So does that make the new name the undead name, and therefore like a zombie name?

Huh; I don’t believe that it is really him.

If this is the real Slim Shady, would you please stand up?

Yeah, I miss living in Australia where you didn’t have your own waiter but on the other hand that meant that it wasn’t rude to flag down any of the wait staff if you need anything rather than being restricted to having to go through a single person.

I’ve only met one other person that knew who/what Dvorak was/is, and also reportedly used that keyboard layout.

I experimented with it in University–I actually got a screwdriver and pried up and rearranged all of the keys on my keyboard within a week or so of starting–but after graduating I noticed that I was still slower at typing on Dvorak than I was on QWERTY so I gave up and changed back.

Horribly incompetent? No. Flawless, or even particularly prescient? No. They got a lot of big stuff right; they got a whole lot wrong.

So just to be clear: you think that this particular language was badly written because it is so easily bypassed?

If, as you say,

I’m unconcerned with how it was intended since that’s totally irrelevant to what it actually is.

Then why did you waste time describing what you believed was the intention behind it earlier when you said,

I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

Regardless, the other point that I made that you haven’t addressed still stands: they put that prohibition against banning the slave trade in there for a reason, and that reason was presumably not “as a rhetorical flourish”, so either the people who insisted that it be present were horribly incompetent at writing legal language that would preserve their own interests, or your personal opinion as to how Constitutional law works in this case is missing something important.

If the purpose of that clause were to restrict the kinds of laws that Congress can pass instead of the kinds of amendments that are allowed, then why does it appear in Article V, which relates to amendments, rather than Article I, which relates to Congress?

Indeed, the limitation in what can be amended is in practice totally powerless. I think of it as a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the importance they placed on representing states rather than people.

It isn’t worded as a “rhetorical flourish”; it is worded incredibly clearly and explicitly as a prohibition:

Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.

In fact, taking your reasoning a step further: are you likewise arguing that when the prohibition against banning the slave trade prior to 1808 was included here, that it was also understood to be a “rhetorical flourish” with no teeth behind it? If so, then why did they go to so much trouble to put it in? It seems like a lot of wasted effort in that case.

This ensures that the Senate can never re-make itself to be anything other than the body with equal representation among states, unless the affected states also agree.

Yes, that is exactly my point: if this restriction could itself be eliminated through the amendment process, then it effectively does not exist.

Sure, but once there is enough determination to deprive a state of equal representation in the Senate that there are sufficient votes to amend the Constitution once in order to do this–which, as you have pointed out, is a very high bar–then it is no harder to go through the amendment process twice in order to first drop that sentence.

Sure, but obviously in that case it would no longer matter whether that state had Senators or not because it would no longer be subject to the laws of the U.S. government.

If it were really so easy to bypass that restriction, then what was the point of putting that sentence in in the first place?

Except for denying a state equal representation on the Senate without its consent; the Constitution explicitlyforbids that.

Fun fact: even when using an absolute scale like Kelvin, it’s theoretically possible to have a negative temperature!

The reason for this is that temperature measures how much energy you have to pay in order to increase the number of possible microscopic states accessible to the system by a certain amount. In really weird systems it is possible that the amount of energy you can put into the system has a cap, so if you keep pouring energy into the system then eventually it will be forced into the unique microscopic state where every part of the system contains as much energy as it possible can. When this happens, the only way to increase the number of microstates that the system can be in is by removing some of the energy from the system–which you can visualize as creating the possibility of there being holes in the system where there is an absence of energy–and so the temperature is negative.

This kind of system is so weird, though, that is existence is primarily theoretical. Last time I checked, such a system has not yet been demonstrated to exist in a lab. Still, it is fun to think about!

A truly fantastic update for our times!

Wow, when I went to bed yesterday it was only December 28, but now it is somehow already April 1!

Alternatively, instead of reading a Phoronix article that has a couple of short snippets from a much longer blog post, you can read the original blog post yourself to see the full context.

Edit: Also, it is worth noting that the author of the original blog post had previously written another relatively recent post criticizing the way in which Wayland was developed, so it’s not like they are refusing to see its problems.

No, if anything the way you can tell you are in a dream is because the top spins forever and never starts wobbling; the way he got his wife to eventually concede that she was in a dream was by setting the top in a perpetual spin so that she stumbled upon it still spinning.

The significance of the ending is not that he is still in a dream but that he is so content with the situation that he stops caring whether he is in a dream or not. (Actually, in fairness that is not quite true either; I’ve heard that basically the ending is more Nolan trolling the audience than anything of narrative significance.)

Yeah, which is why I thought that the original ending to Return of the Jedi, which was just a local party with the Ewoks, was much better than the immediate galaxy wide celebration that Lucas insisted on adding in the re-release.

If you are going to compare the United States to other political entities, I think that the better thing to compare it to is the European Union rather than other countries, because like the EU the US was formed from the union of sovereign member states and that is why it is designed the way that it is (for better or worse).

Given that, I have an honest question asked out of ignorance: Does the EU have more power over its member states than the United States does? (I am not super-familiar with it, so the answer may very well be yes.)