The neighbourhood was all right when I moved there. (This was a highly rural area.) Over the years it deteriorated, as scum got run out of Los Angeles and moved out to the boonies, where the living was cheaper and no one was around to keep an eye on them.
After the first incident, it was several years before any of the local thugs came around again, because word got around that "there's a crazy person with a gun living on that ranch".:) (Actually, I get dead-calm in such situations, which is a lot more scary to perps than if you brandish your gun and yell.)
I don't live there anymore... However, I still own guns, and if you're up to no good against my person or property, I won't just crawl in a hole and let you get away with it. The cops are half an hour away at best, and meanwhile it's up to me to defend my person and my property.
It also falls under "know your police dept." In this case, the "bad cop" was an exception; the sheriff's department itself took a dim view of such behaviour (read my other post above, about how I got another bad cop fired by that same dept.) Admitting that he'd gotten run off someone's property where he had no busines being in the first place (no warrant, no probable cause) would have at the very least cost him his job, and quite possibly gotten him prosecuted. He's lucky my neighbour didn't follow him back to town and file a complaint (as I did in my incident).
In a corrupt department, yes, your escalation scenario could indeed be the result. However, as someone else in this thread points out -- if no one ever stands up to thugs, thugs get to continue and even expand their behaviour, which certainly isn't progress. Thuggery has to be stopped SOMEWHERE, or freedom is lost. Sometimes *you* are the point where it has to stop, or are in a position to help stop it. Should you always abrogate that responsibility of a free man, that of defending your freedom, just because the enemy is an element of the government? That's precisely when it's most important to stand up for yourself!
I should mention that these incidents were in Montana, where people are largely expected to be competent to defend themselves (including against bad government), not California, where people are expected to be defenseless sheep who submit to anything the jackboots want to do.
Well, you're probably right 99% of the time, but in this case it proved the right thing to do... especially since he caught the bad cop by surprise, and with no backup.
As to whether pulling a gun is always a bad idea... I've had to use threat of deadly force to run off scum four times myself... twice saving someone's life (one being my own). IMO, getting beat up or robbed or killed because you won't defend yourself is a worse idea.:)
Printscreen, then paste into something braindead like Paint, then save as GIF, is pretty foolproof.
As to document text -- the only format that's guaranteed clean is plain text. (RTF can carry metadata.) Copy and paste the visible text into Notepad or Editpad or some other pure text editor, and inspect it to make sure no "comments" or the like came along. If it needs formatting, use the simplest HTML possible, and do it by hand to ensure no ID flags wind up in the file.
Back in the 1970s, my nextdoor neighbour got harrassed like that. No good reason, he just looked like a victim, I guess. (He worked as a garbageman.)
Anyway one day the cop who'd done most of the harrassing came on my neighbour's property without a warrant, just to give him shit, and my neighbour came out with a shotgun and ran off the cop. And that was the end of the problem -- no more harrassment.
In the 1980s I had a bad cop move in next door. To cut to the chase, one night at 2am he and his buddy drove past and repeatedly shined their spotlight into my window, just to dick with me. I got up, flung on a coat and boots over my nightgear, and hitailed it into town, where I banged on the sheriff's contract-station door til someone finally opened it... complained to the guy on duty and got a confirm who was out in the car (my idiot neighbour and his buddy). I then drove to the main sheriff's office and complained again.
What got the bad cop in trouble wasn't the stupid harrassment, but the fact that while on duty he was out of his jurisdiction, which was strictly the airport. (We lived on the next road over, but it still counted.) Anyway, shortly afterward he was fired, his wife left him, and his house got repo'd. I stood outside and cheered as the bank hauled off his stuff.:D
Later another neighbour (who'd known this guy since he was a little kid) told me he'd been cashiered from the Navy "for the good of the service".
So, yeah... there are bad cops. And given a sampling of two, seems the best reaction is to stand up to them, and raise hell with their superiors (assuming they're not corrupt).
One problem is once you remove the water that keeps the soil in a slurry state, you've got a lowland subject to potential flooding. Tho I'm not sure that's really a problem, so long as you don't let morons build housing developments on it. Farming can be rather more flexible about its location, especially with annual crops.
And considering that we've built over the top of a lot of our best cropland (according to some studies, as much as HALF of the best cropland in America had been paved over by 1985) -- winter retreating northward, and tundra/targa/bogland becoming usable/farmable over the next few centuries, might actually save us over the long run.
An AC japes, "Surface vehicles?! So waddaya mean, you burrow through the bog with your Underminer(TM) burrowing drill vehicle each summer?"
Actually that might be more practical, cuz you sure can't use wheeled or tracked vehicles on that soft summer bog. You can't build on it either, without accounting for the fact that your structures will sink during summer thaw (even deep pilings may not suffice).
For a good word picture of seasonal life in the tundra, read Farley Mowat's book THE SIBERIANS.
Probably to some degree -- perhaps to about like Britain's peat bogs. I'm not saying it'd be a bad thing over the long haul, but it wouldn't be instantly usable either.
However, the targa and plains that that are NOT just frozen bogland are another thing -- given even another month of growing season, those areas could go from zero production to being as productive as anywhere else for dryland farming.
There's another word for "thawed tundra". It's "bogland", a state it already achieves for a couple months each summer, rendering it impassable to surface vehicles.
I had the same thought -- this model could turn existing counterfeiters into business partners, especially in markets that are presently unprofitable with a Megacorp's typical overhead. So let the counterfeiter absorb the manufacturing and distribution cost, and pay the royalty (as a percentage of their gross) as insurance against being busted/prosecuted. This amounts to free money for the content owner megacorp, with zero investment of their own in a relatively low-profit market.
Counterfeiters would probably line up around the block if paying a small post-sale royalty would ensure they got access to clean copies of new content, thus could raise their own prices and profits (as they'd be able to offer a higher-quality product) and could operate in the open, thus attracting a larger market.
Meanwhile, Megacorp gets a piece of the action in a market where previously they had no profit at all.
This, of course, assumes they can turn loose of the notion that they have to *control* the entire market end-to-end.
I doubt any of them will look seriously at it until some independent becomes wealthy using this model, tho... there's nothing so persuasive as a nicely turned out balance sheet.
Licencing fees for namebrand/trademarked characters tend to start in the mid-5-figures. Some go well up into 7 figures. Doesn't matter if you're just doing a thousand T-shirts that will show a net profit of $5000 -- the typical license terms want many times the small producer's expected profit up front, as their terms were designed around MEGACORP-sized partners, not CafePress-sized partners.
So -- paying that kind of fee would indeed be a failed business model before it even starts, because there's no way in hell the average small entrepreneur could begin to pay it, even if they want to.
Doctorow's royalties model would be directly proportional to your level of sales, whether that's Small Shop or Megacorp, without a huge upfront investment that by its very nature locks out everyone but Megacorps. The idea is to make it EASY and PROFITABLE (you can make more from selling "familiar" stuff) for any small producer to pay a royalty, rather than financially improbable for all but the largest partners.
Also, studios have become exceedingly adept at cooking the books to show that movies ALWAYS cost more to make than they can ever recoup in box-office receipts.
If you're making piddly money that doesn't put a dent in our real market -- we'll call you our R&D/marketing department. Companies might even be able to write that off as an ordinary business expense.
If you're grossing enough money to notice you exist -- then we want our cut.
And as to "teeth" -- how about this: if you don't either willingly cease and desist, or willingly pay up, then the reasonable 20% default royalty becomes a 50% royalty for, say, the next five years. This allows both for correction of honest mistakes (some small outfits might not realise licensing is required) AND penalties for wilfull infringement, without actually putting anyone out of business or fining them money they never made in the first place.
Occurs to me that this would also cover ordinary counterfeiters, who may be selling in a market that the actual owners can't profitably penetrate anyway -- 20% of something is still more profitable than 0% of nothing, so why not USE them rather than prosecute them??
I do a lot of surveys from legitimate market-research outfits (greenfieldonline, zoompanel, surveyspot, etc.) Just for S&G I tried the realage survey. It was pretty clear from how it's structured that it's compiling marketing demographics, probably for the prescription-drug and insurance industries. You might not notice this if you haven't taken a lot of market research surveys.
They won't get much use from my email addy, tho... I used a throwaway courtesy of spam.la:)
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
Seamonkey has this set to a default of 64. Is that a problem?
I did the other config stuff you mentioned and then tried Google Maps (which has been painfully slow since the last messing-with-the-interface). BIG improvement. Thanks!
Shit can happen, yeah. Mistakes get made, people being people. But when there are already an endless supply of natural routes for flu viruses to arrive from, it seems silly to go haring off after unlikely and imagined sources.
My favourite overly-snug tinfoil hat so far was the one that claimed it was engineered in order to kill off 3rd world populations... if so, why release it in bumfuck charparral? Mexico City would have been more to the point.
With some drugs, the expiration date definitely means something -- the drug or test kit or whatever actually degrades and becomes worthless. Diabetic Testape and epinephrine leap to mind -- both go dead very shortly after the expiration date. And some just get weaker over time (frex, oxytocin takes about 3 years after the stale date to go useless, but meanwhile you just double-dose it to get the same effect). However, others have an expiration date mainly to limit the manufacturer's legal liability. Frex, I have bottles of atropine and lidocaine that were stale-dated as of 1991, but they still work just as good as ever.
As a general rule, stuff in dry tablet form falls into that last category -- the expiration date is to limit legal liability, but the drug in fact is stable (so long as it's not exposed to sun or moisture) and may still be good years or decades later.
That's why we have individual little beakers (I forget what they're called) in the U.S., at least at every church I've seen in the past 50 years. It was recognised that sharing spit was a disease vector, and a needless risk to the congregation.
And as I mention above -- we had this flu (if one can define it by the symptoms) in north L.A. County last fall. Chances are it went south, not north, and given conditions in Mexico, quickly became a News Story -- despite being nothing so odd while it was still in the U.S.
So long as the world has the thousands of varieties of wild coronavirus, pigs, and ducks, we will have variants that become human flu. The only thing that's really news is that now we have good ways of tracking new variants thanks to the protein markers.
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The neighbourhood was all right when I moved there. (This was a highly rural area.) Over the years it deteriorated, as scum got run out of Los Angeles and moved out to the boonies, where the living was cheaper and no one was around to keep an eye on them.
After the first incident, it was several years before any of the local thugs came around again, because word got around that "there's a crazy person with a gun living on that ranch". :) (Actually, I get dead-calm in such situations, which is a lot more scary to perps than if you brandish your gun and yell.)
I don't live there anymore... However, I still own guns, and if you're up to no good against my person or property, I won't just crawl in a hole and let you get away with it. The cops are half an hour away at best, and meanwhile it's up to me to defend my person and my property.
It also falls under "know your police dept." In this case, the "bad cop" was an exception; the sheriff's department itself took a dim view of such behaviour (read my other post above, about how I got another bad cop fired by that same dept.) Admitting that he'd gotten run off someone's property where he had no busines being in the first place (no warrant, no probable cause) would have at the very least cost him his job, and quite possibly gotten him prosecuted. He's lucky my neighbour didn't follow him back to town and file a complaint (as I did in my incident).
In a corrupt department, yes, your escalation scenario could indeed be the result. However, as someone else in this thread points out -- if no one ever stands up to thugs, thugs get to continue and even expand their behaviour, which certainly isn't progress. Thuggery has to be stopped SOMEWHERE, or freedom is lost. Sometimes *you* are the point where it has to stop, or are in a position to help stop it. Should you always abrogate that responsibility of a free man, that of defending your freedom, just because the enemy is an element of the government? That's precisely when it's most important to stand up for yourself!
I should mention that these incidents were in Montana, where people are largely expected to be competent to defend themselves (including against bad government), not California, where people are expected to be defenseless sheep who submit to anything the jackboots want to do.
Well, you're probably right 99% of the time, but in this case it proved the right thing to do... especially since he caught the bad cop by surprise, and with no backup.
As to whether pulling a gun is always a bad idea... I've had to use threat of deadly force to run off scum four times myself... twice saving someone's life (one being my own). IMO, getting beat up or robbed or killed because you won't defend yourself is a worse idea. :)
Printscreen, then paste into something braindead like Paint, then save as GIF, is pretty foolproof.
As to document text -- the only format that's guaranteed clean is plain text. (RTF can carry metadata.) Copy and paste the visible text into Notepad or Editpad or some other pure text editor, and inspect it to make sure no "comments" or the like came along. If it needs formatting, use the simplest HTML possible, and do it by hand to ensure no ID flags wind up in the file.
Back in the 1970s, my nextdoor neighbour got harrassed like that. No good reason, he just looked like a victim, I guess. (He worked as a garbageman.)
Anyway one day the cop who'd done most of the harrassing came on my neighbour's property without a warrant, just to give him shit, and my neighbour came out with a shotgun and ran off the cop. And that was the end of the problem -- no more harrassment.
In the 1980s I had a bad cop move in next door. To cut to the chase, one night at 2am he and his buddy drove past and repeatedly shined their spotlight into my window, just to dick with me. I got up, flung on a coat and boots over my nightgear, and hitailed it into town, where I banged on the sheriff's contract-station door til someone finally opened it... complained to the guy on duty and got a confirm who was out in the car (my idiot neighbour and his buddy). I then drove to the main sheriff's office and complained again.
What got the bad cop in trouble wasn't the stupid harrassment, but the fact that while on duty he was out of his jurisdiction, which was strictly the airport. (We lived on the next road over, but it still counted.) Anyway, shortly afterward he was fired, his wife left him, and his house got repo'd. I stood outside and cheered as the bank hauled off his stuff. :D
Later another neighbour (who'd known this guy since he was a little kid) told me he'd been cashiered from the Navy "for the good of the service".
So, yeah... there are bad cops. And given a sampling of two, seems the best reaction is to stand up to them, and raise hell with their superiors (assuming they're not corrupt).
I wonder how feasible that might actually be?
One problem is once you remove the water that keeps the soil in a slurry state, you've got a lowland subject to potential flooding. Tho I'm not sure that's really a problem, so long as you don't let morons build housing developments on it. Farming can be rather more flexible about its location, especially with annual crops.
And considering that we've built over the top of a lot of our best cropland (according to some studies, as much as HALF of the best cropland in America had been paved over by 1985) -- winter retreating northward, and tundra/targa/bogland becoming usable/farmable over the next few centuries, might actually save us over the long run.
An AC japes, "Surface vehicles?! So waddaya mean, you burrow through the bog with your Underminer(TM) burrowing drill vehicle each summer?"
Actually that might be more practical, cuz you sure can't use wheeled or tracked vehicles on that soft summer bog. You can't build on it either, without accounting for the fact that your structures will sink during summer thaw (even deep pilings may not suffice).
For a good word picture of seasonal life in the tundra, read Farley Mowat's book THE SIBERIANS.
Probably to some degree -- perhaps to about like Britain's peat bogs. I'm not saying it'd be a bad thing over the long haul, but it wouldn't be instantly usable either.
However, the targa and plains that that are NOT just frozen bogland are another thing -- given even another month of growing season, those areas could go from zero production to being as productive as anywhere else for dryland farming.
There's another word for "thawed tundra". It's "bogland", a state it already achieves for a couple months each summer, rendering it impassable to surface vehicles.
In Latin, -us pluralizes as -i, not as -ii.
So that's cactus, cacti.
Cactii would be the plural of cactius, if that were a real word.
Exactly so. You can't make costs out of proportion to profits, then expect people to comply with your terms.
BTW nice work -- I especially like the silhouettes against the marsh grass, and the keyhole shots.
I had the same thought -- this model could turn existing counterfeiters into business partners, especially in markets that are presently unprofitable with a Megacorp's typical overhead. So let the counterfeiter absorb the manufacturing and distribution cost, and pay the royalty (as a percentage of their gross) as insurance against being busted/prosecuted. This amounts to free money for the content owner megacorp, with zero investment of their own in a relatively low-profit market.
Counterfeiters would probably line up around the block if paying a small post-sale royalty would ensure they got access to clean copies of new content, thus could raise their own prices and profits (as they'd be able to offer a higher-quality product) and could operate in the open, thus attracting a larger market.
Meanwhile, Megacorp gets a piece of the action in a market where previously they had no profit at all.
This, of course, assumes they can turn loose of the notion that they have to *control* the entire market end-to-end.
I doubt any of them will look seriously at it until some independent becomes wealthy using this model, tho... there's nothing so persuasive as a nicely turned out balance sheet.
We always made Nail Soup. Much more nutritious than Stone Soup. :)
But I get your point... yes, a few will just eat for nothing, but once someone contributes it's relatively easy to get most people to do likewise.
Licencing fees for namebrand/trademarked characters tend to start in the mid-5-figures. Some go well up into 7 figures. Doesn't matter if you're just doing a thousand T-shirts that will show a net profit of $5000 -- the typical license terms want many times the small producer's expected profit up front, as their terms were designed around MEGACORP-sized partners, not CafePress-sized partners.
So -- paying that kind of fee would indeed be a failed business model before it even starts, because there's no way in hell the average small entrepreneur could begin to pay it, even if they want to.
Doctorow's royalties model would be directly proportional to your level of sales, whether that's Small Shop or Megacorp, without a huge upfront investment that by its very nature locks out everyone but Megacorps. The idea is to make it EASY and PROFITABLE (you can make more from selling "familiar" stuff) for any small producer to pay a royalty, rather than financially improbable for all but the largest partners.
Also, studios have become exceedingly adept at cooking the books to show that movies ALWAYS cost more to make than they can ever recoup in box-office receipts.
The whole industry is one big money-laundry.
It seems fairly straightforward to me:
If you're making piddly money that doesn't put a dent in our real market -- we'll call you our R&D/marketing department. Companies might even be able to write that off as an ordinary business expense.
If you're grossing enough money to notice you exist -- then we want our cut.
And as to "teeth" -- how about this: if you don't either willingly cease and desist, or willingly pay up, then the reasonable 20% default royalty becomes a 50% royalty for, say, the next five years. This allows both for correction of honest mistakes (some small outfits might not realise licensing is required) AND penalties for wilfull infringement, without actually putting anyone out of business or fining them money they never made in the first place.
Occurs to me that this would also cover ordinary counterfeiters, who may be selling in a market that the actual owners can't profitably penetrate anyway -- 20% of something is still more profitable than 0% of nothing, so why not USE them rather than prosecute them??
I do a lot of surveys from legitimate market-research outfits (greenfieldonline, zoompanel, surveyspot, etc.) Just for S&G I tried the realage survey. It was pretty clear from how it's structured that it's compiling marketing demographics, probably for the prescription-drug and insurance industries. You might not notice this if you haven't taken a lot of market research surveys.
They won't get much use from my email addy, tho... I used a throwaway courtesy of spam.la :)
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.
Seamonkey has this set to a default of 64. Is that a problem?
I did the other config stuff you mentioned and then tried Google Maps (which has been painfully slow since the last messing-with-the-interface). BIG improvement. Thanks!
Seamonkey 1.9x gets 0/100, because the test script ran so slowly that it stalled out entirely.
... because the script that runs the referenced test ran so slowly in Seamonkey that it stalled out entirely.
This isn't unusual... hie yourself to realtor.com and watch it in -- uh, inaction any time you like.
Shit can happen, yeah. Mistakes get made, people being people. But when there are already an endless supply of natural routes for flu viruses to arrive from, it seems silly to go haring off after unlikely and imagined sources.
My favourite overly-snug tinfoil hat so far was the one that claimed it was engineered in order to kill off 3rd world populations... if so, why release it in bumfuck charparral? Mexico City would have been more to the point.
With some drugs, the expiration date definitely means something -- the drug or test kit or whatever actually degrades and becomes worthless. Diabetic Testape and epinephrine leap to mind -- both go dead very shortly after the expiration date. And some just get weaker over time (frex, oxytocin takes about 3 years after the stale date to go useless, but meanwhile you just double-dose it to get the same effect). However, others have an expiration date mainly to limit the manufacturer's legal liability. Frex, I have bottles of atropine and lidocaine that were stale-dated as of 1991, but they still work just as good as ever.
As a general rule, stuff in dry tablet form falls into that last category -- the expiration date is to limit legal liability, but the drug in fact is stable (so long as it's not exposed to sun or moisture) and may still be good years or decades later.
It works even better to let ducks live right in the pigpen. That's how it's done in Chinese virus labs, anyway. ;)
That's why we have individual little beakers (I forget what they're called) in the U.S., at least at every church I've seen in the past 50 years. It was recognised that sharing spit was a disease vector, and a needless risk to the congregation.
And as I mention above -- we had this flu (if one can define it by the symptoms) in north L.A. County last fall. Chances are it went south, not north, and given conditions in Mexico, quickly became a News Story -- despite being nothing so odd while it was still in the U.S.
So long as the world has the thousands of varieties of wild coronavirus, pigs, and ducks, we will have variants that become human flu. The only thing that's really news is that now we have good ways of tracking new variants thanks to the protein markers.