The President isn't actually all that powerful, but what he does have can be used effectively.
The problem is, the past few have been supremely good at drawing attention - "Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it", and "anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job", respectively. (Thanks to the late, great Douglas Adams).
What you really want is divided government. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The whiny partisan asswipes will scream "waah gridlock", but the BEST thing we can have is for only those things which both parties manage to agree on happening. Remember, 99% of the real business of governing happens not in the President's office, but instead in Congress. In this respect the most powerful person in our government is the Speaker of the House, who can single-handedly ensure that a proposed bill never sees the light of day.
Where it goes to pot is when the majorities in Congress, Senate, and then the President are all from the same party.
Look at the times we've been fucked in the last three decades. Jimmy Carter had a Democrat congress and nearly doomed us all. Bill Clinton, for his first two years, almost did what Obama has done to us now. Most of the people on this site are probably too young to understand how truly horrible both of those time periods were.
Shrub 43 is an oddity. For his first couple years, there was a major crisis. Then, "dealing with" that major crisis, his advisers convinced him and Congress to run around spending like drunken sailors.
When it came time to be a lame duck, Shrub 43 may as well have been a democrat. Count up the number of vetoes he issued once the Democrats took congress following the 2006 elections and it's pretty clear he was nothing but a joke. Effectively, Pelosi and Reid were running the country even before they got an official rubber-stamper put into the White House.
Of course, this kind of crap is why George Washington warned us about forming political parties at all in his farewell address: political parties effectively take the checks and balances system and make it meaningless unless the people are smart enough not to let one party get hold of House, Senate and Presidency all simultaneously. It's a damn shame nobody listened to him.
Personally, I'd vote Democrat in a snap if they weren't so goddamn pushy about wanting to give my tax money to people I have moral problems supporting.
If the Democrats would stick to getting us out of GATT/NAFTA/WTO, rebuilding American industry, and did more than talk about busting up the vertical monopolies and non-taxpaying overseas megacorporations, I'd be all for them.
Instead, all I hear from the Democrats round here is how I'm somehow morally obligated to let my tax money support thieving, lying illegal aliens and the babies they drop (who have, because they keep running off on the bills, caused two hospitals in my area to shutter their maternity wards completely).
It is a really stupid, crazy thing in the US system: if a friend of mine from overseas is here on a tourist visa and goes into labor early, her kid doesn't become a citizen. But if the kid of some lying, thieving lawbreaker pops on US soil, somehow that kid becomes a citizen.
MAYBE if there were a true requirement of a 50%+ majority to elect, that would be true.
The way that the US system is set up, not true at all. If you have a "sizable enough" third-party candidate, the most likely outcome is that they split the vote of a key demographic, the vote splits 45-44-11, and then some shithead comes in and claims a "majority" and a "mandate" when more than 50% of the population didn't want him in office.
The problem with the US system is (for example), if 10% of the country are libertarian, the libertarians all either vote Republican because the alternative is watching Democrats ruin the country (from their perspective). If 10% of the country are green partiers, likewise - they either vote Democrat, or watch Republicans ruin the country (from their perspective).
In a parliamentary system, however, every party that can get at least x% of the vote, gets at least somebody into office. So that way, the Republicans or Democrats would most likely be forced to come to some form of coalition with another, smaller party that would then hold direct sway because they can always "walk away" if things get ludicrous from their view.
The downside to the parliamentary system, of course, is that you have no say in who your representative is. The "party" gets the votes, and then the party bosses decide which shithead "represents" you later. This makes it possible for particularly odious assholes to get elected in places like Britain merely because nobody can actually vote to directly get rid of them.
If I were to propose an ideal system, I'd suggest we rethink the whole "Senate" concept. Leave the House of Representatives as it is, for local representatives to be elected. Throw the "Senators" out the window, hold a national party election, and let the parties get one senator for each whole 1% of the vote that they acquire. The "Senate" is worthless as hell ever since we threw it to direct elections anyways, it no longer serves as a brake on anything stupid - far from it, it seems most of the stupidity in the USGOV originates in the Senate for the last three decades.
re-cut with paragraph breaks. Goddamnit slashdot, cut that crap out and give me the old text editing method back!
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No, the big problem is that the "3D" technology isn't solid yet. I was out at Tron Night recently: they have point light-sources all over in every scene that are way too bright. This causes ghosting when the polarized lenses can't completely block out the "wrong eye" image.
You also have to hold your head perfectly damn still in the proper position for the whole movie - tilt a couple degrees left or right, and the image starts ghosting like crazy because the polarization isn't properly matched.
3D, done right, can be awesome. The problem with it today is that it IS treated like a gimmick. Nowhere is this more obvious than the ridiculous scenes every damn "3D movie" has to put in where some object breaks the plane of the screen; the 3D tech works best when the z-values of all objects stay behind the screen.
The final problem is the insistence on "glasses on, glasses off" for specific scenes. In this one regard, the Tron Night guys got it right - for the one "2D" scene in evidence, they simply mastered it so that it was viewable without problem through the 3D glasses (essentially, both projected images set so that their Z-value matched the screen). Every time they make you put on or take off the glasses, they're breaking suspension of disbelief - Superman Returns and Batman: The Dark Knight were really ridiculous in that regard!
No, the big problem is that the "3D" technology isn't solid yet.
I was out at Tron Night recently: they have point light-sources all over in every scene that are way too bright. This causes ghosting when the polarized lenses can't completely block out the "wrong eye" image.
You also have to hold your head perfectly damn still in the proper position for the whole movie - tilt a couple degrees left or right, and the image starts ghosting like crazy because the polarization isn't properly matched.
3D, done right, can be awesome. The problem with it today is that it IS treated like a gimmick. Nowhere is this more obvious than the ridiculous scenes every damn "3D movie" has to put in where some object breaks the plane of the screen; the 3D tech works best when the z-values of all objects stay behind the screen.
The final problem is the insistence on "glasses on, glasses off" for specific scenes. In this one regard, the Tron Night guys got it right - for the one "2D" scene in evidence, they simply mastered it so that it was viewable without problem through the 3D glasses (essentially, both projected images set so that their Z-value matched the screen). Every time they make you put on or take off the glasses, they're breaking suspension of disbelief - Superman Returns and Batman: The Dark Knight were really ridiculous in that regard!
Teacher certification usually requires nothing other than a BS in Education (the classes for which are, let's face it, busy-work) and passing the certification exams.
The standards for the certification exams get lower and lower every year.
The certification exams also do NOTHING to weed out any but the real retards any more, since you can now simply take them over and over and over again, every three days, until you pass. Yes, I know someone who scratched out a pass by pure luck on the 73rd try and is now a math teacher at a public high school, churning out perfectly lousy and math-illiterate kids who can barely pass the "standardized test" but couldn't do enough math to balance a checkbook by hand.
It's worse than that.
Teacher pay is already enough that those who are skilled enough to do the job, mostly don't want to because they can get a better job, with better hours and better working conditions.
So many of the "lousy teachers" you mention are in the system merely because they're the dregs that were left over when the pool of prospectives for the career was picked clean. Meanwhile, in order to get warm bodies into public schooling, the standards for certification just get lower and lower.
I've seen "student teacher" projects presented at a local school that would have earned an F... in the third grade back when I was in school.
As far as the human body goes, there are only a few things that are really "constant." Exposure to allergens or illness change the voice enough that it will fail vocal characteristic matching. Taking biometric readouts of a facial structure fails the moment someone has a serious traffic accident, gets any sort of illness that causes facial swelling, or simply grows out their facial hair.
Fingerprints? I think we've done that one pretty much to death.
The best suited is probably retinal or iris scanning, but even those have issues. Retinal scanning fails on any number of degenerative disorders affecting the blood flow, like diabetes and glaucoma. It also fails to properly record and identify on people with moderate to severe cataracts and astigmatism. There are also some pretty hefty privacy issues with retinal scanning, since it can be used to diagnose a number of diseases and conditions - AIDS, syphilis, a number of other STD's, malaria, chicken pox, hereditary diseases like lymphoma and anemia, and even pregnancy.
Iris scanning will fail to recognize due to tinted glasses or cosmetic contact lenses, and it'd be pretty easy to spoof them with a contact lens "printed" to someone else's pattern that is opaque around the ~750nm wave band that most NIR (Near Infrared) scanners use - and the reason they predominantly use NIR is that if you don't pick that specific band, light reflections from the cornea throw enough noise into your scan image to make it virtually unusable. For the really cheap-ass iris scanners, a suitable high-quality picture of someone's eye may even be sufficient to spoof.
And of course, both retinal and iris scanners will fail out if they don't have an incredibly controlled environment - stick a retinal or iris scanner in an area with bright sunlight or inconsistent lighting, and you may as well just chuck the thing out the window, because iris contractions to open/close the pupil will make your scan worthless.
Of course, you could put a hooded structure that people have to stick their eyeball on to look into in order to get scanned. That'll last all of about 2 days before some prankster gets the idea to smear some india ink or something else around the edge of the eyeball viewer...
We lose a good deal of data even going to . It's possible to take a standard 35mm print (standard photo album size) and extract enough useful information during developing to make prints that look actually pretty damn good at, say, 11x17 or 24"x36" or even larger poster formats as long as the film was good quality, because it's a relatively analog photo (only constrained by the grain of the film itself).
At the same time, for easy copying and storage space and shorter-term editing ability, the digital photo does wonders.
The uniqueness of the first man captured on film being there because he was, quite literally, just sitting still the entire time the daugerrotype was exposed is a marvel.
Part of the major loss with digital, however, is the amount of "thrown away" data. In the old days, photographers filming a busy scene would snap off roll after roll, then develop and check their shots later. I'm reminded of a famous basketball championship where a photographer only realized the next day, going through his rolls, that he'd captured a perfect pandemonium in which, in the midst of all the carnage, he had a perfect view of one of the coaches flipping off a ref. These days, all the other shots - which are actually just as important and form an interesting slideshow of the event - would probably just get deleted out of hand by the guy.
The other major loss with digital is the work put into staging and arranging a shot. The "well I'll try and adjust and if it doesn't work I'll just delete and go again and photoshop the light sources later" approach just doesn't have the same artistry as someone painstakingly getting it right the first time.
I'm really sorry to say this. But you are completely full of shit.
Two things need to happen. First up, matchmaking desperately needs a better way to match players of similar skill.
Second, whoever came up with the "play for X hours, get 'experience points' to unlock all the uber fucking gear" for Call of Duty, that every other goddamn FPS-multiplayer has been mimicking ever since, needs to fucking die. It's already bad enough that the lifeless basement-dwellers ruin the game for anyone else coming on to play for fun, now they get an extra advantage in more body armor and deadlier weapons too?
No. Thank. You.
I gave up on playing anything multiplayer on Xbox Live for one simple reason: I can't go on to anywhere, find a "new players" server, and get comfortable in the game. No, all that's available are the deathmatch and ctf-playing 14-year-old fatsos who live in their parents' basement, never see natural light, and scream "faggot" into their headset constantly if you don't do everything picture perfect and have a goddamn photographic memory for every little fucking nook and cranny and weapon respawn time so that you're standing right on the rocket launcher the moment it comes back up from their using the ammo up and dropping the last spawn.
ASS's creed 2? dozens of hours of the same fucking boring "go here, kill this guy" and "jump up and down in front of the guard till he attacks you out of boredom" crap, same as the first game. There's nothing THERE.
Red Dead Redemption? GTA 4? Really? Sorry, but I gave up on GTA and GTA-clones YEARS ago. There's no "story" there either, and the "sandbox" just consists of, again, doing the same crap over and over till you get bored with it.
I'll give the guys from Team Ninja credit for Metroid: Other M. Yes, their story wasn't the best and their gameplay had multiple personality disorder, but at least they TRIED to have a solid, single-player game.
I enjoy SINGLE-PLAYER play. If I'm going to do multiplayer, I'd much rather do multiplayer CO-OP ON THE SAME DAMN BOX going through the story. None of this "You can do co-op but each of you has to have your own fucking box" stuff that they're all trying to push us to these days.
Give me split-screen co-op modes so I and my buddies can have a beer, sit in the same living room, TALK to each other, high-five each other, and generally have fun playing. Give me split-screen multiplayer so ONE of us can bring a second box, plug it in upstairs, and we can do room vs room CTF and deathmatch team games.
And before you even THINK of putting multiplayer in your damn game, make sure that the single-player game is up to snuff. Nothing is worth the crappy nuisance of plugging in what should be a good game only to find out the single-player is basically just a tutorial for the multiplayer that nobody is going to be playing in 3 months anyways.
Think about it. Who plays the Bioshock 2 multiplayer? NOBODY. Who plays the Transformers: War for Shittertron multi? NOBODY. Who plays Singularity multiplayer? NOBODY. Every goddamn fucking game comes out that just wastes a ton of money building the "ooh you gotta have multiplayer" rather than spending their money making a really fun, enjoyable, engrossing single-player campaign.
Bioshock 2 was at least enjoyable in single-player, even though they obviously didn't quite "get" what made the first so special. Pretty much every other "multiplayer" title out there? SHAMEFUL.
There's a reason I hope to motherfucking god that they never try to add multiplayer to a Fallout title. It's not needed, nor wanted. The most I would EVER want to see might be a small, one-box co-op mode where one player can take over playing the companion.
As anyone knows who's ever actually interacted with Wikipedia, the supposed rules mean about as much there as a turd sandwich.
Reagle is pie-in-the-sky clueless, and it's easy to see why. Wikipedia's not set up to "assume good faith." Quite the contrary, the following trends are very much evidence that it is anything but:
- the number of "patrollers" of unblock requests who are anything-but-civil and who do nothing but slap each other on the back about how rude they can get away with being until they provoke someone into crossing a "ban line." You know, kind of like stuff like this where they keep poking and prodding merely because they can.
- the way that organized gangs play the "kill them one at a time" and "get our pet admin to declare them sockpuppets or meatpuppets" games. Look at the Wikipedia articles on Felafel and Za'atar; a group of deranged, racist muslims got together and decided they wanted to strip any reference to "evil jews" about the food. And, since they had a couple of racist administrators on their side, their will was done. These days, even the two FOOD articles look like slanted attack articles.
- The way that certain entrenched personalities get away with abuses at will, especially playing "scarlet letter" games and falsely accusing people of being sockpuppets. Even worse, the way that many of these have - since they play to the political or racist sympathies of other entrenches - have climbed the ladder and are now administrators or worse. "Orangemike" and "Dreamguy" are two nasties, Dreamguy particularly being one who shows major ownership issues on any article related to fantasy or mythology and who is not above accusing people - without any evidence or proof or even editspace collision - of being "Enviroknot", or any one of another dozen names that are instant, without question or proof, ban words.
- The fact that corruption got to the point where the Checkuser tool is now an "orf wiv 'is 'ead" guilty-only attack. Get accused of being a "sockpuppet", and you're done, no matter what. There IS no proving your innocence of this charge, and the only administrators who will ever even touch an unblock request are the totally corrupt ones like Fisherqueen, Bwilkins, Tnxman, Smashville...
- Then there's the fact that the corrupt admin sector of Wikipedia organizes secretly to keep their hit-list up to date, as do the various entrenched POV-groups that maintain control on many articles.
Bullshit. Geohot's hack required inserting a fucking wire into the console after taking it half apart, then slamming a switch like mad to cause the console to glitch.
This is ENTIRELY $ony's fault for being a bunch of paranoid-delusional morons. I wonder if the people responsible for this debacle are the same morons $ony poached from Nintendo who were responsible for the mind-bogglingly stupid design idiocy of cartridges on the N64 and mini-dvds on the Gamecube.
Yeah. the testing I've done on it shows that Win7 runs nicely on decently old hardware - actually runs better than Vista on the same hardware - provided you turn off the Aero interface. Do you lose visual perks? Sure. But it runs just fine.
I get the feeling the poster who submitted this just happened to be a brainwashed Apple fanboi. And I echo your complaints about the shitty quality of iTunes, which slows any system it gets on to a crawl.
Wow, you really don't know how this works in the real world, do you?
In the real world, anyone with actual talent quickly gets weeded out. Next goes actual production experience, in favor of mastering the album way too fucking loud so that everything clips out (yeah, looking at you Metallica, you fucking tone-deaf retards).
Next, if you don't have "the body" or "the look", forget it. Shitney Spears and the teenybopper whores get millions despite being worthless and talentless, because the marketing machines pump all their crap out, put it in boxes, and sell to brainless, clueless idiots.
Actual music is almost dead in America. As for the world, actual music is more endangered than the Panda.
University of Phoenix is not a degree mill. Even wikipedia says it is not a degree mill.
I rest my case that it is, then. You've just provided all the proof needed.
They don't just hand you a degree just for paying the tuition.
Please pull the other one. And since you claim to be military, please realize that I mean the LEG, and not the other thing you spend far too much time pulling on.
Given the number of lawsuits against "University of Phoenix" - which is really just a big fucking degree mill - when people found out that their degrees were non-accredited in many cases, this is a key point to consider. "Wiki University" is more likely to be just like Wikipedia in general: corrupt, based entirely on "who you know" or "did your viewpoint contradict some corrupt loony with far too much crowd following or access to the delete/ban buttons."
The underlying problem is, Final Fantasy doesn't belong in an MMO. And after the way FF13 ("world's most advanced corridor simulator, fuck even the illusion that you have sidequests") turned out, Square had better turn things around in a big way or 15 will be the final nail in the franchise.
Once the prices dropped under a certain threshold the CRTs disappeared off the shelves virtually overnight.
Actually, CRT's dropped off the shelves for three reasons: #1 - Collusion by the "beige box" computer manufacturers (Dell, Gateway, etc) to only offer LCD monitors. #2 - Collusion by the "Big Box" retailers (Worst Buy, Circuit Scammy, etc) to no longer sell CRT's because they got better margin on higher-priced, but same sized, LCD TV's. #3 - Bought-and-Paid-For legislation in states like California creating regulatory nightmares that basically ensured only LCD/"flat panel" monitors could be sold. Remember the uproar over crap like this last year? What you forget is that a number of states passed earlier legislation that made nightmares for CRT's in relation to disposal and components.
LCD TV's are not being pushed for any other reason other than that they are what the retailers want to sell - higher margin, more prone to breaking down (average life of LCDTV: 5 years, average life of CRT: 15+).
"Payroll Deduction" makes it feel painless to people, though.
Ever had to fill out your taxes quarterly, and actually mail the check off and wait for it to clear? Had to account for having enough money on hand to pay it? Ensure that you knew, really understood, how much was taken out and why?
MOST PEOPLE IN THE US DON'T GET THIS. They see their "take-home pay" by direct deposit or in a check. They don't even realize how much was already taken out. Then, come around April 15th, they go pay some shyster accountant to "do their taxes", and he tells them they have a $500-600 "refund check" coming, so they think "woohoo the government is giving me money."
This is the Idiocracy principle at work. They never see the money, never realize how much it is that they get soaked for in taxes, and then they think they're being "given money."
Yes, but having regulations too low can be just as bad - it allows certain bad actors to get away with amazingly destructive behavior because it's "legal" while at the same time being horrible.
Likewise, everyone should have to pay taxes. More to the point, what we in the US really should do is end the ridiculous payroll tax-deduction system so that everyone could really, truly SEE how much they were paying in taxes.
The joke today is that half of the US receives a net income from the government the way our fucked-up taxation system works (you get an "income tax refund" even if you didn't work a day all year, WTF?) and another 40% or so think that sometime between January 1st and April 15th they get a "refund" that counts as some "fun money" from the government. Most of these idiots never look at their actual pay stub to realize precisely how much of their money is going straight into government pockets, or worse yet, providing an interest-free loan to the government for most of the year.
A sane way to handle government would be to decide what services are actually needed, what regulations are actually needed (clean air, water, worker safety, etc), and then tally up what it costs to provide services, emergency response, policing, etc. Instead, what we have today is the "throw it on the pile, another couple billion doesn't matter" spending from the dummycraps and repukicunts.
The US wastes amazing amounts of money - government funds get spent on lobbying efforts (WTF? The government spending money on groups to lobby for policy issues? YEP!). Government funds get wasted on "foreign aid", which is a fancy way of saying we pay off dictators and assholes to keep their anti-America rhetoric just below a dull roar while anally raping the people in their home countries. Government funds get wasted on giving free educations and meals to the kids of people who broke into the country illegally, get wasted on propping up stupidly overproduced commodities like corn while putting tariffs on items like sugar, get wasted buying out businesses (all hail our new overlords from Government Motors...), and of course on programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
High taxes are bad. So is overregulation. But so too is overgrowth of government programs and ridiculous amounts of government waste and make-work.
The Soviets used to call their system "pointless work for pointless pay." How long till the bread lines hit us here in the USA?
I mean, it still sucks less than every other form of governance yet devised, but it has no magical anti-corruption powers
Actually, the idea is to balance corruption against corruption, ambition against ambition, in such a way that nobody can get away with anything too terribly terrible.
The problem with the idea is that partisan politics short-circuits this theory; political parties operate as (almost) monolithic entities and the "cooperative" aspects of them make it so that attempts at balance get co-opted and circumvented.
On the hierarchy of theoretical governments, it's often been stated that the best would be that of the truly enlightened despot, a single ruler and his lieutenants beneath who all act for the greater good of (hopefully) as many of the people as they can manage. The problem here is that assuring such a despot is impossible.
The second-best would be that of the enlightened communism, wherein all put forth an honest and earnest effort to do what they can, even if the job they are assigned is not something they have a passion for; often proponents of this theory suggest that if there is a job nobody really wants, the populace should draw lots and take turns doing it. Unfortunately, the problem here is that you get the two lazy-classes - the leeches and the bureaucrats - who tip the system into unworkability. This is why religious communism (monastic orders mostly) works rather well, while all attempts to expand it into the larger population always fail - the religious orders are freely and happily able to kick those who don't behave as they should out of the commune!
Since those two are fundamentally unworkable on a large or sustained scale, forms of "democracy" are about all we have left. Alas, over time they too are becoming co-opted and short-circuited by those who want to make a "ruling class" of themselves.
So it's not surprising that most people, given power, would inevitably become a "villain" on some score. Everyone has something they think needs fixing and that they would gladly be an "enlightened despot" to fix. After all, even General Zod is for universal healthcare access.
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The President isn't actually all that powerful, but what he does have can be used effectively.
The problem is, the past few have been supremely good at drawing attention - "Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it", and "anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job", respectively. (Thanks to the late, great Douglas Adams).
What you really want is divided government. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The whiny partisan asswipes will scream "waah gridlock", but the BEST thing we can have is for only those things which both parties manage to agree on happening. Remember, 99% of the real business of governing happens not in the President's office, but instead in Congress. In this respect the most powerful person in our government is the Speaker of the House, who can single-handedly ensure that a proposed bill never sees the light of day.
Where it goes to pot is when the majorities in Congress, Senate, and then the President are all from the same party.
Look at the times we've been fucked in the last three decades. Jimmy Carter had a Democrat congress and nearly doomed us all. Bill Clinton, for his first two years, almost did what Obama has done to us now. Most of the people on this site are probably too young to understand how truly horrible both of those time periods were.
Shrub 43 is an oddity. For his first couple years, there was a major crisis. Then, "dealing with" that major crisis, his advisers convinced him and Congress to run around spending like drunken sailors.
When it came time to be a lame duck, Shrub 43 may as well have been a democrat. Count up the number of vetoes he issued once the Democrats took congress following the 2006 elections and it's pretty clear he was nothing but a joke. Effectively, Pelosi and Reid were running the country even before they got an official rubber-stamper put into the White House.
Of course, this kind of crap is why George Washington warned us about forming political parties at all in his farewell address: political parties effectively take the checks and balances system and make it meaningless unless the people are smart enough not to let one party get hold of House, Senate and Presidency all simultaneously. It's a damn shame nobody listened to him.
It's funny you say that!
Personally, I'd vote Democrat in a snap if they weren't so goddamn pushy about wanting to give my tax money to people I have moral problems supporting.
If the Democrats would stick to getting us out of GATT/NAFTA/WTO, rebuilding American industry, and did more than talk about busting up the vertical monopolies and non-taxpaying overseas megacorporations, I'd be all for them.
Instead, all I hear from the Democrats round here is how I'm somehow morally obligated to let my tax money support thieving, lying illegal aliens and the babies they drop (who have, because they keep running off on the bills, caused two hospitals in my area to shutter their maternity wards completely).
It is a really stupid, crazy thing in the US system: if a friend of mine from overseas is here on a tourist visa and goes into labor early, her kid doesn't become a citizen. But if the kid of some lying, thieving lawbreaker pops on US soil, somehow that kid becomes a citizen.
It's a mad, mad world.
MAYBE if there were a true requirement of a 50%+ majority to elect, that would be true.
The way that the US system is set up, not true at all. If you have a "sizable enough" third-party candidate, the most likely outcome is that they split the vote of a key demographic, the vote splits 45-44-11, and then some shithead comes in and claims a "majority" and a "mandate" when more than 50% of the population didn't want him in office.
The problem with the US system is (for example), if 10% of the country are libertarian, the libertarians all either vote Republican because the alternative is watching Democrats ruin the country (from their perspective). If 10% of the country are green partiers, likewise - they either vote Democrat, or watch Republicans ruin the country (from their perspective).
In a parliamentary system, however, every party that can get at least x% of the vote, gets at least somebody into office. So that way, the Republicans or Democrats would most likely be forced to come to some form of coalition with another, smaller party that would then hold direct sway because they can always "walk away" if things get ludicrous from their view.
The downside to the parliamentary system, of course, is that you have no say in who your representative is. The "party" gets the votes, and then the party bosses decide which shithead "represents" you later. This makes it possible for particularly odious assholes to get elected in places like Britain merely because nobody can actually vote to directly get rid of them.
If I were to propose an ideal system, I'd suggest we rethink the whole "Senate" concept. Leave the House of Representatives as it is, for local representatives to be elected. Throw the "Senators" out the window, hold a national party election, and let the parties get one senator for each whole 1% of the vote that they acquire. The "Senate" is worthless as hell ever since we threw it to direct elections anyways, it no longer serves as a brake on anything stupid - far from it, it seems most of the stupidity in the USGOV originates in the Senate for the last three decades.
You also have to hold your head perfectly damn still in the proper position for the whole movie - tilt a couple degrees left or right, and the image starts ghosting like crazy because the polarization isn't properly matched.
3D, done right, can be awesome. The problem with it today is that it IS treated like a gimmick. Nowhere is this more obvious than the ridiculous scenes every damn "3D movie" has to put in where some object breaks the plane of the screen; the 3D tech works best when the z-values of all objects stay behind the screen.
The final problem is the insistence on "glasses on, glasses off" for specific scenes. In this one regard, the Tron Night guys got it right - for the one "2D" scene in evidence, they simply mastered it so that it was viewable without problem through the 3D glasses (essentially, both projected images set so that their Z-value matched the screen). Every time they make you put on or take off the glasses, they're breaking suspension of disbelief - Superman Returns and Batman: The Dark Knight were really ridiculous in that regard!
No, the big problem is that the "3D" technology isn't solid yet. I was out at Tron Night recently: they have point light-sources all over in every scene that are way too bright. This causes ghosting when the polarized lenses can't completely block out the "wrong eye" image. You also have to hold your head perfectly damn still in the proper position for the whole movie - tilt a couple degrees left or right, and the image starts ghosting like crazy because the polarization isn't properly matched. 3D, done right, can be awesome. The problem with it today is that it IS treated like a gimmick. Nowhere is this more obvious than the ridiculous scenes every damn "3D movie" has to put in where some object breaks the plane of the screen; the 3D tech works best when the z-values of all objects stay behind the screen. The final problem is the insistence on "glasses on, glasses off" for specific scenes. In this one regard, the Tron Night guys got it right - for the one "2D" scene in evidence, they simply mastered it so that it was viewable without problem through the 3D glasses (essentially, both projected images set so that their Z-value matched the screen). Every time they make you put on or take off the glasses, they're breaking suspension of disbelief - Superman Returns and Batman: The Dark Knight were really ridiculous in that regard!
The standards for the certification exams get lower and lower every year.
The certification exams also do NOTHING to weed out any but the real retards any more, since you can now simply take them over and over and over again, every three days, until you pass. Yes, I know someone who scratched out a pass by pure luck on the 73rd try and is now a math teacher at a public high school, churning out perfectly lousy and math-illiterate kids who can barely pass the "standardized test" but couldn't do enough math to balance a checkbook by hand.
It's worse than that. Teacher pay is already enough that those who are skilled enough to do the job, mostly don't want to because they can get a better job, with better hours and better working conditions. So many of the "lousy teachers" you mention are in the system merely because they're the dregs that were left over when the pool of prospectives for the career was picked clean. Meanwhile, in order to get warm bodies into public schooling, the standards for certification just get lower and lower. I've seen "student teacher" projects presented at a local school that would have earned an F... in the third grade back when I was in school.
As far as the human body goes, there are only a few things that are really "constant." Exposure to allergens or illness change the voice enough that it will fail vocal characteristic matching. Taking biometric readouts of a facial structure fails the moment someone has a serious traffic accident, gets any sort of illness that causes facial swelling, or simply grows out their facial hair.
Fingerprints? I think we've done that one pretty much to death.
The best suited is probably retinal or iris scanning, but even those have issues. Retinal scanning fails on any number of degenerative disorders affecting the blood flow, like diabetes and glaucoma. It also fails to properly record and identify on people with moderate to severe cataracts and astigmatism. There are also some pretty hefty privacy issues with retinal scanning, since it can be used to diagnose a number of diseases and conditions - AIDS, syphilis, a number of other STD's, malaria, chicken pox, hereditary diseases like lymphoma and anemia, and even pregnancy.
Iris scanning will fail to recognize due to tinted glasses or cosmetic contact lenses, and it'd be pretty easy to spoof them with a contact lens "printed" to someone else's pattern that is opaque around the ~750nm wave band that most NIR (Near Infrared) scanners use - and the reason they predominantly use NIR is that if you don't pick that specific band, light reflections from the cornea throw enough noise into your scan image to make it virtually unusable. For the really cheap-ass iris scanners, a suitable high-quality picture of someone's eye may even be sufficient to spoof.
And of course, both retinal and iris scanners will fail out if they don't have an incredibly controlled environment - stick a retinal or iris scanner in an area with bright sunlight or inconsistent lighting, and you may as well just chuck the thing out the window, because iris contractions to open/close the pupil will make your scan worthless.
Of course, you could put a hooded structure that people have to stick their eyeball on to look into in order to get scanned. That'll last all of about 2 days before some prankster gets the idea to smear some india ink or something else around the edge of the eyeball viewer...
And the kids circumvent it by keeping the gummy bears in their pockets on the way to class.
Once again, a "foolproof" system proves to be only as useful as the fool who invented it.
We lose a good deal of data even going to . It's possible to take a standard 35mm print (standard photo album size) and extract enough useful information during developing to make prints that look actually pretty damn good at, say, 11x17 or 24"x36" or even larger poster formats as long as the film was good quality, because it's a relatively analog photo (only constrained by the grain of the film itself).
At the same time, for easy copying and storage space and shorter-term editing ability, the digital photo does wonders.
The uniqueness of the first man captured on film being there because he was, quite literally, just sitting still the entire time the daugerrotype was exposed is a marvel.
Part of the major loss with digital, however, is the amount of "thrown away" data. In the old days, photographers filming a busy scene would snap off roll after roll, then develop and check their shots later. I'm reminded of a famous basketball championship where a photographer only realized the next day, going through his rolls, that he'd captured a perfect pandemonium in which, in the midst of all the carnage, he had a perfect view of one of the coaches flipping off a ref. These days, all the other shots - which are actually just as important and form an interesting slideshow of the event - would probably just get deleted out of hand by the guy.
The other major loss with digital is the work put into staging and arranging a shot. The "well I'll try and adjust and if it doesn't work I'll just delete and go again and photoshop the light sources later" approach just doesn't have the same artistry as someone painstakingly getting it right the first time.
Oh, I've played them. They were just CRAP.
Two things need to happen. First up, matchmaking desperately needs a better way to match players of similar skill.
Second, whoever came up with the "play for X hours, get 'experience points' to unlock all the uber fucking gear" for Call of Duty, that every other goddamn FPS-multiplayer has been mimicking ever since, needs to fucking die. It's already bad enough that the lifeless basement-dwellers ruin the game for anyone else coming on to play for fun, now they get an extra advantage in more body armor and deadlier weapons too?
No. Thank. You.
I gave up on playing anything multiplayer on Xbox Live for one simple reason: I can't go on to anywhere, find a "new players" server, and get comfortable in the game. No, all that's available are the deathmatch and ctf-playing 14-year-old fatsos who live in their parents' basement, never see natural light, and scream "faggot" into their headset constantly if you don't do everything picture perfect and have a goddamn photographic memory for every little fucking nook and cranny and weapon respawn time so that you're standing right on the rocket launcher the moment it comes back up from their using the ammo up and dropping the last spawn.
ASS's creed 2? dozens of hours of the same fucking boring "go here, kill this guy" and "jump up and down in front of the guard till he attacks you out of boredom" crap, same as the first game. There's nothing THERE.
Red Dead Redemption? GTA 4? Really? Sorry, but I gave up on GTA and GTA-clones YEARS ago. There's no "story" there either, and the "sandbox" just consists of, again, doing the same crap over and over till you get bored with it.
I'll give the guys from Team Ninja credit for Metroid: Other M. Yes, their story wasn't the best and their gameplay had multiple personality disorder, but at least they TRIED to have a solid, single-player game.
I enjoy SINGLE-PLAYER play. If I'm going to do multiplayer, I'd much rather do multiplayer CO-OP ON THE SAME DAMN BOX going through the story. None of this "You can do co-op but each of you has to have your own fucking box" stuff that they're all trying to push us to these days.
Give me split-screen co-op modes so I and my buddies can have a beer, sit in the same living room, TALK to each other, high-five each other, and generally have fun playing. Give me split-screen multiplayer so ONE of us can bring a second box, plug it in upstairs, and we can do room vs room CTF and deathmatch team games.
And before you even THINK of putting multiplayer in your damn game, make sure that the single-player game is up to snuff. Nothing is worth the crappy nuisance of plugging in what should be a good game only to find out the single-player is basically just a tutorial for the multiplayer that nobody is going to be playing in 3 months anyways.
Think about it. Who plays the Bioshock 2 multiplayer? NOBODY. Who plays the Transformers: War for Shittertron multi? NOBODY. Who plays Singularity multiplayer? NOBODY. Every goddamn fucking game comes out that just wastes a ton of money building the "ooh you gotta have multiplayer" rather than spending their money making a really fun, enjoyable, engrossing single-player campaign.
Bioshock 2 was at least enjoyable in single-player, even though they obviously didn't quite "get" what made the first so special. Pretty much every other "multiplayer" title out there? SHAMEFUL.
There's a reason I hope to motherfucking god that they never try to add multiplayer to a Fallout title. It's not needed, nor wanted. The most I would EVER want to see might be a small, one-box co-op mode where one player can take over playing the companion.
- the number of "patrollers" of unblock requests who are anything-but-civil and who do nothing but slap each other on the back about how rude they can get away with being until they provoke someone into crossing a "ban line." You know, kind of like stuff like this where they keep poking and prodding merely because they can.
- the way that organized gangs play the "kill them one at a time" and "get our pet admin to declare them sockpuppets or meatpuppets" games. Look at the Wikipedia articles on Felafel and Za'atar; a group of deranged, racist muslims got together and decided they wanted to strip any reference to "evil jews" about the food. And, since they had a couple of racist administrators on their side, their will was done. These days, even the two FOOD articles look like slanted attack articles.
- The way that certain entrenched personalities get away with abuses at will, especially playing "scarlet letter" games and falsely accusing people of being sockpuppets. Even worse, the way that many of these have - since they play to the political or racist sympathies of other entrenches - have climbed the ladder and are now administrators or worse. "Orangemike" and "Dreamguy" are two nasties, Dreamguy particularly being one who shows major ownership issues on any article related to fantasy or mythology and who is not above accusing people - without any evidence or proof or even editspace collision - of being "Enviroknot", or any one of another dozen names that are instant, without question or proof, ban words.
- The fact that corruption got to the point where the Checkuser tool is now an "orf wiv 'is 'ead" guilty-only attack. Get accused of being a "sockpuppet", and you're done, no matter what. There IS no proving your innocence of this charge, and the only administrators who will ever even touch an unblock request are the totally corrupt ones like Fisherqueen, Bwilkins, Tnxman, Smashville...
- Then there's the fact that the corrupt admin sector of Wikipedia organizes secretly to keep their hit-list up to date, as do the various entrenched POV-groups that maintain control on many articles.
Bullshit. Geohot's hack required inserting a fucking wire into the console after taking it half apart, then slamming a switch like mad to cause the console to glitch.
This is ENTIRELY $ony's fault for being a bunch of paranoid-delusional morons. I wonder if the people responsible for this debacle are the same morons $ony poached from Nintendo who were responsible for the mind-bogglingly stupid design idiocy of cartridges on the N64 and mini-dvds on the Gamecube.
Yeah. the testing I've done on it shows that Win7 runs nicely on decently old hardware - actually runs better than Vista on the same hardware - provided you turn off the Aero interface. Do you lose visual perks? Sure. But it runs just fine.
I get the feeling the poster who submitted this just happened to be a brainwashed Apple fanboi. And I echo your complaints about the shitty quality of iTunes, which slows any system it gets on to a crawl.
Wow, you really don't know how this works in the real world, do you?
In the real world, anyone with actual talent quickly gets weeded out. Next goes actual production experience, in favor of mastering the album way too fucking loud so that everything clips out (yeah, looking at you Metallica, you fucking tone-deaf retards).
Next, if you don't have "the body" or "the look", forget it. Shitney Spears and the teenybopper whores get millions despite being worthless and talentless, because the marketing machines pump all their crap out, put it in boxes, and sell to brainless, clueless idiots.
Actual music is almost dead in America. As for the world, actual music is more endangered than the Panda.
University of Phoenix is not a degree mill. Even wikipedia says it is not a degree mill.
I rest my case that it is, then. You've just provided all the proof needed.
They don't just hand you a degree just for paying the tuition.
Please pull the other one. And since you claim to be military, please realize that I mean the LEG, and not the other thing you spend far too much time pulling on.
Given the number of lawsuits against "University of Phoenix" - which is really just a big fucking degree mill - when people found out that their degrees were non-accredited in many cases, this is a key point to consider. "Wiki University" is more likely to be just like Wikipedia in general: corrupt, based entirely on "who you know" or "did your viewpoint contradict some corrupt loony with far too much crowd following or access to the delete/ban buttons."
The underlying problem is, Final Fantasy doesn't belong in an MMO. And after the way FF13 ("world's most advanced corridor simulator, fuck even the illusion that you have sidequests") turned out, Square had better turn things around in a big way or 15 will be the final nail in the franchise.
Once the prices dropped under a certain threshold the CRTs disappeared off the shelves virtually overnight.
Actually, CRT's dropped off the shelves for three reasons:
#1 - Collusion by the "beige box" computer manufacturers (Dell, Gateway, etc) to only offer LCD monitors.
#2 - Collusion by the "Big Box" retailers (Worst Buy, Circuit Scammy, etc) to no longer sell CRT's because they got better margin on higher-priced, but same sized, LCD TV's.
#3 - Bought-and-Paid-For legislation in states like California creating regulatory nightmares that basically ensured only LCD/"flat panel" monitors could be sold. Remember the uproar over crap like this last year? What you forget is that a number of states passed earlier legislation that made nightmares for CRT's in relation to disposal and components.
LCD TV's are not being pushed for any other reason other than that they are what the retailers want to sell - higher margin, more prone to breaking down (average life of LCDTV: 5 years, average life of CRT: 15+).
Also oblig: "Badgers? BADGERS?..." Someone please finish that one correctly...
"Payroll Deduction" makes it feel painless to people, though.
Ever had to fill out your taxes quarterly, and actually mail the check off and wait for it to clear? Had to account for having enough money on hand to pay it? Ensure that you knew, really understood, how much was taken out and why?
MOST PEOPLE IN THE US DON'T GET THIS. They see their "take-home pay" by direct deposit or in a check. They don't even realize how much was already taken out. Then, come around April 15th, they go pay some shyster accountant to "do their taxes", and he tells them they have a $500-600 "refund check" coming, so they think "woohoo the government is giving me money."
This is the Idiocracy principle at work. They never see the money, never realize how much it is that they get soaked for in taxes, and then they think they're being "given money."
Yes, but having regulations too low can be just as bad - it allows certain bad actors to get away with amazingly destructive behavior because it's "legal" while at the same time being horrible.
Likewise, everyone should have to pay taxes. More to the point, what we in the US really should do is end the ridiculous payroll tax-deduction system so that everyone could really, truly SEE how much they were paying in taxes.
The joke today is that half of the US receives a net income from the government the way our fucked-up taxation system works (you get an "income tax refund" even if you didn't work a day all year, WTF?) and another 40% or so think that sometime between January 1st and April 15th they get a "refund" that counts as some "fun money" from the government. Most of these idiots never look at their actual pay stub to realize precisely how much of their money is going straight into government pockets, or worse yet, providing an interest-free loan to the government for most of the year.
A sane way to handle government would be to decide what services are actually needed, what regulations are actually needed (clean air, water, worker safety, etc), and then tally up what it costs to provide services, emergency response, policing, etc. Instead, what we have today is the "throw it on the pile, another couple billion doesn't matter" spending from the dummycraps and repukicunts.
The US wastes amazing amounts of money - government funds get spent on lobbying efforts (WTF? The government spending money on groups to lobby for policy issues? YEP!). Government funds get wasted on "foreign aid", which is a fancy way of saying we pay off dictators and assholes to keep their anti-America rhetoric just below a dull roar while anally raping the people in their home countries. Government funds get wasted on giving free educations and meals to the kids of people who broke into the country illegally, get wasted on propping up stupidly overproduced commodities like corn while putting tariffs on items like sugar, get wasted buying out businesses (all hail our new overlords from Government Motors...), and of course on programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
High taxes are bad. So is overregulation. But so too is overgrowth of government programs and ridiculous amounts of government waste and make-work.
The Soviets used to call their system "pointless work for pointless pay." How long till the bread lines hit us here in the USA?
I mean, it still sucks less than every other form of governance yet devised, but it has no magical anti-corruption powers
Actually, the idea is to balance corruption against corruption, ambition against ambition, in such a way that nobody can get away with anything too terribly terrible.
The problem with the idea is that partisan politics short-circuits this theory; political parties operate as (almost) monolithic entities and the "cooperative" aspects of them make it so that attempts at balance get co-opted and circumvented.
On the hierarchy of theoretical governments, it's often been stated that the best would be that of the truly enlightened despot, a single ruler and his lieutenants beneath who all act for the greater good of (hopefully) as many of the people as they can manage. The problem here is that assuring such a despot is impossible.
The second-best would be that of the enlightened communism, wherein all put forth an honest and earnest effort to do what they can, even if the job they are assigned is not something they have a passion for; often proponents of this theory suggest that if there is a job nobody really wants, the populace should draw lots and take turns doing it. Unfortunately, the problem here is that you get the two lazy-classes - the leeches and the bureaucrats - who tip the system into unworkability. This is why religious communism (monastic orders mostly) works rather well, while all attempts to expand it into the larger population always fail - the religious orders are freely and happily able to kick those who don't behave as they should out of the commune!
Since those two are fundamentally unworkable on a large or sustained scale, forms of "democracy" are about all we have left. Alas, over time they too are becoming co-opted and short-circuited by those who want to make a "ruling class" of themselves.
So it's not surprising that most people, given power, would inevitably become a "villain" on some score. Everyone has something they think needs fixing and that they would gladly be an "enlightened despot" to fix. After all, even General Zod is for universal healthcare access.