Corporations do not have rights; sadly, we give them rights and falsely site a legal ruling (which never happened) while at the same time restricting rights to non-citizens under the claim that only citizens have any rights. This is a SICK situation we are in. It undermines democracy.
Corporations were pretty much non-existent before the civil war. Why should corporations be allowed to hold such assets at all? They'll be kept busy dealing with the owners and contract agreements... and wanting the owner to LIVE longer instead of laying them off later.
Not that any reform is possible; we must first get approval from the WTO...
You are just a consumer and some are voters- no large organization thinks of you as a citizen anymore.
How about a short range RF signal indicator? a cheap analog signal at each intersection; standardized. future cars could use this to provide additional information to the driver. downside is the blackbox in new cars would likely record this so you'd be stuck having the speed and the light used against you in court.
Actually, bulb replacement costs a TON of money - I forget the cost I heard at a city council meeting when discussing the switch but it was more like $900 per light (they'd do all 3 because it was cheaper.) It also involved TWO city workers for some reason to replace it; safety rule I suppose. The whole city did not have enough lights to keep these workers busy just doing that; they still had to hire extra staff (I guessed it was 1 person) and the labor cost spread out over the year for having 1 extra staffer made it come out high for the labor. LED saves money.
If you want, buy bulbs WITH IR heaters in them! it'll take some work to avoid wiring them in... and the bulbs will cost more... the power use is still a problem... but less than running all year around. A cheap chip in each bulb could turn on the heat below freezing; a pulse sent to the bulb could turn it on/off as well; the whole batch could be wired up to a chip or switch on the pole... Longer lasting and cheaper-- use a heating element in the fixture to do all the lights at once (a toaster heating element should be enough.)
How about a special truck? they love buying special trucks... Better yet, have an addon for the plows to blast air at the lights when it drives under them? (not fool proof but it would reduce problems cheaply.)
You'd think they'd never thought about drinking or eating the bomb. Drugs-- eat them; but nobody ever thinks about bombs even when they won't allow any liquids when a LIQUID is easier to eat. Sure, it might be poison but you only need to last a little while.
Suppositories?? You'd think some old politicians would know about those.
Won't end until we are naked, shoeless and have an x-ray and/or an anal probe.
No imagination. Does anybody have any imagination anymore? Only crackpots are going to try jets and they already WON that battle, they have enough sense to try something else next time.
Problem is a great deal more died than the documented level. its over 1 million. I've heard doctors from Iraq say that they don't see all that many people in hospitals; they can only guess as to how many never get into "the system" which doesn't do a whole lot to document them.
In Vietnam, the US wanted high body counts and it backfired. This time they wanted low and inexact counts so they didn't want to keep track and it has worked out much better.
As far as the invading side:
About half the group is "contractors" (mercenaries) and there is a large number of actual contractors as well.
The military counts goofy to lower their official death count as well. They can save people better, faster, and much much easier in this war (not being a jungle helps a ton) but that doesn't mean they don't die LATER when it doesn't count in the official tally (or they off themselves as a direct result of their experiences - and what if they flip out and kill other people?) We don't get good official numbers for a reason.
Parent is correct in pointing out this basic failure to recognize the problem with averages in statistics.
In addition, abortions can also be counted as early deaths.
We already save many that would naturally die which has skewed the average even further. If the technology froze, one would expect the average to go down as the genetic defects live long enough to reproduce and increase the defect rates possibly leading to complications medicine can not fully counter.
Just think about it -- a dominant defective trait allowed to continue leads a large demographic of people (or all humans) who have some sort of defect that requires advanced technology to continue the species... The makings of an interesting science fiction story?
"Independents" can not win without corporate vetting. Even vetted parties -- the 2 major ones -- screw their own members who manage to get into office despite the corporations. Ron Paul comes to mind, they screwed him as much as they could, even giving lesser candidates entry into debates or more speaking time and he was within the corporate party! Dennis Kucinich was as well, but it was less obvious and his base wasn't as active or as large. These are within the system. Outside the system, they don't get any chance unless they are a funny billionaire who PAYS for time - if you bribe the media they'll talk about you somewhat evenhandedly.
Money talks. speech is not free and coverage especially is not free. You can speak all you want to small groups but you can't reach the public.
Its a SYSTEM. like a buggy program, it needs debugging. We need to stop the indirect bribery; unfortunately, we have to use the broken system to fix itself. This bootstrap won't work just short of a violent revolution - it has to be that close to the edge. We are nowhere near there today. Best we can do is get people woken up and worked up. Then we can start to do things like:
Mandatory equal airtime. FREE. a form of tax on the media. They use OUR airwaves and OUR intellectual property and even the private I.P. they used exists because of OUR laws.
Independent run debates (league of women voters used to do them)
Semi-non-profit media like newspapers. used to be that news divisions were a nice tax write off; besides a public service-- they have gone down since they became profit centered.
Public financing of campaigns. equality. Money is not a vote, its not democratic. think about it.
Politicians can't work again after leaving office. neither can their spouse. Maybe they should just go to jail; if they care so much for us then why won't they actually give something up for real??? At least stick them on SS pay for life and ban them from work or investment.
Run-Off Voting; any of them.....lots of possible things to do-- but until people realize the system is busted... they'll keep using windows 95.
SS is a large slow moving program. A policy at any one instant could make it insolvent in the long term if one extends that into the future without adaptation. Reality is, things do not work like this-- as the bad times approach more people wake up and start trying to fix it. So policies change as the situation becomes more apparent to more people. The process is slow; however, strong measures to fix things DO HAPPEN. In the USA, its a regular pattern of neglect, realization, and expensive quick fixes- somewhat mirroring the boom bust economy. Y2K was a problem; the big problem areas were fixed by billions of dollars of panicked fixes so it never became a serious problem.
The SS system has current payers support the currently retired with a BUFFER of money and the backing power of the government. Sometimes the buffer will empty; in which case, the government will create a secondary buffer until:
A) Government goes broke/stops buffering it (not likely, especially when the boomers will be a MASSIVE voting block)
B) Government avoids monetary problems by lowering benefits.
C) Revenue starts to exceed demand (boomers die) and buffers are refilled.
A ponzi scheme is an IMPOSSIBLE trap that can easily be misapplied to any buffering problem, including any insurance schemes (public or private.) Its especially easy to start drawing parallels when the buffer is going to empty. You are incorrectly applying it to SS.
Social Security WORKS and did for a century before any issues; which started due to poor management combined with an unusual increase in long living old people. Continual growth is not required; right now our economic system is based upon this, not SS. True the fall of this flavor of economics is inevitable therefore making it far more like a ponzi scheme; especially our monetary policy.
Its UNTRUE that SS will fail. This is a plan to kill it by convincing people its inevitably going to end: "so why support it?" Lots of powerful financial corps want you to gamble your SS money -- err, correction, they want to gamble with YOUR savings (and without regulations.) They almost privatized it just a few years ago-- before the collapse, remember?
When SS is projected to go broke the boomers will be dropping like flies. The retirement age may be raised. Then revenue will exceed demand. The real issues:
1) Government steals from SS trust fund (the buffer) which it has been doing.
2) Government ranks up so much debt it's insolvent or unable to carry the debt of buffering the SS system even for a SHORT TIME SPAN. This is possible if current tends continue; but they likely will not. Again, the problem gets bigger as we approach it so we act (unfortunately, with half measures instead of stomaching a real solution..)
3) We finds ways to extend life even longer for the boomers and while refusing to raise retirement age. My neighbor retired at 60 - he is 92. He will spend almost 2/3 his age living off the rest of us; plus the 1st 16 years he was not contributing. He thought he'd die 30 years ago like his parents did.
4) Cost of living increases and wages stagnate; making SS become unaffordable without heavily taxing the rich, which will be even less possible because those circumstances increase their influence over government. This won't kill SS, but force it to become underfunded after government gives up on going into debt for it.
I could clean up my post, but you should get the gist of it.
It is not a WAR. War can only be declared by congress so it must be avoided officially because it is not legal. Politically, it is a war and not a war whenever the need arises to be either - and the public falls for it.
Which leads to the next point: insurgents have good reason to be unhappy with the people who stand bye and do nothing which empowers their enemy. The military/police can also be unkind to those who help insurgents or do nothing - not that one can equate them, after all the people pay to support the government side of the dispute (without choice) and does not fund the other side without breaking the law.
As the world approaches a singular rule (at least as far as the corporate interests) we shall see less war and possibly the elimination of war itself. It will become insurgents, rebels, and terrorists vs the establishment which will be larger than ever before.
In addition, armed conflicts will go down just as they did in the uncivilized old west USA, where the hired guns were replaced by lawyers (still fittingly referred to as hired guns.) Similar dynamics but different process of dispute resolution (and some argue no more fair either.) Economic politics will continue to displace war while also watering the roots of insurgency.
There is a track of thought, not surprisingly aligned with marketplace faith healing where people legitimately believe a 1-world government or more ideally, a more powerful economic regulatory organization eliminates the motives for war. The things these arguments like to ignore is that war is not caused merely for economic reasons (although that often is the case) and that these other motivates can fuel non-war conflicts every bit as troublesome (if not more so) than conventional war.
Get used to "terrorism" it is not going away and will become more common in part because of derogatory nature of that label.
The SPF headers in emails could help with the spam filter - I have mail rules that use the spam rank # in the header (from the server) combined with the SPF to mark emails as junk. This helped reduce a lot of spam: raise the bar for poor SPF results. I also filter spam from my own server using SPF, this cuts down on SOME spam; however, for some technical reasons I can't have a strict SPF record on all my domains and some spammers exploit that so I didn't remove all of it.
Also, I've noticed a huge majority of emails with the SPF header containing: "Maximum nesting level exceeded" and I've not noticed a single legit email with it. I just filter those out now.
When I momentarily tried stricter SPF policies I noticed all of the spammers who get past the normal filtering were using SPF; probably the 1st people to use SPF were the spammers. You know, SPF includes a "loose" mode where you essentially say: these are my mail servers but I might break from it. Strict SPF use stops spam (outside DNS spoofing) but I rarely see strict SPF and everybody would have to use it along with blacklists to stop spam. So many servers lack SPF completely that I couldn't ever require it.
Although, spammers adapt to any popular trick quickly - its their job to do so.
My wish is that more software use the X-Spam email headers... Would be nice if clients would indicate spam rank as well. So I still see the low chance spam but it is color coded (by degree) and the high chance spam is auto filed out of sight.
No, the Sound Manager was designed to output sound on the mac. In the 80s there wasn't much of a library so many apps accessed hardware - I know because I had the 1st mac without compatible sound hardware that crashed everything that didn't use the weak sound api or more robust sound manager. Sound Manager didn't start to take over until the early 90s. Quickdraw was there from the start and has LITTLE to do with quicktime; other than the naming convention and the support of PICT files, QuickDraw was the blitter.
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Quicktime is a massive library as far as I'm concerned; you call it what you wish. When you get a library this flexible this large with so many features you could call it a framework. It is bundled with quicktime player (and used to include the picture viewer, a control panel, and samples; later browser plugs.) Its "shipped" out as a distribution even today; so if you want to be picky...
Quicktime for windows was NOT that massive and it didn't redo a whole OS either. You ARE talking about a time when windows programs used sound hardware to get sound (Sound Blaster compatible...) I suggest you look into the lawsuit that MS lost when they STOLE the code (with comments) and only a tiny change in code was necessary for windows support which is why they so soundly lost the lawsuit. MS abused "discovery" to avoid any actions until 97 when they did a deal with MS to end it. This was the time when MS bought non-vote shares in apple etc. Video for windows wasn't much faster or much smaller it was in large part copied.
The codebase claim I made was heard from an actual quicktime engineer I met in the 90s and he was talking about lines of code not disk or memory. Later I met another QT engineer who said QT's codebase was larger than that of Mac OS 9.
Next, mp4 files: Quicktime files were the basis for mp4 files, which DO LESS but also added some atoms. This one is more debatable so I'll just give you this link: http://developer.apple.com/standards/classicquicktime.html Its not literally the same; duh.
Your sorenson claim I'm wary of but don't know the specifics. I know they worked from draft information in the mpeg group, as did MS with their rip off codecs.
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OpenDoc was an idea without a business model or understandable marketing or documentation. Apple didn't seem to want it themselves. Never tried OpenDoc - I'd be shocked if it had pascal strings given when it came out. QT however was started during the pascal years. Nothing difficult about pascal; I liked being able to instantly know string lengths...(until I went over length.)
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The biggest advantage of Flash was their marketing budget was put into bundling the plug-in on everything to increase the userbase. This was BEFORE macromedia bought them out.
Next was they used a BAD director knock off app to generate the files-- Quicktime HAD NO multimedia app to make its files (until it was too late and it was buggy 3rd party app worse to use than flash ever was.) There was an API but no app to show much of what it could do let alone an authoring environment; which is what flash was-- flash was a vector format turned into a director knock off before shockwave got off the ground. Macromedia bought them to avoid losing.
Oh, Quicktime 3 didn't have flash abilities either-- that wasn't until around QT 5 when it could do just about anything flash does. Oh, the 3D Quicktime unlike the rest was actually built around Quickdraw 3D which unfortunately I learned.. I should have learned OpenGL. This then required a larger lib to be bundled with it-- it was even an optional install.
Quicktime was WAY WAY ahead of everybody and apple never treated it with respect. Also, I think part of the reason it had poor developer support was lack of strategic planning, not engineering.
You socialist! How dare you government run military is best! We all KNOW that the free market attracts the best and brightest producing more for less while bringing up the stock market!
The only problem is Bush didn't have enough time to continue privatizing the military and CIA; once we hand over everything to the market they will protect us competently. The banks, enron, madoff, GM, ceo pay, were all caused by government socialist intervention! We need less regulation! Let their lobbyists compete for contracts - hell, let the lobbyists vote for us! They already control what they want why restrain them further? If we hand government over to the corporations they don't be hurt and cause all these problems because of the socialists!
Welcome to America-- home of the multinational super-human corporations and an embarrassingly ignorant and complacent consumers.;-)
FYI: Quicktime is more than a player. It is a massive video library (with a larger code base than windows 95) used to power video editing etc. Its OLD and used to be the basis of nearly all video editing software. It has gotten stale and others have replaced it but it was the foundation for digital video for many years and its still around being used for this.
The quicktime file format is the basis of the mp4 file format as well. It is a solid library with a lot of extendability for its size, age, and complexity - its in C and I've coded for it a little bit... like 10 years ago.
What I see now is alternatives usually built around a single format library with an import/export system added on. This makes those easier to implement while quicktime has been open ended and not tied to any 1 format (other than its own container format) the timecode in quicktime is confusing because its not a video time code but an abstraction.
Basically apple dropped the ball when they didn't open source the library years ago (and they did ask for public input for a short period without much attention given to it) now we have MKV containers and the zombee avi containers and many specialized libraries.
Not much out there as far as I've seen that competes with the power of quicktime. It could have been the framework but it looks like mkv will be the open container and somebody will tie together enough libraries and codecs into a generalized framework--- or we'll just have to jam it all together ourselves. (which may not be any more difficult than trying to understand the old quicktime C API...)
Just imagine how much damage he played a part in when he was in office. That will be doing harm longer than the lives of the girls and impacting many more people.
How about we put all politicians in jail? If they want to serve the greater good, they must forfeit their freedom - instead of just saying the people come first make them prove it.
How about we ban men from political office for a few hundred years? just to make up for lost time.
Insulting! iTunes is far far from MS Access for Music! MS Access sucks. period. iTunes is one of the best designed music library programs ever made! I've tried tons of them. It is true that web apps are moving to application windows; but also, the nature of the framework severely limits it from breaking out of the browser window paradigm. A multi-document web app is a rare beast because they don't function well in the current framework (its essentially a 1 doc at a time limitation; ironically multiple document frames are heavily used just to implement the 1 doc behavior.)
Breaking the rules is ok based on context; but just like the 1/3 rule of image composition, it shouldn't be broken lightly - one should know what they are doing. I don't see much being broken in iTunes from old mac; now iMovie that thing breaks the most stuff... Final Cut is much more old mac like (except the app-based theme) and I've used the 1st video apps which were made on old mac. One of the fundamentals of design is target audience; which causes many exceptions to naturally occur (plus they WERE guidelines not "rules.")
Owning and having read the 1st interface design book for that obsolete mac - I can say that floating pallets and tool bars are not obsolete and the concepts largely remain the same. In fact, apple has a whole window theme for the floating pallet windows. The tool bars unfortunately are demoted to be attached to windows now instead of floating (this is not ideal, it should be a window and the right side toggle should make it snap to the frontmost window; being on by default.) The menubar remains at the best spot. Right-clicking is not required and property windows (which is a pathetic design hack still commonplace on windows) still don't exist.
I'm not interested in another object scripting language with a console and shell bindings. PowerShell is not new, people have thought of this as soon as OOP came into being and it NEVER had any traction which is why we still don't have something like powershell in the unix world (or widely known if it exists.)
When the actual situations arise people have gone to scripting languages with or without bindings to glue things together; its not a standardized form of interaction for all programs - which is useful - but then I've not seen much in the way of conformity with text I/O, language bindings, except perhaps applescript which is a horrid language that undoes such benefits (yet some apps have odd ball interfaces still.)
When you are programming a real language with some development tools it is far more useful than trying to write/run it interactively - I'd say its a rare use case when something like powershell is useful; besides, if you wanted it so badly, I'm sure you can find somebody's implementation of a shell in whatever language you use.
I'm no fan of the unix shells, but for basic uses they serve their job well for me and for everything else there is perl. If I want to program I'll use a real programming language and not the goofy crap the various shells provide. (I know, I know, that sounds funny because I implied perl is less goofy...)
There is more than MUSIC and MOVIES to the whole "Intellectual Property" BS invented by the propagandists (aka Public Relations, as they call themselves.)
The RIAA and MPAA may not have direct reach in other nations, especially the ones where people are not so preoccupied with consumerism but they help support the imperial corporate movement because it benefits them locally and eventually internationally.
Agra Business is far more involved in the I.P. imperialism than the entertainment industry is. Look into Monsanto, United Fruit, etc. Nationally, there are nationalistic, corporatist, and harsh economic realities at stake. You have nations like the USA where they have little of substance offer; their economy runs on financial gambling (no exaggeration, they had to pass exceptions to gambling laws for derivative trading,) the military industry, healthcare, an oil backed currency, and I.P. Small business never counts despite it being a substantial part of the US economy. Its obvious what the USA will do and has been since the 70s either continue the easy trend to instability and constant effort to maintain it or a drastic change in direction requiring more change than Obama can ever vaguely promise - remember: Carter tried to change tack and look what happened-- it just accelerated in the other direction.
Long term it is going to get interesting.... People in the USA still haven't accepted (or know) that the EU has surpassed them as the biggest economy; they think their education is getting worse when it fact, the world is developing and catching up-- you can't maintain the same advantage when you're near the peak with little room for improvement and the others are approaching. (the "help" that is harming our school system is another issue-- and beside the main point. The BIG-O of this problem is the 1st world nations can't advance a whole lot more relatively and the others are developing algorithms approaching ours.) Plus you have the fact much of the US economic policies are based upon the 3rd world being...well, 3rd world. The USA needs a WW3 to repeat what WW2 did for them in order to maintain and that not considering environmental and resource realities which can not be ignored this time.
So you get a $100,000 government loan on something too risky to get enough private funding and then want to pay it back X years later so you retain all rights? In other words, you want a risky zero interest loan for R & D for X years? The X being variable and the payback possibly never happening? Or additional money will be sunk in until something fruitful comes out of it.
I'm just using your example and fairly phrasing it; I'm not saying government shouldn't ever give out risky zero interest loans or grants to private projects for an indirect greater good. Stadiums these days are all doing it; except that the loans don't seem to ever get paid back - on rare occasion they'll even call it a grant or claim ownership for a while until they sell it off cheaply when the "right" politicians come to power.
China doesn't do jack for quality control other than execute a few people when things get really really bad. China still has to get past our FDA. Our FDA costs money to maintain a minimum level of quality control; despite corruption and the fact it is hopelessly underfunded. Sure you pay some fees for FDA services but I doubt they reflect costs involved in running the FDA. The EU has MORE people and the BIGGEST economy in the world with strong standards and many times the barriers for businesses; they are proof that our half measures are nowhere near as damaging as the misleading business peoples' claims.
Nope. iTunes STILL is the document model despite influences of the web on the main window. Besides, iApps from apple often break their own design guidelines.
1) Try double clicking on a playlist in iTunes; you'll get multiple playlist documents.
2) Sound Jam is iTunes and its still document based despite the main window's short cuts. The scripting API still has document objects; however, since the playlists went to an internal DB those are not document tied anymore.
3) Most mac apps and even apple's dev tools work from the document paradigm. Even most the single doc apps. There is no multiple app instance trick like windows.
The history influences them both to this day.
I would argue that the WEB influenced both GUIs more since Windows 98 than they did each other. The convergence is the web to them and them to the web.
Poor Sound Engineering is why CDs do not sound good enough; source recordings should be at least 48khz minimum and they downsample to CD - if done properly, the CD should sound just fine to everybody but the fanatics with good enough hardware, software, and/or imagination to find something wrong with it. My record player didn't have more dynamic range - and it wasn't the cheapest model either.... that is, excluding the pops and scratches which did give it a larger dynamic range.
Besides, LP has many more flaws like how they lack BASS and need it reduced and then boosted on playback. It wouldn't matter if we had 96Khz 32bit sound on DVDs - sound engineers would continue try to wreak everything again. What is needed is an embedded volume code for the player's decoder / amplifier circuit to use to instantly raise or lower the volume so these sound engineers can continue to mess everything up to a ridiculous extreme without actually throwing away sound quality. This would also allow people to ignore the dynamic compression by telling the player to ignore the encoded volume/dynamic range track.
Mac windows are DOCUMENT centric; multiple windows represent multiple documents - this is why it did not matter in the early years that only 1 application could run at a time (except Desk Accessories.) This is also why the menu bar is disconnected; remains at the top, and indicates the frontmost application - the MENUBAR is application centric. The document paradigm comes from Xerox.
Windows is application centric. So the menus go inside the application window and there is trend to give the application the whole screen space because its trapped (perspectivly) inside the window. This results in multiple documents being document centric windows inside an application window; which is confusing initially. OR they run multiple instances of the same application (appearance wise) to make it more document centric in behavior to avoid the nested window confusion. IE is an example of this; with the new IE tabs providing a document level "task bar" for switching IE documents within 1 application window as well as avoid the task bar clutter caused by lacking document centric windows.... A bunch of patches to what initially was a mistake; proven by the need to change so much of it.
I wasn't speeding, I am allowed to speed to pass somebody and that somebody was on the horizon. How can I pass them if I don't drive faster than they do officer?;-)
Does ANYBODY ever fairly calculate damages? Sometimes one has to wonder how they calculate these numbers they pull out...
SETI costs will not be as high as the legal burden on the system; sure the FA was missing some of the details but having seen some college IT workers who largely come from the student population and few stick around-- it doesn't surprise me they'd have some issues. Some of the top guys are just the kids who didn't leave.
As far as porn on a staff computer-- don't get me started. I'd say that is quite common; sometimes its not intentional... http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ strikes true in too many ways (on both sides of the IT/staff.) We have a situation where staff are encouraged to take laptops home, answer personal emails etc-- to blur the line between home and work so they can get unofficial worktime from people without them realizing it. Being on call with a cell phone without pay... etc. This clever movement to sucker employees with these kinds of "benefits" also has the side affect in that they think of the stuff as also being THEIRS-- or loaned; again, business tries to blur professionalism and friendship/family to get the best of both worlds.
I did IT for a bit. I found porn. The MEN who blurred the line the most also had the stuff or more of it and not really hidden either. I also found those with laptops INCREASED this tendency. If its partially THEIRS then they treat it as such. I think it is fair for them to do this simply because I strongly oppose the intentional blurring going on but a contradictory professionalism that comes up when the darker sides surface. Don't want abuse? don't "loan" your "family member" hardware for their personal use.
My IT job was harder because of these modern management methods; people were extremely upset if they couldn't run what they wanted to, have a laptop to take home, surf anywhere (from any location,) etc.
Its a fallacy to think that people are poor because they deserve to be. For some people it is true but that is not the case for most people.
There are only so many jobs and within that finite set there are jobs that can not provide a living.
Not everybody can be the boss and run their own business, some people have to work FOR a business - many jobs are too big for an individual to perform or perform at the scale to be profitable or competitive. Specialization is the norm and life is too complex for 1 person to handle with limited time/resources.
Many people are BAD at business, but great at everything else - a whole lot of people are bad with money in the USA...
It boils down to this: we are more interdependent than ever before, more specialized, less capable in areas outside our specialty, and get paid less each year while costs continue to rise.
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Corporations do not have rights; sadly, we give them rights and falsely site a legal ruling (which never happened) while at the same time restricting rights to non-citizens under the claim that only citizens have any rights. This is a SICK situation we are in. It undermines democracy.
Corporations were pretty much non-existent before the civil war. Why should corporations be allowed to hold such assets at all? They'll be kept busy dealing with the owners and contract agreements... and wanting the owner to LIVE longer instead of laying them off later.
Not that any reform is possible; we must first get approval from the WTO...
You are just a consumer and some are voters- no large organization thinks of you as a citizen anymore.
How about a short range RF signal indicator? a cheap analog signal at each intersection; standardized. future cars could use this to provide additional information to the driver. downside is the blackbox in new cars would likely record this so you'd be stuck having the speed and the light used against you in court.
Actually, bulb replacement costs a TON of money - I forget the cost I heard at a city council meeting when discussing the switch but it was more like $900 per light (they'd do all 3 because it was cheaper.) It also involved TWO city workers for some reason to replace it; safety rule I suppose. The whole city did not have enough lights to keep these workers busy just doing that; they still had to hire extra staff (I guessed it was 1 person) and the labor cost spread out over the year for having 1 extra staffer made it come out high for the labor. LED saves money.
If you want, buy bulbs WITH IR heaters in them! it'll take some work to avoid wiring them in... and the bulbs will cost more... the power use is still a problem... but less than running all year around. A cheap chip in each bulb could turn on the heat below freezing; a pulse sent to the bulb could turn it on/off as well; the whole batch could be wired up to a chip or switch on the pole... Longer lasting and cheaper-- use a heating element in the fixture to do all the lights at once (a toaster heating element should be enough.)
How about a special truck? they love buying special trucks... Better yet, have an addon for the plows to blast air at the lights when it drives under them? (not fool proof but it would reduce problems cheaply.)
Its probably TRUE. Remember the man who shipped himself?
http://www.thatsweird.net/news6.shtml
You have to be protected from yourself and punished - freedom? hah!
You'd think they'd never thought about drinking or eating the bomb. Drugs-- eat them; but nobody ever thinks about bombs even when they won't allow any liquids when a LIQUID is easier to eat. Sure, it might be poison but you only need to last a little while.
Suppositories?? You'd think some old politicians would know about those.
Won't end until we are naked, shoeless and have an x-ray and/or an anal probe.
No imagination. Does anybody have any imagination anymore? Only crackpots are going to try jets and they already WON that battle, they have enough sense to try something else next time.
Problem is a great deal more died than the documented level. its over 1 million. I've heard doctors from Iraq say that they don't see all that many people in hospitals; they can only guess as to how many never get into "the system" which doesn't do a whole lot to document them.
In Vietnam, the US wanted high body counts and it backfired. This time they wanted low and inexact counts so they didn't want to keep track and it has worked out much better.
As far as the invading side:
About half the group is "contractors" (mercenaries) and there is a large number of actual contractors as well.
The military counts goofy to lower their official death count as well. They can save people better, faster, and much much easier in this war (not being a jungle helps a ton) but that doesn't mean they don't die LATER when it doesn't count in the official tally (or they off themselves as a direct result of their experiences - and what if they flip out and kill other people?) We don't get good official numbers for a reason.
Parent is correct in pointing out this basic failure to recognize the problem with averages in statistics.
In addition, abortions can also be counted as early deaths.
We already save many that would naturally die which has skewed the average even further. If the technology froze, one would expect the average to go down as the genetic defects live long enough to reproduce and increase the defect rates possibly leading to complications medicine can not fully counter.
Just think about it -- a dominant defective trait allowed to continue leads a large demographic of people (or all humans) who have some sort of defect that requires advanced technology to continue the species... The makings of an interesting science fiction story?
"Independents" can not win without corporate vetting. Even vetted parties -- the 2 major ones -- screw their own members who manage to get into office despite the corporations. Ron Paul comes to mind, they screwed him as much as they could, even giving lesser candidates entry into debates or more speaking time and he was within the corporate party! Dennis Kucinich was as well, but it was less obvious and his base wasn't as active or as large. These are within the system. Outside the system, they don't get any chance unless they are a funny billionaire who PAYS for time - if you bribe the media they'll talk about you somewhat evenhandedly.
Money talks. speech is not free and coverage especially is not free. You can speak all you want to small groups but you can't reach the public.
Its a SYSTEM. like a buggy program, it needs debugging. We need to stop the indirect bribery; unfortunately, we have to use the broken system to fix itself. This bootstrap won't work just short of a violent revolution - it has to be that close to the edge. We are nowhere near there today. Best we can do is get people woken up and worked up. Then we can start to do things like:
Mandatory equal airtime. FREE. a form of tax on the media. They use OUR airwaves and OUR intellectual property and even the private I.P. they used exists because of OUR laws.
Independent run debates (league of women voters used to do them)
Semi-non-profit media like newspapers. used to be that news divisions were a nice tax write off; besides a public service-- they have gone down since they became profit centered.
Public financing of campaigns. equality. Money is not a vote, its not democratic. think about it.
Politicians can't work again after leaving office. neither can their spouse. Maybe they should just go to jail; if they care so much for us then why won't they actually give something up for real??? At least stick them on SS pay for life and ban them from work or investment.
Run-Off Voting; any of them. ....lots of possible things to do-- but until people realize the system is busted... they'll keep using windows 95.
SS is a large slow moving program. A policy at any one instant could make it insolvent in the long term if one extends that into the future without adaptation. Reality is, things do not work like this-- as the bad times approach more people wake up and start trying to fix it. So policies change as the situation becomes more apparent to more people. The process is slow; however, strong measures to fix things DO HAPPEN. In the USA, its a regular pattern of neglect, realization, and expensive quick fixes- somewhat mirroring the boom bust economy. Y2K was a problem; the big problem areas were fixed by billions of dollars of panicked fixes so it never became a serious problem.
The SS system has current payers support the currently retired with a BUFFER of money and the backing power of the government. Sometimes the buffer will empty; in which case, the government will create a secondary buffer until:
A) Government goes broke/stops buffering it (not likely, especially when the boomers will be a MASSIVE voting block)
B) Government avoids monetary problems by lowering benefits.
C) Revenue starts to exceed demand (boomers die) and buffers are refilled.
A ponzi scheme is an IMPOSSIBLE trap that can easily be misapplied to any buffering problem, including any insurance schemes (public or private.) Its especially easy to start drawing parallels when the buffer is going to empty. You are incorrectly applying it to SS.
Social Security WORKS and did for a century before any issues; which started due to poor management combined with an unusual increase in long living old people. Continual growth is not required; right now our economic system is based upon this, not SS. True the fall of this flavor of economics is inevitable therefore making it far more like a ponzi scheme; especially our monetary policy.
Its UNTRUE that SS will fail. This is a plan to kill it by convincing people its inevitably going to end: "so why support it?" Lots of powerful financial corps want you to gamble your SS money -- err, correction, they want to gamble with YOUR savings (and without regulations.) They almost privatized it just a few years ago-- before the collapse, remember?
When SS is projected to go broke the boomers will be dropping like flies. The retirement age may be raised. Then revenue will exceed demand. The real issues:
1) Government steals from SS trust fund (the buffer) which it has been doing.
2) Government ranks up so much debt it's insolvent or unable to carry the debt of buffering the SS system even for a SHORT TIME SPAN. This is possible if current tends continue; but they likely will not. Again, the problem gets bigger as we approach it so we act (unfortunately, with half measures instead of stomaching a real solution..)
3) We finds ways to extend life even longer for the boomers and while refusing to raise retirement age. My neighbor retired at 60 - he is 92. He will spend almost 2/3 his age living off the rest of us; plus the 1st 16 years he was not contributing. He thought he'd die 30 years ago like his parents did.
4) Cost of living increases and wages stagnate; making SS become unaffordable without heavily taxing the rich, which will be even less possible because those circumstances increase their influence over government. This won't kill SS, but force it to become underfunded after government gives up on going into debt for it.
I could clean up my post, but you should get the gist of it.
It is not a WAR. War can only be declared by congress so it must be avoided officially because it is not legal. Politically, it is a war and not a war whenever the need arises to be either - and the public falls for it.
Which leads to the next point: insurgents have good reason to be unhappy with the people who stand bye and do nothing which empowers their enemy. The military/police can also be unkind to those who help insurgents or do nothing - not that one can equate them, after all the people pay to support the government side of the dispute (without choice) and does not fund the other side without breaking the law.
As the world approaches a singular rule (at least as far as the corporate interests) we shall see less war and possibly the elimination of war itself. It will become insurgents, rebels, and terrorists vs the establishment which will be larger than ever before.
In addition, armed conflicts will go down just as they did in the uncivilized old west USA, where the hired guns were replaced by lawyers (still fittingly referred to as hired guns.) Similar dynamics but different process of dispute resolution (and some argue no more fair either.) Economic politics will continue to displace war while also watering the roots of insurgency.
There is a track of thought, not surprisingly aligned with marketplace faith healing where people legitimately believe a 1-world government or more ideally, a more powerful economic regulatory organization eliminates the motives for war. The things these arguments like to ignore is that war is not caused merely for economic reasons (although that often is the case) and that these other motivates can fuel non-war conflicts every bit as troublesome (if not more so) than conventional war.
Get used to "terrorism" it is not going away and will become more common in part because of derogatory nature of that label.
The SPF headers in emails could help with the spam filter - I have mail rules that use the spam rank # in the header (from the server) combined with the SPF to mark emails as junk. This helped reduce a lot of spam: raise the bar for poor SPF results. I also filter spam from my own server using SPF, this cuts down on SOME spam; however, for some technical reasons I can't have a strict SPF record on all my domains and some spammers exploit that so I didn't remove all of it.
Also, I've noticed a huge majority of emails with the SPF header containing: "Maximum nesting level exceeded" and I've not noticed a single legit email with it. I just filter those out now.
When I momentarily tried stricter SPF policies I noticed all of the spammers who get past the normal filtering were using SPF; probably the 1st people to use SPF were the spammers. You know, SPF includes a "loose" mode where you essentially say: these are my mail servers but I might break from it. Strict SPF use stops spam (outside DNS spoofing) but I rarely see strict SPF and everybody would have to use it along with blacklists to stop spam. So many servers lack SPF completely that I couldn't ever require it.
Although, spammers adapt to any popular trick quickly - its their job to do so.
My wish is that more software use the X-Spam email headers... Would be nice if clients would indicate spam rank as well. So I still see the low chance spam but it is color coded (by degree) and the high chance spam is auto filed out of sight.
No, the Sound Manager was designed to output sound on the mac. In the 80s there wasn't much of a library so many apps accessed hardware - I know because I had the 1st mac without compatible sound hardware that crashed everything that didn't use the weak sound api or more robust sound manager. Sound Manager didn't start to take over until the early 90s. Quickdraw was there from the start and has LITTLE to do with quicktime; other than the naming convention and the support of PICT files, QuickDraw was the blitter.
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Quicktime is a massive library as far as I'm concerned; you call it what you wish. When you get a library this flexible this large with so many features you could call it a framework. It is bundled with quicktime player (and used to include the picture viewer, a control panel, and samples; later browser plugs.) Its "shipped" out as a distribution even today; so if you want to be picky...
Quicktime for windows was NOT that massive and it didn't redo a whole OS either. You ARE talking about a time when windows programs used sound hardware to get sound (Sound Blaster compatible...) I suggest you look into the lawsuit that MS lost when they STOLE the code (with comments) and only a tiny change in code was necessary for windows support which is why they so soundly lost the lawsuit. MS abused "discovery" to avoid any actions until 97 when they did a deal with MS to end it. This was the time when MS bought non-vote shares in apple etc. Video for windows wasn't much faster or much smaller it was in large part copied.
The codebase claim I made was heard from an actual quicktime engineer I met in the 90s and he was talking about lines of code not disk or memory. Later I met another QT engineer who said QT's codebase was larger than that of Mac OS 9.
Next, mp4 files:
Quicktime files were the basis for mp4 files, which DO LESS but also added some atoms. This one is more debatable so I'll just give you this link: http://developer.apple.com/standards/classicquicktime.html
Its not literally the same; duh.
Your sorenson claim I'm wary of but don't know the specifics. I know they worked from draft information in the mpeg group, as did MS with their rip off codecs.
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OpenDoc was an idea without a business model or understandable marketing or documentation. Apple didn't seem to want it themselves. Never tried OpenDoc - I'd be shocked if it had pascal strings given when it came out. QT however was started during the pascal years. Nothing difficult about pascal; I liked being able to instantly know string lengths...(until I went over length.)
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The biggest advantage of Flash was their marketing budget was put into bundling the plug-in on everything to increase the userbase. This was BEFORE macromedia bought them out.
Next was they used a BAD director knock off app to generate the files-- Quicktime HAD NO multimedia app to make its files (until it was too late and it was buggy 3rd party app worse to use than flash ever was.) There was an API but no app to show much of what it could do let alone an authoring environment; which is what flash was-- flash was a vector format turned into a director knock off before shockwave got off the ground. Macromedia bought them to avoid losing.
Oh, Quicktime 3 didn't have flash abilities either-- that wasn't until around QT 5 when it could do just about anything flash does. Oh, the 3D Quicktime unlike the rest was actually built around Quickdraw 3D which unfortunately I learned.. I should have learned OpenGL. This then required a larger lib to be bundled with it-- it was even an optional install.
Quicktime was WAY WAY ahead of everybody and apple never treated it with respect. Also, I think part of the reason it had poor developer support was lack of strategic planning, not engineering.
You socialist! How dare you government run military is best! We all KNOW that the free market attracts the best and brightest producing more for less while bringing up the stock market!
The only problem is Bush didn't have enough time to continue privatizing the military and CIA; once we hand over everything to the market they will protect us competently. The banks, enron, madoff, GM, ceo pay, were all caused by government socialist intervention! We need less regulation! Let their lobbyists compete for contracts - hell, let the lobbyists vote for us! They already control what they want why restrain them further? If we hand government over to the corporations they don't be hurt and cause all these problems because of the socialists!
Welcome to America-- home of the multinational super-human corporations and an embarrassingly ignorant and complacent consumers. ;-)
FYI:
Quicktime is more than a player. It is a massive video library (with a larger code base than windows 95) used to power video editing etc. Its OLD and used to be the basis of nearly all video editing software. It has gotten stale and others have replaced it but it was the foundation for digital video for many years and its still around being used for this.
The quicktime file format is the basis of the mp4 file format as well.
It is a solid library with a lot of extendability for its size, age, and complexity - its in C and I've coded for it a little bit... like 10 years ago.
What I see now is alternatives usually built around a single format library with an import/export system added on. This makes those easier to implement while quicktime has been open ended and not tied to any 1 format (other than its own container format) the timecode in quicktime is confusing because its not a video time code but an abstraction.
Basically apple dropped the ball when they didn't open source the library years ago (and they did ask for public input for a short period without much attention given to it) now we have MKV containers and the zombee avi containers and many specialized libraries.
Not much out there as far as I've seen that competes with the power of quicktime. It could have been the framework but it looks like mkv will be the open container and somebody will tie together enough libraries and codecs into a generalized framework--- or we'll just have to jam it all together ourselves. (which may not be any more difficult than trying to understand the old quicktime C API...)
Just imagine how much damage he played a part in when he was in office. That will be doing harm longer than the lives of the girls and impacting many more people.
How about we put all politicians in jail? If they want to serve the greater good, they must forfeit their freedom - instead of just saying the people come first make them prove it.
How about we ban men from political office for a few hundred years? just to make up for lost time.
Insulting! iTunes is far far from MS Access for Music! MS Access sucks. period. iTunes is one of the best designed music library programs ever made! I've tried tons of them.
It is true that web apps are moving to application windows; but also, the nature of the framework severely limits it from breaking out of the browser window paradigm. A multi-document web app is a rare beast because they don't function well in the current framework (its essentially a 1 doc at a time limitation; ironically multiple document frames are heavily used just to implement the 1 doc behavior.)
Breaking the rules is ok based on context; but just like the 1/3 rule of image composition, it shouldn't be broken lightly - one should know what they are doing. I don't see much being broken in iTunes from old mac; now iMovie that thing breaks the most stuff... Final Cut is much more old mac like (except the app-based theme) and I've used the 1st video apps which were made on old mac. One of the fundamentals of design is target audience; which causes many exceptions to naturally occur (plus they WERE guidelines not "rules.")
Owning and having read the 1st interface design book for that obsolete mac - I can say that floating pallets and tool bars are not obsolete and the concepts largely remain the same. In fact, apple has a whole window theme for the floating pallet windows. The tool bars unfortunately are demoted to be attached to windows now instead of floating (this is not ideal, it should be a window and the right side toggle should make it snap to the frontmost window; being on by default.) The menubar remains at the best spot. Right-clicking is not required and property windows (which is a pathetic design hack still commonplace on windows) still don't exist.
I'm not interested in another object scripting language with a console and shell bindings. PowerShell is not new, people have thought of this as soon as OOP came into being and it NEVER had any traction which is why we still don't have something like powershell in the unix world (or widely known if it exists.)
When the actual situations arise people have gone to scripting languages with or without bindings to glue things together; its not a standardized form of interaction for all programs - which is useful - but then I've not seen much in the way of conformity with text I/O, language bindings, except perhaps applescript which is a horrid language that undoes such benefits (yet some apps have odd ball interfaces still.)
When you are programming a real language with some development tools it is far more useful than trying to write/run it interactively - I'd say its a rare use case when something like powershell is useful; besides, if you wanted it so badly, I'm sure you can find somebody's implementation of a shell in whatever language you use.
I'm no fan of the unix shells, but for basic uses they serve their job well for me and for everything else there is perl. If I want to program I'll use a real programming language and not the goofy crap the various shells provide. (I know, I know, that sounds funny because I implied perl is less goofy...)
There is more than MUSIC and MOVIES to the whole "Intellectual Property" BS invented by the propagandists (aka Public Relations, as they call themselves.)
The RIAA and MPAA may not have direct reach in other nations, especially the ones where people are not so preoccupied with consumerism but they help support the imperial corporate movement because it benefits them locally and eventually internationally.
Agra Business is far more involved in the I.P. imperialism than the entertainment industry is. Look into Monsanto, United Fruit, etc. Nationally, there are nationalistic, corporatist, and harsh economic realities at stake. You have nations like the USA where they have little of substance offer; their economy runs on financial gambling (no exaggeration, they had to pass exceptions to gambling laws for derivative trading,) the military industry, healthcare, an oil backed currency, and I.P. Small business never counts despite it being a substantial part of the US economy. Its obvious what the USA will do and has been since the 70s either continue the easy trend to instability and constant effort to maintain it or a drastic change in direction requiring more change than Obama can ever vaguely promise - remember: Carter tried to change tack and look what happened-- it just accelerated in the other direction.
Long term it is going to get interesting.... People in the USA still haven't accepted (or know) that the EU has surpassed them as the biggest economy; they think their education is getting worse when it fact, the world is developing and catching up-- you can't maintain the same advantage when you're near the peak with little room for improvement and the others are approaching. (the "help" that is harming our school system is another issue-- and beside the main point. The BIG-O of this problem is the 1st world nations can't advance a whole lot more relatively and the others are developing algorithms approaching ours.) Plus you have the fact much of the US economic policies are based upon the 3rd world being ...well, 3rd world. The USA needs a WW3 to repeat what WW2 did for them in order to maintain and that not considering environmental and resource realities which can not be ignored this time.
So you get a $100,000 government loan on something too risky to get enough private funding and then want to pay it back X years later so you retain all rights?
In other words, you want a risky zero interest loan for R & D for X years? The X being variable and the payback possibly never happening? Or additional money will be sunk in until something fruitful comes out of it.
I'm just using your example and fairly phrasing it; I'm not saying government shouldn't ever give out risky zero interest loans or grants to private projects for an indirect greater good. Stadiums these days are all doing it; except that the loans don't seem to ever get paid back - on rare occasion they'll even call it a grant or claim ownership for a while until they sell it off cheaply when the "right" politicians come to power.
China doesn't do jack for quality control other than execute a few people when things get really really bad. China still has to get past our FDA.
Our FDA costs money to maintain a minimum level of quality control; despite corruption and the fact it is hopelessly underfunded. Sure you pay some fees for FDA services but I doubt they reflect costs involved in running the FDA. The EU has MORE people and the BIGGEST economy in the world with strong standards and many times the barriers for businesses; they are proof that our half measures are nowhere near as damaging as the misleading business peoples' claims.
Nope. iTunes STILL is the document model despite influences of the web on the main window. Besides, iApps from apple often break their own design guidelines.
1) Try double clicking on a playlist in iTunes; you'll get multiple playlist documents.
2) Sound Jam is iTunes and its still document based despite the main window's short cuts. The scripting API still has document objects; however, since the playlists went to an internal DB those are not document tied anymore.
3) Most mac apps and even apple's dev tools work from the document paradigm. Even most the single doc apps. There is no multiple app instance trick like windows.
The history influences them both to this day.
I would argue that the WEB influenced both GUIs more since Windows 98 than they did each other. The convergence is the web to them and them to the web.
Poor Sound Engineering is why CDs do not sound good enough; source recordings should be at least 48khz minimum and they downsample to CD - if done properly, the CD should sound just fine to everybody but the fanatics with good enough hardware, software, and/or imagination to find something wrong with it. My record player didn't have more dynamic range - and it wasn't the cheapest model either.... that is, excluding the pops and scratches which did give it a larger dynamic range.
Besides, LP has many more flaws like how they lack BASS and need it reduced and then boosted on playback. It wouldn't matter if we had 96Khz 32bit sound on DVDs - sound engineers would continue try to wreak everything again. What is needed is an embedded volume code for the player's decoder / amplifier circuit to use to instantly raise or lower the volume so these sound engineers can continue to mess everything up to a ridiculous extreme without actually throwing away sound quality. This would also allow people to ignore the dynamic compression by telling the player to ignore the encoded volume/dynamic range track.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression
Mac windows are DOCUMENT centric; multiple windows represent multiple documents - this is why it did not matter in the early years that only 1 application could run at a time (except Desk Accessories.) This is also why the menu bar is disconnected; remains at the top, and indicates the frontmost application - the MENUBAR is application centric. The document paradigm comes from Xerox.
Windows is application centric. So the menus go inside the application window and there is trend to give the application the whole screen space because its trapped (perspectivly) inside the window. This results in multiple documents being document centric windows inside an application window; which is confusing initially. OR they run multiple instances of the same application (appearance wise) to make it more document centric in behavior to avoid the nested window confusion. IE is an example of this; with the new IE tabs providing a document level "task bar" for switching IE documents within 1 application window as well as avoid the task bar clutter caused by lacking document centric windows.... A bunch of patches to what initially was a mistake; proven by the need to change so much of it.
I wasn't speeding, I am allowed to speed to pass somebody and that somebody was on the horizon. How can I pass them if I don't drive faster than they do officer? ;-)
Does ANYBODY ever fairly calculate damages? Sometimes one has to wonder how they calculate these numbers they pull out...
SETI costs will not be as high as the legal burden on the system; sure the FA was missing some of the details but having seen some college IT workers who largely come from the student population and few stick around-- it doesn't surprise me they'd have some issues. Some of the top guys are just the kids who didn't leave.
As far as porn on a staff computer-- don't get me started. I'd say that is quite common; sometimes its not intentional... http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ strikes true in too many ways (on both sides of the IT/staff.) We have a situation where staff are encouraged to take laptops home, answer personal emails etc-- to blur the line between home and work so they can get unofficial worktime from people without them realizing it. Being on call with a cell phone without pay... etc. This clever movement to sucker employees with these kinds of "benefits" also has the side affect in that they think of the stuff as also being THEIRS-- or loaned; again, business tries to blur professionalism and friendship/family to get the best of both worlds.
I did IT for a bit. I found porn. The MEN who blurred the line the most also had the stuff or more of it and not really hidden either. I also found those with laptops INCREASED this tendency. If its partially THEIRS then they treat it as such. I think it is fair for them to do this simply because I strongly oppose the intentional blurring going on but a contradictory professionalism that comes up when the darker sides surface. Don't want abuse? don't "loan" your "family member" hardware for their personal use.
My IT job was harder because of these modern management methods; people were extremely upset if they couldn't run what they wanted to, have a laptop to take home, surf anywhere (from any location,) etc.
Its a fallacy to think that people are poor because they deserve to be. For some people it is true but that is not the case for most people.
There are only so many jobs and within that finite set there are jobs that can not provide a living.
Not everybody can be the boss and run their own business, some people have to work FOR a business - many jobs are too big for an individual to perform or perform at the scale to be profitable or competitive. Specialization is the norm and life is too complex for 1 person to handle with limited time/resources.
Many people are BAD at business, but great at everything else - a whole lot of people are bad with money in the USA...
It boils down to this: we are more interdependent than ever before, more specialized, less capable in areas outside our specialty, and get paid less each year while costs continue to rise.