I don't know why you were modded "funny". You're spot on. Times Square and Vegas were fantastic before they were nerfed and Disneyfied for boomers and their stupid kids.
If it wasn't being used for something, it wouldn't be the price to get less expensive groceries.
Also, do you want to be the house showing up in a database as always ordering lots of "middle eastern" food? Or the house always buying lots of food that your insurer may not like you consuming, like chips and soda? Or the house buying lots of alcohol that your car insurer might like to know about? I mean, what -- do you really think they're keeping all your data just to mail you the weekly flyer that they're going to send to every house *anyway*, as "current resident"?
Actually, my initial thought is that it's a great map for criminals to hone in on robbing houses that probably have weapons within them. Case the place, to make sure the homeowners are gone. Break in. Find the guns. Now you have some poor guy's gun for defending his home (or whatever uses he wanted) out in the market committing crimes. Way to go, media.
To be frank, I don't know what other UI you could implement. It's a web browser. It has some tabs and some forward and back buttons and a giant viewport.
I don't have any kids, but if I did, the last thing I would be worried about each day is them going to school and being the victim of one of these freak-occurrence events where some nutjob stomps into a school and unloads a couple guns on the students and teachers. Statistically, I'd be far more worried about teachers, coaches, scout leaders, and religious authorities sexually molesting them.
About 300 people (not just students) have been killed in school shootings in the last thirty years, in this country. Something like one per million or one per three million odds of being killed in a school shooting (source: http://www.teenviolencestatistics.com/content/school-shootings.html ).
About 4 to 10 percent of all children have been molested or sexually abused in some way by teachers.
What video games, weapons, television shows, movies, books, or society influences are to blame for these teachers sexually molesting children on such a mass scale? Where's the investigation into that? Where's the rational concern and moral outrage over that compared to the irrational concern that your child might be the freak statistic that is killed in a shooting? How the lizard-brain might initially fear the school shooting far more, how does it reach the point of discussion and legislation on a society-wide level without the common sense acknowledgement that 1:10 or 1:20 is far fucking greater than 1:1000000 to 1:3000000?
No, people are stupid to begin with. The sensationalism of freak-events that are unlikely to ever even remotely impact them only serves to take advantage of that stupidity.
Though, in the 1980s, we had a librarian in grade school who would punish you for drawing even the most crude weapon (especially a gun), the fact is that every little boy spends almost his entire childhood drawing guns, bombs, explosions, tanks, and massive battle scenes, and other gory and violent depictions. It's called being a boy. And last I checked, nobody has ever been physically harmed by a drawing or a painting.
No. Being pre-occupied with politics (the way one might be with sports or stocks or soap operas, perhaps) will be classified as a mental illness and it will become a failsafe option to whisk anyone away at any time for any reason. Need to rid yourself of some dissenters? Someone threatening to expose your corporate payola scam or secret affair while in office? Have them diagnosed as mentally unstable, due to pre-occupation with politics. Maybe throw in an accusation that they're paranoid or something -- and bam! -- stuck in a padded room.
You don't think cities pay for everything in their city themselves, right? There are many states (most of them red) that actually get MORE money from the rest of the country (via the federal government) than they pay to the federal government. And if you're looking for funding to violate people's liberties and privacy and further the cause of establishment of an ultimate police state? Fuck yeah, you're going to get funding for that from uncle Sam!
One reason that we can not track mental patients is that most people spend a portion of their lives with some form of mental illness
BULLSHIT.
Most people spend a portion of their lives being diagnosed with some bullshit invented form of "mental illness", because it has been the medical oppression's goal (and that of the government, I suppose) to ensure that the DSM provides at least one diagnoses that could apply to EVERY HUMAN BEING. Are you an underachiever? You have ADD! Are you an over-achiever? You have an overwhelming need to please authority and seek approval, you secretly depressed narcissist!
Even being critical of your government or questioning authority qualifies for a mental illness diagnosis.
We have to sacrifice our rights and live in a police state, because that is the "price to protect us from three or four crazy lunatics that we'll never actually be able to protect society from, anyway" because it's going to "save so many innocent people (presumably, children)".
With this sort of math, we need to be sacrificing a lot more rights and liberties across the board for every other thing which results in more deaths than school shootings (in other words - EVERYTHING INCLUDING JAY WALKING). After all, if every life has a precious cost associated with its lost that is of such intense value to society that all of society must make sacrifices that are most "sacred" to the foundation and existence of our entire society (the Constitution), then why focus on the random unavoidable nutjobs that conduct "mass" shootings? What about seat-belts? What about parents who drink or smoke and put children at risk? What about mothers who bring questionable "step-dads" into the family? What about jay-walking? What about soda? What about sports? What about lighters, pocket knives, stairways, sidewalks, and bicycles?
If the important thing is the value of a life, then why is the life of someone shot by a nutjob more valuable than that of someone who is killed through any other accident or negligence or criminal act? Especially when those things happen far more frequently?
The secret key here is that: Yes, bad shit will happen to people and that is the cost of enjoying a free life and society. Bad shit doesn't go away just because government clamps down on society. The only thing lost there is your freedom. You *gain* nothing. And all in the effort to do the impossible -- protect every last human being from unpredictable freak occurrences. Crazy shit that pops out of the brush and happens. And it will always happen. And we will always be shocked (that's the nature of it being a FREAK occurrence).
I can guarantee you a great deal of safety and security. Just let me lock you in an underground bunker and control everything you consume and everything you do. It won't be enjoyable and it won't be a life worth having lived, but you'll probably live longer than being out in the big scary world with all sorts of awful things that can happen to you, including being t-boned in an intersection by a guy running a red-light or a nutjob in the office that loses his shit when he's fired and brings a firearm to work.:)
Don't be silly. There's not even the slightest hint of evidence to suggest all these nutjob prophecies are real. Everyone can see through the bullshit. It's not like they're something with a lot of valid evidence that is obviously real, like religion.
I don't think that is cause and effect whatsoever. If that were the case, these would be regular occurrences; not statistical anomalies. The frequency of mass killings and the number of people in them is so small (though that doesn't seem to be the case, based on coverage, of course) that to treat them in the same way you would a flu epidemic is sort of silly.
And if it were an issue of "there's lots of guns and no mental health care", then you'd have tons of people shooting up everything in site, instead of just the occasional person who went berzerk.
You are not going to stop people from shooting up schools or places of work or other gatherings, no matter what restrictions you put on guns. You aren't going to stop people form going nuts and hitting the gas pedal and plowing their car through a crowd. You're not going to stop people from poisoning salad bars at Sizzler. You're not going to stop people from releasing anthrax or releasing poisonous gas in a subway. You're not going to stop people from planting pipe bombs.
All of these other things -- health care, society, religion, weapons, medication -- are all elements in the story. So are a million other things. Ultimately, there is nothing that will stop these events.
I don't buy into this. Arguing over how many rounds a weapon may carry is irrelevant in a world where someone can stab thirty children (killing 8+) with a knife (in China a couple years ago)..
Who, based on her activities and views, likely picked her ideas up from nutjobs like Alex Jones and Pat Robertson. But forbid we throw them in with all the other batshit insane "causes", too.
It was motivated by availability of guns. No, wait -- because of mental illness issues in America. No, wait -- because of video games. Wait, wait, -- I mean, because of goths. Wait, no, I mean it was because of music. What am I saying? I meant to say it was because of movies and television. Oh, geeze, I forgot -- it's because "they took god out of schools". Oh, whoops. No, it's because not enough people at the school were armed. Uh oh, no it's because of the evil internet. No, no, no -- it's because of bad parenting. Oh, boy, it's actually because he was a loner and didn't fit in. No, wait a minute -- it's clearly because of bullies.
Or maybe everyone on the planet should shut the fuck up, grow up, and acknowledge that fucked up shit happens that is beyond our control and you can't blame freak occurrences into never happening and therefore somehow assuring eternal safety. People will lose their shit. Nature will throw something totally fucked at you. Accidents will happen. Mistakes will be made. Instead of realizing fucked up shit happens, we aid those trying to manipulate these freak events to push their personal agendas by somehow trying to reverse-engineer a stream of chaos -- which butterfly's flapping wings in the world lead to the hurricane?
How ARE they supposed to tell subscribers about something? They can't send an email because they are taking downtime. They could call everybody? SMS?
Why do they need to tell them about it? If you aren't trying to use your email, then you don't care if it is out. If you are trying to use your email and the service is out, your email won't work and you'll receive an error message (stating that it can't connect to the server, for example). It seems like a pretty self-evident thing.
If you're trying to avoid unnecessary service calls, then simply update your website so that when someone visits, it warns of what services are experiencing outages and then update your phone system (just like the power company does) so that if you're calling from an area with an outage, it tells you about it as soon as you dial in, rather than wasting the time of a customer service rep.
I prefer an e-ink reader, but when I already have a tablet, I can't really justify carrying around yet another device dedicated to just reading primarily proprietary formatted books. It sucks, but at a certain point, it gets to be too many things.
That is similar (but not identical) to an idea I've batted around for the better part of a decade:
Bounty-Porn.
The public determines who it would like to see do hard core porn and pools all their money. Then a representative approaches the people the public wants to see do porn and offers them the ridiculous amount of money in exchange for doing it and the directors and producers and distributors take a small cut off the top.
Think of it. If every person who wants to see Scarlet Johansen do porn chipped in ten bucks, it might be hard to turn down that half billion dollars for a few days of work.:)
This seems like such a quaint complaint. I can't remember the last time I watched actual television (not that I don't watch television *shows*), much less was confronted with a television commercial. The better part of a decade, at least.
One thing I've learned after the most recent year of Kickstarter projects is that they clearly don't give much of a fuck. The 5% fee is all the same, on their end.
That's the one benefit of crowd-sourcing. I may detest something, but if there is a market willing to support it and pay for it, then clearly it's of enough value to do.
Though, whether it involves developer hours that could be better spent on other aspects of the software remains a valid point.
Okay, wait . . . what? VLC is already ported to Windows. People have been using it on Windows for years (and there really isn't anything comparable on Windows, Linux, or OSX in my experience). I'm pretty certain it works on Windows 8, too. They're just looking to "Metro-ify" it so it buys-into the whole Windows 8 manner of using apps and the whole Windows 8/Metro interface and design. As well as making it available through the Microsoft App Store thing.
So, even less reason for me to feel compelled to donate to this effort, since it's not like people are being prevented from using VLC on Windows 8 as it is, now (as far as I understand).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why you were modded "funny". You're spot on. Times Square and Vegas were fantastic before they were nerfed and Disneyfied for boomers and their stupid kids.
If it wasn't being used for something, it wouldn't be the price to get less expensive groceries.
Also, do you want to be the house showing up in a database as always ordering lots of "middle eastern" food? Or the house always buying lots of food that your insurer may not like you consuming, like chips and soda? Or the house buying lots of alcohol that your car insurer might like to know about? I mean, what -- do you really think they're keeping all your data just to mail you the weekly flyer that they're going to send to every house *anyway*, as "current resident"?
Actually, my initial thought is that it's a great map for criminals to hone in on robbing houses that probably have weapons within them. Case the place, to make sure the homeowners are gone. Break in. Find the guns. Now you have some poor guy's gun for defending his home (or whatever uses he wanted) out in the market committing crimes. Way to go, media.
Totally. All the gun owners I know are spinning them around like John Wayne and playing Cowboys in the street. Yep. Totally dangerous. *eyeroll*
To be frank, I don't know what other UI you could implement. It's a web browser. It has some tabs and some forward and back buttons and a giant viewport.
I don't have any kids, but if I did, the last thing I would be worried about each day is them going to school and being the victim of one of these freak-occurrence events where some nutjob stomps into a school and unloads a couple guns on the students and teachers. Statistically, I'd be far more worried about teachers, coaches, scout leaders, and religious authorities sexually molesting them.
About 300 people (not just students) have been killed in school shootings in the last thirty years, in this country. Something like one per million or one per three million odds of being killed in a school shooting (source: http://www.teenviolencestatistics.com/content/school-shootings.html ).
About 4 to 10 percent of all children have been molested or sexually abused in some way by teachers.
(source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/02/is_sexual_abuse_in_schools_very_common_.html )
What video games, weapons, television shows, movies, books, or society influences are to blame for these teachers sexually molesting children on such a mass scale? Where's the investigation into that? Where's the rational concern and moral outrage over that compared to the irrational concern that your child might be the freak statistic that is killed in a shooting? How the lizard-brain might initially fear the school shooting far more, how does it reach the point of discussion and legislation on a society-wide level without the common sense acknowledgement that 1:10 or 1:20 is far fucking greater than 1:1000000 to 1:3000000?
No, people are stupid to begin with. The sensationalism of freak-events that are unlikely to ever even remotely impact them only serves to take advantage of that stupidity.
Though, in the 1980s, we had a librarian in grade school who would punish you for drawing even the most crude weapon (especially a gun), the fact is that every little boy spends almost his entire childhood drawing guns, bombs, explosions, tanks, and massive battle scenes, and other gory and violent depictions. It's called being a boy. And last I checked, nobody has ever been physically harmed by a drawing or a painting.
No. Being pre-occupied with politics (the way one might be with sports or stocks or soap operas, perhaps) will be classified as a mental illness and it will become a failsafe option to whisk anyone away at any time for any reason. Need to rid yourself of some dissenters? Someone threatening to expose your corporate payola scam or secret affair while in office? Have them diagnosed as mentally unstable, due to pre-occupation with politics. Maybe throw in an accusation that they're paranoid or something -- and bam! -- stuck in a padded room.
You don't think cities pay for everything in their city themselves, right? There are many states (most of them red) that actually get MORE money from the rest of the country (via the federal government) than they pay to the federal government. And if you're looking for funding to violate people's liberties and privacy and further the cause of establishment of an ultimate police state? Fuck yeah, you're going to get funding for that from uncle Sam!
One reason that we can not track mental patients is that most people spend a portion of their lives with some form of mental illness
BULLSHIT.
Most people spend a portion of their lives being diagnosed with some bullshit invented form of "mental illness", because it has been the medical oppression's goal (and that of the government, I suppose) to ensure that the DSM provides at least one diagnoses that could apply to EVERY HUMAN BEING. Are you an underachiever? You have ADD! Are you an over-achiever? You have an overwhelming need to please authority and seek approval, you secretly depressed narcissist!
Even being critical of your government or questioning authority qualifies for a mental illness diagnosis.
We have to sacrifice our rights and live in a police state, because that is the "price to protect us from three or four crazy lunatics that we'll never actually be able to protect society from, anyway" because it's going to "save so many innocent people (presumably, children)".
With this sort of math, we need to be sacrificing a lot more rights and liberties across the board for every other thing which results in more deaths than school shootings (in other words - EVERYTHING INCLUDING JAY WALKING). After all, if every life has a precious cost associated with its lost that is of such intense value to society that all of society must make sacrifices that are most "sacred" to the foundation and existence of our entire society (the Constitution), then why focus on the random unavoidable nutjobs that conduct "mass" shootings? What about seat-belts? What about parents who drink or smoke and put children at risk? What about mothers who bring questionable "step-dads" into the family? What about jay-walking? What about soda? What about sports? What about lighters, pocket knives, stairways, sidewalks, and bicycles?
If the important thing is the value of a life, then why is the life of someone shot by a nutjob more valuable than that of someone who is killed through any other accident or negligence or criminal act? Especially when those things happen far more frequently?
The secret key here is that: Yes, bad shit will happen to people and that is the cost of enjoying a free life and society. Bad shit doesn't go away just because government clamps down on society. The only thing lost there is your freedom. You *gain* nothing. And all in the effort to do the impossible -- protect every last human being from unpredictable freak occurrences. Crazy shit that pops out of the brush and happens. And it will always happen. And we will always be shocked (that's the nature of it being a FREAK occurrence).
I can guarantee you a great deal of safety and security. Just let me lock you in an underground bunker and control everything you consume and everything you do. It won't be enjoyable and it won't be a life worth having lived, but you'll probably live longer than being out in the big scary world with all sorts of awful things that can happen to you, including being t-boned in an intersection by a guy running a red-light or a nutjob in the office that loses his shit when he's fired and brings a firearm to work. :)
Don't be silly. There's not even the slightest hint of evidence to suggest all these nutjob prophecies are real. Everyone can see through the bullshit. It's not like they're something with a lot of valid evidence that is obviously real, like religion.
I don't think that is cause and effect whatsoever. If that were the case, these would be regular occurrences; not statistical anomalies. The frequency of mass killings and the number of people in them is so small (though that doesn't seem to be the case, based on coverage, of course) that to treat them in the same way you would a flu epidemic is sort of silly.
And if it were an issue of "there's lots of guns and no mental health care", then you'd have tons of people shooting up everything in site, instead of just the occasional person who went berzerk.
You are not going to stop people from shooting up schools or places of work or other gatherings, no matter what restrictions you put on guns. You aren't going to stop people form going nuts and hitting the gas pedal and plowing their car through a crowd. You're not going to stop people from poisoning salad bars at Sizzler. You're not going to stop people from releasing anthrax or releasing poisonous gas in a subway. You're not going to stop people from planting pipe bombs.
All of these other things -- health care, society, religion, weapons, medication -- are all elements in the story. So are a million other things. Ultimately, there is nothing that will stop these events.
I don't buy into this. Arguing over how many rounds a weapon may carry is irrelevant in a world where someone can stab thirty children (killing 8+) with a knife (in China a couple years ago)..
Most importantly, these were primarily WHITE children. That means all the stops will be pulled out to trace every last thread of everything, here.
Who, based on her activities and views, likely picked her ideas up from nutjobs like Alex Jones and Pat Robertson. But forbid we throw them in with all the other batshit insane "causes", too.
It was motivated by availability of guns.
No, wait -- because of mental illness issues in America.
No, wait -- because of video games.
Wait, wait, -- I mean, because of goths.
Wait, no, I mean it was because of music.
What am I saying? I meant to say it was because of movies and television.
Oh, geeze, I forgot -- it's because "they took god out of schools".
Oh, whoops. No, it's because not enough people at the school were armed.
Uh oh, no it's because of the evil internet.
No, no, no -- it's because of bad parenting.
Oh, boy, it's actually because he was a loner and didn't fit in.
No, wait a minute -- it's clearly because of bullies.
Or maybe everyone on the planet should shut the fuck up, grow up, and acknowledge that fucked up shit happens that is beyond our control and you can't blame freak occurrences into never happening and therefore somehow assuring eternal safety. People will lose their shit. Nature will throw something totally fucked at you. Accidents will happen. Mistakes will be made. Instead of realizing fucked up shit happens, we aid those trying to manipulate these freak events to push their personal agendas by somehow trying to reverse-engineer a stream of chaos -- which butterfly's flapping wings in the world lead to the hurricane?
How ARE they supposed to tell subscribers about something? They can't send an email because they are taking downtime. They could call everybody? SMS?
Why do they need to tell them about it? If you aren't trying to use your email, then you don't care if it is out. If you are trying to use your email and the service is out, your email won't work and you'll receive an error message (stating that it can't connect to the server, for example). It seems like a pretty self-evident thing.
If you're trying to avoid unnecessary service calls, then simply update your website so that when someone visits, it warns of what services are experiencing outages and then update your phone system (just like the power company does) so that if you're calling from an area with an outage, it tells you about it as soon as you dial in, rather than wasting the time of a customer service rep.
I prefer an e-ink reader, but when I already have a tablet, I can't really justify carrying around yet another device dedicated to just reading primarily proprietary formatted books. It sucks, but at a certain point, it gets to be too many things.
That is similar (but not identical) to an idea I've batted around for the better part of a decade:
Bounty-Porn.
The public determines who it would like to see do hard core porn and pools all their money. Then a representative approaches the people the public wants to see do porn and offers them the ridiculous amount of money in exchange for doing it and the directors and producers and distributors take a small cut off the top.
Think of it. If every person who wants to see Scarlet Johansen do porn chipped in ten bucks, it might be hard to turn down that half billion dollars for a few days of work. :)
This seems like such a quaint complaint. I can't remember the last time I watched actual television (not that I don't watch television *shows*), much less was confronted with a television commercial. The better part of a decade, at least.
One thing I've learned after the most recent year of Kickstarter projects is that they clearly don't give much of a fuck. The 5% fee is all the same, on their end.
That's the one benefit of crowd-sourcing. I may detest something, but if there is a market willing to support it and pay for it, then clearly it's of enough value to do.
Though, whether it involves developer hours that could be better spent on other aspects of the software remains a valid point.
Okay, wait . . . what? VLC is already ported to Windows. People have been using it on Windows for years (and there really isn't anything comparable on Windows, Linux, or OSX in my experience). I'm pretty certain it works on Windows 8, too. They're just looking to "Metro-ify" it so it buys-into the whole Windows 8 manner of using apps and the whole Windows 8/Metro interface and design. As well as making it available through the Microsoft App Store thing.
So, even less reason for me to feel compelled to donate to this effort, since it's not like people are being prevented from using VLC on Windows 8 as it is, now (as far as I understand).