To most people, HDR images look "fake" because they don't look like photographs.
Truth is, photographs don't render scenes the way the human eye does. I think HDR images come closer to the way the human eye works. Notice that painters (with exceptions) have always painted scenes "HDR-Like" for a long time, and notice how people compare extreme HDR images to paintings and say "it looks like a drawing". It's because when people draw/paint, they made it look compressed/expanded (depending on your terminology) so that it mimics the way your eyes see. With photography, you were stuck with roughly linear tone mapping with some toe/shoulder compression, but people got used to it over the decades.
There is a decades/centuries long photographic and motion-picture tradition and a lot of digital imaging still holds photography up as the standard of what things are expected to look like. If you were a digital camera engineer in the '80s and the pictures from your camera looked like HDR instead of Kodachrome, I'm sure your manager would tell you to "fix it" until it did, because that was the standard. In the early era of digital imaging (which we are still in, and hopefully leaving soon), digital pictures have been made to resemble (film) photography from the very beginning, because that was a benchmark of what looked normal. That is what people expect and are used to. If HDR had come first, I think people would say that photographs look "fake".
This is similar to people who think that video footage shot with low-budget video cameras looks "fake" because they don't have the motion blur and judder of 24fps film. It's the opposite. It's the film that looks fake, but it's what people are used to, so the newer, more realistic medium looks 'fake'. Low-budget productions just don't have the budget for the expensive cameras and elaborate post-processing that "breaks" video footage to look like it was shot on film.
I agree with you and that's why I think the Always Innovating Touchbook is about the sweetest thing possible. It's an ARM-based touchscreen tablet with a detachable keyboard. Unfortunately it's being brought to market by a small company and just like the Open Pandora, they have been having trouble with filling orders and continuously lengthening deadlines. It was supposed to come out in 2007 and finally came out in 2009 and now they are sold out. Always Innovating is promising that the new version will be coming out in September but I didn't believe them so I bought one on eBay.
"And on mobile phones, data isn't so cheap -- isn't SMS the world's most expensive data transfer? -- so ideographs are massively more efficient to the consumer."
Too bad each chinese character requires twice as many bits to send as a character of the Latin alphabet...not to mention 2000+ of the actual glyphs have to stored and generated in the phone rather than 26. Real efficient. I also think that the idea that chinese is more efficient at using screen real estate is bullshit.
You mean there's not fucking TSA NOW. No fucking TSA until a few bullshit terrorism events happen. Do you think trains are immune from terrorism? On the contrary, blowing up trains is a prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition. It seems to me, much easier to crash a high speed train than to take down an airplane, with all that vulnerable track laid out over hundreds of miles. One nicely placed mortor and, the results are not going to be pretty, especially in any populated area. Supposing the US builds a high speed rail network, I give it at most a decade before regulations are just as bad as TSA...baggage inspections, patdowns, naked xray viewers, no weapons allowed....
I agree. I know OP says he is taking "photos", but I wonder if he's making any negatives. I'm not saying digital images are worthless, but you only get one shot to put something on film...you can always scan it later any way you want. I'm happy that by chance I ended up with a wedding photographer that shot our wedding on film...I have a roll of negatives in my safe, and it's very special to have those negatives that were in the camera at our wedding. If my wedding had been shot digitally, I would just feel sick...there's no way to go back. 35mm film costs $0.15 per frame. If it's not worth $0.15, then use a digital camera. Unless we are talking about putting things on ebay or something, shoot film. Film can be scanned, so you lose nothing and gain something that may be nearly priceless. Don't let the fact that you might not have a film camera stop you. Pro-level 35mm cameras cost almost nothing now, and disposable cameras also work.
I helped my younger sister with her highschool algebra and physics homework, and my reaction (I have a degree in physics btw) was basically "WTF is this?" The problems were improperly posited, not enough information, or just wrong, and sometimes, not even wrong. I would hate to go back and have to do highschool "physics" like that. It full of bullshit, not unlike TFA.
This is true. A person can only carry maybe a dozen kg of cargo over long distances. You know how much airships can carry? Hundreds. Literally hundreds.
I just hope that it dies before it starts to change the way cinematographers shoot movies, because they are under pressure to make the movie '3d-able'. Composing a film for 3d is an entirely different paradigm compared to the decades/centuries of NORMAL filmmaking and cinematography. I bet in future decades, when people watch today's movies without the lame 3D glasses, everyone looks back at pictures from this era and wonder why everything is composed in the center of the frame, with deep-focus effects and limited pans and zooms.
If you don't think Japanese (both writing and spoken) owes a massive debt to Chinese you are simply delusional. It was the main linguistic influence for centuries, and informs nearly every aspect of Japanese language. It's hard to overstate the influence of Chinese on Japanese when such a giant chuck of their vocabulary is based on ancient Chinese roots. As you know if you know anything about Japanese whatsoever, modern Japanese morphology consists of many roots of Chinese origin. Japanese have there own terms to describe Chinese roots (does "kango" or "on-yomi" sound familiar?), and for fuck's sake, they call the characters "kanji" (lit. "Chinese characters").
Of course a big chunk of Japanese vocabulary also consists of 'native' words of Japanese original, ironically called (in Chinese roots) "wago". The Chinese roots are used for technical terms, compound terms, and just about everywhere in the language. The situation is similar to English where we used borrowed roots to form new/compound words (at least before acronymization came on the scene) or technical terms, and more native anglo roots for 'ordinary' terms. This is why we have to explain to our children that an orthopedic surgeon is a 'bone doctor'.
The structure of the Japanese language is of course vastly different than Chinese, but that only strengthens my argument that Kanji are inconceivably inefficient way to spell the Japanese language. Chinese characters almost make sense for Chinese, which is a very strongly isolating/analytic, as opposed to inflected, with nearly monosyllabic roots, and no case or tense that I'm aware of. Japanese on the other hand, is a very strongly agglutinative left-branching language with tenses and verb-last sentence structure. It's hard to imagine a language where Chinese characters would be worse at representing the underlying language. It's in complete seriousness that I propose that Chinese characters would be better used to spell English than Japanese.
YOU seem to be confused. You make my point for me when you state
"You can get a sense of what a French newspaper article is about because English is partially derived from French and both are derived from Latin and Greek. It has nothing to do with the actual characters themselves."
The point of my analogy was that Japanees people can get a "gist" what a Chinese newspaper article is about because Japanese is partially derived from Chinese. It has nothing to do with the actual characters themselves. It is not a special property of Kanji, and the ability of Japanese to read Chinese because of Kanji is often overstated by Nipponophiles.
"It does not mean that Japanese people can understand specific details of Chinese writing such as the the button pressing example you give. It only extends as far as, for example, seeing that an article is about banks and money and loans or that doctors say drinking green tea is good for you."
Like in my original analogy, I could do the same for many romance languages, not knowing any of the actual language. It's not a special property of the characters, and this should be obvious.
"The Kanji for a book is a good example as it is derived from the one for a tree, since books are made of paper. It doesn't look much like a tree but where that really starts to be useful is when you see that the kanji in question is used in many others which are related to reading, printing and collections of written works."
The english roots "biblio-", "-graphy," "litho-" and others pop up all over things which are related to reading, printing, and collections of printed work. When I see a new word with these morphological roots I have a good idea what the word might be about. Again, not a special property of kanji, and the degree to which the use of kanji clarify unfamiliar new words, better than other languages do, is often overstated, because Japanese etymologies, like all etymologies, are not entirely straightforward.
"In fact something similar happens with English. People don't read every character, they look at the shapes of words and the first and last letters first and that is enough for the brain to fill in much of a sentence."
Again, you are starting to sound like me. There is nothing special about Kanji that makes Japanese writing easier to read. Readers of other languages can also skim text and quickly recognize words and word-fragments too. If you say they do, prepared for a serious [citation needed] smackdown.
"The reason they stick to them is not just out of desire to inflict them on the younger generations"
No, I argue that that is basically why they stick to them. They already have a perfect, easy to learn syllabary. They can't allow it to be used though, because the problem is a deep-rooted, ancient classism associated with the ability to learn and remember Kanji.
"Katakana came about when women used it for their own writings, partially as a way of making it inaccessible to men and partially as a simplified system suitable to women who had less access to education but still desired to write."
Major historical revisionism. Katakana was indeed "women's writing" because it was easy, and anyone could learn it. Learning Kanji was the mark of the upper classes, who could afford the schooling necessary to study Classical Chinese and the Kanji. Women were not worthy of higher education which is why Katakana came to be seen as women's writing. The Tales of Genjii and other old stories are considered to be written by women because they are in katakana. Funny, that they are legible, despite being written with NO KANJI, which proves that kanji are unneccesary for writing Japanese.
Japanese has other characters but Japanese people can get the gist of a story in a Chinese newspaper just from the characters.
As an English speaker I can get the gist of a story in a French newspaper, and I've never studied French. Must be because of the magical properties of the Roman alphabet (which came from pictures of things too, if you go back to Sumerian and squint real hard).
If Japanese and Chinese can understand their language by the kanji, then what the fuck do the Chinese do when confronted with a complex Japanese word that consists of a Kanji followed by kana that NEGATE the root contained in the kanji? A Japanese sentence meaning "whatever you do don't press the button!" becomes <hand><press><button> when a Chinese reads it.
<i>They are pictures - for example the Kanji for person is a stylised stick figure. </i>
They always pick a few kanji out and say "See! it's pictures! The radicals for 'woman' and 'child' make the character for 'safe'! (which is a laughable stretch anyway). That's cute, but if you ever looked past the first page of your basic kanji book you would realize the situation is more like "you take the radical for 'lemon' and you place it next to the radical for 'burlap' and you get the character for 'carburetor'".
The only people who think kanji form some kind of logical system are people who have never studied Japanese. The Japanese writing system is one of those monolithic, looming monstrosities of inefficiency and folly that make you question how it could ever have evolved, much like certain pieces of Microsoft code. Westerners are forgiven in looking at Japanese writing (and kanji overall) and trying to project some kind of reason why it is, and what it does, and how it must have some kind of superior qualities somewhere, but no, there aren't any.
Japanese is a language with a perfectly phonemic alphabet, something almost no other language can boast of. No linguistic theory can explain why they don't use an existing, nearly perfect syllabary they already have, and everyone already knows. After learning to read 100 or so simple glyphs, Japanese children can immediately write and transcribe any word they know or have heard. Machines can easily translate between speech and text with a 1:1 lookup table. But they don't use this immensely efficient, perfectly phonemic syllabary, for no reason whatsoever except masochism. How a language with so few, simple sounds evolved a writing system that uses thousands of difficult to draw and store characters to encode them, while at the same time already having a simple and efficient syllabary for doing the same thing, is surely one of the great mysteries of linguistics.
Citation needed. Or, parent post is bullshit. The whole 'Japanese/Chinese characters are magic' routine makes me want to throw up. Western misconceptions about chinese characters needs to die in fire. They are not little pictures, they are not ideograms, they are not faster to read, they do not use your brain differently, and they do not make it easier to etymologically identify unfamiliar words. They are not "denser than english" whatever the fuck that means.
I refer you to Chinese language--fact and fantasy Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Cent​ury Japan
And on the other side of the coin, the later northern opposition to slavery in the frontier states wasn't motivated by human good will, but it was motivated by the "They'll take our jobs!" thinking identical to that applied to modern immigrants. The northern states simply didn't want the friontier states to become slave states because they didn't want to compete with the cheap/free labor there. Most of them still had a rather strong prejudice against blacks and other races, as a non-revisionist historical study will reveal.
Also, a previous poster asserts that "the south needed slave labor for agriculture". The real situation is more like "the rich and entrenched plantation owners 'needed' slave labor to continue their industrial might". The book Markets and Minorities, which is a great read, argues that the South's economy, as a whole, would have been much better off with free blacks, who would have been able to branch out into other industries and be more productive by far, and that slavery was a detriment to the South's economy at the benefit of a couple industries (kinda like some copyright law now benefits a few industries while hurting the rest of the wider economy).
Same here. I pay well over 25% of my income in taxes, and I think most in the middle class who have real jobs do too. If I quadrupled my taxes, I would be well in the red.
Before I saw parent I was just going to post merely to thank the author of TFS for saying "Videos" instead of "Films".
It really irks me when people talk about "filming" things with their cell phones. Really. How much film does your cell phone hold? Oh, you didn't actually film anything?
There's nothing wrong with videoing things. It's ok. It's the 21st century now.
look at the carnage caused by a few relatively talentless nutballs out there. Remember the DC "snipers"? That was two, unskilled and relatively dumb dudes in a white van, but it was enough to captivate the media and terrorize a whole city. Imagine that in every city in america. Continuously. If there was ever any kind of Fight-club style, pseudo-organized armed domestic insurrection it could be extremely effective in short order. The ammo box remains effective, it is just dormant.
Slashdot Mirror
And good luck getting Netflix Streaming and Hulu to work well on Linux.
To most people, HDR images look "fake" because they don't look like photographs.
Truth is, photographs don't render scenes the way the human eye does. I think HDR images come closer to the way the human eye works. Notice that painters (with exceptions) have always painted scenes "HDR-Like" for a long time, and notice how people compare extreme HDR images to paintings and say "it looks like a drawing". It's because when people draw/paint, they made it look compressed/expanded (depending on your terminology) so that it mimics the way your eyes see. With photography, you were stuck with roughly linear tone mapping with some toe/shoulder compression, but people got used to it over the decades.
There is a decades/centuries long photographic and motion-picture tradition and a lot of digital imaging still holds photography up as the standard of what things are expected to look like. If you were a digital camera engineer in the '80s and the pictures from your camera looked like HDR instead of Kodachrome, I'm sure your manager would tell you to "fix it" until it did, because that was the standard. In the early era of digital imaging (which we are still in, and hopefully leaving soon), digital pictures have been made to resemble (film) photography from the very beginning, because that was a benchmark of what looked normal. That is what people expect and are used to. If HDR had come first, I think people would say that photographs look "fake".
This is similar to people who think that video footage shot with low-budget video cameras looks "fake" because they don't have the motion blur and judder of 24fps film. It's the opposite. It's the film that looks fake, but it's what people are used to, so the newer, more realistic medium looks 'fake'. Low-budget productions just don't have the budget for the expensive cameras and elaborate post-processing that "breaks" video footage to look like it was shot on film.
"Filmmakers"? I think he means "videographers". I don't see any film involved here.
Christians believe that Jesus is God. Jews and Muslims do not. Therefore Christians, Muslims, and Jews do not all have the same god. Quite simple.
I agree with you and that's why I think the Always Innovating Touchbook is about the sweetest thing possible. It's an ARM-based touchscreen tablet with a detachable keyboard. Unfortunately it's being brought to market by a small company and just like the Open Pandora, they have been having trouble with filling orders and continuously lengthening deadlines. It was supposed to come out in 2007 and finally came out in 2009 and now they are sold out. Always Innovating is promising that the new version will be coming out in September but I didn't believe them so I bought one on eBay.
Please don't use "leverage" as a transitive verb. Not on Slashdot at least; save it for management meetings.
Since when are Chinese characters words? They aren't words. You apparently subscribe to the Monosyllabic Myth.
"And on mobile phones, data isn't so cheap -- isn't SMS the world's most expensive data transfer? -- so ideographs are massively more efficient to the consumer."
Too bad each chinese character requires twice as many bits to send as a character of the Latin alphabet...not to mention 2000+ of the actual glyphs have to stored and generated in the phone rather than 26. Real efficient. I also think that the idea that chinese is more efficient at using screen real estate is bullshit.
"I think a trained reader can absorb written text in Chinese characters at much higher speed than someone using an alphabetic script."
bullshit.
I thought "mosquito" was some sort of diminutive form of "mosque"
You mean there's not fucking TSA NOW. No fucking TSA until a few bullshit terrorism events happen. Do you think trains are immune from terrorism? On the contrary, blowing up trains is a prestigious line of work, with a long and glorious tradition. It seems to me, much easier to crash a high speed train than to take down an airplane, with all that vulnerable track laid out over hundreds of miles. One nicely placed mortor and, the results are not going to be pretty, especially in any populated area. Supposing the US builds a high speed rail network, I give it at most a decade before regulations are just as bad as TSA...baggage inspections, patdowns, naked xray viewers, no weapons allowed....
I agree. I know OP says he is taking "photos", but I wonder if he's making any negatives. I'm not saying digital images are worthless, but you only get one shot to put something on film...you can always scan it later any way you want. I'm happy that by chance I ended up with a wedding photographer that shot our wedding on film...I have a roll of negatives in my safe, and it's very special to have those negatives that were in the camera at our wedding. If my wedding had been shot digitally, I would just feel sick...there's no way to go back. 35mm film costs $0.15 per frame. If it's not worth $0.15, then use a digital camera. Unless we are talking about putting things on ebay or something, shoot film. Film can be scanned, so you lose nothing and gain something that may be nearly priceless. Don't let the fact that you might not have a film camera stop you. Pro-level 35mm cameras cost almost nothing now, and disposable cameras also work.
I helped my younger sister with her highschool algebra and physics homework, and my reaction (I have a degree in physics btw) was basically "WTF is this?" The problems were improperly posited, not enough information, or just wrong, and sometimes, not even wrong. I would hate to go back and have to do highschool "physics" like that. It full of bullshit, not unlike TFA.
Call it a mulligan.
This is true. A person can only carry maybe a dozen kg of cargo over long distances. You know how much airships can carry? Hundreds. Literally hundreds.
I just hope that it dies before it starts to change the way cinematographers shoot movies, because they are under pressure to make the movie '3d-able'. Composing a film for 3d is an entirely different paradigm compared to the decades/centuries of NORMAL filmmaking and cinematography. I bet in future decades, when people watch today's movies without the lame 3D glasses, everyone looks back at pictures from this era and wonder why everything is composed in the center of the frame, with deep-focus effects and limited pans and zooms.
If you don't think Japanese (both writing and spoken) owes a massive debt to Chinese you are simply delusional. It was the main linguistic influence for centuries, and informs nearly every aspect of Japanese language. It's hard to overstate the influence of Chinese on Japanese when such a giant chuck of their vocabulary is based on ancient Chinese roots. As you know if you know anything about Japanese whatsoever, modern Japanese morphology consists of many roots of Chinese origin. Japanese have there own terms to describe Chinese roots (does "kango" or "on-yomi" sound familiar?), and for fuck's sake, they call the characters "kanji" (lit. "Chinese characters").
Of course a big chunk of Japanese vocabulary also consists of 'native' words of Japanese original, ironically called (in Chinese roots) "wago". The Chinese roots are used for technical terms, compound terms, and just about everywhere in the language. The situation is similar to English where we used borrowed roots to form new/compound words (at least before acronymization came on the scene) or technical terms, and more native anglo roots for 'ordinary' terms. This is why we have to explain to our children that an orthopedic surgeon is a 'bone doctor'.
The structure of the Japanese language is of course vastly different than Chinese, but that only strengthens my argument that Kanji are inconceivably inefficient way to spell the Japanese language. Chinese characters almost make sense for Chinese, which is a very strongly isolating/analytic, as opposed to inflected, with nearly monosyllabic roots, and no case or tense that I'm aware of. Japanese on the other hand, is a very strongly agglutinative left-branching language with tenses and verb-last sentence structure. It's hard to imagine a language where Chinese characters would be worse at representing the underlying language. It's in complete seriousness that I propose that Chinese characters would be better used to spell English than Japanese.
YOU seem to be confused. You make my point for me when you state
"You can get a sense of what a French newspaper article is about because English is partially derived from French and both are derived from Latin and Greek. It has nothing to do with the actual characters themselves."
The point of my analogy was that Japanees people can get a "gist" what a Chinese newspaper article is about because Japanese is partially derived from Chinese. It has nothing to do with the actual characters themselves. It is not a special property of Kanji, and the ability of Japanese to read Chinese because of Kanji is often overstated by Nipponophiles.
"It does not mean that Japanese people can understand specific details of Chinese writing such as the the button pressing example you give. It only extends as far as, for example, seeing that an article is about banks and money and loans or that doctors say drinking green tea is good for you."
Like in my original analogy, I could do the same for many romance languages, not knowing any of the actual language. It's not a special property of the characters, and this should be obvious.
"The Kanji for a book is a good example as it is derived from the one for a tree, since books are made of paper. It doesn't look much like a tree but where that really starts to be useful is when you see that the kanji in question is used in many others which are related to reading, printing and collections of written works."
The english roots "biblio-", "-graphy," "litho-" and others pop up all over things which are related to reading, printing, and collections of printed work. When I see a new word with these morphological roots I have a good idea what the word might be about. Again, not a special property of kanji, and the degree to which the use of kanji clarify unfamiliar new words, better than other languages do, is often overstated, because Japanese etymologies, like all etymologies, are not entirely straightforward.
"In fact something similar happens with English. People don't read every character, they look at the shapes of words and the first and last letters first and that is enough for the brain to fill in much of a sentence."
Again, you are starting to sound like me. There is nothing special about Kanji that makes Japanese writing easier to read. Readers of other languages can also skim text and quickly recognize words and word-fragments too. If you say they do, prepared for a serious [citation needed] smackdown.
"The reason they stick to them is not just out of desire to inflict them on the younger generations"
No, I argue that that is basically why they stick to them. They already have a perfect, easy to learn syllabary. They can't allow it to be used though, because the problem is a deep-rooted, ancient classism associated with the ability to learn and remember Kanji.
"Katakana came about when women used it for their own writings, partially as a way of making it inaccessible to men and partially as a simplified system suitable to women who had less access to education but still desired to write."
Major historical revisionism. Katakana was indeed "women's writing" because it was easy, and anyone could learn it. Learning Kanji was the mark of the upper classes, who could afford the schooling necessary to study Classical Chinese and the Kanji. Women were not worthy of higher education which is why Katakana came to be seen as women's writing. The Tales of Genjii and other old stories are considered to be written by women because they are in katakana. Funny, that they are legible, despite being written with NO KANJI, which proves that kanji are unneccesary for writing Japanese.
How about we use brush-strokes as our metric of 'density'? Which one is more efficient then? I forgot, is density supposed to be a good or bad thing?
It's all very silly actually.
Japanese has other characters but Japanese people can get the gist of a story in a Chinese newspaper just from the characters.
As an English speaker I can get the gist of a story in a French newspaper, and I've never studied French. Must be because of the magical properties of the Roman alphabet (which came from pictures of things too, if you go back to Sumerian and squint real hard).
If Japanese and Chinese can understand their language by the kanji, then what the fuck do the Chinese do when confronted with a complex Japanese word that consists of a Kanji followed by kana that NEGATE the root contained in the kanji? A Japanese sentence meaning "whatever you do don't press the button!" becomes <hand><press><button> when a Chinese reads it.
<i>They are pictures - for example the Kanji for person is a stylised stick figure. </i>
They always pick a few kanji out and say "See! it's pictures! The radicals for 'woman' and 'child' make the character for 'safe'! (which is a laughable stretch anyway). That's cute, but if you ever looked past the first page of your basic kanji book you would realize the situation is more like "you take the radical for 'lemon' and you place it next to the radical for 'burlap' and you get the character for 'carburetor'".
The only people who think kanji form some kind of logical system are people who have never studied Japanese. The Japanese writing system is one of those monolithic, looming monstrosities of inefficiency and folly that make you question how it could ever have evolved, much like certain pieces of Microsoft code. Westerners are forgiven in looking at Japanese writing (and kanji overall) and trying to project some kind of reason why it is, and what it does, and how it must have some kind of superior qualities somewhere, but no, there aren't any.
Japanese is a language with a perfectly phonemic alphabet, something almost no other language can boast of. No linguistic theory can explain why they don't use an existing, nearly perfect syllabary they already have, and everyone already knows. After learning to read 100 or so simple glyphs, Japanese children can immediately write and transcribe any word they know or have heard. Machines can easily translate between speech and text with a 1:1 lookup table. But they don't use this immensely efficient, perfectly phonemic syllabary, for no reason whatsoever except masochism. How a language with so few, simple sounds evolved a writing system that uses thousands of difficult to draw and store characters to encode them, while at the same time already having a simple and efficient syllabary for doing the same thing, is surely one of the great mysteries of linguistics.
Citation needed. Or, parent post is bullshit. The whole 'Japanese/Chinese characters are magic' routine makes me want to throw up. Western misconceptions about chinese characters needs to die in fire. They are not little pictures, they are not ideograms, they are not faster to read, they do not use your brain differently, and they do not make it easier to etymologically identify unfamiliar words. They are not "denser than english" whatever the fuck that means.
I refer you to
Chinese language--fact and fantasy
Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Cent​ury Japan
Although, I admit it's a cool theory.
And on the other side of the coin, the later northern opposition to slavery in the frontier states wasn't motivated by human good will, but it was motivated by the "They'll take our jobs!" thinking identical to that applied to modern immigrants. The northern states simply didn't want the friontier states to become slave states because they didn't want to compete with the cheap/free labor there. Most of them still had a rather strong prejudice against blacks and other races, as a non-revisionist historical study will reveal.
Also, a previous poster asserts that "the south needed slave labor for agriculture". The real situation is more like "the rich and entrenched plantation owners 'needed' slave labor to continue their industrial might". The book Markets and Minorities, which is a great read, argues that the South's economy, as a whole, would have been much better off with free blacks, who would have been able to branch out into other industries and be more productive by far, and that slavery was a detriment to the South's economy at the benefit of a couple industries (kinda like some copyright law now benefits a few industries while hurting the rest of the wider economy).
Same here. I pay well over 25% of my income in taxes, and I think most in the middle class who have real jobs do too. If I quadrupled my taxes, I would be well in the red.
Texas by the way.
Before I saw parent I was just going to post merely to thank the author of TFS for saying "Videos" instead of "Films".
It really irks me when people talk about "filming" things with their cell phones. Really. How much film does your cell phone hold? Oh, you didn't actually film anything?
There's nothing wrong with videoing things. It's ok. It's the 21st century now.
look at the carnage caused by a few relatively talentless nutballs out there. Remember the DC "snipers"? That was two, unskilled and relatively dumb dudes in a white van, but it was enough to captivate the media and terrorize a whole city. Imagine that in every city in america. Continuously. If there was ever any kind of Fight-club style, pseudo-organized armed domestic insurrection it could be extremely effective in short order. The ammo box remains effective, it is just dormant.