cpleppert

3.3.2 An Internal Use Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple's built-in WebKit framework.

I take this to mean that the javascript has to be downloaded by the webkit/uiwebview as part of an web page and you can't supply the javascript externally if you get if off the network.. There is a lot of confusion online on this point(some people disagree) but that is my understanding.

This is how any parliamentary body on the planet works. If you are concerned about this from a constitutional perspective you do exactly what the founders did: separate legislative powers into equal chambers.

If you place constitutional requirements above a majority vote on a parliamentary body then the judiciary has to step in and enforce those requirements violating the separation of powers.

>>I suspect moderates (and more senior folk) in both parties will tend to threaten a nay-vote on more extreme nominees

In cases where very ideological nominees have been presented in recent years there is no evidence that moderates have been prone to block them. So it isn't clear now what a senator could gain could gain by blocking his own parties nominee. It would require enough senators from the majority party to switch and vote against their party and maintain that united opposition against a candidate whose ideology they agree with simply because they may have qualms about how extreme his ideology is.

The cloture rules have only had significant changes twice in history. Once in the 1910s when they were instituted and later in the 1970s. The fact that the senate requires unanimous consent has nothing to do with any purpose but is basically a quirk of history that the senate never got rid of the unanimous consent requirement. What we call a filibuster today is just a use of withholding unanimous consent to block a motion that would otherwise pass with a majority vote and isn't related to the use of the filibuster in the 19th century.

Senate rules since the 1970s (when the filibuster was set at 60) require 66 votes of all senators to effect a rules change.

This utilizes the majorities ability in any parliamentary body to set the precedent or rule on a point of order. hence the 'nuclear' option.

Ive used the kindle dx and the regular last generation non-touch kindle in addition to the ipad air. The air is spectacular for reading programming books and the reading experience is great for anything else, especially when you need to look something up.

iBooks will sync bookmarks and notes for 'sideloaded' epubs and will automatically transfer new books onto the air. For PDFs the kindle app is great because it actually shows the table of contents(!).

I have a kindle DX and this is false. PDFs are relatively easy to read in the landscape orientation and dont require any conversion whatsoever. If you can convert any ebook format to mobi you are good to go. Try calibre for starters.

I owned both the 2012 Air and the 2010 unibody and to be honest the air was a lot more noticeable as any type of processor workload would cause the fan to kick in.

The considerably smaller amount of maximum RAM(8GB on the Air vs 16GB for the Pro) and lack of a retina display combined with poor integrated graphics make the 13-inch Pro an easy choice in my opinion. The only thing you give up is about half a pound in weight which isn't a big deal. It isn't like you are going from 1.5 pounds to a pound on the ipad; it is a laptop and I doubt you would notice the extra weight in a bag. The processor is also faster(I don't know what is going on with the benchmarks here)

If weight and size matter the 11-inch air actually makes much more sense. You save money and drop a full pound compared to the 13-inch Pro.

>>The major difference is that treaties aren't subject to the Presentment Clause.

Most treaties are CEA agreements that are subject to the presentment clause.

>>International treaties are given to the Senate on a take it or leave it basis,

Regular Treaties can certainly be amended by the senate that then makes ratification conditional.

>>and do not require any approval from the most democratic chamber of Congress: the House.

Hence the two thirds voting requirement for an international agreement that governs foreign relations.

>>I'm sympathetic to your concerns around IP enforcement in TPP. But instead of discussing those, I find myself having to educate people about the basics of legislative procedure, like whether a treaty will be reviewed by the Senate. Even under TPA, the answer is yes.

I'm not quite sure I understand how an up or down vote in the senate that is certain to pass counts as 'review.' The time to mount any public criticism will be very small and there will be enormous pressure to approve the agreement as amendments will not be possible.

>>You're correct in the abstract that such an agreement would need Senate review

Even without fast track approval the agreement would be structured as a congressional-executive agreement that would not require a two thirds majority. With fast track approval congress would still have to approve the agreement although a filibuster would not be possible.

>>However, you don't neccessarily have to obey all laws - a law can prohibit you from making a statement; but a law cannot compel you to make a statement - so the claim is that if your actions conflict with the law in this way, then (at that instance) application of this law is unconstitutional and your violation is acceptable.

The law doesn't require you to do anything but not reveal the gag order. In such a situation your actions have caused you to be placed in a situation where you either have to lie or violate the law and the judge will recognize your intention was to reveal the gag order.

I'm not sure why the warrant canary line of reasoning doesn't extend to all situations where you are legally required not to reveal something. You could exhaustively enumerate every possibility (I did not receive a warrant asking about cash transactions in zip code 76225 targeting an occupant on maple street as a result of an ongoing FBI investigation).

>>I can buy the idea that a judge would compel you to fake a written canary like this.

I don't know how that could happen.

>>Could a judge really compel you to do that?

No, but if you didn't do it and the purpose of doing the action in the first place was to be able to violate a gag order you would be violating that order. So at that point you would have to decide between breaking the law or being deceitful. The judge wouldn't have to order you to do anything.

>>If the politicians who are re-writing the constitution come from inside a dysfunctional system,how will they be able to ever come to a consensus

That is the issue with the current constitution, it doesn't allow a consensus; it doesn't have anything to do with politicians.

"debt limit denial" is only a small part of the problem. The other half is the expectation that 1) threatening something that hurts the country(which he admits) is a good thing if you can pass your political program and 2) the other party will simply fold and its members will pass your program

1 simply denies that the opposing party should be able to represent itself in the democratic process but 2 is simply bizarre. No one is going to help their opponents pass their agenda on the basis that if they don't the other party will cause the economy to collapse. If that worked, the Soviet Union would have threatened to start a nuclear war anytime they wanted something and would expect the United States to back down.

The line of reasoning that validates such a tactic is just totally bizarre. Even if you can get some type of leverage over the other party you will never get enough concessions to justify the economic damage. Economic damage occurs in the present while entitlement spending cuts occur in the future. Even if the economic damage is minimal it seems quite a stretch to assume that statutory changes today are the only way to stop a future congress from overspending. This hypothetical future congress would be perfectly capable of cutting spending on its own.

Because the treasury probably doesn't have the statutory authority to withhold payments to appropriated programs. Even if it did, that would mean cutting social security or medicare payments while waiting for an interest payment. So you are certainly hurting people who are depending on those programs(a political nightmare) in the expectation that there will be no debt limit raise. If you think that missing an interest payment will be a catastrophe you paradoxically have no incentive to order these social programs cut to make an interest payment because no one would be so irresponsible as to allow that to happen.

>>Frankly I'm a bit tired of all the negative comments about the NYT, The Economist and other respected establishments by simple reflex. I can scroll through comment threads or posts in the archives and describe an HN where "middlebrow dismissals"

I think that this comment thread has become a good example of a typical hacker news discussion right now. The top comments don't add anything to the discussion and the vast majority of the rest are entirely political and repeat the same thing while being totally devoid of any facts or analysis. I could (and would have if I knew nothing about the topic) learn more by searching for information about the quality of life in the rural russian countryside than by reading this thread.

Russia has a GDP per capita of about a fourth of the US or other Western countries but it also has a very large inequality among regions and rural/urban areas. So the difference between rural GDP per capita in the US and Russia is something like 5-6. So when people in this thread are screaming how this is all propaganda and the rural areas of Russia are comparable to any area of the US they are claiming things that can't possibly be true.

The same difficulties with identifying individual species today were faced by Darwin in the Origin of Species. That is in fact exactly what the title of the book refers to.

>>BTW: Earth does not orbit around sun. It orbits around center of gravity, which is not even inside Sun.

The center of gravity of the sun-earth system is most certainly inside the sun. If it wasn't, the sun would perceptively move as the earth orbited it.

>>Those two are actually somewhat mutually exclusive. Either you believe that some kind of deity "uses" evolution as a tool, at which point people should ask themselves what the point of having gods is if they're not actually doing anything measurable at all.

That is the most basic methodological problem with Intelligent Design. The claim is that there are gaps where "intelligence" injects itself into the evolution of living things. The funny thing is, every gap is very well hidden and looks exactly like the result of evolutionary processes and builds on the same design patterns that have already been established.

How to multiply isn't necessarily self evident, especially if you don't have a positional notation system. Even after the introduction of arabic numerals into Europe there were many different algorithms for performing multiplication, some of which are only moderately recognizable as our long multiplication system: http://www.pballew.net/old_mult.htm

This method in practice would have used objects that represent larger numbers(1,5,10) and with those a practitioner only needs to know how to add, subtract and multiply or divide by 2. All of which are operations which can be performed quickly. It certainly isn't true that you would need as many stones as the final result.

We know that the algorithm was used because it was specifically described in ancient Egyptian texts. The calculator would use either symbols on paper or objects representing successively larger numbers (1,5,10 etc) to perform the algorithm. He obviously wouldn't use only a single stone to count out each number.

It is simply a way of performing multiplication without requiring a positional notation system. If you don't have that this allows you to do multiplication of very large numbers assuming you can divide and multiply by 2. You could do this on paper but usually you would have objects that would represent number units used in the culture such as 50,10,5,1 etc. So your objection that you might as well count them out is simply not true, this method is faster than what you suggested.

>>Reality doesn't always conform to the PC narrative of how all civilizations are equal. Unless you are a sociology major that is.

I'm not sure what your point is. True positional numerals have a long cultural history that doesn't lend itself easily to an analysis of which culture performed math better.

>>Where'd it go? What's it doing? If you want to dislodge evolution as a directionless force, and avoid Occam's Razor, you need to account for this intelligence somehow, because evolution already describes a reality in which it's not necessary.

You can state a similar(and in my view incredibly strong) objection to ID by pointing out that diverse bodies of evidence(DNA, morphology, speciation) support evolution in a way that would any other competing explanation would need to replicate. Considering this was identified in the 1700s once it was seen that whole classes of animals went extinct in the past it seems rather silly that with exponentially more evidence that has to replicated by a creation-like argument anyone would even consider ID as a serious view.

First of all you aren't using the word species correctly. Different types of barnacles and birds that were observed in the nineteenth century were different species as were the different species observed on tropical islands that were related but clearly distinct from those on the mainland or from the fauna on other islands. In all of these cases only a hypothesis that they were related to a common ancestor could explain (1)how geographical variation seemed to imply corresponding changes in the fauna (2) how different species had 'adaptations' that provided advantages in their environment (3) why geographical variation seemed to be compounded the farther you got away from the mainland.

There is no other explanation besides natural selection that could explain these basic facts. Besides Darwin other scientists were independently converging on the exact same solution.

In the same way only natural selection could explain the existence of vestigial features among related families of species such as the existence of hind limbs in whales or the curious why that the eye of the vertebrates is constructed. This was recognized immediately in the 1860s once Darwin's work was published.

DNA evidence supports evolution 100%. Hypothesized descent from two families can be easily verified from DNA evidence. The whale really once had an ancestor that walked on the land with four limbs. There is simply no other explanation could produce DNA in the exact way that would be predicted from natural selection.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

>> such evidence seems weak to me, and hardly enough to present those ideas as facts.

Maybe the problem is that you don't have the full context of the evidence being presented. How was the material found; was it in the exact same layer of dirt? Was it dated to the time period of the rest of the site? Some bowl fragments don't provide evidence independent of the context that gives them validity.

But you should be comforted to know that the evidence for evolution from DNA is so overwhelming that there is no room for doubt at all. Species are related to each other and the approximate time that their common ancestor lived can be established as well independent of any fossil evidence. There is no other plausible hypothesis besides evolution that can be presented to explain the evidence.

The Tu-144 was an absolute disaster and had to have every flight pre-approved by the political leadership. It doesn't matter it flew first if it doesn't work.

Yeah, the SSME's were never as reusable as projected but their efficiency helped to mitigate somewhat the massive cost in weight of the shuttle. If you are committed to a shuttle design you might as well choose a very efficient partially reusable engine over one with RP-1 or a less efficient lox/h20 engine with lower total costs. That isn't an argument in favor of the shuttle just a reasonable design choice.

>>The Soviets would have been better off continuing to neglect LH2/LOX and focus on the fuels they did best with (basically what they have done ever since they discontinued Energia).

I have to disagree with this. The soviets began developing LH2/LOX technologies immediately after the N1 failure for the same reason that the Saturn V used LH2/LOX as an upper stage fuel: it is hard to make the math work for massive rockets that only consume RP-1. The weight penalty on the upper stages is just too large to be cost effective. You might as well pay the cost of LH2/LOX development if you intend to launch super heavy payloads.

>>Also, while the Energia would have been suboptimal for non-Buran loads, it still would have been the heaviest lifting rocket they ever had, able to put 32,000kg into TLI (compared to the Saturn V's 47,000kg and the N1's never realized 23,500 kg). The Shuttle stack wasn't merely suboptimal for that sort of thing, it was worthless.

If the criteria for deciding between SLS/Buran-Energia is which one can launch the most payload then, yes, you would choose Energia. This wasn't an intended benefit of Energia and was simply due to reliability concerns about reusing rocket engines(especially with fuel sources that the Soviets didn't have experience with).

It is hard to evaluate the cost of reusing Energia technology and developing a new booster that would be more optimal going forward. If the Soviets had the money and the political foresight to cancel Buran they might have been able to do it and use Soyuz and Energia together.

>>In addition, the SSMEs were only reusable in principle; in practice, they were rarely reused, and unit cost was very high.

They were reused and were extremely efficient with a much higher unit cost than the equivalent energia stack main engine. The Soviets intended to design a carrier shuttle with reusable engines just like the US Shuttle but abandoned the effort due to reliability concerns.

That is the whole point of the space shuttle design in any case. If you can't reuse very powerful main engines that can be made to be very efficient there is no point in using a shuttle-truck design in the first place.

> while the Energia from the Energia/Buran combo would have been useful in its own right (sadly the Energia was discontinued with the Buran).

The energia was suboptimal for launching very large items due to its requirement that payloads have to carried on the side. This increases the weight due to atmospheric shielding that cannot be jettisoned and, more importantly, means a third stage cannot be used for efficiency. Every payload also has to be able to deploy itself into the correct orbit which requires custom development for each launch payload. So while energia was powerful it was very expensive as a standalone launch platform and never would have seen much use and consequently was never seriously considered as a future development platform.

The soviets would have done better just to develop a lh2/lox successor to the failed n1 rocket in the first place; especially if they didn't think the shuttle was going to be economical. Instead, they developed a sub-optimal launch vehicle that was itself based on a flawed concept and they had every intention of running the program out to the year 2000 even with a handful of launches scheduled and development costs that were already higher than the US shuttle.