...I admit 1984 was even worse, they had a "Junior Anti-Sex League". Our anti-sex league is at least mostly beyond the age of burning desire themselves.

I love how this stuff exposes the "anti-abortion" forces as actually being "anti-sex". If you were only anti-abortion, you'd be strongly pro-contraceptive. But no, they don't want women's ancient disincentive to sex taken away: if you have sex, you should be punished by bearing children in pain and caring for them for two decades. Then you should mourn how your life was ruined by all the opportunities for education and earning lost to childcare, and mourn how your child started off life at a disadvantage. You should suffer for your sins, the sin of having sex. And you should think about all that before having sex outside of marriage, and Just Not Do It.

All that used to be quite openly stated, you can find grandparents around today who remember lectures with just that rhetoric. Now they cover themselves with victimhood, but they're only "victims" in having their power to dictate women's sex lives taken away by technological advances in medicine. It's particularly sidesplitting that they base their objection to the loss of this power with complaints about a large organization imposing fascist controls on individual behaviour.

Charlie admits that Judaism is still alive and MULTICS is not. He should have gone with Zoroastrianism, even older. (Actually, writer Paul William Roberts found a tiny community of Zoroastrians in Iran a few decades back.) But then a few of us still remember MULTICS with some affection and it still affects our designs. The University of Calgary was sucked into the belief that MULTICS was a great future back in the 70s and ran one of the largest-ever installations of it, in user-count at least. (They were also taken in by ADA and ran some courses and assignments in it for a while.)

MULTICS was the only system I ever used that had the very cool and effective accounts/login design of two-parts to your login: your personal ID and your project ID. Your personal ID stayed permanently, but might lack all resources for years; your compiler course would come with one project-ID that would give you enough resources for that course; your database course would be a different project ID. Your access levels to various files, etc might change with which project ID you used, but your home directory was always yours because of your personal ID. It was cool. There were a few babies tossed with the bathwater when MULTICS was simplified down to Unix...

You should have quoted some of the article, you'd get modded up as "funny"....few realize what a comedian Eco can be. My favourite bit was how, if Mac was Catholicism - because there's this clear set of rituals you go through to reach salvation (or at least the moment your document prints) and anybody can get there; and if DOS is Protestantism - much more flexible about ritual but also much more demanding and takes for granted not all can reach salvation; then Anglicanism is Windows: it LOOKS like Catholicism(Mac) ...but you can always sneak out to DOS to change things you don't like.

The good ship "Paul Ryan", which will anchor safely off the ice pack and send them pictures of the sailors aboard enjoying fine meals and swimming pools to give them incentive to break free of the ice on their own! We do these people no favours, killing them with kindness by "helping" them out of the jam they got themselves in. We can't have these ships oppressing us with their pleas of imminent personal disaster. ...and you thought that this one topic surely couldn't be dragged into American political crank-fests. My next post: how all this relates to gun control.

Thanks for that. The 1972 decision seems quite specific in that it applies to foreign surveillance, not domestic, where a warrant is still required. It still strikes me as "in the tank" for the government to fail to go on at that point to subject the prima facie* claim of foreign-ness to a review by this branch of government, since both of the other two seem willing to take the NSA's word for it. Does "we program our computers to review anything with what, in our sole judgement, seems to be a 51% of having a foreign endpoint" count? Does it count to actually tap every phone, but only check the logs if the 51% is estimated to be true? Does it count as breaking the law to have policies of control over these log-checkings run by the same information staff that let Snowden walk out with gigabytes?

All of these would have been cool things for the court to consider, and would have lent great legitimacy to the program if these burning issues sucking up so much cable news airtime were found to actually be minor issues, or well-handled at least. Instead he basically said, "My read of Keith says they're within the Constitutional limits since they say they're just checking out foreigners, and their word on that is good enough for me".

One hopes that will be a basis for appeal.

*See, I know two words of Latin. So I must be right.

TFA didn't appear to go into the matter of law - does the program violate the 4th or not, and why. The decision must have done so. It's little short of bizarre that a judge went on about matters not of law - how the program is valuable or a "counter punch" for 9/11 or whatever. Surely such talk is all about an end justifying a means. I'm not allowed to break the law just because I've got a valuable end in mind; the government, the same, one would think. If the end justified the means, then, heck , allow cops to search every house at will for evidence of child-molestation.

The NYT article says specifically that he ruled that the 4th does not apply to information given to 3rd parties. TFA notes that he went on about how we give info to 3rd parties all the time so that they can profit from them. What the heck voluntarily and openly giving over information to vendors in return for free services or whatever has to do with the government taking information non-voluntarily and without notification, he doesn't seem to have explained.

So one comes back to the "end justifies the means" parts of his comments. There seems to be capture of the 3rd-branch "regulator" here: he believes the program is saving lives, or something, whereas the judge two weeks ago noted that he was cleared for all possible secrets, yet was shown no cases where they'd averted a crime that would otherwise have occurred. So much for the "54" terrorist plots averted.

Feeling too much Xmas spirit to dig up the stats again, but I recall looking into the Canada vs US figures and spotting that we Canadians kill each other just as much with long guns (rifles, shotguns) as Americans do. It's just our murder rate with handguns as the weapon that really diverges from them. (I believe we are also just as deadly with blunt objects and sharp ones, etc...that it was handguns ALONE where the rates were completely different.)

Not offering an opinion about why or whatever, just observing that the weapon of choice seems to be a statistical driver.

I've worked with a number of challenged people; the ones who were frank about their issues made it way easier; the ones who were in active denial, way harder.

While you're discussing it, recommend the TV show "Perception" - hell, hand out free AVI files. The show's character may have little in common with your particular issues; likely he is far worse, since it shows him having long conversations with hallucinated people - but the point is, the show provides an example of somebody with a very serious schizophrenic problem who is nonetheless good at his job. And a nice guy to know. Heck, he turns out to be a kind of detective on the side.

This is an entirely new level of acceptance for most people - because people talk more frankly now, we all know we're working with manic-depressives, clinical depressives, anxiety- and panic-attack victims...minor mental illnesses are pretty common. But most people's image of a "schizophrenic" is still of the Bad Guy in some crazed-killer movie. The new TV show stresses that it's just another mental challenge that can be overcome with understanding and/or medication.

You may have to stress that you can't solve any murders, should they become fans.

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

Yeah, number 16, right behind Italy, Lichtenstein, and Botswana.

But seriously, it's not about hiding America's faults, it's about America's virtues. I can't think exactly where in the canon of PJ O'Rourke this story comes from, but it was one of his middle-east trips, probably back in the 80's. O'Rourke questions a, young, ummm, Palestinian, I think, street protester, about his radical politics. The teen gives him about 15 straight minutes of all the many terrible faults of America, its support of Israel, its general weight-throwing-around foreign policy, its suppression of the poor everywhere. O'Rourke finally has enough material and tries to change the subject to something upbeat: "So, you're young and just finishing school, what are your plans, do you have a career dream?"

The kid gets all excited, lighted up happy, and says: "My cousin is at the University of Chicago, and he thinks he can get me a green card!" ...at least, America has a lot of job-finding virtues if you're Palestinian and half the people you know - 80% of the kids - have no job prospects...

An individual expression of the 10 can - unless you do your own version, must - be explicitly Jewish or Catholic or Protestant. The division of the list into 10 things differs. Importantly, the Jewish version makes "I am... God" a whole commandment on its own, and "have no other" is relegated to 2. And the Catholic version just skips the whole "no graven images" thing. So you *can't* post the ten without immediately picking a side, not just Jews vs Christians, but Protestant vs Catholic. Yikes. Beliefnet has a comparison chart of the three versions.

The sidesplitting thing about the whole Judge Roy Moore putting The Rock into the courthouse - and going on tour with The Rock as a speaker - was that he tried to have it both ways: The Rock has ELEVEN commandments on it. Easy to check me. Google moore and "the rock" and of course commandments and hit images - there's one big enough to read the surface. It has the Jewish number one, but then all the Protestant ones, for a total of eleven.

It's a great example of the reason WHY you want separation - we have centuries of experience of this kind of issue leading to riots and warfare.

...is to turn the question around. There are two electrical generation utilities connected by a wire: your solar panels and their big fossil plant. Their problem is that they are *required* to buy power from yours when yours happens to be generating, whether they need any power or not. They *have* to turn down or shut off their big plant whenever your system feels like doing some output.

How would most of us feel about being *required* to buy electrical power whenever their plant is underutilized and needing some extra work? Plus, they can build it up all they want and thus make you buy more?

It all imposes costs and they're attempting to recover them. That said, all profit-making utilities love to exaggerate their costs to regulators so as to be allowed higher income, all such claims need to be checked, and the budget for the checking - and the internal information made available to the checkers - needs to be as much as the utility had for the request to the regulator.

With that caveat, there's nothing wrong with this; the system imposes a cost, they deserve compensation. Any contrary view is really based on a belief that solar power people are inherently "good" and the utility is inherently "bad" by using fossil fuels and thus deserve to be punished for their sins.

...wasn't the whole "dot bomb" crash about doing stupid things (pets.com) in an expensive way (all those Aeron chairs) and throwing more money at the problem to fix it? The notion that "government" is a worse bureaucracy than other large bureaucracies like, oh, a healthcare insurer, say... has never clicked with me; I've tried to get service from (or worked in) too many large private bureaucracies.

It's pushing 20 years since I first saw an academic study showing that IT project failure probability increases dramatically - the latest was 2005:

The Challenges of Large-Scale IT Projects

You're darn right I won't be put in charge of such - not without a gun to my head. I'd want to de-scale anything down to a size where you could reasonably spec and test it. As the article says, "test, test, test". A formative experience in my programming was FORTH, a language that strongly rewards small incremental experiments, compiling as you go, building from small functions up to large ones. I'm not saying use FORTH, but the philosophy of getting the basics working and building up has really worked for me for a whole career.

By contrast, all the large-scale projects I've worked on have all taken a philosophy like building a skyscraper or 747 - no one person can comprehend it, design everything before the first screwdriver is picked up, so the design process goes on for months and years, etc. And then you have "crunch time" from then on as the fond beliefs of the design team smack into reality, and the specs are proven to not match needs. Incremental building and testing tends to reveal these problems.

The fear that drives these philosophies is that you'll have the thing mostly built...and discover it doesn't meet every need and can't without some huge rebuild, because you didn't think of everything up front. Rather like an old system that's been patched to death and has to be tossed because it just can't keep up with changes. I think the fear exaggerated, particularly if the design-build team is at least roughly aware of the whole project dimensions.

The advantage of more-incremental projects that are never large because you take one part at a time is you develop in priority order. The 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of the clients will want about 20% of the options available - so get 20% of the offering working, and working well, first.

Canada has this story of medical records: http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/10/10/0124227/open-source-could-have-saved-ontario-hundreds-of-millions
As /. covered it, "open source" would have saved 95% of project costs, but I think it was also about the open-source development was in small increments, no large projects.

Good background would include:

- Environmental officer for a West Virginia mountaintop-removal coal company

- Human rights officer for the Syrian Army

- Risk Management officer for Lehman Brothers

- PhD from the Sorbonne in empty gestures

"Soldiers" includes officers and non-coms - right down to teenage corporals - who send their human friends and colleagues out of cover to maybe get killed. The ability to do so is a primary burden of soldiering, harder, most say, than going over the top yourself.

It's terrific if they have such humanity that they hate doing it to dogs and even robots - but they either have to be able to do it, or belong at home.