Inaccurate reporting is still inaccurate reporting. Would you be saying the same thing if they had plastered a picture of a tattooed, gun toting Cryp on an article about Trevon? There is a huge difference between casually clothed men with holstered pistols and heavily armoured men with assault rifles at the ready. If you can't see how portraying the former as if it were the later is inaccurate and inflammatory you have a big problem.
Trevon was totally unarmed. So a picture of a gun-toting anything would be ratcheting up the emotional level.
At close range, it's easier to shoot someone with a pistol than an assault rifle, and when you have officers fanning out in assault formation, as I said, the color or presence of the uniforms is not what I'm most likely to be worrying about if it's my house. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but actions speak louder still.
Yes, I'd rather have a more accurate picture. But accurate pictures and the news have always been less commonly paired than we would like. If I don't have my cases mixed, the news ran skinny-young-kid pictures of Trevon when in fact, he was much older and larger when he died, and that's also playing around with emotional levels.
Take a look at the picture in the article and compare it with the actual description of what happened;
Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house, two toward the backyard on one side, two on the other side, two toward the front door.
There was no assault team. The wife and children were not present. The picture make it look like the police terrorized an innocent family when the truth is far different.
I hate inflammatory reporting and this is a prime example of it. The story is bad enough as it is without adding falsehoods.
I don't know how much more comfortable their clothing would make me, regardless of the fidelity of the photograph. They deployed in a formation that anticipated trouble, were probably armed, and likely had Kevlar underwear.
You can get accidentally dead whether they're in uniform or not and if they're already treating it as a hazardous situation, accidents are more likely to happen. They were uniformed troops in spirit, if not in actuality.
Bullshit. They could have gotten warrants, or were they surveilling them illegally?
Actually, I believe that one or 2 of the flight schools they were attending were disturbed about their students' behavior/attitudes and reported it. Another case where civilians caught something but the Feds didn't.
People often don't realize that an airliner plot had been previously uncovered during Clinton's time, but that one was quietly quashed. Based out of the Philippines, I think it was.
Wasn't the PRISM program designed to 'spy only on foreigners'? How can a Ma citizen then be legally spied upon? I'd open a can of legal worms if it were me, this is not only unconstitutional but so illegal that everyone involved should be thrown in jail. For a very long time. The program shut down. And all details open to the public to review what their government has been working on.
Well, there might have been FISA approval.
But you're not allowed to ask and they're not going to tell.
No, 3D printing is at best a fantasy of Star Trek level replication which is who knows how many lifetimes away. Until then, it's best off used for fast prototyping and other such applications, not to pretend it will replace walmart or the dollar store for shoddy goods.
Considering just how shoddy some of those goods are, I'd wager that 3D printing would actually be a jump up.
Any self-replicating 3D printing system will introduce errors with each successive generation - if the manufacturing tolerance of the original is 1 in 1000 then the tolerance of a part produced by it will be 2 in 1000, third generation will be 3 in 1000, etc. until eventually you just have an unrecognizable blob of plastic that does nothing.
They don't replicate themselves They print what's in the plan files. As long as the plan files are undamaged, every printed generation will have the same tolerances.
3D printing of the Makerbot / Reprap kind is probably fine for utilitarian purposes (assuming you can model a part), but it looks absolutely hideous for anything decorative that people have a chance to examine up close. So curtain rings, yes, iPhone case probably no.
They set the retail price for the safety razor at $78!!! I'm pretty sure that for $78 in the store you'll get razors included, but the rep-rap certainly won't print any.
They're probably talking about actual, old-fashioned double-edge safety razors, not a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo or whatever. And yes, a very nice one can cost $78 and does not come with blades. The $78 razor would also be a heck of a lot nicer and shave a lot better than anything you could print, and would last for decades. I use one, and it's older than I am. I didn't pay anywhere near $78 for it. More like $10.
Actually, My bet would be on those silly overpriced 5-blade razor modules. Those things scare me - I like to know where the blade is an not have it flopping around, so I don't buy them myself, but I think they're something horrendous like $15-$15 a pack. And every blade pack fits a different razor.
You can't print the blades, obviously, but if you could by blades in generic bulk packs and print the carrier modules, it would probably work out that way.
What if I just click on 'Print it', then go on with the rest of your life until it's printed?
You come back to it 3 hours later to find that the object has separated from the raft leaving you with $20 worth of extruded plastic spaghetti. But if you babysit it the success rate goes way up.
It might have something to do with the nearby body heat, or maybe a hidden camera that verifies a person is there, or just pissed off little elves that don't want to be lonely. But yes, you have to babysit it:(
That's just proof that machines are malign intelligences intent on maximizing human misery. It also explains traffic light timing and photocopier jams.
Actually, I don't like unions myself. I just also don't like companies that run roughshod over employees. The best union, in my opinion is the one that you're threatening to form. And don't have to, because suddenly the company developed an "enlightened" attitude.
That's because, for all practical purposes, unions are corporations who supply labor by (usually exclusive) contract. The same incentives to collude exist for them as for any other company. If you don't accept their contract on their terms, every other union will oppose you and impede business.
I see that you've been in a coma since before Reagan went up against the Air Traffic Controllers.
doubleplusungood. There are only TWO parties. They are 100% opposite of each other. There can be nothing else. There is nothing in between. There is no outside position.
You are obviously mentally deranged. Stay where you are. MiniLuv will be along for you shortly.
I'm not sure in the Airport and Taxi's are unions, but that would explain all of this. This is how unions operate, in groups, again if one or both are unions.
In this case it isn't about Safety, it is about losing money.
This is also how companies operate. In my town, union is a 4-letter word, but any time private transportation companies are involved, they collude to keep out newcomers.
1. There is no such thing as "free content" with ads. When it has ads, IT IS NOT FREE ANYMORE. It costs the most valuable thing I have: The freedom to think my own thoughts! You should read up on "mirror neurons" (the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others) and how the primitive parts of the brain can't tell the difference between imagination (like ads) and reality. But working in advertisement, you must already know that, and use the other thing everybody in advertisement is an expert in: Lying.
2. If your website got something of *actual value* (=not abundantly available for free everywhere else), then you can *always* do the same thing every other *service-based business (model)* is doing: You ask a fair price for it in *advance*. If the only way to "monetize" your site is via advertising, then you have to face the fact that YOUR HAVE NOTHING OF ANY WORTH TO OFFER WHATSOEVER! In that case, please just go bankrupt, and quit ripping us off with your meaningless worthless shit. And most of all: Quit bitching about it!
Get over yourself. This is the 21st Century. Lower Prices Every Day. Information wants to be Free.
Unless you have a very vertical product where you have limited competition, people are not going to pay to visit your site. You local ISPs and utility companies haven't got the memo yet, so they still expect to get paid, and they do have limited competition. Ergo, ads.
Most of those who have studied advanced math have heard of the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but not every single one of them understand it
Putting the same Heisenberg's Unvertainty Principle to the "average Joe on the street" and you would most probably get a blank stare
This has nothing to do with elitism, this is about reality
Most people simply do not have the mental capacity to comprehend the meaning of 1 + 1 = 2, and if you do not believe me, go ask the people around you, why 1 + 1 = 2, and not 1 + 1 = 3 ?
Give me a break. In the 1920s Einstein wrote a popular book about special relativity (with formulas) and general relativity for the layman. And we're talking about 2 theories which at the time were at the frontier of physics research. In the last 90 years we haven't suddenly become idiots, so if popular science books talking about special/general relativity and quantum theory (a theory 90 years old !!!!) don't use equations it is because of stupid preconceptions. I've said it before people are not idiots, they may not be specialists in physics research but you can certainly explain them the basics of 2 theories which are almost 1 century old using carefully selected formulas. Nobody goes apeshit if you write Newton's formula of gravitation, why would you go crazy for Heisenberg's uncertaintly principle ?
The cynic in me observes that in this country, every issue is expected to divide into 2 diametrically-opposed sides. Such as, for example, the party that eats their own babies which is the exact opposite of the party that eats everyone else's babies (yes, those are exact opposites and you can only chose one. Snarf).
Furthermore, in adherence to this post-Einstein Weltanschaung that everything should be as simple as possible, then made simpler, everything must be expressed in short sound-bytes suitable for framing on bumper stickers.
So shouldn't E=mc**2 be short enough? No, because statements like this require context. If you don't know what E, m, and c represent, it's just another math equation. And context won't fit on the bumper sticker.
I've actually had people tell me that no one but Einstein is smart enough to understand Einstein. The Gods themselves...
Part of it is in our heads. Also, we eat mammals, not creepy-crawlies, because mammals aren't poisonous. Meat (mammals, birds) is also highly concentrated food. Insect shells, legs, etc. aren't as good for food, and they are far more likely to be poisonous. Some bugs are poisonous themselves. Others, like flies, hang out in rotting meat which is full of bacteria and toxins. So we evolved to not eat bugs because bugs are likely to make us sick.
Of course, fungus is similar. Mushrooms are an acquired taste, not something that most people enjoy immediately, but with modern practices we can separate the edible fungus from the poisonous. We eat some edible fungus and smoke one of the poisonous ones.:)
Cats and dogs aren't "all in our heads", we have them for a reason, and that reason isn't food. Evolutionarily speaking, it's better to let your cat keep the rats away than to eat the cat. "Don't eat your friends" is a good idea, not just a cultural convention.
I was amazed to be taught in college biology that chitin (insect "bone" material) is found in mushrooms.
The reasons I don't want insect on my plate is that per-pound, bugs have more spiky bits and often emit revolting odors. Grubs are less likely to offend, but I prefer my meat to have no identifiable body parts in it and be quite thoroughly dead. That eliminates a lot of non-insect meat as well.
Then again, if I actually had to kill for meat, I'd be vegetarian. Except maybe geese. Nasty ill-tempered little bastards.
As long as our "representational" government is hijacked to represent the majority of dollars instead of people and of free speech, then we've completely strayed away from any sort of democracy at all. I don't know what you call it, but it ain't democracy.
Clearly our voices no longer equate to a level democratic process. Though we may be born equal, our influence under the law extends with our wealth, regardless of its source or of the massive disparity among the citizens.
Whats the point of voting in an auction that always goes to the highest bidder? Nostalgia or denial? We might as well still have royalty because it sure works like a nobility.
The problem with Citizens United is that the court failed to recognize 2 key facts:
1. The law is not "one dollar, one vote", it's one person one vote. Corporations don't get extra votes per se, but they can afford much bigger megaphones to speak at their representatives with.
2. Giving corporations a "vote" is un-democratic. The corporation is comprised of individuals. Thus, the individuals who control the corporation effectively have an extra vote beyond their individual vote. As a corollary, 98% of the employees of a corporation may oppose a certain piece of legislation, but corporations are not in the least democratic, so the "corporate vote" can be - and often is - directly counter to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the individuals employed there.
If they changed the name to "Department of Rainbows, Unicorns, and Puppies," would you then feel free and happy?
Well, why not? We authorized a lot of this nonsense under the equally high-minded name "USA PATRIOT Act".
If you want to call the US a police state, I think you have some questions to answer: When did the "police state" cancel the vote? When did the "police state" shut down shutdown the newspapers, radio, and TV stations?
I guess you'll have to ask the Germans about that. About how in the beginning they elected people who promised to make them safe and prosperous and extract retribution on those who had injured them. And saw it all slide until votes were meaningless. Who needs to cancel the vote, anyway? The USSR had higher election turnouts than the USA does.
Shut down the media? I have actually descended to the point where one of my major news sources is Fox, because despite their obvious biases and creative invention of the news, the other mainstream channels have all been apparently simply reading verbatim a script handed to them by the Federal Government. Metadata? Who cares? His girlfriend is a pole dancer! Arf! Arf! Arf!
Mind you, not just arrest a reporter here or there for breaking the law, but actually show down the newspapers, radio, and TV stations?
A landslide starts with a few pebbles. But it doesn't end there.
When did the "police state" stop you from traveling without an internal passport?
When they started fingerprinting people coming into the country. Requiring passports to travel to/from alleged allies. And even internally, you'll find it awfully hard to get on an airplane without "showing your papers", even if the term now includes credit cards or driver licenses. Not just airports, either. The DHS has from time to time put the squeeze on at bus terminals and railroad stations.
When did the "police state" dismantle all of the political opposition parties and jail the leadership?
A lot of people have come to the cynical conclusion that they don't need to do that. That R and D are just 2 coats of paint on the same party, same as EastAsia and EurAsia.
When did the "police state" suspend habeas corpus?
Are you a goldfish? That argument came up right after 9/11. Fortunately even the apathetic masses found that idea alarming.
But not so alarming that we couldn't invent a whole new term - "Enemy Combatant".
When did the "police state" institute mandatory censorship of the media? (As opposed to the traditional water carrying for their ideologically favored party?)
You're too hung up on parties. The "party" in question is more like the Military-Industrial Complex. Which is why so many think that outside of single-issue items, both parties are the same party. As for "mandatory censorship", well, Reagan was when I first started hearing of cases where if you didn't report what pleased the administration you'd find your sources choked off. Post 9/11, it turned into a full-fledged megaphone.
When did the "police state" close the churches?
Why bother, if the churches themselves become part of the political inner circle a la Moral Majority? Not every police state is atheistic.
When did the "police state" start imprisoning people for criticizing the president?
"Free Speech Zones" are a good start.
When did the "police state" start having people fired from their jobs for not supporting the government?
Whistleblowers? We have an Act to protect them. And an administration that has made a name for itself in going after Whistleblowers.
When did the "police state" start punishing people for wanting to leave the country?
That's a crowd sourced answer written like someone is trying to convince an IT manager to spend more on storage. The correct answer is more mundane and dystopian. "because they can." There is no other reason. If they couldn't, they wouldn't, but they can so they do. Home drives are good enough for most enterprise use, and see wide use at Google and Amazon. If the enterprise SAS were so much better, why are so many doing what they can to move away from them?
Maybe I've been travelling in the wrong circles, but I haven't run across a case where access to hardware was a serious bottleneck since mainframes stopped being the center of the universe and "DP" became "IT".
The real bottleneck always seems to be software. Specifically, software that is customized to the needs of the customer. And that customization is going to take as long and cost as much regardless of who owns the hardware or where the hardware is located on (or off) the planet.
Well, more accurately, you can buy "cheap" customized software, but it's typically going to be "cheap" in the quality sense of the word.
Slashdot Mirror
Inaccurate reporting is still inaccurate reporting. Would you be saying the same thing if they had plastered a picture of a tattooed, gun toting Cryp on an article about Trevon? There is a huge difference between casually clothed men with holstered pistols and heavily armoured men with assault rifles at the ready. If you can't see how portraying the former as if it were the later is inaccurate and inflammatory you have a big problem.
Trevon was totally unarmed. So a picture of a gun-toting anything would be ratcheting up the emotional level.
At close range, it's easier to shoot someone with a pistol than an assault rifle, and when you have officers fanning out in assault formation, as I said, the color or presence of the uniforms is not what I'm most likely to be worrying about if it's my house. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but actions speak louder still.
Yes, I'd rather have a more accurate picture. But accurate pictures and the news have always been less commonly paired than we would like. If I don't have my cases mixed, the news ran skinny-young-kid pictures of Trevon when in fact, he was much older and larger when he died, and that's also playing around with emotional levels.
Take a look at the picture in the article and compare it with the actual description of what happened;
Six gentleman in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house, two toward the backyard on one side, two on the other side, two toward the front door.
There was no assault team. The wife and children were not present. The picture make it look like the police terrorized an innocent family when the truth is far different.
I hate inflammatory reporting and this is a prime example of it. The story is bad enough as it is without adding falsehoods.
I don't know how much more comfortable their clothing would make me, regardless of the fidelity of the photograph. They deployed in a formation that anticipated trouble, were probably armed, and likely had Kevlar underwear.
You can get accidentally dead whether they're in uniform or not and if they're already treating it as a hazardous situation, accidents are more likely to happen. They were uniformed troops in spirit, if not in actuality.
Bullshit.
They could have gotten warrants, or were they surveilling them illegally?
Actually, I believe that one or 2 of the flight schools they were attending were disturbed about their students' behavior/attitudes and reported it. Another case where civilians caught something but the Feds didn't.
People often don't realize that an airliner plot had been previously uncovered during Clinton's time, but that one was quietly quashed. Based out of the Philippines, I think it was.
Wasn't the PRISM program designed to 'spy only on foreigners'? How can a Ma citizen then be legally spied upon? I'd open a can of legal worms if it were me, this is not only unconstitutional but so illegal that everyone involved should be thrown in jail. For a very long time. The program shut down. And all details open to the public to review what their government has been working on.
Well, there might have been FISA approval.
But you're not allowed to ask and they're not going to tell.
I guess we have no expectation of privacy when online.....
These are the times that try men's souls.
You should not expect privacy anywhere in the sense of being able to keep information private.
The real problem isn't so much privacy as who gets the information and what they do with it.
Android is not Linux. Linux is a kernel not the OS.
That's why some say GNU/Linux.
Technically, this one's Android/Linux.
Haven't seen much GNU on my Android device, but the Linux is definitely there.
No, 3D printing is at best a fantasy of Star Trek level replication which is who knows how many lifetimes away. Until then, it's best off used for fast prototyping and other such applications, not to pretend it will replace walmart or the dollar store for shoddy goods.
Considering just how shoddy some of those goods are, I'd wager that 3D printing would actually be a jump up.
Any self-replicating 3D printing system will introduce errors with each successive generation - if the manufacturing tolerance of the original is 1 in 1000 then the tolerance of a part produced by it will be 2 in 1000, third generation will be 3 in 1000, etc. until eventually you just have an unrecognizable blob of plastic that does nothing.
They don't replicate themselves They print what's in the plan files. As long as the plan files are undamaged, every printed generation will have the same tolerances.
3D printing of the Makerbot / Reprap kind is probably fine for utilitarian purposes (assuming you can model a part), but it looks absolutely hideous for anything decorative that people have a chance to examine up close. So curtain rings, yes, iPhone case probably no.
Next year's big fad: Ridgy iPhone cases.
Don't laugh. People bought rocks in boxes.
They set the retail price for the safety razor at $78!!! I'm pretty sure that for $78 in the store you'll get razors included, but the rep-rap certainly won't print any.
They're probably talking about actual, old-fashioned double-edge safety razors, not a Gillette Mach 3 Turbo or whatever. And yes, a very nice one can cost $78 and does not come with blades. The $78 razor would also be a heck of a lot nicer and shave a lot better than anything you could print, and would last for decades. I use one, and it's older than I am. I didn't pay anywhere near $78 for it. More like $10.
Actually, My bet would be on those silly overpriced 5-blade razor modules. Those things scare me - I like to know where the blade is an not have it flopping around, so I don't buy them myself, but I think they're something horrendous like $15-$15 a pack. And every blade pack fits a different razor.
You can't print the blades, obviously, but if you could by blades in generic bulk packs and print the carrier modules, it would probably work out that way.
Hard work usually wins the day.
However, I've learned from experience that paying someone else to do the hard word is what is more likely to make you wealthy.
Of course, you have to be wealthy enough to pay that someone. Or at least persuasive enough to may them think you will.
What if I just click on 'Print it', then go on with the rest of your life until it's printed?
You come back to it 3 hours later to find that the object has separated from the raft leaving you with $20 worth of extruded plastic spaghetti. But if you babysit it the success rate goes way up.
It might have something to do with the nearby body heat, or maybe a hidden camera that verifies a person is there, or just pissed off little elves that don't want to be lonely. But yes, you have to babysit it :(
That's just proof that machines are malign intelligences intent on maximizing human misery. It also explains traffic light timing and photocopier jams.
You know the difference? A corporation normally doesn't threaten to break your legs if you refuse to go on strike with them.
Normally. These days. It wasn't always the case that corporations abstained from corporal injury: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Maguires
Actually, I don't like unions myself. I just also don't like companies that run roughshod over employees. The best union, in my opinion is the one that you're threatening to form. And don't have to, because suddenly the company developed an "enlightened" attitude.
That's because, for all practical purposes, unions are corporations who supply labor by (usually exclusive) contract. The same incentives to collude exist for them as for any other company. If you don't accept their contract on their terms, every other union will oppose you and impede business.
I see that you've been in a coma since before Reagan went up against the Air Traffic Controllers.
But I want to be in the party that eats any baby.
doubleplusungood. There are only TWO parties. They are 100% opposite of each other. There can be nothing else. There is nothing in between. There is no outside position.
You are obviously mentally deranged. Stay where you are. MiniLuv will be along for you shortly.
...is anyone else disturbed that the Moscow subway system has/needs its own police department? Just how bad is the crime there, anyway?
A lot of transit systems have their own police.
Disney World even has its own fire department.
Regulations == Safety.
I'm not sure in the Airport and Taxi's are unions, but that would explain all of this. This is how unions operate, in groups, again if one or both are unions.
In this case it isn't about Safety, it is about losing money.
This is also how companies operate. In my town, union is a 4-letter word, but any time private transportation companies are involved, they collude to keep out newcomers.
BULLSHIT.
1. There is no such thing as "free content" with ads. When it has ads, IT IS NOT FREE ANYMORE. It costs the most valuable thing I have: The freedom to think my own thoughts! You should read up on "mirror neurons" (the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others) and how the primitive parts of the brain can't tell the difference between imagination (like ads) and reality. But working in advertisement, you must already know that, and use the other thing everybody in advertisement is an expert in: Lying.
2. If your website got something of *actual value* (=not abundantly available for free everywhere else), then you can *always* do the same thing every other *service-based business (model)* is doing: You ask a fair price for it in *advance*. If the only way to "monetize" your site is via advertising, then you have to face the fact that YOUR HAVE NOTHING OF ANY WORTH TO OFFER WHATSOEVER! In that case, please just go bankrupt, and quit ripping us off with your meaningless worthless shit. And most of all: Quit bitching about it!
Get over yourself. This is the 21st Century. Lower Prices Every Day. Information wants to be Free.
Unless you have a very vertical product where you have limited competition, people are not going to pay to visit your site. You local ISPs and utility companies haven't got the memo yet, so they still expect to get paid, and they do have limited competition. Ergo, ads.
You can't write about quantum mechanics without equations - it is NOT an intuitive field.
The cat wants to know if he can come out of the box now.
Most of those who have studied advanced math have heard of the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but not every single one of them understand it
Putting the same Heisenberg's Unvertainty Principle to the "average Joe on the street" and you would most probably get a blank stare
This has nothing to do with elitism, this is about reality
Most people simply do not have the mental capacity to comprehend the meaning of 1 + 1 = 2, and if you do not believe me, go ask the people around you, why 1 + 1 = 2, and not 1 + 1 = 3 ?
Give me a break. In the 1920s Einstein wrote a popular book about special relativity (with formulas) and general relativity for the layman. And we're talking about 2 theories which at the time were at the frontier of physics research. In the last 90 years we haven't suddenly become idiots, so if popular science books talking about special/general relativity and quantum theory (a theory 90 years old !!!!) don't use equations it is because of stupid preconceptions. I've said it before people are not idiots, they may not be specialists in physics research but you can certainly explain them the basics of 2 theories which are almost 1 century old using carefully selected formulas. Nobody goes apeshit if you write Newton's formula of gravitation, why would you go crazy for Heisenberg's uncertaintly principle ?
The cynic in me observes that in this country, every issue is expected to divide into 2 diametrically-opposed sides. Such as, for example, the party that eats their own babies which is the exact opposite of the party that eats everyone else's babies (yes, those are exact opposites and you can only chose one. Snarf).
Furthermore, in adherence to this post-Einstein Weltanschaung that everything should be as simple as possible, then made simpler, everything must be expressed in short sound-bytes suitable for framing on bumper stickers.
So shouldn't E=mc**2 be short enough? No, because statements like this require context. If you don't know what E, m, and c represent, it's just another math equation. And context won't fit on the bumper sticker.
I've actually had people tell me that no one but Einstein is smart enough to understand Einstein. The Gods themselves...
Part of it is in our heads. Also, we eat mammals, not creepy-crawlies, because mammals aren't poisonous. Meat (mammals, birds) is also highly concentrated food.
Insect shells, legs, etc. aren't as good for food, and they are far more likely to be poisonous. Some bugs are poisonous themselves. Others, like flies, hang out in rotting meat which is full of bacteria and toxins. So we evolved to not eat bugs because bugs are likely to make us sick.
Of course, fungus is similar. Mushrooms are an acquired taste, not something that most people enjoy immediately, but with modern practices we can separate the edible fungus from the poisonous. We eat some edible fungus and smoke one of the poisonous ones. :)
Cats and dogs aren't "all in our heads", we have them for a reason, and that reason isn't food. Evolutionarily speaking, it's better to let your cat keep the rats away than to eat the cat. "Don't eat your friends" is a good idea, not just a cultural convention.
I was amazed to be taught in college biology that chitin (insect "bone" material) is found in mushrooms.
The reasons I don't want insect on my plate is that per-pound, bugs have more spiky bits and often emit revolting odors. Grubs are less likely to offend, but I prefer my meat to have no identifiable body parts in it and be quite thoroughly dead. That eliminates a lot of non-insect meat as well.
Then again, if I actually had to kill for meat, I'd be vegetarian. Except maybe geese. Nasty ill-tempered little bastards.
....that still doesn't make it a democracy.
As long as our "representational" government is hijacked to represent the majority of dollars instead of people and of free speech, then we've completely strayed away from any sort of democracy at all. I don't know what you call it, but it ain't democracy.
Clearly our voices no longer equate to a level democratic process. Though we may be born equal, our influence under the law extends with our wealth, regardless of its source or of the massive disparity among the citizens.
Whats the point of voting in an auction that always goes to the highest bidder? Nostalgia or denial? We might as well still have royalty because it sure works like a nobility.
The problem with Citizens United is that the court failed to recognize 2 key facts:
1. The law is not "one dollar, one vote", it's one person one vote. Corporations don't get extra votes per se, but they can afford much bigger megaphones to speak at their representatives with.
2. Giving corporations a "vote" is un-democratic. The corporation is comprised of individuals. Thus, the individuals who control the corporation effectively have an extra vote beyond their individual vote. As a corollary, 98% of the employees of a corporation may oppose a certain piece of legislation, but corporations are not in the least democratic, so the "corporate vote" can be - and often is - directly counter to the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the individuals employed there.
If they changed the name to "Department of Rainbows, Unicorns, and Puppies," would you then feel free and happy?
Well, why not? We authorized a lot of this nonsense under the equally high-minded name "USA PATRIOT Act".
If you want to call the US a police state, I think you have some questions to answer: When did the "police state" cancel the vote? When did the "police state" shut down shutdown the newspapers, radio, and TV stations?
I guess you'll have to ask the Germans about that. About how in the beginning they elected people who promised to make them safe and prosperous and extract retribution on those who had injured them. And saw it all slide until votes were meaningless. Who needs to cancel the vote, anyway? The USSR had higher election turnouts than the USA does.
Shut down the media? I have actually descended to the point where one of my major news sources is Fox, because despite their obvious biases and creative invention of the news, the other mainstream channels have all been apparently simply reading verbatim a script handed to them by the Federal Government. Metadata? Who cares? His girlfriend is a pole dancer! Arf! Arf! Arf!
Mind you, not just arrest a reporter here or there for breaking the law, but actually show down the newspapers, radio, and TV stations?
A landslide starts with a few pebbles. But it doesn't end there.
When did the "police state" stop you from traveling without an internal passport?
When they started fingerprinting people coming into the country. Requiring passports to travel to/from alleged allies. And even internally, you'll find it awfully hard to get on an airplane without "showing your papers", even if the term now includes credit cards or driver licenses. Not just airports, either. The DHS has from time to time put the squeeze on at bus terminals and railroad stations.
When did the "police state" dismantle all of the political opposition parties and jail the leadership?
A lot of people have come to the cynical conclusion that they don't need to do that. That R and D are just 2 coats of paint on the same party, same as EastAsia and EurAsia.
When did the "police state" suspend habeas corpus?
Are you a goldfish? That argument came up right after 9/11. Fortunately even the apathetic masses found that idea alarming.
But not so alarming that we couldn't invent a whole new term - "Enemy Combatant".
When did the "police state" institute mandatory censorship of the media? (As opposed to the traditional water carrying for their ideologically favored party?)
You're too hung up on parties. The "party" in question is more like the Military-Industrial Complex. Which is why so many think that outside of single-issue items, both parties are the same party. As for "mandatory censorship", well, Reagan was when I first started hearing of cases where if you didn't report what pleased the administration you'd find your sources choked off. Post 9/11, it turned into a full-fledged megaphone.
When did the "police state" close the churches?
Why bother, if the churches themselves become part of the political inner circle a la Moral Majority? Not every police state is atheistic.
When did the "police state" start imprisoning people for criticizing the president?
"Free Speech Zones" are a good start.
When did the "police state" start having people fired from their jobs for not supporting the government?
Whistleblowers? We have an Act to protect them. And an administration that has made a name for itself in going after Whistleblowers.
When did the "police state" start punishing people for wanting to leave the country?
Ask Snowden.
That's a crowd sourced answer written like someone is trying to convince an IT manager to spend more on storage. The correct answer is more mundane and dystopian. "because they can." There is no other reason. If they couldn't, they wouldn't, but they can so they do. Home drives are good enough for most enterprise use, and see wide use at Google and Amazon. If the enterprise SAS were so much better, why are so many doing what they can to move away from them?
Maybe I've been travelling in the wrong circles, but I haven't run across a case where access to hardware was a serious bottleneck since mainframes stopped being the center of the universe and "DP" became "IT".
The real bottleneck always seems to be software. Specifically, software that is customized to the needs of the customer. And that customization is going to take as long and cost as much regardless of who owns the hardware or where the hardware is located on (or off) the planet.
Well, more accurately, you can buy "cheap" customized software, but it's typically going to be "cheap" in the quality sense of the word.
What planet are you living on? Software have been deemed copyright-able for decades now.
Software was always copyrightable. Since about 1980, it automatically gets a copyright, just like any other printed work does. No filing required.
It's patents that are the debatable matter.