The cops didn't use anywhere near excessive force.
The taser is considered about as minimum use or force on the books these days. If they beat him with their night sticks for five minutes that would have been excessive force. A few light taps with a personal taser is hardly what anyone could consider force, though I'll have to abmit they hurt. If they had used a big taser him it would have been over in less than a second since he would have gone down instantly and been unable to speak or move. He screamed a bit too much for it to have been a big one.
Assault is the attempt to apply force not the actually the act of applying force.
Battery is the actual unlawful application of physical force to another. They were lawfully trying to remove the man.
Official oppression is a made up term. The police had no beef with this guy until after they were called to deal with him. It's not like they randomly picked him out for abuse.
Manslaughter you have to actually kill someone, and then it needs to be through neglegence. That guy didn't die anyhow.
None of these things apply from what I saw in the video.
Nothing will happen to the police officers. They'll be investigated by the DA and be put on leave till the investigation is over. The kid will sue the city, and being the little punk that he is will take their payoff, and that will be that.
They did serve the general public. The kid was part of the general public right up until the moment he became a nuisance.
As far as unquestionaingly obey all their instructions.
Disobeying a police officer is considered a crime in just about every country I know of. So yes here in the US they are our commanding officers and we did give them authority over the civilian population. That is to say over anyone that is commiting a crime or being a public nuisance or in times of natural disasters and public emergencies.
In the case of the kid, he was being a public nuisance, unfortunately he escalated the situation and he went from nuisance to criminal, and even more unfortunately pushed it to the point where the police felt the need to use force on him.
It could have all been avoided if he had just quit being a punk and went home.
Two things, the first "you" are the average person
So my retorical question to you is "what have you done?" Not trying to be mean or cut you down, just think about that when this paint comes on the market, along with all the other things availabe to help the environment. Once you have your own environmental house in order then start thinking about converting your family and firends. It all starts with you.
The second is recycling schemes usually suck. It's not that people are lazy, they make them overly complicated on what they will and will not take, when they will take it, and how they want them seperated. Also people just don't like going dumpster diving to seperate out cans from say yesterdays diner scraps. I have no choice the local council only gives us three little trash cans. That along with the tiny ass appartments that they call houses here in England barely have the space for muliple trash cans inside to seperate things as we go.
Depends on what kind of taser they use as to whether or not you will be disabled. The most basic kind is basically ment to be used instead of a night stick. It's somewhere under 15,000 volts and generally doesn't do more than hurt like a son of a bitch with a quick zap. It's more like a cattle prod, it motivates the receiver will a lot of pain to submit without much physical injury, but is very unlikely to actually disable the person. The bigger ones above 30,000v either look like a baton or a gun and within a second or two will completely disable you.
The fact that the kid was quite vocal through the whole thing makes me think it was the lesser of the two, since if he had been hit with the bigger one you wouldn't have heard much out of him and the whole thing would have been over after the first taser hit. You said this yourself when describing your little story.
So telling him "get up or you'll get the taser again" is absolutely appropriate as the kid was still able to do so. There's alot of whining about police prutality, well we could always go back to the good ol' days when the first thing the police officer would go for his mapple baton and beat the man till he had broken bones.
The man had every opportunity to avoid the whole thing.
The library staff asked him to leave if he didn't have a student card
He stayed
The police asked him to leave
He stayed and instead began mouthing off to them
The police tried to physically remove him out of the building
He resisted
The police now attemtp to arrest him and now begin tasering him.
At this point it doesn't matter whether or not he could comply with them.
He had pushed the situation past the point of what reasonable a reasonable person would have done. He was offered many opportunities to avoid the whole thing.
To bad He didn't take any of them.
Are you noticing a trend here
He got what he deserved. Maybe a little too much of what he deserved, but deserved none the less.
He could have avoided the whole thing, but he didn't it was his choice. If you are big enough to talk back and scream at the cops then you are big enough to suffer the consequences for your actions. There are three general rules when dealing with police or any person with power over you.
Don't touch them.
Don't mouth off to them
Don't run/resist
Looks like he violated all three to some extent. Unfortunately the kid got what he deserved, maybe a bit too much of what he deserved, but definitely what he deserved.
You've never been to a military base library then. Practically everyone on base has a card and know about the movies. We do the same thing college text books as well. It usually takes six months before I start seeing any of the movies I've donated to stick around on the shelves, because they are checked out so often. This method also lets the non-computer literate participate in "Piracy" as well.
Wow, what a mean bastard you are. I'm surprised you haven't shuffled your "Dear Father" off to a nursing home.
Two things anyone who has a basic clue about computers should know.
One no drivers no work.
Even the all mighty Apple doesn't support everything. I've watched my girlfriend scream at her Mac when it wouldn't recognize a device and then spend hours crawling the web looking for a solution. The funny thing is she usually never finds one since very few Mac users actually know how to set up hardware on their machines beyond simple plug and play.
The second is direct camera interface with either a PC or an Apple is crappy, slow, and unstable. This has to do with the camera and it's drivers, not the OS, neither of which were created by MS or Apple.
So instead of being an Apple Elite (aka snob, aka prick) and a shitty son why don't you go by your dad a $20 card reader (they are much faster than camera transfers anyway) so that he can transfer his beloved pictures to his machine with ease instead of sitting there gloating. While your at it get him an external hard drive for Christmas so he can back up his photos as well. Get yourself one too because even a Mac is not immune to hardware failure.
I like to donate movies to the local library, especially over-hyped crap ones. That way, without piracy, I can "steal" with a nice clear concious from the movie industry along with everyone else in town. Just imagine if everyone went out just once this year and bought one movie and gave it to the library, what that would do to sales and rentals. A simple and effective way to stick it to them and twist. Maybe they'll start paying attention to what we the customers want...
...yeh right we all know they'll try to either sue the libraries or get laws passed to make it illegal for libraries to distribute copyrighted material without their permission.
No I'm referring to an IRA. It's sad that if parents or even the government would start an IRA at the child's birth and put a measely $25 bucks a month in it and then turn it over to the child when of age to continue putting $25 a month in it till they retire that most of the problems with social security would be a non-issue (shy of a catostrophic economic event). That would be too simple of a solution, hence why private Social Security accounts will never take off.
Yes you can use a IRA towards other things, and no most 20 year olds, or 30, or even 40 year olds don't have a clue about those things.
529's are another good higher education investment vehicle since they are specifically for education, but you can start them for youself and then move them to family memebers if you don't use all the money in the account. The best part is if you do start one for your child and they blow off going to college, unlike an IRA, they do not gain control over it at age 18 and can't waste the money. Instead you can cash it in pay the penality & taxes and go buy yourself a new sports car.
I agree completely. The first thing I do to a machine that I build is turn all that crap off, other than maybe powering down the monitor after 45 minutes. All the other hibernation modes tend to spell disaster since most software developers can't be bothered to set up their programs to take in account OS sleep modes.
My method of saving energy is to not install all the extra lighting they try to sell you for your case.
There have been some studies paying the students for grades. There were some mixed results, but it did show a positive impact. Give them a weekly paycheck for their current GPA with half of it going into a savings account for higher education or an IRA. (Might as well solve the social security crisis while we are at it.)
Some people may call it bribery, but I call it getting paid to go to work a full day.
The already have an onboard diagnostic system in cars, and it does reduce polution by a large amount. They also have a catalyzer in the exhaust that does exactly the same thing as this paint/concrete additive, though it works on heat rather than light. This is why cars already polute at a fraction of what they did just ten years ago. The problem is that there are alot more cars than we had ten years ago, and not all air polution comes from cars. Anything that burns anything can create air polutants. Sun light can create even worse polutants out of lesser ones in the air. Plastics and even wood emit polutants with time.
The most effective solutions are usually the simplest ones. The biggest advantage to this solution is that anyone can apply it. You don't have to be a megacorp or a government to make a difference. A free weekend, a case or two of beer, a few friends, and something to paint that's all you need.
You are quite wrong. The polution eating qualities of this material is a secondary bonus to what this material is really good for, which is to keep crud from building up on buildings. Corporations, even the greedy, mean, puppy kicking kinds like their icons to be bold and most of all clean and shinny. They also like keeping all that money they get from kicking puppies, so paying people to clean their giant icons costs lots of money even if you use illegals to do it. A 30% boost in price is a small amount to be paid for something that only needs to be cleaned every great once in a while.
The concrete will be quite common, because of a simple fact corporations don't build roads, governments do, and they are about as hyper anal about the environment as they come, reguardless of what the media says. Lot's of money coming from the federal government has alot of strings attached to it. Cities get alot of flack over polution and loose alot of funding over it. Getting people out of their cars has been a non-starter to reduce polution, but getting the numbers to drop with a special concrete or paint is simplicity in itself, when compared to light rail and other polution fighting schemes.
There is another large group in the US that is willing to pay quite a bit of money for this technology, and that is parents. Ask any parent with an asthmatic child if they would be willing to do something as simple as repaint their home inside and out to better the life of their suffering child and you'll most likely see them jumping in their car and hurrying off to the hardware store before you can even get an answer. Most of the polution in the US, as in greater than 50%, comes not from industry but people. It is the average person whose mind has to be changed, not the corporations. Most people are more than willing to make simple changes in their lives or part with a reasonable amount of money to do so, especially if it will have a real impact on the life of their child.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this paint become mandatory to use at schools and public buildings with just a few years. Even if it didn't or ever get used by corporations, there are 300,000,000 in the US that live in a lot of houses. It wouldn't take very many to start making a noticeable impact on the polution.
That's interesting, I didn't realize that Peter Pan was that "new". There have been so many movies and books made by various companies that I figured it to be squarely in the public domain.
I can see J.K Rowling eventually heading the way so many other self-made billionairs go. She may not turn over the Harry Potter series in her lifetime, since once you give it away you loose all control with what the receiver would do with it, but I can see her heavily contributing to many causes with the royalties she's made. Who knows maybe she'll form a trust from the rights in her will to help send youth's whose parents were killed by evil wizards to private English schools.
"Paying to keep the mess a bit farther away", that is not entirely honest and you know it.
They are sitting there saying hey bring the industry to our country so that our people can have jobs and you know what we don't give a flying flip about environment rules as long as you pay in hard currency. They are the ones that refuse to educate and care for their own people. No one can make them do anything, as we have so painfully learned yet again in foreign policy.
As much as everyone loves to bash the US on consumption, there isn't a single country on the planet that is not heading that way as well. Europe is only a few years behind and is rapidly catching up. The only thing that is slowing it down is the outrageously high taxes they hit them with. China, India, and Russia if they can ever straighten out some of their social and government problems will make US consumption look like a drop in the bucket.
You want to truly lessen the harm to nature? Then lessen the number of people on planet earth. That is something the 3rd has been inflicting upon itself and the rest of us.
Directly or indirectly implicit in problems elsewhere.
Wow so that pretty much means it's our fault right? Everything? everywhere?
Let's see.
Toxic waste yeah that's all our fault. I might point out that you can't "export" without someone else being WILLING to "import" Might have something to do with the corrupt or inept governments holding onto power in just about every 3rd world country on the planet. Yep all our fault. We must have created every single one of those countries there too, because everyone in the 3rd world was happy living as natives one with nature till the US arrived. Oh wait, no they haven't, they've been at each other throats since the Gulf Wars, Vietnam, Korea, WW II, or was that WW I or was it during the English colonial period or the Empires of the French, the Spanish, the Moores, the crusades, the Roman, the Greek, biblical times....
Yep definitely US's fault. We started it all.
Cleaning up our own shit, that's a wonderful idea. Last time I checked that's exactly what we've been doing, and we've gotten nothing but grief for it. Iraq that was our mess, well actually that was Britian's, Germany's, France's, and Italy's mess, but we inherited it by default during the cold war. We propped up Sadam so he could fight the Iranian's who were backed by the Soviets. The enemy of our enemy.... Same in Afghanistan, we made that mess to keep the Soviets out. It was our money and our training that helped Bin Laden get where he is today. Actually there seems to be a link in there where both those areas started to become real problems was about the same time we stopped giving them guns and money. Funny how that works out?
So we finally try to go do something about it and instead of "the Great Liberators" or at least the "So So cleaner uppers of our own messes that weren't really ours to begin with", we are the "imperialistic bastards that are ruining the world".
Yep it's all the US's fault for everything, nobody else is responsible for anything.
Zimbabwe, there is an excellent example of the excellence of the 3rd world. They are pretty busy these days, attacking farmers, confiscating the land, and ruining it with poor farming skills. They should have just about completely run that country into the ground about the same time the fish disappear from the parent article.
I love the exporting waste to the 3rd world argument. As if we sneak over there at night and dump it in their backyard when no one is looking. It's not so much that we "export" to them, but they are "importing" from us. The 3rd world is not full of inocents, it's full of industries and people that just happen to give a shit less about their own people and country. They want to get paid so they too can have the ecological footprint of a single NJ suburbanite.
No America is not a shining beacon, but compared to most places on this planet I have visited it does appear to be so, not so much because America is so good, but because so many places are so bad.
I do love how the SUV and the USA always come up on these. Here are some fun facts for you.
All the population growth in the world is occurring in 3rd world countries and they are the ones least likely to honor fishing agreements. They are also the ones creating some of the biggest ecological messes and have the worst polution. We have some of the worst emmissions as in CO2, but all other forms of polutants have been dropping so fast that people as a whole polute more than industry does now.
The only reason the US is still growing is due to immigration, mostly the illegal kind, and we are working on that.
You want to see where the real world devistation is at, just go dig up your passport and start country hoping. The world is a big shit hole, has been for a long time, long before the US ever was around. You know the funny part, we get the blame for the mess even though we've had little to do with it. We are just an easy target I guess.
The part that cracks me up the most though, is our "horrible" society is the one most likely to come up with a solution that doesn't involve armed Islamic militias and mass genocide.
Just one of many stiching programs out there. There is no reason why something like this couldn't be built into a camera within a year or two. You want a giant picture? Take 5-10 photos and let it stick it all together.
It would be even more interesting if the software got smart enough to not only make flat images but composite 3D photos just based off of a series of 2D images taken of an area.
I agree that a copyright for 10-20 years after it was created by a person , but transfering that copyright to a corporation or any other person be illegal. The problem is when you have something that has the legal rights of a person, but is more or less immortal like a corp there is aways going to be a big push every ten years or so to extend the copyright for another ten years. Look at Disney they've singlehandedly push US copyright far beyond what it was ever intended to do. The funny thing is Disney has made an absolute killing off of public domain material for the last 60 years (Peter Pan, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty etc etc.) It's time they give back some of what they have proffited from.
If copyright is supposed to be about protecting the artists then fine let's protect the artist. Corporations are not artists and that copyright should never be something they could own.
By the time they launch that system, "the Great HD fizzle" (Betamax II) will be history and the true Next Generation War will be upon us.
You've all heard or taken part of the great counsel vs. PC flame war and how the PC is all but dead. Well I beg to differ. Not only is the PC far from dead it's about to smack counsel gaming in the back of the head with a 2x4.
Multiple Independent online game/music/movie/TV delivery systems, 1Tb hard drives, Dx10 video, quad SLI & Crossfire, 1x PCIX video cards, multi-sound device support (USB devices/sound cards) , multi quad core CPU's, PPU's, and Vista. These are all things that we already have or soon will.
Vista is the wild card, though I've noticed every generation of windows has only improved the gamer's experience. If they can pull another repeat of the past the jump forward should be quite big. The PC phobic and neophyte should find PC gaming much more friendly, than in the past.
A big improvement in hardware has already occurred; though I doubt most understand what it is truly capable of. Everyone keeps looking at SLI and Crossfire as a high performance way of upping the frame rate of one game on one monitor. What the gaming public does not realize is that it is an even better way of running 2-8 individual monitors with video and graphic acceleration on each one. Also the new player in town is the 1x PCIX video card. Once we dump PCI slot once and for all that should make room to support even more monitors than before at a very reasonable price.
Currently the NVidia 7900GT can support two monitors with accelleration on both. So watching video while playing a game, or running two games (in window mode) is already possible.
Ah you say "So what, who cares. I could run a counsel and a TV."
"So very true" I respond "But can you add in 4 wireless USB controllers, 4 widescreen monitors, and 4 wireless USB headsets so that each player gets his own screen and sound? No you can't?" I don't know of any counsels that can do that, but the capability is now there on PC's. All of you were wondering what all those 2, 4, and 8 core CPU's were going to be for, now you know. After enjoying games that way, going back to playing in split screen just seems so very quaint.
You shoot back "But wait you say, I can run a bunch of counsels together over a network and do the same thing."
And there lies the rub and where PC gaming pulls out a big ol battle axe and takes the head of the counsel market.
The only advantages counsels had over the PC were price and ease of use. They've given up both those advantages with the big push towards PC like hardware, HD TV's, and continuing to force players towards static expensive anemic proprietary components. It's no longer cheaper to game on a counsel nor is it necessarily any easier or more convenient to do so.
And just like that the Next Generation War is over and the counsels are scratching their heads wondering what the hell just happened.
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The taser is considered about as minimum use or force on the books these days. If they beat him with their night sticks for five minutes that would have been excessive force. A few light taps with a personal taser is hardly what anyone could consider force, though I'll have to abmit they hurt. If they had used a big taser him it would have been over in less than a second since he would have gone down instantly and been unable to speak or move. He screamed a bit too much for it to have been a big one.
Assault is the attempt to apply force not the actually the act of applying force.
Battery is the actual unlawful application of physical force to another. They were lawfully trying to remove the man.
Official oppression is a made up term. The police had no beef with this guy until after they were called to deal with him. It's not like they randomly picked him out for abuse.
Manslaughter you have to actually kill someone, and then it needs to be through neglegence. That guy didn't die anyhow.
None of these things apply from what I saw in the video.
Nothing will happen to the police officers. They'll be investigated by the DA and be put on leave till the investigation is over. The kid will sue the city, and being the little punk that he is will take their payoff, and that will be that.
As far as unquestionaingly obey all their instructions.
Disobeying a police officer is considered a crime in just about every country I know of. So yes here in the US they are our commanding officers and we did give them authority over the civilian population. That is to say over anyone that is commiting a crime or being a public nuisance or in times of natural disasters and public emergencies.
In the case of the kid, he was being a public nuisance, unfortunately he escalated the situation and he went from nuisance to criminal, and even more unfortunately pushed it to the point where the police felt the need to use force on him.
It could have all been avoided if he had just quit being a punk and went home.
So my retorical question to you is "what have you done?" Not trying to be mean or cut you down, just think about that when this paint comes on the market, along with all the other things availabe to help the environment. Once you have your own environmental house in order then start thinking about converting your family and firends. It all starts with you.
The second is recycling schemes usually suck. It's not that people are lazy, they make them overly complicated on what they will and will not take, when they will take it, and how they want them seperated. Also people just don't like going dumpster diving to seperate out cans from say yesterdays diner scraps. I have no choice the local council only gives us three little trash cans. That along with the tiny ass appartments that they call houses here in England barely have the space for muliple trash cans inside to seperate things as we go.
The fact that the kid was quite vocal through the whole thing makes me think it was the lesser of the two, since if he had been hit with the bigger one you wouldn't have heard much out of him and the whole thing would have been over after the first taser hit. You said this yourself when describing your little story.
So telling him "get up or you'll get the taser again" is absolutely appropriate as the kid was still able to do so. There's alot of whining about police prutality, well we could always go back to the good ol' days when the first thing the police officer would go for his mapple baton and beat the man till he had broken bones.
The man had every opportunity to avoid the whole thing.
The library staff asked him to leave if he didn't have a student card
He stayed
The police asked him to leave
He stayed and instead began mouthing off to them
The police tried to physically remove him out of the building
He resisted
The police now attemtp to arrest him and now begin tasering him.
At this point it doesn't matter whether or not he could comply with them.
He had pushed the situation past the point of what reasonable a reasonable person would have done.
He was offered many opportunities to avoid the whole thing.
To bad He didn't take any of them.
Are you noticing a trend here
He got what he deserved. Maybe a little too much of what he deserved, but deserved none the less.
Don't touch them.
Don't mouth off to them
Don't run/resist
Looks like he violated all three to some extent. Unfortunately the kid got what he deserved, maybe a bit too much of what he deserved, but definitely what he deserved.
You've never been to a military base library then. Practically everyone on base has a card and know about the movies. We do the same thing college text books as well. It usually takes six months before I start seeing any of the movies I've donated to stick around on the shelves, because they are checked out so often. This method also lets the non-computer literate participate in "Piracy" as well.
Two things anyone who has a basic clue about computers should know.
One no drivers no work.
Even the all mighty Apple doesn't support everything. I've watched my girlfriend scream at her Mac when it wouldn't recognize a device and then spend hours crawling the web looking for a solution. The funny thing is she usually never finds one since very few Mac users actually know how to set up hardware on their machines beyond simple plug and play.
The second is direct camera interface with either a PC or an Apple is crappy, slow, and unstable. This has to do with the camera and it's drivers, not the OS, neither of which were created by MS or Apple.
So instead of being an Apple Elite (aka snob, aka prick) and a shitty son why don't you go by your dad a $20 card reader (they are much faster than camera transfers anyway) so that he can transfer his beloved pictures to his machine with ease instead of sitting there gloating. While your at it get him an external hard drive for Christmas so he can back up his photos as well. Get yourself one too because even a Mac is not immune to hardware failure.
Yes you can use a IRA towards other things, and no most 20 year olds, or 30, or even 40 year olds don't have a clue about those things.
529's are another good higher education investment vehicle since they are specifically for education, but you can start them for youself and then move them to family memebers if you don't use all the money in the account. The best part is if you do start one for your child and they blow off going to college, unlike an IRA, they do not gain control over it at age 18 and can't waste the money. Instead you can cash it in pay the penality & taxes and go buy yourself a new sports car.
My method of saving energy is to not install all the extra lighting they try to sell you for your case.
After being thwarted yet a third time in the past, Skynet outsourced time line assassinations to Samsung and the rest they say is history.
Some people may call it bribery, but I call it getting paid to go to work a full day.
The most effective solutions are usually the simplest ones. The biggest advantage to this solution is that anyone can apply it. You don't have to be a megacorp or a government to make a difference. A free weekend, a case or two of beer, a few friends, and something to paint that's all you need.
The concrete will be quite common, because of a simple fact corporations don't build roads, governments do, and they are about as hyper anal about the environment as they come, reguardless of what the media says. Lot's of money coming from the federal government has alot of strings attached to it. Cities get alot of flack over polution and loose alot of funding over it. Getting people out of their cars has been a non-starter to reduce polution, but getting the numbers to drop with a special concrete or paint is simplicity in itself, when compared to light rail and other polution fighting schemes.
There is another large group in the US that is willing to pay quite a bit of money for this technology, and that is parents. Ask any parent with an asthmatic child if they would be willing to do something as simple as repaint their home inside and out to better the life of their suffering child and you'll most likely see them jumping in their car and hurrying off to the hardware store before you can even get an answer. Most of the polution in the US, as in greater than 50%, comes not from industry but people. It is the average person whose mind has to be changed, not the corporations. Most people are more than willing to make simple changes in their lives or part with a reasonable amount of money to do so, especially if it will have a real impact on the life of their child.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this paint become mandatory to use at schools and public buildings with just a few years. Even if it didn't or ever get used by corporations, there are 300,000,000 in the US that live in a lot of houses. It wouldn't take very many to start making a noticeable impact on the polution.
I can see J.K Rowling eventually heading the way so many other self-made billionairs go. She may not turn over the Harry Potter series in her lifetime, since once you give it away you loose all control with what the receiver would do with it, but I can see her heavily contributing to many causes with the royalties she's made. Who knows maybe she'll form a trust from the rights in her will to help send youth's whose parents were killed by evil wizards to private English schools.
They are sitting there saying hey bring the industry to our country so that our people can have jobs and you know what we don't give a flying flip about environment rules as long as you pay in hard currency. They are the ones that refuse to educate and care for their own people. No one can make them do anything, as we have so painfully learned yet again in foreign policy.
As much as everyone loves to bash the US on consumption, there isn't a single country on the planet that is not heading that way as well. Europe is only a few years behind and is rapidly catching up. The only thing that is slowing it down is the outrageously high taxes they hit them with. China, India, and Russia if they can ever straighten out some of their social and government problems will make US consumption look like a drop in the bucket.
You want to truly lessen the harm to nature? Then lessen the number of people on planet earth. That is something the 3rd has been inflicting upon itself and the rest of us.
Wow so that pretty much means it's our fault right? Everything? everywhere?
Let's see.
Toxic waste yeah that's all our fault. I might point out that you can't "export" without someone else being WILLING to "import" Might have something to do with the corrupt or inept governments holding onto power in just about every 3rd world country on the planet. Yep all our fault. We must have created every single one of those countries there too, because everyone in the 3rd world was happy living as natives one with nature till the US arrived. Oh wait, no they haven't, they've been at each other throats since the Gulf Wars, Vietnam, Korea, WW II, or was that WW I or was it during the English colonial period or the Empires of the French, the Spanish, the Moores, the crusades, the Roman, the Greek, biblical times....
Yep definitely US's fault. We started it all.
Cleaning up our own shit, that's a wonderful idea. Last time I checked that's exactly what we've been doing, and we've gotten nothing but grief for it. Iraq that was our mess, well actually that was Britian's, Germany's, France's, and Italy's mess, but we inherited it by default during the cold war. We propped up Sadam so he could fight the Iranian's who were backed by the Soviets. The enemy of our enemy.... Same in Afghanistan, we made that mess to keep the Soviets out. It was our money and our training that helped Bin Laden get where he is today. Actually there seems to be a link in there where both those areas started to become real problems was about the same time we stopped giving them guns and money. Funny how that works out?
So we finally try to go do something about it and instead of "the Great Liberators" or at least the "So So cleaner uppers of our own messes that weren't really ours to begin with", we are the "imperialistic bastards that are ruining the world".
Yep it's all the US's fault for everything, nobody else is responsible for anything.
My response to that is ... bullshit.
I love the exporting waste to the 3rd world argument. As if we sneak over there at night and dump it in their backyard when no one is looking. It's not so much that we "export" to them, but they are "importing" from us. The 3rd world is not full of inocents, it's full of industries and people that just happen to give a shit less about their own people and country. They want to get paid so they too can have the ecological footprint of a single NJ suburbanite.
No America is not a shining beacon, but compared to most places on this planet I have visited it does appear to be so, not so much because America is so good, but because so many places are so bad.
All the population growth in the world is occurring in 3rd world countries and they are the ones least likely to honor fishing agreements. They are also the ones creating some of the biggest ecological messes and have the worst polution. We have some of the worst emmissions as in CO2, but all other forms of polutants have been dropping so fast that people as a whole polute more than industry does now.
The only reason the US is still growing is due to immigration, mostly the illegal kind, and we are working on that.
You want to see where the real world devistation is at, just go dig up your passport and start country hoping. The world is a big shit hole, has been for a long time, long before the US ever was around. You know the funny part, we get the blame for the mess even though we've had little to do with it. We are just an easy target I guess.
The part that cracks me up the most though, is our "horrible" society is the one most likely to come up with a solution that doesn't involve armed Islamic militias and mass genocide.
Just one of many stiching programs out there. There is no reason why something like this couldn't be built into a camera within a year or two. You want a giant picture? Take 5-10 photos and let it stick it all together.
It would be even more interesting if the software got smart enough to not only make flat images but composite 3D photos just based off of a series of 2D images taken of an area.
If copyright is supposed to be about protecting the artists then fine let's protect the artist. Corporations are not artists and that copyright should never be something they could own.
I'm a dope. Should read 7800GT not 7900 GT
You've all heard or taken part of the great counsel vs. PC flame war and how the PC is all but dead. Well I beg to differ. Not only is the PC far from dead it's about to smack counsel gaming in the back of the head with a 2x4.
Multiple Independent online game/music/movie/TV delivery systems, 1Tb hard drives, Dx10 video, quad SLI & Crossfire, 1x PCIX video cards, multi-sound device support (USB devices/sound cards) , multi quad core CPU's, PPU's, and Vista. These are all things that we already have or soon will.
Vista is the wild card, though I've noticed every generation of windows has only improved the gamer's experience. If they can pull another repeat of the past the jump forward should be quite big. The PC phobic and neophyte should find PC gaming much more friendly, than in the past.
A big improvement in hardware has already occurred; though I doubt most understand what it is truly capable of. Everyone keeps looking at SLI and Crossfire as a high performance way of upping the frame rate of one game on one monitor. What the gaming public does not realize is that it is an even better way of running 2-8 individual monitors with video and graphic acceleration on each one. Also the new player in town is the 1x PCIX video card. Once we dump PCI slot once and for all that should make room to support even more monitors than before at a very reasonable price.
Currently the NVidia 7900GT can support two monitors with accelleration on both. So watching video while playing a game, or running two games (in window mode) is already possible.
Ah you say "So what, who cares. I could run a counsel and a TV."
"So very true" I respond "But can you add in 4 wireless USB controllers, 4 widescreen monitors, and 4 wireless USB headsets so that each player gets his own screen and sound? No you can't?" I don't know of any counsels that can do that, but the capability is now there on PC's. All of you were wondering what all those 2, 4, and 8 core CPU's were going to be for, now you know. After enjoying games that way, going back to playing in split screen just seems so very quaint.
You shoot back "But wait you say, I can run a bunch of counsels together over a network and do the same thing."
And there lies the rub and where PC gaming pulls out a big ol battle axe and takes the head of the counsel market.
The only advantages counsels had over the PC were price and ease of use. They've given up both those advantages with the big push towards PC like hardware, HD TV's, and continuing to force players towards static expensive anemic proprietary components. It's no longer cheaper to game on a counsel nor is it necessarily any easier or more convenient to do so.
And just like that the Next Generation War is over and the counsels are scratching their heads wondering what the hell just happened.
Really if you don't like Weird Al then you must have been unloved as a child.
Remember that come election time to check the box next to the otion that says "Throw the Bums Out"