One can easily live anonymously if one is willing to sacrifice modern convenience. Buy things only with cash. Live somewhere less desirable where the landlord doesn't want to know who the tenants are, or pay a lot more to live somewhere such that the landlord turns a blind-eye to the anonymity, and don't have some characteristic that draws attention. Use mass transit and use the cash-accepting kiosks to buy tickets and don't own a car.
On the other hand, if one wants to consider anonymity and loss of it, people haven't been anonymous since the wide adoption of the telephone or since the advent of electric power and other utilities that are personally paid-for by the subscriber, and those with means that have sought insurance or purchased land have never been anonymous and documenting private ownership of land with the local government has been the principal means that ownership is established for probably thousands of years. Living anonymously may have its benefits, but there are a lot more benefits when one isn't living truly anonymously.
On the other hand, being away from one's boss is a good way to not get recognition for even large accomplishments, while those that are close to the boss, providing that the boss likes them as people, move up and get the perks because even doing their normal duties gets them recognition.
I've known two people that served in the US military, one in the Marines and one in the Navy. Both observed that officers and enlisted that worked closely with the CO moved up much faster than those that did field work. Those that did the most real work and were good at it were passed over. On top of that, sometimes displaying vulnerability and weakness, if the right kinds of those, could move up out of sympathy when they were arguably worse candidates.
So maybe don't get the office next to your boss or the cube right outside of his door, but if you want to move up don't be on the other side of the building either.
As long as there is zero accountability, there is zero reason to do anything about it.
This honestly should be consumer products safety issue, especially for things like the electronics in cars. Like how Microsoft should never have created a web browser so tied-in that it could serve as a vector into the heart of the operating system kernel itself, automakers should never have tied the infotainment systems into the body control and power control modules where anything on those computers could do anything to the operation of the vehicle.
Maybe because they don't match the definition of a mercenary?
That's sticky mainly due to the Geneva Convention's definitions for the criteria needed for the label. Given that the United States has been a party to the conflicts in which nonmilitary persons have been hired by the US to participate in, they're not mercenaries by the definition that requires Nationals not affiliated with the belligerent nations. Given that they're generally not hired into infantry or other common roles and are usually used for specialty jobs it's hard to argue that their pay is disproportionate. Given that their roles aren't generally infantry, it's even difficult to claim that they take a direct role in fighting the hostilities. Would someone working VIP security that gets into a firefight with a specific group of assassins fall into the same 'direct fighting' role as a soldier in-uniform on a routine patrol?
Based on the need to satisfy several conditions of the 1977 Amendment, Protocol 1, Article 47, it would be difficult to call people in specialized roles mercenaries. It's a challenge applying even one of the several criteria depending on how taking a direct role is interpreted.
Mind you, I don't think that we should employ so many non-military individuals in the military roles in forward-deployed areas, even in things like the laundry or meal production. I believe that other than the medical corps, every individual providing services to combat personnel should themselves be trained as combat personnel and be prepared to take on that role if necessary. I don't want a bunch of laundry workers or mess hall attendants being unable to defend the base because they're civilians, and as civilians have to be defended by the regular military personnel.
Mother's Basements and other places used for self-imposed isolation exist in all places and probably in all cultures.
The biggest problem is finding people that will follow orders when the penalty for not following orders is lower than it is for a military officer or enlistee. That barrier will probably preclude civilian contractors that have never had military service from performing that job. Don't know about former-military civilian contractors though, they might be better at not flinching, but then there's the legality issues surrounding the ramifications of bad calls where innocent people died, or where someone intentionally does something that kills noncombatants. At least in the past civilian contractors had to be present to do the acts that killed innocents such that the country in which the acts were committed could mount something of an objection. What's the law on a civilian remotely operating a machine in a foreign country that's specifically equipped to kill, using that machine to kill? At least a military member could see prosecution if through the military system of justice, but I don't know how well that would work for civilians.
They also deal with the fleet sales department rather than the retail sales department, and the fleet people just look at the numbers and figure out the dealer's markup and make a fairly quick response.
The best technique is to buy a car out-of-state though. Sales tax is paid to your state, not to the selling dealer's state, and there is no county or city sales tax in the equation. On top of that, if your state requires that the sales tax be based on the MSRP rather than on the negotiated price, this technique makes the sales tax price reflect the actual price, not an inflated MSRP.
Pretty much. We already have two distinct areas for watching content. One is for casual content like television shows. It has a 30" TV with only the TV's built-in sound. The other is for watching movies. It has a projector, a 100" screen, and a surround sound system.
Both are technically capable of both functions; both have Blu-ray players, both have Internet-connected computers. When we just want something on to sort-of pay attention to the TV is on, and we're usually doing something else at the same time. When we want to watch a movie, the laptops get put aside, the lights go down, and we actually watch the movie.
If on-demand TV through the Internet has stalled, it's probably due to an apathetic form of analysis paralysis, where there's too much to choose from so narrowing-down the scope is hard to do. By contrast, when content is being 'streamed' (ie, broadcast) whether one makes a selection or not, it's a lot easier to apathetically leave that content on, reducing or eliminating the need to make a decision. Think about it, would most of those crappy mid-day shows exist if people had to actually choose to watch them? I don't think they would, people would simply not bother to select them. Same goes for a lot of the gossip shows like Extra and Entertainment Tonight, most people don't seem to seek-out gossip and only really participate because it's right in front of them. Make them have to choose and that probably won't be their choice.
Consumers don't like having to contend with making things work properly. Remember those crappy Fisher audio systems that looked a bit like a stereo stack, but were basically hollow shells? People bought them because they operated with one remote, even though they produced crap sound and would eat cassettes.
It's not as easy to have separate discrete parts. I know, I still have a receiver/amplifier, VHS, cassette, phonograph, Laserdisc, Blu-ray, HDTV tuner, and projector, and at one point I had a stereo receiver that needed an external Dolby Pro Logic decoder for surround. On the one hand I feel it's a better experience than an all-in-one in terms of quality and of options, but on the other hand we watch most casual TV on the more-integrated stuff in another room and use this system when we're specifically sitting down to watch a movie.
We're getting to where we'll need to push for greater consumer protections at a regulatory level. Companies still refuse to acknowledge that their products have problems. Obviously if they won't correct these problems themselves then they need to be forced to do so.
Yes, I am rather indifferent to them. I guess that comes from having had real pets. Now, the Tamagothi on the other hand, that was just cool. Reminds me of Elmyra from Tiny Tunes and that peculiar hair-tie that she wore...
All you whipper snappers ruined it way back when you didn't even have to be in a university to participate!
A few of us that didn't have University access to Usenet in particular or the Internet in general and only got-in once the commercial Internet became available had some etiquette going-in, we started out on bulletin board systems and Fidonet and had to at least have a modicum of understanding so our local SysOp wouldn't ban us from his board. By that same token most BBSes were free, so without profiting off of the users the SysOp had good reason to ban abusive users so that the board would remain popular. AOL was profit-driven so they were much more willing to tolerate bad users and to give bad users access to everything because it meant that $24.95/month coming in.
Why would so many companies(some with actual software development experience; and others dangerously willing to try, like Adobe) put up with Pearson software?
Probably because PearsonVue has a vast distribution network in that they've associated themselves with thousands of local testing centers. It means that the burden, from a facility point of view, is low on those seeking the certs.
Now, I can tell you first-hand that the exams themselves are shit. They look like they were written in Hypercard on an 800x600 screen that's poorly mapped and essentially not-anti-aliased across the fairly modern 16:9 displays in the testing centers, and it's impossible to put all of the content on-screen that's necessary, so it's a lot harder to keep everything straight.
I'm not asking for multiple 4K displays to have the simlet, the diagram, and the questions on, I'm asking for a display that looks as decent as my eight year old Gateway laptop. Having something that looks more at home in Windows 3.1 is pathetic.
Quads brought a ton of new people into the hobby and the existing community hasn't reached them effectively. Part of that is probably because models (other than rockets) used to be harder to fly, so newbies NEEDED an experienced pilot to train them. Clueless newbies who wouldn't learn from others quickly destroyed their new toys.
I've got a secret for you- your hobby is experiencing its own Eternal September, and you never will reach those clueless newbies unless regulation forces them to actually apprentice with someone experienced. You could even look upon it as two separate hobbies- the older hobby for scale-model aircraft or scale-model-type aircraft that requires a significant degree of skill to participate in without constantly spending large sums of money to replace destroyed equipment, and another hobby for the inexperienced that only want a casual hobby, or want to use the equipment as a means for some greater hobby that can benefit from it.
I have both the (relatively) untouched originals on Laserdisc and the Special Edition versions on Laserdisc.
The biggest problem is that LD is a 4:3 tech where a 2.35:1 image is letterboxed on to it. With a horizontal resolution of 480 lines at 4:3, matted that leaves about 272 lines for program content. When one was accustomed to a tube television this was not seen as a bad thing, but now that we're accustomed to 480 lines even on a widescreen image for DVD as the low-end of what's acceptable this obviously won't do.
If fans have de-special-editioned the SE versions that might be the best approach. Alternately if someone still had theatrical prints it would be even better, but those are probably so caught up in legal limbo between the production company, the studio, the distributor, and any special rights to things like the soundtrack that we'll probably never see a cleaned up original version.
Basically the quadcopter people have ruined RC aircraft for the fixed-wing and scale-model helicopter folks. I will admit that given the developments in camera, storage, and battery technology it may have been inevitable, but it was the quadcopter crowd that really embraced high quality video while flying into the personal space of others and loiter on a large scale.
They might not need to write an OS from scratch, but they can choose from any of a number of non-commodity operating systems or kernels on which to build their software. These are single-purpose machines. They don't need an OS that's capable of running a word processor.
It's only inevitable because the people creating these devices are using commodity operating systems that allow someone else's software to run on them.
These kinds of devices should not run conventional operating systems that can run third-party software. They should probably use a model more like Cisco's where the OS and all software are contained in a single package, but taken a step further where better sanity-checking makes it even harder to crack.
Ockhams razor isn't a test or a law. It's a rule of thumbs that's most often true, but not always.
Also when using this rule of thumb on human being psychology must also apply. Human beings for example have the tendency to form tribe like groups with hierarchies and fall into group think with an us and them mentally.
If you use Ockhams razor on most of the strange things humans does group think IS the simplest explanation. Conspiracy most often occurs as a result of group think, that's a known fact derived from a large amount of police investigations into criminal conspiracies. Watergate for example is a schoolbook example of group think.
I know. It's basically stating that when presented with plural, possibly conflicting explanations, the simplest one usually is the correct one.
In this case, a population that nominally has something in-common (even though not really, given actual behavior, but in their minds) that is marginalized finds itself ripe for exploit by those that have practice manipulating this particular population subset.
Admittedly this is anecdotal, but it seems like we tend to focus on what's wrong with our lives, rather than what's right or good or working in our favor. I know I do it and my friends and family and colleagues do it too. When we do that we start building resentment. In my case I know that it's not intellectually honest, I have a beautiful family, a good job, a nice home in a safe area, but I can easily focus in on the negatives and let them rule me. I don't doubt that people that find themselves resented in a population that doesn't know how to relate to them experiences this much more than I do, and for them it doesn't matter if their parents migrated to get them away from something worse than resentment and state welfare with less opportunity for employment, they can easily see their failures while their successes are simply built into the system.
That's why I brought up community. If people feel that they belong they're much less likely to do something horrific against the community because they feel like they're harming themselves. They still may engage in petty crime or personal violence against others, but they're not going to go blow themselves up to take out a huge crowd.
This marginalization approach that keeps coming up in the news would be the exactly wrong approach to dealing with this. Don't marginalize the moderates to drive them toward the extremists, that will perpetuate the problem. Find a way to show the moderates that they do belong, and you'll probably find both less extremists and more desire on the part of the moderates to report the extremists to the authorities before they carry out attacks.
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One can easily live anonymously if one is willing to sacrifice modern convenience. Buy things only with cash. Live somewhere less desirable where the landlord doesn't want to know who the tenants are, or pay a lot more to live somewhere such that the landlord turns a blind-eye to the anonymity, and don't have some characteristic that draws attention. Use mass transit and use the cash-accepting kiosks to buy tickets and don't own a car.
On the other hand, if one wants to consider anonymity and loss of it, people haven't been anonymous since the wide adoption of the telephone or since the advent of electric power and other utilities that are personally paid-for by the subscriber, and those with means that have sought insurance or purchased land have never been anonymous and documenting private ownership of land with the local government has been the principal means that ownership is established for probably thousands of years. Living anonymously may have its benefits, but there are a lot more benefits when one isn't living truly anonymously.
On the other hand, being away from one's boss is a good way to not get recognition for even large accomplishments, while those that are close to the boss, providing that the boss likes them as people, move up and get the perks because even doing their normal duties gets them recognition.
I've known two people that served in the US military, one in the Marines and one in the Navy. Both observed that officers and enlisted that worked closely with the CO moved up much faster than those that did field work. Those that did the most real work and were good at it were passed over. On top of that, sometimes displaying vulnerability and weakness, if the right kinds of those, could move up out of sympathy when they were arguably worse candidates.
So maybe don't get the office next to your boss or the cube right outside of his door, but if you want to move up don't be on the other side of the building either.
As long as there is zero accountability, there is zero reason to do anything about it.
This honestly should be consumer products safety issue, especially for things like the electronics in cars. Like how Microsoft should never have created a web browser so tied-in that it could serve as a vector into the heart of the operating system kernel itself, automakers should never have tied the infotainment systems into the body control and power control modules where anything on those computers could do anything to the operation of the vehicle.
That's sticky mainly due to the Geneva Convention's definitions for the criteria needed for the label. Given that the United States has been a party to the conflicts in which nonmilitary persons have been hired by the US to participate in, they're not mercenaries by the definition that requires Nationals not affiliated with the belligerent nations. Given that they're generally not hired into infantry or other common roles and are usually used for specialty jobs it's hard to argue that their pay is disproportionate. Given that their roles aren't generally infantry, it's even difficult to claim that they take a direct role in fighting the hostilities. Would someone working VIP security that gets into a firefight with a specific group of assassins fall into the same 'direct fighting' role as a soldier in-uniform on a routine patrol?
Based on the need to satisfy several conditions of the 1977 Amendment, Protocol 1, Article 47, it would be difficult to call people in specialized roles mercenaries. It's a challenge applying even one of the several criteria depending on how taking a direct role is interpreted.
Mind you, I don't think that we should employ so many non-military individuals in the military roles in forward-deployed areas, even in things like the laundry or meal production. I believe that other than the medical corps, every individual providing services to combat personnel should themselves be trained as combat personnel and be prepared to take on that role if necessary. I don't want a bunch of laundry workers or mess hall attendants being unable to defend the base because they're civilians, and as civilians have to be defended by the regular military personnel.
Mother's Basements and other places used for self-imposed isolation exist in all places and probably in all cultures.
The biggest problem is finding people that will follow orders when the penalty for not following orders is lower than it is for a military officer or enlistee. That barrier will probably preclude civilian contractors that have never had military service from performing that job. Don't know about former-military civilian contractors though, they might be better at not flinching, but then there's the legality issues surrounding the ramifications of bad calls where innocent people died, or where someone intentionally does something that kills noncombatants. At least in the past civilian contractors had to be present to do the acts that killed innocents such that the country in which the acts were committed could mount something of an objection. What's the law on a civilian remotely operating a machine in a foreign country that's specifically equipped to kill, using that machine to kill? At least a military member could see prosecution if through the military system of justice, but I don't know how well that would work for civilians.
They also deal with the fleet sales department rather than the retail sales department, and the fleet people just look at the numbers and figure out the dealer's markup and make a fairly quick response.
The best technique is to buy a car out-of-state though. Sales tax is paid to your state, not to the selling dealer's state, and there is no county or city sales tax in the equation. On top of that, if your state requires that the sales tax be based on the MSRP rather than on the negotiated price, this technique makes the sales tax price reflect the actual price, not an inflated MSRP.
I can hear the high-fidelity bovine call in my head as I read your post. Amazing.
In my experience, when someone feels the need to insist that something is "surprisingly relevant", it's usually unsurprisingly irrelevant.
What a surprisingly relevant insight...
No, happy accident. Kind of like how the old government buildings will protect their inhabitants from the radiation due to all of the lead paint.
Pretty much. We already have two distinct areas for watching content. One is for casual content like television shows. It has a 30" TV with only the TV's built-in sound. The other is for watching movies. It has a projector, a 100" screen, and a surround sound system.
Both are technically capable of both functions; both have Blu-ray players, both have Internet-connected computers. When we just want something on to sort-of pay attention to the TV is on, and we're usually doing something else at the same time. When we want to watch a movie, the laptops get put aside, the lights go down, and we actually watch the movie.
If on-demand TV through the Internet has stalled, it's probably due to an apathetic form of analysis paralysis, where there's too much to choose from so narrowing-down the scope is hard to do. By contrast, when content is being 'streamed' (ie, broadcast) whether one makes a selection or not, it's a lot easier to apathetically leave that content on, reducing or eliminating the need to make a decision. Think about it, would most of those crappy mid-day shows exist if people had to actually choose to watch them? I don't think they would, people would simply not bother to select them. Same goes for a lot of the gossip shows like Extra and Entertainment Tonight, most people don't seem to seek-out gossip and only really participate because it's right in front of them. Make them have to choose and that probably won't be their choice.
Consumers don't like having to contend with making things work properly. Remember those crappy Fisher audio systems that looked a bit like a stereo stack, but were basically hollow shells? People bought them because they operated with one remote, even though they produced crap sound and would eat cassettes.
It's not as easy to have separate discrete parts. I know, I still have a receiver/amplifier, VHS, cassette, phonograph, Laserdisc, Blu-ray, HDTV tuner, and projector, and at one point I had a stereo receiver that needed an external Dolby Pro Logic decoder for surround. On the one hand I feel it's a better experience than an all-in-one in terms of quality and of options, but on the other hand we watch most casual TV on the more-integrated stuff in another room and use this system when we're specifically sitting down to watch a movie.
We're getting to where we'll need to push for greater consumer protections at a regulatory level. Companies still refuse to acknowledge that their products have problems. Obviously if they won't correct these problems themselves then they need to be forced to do so.
A running platform that needs a security audit is preferable to a broken platform that's already compromised or rendered useless.
Heh. The Tamagochi-equivalent to Grey Goo...
Yes, I am rather indifferent to them. I guess that comes from having had real pets. Now, the Tamagothi on the other hand, that was just cool. Reminds me of Elmyra from Tiny Tunes and that peculiar hair-tie that she wore...
All you whipper snappers ruined it way back when you didn't even have to be in a university to participate!
A few of us that didn't have University access to Usenet in particular or the Internet in general and only got-in once the commercial Internet became available had some etiquette going-in, we started out on bulletin board systems and Fidonet and had to at least have a modicum of understanding so our local SysOp wouldn't ban us from his board. By that same token most BBSes were free, so without profiting off of the users the SysOp had good reason to ban abusive users so that the board would remain popular. AOL was profit-driven so they were much more willing to tolerate bad users and to give bad users access to everything because it meant that $24.95/month coming in.
Why would so many companies(some with actual software development experience; and others dangerously willing to try, like Adobe) put up with Pearson software?
Probably because PearsonVue has a vast distribution network in that they've associated themselves with thousands of local testing centers. It means that the burden, from a facility point of view, is low on those seeking the certs.
Now, I can tell you first-hand that the exams themselves are shit. They look like they were written in Hypercard on an 800x600 screen that's poorly mapped and essentially not-anti-aliased across the fairly modern 16:9 displays in the testing centers, and it's impossible to put all of the content on-screen that's necessary, so it's a lot harder to keep everything straight.
I'm not asking for multiple 4K displays to have the simlet, the diagram, and the questions on, I'm asking for a display that looks as decent as my eight year old Gateway laptop. Having something that looks more at home in Windows 3.1 is pathetic.
And users that are tired of browser hijacks and computer security intrusions will continue to block "ads" forever.
Fool me once, shame on you.
Quads brought a ton of new people into the hobby and the existing community hasn't reached them effectively. Part of that is probably because models (other than rockets) used to be harder to fly, so newbies NEEDED an experienced pilot to train them. Clueless newbies who wouldn't learn from others quickly destroyed their new toys.
I've got a secret for you- your hobby is experiencing its own Eternal September, and you never will reach those clueless newbies unless regulation forces them to actually apprentice with someone experienced. You could even look upon it as two separate hobbies- the older hobby for scale-model aircraft or scale-model-type aircraft that requires a significant degree of skill to participate in without constantly spending large sums of money to replace destroyed equipment, and another hobby for the inexperienced that only want a casual hobby, or want to use the equipment as a means for some greater hobby that can benefit from it.
I have both the (relatively) untouched originals on Laserdisc and the Special Edition versions on Laserdisc.
The biggest problem is that LD is a 4:3 tech where a 2.35:1 image is letterboxed on to it. With a horizontal resolution of 480 lines at 4:3, matted that leaves about 272 lines for program content. When one was accustomed to a tube television this was not seen as a bad thing, but now that we're accustomed to 480 lines even on a widescreen image for DVD as the low-end of what's acceptable this obviously won't do.
If fans have de-special-editioned the SE versions that might be the best approach. Alternately if someone still had theatrical prints it would be even better, but those are probably so caught up in legal limbo between the production company, the studio, the distributor, and any special rights to things like the soundtrack that we'll probably never see a cleaned up original version.
There are still more journalism-school graduates per year than there are jobs in the entirety of the profession.
Probably zero autonomous control.
Basically the quadcopter people have ruined RC aircraft for the fixed-wing and scale-model helicopter folks. I will admit that given the developments in camera, storage, and battery technology it may have been inevitable, but it was the quadcopter crowd that really embraced high quality video while flying into the personal space of others and loiter on a large scale.
They might not need to write an OS from scratch, but they can choose from any of a number of non-commodity operating systems or kernels on which to build their software. These are single-purpose machines. They don't need an OS that's capable of running a word processor.
It's only inevitable because the people creating these devices are using commodity operating systems that allow someone else's software to run on them.
These kinds of devices should not run conventional operating systems that can run third-party software. They should probably use a model more like Cisco's where the OS and all software are contained in a single package, but taken a step further where better sanity-checking makes it even harder to crack.
Joss Whedon has never set-out to make a miniseries.
Nonetheless, he seems to make a lot of them...
Ockhams razor isn't a test or a law. It's a rule of thumbs that's most often true, but not always. Also when using this rule of thumb on human being psychology must also apply. Human beings for example have the tendency to form tribe like groups with hierarchies and fall into group think with an us and them mentally. If you use Ockhams razor on most of the strange things humans does group think IS the simplest explanation. Conspiracy most often occurs as a result of group think, that's a known fact derived from a large amount of police investigations into criminal conspiracies. Watergate for example is a schoolbook example of group think.
I know. It's basically stating that when presented with plural, possibly conflicting explanations, the simplest one usually is the correct one.
In this case, a population that nominally has something in-common (even though not really, given actual behavior, but in their minds) that is marginalized finds itself ripe for exploit by those that have practice manipulating this particular population subset.
Admittedly this is anecdotal, but it seems like we tend to focus on what's wrong with our lives, rather than what's right or good or working in our favor. I know I do it and my friends and family and colleagues do it too. When we do that we start building resentment. In my case I know that it's not intellectually honest, I have a beautiful family, a good job, a nice home in a safe area, but I can easily focus in on the negatives and let them rule me. I don't doubt that people that find themselves resented in a population that doesn't know how to relate to them experiences this much more than I do, and for them it doesn't matter if their parents migrated to get them away from something worse than resentment and state welfare with less opportunity for employment, they can easily see their failures while their successes are simply built into the system.
That's why I brought up community. If people feel that they belong they're much less likely to do something horrific against the community because they feel like they're harming themselves. They still may engage in petty crime or personal violence against others, but they're not going to go blow themselves up to take out a huge crowd.
This marginalization approach that keeps coming up in the news would be the exactly wrong approach to dealing with this. Don't marginalize the moderates to drive them toward the extremists, that will perpetuate the problem. Find a way to show the moderates that they do belong, and you'll probably find both less extremists and more desire on the part of the moderates to report the extremists to the authorities before they carry out attacks.