Reading comprehension like your failure to understand the part of the summary where they point out that people put forth and defended arguments for the position that was the opposite of how they originally answered?
Or the failure of the people who quickly modded you insightful despite your not even seeing something in the summary, or not understanding if you did?
I was sought out specifically by a government agency because of some research work I had done and some tools I had developed - they basically had a position that was an EXACT match for my skills, just in a broader scope.
I had to submit my CV to their automated system and was rejected because there was a typo in one of the filter criteria for their automated screening system. Then when they fixed it and I resubmitted, because I was found unqualified previously I was booted out.
They reset the job listing, triple checked the criteria, had me re-format my resume and submit it from a different email address just to make sure it wouldn't reject, but then when a human HR manager looked, she noted I had been rejected previously (but not why) and rejected it again.
Bottom line, you need smart people handling your hiring, and you need to make damn sure your automated systems are helping rather than hindering getting good people in there.
What's funny is that they wound up hiring me as a consultant (costing them at least 3x as much as hiring me on staff would cost) for the work, which worked out great for me since I was able to keep my old job and do the new work telecommuting with only the occasional trip to various sites.
This is a huge problem in the US - our first responders are not well trained in handling people in emotional distress or who are mentally ill. Even medical first responders tend to be extremely ill equipped to handle this. Often by their ham-handed approach to things they make a situation much, much worse than it needs to be.
There are efforts to train LEOs and other first responders, but the problem is that by and large, the qualities that police forces look for when hiring officers do not tend to mesh well with the qualities ideal for working well with the mentally ill.
It's a horrible situation, and one that keeps on getting made worse in the US because politicians want to be seen as tough on crime to satisfy a bloodthirsty population out for revenge and punishment rather than rehabilitation and prevention.
It should look nice enough that it isn't jarringly ugly, handle transitions between tasks gracefully enough that it doesn't feel abrupt or like it's taking forever, and everything *I* want to do regularly (not what the designers think I'll want to do regularly) should be immediately accessible and in a position that I find most comfortable.
Difficulty: I don't want to have to screw around configuring everything - I want my "smart" devices to be smart enough to figure out how I work and get better over time, but also not seem to randomly rearrange things without my realizing it.
What I would love would be some kind of calibration application that I can use to do examples of very common tasks (write a letter, compose a text, create a spreadsheet, create an email + attachment, add/remove contacts from a distribution list, etc. and so on) and that will gauge how I do them in some fashion (maybe have me do them in 3-5 different ways), compare each step of that process for speed & efficiency on my part, and then create a generic profile that has every kind of basic UI function in it and that can be exported to any kind of application that would use some sort of standard skinning library so that I can have literally ANY piece of software I use work exactly the same way, so that ANY device I get in the future can automatically configure itself to a way I feel most comfortable working, without my having to bother setting it up appropriately. Kind of like how speech recognition software learns from you over time and gets trained.
Let me create a profile for any given category of object or software. Video games should be able to import a specific control scheme, productivity apps should import a specific scheme for saving/loading/re-doing/undoing, and so on.
That's probably a really difficult task, but that's what I want from my devices and software. I want things to do what I want, how I want in a way that feels best for *me*, even if some designer somewhere insists that their way might be better.
And it isn't that I'm unwilling to learn new ways to do things, it's really more that I just want to not spend the time it takes to customize a new thing that's basically the same as an old thing unless there's some REALLY good reason that the old ways won't work anymore.
Garlic, onions and horseradish make virtually everything better.
Lemon or lime juice makes most of the things the above won't improve better.
Anything left after that will probably be improved by cayanne pepper or ground coffee, and if not, nothing can be done for the dish.
Then again, I have an incredibly weird sense of taste, since I can't abide most sweet things and would rather have something incredibly savory or salty for a dessert.
On the topic - seaweed is an awesome addition to many dishes. I'm starting to do a lot of vegetarian type cooking, and have been incorporating a LOT of seaweed, quinoa (instead of rice) and red+green kale into dishes lately. The seaweed adds a little bit of depth to the flavor that the other things don't have, as well as having a nice effect on the texture of the dish.
Do they have addon and macro support? Or even just macros?
I was a Juggernaut and I had a HUGE number of keybinds I had to manage for every fight and it was just painful to try to both maintain situational awareness when tanking and also manage all those keybinds and abilities that procced without macros.
The other issue I had was with the way abilities were tied to animations, which meant that if you hit a button too soon (which ALWAYS happens when you have a huge number of keybinds to manage) you would wind up skipping an activation or canceling an activation, or doing something else.
I liked most everything about the game except for the gameplay - no macros in this day and age is a deal breaker, and I don't honestly know what they were thinking tying all abilities in an MMO where there are various degrees of latency to animations.
And, I should say, I knew you were being sarcastic/describing consoles, but I didn't want the op to imagine anyone actually thought it was a good idea.
It's actually a really stupid idea. Why the fuck would I, as a consumer, want to have to reboot to play a game, screw around keeping track of all discs or USB drives or whatever, and lose the ability to do anything else with my computer when it's playing a game?
On top of that, yes, as you say, hardware support would be problematic. Updates would be a pain in the ass. There would be absolutely no way of knowing if any two games would do something incredibly weird to your system because maybe neither one of them was developed with an eye towards checking if, I dunno, that space on the hard drive it is writing a patch to was occupied by anything.
It's just a staggeringly stupid idea that doesn't solve any problems and serves no purpose. Literally encasing games in human feces would be a better idea because at least then it might serve the purpose of reducing shoplifting losses.
That said, pitch it to Ubisoft, they have a history of trying out pants on head retarded ideas and may pay well for it.
If you are paying for your PhD in psychology it means you don't have an assistantship, and it also means you will have a very, very, very hard time competing against other people once you graduate. Doing IT work during your graduate studies will make you even less desirable as a graduate because it's nice that you have skills in that area, but those don't translate to useful research skills, and there are a fair number of computer savvy grads coming out who also have research skills and experience, so they are vastly more desirable.
In my lab, we bin any post-doc who applies who didn't have an assistantship because, well, what's wrong with them that nobody wanted to take them on? And we would also have to spend far, far more time training them thawe would someone who had been doing research or working with faculty during their graduate studies at that level.
If you do have an assistantship, there is really no way in hell you're going to have time to handle everything. I know they *say* 20ish hours of work per week, but it really goes far beyond that.
Being a freelancer/consultant eats up a LOT of time. I mean for every billable hour you have, or for every project you get, you are going to be spending a ton of time getting the work or adjusting to your client's changing demands. It sounds like you're really green (else wise why are you asking such basic questions here) so my prediction is that you would get eaten alive.
Seriously, as someone who is now working in your desired field and who has in the past done IT consulting, focus on your studies, get in a lab to do research (eveif you are in a clinical program - research experience makes you vastly more desirable in any number of ways) and get a job that has extremely defined hours if you need to pay the bills. Unless you are super human (and your basic question indicates to me that you aren't) you will just be completely screwed.
Again, I don't meats shit on your hopes, but seriously, if you want your PhD to be useful and worthwhile, focus on that and don't worry about tech stuff except as a hobby.
Signed, someone who went through her first semester in a clinical science psych PhD program thinking she could easily handle the coursework, TA and RA responsibilities, and also a part time job that required any thought at all, and learned from her mistake.
The main distinction is that one of them is proven to create victims and one of them is not.
Creating child porn by actually filming/taking pictures of or otherwise documenting the sexual abuse of a child absolutely is not just a thought crime. A real child is being victimized. Some people who create child porn do so because it gets them off, but some others do so for financial gain to be had from selling it to people who like viewing it. Because of that, simply owning it means that it is possible that one owning child porn is contributing to the financial incentive behind those creating it, and adding to the problem. The main point here is that a direct causal link can be reasonably drawn: If you have a real photo of a child really being sexually abused, it is absolutely the case that a child was sexually abused to create that photo.
So, with real child porn it absolutely is not a thought crime - it's an actual crime, and people who possess it should be charged with a crime because they are to some extent intentionally facilitating the abuse of children. It may be an incredibly slender connection, but it is absolutely a connection to a child being sexually assaulted.
With fictional stuff - drawings, photoshops, stories - there is absolutely no proven causal link between people writing and consuming those things and actual children being abused sexually. It may be that drawings, photoshops and stories about child sexual abuse encourage some people to do it, but it can't be proven because there are no children directly involved in the creation of those things. It would be roughly the same as saying that violent video games lead to murder sprees and as such should be banned. The problem here is that some people think that their own personal distaste for such things means that there must be a direct link between those things and children being hurt - that is not so. The main point here is that if you have some fiction about a child being sexually abused, you cannot say that absolutely a child must have been sexually abused to make that fiction.
So, because there is no direct link between fictional child porn and children actually being hurt, THAT would be a thought crime. It would be roughly equivalent to putting someone up on charges of attempted murder because they spent all day playing Call of Duty and so clearly they must be about to kill someone. There's no actual child being assaulted/no person being killed, so there's no actual connection to a child being assaulted/person being killed. No link.
There's also a grey area: Does fictionalized child porn create a culture in which child sexual abuse becomes more acceptable or more likely? Proponents of bans on fictionalized child porn say yes it does, while opponents either cite free speech or theories that fictionalized child porn reduces the likelihood of people seeking real child porn or actually abusing children themselves. Depending on how convincing one finds the arguments, one could go either way.
Personally, I find any kind of representation of child sexual abuse presented as a form of sexual gratification (fictionalized or real) to be disgusting, but I'm at least willing to acknowledge that my being disgusted by something doesn't mean it should be criminalized if it can't be shown to actually cause harm to innocents. That's something all too many people who are on a "think of the children" crusade don't get: their personal distaste doesn't automatically change the facts to suit their opinions.
The zeroth thing you should do is make damn sure your skills are sufficient to provide the kind of service you want to provide, and that you know what you can provide.
First thing you should do is look to local chambers of commerce in your country. They will give you plenty of advice and help on the business side of things that is relevant to your region.
Second thing you should do is go to a ton of local meetups for professionals in the area you want to freelance in so that you have some ideas as to what other people are doing. You also may make some contacts there who would be willing to take you under their wing and give you a trial working on some stuff that they have, to see if you're any good.
Independent votes mean nothing when it comes to POTUS because the system only rewards parties that go past a certain threshold that even Ross Perot couldn't cross.
Independent groups need to win at the state and local level and build up steam before they'll matter at the national level.
Or we need to change the way elections work.
Let me put it this way: In Montana, one of the states where you think a third party (Libertarian) candidate could actually get a foothold, they ran Poppa Smurf, a man who turned himself blue in fear of Y2K, for Senate.
Voting 3rd party is a joke in this country until we change the rules.
But, if you are caught carrying a gun without a license you go to jail for a very, very long time.
If you commit and are convicted of a crime more serious than a minor traffic violation while carrying a gun (even if you don't use it), you go to jail for a very, very long time.
If your gun kills someone else, you should be tried for murder, and allowed to plead self-defense, but even obvious cases of self-defense must go to trial to avoid things like the Trayvon Martin case. If your gun kills someone by accident (such as a child who finds it and uses it) you should be charged with negligent homicide.
Free up space by letting people who committed non-violent crimes (read: drug users) out and legalize drugs. Save a bunch of money.
Wanna carry a gun? Then you had damn well better be extremely responsible when you do so or you will very likely end up going to jail for a very, very long time.
Most gun owners are very responsible people, so they shouldn't have any problem avoiding penalties, while the people who are the problem - irresponsible gun owners and criminals - will wind up going away.
I think of our gun policy as similar to DRM: Currently it's a trivial obstacle to those who want to pirate while it's a huge pain in the ass to legit users. Let's make it easy for legit users to do what they want, but absolutely crucify those who abuse that right by behaving irresponsibly.
He comes off as more mentally ill/paranoid than dumb, which is a shame. Most people in good mental health don't spout off paranoid fantasies vilifying people who simply have different politics, and that goes for people at any point of the spectrum.
And just to preempt the obvious, no, saying someone is likely mentally ill is in no way villifying them, it just means they should get some help.
At the last corporate job I held our managers would frequently push the development staff to put things out before they had been fully tested.
Why punish the people who write the software when often they have an extremely limited amount of control over things?
Businesses selling shitty, insecure software should absolutely be held accountable. Individual developers within those businesses being directly liable? No way.
Why not hold each factory worker who was responsible for a round of ammunition or piece of a missile liable for murder when a drone strike takes out a civilian?
Hold the people responsible for making decisions responsible, not the people who are just putting things together.
Yeah, I like my standing set-up, too. I tend to dance around a bit, sort of stretch, do leg lifts and such while I'm working, and I really don't even have to think about it. In addition, I do multiple muscle tension exercises as well - tightening my abs and stuff like that.
I'm considering adding a treadmill to the mix as well - for the times when I'm not too focused to be able to walk, walking and reading web stuff would be brilliant.
Obviously that set-up won't work for everyone, or in every office, but I find that with good shoes and a proper anti-fatigue mat I am quite easily able to stand for 5-10 hours (with appropriate breaks from being at my desk, of course) without an issue.
I've also noticed that I feel healthier in general and tend to have more energy. It was a relatively easy thing to get used to (took me less than a week before I didn't feel like I wanted to have a chair around for a safety net) and was extremely cheap to set up. A win all around.
The only downside I have found is that if I don't wear shoes (I use this at home and work) my feet can hurt a fair amount at the end of the day. So I just wear a pair of clogs while I'm standing and it's great.
Exactly that. The writing was awful - I read Dragon's Egg when I was 12 or so and even then I could tell his prose was absolute shit. But the ideas - those were awesome.
The sequel wasn't as good idea-wise, though it was somewhat interesting and if I remember right the prose wass a bit of an improvement (though still really not good).
Record the lecture (both video and audio) and write notes by hand on paper since there's a benefit to having to process information that way. Grab the notes online as well, and you have everything you could want.
When I returned to school for my graduate program that's what I did in my classes and it yielded a very good set of sources for review. I would re-watch classes with the video and audio sped up a bit - 1 hour of class time with the extraneous stuff taken out and sped up would take me about 20-30 minutes to review, depending on the instructor. This was 4-6 years ago so I only recorded essential classes, as storage was at a bit of a premium.
The only thing to be wary of is not posting the videos or handing them out to other students without the permission of your instructor. It's a good way to get them to ban recording.
The way to do this at the publicly funded level would be to do it as follows:
Take a list of everyone who wants to participate in sport and measure relevant physical values (mass, height, V02max whatever) and break them into brackets based on whatever kind of cutoff point.
Each bracket is funded based on population in that bracket - if you have 90% of the athletes in one bracket, 90% of the funding goes to that bracket, even if it isn't the "top tier" bracket (which is usually where the most money goes now for fewer people).
At the end of each season, if a player is dominating their bracket (as determined by a statistical analysis of their performance over the season) they are moved up to the next bracket, even if their physical stats aren't at the same level. The reverse happens for a player who is struggling - they get dropped down a bracket even if their stats suggest they should perform better.
This would have the added benefit of helping out athletes of either (any?) sex/gender by not making tiny guys compete against giant dudes in sports just because they're guys, and would also let very competitive women play at a higher level. Additionally, it would also encourage more people to get involved in sport since it absolutely would be more democratic, and would probably lead to much closer/more competitive games since the people would be more closely physically matched.
The only disadvantages I would see would be social - some people are assholes and would mercilessly taunt a guy who was competing in a league mostly comprised of women, while some women may not feel comfortable competing with men in their sport (witness some issues of social anxiety in mixed gender classrooms being suggested for poor female performance in some subjects vs. single gender classrooms).
This should be done at the *publicly* funded level only - at the professional level people can do whatever the hell they want, as far as I'm concerned.
I would think that the parts that aren't currently printable could be made by a fairly well equipped (but not prohibitively so) home machinist. They might not be of the same quality as those produced by a gun manufacturer, but surely they would be sufficient for a functional firearm.
Personally, I think the gun genie is mostly out of the bottle in the US: We will never, ever, be able to have meaningful or useful gun control laws. What we should do instead is have incredibly toothy gun use laws that will make damn sure someone who uses a gun in a crime or in an irresponsible manner and gets caught is absolutely not going to be able to do so again in the future, and to limit the number of people who imagine they're Dirty Harry and try to take the law into their own hands.
I say completely stop trying to control guns, make the punishments for using a gun improperly incredibly severe (like, life in prison without parole level severe for just brandishing a firearm/being armed during a crime), and make space in the justice system for handling this by legalizing drugs, letting non-violent offenders out of prison, and making jail/prison only for violent offenses with everyone else getting community service and parole.
Take the money we currently flush down the toilet in our War on Drugs in the US and spend it instead on properly funding mental health preventative and treatment services across the country.
I guarantee that if we did these things we would begin to see a rapid decrease in gun related crime (and in crime overall) and an overall increase in public health and safety.
But trying to restrict firearms is, in the US, a completely lost cause. There are just too many guns out there, too easy to get by too many different channels that the only thing gun control laws wind up doing are inconveniencing people who would be responsible and doing nothing to stop the people who would be irresponsible.
Slashdot Mirror
In this age of ubiquitous spyware and key loggers passwords are pointless. Two factor security or don't trust anything important to a system.
My passwords for things are simple, but I only trust important data to to factor. I just assume anything only password protected is compromised.
Reading comprehension like your failure to understand the part of the summary where they point out that people put forth and defended arguments for the position that was the opposite of how they originally answered?
Or the failure of the people who quickly modded you insightful despite your not even seeing something in the summary, or not understanding if you did?
I was sought out specifically by a government agency because of some research work I had done and some tools I had developed - they basically had a position that was an EXACT match for my skills, just in a broader scope.
I had to submit my CV to their automated system and was rejected because there was a typo in one of the filter criteria for their automated screening system. Then when they fixed it and I resubmitted, because I was found unqualified previously I was booted out.
They reset the job listing, triple checked the criteria, had me re-format my resume and submit it from a different email address just to make sure it wouldn't reject, but then when a human HR manager looked, she noted I had been rejected previously (but not why) and rejected it again.
Bottom line, you need smart people handling your hiring, and you need to make damn sure your automated systems are helping rather than hindering getting good people in there.
What's funny is that they wound up hiring me as a consultant (costing them at least 3x as much as hiring me on staff would cost) for the work, which worked out great for me since I was able to keep my old job and do the new work telecommuting with only the occasional trip to various sites.
This is a huge problem in the US - our first responders are not well trained in handling people in emotional distress or who are mentally ill. Even medical first responders tend to be extremely ill equipped to handle this. Often by their ham-handed approach to things they make a situation much, much worse than it needs to be.
There are efforts to train LEOs and other first responders, but the problem is that by and large, the qualities that police forces look for when hiring officers do not tend to mesh well with the qualities ideal for working well with the mentally ill.
It's a horrible situation, and one that keeps on getting made worse in the US because politicians want to be seen as tough on crime to satisfy a bloodthirsty population out for revenge and punishment rather than rehabilitation and prevention.
It should look nice enough that it isn't jarringly ugly, handle transitions between tasks gracefully enough that it doesn't feel abrupt or like it's taking forever, and everything *I* want to do regularly (not what the designers think I'll want to do regularly) should be immediately accessible and in a position that I find most comfortable.
Difficulty: I don't want to have to screw around configuring everything - I want my "smart" devices to be smart enough to figure out how I work and get better over time, but also not seem to randomly rearrange things without my realizing it.
What I would love would be some kind of calibration application that I can use to do examples of very common tasks (write a letter, compose a text, create a spreadsheet, create an email + attachment, add/remove contacts from a distribution list, etc. and so on) and that will gauge how I do them in some fashion (maybe have me do them in 3-5 different ways), compare each step of that process for speed & efficiency on my part, and then create a generic profile that has every kind of basic UI function in it and that can be exported to any kind of application that would use some sort of standard skinning library so that I can have literally ANY piece of software I use work exactly the same way, so that ANY device I get in the future can automatically configure itself to a way I feel most comfortable working, without my having to bother setting it up appropriately. Kind of like how speech recognition software learns from you over time and gets trained.
Let me create a profile for any given category of object or software. Video games should be able to import a specific control scheme, productivity apps should import a specific scheme for saving/loading/re-doing/undoing, and so on.
That's probably a really difficult task, but that's what I want from my devices and software. I want things to do what I want, how I want in a way that feels best for *me*, even if some designer somewhere insists that their way might be better.
And it isn't that I'm unwilling to learn new ways to do things, it's really more that I just want to not spend the time it takes to customize a new thing that's basically the same as an old thing unless there's some REALLY good reason that the old ways won't work anymore.
Garlic, onions and horseradish make virtually everything better.
Lemon or lime juice makes most of the things the above won't improve better.
Anything left after that will probably be improved by cayanne pepper or ground coffee, and if not, nothing can be done for the dish.
Then again, I have an incredibly weird sense of taste, since I can't abide most sweet things and would rather have something incredibly savory or salty for a dessert.
On the topic - seaweed is an awesome addition to many dishes. I'm starting to do a lot of vegetarian type cooking, and have been incorporating a LOT of seaweed, quinoa (instead of rice) and red+green kale into dishes lately. The seaweed adds a little bit of depth to the flavor that the other things don't have, as well as having a nice effect on the texture of the dish.
Do they have addon and macro support? Or even just macros?
I was a Juggernaut and I had a HUGE number of keybinds I had to manage for every fight and it was just painful to try to both maintain situational awareness when tanking and also manage all those keybinds and abilities that procced without macros.
The other issue I had was with the way abilities were tied to animations, which meant that if you hit a button too soon (which ALWAYS happens when you have a huge number of keybinds to manage) you would wind up skipping an activation or canceling an activation, or doing something else.
I liked most everything about the game except for the gameplay - no macros in this day and age is a deal breaker, and I don't honestly know what they were thinking tying all abilities in an MMO where there are various degrees of latency to animations.
And, I should say, I knew you were being sarcastic/describing consoles, but I didn't want the op to imagine anyone actually thought it was a good idea.
It's actually a really stupid idea. Why the fuck would I, as a consumer, want to have to reboot to play a game, screw around keeping track of all discs or USB drives or whatever, and lose the ability to do anything else with my computer when it's playing a game?
On top of that, yes, as you say, hardware support would be problematic. Updates would be a pain in the ass. There would be absolutely no way of knowing if any two games would do something incredibly weird to your system because maybe neither one of them was developed with an eye towards checking if, I dunno, that space on the hard drive it is writing a patch to was occupied by anything.
It's just a staggeringly stupid idea that doesn't solve any problems and serves no purpose. Literally encasing games in human feces would be a better idea because at least then it might serve the purpose of reducing shoplifting losses.
That said, pitch it to Ubisoft, they have a history of trying out pants on head retarded ideas and may pay well for it.
If you are paying for your PhD in psychology it means you don't have an assistantship, and it also means you will have a very, very, very hard time competing against other people once you graduate. Doing IT work during your graduate studies will make you even less desirable as a graduate because it's nice that you have skills in that area, but those don't translate to useful research skills, and there are a fair number of computer savvy grads coming out who also have research skills and experience, so they are vastly more desirable.
In my lab, we bin any post-doc who applies who didn't have an assistantship because, well, what's wrong with them that nobody wanted to take them on? And we would also have to spend far, far more time training them thawe would someone who had been doing research or working with faculty during their graduate studies at that level.
If you do have an assistantship, there is really no way in hell you're going to have time to handle everything. I know they *say* 20ish hours of work per week, but it really goes far beyond that.
Being a freelancer/consultant eats up a LOT of time. I mean for every billable hour you have, or for every project you get, you are going to be spending a ton of time getting the work or adjusting to your client's changing demands. It sounds like you're really green (else wise why are you asking such basic questions here) so my prediction is that you would get eaten alive.
Seriously, as someone who is now working in your desired field and who has in the past done IT consulting, focus on your studies, get in a lab to do research (eveif you are in a clinical program - research experience makes you vastly more desirable in any number of ways) and get a job that has extremely defined hours if you need to pay the bills. Unless you are super human (and your basic question indicates to me that you aren't) you will just be completely screwed.
Again, I don't meats shit on your hopes, but seriously, if you want your PhD to be useful and worthwhile, focus on that and don't worry about tech stuff except as a hobby.
Signed, someone who went through her first semester in a clinical science psych PhD program thinking she could easily handle the coursework, TA and RA responsibilities, and also a part time job that required any thought at all, and learned from her mistake.
The main distinction is that one of them is proven to create victims and one of them is not.
Creating child porn by actually filming/taking pictures of or otherwise documenting the sexual abuse of a child absolutely is not just a thought crime. A real child is being victimized. Some people who create child porn do so because it gets them off, but some others do so for financial gain to be had from selling it to people who like viewing it. Because of that, simply owning it means that it is possible that one owning child porn is contributing to the financial incentive behind those creating it, and adding to the problem. The main point here is that a direct causal link can be reasonably drawn: If you have a real photo of a child really being sexually abused, it is absolutely the case that a child was sexually abused to create that photo.
So, with real child porn it absolutely is not a thought crime - it's an actual crime, and people who possess it should be charged with a crime because they are to some extent intentionally facilitating the abuse of children. It may be an incredibly slender connection, but it is absolutely a connection to a child being sexually assaulted.
With fictional stuff - drawings, photoshops, stories - there is absolutely no proven causal link between people writing and consuming those things and actual children being abused sexually. It may be that drawings, photoshops and stories about child sexual abuse encourage some people to do it, but it can't be proven because there are no children directly involved in the creation of those things. It would be roughly the same as saying that violent video games lead to murder sprees and as such should be banned. The problem here is that some people think that their own personal distaste for such things means that there must be a direct link between those things and children being hurt - that is not so. The main point here is that if you have some fiction about a child being sexually abused, you cannot say that absolutely a child must have been sexually abused to make that fiction.
So, because there is no direct link between fictional child porn and children actually being hurt, THAT would be a thought crime. It would be roughly equivalent to putting someone up on charges of attempted murder because they spent all day playing Call of Duty and so clearly they must be about to kill someone. There's no actual child being assaulted/no person being killed, so there's no actual connection to a child being assaulted/person being killed. No link.
There's also a grey area: Does fictionalized child porn create a culture in which child sexual abuse becomes more acceptable or more likely? Proponents of bans on fictionalized child porn say yes it does, while opponents either cite free speech or theories that fictionalized child porn reduces the likelihood of people seeking real child porn or actually abusing children themselves. Depending on how convincing one finds the arguments, one could go either way.
Personally, I find any kind of representation of child sexual abuse presented as a form of sexual gratification (fictionalized or real) to be disgusting, but I'm at least willing to acknowledge that my being disgusted by something doesn't mean it should be criminalized if it can't be shown to actually cause harm to innocents. That's something all too many people who are on a "think of the children" crusade don't get: their personal distaste doesn't automatically change the facts to suit their opinions.
The zeroth thing you should do is make damn sure your skills are sufficient to provide the kind of service you want to provide, and that you know what you can provide.
First thing you should do is look to local chambers of commerce in your country. They will give you plenty of advice and help on the business side of things that is relevant to your region.
Second thing you should do is go to a ton of local meetups for professionals in the area you want to freelance in so that you have some ideas as to what other people are doing. You also may make some contacts there who would be willing to take you under their wing and give you a trial working on some stuff that they have, to see if you're any good.
I'm not really sure how to feel about this.
You have a funny way of spelling Castro.
Independent votes mean nothing when it comes to POTUS because the system only rewards parties that go past a certain threshold that even Ross Perot couldn't cross.
Independent groups need to win at the state and local level and build up steam before they'll matter at the national level.
Or we need to change the way elections work.
Let me put it this way: In Montana, one of the states where you think a third party (Libertarian) candidate could actually get a foothold, they ran Poppa Smurf, a man who turned himself blue in fear of Y2K, for Senate.
Voting 3rd party is a joke in this country until we change the rules.
Maybe not where you work, but at my office we had cake that day.
We have cake pretty much every day, since a bunch of people I work with are insanely avid bakers.
But, if you are caught carrying a gun without a license you go to jail for a very, very long time.
If you commit and are convicted of a crime more serious than a minor traffic violation while carrying a gun (even if you don't use it), you go to jail for a very, very long time.
If your gun kills someone else, you should be tried for murder, and allowed to plead self-defense, but even obvious cases of self-defense must go to trial to avoid things like the Trayvon Martin case. If your gun kills someone by accident (such as a child who finds it and uses it) you should be charged with negligent homicide.
Free up space by letting people who committed non-violent crimes (read: drug users) out and legalize drugs. Save a bunch of money.
Wanna carry a gun? Then you had damn well better be extremely responsible when you do so or you will very likely end up going to jail for a very, very long time.
Most gun owners are very responsible people, so they shouldn't have any problem avoiding penalties, while the people who are the problem - irresponsible gun owners and criminals - will wind up going away.
I think of our gun policy as similar to DRM: Currently it's a trivial obstacle to those who want to pirate while it's a huge pain in the ass to legit users. Let's make it easy for legit users to do what they want, but absolutely crucify those who abuse that right by behaving irresponsibly.
He comes off as more mentally ill/paranoid than dumb, which is a shame. Most people in good mental health don't spout off paranoid fantasies vilifying people who simply have different politics, and that goes for people at any point of the spectrum.
And just to preempt the obvious, no, saying someone is likely mentally ill is in no way villifying them, it just means they should get some help.
If anyone would be a good employer it would be a foundation that works in some aspect of mental health, whether it be support, advocacy, research erc.
I used to work across the street from one of the Lighthouse for the Blind organization and at least half of their staffers were visually impaired.
You can have a job where they get you while also doing some good work for other people who need it, and everyone wins.
At the last corporate job I held our managers would frequently push the development staff to put things out before they had been fully tested.
Why punish the people who write the software when often they have an extremely limited amount of control over things?
Businesses selling shitty, insecure software should absolutely be held accountable. Individual developers within those businesses being directly liable? No way.
Why not hold each factory worker who was responsible for a round of ammunition or piece of a missile liable for murder when a drone strike takes out a civilian?
Hold the people responsible for making decisions responsible, not the people who are just putting things together.
Yeah, I like my standing set-up, too. I tend to dance around a bit, sort of stretch, do leg lifts and such while I'm working, and I really don't even have to think about it. In addition, I do multiple muscle tension exercises as well - tightening my abs and stuff like that.
I'm considering adding a treadmill to the mix as well - for the times when I'm not too focused to be able to walk, walking and reading web stuff would be brilliant.
Obviously that set-up won't work for everyone, or in every office, but I find that with good shoes and a proper anti-fatigue mat I am quite easily able to stand for 5-10 hours (with appropriate breaks from being at my desk, of course) without an issue.
I've also noticed that I feel healthier in general and tend to have more energy. It was a relatively easy thing to get used to (took me less than a week before I didn't feel like I wanted to have a chair around for a safety net) and was extremely cheap to set up. A win all around.
The only downside I have found is that if I don't wear shoes (I use this at home and work) my feet can hurt a fair amount at the end of the day. So I just wear a pair of clogs while I'm standing and it's great.
Exactly that. The writing was awful - I read Dragon's Egg when I was 12 or so and even then I could tell his prose was absolute shit. But the ideas - those were awesome.
The sequel wasn't as good idea-wise, though it was somewhat interesting and if I remember right the prose wass a bit of an improvement (though still really not good).
Record the lecture (both video and audio) and write notes by hand on paper since there's a benefit to having to process information that way. Grab the notes online as well, and you have everything you could want.
When I returned to school for my graduate program that's what I did in my classes and it yielded a very good set of sources for review. I would re-watch classes with the video and audio sped up a bit - 1 hour of class time with the extraneous stuff taken out and sped up would take me about 20-30 minutes to review, depending on the instructor. This was 4-6 years ago so I only recorded essential classes, as storage was at a bit of a premium.
The only thing to be wary of is not posting the videos or handing them out to other students without the permission of your instructor. It's a good way to get them to ban recording.
The way to do this at the publicly funded level would be to do it as follows:
Take a list of everyone who wants to participate in sport and measure relevant physical values (mass, height, V02max whatever) and break them into brackets based on whatever kind of cutoff point.
Each bracket is funded based on population in that bracket - if you have 90% of the athletes in one bracket, 90% of the funding goes to that bracket, even if it isn't the "top tier" bracket (which is usually where the most money goes now for fewer people).
At the end of each season, if a player is dominating their bracket (as determined by a statistical analysis of their performance over the season) they are moved up to the next bracket, even if their physical stats aren't at the same level. The reverse happens for a player who is struggling - they get dropped down a bracket even if their stats suggest they should perform better.
This would have the added benefit of helping out athletes of either (any?) sex/gender by not making tiny guys compete against giant dudes in sports just because they're guys, and would also let very competitive women play at a higher level. Additionally, it would also encourage more people to get involved in sport since it absolutely would be more democratic, and would probably lead to much closer/more competitive games since the people would be more closely physically matched.
The only disadvantages I would see would be social - some people are assholes and would mercilessly taunt a guy who was competing in a league mostly comprised of women, while some women may not feel comfortable competing with men in their sport (witness some issues of social anxiety in mixed gender classrooms being suggested for poor female performance in some subjects vs. single gender classrooms).
This should be done at the *publicly* funded level only - at the professional level people can do whatever the hell they want, as far as I'm concerned.
I would think that the parts that aren't currently printable could be made by a fairly well equipped (but not prohibitively so) home machinist. They might not be of the same quality as those produced by a gun manufacturer, but surely they would be sufficient for a functional firearm.
Personally, I think the gun genie is mostly out of the bottle in the US: We will never, ever, be able to have meaningful or useful gun control laws. What we should do instead is have incredibly toothy gun use laws that will make damn sure someone who uses a gun in a crime or in an irresponsible manner and gets caught is absolutely not going to be able to do so again in the future, and to limit the number of people who imagine they're Dirty Harry and try to take the law into their own hands.
I say completely stop trying to control guns, make the punishments for using a gun improperly incredibly severe (like, life in prison without parole level severe for just brandishing a firearm/being armed during a crime), and make space in the justice system for handling this by legalizing drugs, letting non-violent offenders out of prison, and making jail/prison only for violent offenses with everyone else getting community service and parole.
Take the money we currently flush down the toilet in our War on Drugs in the US and spend it instead on properly funding mental health preventative and treatment services across the country.
I guarantee that if we did these things we would begin to see a rapid decrease in gun related crime (and in crime overall) and an overall increase in public health and safety.
But trying to restrict firearms is, in the US, a completely lost cause. There are just too many guns out there, too easy to get by too many different channels that the only thing gun control laws wind up doing are inconveniencing people who would be responsible and doing nothing to stop the people who would be irresponsible.