ja30278

I have never understood why, post 9/11, planes were not modified to remove the cabin to cockpit door, and make the cockpit door a separate entrance. This would more or less completely remove the possibility of a second 9/11 attack, and would render airplanes no more attractive a target than any other group of several hundred people.

Have you read the decision? That is an odd way to frame it...a corporation cannot ‘be the government’, and there is nothing in that decision that says they were. The more applicable passage would be:

“The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.”

Incorrect. See Marsh v Alabama

I don't understand the fixation with Wikileaks' motive. That seems independent of whether their information is true or false.

There seems to be a common bait-and-switch tactic performed by proponents of UBI, in which they mention UBI as a replacement for social programs when talking about affordability, but back away from that assertion when questioned about how to handle (for example) recipients that spend all of their UBI on drugs instead of food.

Counterpoint: As Taleb points out, car accident deaths are 'thin-tailed'; that is, the rate of car fatalities is essentially fixed (and predictable by looking at past data), while terrorism is 'fat-tailed', and the number of deaths that would be caused by a dirty-bomb in Manhattan does not appear in historical data, and so it can't be 'priced' in the same way.

There's also a certain kind of person who seems to really want 10x people _not_ to exist.

I'm not a 10x person, but I have worked with some. I don't think they are unique to programming..there are 10x folks in every field.

Sometimes you don't need a 10x person, and if you don't, it can seem like they don't matter. In those cases, a few 1x people will do just as well. But I do believe that sometimes you _do_ need a 10x person, and if you do, you can't do the same things without them. In those cases, I'd absolutely take a 'toxic' 10x person over the nice-but-1x alternative.

Part of the issue is that there's more work for programmers than ever, and most of that work is of the 1x variety.....if you're just banging out CSS for some small-business website, it doesn't matter whether you have Jeff Dean do it, or a new grad from Omaha Community college. If, however, you need to write a new globally consistent database abstraction at scale, then the new grad probably won't cut it. If you actually need that thing, then it wouldn't matter if the new grad was the nicest person on earth, and Jeff Dean the most 'toxic' (though actually I understand that he's a very nice person).

As a thought experiment, for people who agree with the idea that a company 'owns' all of the thought-output of an employee: Why should that mean only the valuable IP, and not _all_ of the thought-output, including the unpleasant parts. If an employee commits a pre-meditated murder, should the company be liable, as a partial 'thought-owner'?

It's quite funny, but..

" The followers advice is dropping the curly brackets for these one-line ifs to make them all happy. "

I have never understood why anyone would do this. It's a bug waiting to happen (as goto fail showed), for truly marginal benefit

    if (foo)
      bar();

    if (foo) { 
      bar();
    }

"And again if it be true, that a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdome, while we seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrain'd will be no hindrance to his folly"

I feel compelled to point out that your question has 2 assumptions: - that the RNC is equally corrupt as the DNC - that Assange has (or could obtain) evidence of that corruption.

If either of these assumptions is incorrect, then your question is meaningless.

You can have a similar epiphany with regard to corporate taxes, which are ultimately paid by the consumer.

Oddly enough, I just finished the last episode of this series 10 minutes before seeing this link posted (and your comment).

It is uniformly excellent, and well worth the time commitment required to listen to the whole thing.

I've also enjoyed watching several episodes of "The Great War" on youtube, which seems to be of a similar quality. ( https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar )

"There was rampant shadiness back in the day" ...this is an actual quote from a major paper? Maybe I'm just getting old, but this seems like unbelievably sloppy language for someone being paid to write.

NB: you've mixed up spot and process colors ( spot = pantone, process = CMYK dots ), but otherwise correct.

Reading arguments for Basic Income makes me realize what it must be like to argue with a flat-earth proponent. I literally can't understand the frame of mind that leads to the belief that this would be a good idea, at least as proposed.

I realize this isn't a substantive argument about the issue at hand, and will be rightfully downvoted..but I think this might be the first time I've _ever_ been so daunted by the ridiculousness of an idea, that I can't begin to formulate arguments against it, solely because I can't tell how to frame the argument.

Even simpler: Completely separate the cockpit from the passenger cabin.

Without the possibility to use the hijacked plane to take hostages to a friendly destination, or to use the plane as a missle, it's no more attractive as a target than any other public space.

So..the cost of an extra kernel/userspace switch was too much for a file request that is going to be serviced by a server on the other side of the internet?..really?

I really don't understand how a 'basic' income is supposed to work.

What if I spend my basic income on drugs and hookers? are you willing to let me starve? what about my kids? If not, then the basic income can't actually replace the existing social programs.

If nobody need to work, then if employers want employees, they have to pay more to get them, which makes prices rise, which makes your 'basic' income insufficient again.

I don't get it.

I'm sorry, but this is nonsensical. 'Poor' people, on the whole, work less, and have a better standard of living now than for most of recorded history.

It's much more likely that over-prescription of oxycontin is the root cause of any increase in heroin use.

Medical professionals and hospital rooms are absolutely finite resources. You can certainly build more, either by incentivizing their construction (capitalism) or have the state build them as part of some 5 year plan. Medical professionals are somewhat harder...we get them now by paying them handsomely...you could continue to do that, or conscript people into service. I'm not sure I'd want my heart surgeon to be a draftee..but ok.

How about donor organs? is there some infinite source of hearts and livers out there I'm unaware of?

Once you accept the fact that a given resource is rivalrous, you have to come up with some way to distribute it. Currently, that mechanism is money. If you get rid of that, then you have to replace it with _something_..whether it be algorithms, favor-economies, or central planning.

Now if you want to argue that insurance companies distort the market, then I probably agree with you (though I think there is room for interesting discussion here...). Certainly I think a single-payer solution is preferable to the current status quo, which mandates that individuals purchase insurance from private companies.

Whenever someone says that some rivalrous resource is a 'basic human right', I have a hard time taking them seriously.

As I get older, I have mellowed a great deal, and I understand how smart people can reasonably disagree about a large number of things...but I honestly can't fathom how intelligent people can fail to grasp that you can't possibly have a 'right' to a finite, tangible resource which you yourself don't produce.

Because if we aren't causing it, then there's very little reason to make vast changes to our way of life in hopes of preventing it.

I prefer Milton here:

“Though all winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple, who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter.”

It boggles my mind that otherwise intelligent people have a hard time grasping this simple concept. Taxes are simply another cost of doing business, especially if they are applied to whole categories.

Even if they are applied to specific companies (to favor domestic companies, for instance), then they still have largely the same effect, since they allow the domestic competitors to compete in the market inefficiently, raising prices on the consumer.

With the caveat that I haven't kept up closely with systemd

1. It is attempting to unify a bunch of previously disconnected functionality into a single program. Typically unix is composed of small single-purpose utilities that perform a single function, rather than a giant monolithic blob of code (with obvious exceptions, like emacs).

2. Partially because it has been around for so long and has so much history, and partially because it follows a unix tradition of using plain text configuration and shell scripting to solve problems.

3. The systemd folks believe that sysv init isn't capable of doing things that are important to modern systems (ex. dependencies between services, reacting to devices coming and going, intelligent daemon management, etc), and that doing those things correctly requires that an init system be 'more' than people previously thought it needed to be. They are also very....confident in their ideas, and don't hesitate to re-implement functionality (like logging) if it makes is easier to interoperate with their other code.

People opposed to systemd believe that it is too complex for such a critical piece of system functionality. They also resent the fact that systemd seems to require tight coupling to the rest of the system, and that it is aggressively pushing into so many linux systems. Many of them also probably have a long history with sysv init, and are comfortable with the way that it works. (Some portion also probably recall pulseaudio, which had similar grand visions, was similarly aggressively pushed into use before it was fully baked).

4. I think 1-3 probably cover most of this.

I never understand the desire to omit braces in single line blocks.

sure

   for ()
       foo

saves you a line, but it's a bug waiting to happen.

1. Exceptions are basically 'goto' with a pretty wrapper. Over time, I've come to believe that the best place to handle an error is close to where it occurs, rather than throwing some hail mary message up the stack and hope someone else can deal with it.

2. Well, it certainly is true that more code and more functionality is likely to contain more bugs. Whether your pid 1 needs to be doing all the things that upstart does is obviously a contentious issue.

3. This is a toss-up. I usually like 'crash loudly' over 'fail silently', but I think rejecting the patch outright was a poor decision.

"Another sort there be who, when they hear that all things shall be ordered, all things regulated and settled, nothing written but what passes through the custom-house of certain publicans that have the tonnaging and poundaging of all free-spoken truth, will straight give themselves up into your hands, make 'em and cut 'em out what religion ye please: there be delights, there be recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream. What need they torture their heads with that which others have taken so strictly and so unalterably into their own purveying? These are the fruits which a dull ease and cessation of our knowledge will bring forth among the people. How goodly and how to be wished were such an obedient unanimity as this, what a fine conformity would it starch us all into! Doubtless a staunch and solid piece of framework, as any January could freeze together."

Well...of course. Heroin dealers don't take Visa cards, so you wouldn't see a line item for drugs on a Visa bill. You also wouldn't see that the prepaid card had been exchanged for cash at a discount to someone that actually wanted food.