I'd really like to see them do a Mechassault movie. The 'mechs in Avatar showed they can do the CGI just fine; several movies have been mostly CGI already; so all they really need is a sorta-kinda plot. Not for me, you understand, but for other people. Who worry about that stuff. Throw a love story in there, buncha cleavage... I'm good with that. Even if it steals some time from blowing things up. I'll have to blink sometime, right?
I would truly welcome a couple hours of "blasting the shit out of everything." Especially if compelling Mad Cats, Thors, Ragnaroks, Atlases, and so forth were doing the blasting. Dropships. Squishies. Fusion reactor cores going critical, etc. Mines. Jumpjets. Red-hot heat sinks setting stuff the 'mechs step on, on fire. Teamwork and solo craziness. Stealth gear. Oh, yeah. Bangity-bang-bang BANG! Gimme the blue-ray right now. I got a couple kilowatts of multi-channel audio gear ready to make 'mech footsteps shake the building.:)
Sometimes I run the intro to Chromehounds on the XBox 360 just to get a 1080p mech fix.
Then I go all the way back and run Mechwarrior II's intro... low res and pixelated as it is... because it's just so awesome. Sigh.
This and similar phrases always mean "point of view I strongly disagree with", regardless of who uses them. There has never been an exception, and all claims to the contrary are lies.
Yes, I designate as woo-woo, and strongly disagree with, and dispute that there are relevant relevant objective facts underlying creationism, the presumption of the actuality of "god(s)", actual data that demonstrate causative links from vaccines to autism, aliens anally probing us (much as some folks might prefer otherwise), ghosts, anything whatsoever to do with astrology other than locating general regions of the sky (e.g. the comet will cross Sagittarius in early June), any "healing" or other health functions of simple possession of any crystal in the quartz family with the possible exception of using one to rap you on the head if you claim they are "generators", "healers", provide "energy", etc.; I call woo-woo on phrenology, the efficacy of copper bracelets, magnets in your shoes, Scientology, and almost anything that comes out of Glen Beck's mouth. And I'm just warming up.
But the reason isn't disagreement, per se, it is that there is zero underlying science, much less data, for these things. If they come up with data, that'll be another matter entirely. Disagreement is a consequence of the lack of data and supporting theory (or even tenable hypotheses) underlying these things.
There has never been an exception, and all claims to the contrary are lies.
Let's see... "Wow homie" Black mark for failure to use comma; "homie" Black mark for use of slang; "you experienced a nearly 1% literacy rate" Black mark for tortured sentence construction; "love2putmypenisthere", Black mark for poor presentation.
My standards for literacy are clearly higher than yours. The fact that you (and perhaps 89 or so other people who graduated next to you) don't understand this, or consider it an issue to correct... that was kind of my point.
Then let me tell you why the news industry lost me. It wasn't paywalls. It wasn't paper or plastic or bits.
It was:
Opinion dumping instead of fact reporting outside the editorial bailiwick
Ridiculous woo-woo "alternate" POVs
Ultra-light content - there are others besides IQ 90 people out there! Let me remind you of this actual news format: [headline, easily comprehended summary, detailed exposition that actually covers the issue at hand well]
Web-fail: No or minimal links to relevant data, reporting. It's the LINKS, stupid.
Absurdly low-resolution images, if there even were images (1024 is quite low these days... you make newsies use decent resolution cameras like the Canon 5DmkII, then you give us these freaking 300...600px thumbnails... thanks for nothing!)
On the other hand, if a news story doesn't allow comments... how can the public discuss it? You inform. We talk it over. That's the way it's supposed to work.
"Hover" crippled sites - If I don't click, DON'T raise menus, windows. My mouse moves to get from here to there, not to find out the definition of your "keyword(TM)" somewhere along the way. And contrary to the presumptions of your moron web site designers, we do know how to click our mice when we want something oh-so-sophisticated (like a... menu.)
I would honestly rather read some resourceful person's blog where they have gone to the trouble to find interesting, reasonable resolution images; linked to supporting information for their factual claims; and don't try to put in crazy "alternative" ideas like the idiocy of creationism, scientifically unsubstantiated claims of vaccine/autism, cellphone/cancer, angels, auras, and so on down the line of malarkey, and where I may comment upon the subject matter, provoking others to respond, which in turn often digs up more information, etc.
To watch Fox News is to watch the poster child for the failure of an entire industry. To watch CNN is to listen to Kindergarten level expositions on celebrity hi-jinks when wars are raging. The web sites these companies have created are true lowest-common-denominator designs that are painful to anyone who can think their way out of a paper bag. If you're going to aim your content at only half the country, maybe you should be aiming at the half that can think. Or is that too frightening?
And the news industry wonders why its income has dropped. Sheesh.
PS: Spell check and grammar check too... maybe an intern could do that while you FACT CHECK and EDIT OUT YOUR OPINION!
Almost all televised news is so light in content, it would float in a hydrogen atmosphere
Schools routinely "graduate" kids who can't read, write, spell, or do math
Kids consider "tweeting" and "text messaging" as adequate communication
The US promotes a superstitious culture -- and consequently the majority of the population can't apply critical thinking worth a darn.
The Internet, in sharp contrast, is rich with content of very high value, easily accessed by anyone with even moderate 'net skills and literacy. The problem is if you come in with the average set of skills our culture and our pre-college school system provide you with, you aren't equipped to take advantage of that unless you did a lot of self-starting as well.
Anecdote: Recently, I interviewed young folks for an internship; what I wanted was an ability to read and write at a decent level, use a spelling checker, and basic (+-*/) math skills. I went though over ninety applicants before I found one. Over ninety!
But they all had lots of experience in in high school sports. And someone -- most assuredly not me -- had told them this would count for something. Maybe if the job is ditch digging, it would, but not in an office environment.
Slashdot is a collection of people so atypical - so skilled as compared to the average US citizen - that I can't even imagine comparing how they process tv and schooling as compared to the average citizen. When we ask here how television affects someone, we're asking a group that's already been selected for way above average skill sets. For instance, if I watch Fox News, I spend the entire time either laughing or shaking my head in disgust. But it's the most popular news broadcast in the country.
To paraphrase Phil Plait, it seems as though we're doomed.
Doesn't work like that. You're confusing authorization to do so - which I agree, obviously they do not have - with the power to do so - which they do have. You, on the other hand, don't have the power to stop them, authorized or otherwise; compared to the power they can bring to bear, your power is insignificant.
What you want is a chart that shows imprisoned folks as a percentage of the overall population. This chart is fine. Many other things have changed as well, and are not shown, such as draconian drug law implementation, sentence lengths, three strikes rules, and so forth. No chart can be reasonably approached without background knowledge of the area in question, including imprisoned folks as a percentage -- it still doesn't tell the whole story. Nor, I think, would any chart, because the more you add into the chart, the more it conveys a viewpoint, rather than raw data. I find the raw prisoner count more informative for that very reason. I just don't take it as the final authority on what is going on. If your complaint is that some people will... that'll never be solved. There will always be a level at which people simply don't understand what they are looking at. We're not, unfortunately, all created equal, and we're not all educated equally, either.
English is one of those languages where one word, or a phrase, can include other meanings. From the fourth:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...
It is very clear that this describes the people's right to not have the feds (and the states, by 14th amendment incorporation) look inside their houses; not look at their papers; not look upon their bodies; not look at their belongings. Those of us who speak English well tend to sum all that up as "privacy, invasion thereof." Perhaps you should read this.
You've completely missed the point and misunderstood what I was saying.
I wasn't suggesting any income level is ok, or that any particular way to earn is ok, or that any particular tax is ok (or not.)
I was setting a defined horizon, then demonstrating what happens to that horizon at different income levels and a constant tax rate. You can set the horizon anywhere you want, living any way you like, with any particular tax rate, and the example works precisely the same way.
The point simply was, and remains, that a particular tax rate affects people at different income levels differently. Which is the answer to the original question.
Even if we discard the entirely dysfunctional first government(s) the US had between the Brits and the Constitution, you'll find even our earliest forms of government to be hopelessly corrupt, not comitted(sic) to modern notions of equality, fairness, or civility.
I'm afraid you're confusing "I want it to be better than it is" with "it was worse than it is at some points." I speak from the viewpoint of the former; the latter is only of use as a means (rarely used, I admit freely) to learn how "not to do it again" from. History is something to contemplate calmly, and from a distance. The present reality is something we have to live in and frankly, it doesn't make any real difference at all if we had slaves in the 1800's -- it is far more important that people are being coerced today by the government. So forgive me if I don't rise to your "the past was terrible" bait. My point is today is terrible on its own unique terms, and needs fixes on many levels.
I happen to otherwise admire John Adams, but his behaviour (and Federalist behaviour in general) in struggle with Jefferson brought the US as close as it ever came to the witchhunts of the Reign of Terror in France (McCarthy in the 50s may be similar in some ways too).
Oh, we have our witch hunts today. Drug based, sex based, race based, felony based. Violence from the people, from the police, and organized ostracism (and worse) from the government and businesses. As I mentioned elsewhere, the creation of a permanent criminal class is a current area in which we're doing very advanced work both politically and socially. Oh, you forgot about them, eh? Most people do. Being as they're criminals, and all. Of course, the fact that a great deal of "criminal" activity is group A applying their opinions to group B (recreational drugs being an excellent example here, though certainly not the only one) and the fact that in other cultures, some of this "criminal' activity is perfectly ok, etc., doesn't stop the public and the government from permanently hosing those people's lives -- it doesn't even slow them down. Oh yes, witch hunts are alive and well.
You lack historical perspective if you seriously think that the US government is the worst it has ever been.
And you lack discussion skills -- I didn't say that. I simply said it was a clusterfuck. And it is. It's been worse. And it's been better, too. Right now, it's at (one of several) serious low-water marks, though.
The only people that used to be able to vote in this country were white landowners.
Which would be useful, if the vote did anything but install hand-picked puppets for their respective parties, choices that the voters don't make, I might add -- the parties pick who stands and gets support, and you pick from there.
We committed systematic genocide of the Native Americans.
Well, not quite. We killed the ones that got in our way. The rest, or at least their descendants, are still here. So genocide is fairly hyperbolic in itself here. Definitely a low point. Of course, now we have a permanent criminal class, of which the native Americans carry a decent membership in. If you can't ruin 'em one way, there's always another in the wings, eh?
There was no stable economic system in this country for much of its history.
There still isn't.
The bill of rights WAS thrown out of the window by Lincoln during the Civil War (hell, there WAS a Civil War).
Well, it's gone again. Or hadn't you noticed? And this time, without the excuse of a real war, much less a war on our own soil.
We have a large history of unjust wars including the The Spanish-American War and probably every conflict fought in South America.
Yes, and we're cooking three of them now. Afghanistan, Iraq, and a pretend one here that's being used as the sandpaper to the wood of the bill of rights. In fact, there are precious few times when we aren't at war, and that should be cause for pause all by itself.
We detained a hundred thousand people based on their ancestry 65 years ago.
Actually, we detained them because their brethren-in-race bombed Pearl Harbor; It wasn't what their parents ever did, it was what their originating country was doing right then. Not saying it was right, but you'll do better if you actually understand what was going on. It wasn't racist; it was straight-up fear based. We didn't care that they were Japanese; we cared that their families were making war on us, and we suspected that these people might as well. Just as people look at US Muslims today with great suspicion. When a class misbehaves, we go after all of them. It's what we do (wrongly.) That's why we have a permanent underclass of felons today. We tar them all most thoroughly so we don't have to actually deal with individuals. Despite the fact that some of them are completely harmless. We really don't care.
Shall I go on?
Oh yes, please do.:)
The government is not out of control.
Yes, it is. It is operating well outside the bounds of its authorizing document; that is its only justification for anything it does, and therefore, it is running an an unauthorized mode, using powers not given to it, but usurped and coerced from the people. Wake up and smell the burning parchment, my friend.
Just because it is not what YOU want it to do does not mean it is unconstitutional or out of control.
It has zero to do with what "I want"; it has to do with the constitution saying "no, don't, shall not" and so forth, and the government going, "will, am, shall too." You can't hide the malfeasance -- it's plain as day.
Except we don't have an out of control government.
No?
Commerce clause? Ex post facto laws? Most of the bill of rights thrown out the window? Unjust wars? Insane debt levels? Financial system based entirely on an illusion? Judges asserting section five powers that there are no mention of in article three? Intellectual property laws that do more to deter innovation than to encourage it? Educational system that result in large percentages of the population indulging in rampant superstition, and largely unable to read, write or think at a level I'd accept for secretarial work, never mind the tiny (and largely wrong) collection of "facts" they bring with them? Have you noticed that almost our entire manufacturing base is no longer present and accounted for? I could go on - for pages - but it's pretty depressing.
Wait -- I should have asked -- do you live in the USA? Because that's the government I was speaking of. If you live somewhere else, you might, I suppose, have a government that's just fine. I doubt it somehow, but I accept the idea in principle. The US government, however, is an utter clusterfuck. You'd have to be the most servile kind of blinders-wearing sycophant to think otherwise.
How is paying the same percentage of one's income hard on one person and gives a "huge break" to another?
I'll use 20% as an example. You can substitute any number.
If your earnings are low enough that with 100% of your income you are *just* paying the rent and food and utilities, and then they apply 20% taxes, you're screwed.
If your earnings are high enough that you can pay all those things and you have 20% left, and then they apply a 20% tax, you're simply ok.
If your earnings are high enough that you can pay everything, go to Maui and Europe, and drive (and insure) a Lamborghini and have 80% left over, and they apply an 20% tax, you're not only ok, you're golden, as they say.
That - in short - demonstrates how "20%" means something different specifically depending upon your earnings.
Fair: Tax purchases, not income; don't tax necessities (generously figured as X dollars of food per person, X kilowatts per person, X gallons of water per person, X number of square feet per person, etc.) Every person gets X in certificates good for those tax debts, rather than the usual money. Like food stamps; but water stamps, real estate tax stamps, etc. These act like money, but only in the domain they are meant for - when submitted back to the IRS by the appropriate vendors. Tax every other purchase. At the other end, absolutely separate government spending from government income collection and distribution; and disallow operating at a deficit, period.
Governments do useful things, and they acquire funding for that through taxes.
They also do harmful things, and they acquire funding for that through taxes as well. This is one (of many) reasons that government powers and government funding should be severely limited. The main reason we have an out of control government is because they control their own funds, and now also their powers (the constitution no longer governs them.) Not only do they tell you how much you have to pay them, and how often, and why, and for what, and what words like "income" and "profit" mean, they can print money (via the banking scam), incur unlimited debt (stroke of a pen, no approval required), and spend it all any way they want -- and all without you getting a word in edgewise.
Legally speaking, you can't do squat about it. In the case of the US, that's the hallmark of a government that is not in the least responsible to the people who originally put it in place. That connection has been well and truly severed.
Politicians? They're just a manipulated subset. Go after the lawyers. That has the potential to actually solve the problem. Laws are created by lawyers, not politicians. Judges - inevitably lawyers as well - are the ones demolishing the bill of rights and otherwise turning government compliance with the constitution into a parody of the oaths they swear. Lawyers are the ones that have made the idea of intellectual property into a series of brick walls instead of encouragement to the citizens to innovate. Lawyers have made medical care both more expensive and more difficult.
Make sure you tear up the laws as well, and start over with some simple ones individuals and juries can understand. There's no real need for judges or lawyers. Juries are sufficient, given just a moderate amount of structure and a reasonable, simple set of laws to moderate.
Shakespeare's Dick the butcher was on to something. The fact that it was obvious then, as now, should provide at least a hint as to the basic underlying truth.
That statement is predicated upon the idea that taxing income is reasonable in the first place. That has never been shown to be true. It's a method that is bound to gain enormous complexity - as it has - as the definition of "income" is stretched and mutilated by the government.
It's long past time to simplify; right now, the costs of paying taxes added to the costs of collecting taxes and the privacy invasions of cross-checking for liabilities in normal (through banks, etc.) cash flow, are so onerous that huge numbers of people and businesses don't comply.
The mechanism needs to be changed to one where compliance is simple; validation requirements are enormously simplified; and the vast infrastructure of the IRS is not required, nor an echo of it at the state level.
What exists right now is not by any means "reasonable."
What's to stop someone from having multiple eBay / PayPal accounts?
How about having to give your taxpayer ID number (SSN for most of you... yes, that same SSN they promised not to use for anything but your retirement accounts, you stupid suckers) to Ebay for starters. Then, when you try to open account #2, they say, oh, wait, we already have an account for that TIN, sorry, no more accounts for you.
Fake TIN/SSN? Jail.
Don't worry; while the government isn't bright enough to keep from screwing the citizens, it is bright enough to keep the majority of citizens from screwing it.
It's just going to keep getting more and more like this. They conned the public, and the supreme court, into giving up 4th amendment guarantees on privacy a long time ago -- no legal recourse remains.
...Youtube has amply demonstrated that there is no problem at all encoding, and subsequently decoding, h.264 videos that are full of errors. Recoverable errors, fatal errors, even funny errors. All may be encoded, and then decoded.
Now, encoding/decoding tolerance? You can do it, but will anyone watch it?
This research will go nowhere.
Now, if he was encoding porn tolerance, we'd really have something society needs. But you know, that only leads to more needs. Like keyboard protectors.
The ham radio project was the AVT system, a system for sending and receiving analog (AFSK) slow scan television. The AVT format uses a combination of synchronous formats, multiple (32) start-time headers and time-wise interlace to reduce the effect of fading and long period interference on image reception. You could lose as much as 25% of the signal in a single chunk and still be able to reconstruct a very good reproduction of the entire image. That, added to the fact that you had 32 chances to get a proper synchronous start (and the ability to start manually if you simply heard the signal late), made the system surprisingly robust, even under conditions where voice was out of the question.
I developed the system myself, a spare time kind of thing, then AEA, a then-largish ham radio company, heard about it on the air, invited me out to their headquarters for discussions and so forth, and finally bought the rights and had me do a version two that was a bit more polished and had some additional hardware features (like a telephone interface.) Right now, with the sunspot numbers so low, there's almost no SSTV activity, so there's nothing to hear. In a few years it'll be back again, though, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with the mode -- presuming there are many hams left, that is. Ham radio isn't what it used to be, let me tell you.
It was almost entirely a "garage" effort. I wrote the PCB layout software I laid out the board with, and I designed the board on that; I wrote the schematic capture software, and I designed the electronics on that; I wrote the cross-macro-assembler for the microcontroller, and I wrote the code using that; I wrote the code for the host computer; and I invented the AVT modes themselves. I designed the CPU burner that I used to burn the microcontroller when I worked at a company that made UV erasers and burners, and I also wrote the utility that transferred the assembled code to the burner. I used two key outside tools, Rick Stiles UEDIT and Lattice's c compiler (to write the tools and the host machine's software.) Other than that, it was strictly garage work. If I didn't already have it, I undertook to make it. Don't ask why, there is no reasonable answer to that.
The moneymaker was a high speed image layering system that incorporated real-time geometric effects. So you could put waves or swirls or other distortions on an image and slide them around as an image layer without ever doing anything destructive to the image(s) underneath the geometric effect. This, implemented as an upgrade to a very powerful but at the time, non-layered, special effects and image animation/editing system (and combined with some very competitive pricing), kept interest in the software relatively high without any particular marketing effort -- and when you can sell software steadily at even moderate prices, but have little overhead and no debt... that's really good for the bottom line, let me tell you. Here is an example of using warp layers; that's how I did the tiny model's wake in the diorama.
The warp layers can do morphing and warping, zooms, reductions, almost any geometric effect you can imagine. And they stack over/between each other and other layer types and warp each other, as well -- they're truly layers. For instance, you stack two sets of waves, you get wave interference, just like you would if those waves were crossing the water. Or you can put multiple geometric effects into one warp layer if you prefer (it's more flexible the other way, though.) Add to that the "usual" layer abilities such as you'd find in Photoshop and etc., and you have something useful. There are 70+ layer modes in the system, including 20-odd standard types and a raft of specialized masking modes, but the geometric mode is the star.
The actual low level implementation was the thing that hit me. We sold morphing and warping software already, but it
A space elevator is a straightforward materials problem. Make the right material, the problem is solved. Current candidates for materials include carbon nanotubes. Which, among other places, can be found in candle soot. I wouldn't rule out the garage as a source for ground breaking discoveries here.
AI... again, all you need is a PC that can address lots of RAM, and a goodly amount of RAM. Guaranteed. I may be overestimating the amount of RAM. Go ahead, ask me why. I love that question.:)
Fusion... you can put a fusion reaction on your desktop with a Farnsworth Fusor. Look it up. You can build a high powered laser. Water is readily available. Who's to say what you can, and cannot, do? I'm not saying you could make a commercially viable reactor (or that you couldn't), but I am saying that you might find a fundamental reaction or process.
Artificial meat... this field is *definitely* ripe (hah!) for garage work. It consists of getting cells to grow outside the body. In order to be practical, it *requires* that the process be simple. We already know how to culture in a small plate; we know how to stimulate muscles so they have tone; so a lot of research is concentrated on how to scaffold the cells and this may turn out to be very simple - can't say until its done - but again, nothing about it screams "not in the garage."
And nothing about them says you can't have an idea and chase venture capital, either. The bottom line is that these are presently unsolved problems that need solutions, and none of them are either impossible or even unlikely. Fusion? Look up. Space elevator? The math works. Ai? You're intelligent, so we know it can be done at least one way. Artificial meat -- almost the same answer.
Yet each of these presents an industry-launching potential, reputation, fame, money, service... the world is full of things like this. But every time you look at something and go "aw, can't do THAT without a lab, you fulfill your own expectations. Einstein did his most interesting work while employed as a patent clerk. Many discoveries came about as accidental consequences of other work. Not saying you can't discover stuff with a huge staff and a big budget, I'm just saying it's no certainty that you have to have them. Finally, given the right intellectual gifts, you may figure it out with zero lab work at all. Clarke worked out geostationary satellites with no particular lab work.
Speaking as an engineer, I've worked on problems and had at least four (that I recall) of them spring, as far as I could tell, completely solved into my mind after a good sleep, while driving, and once while walking into the kitchen. The only thing remaining for each of those four ideas was implementation using well known and rather vanilla techniques and/or parts. But all of those ideas were new, commercially viable, and served me *extremely* well.
One was specific to ham radio and while it got me mentioned in the "Amateur Radio Handbook" and won me some awards, didn't make a whole lot of money.
One of them (in the realm of dithering palettes for color) remains the best approach, by far, that I've ever been able to find, but has few applications today because images created through color palettes are generally obsolete.
Another was so obscure and specific that the market for it only existed as long as a certain set of other-party hardware was being sold. But it was a hell of a money maker.
The remaining one continues to pay off today, almost ten years after it popped into my head and I almost drove off the road. I spent the next hour babbling about it to my long-suffering and ultra loyal ladyfriend, who was at the time a captive audience as we were driving about three hours to visit her kids. Today, she lives in a fully paid off, 5,000 sq foot home with me, bought with income leveraged with that idea. And she drives the car she always wanted, also fully paid off. Apparently it was worth it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really like to see them do a Mechassault movie. The 'mechs in Avatar showed they can do the CGI just fine; several movies have been mostly CGI already; so all they really need is a sorta-kinda plot. Not for me, you understand, but for other people. Who worry about that stuff. Throw a love story in there, buncha cleavage... I'm good with that. Even if it steals some time from blowing things up. I'll have to blink sometime, right?
I would truly welcome a couple hours of "blasting the shit out of everything." Especially if compelling Mad Cats, Thors, Ragnaroks, Atlases, and so forth were doing the blasting. Dropships. Squishies. Fusion reactor cores going critical, etc. Mines. Jumpjets. Red-hot heat sinks setting stuff the 'mechs step on, on fire. Teamwork and solo craziness. Stealth gear. Oh, yeah. Bangity-bang-bang BANG! Gimme the blue-ray right now. I got a couple kilowatts of multi-channel audio gear ready to make 'mech footsteps shake the building. :)
Sometimes I run the intro to Chromehounds on the XBox 360 just to get a 1080p mech fix.
Then I go all the way back and run Mechwarrior II's intro... low res and pixelated as it is... because it's just so awesome. Sigh.
Yes, I designate as woo-woo, and strongly disagree with, and dispute that there are relevant relevant objective facts underlying creationism, the presumption of the actuality of "god(s)", actual data that demonstrate causative links from vaccines to autism, aliens anally probing us (much as some folks might prefer otherwise), ghosts, anything whatsoever to do with astrology other than locating general regions of the sky (e.g. the comet will cross Sagittarius in early June), any "healing" or other health functions of simple possession of any crystal in the quartz family with the possible exception of using one to rap you on the head if you claim they are "generators", "healers", provide "energy", etc.; I call woo-woo on phrenology, the efficacy of copper bracelets, magnets in your shoes, Scientology, and almost anything that comes out of Glen Beck's mouth. And I'm just warming up.
But the reason isn't disagreement, per se, it is that there is zero underlying science, much less data, for these things. If they come up with data, that'll be another matter entirely. Disagreement is a consequence of the lack of data and supporting theory (or even tenable hypotheses) underlying these things.
There has never been an exception, and all claims to the contrary are lies.
Let's see... "Wow homie" Black mark for failure to use comma; "homie" Black mark for use of slang; "you experienced a nearly 1% literacy rate" Black mark for tortured sentence construction; "love2putmypenisthere", Black mark for poor presentation.
My standards for literacy are clearly higher than yours. The fact that you (and perhaps 89 or so other people who graduated next to you) don't understand this, or consider it an issue to correct... that was kind of my point.
Next candidate, please?
Then let me tell you why the news industry lost me. It wasn't paywalls. It wasn't paper or plastic or bits.
It was:
I would honestly rather read some resourceful person's blog where they have gone to the trouble to find interesting, reasonable resolution images; linked to supporting information for their factual claims; and don't try to put in crazy "alternative" ideas like the idiocy of creationism, scientifically unsubstantiated claims of vaccine/autism, cellphone/cancer, angels, auras, and so on down the line of malarkey, and where I may comment upon the subject matter, provoking others to respond, which in turn often digs up more information, etc.
To watch Fox News is to watch the poster child for the failure of an entire industry. To watch CNN is to listen to Kindergarten level expositions on celebrity hi-jinks when wars are raging. The web sites these companies have created are true lowest-common-denominator designs that are painful to anyone who can think their way out of a paper bag. If you're going to aim your content at only half the country, maybe you should be aiming at the half that can think. Or is that too frightening?
And the news industry wonders why its income has dropped. Sheesh.
PS: Spell check and grammar check too... maybe an intern could do that while you FACT CHECK and EDIT OUT YOUR OPINION!
The Internet, in sharp contrast, is rich with content of very high value, easily accessed by anyone with even moderate 'net skills and literacy. The problem is if you come in with the average set of skills our culture and our pre-college school system provide you with, you aren't equipped to take advantage of that unless you did a lot of self-starting as well.
Anecdote: Recently, I interviewed young folks for an internship; what I wanted was an ability to read and write at a decent level, use a spelling checker, and basic (+-*/) math skills. I went though over ninety applicants before I found one. Over ninety!
But they all had lots of experience in in high school sports. And someone -- most assuredly not me -- had told them this would count for something. Maybe if the job is ditch digging, it would, but not in an office environment.
Slashdot is a collection of people so atypical - so skilled as compared to the average US citizen - that I can't even imagine comparing how they process tv and schooling as compared to the average citizen. When we ask here how television affects someone, we're asking a group that's already been selected for way above average skill sets. For instance, if I watch Fox News, I spend the entire time either laughing or shaking my head in disgust. But it's the most popular news broadcast in the country.
To paraphrase Phil Plait, it seems as though we're doomed.
Doesn't work like that. You're confusing authorization to do so - which I agree, obviously they do not have - with the power to do so - which they do have. You, on the other hand, don't have the power to stop them, authorized or otherwise; compared to the power they can bring to bear, your power is insignificant.
Ago: One less than twogo.
[head asplodes]
Not really, but isn't relativity fun?
Prisoners by headcount and as a function of population
What you want is a chart that shows imprisoned folks as a percentage of the overall population. This chart is fine. Many other things have changed as well, and are not shown, such as draconian drug law implementation, sentence lengths, three strikes rules, and so forth. No chart can be reasonably approached without background knowledge of the area in question, including imprisoned folks as a percentage -- it still doesn't tell the whole story. Nor, I think, would any chart, because the more you add into the chart, the more it conveys a viewpoint, rather than raw data. I find the raw prisoner count more informative for that very reason. I just don't take it as the final authority on what is going on. If your complaint is that some people will... that'll never be solved. There will always be a level at which people simply don't understand what they are looking at. We're not, unfortunately, all created equal, and we're not all educated equally, either.
English is one of those languages where one word, or a phrase, can include other meanings. From the fourth:
It is very clear that this describes the people's right to not have the feds (and the states, by 14th amendment incorporation) look inside their houses; not look at their papers; not look upon their bodies; not look at their belongings. Those of us who speak English well tend to sum all that up as "privacy, invasion thereof." Perhaps you should read this.
You've completely missed the point and misunderstood what I was saying.
I wasn't suggesting any income level is ok, or that any particular way to earn is ok, or that any particular tax is ok (or not.)
I was setting a defined horizon, then demonstrating what happens to that horizon at different income levels and a constant tax rate. You can set the horizon anywhere you want, living any way you like, with any particular tax rate, and the example works precisely the same way.
The point simply was, and remains, that a particular tax rate affects people at different income levels differently. Which is the answer to the original question.
I'm afraid you're confusing "I want it to be better than it is" with "it was worse than it is at some points." I speak from the viewpoint of the former; the latter is only of use as a means (rarely used, I admit freely) to learn how "not to do it again" from. History is something to contemplate calmly, and from a distance. The present reality is something we have to live in and frankly, it doesn't make any real difference at all if we had slaves in the 1800's -- it is far more important that people are being coerced today by the government. So forgive me if I don't rise to your "the past was terrible" bait. My point is today is terrible on its own unique terms, and needs fixes on many levels.
Oh, we have our witch hunts today. Drug based, sex based, race based, felony based. Violence from the people, from the police, and organized ostracism (and worse) from the government and businesses. As I mentioned elsewhere, the creation of a permanent criminal class is a current area in which we're doing very advanced work both politically and socially. Oh, you forgot about them, eh? Most people do. Being as they're criminals, and all. Of course, the fact that a great deal of "criminal" activity is group A applying their opinions to group B (recreational drugs being an excellent example here, though certainly not the only one) and the fact that in other cultures, some of this "criminal' activity is perfectly ok, etc., doesn't stop the public and the government from permanently hosing those people's lives -- it doesn't even slow them down. Oh yes, witch hunts are alive and well.
And you lack discussion skills -- I didn't say that. I simply said it was a clusterfuck. And it is. It's been worse. And it's been better, too. Right now, it's at (one of several) serious low-water marks, though.
Which would be useful, if the vote did anything but install hand-picked puppets for their respective parties, choices that the voters don't make, I might add -- the parties pick who stands and gets support, and you pick from there.
Well, not quite. We killed the ones that got in our way. The rest, or at least their descendants, are still here. So genocide is fairly hyperbolic in itself here. Definitely a low point. Of course, now we have a permanent criminal class, of which the native Americans carry a decent membership in. If you can't ruin 'em one way, there's always another in the wings, eh?
There still isn't.
Well, it's gone again. Or hadn't you noticed? And this time, without the excuse of a real war, much less a war on our own soil.
Yes, and we're cooking three of them now. Afghanistan, Iraq, and a pretend one here that's being used as the sandpaper to the wood of the bill of rights. In fact, there are precious few times when we aren't at war, and that should be cause for pause all by itself.
Actually, we detained them because their brethren-in-race bombed Pearl Harbor; It wasn't what their parents ever did, it was what their originating country was doing right then. Not saying it was right, but you'll do better if you actually understand what was going on. It wasn't racist; it was straight-up fear based. We didn't care that they were Japanese; we cared that their families were making war on us, and we suspected that these people might as well. Just as people look at US Muslims today with great suspicion. When a class misbehaves, we go after all of them. It's what we do (wrongly.) That's why we have a permanent underclass of felons today. We tar them all most thoroughly so we don't have to actually deal with individuals. Despite the fact that some of them are completely harmless. We really don't care.
Oh yes, please do. :)
Yes, it is. It is operating well outside the bounds of its authorizing document; that is its only justification for anything it does, and therefore, it is running an an unauthorized mode, using powers not given to it, but usurped and coerced from the people. Wake up and smell the burning parchment, my friend.
It has zero to do with what "I want"; it has to do with the constitution saying "no, don't, shall not" and so forth, and the government going, "will, am, shall too." You can't hide the malfeasance -- it's plain as day.
No?
Commerce clause? Ex post facto laws? Most of the bill of rights thrown out the window? Unjust wars? Insane debt levels? Financial system based entirely on an illusion? Judges asserting section five powers that there are no mention of in article three? Intellectual property laws that do more to deter innovation than to encourage it? Educational system that result in large percentages of the population indulging in rampant superstition, and largely unable to read, write or think at a level I'd accept for secretarial work, never mind the tiny (and largely wrong) collection of "facts" they bring with them? Have you noticed that almost our entire manufacturing base is no longer present and accounted for? I could go on - for pages - but it's pretty depressing.
Wait -- I should have asked -- do you live in the USA? Because that's the government I was speaking of. If you live somewhere else, you might, I suppose, have a government that's just fine. I doubt it somehow, but I accept the idea in principle. The US government, however, is an utter clusterfuck. You'd have to be the most servile kind of blinders-wearing sycophant to think otherwise.
I'll use 20% as an example. You can substitute any number.
If your earnings are low enough that with 100% of your income you are *just* paying the rent and food and utilities, and then they apply 20% taxes, you're screwed.
If your earnings are high enough that you can pay all those things and you have 20% left, and then they apply a 20% tax, you're simply ok.
If your earnings are high enough that you can pay everything, go to Maui and Europe, and drive (and insure) a Lamborghini and have 80% left over, and they apply an 20% tax, you're not only ok, you're golden, as they say.
That - in short - demonstrates how "20%" means something different specifically depending upon your earnings.
Fair: Tax purchases, not income; don't tax necessities (generously figured as X dollars of food per person, X kilowatts per person, X gallons of water per person, X number of square feet per person, etc.) Every person gets X in certificates good for those tax debts, rather than the usual money. Like food stamps; but water stamps, real estate tax stamps, etc. These act like money, but only in the domain they are meant for - when submitted back to the IRS by the appropriate vendors. Tax every other purchase. At the other end, absolutely separate government spending from government income collection and distribution; and disallow operating at a deficit, period.
They also do harmful things, and they acquire funding for that through taxes as well. This is one (of many) reasons that government powers and government funding should be severely limited. The main reason we have an out of control government is because they control their own funds, and now also their powers (the constitution no longer governs them.) Not only do they tell you how much you have to pay them, and how often, and why, and for what, and what words like "income" and "profit" mean, they can print money (via the banking scam), incur unlimited debt (stroke of a pen, no approval required), and spend it all any way they want -- and all without you getting a word in edgewise.
Legally speaking, you can't do squat about it. In the case of the US, that's the hallmark of a government that is not in the least responsible to the people who originally put it in place. That connection has been well and truly severed.
Politicians? They're just a manipulated subset. Go after the lawyers. That has the potential to actually solve the problem. Laws are created by lawyers, not politicians. Judges - inevitably lawyers as well - are the ones demolishing the bill of rights and otherwise turning government compliance with the constitution into a parody of the oaths they swear. Lawyers are the ones that have made the idea of intellectual property into a series of brick walls instead of encouragement to the citizens to innovate. Lawyers have made medical care both more expensive and more difficult.
Make sure you tear up the laws as well, and start over with some simple ones individuals and juries can understand. There's no real need for judges or lawyers. Juries are sufficient, given just a moderate amount of structure and a reasonable, simple set of laws to moderate.
Shakespeare's Dick the butcher was on to something. The fact that it was obvious then, as now, should provide at least a hint as to the basic underlying truth.
They like to jail people. Done a headcount lately?
That statement is predicated upon the idea that taxing income is reasonable in the first place. That has never been shown to be true. It's a method that is bound to gain enormous complexity - as it has - as the definition of "income" is stretched and mutilated by the government.
It's long past time to simplify; right now, the costs of paying taxes added to the costs of collecting taxes and the privacy invasions of cross-checking for liabilities in normal (through banks, etc.) cash flow, are so onerous that huge numbers of people and businesses don't comply.
The mechanism needs to be changed to one where compliance is simple; validation requirements are enormously simplified; and the vast infrastructure of the IRS is not required, nor an echo of it at the state level.
What exists right now is not by any means "reasonable."
How about having to give your taxpayer ID number (SSN for most of you... yes, that same SSN they promised not to use for anything but your retirement accounts, you stupid suckers) to Ebay for starters. Then, when you try to open account #2, they say, oh, wait, we already have an account for that TIN, sorry, no more accounts for you.
Fake TIN/SSN? Jail.
Don't worry; while the government isn't bright enough to keep from screwing the citizens, it is bright enough to keep the majority of citizens from screwing it.
It's just going to keep getting more and more like this. They conned the public, and the supreme court, into giving up 4th amendment guarantees on privacy a long time ago -- no legal recourse remains.
Now, encoding/decoding tolerance? You can do it, but will anyone watch it?
This research will go nowhere.
Now, if he was encoding porn tolerance, we'd really have something society needs. But you know, that only leads to more needs. Like keyboard protectors.
I don't want to fuck the FSM... I want to eat the FSM!
The ham radio project was the AVT system, a system for sending and receiving analog (AFSK) slow scan television. The AVT format uses a combination of synchronous formats, multiple (32) start-time headers and time-wise interlace to reduce the effect of fading and long period interference on image reception. You could lose as much as 25% of the signal in a single chunk and still be able to reconstruct a very good reproduction of the entire image. That, added to the fact that you had 32 chances to get a proper synchronous start (and the ability to start manually if you simply heard the signal late), made the system surprisingly robust, even under conditions where voice was out of the question.
I developed the system myself, a spare time kind of thing, then AEA, a then-largish ham radio company, heard about it on the air, invited me out to their headquarters for discussions and so forth, and finally bought the rights and had me do a version two that was a bit more polished and had some additional hardware features (like a telephone interface.) Right now, with the sunspot numbers so low, there's almost no SSTV activity, so there's nothing to hear. In a few years it'll be back again, though, and it'll be interesting to see what happens with the mode -- presuming there are many hams left, that is. Ham radio isn't what it used to be, let me tell you.
It was almost entirely a "garage" effort. I wrote the PCB layout software I laid out the board with, and I designed the board on that; I wrote the schematic capture software, and I designed the electronics on that; I wrote the cross-macro-assembler for the microcontroller, and I wrote the code using that; I wrote the code for the host computer; and I invented the AVT modes themselves. I designed the CPU burner that I used to burn the microcontroller when I worked at a company that made UV erasers and burners, and I also wrote the utility that transferred the assembled code to the burner. I used two key outside tools, Rick Stiles UEDIT and Lattice's c compiler (to write the tools and the host machine's software.) Other than that, it was strictly garage work. If I didn't already have it, I undertook to make it. Don't ask why, there is no reasonable answer to that.
The moneymaker was a high speed image layering system that incorporated real-time geometric effects. So you could put waves or swirls or other distortions on an image and slide them around as an image layer without ever doing anything destructive to the image(s) underneath the geometric effect. This, implemented as an upgrade to a very powerful but at the time, non-layered, special effects and image animation/editing system (and combined with some very competitive pricing), kept interest in the software relatively high without any particular marketing effort -- and when you can sell software steadily at even moderate prices, but have little overhead and no debt... that's really good for the bottom line, let me tell you. Here is an example of using warp layers; that's how I did the tiny model's wake in the diorama.
The warp layers can do morphing and warping, zooms, reductions, almost any geometric effect you can imagine. And they stack over/between each other and other layer types and warp each other, as well -- they're truly layers. For instance, you stack two sets of waves, you get wave interference, just like you would if those waves were crossing the water. Or you can put multiple geometric effects into one warp layer if you prefer (it's more flexible the other way, though.) Add to that the "usual" layer abilities such as you'd find in Photoshop and etc., and you have something useful. There are 70+ layer modes in the system, including 20-odd standard types and a raft of specialized masking modes, but the geometric mode is the star.
The actual low level implementation was the thing that hit me. We sold morphing and warping software already, but it
A space elevator is a straightforward materials problem. Make the right material, the problem is solved. Current candidates for materials include carbon nanotubes. Which, among other places, can be found in candle soot. I wouldn't rule out the garage as a source for ground breaking discoveries here.
AI... again, all you need is a PC that can address lots of RAM, and a goodly amount of RAM. Guaranteed. I may be overestimating the amount of RAM. Go ahead, ask me why. I love that question. :)
Fusion... you can put a fusion reaction on your desktop with a Farnsworth Fusor. Look it up. You can build a high powered laser. Water is readily available. Who's to say what you can, and cannot, do? I'm not saying you could make a commercially viable reactor (or that you couldn't), but I am saying that you might find a fundamental reaction or process.
Artificial meat... this field is *definitely* ripe (hah!) for garage work. It consists of getting cells to grow outside the body. In order to be practical, it *requires* that the process be simple. We already know how to culture in a small plate; we know how to stimulate muscles so they have tone; so a lot of research is concentrated on how to scaffold the cells and this may turn out to be very simple - can't say until its done - but again, nothing about it screams "not in the garage."
And nothing about them says you can't have an idea and chase venture capital, either. The bottom line is that these are presently unsolved problems that need solutions, and none of them are either impossible or even unlikely. Fusion? Look up. Space elevator? The math works. Ai? You're intelligent, so we know it can be done at least one way. Artificial meat -- almost the same answer.
Yet each of these presents an industry-launching potential, reputation, fame, money, service... the world is full of things like this. But every time you look at something and go "aw, can't do THAT without a lab, you fulfill your own expectations. Einstein did his most interesting work while employed as a patent clerk. Many discoveries came about as accidental consequences of other work. Not saying you can't discover stuff with a huge staff and a big budget, I'm just saying it's no certainty that you have to have them. Finally, given the right intellectual gifts, you may figure it out with zero lab work at all. Clarke worked out geostationary satellites with no particular lab work.
Speaking as an engineer, I've worked on problems and had at least four (that I recall) of them spring, as far as I could tell, completely solved into my mind after a good sleep, while driving, and once while walking into the kitchen. The only thing remaining for each of those four ideas was implementation using well known and rather vanilla techniques and/or parts. But all of those ideas were new, commercially viable, and served me *extremely* well.
One was specific to ham radio and while it got me mentioned in the "Amateur Radio Handbook" and won me some awards, didn't make a whole lot of money.
One of them (in the realm of dithering palettes for color) remains the best approach, by far, that I've ever been able to find, but has few applications today because images created through color palettes are generally obsolete.
Another was so obscure and specific that the market for it only existed as long as a certain set of other-party hardware was being sold. But it was a hell of a money maker.
The remaining one continues to pay off today, almost ten years after it popped into my head and I almost drove off the road. I spent the next hour babbling about it to my long-suffering and ultra loyal ladyfriend, who was at the time a captive audience as we were driving about three hours to visit her kids. Today, she lives in a fully paid off, 5,000 sq foot home with me, bought with income leveraged with that idea. And she drives the car she always wanted, also fully paid off. Apparently it was worth it. :)
So my personal experience tell