Oh, nothing prevents it: witness Prohibition. There's just much greater inertia, a wider cross-section of opinion, and less opportunity for a single person or small group to exert sufficient pressure to get a law passed. But, since the stakes are higher, there's much greater reason for that sufficient pressure at federal lobbying levels.
>Matching funds works like this. Candidate A raises $500 million dollars to run for president. The United States Treasury cuts a check to the campaign funds of Candidate's B and C, in the amount of $500 million. Except that it will never happen. Nobody will bother taking the time to raise $500 million when their competitors can spend their time on more worthwhile things, and collect their check at the end of the day.
Okay, so the function is whoever raises the max amount of money, that's the amount of money everyone gets. So nobody bothers taking the time to raise the money, so the max amount of money drops, because there's a negative incentive to raise money. Everyone ends up spending less, and the value of money to any one campaign is lessened because everyone else is going to get the same amount. That seems to address the problems, doesn't it? Am I missing something?
I think one problem we have is that there's a free speech/organization issue, where a citizens' committee can't be prevented from taking out ads to support a given person, so the person who has more 'independent' groups channeling advertising money gets more advertising. I don't see an obvious way to prevent that, while still allowing reasonable freedom of speech.
I'm big on states' rights over federal ones, and local laws over state ones, on the assumption that the closer to home, the better the legislators will deal with what's actually going on. (Also lobbies find it much harder to affect vast numbers of low-level officials, even though you can buy them off with (1) hooker and (1) thimbleful of blow, rather than having to give them a whole sorority for a weekend -- coz there are just so many low-level officials compared to senators.)
But I have to wonder, at the same time, at what point legislation stops being about good-for-the-people, or even look-I'm-doing-something-vote-for me, and starts being about legislating morals, ethics, and such. One part of me wishes more states would make like California and start making effective carbon-emission-reduction laws, or Washington, making effective anti-dangerous-chemical laws, but how long before Tennessee bans birth control pills as suspect carcinogens, or any of a variety of other handwaving subterfuges that are intended not to make people safer but to force them towards different behavior? Maybe states' rights isn't such a hot idea after all.
I have several friends that spend a lot of time, when visiting (or I spend the time, when visiting them) hiding small alarm/timers in unexpected places, set for 2 AM. One of the best, so far, has been in a baggie in the toilet tank, although I'm pretty fond of taking off a heater vent grille and chucking it back in there and then putting the grille back together. That took one of my friends *forever* to recover, and plus you could hear it in multiple rooms.
http://www.radio1190.org/ is the radio station for CU Boulder: that's what I listen to most. Most of their stuff isn't great, or even good, but they'll play three days without me ever having heard *any* of it before and maybe 5% of it is really good stuff that I end up chasing down and buying, so it's kind of do-it-yourself filtering. http://www.kexp.org/home.asp?noflash=true is a Seattle-based station I also listen to a lot. It's higher-quality but/and more mainstream than 1190. As for the iceland, the link I use is on a machine at home, so this is the best I can dig up: http://www.penguinradio.com/regional/europe/icelan d/ -- the 'ethnic' stuff is *interesting*. I tend to listen to a more hiphop/r&b station but I can't find a link to it. If I remember tonight, I'll reply to this.
I've been listening to a lot of icelandic radio lately. It's disappointingly american-based, but at least it's not the same 30 songs that every american radio outside of college stations is currently playing. With that said, I also listen to a lot of college radio -- a whole lot.
Holy christ you have a lot of assumptions there. Let's count: you're assuming that the first person he encountered would've shot him dead, rather than after he's already shot twenty. You're assuming that multiple armed people don't shoot each other, entirely unrelated to him, each thinking the other is the evil gunman, leaving him to keep on shooting other people. You're assuming that multiple armed people don't mistakenly shoot other, unarmed people mistaking their identity or just missing the target gunman and hitting innocent bystanders. You're assuming that people trying to shoot him are not in turn mistaken for a gunman or multiple gunmen by the police, who then start shooting at them, possibly hitting innocent, unarmed people as well as the people trying to shoot the gunman. In other words, you assume that everything goes perfectly for a single, armed, ideally fortunate person facing a madman, to come up with your estimate. Cute. Quaint, even. But nothing like reality.
Again, I agree with the idea. But the thing is: for every reason we can come up with to say why children, crazy people, and convicts shouldn't have guns, is basically a reason that sane, healthy, non-violent adults shouldn't have guns -- because they're really only a couple of drinks/a brain injury/a really serious grudge away from being mentally ill/violent-convict-to-be. I wish there were more widespread training for gun usage and ownership. I sometimes wish that gun ownership came with a legal obligation to have initial and recurrent training in ownership/usage, although there are problems with that, too.
Frankly, I think a good reason for guns is because freedom is more important than security, and I unhappily accept deaths from guns because I think that the population is better off with one more freedom/responsibility and a large population with weapons is less likely to be cowed by a government bent on control. However, when it comes right down to it, that's a pretty shaky argument, especially to anyone who has lost family/friends to a shooting. To them, security is certainly going to be more important than freedom, and I think in the long term, that mindset is prevailing, which is scary in its own right.
I don't disagree with the idea. I just suspect that the implementation would lead to a greater number of overall deaths, because I suspect that if more people have guns, they'll be used more often -- in anger, drunkenness, or under mistaken circumstances (shooting the wrong person in just such a situation as we're reading about here.) So, which is the greater good?
The concept of sane/insane is really tricky, here. The two kids at Columbine knew that there was a trained, armed policeman at the school that day, and that there wouldn't be the next day, but that didn't deter them. Does that automatically mean they were insane? Or does it mean that the symbolic nature of the date was more important? Or that the idea of a gunfight was more interesting than deterring? I suggest that a person who is even considering shooting a bunch of other people is unlikely to be strongly deterred by the idea of armed opponents, so then it becomes a matter of whether having more armed people will more quickly remove a gunman than it will lead to additional deaths from those same guns.
And if 20x more people were carrying guns, how many more shootings would there be? You assume that the vast majority of people would only ever shoot in self-defense, rather than when they've had a bit to drink and get irrationally mad at someone. Or, in this horrible case, mistake someone firing back at the sniper as the actual sniper and shoot the wrong person.
I don't know what the solution is, but given how many people I see wandering around with bad attitudes and irrational behavior, having more guns in the hands of more people isn't obviously the way to reduce the number of shooting deaths.
>You get in fight, the other guy is bleeding more than you are and down for the count - You Win!
I knew a guy who thought this way. He murdered his girlfriend when she slept around, and when he was convicted and sent to jail, he said "well, yeah, but she's dead, so I win." I guess he did. I'm glad he's in jail. Maybe he'll learn the meaning of Pyrric victory.
Let's talk about what Napster is now, compared to eight years ago. The RIAA is fighting a losing battle. We know it, they know it. But they're doing a very impressive job of it. I know very few people who are willing to sit around downloading stuff all day long because they're afraid; this includes several people who were dragging down several albums a day back in the Napster era.
If I were hiring a communications person, I'd be hiring on how well someone does a job, more than whether the person wins the fight, especially if it's an unwinnable fight.
Think of it as black-box reverse engineering: there's this thing, with inputs and an output, and you're trying to make something that has the same output given the inputs. You don't need to precisely re-implement the black box. Birds, bees, butterflies, and bats all have different ways of implementing flying: convergent evolution. 'Intelligence' is a far, far harder thing to implement. I'd argue that taking a black-box reverse engineering path is the wrong way to do it, but I don't think it's impossible and it is probably the only path that is actually feasible right now. The faster/more efficient paths are based on understanding we don't have, so we throw hardware and algorithms at it until we get something that emulates it, then work to improve the emulation.
For President, only two of those parties have a chance in hell of being elected. But there have been -- and are, to the best of my knowledge -- people neither D nor R elected to the House, the Senate, and as Governers. In other words, the only office that's pretty much unquestionably going to a D or R is the White House. So, for President, vote D or R if you don't want to "throw your vote away" (although that's a somewhat questionable assertion in and of itself) but below that there *are* viable options, and the more people that think about this, the more viable those options become.
First off: a person who does communications for group 1 is probably going to do a reasonable job of doing communications for group 2. If you're hiring based on merit, how much does it matter if the person is one of satan's catchers?
Secondly: the RIAA is everyone in power's best friend. Republicans love the big companies, Democrats love the film and rock stars, and both parties just absolutely adore lobbyists. They're like groupies only they give money.
My brother built something like this LEGO panoramic camera mount using Mindstorms. His digital camera screw-mounts to it, and it turns a precise number of degrees and pushes the camera's shutter button, then turns again... A lot of other people have done similar things. I'm in the midst of building a LEGO-based robotic arm to grab rings and feed them into a spotwelder. LEGO is a great prototyping tool and with the addition of mindstorms you can build amazing things: the LEGO rubik's cube solver is pretty old, but the LEGO car assembly line is pretty spectacular. That's like $5000 of LEGO right there.
>When does nature ever produce slow ungainly hunters?
When what they're hunting is even slower and more ungainly. Consider anteaters. It's like the old joke about the two guys getting chased by a grizzly and one starts putting on running shoes: it's not the grizzly he has to outrun.
My mom was hit by a cop when I was a kid. We were sitting at a red light and the cop just ploughed into the back of the car. Mom didn't realize it was a cop car and got out blazing mad until she saw it was a cop and then she calmed down a bit. In any case, they had the cop's supervisor and two other cops there in less than five minutes. I don't know that the cop got a ticket, but I do know that they paid for a new bumper on our car and apologized quite a lot.
My brother and I made a paper version of the codewheel that I still have around somewhere. It was *really* difficult to get working because it wasn't just a circular sliderule, it was more of three sheets of paper in a cylinder, sliding one-over-the-other, with holes cut out in specific places so we could see the data on the inner layers. I can't remember how he generated the material for it. It was all hand-written. But it worked.
You're right: I probably haven't seen more than a thousand or so indi films, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands that exist. As I've said in other posts in this thread, once you've seen a couple indi films where the cameraman's finger is across the lens, or the actor's voice is drowned out by a truck driving by, or the actor can't remember the words and you can hear a director yelling the lines, you come to appreciate the mediocrity of Hollywood films a little more.
You're not reading my other replies here. I think that Hollywood's best rivals independent's best, but Hollywood's worst is much less horrible than indi's worst. I don't think Hollywood's best stuff is better, or even as good as, the very best independent material, however.
"white" just seemed mean-spirited. Even though I think Julie Delpy is the most beautiful woman on the face of the planet I couldn't feel like it was one of the best movies ever. "Before Sunrise" was pretty damn spectacular, though, and only partly because of her.
As for subtitles, well, here you are! They're all pretty fantastic, and very funny.
I'm not denying that most mainstream films suck. It's just that most indi films suck worse. The top percent of Hollywood, Bollywood, Shanghai, and indi films is awesome. But from there on down, the suckage increases rapidly. The difference is that the less money that is put into the film, the more the potential suckage, down to the point where the camera is shaking enough the audience gets sick and you can hear airplanes flying over on the soundtrack.
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Oh, nothing prevents it: witness Prohibition. There's just much greater inertia, a wider cross-section of opinion, and less opportunity for a single person or small group to exert sufficient pressure to get a law passed. But, since the stakes are higher, there's much greater reason for that sufficient pressure at federal lobbying levels.
The matching funds thing is an awesome idea.
>Matching funds works like this. Candidate A raises $500 million dollars to run for president. The United States Treasury cuts a check to the campaign funds of Candidate's B and C, in the amount of $500 million. Except that it will never happen. Nobody will bother taking the time to raise $500 million when their competitors can spend their time on more worthwhile things, and collect their check at the end of the day.
Okay, so the function is whoever raises the max amount of money, that's the amount of money everyone gets. So nobody bothers taking the time to raise the money, so the max amount of money drops, because there's a negative incentive to raise money. Everyone ends up spending less, and the value of money to any one campaign is lessened because everyone else is going to get the same amount. That seems to address the problems, doesn't it? Am I missing something?
I think one problem we have is that there's a free speech/organization issue, where a citizens' committee can't be prevented from taking out ads to support a given person, so the person who has more 'independent' groups channeling advertising money gets more advertising. I don't see an obvious way to prevent that, while still allowing reasonable freedom of speech.
I'm big on states' rights over federal ones, and local laws over state ones, on the assumption that the closer to home, the better the legislators will deal with what's actually going on. (Also lobbies find it much harder to affect vast numbers of low-level officials, even though you can buy them off with (1) hooker and (1) thimbleful of blow, rather than having to give them a whole sorority for a weekend -- coz there are just so many low-level officials compared to senators.)
But I have to wonder, at the same time, at what point legislation stops being about good-for-the-people, or even look-I'm-doing-something-vote-for me, and starts being about legislating morals, ethics, and such. One part of me wishes more states would make like California and start making effective carbon-emission-reduction laws, or Washington, making effective anti-dangerous-chemical laws, but how long before Tennessee bans birth control pills as suspect carcinogens, or any of a variety of other handwaving subterfuges that are intended not to make people safer but to force them towards different behavior? Maybe states' rights isn't such a hot idea after all.
I have several friends that spend a lot of time, when visiting (or I spend the time, when visiting them) hiding small alarm/timers in unexpected places, set for 2 AM. One of the best, so far, has been in a baggie in the toilet tank, although I'm pretty fond of taking off a heater vent grille and chucking it back in there and then putting the grille back together. That took one of my friends *forever* to recover, and plus you could hear it in multiple rooms.
http://www.radio1190.org/ is the radio station for CU Boulder: that's what I listen to most. Most of their stuff isn't great, or even good, but they'll play three days without me ever having heard *any* of it before and maybe 5% of it is really good stuff that I end up chasing down and buying, so it's kind of do-it-yourself filtering.n d/ -- the 'ethnic' stuff is *interesting*. I tend to listen to a more hiphop/r&b station but I can't find a link to it. If I remember tonight, I'll reply to this.
http://www.kexp.org/home.asp?noflash=true is a Seattle-based station I also listen to a lot. It's higher-quality but/and more mainstream than 1190.
As for the iceland, the link I use is on a machine at home, so this is the best I can dig up: http://www.penguinradio.com/regional/europe/icela
I've been listening to a lot of icelandic radio lately. It's disappointingly american-based, but at least it's not the same 30 songs that every american radio outside of college stations is currently playing. With that said, I also listen to a lot of college radio -- a whole lot.
Holy christ you have a lot of assumptions there. Let's count: you're assuming that the first person he encountered would've shot him dead, rather than after he's already shot twenty. You're assuming that multiple armed people don't shoot each other, entirely unrelated to him, each thinking the other is the evil gunman, leaving him to keep on shooting other people. You're assuming that multiple armed people don't mistakenly shoot other, unarmed people mistaking their identity or just missing the target gunman and hitting innocent bystanders. You're assuming that people trying to shoot him are not in turn mistaken for a gunman or multiple gunmen by the police, who then start shooting at them, possibly hitting innocent, unarmed people as well as the people trying to shoot the gunman. In other words, you assume that everything goes perfectly for a single, armed, ideally fortunate person facing a madman, to come up with your estimate. Cute. Quaint, even. But nothing like reality.
Alcohol, hormones, immaturity, and guns: yow.
Again, I agree with the idea. But the thing is: for every reason we can come up with to say why children, crazy people, and convicts shouldn't have guns, is basically a reason that sane, healthy, non-violent adults shouldn't have guns -- because they're really only a couple of drinks/a brain injury/a really serious grudge away from being mentally ill/violent-convict-to-be. I wish there were more widespread training for gun usage and ownership. I sometimes wish that gun ownership came with a legal obligation to have initial and recurrent training in ownership/usage, although there are problems with that, too.
Frankly, I think a good reason for guns is because freedom is more important than security, and I unhappily accept deaths from guns because I think that the population is better off with one more freedom/responsibility and a large population with weapons is less likely to be cowed by a government bent on control. However, when it comes right down to it, that's a pretty shaky argument, especially to anyone who has lost family/friends to a shooting. To them, security is certainly going to be more important than freedom, and I think in the long term, that mindset is prevailing, which is scary in its own right.
I don't disagree with the idea. I just suspect that the implementation would lead to a greater number of overall deaths, because I suspect that if more people have guns, they'll be used more often -- in anger, drunkenness, or under mistaken circumstances (shooting the wrong person in just such a situation as we're reading about here.) So, which is the greater good?
The concept of sane/insane is really tricky, here. The two kids at Columbine knew that there was a trained, armed policeman at the school that day, and that there wouldn't be the next day, but that didn't deter them. Does that automatically mean they were insane? Or does it mean that the symbolic nature of the date was more important? Or that the idea of a gunfight was more interesting than deterring? I suggest that a person who is even considering shooting a bunch of other people is unlikely to be strongly deterred by the idea of armed opponents, so then it becomes a matter of whether having more armed people will more quickly remove a gunman than it will lead to additional deaths from those same guns.
And if 20x more people were carrying guns, how many more shootings would there be? You assume that the vast majority of people would only ever shoot in self-defense, rather than when they've had a bit to drink and get irrationally mad at someone. Or, in this horrible case, mistake someone firing back at the sniper as the actual sniper and shoot the wrong person.
I don't know what the solution is, but given how many people I see wandering around with bad attitudes and irrational behavior, having more guns in the hands of more people isn't obviously the way to reduce the number of shooting deaths.
>In the previous link I put, there is an example of scanning through a Hershey bar, where you can see the positions of the nuts.
Since these can see through clothing...
oh, man, I can't bring myself to say it.
Anyway, tinfoil! It's not just for hats anymore!
>You get in fight, the other guy is bleeding more than you are and down for the count - You Win!
I knew a guy who thought this way. He murdered his girlfriend when she slept around, and when he was convicted and sent to jail, he said "well, yeah, but she's dead, so I win." I guess he did. I'm glad he's in jail. Maybe he'll learn the meaning of Pyrric victory.
Let's talk about what Napster is now, compared to eight years ago.
The RIAA is fighting a losing battle. We know it, they know it. But they're doing a very impressive job of it. I know very few people who are willing to sit around downloading stuff all day long because they're afraid; this includes several people who were dragging down several albums a day back in the Napster era.
If I were hiring a communications person, I'd be hiring on how well someone does a job, more than whether the person wins the fight, especially if it's an unwinnable fight.
Think of it as black-box reverse engineering: there's this thing, with inputs and an output, and you're trying to make something that has the same output given the inputs. You don't need to precisely re-implement the black box. Birds, bees, butterflies, and bats all have different ways of implementing flying: convergent evolution. 'Intelligence' is a far, far harder thing to implement. I'd argue that taking a black-box reverse engineering path is the wrong way to do it, but I don't think it's impossible and it is probably the only path that is actually feasible right now. The faster/more efficient paths are based on understanding we don't have, so we throw hardware and algorithms at it until we get something that emulates it, then work to improve the emulation.
For President, only two of those parties have a chance in hell of being elected. But there have been -- and are, to the best of my knowledge -- people neither D nor R elected to the House, the Senate, and as Governers. In other words, the only office that's pretty much unquestionably going to a D or R is the White House. So, for President, vote D or R if you don't want to "throw your vote away" (although that's a somewhat questionable assertion in and of itself) but below that there *are* viable options, and the more people that think about this, the more viable those options become.
First off: a person who does communications for group 1 is probably going to do a reasonable job of doing communications for group 2. If you're hiring based on merit, how much does it matter if the person is one of satan's catchers?
Secondly: the RIAA is everyone in power's best friend. Republicans love the big companies, Democrats love the film and rock stars, and both parties just absolutely adore lobbyists. They're like groupies only they give money.
My brother built something like this LEGO panoramic camera mount using Mindstorms. His digital camera screw-mounts to it, and it turns a precise number of degrees and pushes the camera's shutter button, then turns again... A lot of other people have done similar things. I'm in the midst of building a LEGO-based robotic arm to grab rings and feed them into a spotwelder. LEGO is a great prototyping tool and with the addition of mindstorms you can build amazing things: the LEGO rubik's cube solver is pretty old, but the LEGO car assembly line is pretty spectacular. That's like $5000 of LEGO right there.
>When does nature ever produce slow ungainly hunters?
When what they're hunting is even slower and more ungainly. Consider anteaters. It's like the old joke about the two guys getting chased by a grizzly and one starts putting on running shoes: it's not the grizzly he has to outrun.
My mom was hit by a cop when I was a kid. We were sitting at a red light and the cop just ploughed into the back of the car. Mom didn't realize it was a cop car and got out blazing mad until she saw it was a cop and then she calmed down a bit. In any case, they had the cop's supervisor and two other cops there in less than five minutes. I don't know that the cop got a ticket, but I do know that they paid for a new bumper on our car and apologized quite a lot.
My brother and I made a paper version of the codewheel that I still have around somewhere. It was *really* difficult to get working because it wasn't just a circular sliderule, it was more of three sheets of paper in a cylinder, sliding one-over-the-other, with holes cut out in specific places so we could see the data on the inner layers. I can't remember how he generated the material for it. It was all hand-written. But it worked.
You're right: I probably haven't seen more than a thousand or so indi films, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands that exist. As I've said in other posts in this thread, once you've seen a couple indi films where the cameraman's finger is across the lens, or the actor's voice is drowned out by a truck driving by, or the actor can't remember the words and you can hear a director yelling the lines, you come to appreciate the mediocrity of Hollywood films a little more.
*fiexd*?
You're not reading my other replies here. I think that Hollywood's best rivals independent's best, but Hollywood's worst is much less horrible than indi's worst. I don't think Hollywood's best stuff is better, or even as good as, the very best independent material, however.
"white" just seemed mean-spirited. Even though I think Julie Delpy is the most beautiful woman on the face of the planet I couldn't feel like it was one of the best movies ever. "Before Sunrise" was pretty damn spectacular, though, and only partly because of her.
As for subtitles, well, here you are! They're all pretty fantastic, and very funny.
I'm not denying that most mainstream films suck. It's just that most indi films suck worse. The top percent of Hollywood, Bollywood, Shanghai, and indi films is awesome. But from there on down, the suckage increases rapidly. The difference is that the less money that is put into the film, the more the potential suckage, down to the point where the camera is shaking enough the audience gets sick and you can hear airplanes flying over on the soundtrack.