If our money were backed by gold and silver, people couldn’t just sit in some fancy building and push a button to create new money. They would have to engage in honest trade with another party that already has some gold in their possession. Alternatively, they would have to risk their lives and assets to find a suitable spot to build a gold mine, then get dirty and sweaty and actually dig up the gold. Not something I can imagine our “money elves” at the Fed getting down to whenever they feel like playing God with the economy.
Paulians don't even know what they're talking about when they claim to be quoting Ron Paul. If that isn't evidence of a cult of personality disorder, I don't know what is.
And yet it seems that the solution is MORE accountability in terms of separation regulations.
Predecessor to the Great Depression? Financial regulation-stripping that allowed everyone's money to get caught up in stock market crashes because banks were "investing" in that level of risk.
Predecessor to the Bush Recession? Oh look - repeal of Glass-Steagall reforms, allowing (once again) everyone's money to get caught up in stock market crashes because banks were "investing" in that level of risk.
Worshiping the almighty "market" to magically do anything but create greater and greater income equality is stupid and evidence that the right wing suffers from a collective mental disorder characterized by faulty logic and an inability to understand history.
Ever held a paperback book that close to your face to read it? Notice the type looking a little bit "blocky"? Notice how you can see the flaws in the printing process?
No different. 75 ppi is just fine for an e-reader. And no respectable optometrist EVER recommends holding the book at that distance. Hold it at standard reading distance instead (say, 24 inches or higher) and run that calculation.
The problem with these guys is that they have forceful personalities conductive to a cult-of-personality campaign and organization style. So they say a few things that make sense (in a "blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while" sense) and then certain people are willing to jump on board with everything else they say without considering what's being said because "this guy started out making sense."
Consider the guy above you: "Tell me, what has had value for thousands of years. I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon."
Actually, the problem with goldbuggery is that it cannot work in the modern economic system for two reasons: #1 - Most of the gold in the world is being used for industrial applications. #2 - Even absent #1, there is not remotely enough gold in the world for even one major nation to create a "backing" system to allow people to trade in their currency for raw gold.
Additionally, even if that did exist, gold puts immense downward pressures on currency and economics. So much so that even at the beginning of the US, we actually existed on a silver standard, and only created a silver-to-gold exchange ratio in 1792 due to a shortage of enough silver to back the currency. The 1792 expansion was - tadahh! - the government instantly creating money by adding another so-called precious metal to the currency base.
Historically, goldbuggery and silverbuggery were pretty much at odds, and there was constant changing and exchanging of the two metals with other countries that were engaging in the same foolishness and setting their own silver-to-gold exchange rates. The Independent Treasury Act of 1848 caused a lot of gold to migrate to the British due to a skewed exchange rate; this also caused the gold rush of 1849, because gold was so overvalued by law. Constant changes in the availability of one metal or the other - due to finding of new veins for mining - would cause devaluation or overvaluation in one locality or another.
In short: hitching your finances to goldbuggery and silverbuggery is insanity. And it seems the only people who can't figure that out (the "never learned history so they're doomed to repeat it" crowd) tend to be on the Ron Paul side of the political spectrum.
If you can produce something at 75 ppi that's intended to be held at standard reading distance, then you're just fine - you're relatively close to computer monitor spacing anyways and you're really not that far off from the standard printing dimensions of a paperback book.
If you're expecting someone to hold it up to their eyeballs for cheap laser surgery (or hell, a pattern of eyeball abuse that'll cause them to need laser surgery eventually), then maybe you want more pixels. Not that it'll really help you, you'd do better with a pair of reading glasses anyways.
Except that he is currently retiring and not running for the House again this time around. So you won't have him anywhere.
Not that that's a bad thing. Someone up above said "he is the only candidate that talks truth"; this only applies where "truth" includes insane goldbuggery, hermitic levels of nativism and xenophobia, extreme isolationism, and a standard monologue that ought to begin with "ok, everyone put on your tinfoil hats now."
Ron Paul is to the Republicans what Lyndon LaRouche was to the Democrats - a weirdo who attached himself to their party for his own goals and who manages to get by on a cult-of-personality effect while never remotely breaking into the mainstream because when you get right down to it, his "fundamental principles" have been disproven by history time and again.
- Colonel's original recipe:chicken grease salt. - Coca Cola recipe: right here, most likely genuine.
Now as to the USPTO, the problem is that they are no longer paid to DENY patents. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, republicans in key positions began playing games with the system, setting up metrics for the patent examiners that judged their performance not by the number of processed patents, but by the number of APPROVED patents. Examine several patents a week, deny most of them, and your "job performance" was not as good as the moron who just rubber-stamped stuff a few cubicles down.
To top that, corporations came up with the idea of "patent slamming." The idea was to overload the patent system; every time the tiniest change to a system was made, it was filed as a new patent by the giant companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, GM, GE, etc. Particularly nauseating about it have been certain software houses, where it seems every new line of code ends up farted out by some shyster in the legal department as a new patent application.
The result has been that for about the last 30 years, the USPTO has been pointless. Not to say that meaningful patents are denied, but so many meaningless patents are granted that any patent in the past 30 years is suspect.
Patents like making a rectangle. Or turning a playing card sideways, a patent so fucking stupidly absurd it should have been laughed out of the office and shipped back to the fucking morons at WOTC/Hasborg along with a copy of Hoyle's Rules for Card Games as century-old prior art.
You know, calculating collisions is independent of resolution.
Not really, no. Calculating the aim direction and collisions of a firing arc is very dependent on resolution. Compare the firing arc jumpiness of Wolfenstein 3D to Doom; one of the big things you'll start to notice is that Wolfenstein isn't truly a "360 degree" turning radius, but instead moves a few degrees at a time for each keyboard tap. If you want to hit a bad guy, and he's in between arcs, you learn to aim consistently to one side (IIRC the right side) because the collision detection is programmed to compensate inward from your aim to that side.
Now with a mouse, you have to calculate where the crosshairs are pointing. Have a game rendering internally at 640x480, but visually at 1600x1200, and players are going to complain about a "jumpy" mouse and aiming system. So the programmers overcorrect instead - they render INTERNALLY as high as possible and allow the player to turn the resolution down for visual rendering... and it eats up a shit-ton of processing power no matter what.
And then there's "auto-aim correction" calculations for consoles...
Republicans always love regressive taxation. They don't even mind the payroll tax that much since it's highly regressive (capping out means it applies on 100% of the income of the poor and middle class, but 10% or less of the income of the upper class).
We could fix the tax system by classifying ALL income as income and eliminating the "capital gains" cheating bullshit, and eliminating the payroll tax caps and simply making it apply to all wages. But that'd never fly, because it'd be fair to all instead of the regressive taxation the Republicans want.
Consider: If you ONLY consider income tax, somewhere around 50% of people have "no tax liability." A whole fucking lot of them are the senile delinquent Tea Party followers who no longer work because they're retired; the rest are mostly stay-at-home parents.
If you add in payroll taxes, it drops to 18%.
If you add in sales taxes, it drops to around 10%.
If you add in the various FEES that Republicans like to pass (remember, fees are even MORE regressive as a percentage of income) - stuff like auto registration fees for instance - it's around 5%.
But the Republicans still insist on ranting about people who "don't pay taxes."
#1 - trying to make games run at OMG FUCKING HUGE RESOLUTION and OMG FRAMERATE are big ones. You want 120 FPS at 1600x1200 or higher? Well shit, there went a ton of calculating power. Even if your video board is handling the rendering, you still have to calculate collisions and other factors on CPU.
#2 - trying to make AI work is fucking HARD. Sure, you can code it to be perfect, and constantly win because it never misses, but then you're just replicating the kind of shitty experience you get on the Call of Duty and Halo servers full of aimbots and lag-hack cheaters. Make the AI miss too often, or make too many obvious mistakes, and it looks bad. The sweet spot is hard because inevitably, players figure out how to "trigger" the mistakes of the AI and then the game seems easy. And that's just FPS AI. RTS AI and anything involving team dynamics (like CTF), it gets even harder.
#3 - programming and dumbing it down for consoles. Compare: Deus Ex, Deus EX: Invisible War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The first, on PC, programmed for gameplay over graphics = phenomenal. The second, programmed for the console and graphics over gameplay, = a steam pile of shit. The third, programmed for console but for later gen consoles and with an eye towards trying to redeem the franchise's gameplay? Somewhere in the middle, good game, but still not up to the gameplay quality of the first.
Well the corrupt Republicans in the US House pulled the same thing last night.
CISPA passed at 6:31 pm in a surprise vote, right before the speaker pounded the gavel and shouted "adjourned." Why the rushed, secret-surprise vote instead of the normally scheduled vote next week?
- No news story already running (e.g. the evening drive-time news) would cover it. Not that the corrupt assholes on right wing racist "talk" radio would bother, even if CISPA is how freedom dies. - No 10:00 news will devote more than 30 seconds to it, they don't have time to round up experts. - Friday news is "trash day", nobody pays attention to the friday and saturday news, so they can hope any blowback just gets forgotten around Monday. - Holding the vote as a surprise gets it through BEFORE the planned protests the day before the scheduled vote.
Corruption ain't unique to Britain, if anything in the USA it's far worse. You at least have proportional representation so that the shitwads from the "conservative party" can't seig-heil their way into total governmental control by "winning the government" with a 40% plurality that nets over 60% of the seats.
TL;DR version - CISPA is how "Total Information Awareness" and spying on every US citizen without cause becomes legal.
What's really sad is that the current Supreme Court couldn't even be counted on to assert the 4th amendment if this got challenged in court. After all, 5 of those senile delinquents recently ruled that you can be strip-searched for jaywalking.
Are you saying that officers don't have the authority to arrest people?
Officers have authority to arrest people ONLY IF: - the officer has seen you commit an offence; - someone charges you with having committed an offence and gives an undertaking to prosecute the charge; - the officer finds you disturbing the peace; - she/he reasonably suspects you have committed or are about to commit an offence or breach of the peace.
The law also states that you must be told in simple language WHY YOU ARE BEING ARRESTED. Simply having the thug in blue announce "that's it, you're under arrest" is not valid.
This is lost on most of the right-wing assholes who worship the thugs-in-blue, however.
It's a cyclical joke at that point. And one of the things the thugs in blue count on. "Resisting arrest" and "disobeying a lawful order" - you can be given an UNlawful order, arrested for "disobeying" it, have "resisting arrest" thrown on for spite.
Even if you prove the order was UNlawful, they can try to make the "resisting arrest" stand with any number of corrupt judges who are more than willing to set unreasonably high bail, endorse witness tampering under color of law (e.g. witness tampering BY the prosecutors and cops), and just generally harass you till you cave in and plea bargain.
What "decrease caused by piracy"? Cracking the DRM on ebooks was trivial. There are more ebooks in open formats or PDF floating around than anyone could possibly want. All DRM did was piss off the paying customers.
The ugly truth of every industry that has bitched and moaned about "piracy" is that all the money wasted on DRM has not gotten them any money in return. The people who are going to "pirate" do it for lots of reasons. Some want a more functional copy that can be moved to other devices, or that they're sure will still work in 5 years if they upgrade to a newer model device. Some just want to not deal with this kind of bullshit - the unskippable ads/previews, annoying nag screens, and other nuisances. Some are the kind of OCD person that archives anything they can get their hands on, which is actually really fucking useful to society when it comes to preserving missing/lost episodes of TV shows or presumed-destroyed literary or computer works from a few decades ago.
Some are never going to be your customers merely because the prices are so goddamn high that they could never afford to purchase. And a decade ago, certain companies (*cough*microsoft*cough*adobe*cough*) used to have a "well we don't really care too much" attitude, because they saw the numbers: putting up with so-called "piracy" led to a lot of self-taught people using their product and then buying it legit at offices or other small business environments. When Adobe started cracking down on "piracy", all of a sudden you saw the rise of the open source movement handing out programs like Paint.Net to compensate. Only the staggering incompetence of the GUI designers and lack of foresight and marketing competence in the discordant linux community have prevented a similar situation on the desktop OS level.
Not only that: the non-immune kids, once you break past herd immunity numbers, become the incubators of the mutations that break out of the vaccination wall.
Of the 132 patients under age 18, 81 percent were up to date on recommended whooping cough shots and eight percent had never been vaccinated. The other 11 percent had received at least one shot, but not the complete series.
So: 81% fully vaccinated. 11% incomplete. 8% unvaccinated.
Threshold for herd immunity: generally considered to be at 92% minimum for pertussis.
In other words: the unvaccinated/incompletely-vaccinated 19% broke herd immunity. Once that happens, you have an incubation dish for mutations, you have transmission vectors to those for whom the vaccine is out of date or has not worked as well as hoped.
The rate of cases for each age, two through 18 years old, peaked among kids in their pre-teens. Among fully immunized kids, there were about 36 cases for every 10,000 children two to seven years old, compared to 245 out of every 10,000 kids aged eight to 12. "The longer you went from your last vaccine, the greater your risk of disease," Witt told Reuters Health. At age 13, the number of cases dropped, presumably because that's the age when children are eligible for their booster shot.
Aha! The REAL pattern begins to emerge:
Broken herd immunity lets the disease in: those with incomplete vaccinations begin to be affected at higher rates than those who have received the booster shot. In essence, age 12 - due to the pacing of the booster shots - is effectively a risk zone.
This is why "religious objections" for booster shots are such fucking bullshit: being unvaccinated DOES cause societal risk. We need 92% minimum coverage for herd immunity and we do not have it.
Someone who works in a "private sector" job (such as night security) to pay their way through school and then gets an MBA or some other degree or certification (say, CPA) to move into the "corporate sector" (banking/accounting) makes precisely the move the GPP described, and the description is valid.
The fact that you are too unimaginative to understand the description does not invalidate it.
Companies bankrupt under Bain: 30%. Companies that bankrupted within 2 years of being "spun off" from Bain: 80%.
The Bain Capital methodology was simple.
Step 1: Buy out a company. Step 2: Sell off all the assets you can, and raid the pension fund. Step 3: Hide stolen assets in tax shelters and overseas accounts. Step 4: Put the company into bankruptcy to shift the burden of pension fund and other debts to taxpayers. If necessary for state law, "spin off" company into unowned status first.
Mitt Romney: corporate thief and fraudster. Bain Capital's corporate raider scheme wasn't just fraud, it was fraud that put the burden of its behavior on the taxpayers.
You are technically correct, according to the technical definition you provided, but not necessarily correct for colloquioal definitions. The economy is not simply divided into two sectors. There are the "Private Sector", "Corporate Sector" (sometimes known as Banking Sector), Public Sector, Home Sector, Retail Sector... you may also choose to divide your sectors by field in an even more granular fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
You what now?
If our money were backed by gold and silver, people couldn’t just sit in some fancy building and push a button to create new money. They would have to engage in honest trade with another party that already has some gold in their possession. Alternatively, they would have to risk their lives and assets to find a suitable spot to build a gold mine, then get dirty and sweaty and actually dig up the gold. Not something I can imagine our “money elves” at the Fed getting down to whenever they feel like playing God with the economy.
Paulians don't even know what they're talking about when they claim to be quoting Ron Paul. If that isn't evidence of a cult of personality disorder, I don't know what is.
And yet it seems that the solution is MORE accountability in terms of separation regulations.
Predecessor to the Great Depression? Financial regulation-stripping that allowed everyone's money to get caught up in stock market crashes because banks were "investing" in that level of risk.
Predecessor to the Bush Recession? Oh look - repeal of Glass-Steagall reforms, allowing (once again) everyone's money to get caught up in stock market crashes because banks were "investing" in that level of risk.
Worshiping the almighty "market" to magically do anything but create greater and greater income equality is stupid and evidence that the right wing suffers from a collective mental disorder characterized by faulty logic and an inability to understand history.
Please learn to post without block-quoting everything into an unreadable gray mass. That's far more annoying than having smaller pagination breaks.
Thank you.
When the government can print money or borrow without practical limit, we have a great depression or the morass we're in now.
Actually, at the time of the Great Depression the US was still on the gold standard.
Paulians: they never let facts get in the way of a good rant.
If you're trying to render an entire "page" of text all in one go, sure.
If you're willing to scroll paragraph by paragraph and see a quantity of readable text at a time, not so much.
I swear, you kids are spoiled.
Ever held a paperback book that close to your face to read it? Notice the type looking a little bit "blocky"? Notice how you can see the flaws in the printing process?
No different. 75 ppi is just fine for an e-reader. And no respectable optometrist EVER recommends holding the book at that distance. Hold it at standard reading distance instead (say, 24 inches or higher) and run that calculation.
Yeah, that's another good comparison.
The problem with these guys is that they have forceful personalities conductive to a cult-of-personality campaign and organization style. So they say a few things that make sense (in a "blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while" sense) and then certain people are willing to jump on board with everything else they say without considering what's being said because "this guy started out making sense."
Consider the guy above you: "Tell me, what has had value for thousands of years. I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon."
Actually, the problem with goldbuggery is that it cannot work in the modern economic system for two reasons:
#1 - Most of the gold in the world is being used for industrial applications.
#2 - Even absent #1, there is not remotely enough gold in the world for even one major nation to create a "backing" system to allow people to trade in their currency for raw gold.
Additionally, even if that did exist, gold puts immense downward pressures on currency and economics. So much so that even at the beginning of the US, we actually existed on a silver standard, and only created a silver-to-gold exchange ratio in 1792 due to a shortage of enough silver to back the currency. The 1792 expansion was - tadahh! - the government instantly creating money by adding another so-called precious metal to the currency base.
Historically, goldbuggery and silverbuggery were pretty much at odds, and there was constant changing and exchanging of the two metals with other countries that were engaging in the same foolishness and setting their own silver-to-gold exchange rates. The Independent Treasury Act of 1848 caused a lot of gold to migrate to the British due to a skewed exchange rate; this also caused the gold rush of 1849, because gold was so overvalued by law. Constant changes in the availability of one metal or the other - due to finding of new veins for mining - would cause devaluation or overvaluation in one locality or another.
In short: hitching your finances to goldbuggery and silverbuggery is insanity. And it seems the only people who can't figure that out (the "never learned history so they're doomed to repeat it" crowd) tend to be on the Ron Paul side of the political spectrum.
If you can produce something at 75 ppi that's intended to be held at standard reading distance, then you're just fine - you're relatively close to computer monitor spacing anyways and you're really not that far off from the standard printing dimensions of a paperback book.
If you're expecting someone to hold it up to their eyeballs for cheap laser surgery (or hell, a pattern of eyeball abuse that'll cause them to need laser surgery eventually), then maybe you want more pixels. Not that it'll really help you, you'd do better with a pair of reading glasses anyways.
Except that he is currently retiring and not running for the House again this time around. So you won't have him anywhere.
Not that that's a bad thing. Someone up above said "he is the only candidate that talks truth"; this only applies where "truth" includes insane goldbuggery, hermitic levels of nativism and xenophobia, extreme isolationism, and a standard monologue that ought to begin with "ok, everyone put on your tinfoil hats now."
Ron Paul is to the Republicans what Lyndon LaRouche was to the Democrats - a weirdo who attached himself to their party for his own goals and who manages to get by on a cult-of-personality effect while never remotely breaking into the mainstream because when you get right down to it, his "fundamental principles" have been disproven by history time and again.
Hate to spoil a few things for you but:
- Colonel's original recipe:chicken grease salt.
- Coca Cola recipe: right here, most likely genuine.
Now as to the USPTO, the problem is that they are no longer paid to DENY patents. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, republicans in key positions began playing games with the system, setting up metrics for the patent examiners that judged their performance not by the number of processed patents, but by the number of APPROVED patents. Examine several patents a week, deny most of them, and your "job performance" was not as good as the moron who just rubber-stamped stuff a few cubicles down.
To top that, corporations came up with the idea of "patent slamming." The idea was to overload the patent system; every time the tiniest change to a system was made, it was filed as a new patent by the giant companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, GM, GE, etc. Particularly nauseating about it have been certain software houses, where it seems every new line of code ends up farted out by some shyster in the legal department as a new patent application.
The result has been that for about the last 30 years, the USPTO has been pointless. Not to say that meaningful patents are denied, but so many meaningless patents are granted that any patent in the past 30 years is suspect.
Patents like making a rectangle. Or turning a playing card sideways, a patent so fucking stupidly absurd it should have been laughed out of the office and shipped back to the fucking morons at WOTC/Hasborg along with a copy of Hoyle's Rules for Card Games as century-old prior art.
The last company to get all "multiple core happy" and "SLI On A Board" happy was 3dfx. Who NVidia bought out when they... oh yeah, crash and burned.
Whoops.
Time Quantum systems can create some very interesting calculations based on your framerate...
You know, calculating collisions is independent of resolution.
Not really, no. Calculating the aim direction and collisions of a firing arc is very dependent on resolution. Compare the firing arc jumpiness of Wolfenstein 3D to Doom; one of the big things you'll start to notice is that Wolfenstein isn't truly a "360 degree" turning radius, but instead moves a few degrees at a time for each keyboard tap. If you want to hit a bad guy, and he's in between arcs, you learn to aim consistently to one side (IIRC the right side) because the collision detection is programmed to compensate inward from your aim to that side.
Now with a mouse, you have to calculate where the crosshairs are pointing. Have a game rendering internally at 640x480, but visually at 1600x1200, and players are going to complain about a "jumpy" mouse and aiming system. So the programmers overcorrect instead - they render INTERNALLY as high as possible and allow the player to turn the resolution down for visual rendering... and it eats up a shit-ton of processing power no matter what.
And then there's "auto-aim correction" calculations for consoles...
Indeed.
Republicans always love regressive taxation. They don't even mind the payroll tax that much since it's highly regressive (capping out means it applies on 100% of the income of the poor and middle class, but 10% or less of the income of the upper class).
We could fix the tax system by classifying ALL income as income and eliminating the "capital gains" cheating bullshit, and eliminating the payroll tax caps and simply making it apply to all wages. But that'd never fly, because it'd be fair to all instead of the regressive taxation the Republicans want.
Consider:
If you ONLY consider income tax, somewhere around 50% of people have "no tax liability." A whole fucking lot of them are the senile delinquent Tea Party followers who no longer work because they're retired; the rest are mostly stay-at-home parents.
If you add in payroll taxes, it drops to 18%.
If you add in sales taxes, it drops to around 10%.
If you add in the various FEES that Republicans like to pass (remember, fees are even MORE regressive as a percentage of income) - stuff like auto registration fees for instance - it's around 5%.
But the Republicans still insist on ranting about people who "don't pay taxes."
Actually it's more a combination:
#1 - trying to make games run at OMG FUCKING HUGE RESOLUTION and OMG FRAMERATE are big ones. You want 120 FPS at 1600x1200 or higher? Well shit, there went a ton of calculating power. Even if your video board is handling the rendering, you still have to calculate collisions and other factors on CPU.
#2 - trying to make AI work is fucking HARD. Sure, you can code it to be perfect, and constantly win because it never misses, but then you're just replicating the kind of shitty experience you get on the Call of Duty and Halo servers full of aimbots and lag-hack cheaters. Make the AI miss too often, or make too many obvious mistakes, and it looks bad. The sweet spot is hard because inevitably, players figure out how to "trigger" the mistakes of the AI and then the game seems easy. And that's just FPS AI. RTS AI and anything involving team dynamics (like CTF), it gets even harder.
#3 - programming and dumbing it down for consoles. Compare: Deus Ex, Deus EX: Invisible War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The first, on PC, programmed for gameplay over graphics = phenomenal. The second, programmed for the console and graphics over gameplay, = a steam pile of shit. The third, programmed for console but for later gen consoles and with an eye towards trying to redeem the franchise's gameplay? Somewhere in the middle, good game, but still not up to the gameplay quality of the first.
Well the corrupt Republicans in the US House pulled the same thing last night.
CISPA passed at 6:31 pm in a surprise vote, right before the speaker pounded the gavel and shouted "adjourned." Why the rushed, secret-surprise vote instead of the normally scheduled vote next week?
- No news story already running (e.g. the evening drive-time news) would cover it. Not that the corrupt assholes on right wing racist "talk" radio would bother, even if CISPA is how freedom dies.
- No 10:00 news will devote more than 30 seconds to it, they don't have time to round up experts.
- Friday news is "trash day", nobody pays attention to the friday and saturday news, so they can hope any blowback just gets forgotten around Monday.
- Holding the vote as a surprise gets it through BEFORE the planned protests the day before the scheduled vote.
Corruption ain't unique to Britain, if anything in the USA it's far worse. You at least have proportional representation so that the shitwads from the "conservative party" can't seig-heil their way into total governmental control by "winning the government" with a 40% plurality that nets over 60% of the seats.
TL;DR version - CISPA is how "Total Information Awareness" and spying on every US citizen without cause becomes legal.
What's really sad is that the current Supreme Court couldn't even be counted on to assert the 4th amendment if this got challenged in court. After all, 5 of those senile delinquents recently ruled that you can be strip-searched for jaywalking.
Are you saying that officers don't have the authority to arrest people?
Officers have authority to arrest people ONLY IF:
- the officer has seen you commit an offence;
- someone charges you with having committed an offence and gives an undertaking to prosecute the charge;
- the officer finds you disturbing the peace;
- she/he reasonably suspects you have committed or are about to commit an offence or breach of the peace.
The law also states that you must be told in simple language WHY YOU ARE BEING ARRESTED. Simply having the thug in blue announce "that's it, you're under arrest" is not valid.
This is lost on most of the right-wing assholes who worship the thugs-in-blue, however.
It's a cyclical joke at that point. And one of the things the thugs in blue count on. "Resisting arrest" and "disobeying a lawful order" - you can be given an UNlawful order, arrested for "disobeying" it, have "resisting arrest" thrown on for spite.
Even if you prove the order was UNlawful, they can try to make the "resisting arrest" stand with any number of corrupt judges who are more than willing to set unreasonably high bail, endorse witness tampering under color of law (e.g. witness tampering BY the prosecutors and cops), and just generally harass you till you cave in and plea bargain.
What "decrease caused by piracy"? Cracking the DRM on ebooks was trivial. There are more ebooks in open formats or PDF floating around than anyone could possibly want. All DRM did was piss off the paying customers.
The ugly truth of every industry that has bitched and moaned about "piracy" is that all the money wasted on DRM has not gotten them any money in return. The people who are going to "pirate" do it for lots of reasons. Some want a more functional copy that can be moved to other devices, or that they're sure will still work in 5 years if they upgrade to a newer model device. Some just want to not deal with this kind of bullshit - the unskippable ads/previews, annoying nag screens, and other nuisances. Some are the kind of OCD person that archives anything they can get their hands on, which is actually really fucking useful to society when it comes to preserving missing/lost episodes of TV shows or presumed-destroyed literary or computer works from a few decades ago.
Some are never going to be your customers merely because the prices are so goddamn high that they could never afford to purchase. And a decade ago, certain companies (*cough*microsoft*cough*adobe*cough*) used to have a "well we don't really care too much" attitude, because they saw the numbers: putting up with so-called "piracy" led to a lot of self-taught people using their product and then buying it legit at offices or other small business environments. When Adobe started cracking down on "piracy", all of a sudden you saw the rise of the open source movement handing out programs like Paint.Net to compensate. Only the staggering incompetence of the GUI designers and lack of foresight and marketing competence in the discordant linux community have prevented a similar situation on the desktop OS level.
Bingo!
Not only that: the non-immune kids, once you break past herd immunity numbers, become the incubators of the mutations that break out of the vaccination wall.
Of the 132 patients under age 18, 81 percent were up to date on recommended whooping cough shots and eight percent had never been vaccinated. The other 11 percent had received at least one shot, but not the complete series.
So:
81% fully vaccinated.
11% incomplete.
8% unvaccinated.
Threshold for herd immunity: generally considered to be at 92% minimum for pertussis.
In other words: the unvaccinated/incompletely-vaccinated 19% broke herd immunity. Once that happens, you have an incubation dish for mutations, you have transmission vectors to those for whom the vaccine is out of date or has not worked as well as hoped.
The rate of cases for each age, two through 18 years old, peaked among kids in their pre-teens. Among fully immunized kids, there were about 36 cases for every 10,000 children two to seven years old, compared to 245 out of every 10,000 kids aged eight to 12. "The longer you went from your last vaccine, the greater your risk of disease," Witt told Reuters Health. At age 13, the number of cases dropped, presumably because that's the age when children are eligible for their booster shot.
Aha! The REAL pattern begins to emerge:
Broken herd immunity lets the disease in: those with incomplete vaccinations begin to be affected at higher rates than those who have received the booster shot. In essence, age 12 - due to the pacing of the booster shots - is effectively a risk zone.
This is why "religious objections" for booster shots are such fucking bullshit: being unvaccinated DOES cause societal risk. We need 92% minimum coverage for herd immunity and we do not have it.
No, they've invented vaporators.
The problem will be finding translator droids who speak Bocce.
Not irrelevant at all.
Someone who works in a "private sector" job (such as night security) to pay their way through school and then gets an MBA or some other degree or certification (say, CPA) to move into the "corporate sector" (banking/accounting) makes precisely the move the GPP described, and the description is valid.
The fact that you are too unimaginative to understand the description does not invalidate it.
Companies bankrupt under Bain: 30%.
Companies that bankrupted within 2 years of being "spun off" from Bain: 80%.
The Bain Capital methodology was simple.
Step 1: Buy out a company.
Step 2: Sell off all the assets you can, and raid the pension fund.
Step 3: Hide stolen assets in tax shelters and overseas accounts.
Step 4: Put the company into bankruptcy to shift the burden of pension fund and other debts to taxpayers. If necessary for state law, "spin off" company into unowned status first.
Mitt Romney: corporate thief and fraudster. Bain Capital's corporate raider scheme wasn't just fraud, it was fraud that put the burden of its behavior on the taxpayers.
You are technically correct, according to the technical definition you provided, but not necessarily correct for colloquioal definitions. The economy is not simply divided into two sectors. There are the "Private Sector", "Corporate Sector" (sometimes known as Banking Sector), Public Sector, Home Sector, Retail Sector... you may also choose to divide your sectors by field in an even more granular fashion.