thoth

US Agencies don't need a Constitutional Amendment to come into existence - the usual method is simply a law that Congress passes that the President then signs. E.g. Dept of Energy, Dept of Education, Dept of Homeland Security, Dept of Housing and Urban Development, etc. going way back to the Dept of Foreign Affairs (precursor to Dept of State).

Obamacare (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) was also created by Congress - bill passed in both houses, signed by the President, upheld by the Supreme Court. That's basically a textbook example of how the system is supposed to work.

I'm not sure why the EPA (and others, like FEMA) were created by Executive Order instead.

As far as why Congress hasn't declared war since WW2, they've basically rolled up their say into the War Powers Act and the War Powers Resolution which provides for them being informed and issuing continuing approvals. They can then support the President (as Commander in Chief) but not officially declare war.

Huh? Stocks (shares) were invented to raise capital for businesses.

There probably are beneficial areas to reduce grocery plastic, but some of that plastic packaging is how/why food stays fresh on shelves longer. Cutting that back means increasing preservatives, throwing stuff out more often, shopping more often, etc.

Getting rid of plastic bags and other low hanging fruit (like straws) might not make a huge difference. On the other hand part of the battle is changing human behavior so starting with low hanging fruit is a good way to get people used to looking for plastic alternatives.

Someone with a masters in education may or may not have the knowledge required for a particular subject, say a math or science. Or another way, just because someone has a masters in education doesn’t mean they can teach any specific class. Their background could be in counseling, administration, school psychology, or education methodology... not, for instance, typical high school subjects.

Well, the more difficult/specialized the subject, the fewer available teachers. Plus, someone that knows calculus well enough to teach it likely has other job prospects (competitive pay).

>The 17th amendment[1] is another, which allowed for the direct election (and thus hyper politicization) of Senators.

The time before the 17th Amendment wasn't exactly all roses, that was the age of outright bribery of state legislatures for Senate seats. William Clark's famous quote "I never bought a man who wasn't for sale" was about this and the surrounding corruption of his election brought the 17th Amendment around.[0]

Listen to the 6th episode of the Constitutional podcast for some extra background, it is very interesting. Some states really wanted this because they were unable to even elect Senators due to political parties of the time simply not agreeing on anybody.[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Clark

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/constitutional/

If you take into account inflation, there is an argument for previous heists being larger... IIRC.

Check out http://nosygamer.blogspot.com/2017/09/did-judge-really-pull-...

I switched from UE to ST entirely because of UE's licensing/activation model.

Maybe it is different now, but UE used to require an internet connection for the registration... or you had to email your info for offline codes.

I have a bunch of isolated machines at work, physical and virtual, and got tired of dealing with UE and its registration requirements. Especially when ST gave a license key file I could copy around as needed.

So I switched. But yeah, I remember UE was a really good editor. Now I'm happy with ST.

Same here. I'm on Facebook because of events.

Years ago, a club I was in was using Yahoo Groups, and over time more and more events were posted to Facebook. People complained, and eventually the organizer wrote back "I've been using Facebook because it lets me schedule an event, track RVSP's, link to the location/map, add members, post pics, and help advertise/recruit for more members. Anybody that wants to help or takeover any or all of this, let me know".

Total silence for a day or two before about 50 of us joined Facebook.

That was 8 years ago. I moved away but now I'm in at least 4 clubs that actively use Facebook for events... now it's typical for friends to schedule birthday parties, housewarmings, plain old get-togethers via Facebook private events. Also alumni groups, community events and so on that keep in touch or advertise things to do that way.

The only thing I'm tired of is people that constantly mention how they quit Facebook. I don't care. It serves a useful purpose for me. It's like that Onion article about the guy who doesn't own a TV and mentions that as often as possible - Onion should do an update starring Facebook quitters.

And before anybody suggests it, Meetup isn't a good alternative. (I'm an organizer of a Meetup group as well; I like Meetup but fills a different niche.)

Their budget is sizeable but less than the annual profits of Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. And NSA pays for tons of stuff that those corporations don't have to deal with like having thousands of linguists.

Where is the responsibility of corporations in all of this? They have a cash pile that dwarfs the entire intel budget and ought to be the FIRST entities that invest in fixing their OWN products, right?

Defense may be the only game worth playing, but how will that work? Unlike the real military where civilians simply don't own the hardware, in computer security they do.

NSA isn't a hardware or software vendor, and the corporations that are don't have much of a profit motive to heavily invest in security. They aren't actually liable for problems unlike say a car manufacturer that releases a faulty product, which leaves what exactly... reputation that takes a hit? But every vendor has bugs and security issues and the market isn't really punishing anyone.

Is the future effectively an enormous government subsidy to profitable corporations (i.e. NSA and other US government agencies basically become extensions of corporate America's QA department)? Is the future heavy regulations to create the proper financial incentives and/or penalties so corporations start seriously spending on security?

It's easy to say "the government should do something!!" but what exactly will that look like?

Call them "bugchecks" instead - that's the actual Windows kernel API that produces these blue/red/green/whatever-color screens:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff...

Whatever logic currently used to print the 'Use quit() or Ctrl-Z plus Return to exit' message could also... quit the REPL in the first place, right?

I don't program Python much but do its users constantly type "quit" but not actually want to quit such that the REPL special cases this situation?

No kidding. What about US customers that want "to manage all telemetry and updates"?

You could say the same thing about chat apps (What's App) and picture sharing (Instagram)...

>Is there much left?

You might want to look at the Netflix tech blog - lots of interesting posts covering all kinds of topics.

So: A makes a product with flaws, B makes an exploit, C leaks that exploit, D adds a harmful payload to the exploit and goes on to extort/profit from E, who has computers systems they failed to patch in time... and somehow B and only B is at fault?

>infix operators do have upsides

What you are also glossing over are the precedence rules for operators. In this case it works in favor of your point and LISP indeed needs more parens.

However in other situations, you might need to re-parenthesize (language with flat precedence like APL) or consult your favorite chart[0] in order to figure out what is going on.

[0] http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/operator_precedence

Not sure it is the same game, but I played one my Apple //e in that era, named Telengard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telengard). I remember doing exactly as you describe: teleporting very deep and looting a chest for an extremely powerful weapon, and hoping to teleport back so I could rampage for a while. Good times. ;)

>Really free markets would have solved this.

How do you figure that? Wouldn't a free market solution require United to honor its contracts and the legal system in the first place? Which they provably already ignored when they removed ALREADY BOARDED AND SEATED passengers?

This didn't fall into "involuntary denied boarding" situation so United was free to offer whatever they wanted to. Which they chose not to do. Essentially, they had the situation you think would have solved the problem, but did not solve the problem.

Others have mentioned games... plenty of those.

I have some minor apps I run like Zone Five Software's "Sports Tracks" (exercise logger), gaming helper utilities, etc.

> * Greater than: 8 -gt 6 ( why isn't this 8 > 6 ?)

Wouldn't that be ambiguous with ">" when used for redirecting IO?

So basically your perception is that an insider with access (Snowden, Manning) can leak more info than hackers? That's the most obvious and difficult security threat anywhere, something even Google/Gmail is susceptible to.

You assume incorrectly and should read the Information Assurance section on their page:

"NSA to secure National Security Systems, which includes systems that handle classified information or are otherwise critical to military or intelligence activities."

That does not include civilian networks or non-DoD government networks or any system that isn't designated a National Security System. It definitely isn't "protecting USA government assets" in general.

Windows support for the touch bar gizmo will depend on Apple updating their bootcamp drivers.

As for Linux... I guess somebody will need to reverse engineer and write a driver for it.

>Being required to use my pinky to try and hit CTRL

I use Windows, OSX, and Linux fairly often (mostly Windows, then OSX, Linux here and there). For me, the most frustrating thing about Windows, a minor point but it bugs me, is that you can't remap the CTRL key without having admin rights.

This is a user-controlled preference the OS has in the box, in OSX and Linux distros I've used. On Windows, you need to edit the registry (!!) or use the SysInternals driver, which requires Admin rights. I haven't found another way to do it that doesn't require installing more software and/or admin rights.

To me, "binge-watching" is along the lines of watching a season of a TV show over a weekend.

I don't think of watching several movies in a row as binging them, I'd call that a "movie marathon" especially if they were a series (e.g. watching a trilogy like Lord of the Rings one after another).

Koan about the radio?! Try nearly 2000 years old, also known as the Ship of Theseus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus).

The FAQ says:

What's the actual laptop being used for HacBook Elite? It's a like-new refurbished HP EliteBook, the business class version of the HP ProBook.

>forgot who it was at the time, Raikes?

It was Allchin when I was there... about that era.

I'm not sure Microsoft gives an official name for "\\?\".

The closest I can find is "To specify an extended-length path, use the "\\?\" prefix." (from https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...).

So maybe it is the "extended-length path prefix".