And the founders had to go back and add a bill of rights; there were several amendments to the constitution also. The world isn't as it was back then, there's no reason to think that allowing no changes would have allowed the U.S. to continue its existence.
Absolutely! There is a mechanism in place for amending the constitution. If it needs to be changed, we should exercise that process, rather than just ignoring it when inconvenient. If we can't muster the political will to change it, well, maybe we should step back and think about what that means.
Not allowing for a standing army means no counter to WWI Germany, WWII Germany and Japan. No counter to Stalin.
Nonsense. WWI and WWII actually prove you wrong, because there was no significant standing army prior to either of those wars. From 1800 to 1945, after every conflict the military force was drawn way down, practically to nothing. Between WWI and WWII, the size of the scaled-back army was increased a little, and the size of the national guard forces were quadrupled, but it was still a tiny fraction of what it is today, even when adjusted for population size.
After WWII, the customary drawdown didn't occur, due to the soviet threat. It was felt that a high degree of readiness must be maintained in the face of that imminent danger. But by the time the Cold War drew to a close, we had had two whole generations born with the idea that the military force should be big all the time.
The founders never found a reason for NiH, NSF, Social Security, FDA, NISTA, or any of the other alphabet soup of government arms we found necessary to protect us from the elements. They also never found a use for federally funded education or more recently, universal health care.
Actually, the founders would have decried almost all of the above as overreaching by a dangerously overgrown central government. Other than the FDA and NIST (I assume that's what you meant by "NISTA"), the rest of those functions should be peformed by the states, because the federal government has no authority to take on those roles. Not until FDR coerced the courts into redefining the meanings of the Commerce and General Welfare clauses, anyway.
As I said at the beginning: I have no objection to amending the constitution if we really feel it needs to be amended. But just ignoring the document which forms the basis of our law and government seems like it sets a really bad precedent.
But we could always disband the U.S. Military because, y'know, the world is a bunny world where there are no goblins and everyone just wants to be happy.
This comment deserves no response. In fact, I seriously considered simply not responding to the rest, based entirely on the assholishness displayed here. I decided to give you another chance. If you'd like to have the last word in this conversation, just repeat this sort of performance, and you'll have it.
Defense spending comprises over 20% of the annual federal budget. Pretty sad, given that the Founders tried to establish a system that didn't allow for a standing army. Our military forces aren't technically unconstitutional, but they clearly violate the spirit.
Of course, entitlements violate both the letter and the spirit. If it weren't for the executive branch's bald-faced manipulation of the Supreme Court (specifically, FDR's court-packing threats), they'd never have been allowed to get started.
Goes for programming and infrastructure and all things IT -- you have to move around a lot. Employers in general have no interest in paying you more once you work there. If you want another $15k, you have to move elsewhere.
That holds up to a point, then you start to find that you've more or less topped out and moves get you little, if anything. At that point, you have two choices to continue increasing your income: Leave the salaried world behind and start taking on contract gigs, where you can pretty easily get significantly higher pay, but no other benefits and no guaranteed income (though if you're good you can keep the contracts coming), or go to a big company where you can settle in and just accept the 3-6% annual raises and then let the years work for you. Eventually you'll get to where you can't move (except into contracting or management) without taking a pay cut. Hopefully you like the job.
National Defense, Homeland Security, Aid to poor people are extra. Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, will be canceled.
Sounds good to me. National defense should be provided primarily by the second amendment (the unorganized militia), with the state national guard forces (the organized militia) providing the framework and the sorts of expensive, high-tech weaponry that the people can't afford. The feds should provide a navy, per the constitution. An air force is debatable; it could be provided at either the state or federal level. The federal government is not supposed to maintain a standing army, only to create one when needed -- and if we'd stop trying to impose our will all over the world, we wouldn't need one very often. National defense should be national defense, meaning defending against incursions by foreign forces, not running around invading other countries.
As for the rest, the federal government has no business being involved in any of them. There is no constitutional basis for any of them (yeah, yeah "General Welfare Clause" -- that's been stretched even worse than the Commerce Clause). Those issues should be handled at the state level.
As long as there is money to be made in spam, spammers will continue to send spam.
But if the US government was to threaten the US based credit card companies that process every single one of these transactions there would be no more money, and no more spam.
Which transactions should they block?
It's also important to keep in mind that spammers don't make money from selling V1AGRA. Spammers make money from other people who want to make money by selling V1AGRA. The distinction is important because it doesn't really matter whether money can be made by selling shady products or not. As long as there's a sucker who *believes* they can make money by selling the shady products, the spammer has a customer. When that one wises up, there are 10 more waiting.
Almost all states allow you to use a firearm in self defense, but many, like Florida, do not allow you to fire a warning shot.
Florida law doesn't say anything at all about warning shots. It DOES say that if you're using a firearm, you'd better have the appropriate legal justification, and that justification is the same whether the you actually hit your target or not. Shooting without justification can land you in jail, but that's not what we're talking about here.
At least, that was my understanding the last time I reviewed Florida law. If they've changes, please point me to the appropriate statute(s).
It's never a good idea. Firing a warning shot means the "bad guy" now has a reason to fear for his/her life. And may legally use lethal force on YOU.
That could be true, but I doubt it. It would certainly be an anomaly among state laws. What state are you in? I'd like to read the statutes.
In my state, if the attacker initiated the confrontation or escalated it to the level where I was justified in threatening or using deadly force, then he has no legal justification for using deadly force himself.
"But he started it!", as it turns, out is a valid argument in a court of law;-)
In addition, in my state a warning shot would constitute a threat with a deadly weapon (which is prosecuted as Aggravated Assault, a second-degree felony), so I was implicitly assuming that the blind person firing the warning shot already had the reasonable fear of death or severe bodily injury that is required to justify it, or he wouldn't have done it.
Consider the removal of an appendix. 20 years ago, it was a major surgery with a few weeks in the hospital. Today, it is a small slit for the telescopic viewer and you're home in a couple of days.
Not generally disagreeing with your point, but I don't think that's accurate. I just asked my mom, who is in her 60s and had her appendix out when she was about 10, so 50 years ago. She was in the hospital for less than a week.
Also, you have to look at the cost of those shorter stays. My daughter had to go to the ER last year and was released less than 24 hours later (6 hours in the ER, most of a day in a regular room) -- the cost was over $6000. Even after adjusting for inflation, the cost of spending a night in a hospital room has increased dramatically in the last few decades, in many cases more than erasing any savings from lower-impact surgery.
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Why would you prefer a model where you pay $60 per year and you have a decide on a click-by-click basis if you want to spend the money over a model where you pay $50 per year and can read whatever you want on a whim?
That is the fundamental problem with micropayment schemes. Having to make all of those micro-decisions. In theory, it should be 100 times easier to make a one penny decision than a one dollar decision, but it's not. As the per-decision monetary cost goes down, it quickly becomes dominated by the per-decision cognitive effort cost. Free works because there is no cost decision to be made. Almost-free quickly becomes too annoying to bother with.
Groklaw is the exception that proves the rule. It's also a bit too narrowly-focused and activist to be considered a "news source".
Maybe you're okay with that. I'm not.
Regardless of whether or not you're okay with it, it's changing, because newspapers no longer make sense.
Given the pre-Internet structure of the costs involved in collecting and distributing news, newspapers used to make perfect sense, both in terms of providing access to a moderately accurate snapshot of what's going on (if you think it was EVER highly accurate, you're fooling yourself) and as a business. But that's no longer the case, on either front.
With respect to the accuracy of the information, journalists always end up getting it a little bit wrong. Blogs actually do a much better job of reporting accurately, in part because they tend to have a narrow focus and deep knowledge about that focus, and in part because of reader comments. There is the potential disadvantage of bias, but I think the theoretical lack of bias in traditional news sources is overrated at the least -- and it's often pure fiction. Prior to the early 20th century newspapers were also openly biased, and that works just fine as long as you know what the bias is. In fact, I'd argue that it works better than reading something that is supposedly unbiased. At a minimum, reading clearly-biased news encourages you to read critically.
With respect to the business model, I don't really even need to go into it. Newspapers just don't work in an Internet-enabled world.
I think where we're heading is a world where deep investigative reporting is done primarily by amateurs, and I think they'll do it far better than the professionals ever did. Professional news organizations will still exist, but they'll be oriented primarily around local news and columns, plus collecting, sifting and publishing important blogger-written articles, all in a video soundbite format (much of the footage will be amateur) with embedded advertising. The future equivalent of a deep cover-to-cover read of a news paper will be sitting down with a feed of such soundbite articles and following the links to the deeper amateur coverage.
I'm sure that sounds distasteful to you, but I think it will result in coverage that is broader, deeper and more accurate, with less tolerance for misinformation or propaganda, precisely because everyone recognizes the constant possibility of propaganda.
Sound propagation from a firearm is pretty complex, I'd imagine. Probably depends on a lot of factors. I do know that the majority of the noise is from gases exploding out the end of the barrel behind the bullet, so it might make some sense that more of the sound energy goes downrange and to the sides than comes straight back. Also, you may actually be closer to the end of the barrel when standing near someone who is shooting than when you're doing the shooting, in some cases (not usually).
Short answer: beats me. Gets pretty danged loud either way.
You got lucky, somehow. Nearly everyone who does a significant amount of shooting without hearing protection ends up with permanent hearing damage. You can probably get away with firing a lot of.22 shells through a rifle without too much concern, but shorten the barrel or increase the powder charge, or both, and if you don't wear some protection you will probably be sorry. Well, not YOU, I guess, but the rest of us.
Umm. Fully blind people can get CCWs? They can fire live rounds? I suppose I can see why the 2nd ammendment allows for that, but still, wtf America.
They're blind, not stupid or irresponsible. Blind people are perfectly capable of understanding the risks and potential consequences of using a firearm for self-defense. Granted that it's much more difficult for them to use a gun safely and effectively, but those obstacles are no more insuperable than many others a blind person faces. Obviously, they would only use their gun on an attacker at contact distance, and the idea of using blanks is to prevent innocents from being injured by overpenetration, since the blind person may not know who or what is on the other side of their target.
Personally, I wouldn't recommend blanks for that application. I'd recommend frangible bullets, or perhaps just a relatively light powder charge in a large caliber cartridge with a reliably-expanding jacketed hollowpoint. Blanks fired into the chest are unlikely to stop a determined attacker. On the other hand, 95% of firearms self-defense incidents don't involve a shot being fired at all -- the attacker sees the gun and runs away -- so blanks would work fine. With blanks, you could even fire a "warning shot" (NOT a good idea with real ammunition) to make the point that you're serious, which would probably raise the likelihood of the bad guy turning tail another percentage point or two.
Oh, and to answer the first question: Yes, in most states. A handful (e.g. Nevada) have range requirements that would be hard for a blind person to meet. Then again, there may be exceptions in the laws, or ways around them for disabled people.
Bibble 5 allows for selective area editing and multiple layers, all of which is non-destructive.
I just downloaded my update to 5 a couple of days ago... I haven't found the time to start playing with it though. I'm looking forward to it.
The 8-bit-channel problem renders it almost useless for any kind of professional or advanced amateur work.
I disagree with this. I'm in the advanced amateur camp, and I find GIMP to be perfectly adequate. None of the printers I use support more than 8 bpp anyway, so I always have to reduce it to that before printing. I use Bibble to do the work that requires the full dynamic range, then when I've got that done I go to GIMP for editing the details (cloning out distractions, smoothing skin, emphasizing regions, etc.).
The only time I really find GIMP's color depth to be a problem is when I want to work on HDR images. Not that it wouldn't be convenient for other uses, but saying that the limited color depth "renders it almost useless" goes way too far, IMO.
GEGL is to Gimp what WinG was to Windows 3.1: a deeply ugly and flawed attempt to shoehorn much-needed features into something old and obsolete, instead of doing the needed total rewrite.
And this is just incorrect. GEGL is a total rewrite of the graphics engine. Right now the two engines coexist side by side, with the old engine being used for most everything and GEGL being used for a handful of things, but assuming GEGL development ever gets to the point where GEGL can replicate all (or even most) of the features of the old engine, then the old one will be removed in favor of GEGL.
Bibblepro is a great commercial RAW converter that runs quite well on Linux. I've been using it for several years and really like both the job it does and the options it gives for structuring your workflow.
Not to detract from this new open source tool (which I look forward to trying out), but I like to point out that there is at least one really high quality tool for Linux users already.
Now imagine how much better it would be if every Windows box had SSH client and server installed by default (though the server should be disabled until enabled by the user).
a self-signed certificate is barely better than raw http
I disagree. A self-signed certificate isn't as good as a certificate that verifies the identity of the server, but it's significantly better than raw http, especially if your browser keeps track of which self-signed certs come from which sites, and alerts you when the cert changes.
I think in this respect the behavior of current browsers with self-signed certificates is unfortunate. What I'd like to see is for the browser to silently accept self-signed certificates but not to show the "secure" lock icon. That should be reserved for sites with proper certificates, so that users don't think that they have a secure connection when they might be subject to a MITM attack. I'd also like to see browsers complain LOUDLY when a site that used to have one self-signed certificate (or proper certificate) suddenly starts providing another one. Particularly if the previous certificate isn't revoked or expired.
The security model of self-signed certificates would then be very similar to that of SSH server keys. The first time you SSH to a machine, you're asked if you want to connect, since this is an unknown key. Thereafter connections succeed silently, as long as the server continues providing the stored key. But if the server key changes, connections are ABORTED and you have to take specific corrective action before SSH will allow you to connect again. With that model, MITM attacks are possible, but only if the attacker gets in on the very first connection.
I think if our browsers handled it similarly, we could easily move to a model where HTTPS is the default. Eventually, we could "deprecate" raw HTTP, by having the browser provide a visual indication that this site is "unsecure" (meaning less secure than the norm).
Fortunately, clueless admins tend to leave other holes in their security, so you can usually use one of those to sneak a secure channel through...
Though you have to wonder if there's any point in sneaking your secure channel through, given that the endpoint you're connecting it to is so obviously insecure...
You're right that a lot of the issue is the progress in medicine's ability to care for health conditions that previously would have simply been fatal. What's strange is that in every other area of technology, progress leads not only to increased capability, but also to decreased price. The latter hasn't happened with medicine. Why not?
You're also right that in many cases we indulge in long, expensive palliative care that doesn't ultimately improve the patient's life or reduce morbidity. In fact, a lot of times they just die more slowly and have a choice between doing it in a drugged stupor or doing it more painfully. That's another reason why the separation between patient (or family) and bills is so bad. Painful as it is, the fiscal cost of extending grandpa's life for another agonizing eight months needs to be considered alongside the other issues.
Any health reform that does not change this won't contain costs. What you are wrong about is the idea that a one-payer system can't change this. It may not - I can think of several plausible national health care systems that wouldn't - but some in Europe do.
Agreed. I was speaking primarily of the approaches being bandied about for the US, all of which would strongly favor low or no-deductible coverage and trivial co-pays.
That said, I am not in favor of a national health care system.
A systen where deductibles were $10,000 minimum with 50-90% of costs (depending on price etc) were covered after that, would do wonders for keeping costs down and improving medical tech (that last bit national health care tends to be rather poor at)
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$10K is a bit higher than I would go, especially if the deductible resets annually. For many people a $10,000 bill is a financial catastrophe. I'd start it at half that, maybe a little less. Although I'm generally quite libertarian, in this case I think I'd also like to see forced health care savings. The collection process could be handled similar to social security, with the (very important!) difference that the funds are deposited in an account owned by the individual. So any employed (or self-employed) individual would begin building a health savings account from the first day they start collecting a paycheck. Since people are generally healthy in their younger years, that should ensure that by the time they start experiencing significant medical expenses they CAN afford a $10K deductible. At retirement, any money in the health care savings account should convert to a traditional IRA. Funds withdrawn and spend on health care should be tax deductible, other withdrawals should be taxed as income.
Similarly, in order to ensure that insurers can spread risks across the broadest possible pool, I would suggest that at least a basic level of high-deductible insurance be mandatory for everyone who is employed. I'd leave it to private insurers to compete for the business, but every employed person would be required to purchase medical insurance meeting the mandated minimum standards for catastrophic coverage. Setting the standards low and requiring everyone to buy should allow premiums to be very reasonable. Making coverage mandatory would also allow us to legislate that insurers cannot decline to cover an individual without worry that it would encourage the healthy to opt out.
It should also be mandatory to purchase coverage for your dependents.
All that "mandatory" stuff really goes against my principles, but I think it's impractical to allow people opt out -- because we're too soft-hearted to TRULY allow them to opt out. As long as we don't feel comfortable refusing emergency treatment to those who can't pay, we need to focus instead on ensuring that everyone can pay because they're full participants in the system.
Even requiring everyone who is employed (and their dependents) doesn't fully resolve the issue. There are still people who are unemployed, and there are people who do get very sick while still too young to have built up significant health savings. We need to make it easy for relatives and charities to help out, and we probably need government intervention to arrange for coverage when that fails. It should be handled at the state level, though, not federal, to allow us to explore a variety of options and figure out what works well.
That's how I'd set it up, if I were in charge:) You're probably glad I'm not.
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And the founders had to go back and add a bill of rights; there were several amendments to the constitution also. The world isn't as it was back then, there's no reason to think that allowing no changes would have allowed the U.S. to continue its existence.
Absolutely! There is a mechanism in place for amending the constitution. If it needs to be changed, we should exercise that process, rather than just ignoring it when inconvenient. If we can't muster the political will to change it, well, maybe we should step back and think about what that means.
Not allowing for a standing army means no counter to WWI Germany, WWII Germany and Japan. No counter to Stalin.
Nonsense. WWI and WWII actually prove you wrong, because there was no significant standing army prior to either of those wars. From 1800 to 1945, after every conflict the military force was drawn way down, practically to nothing. Between WWI and WWII, the size of the scaled-back army was increased a little, and the size of the national guard forces were quadrupled, but it was still a tiny fraction of what it is today, even when adjusted for population size.
After WWII, the customary drawdown didn't occur, due to the soviet threat. It was felt that a high degree of readiness must be maintained in the face of that imminent danger. But by the time the Cold War drew to a close, we had had two whole generations born with the idea that the military force should be big all the time.
The founders never found a reason for NiH, NSF, Social Security, FDA, NISTA, or any of the other alphabet soup of government arms we found necessary to protect us from the elements. They also never found a use for federally funded education or more recently, universal health care.
Actually, the founders would have decried almost all of the above as overreaching by a dangerously overgrown central government. Other than the FDA and NIST (I assume that's what you meant by "NISTA"), the rest of those functions should be peformed by the states, because the federal government has no authority to take on those roles. Not until FDR coerced the courts into redefining the meanings of the Commerce and General Welfare clauses, anyway.
As I said at the beginning: I have no objection to amending the constitution if we really feel it needs to be amended. But just ignoring the document which forms the basis of our law and government seems like it sets a really bad precedent.
But we could always disband the U.S. Military because, y'know, the world is a bunny world where there are no goblins and everyone just wants to be happy.
This comment deserves no response. In fact, I seriously considered simply not responding to the rest, based entirely on the assholishness displayed here. I decided to give you another chance. If you'd like to have the last word in this conversation, just repeat this sort of performance, and you'll have it.
I'm just going to bury my head back into the sand and turn Fox news back on, so I don't have to think about this reality.
Adam Sandler has the perfect slogan for Fox News: "I reject your reality, and substitute my own."
You have clearly rejected my reality, where it's Adam Savage who says that..
Defense spending comprises over 20% of the annual federal budget. Pretty sad, given that the Founders tried to establish a system that didn't allow for a standing army. Our military forces aren't technically unconstitutional, but they clearly violate the spirit.
Of course, entitlements violate both the letter and the spirit. If it weren't for the executive branch's bald-faced manipulation of the Supreme Court (specifically, FDR's court-packing threats), they'd never have been allowed to get started.
Goes for programming and infrastructure and all things IT -- you have to move around a lot. Employers in general have no interest in paying you more once you work there. If you want another $15k, you have to move elsewhere.
That holds up to a point, then you start to find that you've more or less topped out and moves get you little, if anything. At that point, you have two choices to continue increasing your income: Leave the salaried world behind and start taking on contract gigs, where you can pretty easily get significantly higher pay, but no other benefits and no guaranteed income (though if you're good you can keep the contracts coming), or go to a big company where you can settle in and just accept the 3-6% annual raises and then let the years work for you. Eventually you'll get to where you can't move (except into contracting or management) without taking a pay cut. Hopefully you like the job.
National Defense, Homeland Security, Aid to poor people are extra. Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, will be canceled.
Sounds good to me. National defense should be provided primarily by the second amendment (the unorganized militia), with the state national guard forces (the organized militia) providing the framework and the sorts of expensive, high-tech weaponry that the people can't afford. The feds should provide a navy, per the constitution. An air force is debatable; it could be provided at either the state or federal level. The federal government is not supposed to maintain a standing army, only to create one when needed -- and if we'd stop trying to impose our will all over the world, we wouldn't need one very often. National defense should be national defense, meaning defending against incursions by foreign forces, not running around invading other countries.
As for the rest, the federal government has no business being involved in any of them. There is no constitutional basis for any of them (yeah, yeah "General Welfare Clause" -- that's been stretched even worse than the Commerce Clause). Those issues should be handled at the state level.
As long as there is money to be made in spam, spammers will continue to send spam.
But if the US government was to threaten the US based credit card companies that process every single one of these transactions there would be no more money, and no more spam.
Which transactions should they block?
It's also important to keep in mind that spammers don't make money from selling V1AGRA. Spammers make money from other people who want to make money by selling V1AGRA. The distinction is important because it doesn't really matter whether money can be made by selling shady products or not. As long as there's a sucker who *believes* they can make money by selling the shady products, the spammer has a customer. When that one wises up, there are 10 more waiting.
Almost all states allow you to use a firearm in self defense, but many, like Florida, do not allow you to fire a warning shot.
Florida law doesn't say anything at all about warning shots. It DOES say that if you're using a firearm, you'd better have the appropriate legal justification, and that justification is the same whether the you actually hit your target or not. Shooting without justification can land you in jail, but that's not what we're talking about here.
At least, that was my understanding the last time I reviewed Florida law. If they've changes, please point me to the appropriate statute(s).
No. They outcompeted their competitors based on merit
Yep, you weren't around. Merit had next to nothing to do with it.
You're too young to have lived through all of the despicable things MS did in the early to mid-90s, aren't you?
On a social analogy, is a thief always a thief, even when he shows remorse and changed his ways?
What evidence is there that Microsoft has changed it's ways? There certainly has never been any showing of remorse.
It's never a good idea. Firing a warning shot means the "bad guy" now has a reason to fear for his/her life. And may legally use lethal force on YOU.
That could be true, but I doubt it. It would certainly be an anomaly among state laws. What state are you in? I'd like to read the statutes.
In my state, if the attacker initiated the confrontation or escalated it to the level where I was justified in threatening or using deadly force, then he has no legal justification for using deadly force himself.
"But he started it!", as it turns, out is a valid argument in a court of law ;-)
In addition, in my state a warning shot would constitute a threat with a deadly weapon (which is prosecuted as Aggravated Assault, a second-degree felony), so I was implicitly assuming that the blind person firing the warning shot already had the reasonable fear of death or severe bodily injury that is required to justify it, or he wouldn't have done it.
Consider the removal of an appendix. 20 years ago, it was a major surgery with a few weeks in the hospital. Today, it is a small slit for the telescopic viewer and you're home in a couple of days.
Not generally disagreeing with your point, but I don't think that's accurate. I just asked my mom, who is in her 60s and had her appendix out when she was about 10, so 50 years ago. She was in the hospital for less than a week.
Also, you have to look at the cost of those shorter stays. My daughter had to go to the ER last year and was released less than 24 hours later (6 hours in the ER, most of a day in a regular room) -- the cost was over $6000. Even after adjusting for inflation, the cost of spending a night in a hospital room has increased dramatically in the last few decades, in many cases more than erasing any savings from lower-impact surgery.
Frankly, what I really want would be a micro-transaction sort of system. I would be happy to pay 5 cents per article I read on NY times. Sounds tiny right? I'd say I read at least 5 articles on a week day. That's a quarter a day, $5 a month. More than the $50 they ask for.
Why would you prefer a model where you pay $60 per year and you have a decide on a click-by-click basis if you want to spend the money over a model where you pay $50 per year and can read whatever you want on a whim?
That is the fundamental problem with micropayment schemes. Having to make all of those micro-decisions. In theory, it should be 100 times easier to make a one penny decision than a one dollar decision, but it's not. As the per-decision monetary cost goes down, it quickly becomes dominated by the per-decision cognitive effort cost. Free works because there is no cost decision to be made. Almost-free quickly becomes too annoying to bother with.
Groklaw is the exception that proves the rule. It's also a bit too narrowly-focused and activist to be considered a "news source".
Maybe you're okay with that. I'm not.
Regardless of whether or not you're okay with it, it's changing, because newspapers no longer make sense.
Given the pre-Internet structure of the costs involved in collecting and distributing news, newspapers used to make perfect sense, both in terms of providing access to a moderately accurate snapshot of what's going on (if you think it was EVER highly accurate, you're fooling yourself) and as a business. But that's no longer the case, on either front.
With respect to the accuracy of the information, journalists always end up getting it a little bit wrong. Blogs actually do a much better job of reporting accurately, in part because they tend to have a narrow focus and deep knowledge about that focus, and in part because of reader comments. There is the potential disadvantage of bias, but I think the theoretical lack of bias in traditional news sources is overrated at the least -- and it's often pure fiction. Prior to the early 20th century newspapers were also openly biased, and that works just fine as long as you know what the bias is. In fact, I'd argue that it works better than reading something that is supposedly unbiased. At a minimum, reading clearly-biased news encourages you to read critically.
With respect to the business model, I don't really even need to go into it. Newspapers just don't work in an Internet-enabled world.
I think where we're heading is a world where deep investigative reporting is done primarily by amateurs, and I think they'll do it far better than the professionals ever did. Professional news organizations will still exist, but they'll be oriented primarily around local news and columns, plus collecting, sifting and publishing important blogger-written articles, all in a video soundbite format (much of the footage will be amateur) with embedded advertising. The future equivalent of a deep cover-to-cover read of a news paper will be sitting down with a feed of such soundbite articles and following the links to the deeper amateur coverage.
I'm sure that sounds distasteful to you, but I think it will result in coverage that is broader, deeper and more accurate, with less tolerance for misinformation or propaganda, precisely because everyone recognizes the constant possibility of propaganda.
Yeah, that's why I specified a rifle. Even a 3-4 inch barrel on a .22 pistol can get really loud, much less a 1" derringer.
Sound propagation from a firearm is pretty complex, I'd imagine. Probably depends on a lot of factors. I do know that the majority of the noise is from gases exploding out the end of the barrel behind the bullet, so it might make some sense that more of the sound energy goes downrange and to the sides than comes straight back. Also, you may actually be closer to the end of the barrel when standing near someone who is shooting than when you're doing the shooting, in some cases (not usually).
Short answer: beats me. Gets pretty danged loud either way.
You got lucky, somehow. Nearly everyone who does a significant amount of shooting without hearing protection ends up with permanent hearing damage. You can probably get away with firing a lot of .22 shells through a rifle without too much concern, but shorten the barrel or increase the powder charge, or both, and if you don't wear some protection you will probably be sorry. Well, not YOU, I guess, but the rest of us.
Umm. Fully blind people can get CCWs? They can fire live rounds? I suppose I can see why the 2nd ammendment allows for that, but still, wtf America.
They're blind, not stupid or irresponsible. Blind people are perfectly capable of understanding the risks and potential consequences of using a firearm for self-defense. Granted that it's much more difficult for them to use a gun safely and effectively, but those obstacles are no more insuperable than many others a blind person faces. Obviously, they would only use their gun on an attacker at contact distance, and the idea of using blanks is to prevent innocents from being injured by overpenetration, since the blind person may not know who or what is on the other side of their target.
Personally, I wouldn't recommend blanks for that application. I'd recommend frangible bullets, or perhaps just a relatively light powder charge in a large caliber cartridge with a reliably-expanding jacketed hollowpoint. Blanks fired into the chest are unlikely to stop a determined attacker. On the other hand, 95% of firearms self-defense incidents don't involve a shot being fired at all -- the attacker sees the gun and runs away -- so blanks would work fine. With blanks, you could even fire a "warning shot" (NOT a good idea with real ammunition) to make the point that you're serious, which would probably raise the likelihood of the bad guy turning tail another percentage point or two.
Oh, and to answer the first question: Yes, in most states. A handful (e.g. Nevada) have range requirements that would be hard for a blind person to meet. Then again, there may be exceptions in the laws, or ways around them for disabled people.
Bibble 5 allows for selective area editing and multiple layers, all of which is non-destructive.
I just downloaded my update to 5 a couple of days ago... I haven't found the time to start playing with it though. I'm looking forward to it.
The 8-bit-channel problem renders it almost useless for any kind of professional or advanced amateur work.
I disagree with this. I'm in the advanced amateur camp, and I find GIMP to be perfectly adequate. None of the printers I use support more than 8 bpp anyway, so I always have to reduce it to that before printing. I use Bibble to do the work that requires the full dynamic range, then when I've got that done I go to GIMP for editing the details (cloning out distractions, smoothing skin, emphasizing regions, etc.).
The only time I really find GIMP's color depth to be a problem is when I want to work on HDR images. Not that it wouldn't be convenient for other uses, but saying that the limited color depth "renders it almost useless" goes way too far, IMO.
GEGL is to Gimp what WinG was to Windows 3.1: a deeply ugly and flawed attempt to shoehorn much-needed features into something old and obsolete, instead of doing the needed total rewrite.
And this is just incorrect. GEGL is a total rewrite of the graphics engine. Right now the two engines coexist side by side, with the old engine being used for most everything and GEGL being used for a handful of things, but assuming GEGL development ever gets to the point where GEGL can replicate all (or even most) of the features of the old engine, then the old one will be removed in favor of GEGL.
Bibblepro is a great commercial RAW converter that runs quite well on Linux. I've been using it for several years and really like both the job it does and the options it gives for structuring your workflow.
Not to detract from this new open source tool (which I look forward to trying out), but I like to point out that there is at least one really high quality tool for Linux users already.
Now imagine how much better it would be if every Windows box had SSH client and server installed by default (though the server should be disabled until enabled by the user).
a self-signed certificate is barely better than raw http
I disagree. A self-signed certificate isn't as good as a certificate that verifies the identity of the server, but it's significantly better than raw http, especially if your browser keeps track of which self-signed certs come from which sites, and alerts you when the cert changes.
I think in this respect the behavior of current browsers with self-signed certificates is unfortunate. What I'd like to see is for the browser to silently accept self-signed certificates but not to show the "secure" lock icon. That should be reserved for sites with proper certificates, so that users don't think that they have a secure connection when they might be subject to a MITM attack. I'd also like to see browsers complain LOUDLY when a site that used to have one self-signed certificate (or proper certificate) suddenly starts providing another one. Particularly if the previous certificate isn't revoked or expired.
The security model of self-signed certificates would then be very similar to that of SSH server keys. The first time you SSH to a machine, you're asked if you want to connect, since this is an unknown key. Thereafter connections succeed silently, as long as the server continues providing the stored key. But if the server key changes, connections are ABORTED and you have to take specific corrective action before SSH will allow you to connect again. With that model, MITM attacks are possible, but only if the attacker gets in on the very first connection.
I think if our browsers handled it similarly, we could easily move to a model where HTTPS is the default. Eventually, we could "deprecate" raw HTTP, by having the browser provide a visual indication that this site is "unsecure" (meaning less secure than the norm).
Fortunately, clueless admins tend to leave other holes in their security, so you can usually use one of those to sneak a secure channel through...
Though you have to wonder if there's any point in sneaking your secure channel through, given that the endpoint you're connecting it to is so obviously insecure...
You're right that a lot of the issue is the progress in medicine's ability to care for health conditions that previously would have simply been fatal. What's strange is that in every other area of technology, progress leads not only to increased capability, but also to decreased price. The latter hasn't happened with medicine. Why not?
You're also right that in many cases we indulge in long, expensive palliative care that doesn't ultimately improve the patient's life or reduce morbidity. In fact, a lot of times they just die more slowly and have a choice between doing it in a drugged stupor or doing it more painfully. That's another reason why the separation between patient (or family) and bills is so bad. Painful as it is, the fiscal cost of extending grandpa's life for another agonizing eight months needs to be considered alongside the other issues.
Any health reform that does not change this won't contain costs. What you are wrong about is the idea that a one-payer system can't change this. It may not - I can think of several plausible national health care systems that wouldn't - but some in Europe do.
Agreed. I was speaking primarily of the approaches being bandied about for the US, all of which would strongly favor low or no-deductible coverage and trivial co-pays.
That said, I am not in favor of a national health care system.
A systen where deductibles were $10,000 minimum with 50-90% of costs (depending on price etc) were covered after that, would do wonders for keeping costs down and improving medical tech (that last bit national health care tends to be rather poor at)
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$10K is a bit higher than I would go, especially if the deductible resets annually. For many people a $10,000 bill is a financial catastrophe. I'd start it at half that, maybe a little less. Although I'm generally quite libertarian, in this case I think I'd also like to see forced health care savings. The collection process could be handled similar to social security, with the (very important!) difference that the funds are deposited in an account owned by the individual. So any employed (or self-employed) individual would begin building a health savings account from the first day they start collecting a paycheck. Since people are generally healthy in their younger years, that should ensure that by the time they start experiencing significant medical expenses they CAN afford a $10K deductible. At retirement, any money in the health care savings account should convert to a traditional IRA. Funds withdrawn and spend on health care should be tax deductible, other withdrawals should be taxed as income.
Similarly, in order to ensure that insurers can spread risks across the broadest possible pool, I would suggest that at least a basic level of high-deductible insurance be mandatory for everyone who is employed. I'd leave it to private insurers to compete for the business, but every employed person would be required to purchase medical insurance meeting the mandated minimum standards for catastrophic coverage. Setting the standards low and requiring everyone to buy should allow premiums to be very reasonable. Making coverage mandatory would also allow us to legislate that insurers cannot decline to cover an individual without worry that it would encourage the healthy to opt out.
It should also be mandatory to purchase coverage for your dependents.
All that "mandatory" stuff really goes against my principles, but I think it's impractical to allow people opt out -- because we're too soft-hearted to TRULY allow them to opt out. As long as we don't feel comfortable refusing emergency treatment to those who can't pay, we need to focus instead on ensuring that everyone can pay because they're full participants in the system.
Even requiring everyone who is employed (and their dependents) doesn't fully resolve the issue. There are still people who are unemployed, and there are people who do get very sick while still too young to have built up significant health savings. We need to make it easy for relatives and charities to help out, and we probably need government intervention to arrange for coverage when that fails. It should be handled at the state level, though, not federal, to allow us to explore a variety of options and figure out what works well.
That's how I'd set it up, if I were in charge :) You're probably glad I'm not.