The FBI and other police are all well aware of course that serious bombers with actual plans and devices almost never make THREATS.
No, they act. They attack. They detonate their device and then later take credit for it, if at all. They do not phone ahead.
People who phone ahead are making empty threats or they are late for work or out sick and want to be away from their job for the day without penalty. There is a LOT of "hey I don't want to have THAT meeting with my boss today so I'll just phone in a bomb threat and then I won't have to deal with the boss!" bullshit.
It's true. Got laid off last year from an IT company, not IBM but similar. At age 45, I still look 30s but I still have had huge trouble getting interviews and when they do talk to me, I don't get call backs.
My salary needs are not extreme. But my 15+ years of experience is not as useful to these people as somebody fresh out of school who will work long hours for lower pay.
I can't blame them too much. When I go to the store, I normally look at whether there is a store brand item that will do the same task for less and buy accordingly. So if I won't pay for a name brand when there is a cheaper, almost-as-good store brand, why would a job be different?
This has pushed me to reconsider everything including a drastic career change. I'm not qualified to do anything else so I'd have to start over. Starting over at age 45 is scary. I can't afford to live on what I made starting out years ago or what starter jobs pay now. Bills don't care what you make.
What am I supposed to DO, give up and fade away? That seems to be where I am heading.
It's no secret IBM has been offshoring as many workers as they possibly can. Before I was laid off from an unrelated company, I used to work with a huge team within IBM who worked to support my client. They were the client's entire IT department.
Well, the client didn't like IBM's costs. Any conference call would have 30-40 IBMers from all over the place sitting in and billing for the time, even if most of them had nothing to contribute, and they loved these calls. And they didn't like leasing mainframe time or something. Anyway, the upshot was that the client hired a couple of the lead IBMers directly and IBM offshored everything else.
Net headcount stayed the same but it was really a couple thousand layoffs in the US and a similar number of hires in India.
When my team had to deal with this client, we had to talk to India and it's not our fault to say we could not understand them AT ALL. When the phone rings at 4:00AM something is broken and it helps if they can TELL us what the hell is wrong. We had to insist on an email-first policy. This greatly impacted my company's ability to support the client within SLA. We had to basically diag everything on our side to see if we could find a problem they might be calling about, and for our part, we didn't HAVE afterhour support, only a rotating on-call person for "something is on fire" emergencies, not routine troubleshooting like "the FTP was 45 seconds late for one file. Please provide root cause."
So this pushed a lot of burden where it wasn't needed.
I get that IBM thinks it can replace high-paid US workers with much cheaper workers in India, but at some point they will run out of jobs they can outsource and the annual labor savings will stop. It may also stop when India begins demanding more pay. It won't go on forever.
And then where will IBM outsource next? China? Russia?
You don't even need your FIOS. I'm on a 100mbit cable connection in a major city and I can still have a movie in my hands quickly, in part because I use a seedbox in Europe to do the actual torrenting. That thing grabs pretty much any movie in under five minutes, usually less than two. Quite fast and keeps me from getting DMCA notices.
And then it's a simple matter to download the movie to my home PC. FTP over TLS over a VPN. Total time needed is less than 15 min.
The worst thing about this egregious program, and for that matter,all the big "tap them all!" programs, is that this one didn't even dent crime.
Riverside, the most monitored place in the US outside of a prison cell, had no less crime than anywhere else in the LA area. So it did NOTHING.
Fuckers. You take away our privacy in the name of protecting us but you fail to actually even do that, and yet we're left without our privacy and nobody holds you accountable for lying and failing to do your apparently job. What a bullshit world this is.
You can't disable updates on Windows 10, only "defer" them, at least on non enterprise versions.
Of course you can disable it, by doing nothing more than providing the machine with no internet access. Or if you want to get fancy, let it have access but block all the update servers.
But generally, a given PC doesn't have to have internet access to still do useful work. You determine if you need that access or not, and if you do, take steps to keep the machine from talking to Microsoft. It should not take much effort, certainly an amount of work worth the end result of a machine unencumbered by updates.
This phone belonged to the place where this guy worked. So when he murdered a bunch of people, I am sure HR started a process to terminate his network access and revoke his use of things like this phone, in part by changing the passwords.
He may have died in a shower of bullets but god damn it Sally in HR was gonna cross every T and dot every i on that termination form!
Do they handle commercial blu rays well enough? I've got one I wanted to copy and I tried the Slysoft demo but all it would tell me is that it could not look up the decryption tables (or some such thing) while in demo mode.
So I could not really test it to see if it would work for what I wanted to do without first paying for it, but I didn't want to pay for it if it could not do what I needed. Kind of a paradox.
Deadpool just delivered a whole pile of new box office records and around $150 million in ticket sales.
The way to defeat piracy is to make movies, like this one, which are so good, people will happily pay to go see them. I know, the idea of people happily paying to go see a movie is a concept Hollywood hasn't understood much. But now they are looking at a huge pile of money, which of course will all end up as losses thanks to Hollywood accounting, but making good movies people want to see is how you fight piracy. Hollywood needs to wake the hell up and learn from this.
You missed the elephant in the room. What maintains peace? Among other things, a populace who is otherwise engaged in things that keep them from thinking about war. Namely, having a job, food on the table, a home, and the levels of property and prosperity that their particular culture or society has decided are normal.
For Americans, this is something like mom and dad both educated and employed in good jobs with decent benefits, and they own a house in the suburbs stocked with the latest gadgets and plenty of everything, several kids, a dog, and probably two SUVs. These people carry a fair amount of debt to pay for all these things but they are largely happy and the conflict in their lives mostly comes from neighbors not mowing the lawn or local taxes or infidelity between the spouses.
But take away one of the tentpole jobs and suddenly the whole thing begins to collapse. A life and bill payments built around the idea of a paycheck every few weeks can't cope. If both parents end up out of a job, then suddenly people who had a stable, if boring, life, are facing calamity. And why? Because their job has been offshored.
You say offshoring builds ties but it only does so in a supply chain sort of way. When it comes to flesh and blood people, they need to be able to earn an income to be able to afford the iPhones made by Foxconn. If jobs go away, no more iPhones and no more food, shelter, SUVs in the driveway, etc.
Get enough unhappy people and war becomes more likely, not less.
It's probably not even one hundred million. I've seen politicians take a firm stance and vote for or against legislation with only a few thousand dollars in contribution on the table.
"Here in the US Project 25 (P25 or APCO-25) is a suite of standards for digital radio communications for federal users, but for state/county and local public safety organizations including police dispatch channels are using Mototrbo DMR digital standard."
It should say "Here in the US Project 25 (P25 or APCO-25) is a suite of standards for digital radio communications for federal users, but SOME state/county and local public safety organizations including police dispatch channels are using Mototrbo DMR digital standard."
Most state/local agencies are in fact using P25. Some are using DMR, others use other things. The same is true for commercial businesses. They can operate in P25, DMR, Nextedge, etc on a variety of bands, which means it's rather more complicated to hear everyone and everything at the same time.
I've had an MDR380 for a while but it's been sitting in a drawer because DMR for amateur radio is a joke.
They've built all these local, regional, and national talk groups but everyone is afraid to use them in case somebody else wants to use them, so everyone who does try is either scared or they are idiots who hog it for tens of minutes.
And the DMR system is broken such that when you turn on your radio, you have no idea if the repeater you are calling is linked into anything. The act of transmitting will cause an idling repeater to wake up and reconnect at which point you stomp on an existing conversation if any are taking place.
So DRM for hams is a real mess that makes D-STAR look amazing by comparison.
Anyway, now maybe this 380 will have a use. But probably not.
Translation: State Farm plans to spam the fuck out of you, chasing every step you take with coupons and offers and helpful hints and discount offers on vitamins and shoes.
You: walk to your mailbox to get the mail State Farm: Hey Billy, looks like you're going out today. Did you know we can offer you a discount on home owner's insurance for multiple car households, and did you fully understand and appreciate the paragraph in your policy that cancels coverage for anything we don't feel like paying, and hey here is a coupon for a hamburger and fries! State Farm: Dear Mr. Billy, careful analysis of your risk profile has revealed areas of concern which will cause us to raise your premium at the next renewal. Specifically, your consumption of a hamburger and fries puts you into a higher risk pool. And your desire to save money on insurance by pursuing multi-policy discounts indicate that you have or are seeking to have extra insurance policies which is a risk factor for loss and fraud. For these reasons your rates are doubling. You can appeal but we don't care. Suck it brother! State Farm: Hey Billy, have you heard about our multi-policy discounts? Online Agent Ashley, who is totally not the Ashley Comcast uses, is ready to talk to you NOW!
I don't buy it. The public happily flings piles of cash at really bad movies which in turn causes other filmmaker to make the say kind of movies since, well, the public WILL go see it.
Case in point, the James Bond film Skyfall. It made HUGE box office but when you actually look at what was in the film, it was just a generic action movie with the Bond name stuck on it, and there was nothing in the film that had anything to do with the Bond trademarks (gadgets, babes, really bad villain). Instead there were no gadgets worth mentioning, nor babes, the villain and in fact the entire cast were idiots, and the whole plot only happened the way it did because the writers made it so, not because it made any sense whatsoever.
Nobody cared. A lot of stuff blew up and a lot of tickets got sold. For the most recent Bond film, Spectre, I believe I read that it had within it the biggest practical effects explosion ever filmed for a movie. They bragged heavily about this and for my part I know nothing else about the movie except they blew up a lot of pyro and gasoline bombs. Which makes my point that it's now all about how big you can make the boom and far less about story or acting or direction. Nah. Just toss in some pyro and gasoline bombs, film it in slo mo and rake in the dollars. And because you do rake in the money, you and 50 other people will make the same film only bigger next time.
Visit "witnesses" and tell them "You didn't see anything strange in the sky, did you?" in a menacing manner. Thus there are no "sightings" to worry about.
In truth, they brought in J.Allen Hynek as a Project Bluebook skeptic. And he was deeply involved in debunking sightings and reports. But by the time he left Bluebook, he had begun to see patterns of evidence he could not dismiss or ignore, and became convinced he had been wrong and something actually was happening. The man walked in a scientist with a closed mind and by the time he left, he'd changed his mind completely. That doesn't happen without a good reason. Hynek remained a UFO believer for the rest of his life.
The human mind does have limits, driven by the assumptions we learn or develop as we age, and also by our senses. We can only directly perceive a certain number of things that we can see or touch or feel or taste.
The universe may be full of dimensions and forces and things we can't see and therefore don't know about. Dark matter is one, something we know little about and can barely detect yet it is apparently the most common kind of matter. And we can't even see it, touch it, anything.
If there are other things like dark matter, well, we can't see them and don't know about them and have no theories about them. Our view of the universe will never be complete and we wouldn't even know it. Some people say they see ghosts or sense things. We dismiss them as delusions or worse and never take it seriously as an aspect of something we cannot normally detect. We write it off.
And then we have this very narrow assumption about where life can exist; the so-called Goldilocks zone. We refuse to believe there is any other possibility. Yet we admit we don't know everything about the universe. We are shocked when we find worlds with the same geologic features we have here. Why are we so shocked that things are the same?
But if we don't know even know sand dunes form the same in many places (holy shit, it should be news if they DIDN'T, not that they DO), how do we dare make this judgement about where life can be? Why do we assume it has to be life as we know it? This view is ridiculously close to the idea that the Earth is the center of all and the template for all. And it's wrong.
The only thing we know for sure is that we don't know an awful lot. And yes it may be beyond human comprehension to ever really know what's going on.
It does not help that we spend a huge chunk of our lives learning basic schooling, toil for a while and then die. We don't live long enough to actually spend a long time examining the universe. We lack perspective. We spend too many good energetic years stuck in classrooms learning the way people learned 200 years ago. Hell, we still embrace Greek concepts of higher education that go back thousands of years. Is this the best way? Nobody knows because nobody will try anything else.
Not only is this not illegal, this is how it's been done as far back as there have been TV shows and movies. But it is also done with books, music, video games and board games, computer software, and so on. It the US, the markets are as small as major cities. So a TV station in LA pays for rights to Seinfeld and another station in San Francisco pays again, perhaps not even the same price. This goes on across the US in city after city. And TBS pays for a national cable license.
And in the end you get the program sales copy bragging about how the show has been cleared in 9 of the 10 top markets and 45 of the top 50, plus countries. Add to that streaming services around the world -Netflix isn't the only such streaming company.
The bottom line is that the companies who make this stuff have an interest in getting as many separate buyers to pay as much as possible for every single piece.
It's been this way forever. It isn't going to change now because untold sums of money are vested in keeping it the way it is. Just as an example, back in the day Carsey-Warner made well over $1 billion dollars selling reruns of Roseanne to TV stations around the US. Each station paid up to millions of dollars PER episode. Likewise, reruns of the Cosby show sitcom (once THE powerhouse show, hard as that may be to believe now) also went for in excess of a billion dollars.
Now, there is no way a Netflix or anyone else can possibly top that kind of money. Why should a Carsey-Warner settle for a percentage of that money from Netflix when they can get it all? Do you know how many salespeople made huge commission off that, and how many TV stations were able to sell massive amounts of commercial time on those shows? If you want to be on Cosby, you gotta buy a whole package of ads to run around the clock, you see,
Syndication isn't that valuable any more in the US but there is still a lot of money in it outside the US.
The thing with Trump is that he proudly proclaims he does, and will do if elected, pretty much as he pleases.
So Trump on his own could decide to support a bigger space program OR he could decide we don't need one at all, purely at his whimsy. Now it can be said that the current system of idiots arguing about things and not getting a lot done is not very effective, but it does occasionally come up with things that are good ideas even if they cost money or are otherwise somehow unpalatable.
Trump's approach, and again one he is proud of, is to declare his support or not for things. No appeal. No second opinion. If Trump says we get a bridge to nowhere Alaska, we get one. If Trump says NO to fixing the 405, or food stamps or tax refunds or who knows what, then we don't get them.
He isn't interested in listening to opinions or research. He makes off the cuff decisions. And not all of them are good. And he seems to feel zero remorse for bad choices or mistakes. There is no ownership or accountability or humility, which are traits needed and useful to being President. Trump would make a good king or something, where the throne rules and that's all and that's law. But we deserve better than that. We deserve a president who will make decisions he or she doesn't like, things that make them sick in the stomach or keep them up at night, because somethings those decisions have to be made. We don't need somebody making their choices on whimsy.
Slashdot Mirror
The FBI and other police are all well aware of course that serious bombers with actual plans and devices almost never make THREATS.
No, they act. They attack. They detonate their device and then later take credit for it, if at all. They do not phone ahead.
People who phone ahead are making empty threats or they are late for work or out sick and want to be away from their job for the day without penalty. There is a LOT of "hey I don't want to have THAT meeting with my boss today so I'll just phone in a bomb threat and then I won't have to deal with the boss!" bullshit.
He built in New York and Colorado Springs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Not even remotely the same purpose, same frequency or even the same construction or appearance.
But other than that, sure, it's identical.
.
It might go something like this:
Shit!
SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!
SHIT!
Shit.
Shit.
Sorry to see Fuji go, but Polaroid film is still in production elsewhere.
Fuji's exit won't really change much.
It's true. Got laid off last year from an IT company, not IBM but similar. At age 45, I still look 30s but I still have had huge trouble getting interviews and when they do talk to me, I don't get call backs.
My salary needs are not extreme. But my 15+ years of experience is not as useful to these people as somebody fresh out of school who will work long hours for lower pay.
I can't blame them too much. When I go to the store, I normally look at whether there is a store brand item that will do the same task for less and buy accordingly. So if I won't pay for a name brand when there is a cheaper, almost-as-good store brand, why would a job be different?
This has pushed me to reconsider everything including a drastic career change. I'm not qualified to do anything else so I'd have to start over. Starting over at age 45 is scary. I can't afford to live on what I made starting out years ago or what starter jobs pay now. Bills don't care what you make.
What am I supposed to DO, give up and fade away? That seems to be where I am heading.
It's no secret IBM has been offshoring as many workers as they possibly can. Before I was laid off from an unrelated company, I used to work with a huge team within IBM who worked to support my client. They were the client's entire IT department.
Well, the client didn't like IBM's costs. Any conference call would have 30-40 IBMers from all over the place sitting in and billing for the time, even if most of them had nothing to contribute, and they loved these calls. And they didn't like leasing mainframe time or something. Anyway, the upshot was that the client hired a couple of the lead IBMers directly and IBM offshored everything else.
Net headcount stayed the same but it was really a couple thousand layoffs in the US and a similar number of hires in India.
When my team had to deal with this client, we had to talk to India and it's not our fault to say we could not understand them AT ALL. When the phone rings at 4:00AM something is broken and it helps if they can TELL us what the hell is wrong. We had to insist on an email-first policy. This greatly impacted my company's ability to support the client within SLA. We had to basically diag everything on our side to see if we could find a problem they might be calling about, and for our part, we didn't HAVE afterhour support, only a rotating on-call person for "something is on fire" emergencies, not routine troubleshooting like "the FTP was 45 seconds late for one file. Please provide root cause."
So this pushed a lot of burden where it wasn't needed.
I get that IBM thinks it can replace high-paid US workers with much cheaper workers in India, but at some point they will run out of jobs they can outsource and the annual labor savings will stop. It may also stop when India begins demanding more pay. It won't go on forever.
And then where will IBM outsource next? China? Russia?
You don't even need your FIOS. I'm on a 100mbit cable connection in a major city and I can still have a movie in my hands quickly, in part because I use a seedbox in Europe to do the actual torrenting. That thing grabs pretty much any movie in under five minutes, usually less than two. Quite fast and keeps me from getting DMCA notices.
And then it's a simple matter to download the movie to my home PC. FTP over TLS over a VPN. Total time needed is less than 15 min.
The worst thing about this egregious program, and for that matter,all the big "tap them all!" programs, is that this one didn't even dent crime.
Riverside, the most monitored place in the US outside of a prison cell, had no less crime than anywhere else in the LA area. So it did NOTHING.
Fuckers. You take away our privacy in the name of protecting us but you fail to actually even do that, and yet we're left without our privacy and nobody holds you accountable for lying and failing to do your apparently job. What a bullshit world this is.
You can't disable updates on Windows 10, only "defer" them, at least on non enterprise versions.
Of course you can disable it, by doing nothing more than providing the machine with no internet access. Or if you want to get fancy, let it have access but block all the update servers.
But generally, a given PC doesn't have to have internet access to still do useful work. You determine if you need that access or not, and if you do, take steps to keep the machine from talking to Microsoft. It should not take much effort, certainly an amount of work worth the end result of a machine unencumbered by updates.
I doubt it will be used in court considering the owner of the phone is dead.
The OWNER of the phone was the place where he worked. It was "company issued" not his own device.
The owner of the device has given consent to search the device. But they don't have the PIN. The dead man had that.
This phone belonged to the place where this guy worked. So when he murdered a bunch of people, I am sure HR started a process to terminate his network access and revoke his use of things like this phone, in part by changing the passwords.
He may have died in a shower of bullets but god damn it Sally in HR was gonna cross every T and dot every i on that termination form!
If an intruder has physical access to your damn network, you have a LOT more to worry about than VOIP/SIP calls they might be sniffing.
Do they handle commercial blu rays well enough? I've got one I wanted to copy and I tried the Slysoft demo but all it would tell me is that it could not look up the decryption tables (or some such thing) while in demo mode.
So I could not really test it to see if it would work for what I wanted to do without first paying for it, but I didn't want to pay for it if it could not do what I needed. Kind of a paradox.
Deadpool just delivered a whole pile of new box office records and around $150 million in ticket sales.
The way to defeat piracy is to make movies, like this one, which are so good, people will happily pay to go see them. I know, the idea of people happily paying to go see a movie is a concept Hollywood hasn't understood much. But now they are looking at a huge pile of money, which of course will all end up as losses thanks to Hollywood accounting, but making good movies people want to see is how you fight piracy. Hollywood needs to wake the hell up and learn from this.
You missed the elephant in the room. What maintains peace? Among other things, a populace who is otherwise engaged in things that keep them from thinking about war. Namely, having a job, food on the table, a home, and the levels of property and prosperity that their particular culture or society has decided are normal.
For Americans, this is something like mom and dad both educated and employed in good jobs with decent benefits, and they own a house in the suburbs stocked with the latest gadgets and plenty of everything, several kids, a dog, and probably two SUVs. These people carry a fair amount of debt to pay for all these things but they are largely happy and the conflict in their lives mostly comes from neighbors not mowing the lawn or local taxes or infidelity between the spouses.
But take away one of the tentpole jobs and suddenly the whole thing begins to collapse. A life and bill payments built around the idea of a paycheck every few weeks can't cope. If both parents end up out of a job, then suddenly people who had a stable, if boring, life, are facing calamity. And why? Because their job has been offshored.
You say offshoring builds ties but it only does so in a supply chain sort of way. When it comes to flesh and blood people, they need to be able to earn an income to be able to afford the iPhones made by Foxconn. If jobs go away, no more iPhones and no more food, shelter, SUVs in the driveway, etc.
Get enough unhappy people and war becomes more likely, not less.
It's probably not even one hundred million. I've seen politicians take a firm stance and vote for or against legislation with only a few thousand dollars in contribution on the table.
A lot of things happen for not a lot of money,
This statement is not correct:
"Here in the US Project 25 (P25 or APCO-25) is a suite of standards for digital radio communications for federal users, but for state/county and local public safety organizations including police dispatch channels are using Mototrbo DMR digital standard."
It should say "Here in the US Project 25 (P25 or APCO-25) is a suite of standards for digital radio communications for federal users, but SOME state/county and local public safety organizations including police dispatch channels are using Mototrbo DMR digital standard."
Most state/local agencies are in fact using P25. Some are using DMR, others use other things. The same is true for commercial businesses. They can operate in P25, DMR, Nextedge, etc on a variety of bands, which means it's rather more complicated to hear everyone and everything at the same time.
I've had an MDR380 for a while but it's been sitting in a drawer because DMR for amateur radio is a joke.
They've built all these local, regional, and national talk groups but everyone is afraid to use them in case somebody else wants to use them, so everyone who does try is either scared or they are idiots who hog it for tens of minutes.
And the DMR system is broken such that when you turn on your radio, you have no idea if the repeater you are calling is linked into anything. The act of transmitting will cause an idling repeater to wake up and reconnect at which point you stomp on an existing conversation if any are taking place.
So DRM for hams is a real mess that makes D-STAR look amazing by comparison.
Anyway, now maybe this 380 will have a use. But probably not.
Translation: State Farm plans to spam the fuck out of you, chasing every step you take with coupons and offers and helpful hints and discount offers on vitamins and shoes.
You: walk to your mailbox to get the mail
State Farm: Hey Billy, looks like you're going out today. Did you know we can offer you a discount on home owner's insurance for multiple car households, and did you fully understand and appreciate the paragraph in your policy that cancels coverage for anything we don't feel like paying, and hey here is a coupon for a hamburger and fries!
State Farm: Dear Mr. Billy, careful analysis of your risk profile has revealed areas of concern which will cause us to raise your premium at the next renewal. Specifically, your consumption of a hamburger and fries puts you into a higher risk pool. And your desire to save money on insurance by pursuing multi-policy discounts indicate that you have or are seeking to have extra insurance policies which is a risk factor for loss and fraud. For these reasons your rates are doubling. You can appeal but we don't care. Suck it brother!
State Farm: Hey Billy, have you heard about our multi-policy discounts? Online Agent Ashley, who is totally not the Ashley Comcast uses, is ready to talk to you NOW!
I don't buy it. The public happily flings piles of cash at really bad movies which in turn causes other filmmaker to make the say kind of movies since, well, the public WILL go see it.
Case in point, the James Bond film Skyfall. It made HUGE box office but when you actually look at what was in the film, it was just a generic action movie with the Bond name stuck on it, and there was nothing in the film that had anything to do with the Bond trademarks (gadgets, babes, really bad villain). Instead there were no gadgets worth mentioning, nor babes, the villain and in fact the entire cast were idiots, and the whole plot only happened the way it did because the writers made it so, not because it made any sense whatsoever.
Nobody cared. A lot of stuff blew up and a lot of tickets got sold. For the most recent Bond film, Spectre, I believe I read that it had within it the biggest practical effects explosion ever filmed for a movie. They bragged heavily about this and for my part I know nothing else about the movie except they blew up a lot of pyro and gasoline bombs. Which makes my point that it's now all about how big you can make the boom and far less about story or acting or direction. Nah. Just toss in some pyro and gasoline bombs, film it in slo mo and rake in the dollars. And because you do rake in the money, you and 50 other people will make the same film only bigger next time.
There is only one step:
Visit "witnesses" and tell them "You didn't see anything strange in the sky, did you?" in a menacing manner. Thus there are no "sightings" to worry about.
In truth, they brought in J.Allen Hynek as a Project Bluebook skeptic. And he was deeply involved in debunking sightings and reports. But by the time he left Bluebook, he had begun to see patterns of evidence he could not dismiss or ignore, and became convinced he had been wrong and something actually was happening. The man walked in a scientist with a closed mind and by the time he left, he'd changed his mind completely. That doesn't happen without a good reason. Hynek remained a UFO believer for the rest of his life.
The human mind does have limits, driven by the assumptions we learn or develop as we age, and also by our senses. We can only directly perceive a certain number of things that we can see or touch or feel or taste.
The universe may be full of dimensions and forces and things we can't see and therefore don't know about. Dark matter is one, something we know little about and can barely detect yet it is apparently the most common kind of matter. And we can't even see it, touch it, anything.
If there are other things like dark matter, well, we can't see them and don't know about them and have no theories about them. Our view of the universe will never be complete and we wouldn't even know it. Some people say they see ghosts or sense things. We dismiss them as delusions or worse and never take it seriously as an aspect of something we cannot normally detect. We write it off.
And then we have this very narrow assumption about where life can exist; the so-called Goldilocks zone. We refuse to believe there is any other possibility. Yet we admit we don't know everything about the universe. We are shocked when we find worlds with the same geologic features we have here. Why are we so shocked that things are the same?
But if we don't know even know sand dunes form the same in many places (holy shit, it should be news if they DIDN'T, not that they DO), how do we dare make this judgement about where life can be? Why do we assume it has to be life as we know it? This view is ridiculously close to the idea that the Earth is the center of all and the template for all. And it's wrong.
The only thing we know for sure is that we don't know an awful lot. And yes it may be beyond human comprehension to ever really know what's going on.
It does not help that we spend a huge chunk of our lives learning basic schooling, toil for a while and then die. We don't live long enough to actually spend a long time examining the universe. We lack perspective. We spend too many good energetic years stuck in classrooms learning the way people learned 200 years ago. Hell, we still embrace Greek concepts of higher education that go back thousands of years. Is this the best way? Nobody knows because nobody will try anything else.
Not only is this not illegal, this is how it's been done as far back as there have been TV shows and movies. But it is also done with books, music, video games and board games, computer software, and so on. It the US, the markets are as small as major cities. So a TV station in LA pays for rights to Seinfeld and another station in San Francisco pays again, perhaps not even the same price. This goes on across the US in city after city. And TBS pays for a national cable license.
And in the end you get the program sales copy bragging about how the show has been cleared in 9 of the 10 top markets and 45 of the top 50, plus countries. Add to that streaming services around the world -Netflix isn't the only such streaming company.
The bottom line is that the companies who make this stuff have an interest in getting as many separate buyers to pay as much as possible for every single piece.
It's been this way forever. It isn't going to change now because untold sums of money are vested in keeping it the way it is. Just as an example, back in the day Carsey-Warner made well over $1 billion dollars selling reruns of Roseanne to TV stations around the US. Each station paid up to millions of dollars PER episode. Likewise, reruns of the Cosby show sitcom (once THE powerhouse show, hard as that may be to believe now) also went for in excess of a billion dollars.
Now, there is no way a Netflix or anyone else can possibly top that kind of money. Why should a Carsey-Warner settle for a percentage of that money from Netflix when they can get it all? Do you know how many salespeople made huge commission off that, and how many TV stations were able to sell massive amounts of commercial time on those shows? If you want to be on Cosby, you gotta buy a whole package of ads to run around the clock, you see,
Syndication isn't that valuable any more in the US but there is still a lot of money in it outside the US.
The thing with Trump is that he proudly proclaims he does, and will do if elected, pretty much as he pleases.
So Trump on his own could decide to support a bigger space program OR he could decide we don't need one at all, purely at his whimsy. Now it can be said that the current system of idiots arguing about things and not getting a lot done is not very effective, but it does occasionally come up with things that are good ideas even if they cost money or are otherwise somehow unpalatable.
Trump's approach, and again one he is proud of, is to declare his support or not for things. No appeal. No second opinion. If Trump says we get a bridge to nowhere Alaska, we get one. If Trump says NO to fixing the 405, or food stamps or tax refunds or who knows what, then we don't get them.
He isn't interested in listening to opinions or research. He makes off the cuff decisions. And not all of them are good. And he seems to feel zero remorse for bad choices or mistakes. There is no ownership or accountability or humility, which are traits needed and useful to being President. Trump would make a good king or something, where the throne rules and that's all and that's law. But we deserve better than that. We deserve a president who will make decisions he or she doesn't like, things that make them sick in the stomach or keep them up at night, because somethings those decisions have to be made. We don't need somebody making their choices on whimsy.
Among other places, I use Windows 10 to run my security cameras and alarm system. That box is on 24/7/365. So there Microsoft. There is a data point.
It actually runs fine doing this. It doesn't do anything else.