime, but that's not good enough, he could have kept forgetting to eat and what then? He runs out of stored reserves and starves to death, right there in the middle of conducting a safety examination.
Why if enough of the safety guys forgot to eat, every single one of them could die, and then there would be NONE left. No way in hell am I relying on a backup system that was designed by trial and error evolution.
How are critical systems only protected by a single button?
Shouldn't it be a mechanically complex task, or be password/switch position controlled action?
It wasn't protected by a single button. It was also protected by a backup system of pumps (and likely more). It might have been a mechanically complex task, or controlled as well.
Lots of things can have complex steps and safety checks, but they matter for little if the person going through the checks doesn't realize he is flipping the wrong switch.
It could have been a failure way up the communication chain as well.
Mgr: Go turn off Pump Room #4 ... wait, didn't I tell you Pump Room #3?
Worker: OK. *Goes off and gets the keys to the power box, unlocks the box, goes through his checklist to verify that he is turning off Pump Room #4*
Worker: OK boss, Pump Room #4 is turned off like you asked.
Mgr:
I think it's a story in that it apparently only takes a single mistake to toggle off the cooling pumps. Even standard rack servers have bezels that keep you from accidentally powering them down unless you really mean to get to that part of the server.
It very likely did. What happened is that the worker was intentionally shutting down the power to some systems, but accidentally turned off the pumps. He could have been trying to turn off Pump Room #2 and accidentally flipped the switch for Pump Room #3. If he got the switches confused, a faceplate or bezel isn't going to stop it.
Yeah, but who needs the idea to switch off the friggin' cooling pumps easily in the first place? I mean, unless one lives happily in hell the main risk of "spent" fuel rods is not that they do freeze over...
Well, do you want to be able to shut them down quickly when something goes wrong and instead of refilling the coolant they are pumping the radioactive water out of the cooling towers? Think of a swimming pool and its pump. A hose on the outside breaks, and instead of recirculating out and back into the pool, you just have something pumping water OUT of the pool.
Or what happens when your sensors pick up noise in the pumps. Do you want to shut them down quickly so that damaged bearing can be replaced and get the pump back to full functionality in a day or so? Or do you want to take a few extra minutes while the pump grinds itself into a fuzed hunk of steel due to a fractured bearing? Now you have to replace the entire pump (these are not tiny sump pumps), and you will be operating on your backup pumps for a long time while the old primary pump is replaced, and a huge inspection needs to take place.
Basically, sometimes there are very good reasons for wanting a system to shut down quickly.
I think the point is not that no disaster occurred, it is that a failure of the primary system happened for whatever reason. Remember that the backup generators failed during the tsunami. On a different day, this inadvertent power off might have been worse.
Ideally you have no unexpected failures, and at least one redundant backup.
I think the bigger point here is that even though someone pressed the wrong button, the system didn't go into a catastrophic failure mode. You can't expect that every failure possiblity be prevented, only that no single failure leads to a catastrophic failure.
EFF.org has a great page about why https is so important to use with Tor. Also don't use Windows......ever
So if I'm concerned about security, I should switch over to an OS that I know even less about, and will probably blindly follow guides on the internet about how to configure it and get it working for what I want.
ie: Telling people to not use Windows.... ever, doesn't really tell us the reasons why we should never use windows, and anyone blindly following such advice is likely running something unsecure or setup incorrectly.
Spice weasels.
It's a great way to keep robots in check. When designing an AI for robots; make sure that every single one of them has a craving to have human friends, companionship, and to be remembered and recognized as "important" or "special" in a positive way.
Yeah, that sounds good, until a type has every single robot 'craving to have human fries'.
Honestly, I was stunned when I discovered that IE could pull files via FTP. Completely blew my mind. Graphical FTP?
If my experience with trackpad controls on phone games is anything to go by, I think it's a very bad idea.
where those phone games, "built around a new generation of super-precise haptic feedback, employing dual linear resonant actuators"?
no? then your experience is invalid.
That's a pretty way to say: Magnets will bounce in the controller corresponding to motion in the game.
Unless those "super-precise haptic feedback, employing dual linear resonant actuators" are actuating my thumb back to the center of the trackpad, I kind of think my concern is still valid.
If my experience with trackpad controls on phone games is anything to go by, I think it's a very bad idea. Incorporating a trackpad isn't necessarily a bad idea, but I can't stand the 'virtual D-pads' in mobile games. I'm constantly losing my 'center' and my thumbs slip out of the 'zero' position and I'll have to constantly reposition my thumbs back onto the center of the virtual D-pad. I've given up on many games (some of which are console ports) because I just can't stand that style of interface for directional movement.
I hope that I'm wrong, because I don't like how my xbox360 controller behaves on my computer and would love an alternative, but I have really strong reservations about their plan.
I highly doubt the person wanting to visit a foreign country will be praising the fact they have excellent programming skills at age 17, and yet find they cannot communicate.
When I was in Germany, I had just finished my degree in Computer Engineering so programming was fresh in my mind. I was also fluent in Spanish. Communication was done in English and 'Bitte Danke Bitte, der Rechnung bitte' since I didn't meet a single person in Germany who knew Spanish.
(That said, I agree with your point.)
Kids don't default to wild inattentive hoodlums
No. They are 'wild ATTENTIVE hoodlums'.
Right. Because as every parent will tell you, all you have to do is explain the logic to a preschooler and bam! You have instant recognition and the child will follow you request.
As the parent of a 4 yr old, you just need to know how to do it in a way that 'tricks' them into learning. Preschoolers have tons of urges to do things, they just don't know how yet. That's why they seem holy terrors trying to get your attention. They know there are lots of things to do, but they are currently limited in their ability to actually do those things.
So if a 4 yr old wants to watch 'Jake and the Neverland Pirates', I don't put it on for them. I sit down with them and ask them what we need to do. I get them to tell me that we need to turn on the television. Ok, then what? "Now we get the 'bemote'." Where is it? "I don't know." Where did you last use it? "On the beanbag chair." OK, should I look for it in the couch? "No, it's over here near the beanbag." Ok, now what do you do with the remote? "I press OK on the red box (netflix icon on Roku)" OK, what now? "I pick 'Jake' and press ok."
Yeah, that sounds pretty mundane, but even something as simple as putting on a children's show can be used as a process for walking through a problem in a step-by-step manner, and steps like asking where they might have last used the missing remote, and then suggesting we look in the 'wrong' location to get them to understand the deductive process and elimination of impossible options.
That's how you you start it.
Then, when you trust them more, get them to help you in the kitchen. Cooking is the ultimate in 'introductory programming'.
I don't think sleeveless shirts will help the situation, but thanks for trying.
But how else will I show of 'Mah gunz'!
Oh yeah, welcome to the gun show ladies.
Yeah I know this is ever so slightly big brother like but
As a general rule, if you ever preface a statement with with the following:
"I'm not a racist, but"
You can feel pretty confident that the person making that statement is probably racist.
So when you say that it is 'ever so slightly big brother like'
I'm pretty sure that it's not slightly big brother-like, but full blown victory gin and increased chocolate rations big brother-like.
Until someone needs to provide justification after the fact.