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That's a completely different question. You're doing pancakes/waffles.

Even if that were true, so what? ICE's violence and overreach are unacceptable and its culture is rotten to the core. The agency needs to be abolished. If there are functions they're performing that we actually need, move those functions elsewhere, but as an agency ICE is irredeemable.

They're talking about the period of time that followed reunification. Going from there to where Germany is today isn't inevitable.

Animations make me crazy. Computers used to respond at the speed of thought, and now we've deliberately slowed them down for no good reason. Just show me the thing!

I used to be able to whip through 3-4 keyboard shortcuts in a fraction of a second and the computer would keep up. This was on an 80 MHz machine, by the way. Now I have a supercomputer and I have to wait for a quarter-to-half-second zoom/pan/slide/whatever with nearly every single interaction. It's maddening.


In the US, photographing and recording police are first amendment-protected activities.

Likewise, the fourth amendement doesn't forbid a police officer from recording someone in public, because there's no expectation of privacy when out in public.

The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.

Well, that argument goes both ways. If the scale and automation don't make a difference, they don't make a difference.


Given that this is Canada, the first and fourth amendments don't come into the discussion.

Canada's rights are in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and they aren't absolute.

Part 1, Section 1.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

Subject to that, we get Section 2.

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:

(a) freedom of conscience and religion;

(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

(c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and

(d) freedom of association.


Section 1 is literally just "ignore everything below this section".

If they're not absolute, they're not rights. It's a feel-good document that protects jack shit.


I think this just highlights that a law, as written, isn't everything.

Say one country has this type of "feel-good document," but it's consistently interpreted by powerful courts as a strong protection, and the government generally leaves people alone due to democratic norms. Another country has a strict and absolute constitution, but courts in practice don't interpret it as such, or people are more frequently harassed when criticising the government. Where would you feel more comfortable speaking your mind, and which document is more useful for protecting freedoms?

I'm not making a specific claim about any real countries, though I would say that freedoms are not strictly worse-protected in Canada than in the US. I'm only stating that a law or other document in and of itself can't protect anything - government and society need to respect it.

Democracy is about more than just elections, and freedom is about more than just laws.


> If they're not absolute, they're not rights.

I disagree as there's often reasonable exceptions to "rights", especially when they might infringe other people's rights. e.g. The right to freedom isn't absolute in any country that has prisons.


Au contraire, taking rights as if they're defined absolutely means that conflicts between them cannot be resolved equitably, but rather only binary-axiomatically. In this US, this plays out as most natural rights being undermined through inescapable interactions with corpos, with the justification that you've "voluntarily" agreed that you will not exercise your right. There are some exceptions of course (eg Pruneyard v. Robins), but they're more like exceptions that prove the rule.


US courts giving insane leeway to corporations in what a contract can include has nothing to do with whether rights are defined absolutely or not. The exact same scenario could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited.


> could play out if the voluntarily waived rights were reasonably limited rather than unlimited

My point revolves around the unlimitedness of the other right that is being used to override the first right in question. A large part of that "insane leeway" is exactly due to the corpos' rights being taken as unlimited/absolute - note how the argument in Pruneyard was trying to use property rights to override free speech rights.

But sure, rather than tweaking the conception of rights, we could instead target reform at reigning in the "rights" of corpos - they are merely whole-cloth creations of government, after all. But I suspect we'd still hit corner cases with sufficient power imbalances between individuals (say a small-time landlord and their tenant, with the landlord attempting to curtail the tenant's speech).


There is nothing in Canadian Charter of Rights that prevents corporations' rights to be taken as unlimited. Section 1's phrase "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified" makes it very easy - the judge just has to say that any limits would be unreasonable, and voila, rights are now unlimited. And overriding rights of individuals is just as easy - the judge only has to say that limiting them is justified, and bam, rights are limited.

At least with American system, they actually have to come up with an opposing right that's in conflict with the one they're limiting. In Canada, any right can be limited even without any conflicts.


You're right.

Of course that's the same everywhere else, including the US, meaning it's not worth pointing out.


I would think the natural follow on would be that police have a relative expectation to be photographed and recorded by the public, their actions being public record - they're acting on behalf of the government, FOIA and all that sort of thing applies, right?

Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams? The frequent stated reason for lack of which is "we would but our department can't afford it :'( anyway check out this new armored vehicle we bought!"

"Tracking" on duty cops doesn't seem unusual, though I think a different argument could be made for their off duty time.

* Edit: this is Canada, so my feelings likely don't apply to their laws.


While this doesn't apply to Canada, an American law professor (who leans very conservative politically) has argued that the public has the right to record the police doing their jobs, based on the due-process clause of the U.S. Constitution rather than on the First Amendment. (EDIT to clarify: he's not arguing that there isn't a First Amendment right to record the police, he's saying that besides the First Amendment, the due-process clause also gives citizens a right to record the police doing their jobs). You can read the 2012 paper "A Due Process Right to Record the Police" at https://ir.law.utk.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1460&cont...

I have only skimmed the paper myself, so if it contains any mistakes I'm likely to have missed them. But his argument seems good to me.


> Isn't this effectively outsourcing body cams?

I think its equivalent to putting a tracker in everyone's car and giving the police access to it.

Surveillance is also firmly in pre-crime territory. People being stalked when they haven't (yet) done a crime.


I believe the American Supreme Court explicitly ruled against that in the past ~10 or so years. Except it was one GPS tracker on one car, done without a warrant.

I don't know why that decision, explicitly founded on "making warrantless surveillance too easy violates the intent of warrants" is being used as toilet paper.


But in the inverse, right? It's like putting a tracker on every cop's car and giving the public access to it.


You're right--I was addressing Flock (et al) at scale, which is what I'm more worried about.


> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.

If you're talking about US courts, then no. If they had, then we wouldn't see -for example- SCOTUS ruling that "geofence warrants" were searches that require Fourth Amendment analysis, rather than being equivalent to picking up a recording of events that happened in plain sight. We also wouldn't see at least one Federal judge openly noting that the judges that cite US vs. Knotts really need to read the entire opinion, rather than just the bit that agrees with what is convenient for them.

US v. Knotts is the forty-year-old case that is the source of the "You've no right to privacy when you're on public roads" idea that both people and judges have been parroting for quite a while now. In addition to establishing that principle, it also considered a possible future where the electronic surveillance that -at the time-

* had to be manually installed into cargo destined for the target's vehicle

* was only capable of tracking a single target vehicle

would become sufficiently advanced as to permit 24/7 dragnet surveillance... at which time, courts would need to reconsider what was just and right in light of such dreadfully advanced mass surveillance capabilities.

Pages 28 (starting at section C.) through 38 of this judge's opinion and order [0] are good reading... it can be hard to tell, but the judge really takes other judges who rely on Knotts but clearly haven't actually read it to task. If you have a half hour free, you should really read the whole thing.

[0] <https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.oknd.76...>


> The courts have found that legally, one officer recording one person is no different from a large-scale, automated surveillance system recording everyone.

That is not the case. It hasn't been truly tested, and there are very strong hints in SCOTUS's previous opinions that scale dramatically changes the equation for them.

Of course SCOTUS is currently much more amenable to the idea of changing their mind, so who knows how it'd actually hit, but it's far from decided law in the US.

For one example, Sotomayer's concurrence in US v. Jones (2012)

> Awareness that the Government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse. The net result is that GPS monitoring—by making available at a relatively low cost such a substantial quantum of intimate information about any person whom the Government, in its unfettered discretion, chooses to track—may “alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.” United States v. Cuevas-Perez, 640 F. 3d 272, 285 (CA7 2011) (Flaum, J., concurring).

> I would take these attributes of GPS monitoring into account when considering the existence of a reasonable societal expectation of privacy in the sum of one’s public movements. I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the Government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on. I do not regard as dispositive the fact that the Government might obtain the fruits of GPS monitoring through lawful conventional surveillance techniques. See Kyllo, 533 U. S., at 35, n. 2; ante, at 11 (leaving open the possibility that duplicating traditional surveillance “through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy”). I would also consider the appropriateness of entrusting to the Executive, in the absence of any oversight from a coordinate branch, a tool so amenable to misuse, especially in light of the Fourth Amendment’s goal to curb arbitrary exercises of police power to and prevent “a too permeating police surveillance,” United States v. Di Re, 332 U. S. 581, 595 (1948).*


The case you’re commenting on took place in Brampton. The Charter is slightly more nuanced on this topic than the American Bill of Rights.


Altitude doesn't change (much) at the point where an orbit raising maneuver is performed. It increases the altitude of the rest of the orbit, with the greatest change ~180 degrees later.

If you'll excuse some poor ASCII art:

                                       _______
                  ______              /       \
                 /      \            /         \
    burn here -> *    O |    result: |    O    |
  in elliptical  \______/            \         /
    orbit                             \_______/


You've got 30-45 minutes with the candidate. Is this question the best use of that time?


It sure is, if that's what I'm trying to find out. You might also think it would be crazy to base a hiring decision on whether the candidate was rude to their airport shuttle bus driver, but that strategy famously worked out well for Zappos: https://www.businessinsider.com/tony-hsieh-zappos-hiring-str...


What's hard to understand about it? It's just

  x = initial
  for y in collection:
    x = f(y, x)


It's easy but it ain't simple. Because `f` can do arbitrary things to `x` you have to look at it just to know the general shape of the computation. Reduce gives you a lot of the flexibility of imperative programming but with that also a lot of the problems. Sometimes that's the right trade-off but it is good to be aware that it is a trade-off.


You mean "f(x, y)", right? Half of the languages that have reduce/fold use this ordering, another half uses yours.

So in effect, as some other commenter said, it's just the loop with worse syntax.


Walmart used to be (and maybe still is?) known for doing this. They would get companies to produce lower-quality versions of products under the same name as the standard versions available elsewhere. They could sell them for cheaper and consumers were none the wiser - or so the theory went, anyway. Obviously people caught on.


People have caught on and nothing can be done because all ten "brands" are produced on the same machine in Ohio


I've noticed this at Aldi too. Boxes of muesli that look 30% cheaper than at other supermarkets... but when you look closer, the box is 3/4 the size and it's only 3/4 full. I don't regularly shop at Aldi.


Don't you look at the unit price? Price per kg or litre.


In the US that's annoying, sometimes they show price per oz, other times price per lbs.


Time was, if you didn't understand how to use VORs, you couldn't really fly. We used them as primary en route nav, as well as for approaches, for many decades. As a CFI I think most of the confusion around VORs these days comes down to poor or inadequate training.


> As a CFI I think most of the confusion around VORs these days comes down to poor or inadequate training.

I would say it is partially true. The reason I have trouble with VORs is that the equipment inside the plane is very awkward to use. The fact that the plane is in the center of the VOR display is super confusing as it shows everything in reverse: if the line is on the left it means the plane is on the right. And having to learn Morse Code to validate you tuned in the right frequency. And so on.

I get it that when they invented that we did not have technology, but now we do and nothing is stopping us from using a digital display that can translate VORs/DMEs/NDBs fixes into GPS like routes. And knowing where every VOR is can make the map accurate too. That would make it very easy for a lot of people to use and not have to learn the arcane ways of how people used to fly 50 years ago. I don't need to know that I'm flying TO or FROM the station.


That's fair. I replied to someone else with a similar remark, but essentially doing most of my flying in 70s to 90s prop planes, I imagine the tools I'm most used to are just dated. Your point around training is likely very accurate, I had some great teachers but I also had a few instances of being given inaccurate information and having to teach the teacher so to speak.


I don't fly and I wouldn't call my self someone that plays a lot of flight simulator. But I do enjoy navigation methods and I did learn the basics and practices of VOR navigation. I got an Android app that simulates flying courses, holding patterns etc, but only the navigation part. I would say I learned some intuition to it.


A lot of those planes still exist and have not gotten panel upgrades, so IMO you still should learn how to navigate purely via only visual references and radio navigation. I believe you are still required to know how to use them to pass your private pilot check ride, too, but I may be wrong.


> I believe you are still required to know how to use them to pass your private pilot check ride, too, but I may be wrong.

Thankfully, they are not needed to pass a PPL check-ride.

Creating a track on a 1:500k map and fly it is incredibly complicated when you have to do a ton of other things inside the plane too.


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