Face it, we don't get any mail anymore that can't wait a day. Bills and junk mail are the norm. It makes a huge amount of sense to deliver non-priority packages every other day. It would cut the manpower needed for delivery almost in half. Combine that with community / street mailboxes and then that makes some real savings.
I live in an apartment and I don't pick up my mail but 3 times a month. Only thing i get that is important is my rent bill. People call or email me if they have something urgent.
tbh, I do miss when I used to get those checks in the mail to change my long distance service back in the 90's. I think I raked in a few hundred switching my LD every few days.
my 12th grade year, i had 45% absence in every class and still pulled a 3.25 gpa that year. If i didn't feel like going to class or school, I didn't. If i decided to go get stoned instead of going to class, I did. And the vice-principal was smart enough to leave me alone because I got good grades. During the beginning of the 12th grade, same school, got kicked out for 3 days for missing too much school. Yes, apparently when you miss too much school, the answer is to make the person miss more school, because that shows them. So to show them, I didn't go back to school for 2 weeks. The vice principal was mad, and I pointed out that having me suspended for missing school is the stupidest fucking thing ever. And I explained to him why it was stupid and that I was caught up in my school work (which he checked and saw that I was). He decided since I was 18 by then, that I could just write my own excuses and to write an excuse everytime i skipped a class or missed a day, and it would be excused.
So while school is the center of education for youngsters, sometimes the youngsters have to teach the teachers/principals reality.
In Auburn, WA a corrections officer was seeking another person. The DOC officer and King County police shot an unarmed man (Theoharis), the officers later claiming say they thought he (Theoharis) was reaching for a gun, though no weapons were found in the room.The independent review also found evidence the sheriff's office was more interested in advocating for its officers than uncovering the facts behind the shooting.
I've lived in WA all my life and stories like this aren't new. When I was in high school, the police got the wrong address, bust the door of a "suspected" drug dealer, killed the guy on the couch because he was holding up a remote control. They find out wrong address. Justified shooting. Another time after a "all clear" call, a police, still speeding to the scene, hits a car and kills the person inside. Policeman wasn't hurt and didn't get in trouble.
Cops generally get away with a lot here. Only 1 time did a hear about a cop getting in trouble, and that was because he was shaking down junkies and dealers. Probably didn't cut his fellow cops in, i don't know, but he got in trouble and off the force for it.
I used to be a pizza delivery guy in Niagara Falls, NY. I've delivered pizza to places with crack and guns on the table in the living room. Let me know when you've been standing in front of a cracked out gangbanger with hundreds in your pocket and nothing to defend yourself with but a 2 liter of diet coke. Yeah, that's what I thought.
If you are carrying that much money on you while delivering pizzas, then you are a fool.
On TV, you watch the U.S. 'Cops' and you see violence all over from the cops....... you watch the Canadian show 'To Serve & Protect' and the cops are all, "You've been driving drunk, eh!... I'll give you a warning this time. Did you want us to drive you home or can we call you a Taxi." A much different look at police tactics (or TV show tactics?)
Cops was created to desensitize the American Public to police brutality. That is the only reason the show was created and still going 20+ years, even though the show has always sucked.
With those cool commercials showing people spinning these around, and snapping keyboards onto them with such gusto. Certainly the choreography should have guaranteed these things get snapped up in masses.
It can't be that people are finally paying attention, and ignoring fluff. So what gives?
I took 2 things from that commercial, one was the end close up shot of the Surface, with tons of finger smudges. And the other was those keypads look like the plastic binders i used in highschool, the ones that fell apart really easy.
Nope. The real estate agent is 1 hop. They pull all his records. The daughter is 2 hops. They pull all her records. The mechanic is 3 hops. They pull all his records.
3 hops. The fact that the mechanic serviced your car will be captured, even though they never made the 4th hop to pull your records directly.
And suddenly the mechanic becomes a "suspect" and they pull his records, and the peoples cars he's worked on records and the owners of the cars records.
While the capabilities to do this are there, can the local police stations afford it? Or would they outsource it to the NSA (who in turn outsources to a private contractor) so they can claim they are not doing it?
If this is the future we are looking forward to, maybe it is a time for transparency in the local governments & police. Let's face it, while this has some good uses, the ability to easily abuse it is way too high. And it will be abused because that is what we humans do when we have no oversight (sometimes even when we do).
If we want to still have freedoms in America, we have to change the way our government works. We have to reign in the abuse of power that happens at all levels. Give no one total power and make sure there is always oversight.
.. Consider here in the US we have more forest than we had 100 years ago,...
I really have to call bullshit on this. This is like people saying "There is more people alive today then ever died." Statements that sound great, but can't be proved.
While I'm sure we plant more trees now then we did 100 years ago, and are better with logging, but what exactly is going on?
They are cutting old growth timber/forest down and replacing it with new little trees. Does anyone of those trees really replace what was cut? it took hundreds of years for the trees that were cut to grow, but it's okay, because they have been replaced.
Where I live, a 100 years ago the population was 1,141,990 and now it's 6,897,012. You going to tell me that we really housed almost 6million people in 100 years and now have more trees?
My guess even if we have more trees number wise, we have less trees volume wise.
... If a popular artist's work gets, say, half its plays through Spotify, how much would Spotify have to charge us to provide a decent income to the artist?...
If you buy a CD and listen to it 20,000 times. How much should the artist receive? After all, you want to provide a decent income to the artist right? And you are listening to the CD lots and lots of times.
Oh wait, you pay a set price for the CD and the record company pays the musician whatever set fee that decided on.
How much do artist get paid for radio play? Very little, if not nothing. The record compaines get paid royalties for their music getting played, but does it trinkle down to the artist? Very doubtful based on the record companies histories.
The fact that as an artist you might get some money for people using services like Spotify is a bonus, not a right. You want to make more money on Spotify? Get rid of your fucking label and self produce.
The record companies are setting the price. They hold an 18% share in Spotify. Still, Spotify is the only legal way for me to listen to music without buying shitloads of even more expensive albums each month. If artists want money from me directly, they need to skip the middle man.
Legal. I like that term.
But there is a problem.
See, I can get music for free, very easy. I don't need to listen to the radio, i don't need to record it from friends. I, like you, can just download it off the internet. So explain to me why I should overpay (let alone pay) a corporation who treats everyone like criminals, wants to keep the copyright laws in the stone age, lobbies abusive personal freedom laws to the government, and are corporate greed bastards? So that maybe 1% of that money makes it to the musician?
That is like me paying the bully money so he doesn't beat me up. That is like me paying the mafia protection money so my business doesn't get abused or rob.
Fuck the current music corporations. I am NOT paying them shit, I'd prefer they die away in bankrupt hell or something. You don't need to be part of the music corporate industry to get your name out anymore, shit you didn't need it before. Prime Example, Big Black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Black They self funded all their albums, never took a "loan" out from a record company to get their music made. And yet I knew about them when they were playing, even made their last concert ever. And to this day, Steve Albini (main guy of Big Black) still does his music business that same way, doesn't take loans from record companies to produce his music. Oh ya, and he owns all his own music.
One of my closest friends is a mad Dave Matthews Band fan and has been fortunate enough to attend at least four DMB gigs over the past twelve months...
Here's the deal. No bands, except local every play anywhere 4 times a year. Sure, if you want to travel to 4 towns, or maybe you'll get lucky and they 2 of them in the same town. But a band that actually tours a city a few times a year? Local or very very small time.
Here's what I think. Musicians, instead of trying to sit at home, on the royalties your CD sales makes, and maybe doing a 10-15 city concert every year or 2, how about you go go tour more. Make live shows the must see performance. Have fans that get to actually see you play more then once in their life. You don't have to go sell out the biggest places in each city, have smaller concerts, little cheaper tickets.
In other words, why don't you fucking work for more money? I'd feel bad that you signed a contract with a record company, except I don't. You are the stupid ass musicians who sold your soul to become famous (not rich, famous). You want to make the money the record company is making? Go do the things where you get more of the money for.
In my opinion, most musicians are lazy fucks who want to do as least as possible, but yet be famous and rake in mass money. That is not how it works, and yet, it doesn't change.
...Being able to write a good song does not mean you have a good voice – just look at Bob Dylan. Or are you saying (almost) all symphony players and opera singers are not musicians because they play dead peoples songs? Like you, I tend to prefer singer / songwriters but I recognize they are two separate talents that lie along different axis.
Some might say Bob Dylan's voice was what made his songs so good.
He's small time, he cheated, he got caught and made an example of. If only we could have this sort of efficiency and insight into real politicians.
A year in jail is not being made an example from. This person set out to cheat the school, then installed keyloggers to get access to people login info.
They want to set an example? Give him 5 years in jail.
What I see is a slap on the wrist for something that is serious.
If i was Google, I'd start charging companies for fake DMCA notices. $100k per notice that isn't actually pointing to an infringing file that the DMCA filer doesn't own the copyright to.
I bet these "mistakes" would stop happening pretty quick.
I like hackaday, been following it for years. But now that it is for sale, i might as well forget it. 99% that some corporation is going to buy it and ruin it.
Makers are big, hacking is big, somewhat popular site based on those 2? Ya, corporation is going to fuck it till it bleeds, then leave it for something else.
The state is the expression of the collective will of a society. The more advanced and democratic that society, the more likely it is to reflect the collective will. That will reflects that society's priorities, hopes and fears.
As it were, it appears, judging by the size of the US military, that the US as a nation are fearful and paranoid.
That might be a difficult concept for an American to grasp, but it's an uncomfortable truth.
Don't pretend that "the government" is some distant, remote entity. Last time I looked, the government was staffed, run and overseen by citizens too.
Don't like it? Then do something about it. Then the change must come from society, and government will reflect that change. That's already been demonstrated through the civil rights era and the Vietnam War.
Just don't lie to yourself that you aren't "the government".
I'm not the government. It's not a lie. I can go down to any of my local or federal government offices, but I won't get passed where the public can go. Will they allow me access to the meetings because I pay taxes or vote? No. Will they listen to what I say? Maybe, but unless I'm a big ass corporation with lots of money, they rarely care.
And for the matter, when we vote for someone (ie. Obama) and they say one thing and then do the opposite of what they been saying, what can you do? When you have 2 party choices and they both suck and are taking the country in a direction different then what you want, what can you do?
When your whole political system is setup for a 2 party system, so even if you get a good 3rd or 4th choice, they need to have senators & congress people from their party voted in to become president?
The USA government isn't ran by it's people. It's ran by corporations and the rich. anyone who thinks or says otherwise are fooling themselves or part of the problem.
That's not the point. If you are not going to transact business in a country specifically over the concern about your puppies being killed, you should be aware of which other countries kill puppies as a matter of routine governmental intelligence gathering. And by which others, I mean all of them. In fact, I would say that any country who doesn't kill puppies as part of their internal intelligence operations either has no significant stake in world affairs or is lying. Killing puppies is a fact of modern intelligence gathering; no, let me restate that - killing puppies has always been a fact of all intelligence gathering: governmental, corporate, and private.
To pull out of a country over a "moral issue" and then to ignore such moral issues occurring everywhere else is just grandstanding.
God, some of you people are so fucking stupid it amazes me.
Yet that time and again is what most Slashdotters say and celebrate with "+5: Insightful" every time another country is mentioned in this arena or any other. "So what, the USA [...]" and "It's not like no one else [...]" are the mainstays of our enlightened readership. There's no falling back to the excuse of "There's more than one person on Slashdot" -- when it occurs with such consistency, predictability, and overwhelming support of moderation across time, there might as well be.
It tells you who the government shills are, doesn't it? I'm taking note.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't know your representative's name in a representative democracy, something's very broken.
Some of us have trouble with names. Numbers, yes, can remember those. But names? oh fuck no. have a hell of a time remembering.
A billion dollars they're spending. The NIH, the people who fund research that is going to cure cancer, they had their funding cut about 1.5 billion.
Hey, NSA! I'm thinking highly unpatriotic, violent thoughts right now!
Well obviously Terrorist kill more then cancer.
Face it, we don't get any mail anymore that can't wait a day. Bills and junk mail are the norm. It makes a huge amount of sense to deliver non-priority packages every other day. It would cut the manpower needed for delivery almost in half. Combine that with community / street mailboxes and then that makes some real savings.
I live in an apartment and I don't pick up my mail but 3 times a month. Only thing i get that is important is my rent bill. People call or email me if they have something urgent.
tbh, I do miss when I used to get those checks in the mail to change my long distance service back in the 90's. I think I raked in a few hundred switching my LD every few days.
my 12th grade year, i had 45% absence in every class and still pulled a 3.25 gpa that year. If i didn't feel like going to class or school, I didn't. If i decided to go get stoned instead of going to class, I did. And the vice-principal was smart enough to leave me alone because I got good grades. During the beginning of the 12th grade, same school, got kicked out for 3 days for missing too much school. Yes, apparently when you miss too much school, the answer is to make the person miss more school, because that shows them. So to show them, I didn't go back to school for 2 weeks. The vice principal was mad, and I pointed out that having me suspended for missing school is the stupidest fucking thing ever. And I explained to him why it was stupid and that I was caught up in my school work (which he checked and saw that I was). He decided since I was 18 by then, that I could just write my own excuses and to write an excuse everytime i skipped a class or missed a day, and it would be excused.
So while school is the center of education for youngsters, sometimes the youngsters have to teach the teachers/principals reality.
politicians are making promises they can not keep.
In Auburn, WA a corrections officer was seeking another person. The DOC officer and King County police shot an unarmed man (Theoharis), the officers later claiming say they thought he (Theoharis) was reaching for a gun, though no weapons were found in the room.The independent review also found evidence the sheriff's office was more interested in advocating for its officers than uncovering the facts behind the shooting.
I've lived in WA all my life and stories like this aren't new. When I was in high school, the police got the wrong address, bust the door of a "suspected" drug dealer, killed the guy on the couch because he was holding up a remote control. They find out wrong address. Justified shooting. Another time after a "all clear" call, a police, still speeding to the scene, hits a car and kills the person inside. Policeman wasn't hurt and didn't get in trouble.
Cops generally get away with a lot here. Only 1 time did a hear about a cop getting in trouble, and that was because he was shaking down junkies and dealers. Probably didn't cut his fellow cops in, i don't know, but he got in trouble and off the force for it.
I used to be a pizza delivery guy in Niagara Falls, NY. I've delivered pizza to places with crack and guns on the table in the living room. Let me know when you've been standing in front of a cracked out gangbanger with hundreds in your pocket and nothing to defend yourself with but a 2 liter of diet coke. Yeah, that's what I thought.
If you are carrying that much money on you while delivering pizzas, then you are a fool.
On TV, you watch the U.S. 'Cops' and you see violence all over from the cops.... ... you watch the Canadian show 'To Serve & Protect' and the cops are all,
"You've been driving drunk, eh!... I'll give you a warning this time. Did you want us to drive you home or can we call you a Taxi."
A much different look at police tactics (or TV show tactics?)
Cops was created to desensitize the American Public to police brutality. That is the only reason the show was created and still going 20+ years, even though the show has always sucked.
With those cool commercials showing people spinning these around, and snapping keyboards onto them with such gusto. Certainly the choreography should have guaranteed these things get snapped up in masses.
It can't be that people are finally paying attention, and ignoring fluff. So what gives?
I took 2 things from that commercial, one was the end close up shot of the Surface, with tons of finger smudges.
And the other was those keypads look like the plastic binders i used in highschool, the ones that fell apart really easy.
Nope. The real estate agent is 1 hop. They pull all his records. The daughter is 2 hops. They pull all her records. The mechanic is 3 hops. They pull all his records.
3 hops. The fact that the mechanic serviced your car will be captured, even though they never made the 4th hop to pull your records directly.
And suddenly the mechanic becomes a "suspect" and they pull his records, and the peoples cars he's worked on records and the owners of the cars records.
Rinse, repeat.
... but let's not start re-writing history here.
But that's the reward for being in power!
While the capabilities to do this are there, can the local police stations afford it? Or would they outsource it to the NSA (who in turn outsources to a private contractor) so they can claim they are not doing it?
If this is the future we are looking forward to, maybe it is a time for transparency in the local governments & police. Let's face it, while this has some good uses, the ability to easily abuse it is way too high. And it will be abused because that is what we humans do when we have no oversight (sometimes even when we do).
If we want to still have freedoms in America, we have to change the way our government works. We have to reign in the abuse of power that happens at all levels. Give no one total power and make sure there is always oversight.
.. Consider here in the US we have more forest than we had 100 years ago, ...
I really have to call bullshit on this. This is like people saying "There is more people alive today then ever died." Statements that sound great, but can't be proved.
While I'm sure we plant more trees now then we did 100 years ago, and are better with logging, but what exactly is going on?
They are cutting old growth timber/forest down and replacing it with new little trees. Does anyone of those trees really replace what was cut? it took hundreds of years for the trees that were cut to grow, but it's okay, because they have been replaced.
Where I live, a 100 years ago the population was 1,141,990 and now it's 6,897,012. You going to tell me that we really housed almost 6million people in 100 years and now have more trees?
My guess even if we have more trees number wise, we have less trees volume wise.
... If a popular artist's work gets, say, half its plays through Spotify, how much would Spotify have to charge us to provide a decent income to the artist?...
If you buy a CD and listen to it 20,000 times. How much should the artist receive? After all, you want to provide a decent income to the artist right? And you are listening to the CD lots and lots of times.
Oh wait, you pay a set price for the CD and the record company pays the musician whatever set fee that decided on.
How much do artist get paid for radio play? Very little, if not nothing. The record compaines get paid royalties for their music getting played, but does it trinkle down to the artist? Very doubtful based on the record companies histories.
The fact that as an artist you might get some money for people using services like Spotify is a bonus, not a right. You want to make more money on Spotify? Get rid of your fucking label and self produce.
The record companies are setting the price. They hold an 18% share in Spotify. Still, Spotify is the only legal way for me to listen to music without buying shitloads of even more expensive albums each month. If artists want money from me directly, they need to skip the middle man.
Legal. I like that term.
But there is a problem.
See, I can get music for free, very easy. I don't need to listen to the radio, i don't need to record it from friends. I, like you, can just download it off the internet. So explain to me why I should overpay (let alone pay) a corporation who treats everyone like criminals, wants to keep the copyright laws in the stone age, lobbies abusive personal freedom laws to the government, and are corporate greed bastards? So that maybe 1% of that money makes it to the musician?
That is like me paying the bully money so he doesn't beat me up. That is like me paying the mafia protection money so my business doesn't get abused or rob.
Fuck the current music corporations. I am NOT paying them shit, I'd prefer they die away in bankrupt hell or something. You don't need to be part of the music corporate industry to get your name out anymore, shit you didn't need it before. Prime Example, Big Black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Black They self funded all their albums, never took a "loan" out from a record company to get their music made. And yet I knew about them when they were playing, even made their last concert ever. And to this day, Steve Albini (main guy of Big Black) still does his music business that same way, doesn't take loans from record companies to produce his music. Oh ya, and he owns all his own music.
I've always heard that Tom Waits was Big in Japan.
Weird, i always thought Alphaville was Big in Japan.
...
One of my closest friends is a mad Dave Matthews Band fan and has been fortunate enough to attend at least four DMB gigs over the past twelve months...
Here's the deal. No bands, except local every play anywhere 4 times a year. Sure, if you want to travel to 4 towns, or maybe you'll get lucky and they 2 of them in the same town. But a band that actually tours a city a few times a year? Local or very very small time.
Here's what I think. Musicians, instead of trying to sit at home, on the royalties your CD sales makes, and maybe doing a 10-15 city concert every year or 2, how about you go go tour more. Make live shows the must see performance. Have fans that get to actually see you play more then once in their life. You don't have to go sell out the biggest places in each city, have smaller concerts, little cheaper tickets.
In other words, why don't you fucking work for more money? I'd feel bad that you signed a contract with a record company, except I don't. You are the stupid ass musicians who sold your soul to become famous (not rich, famous). You want to make the money the record company is making? Go do the things where you get more of the money for.
In my opinion, most musicians are lazy fucks who want to do as least as possible, but yet be famous and rake in mass money. That is not how it works, and yet, it doesn't change.
...Being able to write a good song does not mean you have a good voice – just look at Bob Dylan. Or are you saying (almost) all symphony players and opera singers are not musicians because they play dead peoples songs? Like you, I tend to prefer singer / songwriters but I recognize they are two separate talents that lie along different axis.
Some might say Bob Dylan's voice was what made his songs so good.
He's small time, he cheated, he got caught and made an example of. If only we could have this sort of efficiency and insight into real politicians.
A year in jail is not being made an example from. This person set out to cheat the school, then installed keyloggers to get access to people login info.
They want to set an example? Give him 5 years in jail.
What I see is a slap on the wrist for something that is serious.
If i was Google, I'd start charging companies for fake DMCA notices. $100k per notice that isn't actually pointing to an infringing file that the DMCA filer doesn't own the copyright to.
I bet these "mistakes" would stop happening pretty quick.
I like hackaday, been following it for years. But now that it is for sale, i might as well forget it. 99% that some corporation is going to buy it and ruin it.
Makers are big, hacking is big, somewhat popular site based on those 2? Ya, corporation is going to fuck it till it bleeds, then leave it for something else.
Yes I am for real.
The state is the expression of the collective will of a society. The more advanced and democratic that society, the more likely it is to reflect the collective will. That will reflects that society's priorities, hopes and fears.
As it were, it appears, judging by the size of the US military, that the US as a nation are fearful and paranoid.
That might be a difficult concept for an American to grasp, but it's an uncomfortable truth.
Don't pretend that "the government" is some distant, remote entity. Last time I looked, the government was staffed, run and overseen by citizens too.
Don't like it? Then do something about it. Then the change must come from society, and government will reflect that change. That's already been demonstrated through the civil rights era and the Vietnam War.
Just don't lie to yourself that you aren't "the government".
I'm not the government. It's not a lie. I can go down to any of my local or federal government offices, but I won't get passed where the public can go. Will they allow me access to the meetings because I pay taxes or vote? No. Will they listen to what I say? Maybe, but unless I'm a big ass corporation with lots of money, they rarely care.
And for the matter, when we vote for someone (ie. Obama) and they say one thing and then do the opposite of what they been saying, what can you do? When you have 2 party choices and they both suck and are taking the country in a direction different then what you want, what can you do?
When your whole political system is setup for a 2 party system, so even if you get a good 3rd or 4th choice, they need to have senators & congress people from their party voted in to become president?
The USA government isn't ran by it's people. It's ran by corporations and the rich. anyone who thinks or says otherwise are fooling themselves or part of the problem.
That's not the point. If you are not going to transact business in a country specifically over the concern about your puppies being killed, you should be aware of which other countries kill puppies as a matter of routine governmental intelligence gathering. And by which others, I mean all of them. In fact, I would say that any country who doesn't kill puppies as part of their internal intelligence operations either has no significant stake in world affairs or is lying. Killing puppies is a fact of modern intelligence gathering; no, let me restate that - killing puppies has always been a fact of all intelligence gathering: governmental, corporate, and private.
To pull out of a country over a "moral issue" and then to ignore such moral issues occurring everywhere else is just grandstanding.
God, some of you people are so fucking stupid it amazes me.
Yet that time and again is what most Slashdotters say and celebrate with "+5: Insightful" every time another country is mentioned in this arena or any other. "So what, the USA [...]" and "It's not like no one else [...]" are the mainstays of our enlightened readership. There's no falling back to the excuse of "There's more than one person on Slashdot" -- when it occurs with such consistency, predictability, and overwhelming support of moderation across time, there might as well be.
It tells you who the government shills are, doesn't it? I'm taking note.
What does the dgse and other agencies do all day?
Xbox?
Not getting data about their spying being released into the open is what they are doing. And probably reading all the NSA leaked info.