1) The University of Hawaii owns outright the 19 acre Haleakala Observatory land. So, unlike the lease of state land it holds for the 12000 acre Mauna Kea observatory reserve, it doesn't have to put up with as much crap from the rest of the state government, never mind Hawaiian sovereignty activists.

2) The term is "Ceded Lands", in that land formally held by the Hawaiian sovereign was ceded first to the Republic, then Territory, and finally State of Hawaii to be held in trust for the people of Hawaii.

The University *did* ask permission from the state government, and got it. Various ethnic Hawaiian groups want the summit of Mauna Kea completely cleared of telescopes, and will continue to hassle the governor, legislature, and state court about it until they achieve their goal. My gut feeling is that the various elected officials and judges don't give a rat's okole about the activists, but since the anti-telescope activists are constituents like any other resident, they are obligated to at least let the fight play out in the court of public opinion.

Yeah, it's stupid, it's lazy writing, and just just Reagan noting that Brownsville, TX is closer to Managua than D.C. A cute factoid in a trivia quiz, otherwise so what? And, the editors will never beotch-slap it out of the writers, as long as it seems to draw eyeballs.

This act, or one very much like it, will sooner or later pass. Frankly, given existing law, it hardly matters. If you want to consume or publish existing material whether original or modified, merged, reexamined, or what have you without giving a cut to rent-seekers, you're just going to have to go old skool, like Soviet-bloc "reactionaries" used to.

Naturally, it's a bit harder if you're putting a MAC, IP, or URL out there... so I guess there's a future in physical media after all, and non-pr0n uses for the dark web.

Obama won, twice. Get over it.

It's a bit of a meme among progressives and the harder left in the US that bullshit jobs were an invention by the capital owning class to tamp down what might otherwise develop into a tipping point of popular pressure to take ownership of the means of production away from them.

But, this gives the Captains of Industry more credit than they're due, because creating jobs is a PITA, and with actual revolutions too far in the past for them to have even heard stories of over cocktails, never mind experienced, I doubt they think there's any practical limit to how much they can screw the rabble (ie. you).

In fact, increased productivity of existing work merely makes nice-to-have stuff enterprises and people couldn't economically justify before affordable. Stuff you didn't even give a second thought about become a handy way to put some surplus coin to use, finally spiraling down to the point where mobile dog groomers, large HR departments, and conservative think tanks are a thing. That's where the bullshit work comes in.

We've been through rapid economic changes before, and the past may well provide a guide to the future. But, which past? The one where farmers became steel and automobile workers? Or the one where steel and automobile workers became Walmart greeters? And not so fast you programmers, escrow agents, insurance brokers, and day traders. When you get automated out of your current job within a matter of a couple of years, or months, then what? Exactly what sort of bullshit work are you , you Ayn Rand-worshipping, it-won't-happen-to-me, automation fodder, going to do, eh? Learn to use a dog brush?

At the smaller/individual development shop level, the idea that blowing off reacting to all but the most literal of copies of your work makes sense, and it's been a part of the lives of fashion designers since the beginning of time.

This is likely the primary driver for why fashion and fabrics change so fast, because fashion can't be copyrighted, and a successful design will attract knockoffs before a year is out.

My suspicion, based on the hassles s/w shops large and small have dealing with patent search and lawsuits, is that for the industry and its customers, fashion has it right . It sucks to have popular ideas ripped off, but it sucks even more for just about everyone to be prevented from exploiting ideas at all because of well heeled rent collectors.

To add a historical reference for a couple of software dev tools I thought were cool in the early '90s:

Mainstay Software released VIP Basic and C (Visual Interactive Programming) for the classic MacOS. You drew the flowcharts, they cranked out the source code. I have no idea what the quality of the code was, but for budding Mac devs, I'd guess it gave them a starting point.

Sometimes you're not paranoid, they really are fscking with you(r data). Slashdot, 12 Dec 2016, Scientists Scramble To Protect Research On Climate Change

Breaker, breaker, that'd be a big no on ditching the steering wheels, back up drivers, and reporting fack-ups, good buddy, over.

Fact is, autonomous driving systems aren't yet up to snuff to go the full monty. Until they prove out, they need a human with some skin in the game, and who's aware s/he's playing. And the state can't be sure how close to the tipping point we are without reporting.

On the flip side, I agree that allowing higher gross vehicle weights should be allowed, the better to test freight hauling.

A few comments make the claim that this suit will get thrown out, based on the idea that 1) the Indian outsource firms just happen to have younger workers, and 2) that these workers just happen to be Indian nationals with a number of India-sourced ethnicities.

That would be an interesting dodge, except for one wee obstacle: US labor law doesn't believe in coincidences. Rather, it focuses on disparate impact, and the plaintiffs have that in spades.

Then there are the 800 gorillas of social giving: Social Security ($845B) and Medicare and Medicaid ($831B).

Compared to charitable support for domestic poverty relief, Federal programs are large and strongly counter-cyclical â" growing as the economy weakens. Unemployment assistance climbed from $33 billion in 2007 to $158 billion in 2010, before declining back to $68 billion in 2013. Food and nutrition assistance rose from $54 billion in 2007 to $110 billion in 2013, the Earned Income Tax Credit from $38 billion to $58 billion in 2013. These three programs alone total $236 billion, compared to $40 billion of private charitable giving to human services. While charitable support was at best stagnant during the recession, government safety net spending on these three programs increased 89% between 2007 and 2013.

Per TFA: "... arguing that the disclosure of the scale of surveillance by US and British intelligence agencies was not only morally right but had left citizens better off.

Based on what Ed has released thus far, the onus is on him to show that he didn't scoop up everything his could lay his file system on, and intends to make all of it public. On the face of it, he was no more focused on domestic intel gathering than Chelsea Manning, and not much more emotionally mature. What is his rationale for highlighting foreign intelligence gathering?

It doesn't matter, because there is no rationale that keeps him out of pound-me-in-the-arse prison. He needs to remain an example of how emotional immaturity and naivete is rewarded in his line of work.

As a part of a comparative languages class in my comp sci program in the '80's, I look ExperTelligence's ExperLogo for a spin on the Mac. I ended up having to drive up to their offices in Goleta, CA to pick up a copy. I liked the syntax, and using what I suppose was a JIT compiler, it was reasonably quick. But, there was no way to create standalone binaries, ExperTelligence didn't stick with it for long, and Logo as a whole didn't get a shot at going beyond a classroom tool.

Kudos to Dr. Papert and Mr. Feurzeig for their contributions to comp sci and education.

I'd think the more "DOS-like" way to multitask would be to launch DESQView from FreeDOS and spawn processes from that. While DESQView can be freely downloaded and passed around, I don't believe Symantec has ever released the source to this bit of Quarterdesk flotsam. Bummer.

Why more "DOS-like"? DESQView sucks up 150KB, plus 30KB per task. IIRC, about the minimum Linux memory overhead from among the low footprint Linux distros is about 7MB, although perhaps one can do better with Linux From Scratch. But then who's got less than 7MB nowadays? ;-)