You forget that once you METER something, then it effects everything down the line. It's not just the payment -- it's the effort involved in dealing with the payment.
If someone at a school or business has to create a purchase order to request "X amount of projected Bits of Internet use" -- then the school/business has to meter and check and someone has to approve and someone else has to check the process.
Sure the internet is a flexible commodity -- but it's not just the COST that will go up, it's the speed that will go down. You've just changed it from free form expression to something that has to be justified each and every time. Might as well get out that AOL floppy and fire up the old Modem and see if the government is checking the phone lines.
When you start with "Reagan said..." you've already simplified beyond recognition.
Most anecdotes Reagan had of "this guy I know who could no longer help his children because of ____ " -- they were all completely made up. He got that bedtime story voice and a boatload of Bull -- and THAT sounds like a guy making sense and being authentic to a lot of fools. Reagan made a lot more sense before he sold out his Liberal rhetoric and started betraying actors for Hoover.
Anyone getting mod points as "insightful" for quoting Reagan shows that we still have people who haven't figured out that Supply Side is a fancy term for Economic Royalists about to crash the economy.
It takes a lot of myopia and selecting history editing to make anything from the Reagan era a good idea. Most Reagan fans still have not figured out that he doubled taxes on the self employed and only lowered it for businesses and the wealthy. Sure, this sounds like a troll comment -- but the difference is; it's true.
Oh, and Reaganites doubled the money going to Social Security -- which was right (except for the limit that kept wealthy people from paying more), so that SS is solvent. And yet, nobody knows that it's SUPPOSED to zero out around the time baby boomers are in the grave because it's mostly a transfer fund,... that's probably going to come as a shock and nonsense to most. That's why we have Think Tanks, so everyone else stops thinking.
It's funny how our media chooses something a few times a year that can tell a story and scare the public. Usually it's something from overseas, that we have to start behaving differently and checking on people coming across the border to prevent.
I just heard a story of some moron who yelled "I have Ebola" on an airplane, and they sent him back home. Why the overreaction? Is someone shouting nonsense MORE likely to have a disease after they say; "just kidding?" than the person next to them on the plane? How about people who get sick of stupid TSA nonsense and act out?
If someone shouted "I have C dificile" on a plane, everyone would say; "sit down and shut up?" Right, nothing would happen. It's almost as dangerous as someone shouting "I have the flu" that kills even more people each year but it's already here -- not something on a plane that requires a background check. Ebola and Al Qaeda are just the latest Pavlovian words that we must respect, otherwise someone needs to over react. It's OK that more Americans die each year from coal pollution or police shootings -- as long as it isn't the "bad guys" from over there. We blow up thousands and a few people get beheaded on TV and everyone MUST DO SOMETHING -- let's spend another trillion dollars without question.
It's so damn old and tired now how like clockwork, we get scared about some existential threat each fall. It's like our local TV stations pretending they've got hard hitting news and investigating a strip club, or the mechanic who replaces your old auto part with another old auto part and RIPS YOU OFF! Ignore the over draft fees from the bank and the hundred and one overpayments you make to a monopoly.
I don't know if this is a plan to distract us, or just an organic process of brain dead 24 hours news chasing the last safe stories that don't hurt the feelings of a paying sponsor -- but it damn sure seems the stay away from topics of real interest regardless of whether they are paid to or not.
This needs to be the major discussion I here from our "so called" leaders. Not fences with Mexico. People seem to be clueless and think everything is a cyclical cycle. Not true when you have a game changer like self-driving trucks or automated fast food.
From my experience (I Am Not An Eye Doctor) Eye fatigue can be seriously affected by the light in the room around your monitor. The fact that most people now have flat panel displays, mitigates some of the problem. People used to have CRT monitors and often they were at 60hz. The other problem is that we often have florescent lights and those are at 60hz as well. We perceive consistent light, while in fact the light in the room is flickering on and off all the time. And your eyes can in fact respond to these constant changes faster than you can perceive them and that causes a lot of the strain.
The other factor in strain is staring at the same position in space all the time; our eyes are designed to be constantly looking at objects that are both near and far and not doing so makes them weak. If you just remember to focus your eyes at an object about 15 feet away for a few seconds a few time an hour - this can do a lot to prevent "eye strain" -- in fact it's probably eye focusing weakness while the pupil is getting strained.
Dark room + bright monitor = not good. Have a bit of fill light around your monitor (not florescent) is better.
Having full spectrum light or something to look at behind the monitor -- YES that can help. But knowing how your eyes are getting weak is also part of the issue.
Actually, having a Job Hunting website give the heads up on which languages are dying makes perfect sense. Who else is going to first notice; "nobody is asking for a Perl programmer?"
It's like the Housing market as a bell-weather for the economy. More building starts means more money in circulation. More jobs in a programming language means there is demand for that skill set.
It could be a puff piece purchased to get clicks and then resumes, but I just posit the notion that collecting data on job positions is not a bad way to read the tea leaves.
That's why agencies that use the NSA services choose to re-route the sexting from the smart phone to ruin a person's reputation, rather than go after them on criminal grounds.
A problem with this statute is that it allows people we know to be guilty to get off.
Well I don't agree. People with power to incarcerate you following the rule of law and checks and balances is FAR MORE important to me, than some dark net distributor getting away with it.
Some things are legal and some are not -- and I can see many examples of where that decision was not informed.
It's better that a thousand guilty go free than one innocent go to prison. The guilty will commit another crime and we may catch them. But an abusive justice system scares me more than Al Qaeda.
1) The violation was of a UN resolution. The DAY it would expire. When was the last time the US cared about a UN resolution? All I can remember is that one time. So there was no violation found and no probable cause.
2) The US supports all kinds of dictatorships.
3) We were responsible for the deaths of many thousands. At least 2 million people were dispossessed of their homes. We didn't collect numbers on these deaths we caused because the lady charged with collecting that data was killed by friendly fire in the green zone on her way to the airport. The fact that "other Iraqis" killed even more people does not dismiss the fact that this would not have happened had we not bombed and invaded their country, destroyed their government, let the soldiers go home with their weapons, left the ammo depots with a couple padlocks on them and sometimes a guard or two, and generally set the country up with two religious factions and designed to fail.
The people in charge are responsible, and we were in charge while about 100,000 or more Iraqis died and 2 million more displaced, and thousands of birth defects which were likely due to depleted Uranium.
Anyway; invading another country is not trivial, and there was no reason to. Other than putting some oil companies back in the country and having the same production sharing agreements as they had before Saddam kicked them out. Is it a coincidence that our 14 fortified embassies are all located on the path of the oil pipeline? It was a resource war; plain and simple. It's just now that we have an internet, more people realize this than when we had the Spanish/American war.
I imagine that teleportation of complex objects would be a technique that did NOT require gathering data independent of an object. I figure anything transported would either have the "space around it" reassigned -- kind of like a carrier wave, or they would be smashed into a super dense object that had to transfer 100% of the energy to a receiver. Basically, you use the "equal and opposite" properties of physics to guarantee data transmission. However, you may have to jump on another pad if you are uncomfortable with suddenly being left handed.
Often, I see TV shows that dramatize the hindrance of proper procedure to convict a "bad guy". But what threat does Silk Road represent versus government agencies that use illegal data collection and secret information to convict people? More people die from legal prescriptions than illegal -- but regardless of what anyone believes about Silk Road's activities, they bypass laws that are designed to protect people (whether they do or not). While the justice system is bypassing it's own rules, or eroding legal protections.
Look at it this way; if all data is collected, and there are so many RULES we can break - then with enough data mining, all people at some point are breaking a RULE even if it does no harm to anyone else. Everyone is guilty. Enforcement then becomes merely a process of picking and choosing where you bother to enforce the law.
Silk Road isn't the "little guy", nor the big bad guy -- but I don't like the idea of secret information in any court case. It's the end of free expression because anyone who offends the system is already guilty. The trial is merely a formality.
So basically you can have your confident prince charming who sweeps you off your feet, and then take the risk of them continuing their princely conquests, or you can ask a guy out who is not so confident, and complain that he's not that exciting one day.
These are simple facts of life, but the take home lesson I think is that women are going to complain and wonder why stuff isn't working. Not to be a chauvanist but a realist. I think at least the non-macho Men like myself have a more realistic expectation of reality.
I think it's going to be more challenging for writers to create a scenario than even Battleship!
Is the hero going to use a laser beam, telepathy, or Jeff Goldbloom's laptop to steer geometric alien enemies into a well packed space in order to disable their ships? Or do they have a weakness to water? Or is our super weapon of the future large geometric shapes and we have to contract a super bright Chinese exchange student to quickly configure them in order to save the world, while John Glenn walks slowly in the background to stirring music?
The EASY part will be the battle scenes -- just hire the same FX group that did Enders game.
The HARD part is creating a movie where the plot is; "use large geometric shapes and pack them well!" If it's a comedy, I'd enlist people who stack boxes for a living. Maybe a giant fork lift with laser beams.
And the other giant elephant poop in the room that burns me up; A drone is a NEW WAY to allow surveillance on people. The attitude seems to be that "they have a RIGHT to find out everything the can" without actually letting anyone know what the burning need is. Technology is accelerating, but people don't seem to be at a greater threat of organizing, growing unions and becoming educated and empowered citizens in a Democracy.
Heck, you've got Wall Street brokers talking on PBS, and sleezy monopoly frankenfood peddlers endowing NPR, and since the Reagan era, there are no more civics classes -- so people don't know what a Congress person does anymore. Where is the threat?
Oh, you mean them bad guys you divert a Trillion dollars to chasing down rather than spend it on education or jobs -- so people here get angry and you have to spend another trillion spying on them so they don't make a mess of your perfect country that has no opportunity except for prison guards and drone operators? Yeah, well, I don't think the BAD GUY in the us are going to be doing stuff out in the open. They won't use their credit cards to buy bad guy equipment -- they'll steal it. They won't use their names to plot of facebook.
Honestly, it's all about keeping citizens from organizing and having some capability to disrupt them should they start acting like French and treat this country as if it belonged to the People, rather than stock holders.
Yes, American scientists seem to be trained in adsvertising their accomplishments too much. When I graduated we were tought to be modest, talk en write mostly factional. An American guest student had the habit of reporting each small result in a way someone else would only do if he truly believed it would earn him a Nobel prize.
What you are talking about is the very real pressure to "publish or perish". The fact is that those with better connections do get published and sited far more than the rest regardless of merit.
However, when scientists publish garbage, they can lose their credibility. You don't get a Nobel Prize for filling sheets of paper.
The fact that a good chunk of scientists are just that corrupt doesn't help either.
And most of those are the ones actively discrediting the 'good' ones because they've been paid off by the fossil fuel industry.
Seriously though, what evidence do you have that 'a good chunk' are corrupt?
A good deal of offal pulled from the nether regions of highly paid media pundits and think tanks.The fact that some people suspect the average scientist MORE than people who MAKE A PROFIT from the exact topic they are disparaging tells me that someone spent their money well to make sure people are ignorant.
That isn't to say I don't process what I'm told from all sources with a healthy dose of skepticism and logic. But I don't swat at butterflies all day just in case they might attack. I think I can depend on butterflies and scientists more than bees and pundits.
I think that critical thinking skills are something that scientists cannot trust American citizens to have. We are lead to believe that someone would have around 16 years of higher education, and take a job that pays at least a third of what they could make with the math and technical skills if they became stock brokers or media pundits -- and they do all this so they can lie about a passion for seeking truth and knowledge. It shows a complete lack of empathy or understanding of human nature.
If I'm wanting to rip people off, I'll open a pay-day loan or a bank and charge bounce fees to poor people -- I don't need to waste time with difficult science to fudge a climate report in the desperate hope of getting a meager research grant.
The Crooks that own the media and hire think tanks to make every controversy like dealing with the Tobacco industry -- they are to blame. They are a cancer on society. We have to do something about these idle, useless rich people gaming the system to ruin it for everyone else. What, are they not able to afford a prostitute and enough steak to eat? These entitled parasites need to be shut down. We face a few existential crisis right now but we can't deal with Climate Change or the end of cheap labor (replaced by robots) because money owns politics and the media.
Slashdot Mirror
We joke, but it's clearly a target for Denial of Service attacks.
Or anyone who can train a large group of Artic Terns to fly in a circle. Should be pretty easy if you just clip the left wing.
They should tax the bad news about the Hungarian government 3X if they really wanted to make money and put the boot down.
You forget that once you METER something, then it effects everything down the line. It's not just the payment -- it's the effort involved in dealing with the payment.
If someone at a school or business has to create a purchase order to request "X amount of projected Bits of Internet use" -- then the school/business has to meter and check and someone has to approve and someone else has to check the process.
Sure the internet is a flexible commodity -- but it's not just the COST that will go up, it's the speed that will go down. You've just changed it from free form expression to something that has to be justified each and every time. Might as well get out that AOL floppy and fire up the old Modem and see if the government is checking the phone lines.
When you start with "Reagan said..." you've already simplified beyond recognition.
Most anecdotes Reagan had of "this guy I know who could no longer help his children because of ____ " -- they were all completely made up. He got that bedtime story voice and a boatload of Bull -- and THAT sounds like a guy making sense and being authentic to a lot of fools. Reagan made a lot more sense before he sold out his Liberal rhetoric and started betraying actors for Hoover.
Anyone getting mod points as "insightful" for quoting Reagan shows that we still have people who haven't figured out that Supply Side is a fancy term for Economic Royalists about to crash the economy.
It takes a lot of myopia and selecting history editing to make anything from the Reagan era a good idea. Most Reagan fans still have not figured out that he doubled taxes on the self employed and only lowered it for businesses and the wealthy. Sure, this sounds like a troll comment -- but the difference is; it's true.
Oh, and Reaganites doubled the money going to Social Security -- which was right (except for the limit that kept wealthy people from paying more), so that SS is solvent. And yet, nobody knows that it's SUPPOSED to zero out around the time baby boomers are in the grave because it's mostly a transfer fund,... that's probably going to come as a shock and nonsense to most. That's why we have Think Tanks, so everyone else stops thinking.
It's funny how our media chooses something a few times a year that can tell a story and scare the public. Usually it's something from overseas, that we have to start behaving differently and checking on people coming across the border to prevent.
I just heard a story of some moron who yelled "I have Ebola" on an airplane, and they sent him back home. Why the overreaction? Is someone shouting nonsense MORE likely to have a disease after they say; "just kidding?" than the person next to them on the plane? How about people who get sick of stupid TSA nonsense and act out?
If someone shouted "I have C dificile" on a plane, everyone would say; "sit down and shut up?" Right, nothing would happen. It's almost as dangerous as someone shouting "I have the flu" that kills even more people each year but it's already here -- not something on a plane that requires a background check. Ebola and Al Qaeda are just the latest Pavlovian words that we must respect, otherwise someone needs to over react. It's OK that more Americans die each year from coal pollution or police shootings -- as long as it isn't the "bad guys" from over there. We blow up thousands and a few people get beheaded on TV and everyone MUST DO SOMETHING -- let's spend another trillion dollars without question.
It's so damn old and tired now how like clockwork, we get scared about some existential threat each fall. It's like our local TV stations pretending they've got hard hitting news and investigating a strip club, or the mechanic who replaces your old auto part with another old auto part and RIPS YOU OFF! Ignore the over draft fees from the bank and the hundred and one overpayments you make to a monopoly.
I don't know if this is a plan to distract us, or just an organic process of brain dead 24 hours news chasing the last safe stories that don't hurt the feelings of a paying sponsor -- but it damn sure seems the stay away from topics of real interest regardless of whether they are paid to or not.
Mod this up to 11.
This needs to be the major discussion I here from our "so called" leaders. Not fences with Mexico. People seem to be clueless and think everything is a cyclical cycle. Not true when you have a game changer like self-driving trucks or automated fast food.
From my experience (I Am Not An Eye Doctor) Eye fatigue can be seriously affected by the light in the room around your monitor. The fact that most people now have flat panel displays, mitigates some of the problem. People used to have CRT monitors and often they were at 60hz. The other problem is that we often have florescent lights and those are at 60hz as well. We perceive consistent light, while in fact the light in the room is flickering on and off all the time. And your eyes can in fact respond to these constant changes faster than you can perceive them and that causes a lot of the strain.
The other factor in strain is staring at the same position in space all the time; our eyes are designed to be constantly looking at objects that are both near and far and not doing so makes them weak. If you just remember to focus your eyes at an object about 15 feet away for a few seconds a few time an hour - this can do a lot to prevent "eye strain" -- in fact it's probably eye focusing weakness while the pupil is getting strained.
Dark room + bright monitor = not good. Have a bit of fill light around your monitor (not florescent) is better.
Having full spectrum light or something to look at behind the monitor -- YES that can help. But knowing how your eyes are getting weak is also part of the issue.
Actually, having a Job Hunting website give the heads up on which languages are dying makes perfect sense. Who else is going to first notice; "nobody is asking for a Perl programmer?"
It's like the Housing market as a bell-weather for the economy. More building starts means more money in circulation. More jobs in a programming language means there is demand for that skill set.
It could be a puff piece purchased to get clicks and then resumes, but I just posit the notion that collecting data on job positions is not a bad way to read the tea leaves.
That's why agencies that use the NSA services choose to re-route the sexting from the smart phone to ruin a person's reputation, rather than go after them on criminal grounds.
*wink*
A problem with this statute is that it allows people we know to be guilty to get off.
Well I don't agree. People with power to incarcerate you following the rule of law and checks and balances is FAR MORE important to me, than some dark net distributor getting away with it.
Some things are legal and some are not -- and I can see many examples of where that decision was not informed.
It's better that a thousand guilty go free than one innocent go to prison. The guilty will commit another crime and we may catch them. But an abusive justice system scares me more than Al Qaeda.
It's actually been "working" for a long time.
It just takes more energy to make it work, which won't work for making energy.
This post got modded up?
1) The violation was of a UN resolution. The DAY it would expire. When was the last time the US cared about a UN resolution? All I can remember is that one time. So there was no violation found and no probable cause.
2) The US supports all kinds of dictatorships.
3) We were responsible for the deaths of many thousands. At least 2 million people were dispossessed of their homes. We didn't collect numbers on these deaths we caused because the lady charged with collecting that data was killed by friendly fire in the green zone on her way to the airport. The fact that "other Iraqis" killed even more people does not dismiss the fact that this would not have happened had we not bombed and invaded their country, destroyed their government, let the soldiers go home with their weapons, left the ammo depots with a couple padlocks on them and sometimes a guard or two, and generally set the country up with two religious factions and designed to fail.
The people in charge are responsible, and we were in charge while about 100,000 or more Iraqis died and 2 million more displaced, and thousands of birth defects which were likely due to depleted Uranium.
Anyway; invading another country is not trivial, and there was no reason to. Other than putting some oil companies back in the country and having the same production sharing agreements as they had before Saddam kicked them out. Is it a coincidence that our 14 fortified embassies are all located on the path of the oil pipeline? It was a resource war; plain and simple. It's just now that we have an internet, more people realize this than when we had the Spanish/American war.
So, on balance, we can find an economic reason for not treating people like crap.
However, if someone could save a buck; die!
I imagine that teleportation of complex objects would be a technique that did NOT require gathering data independent of an object. I figure anything transported would either have the "space around it" reassigned -- kind of like a carrier wave, or they would be smashed into a super dense object that had to transfer 100% of the energy to a receiver. Basically, you use the "equal and opposite" properties of physics to guarantee data transmission. However, you may have to jump on another pad if you are uncomfortable with suddenly being left handed.
Often, I see TV shows that dramatize the hindrance of proper procedure to convict a "bad guy". But what threat does Silk Road represent versus government agencies that use illegal data collection and secret information to convict people? More people die from legal prescriptions than illegal -- but regardless of what anyone believes about Silk Road's activities, they bypass laws that are designed to protect people (whether they do or not). While the justice system is bypassing it's own rules, or eroding legal protections.
Look at it this way; if all data is collected, and there are so many RULES we can break - then with enough data mining, all people at some point are breaking a RULE even if it does no harm to anyone else. Everyone is guilty. Enforcement then becomes merely a process of picking and choosing where you bother to enforce the law.
Silk Road isn't the "little guy", nor the big bad guy -- but I don't like the idea of secret information in any court case. It's the end of free expression because anyone who offends the system is already guilty. The trial is merely a formality.
So basically you can have your confident prince charming who sweeps you off your feet, and then take the risk of them continuing their princely conquests, or you can ask a guy out who is not so confident, and complain that he's not that exciting one day.
These are simple facts of life, but the take home lesson I think is that women are going to complain and wonder why stuff isn't working. Not to be a chauvanist but a realist. I think at least the non-macho Men like myself have a more realistic expectation of reality.
I think it's going to be more challenging for writers to create a scenario than even Battleship!
Is the hero going to use a laser beam, telepathy, or Jeff Goldbloom's laptop to steer geometric alien enemies into a well packed space in order to disable their ships? Or do they have a weakness to water? Or is our super weapon of the future large geometric shapes and we have to contract a super bright Chinese exchange student to quickly configure them in order to save the world, while John Glenn walks slowly in the background to stirring music?
The EASY part will be the battle scenes -- just hire the same FX group that did Enders game.
The HARD part is creating a movie where the plot is; "use large geometric shapes and pack them well!" If it's a comedy, I'd enlist people who stack boxes for a living. Maybe a giant fork lift with laser beams.
And the other giant elephant poop in the room that burns me up; A drone is a NEW WAY to allow surveillance on people. The attitude seems to be that "they have a RIGHT to find out everything the can" without actually letting anyone know what the burning need is. Technology is accelerating, but people don't seem to be at a greater threat of organizing, growing unions and becoming educated and empowered citizens in a Democracy.
Heck, you've got Wall Street brokers talking on PBS, and sleezy monopoly frankenfood peddlers endowing NPR, and since the Reagan era, there are no more civics classes -- so people don't know what a Congress person does anymore. Where is the threat?
Oh, you mean them bad guys you divert a Trillion dollars to chasing down rather than spend it on education or jobs -- so people here get angry and you have to spend another trillion spying on them so they don't make a mess of your perfect country that has no opportunity except for prison guards and drone operators? Yeah, well, I don't think the BAD GUY in the us are going to be doing stuff out in the open. They won't use their credit cards to buy bad guy equipment -- they'll steal it. They won't use their names to plot of facebook.
Honestly, it's all about keeping citizens from organizing and having some capability to disrupt them should they start acting like French and treat this country as if it belonged to the People, rather than stock holders.
Well shouldn't the burden be; "does not infringe constitutional rights" and not "might take away our fun of snooping on everyone"?
We have a "climategate" controversy because more money is spent to keep people ignorant than to do research today.
Yes, American scientists seem to be trained in adsvertising their accomplishments too much. When I graduated we were tought to be modest, talk en write mostly factional. An American guest student had the habit of reporting each small result in a way someone else would only do if he truly believed it would earn him a Nobel prize.
What you are talking about is the very real pressure to "publish or perish". The fact is that those with better connections do get published and sited far more than the rest regardless of merit.
However, when scientists publish garbage, they can lose their credibility. You don't get a Nobel Prize for filling sheets of paper.
The fact that a good chunk of scientists are just that corrupt doesn't help either.
And most of those are the ones actively discrediting the 'good' ones because they've been paid off by the fossil fuel industry.
Seriously though, what evidence do you have that 'a good chunk' are corrupt?
A good deal of offal pulled from the nether regions of highly paid media pundits and think tanks.The fact that some people suspect the average scientist MORE than people who MAKE A PROFIT from the exact topic they are disparaging tells me that someone spent their money well to make sure people are ignorant.
That isn't to say I don't process what I'm told from all sources with a healthy dose of skepticism and logic. But I don't swat at butterflies all day just in case they might attack. I think I can depend on butterflies and scientists more than bees and pundits.
I think that critical thinking skills are something that scientists cannot trust American citizens to have. We are lead to believe that someone would have around 16 years of higher education, and take a job that pays at least a third of what they could make with the math and technical skills if they became stock brokers or media pundits -- and they do all this so they can lie about a passion for seeking truth and knowledge. It shows a complete lack of empathy or understanding of human nature.
If I'm wanting to rip people off, I'll open a pay-day loan or a bank and charge bounce fees to poor people -- I don't need to waste time with difficult science to fudge a climate report in the desperate hope of getting a meager research grant.
The Crooks that own the media and hire think tanks to make every controversy like dealing with the Tobacco industry -- they are to blame. They are a cancer on society. We have to do something about these idle, useless rich people gaming the system to ruin it for everyone else. What, are they not able to afford a prostitute and enough steak to eat? These entitled parasites need to be shut down. We face a few existential crisis right now but we can't deal with Climate Change or the end of cheap labor (replaced by robots) because money owns politics and the media.
They do, but after taking 8 liters, they won't need it anymore.