Yeah, why should we trust judges when they explain the law? And what's with these pesky biologists trying to explain biology. And don't get me started on mathematicians telling me that I'm doing matrix multiplication wrong! And historians! Talking about history!

Anti-intellectualism at its finest.

You should really start referring to them as "my opinions of how the 4th amendment works". As far as I can tell, not a single practicing or academic legal authority has ever endorsed this construction.

Now, of course, it's a free country -- you can represent your views however you want. But you don't get to pick your facts and you definitely don't get to reinterpret the law just because you don't like it (hellooo segregationists).

The problem is that many of us rent or otherwise occupy a dwelling for a much shorter period of time than the lifetime of these bulbs. So either you've got to convince my landlord (or the next tenant) to pay me for the remaining lifetime on the LED bulb (how can they measure that, we don't know) or else I've got to swallow it when I move somewhere else.

The time horizon of these things is just way too long to make sense except for those already fairly stable in where they are.

You seem to have misunderstood the point of insurance. The way it works is that you pay more than you need to most of the time on the off chance that something goes horribly wrong.

The issue is that the vast majority of spending doesn't go to "the off chance something goes horribly wrong", it goes to treating a very small fraction of people with multiple chronic conditions. That's not catastrophe insurance, it's continued expense.

Since you made the analogy to homeowners insurance, it's the difference between having your house burn down once by accident and living right in the middle of a dry forest that periodically burns down. Insurance will cover the first case without issue, but in the latter case you simply won't be able to get homeowner's insurance because the company figures out that they aren't so much insuring you against a random chance of disaster but signing up for continued upkeep of a house that's nearly certain to burn down again.

What 23andMe does is market a product that you use to extract unique information about your own body, which is then presented to you in the form of suggestions about what health measures you should take -- in other words, medical advice. Very different.

So does the local palm-reader.

The point appears to be that you can provide medical advice if you are completely unscientific about it, but as soon as you try to offer even a little bit (even of experimental or tenuous) fact, then you have to go whole hog.

This is in Germany. They have a different history than we do in the US. You will find laws like that in France and other nations that where under Nazi rule. They are a democratic nation and it is up to them to change their laws if they see fit. Canada also has laws about hate speech that would not fly in the US. The US never had Nazis in control of our nation so we feel the best protection is freedom of speech. In many places in the EU they do not feel secure in that. The US has stricter restrictions on porn because of our culture. Although the restrictions are really very minimal outside of broadcast TV and radio.
I hate when a bunch of people from Europe start spouting off options about the US's rules. Germany is a free nation so let it's citizens decide what works best for them.

This line of logic might be fine for Nazis, but ultimately it has the problem that "a free nation" is not just a statement about the derivation of rules but also about some meta-rules that govern the process of rules-formation itself. This is sometimes called constitutional (not in the capital-C sense) or meta-political ordering that goes beyond the individual policy choices. One of those meta-political rules that I think has merit is that, irrespective of the democratic nature of the process, no body-politic ought to be able to suppress organized dissent or prevent those from offering a contrary platform. Otherwise, I think you (in general, not in Germany ever) risk the run of falling into the "one-man-one-vote-one-time" trap where a democratically elected government is able to use the levers of power to permanently embed itself.

Ultimately, I'm not losing any sleep over it.

[ FWIW, I don't think there's anything wrong with (polite!) normative comments about contrary policies abroad. I have no problem when people from Europe say (respectfully) that they are bewildered by American support for the RKBA and that, if they were the voters here, they would not chose such a policy. I disagree with that, but they are entitled to their opinion and no one should begrudge them that. ]

. Before it's done, it will become clear that the House and Senate oversight committees were either derelict in their duties or complicit in illegal activities. They either knew or they didn't. Either way, eventually they will be the ones asking for clemency.

Huh? I don't agree with the behavior or the votes of the Intelligence Committees but it's hard for me to accept that this constitutes some sort of criminal act because I disagree with their (vile) politics. This is getting perilously close to criminalizing legislators over holding divergent views about the proper role of secrecy and surveillance. What happens if some next neo-con administration accuses the SSCI of treason over denying some operation or publicizing some classified fact?

Is it no longer enough to disagree with our political opponents that we have to accuse them of criminality at every turn?

Why would someone who supposedly fears the police send an unencrypted e-mail acknowledging that heâ(TM)s a member of an Islamic group that is trying to change the government of Iraq?

Why would such a person also provide his full name and how long heâ(TM)s been in the country?

So that if you refuse to do business with him on equal terms with Americans, they can sic the DOJ on you for discrimination in a public accommodation.

After all, it's illegal to refuse to do business with Mr Aghazadeh based on his religion or national origin.

That's not efficient with respect to the marginal utility of an extra hour of light. Imagine that following set of preferences from winter to summer solstices. At the marked point, we would "naturally" (if we left things as they were year round) get another hour of daylight in the morning -- since light gets longer symmetrically from noon.

8H: 8AM-4PM
9H: 8AM-5PM
10H: 7AM-5PM
11H: 7AM-6PM
12H: 7AM-7PM =====
13H: 7AM-8PM
14H: 7AM-9PM

The underlying issue of our asymmetric preferences cannot be wished away without adjusting where the solar zenith falls with respect to noon.

There is a perfectly rational reason for it -- the additional light we get from longer days in the summer is not distributed according to our preference. The marginal utility of adding an hour of light between 6-7PM is much greater than adding it from 5-6AM. Unfortunately for us, as the days get longer, they get longer equally in both directions from noon (the zenith).

Picture this, it's the winter solstice and the daylight is 8-4. Now someone says "where is the best place to add an hour of light, at the end or the beginning?" -- at first it's equal -- the first 2 hours bring us to 7-5. But after that, the utility of adding 6-7AM is much less than adding 5-6PM, since people aren't going to wake up an hour earlier to take any advance of the former. Similarly for 6-7PM and so forth.

Our preferences are not symmetric, the natural extension of light is. DST fixes that.

By the same token, if you securely encrypt your credentials and refuse to give them the key despite any threats they may bring, they can't meaningfully seize those assets. Of course that "sharing" may come involuntarily via surveillance software surreptitiously installed on your computer.

If it's a legal case (and not some black-ops) and they have a legitimate order, they can compel you to transfer the money or throw you in jail for contempt (note, I didn't say you have to give them the key, only transfer the money). This sort of thing happens all the time in nasty divorce cases where one spouse tries to lock the money up where the court and the other spouse cannot find it. A few persist and spend a long time in jail.

That is, most people have a really way-too-technical notion of what "seizure" usually entails. In most cases that don't involve the SWAT, it just means ordering someone to do something. In the case of divorcees that don't want to abide the decision of the Family Court, this seems like the expedient way to do it.

The tension between KISS and DRY has always been there. Both are fundamental principles and yet at some level they are incompatible, since writing reusable code necessarily involves increasing its complexity. And the less you want to RY, the more complexity you have to build in.

The C++ STL is a shining example of this. Everyday developers shouldn't be writing their own lists and array and hashmaps. They definitely shouldn't write their own string utilities. And they shouldn't have to change those implementations whether they are working on regular strings or wide strings or with a HPC memory allocator. To deal with the genericity, STL is horrendously complex and Thor help me if I have to sit down with an error-page that's 5 pages long and 5 levels of template deep.

At the end of the day, you've just got to deal with that tension and decide what level of repetition (and the incumbent bugs and maintenance costs) you are willing to put up with to increase simplicity. If all you need is a simple array, don't use a library. If you are manipulating XML by using apos, on the other hand ...

Borderline NSFW

The fact that the rebels resorted to bombing theaters instead of trying to take and hold territory is itself evidence that they were pretty utterly defeated. But that evidence isn't even necessary, since all the Chechen leaders are dead or have laid down their weapons and the army has long since withdrawn. There's probably more separatists in Montana than Chechnya these days.

Face it, Russia won. They lost a few thousand troops and a couple hundred civilians and won the province back by brute force. Sometimes crime pays.