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Comment Re:Reality (Score 1) 221

Yes, but I see the law passed in 1947 as an assertion by Congress that the mission of the BGN was an article I power. Executive orders can fill in the gaps where Congress has not passed specific laws, but the legislative branch is supreme in these matters. It is the same with Judicial power. Judges can rule on the meaning of law, but Congress can then come along and blow those decisions away with new law clarifying meani ng, or just changing it. The exception is constitutional law, where it is Congress and the States together that have the power. As for names being legal before then... Well, the whole point of the executive orders in the first place was to create a sort of Doomsday Book for place names since there were a lot of conflicting place names out there. Of course, if there were local conflicts, they didn't need to listen to the federal government anyway, although they might have been forced to use the federally mandated name when mailing things via the post office (probably not though, since the post office will usually recognize alternate names for places). As for whether names were legal before then, you're kind of ignoring the fact that there are state and local governments as well. In most cases, names are actually set by statute by local governments. The BGN normally just harmonizes those names with Federal registries of names. If a town changes its name from Muckville to Muckberg, they do that by passing some form of statute in their town. Then they petition other agencies and organizations such as the BGN to recognize the name change at various levels like county, parish (which I just don't get, but whatever), boroughs, census areas, state level, federal level and whatever other administrative subdivisions may exist.

No Article 2 power authorizes the President to execute a power Congress has not yet made law for. There is in fact Supreme Court precedent confirming this.
So either all names prior to 1947 were not legal, or the Executive has this power in its own right (That doesn't mean that Congress has no oversight of it)

The point though, is that the President probably does not have that power. Being able to name things like that is a traditional right of kings, but the US President is not a king. The US President is an administrator and civil servant whose job is to follow and faithfully execute the laws.

Now that's just absurd.
Arguments that "President is not a King, therefor cannot wield powers that King's wielded" is flat-out wrong.
See: The pardon power.
The President almost certainly has the power to name anything within the Executive branch as he wishes.
There's some discussion to be had about things that Congress disagrees with- i.e., Department of War vs. Department of Defense. It will be interesting to see how the Court rules on that.

Yes, that happens a lot with people who just can't stand when people don't just fall in line and agree. Don't be that guy.

It also happens a lot when people try to dress up bad faith arguments in a veneer of logic. Don't be that guy.

I did already concede that my original statement that Gulf of Mexico _is_ the legal name in the US was not accurate. I continue to hold, however, that there is a good legal argument that Gulf of America is not the legal name, not because the BGN can not assign legal names, but because of the abuse of process and the stipulations in the original act.

Will be interesting to see how that goes.
I don't find anything the BGN did in violation of the codified public law that created it.
I also don't find that they violated their own bylaws, since- amazingly- one of their bylaws say that names that come from Congress or the President shall take precedence over any other bylaws.

In any case, this is all a bit ridiculous. No one serious considers the name change valid and it is going to be changed back after the next President is elected or possibly even after the midterms if control of Congress shifts and an update to that 1947 law happens. Probably not though, since there's a lot more important stuff to take care of.

We agree entirely on this.

There is a point to this long-winded discussion though.

The problem with Trump, are the laws that don't constrain him.
We've been playing Unitary Executive ball for a long time, and now we're freaked the fuck out that some President is wielding that power in bad faith.
This needs to be a fucking wake-up call. There can be a bad President elected every 4 years. Congress has a duty to jealously guard its power. It has failed in that duty so dramatically that we can have a more-or-less legal dictator as the President, now.

Laws need to fucking change after this. Congress needs to take its fucking job seriously.

Comment Re: Reality (Score 1) 221

Read the board minutes you fucking toolshed.
President directed Secretary of Interior to direct board to make it happen.
Board was subservient, so board made it happen.

The board minutes are literally publicly available online, you dumb partisan shit-for-brains.

Comment Re:Sure! (Score 2) 79

I have a thing about commercial failures. Computers, games consoles, video formats... I wasn't intending to get any CED stuff, but I saw a couple of basically mint units being sold a "junk" in Japan.

The word "junk" in Japanese (as in jyanku, a loan word) means "untested, sold as seen, no warranty", but I find that in practice a lot of it is actually in perfect working order. Hard Off branches usually have a little test area with power, batteries, tapes and so forth where you can check out junk for yourself before buying. I plugged on in and it powered up okay, so decided to take a punt.

One day I hope that ld/vhs-decode will add support for the format. It's actually not all that interesting beyond the technical details and how cool the cartridge system is, because from what I've seen all the discs ever released were just Western movies (as in Hollywood or European, not cowboys).

I am actually much more active with Laserdisc and VHS, where I archive them by capturing the raw RF signal using a Domesday Duplicator. If you aren't familiar, someone wanted to preserve the old BBC Domesday system from back in the 80s, which used a proprietary Laserdisc format. To that end they built a special capture device that samples at 40MHz, to ingest the analogue RF signal direct off the laser pickup amplifier. Laserdiscs use PWM to generate an RF signal that is similar to analogue broadcast TV, but free from interference and with higher bandwidth.

VHS is similar, it's an RF signal, or even two RF signals if the tape has HiFi audio. The main difference being much lower bandwidth, resulting in a poorer image. That said, a couple of the tapes I've done, in particular a Japanese pro wrestling one, look amazing. Beyond anything I thought VHS could ever do. Some of the Laserdisc stuff looks practically HD in places.

Anyway, I've been preserving various discs and tapes with the Internet Archive, all Japanese stuff. Some of it is fascinating. There are some ones about various NASA missions from the Apollo and Shuttle eras, with dual original English and a dub into Japanese. They dubbed the radio comms, and the voice actors seem to have taken it pretty seriously. I've got some promo discs too, showing off the quality of Laserdisc, and often they are unintentionally hilarious. It was the 80s and 90s, so much of it is speed boats, flimsy excuses to put models in swimwear, creepy guys taking photos of them... Cultural artefacts that are preserved, hopefully forever now.

Comment Re:Nuclear reactors being approved (Score 1) 63

Sodium cooled reactors have been tried before, and they always catch fire. The sodium becomes radioactive because it is a weak neutron absorber, and when it is hot it is extremely volatile. It corrodes the pipework, and ignites upon contact with air. You can't use water to put the fire out, because water and sodium produces sodium hydroxide and hydrogen, and the hydrogen also catches fire.

All that gets worse as you scale the design up. Containment buildings are one of the major costs of build a reactor, especially post-Fukushima where it turned out that the ones they did build were not adequate to contain the hydrogen explosions or melting down reactors. Naturally, those costs increase dramatically when the coolant itself is highly flammable and liable to produce explosions.

Comment Re:80% Agreement (Score 1) 63

There are a lot of people who live in places that are unsuitable for nuclear power too, either for geographic or for political reasons. And of course there is the cost. Places that don't get much sun often have decent wind resources.

I have a feeling that China will end up abandoning or mothballing a lot of the ones it has planned or under construction. That's what happened with a lot of the coal plants they built, because renewables displaced them before they even came online.

Of course they need some nuclear plants to produce medical isotopes and weapons, but cost will always be the driving factor for consumer demand.

Comment Re:This is good (Score 2) 63

Japan had one too, which also caught fire. The Soviets built one, and it caught fire at least 14 times.

The problem with sodium as a coolant is that if it comes into contact with air, it ignites. If it comes into contact with water, it produces hydrogen, and then ignites. It becomes radioactive too, although the half life is 15 hours, but still enough to make fighting the inevitable fire a much more difficult and dangerous process.

Comment Re:Then M$ did the dirty on Nvidia (Score 1) 24

It was a flaw that affected a lot of laptops as well, including pretty much every HP manufactured for a few years. The GPU got so hot that the repeated heating and cooling cycles eventually caused the motherboard and/or chip to flex, and the BGA interface to fail. A temporary fix was to apply some pressure to the chip when it was cold, or more permanently you could reball it.

Comment Re:Then M$ did the dirty on Nvidia (Score 1) 24

Microsoft got shafted by Nvidia. The high failure rate of the Xbox 360 was mostly Nvidia's fault.

The PS2 was the best selling console for a long time. The Xbox didn't gain much traction in Japan, so as well as missing out on that market, if you like Japanese games it's not a great platform.

Comment Re:That's not AI failure! (Score 1) 132

It's how the cops use every new bit of tech. When DNA came in, they were arresting people on very flimsy DNA evidence that later turned out to either be flawed or easily and obviously explained away.

Happened when IP addresses became their new toy. Still happens with fingerprints, which, despite what CSI may tell you, rarely present an exact match.

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