Good luck with that. Apparently there's a Federal law that gives them these privileges. When was the last time you ever heard the gun-control crowd suggest stricter gun control measures for cops or ex-cops?
Build up. Dig down. Viola, built real estate. Robots can do that.
Built real estate is much, much less valuable than less-built real estate (e.g., 40 acres of land with trees). Not that many people prefer living in a concrete cell to living in less-dense conditions. Just look at the cost per square foot of an apartment in NYC compared to the cost per square foot of open land in the same place.
From what I've seen, the American contract manufacturers generally have extremely high prices, because they get most of their business from the military sector where they're happy to pay $600 for a toilet seat. If you're not doing military-funded work, it generally is just too expensive to get anything made in America.
Except in Mexico, you have to worry about cartels kidnapping your employees or shaking down your factories. Mexico is a failed state; they now have vigilantes who are so sick of the corruption they've taken up arms and seized towns, shooting at both cartels and Federal police and arresting the latter. There is no rule of law in Mexico, and the situation is getting worse. You'd have to be insane to set up a factory there.
To be fair, NYC cops are probably the worst in the nation, if not the entire world, for shooting accuracy. The reason for this is that they have specially-made guns from Glock, which have been modified to have 12-pound trigger pulls to match the revolvers they used to carry many years ago. This of course hugely affects shooting accuracy under duress, leading to suspects not being shot, and bystanders catching the bullets instead. The NYPD refuses to change this policy even after it's come to light after the incidents you cited.
Theaters don't bother actually confronting unruly patrons any more; they consider it too much of a liability I suppose. Instead, you just have to leave the theater if someone is disturbing you, and go ask for a refund. Theaters will generally happily and quickly give you a full refund if you have a complaint like that, and leave in the middle of the show.
Of course, since there's so many annoying people in theaters, and they won't do anything to deter or remove those people, then it becomes pointless, in my mind, to bother going to a theater, since chances are high I'll just have to leave partway through. I'd rather just wait for it to come out on Netflix.
This has absolutely nothing to do with gun regulation. This was a retired police officer. I don't think there's a single state in the union where retired police officers don't get special rights and privileges regarding carrying guns. As one other responder here pointed out, even in ultra anti-gun NYC, retired cops can still carry guns.
For some reason, gun control measures and proposals here in the US from the left never include cops or former cops. They always get a special pass.
Does your cost-of-living comparison analysis take into account the difference in house insurance costs? Insuring a house on the Gulf Coast (esp. MS, LA, and AL) became insanely expensive after Hurricane Katrina; it's so bad that there's been very little rebuilding in the Gulfport area near the coast, because no one will insure it. This of course has had the obvious effect of depressing house prices, as no one wants to buy a house there with such high insurance prices.
See, here is the thing you maybe haven't noticed. Only white people seem capable of building prosperous, safe, beautiful places with good public order, high trust, and relatively little corruption.
The thing you obviously haven't noticed is that the US, run by white people, is even more corrupt than Mexico, and Russia (run by white people) is also extremely corrupt. Neither of these countries is particularly safe, and the idea of "high trust" is a joke. (I'll also add that various all-white eastern European countries, such as Romania and Greece, aren't exactly known for low corruption either, and Italy has some extreme problems with corruption too.) By contrast, South Korea and Japan are extremely prosperous, safe, beautiful, have far better public order and trust than the US and Russia, and have relatively low corruption.
I'll grant you that certain select groups of white people definitely seem to have excelled in building very nice, prosperous societies, namely the Scandinavians. (The Germans seem to be doing quite well these days too.) But there's a lot of other groups and nationalities of white people out there, and lots of them have made a complete mess of things, and the Americans are probably at the top of that list.
That's irrelevant. The debate here is about open-source adoption of Mono/.NET. The allegation is that, if the open-source community were to adopt it, build it into Linux, etc., then Microsoft would sue for patent infringement, exactly like they did with Android and the FAT patents (and some others I believe).
Unity3D is irrelevant: it's a commercial, proprietary product. It can't be built into any Linux distros or other open-source product, because it's proprietary, and has licensing fees. MS can't sue anyone except the owners of Unity3D (Unity Technologies).
To be honest, even the "555" phone number is enough to jolt me out of a movie I'm into - you instantly are reminded that it's fake things you are watching (which is not what a film director should be doing to their captivated audience).
There's a reason for this. Long ago, there were some cases where moviemakers (or musicians) used a realistic phone number in their work, and then people would call up that phone number en masse, making that number completely unusable for some poor random person. So the movie and TV show makers adopted the 555- standard, along with the Bell phone company which set aside that block, so they could make up fake numbers for movies without some poor schlub being deluged with phone calls.
and why do you need to "fake" loading screens or password decryptions or whatever - everyone KNOWS what a computer looks like and how display windows work).
There actually might be a sensible reason for some of these: to make things more viewable for the viewer. Unless the camera is zoomed in, the viewer might not be able to see a real loading screen or other error/status message, so sometimes they use fake ones which are really huge, so the viewer can easily see what the character is doing. If they used standard-size fonts on smartphones in TV shows, we wouldn't be able to read the text when someone calls and our character looks at the phone to see if they should answer it or not.
For all the other things, you're absolutely right. There's no excuse to make something obviously unrealistic, when it's fairly easy to consult someone and make it realistic enough that average people won't know the difference, and experts won't care too much about nit-picky details; if you're going to make things completely wrong, then you might as well call it a fantasy movie, and start adding rainbow-farting unicorns to the plot.
It causes a bigger exit wound. The entry would should be the same size, since the bullet is the same size until it actually hits something and starts to deform.
.38 Special and.357 Magnum use the exact same bullets; the.357 is simply a lengthened version of the the.38 Special round, with that additional space being used to hold a lot more powder. The difference in numbers comes from a change in the way bullets were measured. In the really old days, when the.38 Special was made, they measured the gun's barrel between the grooves of the rifling (the maximum diameter of the barrel, neglecting the lands), whereas when the.357 came out, they changed to measuring the diameter between the lands (or, the minimum diameter, as if the grooves were all filled in). The.38Special was very popular for police departments, but they decided they wanted something with more knock-down power, which is where the.357 Magnum came from. It was very popular for police use, until semi-automatic handguns like the Glock finally took over that market.
Very interesting. This sounds like a pretty good idea actually.
Note that it is possible to create more living space (or space for factories, offices, etc.), simply by building taller (or deeper) buildings. However, most people tend to prefer having land reserved for their sole use and not having to share it with lots of other people in the form of a high-rise, and very few people prefer to live underground (though underground spaces are good for things like parking garages, utilities, subways, perhaps even factories (esp. the automated kind). They could also be good for shopping malls; no one expects windows to the outside in a shopping mall.). So land kept in a more natural state, or used for single-family housing, would tend to be more valuable per acre than land used for high-rises and surrounded by dense development.
MS only knows how to do one platform: Windows. When they make new languages, they're completely tied to their own platform, and useless on others. No one uses C# outside of Windows.
Re:We're already there.
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 4, Informative
Because they're not self-aware or conscious. People have been predicting self-aware robots for many decades now, but it's turned out to be probably the most inaccurate prediction in all of sci-fi. Computers now are smaller and faster than conceived by most sci-fi writers, but they're still no closer to being self-aware than the ENIAC was.
Wrong, it's been done before. Go look on YouTube; there's a video. It was probably a specially-modified helicopter.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal?
on
If I Had a Hammer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Robots can't build real estate. Fundamentally, there's still a big problem of scarcity, no matter how much automation there is: even if all labor is automatable, there's three things which are scarce: raw materials (perhaps some of them rare, such as lithium, tantalum, etc.), energy, and real estate. The first two can be mitigated: we could build automated mining missions to mine asteroids or the Moon for more raw materials; and we can build better energy-collection systems to gather more energy (such as orbital photovoltaic stations). However, one thing you can never fully mitigate is the cost of real estate. There's only so much land area on the planet, and some of it is much more valuable than other parts. Everyone wants to live in a picturesque coastal location (or mountain location, etc.). No one wants to live in the middle of the Sahara, or in Fargo ND. And as the population expands, the demand for real estate rises and the value goes up. So money can never be obsolete, at least until the environment is wrecked and we all have to resign ourselves to living in pods in the Matrix.
We could definitely use some more good movies. There haven't been very many lately. Especially sci-fi; back in the 70s and 80s, there were all kinds of fantastic sci-fi movies; now there's barely anything, and half of them seem to star Xenu-worshipping Tom Cruise for some odd reason.
But even without relying on BT or a cable company, there are various mobile providers with 3G and soon 4G connections
Yes, we have that too. But cellular data access is expensive (usually $30/month for any smartphone, plus regular cellular access charges), and carries small monthly caps (2G/month, perhaps). It's entirely useless as a main connection. There's unlimited ones available, but now you're looking at prices much higher than the cable/fiber-telecom alternatives.
there are rural areas where people literally use satellites to get their access because they are too far from a telephone exchange to use the same facilities most urban households do,
Yes, we have Hughes satellite too. It's expensive (always more than the land-based alternatives) and has terrible latency.
I left out these "alternatives" because they're always even more expensive than the other ones, and you're not going to get service that's any better, in fact it could be worse (cellular companies here aren't exactly known for good service).
I also pay a bit more than average to use a good ISP with solid technical specs, clueful people at the other end of the phone on the rare occasions anything does go wrong, things like a static IP address as standard, etc.
Here in America, such a thing is not available at any price. Unless you're willing to settle for dog-slow DSL speeds (forget about any kind of streaming video), you have either 1 or 2 choices for ISPs: your local cable company (like ComCast), or your local telecom company (like Verizon). In many places, there's only 1 choice.
I guess if you don't mind spending an extra $100/month on top of what you're paying for your mass-market ISP, you can opt for one of the DSL ISPs as they do seem to tout reliability as their selling point, and use that for email and other such stuff while using the mass-market ISP for Netflix and Youtube, but that's not a cheap prospect at all (probably between $150-200/month total).
That's because people in that position simply can't conceive that other people won't like their creation. It's like the GNOME developers who couldn't understand why so many users didn't like the Gnome3 UI.
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Good luck with that. Apparently there's a Federal law that gives them these privileges. When was the last time you ever heard the gun-control crowd suggest stricter gun control measures for cops or ex-cops?
Build up. Dig down. Viola, built real estate. Robots can do that.
Built real estate is much, much less valuable than less-built real estate (e.g., 40 acres of land with trees). Not that many people prefer living in a concrete cell to living in less-dense conditions. Just look at the cost per square foot of an apartment in NYC compared to the cost per square foot of open land in the same place.
From what I've seen, the American contract manufacturers generally have extremely high prices, because they get most of their business from the military sector where they're happy to pay $600 for a toilet seat. If you're not doing military-funded work, it generally is just too expensive to get anything made in America.
Except in Mexico, you have to worry about cartels kidnapping your employees or shaking down your factories. Mexico is a failed state; they now have vigilantes who are so sick of the corruption they've taken up arms and seized towns, shooting at both cartels and Federal police and arresting the latter. There is no rule of law in Mexico, and the situation is getting worse. You'd have to be insane to set up a factory there.
To be fair, NYC cops are probably the worst in the nation, if not the entire world, for shooting accuracy. The reason for this is that they have specially-made guns from Glock, which have been modified to have 12-pound trigger pulls to match the revolvers they used to carry many years ago. This of course hugely affects shooting accuracy under duress, leading to suspects not being shot, and bystanders catching the bullets instead. The NYPD refuses to change this policy even after it's come to light after the incidents you cited.
Theaters don't bother actually confronting unruly patrons any more; they consider it too much of a liability I suppose. Instead, you just have to leave the theater if someone is disturbing you, and go ask for a refund. Theaters will generally happily and quickly give you a full refund if you have a complaint like that, and leave in the middle of the show.
Of course, since there's so many annoying people in theaters, and they won't do anything to deter or remove those people, then it becomes pointless, in my mind, to bother going to a theater, since chances are high I'll just have to leave partway through. I'd rather just wait for it to come out on Netflix.
This has absolutely nothing to do with gun regulation. This was a retired police officer. I don't think there's a single state in the union where retired police officers don't get special rights and privileges regarding carrying guns. As one other responder here pointed out, even in ultra anti-gun NYC, retired cops can still carry guns.
For some reason, gun control measures and proposals here in the US from the left never include cops or former cops. They always get a special pass.
Does your cost-of-living comparison analysis take into account the difference in house insurance costs? Insuring a house on the Gulf Coast (esp. MS, LA, and AL) became insanely expensive after Hurricane Katrina; it's so bad that there's been very little rebuilding in the Gulfport area near the coast, because no one will insure it. This of course has had the obvious effect of depressing house prices, as no one wants to buy a house there with such high insurance prices.
See, here is the thing you maybe haven't noticed. Only white people seem capable of building prosperous, safe, beautiful places with good public order, high trust, and relatively little corruption.
The thing you obviously haven't noticed is that the US, run by white people, is even more corrupt than Mexico, and Russia (run by white people) is also extremely corrupt. Neither of these countries is particularly safe, and the idea of "high trust" is a joke. (I'll also add that various all-white eastern European countries, such as Romania and Greece, aren't exactly known for low corruption either, and Italy has some extreme problems with corruption too.) By contrast, South Korea and Japan are extremely prosperous, safe, beautiful, have far better public order and trust than the US and Russia, and have relatively low corruption.
I'll grant you that certain select groups of white people definitely seem to have excelled in building very nice, prosperous societies, namely the Scandinavians. (The Germans seem to be doing quite well these days too.) But there's a lot of other groups and nationalities of white people out there, and lots of them have made a complete mess of things, and the Americans are probably at the top of that list.
That's irrelevant. The debate here is about open-source adoption of Mono/.NET. The allegation is that, if the open-source community were to adopt it, build it into Linux, etc., then Microsoft would sue for patent infringement, exactly like they did with Android and the FAT patents (and some others I believe).
Unity3D is irrelevant: it's a commercial, proprietary product. It can't be built into any Linux distros or other open-source product, because it's proprietary, and has licensing fees. MS can't sue anyone except the owners of Unity3D (Unity Technologies).
To be honest, even the "555" phone number is enough to jolt me out of a movie I'm into - you instantly are reminded that it's fake things you are watching (which is not what a film director should be doing to their captivated audience).
There's a reason for this. Long ago, there were some cases where moviemakers (or musicians) used a realistic phone number in their work, and then people would call up that phone number en masse, making that number completely unusable for some poor random person. So the movie and TV show makers adopted the 555- standard, along with the Bell phone company which set aside that block, so they could make up fake numbers for movies without some poor schlub being deluged with phone calls.
and why do you need to "fake" loading screens or password decryptions or whatever - everyone KNOWS what a computer looks like and how display windows work).
There actually might be a sensible reason for some of these: to make things more viewable for the viewer. Unless the camera is zoomed in, the viewer might not be able to see a real loading screen or other error/status message, so sometimes they use fake ones which are really huge, so the viewer can easily see what the character is doing. If they used standard-size fonts on smartphones in TV shows, we wouldn't be able to read the text when someone calls and our character looks at the phone to see if they should answer it or not.
For all the other things, you're absolutely right. There's no excuse to make something obviously unrealistic, when it's fairly easy to consult someone and make it realistic enough that average people won't know the difference, and experts won't care too much about nit-picky details; if you're going to make things completely wrong, then you might as well call it a fantasy movie, and start adding rainbow-farting unicorns to the plot.
It causes a bigger exit wound. The entry would should be the same size, since the bullet is the same size until it actually hits something and starts to deform.
.38 Special and .357 Magnum use the exact same bullets; the .357 is simply a lengthened version of the the .38 Special round, with that additional space being used to hold a lot more powder. The difference in numbers comes from a change in the way bullets were measured. In the really old days, when the .38 Special was made, they measured the gun's barrel between the grooves of the rifling (the maximum diameter of the barrel, neglecting the lands), whereas when the .357 came out, they changed to measuring the diameter between the lands (or, the minimum diameter, as if the grooves were all filled in). The .38Special was very popular for police departments, but they decided they wanted something with more knock-down power, which is where the .357 Magnum came from. It was very popular for police use, until semi-automatic handguns like the Glock finally took over that market.
Very interesting. This sounds like a pretty good idea actually.
Note that it is possible to create more living space (or space for factories, offices, etc.), simply by building taller (or deeper) buildings. However, most people tend to prefer having land reserved for their sole use and not having to share it with lots of other people in the form of a high-rise, and very few people prefer to live underground (though underground spaces are good for things like parking garages, utilities, subways, perhaps even factories (esp. the automated kind). They could also be good for shopping malls; no one expects windows to the outside in a shopping mall.). So land kept in a more natural state, or used for single-family housing, would tend to be more valuable per acre than land used for high-rises and surrounded by dense development.
MS only knows how to do one platform: Windows. When they make new languages, they're completely tied to their own platform, and useless on others. No one uses C# outside of Windows.
Here's an article that's relevant to your point.
Because they're not self-aware or conscious. People have been predicting self-aware robots for many decades now, but it's turned out to be probably the most inaccurate prediction in all of sci-fi. Computers now are smaller and faster than conceived by most sci-fi writers, but they're still no closer to being self-aware than the ENIAC was.
Wrong, it's been done before. Go look on YouTube; there's a video. It was probably a specially-modified helicopter.
Robots can't build real estate. Fundamentally, there's still a big problem of scarcity, no matter how much automation there is: even if all labor is automatable, there's three things which are scarce: raw materials (perhaps some of them rare, such as lithium, tantalum, etc.), energy, and real estate. The first two can be mitigated: we could build automated mining missions to mine asteroids or the Moon for more raw materials; and we can build better energy-collection systems to gather more energy (such as orbital photovoltaic stations). However, one thing you can never fully mitigate is the cost of real estate. There's only so much land area on the planet, and some of it is much more valuable than other parts. Everyone wants to live in a picturesque coastal location (or mountain location, etc.). No one wants to live in the middle of the Sahara, or in Fargo ND. And as the population expands, the demand for real estate rises and the value goes up. So money can never be obsolete, at least until the environment is wrecked and we all have to resign ourselves to living in pods in the Matrix.
More movies be done?
We could definitely use some more good movies. There haven't been very many lately. Especially sci-fi; back in the 70s and 80s, there were all kinds of fantastic sci-fi movies; now there's barely anything, and half of them seem to star Xenu-worshipping Tom Cruise for some odd reason.
Who said anything about pirating? And why would I want their shitty software anyway? You sound like you have some serious mental health issues.
Ok, maybe I left some options out.
But even without relying on BT or a cable company, there are various mobile providers with 3G and soon 4G connections
Yes, we have that too. But cellular data access is expensive (usually $30/month for any smartphone, plus regular cellular access charges), and carries small monthly caps (2G/month, perhaps). It's entirely useless as a main connection. There's unlimited ones available, but now you're looking at prices much higher than the cable/fiber-telecom alternatives.
there are rural areas where people literally use satellites to get their access because they are too far from a telephone exchange to use the same facilities most urban households do,
Yes, we have Hughes satellite too. It's expensive (always more than the land-based alternatives) and has terrible latency.
I left out these "alternatives" because they're always even more expensive than the other ones, and you're not going to get service that's any better, in fact it could be worse (cellular companies here aren't exactly known for good service).
I have dropped my Gmail account and have gone to http://gmx.com/
Ok, a quick glance shows this to be another free email provider. So what's the catch? How do they pay for it?
I also pay a bit more than average to use a good ISP with solid technical specs, clueful people at the other end of the phone on the rare occasions anything does go wrong, things like a static IP address as standard, etc.
Here in America, such a thing is not available at any price. Unless you're willing to settle for dog-slow DSL speeds (forget about any kind of streaming video), you have either 1 or 2 choices for ISPs: your local cable company (like ComCast), or your local telecom company (like Verizon). In many places, there's only 1 choice.
I guess if you don't mind spending an extra $100/month on top of what you're paying for your mass-market ISP, you can opt for one of the DSL ISPs as they do seem to tout reliability as their selling point, and use that for email and other such stuff while using the mass-market ISP for Netflix and Youtube, but that's not a cheap prospect at all (probably between $150-200/month total).
That's because people in that position simply can't conceive that other people won't like their creation. It's like the GNOME developers who couldn't understand why so many users didn't like the Gnome3 UI.