There is a very good reason for this. The prison-industrial complex is made up of companies that make lots and lots of campaign donations. In return for this, they get more and more legislation guaranteeing them more inmates.
When prison is a for-profit venture, rather than a safe-society venture, then the powers that be have a vested interest in throwing as many people in jail as possible. The number one purpose of our prison system is not rehabilitation, correction, safety, or even punishment. It is to turn a profit. Added bonus: reduces the unemployment numbers and provides cheap labor to other big companies.
As comforting as the notion of conspiracy is, the truth is usually much worse. Draconian laws are being passed out of ignorance and stupidity, and the prison industry is merely taking advantage of the increased demand for "incarceration services". The idea of a "evil mastermind" behind it is comforting because a central authority can (theoretically) be arrested/exposed/discreditted, but I don't think you can convincingly demonstrate that the prison industry has ever even tried to lobby for harsher laws. But then there's some that say lack of evidence is the surest sign the conspiracy is working, and what can you say to that?
My 65" HDTV shows me wayyyy too much detail at times, and it's a turn off. Stretch marks, surgery scars, acne, razor burns... it's not stuff you want to see in high definition. And for some reason the directors still love their closeups.
I'm hopin HDTV will make the EXTREME CLOSE UP go out of favor. Really, if I wanted to see that kind of detail, I can open up Gray's Anatomy. With the advent of HDTV, those folks who want to see it that close can sit 10 inches from the screen and look at it, and the rest of us can sit back and watch the actual people. Honestly, whose idea was it to shove a camera with a harsh spotlight between some guy's legs like that?
When archiologists dig up ancient sites, they often find small fired-clay figurines of naked women with exagerated primary and secondary sexual characteristics.
Due, I presume, to the need to be published in sober journals, these are usually described as religious totems etc.
However, ISTM this is the earliest example we have of technology being driven by porn.Just imagine some neolithic teenager making clay wank-material and looking for some way to make them survive his sweaty little grip... And ceramics were born.
Heh. Some of the stuff I've seen painted on ancient greek pottery give modern porn a run for its money. I'd like to see a sober journal description of that stuff. "We think this is some sort of depiction of...errr...fertility rites. Yeah, ritual fertility rites."
If we are forced to put display items back into service, just what does that say about our space program? In retrospect, climbing on the Columbia was sheer insanity. This was an accident waiting to happen.
To their credit, they probably didn't just run it through the car wash and send it straight to the launch pad. Most of the shuttles have/had been stripped down to the frame and totally refitted more than once. Columbia, for example, had just recently come off such a total refurbishment when it disintegrated.
I believe the second stage was H2/LOX. At least I seem to recall reading that in "Angle of Attack".
You're right. I meant to word it the other way 'round. RP-1 (kerosene) and LOX into five F-1 engines for stage 1, liquid hydrogen and LOX in stage 2 and 3 into five and one J-2 engines, respectively.
"First, the things we build can barely last a few decades without being destroyed by something as simple as weather."
That's just because NASA failed to order the correct equipment for the mission. These Saturn Vs are the standard spaceflight edition made out of flimsy aluminum sheets.
For archival applications, they really should have ordered the special National Monument Edition Saturn V model. These are constructed entirely out of inch-thick solid bronze, and are designed to withstand centuries of exposure to the elements.
Parent is funny, but somebody PLEASE mod it insightful! The GP poster is lamenting the impermanence of what is meant to be a DISPOSABLE LAUNCH SYSTEM?
Truly the saturn V is a marvel of modern engineering.
Modern? It's a scaled up V2.
Yeah, and a fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached. The V2 was a single-chambered, single stage rocket fueled by alcohol and LOX, with a mechanical guidance system that was essentially just sophisticated clockwork and gyros adjusting tiny fins in the exhaust stream. The Saturn V was multi staged, multi engined, fueled by kerosene and LOX in stage one and two, and hydrogen and LOX after that. It was computer guided by gimballing the engines themselves on movable mounts. Other than the obvious similarity in that they're both rockets and that the project leader for both was Wehrner von Braun, they are completely different animals.
Wifi vendors are reluctant to release drivers because adapters are actually programable radio devices. Someone so inclined, and with the source, go out and jam police and fire communication systems. The FCC wouldn't like that and the manufacturers would probably get sued.
What? No wifi card maker is going to incur the pointless expense of building an adaptor with a multi-band tranceiver. They're built cheap as possible and are only capable of broadcasting in their own band. The best you could ever hope to do is jam other wifi cards by cycling channels and spewing disruptive garbage, and even then your range is what, maybe 300 feet?
Hey, whatever, but it's just that you come off like an illiterate hillbilly whenever you use chatroom-level spelling. Seriously, it's like an icepick in the eyes every time I see misspellings like that.
And honestly, is it THAT hard to get it right?
Most people who can't spell are people who don't read much (in the way of complex, proofread works of book length), and therefore aren't as familiar with how words are supposed to look. For those who read a lot, misspelled words are, as you say, "like an icepick in the eyes". Those who spell badly generally have no idea that they've made an error.
For the extroverts out there, I suggest you read Caring for Your Introvert.
For link posters out there, I suggest not referring people to articles that require a paid subscription to the site in order to read past the first paragraph.
Don't forget that the cost of WinXP and Turbotax is it self tax deductable (tax preperation expenses).
Not that deductability matters in small increments like that. A hundred and thirty bucks in software is meaningless for anyone who deducts enough to get over the "standard deduction". It is, after all, just a deduction in income; you save maybe twenty, maybe thirty bucks off your tax bill.
extra? CD players cost less than 50 bucks 5 years ago
I think he means "extra" as in $500 more when you buy the car new to get the FANCY stereo package (which has the CD player) vs. the "stock" stereo which still defaults to cassette for most car manufacturers. I suspect they only do it because they know nobody wants cassette anymore so it's an easy upsell.
Would anyone find it ironic if Wired hyped their vaporware awards for an entire year and didn't come out with one that year?
Finally, someone who knows how irony works! All you wieners out there who think you know what it means, but don't, take notice! The parent post is an example of irony!
Just because you're an idiot doesn't mean everybody else is necessarily held back by your idiocy.
High performance simply means siuperior performance at whatever parameter you are measuring.
Communication is all about common definitions of terms, jackass. Just because the literal definition of the two words in combination is very general does not mean that the two words as a phrase has the same very general meaning. You can wax poetic about transcending the idiocy of the masses and their pitifully limited vernacular, but everyon is going to consider you the idiot when you call the 40MPG Chevy Sprint a "high performance vehicle". Doesn't matter what you think "high performance" should mean, it has a fairly well defined meaning in the vernacular already.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
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Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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Perhaps you don't understand that:
We the people != You the individual
Yes it does, just as it does in all the other amendments. Read the Federalist Papers next time before you presume to understand exactly what the words in the bill of rights were intended to mean.
Re:Engineering within limits brings great results
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
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· Score: 1
The right to bear arms was meant to be about local militias, not redneck wankers shooting their neighbours.
Straw man argument. False dichotomy. When you have a local militia made up of regular citizens, some of them are going to be redneck wankers and they are going to shoot their neighbors. You send those jackasses to the electric chair; you don't decide the militia shouldn't be armed.
Power consumption and dissipation are performance parameters.
Big power-pig processors are actually 'low' performance, when it's MIPS-per-watt being considered.
Gotta disagree with you there on the terminology point. I've never heard "high performance" used to describe economy or efficiency. For example, "high performance" in the automotive world means big displacement, turbochargers, big valves, and the like; it's never used to describe small, lightweight, hybrid or 3-cylinder econo boxes.
It doesn't matter how good or well-calibrated your monitor is. We see real objects' colors because they reflect light; the process is subtractive. The computer monitor transmits light; the process is additive. If you look at a real object in bright sunlight, it looks brighter. If you look at a computer monitor in bright sunlight, it looks dimmer.
Expecting representative color from a transmissive display is like expecting photographs of lightbulbs to glow in the dark.
What you say is true, but isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand. Photographs in catalogs, for example, generally represent the color of the product under "normal" indoor lighting conditions. Digital photos on a web site come fairly close to representing those conditions on most adequately adjusted CRTs. LCD monitors, even under the best conditions, don't even come close.
but in order for this to be monopolistic wouldnt apple have to have a monopoly on the digital music market?
No, they only have to engage in practices that woulod lead to a monopoly or near-monopoly. Waiting until they've actually driven all competitors out of business would be too late, so the laws are against practices that would lead to that, e.g. dumping at below cost, forced bundling, buying out competitors, etc.
So the lighting in the pictures, the quality of the pictures, the sample clothing used in the photograph, and the size of the photograph is good enough to see the fine details and have always been 100% acceptable to her for making a buying decision but the LCD is the problem and un acceptable? Yeah..
I personally consider all those things to be deal breakers, but before the internet she was a mail order catalog junkie. She does end up sending back about half of what she orders because of size and quality issues, but for some reason having to send things back because the color looked different on an LCD is unacceptable. This is, in fact, the crux of my point: if the color isn't accurate enough for a former catalog shopper to buy clothes on the internet, it's not really good for a task that requires any degree of color accuracy.
A good friend of mine works as a digital compositor in a Hollywood special effects house and swears that LCDs have a long way to go in color fidelity.
Friend of mine who's a computer artist (mostly photoshop work) says the same. LCD color is, at best, an approximation of what it should be. Heck, my girlfriend won't buy clothes over the internet unless she's seen a picture on a real monitor because the color on a laptop screen isn't just off, it's downright wrong.
Does anyone else find it ironic that NPR has posted a digital stream of this story about the analog tape industry?
No, irony would be an employee at OSHA dying in an accident caused by unsafe workplace conditions. This is just the radio media reporting on something having to do with outmoded audio tape. If they had claimed that the plant should have stayed open because reel to reel tape is an ideal medium for distributing radio content while they themselves don't use it, that might be considered irony.
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As comforting as the notion of conspiracy is, the truth is usually much worse. Draconian laws are being passed out of ignorance and stupidity, and the prison industry is merely taking advantage of the increased demand for "incarceration services". The idea of a "evil mastermind" behind it is comforting because a central authority can (theoretically) be arrested/exposed/discreditted, but I don't think you can convincingly demonstrate that the prison industry has ever even tried to lobby for harsher laws. But then there's some that say lack of evidence is the surest sign the conspiracy is working, and what can you say to that?
I'm hopin HDTV will make the EXTREME CLOSE UP go out of favor. Really, if I wanted to see that kind of detail, I can open up Gray's Anatomy. With the advent of HDTV, those folks who want to see it that close can sit 10 inches from the screen and look at it, and the rest of us can sit back and watch the actual people. Honestly, whose idea was it to shove a camera with a harsh spotlight between some guy's legs like that?
Heh. Some of the stuff I've seen painted on ancient greek pottery give modern porn a run for its money. I'd like to see a sober journal description of that stuff. "We think this is some sort of depiction of...errr...fertility rites. Yeah, ritual fertility rites."
To their credit, they probably didn't just run it through the car wash and send it straight to the launch pad. Most of the shuttles have/had been stripped down to the frame and totally refitted more than once. Columbia, for example, had just recently come off such a total refurbishment when it disintegrated.
You're right. I meant to word it the other way 'round. RP-1 (kerosene) and LOX into five F-1 engines for stage 1, liquid hydrogen and LOX in stage 2 and 3 into five and one J-2 engines, respectively.
No, the Redstone used early in the Mercury program was just a big WW2 rocket. The multistage Saturn V is a very different animal
That's just because NASA failed to order the correct equipment for the mission. These Saturn Vs are the standard spaceflight edition made out of flimsy aluminum sheets.
For archival applications, they really should have ordered the special National Monument Edition Saturn V model. These are constructed entirely out of inch-thick solid bronze, and are designed to withstand centuries of exposure to the elements.
Parent is funny, but somebody PLEASE mod it insightful! The GP poster is lamenting the impermanence of what is meant to be a DISPOSABLE LAUNCH SYSTEM?
Modern? It's a scaled up V2.
Yeah, and a fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached. The V2 was a single-chambered, single stage rocket fueled by alcohol and LOX, with a mechanical guidance system that was essentially just sophisticated clockwork and gyros adjusting tiny fins in the exhaust stream. The Saturn V was multi staged, multi engined, fueled by kerosene and LOX in stage one and two, and hydrogen and LOX after that. It was computer guided by gimballing the engines themselves on movable mounts. Other than the obvious similarity in that they're both rockets and that the project leader for both was Wehrner von Braun, they are completely different animals.
What? No wifi card maker is going to incur the pointless expense of building an adaptor with a multi-band tranceiver. They're built cheap as possible and are only capable of broadcasting in their own band. The best you could ever hope to do is jam other wifi cards by cycling channels and spewing disruptive garbage, and even then your range is what, maybe 300 feet?
And honestly, is it THAT hard to get it right?
Most people who can't spell are people who don't read much (in the way of complex, proofread works of book length), and therefore aren't as familiar with how words are supposed to look. For those who read a lot, misspelled words are, as you say, "like an icepick in the eyes". Those who spell badly generally have no idea that they've made an error.
For link posters out there, I suggest not referring people to articles that require a paid subscription to the site in order to read past the first paragraph.
Not that deductability matters in small increments like that. A hundred and thirty bucks in software is meaningless for anyone who deducts enough to get over the "standard deduction". It is, after all, just a deduction in income; you save maybe twenty, maybe thirty bucks off your tax bill.
I think he means "extra" as in $500 more when you buy the car new to get the FANCY stereo package (which has the CD player) vs. the "stock" stereo which still defaults to cassette for most car manufacturers. I suspect they only do it because they know nobody wants cassette anymore so it's an easy upsell.
Sorry, but that's been around for much more than 25 years. I've ridden in 60's Cadillacs with central locking doors.
Finally, someone who knows how irony works! All you wieners out there who think you know what it means, but don't, take notice! The parent post is an example of irony!
Communication is all about common definitions of terms, jackass. Just because the literal definition of the two words in combination is very general does not mean that the two words as a phrase has the same very general meaning. You can wax poetic about transcending the idiocy of the masses and their pitifully limited vernacular, but everyon is going to consider you the idiot when you call the 40MPG Chevy Sprint a "high performance vehicle". Doesn't matter what you think "high performance" should mean, it has a fairly well defined meaning in the vernacular already.
Yes it does, just as it does in all the other amendments. Read the Federalist Papers next time before you presume to understand exactly what the words in the bill of rights were intended to mean.
Straw man argument. False dichotomy. When you have a local militia made up of regular citizens, some of them are going to be redneck wankers and they are going to shoot their neighbors. You send those jackasses to the electric chair; you don't decide the militia shouldn't be armed.
Gotta disagree with you there on the terminology point. I've never heard "high performance" used to describe economy or efficiency. For example, "high performance" in the automotive world means big displacement, turbochargers, big valves, and the like; it's never used to describe small, lightweight, hybrid or 3-cylinder econo boxes.
What you say is true, but isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand. Photographs in catalogs, for example, generally represent the color of the product under "normal" indoor lighting conditions. Digital photos on a web site come fairly close to representing those conditions on most adequately adjusted CRTs. LCD monitors, even under the best conditions, don't even come close.
No, they only have to engage in practices that woulod lead to a monopoly or near-monopoly. Waiting until they've actually driven all competitors out of business would be too late, so the laws are against practices that would lead to that, e.g. dumping at below cost, forced bundling, buying out competitors, etc.
I personally consider all those things to be deal breakers, but before the internet she was a mail order catalog junkie. She does end up sending back about half of what she orders because of size and quality issues, but for some reason having to send things back because the color looked different on an LCD is unacceptable. This is, in fact, the crux of my point: if the color isn't accurate enough for a former catalog shopper to buy clothes on the internet, it's not really good for a task that requires any degree of color accuracy.
Friend of mine who's a computer artist (mostly photoshop work) says the same. LCD color is, at best, an approximation of what it should be. Heck, my girlfriend won't buy clothes over the internet unless she's seen a picture on a real monitor because the color on a laptop screen isn't just off, it's downright wrong.
Hypocrisy can be ironic. The two are not mutually exclusive.
No, irony would be an employee at OSHA dying in an accident caused by unsafe workplace conditions. This is just the radio media reporting on something having to do with outmoded audio tape. If they had claimed that the plant should have stayed open because reel to reel tape is an ideal medium for distributing radio content while they themselves don't use it, that might be considered irony.