(addendum to self... hit the submit button too fast).
Note that after having lived lots of other places, I live in the US. Like anyplace else, there's good and bad. I've decided the good substantially outweighs the bad, but there's more than one way to put that together. My in-laws all (theoretically) have the right to immigrate here. None of them have shown the slightest interest in doing so. Big houses and clean air doesn't make up for the fact that people talk funny and the food is all wrong.
As Americans, we look at China and say "well why don't they want freedom?" The reality is that they don't even have a concept of what our type of freedom is, for them it's probably something to be feared because that's what they have been told. But the more that the people are exposed to the western world the more they may realize what it is that they are missing out on
Um, No.
First, the Olympics won't do much except to bring a bunch of well-fed non-Chinese speaking tourists to Beijing. These are only unlike well-fed Chinese-speaking tourists in the sense that they, well, won't speak Chinese.
China has a large middle class and a lot of rich idiots. The only difference is that there are a lot more poor folks in China than there are of the first two, which brings those "average income" numbers down. It's not like this will be the first chance Beijingren will have to see someone who hasn't skipped a meal recently.
Second, and I have to be very measured in what I say here, you need to understand something about the "cultural DNA" of China. The West, especially the US, is a very individualistic society. We will put up with a certain quantity of crime, homelessness, etc. as a consequence of this individualism. This isn't a "god damn America" indictment. It's a deal we've all made with each other. We like our personal freedoms, and have decided to accept a certain level of the bad in order to get the good. What tinkering is done with our social safety net is done with this background.
Chinese society comes from a more collectivist background. This does not mean that Chinese like repression, or will always reflexively listen to elders and betters. However, it does mean that there is an expectation that the state will provide public order. In short, in the interest of maintaining a well-ordered society, you can give up a little individual freedom.
Many of my in-laws from Taiwan (a free, democratic, thoroughgoingly capitalist Chinese society) find American culture to be strange and alien. The big houses and the lawns are nice, as is the open space and clean air, but what's up with all these people staggering around downtown drunk and drugged out of their mind with nowhere to sleep? Don't they have family to take care of them or something? Why on earth do they allow anyone to go to a store and buy a gun? Doesn't that encourage criminals? Isn't someone going to write a law to stop this?
Even when I talk to people in China (who have some incomplete knowledge of what the US is like), you get some interesting discussions about how the world should be put together.
Chinese taxi driver: "American houses are very big, and you have lots of land with them. That must be really nice."
Me: "Yes, but the other side of that is that it's not very convenient. You need a car to go to the market, or to visit friends, or to go out to eat."
Driver: "So you can't just walk to all of those things?"
Me: "No. They're often several kilometers away."
Driver: "Oh, that's no good at all. I wouldn't like that a bit."
Assuming that life in the USA is the apogee of human civilization and that all societies will inherently want to move in that direction as quickly as possible displays ignorance at best and arrogance at worst. Get out and see a bit of how things are put together elsewhere before making assumptions about what other people want.
It's not slimy vs non-slimy or the power of the VP vs the President, etc.
The Federal government is not a corporation. Being a VP of the United States is a fundamentally different job than being the CEO of a large public company.
You know it's a small world when your friends come out of the blue and start arguing with you on/. (Hi Mike!)
Running mate for McCain? following in the Dick Cheney tradition of dark lord of the underworld?
While this is/., and conventional wisdom here is that Ballmer is Lord Voldemort made flesh, frankly, I don't think he'd be very well predisposed for a position in the White House.
The boss of a corporation is lord of all he surveys. While you have sales and politicking to get people to do things because it's a good idea, and not just because you sign the paychecks and say so, the fact is, you sign the paychecks, and can say so.
A strong VP (theoretically) has that sort of "do as I say" authority over the bureaucracy under the Executive Branch (although they can chuckle and drag their feet because the veep is likely to be gone in 4 years, while the bureaucracy is eternal). In terms of making laws, budgets, etc. all the influence is done through "soft power". The individual members of Congress have authority for passing laws and authorizing budgets. While a veep can exercise influence indirectly ("I hear you're running for reelection. Money is tight this year, and I can't promise how much can be allocated to your campaign, but there's a bill coming through where your support would be appreciated."), he can't call a Senator or Congressman and order them to do squat.
Now, knowing what I gather about Ballmer's leadership style, why do I think he'd find that to be an exercise in frustration?
But who knows, lots of theories have languished in kookdom for hundreds of years and then a mutated version of them has turned out to be quite relevant.
It's too early to have a proper discussion, so I'll just quote Carl Sagan......But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
It's really hard to believe that it costs more to produce a CD than it does to produce a DVD when movies cost a hell of a lot more to make.
Yeah and no.
Obviously the manufacturing cost of a DVD is higher than a CD. That's obvious. When you consider that a CD needs to be recorded, mixed, etc. while a DVD needs five people to sit in a very expensive room in Los Angeles doing color correction for 6 weeks, you may be getting close to a push on the production costs. How the beancounters see the respective products is night and day tho'
In the film world, the number everyone pays attention to is the North American box office gross. And by "everyone" I don't mean fans/freaks reading boxofficemojo.com. I mean the people who sit in the corner office bankrolling films also pay attention to this number.
DVDs/television rights/foreign sales/toys/happy meals are all additional sources of revenue. The additional can turn into a nice chunk of change for everyone, but it's considered "extra", not a number which makes or breaks your career as a filmmaker.
Of course, in the music world, it's exactly the opposite. CD sales are your PRIMARY source of revenue that keeps the whole show running. Touring, T-shirts, etc. are all "extra".
For better or worse, US vs Miller is the one and only ruling the Supremes did on the Second, and because it was fairly limited in scope (The court ruled that the federal government did have a compelling interest in the transportation of weapons across state lines, which I'd generally agree with), there's a lot of room to argue about what might or might not be considered legal under that ruling.
A decision will be handed down on District of Columbia v. Heller, which will give an opinion on what the rights are of the individual states to pass laws to regulate the ownership of firearms.
Oh, and considering the police, teachers and professors already have regular reviews of their performance what on earth do these "rating" sites bring to the table other than the chance to rant?
I wont speak to teachers and professors, but I'd say the police review mechanism may be a little flawed.
Here in my hometown, 40-odd people have been killed by police officers since 1980. Number of cases where a fatality shooting by a police officer resulted in criminal prosecution? Zero. Not zero since 1980. Zero since the establishment of the city.
I don't have any particular axe to grind with the police. I don't get pulled over very often, and the few times it's happened, the officers have been polite and professional. But please. Not one criminal prosecution in over 150 years? Just from a point of statistics, I'd say something is wrong here.
Your summary contempt for the military taints whatever point you were trying to make.
My contempt is not for the soldiers themselves, but for the people who put them there. I will admit I could have phrased it better.
There was no organization, there was no planning. There were a bunch of very young men walking around with guns. A lot of the ones I saw were making small talk, flirting with girls, etc.
It was a massive show of force with no forethought whatsoever. If something DID happen, what were they supposed to do? 10 guys in random points in a lobby with 6 weeks of rifle training, hundreds of civilians scattered around and a security incident going on? Forgive me if I think this doesn't sound like a good idea.
It was pretty much the working definition of bad security (see great-grandparent post).
Get your tail over to a major European airport, take a look around, and see how it's done by professionals.
In case you're wondering, no, I'm not a big Europhile. They've had a 30-year head start on counter-terrorism, have made all the mistakes, and have a mature system in place. My annoyance with the 'States is that rather than adopting accepted best practices, we seem determined to start from scratch.
The previous poster has obviously never been to Heathrow airport:
Most airports suck. I NEVER call my friends and say "Hey, let's go down to Sea-Tac, grab a pint and scope the girls".
The reference was to a fairly narrow and specific area related to security. American airports are trying to scare the bejeezus out of you, particularly in the days after 9-11 when there were 19 year-old idiots with M-16s wandering around everywhere. For Heathrow's lack of charm, in spite of 30 years of counter-terrorism, that doesn't happen.
As for going to Heathrow, I'm flying in from the 'States. I came, I had a beer, I giggled at the ridiculously expensive stuff in the mall.
I went on to the continent, and life was good.
I would say some waggish comment like "why would one EVER deplane in the UK?", but unfortunately, due to the passport status of my SO (Taiwanese national, needs a visa for every piece of land she touches, I'd exceeded my frustration level with the Schengen visa, and didn't feel like going through the same crap to spend a day or two in London), it hasn't happened yet. Maybe next time 'round.
The main purpose behind the security is to keep the population frightened and annoyed.
No. That's the purpose behind the ever-popular bad security, popular with tinpot governments and nasty IT departments the world over.
Real security is supposed to let legitimate users get on with their jobs, stopping bad guys in their tracks, and being as invisible as possible.
If you want a good example of real security, go to London Heathrow airport. It's nice. It's pleasant. It's a giant shopping mall where airplanes land. You never see anything there but happy tourists and the odd lightly armed police officer.
That's an illusion. Hundreds of people are around to make sure that nothing goes sideways there.
I heard a FOAF story about someone who "tripped the alarm" (in this case, walking through a door plainly marked "Do Not Enter")
There is//// was a well-established process for hijackings. Do whatever they say. Fly the plane wherever they want to go. EVERY country on earth has signed anti-hijacking treaties. Yes, even really wacky places like Iran and North Korea. You don't sign the treaty, you can't fly anywhere.
Once the plane lands on the ground, bring out the negotiators as the first line, and the SWAT team as a backup. The hijackers will be arrested, hopefully nobody gets hurt, and the appeal of hijacking as a crime is very low. Crimes with a 0% success rate usually don't get repeated.
One reason 9/11 was so successful is that with the exception of Flight 93, everyone followed the script.
Nobody is EVER going to do anything a hijacker asks for ever again.
As for your suggestion, I am seeing a major problem.
I will assume that you are trained in the use of firearms and take their use seriously. You would never point a gun at anything unless your goal was to put a hole in it. Not as a joke, not as a threat, not for any other reason. If you wanted a hole in something, you'd raise the gun and pull the trigger. Otherwise, you'd keep it where it belongs.
You are proposing giving firearms to civilians, many of whom have no experience with firearms. Several of them will be drinking on the flight, at least a few will be pissed off by the food, being crowded in small seats, the fact that their boss hated them so much as to send them to Poughkeepsie or whatever other humiliations real and imaginary are meted out on air travelers today.
There is a 75% chance that the gun you issued the civilian shoots blanks. As a civilian (unlike someone trained in the use of firearms), I'd say that means pretty good odds that pointing a gun at the stewardess, the fatty next to you who should have bought two tickets, or the kid who is playing rap music at 110db over his headphones, thereby aggravating your migraine will do nothing but scare them straight.
God help us the first time some idiot does that and s/he's the one with a loaded gun.
The fallacy of these sort of solutions (I would use the l-word, but it would just piss people off) is the belief that all humans are rational players. This is indicative that you really need to spend more time around humans.
I don't think his Canadian senator has much pull with the Pentagon.
Worse, while his Member of Parliament sits for election and is keen on donations, his Senator is an appointed position. She's had her seat since 2001 and isn't going anywhere until 2024!
Pumped hydro is insane. I can't imagine what your power loss is on taking water that you've run downhill and running it uphill again. Almost certainly in excess of 100%. If not, you have a perpetual motion machine on your hands. Go forth!
Folks have been thinking about storing energy for a long time, and there are some promising avenues. But nothing is ready for prime-time or even very close. You're losing too much in storage/transfer to bother.
I think a problem techies have is to think that the whole world runs on Moore's law. Today's $50,000 wet dream machine will be down at Fry's for $3,000 within 4 years, and will be on the junk pile as obsolete tech in 7 while we come up with new gizmos, and overly bloated Microsoft operating systems which will require all this new CPU power, new memory, and more. You expect it as surely as sunrises and disappointing politicians.
The energy world doesn't run on Moore's law. If battery storage engineers get a 1% improvement on current technologies per year, they think they've done pretty good.
A lot of the problems with energy storage are not Moore's law sort of problems. They are in need of fundamental technology shifts, like when we went from vacuum tubes to transistors.
Dude, you really need to cut back on the hydro, in more ways than one.
A pyramid is a static structure. All it has to do is sit year after year.
A power-generating station is full of moving parts. Things with moving parts break down over time. You may want to look at this handy informational link which shows maintenance over time on our local power plant. (since it's run by falling water, it provides some of the world's cheapest power, regardless)
When you start talking about tidal power, you are talking about putting devices which sit in salt water day after day. Go find someone who owns a boat. ANY boat, large, small, freighter or dinghy and talk about this idea of "set it and forget it". Watch as peals of laughter come rolling from their mouth. Boat owners in this part of the world (US Pacific Northwest) will pay a substantial rental premium to moor their boats in fresh water because it saves so much money on maintenance.
Finally, remember that electricity is like no other commodity on earth. You can not store it for a rainy day. You use it when it's generated, or not at all. Even fish (our other highly perishable commodity) can be canned or packed in salt. Good luck doing that with electricity.
Yes, oil gets some subsidies. Yes, euphemistically named "energy companies" almost certainly throw their weight around to discourage development of alternative energy sources. These are fairly small market-distorting effects which reinforce (but do not change) an underlying fact: historically, petroleum has been the cheapest and most flexible means of generating energy. While we get spoiled in this part of the world by abundant hydropower, there are some fairly serious environmental consequences (check out our vanishing salmon runs!) and hydro is a one-off. Once you've dammed the river, you're done. You can't scale this solution forever.
While more needs to be done with alternative energy sources, there seems to be this meme running around that there is cheap power floating around which is being withheld from the people by "The Man". Standing in the way of that cheap power in reality is not some gigantic conspiracy, but some really tough unsolved engineering problems (i.e. how do you store enough energy to power a city for when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow? A big pile of batteries doesn't really work).
Take the softwood lumber dispute, for example. The US illegally imposed billions of dollars in tariffs and planned, illegally, to give them to US lumber companies.
Yep, so money is taken from Canada's main lumber company and given to The main lumber company in the US because low stumpage fees in BC give the Canadian company an unfair advantage? But, the US company can still buy cheap raw logs from the Canadian company free of punitive tariffs for milling in the US because that's OK.
It serves no instructive purpose and distracts others from the meaningful dialogue that SHOULD be taking place.
That depends. Picking on trivial spelling or punctuation errors in long messages is the height of pettiness.
The only thing we have to go on here is how you present your arguments. If you can't make it to the end of a 50 word posting without three flagrant errors your middle-school grammar teacher should have caught, how much care are you taking in the thought that frames this argument?
[Looks at youtube video running in browser] Really? [Looks again] You SURE about that?
Yep, pretty sure.
First, I said at any reasonable quality. YouTube is horrible from a quality point of view. Call me back when you're even streaming NTSC.
Second, another poster talked about contributions to your bank account, which I'd like to dwell on for a minute. You and your buddies can fire up the video recorder and do 15 minutes of funny stuff and put it on YouTube. Good on ya.
Real, live professional cinema costs real bucks. The basement price for 2 hours of film that can be shown in an art house is around $50,000. That's doing Clerks level filming where you're doing all live (i.e. little or no FX), half of the people are unpaid, public spaces for sets, etc. As soon as you get lights, cameras, people actually getting paid for doing this, etc. your floor is probably around 2 million.
And it goes up from there.
Call me when someone has gotten 50 large in PayPal donations from their online flick, and it starts to get interesting.
Even if the entire entertainment industry insists on clinging desperately to 50-year-old ideas about copyright, despite the inevitable consequence of that doomed ideology, it's nice to know that we can lose them all and still not lose cinema and music as artistic media.
Yeah, but...
There are two sides to the film business. Production (the business of turning a script and thousands of man hours of work into 2 hours of film) and distribution (the business of copying that 2 hours of film, getting copies to the theaters, DVDs printed, advertisements run, etc. etc.).
When you look at summer theater fare, the cost of distributing the film often costs as much as making the film did. That business is expensive, it's not getting a lot cheaper, and unfortunately, the studios still have a lock on it. While new technology will allow you to make a feature film more cheaply if you're clever, getting it out of the film festival circuit and into real cinemas where people besides your friends will see it is still largely locked in that bad old world of Hollywood distribution.
Music has been set free not only by cheaper production, but much cheaper distribution. Broadband means I can stream songs from your band's myspace page in real time. I still can't do that with film at any reasonable quality level.
I don't think it's hopeless. The quantity of bandwidth marches upwards year after year, and the cost we pay for it goes down, but I don't think we're there yet.
> > Dr. - I was unable to stay in business with the high cost of insurance and low reimbursement from payers like Medicare. > Unemployment Office - Wow that sucks! You have an experience with French Fries? >
Yep, that's teh funny, but here's something to think about for all the bellyaching doctors do about their costs and reimbursement.
I work in IT. This is a field that has made some lucky and hardworking folks into millionaires, allows folks like me to pull down low six-figure incomes, and pays a lot of people kind of middlingly. You'll meet a fair number of people who got their MCSE or other paper cert who are either not working in IT or who are marginally employed.
Think REALLY hard. When was the last time you met a doctor, i.e. a board-certified MD who was NOT working in medicine? For all practical purposes, it does not happen. Docs will retire early because the hassle:cash ratio doesn't work out. Docs will sometimes take their money from practicing medicine and open another business.
You have probably never met an unemployed MD, and you probably never will. That is almost unique in any profession.
Is this whole thing a joke, or do these clocks actually work for some people? I had another one several years ago that also did not work.
I have an Oregon Scientific clock which has traveled with me from the South Bay to Seattle to Vancouver, BC and now back to Seattle. It works great and has done its part to keep me on time. As long as you are inside WWVB's footprint and aren't doing wrong things which will mess with longwave propagation (i.e. living in a house which is running unshielded electric motors all day or having a wall of bare monitors), it should work fine.
I have a tangential story about a roommate with a piece of hardware that messed up all my RF, but it's Not Safe For Slashdot.;-)
I do disagree about the "slightly better" shake. The hidden price Canadians pay for this is quite high.
I've lived in the US and in Canada. Because they are different countries and things are put together differently, it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. For example, income taxes are a lot higher in Canada. Everyone knows that. However, while Americans with professional jobs and high salaries will tend to be W-2 (T-4) employees, their Canadian counterparts will frequently be independent consultants with companies that deduct everything their "proprietor" touches.
It also depends on where you are on the social ladder. Being poor in Canada is better than being poor in the US, but not by much.
Once you've entered the middle class, you get shafted either way, and keep getting shafted until your net worth goes into the millions. What Canadians pay in taxes, Americans pay in fiddly supplemental fees and what not (example: I just wrote a $500 check to the PTA at my daughter's public school so that support staff can be paid, and books and whatnot can be bought. And no, I am not a particularly generous contributor to the school's fund).
I keep hearing about how wonderful Canada is, compared to their neighbor to the south, and then stuff like this happens which seems to show no regard for the common citizen at all!
Canada is a wonderful country which is run by plutocrats rather like its counterpart to the South. The vast majority of the money and power is concentrated into a few hands. The social contract gives ordinary people a slightly better shake than their American counterparts get, but if you think it's a Utopian wonderland, you should really hang out there for a few years.
The wedge is simple. Billions (with a b) of dollars are transferred from the US film and television industries to Canada for making feature films and serials. Don't think for a moment that those who send that money up there haven't had a friendly word with their MP, PM, and Premier about how they feel about Canadian copyright law, and wouldn't it be a shame if all this film work wound up in Austin or Rhode Island?
Slashdot Mirror
(addendum to self... hit the submit button too fast).
Note that after having lived lots of other places, I live in the US. Like anyplace else, there's good and bad. I've decided the good substantially outweighs the bad, but there's more than one way to put that together. My in-laws all (theoretically) have the right to immigrate here. None of them have shown the slightest interest in doing so. Big houses and clean air doesn't make up for the fact that people talk funny and the food is all wrong.
As Americans, we look at China and say "well why don't they want freedom?" The reality is that they don't even have a concept of what our type of freedom is, for them it's probably something to be feared because that's what they have been told. But the more that the people are exposed to the western world the more they may realize what it is that they are missing out on
Um, No.
First, the Olympics won't do much except to bring a bunch of well-fed non-Chinese speaking tourists to Beijing. These are only unlike well-fed Chinese-speaking tourists in the sense that they, well, won't speak Chinese.
China has a large middle class and a lot of rich idiots. The only difference is that there are a lot more poor folks in China than there are of the first two, which brings those "average income" numbers down. It's not like this will be the first chance Beijingren will have to see someone who hasn't skipped a meal recently.
Second, and I have to be very measured in what I say here, you need to understand something about the "cultural DNA" of China. The West, especially the US, is a very individualistic society. We will put up with a certain quantity of crime, homelessness, etc. as a consequence of this individualism. This isn't a "god damn America" indictment. It's a deal we've all made with each other. We like our personal freedoms, and have decided to accept a certain level of the bad in order to get the good. What tinkering is done with our social safety net is done with this background.
Chinese society comes from a more collectivist background. This does not mean that Chinese like repression, or will always reflexively listen to elders and betters. However, it does mean that there is an expectation that the state will provide public order. In short, in the interest of maintaining a well-ordered society, you can give up a little individual freedom.
Many of my in-laws from Taiwan (a free, democratic, thoroughgoingly capitalist Chinese society) find American culture to be strange and alien. The big houses and the lawns are nice, as is the open space and clean air, but what's up with all these people staggering around downtown drunk and drugged out of their mind with nowhere to sleep? Don't they have family to take care of them or something? Why on earth do they allow anyone to go to a store and buy a gun? Doesn't that encourage criminals? Isn't someone going to write a law to stop this?
Even when I talk to people in China (who have some incomplete knowledge of what the US is like), you get some interesting discussions about how the world should be put together.
Chinese taxi driver: "American houses are very big, and you have lots of land with them. That must be really nice."
Me: "Yes, but the other side of that is that it's not very convenient. You need a car to go to the market, or to visit friends, or to go out to eat."
Driver: "So you can't just walk to all of those things?"
Me: "No. They're often several kilometers away."
Driver: "Oh, that's no good at all. I wouldn't like that a bit."
Assuming that life in the USA is the apogee of human civilization and that all societies will inherently want to move in that direction as quickly as possible displays ignorance at best and arrogance at worst. Get out and see a bit of how things are put together elsewhere before making assumptions about what other people want.
It's not slimy vs non-slimy or the power of the VP vs the President, etc.
/. (Hi Mike!)
The Federal government is not a corporation. Being a VP of the United States is a fundamentally different job than being the CEO of a large public company.
You know it's a small world when your friends come out of the blue and start arguing with you on
Running mate for McCain? following in the Dick Cheney tradition of dark lord of the underworld?
/., and conventional wisdom here is that Ballmer is Lord Voldemort made flesh, frankly, I don't think he'd be very well predisposed for a position in the White House.
While this is
The boss of a corporation is lord of all he surveys. While you have sales and politicking to get people to do things because it's a good idea, and not just because you sign the paychecks and say so, the fact is, you sign the paychecks, and can say so.
A strong VP (theoretically) has that sort of "do as I say" authority over the bureaucracy under the Executive Branch (although they can chuckle and drag their feet because the veep is likely to be gone in 4 years, while the bureaucracy is eternal). In terms of making laws, budgets, etc. all the influence is done through "soft power". The individual members of Congress have authority for passing laws and authorizing budgets. While a veep can exercise influence indirectly ("I hear you're running for reelection. Money is tight this year, and I can't promise how much can be allocated to your campaign, but there's a bill coming through where your support would be appreciated."), he can't call a Senator or Congressman and order them to do squat.
Now, knowing what I gather about Ballmer's leadership style, why do I think he'd find that to be an exercise in frustration?
Interestingly, when I carried my entire home across the border a few months back, they weren't very interested.
When I carry 3 bottles of whiskey across the border, they blow a bolt.
But who knows, lots of theories have languished in kookdom for hundreds of years and then a mutated version of them has turned out to be quite relevant.
...But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
It's too early to have a proper discussion, so I'll just quote Carl Sagan...
"In Beijing, not even the rain falls by chance."
(A reference to being in the center of the empire and all the palace intrigues that come with it).
Now it's actually true!
It's really hard to believe that it costs more to produce a CD than it does to produce a DVD when movies cost a hell of a lot more to make.
Yeah and no.
Obviously the manufacturing cost of a DVD is higher than a CD. That's obvious. When you consider that a CD needs to be recorded, mixed, etc. while a DVD needs five people to sit in a very expensive room in Los Angeles doing color correction for 6 weeks, you may be getting close to a push on the production costs. How the beancounters see the respective products is night and day tho'
In the film world, the number everyone pays attention to is the North American box office gross. And by "everyone" I don't mean fans/freaks reading boxofficemojo.com. I mean the people who sit in the corner office bankrolling films also pay attention to this number.
DVDs/television rights/foreign sales/toys/happy meals are all additional sources of revenue. The additional can turn into a nice chunk of change for everyone, but it's considered "extra", not a number which makes or breaks your career as a filmmaker.
Of course, in the music world, it's exactly the opposite. CD sales are your PRIMARY source of revenue that keeps the whole show running. Touring, T-shirts, etc. are all "extra".
ICBW, of course, but I suspect that the ACLU found a ruling it liked and decided that it was the One True Ruling and all others would be ignored.
#include <ianal.h>
#include <just_a_court_junkie.h>
For better or worse, US vs Miller is the one and only ruling the Supremes did on the Second, and because it was fairly limited in scope (The court ruled that the federal government did have a compelling interest in the transportation of weapons across state lines, which I'd generally agree with), there's a lot of room to argue about what might or might not be considered legal under that ruling.
A decision will be handed down on District of Columbia v. Heller , which will give an opinion on what the rights are of the individual states to pass laws to regulate the ownership of firearms.
Oh, and considering the police, teachers and professors already have regular reviews of their performance what on earth do these "rating" sites bring to the table other than the chance to rant?
I wont speak to teachers and professors, but I'd say the police review mechanism may be a little flawed.
Here in my hometown, 40-odd people have been killed by police officers since 1980. Number of cases where a fatality shooting by a police officer resulted in criminal prosecution? Zero. Not zero since 1980. Zero since the establishment of the city.
I don't have any particular axe to grind with the police. I don't get pulled over very often, and the few times it's happened, the officers have been polite and professional. But please. Not one criminal prosecution in over 150 years? Just from a point of statistics, I'd say something is wrong here.
Maybe you look for responses, maybe you don't.
Your summary contempt for the military taints whatever point you were trying to make.
My contempt is not for the soldiers themselves, but for the people who put them there. I will admit I could have phrased it better.
There was no organization, there was no planning. There were a bunch of very young men walking around with guns. A lot of the ones I saw were making small talk, flirting with girls, etc.
It was a massive show of force with no forethought whatsoever. If something DID happen, what were they supposed to do? 10 guys in random points in a lobby with 6 weeks of rifle training, hundreds of civilians scattered around and a security incident going on? Forgive me if I think this doesn't sound like a good idea.
It was pretty much the working definition of bad security (see great-grandparent post).
Get your tail over to a major European airport, take a look around, and see how it's done by professionals.
In case you're wondering, no, I'm not a big Europhile. They've had a 30-year head start on counter-terrorism, have made all the mistakes, and have a mature system in place. My annoyance with the 'States is that rather than adopting accepted best practices, we seem determined to start from scratch.
The previous poster has obviously never been to Heathrow airport:
Most airports suck. I NEVER call my friends and say "Hey, let's go down to Sea-Tac, grab a pint and scope the girls".
The reference was to a fairly narrow and specific area related to security. American airports are trying to scare the bejeezus out of you, particularly in the days after 9-11 when there were 19 year-old idiots with M-16s wandering around everywhere. For Heathrow's lack of charm, in spite of 30 years of counter-terrorism, that doesn't happen.
As for going to Heathrow, I'm flying in from the 'States. I came, I had a beer, I giggled at the ridiculously expensive stuff in the mall.
I went on to the continent, and life was good.
I would say some waggish comment like "why would one EVER deplane in the UK?", but unfortunately, due to the passport status of my SO (Taiwanese national, needs a visa for every piece of land she touches, I'd exceeded my frustration level with the Schengen visa, and didn't feel like going through the same crap to spend a day or two in London), it hasn't happened yet. Maybe next time 'round.
The main purpose behind the security is to keep the population frightened and annoyed.
No. That's the purpose behind the ever-popular bad security, popular with tinpot governments and nasty IT departments the world over.
Real security is supposed to let legitimate users get on with their jobs, stopping bad guys in their tracks, and being as invisible as possible.
If you want a good example of real security, go to London Heathrow airport. It's nice. It's pleasant. It's a giant shopping mall where airplanes land. You never see anything there but happy tourists and
the odd lightly armed police officer.
That's an illusion. Hundreds of people are around to make sure that nothing goes sideways there.
I heard a FOAF story about someone who "tripped the alarm" (in this case, walking through a door plainly marked "Do Not Enter")
The results were amazing.
Wrong answer to the question.
There is//// was a well-established process for hijackings. Do whatever they say. Fly the plane wherever they want to go. EVERY country on earth has signed anti-hijacking treaties. Yes, even really
wacky places like Iran and North Korea. You don't sign the treaty, you can't fly anywhere.
Once the plane lands on the ground, bring out the negotiators as the first line, and the SWAT team as a backup. The hijackers will be arrested, hopefully nobody gets hurt, and the appeal of hijacking as a crime is very low. Crimes with a 0% success rate usually don't get repeated.
One reason 9/11 was so successful is that with the exception of Flight 93, everyone followed the script.
Nobody is EVER going to do anything a hijacker asks for ever again.
As for your suggestion, I am seeing a major problem.
I will assume that you are trained in the use of firearms and take their use seriously. You would never point a gun at anything unless your goal was to put a hole in it. Not as a joke, not as a threat, not for any other reason. If you wanted a hole in something, you'd raise the gun and pull the trigger. Otherwise, you'd keep it where it belongs.
You are proposing giving firearms to civilians, many of whom have no experience with firearms. Several of them will be drinking on the flight, at least a few will be pissed off by the food, being crowded in small seats, the fact that their boss hated them so much as to send them to Poughkeepsie or whatever other humiliations real and imaginary are meted out on air travelers today.
There is a 75% chance that the gun you issued the civilian shoots blanks. As a civilian (unlike someone trained in the use of firearms), I'd say that means pretty good odds that pointing a gun at the stewardess, the fatty next to you who should have bought two tickets, or the kid who is playing rap music at 110db over his headphones, thereby aggravating your migraine will do nothing but scare them straight.
God help us the first time some idiot does that and s/he's the one with a loaded gun.
The fallacy of these sort of solutions (I would use the l-word, but it would just piss people off) is the belief that all humans are rational players. This is indicative that you really need to spend more time around humans.
I don't think his Canadian senator has much pull with the Pentagon.
Worse, while his Member of Parliament sits for election and is keen on donations, his Senator is an appointed position. She's had her seat since 2001 and isn't going anywhere until 2024!
Pumped hydro is insane. I can't imagine what your power loss is on taking water that you've run downhill and running it uphill again. Almost certainly in excess of 100%. If not, you have a perpetual motion machine on your hands. Go forth!
Folks have been thinking about storing energy for a long time, and there are some promising avenues. But nothing is ready for prime-time or even very close. You're losing too much in storage/transfer to bother.
I think a problem techies have is to think that the whole world runs on Moore's law. Today's $50,000 wet dream machine will be down at Fry's for $3,000 within 4 years, and will be on the junk pile as obsolete tech in 7 while we come up with new gizmos, and overly bloated Microsoft operating systems which will require all this new CPU power, new memory, and more. You expect it as surely as sunrises and disappointing politicians.
The energy world doesn't run on Moore's law. If battery storage engineers get a 1% improvement on current technologies per year, they think they've done pretty good.
A lot of the problems with energy storage are not Moore's law sort of problems. They are in need of fundamental technology shifts, like when we went from vacuum tubes to transistors.
Dude, you really need to cut back on the hydro, in more ways than one.
A pyramid is a static structure. All it has to do is sit year after year.
A power-generating station is full of moving parts. Things with moving parts break down over time. You may want to look at this handy informational link which shows maintenance over time on our local power plant. (since it's run by falling water, it provides some of the world's cheapest power, regardless)
When you start talking about tidal power, you are talking about putting devices which sit in salt water day after day. Go find someone who owns a boat. ANY boat, large, small, freighter or dinghy and talk about this idea of "set it and forget it". Watch as peals of laughter come rolling from their mouth. Boat owners in this part of the world (US Pacific Northwest) will pay a substantial rental premium to moor their boats in fresh water because it saves so much money on maintenance.
Finally, remember that electricity is like no other commodity on earth. You can not store it for a rainy day. You use it when it's generated, or not at all. Even fish (our other highly perishable commodity) can be canned or packed in salt. Good luck doing that with electricity.
Yes, oil gets some subsidies. Yes, euphemistically named "energy companies" almost certainly throw their weight around to discourage development of alternative energy sources. These are fairly small market-distorting effects which reinforce (but do not change) an underlying fact: historically, petroleum has been the cheapest and most flexible means of generating energy. While we get spoiled in this part of the world by abundant hydropower, there are some fairly serious environmental consequences (check out our vanishing salmon runs!) and hydro is a one-off. Once you've dammed the river, you're done. You can't scale this solution forever.
While more needs to be done with alternative energy sources, there seems to be this meme running around that there is cheap power floating around which is being withheld from the people by "The Man". Standing in the way of that cheap power in reality is not some gigantic conspiracy, but some really tough unsolved engineering problems (i.e. how do you store enough energy to power a city for when the sun don't shine or the wind don't blow? A big pile of batteries doesn't really work).
Take the softwood lumber dispute, for example. The US illegally imposed billions of dollars in tariffs and planned, illegally, to give them to US lumber companies.
Yep, so money is taken from Canada's main lumber company and given to The main lumber company in the US because low stumpage fees in BC give the Canadian company an unfair advantage? But, the US company can still buy cheap raw logs from the Canadian company free of punitive tariffs for milling in the US because that's OK.
It serves no instructive purpose and distracts others from the meaningful dialogue that SHOULD be taking place.
That depends. Picking on trivial spelling or punctuation errors in long messages is the height of pettiness.
The only thing we have to go on here is how you present your arguments. If you can't make it to the end of a 50 word posting without three flagrant errors your middle-school grammar teacher should have caught, how much care are you taking in the thought that frames this argument?
[Looks at youtube video running in browser] Really? [Looks again] You SURE about that?
Yep, pretty sure.
First, I said at any reasonable quality. YouTube is horrible from a quality point of view. Call me back when you're even streaming NTSC.
Second, another poster talked about contributions to your bank account, which I'd like to dwell on for a minute. You and your buddies can fire up the video recorder and do 15 minutes of funny stuff and put it on YouTube. Good on ya.
Real, live professional cinema costs real bucks. The basement price for 2 hours of film that can be shown in an art house is around $50,000. That's doing Clerks level filming where you're doing all live (i.e. little or no FX), half of the people are unpaid, public spaces for sets, etc. As soon as you get lights, cameras, people actually getting paid for doing this, etc. your floor is probably around 2 million.
And it goes up from there.
Call me when someone has gotten 50 large in PayPal donations from their online flick, and it starts to get interesting.
Even if the entire entertainment industry insists on clinging desperately to 50-year-old ideas about copyright, despite the inevitable consequence of that doomed ideology, it's nice to know that we can lose them all and still not lose cinema and music as artistic media.
Yeah, but...
There are two sides to the film business. Production (the business of turning a script and thousands of man hours of work into 2 hours of film) and distribution (the business of copying that 2 hours of film, getting copies to the theaters, DVDs printed, advertisements run, etc. etc.).
When you look at summer theater fare, the cost of distributing the film often costs as much as making the film did. That business is expensive, it's not getting a lot cheaper, and unfortunately, the studios still have a lock on it. While new technology will allow you to make a feature film more cheaply if you're clever, getting it out of the film festival
circuit and into real cinemas where people besides your friends will see it is still largely locked in that bad old world of Hollywood distribution.
Music has been set free not only by cheaper production, but much cheaper distribution. Broadband means I can stream songs from your band's myspace page in real time. I still can't do that with film at any reasonable quality level.
I don't think it's hopeless. The quantity of bandwidth marches upwards year after year, and the cost we pay for it goes down, but I don't think we're there yet.
>
> Dr. - I was unable to stay in business with the high cost of insurance and low reimbursement from payers like Medicare.
> Unemployment Office - Wow that sucks! You have an experience with French Fries?
>
Yep, that's teh funny, but here's something to think about for all the bellyaching doctors do about their costs and reimbursement.
I work in IT. This is a field that has made some lucky and hardworking folks into millionaires, allows folks like me to pull down low six-figure incomes, and pays a lot of people kind of middlingly. You'll meet a fair number of people who got their MCSE or other paper cert who are either not working in IT or who are marginally employed.
Think REALLY hard. When was the last time you met a doctor, i.e. a board-certified MD who was NOT working in medicine? For all practical purposes, it does not happen. Docs will retire early because the hassle:cash ratio doesn't work out. Docs will sometimes take their money from practicing medicine and open another business.
You have probably never met an unemployed MD, and you probably never will. That is almost unique in any profession.
So why is that?
Is this whole thing a joke, or do these clocks actually work for some people? I had another one several years ago that also did not work.
;-)
I have an Oregon Scientific clock which has traveled with me from the South Bay to Seattle to Vancouver, BC and now back to Seattle. It works great and has done its part to keep me on time. As long as you are inside WWVB's footprint and aren't doing wrong things which will mess with longwave propagation (i.e. living in a house which is running unshielded electric motors all day or having a wall of bare monitors), it should work fine.
I have a tangential story about a roommate with a piece of hardware that messed up all my RF, but it's Not Safe For Slashdot.
I do disagree about the "slightly better" shake. The hidden price Canadians pay for this is quite high.
I've lived in the US and in Canada. Because they are different countries and things are put together differently, it's hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison. For example, income taxes are a lot higher in Canada. Everyone knows that. However, while Americans with professional jobs and high salaries will tend to be W-2 (T-4) employees, their Canadian counterparts will frequently be independent consultants with companies that deduct everything their "proprietor" touches.
It also depends on where you are on the social ladder. Being poor in Canada is better than being poor in the US, but not by much.
Once you've entered the middle class, you get shafted either way, and keep getting shafted until your net worth goes into the millions. What Canadians pay in taxes, Americans pay in fiddly supplemental fees and what not (example: I just wrote a $500 check to the PTA at my daughter's public school so that support staff can be paid, and books and whatnot can be bought. And no, I am not a particularly generous contributor to the school's fund).
I keep hearing about how wonderful Canada is, compared to their neighbor to the south, and then stuff like this happens which seems to show no regard for the common citizen at all!
Canada is a wonderful country which is run by plutocrats rather like its counterpart to the South. The vast majority of the money and power is concentrated into a few hands. The social contract gives ordinary people a slightly better shake than their American counterparts get, but if you think it's a Utopian wonderland, you should really hang out there for a few years.
The wedge is simple. Billions (with a b) of dollars are transferred from the US film and television industries to Canada for making feature films and serials. Don't think for a moment that those who send that money up there haven't had a friendly word with their MP, PM, and Premier about how they feel about Canadian copyright law, and wouldn't it be a shame if all this film work wound up in Austin or Rhode Island?