So "mildly pissed off" would be more aroused than not caring, but less aroused than screaming and raging. You're not going to be very creative if you have nothing to say, and neither will you be creative if you're so mad you can't think. Likewise, if you're overcome with joy, you'll be less creative than if you're just in a cheerful mood.
What I think the study is saying is that DDR "regulates" your arousal, exciting you if you're bored and not interested in doing anything, and calming you down if you're too upset to do anything. It's like drinking a cup of coffee to wake yourself up, but not so many that you get jittery.
Most people can retain 7 +/- 2 (5 to 9) semantic "packets" of information. A "packet" can be a part of a larger packet. Most people can reliably recall 5 random numbers or letters in a row. Or 5 groups of 5 numbers or letters. Or 5 random words. Or 5 unrelated phrases.
But don't try to memorize a paragraph worth of random letters and numbers -- that's more than 9 packets so it's almost impossible without a lot of repetition. That's why phone numbers have a dash in them, to break the number up into smaller packets that are easier to remember.
Cocaine, (meth)amphetamines, and methylphenidate actually have rather similar effects. They all boost dopamine. Ritalin is much slower acting, has a longer half-life, and is much less potent, and I think it has some other effects. Some kids crush and snort Ritalin for a cocaine-like high, and it's nicknamed "kiddie coke" IIRC. One of my junior high teachers told us she used to sell her pills when she was in school. I don't think addictiveness or anything have been fully studied. I was going to write a research paper on the subject a while ago, but I had trouble finding sources.
I actually took Ritalin for a while in high school. It didn't do me much good, though it might now that I understand how it works. I wish I could try it again, knowing better, but of course it takes 8 months to get an appointment with my doctor.
I've been taking melatonin for a little while to get myself to sleep (at a reasonable hour). The effect is so much better than any other sleeping pill I've tried that it's hard to believe. Feeling sleepy without feeling bone tired is so much more pleasant than feeling bone tired and drowsy, but not sleepy.
Touch did so catch on. Remember the PalmPilot? All the rage like 10 years ago. Had a touch screen. The difference is -- more than multitouch, because similar things can be done with gestures -- the iPhone is 25 times faster, in color, and internet-capable, and a phone, and a camera, plays videos, and has over 16000 times more storage space. It's as fast as a desktop computer from the PalmPilot era.
All kinds of bank machines and kiosks have had touch screens for years. It's not the touch screens that caught on. It's everything else that caught up -- and got cheap enough for consumer goods.
I have no need for a change of opinion. I've thought eBook readers were the best thing ever since they were invented. There's a magic balance of "good enough" and "cheap enough" that hasn't really been reached yet, though, at least not for me. Until then I'm using my Samsung P2 (MP3/media player) which restricts me to.txt files but otherwise works great. (This isn't even really a bad thing -- I have a few years worth of classics to get through anyway, and many other formats can be converted easily.) The tiny form factor makes it very convenient to carry around. Plus 8GB of storage blows the Kindle away. And it plays videos. And it has (dull) games, and a calculator. The LCD is roughly 150 DPI so it's easy to read; with the brightness turned up it's even OK outdoors.
I'd love an iLiad though. If I had a grand to waste I'd buy it for sure. The pen input and Linux is the main thing.
I used to use a Handspring Visor but there were shadows on the monochrome LCD that were pretty annoying. I still read a few novels on it.
I'm using an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 9600 on my desktop with a NEC LCD1712 monitor. That video card needs a proprietary driver to work with Linux. Without it, X won't start. After following some very complicated, hard to find instructions -- which I had to get off my laptop, because I couldn't access the web without X -- I managed to install Kubuntu and get the driver running. And then I broke it as soon as I tried to change a video setting. I didn't even get a command line because the monitor and video card weren't talking to each other.
The sound card, a cheap old Creative SB-Live, needs a driver but that was relatively easy to install. Hard to find, though.
My laptop is a Gateway Tablet PC with a sort of lousy Finepoint digitizer. Theoretically it works with Ubuntu if you take apart the "fpit" driver, change and recompile it, then "play around" with your settings until it works. It actually detected my pen for a couple of hours, then it broke before I got the tap/click working. I spent a week on it before I gave up.
The Wi-Fi works on my laptop, sometimes. It detects all the networks but just won't always connect. It's sort of temperamental. It reminds me of my first mouse under Windows 3.1, which would only work if you loaded the driver before you loaded Windows, and then only about half the time, with no apparent explanation. I guess it just doesn't feel up to it some days.
My Epson 1250 scanner scans at roughly 100 DPI only. I don't know what the heck is going on there.
I still dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu on my laptop because I do need my tablet for tabletty things, but I like Ubuntu because it's a little easier on the battery, cleaner, I like the apps, and it's a little quicker. I went back to XP on my desktop, though.
I consider myself a fairly advanced user, but not an expert. I've been playing around with computers for a long time, and while I'm really excited about Linux and I'm comfortable with the command line and editing configuration files, it was very difficult to get these things working. I gave up on some of them because it was just too time-consuming. If I couldn't do it, I wouldn't expect my mom to be able to do it. None of my hardware is "whacked out" -- it's all common, off-the-shelf stuff from major companies, except maybe the digitizer. It's not really Linux's fault so much as the companies, I'd say, but getting everything to work was far from trivial.
The touch screen seems like a far more worthwhile upgrade than WinXP. I hate touch pads. Carrying a mouse is a PIA. And how would you use one standing up, or on your lap?
I don't really mind Windows XP and it does have some advantages, but for the kind of things this machine is built for, it's a little pointless.
Sci-fi unfortunately got in the habit early on of using the wrong word. "Sentience" derives from Latin "sentire" which means to feel. Sapience (sapere, to be wise or to know), on the other hand, suggests intelligence and judgement.
So a dog is sentient but not sapient. But I guess you could say a dog is more sapient than a trout. (My dogs at least can figure certain things out ['If I go to my food dish but don't eat, the humans will figure out that I want a treat'] and make choices ['Should I chase squirrels and risk getting my paws wet?']. Dogs are pretty darn social, after all.
I think you're right. We're quite happy with the robots we don't see, like manufacturing machines, but the "smart" computers we interact with tend to focus on being idiot-proof rather than personable.
Pre-recorded messages drive me crazy because they're always played back with the exact same intonation. A computer voice should vary intonation slightly every time it says a particular word. The woman in my phone always asks me "Who would you like to call?" exactly the same way, and it drives me crazy. I've heard "Please place the last item scanned on the scanner and wait" so many times now. I put up with these machines, I even like them, but they are a bit annoying.
Americans seem to be more willing to turn to animals to care for people. We're happier training a monkey or a dog to do a job than build a robot. Dogs have been part of our lives forever and we like dealing with them. If they fail, well, they're doing their best -- you can't really blame the poor animals. If a robot fails, it's a piece of junk gadget. We have sympathy for animals. Recently it's been found that seniors like robot dogs as much as real ones, though, so that attitude might be changing.
Astro Boy is still friendlier than Terminator, though, even if he does have a machine gun in his butt.
Microsoft's net income was around $14 billion in 2007. Over fifteen months, this charge is only 7.6% of that. It's only around 2% of their gross revenue. It's basically just a little extra tax, from MS's perspective. No mistake, it's still a lot of money, but I wouldn't be surprised if they paid it happily and kept their little monopoly.
Er, no. You might want to look at your sources next time you suggest other people do. Overall, the murder rate has been pretty stable.
The number of murders (not the rate) increased about 3% from 2002 to 2006, peaking at 663 before dropping again. The population also increased by about 3.4%. The rate per 100,000 has remained around 1.8, but jumped for a while to about 2.1. I reamember hearing some expert on CBC call 2005's murder rate a statistical anomaly. http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/legal01.htm
"Canada's overall national crime rate, based on incidents reported to police, hit its lowest point in over 25 years in 2006, driven by a decline in non-violent crime." "The total violent crime rate remained virtually unchanged from 2005, mainly due to the stability in the rate of minor assaults, which account for 6 in 10 violent crimes. The national homicide rate fell 10%, halting two years of increases. However, increases were reported in many serious violent crimes such as attempted murder, aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, robbery and kidnapping/forcible confinement." "Police reported 605 homicides in 2006, 58 fewer than in 2005. This resulted in a rate of 1.85 homicides per 100,000 population, 10% lower than in 2005. The national homicide rate has generally been declining since the mid-1970s, when it was around 3.0." "Robberies involving a firearm increased 4% in 2006, although they are still well below their peak in 1991." http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070718/d070718b.htm
I don't remember what came first, but... At some point between ages 6 and 8 I had a Mom's-Office-Surplus computer with a green-black monitor and one program, a word processor. It wasn't a game, but I had a lot of fun with it, mostly making ASCII art. I also made up some sort of game... I forget how it worked, but I think it involved using the thesaurus to make funny sentences.
My best friend got an NES at some point, and later an SNES, and I was desperately jealous, but I never got one. We played a lot of Mario. My first console ended up being a PS2.
At school, we had some Commodore machines, and any time we were allowed, we played this platform game about a guy with a pointy hat. I think it had an Indiana Jones-esque theme but I forget the title.
Just a guess, but you may need contacts to use these. They should focus at a distance of a few feet, so you might be able to use one for a little while without problems, but it might get uncomfortable after a while. It'd look like the screen was floating, not right in front of your eyes, but a couple of feet away. HUDs in cars and aircraft focus at infinity so you can drive without refocusing your eyes to look at the display.
I'm nearsighted with a little astigmatism, and I wear glasses to read even though I can focus easily at reading distance, because my eyes get fatigued quickly.
All I want is stereoscopic vision in ordinary 3d games.
That's right. Someone called that "dead men defrosting" (as opposed to "women in refrigerators").
Men get to go back to their former status quo after getting screwed. Women generally don't. WiR specifically refers to women getting screwed over or killed to advance NOT their own development, but instead the development of a male character to whom they are attached. If a male character (such as Wolverine) gets screwed, it's usually to advance his own character, not someone else's.
It's not a hard and fast rule, of course, but a general observation. There are plenty of counterpoints -- it's not like the boys don't get killed. The key thing is that it's hard for women to enjoy comics when the female characters are getting raped and murdered. It's just not fun to read about.
Gail Simone is a fantastic writer and a personal hero of mine.
I'm counting on two things in her Wonder Woman run... which actually started a couple of months ago, so this story is kind of late, but anyway...
The same standard of quality storytelling and hilarity she's shown on her previous books, such as Birds of Prey (about ex-Batgirl Barbara Gordon, now super-hacker Oracle, and her various superheroine operatives). So far, we have evil Amazons and talking gorillas, so all is well.
And, as in her previous books, plenty of equal opportunity nudity.
The United States has THE highest incarceration rate (0.75%) in the world, by far. "The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population."
There are two reasons for this: widespread and efficient policing (compared to the countries with the lowest incarceration rates, at least) and laws that promote long sentences for crimes that are usually given shorter sentences in other countries. Crime rates are about the same in most developed countries (except that the US has a much higher homicide rate -- but that only accounts for a tiny proportion of crime).
Most of those laws are due to the "war on drugs," which was ineffective and wasteful, and a mistaken study from the 1970s that suggested that treatment programs don't reduce crime (good ones do; not so good ones have no effect; strong programs -- and long sentences -- for people who are unlikely to re-offend anyway actually increase crime).
Some people are leeches, I don't disagree on that, but many, many people in prison in the US have either been in too long, which makes it harder to reintegrate into society, or should be in a medical or psychiatric setting instead. Warehousing offenders rather than getting them out and into real jobs is enormously expensive, something like $100000 a year. That's, what, five average adults' income tax? If drugs and their dealers were paying taxes instead...
The people running prisons know this, and lawmakers are realizing that they're throwing money away and are trying to turn things around. They don't talk about it much because it's political suicide to look soft on crime, but road money has to come from somewhere and raising taxes is just as unpopular.
Let's put it this way: if any change at all reduces incarceration by 1%, that would save roughly $2 billion. Reduce it enough to match even China and you're looking at $15 billion freed up. That doesn't include court costs. That would pay for a hell of a lot of rehab.
I was watching this incredibly repetitive documentary the other day called "Mammals vs. Dinos," or possibly "vs. Dinosaurs." They suggested that earlier dinosaurs were a) cold-blooded and b) couldn't see in the dark, so they went dormant at night. Early mammals were small and delicious, so they had to hunt at night. To do that, they evolved really good hearing, and some eventually developed good night vision.
Most birds (or maybe just songbirds, I forget) can't see in the dark even now; they have cones but not rods (or, you know, whatever the bird equivalent is. IANA biologist).
I'm kind of surprised at this article, because I'd suspected that for some time. The "random firing of neurons" theory seemed pretty silly, prima facie.
Looks like an assumption based on the fact that with all the ads cut out, most hour-long programs are about 44 minutes and rarely less. But that includes things that aren't really ads, like station identification, or news updates.
I thought it was based on some sort of rule, but I guess not.
Sure they would have. Companies leave features out of things all the time to "force" you to upgrade later on, or buy more products. (Memory cards are a big one for video game consoles.)
I'm looking at a $379 cell phone/media player right now that's perfect in every way... except it only has 64 MB of memory. Why? So I'll have to buy an MP3 player too, or a memory card, or another phone in a year when I get sick of it. Meanwhile, a 1GB flash memory stick is selling for $15, retail. Why not just build a gig of memory into the phone and charge $389 for it? There is no reason for the company not to do this, except...
If you actually got what you wanted, would you keep shopping?
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Arousal means "excitement" more than anything.
So "mildly pissed off" would be more aroused than not caring, but less aroused than screaming and raging. You're not going to be very creative if you have nothing to say, and neither will you be creative if you're so mad you can't think. Likewise, if you're overcome with joy, you'll be less creative than if you're just in a cheerful mood.
What I think the study is saying is that DDR "regulates" your arousal, exciting you if you're bored and not interested in doing anything, and calming you down if you're too upset to do anything. It's like drinking a cup of coffee to wake yourself up, but not so many that you get jittery.
It's an old finding with new supporting research.
That's totally normal, don't worry about it.
Most people can retain 7 +/- 2 (5 to 9) semantic "packets" of information. A "packet" can be a part of a larger packet. Most people can reliably recall 5 random numbers or letters in a row. Or 5 groups of 5 numbers or letters. Or 5 random words. Or 5 unrelated phrases.
But don't try to memorize a paragraph worth of random letters and numbers -- that's more than 9 packets so it's almost impossible without a lot of repetition. That's why phone numbers have a dash in them, to break the number up into smaller packets that are easier to remember.
Cocaine, (meth)amphetamines, and methylphenidate actually have rather similar effects. They all boost dopamine. Ritalin is much slower acting, has a longer half-life, and is much less potent, and I think it has some other effects. Some kids crush and snort Ritalin for a cocaine-like high, and it's nicknamed "kiddie coke" IIRC. One of my junior high teachers told us she used to sell her pills when she was in school. I don't think addictiveness or anything have been fully studied. I was going to write a research paper on the subject a while ago, but I had trouble finding sources.
I actually took Ritalin for a while in high school. It didn't do me much good, though it might now that I understand how it works. I wish I could try it again, knowing better, but of course it takes 8 months to get an appointment with my doctor.
I've been taking melatonin for a little while to get myself to sleep (at a reasonable hour). The effect is so much better than any other sleeping pill I've tried that it's hard to believe. Feeling sleepy without feeling bone tired is so much more pleasant than feeling bone tired and drowsy, but not sleepy.
The numbers are not certain and the amounts are very small, but Snopes says "about 4/5" and cites a study that found about 97%.
http://www.snopes.com/business/money/cocaine.asp
Touch did so catch on. Remember the PalmPilot? All the rage like 10 years ago. Had a touch screen. The difference is -- more than multitouch, because similar things can be done with gestures -- the iPhone is 25 times faster, in color, and internet-capable, and a phone, and a camera, plays videos, and has over 16000 times more storage space. It's as fast as a desktop computer from the PalmPilot era.
All kinds of bank machines and kiosks have had touch screens for years. It's not the touch screens that caught on. It's everything else that caught up -- and got cheap enough for consumer goods.
I have no need for a change of opinion. I've thought eBook readers were the best thing ever since they were invented. There's a magic balance of "good enough" and "cheap enough" that hasn't really been reached yet, though, at least not for me. Until then I'm using my Samsung P2 (MP3/media player) which restricts me to .txt files but otherwise works great. (This isn't even really a bad thing -- I have a few years worth of classics to get through anyway, and many other formats can be converted easily.) The tiny form factor makes it very convenient to carry around. Plus 8GB of storage blows the Kindle away. And it plays videos. And it has (dull) games, and a calculator. The LCD is roughly 150 DPI so it's easy to read; with the brightness turned up it's even OK outdoors.
I'd love an iLiad though. If I had a grand to waste I'd buy it for sure. The pen input and Linux is the main thing.
I used to use a Handspring Visor but there were shadows on the monochrome LCD that were pretty annoying. I still read a few novels on it.
"CGI" stands for "Computer-Generated Imagery." "CG" also stands for "Computer Graphics" but gp is not wrong.
I'm using an ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 9600 on my desktop with a NEC LCD1712 monitor. That video card needs a proprietary driver to work with Linux. Without it, X won't start. After following some very complicated, hard to find instructions -- which I had to get off my laptop, because I couldn't access the web without X -- I managed to install Kubuntu and get the driver running. And then I broke it as soon as I tried to change a video setting. I didn't even get a command line because the monitor and video card weren't talking to each other.
The sound card, a cheap old Creative SB-Live, needs a driver but that was relatively easy to install. Hard to find, though.
My laptop is a Gateway Tablet PC with a sort of lousy Finepoint digitizer. Theoretically it works with Ubuntu if you take apart the "fpit" driver, change and recompile it, then "play around" with your settings until it works. It actually detected my pen for a couple of hours, then it broke before I got the tap/click working. I spent a week on it before I gave up.
The Wi-Fi works on my laptop, sometimes. It detects all the networks but just won't always connect. It's sort of temperamental. It reminds me of my first mouse under Windows 3.1, which would only work if you loaded the driver before you loaded Windows, and then only about half the time, with no apparent explanation. I guess it just doesn't feel up to it some days.
My Epson 1250 scanner scans at roughly 100 DPI only. I don't know what the heck is going on there.
I still dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu on my laptop because I do need my tablet for tabletty things, but I like Ubuntu because it's a little easier on the battery, cleaner, I like the apps, and it's a little quicker. I went back to XP on my desktop, though.
I consider myself a fairly advanced user, but not an expert. I've been playing around with computers for a long time, and while I'm really excited about Linux and I'm comfortable with the command line and editing configuration files, it was very difficult to get these things working. I gave up on some of them because it was just too time-consuming. If I couldn't do it, I wouldn't expect my mom to be able to do it. None of my hardware is "whacked out" -- it's all common, off-the-shelf stuff from major companies, except maybe the digitizer. It's not really Linux's fault so much as the companies, I'd say, but getting everything to work was far from trivial.
The touch screen seems like a far more worthwhile upgrade than WinXP. I hate touch pads. Carrying a mouse is a PIA. And how would you use one standing up, or on your lap?
I don't really mind Windows XP and it does have some advantages, but for the kind of things this machine is built for, it's a little pointless.
Has anyone here tried the touchscreen mod?
The cake is (pi * r^2 * z) + frosting.
Wait, Jessica Abel can act, too? Wow, she really is talented!
Sci-fi unfortunately got in the habit early on of using the wrong word. "Sentience" derives from Latin "sentire" which means to feel. Sapience (sapere, to be wise or to know), on the other hand, suggests intelligence and judgement.
So a dog is sentient but not sapient. But I guess you could say a dog is more sapient than a trout. (My dogs at least can figure certain things out ['If I go to my food dish but don't eat, the humans will figure out that I want a treat'] and make choices ['Should I chase squirrels and risk getting my paws wet?']. Dogs are pretty darn social, after all.
I think you're right. We're quite happy with the robots we don't see, like manufacturing machines, but the "smart" computers we interact with tend to focus on being idiot-proof rather than personable.
Pre-recorded messages drive me crazy because they're always played back with the exact same intonation. A computer voice should vary intonation slightly every time it says a particular word. The woman in my phone always asks me "Who would you like to call?" exactly the same way, and it drives me crazy. I've heard "Please place the last item scanned on the scanner and wait" so many times now. I put up with these machines, I even like them, but they are a bit annoying.
Americans seem to be more willing to turn to animals to care for people. We're happier training a monkey or a dog to do a job than build a robot. Dogs have been part of our lives forever and we like dealing with them. If they fail, well, they're doing their best -- you can't really blame the poor animals. If a robot fails, it's a piece of junk gadget. We have sympathy for animals. Recently it's been found that seniors like robot dogs as much as real ones, though, so that attitude might be changing.
Astro Boy is still friendlier than Terminator, though, even if he does have a machine gun in his butt.
It'd be nice if you were able to pick the default color every time you create a new account.
And you're right, I totally changed my theme to pink almost immediately.
Microsoft's net income was around $14 billion in 2007. Over fifteen months, this charge is only 7.6% of that. It's only around 2% of their gross revenue. It's basically just a little extra tax, from MS's perspective. No mistake, it's still a lot of money, but I wouldn't be surprised if they paid it happily and kept their little monopoly.
Er, no. You might want to look at your sources next time you suggest other people do. Overall, the murder rate has been pretty stable.
The number of murders (not the rate) increased about 3% from 2002 to 2006, peaking at 663 before dropping again. The population also increased by about 3.4%. The rate per 100,000 has remained around 1.8, but jumped for a while to about 2.1. I reamember hearing some expert on CBC call 2005's murder rate a statistical anomaly.
http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/legal01.htm
The majority of violent crimes, almost 2/3, are perpetrated against family members; most are minor:
http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/85-570-XIE/2006001/figures/figure34.htm
"Canada's overall national crime rate, based on incidents reported to police, hit its lowest point in over 25 years in 2006, driven by a decline in non-violent crime."
"The total violent crime rate remained virtually unchanged from 2005, mainly due to the stability in the rate of minor assaults, which account for 6 in 10 violent crimes.
The national homicide rate fell 10%, halting two years of increases. However, increases were reported in many serious violent crimes such as attempted murder, aggravated assault, assault with a weapon, robbery and kidnapping/forcible confinement."
"Police reported 605 homicides in 2006, 58 fewer than in 2005. This resulted in a rate of 1.85 homicides per 100,000 population, 10% lower than in 2005. The national homicide rate has generally been declining since the mid-1970s, when it was around 3.0."
"Robberies involving a firearm increased 4% in 2006, although they are still well below their peak in 1991."
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070718/d070718b.htm
Total violent crime declined about 1% between 2002 and 2006.
http://www40.statcan.ca/l01/cst01/legal14a.htm
The gun registry was a mismanaged waste of money, but it didn't affect the murder rate in any meaningful way.
I don't remember what came first, but...
At some point between ages 6 and 8 I had a Mom's-Office-Surplus computer with a green-black monitor and one program, a word processor. It wasn't a game, but I had a lot of fun with it, mostly making ASCII art. I also made up some sort of game... I forget how it worked, but I think it involved using the thesaurus to make funny sentences.
My best friend got an NES at some point, and later an SNES, and I was desperately jealous, but I never got one. We played a lot of Mario. My first console ended up being a PS2.
At school, we had some Commodore machines, and any time we were allowed, we played this platform game about a guy with a pointy hat. I think it had an Indiana Jones-esque theme but I forget the title.
Just a guess, but you may need contacts to use these. They should focus at a distance of a few feet, so you might be able to use one for a little while without problems, but it might get uncomfortable after a while. It'd look like the screen was floating, not right in front of your eyes, but a couple of feet away. HUDs in cars and aircraft focus at infinity so you can drive without refocusing your eyes to look at the display.
I'm nearsighted with a little astigmatism, and I wear glasses to read even though I can focus easily at reading distance, because my eyes get fatigued quickly.
All I want is stereoscopic vision in ordinary 3d games.
That's right. Someone called that "dead men defrosting" (as opposed to "women in refrigerators").
Men get to go back to their former status quo after getting screwed. Women generally don't. WiR specifically refers to women getting screwed over or killed to advance NOT their own development, but instead the development of a male character to whom they are attached. If a male character (such as Wolverine) gets screwed, it's usually to advance his own character, not someone else's.
It's not a hard and fast rule, of course, but a general observation. There are plenty of counterpoints -- it's not like the boys don't get killed. The key thing is that it's hard for women to enjoy comics when the female characters are getting raped and murdered. It's just not fun to read about.
http://www.unheardtaunts.com/wir/
Not quite. It was the key to Marvel Comics' success in the 1960s. Spider-Man exemplified it.
Prior to that, there was plenty of angst and doubt in comics outside of the superhero corner. E.C. thrived on it.
Gail Simone is a fantastic writer and a personal hero of mine.
I'm counting on two things in her Wonder Woman run... which actually started a couple of months ago, so this story is kind of late, but anyway...
The same standard of quality storytelling and hilarity she's shown on her previous books, such as Birds of Prey (about ex-Batgirl Barbara Gordon, now super-hacker Oracle, and her various superheroine operatives). So far, we have evil Amazons and talking gorillas, so all is well.
And, as in her previous books, plenty of equal opportunity nudity.
How heavy, because I'd take it.
The United States has THE highest incarceration rate (0.75%) in the world, by far. "The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population."
There are two reasons for this: widespread and efficient policing (compared to the countries with the lowest incarceration rates, at least) and laws that promote long sentences for crimes that are usually given shorter sentences in other countries. Crime rates are about the same in most developed countries (except that the US has a much higher homicide rate -- but that only accounts for a tiny proportion of crime).
Most of those laws are due to the "war on drugs," which was ineffective and wasteful, and a mistaken study from the 1970s that suggested that treatment programs don't reduce crime (good ones do; not so good ones have no effect; strong programs -- and long sentences -- for people who are unlikely to re-offend anyway actually increase crime).
Some people are leeches, I don't disagree on that, but many, many people in prison in the US have either been in too long, which makes it harder to reintegrate into society, or should be in a medical or psychiatric setting instead. Warehousing offenders rather than getting them out and into real jobs is enormously expensive, something like $100000 a year. That's, what, five average adults' income tax? If drugs and their dealers were paying taxes instead...
The people running prisons know this, and lawmakers are realizing that they're throwing money away and are trying to turn things around. They don't talk about it much because it's political suicide to look soft on crime, but road money has to come from somewhere and raising taxes is just as unpopular.
Let's put it this way: if any change at all reduces incarceration by 1%, that would save roughly $2 billion. Reduce it enough to match even China and you're looking at $15 billion freed up. That doesn't include court costs. That would pay for a hell of a lot of rehab.
I was watching this incredibly repetitive documentary the other day called "Mammals vs. Dinos," or possibly "vs. Dinosaurs." They suggested that earlier dinosaurs were a) cold-blooded and b) couldn't see in the dark, so they went dormant at night. Early mammals were small and delicious, so they had to hunt at night. To do that, they evolved really good hearing, and some eventually developed good night vision.
Most birds (or maybe just songbirds, I forget) can't see in the dark even now; they have cones but not rods (or, you know, whatever the bird equivalent is. IANA biologist).
I'm kind of surprised at this article, because I'd suspected that for some time. The "random firing of neurons" theory seemed pretty silly, prima facie.
Looks like an assumption based on the fact that with all the ads cut out, most hour-long programs are about 44 minutes and rarely less. But that includes things that aren't really ads, like station identification, or news updates.
I thought it was based on some sort of rule, but I guess not.
Sure they would have. Companies leave features out of things all the time to "force" you to upgrade later on, or buy more products. (Memory cards are a big one for video game consoles.)
I'm looking at a $379 cell phone/media player right now that's perfect in every way... except it only has 64 MB of memory. Why? So I'll have to buy an MP3 player too, or a memory card, or another phone in a year when I get sick of it. Meanwhile, a 1GB flash memory stick is selling for $15, retail. Why not just build a gig of memory into the phone and charge $389 for it? There is no reason for the company not to do this, except...
If you actually got what you wanted, would you keep shopping?