OK. How are these two different?

Obama: We need Obamacare so that more people will have better health insurance for less money.
(health insurance costs skyrocket that lots of people, including many who gained coverage under Obamacare, cannot afford to actually use their insurance)
Obamacare critics: See!?!? We told you so!
Obama: It would have been far worse without Obamacare.
(Obama goes on to reelection in 2012)

Trump: We need tax cuts to boost the economy.
(economy improves for some but not all)
Trump critics: See?!?!? We told you so!
Trump: It would have been far worse without the tax cuts.
(Trump goes on to reelection in 2020??)

You see, Trump is actually playing out almost the same playbook as Obama. The thing is that he is using the same tactics to promote policies that are the polar opposite of what Obama pushed. That may be why the media and so many liberals are so utterly incapable of seeing it. They are so blinded by their personal hatred of Trump (face it they have no objectivity when it comes to Trump) that they cannot see what he is doing.

All of that to say that Trump's supporters are as fanatical about supporting him as Obama's supporters were about him (Obama). I honestly thought that Obama had overplayed his hand in his first term (Obamacare was just the start) and would not get re-elected. I was wrong. I think Trump is on track for about the same level of overplaying his hand as Obama. If not for Obama being re-elected in 2012 I would have said that Trump does not stand a chance in 2020. Having seen how Obama was able to get re-elected, I would put Trump at even odds in 2020.

First, what they did actually complies with Subsection (1)(b)(ii)(A). We may not like their approach, but it does comply with the law. Go read the law, it is a rather sparse 5 pages.

Second, the proximity to the anniversary of the NN deregulation is both specious and disingenuous. If you know anything about how corporations work you know that legal compliance is an exercise in minimization. The CenturyLink corporate counsel (probably more than one) had to weigh in on this and conclude that this was done in a way that both met the requirements of the law and also did not expose the company to additional liability. It probably had to clear multiple similar hurdles.

So, just like I do when a programmer implements a spec and I look at the product and say, "wow that was wrong," my first thought is always, "the spec must be defective." Granted, there are times where the programmer just makes the wrong choice, but more often than not, the spec really is deficient. If it was a whole team of programmers that produced the wrong thing then the only sensible conclusion is that the spec was faulty.

In this case, the army of lawyers came to a conclusion on a course of action that is making people say, "wow, that cannot be right.". Based on my earlier reasoning, the law is poorly written.

Every time I read something like this I have to imagine it was written by someone who works for or owns stock in one of those companies that produces "compliance" tools/services targeted at businesses that use open source.

I mean, come on. This exact same problem exists for closed source software. Face it, you know about as much about the developers of any random closed source application or library as you do about any random open source application or library. In fact, it is less likely that a malicious change will be discovered if you do not have access to the source code.

I agree. When I was younger I spent lots of time outdoors. Preserving the natural beauty of the world should be something humanity strives to do.

I think what was happened is that we have reached the "tipping point" where clean energy is actually competitive in the marketplace. Interestingly, all the various governments around the world that have pushed for clean energy production have varying economic and regulatory philosophies (as evidenced by the various approaches to regulation of dirty power and economic incentives/penalties for varies participants in the energy market), but the end result has been the same: for the longest time it just looked like a money pit, and now we start to see some large scale benefit.

I think that a solution based on market forces (i.e, people doing what benefits them economically) will always be stronger, healthier, and more effective than one based on regulatory forces. Granted, sometimes regulatory forces are required (e.g., to maintain clean air and water in the era of industrial production and dirty power), but those are never as good as market forces because regulations mean people do what they are required to do (and people will try to find ways to avoid meeting the requirements) while market forces mean people act in their own best interests.

It would only be a problem if they let the customer incur the obligation and then refuse the legal tender.

If the merchant makes incurring the obligation contingent on the form of payment, then I suspect the merchant is legally in the clear. It is no different than a sign on the cash register that reads, "no bills over $20."

I wonder how they will write the law. For example, if it is not written in a clear and precise way, I could have a coffee shop with a sign on the door: "cash transactions require exact change." I am in compliance with the law (I technically accept cash), but I suspect that it would have a discriminatory effect. That would be because the people who pay cash will be those who do not care about how much they spend and can hand over $10 for an $8.91 transaction and not care about getting the change back.

Another aspect would be that the law might make it illegal to refuse certain denominations of bills, as I already mentioned is common practice. That might make merchants more attractive targets for petty thieves (you have to keep more cash on hand in order to make change for larger bills) and also more attractive targets for counterfeiters (nobody bothers to counterfeit $5 bills, but $100 bills are a different story).

I do not think that this politician can get where he wants without a good deal of collateral damage.

I don't know about the health benefits, but fighting the after lunch drag is definitely easier while standing. Also, there are times when when I am doing more thinking than typing and I find I can be more productive in a standing posture. Sometimes reading is easier while standing. The main thing is it enables to me to pace, walk to the whiteboard, go back to the desk, and immediately type stuff without having to sit first. It really is a productivity enhancer. A-plus, would recommend.

Not just modern companies. In a graduate software engineering class I took (mumble mumble) years ago we had a rather vigorous discussion about people versus process. That is, if you have a sufficiently sophisticated and well implemented process, do the people matter that much? And the reverse, if you have sufficiently excellent people, does the process matter that much?

Big companies seem to tilt heavily toward the process side, while small companies and especially start ups seem to tilt heavily toward the people side. Interestingly, start up that get big enough eventually succumb to the sirens of process over people.

Sadly, none of this is new, nor does it show any real signs of changing.

This happens all the time with human-created art, especially experimental, avant-garde, and other artistic expressions that are "ahead of their time." Seems to me like the debate is a solid indicator that it actually is art.

I am a qualified test engineer. Let me help Netflix with the test plan.

Objective: determine if customers are able to achieve the same level of enjoyment while paying less.

Procedure: 1. Lower prices.

Conclusion: Yes, they can.

If you have to test for this, then I have some bad news for you...

When I teach my students about the MVC paradigm I describe the model component this way:

For example, a maintenance work scheduling application for a school probably needs to know how many display screens are in a classroom, and maybe their positions. Suppose that the decision was made that it does not need to know the make, model and version of the multimedia control panel at the instructor workstation.

Now, if somebody came along and tried to make maintenance purchasing decisions to replace the multimedia control panel based on just the number of display screens in the classroom, they might find the decisions to be faulty because of the lack of information. That does not mean that the lecture hall defied the model. It just means that when the model was developed, the important aspects of the reality being modeled were not considered properly and some were left out. In this example, somebody would need to walk to the classroom and look at the actual control panel to be replaced and gather information on that.

It could be that perhaps the researches described in the article need more detailed models to accurately describe the behaviors they are interested in for these systems.

I would have to agree with this. Things like quarterly "CPU" releases (critical patch update) that mix security fixes with "feature updates" (and those being the only way to obtain security fixes, not annotating CVE IDs in the commit messages of related commits, and forbidding Oracle personnel from helping outside project personnel identify specific commits associated with specific security vulnerability fixes (very useful for backporting purposes) makes for Oracle having a well earned reputation for being obnoxious to the open source community in general.

That is, unless they only have, say, 1 TB and 2 TB drives and maybe two or three physical memory configurations and they can factory disable the "extra" that the customer didn't pay for.

If Apple did that, if could actually be cheaper than managing the large number of variations and still allow them to maximize profits by price discrimination.

As I understand it, HP or IBM did something similar with their servers ages ago (maybe they still do), where you paid for additional CPU, memory, or whatever, and what you paid for was a code that granted you access to the extra capacity because the machine shipped with it from the factory in a disabled state.

Good point. I did not even try to find those figures and just found data to support my position. After reading your reply, I took a look at the population density map on the Demographics of New Zealand Wikipedia article. It is difficult to tell just going by that, but it sure seems like there are far fewer high concentration urban areas in New Zealand than most places in the US. It does say that 86% of the population lives in those urban areas and the remaining 14% in rural areas, which appear to be less dense than the typical rural area in the US. I would expect that it would be fairly difficult to connect those people.

That said, even though the two situations look more comparable than I initially considered (at least from a population density and dispersion perspective), the matter of scale is huge (no pun intended). The solution is not immediately apparent to me.

Of course, while Internet infrastructure gets more expensive as the population spreads out, other things are the reverse. For instance, produce and other fresh grocery items (e.g., milk, OJ, etc.) are more expensive in NYC than they are in, say, Lake Charles, Louisiana. I guess on thing that I never realized is that the market economy tends to favor those things with a cost gradient toward higher population density (higher density is also an indicator of higher overall incomes) than those things with a cost gradient in the other direction.

What you say is a non sequitur. For example, the least densely populated county in Rhode Island (385.67/sq mi) is more densely populated the most densely populated counties in Nevada (382.09/sq mi), Idaho, Mississippi, Maine, Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming (34.15/sq mi). All the stats are here.

That indicates that while the average US population density is twice that of NZ, the imbalance (i.e., density of densely populated areas compared to density of sparsely populated areas) is far greater in the US. I think the grand-parent post had it right. It is far more difficult to solve the rural access problem in the US than in NZ. Of course, I'll bet that in comparison Russia's problem are quite a bit worse than the US's problems in this regard.

And if we could get the major car companies to stockpile their cars in great big warehouses to constrict supply and keep prices high, like DeBeers does with most of the diamonds pulled from the earth, we might be a great deal better off.