March_f6

A start would be moving the NSA head office out of some rather depressing forest in Maryland and perhaps to say Venice Beach? :)

I think you misunderstood my comment William. 1876 was a time when the Republican party generally wanted a large federal government (as opposed to a smaller government favored by Democrats) and you can look at the policies they supported during this time to verify this. It's not controversial, it's historical.

To add a little context, this was during a time when the Republican party supported policies that today we typically expect the Democratic party to support and vice versa.

When you consider how much human and financial capital is put into it, yes. Doubly so when you add to that how much human and financial capital is put into dodging it.

I'm not sure exactly about the visual linking part but Zim has always worked for me. But I might be misunderstanding what you're looking for too.

I think I can understand a kernel of what is being suggested here and I think its based on the idea of proportion. Silicon Valley represents the largest aggregations of human and financial capital ever seen, but for all of that investment and energy how much do we have to show aside from a video chat app and e-commerce? I'm not arguing for or against but just trying to understand some part of the sentiment in the context of a crisis.

As someone who just finished their undergrad in CS I can say that the majority of the people I know who dropped did so because of the workload and the nature of it. Coding up a robust LZW compression algo or a small version of BASH in a week and a half on top of other classes can make for a stressful time. But every school is different of course.

No one should be surprised by this, especially not enough to claim it as "fake news". Its entirely consistent with the administration's approach to the role of government. Unfortunately it took a crisis like this to make clear a good reason why we need large government for some things.

Thanks Jedd, this is all super enlightening!

That's one take, sure. But the original point I was making was what if southern farmers had failed to make a large profit off of slave labor in the first place (with the help of the cotton gin), then maybe they wouldn't have been so attached to the idea of slavery to begin with and the civil war would have been radically different or entirely averted.

Deciding if you're a part of the problem or part of the solution can be done without thinking about blame in any sort of absolute terms. Also, the steam engine and cotton gin are two completely different inventions.

Predicting outcomes is one thing. Putting the two questions: "Should I do something?" and "Can I do something?" on equal footing is another. Maybe don't conflate wishful thinking and foresight. And as far as the statement of a fact being constructive or nonconstructive, maybe don't conflate those things either.

Interesting to be down-voted for this comment.

An excellent case study of what can happen when an engineer's ethical framework amounts to: "does it work?", given the cotton gin's impact on slavery. To think, if only it was invented after the civil war.

Took a tour of one of the big ones there recently. It was quite strange with respect to the content of the library (pretty much the only place you are allowed to go if not on a guided tour) and the inordinate amount of Ben Franklin ephemera.

I mean, sure. But at a certain point, LISP was Javascript in terms of bleeding edge no? As someone who has built multiple things using React Native I can absolutely relate to the churn, but each time I willfully wade into it and each time I get better at handling all the pains that come along. I also can't think of a better way to improve debugging skills than to use a tech stack that gives rise to issues not easily solved via StackOverflow.

Half way through reading this now actually and can't recommend it enough.

I lived in NYC from 2009 to 2017 and can affirm the author's feeling. Over the span of those years, and mostly as of late, I saw many of my favorite brick and mortars (Rare books, sporting goods shops, record stores, etc.) all be replaced by coffee shops or juice places.

Granted each of the above mentioned places have challenges with their respective industry but the feeling still stands.

Having been born in North Texas, I can also affirm the changing topography of America due to traditional brick and mortars being ousted. My hometown was once called the "Little Austin". It's now overrun with mini-mall strips that hold duplicates of things set up on the other side of town. (How many mattress stores and Sonics does a town of 100,000 need?)

The recent bankruptcy of Sears is another example where we will likely see large buildings across the country left empty and whose re-purposing will be contingent on state/city zoning laws (Texas doesn't have any) and rent. That is, why should I pay to reuse Sears's old building when the state/city will let me build a brand new building right down the highway?

1.) How does the market (in the most basic sense) make any meaningful distinction between "owning" a rack of DVDs and "owning" a Netflix subscription? Both are transactions where resources are being traded for "goods".

2.)The idea of spending more resources on experiences rather than goods has become more pervasive over the years so the trend of people owning less stuff would make sense.

3.)This is a little more in the weeds but it's funny to think about how a society's definition of wealth changes over time and how that might affect consumer behavior.

This kind of thing goes back to '91 at least with Feist v. Rural when Feist copied telephone entries from Rural's directory which included some fakes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Am pretty curious what kind of "skeleton key" ATM card they were using to access all of the ATM's as different users. Lest they were posed as repair people and stood there with a laptop hooked in.

Third-party doctrine has been on borrowed time since at least Jones with Sotomayor's concurrence. Carpenter paves the way for moving the legal understanding of privacy beyond narrow property talk and the ill-suited third-party doctrine.

This is a nice article that highlights some of the more important case law regarding privacy while traveling in your car. But I think it's important to make clear that the Supreme Court has ruled that individuals do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements, car or otherwise (U.S. v Knotts). While most agree that the infallibility and general capability of GPS does create a new technological perception of privacy in public spaces, and that an individual does not shirk all expectations of privacy once they are in a vehicle, one argument is that the technology does not make something that was previously public now private. Carpenter v. U.S. is a landmark case right now that will be decided this summer and is distinct from Jones in that there was no common law trespass to help the court answer the question about tracking via GPS or cell phone records.

Unfortunately, the relevance of the Fourth Amendment to informational privacy within cyberspace has been significantly diminished due to piecemeal legislation that has not been internally consistent and a fundamental misinterpreting of what constitutes private information. As it stands, informational privacy in the U.S. is severely lacking in constitutional protections. States do attempt to fill these holes with statutes but even then their conceptual frameworks are based on an understanding of privacy that isn't directly applicable to the digital world.