You forget; Ever since 9/11, New York has been the center of the New World Order as far as law enforcement actions are concerned. Surrounding Wall Street with deployable barricades to cut off street traffic, and building walls around other parts of it... surveillance cameras everywhere; RF monitoring, facial recognition, airport scanners... every new law enforcement technology or method comes to New York first. And it's citizens are happy for the attention. It means the government is spending a fortune modernizing their antiquidated infrastructure. And large parts of the state are built on swamp land; no joke. There are sewers that were build in the 1700s that are still being used today there. It's a stagnant cesspool.
Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.
I can only assume you point this out to distract readers from the point; Namely, that the government has created a monopoly which results in massive profits for those companies at the expense of the people consuming those services.
Anyway, not that your point has any merit... if it did, grocery companies would be the darlings of Wall Street, protesters would be outside their headquarters protesting their profiteering ways, and the cover of People magazine would regularly feature The Most Eligible Grocer with a 5 page writeup. None of those things are happening because groceries are one of the few things you can buy and most of the money goes into the production and labor costs of what you're buying.
It seems to me that the main development that has enabled these is battery technology.
1780 is commonly marked as the start of battery technology, with the invention of the voltaic pile. The technology currently used for most batteries, the lead-acid battery, was created in 1859. Battery technology is not new, and the advancements in batteries have been slow; In fact, it's the main limiting factor in the minaturization and capabilities of mobile devices.
The idea of drones is not new.
Correct. The ability to manufacture them on an industrial scale, however, is.
The idea of Kamikaze aircraft is not new.
Pretty recent, in historical terms, actually. 1944 is recent enough some people are still alive from that period of history.
What is new is a small, quiet kamikaze drone that doesn't have a significant heat signature because suddenly batteries are good enough to keep one flying long enough to be useful.
Technically, solar cells can provide that power. Even weather balloons can be released carrying a bomb, and wind can carry it in. The only "advancement" is that mass production of drones is now affordable because the individual parts are cheap. An individual can assemble all the parts required to create a UAV; gps module, telemetry, propulsion, etc., for under $1,000. There's plenty of sites on the internet that can provide instructions. And heat signatures aren't really a big deal; Because of their low power and slow speed, drones can be shot down by laser or radar tracking easily. They have large wing-spans and have a low flight ceiling.
As you pointed out, drones are only useful against soft targets. In countries where the radar and communications infrastructure have been taken out, drones can be cost-effective. But by that time, so is every other military option, compared to a country with intact infrastructure.
The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%. They also don't charge you taxes, and due to the small margins, most of the people who pick the food and package it are illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage. It's back breaking work, you're in the sun all day, and your skin is regularly cut up from constantly reaching into bushes, etc., to rip the food from the plant, who has had thousands of years to develop defense strategies to keep animals from doing just that.
As to medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, you can thank your government for that -- they handed them a monopoly on a silver platter and give them large private police forces to travel worldwide attacking and imprisoning whomever threatens the profit margin. ISPs also have a government-mandated monopoly, thanks to exclusive contracts negotiated with municipalities that guarantee they're the only provider in an area. In other parts of the world, pills you pay hundreds of dollars for cost pennies, and internet flows freely from giant pipes, fed to you all day long by beautiful women.
Your government is the sole party to blame for this state of affairs.
You're assuming that the next internet will be created, or even depend, on commercial and government organizations. There are some laws higher than theirs; Sooner or later the cost of producing a device capable of communicating wirelessly in a secure, mobile, and untraceable fashion, will be low enough that individuals can produce it. And then, no amount of government influence will keep private citizens from taking to the skies, quite literally, in pursuit of freedom.
Wait, what? Government legally mandates services and prices, granting monopolies to companies within those terms, and you think that's a failure of capitalism?
Yes. The government either needs to take it over, or lower the cost of entry so more economic agents can participate in it. But that would require an overhaul of current FCC regulations, new bandwidth allocation, and taking away the authority to lay new lines, etc., from municipalities and concentrating it at the state and federal level, to simplify the approvals process. It would also require invalidating exclusive contracts that municipalities, counties, and even states sign for service. This half-assed regulation is a hatchet-job that combines the worst elements of capitalism and socialism.
Those two claims are astounding charges. They are incredibly serious claims, so serious that my initial suspicion is that you're exaggerating and/or making it up, OR that you got your information from someone else who was.
My information is from someone who was a direct participant in the aforementioned action. I was provided camera footage, as well as web casts of the event and other "boots on the ground" media, as well as the dates, times, arresting agency, and number arrested. I was asked to investigate as an independent agent by two people who were regular participants in the protests, having been referred to me through a mutual friend.
The arresting agency maintained that a couple people who I have footage of being at the event and being led away in cuffs, were never arrested. They have no paperwork, no indication that they were ever in contact with the police that night. Those people haven't been seen or heard from since. They simply aren't on the grid anymore.
I provided my findings to those two people, who a few months later told me they couldn't get any traction on my findings with local press. I haven't been in touch with them since. I also found out after the fact that I wasn't the first, and probably won't be the last, to get this result. Most of the time, there is no hard identity confirmation and solid evidence of their arrest; Especially at smaller gatherings, there isn't anything but another person's word that the other was present. Cameras are often confinscated and destroyed (or erased). Only in larger crowds to police shy away from this tactic of confinscation.
Given the evidence, it's highly probable that US citizens have been arrested and then removed from society, temporarily or permanently, via an unknown process that eliminates any publicly-inspectable documentation of the person's contact with the government. Numerous published stories have confirmed this happens, though specifics are never given. It is often justified as being 'terrorism-related', and a cursory search of the web will point out Department of Homeland Security involvement in the Occupy protests, which considers them a domestic terror organization, and thus subject to the kind of rules and extrajudicial process mentioned earlier.
As far as being held for weeks without being charged of any crime... It happens all the time. I won't even bother rebutting that -- do your own homework. You can start with arrests at the national caucus' of either party in the last 20 years, if you need a hint.
I'd have never thought corporate greed for profit could actually do a good thing in the long run. Darn it, I sound like a capitalism-apologist right there.
Capitalism isn't the problem; In a competitive market with many agents, there's market pressure to innovate; lower prices, more features, better reliability, etc. When you get a market like ours with only about 3 major players, that pressure goes away, and this is the result. The problem, is monopoly. And the solution is government-mandated breakup. But time and time again, it's been proven that the government here screws up telecommunications; they create the monopoly, then they break it up, then it reforms and becomes stronger. The problem is the government's laws, which create the conditions not only to create a monopoly, but also sustain and reinforce it. It's the same with all our utilities; Our electric grid is ailing... Electric plants aren't being built, and you can only buy from one provider in any given area. Hey look, costs are rising there. Sewers, water service, every last thing that creates a government monopoly goes to shit.
The message here is that infrastructure services simply can't be owned by private business. Capitalism is not a perfect solution to all economic situations.
So you're advocating that the only way for the laws to better reflect the "people" as opposed to corporations is for a civil uprising resulting in murder of the "ruling" class?
When you make peaceful protest impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable. There is a massive power imbalance, and the police overwhelmingly support corporations. Protesters are routinely disappeared in this country, or held on phoney charges, etc. When US Bank had protesters out front, they literally hooked up the hoses and power sprayed away the sin for weeks at a go... in a public square... all to keep the protesters from having a place to congregate near their headquarters. The "routine cleaning" that went on for weeks stopped at the next city hall meeting, when they passed a resolution in secret forbidding protest in the public meeting area, paid for by US tax dollars, as in on public property. The next morning, the protesters showed up and were promptly shoved into a dozen police SWAT vans and taken away, held for weeks without charge. The entire affair was later revealed to have been supported by the Department of Homeland Security, who labeled the protesters potential domestic terrorists and persons of interest.
When you have this kind of overbearing police response at the request of a corporation, with full cooperation from all levels of government, what option do you realistically think the people have for peaceful recourse? The Constitution provided that "the right of the people to peacefully assemble shall not be infringed," not just because it's necessary to the efficient running of a democratic state, but because as long as people feel their concerns are being heard (even if nothing is done), they're very unlikely to become violent. People become violent when they're isolated.
Having places for public protest is essential to the national security of this country. Without it, people's anger and emotion builds until it finds a violent release. We're nearing the high-water mark of violence; Our society goes through cycles of violence on a 50 year mark. In 4 years, we hit that high water mark again. If we don't give activists the space they need to non-violently protest, then (statistically) there's a very high probability that we'll experience high levels of politically-motivated violence by individuals acting alone or in small groups. In short, our anti-terrorism initatives are leading to a perfect storm of conditions to create terrorism.
I don't want violence; I've seen more than enough to last me many lifetimes. But not everyone shares that view; Some people think a certain level of violence is acceptable and many of them work for the government. They're going to get a lot of people hurt and killed. There's a simple, proven method of avoiding this: Public meetings. That's something our police are dead-set on preventing.
The problem is, sufficiently creative these days has been so narrowly defined as to mean "But ours is off-white instead of muave. See! That's creative!" -- and the courts uphold this. That's one of the problems with our archaic case law / common law judiciary: Once you win a case against an opponent that can't defend themselves, you can then use that precident against an opponent who can, and probably win. The system assumes that both the defense and prosecution are fairly represented, and the judge is impartial in every case. Of course it isn't, so over time, the system biases itself politically and economically in favor of whomever is in power. This was probably by design... a testament to miserable Britain.
This is what happens when you automate things and accept all claims as true.
... as required by law.
Sad thing is, "the industry" will say this is a small price to pay...
You must be referring to That Company Which Must Not Be Named, run by the Dark Lord [censored], and [pronoun] legions of [redacted] lawyers! Of course, it's so obvious!/snark His name is Cary Sherman, and he doesn't speak for the industry; He speaks for a very small portion of it which profits a great deal from the rest of it being forced into using its monopoly. Subtle difference.
This needs to be a wakeup call before we allow ISP's to monitor and police everything - there needs to be a human in the loop to fix these issues -
There is a human loop to fix these issues, but it's not in your ISP's office but your legislator's. And, as I understand it, they're paid a great deal of money to not care about you, as a not-a-corporation person, as opposed to a person person.
and timely, not is days or weeks, but with the same SLA as the automated system.
You want people who are capable of making decisions in nanoseconds? Look, I'm all for overclocking the human brain, but to date nobody has been able to figure out how to get into the BIOS, which means either it's not possible or (more horrifyingly) the secret of life, universe, and everything, was built by Compaq.
Right now, it is almost like the recording industry is calling the shots and everyone is guilty unless they prove they are not infringing.
They paid a lot of money to be able to due that, and you didn't. It's my understanding that the general public is okay with this, since they haven't stormed the castle and killed the royalty.
In the US, shouldn't the system be the other way around?
Why just here? Are we somehow more deserving of a harmonious and fair judiciary and incorruptable politicians and a transparent political process than other countries? I'm pretty sure those are universally good values that every citizen, in every country, wished they had.
That's the problem with the copyright filters at Youtube and elsewhere: Copyright is based on the production of a work, not the work itself. So if NASA releases footage of something that is public domain (paid for by your tax dollars) then if, say, NBC, replays that footage and adds a logo in the lower right corner... NBC can then sue you if you save that footage to your harddrive. So the content might be "Curiousity rover team hugging", which can't be copyrighted, but the production of it is. Since NASA made it public domain, they have no rights to it whatsoever, so anyone can take the content, re-broadcast it, and then claim copyright on that broadcasted content.
Which is a problem in a digital environment: How can you tell whether something came from the original (public domain) source, or the re-broadcaster? YouTube's auto-filters obviously can't. There's no way to tell original from copy; And guess who gets sued if they don't block when they could have? Which underscores another problem with copyright law: Presumed guilt. DMCA notices force providers to take down potentially infringing content. Not actually infringing, potentially-infringing. It's a presumption of guilt; Your innocence must then be established later. And with technology like this, how can a judge, or even yourself, tell the difference between the original 101110101000101110100011 and the copied 101110101000101110100011?
I don't consider it real progress that some companies come out in support of gay marriage, while others are against it. I go to Pride, but I wish we didn't have it. Real progress will be when it ceases to matter whether or not you're gay; When it's as natural as not being gay.
It's like black history month. I don't support that either. People call me racist for it, but I don't. There is no black history month; Black history is American history. It's human history. And their accomplishments should be celebrated the same way as every other historical accomplishment is. We don't need a "special olympics" history for people based on the color of their skin, we need to delete those divisions from our history books, mentioning only that there was a period of time (known as the Stupid Ages) when it was relevant, and then we grew up and put a stop to it. Ta-da, the end.
It'll be progress with companies like Chic-Fil A say they don't support gay marriage or homosexuality, and gets no press coverage at all. Like, wait, what? Why the fuck does anyone care what a fast food restaurant owner thinks about a perfectly natural state of being? That'd be like Ford Motor Co., coming out and saying they're against red heads marrying. It would go on the back pages, in the "News of the Weird" section.
That's where shit like this belongs, and until that's where it ends up and people pay it no more attention than as a source of fringe humor and entertainment when companies make announcements like this, we're still in the Stupid Ages of our future history books.
I'm fairly certain you're either exaggerating, trolling or you've got a misbehaving addon.
I'm not exaggerating, or trolling. I can't prove it's not a misbehaving addon, but all the addons I use are on the list of 'most popular', so if I have this problem, a lot of people do as well.
What I find annoying about Firefox is that it has massive memory leaks and needs to be force-killed every few hours of use because it balloons to such a size that it starts killing the system it's running on. And that's pretty much a show stopper right there. There's no reason for a web browser to eat up 2GB of memory during regular use.
For a certain cohort of workers that want to protect their salaries it is an issue. For the society as a whole not so much. These are highly trained workers that are definitely a positive for the overall economy.
You may be right, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that businesses benefit from a lower labor cost by exploiting that labor's desire to live here: If they are fired, they have to go back to the country they came from. Many would consider that unethical, and immoral... but you are right, it's good for the economy, and totally legal.
No. You'd be able to see the shear plane, at least, you would if you're a competent x-ray operator and look at it from more than one angle. (-_-) Okay, you're right, the TSA would probably miss it.
True, but many would, and have, argued that illegal immigrants should receive no government services of any kind, that they're taking jobs away from 'real' americans, etc. So maybe they won't get their taxes back, but they still got a paycheck for a whole lot more. And, not legally, I might add.
That said, the problem of legal immigration by false reporting by corporations is a larger problem than illegal immigration; Corporations that can afford to pay to have exemptions carved out for their industry (H1-B anyone?) can undercut labor in this market; They manufacture a labor shortage by intentionally paying far less than market rate for domestic labor, then use that to justify importing people from other countries who will work at that rate, thus undercutting the market value for that labor. But that only works for highly-trained labor that isn't tied to geography (You can't outsource doctors, for example, because someone has to do those procedures on the patients... though robotic medicine may eliminate that in the future). Farm labor, which we have a massive shortage of, doesn't get the same treatment -- which results in a lot of illegal immigrants working on farms. Of course, if you get rid of them, then you don't get to eat, since all the food rots in the field, unharvested.
Immigration is a much more complex issue than most people care to admit, and the same politicians that claim they're getting tough on it are often carving out exemptions and bypassing the process... for anyone who can pay enough in *cough* campaign contributions *cough*, of course.
After all, they could use it to make a box cutter and then hijack the plane.
Maybe not a box cutter -- it has a spring in it -- but you could make a knife; Plastic is incredibly hard, and skin is incredibly soft. It only takes a few pounds of pressure to cut skin. Hell, I can snap a credit card in two and that makes a crude, but effective, slashing weapon. The idea that only metal is dangerous is pretty stupid. But then, this is the TSA we're talking about.
They even had the where the number one budgetary item wasn't cost but electric load.
Probably true wherever you go, but the NYSE is in the middle of a dense urban area stretching for a hundred miles in every direction. Electricity, along with everything else, is painfully expensive there. I believe that's why so many data centers are built in relatively remote areas. Obviously, the NYSE has a physical location requirement...:\
VR goggles have been promised to be the future of computers since the 90s. Since before the internet was a household term, even. And yet time and time again they fail to work. The reason is that our technology just isn't as sophisticated as our eyes. We have hundred megapixel vision, realtime depth perception, motion sensing, and they scan at around 200 frames per second. The amount of information our visual cortex processes and compresses for other parts of our brain make most supercomputers look stupid by comparison.
It took millions of years to develop Human Eyeball v1.0. It's pretty arrogant to assume we'll just write a business proposal and KAZAM! (-_-) But hey, keep trying guys. In another 50 years or so, they might have evolved to the point where people don't get headaches using them.
I'm very disappointed here. I would have expected at least one person in the first 50 comments to suggest that his running mate will be a refrigerator magnet. Remind me how those work again, Romney?:D
Things are not perfect in the US, far from it, but that doesn't mean that everything is shit, as many people seem to believe.
1 in 7 of those people are justified in that belief, since they're in jail. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet, by a significant margin. And some of our prisons are in places like... the desert, in Nevada, where this is no air conditioning, you sleep outdoors with cockroaches, and your housing consists of tents. If you decide to run... it's at least two weeks' walk in any direction, and once you leave, if the guards see you, they shoot to kill. Bonus: Whether you die from dehydration or bullets, they drag your body back through the prison and leave it there for the day as an example to the others before it's collected. 14% of the population presently lives in similar squalor, though perhaps without the cockroaches and lack of air conditioning.
So please, don't say that there aren't justified reasons for people to say the United States is not number one, since for the most part, people who say that say so because they were born here; And that's just as arrogant.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget; Ever since 9/11, New York has been the center of the New World Order as far as law enforcement actions are concerned. Surrounding Wall Street with deployable barricades to cut off street traffic, and building walls around other parts of it... surveillance cameras everywhere; RF monitoring, facial recognition, airport scanners... every new law enforcement technology or method comes to New York first. And it's citizens are happy for the attention. It means the government is spending a fortune modernizing their antiquidated infrastructure. And large parts of the state are built on swamp land; no joke. There are sewers that were build in the 1700s that are still being used today there. It's a stagnant cesspool.
Yes, but percent margin is an inappropriate measure to use in this situation.
I can only assume you point this out to distract readers from the point; Namely, that the government has created a monopoly which results in massive profits for those companies at the expense of the people consuming those services.
Anyway, not that your point has any merit... if it did, grocery companies would be the darlings of Wall Street, protesters would be outside their headquarters protesting their profiteering ways, and the cover of People magazine would regularly feature The Most Eligible Grocer with a 5 page writeup. None of those things are happening because groceries are one of the few things you can buy and most of the money goes into the production and labor costs of what you're buying.
It seems to me that the main development that has enabled these is battery technology.
1780 is commonly marked as the start of battery technology, with the invention of the voltaic pile. The technology currently used for most batteries, the lead-acid battery, was created in 1859. Battery technology is not new, and the advancements in batteries have been slow; In fact, it's the main limiting factor in the minaturization and capabilities of mobile devices.
The idea of drones is not new.
Correct. The ability to manufacture them on an industrial scale, however, is.
The idea of Kamikaze aircraft is not new.
Pretty recent, in historical terms, actually. 1944 is recent enough some people are still alive from that period of history.
What is new is a small, quiet kamikaze drone that doesn't have a significant heat signature because suddenly batteries are good enough to keep one flying long enough to be useful.
Technically, solar cells can provide that power. Even weather balloons can be released carrying a bomb, and wind can carry it in. The only "advancement" is that mass production of drones is now affordable because the individual parts are cheap. An individual can assemble all the parts required to create a UAV; gps module, telemetry, propulsion, etc., for under $1,000. There's plenty of sites on the internet that can provide instructions. And heat signatures aren't really a big deal; Because of their low power and slow speed, drones can be shot down by laser or radar tracking easily. They have large wing-spans and have a low flight ceiling.
As you pointed out, drones are only useful against soft targets. In countries where the radar and communications infrastructure have been taken out, drones can be cost-effective. But by that time, so is every other military option, compared to a country with intact infrastructure.
How about the food industry?
The average profit margin for most businesses in the US is around 5.5%. The average profit margin for a grocery store is about 0.8%. They also don't charge you taxes, and due to the small margins, most of the people who pick the food and package it are illegal immigrants working for less than minimum wage. It's back breaking work, you're in the sun all day, and your skin is regularly cut up from constantly reaching into bushes, etc., to rip the food from the plant, who has had thousands of years to develop defense strategies to keep animals from doing just that.
As to medical insurance and pharmaceutical companies, you can thank your government for that -- they handed them a monopoly on a silver platter and give them large private police forces to travel worldwide attacking and imprisoning whomever threatens the profit margin. ISPs also have a government-mandated monopoly, thanks to exclusive contracts negotiated with municipalities that guarantee they're the only provider in an area. In other parts of the world, pills you pay hundreds of dollars for cost pennies, and internet flows freely from giant pipes, fed to you all day long by beautiful women.
Your government is the sole party to blame for this state of affairs.
You're assuming that the next internet will be created, or even depend, on commercial and government organizations. There are some laws higher than theirs; Sooner or later the cost of producing a device capable of communicating wirelessly in a secure, mobile, and untraceable fashion, will be low enough that individuals can produce it. And then, no amount of government influence will keep private citizens from taking to the skies, quite literally, in pursuit of freedom.
Wait, what? Government legally mandates services and prices, granting monopolies to companies within those terms, and you think that's a failure of capitalism?
Yes. The government either needs to take it over, or lower the cost of entry so more economic agents can participate in it. But that would require an overhaul of current FCC regulations, new bandwidth allocation, and taking away the authority to lay new lines, etc., from municipalities and concentrating it at the state and federal level, to simplify the approvals process. It would also require invalidating exclusive contracts that municipalities, counties, and even states sign for service. This half-assed regulation is a hatchet-job that combines the worst elements of capitalism and socialism.
Those two claims are astounding charges. They are incredibly serious claims, so serious that my initial suspicion is that you're exaggerating and/or making it up, OR that you got your information from someone else who was.
My information is from someone who was a direct participant in the aforementioned action. I was provided camera footage, as well as web casts of the event and other "boots on the ground" media, as well as the dates, times, arresting agency, and number arrested. I was asked to investigate as an independent agent by two people who were regular participants in the protests, having been referred to me through a mutual friend.
The arresting agency maintained that a couple people who I have footage of being at the event and being led away in cuffs, were never arrested. They have no paperwork, no indication that they were ever in contact with the police that night. Those people haven't been seen or heard from since. They simply aren't on the grid anymore.
I provided my findings to those two people, who a few months later told me they couldn't get any traction on my findings with local press. I haven't been in touch with them since. I also found out after the fact that I wasn't the first, and probably won't be the last, to get this result. Most of the time, there is no hard identity confirmation and solid evidence of their arrest; Especially at smaller gatherings, there isn't anything but another person's word that the other was present. Cameras are often confinscated and destroyed (or erased). Only in larger crowds to police shy away from this tactic of confinscation.
Given the evidence, it's highly probable that US citizens have been arrested and then removed from society, temporarily or permanently, via an unknown process that eliminates any publicly-inspectable documentation of the person's contact with the government. Numerous published stories have confirmed this happens, though specifics are never given. It is often justified as being 'terrorism-related', and a cursory search of the web will point out Department of Homeland Security involvement in the Occupy protests, which considers them a domestic terror organization, and thus subject to the kind of rules and extrajudicial process mentioned earlier.
As far as being held for weeks without being charged of any crime... It happens all the time. I won't even bother rebutting that -- do your own homework. You can start with arrests at the national caucus' of either party in the last 20 years, if you need a hint.
I'd have never thought corporate greed for profit could actually do a good thing in the long run. Darn it, I sound like a capitalism-apologist right there.
Capitalism isn't the problem; In a competitive market with many agents, there's market pressure to innovate; lower prices, more features, better reliability, etc. When you get a market like ours with only about 3 major players, that pressure goes away, and this is the result. The problem, is monopoly. And the solution is government-mandated breakup. But time and time again, it's been proven that the government here screws up telecommunications; they create the monopoly, then they break it up, then it reforms and becomes stronger. The problem is the government's laws, which create the conditions not only to create a monopoly, but also sustain and reinforce it. It's the same with all our utilities; Our electric grid is ailing... Electric plants aren't being built, and you can only buy from one provider in any given area. Hey look, costs are rising there. Sewers, water service, every last thing that creates a government monopoly goes to shit.
The message here is that infrastructure services simply can't be owned by private business. Capitalism is not a perfect solution to all economic situations.
So you're advocating that the only way for the laws to better reflect the "people" as opposed to corporations is for a civil uprising resulting in murder of the "ruling" class?
When you make peaceful protest impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable. There is a massive power imbalance, and the police overwhelmingly support corporations. Protesters are routinely disappeared in this country, or held on phoney charges, etc. When US Bank had protesters out front, they literally hooked up the hoses and power sprayed away the sin for weeks at a go... in a public square... all to keep the protesters from having a place to congregate near their headquarters. The "routine cleaning" that went on for weeks stopped at the next city hall meeting, when they passed a resolution in secret forbidding protest in the public meeting area, paid for by US tax dollars, as in on public property. The next morning, the protesters showed up and were promptly shoved into a dozen police SWAT vans and taken away, held for weeks without charge. The entire affair was later revealed to have been supported by the Department of Homeland Security, who labeled the protesters potential domestic terrorists and persons of interest.
When you have this kind of overbearing police response at the request of a corporation, with full cooperation from all levels of government, what option do you realistically think the people have for peaceful recourse? The Constitution provided that "the right of the people to peacefully assemble shall not be infringed," not just because it's necessary to the efficient running of a democratic state, but because as long as people feel their concerns are being heard (even if nothing is done), they're very unlikely to become violent. People become violent when they're isolated.
Having places for public protest is essential to the national security of this country. Without it, people's anger and emotion builds until it finds a violent release. We're nearing the high-water mark of violence; Our society goes through cycles of violence on a 50 year mark. In 4 years, we hit that high water mark again. If we don't give activists the space they need to non-violently protest, then (statistically) there's a very high probability that we'll experience high levels of politically-motivated violence by individuals acting alone or in small groups. In short, our anti-terrorism initatives are leading to a perfect storm of conditions to create terrorism.
I don't want violence; I've seen more than enough to last me many lifetimes. But not everyone shares that view; Some people think a certain level of violence is acceptable and many of them work for the government. They're going to get a lot of people hurt and killed. There's a simple, proven method of avoiding this: Public meetings. That's something our police are dead-set on preventing.
The problem is, sufficiently creative these days has been so narrowly defined as to mean "But ours is off-white instead of muave. See! That's creative!" -- and the courts uphold this. That's one of the problems with our archaic case law / common law judiciary: Once you win a case against an opponent that can't defend themselves, you can then use that precident against an opponent who can, and probably win. The system assumes that both the defense and prosecution are fairly represented, and the judge is impartial in every case. Of course it isn't, so over time, the system biases itself politically and economically in favor of whomever is in power. This was probably by design... a testament to miserable Britain.
This is what happens when you automate things and accept all claims as true.
Sad thing is, "the industry" will say this is a small price to pay...
You must be referring to That Company Which Must Not Be Named, run by the Dark Lord [censored], and [pronoun] legions of [redacted] lawyers! Of course, it's so obvious! /snark His name is Cary Sherman, and he doesn't speak for the industry; He speaks for a very small portion of it which profits a great deal from the rest of it being forced into using its monopoly. Subtle difference.
This needs to be a wakeup call before we allow ISP's to monitor and police everything - there needs to be a human in the loop to fix these issues -
There is a human loop to fix these issues, but it's not in your ISP's office but your legislator's. And, as I understand it, they're paid a great deal of money to not care about you, as a not-a-corporation person, as opposed to a person person.
and timely, not is days or weeks, but with the same SLA as the automated system.
You want people who are capable of making decisions in nanoseconds? Look, I'm all for overclocking the human brain, but to date nobody has been able to figure out how to get into the BIOS, which means either it's not possible or (more horrifyingly) the secret of life, universe, and everything, was built by Compaq.
Right now, it is almost like the recording industry is calling the shots and everyone is guilty unless they prove they are not infringing.
They paid a lot of money to be able to due that, and you didn't. It's my understanding that the general public is okay with this, since they haven't stormed the castle and killed the royalty.
In the US, shouldn't the system be the other way around?
Why just here? Are we somehow more deserving of a harmonious and fair judiciary and incorruptable politicians and a transparent political process than other countries? I'm pretty sure those are universally good values that every citizen, in every country, wished they had.
Which is a problem in a digital environment: How can you tell whether something came from the original (public domain) source, or the re-broadcaster? YouTube's auto-filters obviously can't. There's no way to tell original from copy; And guess who gets sued if they don't block when they could have? Which underscores another problem with copyright law: Presumed guilt. DMCA notices force providers to take down potentially infringing content. Not actually infringing, potentially-infringing. It's a presumption of guilt; Your innocence must then be established later. And with technology like this, how can a judge, or even yourself, tell the difference between the original 101110101000101110100011 and the copied 101110101000101110100011?
I don't consider it real progress that some companies come out in support of gay marriage, while others are against it. I go to Pride, but I wish we didn't have it. Real progress will be when it ceases to matter whether or not you're gay; When it's as natural as not being gay.
It's like black history month. I don't support that either. People call me racist for it, but I don't. There is no black history month; Black history is American history. It's human history. And their accomplishments should be celebrated the same way as every other historical accomplishment is. We don't need a "special olympics" history for people based on the color of their skin, we need to delete those divisions from our history books, mentioning only that there was a period of time (known as the Stupid Ages) when it was relevant, and then we grew up and put a stop to it. Ta-da, the end.
It'll be progress with companies like Chic-Fil A say they don't support gay marriage or homosexuality, and gets no press coverage at all. Like, wait, what? Why the fuck does anyone care what a fast food restaurant owner thinks about a perfectly natural state of being? That'd be like Ford Motor Co., coming out and saying they're against red heads marrying. It would go on the back pages, in the "News of the Weird" section.
That's where shit like this belongs, and until that's where it ends up and people pay it no more attention than as a source of fringe humor and entertainment when companies make announcements like this, we're still in the Stupid Ages of our future history books.
I'm fairly certain you're either exaggerating, trolling or you've got a misbehaving addon.
I'm not exaggerating, or trolling. I can't prove it's not a misbehaving addon, but all the addons I use are on the list of 'most popular', so if I have this problem, a lot of people do as well.
What I find annoying about Firefox is that it has massive memory leaks and needs to be force-killed every few hours of use because it balloons to such a size that it starts killing the system it's running on. And that's pretty much a show stopper right there. There's no reason for a web browser to eat up 2GB of memory during regular use.
For a certain cohort of workers that want to protect their salaries it is an issue. For the society as a whole not so much. These are highly trained workers that are definitely a positive for the overall economy.
You may be right, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that businesses benefit from a lower labor cost by exploiting that labor's desire to live here: If they are fired, they have to go back to the country they came from. Many would consider that unethical, and immoral... but you are right, it's good for the economy, and totally legal.
No. You'd be able to see the shear plane, at least, you would if you're a competent x-ray operator and look at it from more than one angle. (-_-) Okay, you're right, the TSA would probably miss it.
That said, the problem of legal immigration by false reporting by corporations is a larger problem than illegal immigration; Corporations that can afford to pay to have exemptions carved out for their industry (H1-B anyone?) can undercut labor in this market; They manufacture a labor shortage by intentionally paying far less than market rate for domestic labor, then use that to justify importing people from other countries who will work at that rate, thus undercutting the market value for that labor. But that only works for highly-trained labor that isn't tied to geography (You can't outsource doctors, for example, because someone has to do those procedures on the patients... though robotic medicine may eliminate that in the future). Farm labor, which we have a massive shortage of, doesn't get the same treatment -- which results in a lot of illegal immigrants working on farms. Of course, if you get rid of them, then you don't get to eat, since all the food rots in the field, unharvested.
Immigration is a much more complex issue than most people care to admit, and the same politicians that claim they're getting tough on it are often carving out exemptions and bypassing the process... for anyone who can pay enough in *cough* campaign contributions *cough*, of course.
After all, they could use it to make a box cutter and then hijack the plane.
Maybe not a box cutter -- it has a spring in it -- but you could make a knife; Plastic is incredibly hard, and skin is incredibly soft. It only takes a few pounds of pressure to cut skin. Hell, I can snap a credit card in two and that makes a crude, but effective, slashing weapon. The idea that only metal is dangerous is pretty stupid. But then, this is the TSA we're talking about.
It wasn't a black hole, it was a hipster hole... You probably didn't know about it until now.
They even had the where the number one budgetary item wasn't cost but electric load.
Probably true wherever you go, but the NYSE is in the middle of a dense urban area stretching for a hundred miles in every direction. Electricity, along with everything else, is painfully expensive there. I believe that's why so many data centers are built in relatively remote areas. Obviously, the NYSE has a physical location requirement... :\
VR goggles have been promised to be the future of computers since the 90s. Since before the internet was a household term, even. And yet time and time again they fail to work. The reason is that our technology just isn't as sophisticated as our eyes. We have hundred megapixel vision, realtime depth perception, motion sensing, and they scan at around 200 frames per second. The amount of information our visual cortex processes and compresses for other parts of our brain make most supercomputers look stupid by comparison.
It took millions of years to develop Human Eyeball v1.0. It's pretty arrogant to assume we'll just write a business proposal and KAZAM! (-_-) But hey, keep trying guys. In another 50 years or so, they might have evolved to the point where people don't get headaches using them.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a marketing robot that has cloned itself 50,000 times on hundreds of internet forums and social media websites.
Nanu, nanu.
I'm very disappointed here. I would have expected at least one person in the first 50 comments to suggest that his running mate will be a refrigerator magnet. Remind me how those work again, Romney? :D
Things are not perfect in the US, far from it, but that doesn't mean that everything is shit, as many people seem to believe.
1 in 7 of those people are justified in that belief, since they're in jail. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet, by a significant margin. And some of our prisons are in places like... the desert, in Nevada, where this is no air conditioning, you sleep outdoors with cockroaches, and your housing consists of tents. If you decide to run... it's at least two weeks' walk in any direction, and once you leave, if the guards see you, they shoot to kill. Bonus: Whether you die from dehydration or bullets, they drag your body back through the prison and leave it there for the day as an example to the others before it's collected. 14% of the population presently lives in similar squalor, though perhaps without the cockroaches and lack of air conditioning.
So please, don't say that there aren't justified reasons for people to say the United States is not number one, since for the most part, people who say that say so because they were born here; And that's just as arrogant.