What we need is to have a multiple choice test system where questions are generated by universities, individual scholars, and even regular Joes, based on the content of any given bill. Questions will be screened for accuracy, and each politician will be given a unique test populated with questions selected by random distribution from a pool of questions.
There will be a mandatory 60 day review period, when a bill passes the house, where the text of the bill will be available to anyone and everyone, and people will have the option to subscribe to an RSS feed. Questions will be delivered to the house floor on 90th day, and all representatives are required to partake. In other words, you have million monkeys auditing the source code to our republic. If the politician wants to vote yes to the bill, a 60% (D-) grade is required, otherwise his vote is nullified. Rinse and repeat for senate, amendments to the bill are likewise audited when the bill is kicked back to the house to repeat the process again..
This would do several things: 1) it would simplify every bill to the point any single person of moderate intelligence could understand it, in its entirety. 2) it would make it exceedingly difficult to be a stupid politician. 3) it would slow government down so much that they would have to completely ignore the small stuff that they have no business meddling in, if they ever wanted to get anything done. 4) preserve individual liberties.
If you think it's rude and annoying that people camp out at a table for hours during a standing-room only rush, then simply reciprocate and be rude and annoying in return and sit down with them and ask if anyone was sitting in the vacant seat!
This also makes a great time to practice your small talk skills. Talk about *everything*. Bonus points for pretending to be a former schoolmate, even when they keep insisting they've never seen you before in their life. They'll be packing up inside two minutes, or maybe you'll meet someone interesting.
One could actually make this into a sort of sport.
So what if there are more than two anti-anxiety meds? They all work similarly, and can all cause dependence, and tolerance. Most are for short term use only, because increasing doses to keep getting that same level of anxiety relief is Dangerous, with a capital D, and if you knew anything about them, well, you'd know that. Marijuana? The body doesn't build tolerance to THC and related cannabinoids, and any addictive qualities are debatable.
It's highly probable that any number of well-adjusted individuals in your life have enjoyed a bit (or a lot) of MJ, and haven't turned out any worse for it. 1950's propaganda movies shown to teenagers tell us that if you have one toke, your life is going to spiral out of control into a path of raging self-destruction. Reality and modern medicine tell us otherwise. For example, show me one confirmed case of fatal marijuana overdose. It's virtually impossible for an adult to overdose on marijuana alone, unless one eats copious quantities.
You could take some of your own advice. Real men don't have some asinine compulsion to go around telling others how they need to live their lives, so long as their private affairs don't have a habit of harming other humans. Shitty life, huh? You'd wish you should be so lucky!
Say my adult friend suffers from chronic anxiety. Occasional panic attacks. It's hurting his marriage. He tries yoga and meditation. No go. He visits the Doc for a physical, nothing is found wrong. He visits the shrink, only to have pills pushed in his face. He takes the first batch of prescription pharmaceuticals, which have seriously debilitating side-effects. He's trying fight the sandman at work, even though he had a full night's sleep, and he's afraid to drive; the second batch are worse yet, in the sense that it puts him into a metal fog and for some inexplicable reason, also makes his anus incredibly itchy.
He remembers his college days, how a little toke of MJ calmed him down before tests. He finds some people who know other people, and long story made short, he self-medicates. The MJ has none of the unpleasant side effects, and more importantly, he doesn't feel like his heart is constantly going to explode. This happened before the current medical MJ trend, mind you. He now functions at work, and again has a happy marriage. Even now, despite the will of the people in his state, it's still illegal at the federal level. If he's caught with it, he's potentially in a world of hurt.
Who can argue that he doesn't need it, to be a happy, functional human? It's just easier to make it legal, to those who want it. The people who want it already have it, anyway! The stigma and the black market interest will go away, to the people who want it because they're told they can't have it, at the least. The violent gangs will go away, because the profit will go away. That's what we call hitting five birds with one stone, son. Prohibition never works.
Well, fancy high speed trains and personal liberties *are* mutually exclusive...almost by definition--when the government is involved.
Won't ever use the train? You're 400 miles away from the nearest hub, even if you wanted to use it? You don't like that the federal government is fucking up the economy with stupid social projects (which will ultimately be ineffective) and unnecessary updates to antiquated modes of travel, which will continue to be flawed (relative to other modes) at a basic level, so that it will attract very few customers and therefore, very few people will use it anyway? So, why pay the tax money which builds and subsidizes it, for its entire lifetime? It's not like Uncle Sam and the IRS have men with guns who'll come and fuck your life over royally, take all of your stuff and throw you in the lovely and exclusive Gaybar Hotel if you don't pay your taxes.
Oh, wait... That's exactly, what they have, and that's exactly what they do.
Well, that's close. What we need to do is air-drop Wal-Marts, the ultimate cultural pacifiers. Then, they can buy the fridges, coke and TVs, at Everyday Low Prices!
Not only that, but how/why do they come up with retarded company names like HBGary? I imagine this scenario, He got hacked? Yeah, I hear he went to HBGary®, (the galleria of security)... Yeah, why not take the time to come up with something respectable sounding?
I dunno. Take something like scandium--an element which is pretty useful for strengthening aluminum alloys, and making aluminum much more resistant to age-hardening and work hardening. It would be super useful to put in materials destined for use on airframes, for example. The worldwide production is of scandium oxide ore is supposedly only ~2.4 tons (much comes from Russian strategic stockpiles) which makes commercial application pretty hopeless.
Very few mines in the world have significant quantities of the minerals which bear scandium. The only reason it's even remotely affordable today is because there's little demand, and there's little demand, because it's in fact too rare to use in commercial capacity. I'm sure there's many other examples. The problem with mining the moon for these fun and useful rare elements, as I see it: they're going to be too widely distributed. There's bound to be a lot of useless cruft with a few random goodies in between. You'd need to have *a lot* of centrifuges to extract industrial quantities which would make it all worthwhile.
Well, there's two things which could be done in Afghanistan, and possibly Iraq, short of total war, which would help to ensure victory.
For example, under McChrystal's command... If known insurgents did not have weapons in their hands, the orders were not to fire. Even if they had just shot at some marines, then dropped the weapon... No fire. Weapons at their feet, evil grins? No fire.
Another example of ROE under McChrystal : If you are in a situation where you are under fire from the enemy... if there is any chance of creating civilian casualties or if you don't know whether you will create civilian casualties, if you can withdraw from that situation without firing, then you must do so.
Alright, so there's a perception that the forces have to shoot at everything that moves to win. I don't think that's true at all. In Afghanistan, it's all about perception. Overly restrictive ROE puts the taliban at an advantage. The taliban is shooting at US forces, and they just run away, and the people see this. So, the Afghan people see the taliban as the stronger force. The taliban then 'protect' villages from the drug traders.
Take the ROE advantage away from the taliban, and you cut their balls off.
Here's a few issues which would help shorten the war: If they have their weapons on the ground, and they jeer and sneer at you as you roll by, you preemptively blast 'em. If they're launching mortars and shooting out of a village full of civilians, you target their positions the best you can, and you crush them with the a weapon justified for that particular engagement--and you don't require permission to engage to go through many multiple levels of command. That doesn't mean you have to shell the village with artillery or level it with an airstrike--just use common sense, which apparently isn't common amongst commanders.
In the case of Germany and Japan--what choice did they have but to go along with reconstruction? It is, after all, infinitely better than bullets and bombs flying every which way. Afghans? They're more or less used to living in ruin. More ruins? What do they care? Wanna impress them? Build Wal-Marts.
The US military is also perfectly capable of defeating whatever insurgency exists--but when you let politicians direct ROE (Rules Of Engagement), you're practically guaranteed to never accomplish that mission.
>Besides, where the hell do you get something like THIS in the US?
All that thing needs is some dubs so the cartel can wheel it around all bling-tillery like. At least Saddam had the good taste to gold plate his AKs--that actually might be mildly useful.
Or, as is the most likely answer, those guns DID originate in the US, but did not from the civilian firearms market. Many of these weapons probably came straight from the Mexican armories, and since many of the soldiers which use them generally aren't expected to stick around for their entire tour of duty (some 100,000 have deserted); you can't expect their weapons wouldn't likewise wander off into the sunset. Seeing as how Mexico's military uses a lot of US made weapons, you could factually say that X% did come from the US, just to save face from admitting the truth.
But that would be a bit more than disingenuous, right? It's easier to blame US citizens you've never met, than it is to suffer rightfully won embarrassment on the international stage.
With the 'trivial' internet method, you're likely to cause a round to fire out of battery. And, these amateur gunsmiths get what they deserve when they destroy their rifle, and possibly their face and hands when she blows. If you fire it enough, the probability of that outcome gets stronger and stronger. Real AK-47s have safeguards which prevent this, of course; modded semi-auto AMKs do not.
The Mexican cartels are well armed, alright. And make no mistake--they are cartels in more than one sense of the word. Sure, some have rifles and handguns that were smuggled out of the US.
But they're also armed with heavy machine guns, hand grenades, 40mm grenade launchers, RPGs, LAW anti-tank rockets, and fucking *helicopters outfitted with machine guns*. It's also suspected that they have some cold-war era Stinger SAM missiles. Yeah, didn't read that one in the 'statistics', did you? How do you account for these items? A few hundred semi-automatic AKMs and AR-15s really does not compare to the firepower they've obtained elsewhere.
Out of the items *submitted* to the ATF for tracing, most are found to originate in the US. Why would the Mexican government ask the ATF to trace machine guns, rocket launchers, and other significant battle-field weaponry, which obviously did not and could not come from the US? It would probably come out that the Mexican government's own armories are the source of many of these fun toys.
In fact, the cartels are so well armed that certain sections of the the US government are in fact more worried about *what is coming into the US*, rather than what is going out. Suppose some of our local al-Qaeda cells got a hold of these man-portable anti-air missiles?
So, you'd impinge on the rights of ALL US citizens, rather than tackle the source of the issue--the cartel's money? If they did not have the cash flow, they could not buy the heavy weaponry from South America. If they couldn't move their product, they wouldn't have the money.
If we put a Korean peninsula style DMZ across the southern border, they couldn't move their product, nor could they smuggle a few piddly AR-15s into Mexico. Nor would we have to suffer continued illegal immigration, and all of the economic externalities which come along with it.
Let's buy a few thousand of Samsung's machine gun turrets and place them every 1000 yards along the border. The price would be about a billion dollars to cover the entire border, even if we didn't get a bulk discount from Samsung, which could still charge the full $200k per unit, plus a bit more to network them. Add some more to pay soldiers to staff the cameras and controls--it would be a steal compared to the $1 billion / 100 mile virtual fence bullshit.
This would be like hitting ten birds with one stone. Trespassers first get a warning salvo, and if they don't turn around or wait to be arrested as directed by loudspeaker, they get lead poisoning. The vultures would love it.
Actually, I haven't kept up on it much at all, for the very simple reason that it'll continue to play out in the weeks and months to come (many months, undoubtedly). I grew up in a household which cared for women with various mental problems. I'm relatively familiar with some of these disorders--and I wouldn't put some form of 'obsessive love' out of the picture just yet--and I acknowledge this may not be the only disorder present.
But it does sadden me that the media couldn't settle on the very basic facts, like the the number of people shot vs the number of people killed, before the rhetoric was pulled out. Damnit, the bodies had barely begun cooling off before 'The Teabaggers' (one reporter said just that), Beck or Palin, or some combination were being fingered. Not that I agree with or even like Beck or Palin.
It also saddens me that the partisan rhetoric has been put so far ahead of the victim's lives. It saddens me that last night's memorial was less of a memorial, and more like a political rally. I mean, memorial...T-shirts? REALLY?! At least they had the good sense to leave the confetti and balloons out of the gig. The Prez said what needed to be said and all, and I dug the bit where he talked on each of the victims. It should have began and ended there. I digress.
I think it's more likely that Loughner had the hornies for Giffords. Many times it has happened before, that a deranged stalker says "If I can't have you, nobody else will", before attempting (and often succeeding) to assassinate the target. He probably figured that if he was going to get in that deep, that he would shoot up anyone else that he possibly could, to pay back society for this perceived injustice, just before sealing the whole deal by putting a bullet in his own brain... But that part of the plan was upset via the bystanders.
Would vitriol and rhetoric fuel such an individual? I don't think so. Constantly seeing his love interest in the media spotlight during the recent election, on the other hand?
News flash: something is happening bad somewhere in the world right now. It was happening five minutes ago, and it will be happening five minutes from now. So, we better not even have a little bit of fun, because someone somewhere is suffering a whole lot, and someone else is causing it. On topic: statistically, a gun isn't even being used.
For example someone is robbed every 30 seconds, someone is assaulted every 10 seconds. Here in America a woman is being raped every two minutes. Some really nice lady was probably being raped just now, while you were reading this--and what did YOU feel about it? What did you DO about it? Too bad she didn't have a gun and the know how to use it; so that she may have had the chance to splatter her attacker's brains all over the pavement/ceiling/dark alley.
I hope that you remember that someone is suffering the next time you're about to have some fun. I hope you can constantly visualize all the pain, and the torment in the world. Not! You'd probably be compelled to go jump off an overpass, and you'd cause a traffic jam--and I wouldn't wish that on random motorists.
You know what you need to do? Go fuck off. Literally. Go find whatever brand of porno you like, and rub one out, pronto. On the bright side, with a bit of a release, maybe you'd be less of a cantankerous, maladjusted asshat.
Newer CDs are mastered with so much audio compression,
But, that's a feature, not a bug. I'm sure it's as present on digitally distributed music as it is on modern CDs. This is why you do not buy the "remastered" edition, because its producers are surely participating in the dreaded 'loudness war'...I absolutely loathe it. It might acceptable (or even marginally better) on craptastic iPod earbuds (whose owners are probably the target audience), but it truly sounds like ass on anything else.
Tiff could handle that task, being a container format, and quite easily... If only you could get *everyone* behind it.
If you don't care so much about generational losses, the lossy compression mode makes some astonishingly small, yet high quality files. I routinely compress ~300MB RGB tiff files down to 5-10 MB (depending on content, obviously) with 95% quality setting for my particular encoder. I use it for archiving files I don't want to lose--but when you generate a thousand or so of that kind of file every quarter, it adds up!
Might not be a good idea to compress something like scientific images which are to be analyzed in some fashion--but it works *freaking great* the images I use. I can only see the change in a difference-map, (or by studying both images pixel by pixel), where the only significant change is that the image is slightly less noisy. Pretty awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
What we need is to have a multiple choice test system where questions are generated by universities, individual scholars, and even regular Joes, based on the content of any given bill. Questions will be screened for accuracy, and each politician will be given a unique test populated with questions selected by random distribution from a pool of questions.
There will be a mandatory 60 day review period, when a bill passes the house, where the text of the bill will be available to anyone and everyone, and people will have the option to subscribe to an RSS feed. Questions will be delivered to the house floor on 90th day, and all representatives are required to partake. In other words, you have million monkeys auditing the source code to our republic. If the politician wants to vote yes to the bill, a 60% (D-) grade is required, otherwise his vote is nullified. Rinse and repeat for senate, amendments to the bill are likewise audited when the bill is kicked back to the house to repeat the process again..
This would do several things: 1) it would simplify every bill to the point any single person of moderate intelligence could understand it, in its entirety. 2) it would make it exceedingly difficult to be a stupid politician. 3) it would slow government down so much that they would have to completely ignore the small stuff that they have no business meddling in, if they ever wanted to get anything done. 4) preserve individual liberties.
That's pretty awesome, mind if I steal it?
So, if you take the guns away, there are many other, perhaps more effective and or more creative tools for creating mayhem and destruction. Maybe he brings a knife, and casually walks around stabbing people., or maybe he casually walks out to the parking lot to retrieve his truck, only to casually drive it through the nightclub and the crowd waiting in front.
Blades don't need to be reloaded, and if you think a pocket pistol has anything on a 4,000 pound guided cruise missile, well, I'm sorry for you.
I remember that site too, but I wouldn't recommend it, unless you're fond of staring down random strangers' penises.
If you think it's rude and annoying that people camp out at a table for hours during a standing-room only rush, then simply reciprocate and be rude and annoying in return and sit down with them and ask if anyone was sitting in the vacant seat!
This also makes a great time to practice your small talk skills. Talk about *everything*. Bonus points for pretending to be a former schoolmate, even when they keep insisting they've never seen you before in their life. They'll be packing up inside two minutes, or maybe you'll meet someone interesting.
One could actually make this into a sort of sport.
So what if there are more than two anti-anxiety meds? They all work similarly, and can all cause dependence, and tolerance. Most are for short term use only, because increasing doses to keep getting that same level of anxiety relief is Dangerous, with a capital D, and if you knew anything about them, well, you'd know that. Marijuana? The body doesn't build tolerance to THC and related cannabinoids, and any addictive qualities are debatable.
It's highly probable that any number of well-adjusted individuals in your life have enjoyed a bit (or a lot) of MJ, and haven't turned out any worse for it. 1950's propaganda movies shown to teenagers tell us that if you have one toke, your life is going to spiral out of control into a path of raging self-destruction. Reality and modern medicine tell us otherwise. For example, show me one confirmed case of fatal marijuana overdose. It's virtually impossible for an adult to overdose on marijuana alone, unless one eats copious quantities.
You could take some of your own advice. Real men don't have some asinine compulsion to go around telling others how they need to live their lives, so long as their private affairs don't have a habit of harming other humans. Shitty life, huh? You'd wish you should be so lucky!
Say my adult friend suffers from chronic anxiety. Occasional panic attacks. It's hurting his marriage. He tries yoga and meditation. No go. He visits the Doc for a physical, nothing is found wrong. He visits the shrink, only to have pills pushed in his face. He takes the first batch of prescription pharmaceuticals, which have seriously debilitating side-effects. He's trying fight the sandman at work, even though he had a full night's sleep, and he's afraid to drive; the second batch are worse yet, in the sense that it puts him into a metal fog and for some inexplicable reason, also makes his anus incredibly itchy.
He remembers his college days, how a little toke of MJ calmed him down before tests. He finds some people who know other people, and long story made short, he self-medicates. The MJ has none of the unpleasant side effects, and more importantly, he doesn't feel like his heart is constantly going to explode. This happened before the current medical MJ trend, mind you. He now functions at work, and again has a happy marriage. Even now, despite the will of the people in his state, it's still illegal at the federal level. If he's caught with it, he's potentially in a world of hurt.
Who can argue that he doesn't need it, to be a happy, functional human? It's just easier to make it legal, to those who want it. The people who want it already have it, anyway! The stigma and the black market interest will go away, to the people who want it because they're told they can't have it, at the least. The violent gangs will go away, because the profit will go away. That's what we call hitting five birds with one stone, son. Prohibition never works.
Well, fancy high speed trains and personal liberties *are* mutually exclusive...almost by definition--when the government is involved.
Won't ever use the train? You're 400 miles away from the nearest hub, even if you wanted to use it? You don't like that the federal government is fucking up the economy with stupid social projects (which will ultimately be ineffective) and unnecessary updates to antiquated modes of travel, which will continue to be flawed (relative to other modes) at a basic level, so that it will attract very few customers and therefore, very few people will use it anyway? So, why pay the tax money which builds and subsidizes it, for its entire lifetime? It's not like Uncle Sam and the IRS have men with guns who'll come and fuck your life over royally, take all of your stuff and throw you in the lovely and exclusive Gaybar Hotel if you don't pay your taxes.
Oh, wait... That's exactly, what they have, and that's exactly what they do.
And that's completely ignoring the extreme probability that it'll be at least 4-10x more expensive than $53 BILLION DOLLARS! (muhaha)
Well, that's close. What we need to do is air-drop Wal-Marts, the ultimate cultural pacifiers. Then, they can buy the fridges, coke and TVs, at Everyday Low Prices!
Not only that, but how/why do they come up with retarded company names like HBGary? I imagine this scenario, He got hacked? Yeah, I hear he went to HBGary®, (the galleria of security)... Yeah, why not take the time to come up with something respectable sounding?
I dunno. Take something like scandium--an element which is pretty useful for strengthening aluminum alloys, and making aluminum much more resistant to age-hardening and work hardening. It would be super useful to put in materials destined for use on airframes, for example. The worldwide production is of scandium oxide ore is supposedly only ~2.4 tons (much comes from Russian strategic stockpiles) which makes commercial application pretty hopeless.
Very few mines in the world have significant quantities of the minerals which bear scandium. The only reason it's even remotely affordable today is because there's little demand, and there's little demand, because it's in fact too rare to use in commercial capacity. I'm sure there's many other examples. The problem with mining the moon for these fun and useful rare elements, as I see it: they're going to be too widely distributed. There's bound to be a lot of useless cruft with a few random goodies in between. You'd need to have *a lot* of centrifuges to extract industrial quantities which would make it all worthwhile.
Hmm, That would be a significant improvement. It would give NJ some redeeming value, lead prices are going up after all.
Let's do it.
Well, there's two things which could be done in Afghanistan, and possibly Iraq, short of total war, which would help to ensure victory.
For example, under McChrystal's command... If known insurgents did not have weapons in their hands, the orders were not to fire. Even if they had just shot at some marines, then dropped the weapon... No fire. Weapons at their feet, evil grins? No fire.
Another example of ROE under McChrystal : If you are in a situation where you are under fire from the enemy... if there is any chance of creating civilian casualties or if you don't know whether you will create civilian casualties, if you can withdraw from that situation without firing, then you must do so.
Alright, so there's a perception that the forces have to shoot at everything that moves to win. I don't think that's true at all. In Afghanistan, it's all about perception. Overly restrictive ROE puts the taliban at an advantage. The taliban is shooting at US forces, and they just run away, and the people see this. So, the Afghan people see the taliban as the stronger force. The taliban then 'protect' villages from the drug traders.
Take the ROE advantage away from the taliban, and you cut their balls off.
Here's a few issues which would help shorten the war: If they have their weapons on the ground, and they jeer and sneer at you as you roll by, you preemptively blast 'em. If they're launching mortars and shooting out of a village full of civilians, you target their positions the best you can, and you crush them with the a weapon justified for that particular engagement--and you don't require permission to engage to go through many multiple levels of command. That doesn't mean you have to shell the village with artillery or level it with an airstrike--just use common sense, which apparently isn't common amongst commanders.
In the case of Germany and Japan--what choice did they have but to go along with reconstruction? It is, after all, infinitely better than bullets and bombs flying every which way. Afghans? They're more or less used to living in ruin. More ruins? What do they care? Wanna impress them? Build Wal-Marts.
The US military is also perfectly capable of defeating whatever insurgency exists--but when you let politicians direct ROE (Rules Of Engagement), you're practically guaranteed to never accomplish that mission.
>Besides, where the hell do you get something like THIS in the US?
All that thing needs is some dubs so the cartel can wheel it around all bling-tillery like. At least Saddam had the good taste to gold plate his AKs--that actually might be mildly useful.
Or, as is the most likely answer, those guns DID originate in the US, but did not from the civilian firearms market. Many of these weapons probably came straight from the Mexican armories, and since many of the soldiers which use them generally aren't expected to stick around for their entire tour of duty (some 100,000 have deserted); you can't expect their weapons wouldn't likewise wander off into the sunset. Seeing as how Mexico's military uses a lot of US made weapons, you could factually say that X% did come from the US, just to save face from admitting the truth.
But that would be a bit more than disingenuous, right? It's easier to blame US citizens you've never met, than it is to suffer rightfully won embarrassment on the international stage.
With the 'trivial' internet method, you're likely to cause a round to fire out of battery. And, these amateur gunsmiths get what they deserve when they destroy their rifle, and possibly their face and hands when she blows. If you fire it enough, the probability of that outcome gets stronger and stronger. Real AK-47s have safeguards which prevent this, of course; modded semi-auto AMKs do not.
The Mexican cartels are well armed, alright. And make no mistake--they are cartels in more than one sense of the word. Sure, some have rifles and handguns that were smuggled out of the US.
But they're also armed with heavy machine guns, hand grenades, 40mm grenade launchers, RPGs, LAW anti-tank rockets, and fucking *helicopters outfitted with machine guns*. It's also suspected that they have some cold-war era Stinger SAM missiles. Yeah, didn't read that one in the 'statistics', did you? How do you account for these items? A few hundred semi-automatic AKMs and AR-15s really does not compare to the firepower they've obtained elsewhere.
Out of the items *submitted* to the ATF for tracing, most are found to originate in the US. Why would the Mexican government ask the ATF to trace machine guns, rocket launchers, and other significant battle-field weaponry, which obviously did not and could not come from the US? It would probably come out that the Mexican government's own armories are the source of many of these fun toys.
In fact, the cartels are so well armed that certain sections of the the US government are in fact more worried about *what is coming into the US*, rather than what is going out. Suppose some of our local al-Qaeda cells got a hold of these man-portable anti-air missiles?
So, you'd impinge on the rights of ALL US citizens, rather than tackle the source of the issue--the cartel's money? If they did not have the cash flow, they could not buy the heavy weaponry from South America. If they couldn't move their product, they wouldn't have the money.
If we put a Korean peninsula style DMZ across the southern border, they couldn't move their product, nor could they smuggle a few piddly AR-15s into Mexico. Nor would we have to suffer continued illegal immigration, and all of the economic externalities which come along with it.
Let's buy a few thousand of Samsung's machine gun turrets and place them every 1000 yards along the border. The price would be about a billion dollars to cover the entire border, even if we didn't get a bulk discount from Samsung, which could still charge the full $200k per unit, plus a bit more to network them. Add some more to pay soldiers to staff the cameras and controls--it would be a steal compared to the $1 billion / 100 mile virtual fence bullshit.
This would be like hitting ten birds with one stone. Trespassers first get a warning salvo, and if they don't turn around or wait to be arrested as directed by loudspeaker, they get lead poisoning. The vultures would love it.
Actually, I haven't kept up on it much at all, for the very simple reason that it'll continue to play out in the weeks and months to come (many months, undoubtedly). I grew up in a household which cared for women with various mental problems. I'm relatively familiar with some of these disorders--and I wouldn't put some form of 'obsessive love' out of the picture just yet--and I acknowledge this may not be the only disorder present.
But it does sadden me that the media couldn't settle on the very basic facts, like the the number of people shot vs the number of people killed, before the rhetoric was pulled out. Damnit, the bodies had barely begun cooling off before 'The Teabaggers' (one reporter said just that), Beck or Palin, or some combination were being fingered. Not that I agree with or even like Beck or Palin.
It also saddens me that the partisan rhetoric has been put so far ahead of the victim's lives. It saddens me that last night's memorial was less of a memorial, and more like a political rally. I mean, memorial...T-shirts? REALLY?! At least they had the good sense to leave the confetti and balloons out of the gig. The Prez said what needed to be said and all, and I dug the bit where he talked on each of the victims. It should have began and ended there. I digress.
Well said. I agree fully with your rant.
I think it's more likely that Loughner had the hornies for Giffords. Many times it has happened before, that a deranged stalker says "If I can't have you, nobody else will", before attempting (and often succeeding) to assassinate the target. He probably figured that if he was going to get in that deep, that he would shoot up anyone else that he possibly could, to pay back society for this perceived injustice, just before sealing the whole deal by putting a bullet in his own brain... But that part of the plan was upset via the bystanders.
Would vitriol and rhetoric fuel such an individual? I don't think so. Constantly seeing his love interest in the media spotlight during the recent election, on the other hand?
Lighten up, Francis.
News flash: something is happening bad somewhere in the world right now. It was happening five minutes ago, and it will be happening five minutes from now. So, we better not even have a little bit of fun, because someone somewhere is suffering a whole lot, and someone else is causing it. On topic: statistically, a gun isn't even being used.
For example someone is robbed every 30 seconds, someone is assaulted every 10 seconds. Here in America a woman is being raped every two minutes. Some really nice lady was probably being raped just now, while you were reading this--and what did YOU feel about it? What did you DO about it? Too bad she didn't have a gun and the know how to use it; so that she may have had the chance to splatter her attacker's brains all over the pavement/ceiling/dark alley.
I hope that you remember that someone is suffering the next time you're about to have some fun. I hope you can constantly visualize all the pain, and the torment in the world. Not! You'd probably be compelled to go jump off an overpass, and you'd cause a traffic jam--and I wouldn't wish that on random motorists.
You know what you need to do? Go fuck off. Literally. Go find whatever brand of porno you like, and rub one out, pronto. On the bright side, with a bit of a release, maybe you'd be less of a cantankerous, maladjusted asshat.
Newer CDs are mastered with so much audio compression,
But, that's a feature, not a bug. I'm sure it's as present on digitally distributed music as it is on modern CDs. This is why you do not buy the "remastered" edition, because its producers are surely participating in the dreaded 'loudness war'...I absolutely loathe it. It might acceptable (or even marginally better) on craptastic iPod earbuds (whose owners are probably the target audience), but it truly sounds like ass on anything else.
That's pretty weird, I swear that I said I was using JPEG2000 in the beginning of that paragraph. I'm too young for senior moments :(
Tiff could handle that task, being a container format, and quite easily... If only you could get *everyone* behind it.
If you don't care so much about generational losses, the lossy compression mode makes some astonishingly small, yet high quality files. I routinely compress ~300MB RGB tiff files down to 5-10 MB (depending on content, obviously) with 95% quality setting for my particular encoder. I use it for archiving files I don't want to lose--but when you generate a thousand or so of that kind of file every quarter, it adds up!
Might not be a good idea to compress something like scientific images which are to be analyzed in some fashion--but it works *freaking great* the images I use. I can only see the change in a difference-map, (or by studying both images pixel by pixel), where the only significant change is that the image is slightly less noisy. Pretty awesome.