You can't rest on your laurels and think you can keep making the same profits you used to in the "beige box" era of PCs.
The problem is, I wish they would stick more to boring commodity PCs. Instead they pre-load it with utterly useless software.
The amount of sheer crap they install on PCs now is maddening. On both my wife's HP laptop, and her mom's Toshiba, I had to go in and disable/uninstall of those stupid *$^%!@ extra "assistant" pieces of crap. They don't do anything except hog up the CPU and memory, and mostly amount to something which says "I see you are using a computer, would you like us to optimize that for you".
I wouldn't buy a PC from any of the manufacturers which install any of this shit. Give me a vanilla install of Windows, and leave me the hell alone. I don't want your wizard, agent, helper, toolbar, or any other of this crap. It doesn't help, and it effectively downgrades my machines as it's using all of the memory and much of the CPU.
The problem with these companies is they think they can make something better to brand the OS, and they end up selling a shitty machine with a crappy user experience. Stay out of there, you're clearly not qualified for this.
And, from what I've seen of my wife's personal and work laptops... well, HP sells low end hardware at a high-end price. I would personally not buy from them again. Give me a boring old beige box PC from a local system builder any day that has quality parts in it -- I can always put some "Type R" stickers on the case later if I feel it needs a little something extra.;-)
But that doesn't mean I want to fight their wars! If for example: Britain or France suddenly decided to go to war against Iran.
Well, I might point out that it was you guys who waded into Iraq and Afghanistan and pretty much demanded the world follow along with you... I believe Bush famously said "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists". You'll notice that lots of other countries committed resources (and lives) to that, but in the end, absolutely none of the reasons it was done were ever proven to be valid. There never was a good reason to go into Iraq, but you guys bullied everyone else into doing it with you.
This is a two way street. And if you want to start disentangling yourselves from your allies, well, you might not find yourself with much support later.
I'm sure the Europeans aren't all that thrilled with their banking and flight data being handed over to serve US interests. So maybe everyone just says "well, since you think we're not such good allies, we're not doing that any more".
I fully understand that politicians have been working for years to suppress such an understanding among the general public.
they don't even need to suppress the understanding, they just need the courts to back them on some of these things.
In America, there's Free Speech Zones, the Fourth Amendment is apparently optional in many states, warrant-less wiretapping. All sorts of crap.
Pretty much wherever you go, copyright law trumps everything (and is part of the push for the data retention), "think of the children" gives people reason to bypass all sorts of laws, and terrorism bypasses pretty much anything else.
These things are being eroded fairly constantly. This is just another example of an organization trying to say why their needs should trump any other considerations.
I'm just not sure anymore how much getting the citizenry pissed off would actually accomplish. Overall, we're becoming less free over time. Unless they take away TV, I can't imagine enough people getting angry enough to do something about it.
It's time for people to stand up for the principle that government may only exercise those powers expressly granted to it. All other powers are reserved to the people.
Not everybody's Constitution (or equivalent) says the same thing.
That's not actually true everywhere. And, for practical purposes, it's not true anywhere any more.
The "version" of this Bilderberg theory I hear is that Bush is dumb as dirt
I think there's enough video evidence from him speaking to prove that point.
Bush said an incredible amount of Really Stupid Things. I find it hard to believe anybody still believes he's anything but a drooling chimp.
As to whether some secret illuminati are controlling him from behind the scenes... it doesn't even need to be some grand conspiracy, lobbyists have a lot of access and influence, and seem to get what they want. The copyright cartels are telling government to force trading partners to implement IP laws they wrote. The idiots on Wall Street who lost all the money advise on financial policy. There's Halliburton, who seem to be able to run around doing all sorts of awful things.
Like I said, it doesn't even need to be some big secret group that sits around the table and influences such things. They do it right in the open.
Then let me rephrase: What should I do to verify that my material is in fact legally original?
You know, I wanted to say something flippant, but it occurs to me that as people copyright songs, the brief snippets in them get copyrighted, and then you run out of unique combinations where someone won't then come along and say "Hey, I did a 'D A C G' note progression, you infringed on my copyright".
You have made me sad.:-P
I wonder how (or even if) the labels do this... you can't compare every new song to every existing song. It seems like it would basically be intractable to prove that.
Maybe not the entire RIAA, but there are record labels which aren't members.
Fat Wreck Chords for example.
Trade group monopoly must be broken.
That would take a court ruling, legislation, or a freakin' miracle. These are the guys writing the current copyright laws (and exporting them via ACTA etc)... which means they're 'greasing the wheels' an awful lot, so the lawmakers aren't going to cut them off.
Somehow, an industry cartel is dictating terms to government and getting away with it. They want it entrenched in law in every country that they get tithed.
How should someone who writes and records an album verify that the songs he wrote don't accidentally infringe a third party's copyright?
Write original material?
How should they promote it to listeners who aren't already streaming music in their vehicles? These listeners use FM radio because they don't already have a sufficiently expensive data plan or they aren't aware of the streaming sites.
Or, you know, maybe they like radio. Some people actually do.
Could this help Facebook regain the lost trust for their investors?
Only if they can gain the trust of a fair amount of users.
I use Facebook, but under a fake name with as little personal information as I can give them. There's no way I'd trust Facebook with financial information.
I've no doubt that at least some users will think this is grand, but there's no way I'd ever use this. Their level of trust from me is arms length and suspicious.
For the same reason, vaccination should actually NOT be mandatory. Let natural selection sort out the nutcases' offspring.
Did you read TFA? or at least TFS?
These children which aren't getting vaccinated because their parents don't understand science are putting other children at risk.
So it may not be their own children which natural selection sorts out, it may be the children of parents who have accepted that vaccines work, aren't more likely to cause autism, and aren't part of some government conspiracy.
So their "personal belief exemptions" are putting the lives of other people at risk -- basically they've gotten the right to become potential carriers of disease:
In 2008 there was a measles outbreak spread in California. This outbreak was traced to a child whose parents had decided not to have him vaccinated. The child brought the disease back from Europe, resulting in infections of other children at his doctor's office and his classmates. The boy's parents had signed a personal belief exemption affidavit which stated that some or all of the immunizations were against their beliefs, thereby allowing their son to go unvaccinated prior to entering kindergarten.
You can't just have people opting out of things which is intended to prevent disease in greater society if it puts other people at risk. You're free to choose for yourself, but not when you're talking about communicable disease.
Someone needs to explain to these parents that the rest of the world shouldn't bear the risk of them being stupid. If it was only them and their offspring who might be affected, go ahead. But it isn't.
That's no excuse for the judge to ignore the Eighth Amendment.
Dude, when it comes to copyright and terrorism, those trump the Amendments.
Oh, and I guess "free speech zones" might also as well. The Fourth Amendment within three states of a border is optional now. Probably a few things I've forgotten.
But both sides of the political spectrum are tending to want to step on some of those things all in the name of something else. That's actually kind of scary.
I'm not sure how they can say you owe $675,000 for stealing roughly $30 worth of products.
Because the *AA's managed to pass laws that made for ridiculous statutory damages.
the original rationale for statutory damages was that it would often be difficult to establish the number of copies that had been made by an underground pirate business and awards of statutory damages would save rightsholders from having to do so
So, it's an inflated number to allow them to sue for massive damages on the presumption that you've cost them vast sums of lost revenue that they can't prove. It basically says that in the FBI trailer on movies.
Not defending it, but that's how we got here. The *AA's don't believe in the concept of "personal use" or "fair use" -- as far as they are concerned, you have committed Great Evil.
Why would you think that a trait other animals share would have been evolved from a trait that is unique to our species?
Well, since I don't think that, I can't give you an answer to that.
My (albeit limited) understanding is that older structures in the brain than those found just in humans is involved in processing of music, and that it's far more fundamental to us than something which we simply learn (which is consistent with what you've just said).
If infants respond to music and move in time with the rhythm of music (essentially dancing really), then whatever is involved in that is some intrinsic structures in the brain and not purely socialized.
I think we've been steadily showing over the last decades that things we used to think were exclusively human traits are much more wide-spread in animals than was traditionally thought.
My guess would be that there's a lot more at play than 'simply' saying it's part of the deep structures or unique to humans. As usual, there's a lot more complexity and nuance in that kind of thing -- more likely, whatever evolved to give us the capacity for language also gives us a tendency towards music. And from what I've read, the music stuff is spread across more structures, and uses more parts of the brain than language does.
I have no idea, to be honest. But I stopped using eBay years ago, and the push towards PayPal was part of it.
They act like a bank, do bank-like things, but keep saying they're not a bank and therefore not covered by the same laws.
I'm pretty sure eBay basically said everybody needs to use PayPal (they own it after all)... but people have been talking about how wretched PayPal is to deal with for better part of a decade now. I have zero trust in them, and I would only use them if they had to draw from a credit card, and if they weren't willing to do that... well, I'd find another place to deal with.
I don't ever give anybody direct access to my accounts. I sure as hell wouldn't do it with PayPal. Even the mainstream media has covered this numerous times.
I don't think there's much of a choice. After I reached a lifetime total of $10,000, paypal wouldn't draw from a credit card any more to send payments until I linked to the bank account.
Oh, there's a choice, but it involves not using PayPal.
A surprising amount of people have opted for that.
In this case, you can more accurately say "reporting of science by the media fail".
This isn't the only instance of this, it's fairly well reported, and has been known about for some time.
People have done brain scans, cognitive tests, and actually a fair bit of stuff which demonstrate similar effects.
This is far from a sample size of one, but this piece glosses over all of the other stuff that's come before. (And if you want a citation, I've given it twice in this thread, a book by a professor of neurology at Colombia University, and he's got reams of actual scientific papers he's citing.)
The reporting is thin, but there's actually some reputable science that's been done around this.
Oh, and there's even a fair bit of evidence to suggest that infants respond to music and move rhythmically along with it, which strongly suggests that some very basic parts of the brain are associated with music from a very early age.
That's far more than procedural memory at play. If we respond to music before we've even begun to process language, that points to more fundamental things going on.
It's not "muscle memory", it's procedural memory, and it really comes from the brain! There's nothing magical about playing your tune and thinking of something else, without being conscious of what your fingers do. We all do lots of things without being conscious of every minute movement required.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, you should read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.
It's not a procedural memory thing, it's that different parts of the brain structures are actually involved in music than simple memory. It uses a wider set of brain structures, and isn't quite as localized. There's more aspects of the brain that participate here.
In many cases, even if the person wasn't a musician, songs from their youth and other music associations still linger. So someone who is almost completely uncommunicative will perk up and respond to music, and in some cases even sing along when they can't really do much else.
I realize we on Slashdot like to think we can explain most of this stuff with our vast knowledge of such things, but I believe your explanation is a bit simplified. It doesn't even begin to cover all of the cases in which people have been able to demonstrate that, even in the face of actual structural damage to the brain (like a stroke), music still resonates with us. It's not simply that you've learned the procedure from repeated practice. It's that a whole lot more of your brain is involved than the parts that are primarily used for language.
It's actually a fascinating read, written by a neurologist, and shows a lot of cases with really interesting results. As it goes through a bunch of cases, it highlights how they are different from one another and shows a lot of the commonalities.
I believe ultimately there is some belief that language evolved from music instead of the other way around. It would seem that people for whom music plays a big part in their life get some lasting benefit from it.
But, then again, I'm not a neuroscientist either.:-P
This isn't new, and it's been well known for years.
Read the book Musicophilia. There's literally dozens of cases in which people can no longer really communicate or otherwise have some diminished mental capacity, but they respond to music by either singing or playing. That part of the brain seems intact.
Heck, this might even be one of the cases in that book. But he's a professor of neurology, and I believe that was published in 2007.
I don't believe this is a new theory, and it certainly isn't the first time someone has demonstrated this. Given how long I've known this, I'm surprised this is being touted as a first time we've confirmed this.
MetroPCS, considered the fifth-largest carrier in the U.S., made a big announcement of its own Tuesday, saying it would begin offering an unlimited everything promotional plan for $55 a month for a limited time
And wait until your first six months or whatever are up, then you really find out what this will cost you.
So, 4chan is full of sociopaths. Then, by your logic my assessment of the human race's progress should be much different...
Well, kind of. See, you can't diagnose a sociopath in their childhood or teens, because they're not fully developed so the tests are inconclusive. Normal for a teenager isn't necessarily clinically altogether within 'normal'.
From what I understand, 4chan is full of people who are essentially no more developed than teenagers engaging in mass gross-out contests and fart jokes writ large and obscene, thus making them indistinguishable from sociopaths. Of course, I generalize.
Dude, seriously, if someone had to watch every possible bit of human depravity, gore, violence, and obscenities day in and day out for a year... if at the end of it you're not a little fucked up and are really enjoying your job because you get to watch all that shit all day long... then, yes, you too are probably already a Fucked Up Person.
"Tough Minded" in this case means "I'm so desensitized to violence and atrocity that this doesn't bother me", which is scary because you've dehumanized them (and therefore score one more point on the sociopath test)... the ones that didn't want therapy would be the ones I'd worry about.
Agreed with a little help afterwards, you could pull ahead of it such that "nothing can shock you ever again". They do it in the Military all the time, though in a more physical style.
I would argue that if you take the most bad-assed military, police, or what have you... unless someone has some serious issues of their own already which would make them enjoy it (which pretty much disqualifies them from doing the job), this kind of stuff 8 hours/day for a year is going to seriously fuck you up.
Unless you really want your military made up of vicious sadists, I completely fail to see how this kind of thing wouldn't cause lasting damage -- or at least the need for some heavy duty counseling and support.
That much exposure to every single horrible thing that ever gets filmed is bound to wear down anybody. And anybody it doesn't, likely scores in the very scary end of humanity.
A weak mind? I'm sorry, but I'm willing to bet after watching this stuff for long enough it's going to have an effect on anybody but a sociopath. Then too, but they'd probably enjoy it.
Soldiers and police offices get PTSD. The cops who work on child porn and the like get worn down. Heck, I bet people who work in ERs get a little twigged on this stuff.
You immerse anybody in this stuff day in and day out, and I think it's safe to assume there's going to be some lasting trauma.
And I have to assume that anybody who would volunteer for this and thrive on it... well, you need to keep an eye on them because they're probably dangerous.
Anybody who thinks simply being tough-minded (as opposed to being highly twisted) is all that it would take to "man up" and get past this is likely full of crap.
Wow, I figure if anybody had to do that for a year, they should be given a pension, a quiet place to get away from things, and a LOT of therapy.
I can't imagine being the poor bastard that has to look at the worst stuff on the internet. I've glimpsed enough to know that I wouldn't want to see any more of it. I'm frequently appalled at some of the things people choose to see.
I think even the law enforcement guys can get fucked up from this, and they understand the need for support systems. Your first job our of school? That would ruin you forever.
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The problem is, I wish they would stick more to boring commodity PCs. Instead they pre-load it with utterly useless software.
The amount of sheer crap they install on PCs now is maddening. On both my wife's HP laptop, and her mom's Toshiba, I had to go in and disable/uninstall of those stupid *$^%!@ extra "assistant" pieces of crap. They don't do anything except hog up the CPU and memory, and mostly amount to something which says "I see you are using a computer, would you like us to optimize that for you".
I wouldn't buy a PC from any of the manufacturers which install any of this shit. Give me a vanilla install of Windows, and leave me the hell alone. I don't want your wizard, agent, helper, toolbar, or any other of this crap. It doesn't help, and it effectively downgrades my machines as it's using all of the memory and much of the CPU.
The problem with these companies is they think they can make something better to brand the OS, and they end up selling a shitty machine with a crappy user experience. Stay out of there, you're clearly not qualified for this.
And, from what I've seen of my wife's personal and work laptops ... well, HP sells low end hardware at a high-end price. I would personally not buy from them again. Give me a boring old beige box PC from a local system builder any day that has quality parts in it -- I can always put some "Type R" stickers on the case later if I feel it needs a little something extra. ;-)
Well, I might point out that it was you guys who waded into Iraq and Afghanistan and pretty much demanded the world follow along with you ... I believe Bush famously said "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists". You'll notice that lots of other countries committed resources (and lives) to that, but in the end, absolutely none of the reasons it was done were ever proven to be valid. There never was a good reason to go into Iraq, but you guys bullied everyone else into doing it with you.
This is a two way street. And if you want to start disentangling yourselves from your allies, well, you might not find yourself with much support later.
I'm sure the Europeans aren't all that thrilled with their banking and flight data being handed over to serve US interests. So maybe everyone just says "well, since you think we're not such good allies, we're not doing that any more".
they don't even need to suppress the understanding, they just need the courts to back them on some of these things.
In America, there's Free Speech Zones, the Fourth Amendment is apparently optional in many states, warrant-less wiretapping. All sorts of crap.
Pretty much wherever you go, copyright law trumps everything (and is part of the push for the data retention), "think of the children" gives people reason to bypass all sorts of laws, and terrorism bypasses pretty much anything else.
These things are being eroded fairly constantly. This is just another example of an organization trying to say why their needs should trump any other considerations.
I'm just not sure anymore how much getting the citizenry pissed off would actually accomplish. Overall, we're becoming less free over time. Unless they take away TV, I can't imagine enough people getting angry enough to do something about it.
Not everybody's Constitution (or equivalent) says the same thing.
That's not actually true everywhere. And, for practical purposes, it's not true anywhere any more.
I think there's enough video evidence from him speaking to prove that point.
Bush said an incredible amount of Really Stupid Things. I find it hard to believe anybody still believes he's anything but a drooling chimp.
As to whether some secret illuminati are controlling him from behind the scenes ... it doesn't even need to be some grand conspiracy, lobbyists have a lot of access and influence, and seem to get what they want. The copyright cartels are telling government to force trading partners to implement IP laws they wrote. The idiots on Wall Street who lost all the money advise on financial policy. There's Halliburton, who seem to be able to run around doing all sorts of awful things.
Like I said, it doesn't even need to be some big secret group that sits around the table and influences such things. They do it right in the open.
You know, I wanted to say something flippant, but it occurs to me that as people copyright songs, the brief snippets in them get copyrighted, and then you run out of unique combinations where someone won't then come along and say "Hey, I did a 'D A C G' note progression, you infringed on my copyright".
You have made me sad. :-P
I wonder how (or even if) the labels do this ... you can't compare every new song to every existing song. It seems like it would basically be intractable to prove that.
Maybe not the entire RIAA, but there are record labels which aren't members.
Fat Wreck Chords for example.
That would take a court ruling, legislation, or a freakin' miracle. These are the guys writing the current copyright laws (and exporting them via ACTA etc) ... which means they're 'greasing the wheels' an awful lot, so the lawmakers aren't going to cut them off.
Somehow, an industry cartel is dictating terms to government and getting away with it. They want it entrenched in law in every country that they get tithed.
Write original material?
Or, you know, maybe they like radio. Some people actually do.
Only if they can gain the trust of a fair amount of users.
I use Facebook, but under a fake name with as little personal information as I can give them. There's no way I'd trust Facebook with financial information.
I've no doubt that at least some users will think this is grand, but there's no way I'd ever use this. Their level of trust from me is arms length and suspicious.
Did you read TFA? or at least TFS?
These children which aren't getting vaccinated because their parents don't understand science are putting other children at risk.
So it may not be their own children which natural selection sorts out, it may be the children of parents who have accepted that vaccines work, aren't more likely to cause autism, and aren't part of some government conspiracy.
So their "personal belief exemptions" are putting the lives of other people at risk -- basically they've gotten the right to become potential carriers of disease:
You can't just have people opting out of things which is intended to prevent disease in greater society if it puts other people at risk. You're free to choose for yourself, but not when you're talking about communicable disease.
Someone needs to explain to these parents that the rest of the world shouldn't bear the risk of them being stupid. If it was only them and their offspring who might be affected, go ahead. But it isn't.
Dude, when it comes to copyright and terrorism, those trump the Amendments.
Oh, and I guess "free speech zones" might also as well. The Fourth Amendment within three states of a border is optional now. Probably a few things I've forgotten.
But both sides of the political spectrum are tending to want to step on some of those things all in the name of something else. That's actually kind of scary.
Because the *AA's managed to pass laws that made for ridiculous statutory damages.
So, it's an inflated number to allow them to sue for massive damages on the presumption that you've cost them vast sums of lost revenue that they can't prove. It basically says that in the FBI trailer on movies.
Not defending it, but that's how we got here. The *AA's don't believe in the concept of "personal use" or "fair use" -- as far as they are concerned, you have committed Great Evil.
Well, since I don't think that, I can't give you an answer to that.
My (albeit limited) understanding is that older structures in the brain than those found just in humans is involved in processing of music, and that it's far more fundamental to us than something which we simply learn (which is consistent with what you've just said).
If infants respond to music and move in time with the rhythm of music (essentially dancing really), then whatever is involved in that is some intrinsic structures in the brain and not purely socialized.
I think we've been steadily showing over the last decades that things we used to think were exclusively human traits are much more wide-spread in animals than was traditionally thought.
My guess would be that there's a lot more at play than 'simply' saying it's part of the deep structures or unique to humans. As usual, there's a lot more complexity and nuance in that kind of thing -- more likely, whatever evolved to give us the capacity for language also gives us a tendency towards music. And from what I've read, the music stuff is spread across more structures, and uses more parts of the brain than language does.
And that, is pretty cool stuff.
I have no idea, to be honest. But I stopped using eBay years ago, and the push towards PayPal was part of it.
They act like a bank, do bank-like things, but keep saying they're not a bank and therefore not covered by the same laws.
I'm pretty sure eBay basically said everybody needs to use PayPal (they own it after all) ... but people have been talking about how wretched PayPal is to deal with for better part of a decade now. I have zero trust in them, and I would only use them if they had to draw from a credit card, and if they weren't willing to do that ... well, I'd find another place to deal with.
I don't ever give anybody direct access to my accounts. I sure as hell wouldn't do it with PayPal. Even the mainstream media has covered this numerous times.
Oh, there's a choice, but it involves not using PayPal.
A surprising amount of people have opted for that.
In this case, you can more accurately say "reporting of science by the media fail".
This isn't the only instance of this, it's fairly well reported, and has been known about for some time.
People have done brain scans, cognitive tests, and actually a fair bit of stuff which demonstrate similar effects.
This is far from a sample size of one, but this piece glosses over all of the other stuff that's come before. (And if you want a citation, I've given it twice in this thread, a book by a professor of neurology at Colombia University, and he's got reams of actual scientific papers he's citing.)
The reporting is thin, but there's actually some reputable science that's been done around this.
Oh, and there's even a fair bit of evidence to suggest that infants respond to music and move rhythmically along with it, which strongly suggests that some very basic parts of the brain are associated with music from a very early age.
That's far more than procedural memory at play. If we respond to music before we've even begun to process language, that points to more fundamental things going on.
Which is pretty cool, really.
As I said elsewhere in this thread, you should read Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.
It's not a procedural memory thing, it's that different parts of the brain structures are actually involved in music than simple memory. It uses a wider set of brain structures, and isn't quite as localized. There's more aspects of the brain that participate here.
In many cases, even if the person wasn't a musician, songs from their youth and other music associations still linger. So someone who is almost completely uncommunicative will perk up and respond to music, and in some cases even sing along when they can't really do much else.
I realize we on Slashdot like to think we can explain most of this stuff with our vast knowledge of such things, but I believe your explanation is a bit simplified. It doesn't even begin to cover all of the cases in which people have been able to demonstrate that, even in the face of actual structural damage to the brain (like a stroke), music still resonates with us. It's not simply that you've learned the procedure from repeated practice. It's that a whole lot more of your brain is involved than the parts that are primarily used for language.
It's actually a fascinating read, written by a neurologist, and shows a lot of cases with really interesting results. As it goes through a bunch of cases, it highlights how they are different from one another and shows a lot of the commonalities.
I believe ultimately there is some belief that language evolved from music instead of the other way around. It would seem that people for whom music plays a big part in their life get some lasting benefit from it.
But, then again, I'm not a neuroscientist either. :-P
This isn't new, and it's been well known for years.
Read the book Musicophilia. There's literally dozens of cases in which people can no longer really communicate or otherwise have some diminished mental capacity, but they respond to music by either singing or playing. That part of the brain seems intact.
Heck, this might even be one of the cases in that book. But he's a professor of neurology, and I believe that was published in 2007.
I don't believe this is a new theory, and it certainly isn't the first time someone has demonstrated this. Given how long I've known this, I'm surprised this is being touted as a first time we've confirmed this.
And wait until your first six months or whatever are up, then you really find out what this will cost you.
You wait until you leave? ;-)
Well, kind of. See, you can't diagnose a sociopath in their childhood or teens, because they're not fully developed so the tests are inconclusive. Normal for a teenager isn't necessarily clinically altogether within 'normal'.
From what I understand, 4chan is full of people who are essentially no more developed than teenagers engaging in mass gross-out contests and fart jokes writ large and obscene, thus making them indistinguishable from sociopaths. Of course, I generalize.
Dude, seriously, if someone had to watch every possible bit of human depravity, gore, violence, and obscenities day in and day out for a year ... if at the end of it you're not a little fucked up and are really enjoying your job because you get to watch all that shit all day long ... then, yes, you too are probably already a Fucked Up Person.
"Tough Minded" in this case means "I'm so desensitized to violence and atrocity that this doesn't bother me", which is scary because you've dehumanized them (and therefore score one more point on the sociopath test) ... the ones that didn't want therapy would be the ones I'd worry about.
I would argue that if you take the most bad-assed military, police, or what have you ... unless someone has some serious issues of their own already which would make them enjoy it (which pretty much disqualifies them from doing the job), this kind of stuff 8 hours/day for a year is going to seriously fuck you up.
Unless you really want your military made up of vicious sadists, I completely fail to see how this kind of thing wouldn't cause lasting damage -- or at least the need for some heavy duty counseling and support.
That much exposure to every single horrible thing that ever gets filmed is bound to wear down anybody. And anybody it doesn't, likely scores in the very scary end of humanity.
A weak mind? I'm sorry, but I'm willing to bet after watching this stuff for long enough it's going to have an effect on anybody but a sociopath. Then too, but they'd probably enjoy it.
Soldiers and police offices get PTSD. The cops who work on child porn and the like get worn down. Heck, I bet people who work in ERs get a little twigged on this stuff.
You immerse anybody in this stuff day in and day out, and I think it's safe to assume there's going to be some lasting trauma.
And I have to assume that anybody who would volunteer for this and thrive on it ... well, you need to keep an eye on them because they're probably dangerous.
Anybody who thinks simply being tough-minded (as opposed to being highly twisted) is all that it would take to "man up" and get past this is likely full of crap.
Wow, I figure if anybody had to do that for a year, they should be given a pension, a quiet place to get away from things, and a LOT of therapy.
I can't imagine being the poor bastard that has to look at the worst stuff on the internet. I've glimpsed enough to know that I wouldn't want to see any more of it. I'm frequently appalled at some of the things people choose to see.
I think even the law enforcement guys can get fucked up from this, and they understand the need for support systems. Your first job our of school? That would ruin you forever.