Presumably they're not objecting to you selling things because they dislike the concept of a lamp. Presumably they're stopping you from selling things because they dislike the communicative content of the lamp... I.E. the woman's leg. Similarly, a program inherently a form of communication. But if it contains content that someone finds objectionable, by definition they're objecting to the cultural communication. It might be shallow and dumb, but then again it may not. Ulysses clearly is not.
*The dev kit cost is about the smallest hurdle in the process of getting a retail release on a console. Guaranteeing that you have the funding to pull off the title is usually the hardest.
When you and I make a retail title, the process is a lot different than Apple's phone approval. I don't want to get into too much detail since it is technically under NDA, but I couldn't imagine submitting a finished retail title to Microsoft and hearing back "we changed our minds and decided that boob games are out, so your title is rejected." Or being rejected for a wrong reason, with no way of contesting. Or quietly sitting in the queue with nobody responding for months. Or being rejected for being too similar to a game that Microsoft is developing but hadn't told anyone about.
XNA / Indies on the 360 is a lot more like this process... Build first, approve later. But the approval is coming from the community, rather than some arbitrary entity that decided political content was banned. There is feedback every step of the way. And the rules almost never change.
And there are different expectations on the consumer end too. If you buy a game for the PS3, you expect a baseline of quality and content, and that it won't be a total waste of your time. The iPhone is full junk that doesn't work / is useless / is pointless. Barcode generation apps that don't work because lasers don't scan LCD screens. Bubble levels that don't work because the creators didn't calibrate. Old RSS feed gateway apps that broke and nobody bothered to update. It is definitely wild-westey. When we go in and design a game with a 30 million dollar budget that 200 people will spend the next year and a half of their lives perfecting, the viewpoint is different.
I'm sure if more people developed for the major consoles, they'd spend more time complaining about the process. I know I do. Ask me about Nintendo sometime.
Have a tick box for adult or "unfiltered" content? Or letting the unwashed but brave masses go to non-apple app stores? The app store does, after all, have age-appropriate filters already in place. They just don't leverage it very much.
Say what you will about viruses, etc, a point that I agree entirely upon. But when someone sets their filter level to "adult" and downloads something called Boob Jiggle 2000, they know what they're getting. It wasn't just an accident. But protecting us from that sort of thing, also protects us from things like Ulysses, or Nine Inch Nails, or the Gutenberg Project. Or even Obama on a trampoline.
There is a big difference between filtering for safety reasons, and killing people's work because it offends their Christian sensibilities. This is especially offensive because they already have age-filters in place in the app store, and could easily remove the "objectionable" content for anyone who didn't want to see it.
Apple is not used to being a platform company, and they've been screwing it up royally. You don't wait until your developers are finished with a project to declare that the idea is invalid, you don't change the rules on developers mid-production, and you don't arbitrarily rescind approval once it has been given. I feel like we're witnessing the beginning of a repeat of history, where Apple has a dominant platform that starts making foolish and arbitrary rules and drives the developers to other platforms. Unless they learn fast, Android is going to eat their lunch (if it hasn't already).
If there is only one store, and it has unlimited shelf space and guaranteed profits, and by driving to any other store you risk having your car banned, then an editorial decision like "we refuse to sell anything involving cartoon wangs" quite effectively removes objectionable content from the public discourse. It's not as objectionable as government censorship, but it is still a form of censorship.
If an area only had Comcast as a potential ISP, and Comcast decided to block 4chan because it offended their Christian sensibilities, that would be a form of censorship. If Walmart convinced your town to pass a rule saying that all garage sales must happen in Walmart parking lots, and Walmart kicked your garage sale out of its parking lot because it didn't like your novelty lamp that looked like a woman's leg, that would be censorship.
Apple has gone greatly out of their way to force their store to be the only arbiter of content on the iPhone. Going to any other store requires software hacks and risks being banned from apple and the AT&T network. As the arbiter, they block content that is dangerous, remove content that violates copyrights, and censor content they find objectionable.
I had no idea that my ISP offered ESPN3, and seems to make this "exclusive" relationship much less exclusive. One can now get ESPN 3 on their Xbox 360's, but only if they can already get ESPN 3 on their computers. It will be nice to have the programming right there, like Netflix. But still, it's a bit odd.
It's possible. That's what developers do for PC's. But it does increase complexity quite a bit. Loading twice the data means twice the load times, which means any transition sections that mask loading need to be twice as big. There is also the question of bandwidth between chips, which has become a big issue this generation. And, of course, it takes more CPU cycles to render larger textures. The RAM caching of bullet holes that you mention would definitely be a viable use of RAM (as well as more caching in general). The rest tends to come with additional knock-on effects.
The N64's RAM expansion was a nice touch, but primarily because the console was so RAM bottlenecked. The 360's bottlenecks seem to be in on-disk space and interchip communication.
Consoles are fixed platforms. You can't upgrade the internals of a console that way, because games expect that fixed platform. Doubling RAM would simply mean that game developers would have to decide between playing on all consoles (with less RAM), or just playing on the new ones (with more RAM). It's not like a computer internally, that is abstracted enough to deal with upgraded components dynamically.
This is why consoles upgrade with more reliable, quieter, and cheaper hardware. But they almost never get upgraded from performance or specification standpoints.
None of which really matters on the Xbox anyway, as the disks can only take 8 GB max, 4 GB practical. You're maxing out that poor spinning DVD before you max out RAM.
Lag can also come from other people's networks. People connecting over Microsoft's wireless G dongle are notorious for lagging out everyone's online experiences.
Even N, though, adds a minimum extra 10ms of lag. It has great throughput and cleaner signals, but too much wireless noise and running toasters / etc can still kill your transfer. For serious gaming, unless your airspace is relatively clean, wired is still the way to go. With the way wireless networks for home are currently setup, they will always bee a speed penalty on top of wired networks.
Can you post a link to where it says that in detail? Having data dependent upon the ISP for a feature on a console seems like a very convoluted chain, likely to enrage a lot of people (and ISP's).
What about to their advertisers, who now get fewer real impressions and lowered return on their advertising campaigns? Doesn't that diminish their future likelyhood in investing in advertising and, therefore, reduce income to the websites?
I remember Opera's old attempt at installing an overarching structure on the chaos that is web pages. That allowed you to go to the site home, the "next page" and other seemingly straightforward interface choices. It guessed at these values. It also guessed correctly on maybe one out of every two sites.
The automatic conversion of websites into phone-friendly websites was a similar mess.
You can't just lop off large chunks of websites and expect navigation etc to still function. I suspect Safari (being a niche browser) will tout this feature for an iteration, then forget all about it by next one. And the websites that even notice the Safari traffic will shrug at the ereaderization of their sites.
I'd say about a quarter of the completely messed up machines I've seen have come from AntiVirus software that went rogue and deleted large chunks of the system. The only systems that I've had to entirely re-flash were from said destructive AV software. And all of those were either McAfee or Norton.
The idea of backing up to a hard drive is just frightening. Hard Disk Drives are what you need to keep data safe FROM. I have things in my refrigerator that live longer than some of these damned disks.
Of course, I don't trust tapes either. But I don't trust tapes a lot less than I don't trust Hard Drives.
Microsoft used to do this sort of thing, back when it had more of a monopoly over the software industry (and was less fearful of regulations). Forcing computer manufacturers to pay for a copy of windows for each computer they manufacture, whether or not that computer actually had windows on it? Breaking competitors software at an operating system level to make them look bad?
You're complaining about a lack of elegance and talent in modern music and yet you used that pun in your title?
Twitter is a communications medium that requires brevity and succinctness. It's a chance for friends to keep in touch about moderate to low-importance notifications in a way that is appropriate for their value. "I'm heading to Ikea later today. Anyone want to come?" "Need a replacement for an Ibanez Tubescreamer." Etcetera. It's a bit like the chatter that would happen when people chatter in person, but with a forced character limit. Someone saying "I've had a bad day" isn't interesting in and of itself, but it is interesting if it is from someone you happen to care about.
Sure, apple TV sales have gone up 35%. But they're still pretty bad. Apple even refers to it in the press as "a hobby." Maybe someday it will take off, but with verified 1st month sales of 100k (vs 1 million for the ipad), it's no hit.
They also discontinued several formats of the Shuffle, after many attempts at making it a hit.
The Air is seeming a bit creaky. Have you seen sales numbers, or Mac Event pushes? According to this analysis, the air is looking to be around 8% of Apple's total laptop sales.
Also, the cube was not the mini. The mini is a well-designed, compact machine with sufficient power and a low price. The cube was a beast of a thing, with grossly insufficient cooling, a weak processor, and a huge price. Similar philosophy maybe, but no striking it from Apple's list of products that failed to rock the world.
Also, you could buy an eMac almost anywhere: it wasn't just a school machine. But nobody did. It was a legitimate failure.
Not all products have to rock the world. If you're afraid of failing, you'll make bland crap that has no chance of succeeding. Apple is no different. Their products don't succeed because Apple's fanboys will buy anything. Clearly, there are certain things nobody will buy. But Apple does take enough creative risks in major ways, and spend the time polishing them well, that sometimes they catch on with the mass market.
When I grew up in the 80's and 90's the only way to listen to Dr Demento was on tape and later CD. By that time, no stations in my area were carrying him. It was all radio stations playing the major label's push-of-the-week.
The landscape changed. It used to be that the only place to find weird, unexpected, fun acts was Dr Demento. Now some kid in Texas can make a flash video and suddenlythe worldshows up at their inbox. Youtube, Digg, and even Facebook feeds all aggregate the offbeat for us.
I'm sad to see that Dr Demento hasn't quite found a footing on the internet (Pay only podcast? Good luck with that.), but a legendary 40 year run is nothing to sniffle at.
I don't know if I'd agree with this. If you look at the smartphone market at the time the iPhone launched, things were pretty barren. Similarly, the iPod was entering a market that didn't understand that no matter how much capacity you might have, you still need to fit into people's pockets. The iPhone 3G covered a major weakness in the original iPhone (2g browsing really, really sucks). Jobs brought to the market something that people wanted, and made the interface simple enough that it just works. That's a pretty good accomplishment.
And if you think that every apple product sells like hotcakes, you're missing quite a few. As a short list.
iTV ( that useless thing that isn't quite an Xbox 360 ) Motorola ROKR ( anyone remember Apple's pre-iPhone phone? ) eMac ( like a rehashed iMac, but long after laptops made them irrelevant ) Pippin ( that useless computer / video game console that wasn't quite a Playstation ) 20th anniversary macintosh Mac Cube Mac TV Quicktake ( a digital camera / giant blob of plastic ) Newton ( a PDA before PDA's existed ). eMate ( a netbook based upon Newton before netbooks existed )
On the one hand, I doubt nearly anyone in the military has the clearance to release that video. Also, singling out these pilots seems wrong: War does bad things to judgements. What needs to change is our perception that wars can be surgical and clean, with nobody collateral getting killed. In this case, a bunch of people were killed who shouldn't have been. But it seemed more like a bad judgement call than a rampage.
On the other hand, so what if the soldiers spent the intervening time doing good things? They opened fire on an unarmed van after shooting a group of reporters. The context is very different, but if I did that in the middle of New York, nobody would care if I spent half an hour volunteering at a local soup kitchen.
What I got from the video was that the structure of how we run this war encourages people to think in a specific way about the expendability of lives. The abstraction of looking through a remote camera screen at people carrying *something,* with the knowledge that they might kill you or the people you care about at any second, changes things. The military chain of command cleared that these people were not friendlies, therefore they must be hostiles. And it's not always clear.
The pentagon can say what it likes about surgical strikes and only getting the bad guys, but the fact remains that it is not possible. The remoteness and horrors of our wars turns normal, good people into people willing to throw puppies off of cliffs and laugh when bodies get run over. This isn't about the pilots. This is about why the UN warned us about our unmanned weapons. War just does that to people.
Anyone who thinks this can be manned by "a" law enforcement officer has no idea what they're talking about.
On a side note, why just Facebook? I come across obvious criminals on Craigslist every day, but reporting that is basically impossible. Why single out Facebook?
As a bit of a simplification, California is given special dispensation to set environmental regulations since it actually started regulating before the Feds did. Other states can opt to adhere to California's standards or the Feds. In practice, this means that many things are either built to Federal standards, or the usually higher California standards. Thus there is a degree of unity across the country, while still giving the states SOME leeway in setting rules. Manufacturers only have to be aware of 2 sets of regulations, not 50.
Again, that's a simplification of a hugely complex system. And there has been strong movement to bring California standards back into the fold. But it is one reason why you don't see stickers labeled "This product contains chemicals known to the state of Missouri to cause cancer."
It says "by the eye." It does not actually say "by your eye." Certain dictionaries expand the traditional definition of eye to include all photovoltaic devices, such as recording CCD's and fish-skins that sense darkness. And Merriam-Webster isn't as definitive as the Oxford English Dictionary, though I don't have one of those handy at the moment.
And of course, perception is more fluid than most people feel comfortable with. Certain people taste colors or feel sounds. If you put upside-down glasses on, within a week your brain will have re-organized your perception filter so that everything is back right-side up again. Remote haptic perception means that we have actual sizable portions of our brain dedicated to sensing with things that aren't actually part of our bodies, such as walking sticks. When talking in a foreign language, most people hear words: but talking in a native language, most people hear concepts. When I close my eyes and feel around a space, my brain intuitively translates this into a visual mockup of the space. The deaf people use the same part of their brain to make sense of braille as sighted people do to make sense of visual material, and we still call that "reading."
Your brain is getting a representation of the space inside it. Whether that route is visual sensor -> electrical stimulus -> brain, or visual sensor -> electrical stimulus -> compression waves -> electrical stimulus -> Brain, the ultimate point is similar. Is that "seeing"? If you're using cameras to sense stimulus around you, a completely holographic train running silently down the street at this person would still cause them to jump out of the way. They used a completely light-based medium to understand the situation they're in. That's a pretty practical definition of seeing to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably they're not objecting to you selling things because they dislike the concept of a lamp. Presumably they're stopping you from selling things because they dislike the communicative content of the lamp... I.E. the woman's leg. Similarly, a program inherently a form of communication. But if it contains content that someone finds objectionable, by definition they're objecting to the cultural communication. It might be shallow and dumb, but then again it may not. Ulysses clearly is not.
*The dev kit cost is about the smallest hurdle in the process of getting a retail release on a console. Guaranteeing that you have the funding to pull off the title is usually the hardest.
When you and I make a retail title, the process is a lot different than Apple's phone approval. I don't want to get into too much detail since it is technically under NDA, but I couldn't imagine submitting a finished retail title to Microsoft and hearing back "we changed our minds and decided that boob games are out, so your title is rejected." Or being rejected for a wrong reason, with no way of contesting. Or quietly sitting in the queue with nobody responding for months. Or being rejected for being too similar to a game that Microsoft is developing but hadn't told anyone about.
XNA / Indies on the 360 is a lot more like this process... Build first, approve later. But the approval is coming from the community, rather than some arbitrary entity that decided political content was banned. There is feedback every step of the way. And the rules almost never change.
And there are different expectations on the consumer end too. If you buy a game for the PS3, you expect a baseline of quality and content, and that it won't be a total waste of your time. The iPhone is full junk that doesn't work / is useless / is pointless. Barcode generation apps that don't work because lasers don't scan LCD screens. Bubble levels that don't work because the creators didn't calibrate. Old RSS feed gateway apps that broke and nobody bothered to update. It is definitely wild-westey. When we go in and design a game with a 30 million dollar budget that 200 people will spend the next year and a half of their lives perfecting, the viewpoint is different.
I'm sure if more people developed for the major consoles, they'd spend more time complaining about the process. I know I do. Ask me about Nintendo sometime.
Have a tick box for adult or "unfiltered" content? Or letting the unwashed but brave masses go to non-apple app stores? The app store does, after all, have age-appropriate filters already in place. They just don't leverage it very much.
Say what you will about viruses, etc, a point that I agree entirely upon. But when someone sets their filter level to "adult" and downloads something called Boob Jiggle 2000, they know what they're getting. It wasn't just an accident. But protecting us from that sort of thing, also protects us from things like Ulysses, or Nine Inch Nails, or the Gutenberg Project. Or even Obama on a trampoline.
There is a big difference between filtering for safety reasons, and killing people's work because it offends their Christian sensibilities. This is especially offensive because they already have age-filters in place in the app store, and could easily remove the "objectionable" content for anyone who didn't want to see it.
Apple is not used to being a platform company, and they've been screwing it up royally. You don't wait until your developers are finished with a project to declare that the idea is invalid, you don't change the rules on developers mid-production, and you don't arbitrarily rescind approval once it has been given. I feel like we're witnessing the beginning of a repeat of history, where Apple has a dominant platform that starts making foolish and arbitrary rules and drives the developers to other platforms. Unless they learn fast, Android is going to eat their lunch (if it hasn't already).
If there is only one store, and it has unlimited shelf space and guaranteed profits, and by driving to any other store you risk having your car banned, then an editorial decision like "we refuse to sell anything involving cartoon wangs" quite effectively removes objectionable content from the public discourse. It's not as objectionable as government censorship, but it is still a form of censorship.
If an area only had Comcast as a potential ISP, and Comcast decided to block 4chan because it offended their Christian sensibilities, that would be a form of censorship. If Walmart convinced your town to pass a rule saying that all garage sales must happen in Walmart parking lots, and Walmart kicked your garage sale out of its parking lot because it didn't like your novelty lamp that looked like a woman's leg, that would be censorship.
Apple has gone greatly out of their way to force their store to be the only arbiter of content on the iPhone. Going to any other store requires software hacks and risks being banned from apple and the AT&T network. As the arbiter, they block content that is dangerous, remove content that violates copyrights, and censor content they find objectionable.
Call a spade a spade. It's censorship.
This is what I was wondering. Can a summary judgement, taken because someone didn't show up, set precedent?
Thanks for the link!
I had no idea that my ISP offered ESPN3, and seems to make this "exclusive" relationship much less exclusive. One can now get ESPN 3 on their Xbox 360's, but only if they can already get ESPN 3 on their computers. It will be nice to have the programming right there, like Netflix. But still, it's a bit odd.
It's possible. That's what developers do for PC's. But it does increase complexity quite a bit. Loading twice the data means twice the load times, which means any transition sections that mask loading need to be twice as big. There is also the question of bandwidth between chips, which has become a big issue this generation. And, of course, it takes more CPU cycles to render larger textures. The RAM caching of bullet holes that you mention would definitely be a viable use of RAM (as well as more caching in general). The rest tends to come with additional knock-on effects.
The N64's RAM expansion was a nice touch, but primarily because the console was so RAM bottlenecked. The 360's bottlenecks seem to be in on-disk space and interchip communication.
Consoles are fixed platforms. You can't upgrade the internals of a console that way, because games expect that fixed platform. Doubling RAM would simply mean that game developers would have to decide between playing on all consoles (with less RAM), or just playing on the new ones (with more RAM). It's not like a computer internally, that is abstracted enough to deal with upgraded components dynamically.
This is why consoles upgrade with more reliable, quieter, and cheaper hardware. But they almost never get upgraded from performance or specification standpoints.
None of which really matters on the Xbox anyway, as the disks can only take 8 GB max, 4 GB practical. You're maxing out that poor spinning DVD before you max out RAM.
Lag can also come from other people's networks. People connecting over Microsoft's wireless G dongle are notorious for lagging out everyone's online experiences.
Even N, though, adds a minimum extra 10ms of lag. It has great throughput and cleaner signals, but too much wireless noise and running toasters / etc can still kill your transfer. For serious gaming, unless your airspace is relatively clean, wired is still the way to go. With the way wireless networks for home are currently setup, they will always bee a speed penalty on top of wired networks.
Can you post a link to where it says that in detail? Having data dependent upon the ISP for a feature on a console seems like a very convoluted chain, likely to enrage a lot of people (and ISP's).
What about to their advertisers, who now get fewer real impressions and lowered return on their advertising campaigns? Doesn't that diminish their future likelyhood in investing in advertising and, therefore, reduce income to the websites?
...Or embedding advertising in the main text block, like it used to be.
I remember Opera's old attempt at installing an overarching structure on the chaos that is web pages. That allowed you to go to the site home, the "next page" and other seemingly straightforward interface choices. It guessed at these values. It also guessed correctly on maybe one out of every two sites.
The automatic conversion of websites into phone-friendly websites was a similar mess.
You can't just lop off large chunks of websites and expect navigation etc to still function. I suspect Safari (being a niche browser) will tout this feature for an iteration, then forget all about it by next one. And the websites that even notice the Safari traffic will shrug at the ereaderization of their sites.
I'd say about a quarter of the completely messed up machines I've seen have come from AntiVirus software that went rogue and deleted large chunks of the system. The only systems that I've had to entirely re-flash were from said destructive AV software. And all of those were either McAfee or Norton.
The idea of backing up to a hard drive is just frightening. Hard Disk Drives are what you need to keep data safe FROM. I have things in my refrigerator that live longer than some of these damned disks.
Of course, I don't trust tapes either. But I don't trust tapes a lot less than I don't trust Hard Drives.
Microsoft used to do this sort of thing, back when it had more of a monopoly over the software industry (and was less fearful of regulations). Forcing computer manufacturers to pay for a copy of windows for each computer they manufacture, whether or not that computer actually had windows on it? Breaking competitors software at an operating system level to make them look bad?
You're complaining about a lack of elegance and talent in modern music and yet you used that pun in your title?
Twitter is a communications medium that requires brevity and succinctness. It's a chance for friends to keep in touch about moderate to low-importance notifications in a way that is appropriate for their value. "I'm heading to Ikea later today. Anyone want to come?" "Need a replacement for an Ibanez Tubescreamer." Etcetera. It's a bit like the chatter that would happen when people chatter in person, but with a forced character limit. Someone saying "I've had a bad day" isn't interesting in and of itself, but it is interesting if it is from someone you happen to care about.
Sure, apple TV sales have gone up 35%. But they're still pretty bad. Apple even refers to it in the press as "a hobby." Maybe someday it will take off, but with verified 1st month sales of 100k (vs 1 million for the ipad), it's no hit.
They also discontinued several formats of the Shuffle, after many attempts at making it a hit.
The Air is seeming a bit creaky. Have you seen sales numbers, or Mac Event pushes? According to this analysis, the air is looking to be around 8% of Apple's total laptop sales.
Also, the cube was not the mini. The mini is a well-designed, compact machine with sufficient power and a low price. The cube was a beast of a thing, with grossly insufficient cooling, a weak processor, and a huge price. Similar philosophy maybe, but no striking it from Apple's list of products that failed to rock the world.
Also, you could buy an eMac almost anywhere: it wasn't just a school machine. But nobody did. It was a legitimate failure.
Not all products have to rock the world. If you're afraid of failing, you'll make bland crap that has no chance of succeeding. Apple is no different. Their products don't succeed because Apple's fanboys will buy anything. Clearly, there are certain things nobody will buy. But Apple does take enough creative risks in major ways, and spend the time polishing them well, that sometimes they catch on with the mass market.
When I grew up in the 80's and 90's the only way to listen to Dr Demento was on tape and later CD. By that time, no stations in my area were carrying him. It was all radio stations playing the major label's push-of-the-week.
The landscape changed. It used to be that the only place to find weird, unexpected, fun acts was Dr Demento. Now some kid in Texas can make a flash video and suddenly the world shows up at their inbox. Youtube, Digg, and even Facebook feeds all aggregate the offbeat for us.
I'm sad to see that Dr Demento hasn't quite found a footing on the internet (Pay only podcast? Good luck with that.), but a legendary 40 year run is nothing to sniffle at.
I don't know if I'd agree with this. If you look at the smartphone market at the time the iPhone launched, things were pretty barren. Similarly, the iPod was entering a market that didn't understand that no matter how much capacity you might have, you still need to fit into people's pockets. The iPhone 3G covered a major weakness in the original iPhone (2g browsing really, really sucks). Jobs brought to the market something that people wanted, and made the interface simple enough that it just works. That's a pretty good accomplishment.
And if you think that every apple product sells like hotcakes, you're missing quite a few. As a short list.
iTV ( that useless thing that isn't quite an Xbox 360 )
Motorola ROKR ( anyone remember Apple's pre-iPhone phone? )
eMac ( like a rehashed iMac, but long after laptops made them irrelevant )
Pippin ( that useless computer / video game console that wasn't quite a Playstation )
20th anniversary macintosh
Mac Cube
Mac TV
Quicktake ( a digital camera / giant blob of plastic )
Newton ( a PDA before PDA's existed ).
eMate ( a netbook based upon Newton before netbooks existed )
On the one hand, I doubt nearly anyone in the military has the clearance to release that video. Also, singling out these pilots seems wrong: War does bad things to judgements. What needs to change is our perception that wars can be surgical and clean, with nobody collateral getting killed. In this case, a bunch of people were killed who shouldn't have been. But it seemed more like a bad judgement call than a rampage.
On the other hand, so what if the soldiers spent the intervening time doing good things? They opened fire on an unarmed van after shooting a group of reporters. The context is very different, but if I did that in the middle of New York, nobody would care if I spent half an hour volunteering at a local soup kitchen.
What I got from the video was that the structure of how we run this war encourages people to think in a specific way about the expendability of lives. The abstraction of looking through a remote camera screen at people carrying *something,* with the knowledge that they might kill you or the people you care about at any second, changes things. The military chain of command cleared that these people were not friendlies, therefore they must be hostiles. And it's not always clear.
The pentagon can say what it likes about surgical strikes and only getting the bad guys, but the fact remains that it is not possible. The remoteness and horrors of our wars turns normal, good people into people willing to throw puppies off of cliffs and laugh when bodies get run over. This isn't about the pilots. This is about why the UN warned us about our unmanned weapons. War just does that to people.
Anyone who thinks this can be manned by "a" law enforcement officer has no idea what they're talking about.
On a side note, why just Facebook? I come across obvious criminals on Craigslist every day, but reporting that is basically impossible. Why single out Facebook?
As a bit of a simplification, California is given special dispensation to set environmental regulations since it actually started regulating before the Feds did. Other states can opt to adhere to California's standards or the Feds. In practice, this means that many things are either built to Federal standards, or the usually higher California standards. Thus there is a degree of unity across the country, while still giving the states SOME leeway in setting rules. Manufacturers only have to be aware of 2 sets of regulations, not 50.
Again, that's a simplification of a hugely complex system. And there has been strong movement to bring California standards back into the fold. But it is one reason why you don't see stickers labeled "This product contains chemicals known to the state of Missouri to cause cancer."
It says "by the eye." It does not actually say "by your eye." Certain dictionaries expand the traditional definition of eye to include all photovoltaic devices, such as recording CCD's and fish-skins that sense darkness. And Merriam-Webster isn't as definitive as the Oxford English Dictionary, though I don't have one of those handy at the moment.
And of course, perception is more fluid than most people feel comfortable with. Certain people taste colors or feel sounds. If you put upside-down glasses on, within a week your brain will have re-organized your perception filter so that everything is back right-side up again. Remote haptic perception means that we have actual sizable portions of our brain dedicated to sensing with things that aren't actually part of our bodies, such as walking sticks. When talking in a foreign language, most people hear words: but talking in a native language, most people hear concepts. When I close my eyes and feel around a space, my brain intuitively translates this into a visual mockup of the space. The deaf people use the same part of their brain to make sense of braille as sighted people do to make sense of visual material, and we still call that "reading."
Your brain is getting a representation of the space inside it. Whether that route is visual sensor -> electrical stimulus -> brain, or visual sensor -> electrical stimulus -> compression waves -> electrical stimulus -> Brain, the ultimate point is similar. Is that "seeing"? If you're using cameras to sense stimulus around you, a completely holographic train running silently down the street at this person would still cause them to jump out of the way. They used a completely light-based medium to understand the situation they're in. That's a pretty practical definition of seeing to me.