The Beck supporters are the ones most likely to be in agreement with whatever the fuck Beck says. If he complains about government regulation, they'll be against that, if he complains about China poisoning children, they'll be against that.
Trying to ascribe a political agenda to an personality-based anger-based populist moment is stupid.
The Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party people have been eating through the Republicans like a chestburster from Aliens. We need to do the same to the Democratic party to make it more progressive, and various people have been trying.
Although, perhaps, us Democrats could, you know, not have entirely stupid issues and philosophies as we do that, unlike the rather wackadoodle teaparty people, who are out there protesting taxes...as taxes went down for them.;)
The problem isn't who's elected, it's what issues are talked about.
The media will not talk, under any circumstances, about how removing a huge amount of manufacturing and whatnot and sending it overseas was, perhaps, not that clever an idea. (Even pretending it didn't introduce safety issues like this article is talking about.)
Hell, the second I start talking about it, and how perhaps we should make more in the US, even if it costs more, I get hit with multiple stupid people on my side (The left) saying 'Oh, but then poor people can't afford stuff, etc'.
Of course people can't afford manufactured things when they don't have manufacturing jobs! We've created an economy where we all sell things to each other that some other random people make, so said random people slowly leach all money out of the economy. (By 'random people', I mostly mean 'the rich who are barely paying dirt-poor people in other countries to make things', not the poor people themselves.)
The way the economy works is that you make something, I make something, and another guy runs a store, buys from both of us, and sells to both of us, taking enough money to buy our stuff for himself, too. With the businesses we work for skimming off maybe 10% of the money. The money makes a nice figure-eight between me and you.
The way our current economy (doesn't) work is now more like an H. We all work in the middle, and try to make enough to buy things from ourselves. All the money goes to large companies who buy from out of country, dirt cheap, and keep 75% of the money themselves.
You cannot have an economy where money keeps exiting it. We have one with offshore labor, although confusingly it's not because the money is going offshore...that money usually makes it back anyway. No, the money is exiting because companies are only paying those people fractions of their value to the company, and they only need that much, and spend that much...and the rest of the money just quietly vanishes. (It's not so much that it vanishes, it's that it stops being spent.)
Ah, slashdot, where I can specifically say 'You know, everyone here is assume that hotels can make up any rule they want, but actually are covered under something called 'innkeeping laws' which severely restrict some of the things they can do.'
...and have someone show up and say 'No, you're not a lawyer, you don't know what you're talking about, hotels can do whatever they want, and I'm not going to bother to google 'innkeeping common law'.
I will repeat: English (and thus American) common law requires innkeepers to a) accept any tenant who apply except as provided under the law, and b) not evict them except as provided under the law.
This is requirement to operating an 'inn', aka, any place that rents rooms or suites on a nightly basis. (I don't know the exact legal distinction, but it doesn't apply to apartments.)
Unless Nevada has some sort of law overriding that, it applies in Nevada. Hotels, unlike most other businesses in the US, do not have the general right to refuse service, unless Nevada has stepped in and said they do.(1)
Consumer protection laws, to the extent they exist in Vegas, are for consumers. Run a business from your hotel room and you are a commercial enterprise; and the law will assume you are a grown-up who is capable of being held to a contract (see my other post).
Just making up crap doesn't make it true. The law does not 'assume' you are a business and thus can't rent a room simply because you bring people there.
I can't even imagine where you got that from. Legally, rented hotel rooms have tenants, aka people who are allowed to sleep in them. They are human beings. Human beings rent hotel rooms. Every rented hotel room has a person or two or three who are allowed to 'occupy' it. (Technically, that means 'sleep in it'.)
Businesses might pay for the rooms, but that's rather irrelevant.
And there's absolutely no allowance under hospitality law to kick people out who are running a business from their room, unless they are disturbing people.
The people who got evicted had no right to bring business invitees onto the property and to expose the hotel to liability risk, for example for slip and fall accidents.
As I mentioned, under innkeeping laws in most states, and under common law in general, people actually do have the specific right to bring whatever guests they want into their hotel room.
And hotels, strangely enough, have a competing duty to keep out non-tenants who are going to commit criminal acts or even bother other residents. Yes, they are required by law to stop non-tenants from wandering around and knocking on doors and bothering people. (Oddly enough, they aren't required to stop this behavior by tenants, although they can.)
Hotels usually solve this paradoxical duty by requiring all non-tenants to be vouched for, and kicking them out if they aren't specifically 'with' someone else, and visiting that person's room.
And, in fact, the liability issues are also covered under innkeeper laws, although a lot of states have passed specific laws to override common law there. Which you'd know if you'd stop running around saying that other people 'aren't lawyers' and, you know, did the tiniest bit of reading on the issue.
1) Incidentally, an interesting fact: Hotels can never refuse service to an unaccompanied minor, at all, even if they know the minor can't pay. They must give them a room, period. (Of course, nowadays, they call the police and having family services show up.)
...CES 'kicked people out of hotel suites' is patently delusional. The hotels kicked them out. Random people cannot kick people out of hotel rooms.
Whether or not the hotels can do that is a separate point. You cannot just randomly kick people out of their rooms for no reason.
While a lot of you are talking about 'changing agreements' after the fact, I'm not entirely certain hotels could actually dictate the purposes for which you could use a hotel room even with a contract in advance.
Everyone assuming this is a simple matter of contract law needs to look up 'innkeeper statutes'...people who operate hotels cannot just randomly make whatever rules and regulations they want about residents, even in advance.
If I walk up to a hotdog vender, and want to buy a hotdog and have the money, and he doesn't like my hat, he doesn't have to sell me a hotdog. Normal businesses can refuse service to anyone except for specific reasons.
If I want up to a hotel, however, and have the money, they do have to give me a room if they have one, unless they think I'm going to use it for some unlawful purposes. Hotels are not like other businesses, they're not even like apartments...they are considered public accommodations, and the reasons you can refuse service are only the reasons specifically outlined in law.(1)
There are a lot of other regulations about what 'innkeepers' can, and cannot, do. For example, in most places, they can't actually disallow non-renters from visiting a renter who authorizes them. Your parties have to obey fire code, and cannot be disruptive, but that's it.
I know a lot of people assume 'Companies can do anything as long as they say it advance', but 'innkeeping' is actually heavily regulated.
Casinos in Vegas have, for exactly this reason, a clearly defined area that is 'the hotel' (Where innkeeping laws hold sway), vs. 'the casino' (Where gambling laws hold), vs. the rentable floor areas (Which are just like renting a warehouse or something) vs. the rest of the building (Which falls more under the 'mall' part of the law, being open to the public.)
Oh, and some people may be unaware...The Venetian and The Palazzo are the same building. They are two hotels next to each other, with one casino in the middle of them, and one (huge multi-story) exhibit area behind the casino, along with a bunch of other stuff back there like the Blue Man Group theater. (I stayed at the Venetian once.)
1) Someone's about to say 'Hey, didn't hotels used bar unmarried couples from staying, and to have 'house detectives who attempted to make sure that people weren't using hotels for affairs?'. Yes, and having sex outside of marriage used to be illegal, making that being 'using a hotel room for unlawful purposes', until the Supreme Court struck those laws down, and hotels had to stop.
The problem people have isn't licensing. People are fine with the many ways to license things.
What people have a problem with is proving it, and the inability of sane licensing methods to do that.
There are plenty of companies who have 50 computers running XP and have, over the years, purchased over 70 licenses for XP...and somehow still aren't in compliance, because their 20 user site license got used on a total of 23 computers, ten of which no longer exist, and they can't find the licenses for the dozen computers they bought, with XP on them, at Fry's, and someone used the wrong serial numbers on a few other computers, etc, etc.
But they really, honest to God, actually purchased 70+ licenses over the years, and even allowing nonsense like OEM versions magically expiring when the computer crashes, do actually have enough to cover all machines.
Hell, even companies that purchased all their software with their machines, and thus either have a license for it, or at worse were ripped off by the manufacturer, somehow end up not in compliance because they can't locate those licenses. (And read the other reply here for a horror story about the 'wrong' kind of licenses.)
The problem is the 'You didn't keep perfect records and you accidentally installed this copy instead of this other copy and thus you owe us eight bajillion dollars' nonsense.
Almost all health care companies have patient information on one computer, a server for the big places and a single workstation for doctor offices and whatnot. Having the information at one place means it's a lot easier to control.
These means that all other computers can be inspected by, at most, disconnecting them from the network.
I've heard horror stories of nurses losing their jobs because they told other nurses vital information about a patient's care, and I'm not talking about gossip in the hallway, I'm talking about perfectly legitimate transfers of information for the patient's benefit.
I once heard a horror story about a couple in a car who were parked and making out, and they heard a noise, and the boy goes out to investigate...well, to make a long story short, it was his feet thumping against the roof.
All these seems somewhat offtopic, though.
It's worth pointing out, that, in the real world, 'losing your job' is not a way for HIPAA can punish people.
There is no such thing as a 'court order to let these private individuals poke around in your stuff to look for reasons you might owe them money'.
Court orders are issued for one purpose: Collecting evidence.
There are court orders that say 'Party A must turn over Evidence X to Party B', which don't need the police involved, usually stuff like tax records and stuff that the court is going to assume Party A isn't going to forge. You can turn that over directly. (Or, in reality, your lawyer will turn that over to the other lawyer using the somewhat ritualized communication that lawyers do with each other.)
But there aren't any court orders that say 'Party B can walk into Party A's property, find Evidence Y, and take it, or even record it'. No, if the court doesn't trust Party A, the police will be on hand to require Party A to comply.
Because otherwise Party A might destroy evidence right then and there (And, no Party B is not authorized to physically stop them.), or, just as bad, Party B might create evidence and claim to have 'collected' it.
If some random person walks into your place of business,or your house, or anywhere, waving a piece of paper they insist is some sort of legal document that gives them the right to do something, you should kick them the fuck out. Only police can present such documents. (Or, technically, you can receive them directly from the court also, although that will be once some sort of legal proceeding is going on, and it will be through your lawyer.)
Hell, the police are on hand for evictions, just to be sure the tenant actually leaves the property and doesn't decided to burn the place down on the way out. Of course they're going to be on hand for searches.
Yeah, ironically, it seems that a lot of 'You must prove who you are and have privacy invading test done' are instituted by the Republicans, who then complain about them.
They institute those tests because they don't want 'bad people' being able to do thing, or get benefits from the government. Yet they won't actually attempt to catch said 'bad people' criminally, usually because the actual 'crimes' they're yammering about, everyone does.
Because they're not actually worried about the 'crimes', they're worried about the 'wrong sort of people'. Often the punishment is fiscal, like denying people with drug convictions help going to college (So that if you're rich and convicted, you can still go), or idiotic things like stopping people here illegally from buying health insurance.
And, as you probably know, it's trivially easy to stop people from being here illegally. How? Well, they're hired by a dozen companies in each area. Find each company (And you don't really have to 'find' them, everyone knows who they are.) show up in their HR office, and tell them you will be interviewing each employee. See how many stop showing up. Stay there a month. Do the same for construction sites. It would take maybe 1000 people to do a big city, to show up repeatedly at each people with a big INS badge and stand by the door. They don't actually need to arrest anyone..just make sure they aren't working there.
We don't have to arrest anyone, we don't have to attempt to penalize companies in court (Although I'd be fine if we did.), we just have to pick off each business, one by one, and let the word get out the INS is watching that business and if you're not legal, and you show up there, you get deported. All the jobs would dry up.
Hey, look at that, without any work, 90% of them go home. We could even run a free, no questions asked, bus for them out of major cities back to the border. The rest are working for individuals or very small companies, and, heck, I can't solve every problem.
Instead, we waste an absurd about of resources, and privacy invading tactics, collecting information about every person and every job.
Of course, the reason we don't do that is that Democrats don't really mind people being here illegally (And I don't either, really.), whereas Republicans are given large amounts of 'campaign contributions' by big businesses to keep them here.
Yeah, because there are no moderncraters or series of craters that the Aborigines saw wasn't there, and then were suddenly there. Why, the very concept is totally impossible.
As the entire point of dreamtime is to encode location data into stories, I'm baffled as to why you think they managed to figure out how impact craters work, but the fact they had such a location encoded into their story, to correspond to the right place, was 'coincidence'.
I bet their dreamtime has a bunch of stories about rivers and whatnot, and if you look you might 'coincidentally' find rivers exactly where the stories say they are.
It's crazy, man, crazy. It's almost as if they wrote the stories on purpose!
Oral traditions, while changing over the years, change a lot less than stories in societies without oral traditions.
Societies with religious oral traditions almost always have official remember-ers whose main job is to repeat the story exactly the same, and train others to repeat the story the same. There are often strong taboos against changing the story.
This does not mean the story does not ever change, or that new stories don't show up and the old stories are forgotten. There is still change. It happens.
But it's nowhere near the level of the changes oral stories have in a society that doesn't have an oral tradition. It's a thousand times, or more, slower. Don't assume it happens at the same rate as medieval England, a society with no oral tradition whatsoever.
You joke, but there's an interesting question about dragons and dinosaurs.
Presumably, at various points in human history, people actually came across dinosaur bones, and said 'Whoa. Big lizard!', and, tada, dragons were invented. (Multiple times, in fact.)
It's worth pointing out that every historical culture knew not only about meteors, but assumed they were, in fact, 'falling stars', which actually lingers on as an expression even in modern English. I mean, think about it. There are points of light in the sky, entirely stable, although some seem to wander around (And, sure enough, in English, 'planet' is from 'wanderer'), and occasionally one of those points moves incredibly quickly across the sky.
Every single culture came pretty much to the same conclusion. 'Hey, a star moving quickly'. And, because every culture knew abut gravity, the easiest assumption was that stars had come loose from what it was normally attached to (Whatever that was.), and was falling from the sky, like an acorn from a tree.
Now, I don't know how many people connected the 'falling stars' with impact craters, but that's really not a far logical leap. Impact craters show up all the time in other contexts, and hell, all it would take is one human tribe 60,000 years ago seeing something slam into the earth and no one would have to 'figure' anything out at all.
They just need to see a meteor in the sky, and then later find the crater.
As was pointed out, the entire purpose of dreamtime is to know the landscape. They know the landscape very well. They're going to notice if a big damn crater shows up.
Hell, they don't even need to figure out that a specific meteor in the sky caused the later. They see meteors all the time, they know about the 'shooting stars' as Europeans called them, and they apparently came to the same, logical conclusion that they were stars that had broken loose and fallen down. (They already knew that some of them were loose, aka, the planets.)
As any fool can figure out how impact craters work by watching rocks drop into water, it seems a very logical conclusion that an brand new geographic feature that looks like what happens when rocks are dropped into water was made by something dropping into the land. Duh.
So what drops from above? Well, there are stars up there that come loose...maybe a star hit here!
And once they knew that land can suddenly be shaped like that, and that the 'story' for such land is 'it got hit with a falling star', of course they're going to label the other places where land is shaped like that with similar stories. (As that is, in fact, the entire point of dreamtime, to make up stories for the land so you can remember what the damn thing looks like because you haven't invented maps yet.)
Um, all those people are genetically identical to each other for all intents and purposes. That's his point.
Pretending there are vast genetic differences between the various races of humanity is one of the great sillinesses of our time. There's a difference in some melanin, and a few facial features, and maybe different levels of metabolism, and of course any population can have diseases that are more common in it.
But if aliens came down and took DNA samples from everyone, and tried to distinguish 'groups' of people from the DNA, they'd never catch on to 'races' as we've invented them.
The eyes essentially reprogram themselves in low light to up the 'gain' of rods and to ignore the cones, which don't function. It's called scotopic vision, and it does, in fact, take some time to undo. Along with the other changes of the eye, like undoing opening the iris and the altering of the composition of the stuff in the eyeball and the stuff on the rods and cones to block less photons.
It's fun to pay attention to this the next time you have to make a brightness transition. Instantly, your irises will change, which you can't really notice. Next, your rods and cones will start working differently and your color vision will change as a result. Then, over the next minute or so, the composition of the light-blocking material in your eyes and on your rods and cones will change so it will slowly get brighter or darker, and finally you'll be perfectly fine.
But none of that really has anything to do with normal, same-light vision. I'm sure there is some slight inertial effect there, but it's probably not anywhere near as relevant as the persistence of vision caused by the brain 'storing' each value as it comes in until it updates again.
Heh, you actually came up with the same example I almost used in another post here.
Yeah, it's essentially like you described, but the entire system is also somewhat random (It is a biological system), so imagine that pixels drift slowly between groups. One might start as group 1, but next might update in group 2, then group 3, then group 2 again, etc.
Although you need a good deal more than 300fps to pull it off, and certainly more than 5 groups.
Computerized motion blur essentially works by calculating how each pixel 'actually' looks, and then averaging it with previous pixels.
Which sounds correct, and is mostly correct, but we do notice something is slightly off about it we can't explain.
That's because things are actually motion blurred, it's our brain creating the 'persistent' effect, and something in our brain knows that the 'old pixels' that haven't updated yet aren't 'real', or at least are 'less real'. With computer motion blur, they are 'real', it's coming on new updates, and we can tell there's something slightly wrong, somehow.
Heh, I do that too if I don't want it to hit the floor.
I even do it for heavy things like books and boxes and stuff, which gets some rather shocked looks until I reveal my shoes are steel-toed.
I've ended up kicking some stuff, but luckily nothing fragile. Although I did once kick another _person_, although not very hard. Considering I stopped a book from landing on his foot, he was fine with it.
Yes, it's possible if you're using your other hand and your other hand happens to be there. That actually works okay.
But if you can't, if that hand is too far away, a lot of people try to use the same hand, which is just outright silly. If you're holding something at waist height, you can't catch it with the hand you dropped it from...you only have about a foot you can move your hand downward to catch it in, and you can't react fast enough to get around and have it land in your hand.
The other option to having it land in your hand is to grab it sideways...which is why people often end up batting it things across the room as they mistime the closing of their hand. Or, even worse, trying to go straight down and hammering it straight into the floor.
Hell, that's hard even on purpose. Try it. Be sure not to move your hand to catch it until you feel the object leave it. The easiest way to do that is to let it flip off the back of your hand. And be sure you've got your elbows against your body and arm straight out, like you actually carry things. Try downward grabs, sideways ones, and landing in your hand. You can do them more often then not, but I bet you'll screw up at least 25% of the time, despite knowing exactly what's going to happen in advance. (I just tried that, with a hairbrush, and ended up batting the damn thing into my can of Mountain Dew, luckily before I opened it.) It's near impossible when you don't expect it.
With the other hand...yeah, if you happen to be hold something up high, and if your other hand is free, you can catch that thing if you react quick enough.
But that's an awful lot of ifs, and in most cases it's a good deal more useful to just watch the thing fall, especially when it's something like change or a battery or various other things that are going to bounce or roll.
Anyway, like I said, even if you can catch falling things, you had the reflex anyway in the first place. Attempting to grab falling stuff you want to hold (And, clearly, if you were just holding it, you want to hold it.) is a hardwired brain thing...whether you can actually do that is a matter of training, just like deciding to do something else is a matter of training.
Specifically, I suspect that the 'tracking and grabbing out of the air' part is hardwired into the human brain, as part of necessary hunting skills...and what we're screwing up is the hand-eye (Or, rather, hand-brain) coordination. People's brains know where the thing should be, but can't really move their hand fast enough and exact enough to be exactly where it needs to be in the short amount of time given. (Unlike, say, catching a frisbee, which is more complicated than something falling, but we have time to get our hands into position.) But the brain still tries, without being 'trained' to do this at all.
You can think that, but there are a lot of things actually hardwired into people.
And you're wrong about rocks...throw things at people, and they _will_ dodge, or attempt to block, or at least wince, which is just really bad dodging. It is not learned. People can learn _not_ to do it, but people automatically pay attention to and attempt to avoid objects coming towards them.
Very very young children, as in, babies, can't actually recognize moving objects yet, and don't have the ability to do anything about them even if they did. But toddlers, for example, will certainly attempt to do something about objects coming towards them, even if it's completely ineffectual thanks to their poor hand/eye coordination and even if they've never seen it before.
Of course, with no prior training, people will just do random things. Whereas, for example, if you throw knifes at them their response will start being 'dodge', where as if you throw baseballs at them it might be 'catch', or if they commonly have a pillow fight it might be 'close eyes and take it'.
But entirely untrained people who don't normally have things thrown at their head, or even have never had anything impact their head, won't just blithely stand there and let a rapidly moving object impact it. They'll try to do _something_ instinctively, although there's no promise what they try will actually work. Training just controls _which_ thing they do.
There's all sorts of instincts we have. For a better example of _non_-learned instincts, people will try to catch things when dropped, even though this almost _never_ works. I've managed to train myself to not do that, so I can actually watch the damn thing fall and find it afterwards. People are always amazed, saying 'How'd you find that?', and I always think 'Well, if you hadn't been waving your hand around like a loon ten inches above it as it fell, perhaps you could have watched it fall also.'
There's only about a foot leeway there to catch something that fell out of your hand and people simply cannot react fast enough. 95% of the time they utterly miss, and the other 5% of the time they end up giving it a good hard wack across the room. So, considering it doesn't ever work, it is utter impossible that people have been 'taught' to do this. No, this is some instinct left over when we dropped large things, like a spear, that a) we might have caught, and b) we couldn't lose anyway. For the past 1000 years, this instinct has been rather stupid, but there it is.
Re:Motion blur and bloom effects
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Framerates Matter
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· Score: 5, Interesting
More to the point, the eye does not work with frames. The eye itself has no framerate.
Rods and cones individually update at about 15 times a second, but each individual one is entirely asynchronous from all the others. One update, another update, another update, etc. Your entire eye is not read 15 times a second, each individual light sensor 'trips' 15 times a second, semi-randomly, and sends the current light level. (1)
While each rod and cone only sends one signal, and then nothing, until it resets and sends another, our brains seems to assume that the light and color levels have remained the same.
Hence we get a 'blur', as objects move, and our brain assumes that said object is also in the old position until all rods and cones have updated.
1) And even that's not entirely right. Each rod and cone is actually sending a sorta average of the light it received since in the last update. You don't have to receive a photon exactly as it updates.
I can certainly understand the need to close say a 06 server, even an 07 and 08. But to close the 09?
I can't understand the need to close any server. The servers are just matchmaking ones. It's a damn IRC server. People connect, talk a little, get sent each others IP address, and connect directly to each other to play. It uses minimal resources. At this point they probably only need one for 2006. Hell, it's entirely likely it's the same server as 2010, and they just removed 2006 areas.
Don't attempt to justify their behavior. The only reason to shut down any servers is to obsolete the games.
Oh, and it's worth pointing out that developers making an XBox 360 game have the ability to connect to Microsoft's matchmaking servers as part of the XBox's SDK, which you will notice that every XBox 360 game ever released is still supported on. (And don't give MS too much credit here...like I said, matchmaking servers are trivial on resources.) EA deliberately choose to use their own servers....which they could shut down.
What we should do is pay the CEO in stock. Not stock options that he can choose to cash in or not, actual stock. Actual stock he cannot sell for five years.
Pay them $100,000 a year and $2 million in current stock value, five years form now, and watch that stock price stay level and slowly go up. (Well, there needs to be some sort tax deferred structure there, as people can't actually pay taxes on $2 million on a $100,000 salary, but whatever.)
Right now, they've got an incentive to make the stock randomly go up and down. Which is just what 'the stockholders' want, also, which is why I think this will never happen until we also do something else:
Only let people buy and sell stock every six months. That's it. You buy part of a company, you cannot sell it for six months.
It would instantly kill all the idiotic stuff going on in the stock market, and make people actually purchase stock that pays dividends, for said dividends, and only purchase companies they think will make them money by making money, instead of buying companies that will make them money because their stock value will go up next week and they can sell to someone else.
The stock market is operating entirely incorrectly at this point. It should be a place that say 'You can come here and buy a tiny fraction of a company, and share in the profits, and, of course, the risk it might not make any' That is what it was designed to be.
What it has turned into is a place that say 'Come here and purchases these abstract currencies and then try to sell them when their price is higher'. Hell, a good fraction of the stocks normally don't pay any dividends, making them literally valueless...you derive no benefit or value from owning them.
Slashdot Mirror
The Beck supporters are the ones most likely to be in agreement with whatever the fuck Beck says. If he complains about government regulation, they'll be against that, if he complains about China poisoning children, they'll be against that.
Trying to ascribe a political agenda to an personality-based anger-based populist moment is stupid.
The Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck/tea party people have been eating through the Republicans like a chestburster from Aliens. We need to do the same to the Democratic party to make it more progressive, and various people have been trying.
Although, perhaps, us Democrats could, you know, not have entirely stupid issues and philosophies as we do that, unlike the rather wackadoodle teaparty people, who are out there protesting taxes...as taxes went down for them. ;)
The problem isn't who's elected, it's what issues are talked about.
The media will not talk, under any circumstances, about how removing a huge amount of manufacturing and whatnot and sending it overseas was, perhaps, not that clever an idea. (Even pretending it didn't introduce safety issues like this article is talking about.)
Hell, the second I start talking about it, and how perhaps we should make more in the US, even if it costs more, I get hit with multiple stupid people on my side (The left) saying 'Oh, but then poor people can't afford stuff, etc'.
Of course people can't afford manufactured things when they don't have manufacturing jobs! We've created an economy where we all sell things to each other that some other random people make, so said random people slowly leach all money out of the economy. (By 'random people', I mostly mean 'the rich who are barely paying dirt-poor people in other countries to make things', not the poor people themselves.)
The way the economy works is that you make something, I make something, and another guy runs a store, buys from both of us, and sells to both of us, taking enough money to buy our stuff for himself, too. With the businesses we work for skimming off maybe 10% of the money. The money makes a nice figure-eight between me and you.
The way our current economy (doesn't) work is now more like an H. We all work in the middle, and try to make enough to buy things from ourselves. All the money goes to large companies who buy from out of country, dirt cheap, and keep 75% of the money themselves.
You cannot have an economy where money keeps exiting it. We have one with offshore labor, although confusingly it's not because the money is going offshore...that money usually makes it back anyway. No, the money is exiting because companies are only paying those people fractions of their value to the company, and they only need that much, and spend that much...and the rest of the money just quietly vanishes. (It's not so much that it vanishes, it's that it stops being spent.)
Ah, slashdot, where I can specifically say 'You know, everyone here is assume that hotels can make up any rule they want, but actually are covered under something called 'innkeeping laws' which severely restrict some of the things they can do.'
I will repeat: English (and thus American) common law requires innkeepers to a) accept any tenant who apply except as provided under the law, and b) not evict them except as provided under the law.
This is requirement to operating an 'inn', aka, any place that rents rooms or suites on a nightly basis. (I don't know the exact legal distinction, but it doesn't apply to apartments.)
Unless Nevada has some sort of law overriding that, it applies in Nevada. Hotels, unlike most other businesses in the US, do not have the general right to refuse service, unless Nevada has stepped in and said they do.(1)
Consumer protection laws, to the extent they exist in Vegas, are for consumers. Run a business from your hotel room and you are a commercial enterprise; and the law will assume you are a grown-up who is capable of being held to a contract (see my other post).
Just making up crap doesn't make it true. The law does not 'assume' you are a business and thus can't rent a room simply because you bring people there.
I can't even imagine where you got that from. Legally, rented hotel rooms have tenants, aka people who are allowed to sleep in them. They are human beings. Human beings rent hotel rooms. Every rented hotel room has a person or two or three who are allowed to 'occupy' it. (Technically, that means 'sleep in it'.)
Businesses might pay for the rooms, but that's rather irrelevant.
And there's absolutely no allowance under hospitality law to kick people out who are running a business from their room, unless they are disturbing people.
The people who got evicted had no right to bring business invitees onto the property and to expose the hotel to liability risk, for example for slip and fall accidents.
As I mentioned, under innkeeping laws in most states, and under common law in general, people actually do have the specific right to bring whatever guests they want into their hotel room.
And hotels, strangely enough, have a competing duty to keep out non-tenants who are going to commit criminal acts or even bother other residents. Yes, they are required by law to stop non-tenants from wandering around and knocking on doors and bothering people. (Oddly enough, they aren't required to stop this behavior by tenants, although they can.)
Hotels usually solve this paradoxical duty by requiring all non-tenants to be vouched for, and kicking them out if they aren't specifically 'with' someone else, and visiting that person's room.
And, in fact, the liability issues are also covered under innkeeper laws, although a lot of states have passed specific laws to override common law there. Which you'd know if you'd stop running around saying that other people 'aren't lawyers' and, you know, did the tiniest bit of reading on the issue.
1) Incidentally, an interesting fact: Hotels can never refuse service to an unaccompanied minor, at all, even if they know the minor can't pay. They must give them a room, period. (Of course, nowadays, they call the police and having family services show up.)
...CES 'kicked people out of hotel suites' is patently delusional. The hotels kicked them out. Random people cannot kick people out of hotel rooms.
Whether or not the hotels can do that is a separate point. You cannot just randomly kick people out of their rooms for no reason.
While a lot of you are talking about 'changing agreements' after the fact, I'm not entirely certain hotels could actually dictate the purposes for which you could use a hotel room even with a contract in advance.
Everyone assuming this is a simple matter of contract law needs to look up 'innkeeper statutes'...people who operate hotels cannot just randomly make whatever rules and regulations they want about residents, even in advance.
If I walk up to a hotdog vender, and want to buy a hotdog and have the money, and he doesn't like my hat, he doesn't have to sell me a hotdog. Normal businesses can refuse service to anyone except for specific reasons.
If I want up to a hotel, however, and have the money, they do have to give me a room if they have one, unless they think I'm going to use it for some unlawful purposes. Hotels are not like other businesses, they're not even like apartments...they are considered public accommodations, and the reasons you can refuse service are only the reasons specifically outlined in law.(1)
There are a lot of other regulations about what 'innkeepers' can, and cannot, do. For example, in most places, they can't actually disallow non-renters from visiting a renter who authorizes them. Your parties have to obey fire code, and cannot be disruptive, but that's it.
I know a lot of people assume 'Companies can do anything as long as they say it advance', but 'innkeeping' is actually heavily regulated.
Casinos in Vegas have, for exactly this reason, a clearly defined area that is 'the hotel' (Where innkeeping laws hold sway), vs. 'the casino' (Where gambling laws hold), vs. the rentable floor areas (Which are just like renting a warehouse or something) vs. the rest of the building (Which falls more under the 'mall' part of the law, being open to the public.)
Oh, and some people may be unaware...The Venetian and The Palazzo are the same building. They are two hotels next to each other, with one casino in the middle of them, and one (huge multi-story) exhibit area behind the casino, along with a bunch of other stuff back there like the Blue Man Group theater. (I stayed at the Venetian once.)
1) Someone's about to say 'Hey, didn't hotels used bar unmarried couples from staying, and to have 'house detectives who attempted to make sure that people weren't using hotels for affairs?'. Yes, and having sex outside of marriage used to be illegal, making that being 'using a hotel room for unlawful purposes', until the Supreme Court struck those laws down, and hotels had to stop.
Mandatory xkcd
The problem people have isn't licensing. People are fine with the many ways to license things.
What people have a problem with is proving it, and the inability of sane licensing methods to do that.
There are plenty of companies who have 50 computers running XP and have, over the years, purchased over 70 licenses for XP...and somehow still aren't in compliance, because their 20 user site license got used on a total of 23 computers, ten of which no longer exist, and they can't find the licenses for the dozen computers they bought, with XP on them, at Fry's, and someone used the wrong serial numbers on a few other computers, etc, etc.
But they really, honest to God, actually purchased 70+ licenses over the years, and even allowing nonsense like OEM versions magically expiring when the computer crashes, do actually have enough to cover all machines.
Hell, even companies that purchased all their software with their machines, and thus either have a license for it, or at worse were ripped off by the manufacturer, somehow end up not in compliance because they can't locate those licenses. (And read the other reply here for a horror story about the 'wrong' kind of licenses.)
The problem is the 'You didn't keep perfect records and you accidentally installed this copy instead of this other copy and thus you owe us eight bajillion dollars' nonsense.
Almost all health care companies have patient information on one computer, a server for the big places and a single workstation for doctor offices and whatnot. Having the information at one place means it's a lot easier to control.
These means that all other computers can be inspected by, at most, disconnecting them from the network.
I've heard horror stories of nurses losing their jobs because they told other nurses vital information about a patient's care, and I'm not talking about gossip in the hallway, I'm talking about perfectly legitimate transfers of information for the patient's benefit.
I once heard a horror story about a couple in a car who were parked and making out, and they heard a noise, and the boy goes out to investigate...well, to make a long story short, it was his feet thumping against the roof.
All these seems somewhat offtopic, though.
It's worth pointing out, that, in the real world, 'losing your job' is not a way for HIPAA can punish people.
Indeed.
There is no such thing as a 'court order to let these private individuals poke around in your stuff to look for reasons you might owe them money'.
Court orders are issued for one purpose: Collecting evidence.
There are court orders that say 'Party A must turn over Evidence X to Party B', which don't need the police involved, usually stuff like tax records and stuff that the court is going to assume Party A isn't going to forge. You can turn that over directly. (Or, in reality, your lawyer will turn that over to the other lawyer using the somewhat ritualized communication that lawyers do with each other.)
But there aren't any court orders that say 'Party B can walk into Party A's property, find Evidence Y, and take it, or even record it'. No, if the court doesn't trust Party A, the police will be on hand to require Party A to comply.
Because otherwise Party A might destroy evidence right then and there (And, no Party B is not authorized to physically stop them.), or, just as bad, Party B might create evidence and claim to have 'collected' it.
If some random person walks into your place of business,or your house, or anywhere, waving a piece of paper they insist is some sort of legal document that gives them the right to do something, you should kick them the fuck out. Only police can present such documents. (Or, technically, you can receive them directly from the court also, although that will be once some sort of legal proceeding is going on, and it will be through your lawyer.)
Hell, the police are on hand for evictions, just to be sure the tenant actually leaves the property and doesn't decided to burn the place down on the way out. Of course they're going to be on hand for searches.
Yeah, ironically, it seems that a lot of 'You must prove who you are and have privacy invading test done' are instituted by the Republicans, who then complain about them.
They institute those tests because they don't want 'bad people' being able to do thing, or get benefits from the government. Yet they won't actually attempt to catch said 'bad people' criminally, usually because the actual 'crimes' they're yammering about, everyone does.
Because they're not actually worried about the 'crimes', they're worried about the 'wrong sort of people'. Often the punishment is fiscal, like denying people with drug convictions help going to college (So that if you're rich and convicted, you can still go), or idiotic things like stopping people here illegally from buying health insurance.
And, as you probably know, it's trivially easy to stop people from being here illegally. How? Well, they're hired by a dozen companies in each area. Find each company (And you don't really have to 'find' them, everyone knows who they are.) show up in their HR office, and tell them you will be interviewing each employee. See how many stop showing up. Stay there a month. Do the same for construction sites. It would take maybe 1000 people to do a big city, to show up repeatedly at each people with a big INS badge and stand by the door. They don't actually need to arrest anyone..just make sure they aren't working there.
We don't have to arrest anyone, we don't have to attempt to penalize companies in court (Although I'd be fine if we did.), we just have to pick off each business, one by one, and let the word get out the INS is watching that business and if you're not legal, and you show up there, you get deported. All the jobs would dry up.
Hey, look at that, without any work, 90% of them go home. We could even run a free, no questions asked, bus for them out of major cities back to the border. The rest are working for individuals or very small companies, and, heck, I can't solve every problem.
Instead, we waste an absurd about of resources, and privacy invading tactics, collecting information about every person and every job.
Of course, the reason we don't do that is that Democrats don't really mind people being here illegally (And I don't either, really.), whereas Republicans are given large amounts of 'campaign contributions' by big businesses to keep them here.
Yeah, because there are no modern craters or series of craters that the Aborigines saw wasn't there, and then were suddenly there. Why, the very concept is totally impossible.
As the entire point of dreamtime is to encode location data into stories, I'm baffled as to why you think they managed to figure out how impact craters work, but the fact they had such a location encoded into their story, to correspond to the right place, was 'coincidence'.
I bet their dreamtime has a bunch of stories about rivers and whatnot, and if you look you might 'coincidentally' find rivers exactly where the stories say they are.
It's crazy, man, crazy. It's almost as if they wrote the stories on purpose!
Oral traditions, while changing over the years, change a lot less than stories in societies without oral traditions.
Societies with religious oral traditions almost always have official remember-ers whose main job is to repeat the story exactly the same, and train others to repeat the story the same. There are often strong taboos against changing the story.
This does not mean the story does not ever change, or that new stories don't show up and the old stories are forgotten. There is still change. It happens.
But it's nowhere near the level of the changes oral stories have in a society that doesn't have an oral tradition. It's a thousand times, or more, slower. Don't assume it happens at the same rate as medieval England, a society with no oral tradition whatsoever.
You joke, but there's an interesting question about dragons and dinosaurs.
Presumably, at various points in human history, people actually came across dinosaur bones, and said 'Whoa. Big lizard!', and, tada, dragons were invented. (Multiple times, in fact.)
It's worth pointing out that every historical culture knew not only about meteors, but assumed they were, in fact, 'falling stars', which actually lingers on as an expression even in modern English. I mean, think about it. There are points of light in the sky, entirely stable, although some seem to wander around (And, sure enough, in English, 'planet' is from 'wanderer'), and occasionally one of those points moves incredibly quickly across the sky.
Every single culture came pretty much to the same conclusion. 'Hey, a star moving quickly'. And, because every culture knew abut gravity, the easiest assumption was that stars had come loose from what it was normally attached to (Whatever that was.), and was falling from the sky, like an acorn from a tree.
Now, I don't know how many people connected the 'falling stars' with impact craters, but that's really not a far logical leap. Impact craters show up all the time in other contexts, and hell, all it would take is one human tribe 60,000 years ago seeing something slam into the earth and no one would have to 'figure' anything out at all.
They don't need to witness an event.
They just need to see a meteor in the sky, and then later find the crater.
As was pointed out, the entire purpose of dreamtime is to know the landscape. They know the landscape very well. They're going to notice if a big damn crater shows up.
Hell, they don't even need to figure out that a specific meteor in the sky caused the later. They see meteors all the time, they know about the 'shooting stars' as Europeans called them, and they apparently came to the same, logical conclusion that they were stars that had broken loose and fallen down. (They already knew that some of them were loose, aka, the planets.)
As any fool can figure out how impact craters work by watching rocks drop into water, it seems a very logical conclusion that an brand new geographic feature that looks like what happens when rocks are dropped into water was made by something dropping into the land. Duh.
So what drops from above? Well, there are stars up there that come loose...maybe a star hit here!
And once they knew that land can suddenly be shaped like that, and that the 'story' for such land is 'it got hit with a falling star', of course they're going to label the other places where land is shaped like that with similar stories. (As that is, in fact, the entire point of dreamtime, to make up stories for the land so you can remember what the damn thing looks like because you haven't invented maps yet.)
Um, all those people are genetically identical to each other for all intents and purposes. That's his point.
Pretending there are vast genetic differences between the various races of humanity is one of the great sillinesses of our time. There's a difference in some melanin, and a few facial features, and maybe different levels of metabolism, and of course any population can have diseases that are more common in it.
But if aliens came down and took DNA samples from everyone, and tried to distinguish 'groups' of people from the DNA, they'd never catch on to 'races' as we've invented them.
Going from darkness to light is different.
The eyes essentially reprogram themselves in low light to up the 'gain' of rods and to ignore the cones, which don't function. It's called scotopic vision, and it does, in fact, take some time to undo. Along with the other changes of the eye, like undoing opening the iris and the altering of the composition of the stuff in the eyeball and the stuff on the rods and cones to block less photons.
It's fun to pay attention to this the next time you have to make a brightness transition. Instantly, your irises will change, which you can't really notice. Next, your rods and cones will start working differently and your color vision will change as a result. Then, over the next minute or so, the composition of the light-blocking material in your eyes and on your rods and cones will change so it will slowly get brighter or darker, and finally you'll be perfectly fine.
But none of that really has anything to do with normal, same-light vision. I'm sure there is some slight inertial effect there, but it's probably not anywhere near as relevant as the persistence of vision caused by the brain 'storing' each value as it comes in until it updates again.
Heh, you actually came up with the same example I almost used in another post here.
Yeah, it's essentially like you described, but the entire system is also somewhat random (It is a biological system), so imagine that pixels drift slowly between groups. One might start as group 1, but next might update in group 2, then group 3, then group 2 again, etc.
Although you need a good deal more than 300fps to pull it off, and certainly more than 5 groups.
Computerized motion blur essentially works by calculating how each pixel 'actually' looks, and then averaging it with previous pixels.
Which sounds correct, and is mostly correct, but we do notice something is slightly off about it we can't explain.
That's because things are actually motion blurred, it's our brain creating the 'persistent' effect, and something in our brain knows that the 'old pixels' that haven't updated yet aren't 'real', or at least are 'less real'. With computer motion blur, they are 'real', it's coming on new updates, and we can tell there's something slightly wrong, somehow.
Heh, I do that too if I don't want it to hit the floor.
I even do it for heavy things like books and boxes and stuff, which gets some rather shocked looks until I reveal my shoes are steel-toed.
I've ended up kicking some stuff, but luckily nothing fragile. Although I did once kick another _person_, although not very hard. Considering I stopped a book from landing on his foot, he was fine with it.
Yes, it's possible if you're using your other hand and your other hand happens to be there. That actually works okay.
But if you can't, if that hand is too far away, a lot of people try to use the same hand, which is just outright silly. If you're holding something at waist height, you can't catch it with the hand you dropped it from...you only have about a foot you can move your hand downward to catch it in, and you can't react fast enough to get around and have it land in your hand.
The other option to having it land in your hand is to grab it sideways...which is why people often end up batting it things across the room as they mistime the closing of their hand. Or, even worse, trying to go straight down and hammering it straight into the floor.
Hell, that's hard even on purpose. Try it. Be sure not to move your hand to catch it until you feel the object leave it. The easiest way to do that is to let it flip off the back of your hand. And be sure you've got your elbows against your body and arm straight out, like you actually carry things. Try downward grabs, sideways ones, and landing in your hand. You can do them more often then not, but I bet you'll screw up at least 25% of the time, despite knowing exactly what's going to happen in advance. (I just tried that, with a hairbrush, and ended up batting the damn thing into my can of Mountain Dew, luckily before I opened it.) It's near impossible when you don't expect it.
With the other hand...yeah, if you happen to be hold something up high, and if your other hand is free, you can catch that thing if you react quick enough.
But that's an awful lot of ifs, and in most cases it's a good deal more useful to just watch the thing fall, especially when it's something like change or a battery or various other things that are going to bounce or roll.
Anyway, like I said, even if you can catch falling things, you had the reflex anyway in the first place. Attempting to grab falling stuff you want to hold (And, clearly, if you were just holding it, you want to hold it.) is a hardwired brain thing...whether you can actually do that is a matter of training, just like deciding to do something else is a matter of training.
Specifically, I suspect that the 'tracking and grabbing out of the air' part is hardwired into the human brain, as part of necessary hunting skills...and what we're screwing up is the hand-eye (Or, rather, hand-brain) coordination. People's brains know where the thing should be, but can't really move their hand fast enough and exact enough to be exactly where it needs to be in the short amount of time given. (Unlike, say, catching a frisbee, which is more complicated than something falling, but we have time to get our hands into position.) But the brain still tries, without being 'trained' to do this at all.
You can think that, but there are a lot of things actually hardwired into people.
And you're wrong about rocks...throw things at people, and they _will_ dodge, or attempt to block, or at least wince, which is just really bad dodging. It is not learned. People can learn _not_ to do it, but people automatically pay attention to and attempt to avoid objects coming towards them.
Very very young children, as in, babies, can't actually recognize moving objects yet, and don't have the ability to do anything about them even if they did. But toddlers, for example, will certainly attempt to do something about objects coming towards them, even if it's completely ineffectual thanks to their poor hand/eye coordination and even if they've never seen it before.
Of course, with no prior training, people will just do random things. Whereas, for example, if you throw knifes at them their response will start being 'dodge', where as if you throw baseballs at them it might be 'catch', or if they commonly have a pillow fight it might be 'close eyes and take it'.
But entirely untrained people who don't normally have things thrown at their head, or even have never had anything impact their head, won't just blithely stand there and let a rapidly moving object impact it. They'll try to do _something_ instinctively, although there's no promise what they try will actually work. Training just controls _which_ thing they do.
There's all sorts of instincts we have. For a better example of _non_-learned instincts, people will try to catch things when dropped, even though this almost _never_ works. I've managed to train myself to not do that, so I can actually watch the damn thing fall and find it afterwards. People are always amazed, saying 'How'd you find that?', and I always think 'Well, if you hadn't been waving your hand around like a loon ten inches above it as it fell, perhaps you could have watched it fall also.'
There's only about a foot leeway there to catch something that fell out of your hand and people simply cannot react fast enough. 95% of the time they utterly miss, and the other 5% of the time they end up giving it a good hard wack across the room. So, considering it doesn't ever work, it is utter impossible that people have been 'taught' to do this. No, this is some instinct left over when we dropped large things, like a spear, that a) we might have caught, and b) we couldn't lose anyway. For the past 1000 years, this instinct has been rather stupid, but there it is.
More to the point, the eye does not work with frames. The eye itself has no framerate.
Rods and cones individually update at about 15 times a second, but each individual one is entirely asynchronous from all the others. One update, another update, another update, etc. Your entire eye is not read 15 times a second, each individual light sensor 'trips' 15 times a second, semi-randomly, and sends the current light level. (1)
While each rod and cone only sends one signal, and then nothing, until it resets and sends another, our brains seems to assume that the light and color levels have remained the same.
Hence we get a 'blur', as objects move, and our brain assumes that said object is also in the old position until all rods and cones have updated.
1) And even that's not entirely right. Each rod and cone is actually sending a sorta average of the light it received since in the last update. You don't have to receive a photon exactly as it updates.
I can certainly understand the need to close say a 06 server, even an 07 and 08. But to close the 09?
I can't understand the need to close any server. The servers are just matchmaking ones. It's a damn IRC server. People connect, talk a little, get sent each others IP address, and connect directly to each other to play. It uses minimal resources. At this point they probably only need one for 2006. Hell, it's entirely likely it's the same server as 2010, and they just removed 2006 areas.
Don't attempt to justify their behavior. The only reason to shut down any servers is to obsolete the games.
Oh, and it's worth pointing out that developers making an XBox 360 game have the ability to connect to Microsoft's matchmaking servers as part of the XBox's SDK, which you will notice that every XBox 360 game ever released is still supported on. (And don't give MS too much credit here...like I said, matchmaking servers are trivial on resources.) EA deliberately choose to use their own servers....which they could shut down.
We should try and break the 18mo CEO cycle.
What we should do is pay the CEO in stock. Not stock options that he can choose to cash in or not, actual stock. Actual stock he cannot sell for five years.
Pay them $100,000 a year and $2 million in current stock value, five years form now, and watch that stock price stay level and slowly go up. (Well, there needs to be some sort tax deferred structure there, as people can't actually pay taxes on $2 million on a $100,000 salary, but whatever.)
Right now, they've got an incentive to make the stock randomly go up and down. Which is just what 'the stockholders' want, also, which is why I think this will never happen until we also do something else:
Only let people buy and sell stock every six months. That's it. You buy part of a company, you cannot sell it for six months.
It would instantly kill all the idiotic stuff going on in the stock market, and make people actually purchase stock that pays dividends, for said dividends, and only purchase companies they think will make them money by making money, instead of buying companies that will make them money because their stock value will go up next week and they can sell to someone else.
The stock market is operating entirely incorrectly at this point. It should be a place that say 'You can come here and buy a tiny fraction of a company, and share in the profits, and, of course, the risk it might not make any' That is what it was designed to be.
What it has turned into is a place that say 'Come here and purchases these abstract currencies and then try to sell them when their price is higher'. Hell, a good fraction of the stocks normally don't pay any dividends, making them literally valueless...you derive no benefit or value from owning them.