It's probably mostly idiomatic. For native English-speakers it is more natural to use "number" when talking about things that are counted units that would be represented by integers (like marbles, or children, or features). "Amount" would be more appropriate when talking about something that you measure and represent with a floating point number (like butter, or gasoline/petrol, or risk). But an English-speaker will understand what you mean if you say "amount of features" instead of "number of features."
And since we're being picky, it should be "the latter is correct", not "the later is correct."
Off topic: I thought (probably incorrectly) that the EU required that the cookie preferences for sites were supposed to offer "Reject All" if they offered "Accept All". I realize The New Statesman may not need to comply since Brexit, but their opt-out logic seems almost to be calculated to make people give up before they opt out of everything. Net result is that I didn't read an article that might have interested me, and I didn't see any of their advertisements because I didn't want to be tracked.
The cookie law still applies in the UK because it has not been revoked. IIRC, there was a ruling recently that it must be as easy to reject all as it is to accept all. Not every site has been updated/fixed; I still see dark patterns, frequently, but I do feel like it has gotten better.
I believe you are correct, definitely in terms of the spirit of the law and probably in terms of the text. It's just that there haven't been any landmark legal cases yet to settle this point (further complicated by the fact that the EU is more civil law than common law).
Slightly off topic, but related: I'm always interested in the different approach to public "right of ways" in the US (and Canada) versus the UK. Given that the concept of public right of way was well established in the UK before the colonial period, why didn't the colonies recognize rights of way based on well-established use? Based on my limited knowledge of the US and Canada, I'm not aware of any State or Province that recognizes the right of the public to cross private land on established paths/trails in the way that is recognized in the UK.
Maine has right to roam, kind of, in a very american way: you can assume you have permission, unless clearly indicated otherwise. This preserves property rights, but only if you want them. Also there is a strong presumption of zero liability for the landowner (AFAIK!), so landowners aren't particularly incentivized to close off their land.
Yea, I think the liability thing is key, at least in the USA. I have no problem in concept with allowing the public to roam on my property (as long as they're not taking or damaging things), but I wouldn't want to allow it if they could sue me and win because they tripped on a rock or something.
Anyone can sue anyone for anything. I assume that if you trip on a rock or a tree root on a trail on someone's land, suing would be a man bites dog thing--but so could any number of events. Obviously if you deliberately put some hazard of a trail crossing your property, that could be different. (Though probably edge cases--tricky natural hazard on a well-established trail you didn't do anything about.)
Do you know more about the tax incentives in New Hampshire? I'm in Vermont, and wondering if there are established patterns that would work for our town.
Edit: I'd love to hear from anyone elsewhere that offers such incentives as to how they are structured.
There is the concept of easements. Probably not as familiar to the suburban person, but out in the boonies, it is allowed for you to use another person's property to get to your property if there is no other access to your property. For example when your property doesn't have direct access to a road unless using your neighbor's access. Lots of country properties "share" a dirt road
Noted (I'm actually rural, and have an easement on my own property), but an easement is quite different from a public right of way in the UK. An easement does not create a public right, and (at least in WA state) must be negotiated between the landowners.
WA state has a private way of necessity [1] (edit: i had the wrong word here). If my land has no access except through your land, you may not deny me access. Although you're welcome to attempt to negotiate with me to get to something that works well for both of us, but if not, I can do something reasonable.
WA also has easements by traditional access, but it seemed pretty limited and easy for property owners to avoid, when I was looking into it.
Although my understanding (through some personal experience) is that e.g. in Maine it's OK to have only water access. May not still be true but seemed to be in a case I was familiar with.
It's a little more tricky than that. There are implicit public easements that get created merely by a path being open and commonly used. That's pretty close to the right in the UK.
If you can show that you've been using a specific path for years the owner of that path can lose rights to block access. This is why you see some land owners putting up no-trespassing signs and jealously guarding their land and access. They don't want to lose the ability to effectively control their paths. IIRC, this is a common law thing. It's a bit like trademarks in the sense that land owners need to guard their land otherwise they lose a chunk of it.
The squishiness here is I don't think there's a specified amount of time before the public easement is granted.
There's also easements into greenbelts. There are some places around lakes where you can only access the publicly accessible areas by crossing private property. Usually, there is a designated path for that access, and the property owner cannot block it from public use.
Then you get into the peculiarity of "corner crossing", where four parcels meet at an infinitesimal point. Can you cross the corner and not be considered to have trespassed onto one of the other pieces? It's.... tricky.
It only gets tricky when there are wealthy landowners seeking to monopolize public game lands they have surrounded by private property, otherwise it’s pretty clearly acceptable to cross.
Yeah. I live in at least exurban area and I have some specific easements I negotiated when I bought. And, in practice, I have more. But if the neighboring owner really wanted to put up some barbed wire fences or the one or two owners along the river walk I often take outside of conservation land really wanted to clamp down, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have legal options.
Per another comment, some of it at least is that many people really don't want hunting (or destructive off-road vehicles) on their land but have no problem with the occasional person taking a walk on a more-or-less established path.
Even in the UK, I've had an issue with something basically identified as an item of interest on an OS map and getting yelled at for sticking my nose in a gate.
I suspect that most "real" hiking trails in the US that are not on public land have formal easements of some sort. I observe that around me the trails on conservation land are marked on digital maps and the informal trails on private land are not.
Well, for one, public rights of way do exist on, and adjacent to, every public road. But that's kind of besides the point.
I think there's probably many reasons, but here's a few I can think of:
1. The trails and such that warrant these rights never existed in the first place.
2. The rights come from long-established customs, which again, never got the chance to get going in the United States.
3. The legal/juridical establishment in the United States tended to care more about protecting the rights of property owners than protecting the freedom to travel (in this limited respect).
There's a lot of legal history there. The US never had feudalism. The overthrow of feudalism resulted in reduced land rights for large landowners.
There's another amusing historical accident - Blackstone.[1] Blackstone's Commentaries[2] are a self-contained four volume set on how the English legal system worked. They had a strong influence on the US legal system. Most of the drafters of the Constitution read them. There were few if any law libraries, but many copies of Blackstone.
Blackstone was a property rights absolutist. He wrote:
"So great moreover is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community. If a new road, for instance, were to be made through the grounds of a private person, it might perhaps be extensively beneficial to the public; but the law permits no man, or set of men, to do this without consent of the owner of the land. In vain may it be urged, that the good of the individual ought to yield to that of the community; for it would be dangerous to allow any private man, or even any public tribunal, to be the judge of this common good, and to decide whether it be expedient or no."[3]
This is further than English law goes. US law arose from that interpretation. That's the power of writing the most widely read book on the subject.
For good reason, one can suppose. Wealth flows downstream from the concept of private property whose rights are strongly guarded by law. An "ideal" amount of property rights, if one exists at all, is likely much closer to absolute than zero.
"(Trespass) signifies no more than an entry on another man’s ground without a lawful authority, and doing some damage, however inconsiderable, to his real property. For the right of meum and tuum, or property, in lands being once established, it follows as a necessary consequence, that this right must be exclusive; that is, that the owner may retain to himself the sole use and occupation of his soil: every entry therefore thereon without the owner’s leave, and especially if contrary to his express order, is a trespass or transgression. The Roman law seem to have made a direct prohibition necessary, in order to constitute this injury: “qui alienum fundum ingreditur, potest a domino, si is praeviderit, prohiberi ne ingrediatur.” But the law of England, justly considering that much inconvenience may happen to the owner, before he has an opportunity to forbid the entry, has carried the point much farther, and has treated every entry upon another’s lands, (unless by the owner’s leave, or in some very particular cases) as an injury or wrong, for satisfaction of which an action of trespass will lie; but determines the quantum of that satisfaction, by considering how far the offense was willful or inadvertent, and by estimating the value of the actual damage sustained."[1]
Except for the carve-out for fox-hunting: "In like manner the common law warrants the hunting of ravenous beasts of prey, as badgers and foxes, in another man’s land; because the destroying such creatures is profitable to the public."
In Canada, there are so many streams and rivers, lakes, that these are the 'right to roam' areas. There are all sorts of laws for access, and the country was explored by canoe.
And in the winters of 200 years ago, the lakes became frozen roads.
Yet part of it may also be, that land wss apportioned in large, organized chunks in many cases. Given to settlers, with spaces for roads as part of the plan.
Europe had many places where there was no way to get around, for there were no roads!
And in the US, access to waterways isn't guaranteed. I'll have to look up the details, but there are sections of the James River in Virginia which are private and the right to privacy was granted in the colonial era.
Which group of people who were in the Americas had the "right" to the land? The groups that were on the land when Columbus landed? Or the groups that were there when the Pilgrims landed? Or the groups that were there in 1776?
For large swaths of the Americas, these are all different groups, many of which seized the land through violence.
It's something people like to throw out as an argument, but it falls on its face under the most basic of scrutiny. The entire earth was "stolen" many, many times by this definition, making it nonsensical.
You could start with the ones who were forced to sign treaties under the current constitution under duress, or treaties they couldn't read, or treaties that weren't respected.
Your product is legal, but we don't want you giving people ideas that they could use it in a way that is "irresponsible." And yes, we decide what's "irresponsible."
Product is legal, but the way to use it is likely not.
Knives are legal, but likely wouldn't be advertised by showing a scene of stabbing someone.
Or Visa payment cards are legal, but you wouldn't show how to use them to bribe an official in the commercials.
Does anyone see/hear this quote without thinking of Jack Donaghy using it in 30 Rock -- where he specifically cites "Hans Gruber, Die Hard" as the source?
I was working in the bowels of GE's Schenectady site (Zip Code: 12345 - respect), doing tape monkey/account admin stuff, when that show started. In addition to be hilarious on its own merits, the sheer amount of subtle satire about GE culture they threw in there was almost as overwhelming as it was brilliant.
I mean, just the use of the "GE Inspira" font was $(chefs-kiss)
Hopefully, after you "destroy capitalism and wash away the weird bourgeois conception of having a 'career'", there will still be some people around who want to be in Operations and keep information systems running. Of course, we'll probably be too busy subsistence farming to worry about information systems.
Please consider the amount of open source projects that are kept going and maintained for free out of the developers' passion.
Sure we wont have the profit driven ad tracking ops and social media to maintain, but as long as there is a need for communications infrastructure, people will be doing this out of curiosity and desire to create. Whatever would be left of the internet would probably be higher quality.
I applaud those who contribute to open source projects out of passion and curiosity. But presumably they are still participating in some "capitalist" endeavour that puts food on their table and a roof over their head (and pays the electricity bill for whatever they choose to use for development).
What's your point? Obviously jumping to a post-capitalist state in this thought experiment is lofty, but we're already making a lot of assumptions, lets say "working in order to deserve to live" is already something of the past, my point stands that people will partake in creative endeavors for the sake of creating.
The thesis of the book "Capitalist Realism" states the all encompassing nature of the economic system we live in bars the average person from being able to imagine a world outside that system.
Outside a profit motive, people still create and imagine new ideas. Profit motive in our current tech landscape is 80% innovation in selling ads. Basically a pointless expenditure of resources IMO. All we have is advertisement and war, with a sliver of toys to make our days easier. Outside of a profit-centric environment, there's reason to believe ideas can be explored on their own merit, not on their potential profit.
My original point, posited slightly provocatively, was to suggest that one should think about whether the "destruction of capitalism" would leave anyone interested (or able) to perform Operations tasks for an information system. Your response was something of a non-sequitur, since I wasn't really questioning whether there might be people still interested in contributing to an Open Source project. Nonetheless, I felt some social pressure to signal that I appreciate contributions to open source work (with the proviso that we still need to obtain the necessities of life from somewhere).
Do you think the comment to which I originally responded was a "thought experiment"? To me it sounded like another knee-jerk anti-capitalist response that ignores the realities of life today. It certainly wasn't a very practical response to the question of how one works in Operations without burning out. So read my response as a knee-jerk pro-capitalist response.
> Do you think the comment to which I originally responded was a "thought experiment"?
To be honest, it was annoyingly worded so I went with the thought experiment route. While I agree with what the user said, I try to convey my thoughts with a little more tact on the Venture-Capitalist forum.
I do think a post scarcity scenario would breath some life into a tech field that's been bloated with "because money" tech and solutions. Any interesting tech cannot be explored inquisitively without being useful for profit optimization. LLMs would be a really cool tech if the main usecase in our society wasn't "remove the human who does X better to save costs". An AI therapist will never be the solution, even if it was effective, IMO it shouldn't be the solution.
Back to the operations context, so much of the plight of the operations engineer is that teams shrink to reduce costs, take on more responsibility to reduce costs, and drive the operations engineer to an early grave to reduce costs. I firmly believe there should be room in society and the economy for a business to be considered a success without massive year over year growth, hell even static non-growth. Stability should be sought for certain aspects, and disrupted when the solution is actually improved, not just because its shiny.
Participating in capitalism is not an endorsement or a choice when living in a capitalist society. Do you call everyone who is critical of capitalism a hypocrite unless they starve to death for their ideals?
The Serve The Home articles inspired me to go this route. I want to improve my understanding of Kubernetes for work. I picked up an HP EliteDesk 705 G4 mini desktop and an HP EliteDesk 800 G4 mini desktop. Each was less than $200, and included 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, HDMI and DP outputs, and a power brick. One from Amazon ("renewed") and one from eBay. My 705 came with a Ryzen 2400G, and the 800 came with a i5-8500. I'm not planning to stack them so I was happy with the 65W chips although it means keeping the top of the case clear for cooling. Serve The Home recommends the 35W chips if you are going to stack them.
