The poster is a troll, and I completely disagree with the framing that Thomas is some devout defender of the Constitution, but there is actually a point here. The point was highlighted by Justice Sotomayor in the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter.

The TL;DR is that we've been pretty egregiously violating the Constitution's separation of powers for a century, and everyone has just quietly agreed to look away. We've been looking away for very good reasons, and what we really *ought* to do is amend the Constitution, because this is an area where the Constitution's 18th-century design does not work for the 20th (or 21st) century reality.

The longer explanation:

The Constitution sets up a strict separation of powers. Only the legislature can make laws. Only the executive has the wherewithal to enforce the laws. Only the judiciary can interpret the laws, and their constitutionality. Each serves as a check on the others. The president can veto legislation. The legislature can refuse to fund the executive's initiatives. The judiciary can invalidate laws and issue orders to the executive... but the judges have to be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. It's solid partitioning of power, designed to prevent the monarchical abuses the founders were familiar with, abuses that occur when one man (or woman, or small group) has the power to make the laws, enforce the laws and interpret the laws.

Very nice. But it doesn't work in the modern world.

The reason is that the US is much, much bigger and the world is vastly more complicated than it was in the 18th century. Regulations need to have a level of detail and sophistication that just isn't feasible for generalist legislators, and we don't want to leave the drafting of regulations to lobbyists. What we need is government experts in focused areas (fisheries, energy, mineral policy, telecommunications, etc.) whose full-time job is understanding the minutiae. Then lawmakers can write laws providing broad guidelines for the experts, who study the issues, write the regulations, subject them to rounds of public review and then enact them.

On the judicial side, the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, remain the final line for adjudication, but they're designed to grind very finely, which means they grind very slowly, and at great cost, especially since judges are also generalists so the litigants need to educate them on the detailed issues. To make enforcement of the detailed regulations practicable, we also need, effectively, specialist judges. The way we've handled that is by authorizing the same federal agencies who make the regulations to adjudicate their application.

Oops. Does this sound like we've lumped lawmaking, law enforcement and adjudication all together inside the federal agencies (in the executive branch), in clear violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, directly defeating the founders' work in dividing them up, re-enabling tyranny?

The letter, definitely. The spirit... not exactly. The other thing we did was to divide those powers up not by category (rulemaking, enforcement, judging) but by subject matter. So while each agency holds great power over its little fiefdom, that power is limited in the aggregate because the potential fisheries tyrant is completely separate from the potential telecoms tyrant. This limits the total power of each and prevents them from getting so big they can't be slapped down.

Unless it doesn't.

This scheme only works if those agencies are independent within the executive branch. And they cannot be independent if the president is free to fire anyone in the executive branch at will, which is what Slaughter is all about. If the president can fire anyone, then the whole of the executive is subject to his will, which means all of those subject-matter-isolated threads of power get gathered up into a single pair of hands.

And if that happens, we're back to monarchy. An elected monarch, perhaps. And possibly with a limited term, and with a few gross checks on power, slow and uncertain in application. But we have a single person with the power to control nearly all of the federal government's power to make, enforce and adjudicate the law, relegating the formal legislative and judicial bodies to backstop positions, generally unable to act fast enough to prevent tyrannical abuses.

So... what we ought to have done is to have amended the constitution to bake the independence of the executive branch agencies into the system. Or, we ought to have created parallel legislative and judicial sub-branches so that each area had its major functions isolated within the Constitutional framework.

This wouldn't have been difficult in the case of the judiciary, though we'd probably have had to create a different hiring process for the thousands of low-level adjudicators required -- going through presidential appointment and Senate confirmation for all of them would be impractical. But on the legislative side, we'd have needed a Constitutional amendment to enable the massive numerical expansion of the legislature necessary for all of the expert rulemaking roles, and those people would also need an entirely different hiring process. Voting on all of them would be impractical.

But fixing the problem correctly in either of those ways was hard, while just ignoring the issue was easy. And ignoring it worked fine for a while. We saw the first potential issues with Nixon, and ever since Nixon almost every succeeding occupant of the White House has chipped away at agency independence. Until Trump 2.0 when we have a president who has smashed a battering ram through all of the norms that maintained it, and is trying to get judicial blessing (the Slaughter case).

If you think the presidential immunity ruling was bad, that's nothing compared to what will be unleashed if SCOTUS finds fully in Trump's favor in Slaughter. We'll have a king with the power to (among many, many other things) unilaterally direct the imposition and enforcement of regulations that impose hundreds of millions of dollars in fines on telecoms companies. In this case, for what I think is a good reason. But whether it's a good reason won't matter if the president wants to do something for a bad reason, he'll have the power.

Particularly dangerous is the combination of:

1. The immunity ruling, plus
2. Absolute authority over the executive branch, plus
3. The unlimited pardon power.

The president can order anything at all done, federal employees will have to do it or be fired, and if it's a crime (a) the president is immune and (b) he can pardon everyone who does his dirty work.

I think the final backstop of impeachment and conviction by the legislative houses is likely to remain in that case as the only real limitation on presidential power. For the conservatives who think this is a good thing, they should think really hard about what a president AOC who decides to fully use the power of the Unitary Executive might do.

Fully-decentralized trust systems just don't work. PGP failed primarily for this reason, while SSL Certificate Authority system succeeded -- which shows that you don't need perfect centralization, a federation can do it, but the federation has to contain a sufficiently small set of authorities that it's practical for those who need to trust them to do so. The SSL analogy is useful in another way, too. Note that end-users don't know or care about CAs, they only have to trust their browser; the browser authors package the list of trusted root CAs, and they're moderately well-positioned to make those trust decisions on their users' behalf (the certificate transparency log is another layer, a global, fully-decentralized oversight mechanism -- but I don't see an obvious analogue for caller ID).

Applying this structure to caller ID trust, the most obvious points of control are the network operators first and phone makers second. Clearly the MNOs should be taking responsibility. They each know the accuracy of the IDs originating in their networks, and they are in a good position to validate the trustworthiness of IDs from outside their networks. Ideally, they should probably just refuse to forward an ID from a network that doesn't commit to anti-spoofing.

However, they're not doing that, and they're not going to do that, and we all know why: It's more profitable for them to permit spoofing.

One possible market-driven solution to this would be if some sufficiently-large networks decided that consumers cared enough about caller ID accuracy to make it a selling point for their services, committing to send only trustworthy IDs, either because they know the origin within their own network, or because the ID came from another operator who made the same pledge. My guess is that this would require renegotiation of interconnection agreements, but it could be done. More importantly, it would require users to care enough about caller ID spoofing to be willing to switch networks to get away from it. I don't know if that's in the cards.

So, what about the phone makers? They're in the next-best position... and Google by itself can put a big dent in caller ID spoofing globally. If Apple does the same thing between their devices, and then if they collaborate with Google (not an outlandish idea; Google and Apple often collaborate on technical standards), they could ensure that any call originating from a mobile phone provides accurate caller ID, and block the rest. And then they could also collaborate with the dumbphone makers and any new entrants to the smartphone market.

I think this is actually not a bad solution, and the market-driven motivations are clear. Phonemakers benefit from happy phone users and don't profit from phone spam.

Who knew that the 20th-century BBC would be so far ahead of its time?

Well, this tractor is made in Canada... so it'd be parliament that would pass that law.

But, if (as I assume) you are located in the United States - there's no guarantee you can even get a tractor like this.

Mouse-over your name to the upper right, select "Options", then under "Layout" uncheck "Icons" and save. No more Borg Gates, No more DEC logo. One less thing to get worked up about.

He can't hear you over all the WINNING!

Doctor Jesus, anyway...

Well, really that was corporate-speak for "... confirms that, if we don't respond, Apple's Neo is going to steal a huge chunk of our current customer base."

We recently bought our daughter a Neo. I've used it, and it seems pretty nice... but (compared to the various Mac laptops I've used/owned over the years) I found I got annoyed by the non-backlit keyboard more than I expected.

I would be curious to see whether one can easily load Linux Mint onto that Dell. It might make a really nice portable Linux laptop, if everything worked.

So then what is the point of Yoda being immensely old? Is he basically 63 in Yoda years?

It did. The authoritative upstream repository for the Linux kernel is hosted at kernel.org, not GitHub.

The "victory" is literally "pwning the libs." The thought process is, "Anything that denies them something that they want makes them weaker and us stronger." The base rallies and cheers, and meanwhile Trump and his cronies go back to extracting ungodly amounts of wealth from the entire world's resources.

Kinda unlikely. If you leave anything sitting under the ocean, it's going to experience significant wear and tear. If there's no budget even to monitor the status of the monitors, let alone conduct routine maintenance, they're likely to be as good as junk by the time they're switched back on.

Not to mention that the data is also used in industry, particularly in farming and fishing, where it is used to predict climate-related events. And this aren't just long-term events we're talking about. "Where are the fish likely to be this year" is a question this data can help answer.

What? I have one. It's hooked up (through an adapter) to the VoIP port on my fiber router. It rings and everything.