Geez, our present system is an utter failure in most of the US. I would posit that pretty much anything is worth trying, in an effort to start trying to reign in cost, and get more results from our efforts.

Worth trying, yes. But to actually "reign in cost" you have to, you know, budget appropriately (and most charter schools inherently add to costs as extant public schools don't magically become cheaper and it's a slow, grinding process to consolidate them (if at all possible)). As for "get more results", well, you have to first ask questions about whether we are actually getting results and then you have to examine their methodology, including making sure they're producing accurate results and not simply skewing them--for example, taking all the top scorers and placing them in charter schools and leaving all the low performers in public schools and you might have simple shuffled people around without even changing the median score let alone the average one.

There is one thing, however, which I don't know how we can fix, at least not from a legislative or policy standpoint, and that is the lack of parental participation.

How about student participation? The biggest hope for success of students are the students themselves. Yet we've consistently stripped students of any sort of power, consideration, or respect--student council, journalism, etc are all jokes in school. People may look to the past and point about how much administrations so actively fought students in the past as a sign that today things are better, but that's actually more evidence that the administrations won and now students are so actively discouraged that there's basically nothing left to fight over.

So we've doubled the amount of money we spend on food stamps and we have record numbers of Americans that rely on the government for their food. I wonder which way the vote.

Both political parties, since neither wants to get rid of SNAP?

When you don't work and get your income from the government (who gets its money from taxpayers) then there is no incentive to look for work.

You've got it. That's why you don't work, right? Oh, right, you work because you're wholly a motivated person. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that said "income from the government" is at best a meager amount barely capable of supporting a person and that most jobs pay better than that--because even though the average "income from the government" is over minimum wage, that's a factor that is heavily skewed by urban recipients having a higher cost of living and hence higher "income" (read, project housing) figured into the "income", but then urban areas inherently have to pay more than minimum wage precisely for that higher cost of living reason.

Have some kids, collect some checks, and don't ever look for work. And with all the unemployment and record food stamp usage both parties are now talking about letting millions of illegal immigrants into this country and legalizing the ones that are already here.

Of course. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the US has a changing demographic because (a) there's now a lot of legal hispanic immigrants, (b) a lot of illegal hispanic immigrants, and (c) hispanic immigrants tend to have more kids on average which all basically begs for politicians to, in some fashion, address the question of immigration policy. But, sure, it's all about the short-term spike in unemployment and food stamps...

And of course cue the screaming. "Corporate welfare is worse than individual welfare". They are both a major drain on society. And individual welfare is now a record drain. There's no incentive to succeed anymore. There's no incentive for personal responsibility.

So true. That's why no one works. Oh, right, that's obviously false at so many levels.

You can have six kids out of wedlock and be rewarded by the state with free food and housing. This happens on such a massive scale that we lose billions annually creating a system that encourages broken homes, unwanted children, and bastard children with no future as productive citizens.

Two obvious things. One, no one wants to have six kids in today's American society because six kids, even trying to be really, really negligent, still is a pretty full-time job. But, yea, nothing about raising kids is important for society so fuck that. Two, "bastard children with no future as productive citizens"? Did you just drop out of a time warp from the 1700s? "Bastard children" were and are such a fucking common thing throughout history and the very nothing that they, as a rule, have "no future as productive citizens" is such utter bullshit that I honestly can't imagine how you can think such a thing. Why? Because due to automation a "productive citizen" is now days most often a person who does an incredibly menial task of little sophistication that a trained chimp could do.

That is, instead of having a view of this as some sort of utopia where so few people are needed to actually work and the people who do work have such easy jobs, you want to begrudge upon people such horrible filth out of some backwards view of heredity and the importance of being a "productive" "citizen", both of which are increasingly becoming subjective terms. And I wonder, do you begrudge that "productive" workers want to be paid above said "drain"s on society? Do you begrudge all the illegals who can't become "citizens" become some bastardly quota system?

Really, before you go around dismissing people, why don't you prove that *you* are a "productive [citizen]" who is worth the sort of consideration you obviously are unwilling to show when it's so much easier to just play up stereotypes and hyperbole.

Did you actually even bother checking this? No, most modern X11 servers run as root so they can* have hardware access to GLX and DRM. But, please tell me, which distro or OS do you run that runs your X11 server as non-root? Because I'd love to use a system like that.

*Technically, privilege separation is quite possible on these points, which has been done in OpenBSD AFAIK, but very few people use OpenBSD and I think the whole point of your post was about what the vast majority of people use. Otherwise, you're just quibbling over the point without stating it that most people don't run a "modern" X11 server.

So why not follow suit, and keep updating the Constitution with new things that we deem particularly worthy of protection because we have fresh memory of them being infringed?

While that sounds good in theory, in practice you have to keep in mind that as you note...

The Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, were originally written very much with this intent in mind - by a generation that witnessed several flagrant violations of their rights, intent on codifying the law against those particular violations.

And that only happened because people who weren't the original leaders held a revolution because those in the status quo were not at all willing to take part in codifying laws to address those violations. I think that's precisely why TJ spoke about "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants". But beyond that problem, even if we saw a near bloodless coop, there's nothing to stop the equivalent of "The Muslim Brotherhood" taken power. After all, there was enough agreement about the fact that rights were being violated in the colonies. Today in America, if anything the majority seems to want to codify even more abuse.

And again, I speak of the hypocrisy of the founding fathers. They were quick to support Freedom of Speech when it meant being allowed to speak unfavorably about the king, but they wanted to declare it sedition when it came to the newly elected President. TJ himself helped write and pass a Bill of Attainder, then later had them banned in the new United States; yet, he later wrote to continue to defend his previous act, citing the urgent and immediate need. Doesn't that line ring a bell?

Perhaps if there was less hero worship of the founding fathers and a political shift, which might itself take a generation, we could get to the point where we could compromise our way into new Amendments to address what will be hopefully past issues that they wish to avoid resurfacing. I'm just not hopeful of anything being done today since if anything there's been a strong shift the opposite direction, in large part because of a willingness under expediency to bypass amending the Constitution to codify the necessary changes and just hoping that progress would keep going in the desired direction.

Beware of people whose only marketable skills are their supposed loyalty and their ability to equivocate the following of rules to the letter. The ones who actually followed rules to the letter would have died long ago in the shower from lack of common sense.

There's no suspension of constitutional rights here. Fourth Amendment protects you against unreasonable search. Historically, border searches (then primarily to detect contraband) have been practiced since the founding of the Republic, and are deemed reasonable by long historical precedent and public good. As this has always been the case, there's no actual erosion.

You should read about Writs of assistance, which rather tie into this.given how many reports there have been of searches conducted well beyond the borders and over similar logic--smuggling, although of people today. You also seem to be glossing over the point that the courts are directly acknowledging that the searches aren't reasonable in what seems heavily a sign of equivocation on their part to justify the searches--that is, they acknowledge they're not "reasonable" but then counter that the search is okay because "hunches" can be fruitful. This rather falls much further into the category of what's an acceptable level of search for people detained. To that end, it quite clearly seems unreasonable by any definition to allow unilateral mass copying of all data on laptops or any other device.

I do agree that it may well be overly broad and should be narrowed down, but it would require a constitutional amendment to codify that arbitrary searches at the border are not "reasonable". It is not something that SCOTUS can strike down, because the precedent is overwhelmingly in favor of it.

I don't know. We've already got a Fourth Amendment that doesn't qualify "at the border" as some sort of exception. And we've consistently read the Fourth Amendment in all sorts of broad ways well outside the scope of the original intention--mostly because a lot of the people who wrote the Constitution were hypocrites by any reasonable standard. Honestly, if we tomorrow had an Amendment that clarified the point that "at the border the Fourth Amendment applies", I don't doubt that in fifty years we'd just redefine what "at the border" means in such a fashion to be again having this debate. No, the simple truth is that this whole scenario is such a flagrant violation of a person being secure in their effects that we should on principle alone interpret the Fourth Amendment to not allow such things, regardless of how narrow in scope its original intent was. Because honestly, the founders didn't have one concrete idea of what they wanted on most things and even the ones who did were more than willing to make an exception for themselves.

So, short of a whole rewrite of the Constitution to "reset" the interpretation, we're always going to be arguing interpretation. And it's really absurd to argue "deemed reasonable by long historical precedent and public good" or "English Common Law" when the whole Constitution was enacted precisely to rely more upon Statute and not "historical precedent" which the colonists felt were so bad to have to revolt and start a whole separate country over. And if worst comes to worst and the Statute become too absurd, then one can fall upon the meaning behind the Declaration of Independence and excise yourself from absurd Statutes. None of that, though, justifies stomaching this bullshit.

It's not surprising the Catholics can create a big controversy that government actually listens to, while the Quakers cannot.

It also has a lot to do with most Quakers not *wanting* to make a big controversy because they believe it a private, personal matter. Honestly, the whole idea of it is absurd because of the thousand things that health insurance covers, it's not like "The Pill" is the one big morally questionable aspect. No, it's just the "icky" sex-related one that the Catholics are fighting to stop because anything that promotes the ability to have sex or any other kind of worldly pleasure without consequence greatly diminishes their control. The fact that the Church doesn't have nearly the control they think they do...and it's not like "The Pill" is only available through health insurance.

In short, it's more attention whoring than anything wrapped into some self-absorbed desire to dictate to others how society should work. Well, if the Catholics or Quakers or whoever are that opposed to it, they can seclude themselves from society or move to another country. And I say this is as a former Quaker, who recognizes most Quakers really only make a fuss when they're asked to directly harm others or the like. This discussion would be wholly different if the nuns or whoever were being forced to shove "The Pill" literally down people's throats.

'The report said that a reasonable suspicion standard is inadvisable because it could lead to litigation ...

Unlike now, where there's litigation precisely because there isn't a reasonable suspicion standard. Okay, yea, I know, it'll head off future litigation. But, then, is that a good thing in itself? Because if it is, we should just shut down the Judiciary Branch and be done with it.

... and the forced divulgence of national security information, ...

That's some great logic there. If we have some sort of standard of reasonable suspicion for anything related to national security, then indirectly national security information will be divulge. Isn't this the same logic that requires those on the inside to "neither confirm nor deny" everything? And if it's not talking about the indirect form, well, the last decade has shown just how little any part of the federal government has been "forced" to do anything national security wise, even if a court order demanded it. Honestly, no matter how you interpret it it sounds like the court is giving extra-legal blessing to all the "national security" activities the federal government has done/is doing/will do because there's already standards for national security information containment during court proceedings, which apparently they aren't willing to accept as actually good enough.

... and would prevent border officers from acting on inchoate "hunches," a method that it says has sometimes proved fruitful.'

And firing at people on inchoate "hunches" has sometimes proved fruitful in killing drug lords and murderers. Should we legally allow border officers to do that too? Yep, the borders really are a Constitution free zone. There also apparently a human decency free zone. Really, this sort of ruling would make me want to not be a border officer at all. At least the executioner, as bloody as his hands might be, can have some faith that a lengthy process was taken to determine the guilt of the person they kill. With this? It's a free-for-all, with out apparently any reasonable restrictions. Because being reasonable might allow the bad guys to win.

Granted, the last time I checked linux makes the memory space of every process for any uid available to any other process running under the same uid (unless you're using SELinux). It is just that big unixy trust-everything-local attitude.

Actually, what makes it worse than that is that (1) there are suid X clients which makes for an obvious privilege escalation attack vector though the X server and (2) the X server itself is root which makes the X server a big target. The fact that the presentation spoke repeatedly about how nasty GLX was is only funny to me in a dark way because of just how insecure GPUs seem anyways as they suffer even worse from the "unixy" trust-everything-local attitude. So, while I'd love to hear that he succeeds in his GLX clean ups, I only think that clears one bug hurdle while still leaving (a) OpenGL drivers and (b) potentially hardware GPU memory protection limitations. Screen scrapping at the kernel level seems worse if nothing else because it doesn't require nearly the level of sophistication in actually discovering which window holds what object and then try to grab or trap for passwords or whatever that way.

However, until we close the gap of by web browser being able to read my mail directory or modify my .bashrc, I think that X11 vulnerabilities are just the tip of the iceburg.

Strictly speaking, we already have that capability in SELinux or in AppArmor. The reason it's not really heavily implemented is because you might want your web browser to be able to save a file in your mail directory or overwrite your local .bashrc from a server stored copy somewhere. Meanwhile, sticking all the UI stuff to allow/disallow isn't some magic bullet--Windows NT has a very robust system of protection that does very little because people don't micromanage things. And honestly, the issue isn't that the web browser has access to your mail directory. It's that a nefarious web site may manipulate your web browser to read the mail directory when you don't want it to. If that's really a big enough concern, you can just run the web browser as a different user....so long as the X11 bugs are fixed. :)

Piracy is tricky.

Granted.

People who produce content do have some right to keep other people from stealing it.

Define "stealing" in this context. Because "stealing" patents by utilizing the underlying ideas in more or less spelled out ways in a patent application are the basis of most industries in their foundations. It's only much later is there any real recognition of patents, generally, as companies (and people) feel a need to create artificial barriers of entry to preempt competition.

Now, the case in point is copyright, and certainly there's a much greater view of respect for that field precisely because it is, in theory, supposed to be of a much more narrow scope. But, we're so far down that rabbit hole--the very definition of a derivative work has become so warped and the time span for a copyright to last has grown so large--that the respect for copyright at all has really had a falling out.

It is very difficult to track down individual pirates, so most get away and reasonable fines are not a deterrent. This leads to a sort of reverse-lottery where lots of people take a chance at disastrous penalties.

Which is the problem, full stop. If reasonable fines are not a deterrent, well, they're simple not a deterrent. Sometimes justice and punishment aren't a deterrent. That's life. Strive to correct this in some way only makes the situation worse. I mean, by the logic stated, jay walking should carry perhaps 20 years or even a death sentence. That's absurd.

Part of the problem is that the public is very split on what is reasonable.

A more major part is that those writing the laws are being effectively bribed with money from copyright holders into writing laws beneficial to copyright holders. So, that there is a "split on what is reasonable" is true. But, we live in a democracy, and I'm quite certain that way more than 90% of people are not in the "fine a person into oblivion". Hell, ever time you see a story showing the vast majority of a nation are committing piracy, it's a good sign you should rethink your laws to decriminalize it more, not try to crack down harder on it. That doesn't inherently mean that content creators won't be paid at all--although they may have to come to terms with the idea that even fewer will make a living wage from it. But, it may mean devising another system than copyright to facilitate it.

Some people are happy with any arrangement that industry wants because the purchase is voluntary

Piracy is voluntary too, between two consenting people to copy some bit of data. The rub is of course that it's piracy that's the issue, not whether people are somehow obtaining content from the industry directly without paying.

It would be interesting to see a survey of opinions on this and see how well public opinion matches the law.

See above. I'd say Napster was a good effective opinion poll of a sort. I am wary, though, of how any survey may be stacked one way or another to distort the message people wish to express. After all, most people may feel guilty about piracy, but that doesn't mean they feel they should be punished for it. Self-guilt happens in lots of circumstances which are clearly entirely victim-less, so it's important to not extrapolate unwarrantedly even if surveys did suggest that some sort of fine or whatever would be appropriate.

Yes, XP needs to die, because it is made to deal with threats from 2000-2001, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. Windows 7 and newer help address this issue.

Help address this issue..except not really. :/ Windows 7 was made to deal with threats from 2009-2010, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. Windows 8 was made to deal with threats from 2012-2013, with added security patches strapped on as the need arose. You see a trend? The biggest things that consistently have to be done, no matter what version of Windows you use, is to (a) use Internet Explorer/Adobe Flash as little as possible (directly or indirectly through its rendering engine) and (b) keep as much of your software as possible up to date.

That MS has chosen to not push more updates for Windows XP is the only real major thing hindering (b), but that speaks relatively little of XP. The only other major, possibly, beef is the hassle of installing so many incremental security patches. That's a major reason, of course, for Service Packs and slipstreaming.

Nah, really, the only place XP needs to "die" is in that hardware has continued to evolve and XP has been left out of a lot of developments, in large part because fundamentally some things didn't exist when XP was released. That Windows 7/8 already exists and supports said hardware as part of a new system...then XP can "die" when you switch to a new system inherently. But, that still leaves plenty of years for fully functional hardware to keep using XP for a long while.

It reminds me of a funny statement from Woz in "Accidental Empires" about how he couldn't wait for Moore's Law to reach its limit, so hardware would stop changing and schools could afford to spend the money on hardware that'd be around for 10-20 years like most other equipment. Ignoring that the actual time scale has shifted so much because of how cheap computers, not the PCs envisioned, have gotten, the mindset that old software shouldn't reasonably be supported for 10-20 years does sort of kill a lot of good ideas when it comes to reasonably using computer hardware. I guess there's always a long-term support contract with IBM and Linux...

Or, you know, they could have just enforced the sanctions, which would have probably be ineffective towards their intended goal--to end apartheid. And even if they did succeed and Mandela did get elected by a democratic vote, well that's democracy for you. Perhaps that's a "worse" government in your view. In any case, my post wasn't to cast aspersions upon Mandela or his movement. It was to point out that there was a false dichotomy being presented. There were a lot of additional options available.

If the US were to have actually overthrown the South African government, I'm fairly confident they wouldn't have allowed Mandela or his movement to take power. But, you see, that was also a major point of my post which you seemed to miss too. Simply put, Reagan had no problems with apartheid per se. You could argue it was a strategic move to not rock the boat--why overthrow one pro-capitalist government just to probably have to quickly overthrow the next pro-communist (not really a given, but seen as a strong possibility) government. Notice I never mentioned democracy in any of the above because Reagan didn't care about that either.

So, what we're really left with is a government who was repeatedly willing to be policeman to the world but only to further US interests. And human rights were clearly not a US interest as far as Reagan went. Take from that what you want. It certainly has basically nothing to do with "evil" Mandela.

More ink has been spilled and time spent on the subject of ethics in engineering and practical sciences than any discipline save medicine. And yet it does not solve the problem and will not solve the problem because that is not where the problem lies.

What do engineers and practical sciences do? Solve and engineer practical solutions. The answer, of course, is Gort. But, then, perhaps we need a better grasp on what the question is.

ANC/Mandela supported economic nationalism. He was honored by the Soviet Union for his pro-communist affiliations. ...

Mandela was anti-capitalist. Not as in, "bmajik says so", but as in, Mandela says so.

And? Mandela could have been Satan incarnate. That doesn't justify vetoing anti-apartheid sanctions.

In 61-62 he participated in a _bombing campaign_ to put pressure on the apartheid government.

I like how you sandwich that in the above. It's as if you believe that Mandela was a one dimensional man with specific intentions involving communism. Meanwhile, if he had staged non-violent sanctions, would that have been okay? Because Reagan wasn't even willing to push or enforce for that. And if he managed it, Reagan would have likely called for his own _bombing campaign_.

Reagan and Thatcher were hesitant to cut off South Africa not because they gave a shit about Mandela or because they loved sticking it to black people; they saw SA as a pawn in the cold war. They didn't want a bunch of African Nationalist Parties starting communist and Russia-aligned states all over the untapped African continent.

So, they don't give a shit about Mandela, but it's because of Mandela they weren't willing to piss off the South African government as it could possibly lead to Mandela gaining power... Funny. It also goes against the long-held truth that America has consistently in the past (a) pushed sanctions and (b) simultaneously provided support for a pro-nationalist pawn in the country to form a coup. The only reason Mandela wasn't chosen is he was anti-capitalist. And odds are good no other pro-capitalist was chosen because the South African government was good enough for Reagan as a useful pro-capitalist pawn.

To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.

I like how you mixed "nationalizing industry and destroying property". Perhaps if you said "destroying capital" it'd mean something. In fact, nationalizing industry can spur foreign investment if done correctly. The hard part is, of course, convincing foreign investors that you're only going to nationalize those resources that were unreasonably sold to foreign investors in the past. That's the real destroyer, the destroyer of confidence. And there's no real simple way to fix that problem, no matter how unjust a previous government was with previous contracts or grants. The closest thing is to have a slow transition and a strong political party to see it through. The only alternative is to just let things stand and hope that either inequity fixes itself or you can use taxes or something similar to mold the system to solve the problems. In short, there's no simple solutions, and as you state, Mandela was wise to not engage in coarse action.

Mandela is a mixed bag. As terrorists go, he was a pretty pleasant one -- MK (the militant wing he was part of) only attacked infrastructure at night, hoping to minimize civilian losses.

Certainly better than the US government's own various bombing campaigns.

But, he was willing to resort to violence to bring about a communist revolution in Africa.

As above, being peaceful wouldn't have meant the US would have responded in kind.

You think Reagan and Thatcher were against that? You're right.

As you hinted above, Reagan and Thatcher were against any potentially Soviet Union puppet because Reagan and Thatcher wanted to be the puppet masters. You had to be the US or the Soviet's puppet. So, you were right in a way. The US didn't care about Mandela as a person or whether the black people were being killed or not. All they cared about was retaining their puppet and doing nothing to help a potential Soviet puppet. And if Mandela had risen to power, even under a democracy and non-violent means, then the US would violently overthrow that regime and put in its place a democracy or theocracy or aristocracy or whatever it took to have their puppet.

You see, as much as you can potentially condemn Mandela for what he did or might have been, you overlook that Mandela wasn't *the* guaranteed new leader of South Africa. Reagan and ilk were not interested in rocking the boat that was the apartheid South African government because they were uninterested in the foreign policy risk. In essence, the people of South Africa or even the rest of the world didn't matter. All that mattered was the political game. One could argue that such show of strength was necessary, but Carter didn't cause WW3.

The whole notion that any of it was necessary seems as much absurd in hindsight as Mandela creating a communism regime just for the Soviet Union. That's the only point where I'd at least begin to tolerate Reagan's concerns at the time. But even that doesn't justify vetoing sanctions or refusal to enforce them. It only explains why they wouldn't have supported Mandela. Well, the US never had to. And perhaps because they didn't is precisely why Mandela and others like him are so well liked. The US is great at picking losers, perhaps?

I concur very strongly to this. It's funny most of all because the study, if anything, hints less that people are bad at choosing passwords (since given enough password space, a lot of "bad" passwords are inherently obscure by length) as that input constraints result in those "bad" passwords actually becoming bad. But as much as xkcd points it out, I don't think the suggestion of simply four words is enough (or more precisely, I think the entropy numbers are off if one presumes such pass phrases become common and based on dictionary words). The real point would be, of course, that the reason bank pins are so secure is because they can't be brute forced. At that point, it's most often a moot point and the only real issue is sites storing unsalted, unhashed passwords and being hackable.

To wit, the weakest link in the chain is in fact the computer element, not than the human element--baring the pedantic point that all the software is human made.