The Windrush situation is a bit different - the people involved were British Subjects, and didn't need any documentation when they arrived in the UK.
The only thing that changed was the introduction of the "hostile environment" policy in 2012, meaning that everyone (including full UK citizens) must now prove that they have permission to be in the country before getting a job, renting a home, getting a bank account, etc.
The Windrush generation always had that permission, and continued to have it - what they didn't have was the documentation to prove it. And, to make matters worse, the Home Office had disposed of their arrival records so in many cases it became all but impossible for them to get it.
(I know this is a minor quibble, but I think it's worth pointing out that the people affected shouldn't have needed to regularise their situation, because it was never irregular in the first place!)
> I think it's worth pointing out that the people affected shouldn't have needed to regularise their situation, because it was never irregular in the first place!
This is what I don't agree with and exactly why I mentioned Windrush as an example. The situation was irregular because while they were legally entitled to stay, they didn't have a simple way to prove it. And once they needed that, it became an issue.
Now I assume most of them regularised their situation and some didn't and since the state knew enough about them to try to deport them, it should have fixed their status in the first place by issuing them the needed documents. But it didn't! And that was my original point - the state neglected their situation for decades, let them adapt to changing legislative environment on their own (or not), only to swing the axe (wrongly) without warning. If they were issued a citizen ID long ago none of that could ever happen.
Net land area suitable for arable production may well remain roughly constant, but only over timescales much longer than a human lifespan due to the speed at which ecological succession operates.
For instance, when permafrost melts the land left behind is extremely uneven, covered in marshy hollows and collapsing pingos. Where soil exists, it is thin and biologically inert. Primary succession to the point where it is suitable for intensive arable production will take at least a millennium, even if there are no further changes to the climate.
Now, it's likely - human ingenuity being what it is - that we'd be able to use that new land for some form of agriculture well before that, perhaps even within a century or two. But if we do, it'll be through something like genetically-engineered moss and sedges, not intensively growing wheat and corn in northern Siberia!
You make it sound like NBC is some sort of obscure specialist service, but it turns out that they're actually a mainstream national broadcaster, available not just over the air but also on just about every satellite, cable, and streaming provider in the country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC
Not only that, but they're the official Olympic broadcaster in the USA! Around 22m watched it on their broadcast services, and a further 3m on streaming.
In reality, an overwhelming majority of Americans watching the opening ceremony were doing so via NBC.
NBC alone had over 20 million opening ceremony viewers this year (TV + Peacock streams)[0]. TV is a huge huge part of US culture. See also the Super Bowl, which just happened today.
This is making a remarkable assumption about a vast population. I know everybody in my family watched the opening ceremony on TV. Are you just making guesses?
Yes, that would be considered a criminal act in most or all US states. Depending on the exact facts of the case it could be prosecuted as fourth-degree assault (misdemeanor), or it could fall under other statutes covering food adulteration or delivery of prescription drugs. I am answering in general terms and have no knowledge of what happened with Gates. A police investigation seems unlikely because so much time has passed (possibly exceeding the statute of limitations) and it would be hard to find admissible evidence.
With a bunch of specific exceptions, violence is handled by the states, so it depends on the state in which it occurred. My best guess is that it's some kind of criminal offense in all 50.
Isn't use of the internet to facilitate crimes commonly cited as a reason for federal prosecution, on the grounds that all internet communications involve interstate commerce?
No, not that I am aware of. I'm not an expert on the topic, but it is my understanding that the majority of prosecuted crimes involving the Internet in the US are prosecuted in State courts, not Federal.
I wouldn't call myself an expert on this topic, but I think you're severely missing the point: virtually any case involving use of the internet can be federalized under the interstate commerce doctrine.
Everything can be federwlized under the interstate commerce doctrine. There was a case where a farmer grew his own plants (wheat, I think) to feed himself and his animals, in contravention of federal quotas. It was ruled the federal government has authority because growing wheat affects the wheat market, even if the wheat is never sold and never leaves the state.
Much like the SEC is the meta-regulator par excellence as humorously documented as 'everything is securities fraud' by Matt Levine, the Interstate Commerce clause is the hat from which all rabbits and powers of legislation of the Federal Government gets pulled from nowadays, for what does not touch upon interstate commerce in an economy such as ours?
They absolutely do, because packets regularly bounce across state boundaries even if I am just sending a message to my next door neighbor. For example, my phone service provider is headquartered in a different state, so using their network to send an SMS message automatically creates an interstate nexus. If a US attorney wants to take over a case for reasons of professional or political advancement the argument is trivially easy to make.
> Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything – and the federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
Since none of the rich and powerfull are being investigated or arrested for any of the things written in the EpStein files - please correct me if I'm ill-informed about this - it's really unlikely that would happen.
Yeah, people forget the degree to which sysvinit was hated at the time - "why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?!?".
If the intention is to create a system that users can reason about, then sysvinit offers the worst of all possible worlds.
> why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?
Run levels. That's it, sysvinit is about run levels. Each run level starts or kills off its own specific list of runnable things like applications, daemons, capabilities, etc.
Run levels were a desirable feature back in the day amongst System V Unix vendors, so each run level required its own kill and start scripts for each item. Run levels, for example, could take a running system from single user (root admin) mode to multi-user, multi-login, NFS sharing, full X11 mode in one command immediately as the scripts ran. This allowed rapid reconfiguration of a system, such as from a GIS workstation to a headless file server, etc. etc. as needed. Each system could be configured to boot to a specific run level. Rather than duplicate some or all such scripts across some or all run levels, symlinks were the solution.
For example, Solaris had run levels 0 through 6. Zero was a blunt force system halt; 1 was single root user admin mode; 2 was multi-user headless mode with NFS; 3 was multi-user X11 windows mode with NFS; 4 was unspecified and therefore kept for purely local configuration as desired; 5 was a planned, orderly system shutdown; and 6 was a planned, orderly system reboot. The root user could implement their choice of run level directly with the init command.
Each run level had its own run control directory (rc.d) under /etc/rc.d for its appropriate kill and start scripts, which were run in order of their K or S number, so dependencies had to be kept in mind when numbering, and curing a dependency failure was as simple as changing a script's number to rearrange the list. So, why copy S04blahblah from rc2.d to rc3.d when a symlink is far better?
Its not hard to understand when you get the big picture, and it wasn't hard to administer if you had the proper overview of it all. Admittedly, admins coming in cold would have to sort through it all, which is partly why it gained a reputation for murkiness when not properly documented by/for local admins. Keep in mind it was the era of administering sendmail macros and NIS tables by hand and you get the picture.
And that's... fine. They're still giving away their code, and anyone is free to step up and mke sure that it builds or that internal dependencies are replaced.
And it's a completely standard situation for non-corporate open source software, too. OpenSSH, for instance, has OpenBSD-specific dependencies and can only be run on Linux because of the porting efforts by a separate group of volunteers.
Sure, it'd be event better if they went out of their way to facilitate external participation, but they don't have to. Not even GNU does so for everything they publish!
tl;dr: There's a spectrum of FOSS varying from performative crap to usable.
You're conflating the differing treatment of projects where there is much investment and community usability like react, ones that are half-assed like edenfs, and the zillions of others that aren't even explained clearly what they do or what they're for.
> anyone is free to step up and mke [sic] sure that it builds
On thrown-over-the-wall projects, there's too many inside-baseball gotchas and little/no documentation. Effort by others are generally unrealistic and a waste of time that won't be merged since there are rules and limitations for community contributions. The vast majority of tiny and obscure projects, MAANG code is useless to average people working on average problems because the burden to make it work is as much or more than reinventing it themselves.
> or that internal dependencies are replaced.
This is hand-waving away reality. No average engineer for reasonable effort is going to be able to reproduce an undocumented API for unreleased kernel extensions/FUSE/etc. for Mac, Windows, and Linux to make edenfs work.
Another case in point: Hack. No documentation and no portable build instructions/toolchain.
React and react native are in a different class where there is meaningful community participation and investment. Whereas hack, edenfs, and chef cookbooks is/was mostly thrown-over-the-wall stuff. There are a few projects in the middle like watchman that update code using an opaque internal->external export process without a whole lot of documentation or clear changelogs, but it's still semi-useful.
The spirit of FOSS is cheapened by flooding the zone with too much stuff on the side of crap. It's better to release less stuff that's well-supported with meaningful community engagement rather than create noise. But if you're fine with a blizzard of noise that isn't useful to anyone else, that's cool for you. Everyone is free to do what they want to do, even if it's trying to make partially-released stuff work when it would've been faster to rewrite from scratch.
If Waymo didn't exist, we'd instead be lauding the progress of Wayve, Pony, and WeRide.
At this point, Tesla have the potential to be at best maybe #5 globally. No wonder they're so desperate to hide behind a tariff wall in their home market.
The people in this thread complaining about how grim and grey it is have clearly never ventured up the yellow staircase!
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