And it's not particularly new. There was a guy doing the same thing with the scanner head from a flatbed scanner back in the late 90's/early 00's. The general idea of long exposures goes back further than that, much further.
The mass incarceration (US is highest in world) and organized crime that results from prohibition is much more destructive than the harm from someone getting high.
That depends on what they're getting high on and how widespread the behavior is. I don't want to be within a mile of someone driving high on meth for example, ditto many of the other psychoactives.
The world is not a black-and-white place. Not all drugs are the same, and the war on drugs is about a lot more than pot. People often forget that.
One of the other things people forget, if they were ever even educated enough to know, is the massive damage done by alcohol prior to prohibition. One of the good parts of the temperance movement and prohibition is that it started us down the path to where we are today - it's no longer socially acceptable to drink away your pay and starve those dependent on you. It's no longer acceptable to get drunk and beat your spouse and kids or to indulge other behaviors (brawling, drunk driving) after indulging in alcohol.
Prohibition was a bad idea, but forgetting the massive social problems it was meant to solve is far worse.
This maze is otherwise known as "politics" and yes it does have lots of twisty little debates in it.
In other words, exactly the same situation we're in today, changing nothing except to pander to libertarian fantasies.
In evaluating the market size I expect number of participants is more important than transaction sizes. Essentially, if a significant percentage of citizens want to engage in the trade then this is a good indicator the trade should be legal. How many percent of citizens have expressed an interest in child porn?
Child porn or dumping toxic waste, it comes down to the same thing, the same point that you've dodged all along - you imply that however odious the behavior may be, it's OK so long as enough people want to do it.
The only thing that was legalized in WA is possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. Possession of larger quantities, not to mention growing or sale of any quantity, is still illegal. With consumer-level possession legal but production, distribution, and sale illegal, that doesn't really do much to harm the drug smugglers' business.
If production, distribution, and sales are illegal - why is the state in the process of issuing licenses to do those very things? The answer of course is, you haven't a clue what you're talking about. Washington (where I reside BTW) has chosen the sensible first step of treating marijuana like alcohol - production, distribution, and sales aren't completely illegal... but they *are* restricted to licensed entities. If a store is selling marijuana, then it needs to be traceable to a legal source (and vice versa for producers and processors).
A free-for-all (complete legalization and lack of restrictions) won't stop smugglers either, the potential market is simply too big and the average person just too lazy.
You are right, but if the 'free market' were an argument for making something legal, then we should make assassinations and corporations that dump poison into rivers legal, because they are going to anyway.
Well, the free market is an argument for legalization, but only with qualifications. Essentially, if the free market for a given good or service is or would be big enough then this alone is a very strong argument for legalizing it.
That's not qualification, that's sophomoric handwaving and rationalization. It just leads you into an endless maze of twisty little debates over what constitutes 'big enough' and does nothing to prevent the very situation posited by the GP.
How do you prevent something being deliberately manipulated into having a large market in order to legalize it? If you don't think that will happen, both at the grassroots and corporate scales, I have a bridge to sell you. (Not to mention, that's the core of most of the arguments in favor of legalizing marijuana [1] "everybody does it, it costs too much to enforce the laws, so why not legalize it?".)
Child pornography is a three billion dollar business (or so they say, I have no doubt that it is big), is that big enough? And don't bring up "but they're hurting innocent children", because drugs and alcohol hurts a lot of innocents as collateral damage (from the abusers, not the feds) as well. By legalizing the really nasty stuff with a large market (I.E. stuff up the scale from pot[2]) you've already established the principle that damage is acceptable. That's just one more example (beyond those enumerated by the GP) of the trap you and the GGP have set for yourselves.
"The free market" is not a solution to everything.
[1] Which, mind you, I'm in favor of just to be clear.
[2] On/., these debates always end up about pot, forgetting that's just one part of the drug trade.
The loss of safe, stable corporate employment is going to cause a huge shift in people's standard of living. There are millions of people who get up, get in their car, go to an office, take a stack of input work, perform some process on it, forward it to the output queue, and repeat this 5 days a week.
It's not just corporate drones. The medium sized local business my wife works for used to have a full time accountant, bookkeeper, and clerk back in the 70's - now the business is ten times the size it was in those days, and she's the whole of the accounting department. (The phone girl files part time.) When I was growing up, the family business was printing, and even smallish towns (20-30k) like where I live now supported three or four... and now there are none. (Yes, I know about copy centers, no they aren't the same thing. And they use unskilled labor vice the skilled labor of a pressman.) The first summer job I got on my own, rather than through family connections, was working for an architect cleaning up the mistakes he'd made on his Mylar drawings (overrunning an intersection and making it into a "+" rather than a "T", or where the compass left a little blob of ink)... architects use CAD packages now. A friend of mine made a nice, if modest, living as a travel agent - now pretty much everyone books their own travel. The doleful drumbeat goes on and on. The digital revolution has cannibalized a lot of jobs while creating disproportionately fewer.
It would be an awesome first step if we could all just agree that the middle class (at least in America) is in decline from what it was one generation or two generations ago, and that that has several bad consequences, and that we should try to think of ways to reverse this trend.
The problem is, you go back three or four generations, and you find the middle class on the rise from near non-existence. (Well, using the modern conflation of "white collar == middle class", that's what you find.) The whole white collar/middle class/middle America phenomenon people are treating as a permanent state of nature... is actually a fairly recent historical phenomenon. They're the 20th century equivalent of the digital native.
Kodak had a 'cult' favorite in the Polaroid. They discontinued it, citing the 'digital revolution', right exactly at the time when people were backlashing against digital photos and **wanted** and old-school, nostalgic analog product like the Polaroid.
They discontinued it because sales had been dropping for decades (for a variety of reasons) and precipitously at the very end (because of digital). Being badly wanted by a fairly small number of 'cultists' is insufficient reason to assume they were in the wrong.
And then what... What happens after all the infrastructure is rebuilt and all the possible parks are created?
You aren't solving any problems, you're just shuffling the money around and delaying the inevitable. The problem isn't wealth concentrated in a few hands - it's that jobs are gone, and they're gone forever. Sure, some of it is offshoring and globalization... but a large (and often unrecognized) portion is due to automation and the computer revolution and the productivity increases resulting from them.
The clock doesn't turn backwards and no amount of taxing millionaires and billionaires into paupers is going to change that.
All those other companies pulled it off. It's a classic story of pride and hubris.
All what other companies? The big film companies of the past are, almost to man, *gone*. Sony, Nikon, and Canon survived because they were camera companies and digital was just another kind of camera. It's a classic story of someone (you) having no clue what they're talking about and just parroting crap they read elsewhere with no more understanding than a dog biscuit would have.
I don't know where this meme of "Kodak had the world in the hands, but failed to embrace digital and lost it all" got started.
Their EMPLOYEES at the time are the ones who started that. They were privy to the meetings where those decisions were made. Go ahead. Find one and ask them! I have worked and do currently work with a lot of ex-Kodak people. It's accurate. People were telling them "digital is the future" for DECADES, they even invented the technology. It's not like they failed at one crucial moment. They continually made the conscious choice not to do it for about 25 years, in spite of clear trends for the latter 15 years of that span.
If you work and have worked with a lot of ex-Kodak people, it's no wonder you're clueless. You're just repeating their self justifying rhetoric with no understanding of what actually happened. (And seemingly no interest in correcting that lack.)
Unfortunately there's way too much neglect in the industry right now. I drive around the city that I live in and more than half of the pedestals are cracked open, with plastic bags wrapped over the distribution blocks to keep water off of them. The cable and phone companies are neglecting their infrastructure and given the number of years that this has been a problem, they don't seem interested in hiring the staff or paying for the materials to fix these problems correctly.
That's not true where I live, or even anywhere I've been in the last decade. So, you need to re-examine your conclusions as you've mistakenly generalized from a specific circumstance.
This "article" lost all credibility the moment they claimed that Kodak was replaced by Instagram. Kodak was functionally dead long before Instagram was a twinkle in someone's eye. If I was going to try to pin one company as replacing Kodak, it would have to be Apple, since more photos are taken with iPhones than with any other single manufacturer's cameras.
You lost all credibility when you said that - because Kodak was already in it's "Wile E. Coyote" moment (that moment when he is over the edge of a cliff - but it still momentarily defying gravity) when the iPhone was released. And the iPhone wouldn't dominate the cell phone market until a couple of years later.
No, it's a whole laundry list of things, causes, and companies that killed Kodak. Personally, I'd be hard pressed to narrow it down under five or so.
You should read up on it. Talk to some of the incredibly bitter ex-Kodak people.
And then realize that for Kodak to capitalize on the digital revolution they'd have needed a leader with the vision of Steve Jobs, the ruthlessness of Bill Gates, the technical acumen of Seymour Cray, the salesmanship and marketing ability of PT Barnum, a copy of your timeline, and fucking great huge slice of luck.
I don't know where this meme of "Kodak had the world in the hands, but failed to embrace digital and lost it all" got started, but it's bullshit. The digital photography revolution is only obvious with 20/20 hindsight. Take your 1990 timeline entry for just one example - in 1990 it *was* easier to share photo's on a CD. CD's could be mailed - long distance electronic connections however were not something readily available to the non-technical general public. Heck, I was an early adopter of high speed modems, and *I'd* have had a hard time sharing photos with the communications links and protocols available in that era.
It is not required for most fully validating nodes to store the entire chain.
That's the theory - how is it working out in practice? That's the real question.
If one wanted to kill an idea, if one wanted to wage a propaganda war on an extreme viewpoint or tool, here is one way to do it.
Of course, you display the same methodology in supporting your idea - positing simplified and idealized circumstances and then treating said meme as reality.
Let's use the the same techniques our opponents use.
You're already doing it - your blinders are just too tight for you to see it. People rarely notice logical flaws when they accrue to their favor.
Let me get this straight - this is a video interviewing a guy about a business he's never been in, selling something he has no experience with... and his company not only doesn't have a product, it's not expected to for months? And we're supposed to think this is worth watching?
Christ, who set the wayback machine to 1998 and confused Slashdot with a bunch of vulture capitalists?
Dynex has brought the technology to the proof-of-concept phase, in which virtual modelling of the âoeair-sealingâ principle looks promising enough to get to work on the real thing.
A 'virtual model' equates to 'proof-of-concept'? Since when?
You're referring to the WAAS and/or EGNOS payloads on geostationary satellites. While they transmit to GPS receivers using the same data format and signals (and in fact show up as GPS satellites so as to not break older GPS receivers) they are not actually GPS satellites.
Wrong on both counts - they don't show up at all on older GPS receivers. The receiver has to be designed to look for them and use the data. And while they are not GPS satellites per se, they are part of the GPS system.
Romans, for example, have largely stopped growing wheat in Italy long before Julius Caesar. Because it was cheaper to bring stuff over from Africa.
Well, it's not *quite* as simple as that. They didn't stop growing wheat because it was cheap to bring it in from Africa - the patricians (nobles) who owned the land switched from wheat to grapes because there was more profit in wine than in flour. Then, to keep the plebs from rioting, they voted in the senate to have the goverment subsidize shipments of wheat from Africa.
Horsepuckey. Not having fire alarms isn't a "hindsight 20/20" moment (I.E. something no one could have foreseen a need for), it's a "WTF were you *thinking* you blithering idiot" moment.
He got started on TV as a sketch comedian, and was called "Bill Nye - the Science Guy" as the butt of someone else's joke. He managed to parley that into a non speaking role on someone else's show which lead to his own show. As a quasi-celebrity (I.E. not even on the 'B' list, 'D-standby maybe) who openly voices political and philosophical positions that align with theirs, he's endeared himself to the nerd/geek crowd.
Bascially, he's essentially some random guy who got lucky because his last name lent itself to a joke, despite his lack of professional qualifications.
I applaud Bill Nye's contributions to science and education, and think he's eminently qualified.
Frankly, either your bias is showing or your bar for being accomplished and/or qualified is abysmally low, or both.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's not particularly new. There was a guy doing the same thing with the scanner head from a flatbed scanner back in the late 90's/early 00's. The general idea of long exposures goes back further than that, much further.
That depends on what they're getting high on and how widespread the behavior is. I don't want to be within a mile of someone driving high on meth for example, ditto many of the other psychoactives.
The world is not a black-and-white place. Not all drugs are the same, and the war on drugs is about a lot more than pot. People often forget that.
One of the other things people forget, if they were ever even educated enough to know, is the massive damage done by alcohol prior to prohibition. One of the good parts of the temperance movement and prohibition is that it started us down the path to where we are today - it's no longer socially acceptable to drink away your pay and starve those dependent on you. It's no longer acceptable to get drunk and beat your spouse and kids or to indulge other behaviors (brawling, drunk driving) after indulging in alcohol.
Prohibition was a bad idea, but forgetting the massive social problems it was meant to solve is far worse.
In other words, exactly the same situation we're in today, changing nothing except to pander to libertarian fantasies.
Child porn or dumping toxic waste, it comes down to the same thing, the same point that you've dodged all along - you imply that however odious the behavior may be, it's OK so long as enough people want to do it.
If production, distribution, and sales are illegal - why is the state in the process of issuing licenses to do those very things? The answer of course is, you haven't a clue what you're talking about. Washington (where I reside BTW) has chosen the sensible first step of treating marijuana like alcohol - production, distribution, and sales aren't completely illegal... but they *are* restricted to licensed entities. If a store is selling marijuana, then it needs to be traceable to a legal source (and vice versa for producers and processors).
A free-for-all (complete legalization and lack of restrictions) won't stop smugglers either, the potential market is simply too big and the average person just too lazy.
No, tobacco doesn't. But on the other hand "show[s] promise as" is not the same as "actually does these things".
A drum often beaten by those on the pro-cannabis side, conveniently forgetting that physical addiction is not the only form of addiction.
So sayeth years of pro-cannibis propoganda (as with the items above) and some sometimes rather sloppy science.
Mind you, I'm in favor of legalization, but that doesn't mean I mindlessly repeat propaganda.
That's not qualification, that's sophomoric handwaving and rationalization. It just leads you into an endless maze of twisty little debates over what constitutes 'big enough' and does nothing to prevent the very situation posited by the GP.
How do you prevent something being deliberately manipulated into having a large market in order to legalize it? If you don't think that will happen, both at the grassroots and corporate scales, I have a bridge to sell you. (Not to mention, that's the core of most of the arguments in favor of legalizing marijuana [1] "everybody does it, it costs too much to enforce the laws, so why not legalize it?".)
Child pornography is a three billion dollar business (or so they say, I have no doubt that it is big), is that big enough? And don't bring up "but they're hurting innocent children", because drugs and alcohol hurts a lot of innocents as collateral damage (from the abusers, not the feds) as well. By legalizing the really nasty stuff with a large market (I.E. stuff up the scale from pot[2]) you've already established the principle that damage is acceptable. That's just one more example (beyond those enumerated by the GP) of the trap you and the GGP have set for yourselves.
"The free market" is not a solution to everything.
[1] Which, mind you, I'm in favor of just to be clear.
[2] On /., these debates always end up about pot, forgetting that's just one part of the drug trade.
That sound you heard was my point whooshing over your head.
And the specialty chemical division was spun off years ago, and it still quite profitable.
It's not just corporate drones. The medium sized local business my wife works for used to have a full time accountant, bookkeeper, and clerk back in the 70's - now the business is ten times the size it was in those days, and she's the whole of the accounting department. (The phone girl files part time.) When I was growing up, the family business was printing, and even smallish towns (20-30k) like where I live now supported three or four... and now there are none. (Yes, I know about copy centers, no they aren't the same thing. And they use unskilled labor vice the skilled labor of a pressman.) The first summer job I got on my own, rather than through family connections, was working for an architect cleaning up the mistakes he'd made on his Mylar drawings (overrunning an intersection and making it into a "+" rather than a "T", or where the compass left a little blob of ink)... architects use CAD packages now. A friend of mine made a nice, if modest, living as a travel agent - now pretty much everyone books their own travel. The doleful drumbeat goes on and on. The digital revolution has cannibalized a lot of jobs while creating disproportionately fewer.
The problem is, you go back three or four generations, and you find the middle class on the rise from near non-existence. (Well, using the modern conflation of "white collar == middle class", that's what you find.) The whole white collar/middle class/middle America phenomenon people are treating as a permanent state of nature... is actually a fairly recent historical phenomenon. They're the 20th century equivalent of the digital native.
They discontinued it because sales had been dropping for decades (for a variety of reasons) and precipitously at the very end (because of digital). Being badly wanted by a fairly small number of 'cultists' is insufficient reason to assume they were in the wrong.
You're overstating because it's the only way to make your case.
And then what... What happens after all the infrastructure is rebuilt and all the possible parks are created?
You aren't solving any problems, you're just shuffling the money around and delaying the inevitable. The problem isn't wealth concentrated in a few hands - it's that jobs are gone, and they're gone forever. Sure, some of it is offshoring and globalization... but a large (and often unrecognized) portion is due to automation and the computer revolution and the productivity increases resulting from them.
The clock doesn't turn backwards and no amount of taxing millionaires and billionaires into paupers is going to change that.
All what other companies? The big film companies of the past are, almost to man, *gone*. Sony, Nikon, and Canon survived because they were camera companies and digital was just another kind of camera. It's a classic story of someone (you) having no clue what they're talking about and just parroting crap they read elsewhere with no more understanding than a dog biscuit would have.
If you work and have worked with a lot of ex-Kodak people, it's no wonder you're clueless. You're just repeating their self justifying rhetoric with no understanding of what actually happened. (And seemingly no interest in correcting that lack.)
That's not true where I live, or even anywhere I've been in the last decade. So, you need to re-examine your conclusions as you've mistakenly generalized from a specific circumstance.
You lost all credibility when you said that - because Kodak was already in it's "Wile E. Coyote" moment (that moment when he is over the edge of a cliff - but it still momentarily defying gravity) when the iPhone was released. And the iPhone wouldn't dominate the cell phone market until a couple of years later.
No, it's a whole laundry list of things, causes, and companies that killed Kodak. Personally, I'd be hard pressed to narrow it down under five or so.
And then realize that for Kodak to capitalize on the digital revolution they'd have needed a leader with the vision of Steve Jobs, the ruthlessness of Bill Gates, the technical acumen of Seymour Cray, the salesmanship and marketing ability of PT Barnum, a copy of your timeline, and fucking great huge slice of luck.
I don't know where this meme of "Kodak had the world in the hands, but failed to embrace digital and lost it all" got started, but it's bullshit. The digital photography revolution is only obvious with 20/20 hindsight. Take your 1990 timeline entry for just one example - in 1990 it *was* easier to share photo's on a CD. CD's could be mailed - long distance electronic connections however were not something readily available to the non-technical general public. Heck, I was an early adopter of high speed modems, and *I'd* have had a hard time sharing photos with the communications links and protocols available in that era.
That's the theory - how is it working out in practice? That's the real question.
Of course, you display the same methodology in supporting your idea - positing simplified and idealized circumstances and then treating said meme as reality.
You're already doing it - your blinders are just too tight for you to see it. People rarely notice logical flaws when they accrue to their favor.
Let me get this straight - this is a video interviewing a guy about a business he's never been in, selling something he has no experience with... and his company not only doesn't have a product, it's not expected to for months? And we're supposed to think this is worth watching?
Christ, who set the wayback machine to 1998 and confused Slashdot with a bunch of vulture capitalists?
From TFA:
A 'virtual model' equates to 'proof-of-concept'? Since when?
Wrong on both counts - they don't show up at all on older GPS receivers. The receiver has to be designed to look for them and use the data. And while they are not GPS satellites per se, they are part of the GPS system.
Yes, some of them are geostationary.
Well, it's not *quite* as simple as that. They didn't stop growing wheat because it was cheap to bring it in from Africa - the patricians (nobles) who owned the land switched from wheat to grapes because there was more profit in wine than in flour. Then, to keep the plebs from rioting, they voted in the senate to have the goverment subsidize shipments of wheat from Africa.
Horsepuckey. Not having fire alarms isn't a "hindsight 20/20" moment (I.E. something no one could have foreseen a need for), it's a "WTF were you *thinking* you blithering idiot" moment.
Not in the least.
He got started on TV as a sketch comedian, and was called "Bill Nye - the Science Guy" as the butt of someone else's joke. He managed to parley that into a non speaking role on someone else's show which lead to his own show. As a quasi-celebrity (I.E. not even on the 'B' list, 'D-standby maybe) who openly voices political and philosophical positions that align with theirs, he's endeared himself to the nerd/geek crowd.
Bascially, he's essentially some random guy who got lucky because his last name lent itself to a joke, despite his lack of professional qualifications.
Frankly, either your bias is showing or your bar for being accomplished and/or qualified is abysmally low, or both.
No, it's about quasi-celebrity Bill Nye getting himself exposure.