You see, people with evil or even just illegal intent generally try to HIDE themselves and their plans. Sometimes when you ask them their name they will... LIE. They will provide an alias. They don't want to be held accountable for their actions. Isn't that crazy? i know, it's shocking. Some criminals wear masks to obscure their faces to avoid imprisonment, and not just on Halloween! So the list is of NAMES. Sometimes one person might use half a dozen aliases. The number of PEOPLE on the list might be far fewer than that. It gets more complex; sometimes they use a name once and never again. Maybe because using the same alias repeatedly might be easier to trace back to an actual person.
Should we then cap the list to say, 500,000? The 500,001th person who decides to plot a hijacking gets a free pass?
Sorry about the sarcasm. Sometimes my loathing of partisan paranoia gets the better of me.
OK, so the list is long. But instead of doing ANOTHER knee jerk reaction, let's investigate. Why is the list that long? Can we sort the list by likelihood, have one team work to clear the names of the people at the bottom and another apprehending those at the top? Can we review the system that puts a name on the list? Maybe the system is generating too many false positives. If so, change the threshold. Could it be possible that there really ARE that many names we need to investigate? If there are, whining about the length of the list is silly. Wouldn't you want the list of serial killer investigations to be as long as need be? "Sorry, we can't persue the guy who raped your sister, lest we criminalize too many people."
There is no such thing as security, or total security. Security and Convenience/Freedom are mutually opposing forces at the extreme ends. Without some degree of security, you're totally vulnerable. You'll be attacked or living in constant fear of attack. With too much security, you're paralyzed. So perhaps the security should be determined by the actual threat and the value of what you are protecting. Does that sound reasonable?
So, there IS a threat. To pretend otherwise is insane. However, the threat is not nearly as big as those in charge think it is. On the other hand, the value of the target is far higher than is readily obvious. 3000 lives by themselves are a tragic loss, but the cost of 11 Sep does not end with body count! The cost of that attack was a world power thrown into fear, about one trillion $ in damages* and a carte blanche given to a president with an 80 IQ. My life is very valuable to me, as are the lives of the people i care about. i also value the lives of my fellow citizens and even funny talking furriners. i don't want them killed here or elsewhere. As such, i say that the value of the lives that might be taken as pretty damn high. Short of check points with bomb sniffing dogs at every intersection, there's only so much that we can do though without making life unlivable. Which is precisely what our enemy wants.
There must be balance. There must be oversight. And there must be a change to how we do things and how we think. If we pretend the lion means us no harm or that it didn't just kill Bob, we deserve to become lion poop. If we don't figure out what causes the plague and how to stop it, we deserve to die. If we burn down the village to find the guy who pissed in the well, we deserve what that brings as well.
The problem is compounded by partisan idiocy. We're too busy comparing Bush to Hitler to deal with the situation rationally. We're too busy saying "Thats 10 Sep thinking!". We care too much about WHO is saying what, than with what they are saying. We dismiss each other as libtards and neotards. It does not matter who started it, only who participates in it. Anyone joining the fray is guilty. Politicians and citizens should put reality above partisan childishness. Elected officials should represent EVERYONE, not just the people who voted for them.
This is also how investigation into criminals who want to murder us by the thousands start. The slope isn't always slippery. Should we not look for people who mean us harm? Should we tolerate the presence of mass murderers, potential or actual? Should we wait until they start blowing up nightclubs to DO something about them? Often suicide bombers are unavailable for questioning, trial and imprisonment. They're usually occupied by smoldering in the crater that used to be people, or spending time with their 72 virgins, depending on what you believe.
We're new to this game. We're not used to enemies hiding in plain sight among us. While it is likely that somethings have gone too far, that doesn't mean that the direction was wrong from the outset. i don't want my gov't to wait for someone to kill me before taking action. i want them investigated, interrogated, tried and imprisoned BEFORE i'm an unrecognizable carbon stain in a pile of rubble. People don't have the right to crash my plane into a building, or a plane into my building. Unless you consider mass murder an act of protected free speech. Does privacy extend to conspiracy to commit mass murder? i'm going to go with, "no". Many/most of the people on the list aren't US citizens, and are NOT protected by the same rights as citizens, despite popular cries to the contrary. Those that are citizens should be investigated by the FBI only. With adequate oversight such a list and the investigations of those people is not a step toward totalitarianism. If your complaint is a lack of oversight, that is a valid concern as long as it is tempered with perspective. If you are against tracking people who want to kill you, i question your honesty or sanity. Either you're lying because you hate Bush (i do too, but i can see past my politics), or you think that mass murder of civilians is acceptable.
i don't doubt that terrible things have been done in the name of protecting us. Such systems should be reviewed and controlled. Anyone using their authority for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way should do hard time. But that doesn't mean we are on our way to Krystalnacht or even the internment camps filled with our own citizens. We can't pretend that these people mean us no harm. They want to kill us. That includes you, me, your mom, your s/o, your best friend and whoever happens to be in the blast radius. The only way to find out who does and does not mean us harm is to investigate. Unless you think we should wait until they've already killed you.
Shit, i just realized i've spent all this time responding to a Godwin. Moving on....
Will Ubuntu run Planetside, MSO and Neverwinter Nights with current video card drivers? If so, i'm there, dude! Otherwise... i'll stick with XP.
One of my lusers went over my head and ordered a laptop with Vista. He can't connect to the VPN because the devs of our firewall haven't made a driver. i'm pretty much ignoring this luser for making me deal with Vista and disregarding my instructions. i found Vista to arbitrarily different as well. They could have made user affordances of (read: taken advantage of everyone's familiarity with) XP's interface, but no.
If gamers started clamoring for linux drivers and games, maybe something would change. Game developers want to be paid for their skills and time, and well. So where is that money going to come from? Games are already insanely expensive.
When we use their term for what is actually "copyright infringement", we allow them to make it sound worse than it is. The same goes for hacker. A hacker is someone finding elegant solutions, figuring out how things work and then improving them. We allowed the media to abuse that word to mean cyber criminal/cracker. Now we can't use the word hacker for its intended purpose without causing confusion.
You neglected to mention that said Ford has the most parts and modifications available(most hard and software). Finding parts for your Ferrari (video cards) will be a pain in the ass, then you'll have the additional challenge of getting it to work (drivers). The Mac as Toyota analogy fails because Toyotas are ubiquitous and well supported. They're more like Fiats or Citroens, hardly any one uses them or makes parts for them. Because of the shared suffering of the Fiat drivers, they get to be members of an elitist club that looks down on everyone else. Your Ford is also similar enough to every one else's Ford that you can hop in and drive it with a minimal learning curve. From one company to the next, windows is windows.
If the Linux community aggregated their talent into ONE distro, it would be kick awesome and a potential rival to M$, or at least to Mac.
Most people don't want a Ferrari (like OS), they want a Ford. They want something they know how to use, that has lots of cheap parts and support.
Linux is more like a fighter jet. It has more controls than the typical user could possibly use, much less understand. i don't want to RtFM, i want to play Planetside download pr0n. My local gas station doesn't sell fighter jet fuel or parts or know how to fix them.
Macs are unicycles. You look like a queef for having it and you have to struggle against it to do basic functions.
Hi. Former intel analyst here. Using classification to cover up a crime or an embarrassment is illegal. It might be possible that there is legitimately classified information in the confession. i thought coerced confessions were inadmissible.
Why do they call it Wireless Fidelity? Fidelity isn't really the issue. In the term HiFi, fidelity was significant because high fidelity was novel at the time. HiFi systems had higher fidelity than previous systems. So is the use of fidelity meaningful, or just to hijack the sound of familiar term?
It wasn't necessary to refute you. You did it for me. Your post showed all the classic flaws of someone who would hold such a position. Mean spirited. Willfully ignorant (to protect your wallet and saving yourself from looking in the mirror). Nothing i say will make you a kinder person. Your self interest will protect your position from any facts. You don't want to debate, you want to be a jerk, Mr. Tough Guy. i'll take your original advice and shut the fuck up, and let you win this special Olympic race in first place.
It has very little to do with character. A very small % of the population has some sort of predisposition to anti-social behavior. Most people turn to crime because of a lack of access to legal opportunities. i didn't rob a gas station this morning because i have a nice cushy job, a rented townhouse, nice toys and a belief that my life will get better. i have something to gain by obeying the law, and much to lose by breaking it. i have reasonable faith that if i were to apply to grad school that i could get in and succeed. It's easy to say that anyone can succeed if they apply themselves. But it's bullshit. It's a lie. We don't all start the race at the same point on the track. Some have to carry extra weight because of the baggage those with power dump on them. If those at the top shared more of their power, or used it to do more good, to work toward permanent and real solutions, crime would seem like less of an option. Punishment only deters people who have something to lose. i'd love to have some fast easy money that might come from robbing a liquor store, but i would much rather keep my fiber internet connection, girlfriend and possibility of someday earning a six figure income. Hope deters crime. If greed is the problem it is not the greed of the poor, but of those who keep the poor being poor. There's more than enough to go around, and we wouldn't have to resort to communism to do it. Better funding for education would make a huge difference at minimal cost.
This week's box office intake was about 80M$. 1% of that is 800K$ That times 52 weeks is more than 41M$ In a fund or account generating 3% interest, even without compounding is more than 120K$ per year. * Rounding down to add administrative costs
That's 120 scholarships of 1K$ That model would be self perpetuating and would adjust for inflation on it's own.
Now lets take a look at 41M$ per year: Establish a competitive scholarship that awards 10K$ each, for 410 students. Select 410 families and give them 10K$ that they can use to add to their down payment on their first house Give 1M$ to 41 elementary schools. Give 41M$ to the poorest state in the union for use in the education budget Give 410 teachers 10K$ off on their student loans
41M$ is a teentsy-tiny amount of money, but it could do a great deal of good. That's just one percent of what we spend going to the movies (on tickets alone).
i'm not saying taxes can solve everything, or "redistribute wealth, comrade!", but rather that our priorities are fucked. With temporary and/or minor adjustments to our priorities we can right many wrongs and decrease crime drastically in one generation.
What cracks me up is that you've been modded 5; Funny.
Would being all sad and mopey bring make them less dead? They are 9 strangers, they're way the hell outside my monkey sphere. 9 people died in my zip code in the past few days, i'm sure. But i don't have the time or sanity to spare to mourn them. When i die all of 10 people might shed a tear on that day. The other 6 billion people on the planet will call it "Tuesday". It's not about being callous, it's sanity management. i'm sorry these guys died (while working on a device meant to kill people). i feel bad for their families. But in the grand scheme of things, it's no big deal to me personally. i get a bit choked up when i see road kill. When i see a funeral procession i pull over immediately. i'm not callous, i just have more important things to do than mourn people on the other side of a planet.
My mods point always expire just before i have need of them. Ah well....
Went poorly != Mistake.
You can do the right thing, and still have it go all wrong. Somethings are just beyond your control. But that doesn't mean that you do nothing for fear of what could go wrong because of what you don't know or can't control. If some guy is beating his wife and you do nothing to stop it, you're in the wrong, you're a coward and a lousy excuse for a human being. If you try to help her, he might kick your ass too, or maybe he'll kill her. You can't control what he'll do, you're not responsible for how he responds, only for what you do or do not do. Had outside forces stayed out of it, or more of our allies stood beside us instead of voting their wallets to protect Saddam and his band of thugs, things would be very different there. Your political loyalties are blinding you to the big picture. Your sense of right and wrong is blurred by who happens to be president today.
Iraq wasn't about 9/11 specifically or terrorism in general. That was bad marketing on Bush's part. It was only ever about Saddam and the sanctions that were about to end. Leaving Saddam in power with billions in oil revenue to rebuild his military, resume WMD development and threaten his neighbors. As for the lie about him being contained, he was only contained in the sense that he was only killing his own people, he'd resume killing his neighbors as soon as the sanctions ended. Which would allow him to start work on billions in arms deals with Russia, oil contracts with Germany, France, China and Russia. You might note that these were also the nations most opposed to taking down Saddam.
But don't let objectivity and reality get in the way of that smug feeling you get when you bash Bush. i'll tell the girl at the campus bookstore you said all the talking points like a good sheep.
Excellent point.
i'm going to quibble about word choice a bit. Piracy is theft on a boat with swords and guns. Armed robbery at sea. Often involving people dying. There may be a case for calling the mafia stealing a truck load of stereos piracy. Downloading an album you didn't pay for is copyright infringement. i object to the muddying and hijacking of words. Piracy has a meaning, it doesn't need more. Otherwise, it should be called piracy to borrow a pen from my coworker's desk, or to yodel on a mountain top. Why have a dictionary if any word can have whatever meaning we like? Calling infringement piracy is an attempt to steal the significance of armed robbery. When we call infringement piracy, we are helping them (RIAA) win. We are reinforcing their hijacking of the term. It's as bad as calling cyber criminals hackers. Hacking is about figuring out how things work, and improving them, about finding elegant solutions. Breaking into something, stealing code is cracking, or cyber crime, not hacking.
Germany has a great system for this. You can't drive until you're 18, then you have to take a long and expensive course, then car insurance and gas are expensive. So, you don't get a car unless you really have to. Having a 2nd car is almost unheard of. Germany also has reliable and ubiquitous public transport. Americans are used to going where they want, when they want, and without being on a bus with smelly plebes. So, i'm not sure how that would work here. We allow 16 year olds to drive because many of them have jobs. i think kids that age already have a job... going to school and getting good grades. Parents don't want to cart their kids around, but doing so might keep them out of drugs, pregnancy and STDs.
In the US it is supposed to be two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner, but with the sheep being off the menu. Majority rule restricted by minority rights. Where minority means those who disagree with the majority, not race or gender "minorities". If the majority felt that guns/abortion should be banned, minority rights would slow things down a bit.
In my Air Force experience, a 27 yr old would be a freshly appointed Captain (O3). They might have command over a "flight", being an sergeant and an airman or two. In the Navy an O3 might command a patrol boat.
Most people can't handle a car that moves in two dimensions (direction and speed). Compounding that with altitude sounds like a disastrous idea. Just wait until a soccer mom lands her minivanplane on your house. Cell phone drivers will park through the window of your office on the 23rd floor.
*grr*
Dear Open Source Community,
This is why FOSS/OSS is not a threat to M$. You all have your incomplete pet projects with dozens of users that are no match for what M$ offers... unity. M$ Office integrates into Windows. i can go to any company in the first world and know how to operate their computers. Until you guys start consolidating your efforts and making ONE worth office suite (OO.o is cool, i use it as much as i can, but it is NOT a replacement for MSO yet), and ONE operating system, the world will view Linux and Open Source as the purview of nerds. Nothing would please me more than to reformat my hard drive, install TEH Linux (teh as in, the only one). But i can't until PlanetSide and MSO can run on it. i can't until i know there will be a driver for my next video card. i can't rely on OO.o until it can mail merge and has a "Send to Email Recipient" button. i can't until i know that i'm not going to need to learn shell scripting or CLI to get the thing to install or work. i can't until i know that the files i create can be used on the most possible machines.
Pooling your efforts just might get that done.
Or, you could keep doing what you're doing, and keep getting the results you're already getting.
This is where some fanboi flames me for "not getting it". Or someone says, "but OSS is about choice, having a single version of Linux is against what it stands for". Sure, great, but don't stand there scratching your head wondering why you use Debian at home but must suffer through using Windows at work. Or why you have to load Windows when you want to play a current game, or just about any game with more than one player. i don't want choices in operating systems, i want choices in software and hardware. Mac and Linux (and the other pet OSes) offer a fraction of what M$ does.
Remember kids - If someone says something you disagree with, mod them as Flamebait!
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The list is 755,000 NAMES. Not people.
You see, people with evil or even just illegal intent generally try to HIDE themselves and their plans. Sometimes when you ask them their name they will... LIE. They will provide an alias. They don't want to be held accountable for their actions. Isn't that crazy? i know, it's shocking. Some criminals wear masks to obscure their faces to avoid imprisonment, and not just on Halloween! So the list is of NAMES. Sometimes one person might use half a dozen aliases. The number of PEOPLE on the list might be far fewer than that. It gets more complex; sometimes they use a name once and never again. Maybe because using the same alias repeatedly might be easier to trace back to an actual person.
Should we then cap the list to say, 500,000? The 500,001th person who decides to plot a hijacking gets a free pass?
Sorry about the sarcasm. Sometimes my loathing of partisan paranoia gets the better of me.
OK, so the list is long. But instead of doing ANOTHER knee jerk reaction, let's investigate. Why is the list that long? Can we sort the list by likelihood, have one team work to clear the names of the people at the bottom and another apprehending those at the top? Can we review the system that puts a name on the list? Maybe the system is generating too many false positives. If so, change the threshold. Could it be possible that there really ARE that many names we need to investigate? If there are, whining about the length of the list is silly. Wouldn't you want the list of serial killer investigations to be as long as need be? "Sorry, we can't persue the guy who raped your sister, lest we criminalize too many people."
There is no such thing as security, or total security. Security and Convenience/Freedom are mutually opposing forces at the extreme ends. Without some degree of security, you're totally vulnerable. You'll be attacked or living in constant fear of attack. With too much security, you're paralyzed. So perhaps the security should be determined by the actual threat and the value of what you are protecting. Does that sound reasonable?
So, there IS a threat. To pretend otherwise is insane. However, the threat is not nearly as big as those in charge think it is. On the other hand, the value of the target is far higher than is readily obvious. 3000 lives by themselves are a tragic loss, but the cost of 11 Sep does not end with body count! The cost of that attack was a world power thrown into fear, about one trillion $ in damages* and a carte blanche given to a president with an 80 IQ. My life is very valuable to me, as are the lives of the people i care about. i also value the lives of my fellow citizens and even funny talking furriners. i don't want them killed here or elsewhere. As such, i say that the value of the lives that might be taken as pretty damn high. Short of check points with bomb sniffing dogs at every intersection, there's only so much that we can do though without making life unlivable. Which is precisely what our enemy wants.
There must be balance. There must be oversight. And there must be a change to how we do things and how we think. If we pretend the lion means us no harm or that it didn't just kill Bob, we deserve to become lion poop. If we don't figure out what causes the plague and how to stop it, we deserve to die. If we burn down the village to find the guy who pissed in the well, we deserve what that brings as well.
The problem is compounded by partisan idiocy. We're too busy comparing Bush to Hitler to deal with the situation rationally. We're too busy saying "Thats 10 Sep thinking!". We care too much about WHO is saying what, than with what they are saying. We dismiss each other as libtards and neotards. It does not matter who started it, only who participates in it. Anyone joining the fray is guilty. Politicians and citizens should put reality above partisan childishness. Elected officials should represent EVERYONE, not just the people who voted for them.
This is also how investigation into criminals who want to murder us by the thousands start. The slope isn't always slippery. Should we not look for people who mean us harm? Should we tolerate the presence of mass murderers, potential or actual? Should we wait until they start blowing up nightclubs to DO something about them? Often suicide bombers are unavailable for questioning, trial and imprisonment. They're usually occupied by smoldering in the crater that used to be people, or spending time with their 72 virgins, depending on what you believe.
We're new to this game. We're not used to enemies hiding in plain sight among us. While it is likely that somethings have gone too far, that doesn't mean that the direction was wrong from the outset. i don't want my gov't to wait for someone to kill me before taking action. i want them investigated, interrogated, tried and imprisoned BEFORE i'm an unrecognizable carbon stain in a pile of rubble. People don't have the right to crash my plane into a building, or a plane into my building. Unless you consider mass murder an act of protected free speech. Does privacy extend to conspiracy to commit mass murder? i'm going to go with, "no". Many/most of the people on the list aren't US citizens, and are NOT protected by the same rights as citizens, despite popular cries to the contrary. Those that are citizens should be investigated by the FBI only. With adequate oversight such a list and the investigations of those people is not a step toward totalitarianism. If your complaint is a lack of oversight, that is a valid concern as long as it is tempered with perspective. If you are against tracking people who want to kill you, i question your honesty or sanity. Either you're lying because you hate Bush (i do too, but i can see past my politics), or you think that mass murder of civilians is acceptable.
i don't doubt that terrible things have been done in the name of protecting us. Such systems should be reviewed and controlled. Anyone using their authority for the wrong reasons or in the wrong way should do hard time. But that doesn't mean we are on our way to Krystalnacht or even the internment camps filled with our own citizens. We can't pretend that these people mean us no harm. They want to kill us. That includes you, me, your mom, your s/o, your best friend and whoever happens to be in the blast radius. The only way to find out who does and does not mean us harm is to investigate. Unless you think we should wait until they've already killed you.
Shit, i just realized i've spent all this time responding to a Godwin. Moving on....
Yeah, this is pretty much greek to me. What does this mean?
Will Ubuntu run Planetside, MSO and Neverwinter Nights with current video card drivers? If so, i'm there, dude! Otherwise... i'll stick with XP.
One of my lusers went over my head and ordered a laptop with Vista. He can't connect to the VPN because the devs of our firewall haven't made a driver. i'm pretty much ignoring this luser for making me deal with Vista and disregarding my instructions. i found Vista to arbitrarily different as well. They could have made user affordances of (read: taken advantage of everyone's familiarity with) XP's interface, but no.
If gamers started clamoring for linux drivers and games, maybe something would change. Game developers want to be paid for their skills and time, and well. So where is that money going to come from? Games are already insanely expensive.
Piracy is armed robbery at sea.
When we use their term for what is actually "copyright infringement", we allow them to make it sound worse than it is. The same goes for hacker. A hacker is someone finding elegant solutions, figuring out how things work and then improving them. We allowed the media to abuse that word to mean cyber criminal/cracker. Now we can't use the word hacker for its intended purpose without causing confusion.
Am i the only one who cares about this?
You neglected to mention that said Ford has the most parts and modifications available(most hard and software). Finding parts for your Ferrari (video cards) will be a pain in the ass, then you'll have the additional challenge of getting it to work (drivers). The Mac as Toyota analogy fails because Toyotas are ubiquitous and well supported. They're more like Fiats or Citroens, hardly any one uses them or makes parts for them. Because of the shared suffering of the Fiat drivers, they get to be members of an elitist club that looks down on everyone else. Your Ford is also similar enough to every one else's Ford that you can hop in and drive it with a minimal learning curve. From one company to the next, windows is windows.
If the Linux community aggregated their talent into ONE distro, it would be kick awesome and a potential rival to M$, or at least to Mac.
Most people don't want a Ferrari (like OS), they want a Ford. They want something they know how to use, that has lots of cheap parts and support.
Linux is more like a fighter jet. It has more controls than the typical user could possibly use, much less understand. i don't want to RtFM, i want to play Planetside download pr0n. My local gas station doesn't sell fighter jet fuel or parts or know how to fix them.
Macs are unicycles. You look like a queef for having it and you have to struggle against it to do basic functions.
Hi. Former intel analyst here. Using classification to cover up a crime or an embarrassment is illegal. It might be possible that there is legitimately classified information in the confession. i thought coerced confessions were inadmissible.
Why do they call it Wireless Fidelity? Fidelity isn't really the issue. In the term HiFi, fidelity was significant because high fidelity was novel at the time. HiFi systems had higher fidelity than previous systems. So is the use of fidelity meaningful, or just to hijack the sound of familiar term?
It wasn't necessary to refute you. You did it for me. Your post showed all the classic flaws of someone who would hold such a position. Mean spirited. Willfully ignorant (to protect your wallet and saving yourself from looking in the mirror). Nothing i say will make you a kinder person. Your self interest will protect your position from any facts. You don't want to debate, you want to be a jerk, Mr. Tough Guy. i'll take your original advice and shut the fuck up, and let you win this special Olympic race in first place.
This is when you say "Whatever!".
Wow, i don't need to refute any of that. Your own post did it for me.
It has very little to do with character. A very small % of the population has some sort of predisposition to anti-social behavior. Most people turn to crime because of a lack of access to legal opportunities. i didn't rob a gas station this morning because i have a nice cushy job, a rented townhouse, nice toys and a belief that my life will get better. i have something to gain by obeying the law, and much to lose by breaking it. i have reasonable faith that if i were to apply to grad school that i could get in and succeed. It's easy to say that anyone can succeed if they apply themselves. But it's bullshit. It's a lie. We don't all start the race at the same point on the track. Some have to carry extra weight because of the baggage those with power dump on them. If those at the top shared more of their power, or used it to do more good, to work toward permanent and real solutions, crime would seem like less of an option. Punishment only deters people who have something to lose. i'd love to have some fast easy money that might come from robbing a liquor store, but i would much rather keep my fiber internet connection, girlfriend and possibility of someday earning a six figure income. Hope deters crime. If greed is the problem it is not the greed of the poor, but of those who keep the poor being poor. There's more than enough to go around, and we wouldn't have to resort to communism to do it. Better funding for education would make a huge difference at minimal cost.
This week's box office intake was about 80M$.
1% of that is 800K$
That times 52 weeks is more than 41M$
In a fund or account generating 3% interest, even without compounding is more than 120K$ per year.
* Rounding down to add administrative costs
That's 120 scholarships of 1K$
That model would be self perpetuating and would adjust for inflation on it's own.
Now lets take a look at 41M$ per year:
Establish a competitive scholarship that awards 10K$ each, for 410 students.
Select 410 families and give them 10K$ that they can use to add to their down payment on their first house
Give 1M$ to 41 elementary schools.
Give 41M$ to the poorest state in the union for use in the education budget
Give 410 teachers 10K$ off on their student loans
41M$ is a teentsy-tiny amount of money, but it could do a great deal of good. That's just one percent of what we spend going to the movies (on tickets alone).
i'm not saying taxes can solve everything, or "redistribute wealth, comrade!", but rather that our priorities are fucked. With temporary and/or minor adjustments to our priorities we can right many wrongs and decrease crime drastically in one generation.
This. Charge me up front, or a subscription... not both. If you are going to advertise at me, the game should be FREE, the way broadcast TV is.
What cracks me up is that you've been modded 5; Funny.
Would being all sad and mopey bring make them less dead? They are 9 strangers, they're way the hell outside my monkey sphere. 9 people died in my zip code in the past few days, i'm sure. But i don't have the time or sanity to spare to mourn them. When i die all of 10 people might shed a tear on that day. The other 6 billion people on the planet will call it "Tuesday". It's not about being callous, it's sanity management. i'm sorry these guys died (while working on a device meant to kill people). i feel bad for their families. But in the grand scheme of things, it's no big deal to me personally. i get a bit choked up when i see road kill. When i see a funeral procession i pull over immediately. i'm not callous, i just have more important things to do than mourn people on the other side of a planet.
http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html
My mods point always expire just before i have need of them. Ah well....
Went poorly != Mistake.
You can do the right thing, and still have it go all wrong. Somethings are just beyond your control. But that doesn't mean that you do nothing for fear of what could go wrong because of what you don't know or can't control. If some guy is beating his wife and you do nothing to stop it, you're in the wrong, you're a coward and a lousy excuse for a human being. If you try to help her, he might kick your ass too, or maybe he'll kill her. You can't control what he'll do, you're not responsible for how he responds, only for what you do or do not do. Had outside forces stayed out of it, or more of our allies stood beside us instead of voting their wallets to protect Saddam and his band of thugs, things would be very different there. Your political loyalties are blinding you to the big picture. Your sense of right and wrong is blurred by who happens to be president today.
Iraq wasn't about 9/11 specifically or terrorism in general. That was bad marketing on Bush's part. It was only ever about Saddam and the sanctions that were about to end. Leaving Saddam in power with billions in oil revenue to rebuild his military, resume WMD development and threaten his neighbors. As for the lie about him being contained, he was only contained in the sense that he was only killing his own people, he'd resume killing his neighbors as soon as the sanctions ended. Which would allow him to start work on billions in arms deals with Russia, oil contracts with Germany, France, China and Russia. You might note that these were also the nations most opposed to taking down Saddam.
But don't let objectivity and reality get in the way of that smug feeling you get when you bash Bush. i'll tell the girl at the campus bookstore you said all the talking points like a good sheep.
Excellent point. i'm going to quibble about word choice a bit. Piracy is theft on a boat with swords and guns. Armed robbery at sea. Often involving people dying. There may be a case for calling the mafia stealing a truck load of stereos piracy. Downloading an album you didn't pay for is copyright infringement. i object to the muddying and hijacking of words. Piracy has a meaning, it doesn't need more. Otherwise, it should be called piracy to borrow a pen from my coworker's desk, or to yodel on a mountain top. Why have a dictionary if any word can have whatever meaning we like? Calling infringement piracy is an attempt to steal the significance of armed robbery. When we call infringement piracy, we are helping them (RIAA) win. We are reinforcing their hijacking of the term. It's as bad as calling cyber criminals hackers. Hacking is about figuring out how things work, and improving them, about finding elegant solutions. Breaking into something, stealing code is cracking, or cyber crime, not hacking.
Germany has a great system for this. You can't drive until you're 18, then you have to take a long and expensive course, then car insurance and gas are expensive. So, you don't get a car unless you really have to. Having a 2nd car is almost unheard of. Germany also has reliable and ubiquitous public transport. Americans are used to going where they want, when they want, and without being on a bus with smelly plebes. So, i'm not sure how that would work here. We allow 16 year olds to drive because many of them have jobs. i think kids that age already have a job... going to school and getting good grades. Parents don't want to cart their kids around, but doing so might keep them out of drugs, pregnancy and STDs.
In the US it is supposed to be two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner, but with the sheep being off the menu. Majority rule restricted by minority rights. Where minority means those who disagree with the majority, not race or gender "minorities". If the majority felt that guns/abortion should be banned, minority rights would slow things down a bit.
Excellent use of trivia, sir.
In my Air Force experience, a 27 yr old would be a freshly appointed Captain (O3). They might have command over a "flight", being an sergeant and an airman or two. In the Navy an O3 might command a patrol boat.
As they say in Chicago... fuck you, you fucking fuck!
Can someone from the navy tell us about any instances of 27 year old ship captains? i'm seriously skeptical.
How much privacy should one expect in public? Public as in, not in your house or car, but an in an area anyone can get too (public streets etc).
i'm not asking this as "if you have nothing to hide...", but as "seriously, you're in public, public is the opposite of private".
Most people can't handle a car that moves in two dimensions (direction and speed). Compounding that with altitude sounds like a disastrous idea. Just wait until a soccer mom lands her minivanplane on your house. Cell phone drivers will park through the window of your office on the 23rd floor.
How about some suboids from the Dune prequels?
Has someone posted a Biodome reference yet? /trouble in the bubble
*grr* Dear Open Source Community, This is why FOSS/OSS is not a threat to M$. You all have your incomplete pet projects with dozens of users that are no match for what M$ offers... unity. M$ Office integrates into Windows. i can go to any company in the first world and know how to operate their computers. Until you guys start consolidating your efforts and making ONE worth office suite (OO.o is cool, i use it as much as i can, but it is NOT a replacement for MSO yet), and ONE operating system, the world will view Linux and Open Source as the purview of nerds. Nothing would please me more than to reformat my hard drive, install TEH Linux (teh as in, the only one). But i can't until PlanetSide and MSO can run on it. i can't until i know there will be a driver for my next video card. i can't rely on OO.o until it can mail merge and has a "Send to Email Recipient" button. i can't until i know that i'm not going to need to learn shell scripting or CLI to get the thing to install or work. i can't until i know that the files i create can be used on the most possible machines. Pooling your efforts just might get that done. Or, you could keep doing what you're doing, and keep getting the results you're already getting. This is where some fanboi flames me for "not getting it". Or someone says, "but OSS is about choice, having a single version of Linux is against what it stands for". Sure, great, but don't stand there scratching your head wondering why you use Debian at home but must suffer through using Windows at work. Or why you have to load Windows when you want to play a current game, or just about any game with more than one player. i don't want choices in operating systems, i want choices in software and hardware. Mac and Linux (and the other pet OSes) offer a fraction of what M$ does. Remember kids - If someone says something you disagree with, mod them as Flamebait!