TV is no "dumber" now than it was twenty years ago.
While this is true on an industry-wide basis, what isn't true today, that was true twenty years ago, was the number of independent stations that chose their own programming mix. This allowed more independent producers to create and sell programming. Today, most markets are programmed by the major networks, and reruns aren't shown on local TV anymore, but are relegated to cable for the most part.
What does this mean? It means that if the latest and greatest crap isn't appealing, there isn't very much else that is being shown that can draw viewership. It also means that a lot of the programming that might have made it on local and network TV is going to cable instead.
The execs are morons. They pay for show development, for pilots, and then for the actual show. (on average, it's 10% at each stage, ie 1000 pitches become 100 scripts, then 10 pilots, then maybe 1 show actually makes it on the air...) They then cancel the show in the first 6 weeks because they didn't get enough viewers.
Uh, hello? If everybody launches their show at about the same time, you never let people catch up and get to know the characters, because you're missing an episode due to baseball, etc., then how exactly is a show supposed to pick up an audience? Why should I bother tuning in if I hardly know the characters?
Buffy would never have made it today. Neither would Seinfeld. Yet both were successes once the word got around and the writing continued.
"Protecting" content makes no sense, if the show never takes off, they just junk the episodes. (Actually, they show them overseas, but essentially, the domestic value is next to nothing if there's no audience.) Viewed in that light, you'd think at least the first half of the first season would be available from every source you can get your hands on, in order to suck people into viewing on that channel, on that time slot, come second half of the premiere season. Give people DVDs with the premiere episode so they can prime the market. Allow free downloads of the first episode so people can bittorrent them.
If there's a market out there, make sure they have a means to find your product! And the network execs are wondering why people are defecting to cable in droves...
Home defense requires different tools. Massad Ayoob is an excellent resource for setting up multiple lines of defense, of which lethal force is the last one. If you feel that you need a firearm for home defense, shotguns and handguns are usually what are recommended in most home situations, due to the danger of overpenetration and need to maneuver in close quarters. Extremely rural areas, where your nearest neighbor is miles away, are an exception to this. (An XM109 would be a nice addition to your personal armory if you ever needed it, assuming: #1 they'll sell you one, #2 you can find ammo for it, #3 you can survive the massive recoil produced upon shooting it and, #4 if you could get the Class III license needed to posess a "Destructive Device", since it chambers a round larger than.50 cal - although I think it's safe to say it would be mega-overkill in most situations, not to mention extremely expensive to maintain the license.)
Shooting is not only fun (although it can be expensive in terms of ammo and range time), but also a practical skill of benefit to everyone. Why use taxpayer money to (infrequently) train and qualify police and military snipers/shooters, when you can let them go out and buy their own rifles and ammo, and do extra training on their own time that the mandated government budget won't allow? Why restrict these firearms (and hence the ability to train with them) to government agencies only, when in time of dire need, you have to draw upon all able bodied men and women (ie the average citizen.) Why reduce the market for private companies to produce needed firearms and components by destroying the civilian market for their products?
Does anyone else find it depressing that US services personnel seem to be increasingly buying their own equipment?
I find it rather refreshing, actually. Can you imagine how long the testing and approvals process would be to introduce anything of use on the battlefield? And how many taxpayer dollars would be used to do it? Remember, everything has to be bid on (well, almost everything). And for an individual soldier to justify having to get different equipment in a system designed to supply the same thing to pretty much everyone is a daunting thought.
I'd rather just give my tax money over to the soldiers, and have them spend it on what they need (whether it be Jolly Rancher hard candies, or Level IV body armor.) I imagine they can BUY better rifles as citizens from private dealers here in the states, than they get issued. There are exceptions to this of course - places like New Jersy, Massachussets, and New York, where the government has decided that citizens cannot be trusted to arm themselves. The People's Republic of California has publicly declared sniper/hunter/target shooter types unwelcome here, and come Jan 1st, 2005, rifles chambering.50 BMG here will be classified as "assault weapons" and subject to ban/registration/confiscation/destruction, thanks to our overzealous Citizen's Protection Committee in Sacramento.
Pretty much anywhere else in the country, you can pick up tuned rifles chambering.50BMG, Nato 5.56mm, and accessories for both. Magazine shortages? With the expiration of the infamously ineffective Assault Weapons Ban, NEW 30 round magazines are available for cheap (30 round mags were always available, even during the ban, but were slightly more expensive than market prices would dictate in absence of the ban on new manufacture for civilian use.)
Keep in mind that for regular army troops, the US already provides a mind-boggling array of equipment that nobody else in the world issues to average troops (as opposed to elite assault units.) GPS, night vision, aimpoint scopes, etc. This has its own logistical supply issues of course (ie, having to haul batteries of several different types).
i recall even from Gulf War I that soldiers were bringing their own GPS kit.
There weren't enough of the military descrambling GPS receivers to go around (again, a logistical issue, not necessarialy a money issue). They got around this by turning off the selective degradation provided for civilian use (now off by default) and just buying truckloads of off the shelf civilian receivers. With the degradation off in that area, soldiers who didn't want to wait for the new units to percolate through the supply chain probably opted just to buy their own. Logistics (and prioritization) again.
From the impression I'm getting from reading the article, their niche is to take gaming and marrying it to the movie theatre model. I'm not sure that this is such a hot idea, given that the movie theatre business has been in trouble for a number of years (ie, static, or declining number of tickets, and massive costs associated with the opening of new mega-multiplexes to stay competitive, that just serve to cannibalize business at existing theatre properties in the local area.) However, the key advantage of adopting the movie model is that you sell food and drink to viewers. I would imagine that it will be $5 hot dog/pizza and $2 soda concessions that pay the bill, not the $5 an hour or whatever rate they end up charging. Using warehouse space to cut costs probably helps.
Re:Gun rights primer
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The constitution mentions the importance of a well regulated militia. This leaves open the possiblity of regulation, which could go as far as banning certain types of weapons in certain cases.
From Dictionary.com: regulate
1. To control or direct according to rule, principle, or law.
2. To adjust to a particular specification or requirement: regulate temperature.
3. To adjust (a mechanism) for accurate and proper functioning.
4. To put or maintain in order: regulate one's eating habits.
As with many things in a document more than 200 years old, the language and choice of vocabulary is subject to interpretation, and those interpretations subject to debate.
Some claim that "well-regulated" refers to the maintaince of a organized milita, subject to government purview, in absence of a standing army (ie, regulated by the government.) Others put forward the interpretation that "well-regulated" refers to a militia that just well trained, as to obviate the need for a standing army and the power that it would confer (in terms of the power of force, and the power of taxation to support such a standing army) to any municipal, state, or (this would be in the future) federal government.
Obviously, in today's America, with its all-volunteer standing military, and the federal income tax (which has only been in effect for about 91 years out of the 228 years that this republic has been in existence, and was originally levied only on the very richest of rich), the power has most definitely shifted to a federal government that did not exist at the time that this country was founded.
I think many people are waking up to the fact that entrusting any one centralized entity with so much power is a very, very, very bad idea - precisely the lesson that the founders of the United States attempted to lay down in the way that they wrote our constitution, and structured our government. That this much power attracts those who would seek to bend that power to their ends, as we can see from all of the special interests who shop their bills around Congress, and the politicking from both parties to maintain the power they have (by gerrymandering their congressional districts to create "safe seats", for example.)
It has been clear for some time that not every type of armament is illegal. Nuclear weapons, to cite an extreme example, are not.
I think you meant the following:
It has been clear for some time that not every type of armament is legal. Nuclear weapons, to cite an extreme example, are not.
Re:Gun rights primer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yeah, because an armed populace would prevent a major world power from invading your land today.
Like Iraq for example.
An armed populace isn't there to stop an invasion. It's there to discourage one, by making occupation fiendishly expensive, and breaking the invader's will (and bankbook). The colonials were vastly outgunned by the British, and yet we won. Why? Because at a certain point, it wasn't worth it to the British to continue operations over such a long distance at that time. In Vietnam, the US was forced to pull out because the war had dragged on too long in the eyes of the US public, despite the fact that we had crushed a huge portion of the NVA. In Afghanistan, the Soviets conceded defeat at the hands of farmers and sheep/goat herders.
In each of these situations, the "insurgents" had outside aid - the colonials relied on the French, the Vietcong relied on the Chinese, the Afghanis relied on the US. However, the irregulars had to make up the core of the fighting force, and for that, you have to have individuals with arms, and the experience to use them.
The United States is in an interesting state. We have an all-volunteer military (Coast Guard, Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force), as opposed to some nations in Europe and Asia, that have conscript armies with required military service. The idea behind subjecting every male to compulsory military service is to create a pool of able-bodied cannon fodder that you can equip and arm in the event of war, with a minimum of training (since, theoretically, they've all gone through basic.) In many other countries, the United States included, we rely on volunteers to make up our military forces (including the Reserves and the National Guard), and subsequent to regular service, the Individual Ready Reserves (made up of veterans) to call up in time of need.
You notice that in either case, the government needs to expend taxpayer money to train and equip its soldiers. If you acknowledge the Second Amendment as an individual, rather than a collective right, you can allow individual citizens to train and equip themselves, in the comfort of their own communities, without having to spend a single dime of taxpayer money (although government sponsored programs such as the Civilian Marksmanship Program sure do help to encourage individual firearms ownership.)
I'm no expert on asphalt but wouldn't an SUV with knobby tires (because you need them to drive to the mall, you know) be running up greater road damage roughly in proportion to its greater fuel consumption?
Absolutely. In fact, in many residential roads, SUVs of a certain weight or above (say, a H2) are illegal, precisely because they fall into commercial class weight. Taxing a fuel-efficient car, which derives part of the efficiency by being very light, by mileage, unfairly subsidizes larger vehicles that actually cause damage.
Face it, it's an idiot band-aid that, like the proposed telecommunications tax to fund more government flab that was just defeated, merely creates another layer of bureaucracy dedicated to sucking dollar bills out of our wallets. If they could just force us to give half our money to the government, and then require us to fill out forms to get it back, they would... wait, they already do that!
You can't treat your employees better than everyone else does. Shorter work weeks for salaried employees translates into higher wages. This will obviously hurt your ability to compete. (Compare this to the outsourcing situation.)
Your chain of reasoning appears sound, but the foundation is shaky. You're assuming that you can get more work for the same amount of money if you work your developers more - ie, that it is a linear relationship. By your logic, if you can prevent your employees from sleeping, eating, or going to the bathroom, you can get even more productivity out of them.
People are NOT machines. And even machines need downtime for maintenance or otherwise you're setting up disasters waiting to happen (as mechanics in the airline and train industries can attest).
My belief is that treating creative employees like machines isn't going to increase your profits in the long run, and is a questionable tactic even in the short run (like booking orders early to qualify them as sales for this quarter.) The cost of turnover is a major one, as you lose valued knowledge and experience, and you handicap the people left behind by forcing them to take time out of their schedules to bring new hires up to speed. This is how projects fall behind and get majorly fubared, and why documentation ends up being totally inadequate to deal with the situation.
Am I right? Until there's a major development house that can compete with EA on equal terms with a different way of staffing, I guess the jury is out.
Take off your rose colored glasses. Capitalism works that way only under certain conditions which are largely disappearing- labor and management need to have equity. If one gets an upper hand this idealized scenario breaks down.
But just as equally, the conditions upon which traditional labor and management structures are built upon are changing. There's a lot more competition in today's global marketplace, and a lot more market to be had. Technology frees the worker from having to be chained to one location (ie, a factory), working at a piece of capital-intensive equipments (such as a 200lb sheet metal press.) Today, you can have programmers and artists in far flung places, collaborating on projects without a surplus of management bozos.
If you're sick of working for a place like EA, and you have the drive, you can start your own company. I'm sure you can find some greedy bastard VCs who want a part of that 2.8 billion dollar market that EA has. Provide better perks and more reasonable hours than EA, deliver your product on time and in better shape, and set a new model of how the games industry should be.
Open Source != Free Development. You still have to pay them to code up the apps, set up the installation, and to maintain them. At least if you make the source available at the end, you'll get lasting benefit for the PUBLIC taxpayer money spent on the project, and if the source was open to begin with, you won't have problems where the vendor decides to hold you hostage in forcing you to "upgrade" because Application Suite Foo is no longer being supported.
Remember, unlike physical items, once the coding for a piece of software is is done, it costs you nothing to make copies of it. Besides, if you don't like it, go work for the private sector.
It's not just the developers who are being worked ridiculous hours. It's also animators as well. Many of the union protections obtained back when animators did work for 2D union signatories are largely unapplicable to 3D work, since it's a different job classification. Games work is completely out of union purview.
I recall listening to one person from my department relating having to work unpaid overtime (anything over 8 hours a day, or 40 hours a week in California is considered overtime - or at least, it USED to be), and still having to come in during the weekend, by herself to finish up scripting and animating 10 character cut-scenes. Now that's INSANE.
Well, you can get Mozilla, although that's even worse in terms of built-in features. You don't have to use the search bar in Firefox (although it's damn handy - having 20 different targets, from wikipedia.org to google.com, is a great way to set up your browser.) In fact, you can remove the search bar completely, by customizing your browser layout.
Time to pool funds with like-minded geeks and buy a nice 15-mile plot of land in Nevada to turn into your town/city. Make sure it's close to rail and a good airport, and if the prices are right, near enough to a decent sized university or college so you don't have to found your own. Use co-ops for power, telephone, etc., and reserve the most of your taxes to lure good medical/dental/emergency services to the area.
You don't have to build the town now. But you'd be best to have the land ready and zoned out, so that when you do, you can set it up in one go when you're ready to give up on California. Having companies ready to do the move with you, so you'll have jobs there is a good idea also... Nevada is an ideal place for this, since there aren't any taxes to speak of (compared to California), but you're still within an hour or so of the major cities on the West Coast via air, and a few hours by rail.
Oh, and make sure you draw up a good town charter that precludes the possibility of a California-style government suddenly taking hold of your new community...
If you are going to get your news off the net, at least do it from a reputible source like news.yahoo.com or news.google.com.
Both of whom poll other news sources for their stories. It's not as though yahoo or google go out and do their own reporting - you're getting an aggregate from a variety of different sources, each with their own POV - a POV dictated by the audience that the source is reporting to. Filtering happens at every step - from the choice of story, to the reporter's prior understanding of the parties involved and the situation, to the editor's choice of what to cut for length.
In some situations, the story may be slanted, or will omit some information, in order to comply with cultural, government, or social views. In others, vital information will just be left out, just simply for time - not everybody wants to be an investigative journalist, as those stories take time and effort to put together.
Relying on bloggers (who in turn rely on their readers, other bloggers, and news.yahoo.com/news.yahoo.com for their story leads) is no less valid than following "mainstream" media or news aggregates. Everybody is serving their respective readership with the choices of what to print, and how in-depth they take it.
What I find most interesting about blogs (political considerations aside), is that you can post instant feedback without having to wait days (or weeks) for your letter to the editor to appear, in the very back of the paper, or seeing retractions/corrections appearing in very small print on the inside of the paper. In that way, I believe blogs have come to serve a very important role in letting non-institutional (ie, not government, "legitimate" news, or corporations, etc.) individuals dissect, comment upon, and if necessary, challenge "official" accounts of stories and events, in realtime.
Most engineers, songwriters, and filmmakers support the IP system as it stands.
I don't know about that. They may support it in the abstract, but only because they've been led to believe that the alternative is chaos and anarchy (sound familiar?) Certainly engineers, songwriters, writers, and filmmakers who have been screwed over by the patent/copyright system, would take issue with the current IP system, which, if you look closely, has changed greatly since the patent/copyright system of 10-15 yrs ago, all due to technology, which has created new markets and destroyed old ones.
Also associated with this are the increasing number of people who believe that litigation and licensing, not manufacturing/development, are the way to run a sustainable business. Because of the negative impact of these factors on US competitiveness (don't listen to the established oligarchies who just want to protect their personal lunches), reforming IP law, and curbing the negative impact of lawsuits in general on the willingness to take risks, are really issues that affect ALL citizens.
The problem is that the lobbyists with money all represent established, old-tech companies, like oil, automobiles, gas/coal/oil power plants, land developers, etc. Ironically, many of these companies have shifted their operations toward becoming more environmentally compliant, as quite a few of them are international conglomerates with operations/plants outside of the US.
What's being left out of the equation are all the technologies that the US could be developing if we were on the forefront of compliance - things like CO2 sequestration, alternative power systems, etc. Regulation has a cost (it creates economic friction), but where there's economic friction (inefficiency) there's an opportunity. If we took the lead on these things, we could be building a whole new export industry - equipment to retrofit existing plants to deliver Kyoto compliance.
What we need is a progressive interpretation of the Kyoto agreement in the states - one that would allow the same levels of growth, as opposed to the current negative interpretation, which is that going Kyoto would freeze American competitiveness (a given if we keep doing things the same old way.) Unfortunately, I think one reason that the US has been reluctant to commit, is because we're no longer willing to innovate as strongly as we used to - and personally, I blame trial lawyers for that (in addition to a bad patent and copyright system.) Why take the risk of putting $11M in development for a new exhaust control system, if at some point, some lawyer will point to your system, and instead of highlighting that the system saved the combined lives of 100 people (80yr lifespan) over 10 years of operation, point to the possibility that if you had spent an additional $1M, you could have saved 10 more people, and then sue you on behalf of the theoretical 10 more people.
If you need evidence for this, look at the cars and car systems in Europe and Japan, that they're not willing to release in the US for fear of litigation. Toyota is developing cars for the elderly in Japan, but they refuse to commit to selling any of those models in the US for fear of getting sued. Dalmier-Chrysler is selling the Two-Fours in Canada, but environmental compliance aside, they're unwilling to sell those vehicles in the US for safety (ie, litigation) reasons as well. Copyrights and patents also will contribute to this problem - basically, anything that enshrines the status quo, and deters development on anything new. If nobody is willing to innovate in the US, Kyoto treaty or no, we're going to have job problems...
Ahhh, but security and detectability are key problems. If the network is detectable, it doesn't matter if they can eavesdrop on the content of your transmissions - they can do traffic analysis and use the signal itself to do direction finding. If the network isn't detectable (to enemy intelligence) then the question becomes, how do friendlies find local friendlies to talk with (discovery problem.)
Being able to wire up a localized data net isn't difficult. Being able to wire up a battlefield-wide data net that can survive jamming and attack is hard.
Another example, if you take your first Amendment claim and apply it to the second, wouldn't you argue that the Federal government has no claim to prevent you from owning fully automatic machine guns? Or SAMs or fighter airplanes for that matter?
At certain points in history, all 3 of those items were fully legal within the United States. Full auto machine guns were regulated in 1934, and new manufacture for non-military/law enforcement was banned in 1986. Fighter airplanes, I believe, can still be purchased (assuming you have the money to fuel and maintain the beast), although arming it is another matter entirely. You also need to repaint the markings to comply with FAA marking regulations. Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) - well, you can't import any, due to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) restrictions. However, you could probably build one, although I'm unsure of domestic regulations concerning posession of such a device.
Many of the libraries in the country carry copyrighted material. You can walk in and peruse the books at your leisure, for free. Same idea, only you grant access to a lot more people. Scholars routinely pay to get copies of rare items from libraries for research, and every time a query comes in, they have to haul the book out, and run it through a copier. It would be a lot more intelligent to scan once, store it, and make it available on demand.
The chief benefit? Even if the original is lost or destroyed, the digital version lives on - a big issue, assuming that ANY item ever enters the public domain from now on, the way that they were supposed to. Hell, I'd lay out money for a copy of the Library of Congress on a set of blue-ray DVDs, and so would many large corporations (those that still have research labs, that is), universities and colleges, as well as other organizations and governmental entities around the world.
Especially in larger cities that have a widespread suburban sprawl (like Dallas, Houston, LA, Seattle, Atlanta) that makes owning a bigger car easier, if not something of a status symbol.
I don't know about the rest of LA, but in West LA, where high-end SUVs used to dominate the roads, I'm instead now seeing Priuses everywhere. New, 2004, incredibly hard to get, Priuses. That's the new status symbol - being able to get a car that lists new for $20,000 but requires a year-long waiting list, and is available on at a market price of $28,000, used. Funny enough, I even saw a Twofour driving down Westwood Blvd. once - I have no idea if it was street-legal though...
The peak of the SUV fad is over. Everybody has them. Everybody can get them (cheap with rebates.) They're flooding used card lots, and people are discovering that parking in lots designed for passenger cars is a pain, roof clearance becomes an issue, and that they're burning fuel like crazy, even when they're driving solo. Having one no longer means that you're rich - just that you're paying a lot more for your gas. The only people who will continue buying trucks/SUVs, are the people who bought them before they became known as SUVs - people who live in non-urban areas, where traction drive becomes important (ie, mud, snow, sand), and you need to move cargo (feed, equipment, etc.)
I wonder how many people on/. played Pathways into Darkness...
For those who don't know (and who would moderate as offtopic) Pathways into Darkness was one of the FIRST Bungie games, and considered by some to be the forerunner of an underlying mythos that ties all of the Bungie games together (with possible exception of Oni, although some argue about that too.)
You know you've delved too deeply into Bungie's games when you see se7ens and pfors everywhere...
I actually got to talk to a TI engineer after the screening of EP 1 (in Burbank.) If I remember correctly, they were running a highly redundant raid, with about 320 gb storage, to store a 2k image at 4:3 (they expanded to wide screen using an anamorphic lens on the projector, because the DLP chips were 4:3). The engineer said that if they had been able to trim a few dozen gb, they could have put everything on a tape...
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TV is no "dumber" now than it was twenty years ago.
While this is true on an industry-wide basis, what isn't true today, that was true twenty years ago, was the number of independent stations that chose their own programming mix. This allowed more independent producers to create and sell programming. Today, most markets are programmed by the major networks, and reruns aren't shown on local TV anymore, but are relegated to cable for the most part.
What does this mean? It means that if the latest and greatest crap isn't appealing, there isn't very much else that is being shown that can draw viewership. It also means that a lot of the programming that might have made it on local and network TV is going to cable instead.
The execs are morons. They pay for show development, for pilots, and then for the actual show. (on average, it's 10% at each stage, ie 1000 pitches become 100 scripts, then 10 pilots, then maybe 1 show actually makes it on the air...) They then cancel the show in the first 6 weeks because they didn't get enough viewers.
Uh, hello? If everybody launches their show at about the same time, you never let people catch up and get to know the characters, because you're missing an episode due to baseball, etc., then how exactly is a show supposed to pick up an audience? Why should I bother tuning in if I hardly know the characters?
Buffy would never have made it today. Neither would Seinfeld. Yet both were successes once the word got around and the writing continued.
"Protecting" content makes no sense, if the show never takes off, they just junk the episodes. (Actually, they show them overseas, but essentially, the domestic value is next to nothing if there's no audience.) Viewed in that light, you'd think at least the first half of the first season would be available from every source you can get your hands on, in order to suck people into viewing on that channel, on that time slot, come second half of the premiere season. Give people DVDs with the premiere episode so they can prime the market. Allow free downloads of the first episode so people can bittorrent them.
If there's a market out there, make sure they have a means to find your product! And the network execs are wondering why people are defecting to cable in droves...
Home defense requires different tools. Massad Ayoob is an excellent resource for setting up multiple lines of defense, of which lethal force is the last one. If you feel that you need a firearm for home defense, shotguns and handguns are usually what are recommended in most home situations, due to the danger of overpenetration and need to maneuver in close quarters. Extremely rural areas, where your nearest neighbor is miles away, are an exception to this. (An XM109 would be a nice addition to your personal armory if you ever needed it, assuming: #1 they'll sell you one, #2 you can find ammo for it, #3 you can survive the massive recoil produced upon shooting it and, #4 if you could get the Class III license needed to posess a "Destructive Device", since it chambers a round larger than .50 cal - although I think it's safe to say it would be mega-overkill in most situations, not to mention extremely expensive to maintain the license.)
Shooting is not only fun (although it can be expensive in terms of ammo and range time), but also a practical skill of benefit to everyone. Why use taxpayer money to (infrequently) train and qualify police and military snipers/shooters, when you can let them go out and buy their own rifles and ammo, and do extra training on their own time that the mandated government budget won't allow? Why restrict these firearms (and hence the ability to train with them) to government agencies only, when in time of dire need, you have to draw upon all able bodied men and women (ie the average citizen.) Why reduce the market for private companies to produce needed firearms and components by destroying the civilian market for their products?
Does anyone else find it depressing that US services personnel seem to be increasingly buying their own equipment?
.50 BMG here will be classified as "assault weapons" and subject to ban/registration/confiscation/destruction, thanks to our overzealous Citizen's Protection Committee in Sacramento.
.50BMG, Nato 5.56mm, and accessories for both. Magazine shortages? With the expiration of the infamously ineffective Assault Weapons Ban, NEW 30 round magazines are available for cheap (30 round mags were always available, even during the ban, but were slightly more expensive than market prices would dictate in absence of the ban on new manufacture for civilian use.)
I find it rather refreshing, actually. Can you imagine how long the testing and approvals process would be to introduce anything of use on the battlefield? And how many taxpayer dollars would be used to do it? Remember, everything has to be bid on (well, almost everything). And for an individual soldier to justify having to get different equipment in a system designed to supply the same thing to pretty much everyone is a daunting thought.
I'd rather just give my tax money over to the soldiers, and have them spend it on what they need (whether it be Jolly Rancher hard candies, or Level IV body armor.) I imagine they can BUY better rifles as citizens from private dealers here in the states, than they get issued. There are exceptions to this of course - places like New Jersy, Massachussets, and New York, where the government has decided that citizens cannot be trusted to arm themselves. The People's Republic of California has publicly declared sniper/hunter/target shooter types unwelcome here, and come Jan 1st, 2005, rifles chambering
Pretty much anywhere else in the country, you can pick up tuned rifles chambering
Keep in mind that for regular army troops, the US already provides a mind-boggling array of equipment that nobody else in the world issues to average troops (as opposed to elite assault units.) GPS, night vision, aimpoint scopes, etc. This has its own logistical supply issues of course (ie, having to haul batteries of several different types).
i recall even from Gulf War I that soldiers were bringing their own GPS kit.
There weren't enough of the military descrambling GPS receivers to go around (again, a logistical issue, not necessarialy a money issue). They got around this by turning off the selective degradation provided for civilian use (now off by default) and just buying truckloads of off the shelf civilian receivers. With the degradation off in that area, soldiers who didn't want to wait for the new units to percolate through the supply chain probably opted just to buy their own. Logistics (and prioritization) again.
From the impression I'm getting from reading the article, their niche is to take gaming and marrying it to the movie theatre model. I'm not sure that this is such a hot idea, given that the movie theatre business has been in trouble for a number of years (ie, static, or declining number of tickets, and massive costs associated with the opening of new mega-multiplexes to stay competitive, that just serve to cannibalize business at existing theatre properties in the local area.) However, the key advantage of adopting the movie model is that you sell food and drink to viewers. I would imagine that it will be $5 hot dog/pizza and $2 soda concessions that pay the bill, not the $5 an hour or whatever rate they end up charging. Using warehouse space to cut costs probably helps.
From Dictionary.com:
regulate As with many things in a document more than 200 years old, the language and choice of vocabulary is subject to interpretation, and those interpretations subject to debate.
Some claim that "well-regulated" refers to the maintaince of a organized milita, subject to government purview, in absence of a standing army (ie, regulated by the government.) Others put forward the interpretation that "well-regulated" refers to a militia that just well trained, as to obviate the need for a standing army and the power that it would confer (in terms of the power of force, and the power of taxation to support such a standing army) to any municipal, state, or (this would be in the future) federal government.
Obviously, in today's America, with its all-volunteer standing military, and the federal income tax (which has only been in effect for about 91 years out of the 228 years that this republic has been in existence, and was originally levied only on the very richest of rich), the power has most definitely shifted to a federal government that did not exist at the time that this country was founded.
I think many people are waking up to the fact that entrusting any one centralized entity with so much power is a very, very, very bad idea - precisely the lesson that the founders of the United States attempted to lay down in the way that they wrote our constitution, and structured our government. That this much power attracts those who would seek to bend that power to their ends, as we can see from all of the special interests who shop their bills around Congress, and the politicking from both parties to maintain the power they have (by gerrymandering their congressional districts to create "safe seats", for example.)
It has been clear for some time that not every type of armament is illegal. Nuclear weapons, to cite an extreme example, are not.
I think you meant the following:
It has been clear for some time that not every type of armament is legal. Nuclear weapons, to cite an extreme example, are not.
Yeah, because an armed populace would prevent a major world power from invading your land today.
Like Iraq for example.
An armed populace isn't there to stop an invasion. It's there to discourage one, by making occupation fiendishly expensive, and breaking the invader's will (and bankbook). The colonials were vastly outgunned by the British, and yet we won. Why? Because at a certain point, it wasn't worth it to the British to continue operations over such a long distance at that time. In Vietnam, the US was forced to pull out because the war had dragged on too long in the eyes of the US public, despite the fact that we had crushed a huge portion of the NVA. In Afghanistan, the Soviets conceded defeat at the hands of farmers and sheep/goat herders.
In each of these situations, the "insurgents" had outside aid - the colonials relied on the French, the Vietcong relied on the Chinese, the Afghanis relied on the US. However, the irregulars had to make up the core of the fighting force, and for that, you have to have individuals with arms, and the experience to use them.
The United States is in an interesting state. We have an all-volunteer military (Coast Guard, Navy, Marines, Army, Air Force), as opposed to some nations in Europe and Asia, that have conscript armies with required military service. The idea behind subjecting every male to compulsory military service is to create a pool of able-bodied cannon fodder that you can equip and arm in the event of war, with a minimum of training (since, theoretically, they've all gone through basic.) In many other countries, the United States included, we rely on volunteers to make up our military forces (including the Reserves and the National Guard), and subsequent to regular service, the Individual Ready Reserves (made up of veterans) to call up in time of need.
You notice that in either case, the government needs to expend taxpayer money to train and equip its soldiers. If you acknowledge the Second Amendment as an individual, rather than a collective right, you can allow individual citizens to train and equip themselves, in the comfort of their own communities, without having to spend a single dime of taxpayer money (although government sponsored programs such as the Civilian Marksmanship Program sure do help to encourage individual firearms ownership.)
I'm no expert on asphalt but wouldn't an SUV with knobby tires (because you need them to drive to the mall, you know) be running up greater road damage roughly in proportion to its greater fuel consumption?
Absolutely. In fact, in many residential roads, SUVs of a certain weight or above (say, a H2) are illegal, precisely because they fall into commercial class weight. Taxing a fuel-efficient car, which derives part of the efficiency by being very light, by mileage, unfairly subsidizes larger vehicles that actually cause damage.
Face it, it's an idiot band-aid that, like the proposed telecommunications tax to fund more government flab that was just defeated, merely creates another layer of bureaucracy dedicated to sucking dollar bills out of our wallets. If they could just force us to give half our money to the government, and then require us to fill out forms to get it back, they would... wait, they already do that!
You can't treat your employees better than everyone else does. Shorter work weeks for salaried employees translates into higher wages. This will obviously hurt your ability to compete. (Compare this to the outsourcing situation.)
Your chain of reasoning appears sound, but the foundation is shaky. You're assuming that you can get more work for the same amount of money if you work your developers more - ie, that it is a linear relationship. By your logic, if you can prevent your employees from sleeping, eating, or going to the bathroom, you can get even more productivity out of them.
People are NOT machines. And even machines need downtime for maintenance or otherwise you're setting up disasters waiting to happen (as mechanics in the airline and train industries can attest).
My belief is that treating creative employees like machines isn't going to increase your profits in the long run, and is a questionable tactic even in the short run (like booking orders early to qualify them as sales for this quarter.) The cost of turnover is a major one, as you lose valued knowledge and experience, and you handicap the people left behind by forcing them to take time out of their schedules to bring new hires up to speed. This is how projects fall behind and get majorly fubared, and why documentation ends up being totally inadequate to deal with the situation.
Am I right? Until there's a major development house that can compete with EA on equal terms with a different way of staffing, I guess the jury is out.
Take off your rose colored glasses. Capitalism works that way only under certain conditions which are largely disappearing- labor and management need to have equity. If one gets an upper hand this idealized scenario breaks down.
But just as equally, the conditions upon which traditional labor and management structures are built upon are changing. There's a lot more competition in today's global marketplace, and a lot more market to be had. Technology frees the worker from having to be chained to one location (ie, a factory), working at a piece of capital-intensive equipments (such as a 200lb sheet metal press.) Today, you can have programmers and artists in far flung places, collaborating on projects without a surplus of management bozos.
If you're sick of working for a place like EA, and you have the drive, you can start your own company. I'm sure you can find some greedy bastard VCs who want a part of that 2.8 billion dollar market that EA has. Provide better perks and more reasonable hours than EA, deliver your product on time and in better shape, and set a new model of how the games industry should be.
Open Source != Free Development. You still have to pay them to code up the apps, set up the installation, and to maintain them. At least if you make the source available at the end, you'll get lasting benefit for the PUBLIC taxpayer money spent on the project, and if the source was open to begin with, you won't have problems where the vendor decides to hold you hostage in forcing you to "upgrade" because Application Suite Foo is no longer being supported.
Remember, unlike physical items, once the coding for a piece of software is is done, it costs you nothing to make copies of it. Besides, if you don't like it, go work for the private sector.
Oh, did I neglect to mention, she works at EA.
It's not just the developers who are being worked ridiculous hours. It's also animators as well. Many of the union protections obtained back when animators did work for 2D union signatories are largely unapplicable to 3D work, since it's a different job classification. Games work is completely out of union purview.
I recall listening to one person from my department relating having to work unpaid overtime (anything over 8 hours a day, or 40 hours a week in California is considered overtime - or at least, it USED to be), and still having to come in during the weekend, by herself to finish up scripting and animating 10 character cut-scenes. Now that's INSANE.
Well, you can get Mozilla, although that's even worse in terms of built-in features. You don't have to use the search bar in Firefox (although it's damn handy - having 20 different targets, from wikipedia.org to google.com, is a great way to set up your browser.) In fact, you can remove the search bar completely, by customizing your browser layout.
Time to pool funds with like-minded geeks and buy a nice 15-mile plot of land in Nevada to turn into your town/city. Make sure it's close to rail and a good airport, and if the prices are right, near enough to a decent sized university or college so you don't have to found your own. Use co-ops for power, telephone, etc., and reserve the most of your taxes to lure good medical/dental/emergency services to the area.
You don't have to build the town now. But you'd be best to have the land ready and zoned out, so that when you do, you can set it up in one go when you're ready to give up on California. Having companies ready to do the move with you, so you'll have jobs there is a good idea also... Nevada is an ideal place for this, since there aren't any taxes to speak of (compared to California), but you're still within an hour or so of the major cities on the West Coast via air, and a few hours by rail.
Oh, and make sure you draw up a good town charter that precludes the possibility of a California-style government suddenly taking hold of your new community...
If you are going to get your news off the net, at least do it from a reputible source like news.yahoo.com or news.google.com.
Both of whom poll other news sources for their stories. It's not as though yahoo or google go out and do their own reporting - you're getting an aggregate from a variety of different sources, each with their own POV - a POV dictated by the audience that the source is reporting to. Filtering happens at every step - from the choice of story, to the reporter's prior understanding of the parties involved and the situation, to the editor's choice of what to cut for length.
In some situations, the story may be slanted, or will omit some information, in order to comply with cultural, government, or social views. In others, vital information will just be left out, just simply for time - not everybody wants to be an investigative journalist, as those stories take time and effort to put together.
Relying on bloggers (who in turn rely on their readers, other bloggers, and news.yahoo.com/news.yahoo.com for their story leads) is no less valid than following "mainstream" media or news aggregates. Everybody is serving their respective readership with the choices of what to print, and how in-depth they take it.
What I find most interesting about blogs (political considerations aside), is that you can post instant feedback without having to wait days (or weeks) for your letter to the editor to appear, in the very back of the paper, or seeing retractions/corrections appearing in very small print on the inside of the paper. In that way, I believe blogs have come to serve a very important role in letting non-institutional (ie, not government, "legitimate" news, or corporations, etc.) individuals dissect, comment upon, and if necessary, challenge "official" accounts of stories and events, in realtime.
Most engineers, songwriters, and filmmakers support the IP system as it stands.
I don't know about that. They may support it in the abstract, but only because they've been led to believe that the alternative is chaos and anarchy (sound familiar?) Certainly engineers, songwriters, writers, and filmmakers who have been screwed over by the patent/copyright system, would take issue with the current IP system, which, if you look closely, has changed greatly since the patent/copyright system of 10-15 yrs ago, all due to technology, which has created new markets and destroyed old ones.
Also associated with this are the increasing number of people who believe that litigation and licensing, not manufacturing/development, are the way to run a sustainable business. Because of the negative impact of these factors on US competitiveness (don't listen to the established oligarchies who just want to protect their personal lunches), reforming IP law, and curbing the negative impact of lawsuits in general on the willingness to take risks, are really issues that affect ALL citizens.
The problem is that the lobbyists with money all represent established, old-tech companies, like oil, automobiles, gas/coal/oil power plants, land developers, etc. Ironically, many of these companies have shifted their operations toward becoming more environmentally compliant, as quite a few of them are international conglomerates with operations/plants outside of the US.
What's being left out of the equation are all the technologies that the US could be developing if we were on the forefront of compliance - things like CO2 sequestration, alternative power systems, etc. Regulation has a cost (it creates economic friction), but where there's economic friction (inefficiency) there's an opportunity. If we took the lead on these things, we could be building a whole new export industry - equipment to retrofit existing plants to deliver Kyoto compliance.
What we need is a progressive interpretation of the Kyoto agreement in the states - one that would allow the same levels of growth, as opposed to the current negative interpretation, which is that going Kyoto would freeze American competitiveness (a given if we keep doing things the same old way.) Unfortunately, I think one reason that the US has been reluctant to commit, is because we're no longer willing to innovate as strongly as we used to - and personally, I blame trial lawyers for that (in addition to a bad patent and copyright system.) Why take the risk of putting $11M in development for a new exhaust control system, if at some point, some lawyer will point to your system, and instead of highlighting that the system saved the combined lives of 100 people (80yr lifespan) over 10 years of operation, point to the possibility that if you had spent an additional $1M, you could have saved 10 more people, and then sue you on behalf of the theoretical 10 more people.
If you need evidence for this, look at the cars and car systems in Europe and Japan, that they're not willing to release in the US for fear of litigation. Toyota is developing cars for the elderly in Japan, but they refuse to commit to selling any of those models in the US for fear of getting sued. Dalmier-Chrysler is selling the Two-Fours in Canada, but environmental compliance aside, they're unwilling to sell those vehicles in the US for safety (ie, litigation) reasons as well. Copyrights and patents also will contribute to this problem - basically, anything that enshrines the status quo, and deters development on anything new. If nobody is willing to innovate in the US, Kyoto treaty or no, we're going to have job problems...
Ahhh, but security and detectability are key problems. If the network is detectable, it doesn't matter if they can eavesdrop on the content of your transmissions - they can do traffic analysis and use the signal itself to do direction finding. If the network isn't detectable (to enemy intelligence) then the question becomes, how do friendlies find local friendlies to talk with (discovery problem.)
Being able to wire up a localized data net isn't difficult. Being able to wire up a battlefield-wide data net that can survive jamming and attack is hard.
Another example, if you take your first Amendment claim and apply it to the second, wouldn't you argue that the Federal government has no claim to prevent you from owning fully automatic machine guns? Or SAMs or fighter airplanes for that matter?
At certain points in history, all 3 of those items were fully legal within the United States. Full auto machine guns were regulated in 1934, and new manufacture for non-military/law enforcement was banned in 1986. Fighter airplanes, I believe, can still be purchased (assuming you have the money to fuel and maintain the beast), although arming it is another matter entirely. You also need to repaint the markings to comply with FAA marking regulations. Surface to Air Missiles (SAMs) - well, you can't import any, due to ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) restrictions. However, you could probably build one, although I'm unsure of domestic regulations concerning posession of such a device.
"Just a moment...... Just a moment.....
I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 Unit.
Its going to go 100 percent failure within 72 hours."
Deep silence is heard at misson control. A voice pipes up, "Hell, no, I ain't going up there to do no spacewalk. I know how this one ends!"
Many of the libraries in the country carry copyrighted material. You can walk in and peruse the books at your leisure, for free. Same idea, only you grant access to a lot more people. Scholars routinely pay to get copies of rare items from libraries for research, and every time a query comes in, they have to haul the book out, and run it through a copier. It would be a lot more intelligent to scan once, store it, and make it available on demand.
The chief benefit? Even if the original is lost or destroyed, the digital version lives on - a big issue, assuming that ANY item ever enters the public domain from now on, the way that they were supposed to. Hell, I'd lay out money for a copy of the Library of Congress on a set of blue-ray DVDs, and so would many large corporations (those that still have research labs, that is), universities and colleges, as well as other organizations and governmental entities around the world.
Especially in larger cities that have a widespread suburban sprawl (like Dallas, Houston, LA, Seattle, Atlanta) that makes owning a bigger car easier, if not something of a status symbol.
I don't know about the rest of LA, but in West LA, where high-end SUVs used to dominate the roads, I'm instead now seeing Priuses everywhere. New, 2004, incredibly hard to get, Priuses. That's the new status symbol - being able to get a car that lists new for $20,000 but requires a year-long waiting list, and is available on at a market price of $28,000, used. Funny enough, I even saw a Twofour driving down Westwood Blvd. once - I have no idea if it was street-legal though...
The peak of the SUV fad is over. Everybody has them. Everybody can get them (cheap with rebates.) They're flooding used card lots, and people are discovering that parking in lots designed for passenger cars is a pain, roof clearance becomes an issue, and that they're burning fuel like crazy, even when they're driving solo. Having one no longer means that you're rich - just that you're paying a lot more for your gas. The only people who will continue buying trucks/SUVs, are the people who bought them before they became known as SUVs - people who live in non-urban areas, where traction drive becomes important (ie, mud, snow, sand), and you need to move cargo (feed, equipment, etc.)
I wonder how many people on /. played Pathways into Darkness...
For those who don't know (and who would moderate as offtopic) Pathways into Darkness was one of the FIRST Bungie games, and considered by some to be the forerunner of an underlying mythos that ties all of the Bungie games together (with possible exception of Oni, although some argue about that too.)
You know you've delved too deeply into Bungie's games when you see se7ens and pfors everywhere...
I actually got to talk to a TI engineer after the screening of EP 1 (in Burbank.) If I remember correctly, they were running a highly redundant raid, with about 320 gb storage, to store a 2k image at 4:3 (they expanded to wide screen using an anamorphic lens on the projector, because the DLP chips were 4:3). The engineer said that if they had been able to trim a few dozen gb, they could have put everything on a tape...