One of the fundamental tenants of the (literally) pre-historical concept of sovereignty, by which the people ordain and establish the U.S. Constituion, includes the ability to controls one's borders. The federal government, through the 14th amendment, has supremacy in defining citizenship of the United States, and through Article 4, at least a parallel duty to defend the States against invasion. You object that invasion means a group meaning to overthrow the goverment - a definition not found in the Constitution. Another definition of invasion is infrigment by intrusion, which ties back to the ability of the people's goverment to control borders.

So, historical pre-Consitutional ideas of sovereignty give the people the power to form a nation and the ability of that nation to control its borders, Amendment 14 specifically empowers the federal government with defining who is and is not a citizen of the United States, and Article 4 specifically empowers the federal goverment to protect the state's borders (against invasion, which necessarily posits who can and cannot legally cross the border) . You can add to that the Preamble, which states that the purpose of the Constitution is to insure domestic tranquility - legality of residence being central to national domesticity.

Perhaps you're a 10th amendment supporter getting confused about primacy in federalism, and instead of objecting to the argument that Federal law on border security preempts all State law on the topic (i.e. arguing that it does not and States also have the parallel authority to secure the borders), are thinking the inverse: that the federal government has NO rights to secure the State's borders? Which doesn't seem to be correct, because no one, not even 10th Amendmentists, are currently arguing that the federal government has NO right to deport non-citizens not legally in the U.S.; the argument is that the States should be able to do so independently of and in parallel to the federal government.

Article 4, Section 4: "The United States shall...protect [every State] against Invasion;"

Amendment 14, Section 1, Clause 1: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

"what's the gain in running it through Yahoo?"

Advertising. Firefox searches will drive traffic to Yahoo, Yahoo gets paid to show ads to that traffic, and Yahoo pays Mozilla for the referrals.

A good question is what does Mozilla do with $300 million per year in revenue? Does coding Seamonkey, Firefox and Thunderbird plus some 'education and outreach' efforts really cost that much? How many programmers do they hire, and how much of the Mozilla Foundation is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy where the managers have hijacked an open-source code base into long-term employment (doing what, exactly?) A web browser has a QUARTER BILLION in net unrestricted assets.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...

"Actually, you don't get to put Windows on a warship, period."

While it was only a test bed, the USS Yorktown (USN cruiser) was using Windows NT in a test capacity and in 1997 a divide-by-zero error took down the integrated control, navigation, engine and machinery monitoring systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

"Of course, when the frequency of EQ is high, the probability that a bigger one happens is higher."

You maybe talking about cumulative probabilities across multiple faults, but if we're talking about a single fault, then more frequent earthquakes generally mean that each earthquake is 'smaller', as opposed to infrequent fault slips that allow tectonic forces to build up so that when it finally does break free, that earthquake is 'bigger'.

"You realize they could just set up a local state dealer and sell through them?"

Most of the state dealership laws require that the dealers be independent (legally and financially, de jure and de facto) from the vehicle manufacturers.

So, no, Tesla can't just create a controlled dealer in each state and sell through that dealer.

"April 8, 2014. The long-awaited Rand Corp. study of Obamacare's effect on health insurance coverage was released Tuesday and confirmed the numbers that had been telegraphed for more than a week: At least 9.3 million more Americans have health insurance now than in September 2013, virtually all of them as a result of the law."

"That's a net figure, accommodating all those who lost their individual health insurance because of cancellations. The Rand study confirms other surveys that placed the number of people who lost their old insurance and did not or could not replace it -- the focus of an enormous volume of anti-Obamacare rhetoric -- at less than 1 million."

Source: http://www.latimes.com/busines...

Burning isn't always bad.

Burning carbon sources that are the accumulation of millions of years of photosynthesis is bad, because you are net-adding carbon to the atmosphere.

Efficiently burning renewable carbon sources (while controlling other embedded pollutants) is not so bad, because over a reasonable timeframe you are merely putting carbon into the atmosphere that your fuel sources took out several years before; rinse & repeat, with little effect on long-term atmospheric carbon pollution.

"Hard to break free of that system though...everybody expects the benefit, and it costs the company less to provide the benefit than they would have to pay you extra to afford your own insurance."

True. Right now, you do not pay income tax on the value of the employer-provided insurance that is provided by the employer (i.e. that which is not charged to you as premiums or deductibles - employers used to pick up most the tab, and still do pick up some of it). It was usually not even possible for you to get a good answer from HR on the value of that. In the past several years, something akin to the value of that untaxed benefit has started appearing on your W-2 (as information only - not included in your taxable income).

McCain floated a plan in the 2008 U.S. Presidential race to slowly phase out that untaxed-benefit, which would ultimately divorce health-insurance from being mostly employer-provided: it would start including the value of the employer-provided health insurance as taxable income to you, and then provide a tax credit that would cover the majority of this new taxable-income (based on some value of an average health-insurance plan). Over time, that credit would be reduced, under the theory that in a perfect free-market for labor, wages paid would adjust upwards to compensate as previously-health-care-providing employers competed on a tax-neutral playing field against employers that paid 100% in cash (whose employees would purchase their own insurance with after-tax money, just like any other consumer purchase).

This would help to disclose both how much health-insurance costs (theoretically bending the health-case cost curve down), as well as ramping down any tax benefit associated with employer-provided health insurance. Eventually, when there would be no advantage to employer-provided health insurance, people would buy policies on the open market without any connection to their employer, and you would be able to carry that policy with you when you changed employers - no COBRA, because it's not needed.

Of course, that plan did not address all of the other problems with the health insurance market, and of course not all of the problems with delivery of health care in the U.S.. But I liked the plan, because it provided a glide path that seemed to make sense, in reaching a goal of separating the purchase of health-insurance policies from the employer you happen to be working for at the time, when that connection no longer makes any sense.

MightyYar writes "But that shouldn't matter to those of us on the ground, since we have the atmosphere to protect us."

But: "The magnetosphere protect[s] the Earth from cosmic rays that would otherwise strip away the upper atmosphere, including the ozone layer that protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation." (Source: Wikipedia)

Netflix has a local caching solution for ISPs: Netflix OpenConnect Appliance, and it's over 100TB of content (refreshing 5TB per night). 4U chassis, Intel Sandy bridge CPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB solid state, 100TB+ spinning (36x3TB), FreeBSD, nginx, 2x10Gbps fiber

Overview

In-depth Deployment Guide

Useful and effective:

Patriot 3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Israel's Iron Dome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

"You're only directed to the Beta site if you're not logged in."

Incorrect.

When logged in, on several occasions, including this afternoon, I have opened-in-new-tab a number of Slashdot articles, and about 1 out of 10 open in the beta site (and logged in at the beta URL, to boot). I can delete the 'beta.' in the URL, and get the classic site.

I guess I'm not smart enough also?

Total Return (annualized %), over the past 5,10,15 years:

MSFT: 18.8, 5.0, 0.25
SP500: 18.5, 6.8, 4.1

Slightly lower performance that the standard benchmark, and with higher volatility to boot (as a tech/software company during 1998-2001, the starting date matters A LOT). Yes, the law of large numbers applies, but still, not a great reflection on Ballmer.

Source: http://performance.morningstar...

IANAEconomist, but I think the main way to distinguish structural from other forms on unemployment is to observe what happens to the labor market when the economy heads back toward a full-cycle peak, and not just to observe labor conditions near a business-cycle trough after a deep recession with continuing significant aggregate demand shortfalls of over $1 trillion in GDP.

Only then can you try to tweeze out structural vs. cyclical unemployment rates, and if see if the NAIRU has risen.