No, perhaps the government should have done it out-of-house. That code, legally, is in the public domain. It's just not publicly available. I see no reason why the (presumably php and sql) code behind healthcare.gov shouldn't be open to public viewing.
An operating system is more than just the UI - it's the applications, it's always the applications. Going from XP to Windows 8 might take some learning how the new interface works, but at least the extreme majority of your programs you know and love will continue to work just fine. Unless you're using predominantly open-source or cross-platform programs to being with, moving from one OS to another is always going to be more of a shock than going from one version of the OS line to another.
Unless, like most people these days, you spend 95% of your time in the browser.
And I'd mod the whole thread ironic, considering the number of zero-day exploits that have come up for Windows 7 and 8.
Except flaws in 7 & 8 will be fixed. Flaws in XP won't be. In fact, many of the vulnerabilities that affect 7 will also plague XP and due to XP's inferior security model, they'll probably be worse. When security notices for 7 go out, hackers will know to try those flaws out on XP.
It's been observed that the American public will tolerate just about any political scheme so long as it does not obstruct traffic. I imagine this to be the case here. The NSA's spying, creepy as it may be, hasn't harmed anyone yet so nobody cares.
The lower classes (the 98%) don't care about default because they see it as comeuppance for the robber barons who have all the money to lose anyway. It's only a catastrophe for those with something to lose. For the rest, it's an inconvenient equalizer. (Actually probably much more inconvenient than equalizing; hope we don't find out.)
Except the lower classes have far more to lose in a downturn. They are the ones who end up unemployed. They are also the ones who's retirement investments get hammered.
When you're starving, you don't care about freedom -- you care about bread. And anyone who has some is your friend. Make the people starve, and they'll tolerate any amount of tyranny... so long as the tyrant keeps giving out bread crumbs.
One look at our obesity rates would show quite clearly that Americans do not suffer from starvation. That's actually pretty telling since throughout most of history most of the world's population was constantly teetering on the verge of starvation.
Honestly, who cares about "income inequality"? If I'm making more today than I made yesterday, I don't really care if there's someone else making 200x what I'm making. Their success isn't hurting me. In fact, the main factor in predicting someone's income seems to simply be their age. The poor are generally younger than the rich simply because the young have less work experience and over 80% of those who begin their careers in the bottom 20% will eventually move out of it. This has been the case for me. Each job I've had over the course of my life has generally paid more than the previous one and I'm still only in my mid-20's. I don't care if someone else becomes a multimillionaire, I've gone from working really hard to scrape by to working only sorta hard to carve out a decent life for myself.
I want legislation limiting their healthcare and other benefits to those which are available to the general public.
That's actually become a good chunk of what the shutdown fight is over. Republicans originally wanted to essentially kill Obamacare via the budget (a total pipe dream for them). They basically gave up on this. Now they're basically asking for two things. They've been calling for a repeal of a tax on medical devices (something a lot of Congressional Democrats have, in the past, also called for) and they're demanding that Members of Congress and their staff purchase healthcare off of the Obamacare exchanges.
The Democrats have countered by claiming that Congress & staff already have to purchase off the exchanges. That's *sorta* true. They do have to purchase off the exchanges but they get a stipend most Americans don't get. If they were to pay out of pocket, they'd get far less bang for their buck when buying healthcare. There have been claims that were such a program to be implemented Congress might suffer from a "brain drain" because staff would quit if the benefits weren't as good. From the looks of things, if we're talking about a brain drain in Congress I would say that ship sailed long ago.
There's also been a lot of squabbling over whether to even begin negotiating. House Republicans have called for a sit-down between the two chambers to come up with some sort of compromise. Senate Democrats have declared that compromise has no place in the legislative process. Occasionally President Obama has chimed in with the "democracy means do as I say" rhetoric. My guess is that we'll just see the can kicked down the road for the next 4 years or so.
Worse. The source code included the required NSA backdoor. Now requiring to insert backdoors to manufacturers will lead to the logical consequence
Yes, I'm sure the NSA is simply fascinated by that image of your family you shopped your brother's ex out of. I'm sure they spend their time looking at THAT.
if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
As automation and outsourcing drive down the cost of our products the cost of buying such products declines. The poor in America generally own cars, air conditioners, DVD players, TVs, etc. Wages aren't all that matters if consumers can stretch their money further.
Your electoral system gave the GOP a majority when they got notably less votes than the 'minority' Democrats. If I was a Republican I'd be embarrassed by the fact that my party was claiming to be the majority when they majority of voters in a democratic country didn't voted for the opposition.
First off, America isn't a democracy, we're a republic, a collection of states functioning as one federalist nation. As such, our electoral system is designed to balance out majoritarian interest with regional interest. The most obvious example of this is the Senate where California (pop. 38,041,430) gets 2 senators and Wyoming (pop 576,412) gets two senators. Our House is designed so that each member represents a particular area, in stark contrast to proportional systems where each member represents their party.
Take a look at how America's elections broke down by county. When viewed this way, you can see that the Democrats generally only ever carried a few big cities. They carried them overwhelmingly but they were trailing in most of the geographic portions of the United States. America's founders didn't want a system where Virginia (the then-largest state) could dominate the country's politics just as many states today don't want to be lorded over by California, Texas and New York. At the end of the day, our system says it doesn't matter if a Democrat wins an urban seat with 75% of the vote or if a Republican wins a rural seat by 53%. A win is still a win.
Yes, the GOP probably had an edge in redistricting but even that was limited in effect compared to the simple geographic distribution of the two parties. Democrats still had an edge in California, Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, et al and the GOP's edge in southern states was blunted by "creative" uses of the Voting Rights Act by Obama's highly politicized DOJ (this was perhaps most evident with the redistricting legal battle in Texas). Gerrymandering isn't in play nearly as much as where Democrats and Republicans actually live and each Representative is elected to serve the will of their district's voters, not the voters of the nation as a whole. In that sense, the Republicans elected in red districts were elected on the promise of fighting Obamacare so they are basically just doing what most of their constituents want.
The people elected Obama when a central part of his campaign was 'Obamacare'. They re-elected him. If congress want to repeal Obamacare then they could, and should, try and pass a bill doing so
The people also elected a Republican House of Representatives on the message of fighting Obamacare. They re-elected the House Republicans on that same message. The House has passed several bills repealing Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't even allow for an up-down vote on it in the Senate. Obama has no more of a claim to a "mandate" than the House Republicans do.
You're right, let's defer to private industry to provide for us. The great Wall Street Heist of 2008 proved that they have our best interest at heart and are the ultimate in sound fiscal management!
The "great Wall Street Heist of 2008" was caused by a combination of things but the biggest were the crash of the government backed mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Bush called for reigning them in back in 2005 but then Senator Obama along with then Senator Chris Dodd and then Representative Barney Frank made sure that proposal never went anywhere), a government push for "affordable housing" and a good chunk of what made the housing crash so region-specific was that some areas had draconian land use laws that kept the price of land artificially high. Contrary to the assertion that I hear so often, there was no mass deregulation of banks under Bush. At the tail-end of the Clinton Administration we had significant changes to laws that governed home mortgages and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, both of which contributed to the crash. The bubble may have crashed on Wall St. but it began in Washington.
As it is now, if you have a good job or are wealthy (and don't have a pre-condition), then you get insurance. Otherwise, forget it
My family is far from "wealthy" but we liked our existing healthcare. It was great. It wasn't cheap but it wasn't too expensive either and the quality is outstanding. It's still great in terms of quality. The only thing that's changed is our insurance rates spiked after Obamacare was passed. Why is it my job to pay for someone else's insurance when I'm already paying for mine and when I'm already satisfied with the care I am getting?
Folks think this kind of backroom bullshit has been only the last decade or two? try close to a century, probably longer. The blood of the poor paving the road to profit for a handful at the top, this has been going on for a loooong time. I'd say the ONLY difference between then and now? The uber rich have stopped giving a fuck about the kayfabe and even pretending they give a damn about any but the elite, for a perfect example watch that video of the RNC with the "let 'em die!" incident. All those rich cheering the thought of a poor person dying rather than costing them a dime? Perfectly summed up the kind of sociopath scumbags we see at the top.
Only a century? This goes back to the dawn of civilization itself and is hardly unique to America. The ancient Romans had few problems enslaving and looting those around them. Prior to that, Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world just for the sake of power. This isn't unique to the western countries either. Genghis Kahn saw few moral issues with pillaging the Chinese. Going clear back to ancient Mesopotamia we see advanced societies dominate those around it.
America's record isn't even bad compared to other dominant nations that existed around the same timeframe. Yes, America did occasionally have the CIA meddle in the affairs of some central American, east Asian or middle eastern power, but it did so while the rival Soviet Union had placed half of Europe and half of Asia under military occupation. During the age of European Imperialism, America did not maintain vast empires around Africa and Asia. We set up Liberia as a country for our former slaves but basically left it to govern itself. We annexed a few insular areas of the Pacific and Atlantic for strategic reasons but we either didn't hold on to them (Philippines), granted them full statehood (Hawaii) or kept them as territories but letting them largely govern themselves (Puerto Rico et al). After the two World Wars America urged other western nations to decolonize their holdings.
The problem with that is that the US government has a history of bailing out large failed insurance companies. (AIG for example)
AIG and other banks/insurance/financial services companies that received bailouts generally had to pay them back with interest. The bailouts were loans, not giveaways.
Would your rather your PC just turned off without any error message whatsoever? The BSOD is a useful tool... the mistake that causes it lies elsewhere.
It was a useful tool. In Windows 8 Microsoft basically replaced it with a frowny emoticon. It was bad enough that it used to default to rebooting the second it finished saving a memory dump but that setting was easily changed. The decision to remove the error codes from WIndows 8's BSOD was just plain stupid. Now I have to hunt down what caused the error rather than just writing it down whenever I see it.
That's why I love my Logitech G11... it has a "game switch" that basically only serves to disable the Win key.
I would think doing something to caps lock would also be part of a "game mode" for a keyboard. I'm not sure what it should do to caps lock, but it should do something. Normally, you map w, s, a & d to be forward, backward, left and right respectively. Located right next to the a key, caps lock is prime real estate but it's often worse than useless. Rarely, if ever, is the caps lock key used in the default controls. In some games, you can't even map to the stupid thing (unless you change its function in the OS itself). Worse yet, if the game offers in-game chat, you sometimes hit it while moving leftwards, hit whatever button is used for chat and then try to type and end up sending out messages in all caps. Yeah, occasionally you hit the Windows button by mistake with your palms. I see the need for the Windows key, but why do we need two? Don't answer the run command because you could still invoke that one-handed by using the index finger and pinkie of your right hand. Rather than having a keyboard with a game switch it might be best if they simply made keyboards that only had a Windows button in the bottom right and maybe put the caps lock right there with it. (Even
I'm sorry, but that boat sailed away a long time ago. If the feds can control what you grow on your own land for consumption by your own family, or can control your rights to grow your own weed for medicianl purposes, then the effect of the commerce clause is that the feds can tell anyone what they can do in their own state, unless such a law is explicitly prohibited by the constitution.
Yes, the commerce clause is generally interpreted in a ridiculously broad manor and has been since the 40's but in recent decades the Supreme Court has put some limits on the commerce clause. On one instance they ruled that rape was not commerce between the states. On another instance they ruled that carrying a gun on school grounds was not an act of commerce. If I remember right both ere 5-4 with 4 dissenting justices vehemently arguing rape and guns in schools were acts of commerce between states. The Obamacare ruling is generally described as 5-4 but in truth is was more of a 4-4-1 with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the conservative block in declaring that Congress cannot compel someone to engage in commerce so that it may regulate it but then Roberts sided with the liberal block to declare that because Obamacare's mandate was essentially being implemented through the tax code and because it was enforced via a tax, it was a de facto tax hike and thus constitutional.
The Internet is something that clearly is crossing state lines. California could probably regulate what sites hosted within their own state do but they can't really control what sites hosted in Kansas do. Even if Congress itself were to pass such a law, the US can't really control what sites hosted in Belgium do.
Nobody is forced to use Unity *yet*, but the alternatives are clearly treated as second class citizens that do not get the same level of attention to detail or integration, and makes for a substandard experience that's increasingly a throwback to the days where Linux on the desktop was *only* for geeks. With Mir on the horizon, and with many developers targeting Ubuntu specifically rather than Linux in general, that situation threatens to get worse, as we could conceivably have a large pool of software with Mir+Unity as hard dependencies very soon.
Both Mir and Wayland are open source. If there's a compatibility issue, code from one would probably be used to build a compatibility wrapper for the other.
You were saying? NSA spies caught spying on Brazil should be shot?
The NSA doesn't have "spies" in Brazil. They monitor traffic from within the USA. We're watching server and phone traffic coming to/from foreign locations.
It would be more correct to say, because spying on foreigners is a treaty violation and not a Constitutional violation, American citizens lack the legal standing to challenge it in court. I'm not a lawyer, but I would guess that an international court would be the place to raise a complaint, and it would require a foreign government to file a case
It would also require the international criminal court to have jurisdiction. The USA has never agreed to be subject to its rulings and has refused to abide by the Hague's suggestions in the past.
On one instance, the USA refused to pay damages to a Latin American country after we attempted to overthrow their current dictator.
On another case, Texas sentenced a couple of Mexican citizens to death in response to a double rape & double homicide they had committed. Mexico demanded the execution be halted. The international courts ordered Texas to halt the execution. George Bush sued Texas claiming that he had the authority to prevent Texas from interfering with his ability to conduct foreign policy and that the Hague's ruling meant Texas must call off the execution. The case ended up before the US Supreme Court which ruled that the US Constitution gave Texas the authority to execute criminals and that the US Constitution trumps international laws, international courts & the President's foreign policy interest. Texas proceeded to execute the two murderers.
Anyone else think this is a result of Valve's announcement of focus on Linux-based Steam?
Valve, unlike most Linux vendors, probably won't get their panties in a wad over whether or not a driver is "free as in freedom" vs "free as in beer". I'm guessing a SteamOS probably would use the closed source drivers. This anouncement sure helps the Noaveau team, but Valve users will probably just use the NVidia drivers anyway.
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The government should have done it in-house,
No, perhaps the government should have done it out-of-house. That code, legally, is in the public domain. It's just not publicly available. I see no reason why the (presumably php and sql) code behind healthcare.gov shouldn't be open to public viewing.
An operating system is more than just the UI - it's the applications, it's always the applications. Going from XP to Windows 8 might take some learning how the new interface works, but at least the extreme majority of your programs you know and love will continue to work just fine. Unless you're using predominantly open-source or cross-platform programs to being with, moving from one OS to another is always going to be more of a shock than going from one version of the OS line to another.
Unless, like most people these days, you spend 95% of your time in the browser.
And I'd mod the whole thread ironic, considering the number of zero-day exploits that have come up for Windows 7 and 8.
Except flaws in 7 & 8 will be fixed. Flaws in XP won't be. In fact, many of the vulnerabilities that affect 7 will also plague XP and due to XP's inferior security model, they'll probably be worse. When security notices for 7 go out, hackers will know to try those flaws out on XP.
I'll say about Android what I say about desktop Linux: It does what I want it to do. Why should I care if someone else doesn't want it?
It's been observed that the American public will tolerate just about any political scheme so long as it does not obstruct traffic. I imagine this to be the case here. The NSA's spying, creepy as it may be, hasn't harmed anyone yet so nobody cares.
The lower classes (the 98%) don't care about default because they see it as comeuppance for the robber barons who have all the money to lose anyway. It's only a catastrophe for those with something to lose. For the rest, it's an inconvenient equalizer. (Actually probably much more inconvenient than equalizing; hope we don't find out.)
Except the lower classes have far more to lose in a downturn. They are the ones who end up unemployed. They are also the ones who's retirement investments get hammered.
When you're starving, you don't care about freedom -- you care about bread. And anyone who has some is your friend. Make the people starve, and they'll tolerate any amount of tyranny... so long as the tyrant keeps giving out bread crumbs.
One look at our obesity rates would show quite clearly that Americans do not suffer from starvation. That's actually pretty telling since throughout most of history most of the world's population was constantly teetering on the verge of starvation.
Honestly, who cares about "income inequality"? If I'm making more today than I made yesterday, I don't really care if there's someone else making 200x what I'm making. Their success isn't hurting me. In fact, the main factor in predicting someone's income seems to simply be their age. The poor are generally younger than the rich simply because the young have less work experience and over 80% of those who begin their careers in the bottom 20% will eventually move out of it. This has been the case for me. Each job I've had over the course of my life has generally paid more than the previous one and I'm still only in my mid-20's. I don't care if someone else becomes a multimillionaire, I've gone from working really hard to scrape by to working only sorta hard to carve out a decent life for myself.
I want legislation limiting their healthcare and other benefits to those which are available to the general public.
That's actually become a good chunk of what the shutdown fight is over. Republicans originally wanted to essentially kill Obamacare via the budget (a total pipe dream for them). They basically gave up on this. Now they're basically asking for two things. They've been calling for a repeal of a tax on medical devices (something a lot of Congressional Democrats have, in the past, also called for) and they're demanding that Members of Congress and their staff purchase healthcare off of the Obamacare exchanges.
The Democrats have countered by claiming that Congress & staff already have to purchase off the exchanges. That's *sorta* true. They do have to purchase off the exchanges but they get a stipend most Americans don't get. If they were to pay out of pocket, they'd get far less bang for their buck when buying healthcare. There have been claims that were such a program to be implemented Congress might suffer from a "brain drain" because staff would quit if the benefits weren't as good. From the looks of things, if we're talking about a brain drain in Congress I would say that ship sailed long ago.
There's also been a lot of squabbling over whether to even begin negotiating. House Republicans have called for a sit-down between the two chambers to come up with some sort of compromise. Senate Democrats have declared that compromise has no place in the legislative process. Occasionally President Obama has chimed in with the "democracy means do as I say" rhetoric. My guess is that we'll just see the can kicked down the road for the next 4 years or so.
Worse. The source code included the required NSA backdoor. Now requiring to insert backdoors to manufacturers will lead to the logical consequence
Yes, I'm sure the NSA is simply fascinated by that image of your family you shopped your brother's ex out of. I'm sure they spend their time looking at THAT.
if we're all broke on our asses, who is going to buy your products?
As automation and outsourcing drive down the cost of our products the cost of buying such products declines. The poor in America generally own cars, air conditioners, DVD players, TVs, etc. Wages aren't all that matters if consumers can stretch their money further.
Your electoral system gave the GOP a majority when they got notably less votes than the 'minority' Democrats. If I was a Republican I'd be embarrassed by the fact that my party was claiming to be the majority when they majority of voters in a democratic country didn't voted for the opposition.
First off, America isn't a democracy, we're a republic, a collection of states functioning as one federalist nation. As such, our electoral system is designed to balance out majoritarian interest with regional interest. The most obvious example of this is the Senate where California (pop. 38,041,430) gets 2 senators and Wyoming (pop 576,412) gets two senators. Our House is designed so that each member represents a particular area, in stark contrast to proportional systems where each member represents their party.
Take a look at how America's elections broke down by county. When viewed this way, you can see that the Democrats generally only ever carried a few big cities. They carried them overwhelmingly but they were trailing in most of the geographic portions of the United States. America's founders didn't want a system where Virginia (the then-largest state) could dominate the country's politics just as many states today don't want to be lorded over by California, Texas and New York. At the end of the day, our system says it doesn't matter if a Democrat wins an urban seat with 75% of the vote or if a Republican wins a rural seat by 53%. A win is still a win.
Yes, the GOP probably had an edge in redistricting but even that was limited in effect compared to the simple geographic distribution of the two parties. Democrats still had an edge in California, Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, et al and the GOP's edge in southern states was blunted by "creative" uses of the Voting Rights Act by Obama's highly politicized DOJ (this was perhaps most evident with the redistricting legal battle in Texas). Gerrymandering isn't in play nearly as much as where Democrats and Republicans actually live and each Representative is elected to serve the will of their district's voters, not the voters of the nation as a whole. In that sense, the Republicans elected in red districts were elected on the promise of fighting Obamacare so they are basically just doing what most of their constituents want.
The people elected Obama when a central part of his campaign was 'Obamacare'. They re-elected him. If congress want to repeal Obamacare then they could, and should, try and pass a bill doing so
The people also elected a Republican House of Representatives on the message of fighting Obamacare. They re-elected the House Republicans on that same message. The House has passed several bills repealing Obamacare. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won't even allow for an up-down vote on it in the Senate. Obama has no more of a claim to a "mandate" than the House Republicans do.
You're right, let's defer to private industry to provide for us. The great Wall Street Heist of 2008 proved that they have our best interest at heart and are the ultimate in sound fiscal management!
The "great Wall Street Heist of 2008" was caused by a combination of things but the biggest were the crash of the government backed mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Bush called for reigning them in back in 2005 but then Senator Obama along with then Senator Chris Dodd and then Representative Barney Frank made sure that proposal never went anywhere), a government push for "affordable housing" and a good chunk of what made the housing crash so region-specific was that some areas had draconian land use laws that kept the price of land artificially high. Contrary to the assertion that I hear so often, there was no mass deregulation of banks under Bush. At the tail-end of the Clinton Administration we had significant changes to laws that governed home mortgages and the repeal of Glass-Steagall, both of which contributed to the crash. The bubble may have crashed on Wall St. but it began in Washington.
As it is now, if you have a good job or are wealthy (and don't have a pre-condition), then you get insurance. Otherwise, forget it
My family is far from "wealthy" but we liked our existing healthcare. It was great. It wasn't cheap but it wasn't too expensive either and the quality is outstanding. It's still great in terms of quality. The only thing that's changed is our insurance rates spiked after Obamacare was passed. Why is it my job to pay for someone else's insurance when I'm already paying for mine and when I'm already satisfied with the care I am getting?
Folks think this kind of backroom bullshit has been only the last decade or two? try close to a century, probably longer. The blood of the poor paving the road to profit for a handful at the top, this has been going on for a loooong time. I'd say the ONLY difference between then and now? The uber rich have stopped giving a fuck about the kayfabe and even pretending they give a damn about any but the elite, for a perfect example watch that video of the RNC with the "let 'em die!" incident. All those rich cheering the thought of a poor person dying rather than costing them a dime? Perfectly summed up the kind of sociopath scumbags we see at the top.
Only a century? This goes back to the dawn of civilization itself and is hardly unique to America. The ancient Romans had few problems enslaving and looting those around them. Prior to that, Alexander the Great conquered much of the known world just for the sake of power. This isn't unique to the western countries either. Genghis Kahn saw few moral issues with pillaging the Chinese. Going clear back to ancient Mesopotamia we see advanced societies dominate those around it.
America's record isn't even bad compared to other dominant nations that existed around the same timeframe. Yes, America did occasionally have the CIA meddle in the affairs of some central American, east Asian or middle eastern power, but it did so while the rival Soviet Union had placed half of Europe and half of Asia under military occupation. During the age of European Imperialism, America did not maintain vast empires around Africa and Asia. We set up Liberia as a country for our former slaves but basically left it to govern itself. We annexed a few insular areas of the Pacific and Atlantic for strategic reasons but we either didn't hold on to them (Philippines), granted them full statehood (Hawaii) or kept them as territories but letting them largely govern themselves (Puerto Rico et al). After the two World Wars America urged other western nations to decolonize their holdings.
The problem with that is that the US government has a history of bailing out large failed insurance companies. (AIG for example)
AIG and other banks/insurance/financial services companies that received bailouts generally had to pay them back with interest. The bailouts were loans, not giveaways.
Would your rather your PC just turned off without any error message whatsoever? The BSOD is a useful tool... the mistake that causes it lies elsewhere.
It was a useful tool. In Windows 8 Microsoft basically replaced it with a frowny emoticon. It was bad enough that it used to default to rebooting the second it finished saving a memory dump but that setting was easily changed. The decision to remove the error codes from WIndows 8's BSOD was just plain stupid. Now I have to hunt down what caused the error rather than just writing it down whenever I see it.
I'm just glad we didn't have to do something like Ctrl + Alt + Del + F6 + Esc + (number pad) Enter for the same functionality.
Bonus points to anyone who can remember what that key combo does in GNU emacs without looking it up.
That's why I love my Logitech G11... it has a "game switch" that basically only serves to disable the Win key.
I would think doing something to caps lock would also be part of a "game mode" for a keyboard. I'm not sure what it should do to caps lock, but it should do something. Normally, you map w, s, a & d to be forward, backward, left and right respectively. Located right next to the a key, caps lock is prime real estate but it's often worse than useless. Rarely, if ever, is the caps lock key used in the default controls. In some games, you can't even map to the stupid thing (unless you change its function in the OS itself). Worse yet, if the game offers in-game chat, you sometimes hit it while moving leftwards, hit whatever button is used for chat and then try to type and end up sending out messages in all caps. Yeah, occasionally you hit the Windows button by mistake with your palms. I see the need for the Windows key, but why do we need two? Don't answer the run command because you could still invoke that one-handed by using the index finger and pinkie of your right hand. Rather than having a keyboard with a game switch it might be best if they simply made keyboards that only had a Windows button in the bottom right and maybe put the caps lock right there with it. (Even
I'm sorry, but that boat sailed away a long time ago. If the feds can control what you grow on your own land for consumption by your own family, or can control your rights to grow your own weed for medicianl purposes, then the effect of the commerce clause is that the feds can tell anyone what they can do in their own state, unless such a law is explicitly prohibited by the constitution.
Yes, the commerce clause is generally interpreted in a ridiculously broad manor and has been since the 40's but in recent decades the Supreme Court has put some limits on the commerce clause. On one instance they ruled that rape was not commerce between the states. On another instance they ruled that carrying a gun on school grounds was not an act of commerce. If I remember right both ere 5-4 with 4 dissenting justices vehemently arguing rape and guns in schools were acts of commerce between states. The Obamacare ruling is generally described as 5-4 but in truth is was more of a 4-4-1 with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the conservative block in declaring that Congress cannot compel someone to engage in commerce so that it may regulate it but then Roberts sided with the liberal block to declare that because Obamacare's mandate was essentially being implemented through the tax code and because it was enforced via a tax, it was a de facto tax hike and thus constitutional.
The Internet is something that clearly is crossing state lines. California could probably regulate what sites hosted within their own state do but they can't really control what sites hosted in Kansas do. Even if Congress itself were to pass such a law, the US can't really control what sites hosted in Belgium do.
Nobody is forced to use Unity *yet*, but the alternatives are clearly treated as second class citizens that do not get the same level of attention to detail or integration, and makes for a substandard experience that's increasingly a throwback to the days where Linux on the desktop was *only* for geeks. With Mir on the horizon, and with many developers targeting Ubuntu specifically rather than Linux in general, that situation threatens to get worse, as we could conceivably have a large pool of software with Mir+Unity as hard dependencies very soon.
Both Mir and Wayland are open source. If there's a compatibility issue, code from one would probably be used to build a compatibility wrapper for the other.
You were saying? NSA spies caught spying on Brazil should be shot?
The NSA doesn't have "spies" in Brazil. They monitor traffic from within the USA. We're watching server and phone traffic coming to/from foreign locations.
It would be more correct to say, because spying on foreigners is a treaty violation and not a Constitutional violation, American citizens lack the legal standing to challenge it in court. I'm not a lawyer, but I would guess that an international court would be the place to raise a complaint, and it would require a foreign government to file a case
It would also require the international criminal court to have jurisdiction. The USA has never agreed to be subject to its rulings and has refused to abide by the Hague's suggestions in the past.
On one instance, the USA refused to pay damages to a Latin American country after we attempted to overthrow their current dictator.
On another case, Texas sentenced a couple of Mexican citizens to death in response to a double rape & double homicide they had committed. Mexico demanded the execution be halted. The international courts ordered Texas to halt the execution. George Bush sued Texas claiming that he had the authority to prevent Texas from interfering with his ability to conduct foreign policy and that the Hague's ruling meant Texas must call off the execution. The case ended up before the US Supreme Court which ruled that the US Constitution gave Texas the authority to execute criminals and that the US Constitution trumps international laws, international courts & the President's foreign policy interest. Texas proceeded to execute the two murderers.
I don't see anybody calling the Syrian insurgency "terrorists"
I certainly do.
Anyone else think this is a result of Valve's announcement of focus on Linux-based Steam?
Valve, unlike most Linux vendors, probably won't get their panties in a wad over whether or not a driver is "free as in freedom" vs "free as in beer". I'm guessing a SteamOS probably would use the closed source drivers. This anouncement sure helps the Noaveau team, but Valve users will probably just use the NVidia drivers anyway.