Indirection just delays the anger and fear, and keeps it from being expressed. People ought to be seeing numbers-right-now in their faces, getting horrified, and yelling back. Just like with loans, this will make people think, "Oh, I pay later when I'm rich," and suppresses the sticker shock.
We NEED the sticker shock. And we all (not just students) need to get shocked by it. Because the problem of education isn't who pays and how they pay, but how much you pay for it. The price is totally unrealistic compared to the capital required to provide the service.
I would love a government to try and build a HV transmission line in my backyard. I should get nearly $8m for my property if history is anything to go by.
And everyone lived happily ever after. Take the $8M if that's what everyone insists upon shoving in your face. The people who paid it, feel good. I'd add "comma chump sucker" to the end of that, but everyone (including you) is laughing their asses off, so it's hard to type. That is how appropriate the "everyone lived happily ever after" thing is.
My algorithm for NIMBY is "I'll let this be in _my_ backyard, for n dollars/euros," where you set n to zero and slowly increase it until you get a combination of bids that can be assembled into a working solution. Then you charge the NIMBYers whatever cost that is, to pay the bids. You wanna pay an extra 7 cents per KWh to have the lines be somewhere else? Ok. You don't want to pay it? Ok, you get the lines, and lower energy costs than your stuck-up neighbors.
How does everyone not win (or at least break even) in such a scenario?
(Thanks.) Not surprising; I've just been lazy, I guess. So... yeeeah. I probably wouldn't miss Google much. Their cooperation really does look totally optional and expendible, from the PoV of a user of the platform. Not that I'm ungrateful for commodotizing mobile OSes (thanks, Google). But anti-trust? Oh, please. The people getting their panties in a bunch about these agreements, need to take a chill pill.
I use Android. I think the Maps app is pretty good. I like it. That's the one I would miss.
Other than that.. nothing. There just aren't any Google apps or services(*) which matter. I think OEMs are over-agonizing on this. Just don't sign the contract, and your phone will be nearly as good as all your competitors in most ways, and better in other ways.
When people say "Android isn't really free, because..." please don't finish your sentence with a list of pretty much worthless (or trivially-replaced) stuff-that-isn't-free. That's almost like complaining "I tried switching my uranium enrichment plant to ReactOS but it wasn't compatible with Stuxnet, so I switched back to Windows."
Except for that Maps thing. But maybe someone else has a mapping (native, not web) app that uses OSM by now. Haven't looked. That'd be hilarious if the list of precious Google apps was zero items long instead of one.
* Services: well ok, of course I still do use Google for searching the web. They are definitely still best (and by a wide margin, it's not even close) whenever I do the blind test. But my computer's maker didn't need any license for that. Any web browser will do. That's my (the user's) problem, not the phone maker's problem.
I don't want to have to uproot my family, find a new job, and start a new life in another state just because the state I happen to live in wants to push religious beliefs onto my kids through the public school system.
That's easy to say when someone is defending states' right to be wrong. What if we were defending states' right to be right? If the feds were insisting that science be removed from curriculums and the state wanted to teach it, then you might damn well start to care about states rights.
The stupidity of the decision has no bearing on whose decision it is to make.
You're probably right that it's illegal for any public school (whether state or federal) per the first amendment, but in a sense, isn't "evidencism" a religion too? The only reason you think looking-at-evidence works to reveal how the world works, is that you looked at the evidence. That same argument could be used to confirm mysticism. "I made up a neat idea in my head. The way I know it's true, is that the voice in my head says 'Yep, it really is true.'"
So, if a State chooses to not teach their children what is accepted in the scientific community, should this be their prerogative?
Probably, but Republicrats have built up many decades of precedent that it would fall under "Interstate Commerce" and can therefore be a federal power, if the feds want it.
Who would oppose it falling under Interstate Commerce? Libertarians? In the voting booth, 99% of people say they strongly disagree with Libertarians.
I know a total nontechie who wanted to show me something on her laptop. I walked over expecting to see Finder of Explorer, and was surprised to find myself looking at Unity. I'm sure some "rocket scientist" installed that for her, but for day-to-day use, it's very clear that the people who say Linux isn't "ready" don't know WTF they're talking about. Icons and menus and windows, are icons and menus and windows.
Right of first sale applies to distribution of copyrighted products.
Right of first sale applies to sold objects ("goods"). If you buy a hammer or buy a copy of a movie, you own that thing. There may be some some laws saying what you're allowed to do with your thing (the state government says you're not allowed to use the hammer to hit people in the head, the fed government says all kinds of complicated things you're not allowed to do with the movie) but the seller has absolutely no say at all.
If they really need to have a say, then they can try to use purchasing contracts, but purchasing contracts tend to result in most customers saying "fuck that" and walking away. Generally, the desire to do business outweighs the desire to have a say in what becomes of the item, so these things tend to be rare and only used for infrequently-acquired or expensive goods. And then even then these contracts of adhesion tend to have limits.
(There's a lot of possible digression here, various schemes have been tried where sellers have their cake and eat it too. Some have been successful, though they all smack of illegitimacy. e.g. shrinkwrap EULAs, Human Centipad, etc.)
When you get to services, people are able to make a stronger case that there isn't a "good" for first sale doctrine to apply to. BART will say they didn't sell you a ticket; they sold you a ride. The ticket is just an authorization token. That's different from a hammer or movie disc, where the item itself is what you wanted. Nobody wants a ticket nor does the piece of paper have much value in itself; people want rides, not tickets.
Let's assume the flasher actually has a speed-radar (or other tech) of his own, so that he's able to perceive who is driving too fast and who isn't. Given that, then that defense might work for the light-flashing, especially since flashing really is ambiguous. (I've literally used flashing to try to tell someone "hey, you're driving weird. Wake up, snap out of your daydream, shoot your distracting children in the face so they shut up, or do whatever it takes, for you to quit acting weird," and just vaguely hoped that they telepathically understood my signal.)
But I don't know how that can work for the guy who held up a "speed trap ahead" sign. That's unambiguously speech about a speed trap, not possibly speech about how fast someone is driving.
If I wanted to make a constitutionally-safe-for-sure sign, I'd make it political. "The speed trap half a mile ahead, is being used as a revenue alternative to taxing apple pie and baseball. I approve of this, and I strongly protest my opponents who call for an apple pie and baseball tax," but you have already driven by before you can read even a fraction of my sign. I can only hope you don't misinterpret that as a warning about speed traps. It's clearly a warning about un-American taxes.
Copyright law creates large business that must make money over being creative. It also hinders derivative works, which face it all works are.
I think you're probably right, but only because you're seeing copyright with its currently-ridiculous term duration. And that duration is what the article is about.
If you had common-sense copyright terms which were intended to merely serve their stated purpose in the US Constitution, much of copyright's downsides would be eliminated and it could be a pretty good idea again.
As it is, the terms makes no sense, no nobody can respect it (or the government that enacted it), so its downsides are even increased further.
We see this sort of thing often in life: if someone is charged to do a job and they do it utterly incompetently, then it makes lots of people think the job itself was a bad idea. Yet the idea often isn't really bad, and I think Congress' handling of copyright (especially in the 1990s) is an example of this.
Gameshows are supposed to be interesting to watch, but if he kills the tension that builds when bids get higher and questions get tougher, then the show is a complete decrescendo.
I thought the appeal of Jeopardy was in trying to play along, and (for most of us) being impressed as we see we would have been beaten. That, combined with the occasional I-have-a-bigger-dick situation where you know the right response and see the TV person blow it.
Weird how transaction duration and issues of "palatable" are starting to seep into discussions about what/whose code your computer is allowed to run.
Maybe we have different takes on what it means for DRM to be "light" or "heavy." To me, it's just a question of how decisively someone else dominates your computer. To you, I think it's about how hostile (or not) they have your computer act toward you, once they have already decisively won the battle for dominance.
I don't understand how you can refer to Netflix in the same breath as "light or zero DRM." Has anyone yet made a second Netflix client? Maybe I'm not as plugged into the underground as I used to, because I haven't heard anyone say they have managed to play Netflix streams yet. If I'm wrong, then it's time to bring on the XBMC and MythTV plugins.
I found one hack that tries to bring Netflix into the fold, but that actually uses Netflix's own software (running within Chrome!).
As far as I can tell, Netflix still uses extremely heavy DRM, so heavy that currently, only 31337 d00ds crack it (probably to pirate) (and I bet they don't even do that, and are instead capping the output), and regular uses still can't use their own clients.
If anyone other than Netflix ever implements Netflix's protocol (and it gets disclosed in public), you're going to hear words like "lawyers" and "ton of bricks" used repeatedly. There's nothing even slightly "light or none" about Netflix DRM, or how DMCA would apply to it.
The big elephant in the room, is: why do you pussies get all slow-witted and complainy and say "it's hot" when it's only 105 degrees?
Another elephant in the room, is why do those other people, get all scairdy when there's a mag 4 earthquake?
And what's with the people who claim their cars get.. rust?! Are you really trying to tell me there's enough humidity in air to rust a car? And what's with those pansies who get all winded, at the thought of jogging at only 8000 feet? Just get some fucking red blood cells. What's the problem? And you don't even have the pop density to be able to afford 10 gigabit fiber to your house? WTF kind of third world are you living in? And don't get me started on those people live in that place where the native food is bland. And why are you complaining about the cost of groceries, anyway? If you need an ear of corn, just walk out into your back yard and pluck one. WTF, people! Next, you'll be telling me the view from your patio is only a few miles.
The elephant in the room, is that there's a bunch of people pretending that we're not all the same, that we don't all have the same experiences and resources and equipment. That's laughable. Everyone knows we all live in seacoastal mountain desert jungles, in rural highrises, where we all park our 3 cars and 3 bikes downstairs, driving the car on the 180 days of the year when it's snowy and below freezing, and biking through the farm fields to the subway station on the other 180 days when it's above 120F.
you couldn't really record the whole movie, and even if you could, it would be jittery and not great resolution.
Not to take the police state's side, but isn't that a technological limit du jour? I wouldn't expect anyone to necessarily be fully aware of any one product's capabilities and limitations, much less the 2012 model vs the 2014 model. (And even if I see Glass(TM) on your face, I don't know that stock hardware is what you're really wearing.) It's basically possible to build a tiny camera (or cameras) that capture in high resolution and maybe stabilize it some way, or correct in software later. I'm not saying it would be easy but you damn well know it'll be easier in 2024. So it's just a matter of where you are on the tech timeline, and I'm going to cut theater managers and FBI guys a little slack on keeping up with what's the latest and greatest, what's cheap enough to possibly be deployed in the in wild right now, knowing a potential perp's resources, etc. And that's especially true before they start talking to him.
We're talking about something that is basically possible, just to some currently inconvenient/expensive/quality-traded-off degree.
[serious part of post ends]
And quality is sometimes tradable without much regret. Sure, I don't want to see a degraded video quality movie where naked chicks, with swords and warhammers, fight mutant dinosaurs which have cyber-implanted machineguns built into their limbs. I want to see that in all its HD glory. But what about a boring movie where a crusty-but-benign grandmother and her estranged formerly-unforgiving daughter finally get to talk about their feelings, and neither one ever shows hers tits or even wears a particularly short skirt that shows a bit of leg (is that asking SO MUCH!?), and there's not a single CGI monster or spaceship of any kind, where most visually-impacting scene is a sunset over the ocean, of such beauty that the daughter finally realizes that eventually time runs out for everyone and we all only have one life, so you better get on good terms with your mother now while you can, regardless of whatever past transgressions or misunderstanding or.. oh, fuck, it's boring to even try to bullshit my way through this. The point is, some movies don't need "great resolution." You've got all that touching dialog.
"Mother, you never approved of William."
"Janice, did you ever stop to think what I gave up, in order to raise my family? But I didn't mind! I loved you all!"
"Why did dad have to die at such a young age? I sometimes wonder, would he be proud?"
"Honey, I didn't want to worry you, but the doctor says..."
And I swear, not once in this movie, will anyone say anything as moving as "I'll distract them by shaking my boobies, and you sneak up behind the Deinonychus and slit its fucking throat."
Even if the guy really did record the movie, simply recording a film that you already paid to see does not cause anyone any loss.
The cops aren't looking for losses; they're looking for violations of the law. If you want cops to be concerned with losses, then you need to start electing legislators who pass laws which are related to losses. Right now, you (America plural, not necessarily you specifically, IgnorantMotherFucker) tell Congress "right on!" when they do things like enact DMCA, rubberstamp FISA courts, etc.
You're getting the cop behavior that you requested at the voting booth.
We've had Bush and Obama lying through their teeth about things that actually matter, like reasons for going to war or the extent of spying on our own citizens
Ok, let's clear something up right now about impeachment, since a lot of people seem to not really understand anything about it.
Impeachment is something Congress does. It's not something America does whenever a president gets caught being evil. Impeachment isn't about fighting evil. It's about doing something that Congress (or a lot of people in Congress) doesn't approve of.
Congress approves of the war lies and domestic spying. Presidents Bushbama has Congress' nearly unanimous support on starting whatever wars that the campaign contributors ask for, for removing whatever limitations that those "wimps" placed upon government powers 220 years ago, and so on. You're never going to see Congress impeach a president for doing the things that Congress demands that president do. If they were to do that, the President has a perfect defense: "but.. but.. you told me to!" and the impeachment process would immediately grind to a halt.
On the other hand, when a president goes off and truly does something on his own, without Congress telling him to do it, then there's a risk. There's basically no credible conspiracy hypothesis that you can come up with, where a bunch of wealthy campaign contributors met with House and Senate members, and said "It would be in our financial interest, if the president were to use his dominant position at work, in order to get sex. So get to work on forcing him to get some BJs from interns."
When you talk about BJs being benign and war being horrible, that is irrelevant with respect to the matter of impeachment. Congress wants wars and spying. Congress doesn't give a flying fuck about some other things, though, such as promoting sexual harassment. And while presidents can pursue their own agendas without Congress, if those agendas just happen to be illegal (as is the case with sexual harassment) then they risk impeachment.
Want pro-war and pro-spying Presidents to risk impeachment when they get caught doing those things? Then start voting for anti-war and anti-police-state Congress! What's your vote right now, 1% maybe? How often do candidates with those positions, even get in the top two in their races, much less win? You have to work on that, before you can dream of impeaching Presidents for starting wars or pursuing a police state.
And even then, yes, the impeachment is only going to proceed if a whole lot of people Congress happens to dislike the President. That's what happened to Clinton.
Now, Republicans happen to claim that they don't like Obama. But they have raging hardons for spending more of the GPD on war and increasing the amount of power concentrated in Washington DC at the expense of states and citizens liberty. Republicans are some of Obama's biggest supporters, especially on the issues that seem to be pissing you off. So just who are you hoping will impeach him? Ron Paul isn't in the House anymore.
Maybe it's a game. They're exploring all the ways that the Republicrats are trying to characterize the NSA spying as legal and justifiable, and getting rid of them, to see how stupid they can make politicians sound.
If it's only 49% likely US citizens are having their 4th amendment rights violated (and then 49% gets rounded down to 0: legal) then let's try for 100%, and see if that also gets rounded down to legal.
In fact, a lot of jobs at which people work very hard are not paid well at all, and therefore tend to incur lower taxes
Yeah, but look at one of those jobs, for example. Let's say that person is working 8 hours per day. They pay a certain amount of tax. Now compare that to cases where their hours are cut to 4 hours per day, or expanded to 12 hours per day. Even without progressive tax tables (imagine a flat tax rate), notice how the taxes go up or down. Then imagine the real world, where there are progressive tax rates. Notice how the taxes go up or down even more extremely, as person works harder or less hard.
Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax. I think you're just pointing out that there are other factors too, such as jobs' pay rates per hour (where I make more sitting on my ass as a desk, than some guy pouring hot asphalt in the summer). Take nearly any job, no matter how hard or easy) and double or half the amount of work, and you'll see a strong correlation with how much tax we take away from that person.
One thing that has really stood out for me in the last 5 or 6 years is just how conservative their readers tend to skew.
Once thing that has stood out for me, is how many people confuse conservatives with Republican(TM)s. Fox News is Republican(TM), not conservative.
Conservative: "Central government should be relatively small and weak compared to what we have right now, with as many powers and responsibilities born by the individual states as is reasonably expedient."
Republicans: "Every single scientist is a liar, and they and everyone who listen to them, are going to go to Hell, as spake the One True God. Oh, and also, what that conservative guy said. Except when he said to end the federal drug war, or when he said that we need to protect and first and third through tenth amendments. Fuck that, though I do happen to agree with him on the second amendment, so at least that conservative guy isn't all bad.."
Would you favor a repeal of the 4th amendment? Does the 4th do a bad thing, limiting the government's desired powers (and wasting a lot of the courts' time) unnecessarily?
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Indirection just delays the anger and fear, and keeps it from being expressed. People ought to be seeing numbers-right-now in their faces, getting horrified, and yelling back. Just like with loans, this will make people think, "Oh, I pay later when I'm rich," and suppresses the sticker shock.
We NEED the sticker shock. And we all (not just students) need to get shocked by it. Because the problem of education isn't who pays and how they pay, but how much you pay for it. The price is totally unrealistic compared to the capital required to provide the service.
And everyone lived happily ever after. Take the $8M if that's what everyone insists upon shoving in your face. The people who paid it, feel good. I'd add "comma chump sucker" to the end of that, but everyone (including you) is laughing their asses off, so it's hard to type. That is how appropriate the "everyone lived happily ever after" thing is.
My algorithm for NIMBY is "I'll let this be in _my_ backyard, for n dollars/euros," where you set n to zero and slowly increase it until you get a combination of bids that can be assembled into a working solution. Then you charge the NIMBYers whatever cost that is, to pay the bids. You wanna pay an extra 7 cents per KWh to have the lines be somewhere else? Ok. You don't want to pay it? Ok, you get the lines, and lower energy costs than your stuck-up neighbors.
How does everyone not win (or at least break even) in such a scenario?
(Thanks.) Not surprising; I've just been lazy, I guess. So... yeeeah. I probably wouldn't miss Google much. Their cooperation really does look totally optional and expendible, from the PoV of a user of the platform. Not that I'm ungrateful for commodotizing mobile OSes (thanks, Google). But anti-trust? Oh, please. The people getting their panties in a bunch about these agreements, need to take a chill pill.
I use Android. I think the Maps app is pretty good. I like it. That's the one I would miss.
Other than that.. nothing. There just aren't any Google apps or services(*) which matter. I think OEMs are over-agonizing on this. Just don't sign the contract, and your phone will be nearly as good as all your competitors in most ways, and better in other ways.
When people say "Android isn't really free, because..." please don't finish your sentence with a list of pretty much worthless (or trivially-replaced) stuff-that-isn't-free. That's almost like complaining "I tried switching my uranium enrichment plant to ReactOS but it wasn't compatible with Stuxnet, so I switched back to Windows."
Except for that Maps thing. But maybe someone else has a mapping (native, not web) app that uses OSM by now. Haven't looked. That'd be hilarious if the list of precious Google apps was zero items long instead of one.
* Services: well ok, of course I still do use Google for searching the web. They are definitely still best (and by a wide margin, it's not even close) whenever I do the blind test. But my computer's maker didn't need any license for that. Any web browser will do. That's my (the user's) problem, not the phone maker's problem.
That's easy to say when someone is defending states' right to be wrong. What if we were defending states' right to be right? If the feds were insisting that science be removed from curriculums and the state wanted to teach it, then you might damn well start to care about states rights.
The stupidity of the decision has no bearing on whose decision it is to make.
You're probably right that it's illegal for any public school (whether state or federal) per the first amendment, but in a sense, isn't "evidencism" a religion too? The only reason you think looking-at-evidence works to reveal how the world works, is that you looked at the evidence. That same argument could be used to confirm mysticism. "I made up a neat idea in my head. The way I know it's true, is that the voice in my head says 'Yep, it really is true.'"
Probably, but Republicrats have built up many decades of precedent that it would fall under "Interstate Commerce" and can therefore be a federal power, if the feds want it.
Who would oppose it falling under Interstate Commerce? Libertarians? In the voting booth, 99% of people say they strongly disagree with Libertarians.
I know a total nontechie who wanted to show me something on her laptop. I walked over expecting to see Finder of Explorer, and was surprised to find myself looking at Unity. I'm sure some "rocket scientist" installed that for her, but for day-to-day use, it's very clear that the people who say Linux isn't "ready" don't know WTF they're talking about. Icons and menus and windows, are icons and menus and windows.
Right of first sale applies to sold objects ("goods"). If you buy a hammer or buy a copy of a movie, you own that thing. There may be some some laws saying what you're allowed to do with your thing (the state government says you're not allowed to use the hammer to hit people in the head, the fed government says all kinds of complicated things you're not allowed to do with the movie) but the seller has absolutely no say at all.
If they really need to have a say, then they can try to use purchasing contracts, but purchasing contracts tend to result in most customers saying "fuck that" and walking away. Generally, the desire to do business outweighs the desire to have a say in what becomes of the item, so these things tend to be rare and only used for infrequently-acquired or expensive goods. And then even then these contracts of adhesion tend to have limits.
(There's a lot of possible digression here, various schemes have been tried where sellers have their cake and eat it too. Some have been successful, though they all smack of illegitimacy. e.g. shrinkwrap EULAs, Human Centipad, etc.)
When you get to services, people are able to make a stronger case that there isn't a "good" for first sale doctrine to apply to. BART will say they didn't sell you a ticket; they sold you a ride. The ticket is just an authorization token. That's different from a hammer or movie disc, where the item itself is what you wanted. Nobody wants a ticket nor does the piece of paper have much value in itself; people want rides, not tickets.
Let's assume the flasher actually has a speed-radar (or other tech) of his own, so that he's able to perceive who is driving too fast and who isn't. Given that, then that defense might work for the light-flashing, especially since flashing really is ambiguous. (I've literally used flashing to try to tell someone "hey, you're driving weird. Wake up, snap out of your daydream, shoot your distracting children in the face so they shut up, or do whatever it takes, for you to quit acting weird," and just vaguely hoped that they telepathically understood my signal.)
But I don't know how that can work for the guy who held up a "speed trap ahead" sign. That's unambiguously speech about a speed trap, not possibly speech about how fast someone is driving.
If I wanted to make a constitutionally-safe-for-sure sign, I'd make it political. "The speed trap half a mile ahead, is being used as a revenue alternative to taxing apple pie and baseball. I approve of this, and I strongly protest my opponents who call for an apple pie and baseball tax," but you have already driven by before you can read even a fraction of my sign. I can only hope you don't misinterpret that as a warning about speed traps. It's clearly a warning about un-American taxes.
I think you're probably right, but only because you're seeing copyright with its currently-ridiculous term duration. And that duration is what the article is about.
If you had common-sense copyright terms which were intended to merely serve their stated purpose in the US Constitution, much of copyright's downsides would be eliminated and it could be a pretty good idea again.
As it is, the terms makes no sense, no nobody can respect it (or the government that enacted it), so its downsides are even increased further.
We see this sort of thing often in life: if someone is charged to do a job and they do it utterly incompetently, then it makes lots of people think the job itself was a bad idea. Yet the idea often isn't really bad, and I think Congress' handling of copyright (especially in the 1990s) is an example of this.
I thought the appeal of Jeopardy was in trying to play along, and (for most of us) being impressed as we see we would have been beaten. That, combined with the occasional I-have-a-bigger-dick situation where you know the right response and see the TV person blow it.
Weird how transaction duration and issues of "palatable" are starting to seep into discussions about what/whose code your computer is allowed to run.
Maybe we have different takes on what it means for DRM to be "light" or "heavy." To me, it's just a question of how decisively someone else dominates your computer. To you, I think it's about how hostile (or not) they have your computer act toward you, once they have already decisively won the battle for dominance.
I don't understand how you can refer to Netflix in the same breath as "light or zero DRM." Has anyone yet made a second Netflix client? Maybe I'm not as plugged into the underground as I used to, because I haven't heard anyone say they have managed to play Netflix streams yet. If I'm wrong, then it's time to bring on the XBMC and MythTV plugins.
I found one hack that tries to bring Netflix into the fold, but that actually uses Netflix's own software (running within Chrome!).
As far as I can tell, Netflix still uses extremely heavy DRM, so heavy that currently, only 31337 d00ds crack it (probably to pirate) (and I bet they don't even do that, and are instead capping the output), and regular uses still can't use their own clients.
If anyone other than Netflix ever implements Netflix's protocol (and it gets disclosed in public), you're going to hear words like "lawyers" and "ton of bricks" used repeatedly. There's nothing even slightly "light or none" about Netflix DRM, or how DMCA would apply to it.
The big elephant in the room, is: why do you pussies get all slow-witted and complainy and say "it's hot" when it's only 105 degrees? Another elephant in the room, is why do those other people, get all scairdy when there's a mag 4 earthquake? And what's with the people who claim their cars get .. rust?! Are you really trying to tell me there's enough humidity in air to rust a car? And what's with those pansies who get all winded, at the thought of jogging at only 8000 feet? Just get some fucking red blood cells. What's the problem? And you don't even have the pop density to be able to afford 10 gigabit fiber to your house? WTF kind of third world are you living in? And don't get me started on those people live in that place where the native food is bland. And why are you complaining about the cost of groceries, anyway? If you need an ear of corn, just walk out into your back yard and pluck one. WTF, people! Next, you'll be telling me the view from your patio is only a few miles.
The elephant in the room, is that there's a bunch of people pretending that we're not all the same, that we don't all have the same experiences and resources and equipment. That's laughable. Everyone knows we all live in seacoastal mountain desert jungles, in rural highrises, where we all park our 3 cars and 3 bikes downstairs, driving the car on the 180 days of the year when it's snowy and below freezing, and biking through the farm fields to the subway station on the other 180 days when it's above 120F.
Rosa Parks. Meant well, sat in the white part of the bus instead of where people like her belong. Knew it was wrong. Should be punished.
Not to take the police state's side, but isn't that a technological limit du jour? I wouldn't expect anyone to necessarily be fully aware of any one product's capabilities and limitations, much less the 2012 model vs the 2014 model. (And even if I see Glass(TM) on your face, I don't know that stock hardware is what you're really wearing.) It's basically possible to build a tiny camera (or cameras) that capture in high resolution and maybe stabilize it some way, or correct in software later. I'm not saying it would be easy but you damn well know it'll be easier in 2024. So it's just a matter of where you are on the tech timeline, and I'm going to cut theater managers and FBI guys a little slack on keeping up with what's the latest and greatest, what's cheap enough to possibly be deployed in the in wild right now, knowing a potential perp's resources, etc. And that's especially true before they start talking to him.
We're talking about something that is basically possible, just to some currently inconvenient/expensive/quality-traded-off degree.
[serious part of post ends]
And quality is sometimes tradable without much regret. Sure, I don't want to see a degraded video quality movie where naked chicks, with swords and warhammers, fight mutant dinosaurs which have cyber-implanted machineguns built into their limbs. I want to see that in all its HD glory. But what about a boring movie where a crusty-but-benign grandmother and her estranged formerly-unforgiving daughter finally get to talk about their feelings, and neither one ever shows hers tits or even wears a particularly short skirt that shows a bit of leg (is that asking SO MUCH!?), and there's not a single CGI monster or spaceship of any kind, where most visually-impacting scene is a sunset over the ocean, of such beauty that the daughter finally realizes that eventually time runs out for everyone and we all only have one life, so you better get on good terms with your mother now while you can, regardless of whatever past transgressions or misunderstanding or .. oh, fuck, it's boring to even try to bullshit my way through this. The point is, some movies don't need "great resolution." You've got all that touching dialog.
"Mother, you never approved of William."
"Janice, did you ever stop to think what I gave up, in order to raise my family? But I didn't mind! I loved you all!"
"Why did dad have to die at such a young age? I sometimes wonder, would he be proud?"
"Honey, I didn't want to worry you, but the doctor says..."
And I swear, not once in this movie, will anyone say anything as moving as "I'll distract them by shaking my boobies, and you sneak up behind the Deinonychus and slit its fucking throat."
The cops aren't looking for losses; they're looking for violations of the law. If you want cops to be concerned with losses, then you need to start electing legislators who pass laws which are related to losses. Right now, you (America plural, not necessarily you specifically, IgnorantMotherFucker) tell Congress "right on!" when they do things like enact DMCA, rubberstamp FISA courts, etc.
You're getting the cop behavior that you requested at the voting booth.
Ok, let's clear something up right now about impeachment, since a lot of people seem to not really understand anything about it.
Impeachment is something Congress does. It's not something America does whenever a president gets caught being evil. Impeachment isn't about fighting evil. It's about doing something that Congress (or a lot of people in Congress) doesn't approve of.
Congress approves of the war lies and domestic spying. Presidents Bushbama has Congress' nearly unanimous support on starting whatever wars that the campaign contributors ask for, for removing whatever limitations that those "wimps" placed upon government powers 220 years ago, and so on. You're never going to see Congress impeach a president for doing the things that Congress demands that president do. If they were to do that, the President has a perfect defense: "but.. but.. you told me to!" and the impeachment process would immediately grind to a halt.
On the other hand, when a president goes off and truly does something on his own, without Congress telling him to do it, then there's a risk. There's basically no credible conspiracy hypothesis that you can come up with, where a bunch of wealthy campaign contributors met with House and Senate members, and said "It would be in our financial interest, if the president were to use his dominant position at work, in order to get sex. So get to work on forcing him to get some BJs from interns."
When you talk about BJs being benign and war being horrible, that is irrelevant with respect to the matter of impeachment. Congress wants wars and spying. Congress doesn't give a flying fuck about some other things, though, such as promoting sexual harassment. And while presidents can pursue their own agendas without Congress, if those agendas just happen to be illegal (as is the case with sexual harassment) then they risk impeachment.
Want pro-war and pro-spying Presidents to risk impeachment when they get caught doing those things? Then start voting for anti-war and anti-police-state Congress! What's your vote right now, 1% maybe? How often do candidates with those positions, even get in the top two in their races, much less win? You have to work on that, before you can dream of impeaching Presidents for starting wars or pursuing a police state.
And even then, yes, the impeachment is only going to proceed if a whole lot of people Congress happens to dislike the President. That's what happened to Clinton.
Now, Republicans happen to claim that they don't like Obama. But they have raging hardons for spending more of the GPD on war and increasing the amount of power concentrated in Washington DC at the expense of states and citizens liberty. Republicans are some of Obama's biggest supporters, especially on the issues that seem to be pissing you off. So just who are you hoping will impeach him? Ron Paul isn't in the House anymore.
What did she say to her husband before she left? "You feed the dog, I'll feed the fish."
Maybe it's a game. They're exploring all the ways that the Republicrats are trying to characterize the NSA spying as legal and justifiable, and getting rid of them, to see how stupid they can make politicians sound.
If it's only 49% likely US citizens are having their 4th amendment rights violated (and then 49% gets rounded down to 0: legal) then let's try for 100%, and see if that also gets rounded down to legal.
Yeah, but look at one of those jobs, for example. Let's say that person is working 8 hours per day. They pay a certain amount of tax. Now compare that to cases where their hours are cut to 4 hours per day, or expanded to 12 hours per day. Even without progressive tax tables (imagine a flat tax rate), notice how the taxes go up or down. Then imagine the real world, where there are progressive tax rates. Notice how the taxes go up or down even more extremely, as person works harder or less hard.
Hardness is definitely one of the multiplicative factors in the tax. I think you're just pointing out that there are other factors too, such as jobs' pay rates per hour (where I make more sitting on my ass as a desk, than some guy pouring hot asphalt in the summer). Take nearly any job, no matter how hard or easy) and double or half the amount of work, and you'll see a strong correlation with how much tax we take away from that person.
Once thing that has stood out for me, is how many people confuse conservatives with Republican(TM)s. Fox News is Republican(TM), not conservative.
Conservative: "Central government should be relatively small and weak compared to what we have right now, with as many powers and responsibilities born by the individual states as is reasonably expedient."
Republicans: "Every single scientist is a liar, and they and everyone who listen to them, are going to go to Hell, as spake the One True God. Oh, and also, what that conservative guy said. Except when he said to end the federal drug war, or when he said that we need to protect and first and third through tenth amendments. Fuck that, though I do happen to agree with him on the second amendment, so at least that conservative guy isn't all bad.."
See the difference?
Is that a fact? I checked the database and I didn't see that one.
Wow, a reasoned argument. Ok.
Would you favor a repeal of the 4th amendment? Does the 4th do a bad thing, limiting the government's desired powers (and wasting a lot of the courts' time) unnecessarily?