The Story of the Ping Program (1997) - <AUTHOR> https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html <comment><USER2> Mike was killed in a car accident in 2000. Nice to see his website is still up almost 20 years later.

<comment><USER3> I was beaming from that story about the vocoder, that was a fast descent.

I frequently use ping to look like I know what I am doing when trying to fix connectivity problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The story of ping wouldn't be complete without a link to _that_ book review: [https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q](https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VDKZ4X1F992Q)

<comment><USER5> In fact quoted in the article itself. And very good it is too...

<comment><USER6> What's very good? The book or the review? _grin_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> also the author of brl-cad, fwiw:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRL-CAD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRL-CAD)

here, by a PDP/11 (not sure which person he is):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRL- CAD#/media/File:Pdp11,70_6...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRL- CAD#/media/File:Pdp11,70_640x507.jpg)

and mentioned in Clifford Stolls book 'the cuckoos egg' (1989):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg)

which is a complete must read story for anyone interested in this kind of article and led to much of the current cyber-crime coordination in the US (e.g. US-CERT, etc).

from that book:

        "On the heels of Steve's call, Mike Muuss of the Ballistic Research Laboratory called.
        In Aberdeen, Maryland, the Army runs a research and development laboratory;
        it's one of the last government labs that doesn't farm out its research to private
        contractors. Mike's their computer honcho.

        Mike Muuss's famous throughout the Unix community as a pioneer in networking and as a
        creator of elegant programs to replace awkward ones. As Mike puts it, good programs
        aren't written or built. They're grown. A six-foot-tall, mustached runner,
        he's incredibly driven, intense, and obsessed. Mike's paid his dues on ancient
        versions of Unix, dating back to the '70s. When Mike talks, other wizards listen."

RIP.

<comment><USER8> Now, I'm wondering if there's a BRL-CAD around that will still run on a PDP-11/70 so I have some actual excuse to buy and build the PiDP-11... [https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11](https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Sadly, Mike Muuss was killed in an automobile accident on November 20, 2000.

Thank-you for your work. RIP.

<comment><USER10> > My passion at the moment is real-time ray-tracing, with 3-D atmosphere, to > create a physics-based "virtual reality" simulator.

Wow. Imagine if he were here to experience RTX cards in consumer machines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is an unusual (ab)use of ping that I hope no-one here needs but just in case; I and a tech was doing some dos scripting (in windows) at a client and we needed short delays. We couldn't find anything in dos, but a web search suggested an obscure but natty trick - pinging localhost.

ping -n <seconds> 127.0.0.1

It worked (edit: I couldn't stop laughing). To be fair, I've used it and its big brother traceroute (very useful!) for its designed purpose.

<comment><USER11>
        choice /T 1 /D Y

Standard Windows NT command to sleep 1 second. This is actually intended to let the user select an option Yes/No and default after 1 second without answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What was the use of ICMP Echo packets when there was no ping?

<comment><USER13> "ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) is an error-reporting protocol network devices like routers use to generate error messages to the source IP address when network problems prevent delivery of IP packets."

<comment><USER14> They were asking specifically of Echo packets, though. It seems ping covers the whole use of them. I wonder if any other part of an OS tends to make Echo packets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ping is how I found a compromised server once in a large, poorly wired server rack. The sys admins were out and the supervisor did not know anything about the server room (nor did I... the security guy) so he pinged the infected box from a laptop while I went behind the rack and unplugged each machine one at a time.... found it after a dozen or so cables. How about now? Yep, that's the one.

</comment><comment><USER16> Down but mirrored on google [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lVhbXi...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lVhbXiT- cCEJ:https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html)

<comment><USER17> Longer-lasting archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20010107114600/https://ftp.arl.a...](https://web.archive.org/web/20010107114600/https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thread from 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002380)

2014: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443028)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5030309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5030309)

</comment><comment><USER19> I've always wondered if these foundational utilities could ever evolve a bit.

I'd love to have a "ping --reachable <secs> <host>" that just silently returned a return code whether a host was pingable.

(of course you could do "ping -w 5 10.0.0.1 >/dev/null 2>&1" but still)

<comment><USER20> An nmap pingscan can do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sadly the link to the source redirects to the US Army home page now. Anyone got a link?

<comment><USER22> Looks like it's fixed. Worked for me: [https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html](https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/ping.html)

<comment><USER21> No, the link he provided in the document to the original PING source. It's supposed to go to [http://ftp.arl.army.mil/pub/ping.shar](http://ftp.arl.army.mil/pub/ping.shar) But ends up at [https://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm](https://www.arl.army.mil/www/default.cfm)

<comment><USER23> [https://web.archive.org/web/20041205145144/http://ftp.arl.ar...](https://web.archive.org/web/20041205145144/http://ftp.arl.army.mil/pub/ping.shar)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have hundreds of pings running 24/7 from dozens of devices to machines on 6 continents monitoring for packet loss, never even considered the history of the command

</comment><comment><USER25> Respect!

</comment><comment><USER26> put a year on this title I think it's from...2000</comment>


Ten years left to redesign lithium-ion batteries? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05752-3 <comment><USER2> Oh god, another Erlich/Simons bet is needed: what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply. Is there a supply chain problem? Yes. Are we approaching a mad-max hell war for the last vestiges of humanities wonder mineral? Alas.. no.

The ten years meme is based in a false premise. The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14% and yet predicts a long term supply problem without asking what other sources might be discovered.

From the article _A lithium-ion car battery with a 100 kg cathode requires 6–12 kg of cobalt and 36–48 kg of nickel_ so work on 10kg without improvements and same article says at current economic models only 10 exp 8 tonnes economically extractable. So 10 exp 10 batteries. (1000 kg per tonne) 10,000,000,000 batteries. One car for everyone alive... And that's before normal levels of production efficiency, scavenging nice cobalt rich sources like old batteries or even the intent of the article: new sources and new technologies.

<comment><USER3> Australia is not utilising only 14% of their resources, they have only 14% of the known world resources. More than 50% is based on Congo were the work is performed in miserable conditions. We are all happy that we still don't reach peak oil, but if we don't change the way we think about progress and economic growth, in a world with finite resources will have severe consequences.

<comment><USER4> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Our "peak battery" is bounded at the product of "peak population" and per-capita battery need, both of which are fairly constrained. Not really the right analysis.

<comment><USER5> > Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable.

Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.

It's still very much an unsolved problem.

I would love to be proved wrong!

Edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Using current recycling methods, the lithium is not recyclable (the cobalt is). I then asked if I am not correct, to please correct me.

So if not recycled, what's currently happening to lithium batteries in all our electronics and car batteries (etc)? Is it just handled as hazardous waste?

<comment><USER6> Are you suggesting we know how to extract lithium from a random mix of many minerals, but getting it out of the used battery is beyond our capabilities? That's not very believable.

The real issue is that, just as you hint, it's actually cheaper to get lithium from mineral rich dirt, than to set up collection, disassembly and recovery operation for existing batteries. We can do it, it's just not most economically efficient way to get raw lithium. If lithium goes up in price, it might become viable.

<comment><USER5> > That's not very believable.

Can you point me to a recycling facility that's doing this?

<comment><USER4> No, because it's far cheaper to mine it. As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.

<comment><USER5> > No, because it's far cheaper to mine it.

OK, question answered.

> As mentioned above, you've been fooled by the name of the technology and are > looking at the wrong part of the periodic table.

I asked about lithium recycling. How am I being fooled?

<comment><USER4> Because who cares about lithium recycling? We don't need recycled lithium to maintain battery production. Realistically it's one of those resources like iron or aluminum or phosphorous which we can't meaningfully "run out of".

(Though I threw that last one in deliberately: we're pulling P out of rocks and throwing it into the biosphere at an unsustainable rate right now, and are going to have to radically adjust the way we do agriculture fertilization in the coming decades. But even then there's going to be plenty of P around, we just have to change the sources we use to extract it.)

<comment><USER5> Because then this is pretty much a false statement:

> Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable.

Although they can be, they're not.

That's a big point in electric cars, that I think gets swept under the rug in the green-washing of electric cars: the main widget that makes electric cars electric cars is discarded as hazardous waste.

It's too costly and impractical to recycle them. We essentially want to replace a billion gasoline cars with electric ones, and the tech. to recycle those future billion batteries doesn't really exist.

Just a point I wanted to be cleared up.

<comment><USER6> _the tech. to recycle those future billion batteries doesn 't really exist._

You're still missing the whole point, which is why you are being downvoted. The technology to recycle the future billion batteries exists today, and will improve in future. The issue here is that at a current price point it is simply not competitive compared to extracting raw lithium from ground. As the most accessible and profitable fields run out of the material, and as the demand for lithium grows, the price will go up, which might make the battery recycling economically viable.

Compare it to our current wood usage: the wood we use for furniture production is usually recyclable. You could take a wardrobe, disassemble it, and after some recutting and sanding you might use the wood for some other project. However, doing this in the end costs much more than using new materials, because collecting used furniture for recycling purposes, and labor needed to disassemble it and prepare wood for reuse is simply too much for it to be worth it, especially as it cannot be manufactured in a process as automated as making plywood, MDF, 2x4s or hardwood flooring is these days. Same with getting lithium from batteries: we could do it, but you'd have to pay extra for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As one of my favorite comedians once put it: "Analysts are people who tell you what the world will look like in 15 years if nothing changes. Now do you REALLY want to know how long your toenails get if you don't cut them?!"

Movement here will come from a number of factors:

\- Demand increases, which will: \- open up more mines (nicely summarized in the long commentary in this thread) \- incentivize better extraction technology

\- Supply will decrease, which will make Cobalt more expensive, which in turn leads to: \- battery chemistry with way less cobalt needed (already happening) \- better recycling \- technology accessing hidden reserves (oil shale and tar sands anyone?) \- research into complete alternatives like pressured air, hydrogen, redux flow batteries etc.

We'll be fine and renewables will win in any case by now.

<comment><USER8> I don't like over confidence in any resource access, that's probably what oil digger thought 100 years ago.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't this example go against your point? I've been hearing that we were nearing the end of the oil supply since I've been a kid but the date keeps being pushed back. As the demand for oil grows the price goes up and new methods to extract more oil from the ground become profitable. Now current projections seem to target the 2050s at the earliest.

<comment><USER10> This is also exactly what is holding back synthetic fuels from becoming profitable.

Fossil fuels will eventually lose out over synthetic fuels, but not until prices rise substantially.

<comment><USER11> How are "synthetic fuels" produced? If it's anything like synthetic lubricants, it's still fossil fuels, just with more energy-intensive processing.

<comment><USER10> From a theoretical standpoint, virtually any source of carbon could be used, you could even make it out of the carbon already in the atmosphere:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange- carbon/scie...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange- carbon/scientists-say-cost-of-sucking-carbon-from-thin-air-could-tumble- idUSKCN1J325H)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> another-one-off The Broken Hill Proprietary Company, BHP, comes from Broken Hill, Australia. It is one of the largest mining companies in the world.

Now what is interesting about Broken Hill is I have it on reasonable authority that the area as a whole has had "20 years of remaining reserves" for the last 60 years, because the explorers only bother to go out and 'discover' new parts of the deposit when they get below 15-20 years of reserves.

This is an interesting anecdote to my main point - the cobalt price seems to have jumped like a salmon about 12 months ago, but bringing a new mine online can take about 5 years. Even assuming we don't make this 10 year time frame, who really knows what deposits might have become profitable to mine with even a doubling of the price.

High prices isn't a signal that we have run out, it is a signal that more mines are needed. It is likely the market will heed the signal.

<comment><USER12> > _High prices isn 't a signal that we have run out, it is a signal that more > mines are needed. It is likely the market will heed the signal._

It is a signal that there is a high demand, and not enough supply (whether naturally or artificially -- e.g. diamonds) to meet that demand. That's it.

Building more mines can only happen if the resources _exist_ to mine. This idea that "the market" is a magic wand to wave at problems really needs to stop. As far as "the market" is concerned, the electric car industry could collapse because it failed to innovate past resource shortages.

<comment><USER10> >> Building more mines can only happen if the resources exist to mine.

The resources _do_ exist to mine. Only a tiny fraction of rare earth minerals are actually being mined, because _it 's not economical_ in most places.

<comment><USER13> The article is not about rare earth metals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The headline is made to sound like: "Oh no, we are running out of cobalt!"

Yeah, not really. Just like with "oil reserves", there's a common misconception that we'll "run out" when they are depleted. However, "reserves" are just those resources that can be extracted economically at _today 's prices_. When demand increases, prices rise and reserves "magically" increase.

That's exactly what will happen here. "Rare-earth materials" aren't actually rare in the sense that precious metals are rare. They're just uncommon compared to other minerals. If prices rise, eventually China will decide to increase exports and other countries that aren't literally warzones (like the DRC) will chime in.

So, we have ten years until those batteries will become somewhat more expensive, making research into alternatives more promising. There is no urgency here.

Then of course there's the questionable idea that electric motors will replace combustion engines because we're "running out of oil", which is why we supposedly need all these batteries in the first place. My bet is that synthetic fuels will become profitable far earlier.

<comment><USER14> _> "there's the questionable idea that electric motors will replace combustion engines because we're "running out of oil""_

Right. Electric motors will replace combustion engines because they're cheaper to operate, offer better performance, require less maintenance, don't emit toxic pollutants, contribute less CO2 emissions, they're much quieter, and they offer a better driving experience.

Sooner or later they'll be cheaper to manufacture, too, due to reduced labour required, component commonality, fewer moving parts, etc.

<comment><USER10> Some questionable assumptions there:

\- cheaper to operate

An enormous amount of electricity would be required to actually replace all combustion engines in just regular cars, plus a lot of investment into infrastructure to charge all these cars. Higher demand, higher prices.

\- offer better performance

Are the best-selling cars today those with the best performance? No, they're the ones offering acceptable performance at the best price.

\- require less maintenance

That's assuming that maintenance cost is a big deciding factor in a car. Cars are assumed to be depreciating assets, when maintenance becomes too expensive they are replaced. There's some argument to be made here for certain vehicles like Taxis with a lot of usage, but the general consumer will not highly value or even accurately estimate maintenance.

\- don't emit toxic pollutants

Most consumers don't put a premium on this. Modern combustion engines don't emit a lot of pollutants anymore, but even then it would take government intervention to force people away from them.

\- contribute less CO2 emissions

Again, most consumers don't put a premium on this, but government intervention could change that. Synthetic fuels of the future may well be carbon neutral though.

\- they offer a better driving experience

...assuming you're not running out of battery.

<comment><USER14> _> "An enormous amount of electricity would be required to actually replace all combustion engines in just regular cars"_

Not as much as you might think. In the UK, for example, electrifying all ground transport would add only on the order of 25-30% to current grid demand. That's similar to the amount that grid demand has _declined_ in the past decade due to energy efficiency, despite population growth.

Ofgem, the UK's energy market regulator, recently confirmed that there is enough grid capacity available for widespread adoption of electric vehicles, provided a significant portion of charging happens at off-peak times.

 _> "plus a lot of investment into infrastructure to charge all these cars."_

Yes, but this is actually pretty cheap compared to the massive infrastructure requirement for H2 or synthetic fuels. With electricity, the production and distribution infrastructure already exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The NCM cells most commonly used in electric vehicles have already significantly reduced their cobalt content in recent years. Moving from NCM 333 (33% cobalt cathode), to 622 (20%), to 811 (10%).

Tesla claims to use even less cobalt in their 2170 NCA cells than the best NCM811 chemistry.

As for nickel, a billion tonnes of known commercially-viable reserves ought to be enough for all the world's vehicles to be electrified several times over. And all these minerals can be recovered and reused from recycled batteries.

</comment><comment><USER15> My first encounter with a "just 10 more years" projection was while writing a paper on zinc in middle school. My reference book about mining and metallurgy discussed declining reserves and that the world would be entirely out of zinc by 1985 without careful conservation. Except I was reading the book in 1995, and it was published in 1975. It became an interesting point in my paper.

If this writer didn't work for a company that will make money off his ridiculous assertions, I would be baffled how an educated adult could write such an article.

<comment><USER16> > If this writer didn't work for a company that will make money off his > ridiculous assertions

You mean the authors of the Nature article? Only their affiliation to Georgia Tech is listed. Or the author of that book on zinc?

Ooooh at the very bottom:

> Competing Financial Interests

> G.Y. is a co-founder, chief technology officer, a board member and a > shareholder of Sila Nanotechnologies, the company commercializing silicon- > based anode materials mentioned in this Comment article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem with Rare Earth is that the West collectively acts like 3 year old who are to dumb to solve incredibly simple problems.

Rare earth contained lots of Thorium and that has to be handled as nuclear waste and that means you have 1000s of tons of nuclear waste on your hands. This is of course completely idiotic because Thorium not really a big problem as it is not radioactive.

The few Rare Earth mines that do exist only extract the lower group so you can avoid the Thorium.

Because the US drives policy for the whole West, there is basically no Rare Earth mining in the West.

China on the other hand understands that the more expensive rare earths are outside of China the more likely people will manufacture in China.

While I am 100% with Simons (one of the best economists ever) the unlimited stupidly of government is stopping a real market solution.

There was quite a bit of effort to change this and it got traction in congress because many people are really concerned that all US military equipment depends on rare earths from China.

See:

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7QNZ56j-HM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7QNZ56j-HM)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxwF93wnRQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxwF93wnRQo)

<comment><USER18> As someone currently dealing the consequences of being far too cavalier with long term environmental pollutants like PCBs and lead, I would argue that behavior you're describing as being that of a "3 year old" is actually a good example of government sanity, not stupidity. It's reasonable long term caution to avoid creating a bigger problem in the future.

The true 3 year old behavior on display here is the market behavior you're advocating: ignoring a potential long term problem in favor of a short term gain.

Environmental toxins are not something to be cavalier about. Once soil gets contaminated, it's damned hard and expensive to clean up. Land is one of the single most limited resources we have. We can ultimately live with out lithium ion batteries. We can change our behavior, use other electrical sources, or as the article argues for, find other sources of electrode material.

We cannot live with out clean soil in which to grow healthy food. Or on which to live.

<comment><USER19> What does soil have to do with this? You think they're just going to put the thorium in fertilizer or drop it all over the country from the air?

Lithium ion batteries are incredibly important if we want to make a fast transition to green energy. The environmental calculus is 100% in favor of finding a thorium disposal site and making rare earths / lithium cheaper _now_ , rather than being picky about where minerals are mined and pumping way more CO2 into the air due to the delay

Localized thorium pollution is something that we can manage and deal with. Global warming, especially if it reaches a runaway tipping point, could displace a billion people, cause massive famines, and destroy tens of trillions of dollars of infrastructure and assets. Also consider that localized thorium pollution would probably be on-par with the pollution from washing coal, which is what would be replaced

<comment><USER20> >Global warming, especially if it reaches a runaway tipping point

Thought we reached that a long time ago, and yet things haven't really changed.

<comment><USER19> we have somewhat, in that a significant amount is going to happen even if we switch to 100% carbon neutral energy tomorrow. I'm thinking more about a Clathrate Gun kind of event

Also things have changed. Something like 10 of the hottest years on record have been within the last 15 years. Global warming is not simply a modeled prediction, it is very much measurable and ongoing

<comment><USER20> >Something like 10 of the hottest years on record have been within the last 15 years.

Is that based on straight up measurements, or based on measurements that were adjusted based on a realization that the measuring method was flawed to begin with? Aren't the adjustments based on a best guess by people that may have a bias?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _We use less than 3% cobalt in our batteries & will use none in next gen_ \- > Elon Musk

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1006968985760366592](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1006968985760366592)

<comment><USER10> Don't put your money on that.

<comment><USER22> The current 3% battery cobalt level already confirmed by 3rd party tear down analysis. "Next gen" could be years away, sure. But there are PLENTY of _existing_ lithium battery chemistries which use no cobalt whatsoever.

<comment><USER10> There's a big difference between 3% cobalt and _no_ cobalt. Cobalt is important for safety, skimping on it to save some money is a big risk.

I'm not saying it won't happen, just that I wouldn't put money on it.

<comment><USER22> LiFEPo batteries, which are notable for their safety, use zero cobalt. There are other ways to accomplish these goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Recycling cannot replenish supplies. Lithium-ion batteries last for 15–20 > years, 3 times longer than the 5–7 years for lead-acid batteries

Over 90% of car batteries are already recycled. Assuming this stays constant when batteries get bigger(why wouldn't it), we'll hit steady-state on materials about a decade after electric cars become dominant.

Due to recycling, this whole article is baseless. Eventually we'll only need to mine enough to make up for a the few percent of batteries that aren't recycled. Car batteries are already recycled at extremely high rates, and there's no reason to believe this will change.

</comment><comment><USER24> I haven't studied this problem, but I suspect _reserves_ of metals (and anything else that gets mined) is technically defined the same way oil _reserves_ are defined, which renders this kind of headline nonsense.

Even in the pessimistic case, we run out of money before we run out of _reserves_. In other words, price elasticity always brings more _reserves_ online. _Reserves_ are defined as what can be provably economically extracted given proven technology and current economics. And the _proven technology_ is only what has been proven in a particular field (or mine, or battery recycling facility), not proven anywhere in the world.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is supposing that we want big cars with big batteries, In the cities the mobility is moving toward small personal vehicles, and if you have bigger commuter needs, I hope that in the future the highways can be electrified and the cars would only need the battery to get from the highway to your home.

There are not enough minerals to make batteries to replace all the current cars with their current autonomy, but a change of transport paradigm could be feasible.

<comment><USER26> > I hope that in the future the highways can be electrified

Obligatory remark: Let's also put the cars on metal rails instead of on asphalt to reduce rolling friction. And maybe instead of small cars, we could use large wagons or chains of those that could transport a lot of people at the same time.

<comment><USER27> No, those are called trains, and while they're great for shuttling a large number of people between two distant points, or along a line of points, they really suck for moving a large number of people between countless arbitrary points that are arranged in 2-dimensional space like a grid (or a metro area that's spread out in all directions).

What you really want, to replace private cars, is SkyTran: tiny cars for 1-2 people, suspended from metal rails (which have a maglev effect to eliminate friction altogether), that are completely autonomous and take riders directly to their destination within a metro area. Each one operates independently, so you don't have to worry about what other users are doing or waste time going to stations that aren't your destination.

IMO, it's shameful that we haven't done more to explore PRT (personal rapid transit). It could really revolutionize city and suburban life and eliminate the need for so many people to own cars, while also saving people so much time with commuting (since such a system, fully built-out, would have far higher capacity than our current road system).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Worth reading:

[https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/21/cobalt-stocks- what...](https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/21/cobalt-stocks-what- investors-need-to-know.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER29> 3-4 new polymetalic mines can easily double the global cobalt supply.

The story with cobalt is the same as with REEs and Lithium - they are everywhere, but few big companies dare to mine them expecting the business to go bust the moment China or Congo resort to further dumping

For Nickel, global supply is being dominated by a price cartel, doing the same thing.

<comment><USER29> Ironically, in Nickel, the only company that somehow manages to lives outside the cartel scheme is Chinese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's peak cobalt! Just like peak oil.

<comment><USER31> I remember trying to explain basic Econ 101 to a classmate while in third year engineering. Peak Oil was a religion back then.

The same isn't true for the environment. Unlike Peak Oil where economic incentives simultaneously would encourage smaller cars with more efficient engines while also directing research into more advanced oil retrieval (or at the very worst biofuels) the environment is not something the market will automatically solve. Quite the opposite. It will push up against it until there is sufficient political resistance to overcome market resources attempting to maintain the status quo. We have a real problem, but it isn't oil or cobalt.

<comment><USER10> Polluting the environment is damaging _someone 's_ property (private or state), for which they will eventually demand restitution. It's part of market forces.

Conversely, a certain amount of pollution/environmental destruction is a price people are willing to pay.

<comment><USER17> That is all nice and true in theory. But property rights don't exist from nowhere, they need to be created by private actors or governments.

Global property rights issue will not be solved by simply law-suit the way you might fix a noise problem. Governments are not only not establishing property rights they would actively prevent anybody that did.

If your read the literature on the economics of property rights and Ronald Coase own writings you will see that he did not believe simplified version of the 'Coase theorem' that was formalized by Stigler.

<comment><USER10> The point is not that "the market fixes everything", the point is these are still market forces.

Even in a completely free market, _you can get screwed over_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> With respect to electric cars the actual energy density is only half the story.

Efficiency can be gained with pack efficiency, aerodynamics, weight reduction of the vehicle, including smaller low occupancy vehicles enabled by the Mobility-As-A-Service model, and removing material with the help of better computer simulation and modeling, more efficient energy recapture systems, energy efficient accel/decel algorithms, denser destination charging network, skate systems like Boring Loop, all of which can decrease battery size which itself increases efficiency even further.

Similar to density in chip design, as density hits fundamental limits, other axes of power can help keep improvement at least linear.

</comment><comment><USER33> We need to work on super-springs, so you can wind up your car... LOL Right now there is a lot of lithium in the earth, much is not economic, but as lithium prices rise, more mines will become economic. Cobalt, as well as lithium will become far more highly recycled. Battery innards will be improved to reduce Cobalt use. Lithium use can not be reduced very much per KW hour, as the chemical changes oxidation state in a charge/discharge cycle. Lithium is both light in weight and has nearly the highest possible voltage swing of ~~3.7 volts (versus 2 volts for lead and 1.2 volts for Nicads and NiMh which are many time heavier per KWHr in addition))

<comment><USER27> >Lithium is both light in weight and has nearly the highest possible voltage swing of ~~3.7 volts (versus 2 volts for lead and 1.2 volts for Nicads and NiMh which are many time heavier per KWHr in addition)

IANAchemist, but this makes me wonder if there's some other chemistry out there, either undiscovered or deemed uneconomic, that offers even better performance than lithium.

<comment><USER34> >IANAchemist, but this makes me wonder if there's some other chemistry out there, either undiscovered or deemed uneconomic, that offers even better performance than lithium.

There are, but of course there's tradeoffs. Lithium is the best all around cathode choice for economical reasons, but Sodium and Potassium are being explored as well. The real gains can be found in new electrolyte chemistries, though. My money is that we will be using lithium for the foreseeable future, and that advances in electrolyte chemistry will get us to the $100/kWh point.

<comment><USER27> I wonder what the problems with sodium and potassium are. Sodium, for one, is an _extremely_ common element on Earth's surface, which I can't say for Lithium. Potassium is also very common. You can get all the sodium you could possibly want just by drying out seawater. By contrast, lithium supply seems to be limited to a few places such as Bolivia.

<comment><USER33> [http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Chemical/electrod...](http://hyperphysics.phy- astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Chemical/electrode.html#c1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> As I heard an economist say once:

"The best cure for high prices is high prices."

<comment><USER36> As a Houston resident who hears a lot of news about oil prices and demand for goods from the extraction support industries, there's evidence of this every day.

Not everyone grasps self-limiting cycles and feedback signals at first. I like to point them to this old proverb about the Mullah Nasrudin.

[http://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=4&poet=706&poem=34...](http://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=4&poet=706&poem=3443)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> An assistant professor at UCSD just announced a new method for recycling cobalt in lithium-ion batteries.

[http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-lithium- ion...](http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-lithium-ion-battery- recycling-20180316-story.html#)

</comment><comment><USER38> I know that the popsci media can overblow this, but wasn't there some optimistic results for super-capacitors that wouldn't rely on any of these rare-earth metals? I'm seriously asking, since looking this up tends to bring up links to crap-sites like IFLS and whatnot, so I don't know if the hype is warranted.

<comment><USER39> Glad someone asked.

Supercapacitors are the thing that halves the requirement for these lithium iron batteries that we are supposed to be running out of. The good news is that fantastic work is being done in this area, making those Tesla things rather quaint old technology.

It is all going on in Estonia and you are well advised to watch this recent episode of Fully Charged to see what a wonderful place Estonia is and why it should be where you next go on holiday:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2Eo6wl5r0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ2Eo6wl5r0)

So, 'spoiler alert', a supercapacitor in a vehicle compliments the battery and stores the energy from re-gen and gets you away from the lights at super fast speed without having to have some huge Tesla-esque American sized battery providing the oomph. It is win win as the vehicle is lighter.

The other benefit of supercapacitors is that they can also be used to provide smoothing of electricity supply, e.g. when the cup final is on and everyone goes to turn their kettle on at half time.

As mentioned, watch the Fully Charged episode about Estonia and what lovely people there are there, including a few doing great things with supercapacitors.

<comment><USER40> > Supercapacitors are the thing that halves the requirement for these lithium > iron batteries that we are supposed to be running out of.

That's patently false, though. Skeleton claims they have legitimately impressive power/weight ratios, but that's totally irrelevant to vehicles. The current batteries can push short bursts of well over 2 kW/kg. Even the smallest cars (the Smart FourTwo has a 50-100 kW engine) can be powered by tiny batteries (10-15 kWh). Cruising range is the deciding factor in battery size, and capacitors are totally irrelevant to that. The electric FourTwo could be fitted with a 10 kWh battery, but nobody really wants <35 miles of range. At that point it makes far more sense to have an electric bicycle.

To really drive the point home, there are readily available batteries that have 5x the specific power of the batteries used in EVs, and only ~20% less capacity. They aren't used, because the extra power is not required.

[1]: [https://www.skeletontech.com/skeleton- blog/ultracapacitors-o...](https://www.skeletontech.com/skeleton- blog/ultracapacitors-or-batteries-infographic)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> TL;DR: Battery demand grows. Best current tech uses nickel and cobalt. Their prices grow and at the current growth trends demand outstrips supply within 20 years. We should fund research (in the author's area) to find better alternatives (e.g., using iron and silicon). This is valid but not surprising and hardly catastrophic. This is not "10 years left to find an alternative".

But what turned me off is scaremongering and naive justifications. For example, "In Africa, some mine owners exploit child workers and skimp on protective equipment" (this is true, is a problem, but has no relation to the article; they do not even claim that children mine Ni or Co), etc.

My 2c -- the title is clickbait-y and the content is lacking for nature- caliber writeup (I only read it because it referenced nature.com).

<comment><USER42> I thought nickel-colbalt has a significantly lower specific energy / energy density than other lithium-polymer batteries. They might be cheaper to make (or maybe not so much anymore), but they have a large space form factor.

I don't know of any laptop today that's using a nickel cobalt battery. Those ones usually allowed you to remove the battery pack from the laptop. Now there all based on lithium-polymer now. Same with smartphones.

I did some research in lithium polymer batteries a few years back. I distinctly remember there being almost 10 or so variations of lithium polymer mixes being used in battery production.

<comment><USER40> No, LiPo (which really means li-ion with gel or polymer electrolyte) has a lower specific energy (kWh/kg) but higher specific power (kW/kg).

> I don't know of any laptop today that's using a nickel cobalt battery. Those > ones usually allowed you to remove the battery pack from the laptop. Now > there all based on lithium-polymer now. Same with smartphones.

They all use NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) cathodes. LiPo batteries have the exact same cathodes and anodes as normal li-ion, just a different electrolyte.

> I did some research in lithium polymer batteries a few years back. I > distinctly remember there being almost 10 or so variations of lithium > polymer mixes being used in battery production.

There are ~10 main chemistry families, but hundreds of mixes.

<comment><USER42> thanks for the clarification

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> w-m The inclusion of the metal price graph[1] is very strange. What are they trying to tell with that? To me it demonstrates that nickel and cobalt prices are currently right where they should be in the market (considering the concentration), compared to the other metals. So if cobalt prices quadrupled from 22$ to 81$ recently, doesn't it mean that cobalt was highly undervalued before and is now correctly priced?

[1] [https://media.nature.com/w800/magazine- assets/d41586-018-057...](https://media.nature.com/w800/magazine- assets/d41586-018-05752-3/d41586-018-05752-3_15963452.png)

<comment><USER43> I believe the graph was to support their argument that it's better to [fund their research in electrodes that] use Cu and Fe rather than Ni and Co, since their abundance will always make those materials cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> To lessen global co2 emissions we should think about which wehicles gets batteries first. Is it a car commuting for example an hour a day or commercial wehicles which are out in the road constantly?

Think of 100kw if battery power in a personal Wehicle versus commercial delivery trucks.

Secondly you do not need to pack 100kw of batteries in a car who rarely commutes long distance. If the batteries are shared between cars then you swap in a 100kw pack for the long term commute but have a 10kw pack for every day use. That way batteries will last a lot longer.

</comment><comment><USER45> We should invest in space mining as well, there's no practical limit to the natural resources of the solar system at humanity's current scale.

<comment><USER46> There is over a cubic km of earths crust that can be mined _per person_ on the planet using current technology. There is zero need for space mining as actually rare materials we care about like Oil don't exist in space.

<comment><USER45> The problem with the Earth's crust is all the stuff on top of it. We can't extract 100% of the earth's crust's value, or anywhere near it, without disrupting huge swaths of wild and human habitats. We're already causing a mass extinction at our current rate of consumption, do you really want to increase that?

We need to move away from oil so that we don't kill ourselves with climate change regardless.

<comment><USER46> That's just cost / benefit.

We can keep the top ~5 meters of earth and extract what's beneath it without disrupting ecosystems. However, the current approach of massive mines is cheaper and frankly we have such a vast abundance of resources that's working fine it's not like every person on the planet has any need for 20+ lb of gold. Further, we can always just mine old garbage dumps as elements are not destroyed just shifting chemical bonds.

<comment><USER45> But this very article is talking about the possibility of running out. Do you disagree with the premise of the article? Nature is a respected publication, if you think they're wrong you should work on a properly sourced and peer reviewed rebuttal.

<comment><USER46> If you read the article they are not saying that's how much of this element is in the crust. They are making an economic argument which is a secondary issue. Note: People are not making economic arguments in support of space mining just an abundance argument.

In terms of abundance: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust)

Deepest mines [https://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature-top- ten-d...](https://www.mining-technology.com/features/feature-top-ten-deepest- mines-world-south-africa/) Though we have boor holes down to 12,262 meters which means we can extract material to that depth.

Feel free to consider multiplication as original research.

<comment><USER45> An economic argument for space works too. The profits of space mining outweigh the costs by several orders of magnitude and the abundance of resources far outstrips what's economically accessible on Earth, and as a bonus doesn't ruin the only place in the universe we know can support life.

Also, having a bore hole at a certain depth doesn't mean we can extract material from that depth in useful quantities.

<comment><USER46> I think your vastly overestimating the costs of mining stuff on earth and underestimating the costs of mining stuff in space.

On top of that if you bring back say a cubic mile of gold then gold is not going to be worth nearly as much. Which prevents scaling up space mining as we simply don't need that many raw materials to pay for multi trillion dollar space mining enterprises to bring costs down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The solution is investment in public transportation and a reduction in consumption.

There's absolutely no reason for most people in industrialized countries to own a car, other than the fact that the public transportation infrastructure sucks. With the shift of gas to electrically powered vehicles, there's even less of a reason for people to own an electric vehicle with a massive battery. We need higher density public transportation. Where the kwh of transporting a person goes down on average, thus reducing the need for more batteries.

As residential density increases, and road infrastructure can't keep up, we'll see a lot more bike paths, light and heavy rail, close proximity grocery stores, etc...

Look at Atlanta right now. Traffic is a clusterfuck, suburbs are also expanding, prompting more people to own a vehicle so they can get to downtown where the jobs are. You sit on the highway, and every single person is in a 5 person vehicle, only for 1 seat to be occupied. What a colossal waste from a utilization perspective.

Atlanta has decided to repurpose an old rail loop around the city and make a paved path around the entire city, which connects to other public infrastructure via auxiliary paths and existing trails. It is called The Beltline. It will take maybe another 10 years to complete the entire loop, but the city will be ready to handle the problems that will ensue decades from now.

<comment><USER48> And then you have the mayors of North Fulton (for example Mayor Mike Bodker of Johns Creek) that are fundamentally opposed to expanding various forms of rapid transit into their supposedly low density housing suburban communities:

[https://www.johnscreekga.gov/NewsAndEvents/News- Archive/2018...](https://www.johnscreekga.gov/NewsAndEvents/News- Archive/2018-News/View-the-Mayor-s-statement-on-proposed-MARTA-tax-i)

Having moved to Johns Creek from Boston last year, I think the Red Line should go all the way up 400 to Cumming and they should add more express lanes along 400.

But there are two messages I hear consistently around town when I ask various people about this issue:

1\. People like their low density housing, and you are never going to be able to put in enough rail access (like Boston's T or NYC's Subway) close enough to where people live or where they need to be on the other end to eliminate cars off the road through most of the area.

2\. They don't want particular groups from other parts of Atlanta having easy access to where they live...essentially to keep possible criminal elements away.

Point 1 is a legitimate concern, but commuter rail systems do exist in other areas of the country, and parking garages can be placed next to rail stations. Would definitely ease the nightmare that is rush hour on 400.

Point 2 is just a terrible legacy of racism that still exists in the South (and I'm a Southern boy born and raised until living in Boston for 10 years). There is a terrible acronym for MARTA that I have heard multiple times since moving here that just needs to disappear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> In ten years, I predict we'll have started transitioning to aluminum-ion batteries.

Lithium has one valence electron. Aluminum has three.

Aluminum-ion cells are not new, and they do have issues, but the same can be said of Lithium-ion 20 years ago.

Energy densities are remarkably different, with aluminum the clear winner.

Ironically, nickel and probably cobalt will be needed for mass-produced aluminum-ion batteries too.

<comment><USER34> Al-ion may be superior in energy density, but I doubt we'll be seeing it in EVs any time soon. The recharging issues may be able to be solved, but the vast majority of all funding for R&D and production is being focused on lithium right now. Lithium is "good enough" to hit the $100/kWh target which will make EVs affordable to the mass market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Required reading for all you neo-Malthusian types:

[https://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ.html](https://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Jevons/jvnCQ.html)

</comment><comment><USER51> Asteroid mining is just a space program away, and might be strategically valuable to the west if China does try to corner the supply market as it historically does.

</comment><comment><USER52> When things get more scarce, they become more valuable.

When things get more valuable, they become more expensive.

When things get more expensive, people find new ways to sell them.

FUD over supply and demand is so boring!

</comment><comment><USER53> I would argue for a more holistic approach.

Sure, optimize current resource consumption and even bring technically inferior but more practical batteries to market, but also do not assume the electric vehicle end-state = swap electric for internal combustion.

For instance, would we have a possible resource crunch if US car ownership went from >1 car / person to 0.1 car / person or lower? That _could_ happen in a few years now, with Uber / Lyft running on fossil fuels.

What if self-driving, electric vehicles come to market not as personal transport, but instead as transportation-as-a-service?

</comment><comment><USER54> Despite the sentiment to this article here, has anyone invested in cobalt/copper/nickel futures or mining companies?

</comment><comment><USER55> When I was in school - 15 years ago - I remember reading that we will run of oil in 2030. Seems like a similar wrong estimate.

<comment><USER56> The fact that we haven't run out of oil yet doesn't really change anything about the fact that oil-based industry is not sustainable. I don't see why this isn't a similar situation.

<comment><USER57> Is anything truly sustainable when we live on a planet of finite resources?

<comment><USER58> The sun is our best bet. We will have it for another 5 billion years give or take.

<comment><USER59> Yeh so not sustainable.. it will run out..

and...

it will run out even if we don't use it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Ok you guys, we've put a question mark above as a nod to the skepticism in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER61> The thing that I always thing about is that there are other uses for rare- earths. Vanadium, for example is used in structural steel as a alloying element that make steel MUCH stronger. Neodymium is used in magnets and lasers. Thorium is used in TIG welding.

We can't just siphon off all the Rare Earths for batteries without impacting other industries.

<comment><USER40> Good news! None of those are used in batteries. In fact, there are no rare earth elements in batteries. Also, the article does not mention rare earths a single time.

Even better: neodymium is unlike the other rare earths in that it is commonly found on its own. All the other rare earths almost always only occur together. Neodymium is quite easy to find an extract, and has always been of least/little concern.

Back when fears about rare earth shortages were a thing, the element of concern was tellurium, as it was assumed that thin film cadmium-telluride solar panels were the next big thing. They are now virtually obsolete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Good thing in 10 years solid state batteries should just about enter the mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER63> What about graphene-based batteries?

<comment><USER64> Exactly, in ten years graphene batteries wil have obliterated current technologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Let's just use D batteries. Good enough for a flashlight, good enough for a Macbook.

<comment><USER66> I know you're joking, but many D batteries (and effectively all the rechargeable ones) also contain nickel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I don't think batteries are a long term solution without a materials science breakthrough. The charging rate and the charge density needs to be increased exponentially.

I think we have a much better shot with hydrogen fuel cells, or other phase change system that can be refueled rapidly.

</comment><comment><USER68> One of the more interesting aspects of modern global warfare is the fact that, should the world decide to stage another world war, pretty much everyone is going to run out of a lot of these strategic resources within a few months to years. This, plus the fact that nuclear warfare is going to be extremely limited due to lack of available weapons, and the virtual impossibility of invading a country you don't share a land border with, puts a very hard limit on the amount of aggression any one nation can muster up. Even the mighty US military is a paper tiger after a few steady months of all-out combat.

<comment><USER69> Why is it impossible to invade a country without a land bridge when the US have regularly done it in the last few decades? Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq.

I bet China could, quite easily, invade Japan, The Phillipines or Taiwan if it wanted to. I bet Australia probably could too.

Here's Australia practising amphibious assaults:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3AEd5BmQgU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3AEd5BmQgU)

<comment><USER70> > Why is it impossible to invade a country without a land bridge when the US > have regularly done it in the last few decades? Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The United States invaded Iraq from Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan from Pakistan, Afghanistan (note that Afghanistan was more or less in a frozen civil war), and Uzbekistan.

Amphibious assaults are the most complex and riskiest kinds of military attack. It requires expert command of logistics to keep the landing ships providing supplies and men to the beach, even when the environment may be working against you (such as the tide), and where there is far too much to be crammed into too little space. It requires control of the sea and the skies, because you have masses of ships with masses of people just waiting to be bombed out of existence. Even if you do make it to land, you now have to supply your entire front-lines. If you don't capture a port, or if the port you captured was sabotaged by the defending army, you have to supply your entire assault from a beach that's not really capable of providing the deepwater capabilities to handle cargo ships of serious capacity.

In the event of a war, the South Chinese Sea would likely be a contested zone, where neither China nor the US has sufficient control of the area to effect an amphibious assault. It is far from "quite easily."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem with Rare Earth is that the West collectively acts like 3 year old who are to dumb to solve incredibly simple problems.

Rare earth contained lots of Thorium and that has to be handled as nuclear waste and that means you have 1000s of tons of nuclear waste on your hands. This is of course completely idiotic because Thorium not really a big problem as it is not radioactive.

The few Rare Earth mines that do exist only extract the lower group so you can avoid the Thorium.

Because the US drives policy for the whole West, there is basically no Rare Earth mining in the West.

China on the other hand understands that the more expensive rare earths are outside of China the more likely people will manufacture in China.

There was quite a bit of effort to change this and it got traction in congress because many people are really concerned that all US military equipment depends on rare earths from China.

See:

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7QNZ56j-HM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7QNZ56j-HM)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxwF93wnRQo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxwF93wnRQo)

<comment><USER66> REs are an interesting situation but not what's being talked about in this article. China has no production of cobalt and a tiny fraction of nickel.</comment></comment>


Java Platform, Standard Edition 8 Reference Implementations is Released - <AUTHOR> https://jdk8.java.net/java-se-8-ri/

<comment><USER2> Year 2014: Java gets lambdas.

Java 8 is pretty nice actually. Lambdas, date/time API that doesn't suck, filter/map/reduce in the collections. I'm looking forward to work with it.

<comment><USER3> I feel lambdas are kind of like generics. Hacked on top of language which does not really support them. No type interference, no named arguments...

Kotlin is way to go...</comment></comment>


Supreme Court rules 9-0 that warrant absolutely needed for police GPS tracking - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scotus-gps-ruling/ <comment><USER2> This is a victory -- if you can call a victory taking something back to where it was all along.

Along those lines, I noted this in the article:

 _In a footnote, Scalia added that, "Whatever new methods of investigation may be devised, our tsk, at a minimum, is to decide whether the action in question would have constituted a 'search' within the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment. Where, as here, the government obtains information by physically intruding on a constitutionally protected area, such a search has undoubtedly occurred."_

If that broader interpretation would hold, that would be awesome news. But by putting it in a footnote, as I understand it, it's more of a dream than anything else. Great philosophy, though. Here's hoping it plays out that way.

The problem -- and the reason it won't, probably -- is that this kind of interpretation needs to be put into a constitutional amendment. If you rely on judicial interpretation, between the legislature and the courts, they'll make a muddled mess out of it.

<comment><USER3> Some of our most important caselaw is contained in footnotes.

<comment><USER4> If you could supply a few examples I would love to learn!

<comment><USER3> One of the most famous is US v. Carolene ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Produ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Products_Co.)), but there are hundreds, maybe thousands of examples. Even when they don't contain actual law, footnotes often give insights into why a court decided an issue or interpreted a fact the way it did. These little hints can be invaluable in distinguishing later cases, or giving a later court a foothold to create some new law.

<comment><USER5> Minor correction: courts do not create laws. They merely interpret them, setting a precedent.

<comment><USER6> Setting a precedent is, in fact, the creation of new law. This is the basis of the Common Law system that the United States and other former English colonies use. See, for example, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law>

<comment><USER5> :). Thanks for the link, it was very educational. However, it actually doesn't seem to apply in this case: "United States federal courts only act as interpreters of statutes and the constitution by elaborating and precisely defining the broad language (connotation 1(b) above), but, unlike state courts, do not act as an independent source of common law (connotation 1(a) above)." [1]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#United_States_federa...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#United_States_federal_system_.281789_and_1938.29)

<comment><USER3> In theory, you're right: courts don't make laws. In practice, courts make law every day. This is intuitively obvious (e.g. If law says you can't do A or C but says nothing about B, and the court says "B is really just like A and C, so B is also prohibited under the law", the court has just made law)[edit: perhaps not so obvious if you don't practice law, but courts do this every day], but also goes deeper: The very idea of judicial review itself was invented by the courts (see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison>).

<comment><USER5> Neat. I wonder what our society would have looked like today if Marshall lost that one (had a bad day, spilled his coffee).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the meantime Lamar Smith is pushing a bill so ISP's track and log everything you do online for 18 months, and then to give the data away without a warrant.

[http://gcn.com/articles/2011/08/05/protecting-children- bill-...](http://gcn.com/articles/2011/08/05/protecting-children-bill-could- kill-internet.aspx)

<comment><AUTHOR> Warrantless everything. It's the future of America.

Why they feel the need to do an end-run around judicial overview I have no idea, because you rarely see a judge ever say "no" to law enforcement.

<comment><USER8> Most people would be appalled if they saw what the police get away with when they ask for search warrants. In the two areas I have personal experience with, the process of getting a warrant is an administrative inconvenience to the police, not the fair review that it's supposed to be. It's also important to keep in mind that it's similar to a prosecutor getting an indictment -- it's the law enforcement side telling only their side of the story, twisting facts however they please with no rebuttal, being told to a judge that maintains regular working relationships with these people and whose main concern is making sure the affidavit covers their ass enough not to get overturned on an appeal.

<comment><USER9> In France in the 60s the police used to have fill-in-the-blanks search warrants: pre-signed and pre-approved, with the name of the searchee conveniently left blank, so officers could type in whatever they wanted whenever they needed.

I say "in France" and "in the 60s" because it's been proven to happen there and then, but it's probably still common in many parts of the world...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What sort of twisty-turvy world have we found ourselves in?

A right-leaning Supreme court upholds tennants of the 4th Amendment - the go- to civil liberties ammendment - at the same time a Democratic administration seeks to weaken said ammendment.

When Democrats are attacking our civil liberties and Republicans (looking at you, Lamar Smith) are removing our economic freedoms, it's time to take the crackpots seriously when they say we're not living in a republic anymore.

<comment><USER11> What sort of twisty-turvy world have we found ourselves in?

One where the majority of people refuse to see politicians as politicians. There is no Democrat vs Republican.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what you mean exactly; could you please expand a bit?

<comment><USER11> Democrat and Republican are labels given without definition. You can call yourself a Republican but be pro-choice, anti-gun, and tax-and-spend. Political parties are fluid based on which politician participates at any given moment. Actual beliefs are too nuanced to be boiled down to "liberal/conservative" or "democrat/republican". Even trying to do so is making a mockery of democracy, to paraphrase George Washington. A big issue with politics is people pay more attention to the definition-less label and less attention to what the politician actually stands for (if anything).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The headline for this link is incorrect: the Court did NOT rule that a warrant is necessary for police tracking.

So what was the government trying to do? They really wanted the Supreme Court to rule that installing this GPS receiver was not even a SEARCH within the meaning of the 4th Amendment. The Court said no, this is a search. In the future, they will subject similar GPS installations to 4th Amendment scrutiny.

But on the warrant issue, Scalia explicitly wrote the Court will not answer the question of whether the government needed a warrant on page 12 of the opinion. Why? "The Government did not raise [this argument] below, and the D. C. Circuit therefore did not address it... We consider the argument forfeited."

</comment><comment><USER14> The funny thing in this case which the Govt LOST in a big way is that the Govt actually HAD a warrant. They failed to comply with it (Attaching the GPS after the date granted by the court and for longer than granted.)

Basically the Govt. tried to convince the court that their bungling did not matter because a "warrant" not needed to begin with as it was not a "search" as defined in the 4th amendment. The Supremes slapped the hell out of that argument and thus created a major ruling that now impacts all govt. actions on GPS. The irony is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does this ruling cover tracking via cell phone as well? According to the Wikipedia article on mobile phone tracking, "The U.S. Justice Department has argued that current laws allow them to track suspects without having probable cause to suspect a law is being violated."

This case only seems to cover devices the suspect doesn't already willingly carry.

<comment><USER16> The ruling was made pretty narrowly, only covering devices that are physically installed on an owner's property without their permission, so it wouldn't apply to cell phone monitoring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kozinski's dissent from a similar 9th circuit case (United States v. Juan Pineda-Moreno) is an awesome bit of reading ("Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."): [http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08...](http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08-30385.pdf) . I'm also glad the supreme court ruled more sanely than the 9th circuit did on this matter.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious what the next step is going to be, maybe try to use "onstar" gps data without a warrant, because the way this is worded, it maybe seems the action of placing the tracking device that is the violation, not using an existing one, and they can still do it for "segments" (ie. tracking you for just one leg of a journey and removing it afterwards is legal without a warrant?)

Next we have to fight for our bodies not to be searched without a warrant as Rand Paul is currently experiencing personally: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3500715>

<comment><USER18> The linked article says Rand Paul set off an alert on a full body scan, then refused to be searched. That sounds more like his "protest" is trying to cover up something he didn't realize was carrying after the fact - otherwise why was he not protesting the body scan in the first place.

<comment><USER19> Rand Paul has on numerous occasions spoken out against the TSA's use of pat downs...

<comment><USER18> I see no difference in principle between a search using someone's hands and search using X-rays. If one objects to rights violation during a pat-down, why doesn't the same objection apply to backscatter?

A backscatter machine in some ways is even more intrusive than a pat down as it can generate higher resolution images, which can be saved. Furthermore, there is a small, but non-zero risk of bodily harm from the scan -particularly when you multiply the risk by the number of trips and passengers going through the procedure, even a one in a million chance would cause harm far in excess of the risk of terrorist threat that the search is trying to mitigate.

<comment><USER19> _"I see no difference in principle between a search using someone's hands and search using X-rays."_

Then you are hopelessly inhuman. The difference should be obvious, and likely cannot be explained if it is not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the things the article doesn't point out (but the linked case law does) that I was curious enough about to look into:

The "beeper" was essentially a short-ranged RF transponder used as a tracking device. The officers were actively following the suspect, and using it as an aid to tailing the suspect's car. The suspect lost the tail, and the cops used the beeper to find where he went.

This is contrasted with a GPS device, which was placed, tracked for a month, and then retreived, and the data of the month's movements used to convict the drug dealer.

</comment><comment><USER21> The decision 9-0 but with two separate opinions, and boy is the split weird: Scalia-Roberts-Kennedy-Thomas-Sotomayor on the broader interpretation; and Alito-Ginsburg-Breyer-Kagan on the narrower interpretation.

Good news on _either_ interpretation, though.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone know how this is squared with US v. Knotts? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Knotts>

>United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 was a 1983 United States Supreme Court case regarding the use of electronic surveillance devices. The device in question is described as a beeper and can only be tracked from a short distance. The court unanimously held that the use of such devices did not invade a legitimate expectation of privacy, and was therefore allowed, without a warrant, under the Fourth Amendment.

Is it just a distance thing? Or length of time of the surveillance?

Here's the full opinion:

[http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us...](http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=460&invol=276)

<comment><USER16> The majority (Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, Kennedy, Sotomayor) distinguished _Knotts_ on the basis that in that case there was no trespass onto an owner's property to install the device: _"The beeper had been placed in the container before it came into Knotts' possession, with the consent of the then-owner. Knotts did not challenge that installation, and we specifically declined to consider its effect on the Fourth Amendment analysis."_

The four remaining justices (Alito, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan) would've made a stronger holding, instituting a new general principle that pervasive, long- term monitoring requires a warrant, regardless of the method: they summarized _Knotts_ as "relatively short-term monitoring of a person's movements on public streets" as opposed to this case's "use of longer term GPS monitoring". (The're a need to come up with some kind of dividing line, because short-term tailing of people on public streets has long been considered something police can do on mere suspicion, without a warrant.)

Sotomayor's concurrence indicated a potential willingness to join those latter four in an appropriate case, but she didn't feel it was necessary to deciding this case, since it was enough for this case to just hold that the physical installation required a warrant.

<comment><USER22> Great, thanks very much for that.

It seems mind-boggling for me that the mere fact that the device was installed by the then-owner would be enough to make this OK without a warrant. It seems no different than leaving a sticky tracking device on a public street where you know the suspect is going walk, so that he unknowingly picks it up on his shoe and can be monitored...pretty much forever.

EDIT: Wait, on second thought, are you sure? The main opinion says

> The first case, Knotts, upheld against Fourth Amendment challenge the use of > a "beeper" that had been placed in a container of chloroform, allowing law > enforcement to monitor the location of the container. 460 U. S., at 278. We > said that there had been no infringement of Knotts' reasonable expectation > of privacy since the information obtained—the location of the automobile > carrying the container on public roads, and the location of the off-loaded > container in open fields near Knotts' cabin—had been voluntarily conveyed to > the public.6 Id., at 281–282. But as we have discussed, the Katz reasonable- > expectation-of-privacy test has been added to, not substituted for, the > common-law trespassory test. The holding in Knotts addressed only the > former, since the latter was not at issue. The beeper had been placed in the > container before it came into Knotts' possession, with the consent of the > then-owner. 460 U. S., at 278. Knotts did not challenge that installation, > and we specifically de- clined to consider its effect on the Fourth > Amendment analysis. Id., at 279, n. Knotts would be relevant, perhaps, if > the Government were making the argument that what would otherwise be an > unconstitutional search is not such where it produces only public > information. The Government does not make that argument, and we know of no > case that would support it.

To me, that says that Knotts is distinguised because all the data that the police used was available publicly, i.e. that Knotts did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy (which, presumably, Jones did in the recent case).

<comment><USER16> I read that part differently. They're asking if the Government is arguing that, since the search produces only public information here, like in _Knotts_ , that would mean that it's automatically constitutional under _Knotts_ ; and they conclude that no, that can't override the trespass involved in installation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If I were to ask an FBI agent why obtaining a warrant first would have been onerous in this case (or similar ones), what would they say?

<comment><USER24> more importNtly, if the supreme court asks them, what will they say. in this case peosecutors mad it clear they interpreted the law to meanthey could legally gps tag anyone, including then supremejustice's car without a warrant - one imagines this could not have helped their argument, though the supremes, unlike lower courts, are there to be the wisest of the judiciary and keep things on track, iltimately. glad they did.

police need tools to do their jobs, ive lived in lands with police forces that aredysfunctional. they need limits too, it just may turn out that the supreme court decision here changes a. lot of things indirectly, rebalancing things a bit.

<comment><USER23> Right, but my question was more like: Clearly this was a major investigation. The FBI was involved, they followed this guy around for a month, they used expensive technology, they appealed all the way to the Supreme Court .. if they're going through all that trouble, would it have been that much more work to just get a warrant first? Is there a long waiting list for warrant hearings? Would the warrant have been unlikely to have been granted? Or did they just screw up?

<comment><USER25> They just screwed up. They installed the device a day late and outside of DC.

From the last footnote in Alito's opinion, _In this case, the agents obtained a warrant, but they did not comply with two of the warrant's restrictions: They did not install the GPS device within the 10-day period required by the terms of the warrant and by Fed. Rule Crim. Proc. 41(e)(2)(B)(i), and they did not install the GPS device within the District of Columbia..._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> More interesting than the decision—in which Scalia so narrows the scope of the case (to whether attaching a device to a car constitutes a search) that it's pretty boring—are last November's oral arguments.[1a, 1b]

In the oral arguments, there's considerable discussion about whether pervasive GPS or other technologically enabled surveillance in itself is constitutionally permitted. The discussion on this point makes for interesting listening/reading because everyone agrees that the police are permitted persistently to monitor someone over any indefinitely long period (in public, where there is no search) without a warrant. Would equivalent surveillance carried out not by human police officers but rather by technology be allowed? Even though the relevant technologies will soon be so cheap that the authorities would be able to monitor anyone (or everyone) in the country?

Another interesting point brought up in the oral arguments is that the government owns your license plate, so placing a monitoring device on that, rather than the car itself, would not constitute a trespass and so may not constitute a search. Nothing in this decision refutes that logic, so the police may still be able to track you by GPS without a warrant so long as they put the transmitter on your license plate.

1a. Transcript: Oral Argument - Supreme Court [PDF]

1b. Audio: <http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/302576-1> [Flash]

</comment><comment><USER27> I like the way @alex_gaynor put it:

        When the Supreme Court rules 9-0 against you,
        there's a good chance your argument was fucking stupid.

<https://twitter.com/#!/alex_gaynor/status/161481523160297472>

</comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't matter. As always the government is 2 steps ahead. Drones are already being deployed in the US: [http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/15/9476623-domesti...](http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/12/15/9476623-domestic- drones-coming-soon-over-a-home-near-you)

<comment><USER24> I believe that is unavoidable givenhow things work. Getting something in front of thesupreme court is more difficult than law enforcement moving forward.... so there will akways be a lag between the two.

<comment><USER28> I understand what you mean however the problem is more fundamental than that. It has become the case in the US and abroad that the higher courts are just enforcing existing laws in face of clear violations. With the blank card that is terrorism, domestic or foreign, branches of the government simply do whatever they want until they are called out on the illegality of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Great judgment. But if I was an overly cynical person, here's where I could see this going:

Data gathered by voluntarily-placed GPS units aren't covered by the ruling. If they want the data, the onus is then on cities to create incentives to place GPS units voluntarily.

Initiatives are started to link road tax to miles driven in any given county - which requires GPS to check.

Cars suddenly begin to have built-in GPS transmission not just for OnStar, but for other applications, like Facebook.

The car becomes a platform, and suddenly laws are enacted that effectively require private citizens to report data to law enforcement.

Law enforcement gets to track _all_ drivers without a warrant.

(Not that I'm arguing for a different ruling - this is great - but I don't trust the government not to take surveillance to its maximum possible level given current technology.)

</comment><comment><USER30> """The government told the justices during oral arguments that that GPS devices have become a common tool in crime fighting, saying it is employed "thousands" of times annually."""

So sad to think all those investigations will now have to have proper court oversight (not that I imagine that is too hard to get).

Anybody know how this could effect other, already completed, cases? Could I ask for a retrial/appeal if my conviction was heavily based on this type of evidence?

</comment><comment><USER31> _The government told the justices during oral arguments that that GPS devices have become a common tool in crime fighting, saying it is employed "thousands" of times annually._

Wow. So I guess that number is supposed to shrink to zero now? That transition could prove to be very interesting...

<comment><USER32> all they need to do is get a warrant. they actually had a 10 day warrant in the case in question. they just tracked the guy for 11 days and wanted to use the evidence.

<comment><USER33> Based on reading (the beginning of) the decision, that appears to be incorrect.

From the first paragraph of the decision: "The warrant authorized installation in the District of Columbia and within 10 days, but agents installed the device on the 11th day and in Maryland. The Government then tracked the vehicle's movements for 28 days."

And from the footnote on page 2: "1 In this litigation, the Government has conceded noncompliance with the warrant and has argued only that a warrant was not required"

So they got a warrant but messed up and failed to comply with its terms, and to try to preserve the conviction they argued that they didn't have to comply with the warrant.

Edit: Rereading it, andylei's main point is that police just need to get warrants and in order to still be able to use GPS tracking, and that's correct. Apologies for the nitpicking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a victory, sure. But sadly, getting a warrant is a five minute affair nowadays. Judges sign those like water. In fact there are judges that just sign warrants exclusively. That's all they do.

<comment><USER35> It's an important procedural protection. Just having a coordinate branch of the government somewhere in the process gives you a safeguard against egregious abuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does this mean that Facebook, Google and Apple need a warrant to track people? Or just the police?

<comment><USER37> Google, Facebook and Apple don't need a warrant because you voluntarily sign up to give them all your information. If you emailed the police every time you drove somewhere, I don't think they would need a warrant to read those emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The irony is that the govt HAD a search warrant in this case, they were 1 day late in installing the device - the search warrant expired after 10 days, and they installed it on the 11th day.

What's somewhat sad is that a drug dealer, who was caught with 97 kilos of cocaine, 1 kilo of cocaine base, and $800,000 cash, gets to go free. But small price to pay to retain the freedom of 300 million people I guess.

<comment><USER39> > But small price to pay to retain the freedom of 300 million people I guess.

It was merely a coke dealer. We're not talking a serial child rapist or mass murderer. My neighborhood is full of these guys and its unpleasant, but its just drugs. I think a dealer going free is a very, very, very small cost to pay. So small its not even worth worrying about. You could jail him today and 10 others would take his place. Drugs are funny that way. Demand doesn't really go down past a certain point.

Meanwhile people who cover up child rape are deified because the organization they are part of (large sports organization, organizaed religion) is too sacrosanct to challenge.</comment></comment>


The idea of a university as a free space rather than a safe space is vanishing - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/03/idea-university-free-space-rather-safe-space-vanishing/ <comment><USER2> The real tragedy is that university used to be a place where you could be convinced that some of the ideas you had going in might be _wrong_. Now the only thing that's being taught is that certain people just aren't allowed to speak at all.

People who used to have their ways of thinking changed at university are now leaving silent, angry, _and still wrong_.

<comment><USER3> It's not a definitive change and the problem is worldwide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is indeed a sad day when people, that is, students, are censored by their own. It's astounding that this would happen being that through disagreement and argument is how we find our better ways. My sentiment is that here is the one place where we should feel free to share our ideas no matter how immature or adolescent they are. This should be the place where we get to open up and explore. But, as they say, the left and the right have conspired to silence discussion and only received opinion is welcome.

Here's the relevant quote: "In other words, and not for the first time in history, the far left is allied with the far right, and drags the soggy centre along whimpering behind it."

<comment><USER5> Anyone who uses terms like "the left" is pretty much announcing where they are coming from, and that their argument is almost certainly going to be simplistic and flawed.

Take this excerpt:

           Surely the left believes in secularism and despises
           the superstitions that have held humanity back? Not
           so, and not for a long time.

If "the left" believes in secularism and atheism, and the people he's talking about oppose secularism and atheism, why does does he conclude this means "the left" no longer believes in secularism, rather than the people he's talking about are not actually "the left"?

He claims "Feminists, gay-rights campaigners, anti-fascists and anti- Islamists" are being sanctioned or persecuted. So the left is against _feminists, gay-rights and anti-fascism_? What do those groups represent then, "the right"?

If there's one claim socialism and communism can make, it's that it's diametrically opposed to Islamism, as evidenced in numerous post-war socialist, secular Arab countries, Afghanistan in the 70s and 80s, and in the fact that leftists have been persecuted and murdered in every Islamist state from Saudi to Iran.

        In any case, the 'left' as I suppose I have to call it

Why does he _have_ to call it "the left" if even he states they hold "reactionary views"? Because he's pandering to a right-wing audience on a right-wing website.

<comment><USER6> Alternately, the accepted shorthand for some groups may well be "the left" and "the right". Similarly, there are people who will use the term "Social Justice Warrior" while identifying with the movement, because it is a decent shorthand.

 _" What do those groups represent then, "the right"?"_

It is possible to have other disagreements with those viewpoints despite what others might believe. For example, it is absolutely ideologically consistent that while the left may support atheism in the abstract they would also fail to support its logical conclusion that Islam as a religion and its practitioners should be re-educated.

Similarly, the right may support gun owners but still disagree that felons/minorities should be allowed to own firearms.

<comment><USER5> "The Jews" is an accepted shorthand for some people, and like "the left" you can be fairly certain the argument around the term is not going to focus on what a great bunch of lads they are.

As to the other point, if both groups are "the left" (even though in this case one group is not behaving that way) then why argue that "the left" is censoring/repressing, when it's at least equally true (I'd say more true) that "the left" is being censored/repressed?

I mean it's pretty funny seeing people on "the right" pretending to care that feminists and gay-rights activists are being shut down.

<comment><USER6> _" The Jews" is an accepted shorthand for some people,_

Many of those people themselves being Jewish, referring to their own communities and people! I see what you're driving at, but the simple fact of the matter is that "leftist" is no more an automatic insult that "rightist" unless one is misidentified.

 _I mean it 's pretty funny seeing people on "the right" pretending to care that feminists and gay-rights activists are being shut down._

I think it's reasonable that even the most die-hard reactionary may see the existential threat posed by policies and behaviors used to silence folks they might otherwise like. After all, mob justice is never _guaranteed_ to stay in one's favor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <tin-foil-hat> Is it just me or is education being slowly but steadily subverted in many countries at once? </tin-foil-hat>

<comment><USER8> Sort of. But it's more pernicious than that.

What is the purpose of going to a University/College?

The purpose _SHOULD_ be education and enlightenment. The purpose has _BECOME_ vocational training for a job.

<comment><USER7> Do you think that most universities are starting to operate like corporate businesses? with corporate priorities and corporate practices?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Popehat, a blog of free-speech lawyers, is a great source for in-depth articles on this kind of thing. Two recent examples: [1] [2]

[1] [https://popehat.com/2016/02/19/williams-college-our- students...](https://popehat.com/2016/02/19/williams-college-our-students-are- children-and-we-must-protect-them/)

[2] [https://popehat.com/2016/03/08/marc-randazza-something- doesn...](https://popehat.com/2016/03/08/marc-randazza-something-doesnt-click- here/)

</comment><comment><USER10> The author seems to reminisce about a time when universities were pure outlets of free thought. At that time women were vastly outnumbered by men in universities. The time when universities were pure and free for everyone exists only in the authors imagination.

<comment><USER11> You didn't back up anything you were saying. It looks to me like women crossed the majority in 1960.

[http://blogs.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/gender-...](http://blogs.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/gender-college_goldin-et-al-2006.jpg)

<comment><USER12> Read the graph more carefully. That is birth year, not graduation year.

<comment><USER11> Good catch. That would be 1978 for enrollment and 1982 for graduation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Universities have a lot of overhead these days, and to paraphrase Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, the assistant deputy vice provosts say "we gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs".

</comment><comment><USER14> We're becoming a society that values having or feelings affirmed rather more than having the truth affirmed. Is this not at the core of what we're seeing?

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not British, so it's hard to judge, but I'm not entirely certain the interpretation he gives of the events cited are completely accurate.

This is a man who supported the Iraq invasion and accused protesters of harming the civil rights of the citizens of Iraq.

</comment><comment><USER16> When moral relativism is your religion, anyone with moral conviction is your enemy and must be silenced.

What's most pitiful is the cowardice displayed by all who should know better. University trustees and professors, business leaders, entertainers, and every last one of us who has ever surrendered to this tyranny in our schools, our jobs, or our communities. Instead of fighting back, we capitulate and cower in fear for our reputations and livelihoods. Seeing this in my own country, America, especially disgusts me. How many good men have put down their lives to secure for us the blessings of liberty. Today, we lack the confidence and courage to even raise a word in their defense.

<comment> loup-vaillant Okay, I'm lost: why the downvotes? This sounds like reasonable comment, even useful (the first sentence is a good summary of the article's subject). I see no attack to any particular group.

What in this comment could possibly rub HN the wrong way?

<comment><USER17> I think it's just that there's a lot of dramatic and hyperbolic words and phrases in there, here's a list from a quick pass:

> religion, anyone, conviction, enemy, must, silenced

> most, pitiful, cowardice, all, should, every last one of us, ever, > surrendered, tyranny, fighting, capitulate, cower, fear

> my own country, America; disgusts, good men, put down their lives, secure, > blessings, liberty, lack, confidence, courage, even, a word, defense

A few of these would be fine.

<comment><USER16> Dramatic is the right tone here. We are seeing the collapse of intellectual freedom and openness in the places where it was supposed to be valued most. This does not bode well for our civilization. My generation, the millennials, holds free speech in much lower regard than previous generations. [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of- millen...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-millennials- ok-with-limiting-speech-offensive-to-minorities/) . Everyone who values freedom should be very alarmed.

<comment><USER18> Millenials didn't invent video game ratings, movie ratings, the seven 'dirty' words, the hays code, or blacklists.

If your generation targets something that's actually harmful, you're ahead of the game.

Consider a space that becasue all speech is allowed, is dominated by speech that marginalizes some subset of the population. Is that 'free'?

I think that if you want a place of intellectual exploration, excluding people is as dangerous as excluding certain ideas. And there seems to be a trade-off.

<comment><USER16> I very recently graduated from a college where these activists were very active. I can assure you, that there is not some epidemic of racism or any other kind of discrimination that this is a legitimate reaction to. It's nothing short of a political power-grab and an attempt to shut down any discussion by people that they don't agree with. They have successfully created a climate of fear. The reaction among all of the different institutions--different academic and administrative departments, student groups, greek organizations, alumni groups, etc.--is nothing short of race to capitulate the fastest.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sunlight Labs Looking For Volunteers To Scrape Legislation For All 50 States - <AUTHOR> http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/02/26/fifty-state-project/

<comment><USER2> We created a site called Fantasy Congress back in college and we are in the middle of transitioning it to a new home. We became good friends with the Sunlight folks while we were in DC before we made JamLegend.

This is an important undertaking (we had talked about this a long time ago) and we'd be happy to talk to anyone interested in our experiences with scraping the federal government, the future of Fantasy Congress, any tips, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow this is quite an undertaking. As a test, I went out to my state's website (NE) to see how easy it would be to scrape legislation info. It looks like there's plenty of information available online, however every document they have is available in PDF. Hopefully they aren't encrypted...</comment>


Interest in a community for sharing problems? (as opposed to ideas) - <AUTHOR>

Inspired by my post from yesterday [1].<p>[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7326188 <comment><AUTHOR> I'm quickly setting this up, send me an email if you'd like to test it firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER2> I would orginize around markets then problems then solutions.</comment>