> But what about domestic terrorism, or important exceptions? No problem! Get a warrant.
I've heard about accounts of police investigations being aided with access to the mass surveillance data (through the FBI, I believe). It never goes to a FISA court, and the police use the information to develop a pretext for a warrant.
So even with a warrant, the power may still be unchecked. I believe it reasonable to conclude that conducting mass surveillance can't reliably done without abridging constitutional rights. I guess that leads us back to the unresolved conversation from early in this century about the trade-offs between liberty, privacy, and security.
The practice of obtaining warrants with artificial but believable evidentiary basis to conceal the illicit means by which the basis was actually obtained is called "parallel construction", and the intentional practice or facilitation of it should be a felony with a maximum penalty of imprisonment of up to 50 years (2.5x evidence tampering, and I'd be fine with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years). It is a heinous perversion of the public trust, knowingly undertaken by unchecked law enforcement personnel to wilfully conceal unconstitutional acts. Parallel construction is a stain upon the very fabric of our nation... Or, you know, business as usual.
>> The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC eliminated the policy in 1987 and removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.
And for good reason. It doesn't make sense to mandate equal time for mainstream and fringe positions, rational proposals and ones riddled with contradictions. Either some government censor is responsible for deciding which positions are "serious" enough to warrant equal time or the media eventually gets overwhelmed with nonsense and conspiracy theories. If you want to see where the "fairness doctrine" leads, just have a look at some of the less discriminating social media sites.
Evidence suggests that the fairness doctrine worked really well until we ended it. Until it’s elimination mass media news in the US was pretty middle of the road.
Seems to me around the time that it was ended there were several other things going on.
The advent of cable news networks which gave a massive incentive to sensationalism and strong partisan ties as multiple players joined the space with a need to create a sustainable viewership.
Satellite feeds became common ensuring a single message instead of having a layer of abstraction in the form of a local or regional newscaster; instead of relaying facts, they can relay a highly opinionated version.
Local and independent news stations were being purchased and consolidated into national telecom companies with their own partisan editorial bends, a la Nexstar and Sinclair.
I have to believe that all of the above had a much greater influence on news discourse in the past few decades than the elimination of the fairness doctrine. Furthermore, if you give government the power to regulate anything; always expect the current party in power to use that regulation as a weapon. Can you imagine what our leaders would do given even more power to control and manipulate the media narrative? Ending this was a good decision.
I feel there should be some laws for when someone calls themselves news or journalism. So no monopoly for news, but when does call themselves this, there should be some ethical and truth finding considerations attached.
>there should be some ethical and truth finding considerations attached.
But who decides what's true? And why should we let them? Majority consensus is an easy answer, but we'd need something else if we were to regulate truth at a level we could enforce on journalists.
I'm personally more worried about that question spiraling out of control than I am about offering equal air time.
Truth might not be the best word, but the intention is about factual and empirical observations. So news/journalism is X happened at Y, backed up with as much sources as the journalist can muster.
A much better reason to get rid of equal time policies is because on the Internet, spectrum is effectively unlimited.
On TV or radio, you can only have so many stations. But with the internet, people can make a new web site and publish there, they're not limited by the available spectrum. Therefore, the kind of regulation that was needed in a constrained environment (broadcasted TV/Radio), does not really make sense when those constraints are lifted.
Each animal can be said to posses a survival strategy; ours resides not in talons, or rapid flight, or keen perception, or camouflage, but in cooperation. Even the hierarchical structure of our social organization aids in this.
It is a humble observation, even if it was difficult for me to appreciate for such a long time.
I think it is an ambiguous category. At least to native (American) English speakers and heathens like me. The only evidence I can offer of this is that in my language culture, I routinely hear "spicy hot", and often enough when one should simply say "spicy", anticipate the question "spicy hot"?
That qualifies as a circumlocution to me. BTW, I didn't think you Greeks learned Latin since all the classy Romans wanted to speak Greek ;-)
Ah, that's a good point. I'm sure I've heard that question often- "spichy hot?". Kind of like "funny weird or funny ha-ha?".
>> That qualifies as a circumlocution to me. BTW, I didn't think you Greeks learned Latin since all the classy Romans wanted to speak Greek ;-)
Oh, actually I learned some Latin in high school, most of which is now forgotten. But, I was surprised by that turn of phrase myself: I was trying to translate from the Greek in my head to English and suddendly a bit of Latin fell out :)
Edit: Also, to be fair, I love surprising my native English speaker interlocutors with weird little bits of English they never use and which I know because I first learned English not as my everyday language, but from books and textbooks. It helps that some of those weird bits are well, Greek. e.g. I surprised my thesis advisor the other day when I used the Greek plural of "lemma", "lemmata" which turns out to be perfectly correct English, although it's not often used. My advisor suggested I refrain from using such obscure words in papers since most reviewers would probably be confused by them and be annoyed at me- and you don't want to piss off reviewers!
Interestingly, there is a lot of good advice on this in various writings on learning to read Latin fluently. Word order is very free due to the language's inflected nature, and of course, vocabulary requires constant attention.
The most highly regarded advice to breaking through into fluency is to break the habit of re-reading just as you get into trouble, or breaking off to look up a word. Instead, push through to the end of the sentence, holding as much of it in your head as possible, and being ready to re-interpret any chunks (phrases or clauses) that might admit of more than one interpretation. When you've reached the end of the sentence, consider what you think was meant by it. Only then, go back and re-read the sentence. In some cases, it may be necessary to read more than a single sentence together.
At any rate, I think a lot of people agree with your observation.
I don't think there's a chain of valid reasoning that can start with a few very exceptional people (that is to say these people are an exception, whether it be by talent, effort, or luck) and end with any conclusions about what is normative for the burned-out developer.
Given that the story said they rejected a deal in which the city would pay $462,123 plus interest for Comcast to come in, then I'd say the "common folk" would be paying for it in either case.
It's just in one case, the money is ceded to a private corporation.
For some reason I've found that vacpots are easier to clean up than a press-pot, but they really complement each other: some coffees go to the press-pot, some are better with the vacpot.
Boost? I'm sure there's good reason for the -- sui generis -- build system. Always been too underwater to spend much time wondering about why that's a yak I'm shaving.
Or, new languages and language features just steal and adapt from Common Lisp (it's okay, that was just a joke, geeze). I never felt the availability of nearly any programming paradigm ever marred my experience in working in Lisp or made the language any less coherent.
If a fad is just a rediscovery (renewed interest in) some programming paradigm, they will all be familiar to you when they come back around. Hopefully your language incorporates it gracefully. I'm a little circumspect about how Java's lambdas turned out, but I'm not certain it could have actually been otherwise.
So, I don't think it is the inclusion of multiple programming paradigms in your language that is troubling, but rather how it incorporates them. One of the first pieces of advice (and very good advice) in Effective C++ is something to the effect of a) acknowledge that C++ is really a federation of smaller languages, and b) at the outset of a project, explicitly decide which parts the project will use, and which parts it won't.
Lisp is arguably too abstract for rank-and-file use. For more on this hypothesis, search below (Ctrl F) for "Domain-specific languages tend to herd people into certain styles and idioms, making cross-staff reading easier, even if it's more typing. Standardization often trumps linguistic parsimony in real-world work."
Domain specific languages are everywhere. If you ever worked in the Java Enterprise Domain: just see the zillions of XML or other configuration languages. Take any 1MLOC Java project and it will have all kinds of languages and extensions.
From my personal view, very descriptive Lisp programs are actually quite easy to read - but they can be harder to maintain: there is this meta-level.
Lisp has a bunch of 'problems':
1) it has this meta-level where code is data and where programs transform code. This adds added complexity and increases the distance of the executing code from the written code. The machine is possibly transforming a statement before executing it, then the new code will be executed and can also be possibly transformed.
2) the code as data feature adds a layer of confusion: what is code and what is data exactly when?
3) the amount for programmer freedom makes it possible to write extremely hard to understand code. Especially the code might only be understandable while it is running (because then introspection and reflection can be used).
4) much of Lisp was developed at a time when more people knew how to use it. A lot of that practical knowledge is lost and thus it's difficult to educate new programmers. In the 'open source'/'free software' domain SBCL
OTOH, the fear of application/domain specific constructs is overblown. Sometimes groups report that Lisp code for large applications is much smaller and more readable than the equivalent, say, C++. If the code is full of low-level operators, repeating code, etc., then often the usual answers are configuration systems, extensive meta-architecture, added languages, an added scripting level, code generators, lots of manual labor, user-interface-level automation tools, ... this is no better or even worse than Lisp-level code generation/transformation.
> But what about domestic terrorism, or important exceptions? No problem! Get a warrant.
I've heard about accounts of police investigations being aided with access to the mass surveillance data (through the FBI, I believe). It never goes to a FISA court, and the police use the information to develop a pretext for a warrant.
So even with a warrant, the power may still be unchecked. I believe it reasonable to conclude that conducting mass surveillance can't reliably done without abridging constitutional rights. I guess that leads us back to the unresolved conversation from early in this century about the trade-offs between liberty, privacy, and security.