Well, there's no "right" answer, just like most technical questions.
Many people will be glad to sell you whatever they want, or tell you something else sucks, but if you don't know the specs and what you want to do with it you'll wind up with the wrong system.
For example, you mantion using a DV Raptor with a 30GB hard drive. You do realize that DV is 18GB/hour? That hard drive will be full before you can sneeze, much less get any work done. Unless you're doing all 2-3 minute projects without much footage lying around on the disk.
Also, there is still a 2 GB file size limit on Mac/PC. This is the biggest obstacle any beginner (inexperienced) editor runs across because you usually don't hit that wall no matter how hard you're pushing a system.
Find out how the system you're using gets around that limit -- does it require a special program to do editing and read the file? If you want to use Premiere, then make sure the board does Premiere capture and export.
Frankly, for all the greatness of DV, the file sizes are insane. MPEG2 boards can cut5 down file sizes by setting compression level, and if you're doing one-off editing projects youll never notice the difference.
If you're doing web delivery, you might want a board that will capture at 320x240 so all you video isn't 10 times the size you need it. DV and many MPEG2 boards won't let you do anything aside from full DV frame size (~720x640, depending).
This is a lot of data, but any UDMA66 drive can nadle it. Even at 25Mb/second (which you won't go over) you can save money by not buying SCSI. This is not 1987 any more -- IDE is plently fast.
Gotta go to a meeting, but you might want to do more research before buying, it doesn't sound like you're sure what all the specs you're dealing with are. You needs lots of disk space, and no less than 128MB RAM (256 is better, I use 512)...
you liberals have a way of treating kids like emotional and intellectual retards
Please don't paint everyone with such a broad brush -- that's part of why these debates (and party politics in general) tend to be so counterproductive.
I consider myself to be very liberal (meaning that progress is good and people should be helped whenever possible), but I have no interest in restricting gun rights for those who wish to exercise them.
I personally have found the ACLU's position on the matter bizarre -- every point on the bill of rights is universally interpreted in the most liberal light (meaning the light giving the most rights to the citizens), except the second.
As well as criminal, since when guns are banned you can just arrest any potentiel serial killer for owning a gun. Right now you have to wait for the killing spree to arrest him - but too late
Serial killers don't use guns (as a rule, there are exceptions). They use knives and hands and other instruments that let them get up close and personal to their victims. Gun control would do nothing to impact serial killings in the slightest...
The truth is, most gun wounds hurt the victim so bad that he/she wont be capable to get their gun
I take it you've never actually seen someone get shot.
The REAL truth is that gunshots are nowhere near the all-powerful force that many people believe them to be. You're better off getting shot thasn stabbed or bludgeoned, in many cases.
Gunshot wounds tend to be fairly clean, many times the bullet passes right through and you're essentially left with a hole (that admittedly could be fatal depending on where it is).
A serious stab wound tends to cause more damage because it generally covers a larger area and is more likely to hit something important like an organ or artery -- plus they're messy because the wound itself is generally jagged and torn, rather than the "simple" star-shaped bullet hole.
being budgeoned (with a bat or other tool) is almost always the worst long-term damage you can get. It breaks off shards of bone and pushes them down into your body (usually into the skull, as you generally hit someone on the head). The blunt trauma ensures that damage is done to as wide an area as possible, and many of the damages are internal, without the puncture of a cut or hole to relieve pressure. Many times a person will die from the internal bleeding & pressure on the brain, and if they don't they can frequently find themselves with a dramatically reduced mental facility due to brain damage.
Of course, this doesn't apply to hollow-point or tumbler bullets -- the whole reason they exist is because someone had to figure out how to make gunshots more effective and damaging.
Given the choice between being shot from 5 feet away (with a regular bullet), stabbed in the torso, or hit with a bat on the head, I'll take the bullet every time. Odds are I'll be able to walk to the hospital myself (albeit in a great deal of pain). After the wound is healed, your life will be pretty much the same (unless of course it hit your spinal cord or similar).
The real tragedy of movie violence is that they don't show the true damages of things like getting hit in the head (likely brain damage) and treat it like "oh, you just tap somebody and they pass out, and wake up with a headache!".
Obviously this varies by the person and the incident -- I've seen people die of blood loss from minor wounds, and I've seen people with 3 nasty shots to the torso walk out of the hospital 6 weeks later. I saw a guy get shot point-blank in the chest with a.40 (he was wearing a bulletproof vest). He went down, and the shooter thought he was gone for good. He stood back up, very pissed off and the shooter nearly crapped his pants. Needless to say, the victim had a bruise the size of a Mack truck over his whole torso the next day and could barely walk from pain, but at the time of the shooting he was so pumped on adreneline he would have been happy to shoot the other guy if he wasn't already dead from the three others who were backing him up.
The shooter suffered from Hollywood syndrome, thinking that by firing a gun the other guy would turn to dust or something. Guns just aren't as deadly as people make them out to be.
So in my opinion, the whole thing about using guns as self-defence or for "protecting my house from burglars" is effectively moot
Well, your opinion runs contrary to reality. The FBI acknowledges that a victim with a gun is much less likely to be killed in a crime than one unarmed (this is of course ignoring the issue of unsecured guns, which cause greivous problems when children or burglars get access to them. But burglars rarely use a gun in the house they got it, they simply steal it and pawn it, the source of many illeagal weapons).
But self-defense is a legitimate, and truthful application of firearms. Burglars rarely are interested in shooting people (that's why they're burglars), and statistics show they ALWAYS run when faced with an armed homeowner.
That all said, i don't own a gun and never have. I just don't like them...
The only person considered competent to decide infringement is an IP lawyer.
I think the judges generally make this call.
What would happen is your guys would go to court and explain to the judge why what you're doing is different, and their guys would explain why it's too similar. The judge presumably pays attention to this and at the end decides who is correct.
I fail to see how this process could be made any more effective (short of your seeming suggestion that it just be up to the second party to decide whether or not they're infringing)...
I would question how these "diagnoses" will take place, as other have already. Pinkerton claims that they will clarify what symptoms should be reportable by using the same symptoms the professional psychiatric community uses, but that doesn't add much (if any) reliability to the analysis.
The psychiatric community itself accepts that virtually every symptom of anxiety disorders, depression (the leading cause of death for many demographic segments), and mania are merely extremes of commonly occuring issues. The constant debates over symptoms and dignoses cause the DSM to fit, essentially, the moral views of the publishing date. No reputable psychiatrist would disagree that the DSM is as much consenus as it is fact (the difference being that diagnosis & treatment by "consensus" is invariably tainted by moral and political mores).
A clinically depressed person will be diagnosed differently by any number of professional, experienced phsychiatrists & psychologists, and the practice of allowing school counselors to participate in this (or even worse, completely untrained principals) has only made the issue of improper diagnosis more apparent and dangerous. To allow anonymous students to "diagnose" and turn in their fellows is to invite both paranoia and life-devastating errors, especially in the cases of children who are not "normal" (ie, average) but also not dysfunctional.
I find it ironic (although I'm sure the irony is lost on those such as Pinkerton who stand to make a profit) that the same day we're discussing the possibility of turning in aberrant children "for their own safety", the front page article on CNN's web site discussed the alarmingly high rates at which children are being prescribed mood-altering (in fact, brain-chemistry altering) drugs.
The very concept that pre-school children are being prescribed Prozac and Zoloft in hopes to fix their aberrant behavior is shocking and literally nauseating. (Your son eats paste? My god, he's liable to kill someone!)
Even more fundamentally, activities such as this seem to be nothing short of an assault on our own children. We consider them to be caged animals, praying that with the proper psychopharmocology and big brother tactics we will be able to intervene before the inevitable killing spree begins.
In what other society, indeed, in what other history, have citizens been so clearly (and mistakenly) terrified by the concept that their children might exhibit the symptoms of free will? That they might decide sneaking out at night is fun?
Why must we encourage our children to "turn in their neighbors", when similar tactics have consistently and immediately been rejected throughout America in regard to adults? There have been several communities (heavily traffiked by drug users/dealers) where police have encouraged citizens to report any "unusual" behaviour, people or vehicles -- and these measures have always been soundly criticized as disturbing and paranoic, encouraging the use of anonymous tips as retribution between private citizens. This WAVE effort is no different, it just has better t-shirts and a company willing to make money off the abridgement of human trust.
The simple fact of the matter is that there isn't a shred of statistical or empirical evidence that indicates there is even a chance of this working.
The simple fact of the matter is that people (whether old or young) who commit the most shocking and heinous crimes (such as mass-murder, serial killings, etc) are impossible to predict or prevent. The most visably disturbed children and adults are rarely (if ever) capable of these kinds of activities, because they require the kind of intelligence and thoughtful planning that are (coincidentlayy enough!) exactly the skills you need to appear "normal".
While psychiatrists can diagnose ted bundy (or any of the recent teen killers) after the fact, the criminals would all be capable of (and in fact, did) convincing several clinicians of their sanity and harmlessness.
Ultimately, that's why I can't understand the goals of this program (given the stated intentions). If the goal is to stop "casual" crimes (like drug use, assault of fellow students, abuse or other extracurricular trauma), then the faculty (indeed, any capable observer) would be able to spot the symptoms. There is no need for a guerrilla force of students to root out such problems, as they are not frequently (and even less capably) hidden. They are universally ignored by those capable of helping (meaning teachers, police, and other adults). Fight the barrier of apathy among adults, not the "secrecy" of teens.
If the goal is to stop killings such as in Littleton, then I wish you good luck. People capable of such violence and mahem are wholly capable of evading amateur detectives and trained psychologists alike.
White male, upper middle class, highly intelligent, psychological issues from youth. It describes most every serial killer, mass-murderer, and successful businessman in this country. So where do we start the lineup?...
Hah! I remember back in the day (that was the 80's to you youngsters) when everyone in the city would be logging on to the BBSes at 12:01 in the morning to get in the first move on all the games. God help you if you missed a day, you'd log on to find all your money gone and your contries conquered!
It seemed a lot more exciting and personal, despite the low-tech. Playing RISK and Tradewars and trying to get your ratio up!
Of course, Tribes and other stuff is fun, but i do think we're missing the perpetual multi-player online strategy game genre. Everybody's doing "role-playing" games, which are fantastic, but door games were the crack of our day...
Given the fact that public education in this country leaves much to be desired, Given that competition in the marketplace of education will make things better for the consumers
You've got about 10 paragraphs of "givens" that I don't agree are "given".
Although I suppose you could always say education could be better, the fact of the matter is that all the countries with "better" educational systems are far behind us in virtually every segment of technology, business, and finance. All the standardized tests can show that people in the US are poorly educated, but the empirical evidence seems to indicate that we're doing just fine.
I went to public school and don't feel I was robbed of a good education, on the contrary most of the people I've met who went to private school seem to have grown up in a fairyland vacuum where everyone is rich and white and polite. Where every transgression is forgiven as a childish prank (Witness George W, running for president, unlike most other "youthful indescretion" drug users who are in jail).
And I don't buy that "competition" makes schools (or more importantly, education) better. Public schools currently compete too much, IMHO. They waste half their time teaching to the standardized test (because that's what their funding is based on!) rather than educating. They compete with each other and other school districts for funding, and more importantly for the financial impact being the "best district/school in the state" has. A good school district brings companies (and thus $$$), a bad one makes employees reluctant to transfer there.
It is also a fact that, no matter how large or small the community in which we live, we must each make choices that, for better or worse, affect our lives and the lives of those around us. Libertarian thought simply states that it's best if we're able to make those decisions for ourselves
That's the logic I don't understand. Any major decision affects other people, therefore those other people shouldn't have any input on the decision?
Quite frankly, I don't want the chemical plant owner "making the decision for himself" whether or not to dump his waste into the ground (and thus into the water table and our drinking/bathing water.
If you want to "make the decision for yourself" to send your kid to catholic school, or to get more insurance or to buy a house or have sex with an inflatable woman, knock yourself out.
If you want to make the choice not to fund the public schools that you (and everyone else) benefit from, then no the choice is only yours insofar as you and the rest of the community (the electorate) can agree it's a good idea.
And don't kid yourself that this won't have religious repercussions. If 80% of the community sends their kids/vouchers to a Catholic school, then how the hell are the Jewish or Muslim kids gonna get the education they deserve without taxpayer-sponsored religious instruction that is contrary to their beliefs? If it's not profitable to make a non-religious school in an area, it won't get built.
As someone who respects my rights (especially those so sensitive as to be enumerated in the Constitution) I find it disturbing that we're so eager to hand them all over in an eagerness to (maybe) save a few dollars. Businesses have no responsibility to protect your speech or religion or privacy. Private schools will have no issues with prayer at football games -- they can just kick you out if they don't like your attitude...
The gaming software would have to support putting out Dolby/DTS, the card can't make up the signals. But if quake supports true 5.1-channel digital sound, any sound card with digital out (S/P-DIF) can send that digital signal to a Dolby/DTS decoder.
I have my computer hooked up this way right now with a SonicVortex2 (Aureal chipset) so that I can get true 5.1 channel dolby digital surround on my DVD movies. But I don't know of any other application that uses true 5.1 surround. I know a few games are starting to support quadraphonic surround, but that's generally using direct3D or Aureal/Creative APIs, not Dolby/DTS.
I think Panasonic is coming out with a sound card with built-in Dolby digital decoder. Not sure why any sane person would buy it when half the point of using digital out is to get the audio signals away from the electromagnetic noise inside your computer case.
I suspect the Playstation2 has the digital out for the sake of DVDs, adding Dolby to a game rather than 3D "accelerated" sound would probbaly increase processing overhead too much. But I'd love to be proved wrong!...
If you pay taxes (including school district taxes), but you also have to pay tuition and fees and whatnot for your child to attend a private school, why the Hell are you paying school taxes?
You're paying for the same rteason that people wihtout kids pay school taxes -- no one lives in a vacuum. The kids that go to school are the adults, voters, employees, employers, and neighbors of tomorrow.
This, ultimately is my greatest disagreement with pure libertarian thought -- that it never acknowledges the communal reality of existence in modern times...
Actually, I think the reason that most Canadians react so forceably to the US propensity for firearms ownership is that we get along just fine without everyone and his dog owning their own handgun/automatic assault rifle/machine gun or what-have-you. Our *national* annual murder rate is (I am led to understand) equal to the annual murder rate of the city of Detroit alone. If this is the case, then it obviously works for us You make the same mistake many Americans do in regards to firearm crimes. Yes, America has a lot of murder, and it has a lot of guns. But if all guns were gone tomorrow, if there were not a single violent incident with a firearm, we would still be one of the murder capitals of the world. Half of our murders are committed with guns. That means that half of them are committed with (knives|bats|pipes|rope|bare hands|cars|poison|etc). Even without guns America is violent. Even without guns Japan is the suicide capital of the world, they just have to use poison and hanging more frequently than we to get the job done. But it sure hasn't slowed them down any...
In other words regulation of access providers is not really taking into account that the very access these companies deny may be granted by others that see an open path for competition.
The phone companies would have eventually come around to the fact that the access that they were withholding was getting more and more outdated...
But that ignores history and reality. No one suspected that cable would ever be able to compete with phone, so no one took it into consideration when making technology decisions.
And it isn't entriely coincidental that most telecommunications advances have taken place since (de)regulation of the phone systems. Having a theoretical competitor at some future point never got AT&T to stop their ridiculous pricing structures or telling people that they merely "rent" their phones. It was the REAL presence of MCI (and the continuous legal battles) that shook the cobwebs off.
And of course cable companies couldn't offer voice services unless the lines are neutral, which is exactly what Lessig is talking about. If they could only connect you to another cable phone it wouldn't matter how cheap it was, because no one would use it.
Only by standardizing on IP with open access to phone lines have all these great competitive possibilities opened up. They simply didn't exist before, and Lessig is suggesting that we should ensure (through regulation) that this same potential for competition with new technologies on existing open systems remains...
Aargh! As usual, a lot of folks seem to see the words "regulation" and "internet" in the same sentence and assume the suggestion is being made to deny them their pr0n.
Lessig's entire article (I don't know how folks manage to miss it) is discussing how different kinds of regulation (NOT JUST GOVERNMENT REGULATION!! -- read the damn article!) affect innovation, in particular the development of the internet and to a lesser extent much of the current phone network in the US.
In particular, he points out that even Linus is subject to regulation in how much control he has over the kernel. He is regulated by the fact that if people don't like what he's doing, they can pack up the source and do someting different. So he can't simply "force" people to use bad technology because he controls linux.
This is regulation that assures positive benefits in innovation and technology, not to mention the side effect that it creates happier customers and less antagonism between providers and consumers.
Without government regulation of the phone companies, we would not have the internet. Feel free to say that Lessig is an idiot who doesn't know as much as you do, but he's still right. For those of you under the age of 15, phone companies historically made a ton of money off data lines (ISDN and T1s primarily).
They hated the idea of analog modems being used over their phone lines. They lost that fight with the "regulators" and it's a good thing or we wouldn't be worrying about the internet because no one but college students would be connected.
I think it's odd that we bitch and moan about bundling content and access together, complain about AOL owning Roadrunner cable, but at the first suggestion that something be done to prevent this monopoly from locking out competitors we start screaming about "evil regulation".
Even more odd is the fact that we geeks (who are so anal about terminology) are castigating Lessig for calling regulation by its proper name. The "regulation" he's suggesting is referred to as "DE-regulation" by phone companies and most politicians. It means removing competitive obstacles and required that the network remain neutral.
Now who wants to argue against a neutral network?...
The Author seems to think that the concept of regulation is of one type only - government taking care of the little guy (you and me), protecting us from Big Corporations.
You must have been reading a different article, check your link.
The article being discussed has entire paragraphs dedicated to three different kinds of regulations and how they have affected innovation.
In fact, his article was directed at people like YOU -- who hear the word "regulation" and immediately start channeling Ayn Rand. Re-read and pay attention to the parts where he says regulation DOES NOT MEAN BIG GOVERNMENT "taking care of the little guy" as you put it.
The 20 somethings that he mentions in the beginning of the article bring up the slippery-slope argument, that if you start regulating broad-band, satellites, and other networks will go next...This is a good point - one that he doesn't grasp
He grasps it more effectively than most folks here. Tell me, were you complaining about the "regulation" that prevented phone companies from charging more for data than voice? That's exactly what Lessig is speaking of when he refers to phone companies that would have kept the internet stillborn.
The phone companies wanted to protect their lucrative ISDN and T1 lines, so they were quite upset at the idea of people sending data over a regular voice line. They wanted to charge more (not that it cost them any more to send data than voice) and "big government regulators" said they were being idiots. Without that regulation the internet would still be a university toy and we'd still be dialing onto BBSes and downloading messages for offline reading.
Lessig wrote this article to educate those 20-somethings (like you) who seem to think all these toys sprang from nowhere and were inevitable. "Deregulation" is not deregulation at all, it is a different kind of regulation. And of course government (legal) regulations are only a THIRD of what he's talking about...
Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve
DR-DOS was compatible (and superior in every way). MS purposely, actively and consciously used several mechanisms to stop it, up to and including per-processor licenses (which were illegal) and purposely incorrect error messages...
Frighteningly enough, the average IQ is really only between 90-100. *OVER* 100 is considered high, below 100 is normal (of course 85 and below are "low")...
Really? So if you're watching TV you can hit the "pause" button to go to the bathroom and your VCR will automatically and instantly pause what you're watching, even though you never told it to start recording?
And if you hit the "Pause" button on your VCR, you get digital frame advance capabilities, without the shakiness that comes from tape?
And your VCR+ allows it to record the right show even if they change the time the show is broadcast?
income taxes are viewed as punishing people for making money If we're going to come up with outrageous analogies, sales taxes punish people for existing, and punish the poor more heavily than those who aren't poor.
If it makes it less painful, the correct response to "income taxes penalize people for making more money" is "the people who benefit most from our economic system should bear a similarly greater responsibility for maintaining it".
Unfortunately both points are correct, as is true with most fo these debates. So no matter what we do, we'll continue arguing about it (g)...
itachi, who is going to stop reading this thread before he has an aneurysm
Well don't have an aneurysm without good insurance. Cost-cutting measures have reduced the number of beds in publicly-funded hospitals. And medical education has been drastically reduced to save medicare money, so you'll have fewer qualified doctors to work on you. But look at the bright side, you saved $15 on your taxes! (g)...
Well, you have to understand that i'm starting with the assumption the business owner is trying to make money.
In order to do that, he already keeps books (presumably on the computer) with tallies of sales by date and kind. Presumably this already existing data (scanned in at time of sale!) would be capable of generating exactly the tax numbers you claim are so costly to produce? I can only assume the bank that holds the loans that started his business would demand much more detailed financial logging.
While i grant you that the accountant may wait an extra.023 milliseconds for the computer to calculate those extra kilobytes of numerical data, I hardly think such a delay would justify scrapping the current tax system?
And, to pick a nit, yes this is "less efficient" than fewer calculations, but you didn't say it was "less efficient", you said it was "inefficient", which it patently isn't. It also doesn't penalize small businesses "heavily".
At most, it is simply one more calculation in a series of hundreds of others done on a regular basis with the same figures for many other reasons not involving taxation.
At best, it is entirely automatic from the moment merchandise arrives in inventory to the moment it is sold, meaning that it is essentially a zero-cost proposition (though obviously there is an incremental cost involved).
So no, I don't think it's inefficient, any more so than making every American sit down with income tax forms on a yearly basis.
I have to admit this is one thing that's been bothering me lately -- the US doing a brain drain on other countries. While obviously it's in our own short-term interest to get all we can in whatever resources are available, I question the long-term feasibility of essentially strip-mining a country's population.
Fortunately, many people send money back, but as you point out, if the money is wasted it doesn't do much good. The obviousl answer is to invest in education and such, but then you have a new generation of educated students (at local expense) leaving the country to generate income for the US.
I suppose a national sending money back puts more into the economy than he would if he stayed behind, so in that light it might be a good thing.
Man, i hate trying to figure this stuff out. No matter how you look at it it seems like everyone's getting screwed (and yet everyone is making money!)...
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Well, there's no "right" answer, just like most technical questions.
Many people will be glad to sell you whatever they want, or tell you something else sucks, but if you don't know the specs and what you want to do with it you'll wind up with the wrong system.
For example, you mantion using a DV Raptor with a 30GB hard drive. You do realize that DV is 18GB/hour? That hard drive will be full before you can sneeze, much less get any work done. Unless you're doing all 2-3 minute projects without much footage lying around on the disk.
Also, there is still a 2 GB file size limit on Mac/PC. This is the biggest obstacle any beginner (inexperienced) editor runs across because you usually don't hit that wall no matter how hard you're pushing a system.
Find out how the system you're using gets around that limit -- does it require a special program to do editing and read the file? If you want to use Premiere, then make sure the board does Premiere capture and export.
Frankly, for all the greatness of DV, the file sizes are insane. MPEG2 boards can cut5 down file sizes by setting compression level, and if you're doing one-off editing projects youll never notice the difference.
If you're doing web delivery, you might want a board that will capture at 320x240 so all you video isn't 10 times the size you need it. DV and many MPEG2 boards won't let you do anything aside from full DV frame size (~720x640, depending).
This is a lot of data, but any UDMA66 drive can nadle it. Even at 25Mb/second (which you won't go over) you can save money by not buying SCSI. This is not 1987 any more -- IDE is plently fast.
Gotta go to a meeting, but you might want to do more research before buying, it doesn't sound like you're sure what all the specs you're dealing with are. You needs lots of disk space, and no less than 128MB RAM (256 is better, I use 512)...
you liberals have a way of treating kids like emotional and intellectual retards
Please don't paint everyone with such a broad brush -- that's part of why these debates (and party politics in general) tend to be so counterproductive.
I consider myself to be very liberal (meaning that progress is good and people should be helped whenever possible), but I have no interest in restricting gun rights for those who wish to exercise them.
I personally have found the ACLU's position on the matter bizarre -- every point on the bill of rights is universally interpreted in the most liberal light (meaning the light giving the most rights to the citizens), except the second.
As well as criminal, since when guns are banned you can just arrest any potentiel serial killer for owning a gun. Right now you have to wait for the killing spree to arrest him - but too late
Serial killers don't use guns (as a rule, there are exceptions). They use knives and hands and other instruments that let them get up close and personal to their victims. Gun control would do nothing to impact serial killings in the slightest...
Killing a burglar is *not* self defence
It depends on the state. In Texas, you are allowed to protect your property with lethal force...
The truth is, most gun wounds hurt the victim so bad that he/she wont be capable to get their gun
.40 (he was wearing a bulletproof vest). He went down, and the shooter thought he was gone for good. He stood back up, very pissed off and the shooter nearly crapped his pants.
I take it you've never actually seen someone get shot.
The REAL truth is that gunshots are nowhere near the all-powerful force that many people believe them to be. You're better off getting shot thasn stabbed or bludgeoned, in many cases.
Gunshot wounds tend to be fairly clean, many times the bullet passes right through and you're essentially left with a hole (that admittedly could be fatal depending on where it is).
A serious stab wound tends to cause more damage because it generally covers a larger area and is more likely to hit something important like an organ or artery -- plus they're messy because the wound itself is generally jagged and torn, rather than the "simple" star-shaped bullet hole.
being budgeoned (with a bat or other tool) is almost always the worst long-term damage you can get. It breaks off shards of bone and pushes them down into your body (usually into the skull, as you generally hit someone on the head). The blunt trauma ensures that damage is done to as wide an area as possible, and many of the damages are internal, without the puncture of a cut or hole to relieve pressure. Many times a person will die from the internal bleeding & pressure on the brain, and if they don't they can frequently find themselves with a dramatically reduced mental facility due to brain damage.
Of course, this doesn't apply to hollow-point or tumbler bullets -- the whole reason they exist is because someone had to figure out how to make gunshots more effective and damaging.
Given the choice between being shot from 5 feet away (with a regular bullet), stabbed in the torso, or hit with a bat on the head, I'll take the bullet every time. Odds are I'll be able to walk to the hospital myself (albeit in a great deal of pain). After the wound is healed, your life will be pretty much the same (unless of course it hit your spinal cord or similar).
The real tragedy of movie violence is that they don't show the true damages of things like getting hit in the head (likely brain damage) and treat it like "oh, you just tap somebody and they pass out, and wake up with a headache!".
Obviously this varies by the person and the incident -- I've seen people die of blood loss from minor wounds, and I've seen people with 3 nasty shots to the torso walk out of the hospital 6 weeks later. I saw a guy get shot point-blank in the chest with a
Needless to say, the victim had a bruise the size of a Mack truck over his whole torso the next day and could barely walk from pain, but at the time of the shooting he was so pumped on adreneline he would have been happy to shoot the other guy if he wasn't already dead from the three others who were backing him up.
The shooter suffered from Hollywood syndrome, thinking that by firing a gun the other guy would turn to dust or something. Guns just aren't as deadly as people make them out to be.
So in my opinion, the whole thing about using guns as self-defence or for "protecting my house from burglars" is effectively moot
Well, your opinion runs contrary to reality. The FBI acknowledges that a victim with a gun is much less likely to be killed in a crime than one unarmed (this is of course ignoring the issue of unsecured guns, which cause greivous problems when children or burglars get access to them. But burglars rarely use a gun in the house they got it, they simply steal it and pawn it, the source of many illeagal weapons).
But self-defense is a legitimate, and truthful application of firearms. Burglars rarely are interested in shooting people (that's why they're burglars), and statistics show they ALWAYS run when faced with an armed homeowner.
That all said, i don't own a gun and never have. I just don't like them...
The only person considered competent to decide infringement is an IP lawyer.
I think the judges generally make this call.
What would happen is your guys would go to court and explain to the judge why what you're doing is different, and their guys would explain why it's too similar. The judge presumably pays attention to this and at the end decides who is correct.
I fail to see how this process could be made any more effective (short of your seeming suggestion that it just be up to the second party to decide whether or not they're infringing)...
I would question how these "diagnoses" will take place, as other have already. Pinkerton claims that they will clarify what symptoms should be reportable by using the same symptoms the professional psychiatric community uses, but that doesn't add much (if any) reliability to the analysis.
The psychiatric community itself accepts that virtually every symptom of anxiety disorders, depression (the leading cause of death for many demographic segments), and mania are merely extremes of commonly occuring issues. The constant debates over symptoms and dignoses cause the DSM to fit, essentially, the moral views of the publishing date. No reputable psychiatrist would disagree that the DSM is as much consenus as it is fact (the difference being that diagnosis & treatment by "consensus" is invariably tainted by moral and political mores).
A clinically depressed person will be diagnosed differently by any number of professional, experienced phsychiatrists & psychologists, and the practice of allowing school counselors to participate in this (or even worse, completely untrained principals) has only made the issue of improper diagnosis more apparent and dangerous. To allow anonymous students to "diagnose" and turn in their fellows is to invite both paranoia and life-devastating errors, especially in the cases of children who are not "normal" (ie, average) but also not dysfunctional.
I find it ironic (although I'm sure the irony is lost on those such as Pinkerton who stand to make a profit) that the same day we're discussing the possibility of turning in aberrant children "for their own safety", the front page article on CNN's web site discussed the alarmingly high rates at which children are being prescribed mood-altering (in fact, brain-chemistry altering) drugs.
The very concept that pre-school children are being prescribed Prozac and Zoloft in hopes to fix their aberrant behavior is shocking and literally nauseating. (Your son eats paste? My god, he's liable to kill someone!)
Even more fundamentally, activities such as this seem to be nothing short of an assault on our own children. We consider them to be caged animals, praying that with the proper psychopharmocology and big brother tactics we will be able to intervene before the inevitable killing spree begins.
In what other society, indeed, in what other history, have citizens been so clearly (and mistakenly) terrified by the concept that their children might exhibit the symptoms of free will? That they might decide sneaking out at night is fun?
Why must we encourage our children to "turn in their neighbors", when similar tactics have consistently and immediately been rejected throughout America in regard to adults? There have been several communities (heavily traffiked by drug users/dealers) where police have encouraged citizens to report any "unusual" behaviour, people or vehicles -- and these measures have always been soundly criticized as disturbing and paranoic, encouraging the use of anonymous tips as retribution between private citizens. This WAVE effort is no different, it just has better t-shirts and a company willing to make money off the abridgement of human trust.
The simple fact of the matter is that there isn't a shred of statistical or empirical evidence that indicates there is even a chance of this working.
The simple fact of the matter is that people (whether old or young) who commit the most shocking and heinous crimes (such as mass-murder, serial killings, etc) are impossible to predict or prevent. The most visably disturbed children and adults are rarely (if ever) capable of these kinds of activities, because they require the kind of intelligence and thoughtful planning that are (coincidentlayy enough!) exactly the skills you need to appear "normal".
While psychiatrists can diagnose ted bundy (or any of the recent teen killers) after the fact, the criminals would all be capable of (and in fact, did) convincing several clinicians of their sanity and harmlessness.
Ultimately, that's why I can't understand the goals of this program (given the stated intentions). If the goal is to stop "casual" crimes (like drug use, assault of fellow students, abuse or other extracurricular trauma), then the faculty (indeed, any capable observer) would be able to spot the symptoms. There is no need for a guerrilla force of students to root out such problems, as they are not frequently (and even less capably) hidden. They are universally ignored by those capable of helping (meaning teachers, police, and other adults). Fight the barrier of apathy among adults, not the "secrecy" of teens.
If the goal is to stop killings such as in Littleton, then I wish you good luck. People capable of such violence and mahem are wholly capable of evading amateur detectives and trained psychologists alike.
White male, upper middle class, highly intelligent, psychological issues from youth. It describes most every serial killer, mass-murderer, and successful businessman in this country. So where do we start the lineup?...
Hah! I remember back in the day (that was the 80's to you youngsters) when everyone in the city would be logging on to the BBSes at 12:01 in the morning to get in the first move on all the games. God help you if you missed a day, you'd log on to find all your money gone and your contries conquered!
It seemed a lot more exciting and personal, despite the low-tech. Playing RISK and Tradewars and trying to get your ratio up!
Of course, Tribes and other stuff is fun, but i do think we're missing the perpetual multi-player online strategy game genre. Everybody's doing "role-playing" games, which are fantastic, but door games were the crack of our day...
Given the fact that public education in this country leaves much to be desired, Given that competition in the marketplace of education will make things better for the consumers
You've got about 10 paragraphs of "givens" that I don't agree are "given".
Although I suppose you could always say education could be better, the fact of the matter is that all the countries with "better" educational systems are far behind us in virtually every segment of technology, business, and finance. All the standardized tests can show that people in the US are poorly educated, but the empirical evidence seems to indicate that we're doing just fine.
I went to public school and don't feel I was robbed of a good education, on the contrary most of the people I've met who went to private school seem to have grown up in a fairyland vacuum where everyone is rich and white and polite. Where every transgression is forgiven as a childish prank (Witness George W, running for president, unlike most other "youthful indescretion" drug users who are in jail).
And I don't buy that "competition" makes schools (or more importantly, education) better. Public schools currently compete too much, IMHO. They waste half their time teaching to the standardized test (because that's what their funding is based on!) rather than educating. They compete with each other and other school districts for funding, and more importantly for the financial impact being the "best district/school in the state" has. A good school district brings companies (and thus $$$), a bad one makes employees reluctant to transfer there.
It is also a fact that, no matter how large or small the community in which we live, we must each make choices that, for better or worse, affect our lives and the lives of those around us. Libertarian thought simply states that it's best if we're able to make those decisions for ourselves
That's the logic I don't understand. Any major decision affects other people, therefore those other people shouldn't have any input on the decision?
Quite frankly, I don't want the chemical plant owner "making the decision for himself" whether or not to dump his waste into the ground (and thus into the water table and our drinking/bathing water.
If you want to "make the decision for yourself" to send your kid to catholic school, or to get more insurance or to buy a house or have sex with an inflatable woman, knock yourself out.
If you want to make the choice not to fund the public schools that you (and everyone else) benefit from, then no the choice is only yours insofar as you and the rest of the community (the electorate) can agree it's a good idea.
And don't kid yourself that this won't have religious repercussions. If 80% of the community sends their kids/vouchers to a Catholic school, then how the hell are the Jewish or Muslim kids gonna get the education they deserve without taxpayer-sponsored religious instruction that is contrary to their beliefs? If it's not profitable to make a non-religious school in an area, it won't get built.
As someone who respects my rights (especially those so sensitive as to be enumerated in the Constitution) I find it disturbing that we're so eager to hand them all over in an eagerness to (maybe) save a few dollars. Businesses have no responsibility to protect your speech or religion or privacy. Private schools will have no issues with prayer at football games -- they can just kick you out if they don't like your attitude...
The gaming software would have to support putting out Dolby/DTS, the card can't make up the signals.
But if quake supports true 5.1-channel digital sound, any sound card with digital out (S/P-DIF) can send that digital signal to a Dolby/DTS decoder.
I have my computer hooked up this way right now with a SonicVortex2 (Aureal chipset) so that I can get true 5.1 channel dolby digital surround on my DVD movies. But I don't know of any other application that uses true 5.1 surround. I know a few games are starting to support quadraphonic surround, but that's generally using direct3D or Aureal/Creative APIs, not Dolby/DTS.
I think Panasonic is coming out with a sound card with built-in Dolby digital decoder. Not sure why any sane person would buy it when half the point of using digital out is to get the audio signals away from the electromagnetic noise inside your computer case.
I suspect the Playstation2 has the digital out for the sake of DVDs, adding Dolby to a game rather than 3D "accelerated" sound would probbaly increase processing overhead too much. But I'd love to be proved wrong!...
If you pay taxes (including school district taxes), but you also have to pay tuition and fees and whatnot for your child to attend a private school, why the Hell are you paying school taxes?
You're paying for the same rteason that people wihtout kids pay school taxes -- no one lives in a vacuum. The kids that go to school are the adults, voters, employees, employers, and neighbors of tomorrow.
This, ultimately is my greatest disagreement with pure libertarian thought -- that it never acknowledges the communal reality of existence in modern times...
Actually, I think the reason that most Canadians react so forceably to the US propensity for firearms ownership is that we get along just fine without everyone and his dog owning their own handgun/automatic assault rifle/machine gun or what-have-you. Our *national* annual murder rate is (I am led to understand) equal to the annual murder rate of the city of Detroit alone. If this is the case, then it obviously works for us
You make the same mistake many Americans do in regards to firearm crimes. Yes, America has a lot of murder, and it has a lot of guns. But if all guns were gone tomorrow, if there were not a single violent incident with a firearm, we would still be one of the murder capitals of the world. Half of our murders are committed with guns. That means that half of them are committed with (knives|bats|pipes|rope|bare hands|cars|poison|etc). Even without guns America is violent. Even without guns Japan is the suicide capital of the world, they just have to use poison and hanging more frequently than we to get the job done. But it sure hasn't slowed them down any...
In other words regulation of access providers is not really taking into account that the very access these companies deny may be granted by others that see an open path for competition.
The phone companies would have eventually come around to the fact that the access that they were withholding was getting more and more outdated...
But that ignores history and reality. No one suspected that cable would ever be able to compete with phone, so no one took it into consideration when making technology decisions.
And it isn't entriely coincidental that most telecommunications advances have taken place since (de)regulation of the phone systems. Having a theoretical competitor at some future point never got AT&T to stop their ridiculous pricing structures or telling people that they merely "rent" their phones. It was the REAL presence of MCI (and the continuous legal battles) that shook the cobwebs off.
And of course cable companies couldn't offer voice services unless the lines are neutral, which is exactly what Lessig is talking about. If they could only connect you to another cable phone it wouldn't matter how cheap it was, because no one would use it.
Only by standardizing on IP with open access to phone lines have all these great competitive possibilities opened up. They simply didn't exist before, and Lessig is suggesting that we should ensure (through regulation) that this same potential for competition with new technologies on existing open systems remains...
Aargh! As usual, a lot of folks seem to see the words "regulation" and "internet" in the same sentence and assume the suggestion is being made to deny them their pr0n.
Lessig's entire article (I don't know how folks manage to miss it) is discussing how different kinds of regulation (NOT JUST GOVERNMENT REGULATION!! -- read the damn article!) affect innovation, in particular the development of the internet and to a lesser extent much of the current phone network in the US.
In particular, he points out that even Linus is subject to regulation in how much control he has over the kernel. He is regulated by the fact that if people don't like what he's doing, they can pack up the source and do someting different. So he can't simply "force" people to use bad technology because he controls linux.
This is regulation that assures positive benefits in innovation and technology, not to mention the side effect that it creates happier customers and less antagonism between providers and consumers.
Without government regulation of the phone companies, we would not have the internet. Feel free to say that Lessig is an idiot who doesn't know as much as you do, but he's still right. For those of you under the age of 15, phone companies historically made a ton of money off data lines (ISDN and T1s primarily).
They hated the idea of analog modems being used over their phone lines. They lost that fight with the "regulators" and it's a good thing or we wouldn't be worrying about the internet because no one but college students would be connected.
I think it's odd that we bitch and moan about bundling content and access together, complain about AOL owning Roadrunner cable, but at the first suggestion that something be done to prevent this monopoly from locking out competitors we start screaming about "evil regulation".
Even more odd is the fact that we geeks (who are so anal about terminology) are castigating Lessig for calling regulation by its proper name. The "regulation" he's suggesting is referred to as "DE-regulation" by phone companies and most politicians. It means removing competitive obstacles and required that the network remain neutral.
Now who wants to argue against a neutral network?...
The Author seems to think that the concept of regulation is of one type only - government taking care of the little guy (you and me), protecting us from Big Corporations.
You must have been reading a different article, check your link.
The article being discussed has entire paragraphs dedicated to three different kinds of regulations and how they have affected innovation.
In fact, his article was directed at people like YOU -- who hear the word "regulation" and immediately start channeling Ayn Rand. Re-read and pay attention to the parts where he says regulation DOES NOT MEAN BIG GOVERNMENT "taking care of the little guy" as you put it.
The 20 somethings that he mentions in the beginning of the article bring up the slippery-slope argument, that if you start regulating broad-band, satellites, and other networks will go next...This is a good point - one that he doesn't grasp
He grasps it more effectively than most folks here. Tell me, were you complaining about the "regulation" that prevented phone companies from charging more for data than voice? That's exactly what Lessig is speaking of when he refers to phone companies that would have kept the internet stillborn.
The phone companies wanted to protect their lucrative ISDN and T1 lines, so they were quite upset at the idea of people sending data over a regular voice line. They wanted to charge more (not that it cost them any more to send data than voice) and "big government regulators" said they were being idiots. Without that regulation the internet would still be a university toy and we'd still be dialing onto BBSes and downloading messages for offline reading.
Lessig wrote this article to educate those 20-somethings (like you) who seem to think all these toys sprang from nowhere and were inevitable. "Deregulation" is not deregulation at all, it is a different kind of regulation. And of course government (legal) regulations are only a THIRD of what he's talking about...
Microsoft has NEVER prevented anyone from making a compatible system, had they done that it would have been anticompetitve
DR-DOS was compatible (and superior in every way). MS purposely, actively and consciously used several mechanisms to stop it, up to and including per-processor licenses (which were illegal) and purposely incorrect error messages...
Oh, dear -- I only wish I had thought to use that account first!...
Frighteningly enough, the average IQ is really only between 90-100. *OVER* 100 is considered high, below 100 is normal (of course 85 and below are "low")...
It's not a lot different than tape
Really? So if you're watching TV you can hit the "pause" button to go to the bathroom and your VCR will automatically and instantly pause what you're watching, even though you never told it to start recording?
And if you hit the "Pause" button on your VCR, you get digital frame advance capabilities, without the shakiness that comes from tape?
And your VCR+ allows it to record the right show even if they change the time the show is broadcast?
income taxes are viewed as punishing people for making money
If we're going to come up with outrageous analogies, sales taxes punish people for existing, and punish the poor more heavily than those who aren't poor.
If it makes it less painful, the correct response to "income taxes penalize people for making more money" is "the people who benefit most from our economic system should bear a similarly greater responsibility for maintaining it".
Unfortunately both points are correct, as is true with most fo these debates. So no matter what we do, we'll continue arguing about it (g)...
Wow, that explaination seemed a lot shorter than the word count, because it turned out to be so informative. Thanks!...
Ack! No german beer purity law?!!!
Next you'll tell me that America doesn't really want the tired, poor, wretched masses yearning to be free!
All my delusions, shattered!...
itachi, who is going to stop reading this thread before he has an aneurysm
Well don't have an aneurysm without good insurance. Cost-cutting measures have reduced the number of beds in publicly-funded hospitals. And medical education has been drastically reduced to save medicare money, so you'll have fewer qualified doctors to work on you. But look at the bright side, you saved $15 on your taxes! (g)...
Well, you have to understand that i'm starting with the assumption the business owner is trying to make money.
.023 milliseconds for the computer to calculate those extra kilobytes of numerical data, I hardly think such a delay would justify scrapping the current tax system?
In order to do that, he already keeps books (presumably on the computer) with tallies of sales by date and kind. Presumably this already existing data (scanned in at time of sale!) would be capable of generating exactly the tax numbers you claim are so costly to produce? I can only assume the bank that holds the loans that started his business would demand much more detailed financial logging.
While i grant you that the accountant may wait an extra
And, to pick a nit, yes this is "less efficient" than fewer calculations, but you didn't say it was "less efficient", you said it was "inefficient", which it patently isn't. It also doesn't penalize small businesses "heavily".
At most, it is simply one more calculation in a series of hundreds of others done on a regular basis with the same figures for many other reasons not involving taxation.
At best, it is entirely automatic from the moment merchandise arrives in inventory to the moment it is sold, meaning that it is essentially a zero-cost proposition (though obviously there is an incremental cost involved).
So no, I don't think it's inefficient, any more so than making every American sit down with income tax forms on a yearly basis.
I have to admit this is one thing that's been bothering me lately -- the US doing a brain drain on other countries. While obviously it's in our own short-term interest to get all we can in whatever resources are available, I question the long-term feasibility of essentially strip-mining a country's population.
Fortunately, many people send money back, but as you point out, if the money is wasted it doesn't do much good. The obviousl answer is to invest in education and such, but then you have a new generation of educated students (at local expense) leaving the country to generate income for the US.
I suppose a national sending money back puts more into the economy than he would if he stayed behind, so in that light it might be a good thing.
Man, i hate trying to figure this stuff out. No matter how you look at it it seems like everyone's getting screwed (and yet everyone is making money!)...