can we at least get intelligent intelligence officers? Haven't you heard the expression that military intelligence is an oxymoron? It's true to a great extent. Intelligence analysts tend to be very specialized, and are proficient in one and usually only one thing. Basically, these people might be able to solve second order differential equations in their head, but they wouldn't be able to tell you which way is north on a map. The other guys are just talking heads, administrative people, bureaucrats, etc. whose job requirement includes "not exhibiting common sense."
From the summary ('cause having been indoctrinated into the/. culture, I don't read articles anymore):
Lt. Col. Bush blasted Wikileaks for identifying one 'mass communications officer' by name, who has since received death threats for 'simply doing his job -- posting positive comments on the Internet about Gitmo.' I would never support people making death threats to anyone else regardless of reason, but I think this is not a bad thing. The government is supposed to be afraid of we the People. They're supposed to always be looking behind their backs, making sure the People approve of their every action. Governments are recognized to not behave without oversight, and thus our government was designed with the idea of the People overseeing the government's every actions.
Which is to say, now that this has happened, next time, the next guy in the same position might think twice about 'just doing his job.' And that would be a (very) small victory in an increasingly hopeless war to prevent the government from amassing more power.
The U.S. Constitution, for example, grants basic rights which are then upheld by the courts. Not to be terribly pedantic, but it's been mentioned here on numerous occasions that the constitution doesn't grant rights. Our rights are innate to our existence, and thus the constitution only mandates that laws are not created that might abridge our innate rights. And, it lists a few of the big ones, though it recognizes that there are others. At most, the constitution enumerates what aspects of governing the federal government can control, leaving everything else to states and the people.
Our representative democracy was designed such that the government feared the people. The failure of representative democracies is often that the government would only pay lip service to the people while it strengthened itself. The failure of our current representative democracy is that of education. Most of the US is uneducated, and know squat about its history, much less the ideal it embodies. And the few who are educated and do know can't be bothered to care.
The government is absolutely stupid enough to get caught.
The government is vast and composed almost entirely of low-paid operatives.
Unfortunately, while the first part is correct (that the government is stupid), the second is not. The government compensates its employees very well, just not always in the salary department. But the people who work at the upper echelons of the government are very well paid, in addition to everything else. That doesn't mean they're not any more or less stupid; they were just ambitious enough to get themselves to their position. In fact, the bottom rungs tend to contain smarter people than the top.
This is a boycott, it isn't civil disobedience. You're not required to buy anything...
Civil disobedience is when the law says X, but you refuse to. This usually results in punishment by the government (which is the whole point of civil disobedience). Look up Thoreau for what civil disobedience is. Or Ghandi for that matter.
The last one is a non-issue. Forks cannot exist under the same name, as these are all trademarked by Xiph. They need only to keep supporting the official codebase.
Agreed. The US is so busy trying to police the rest of the world...
All of this, between the lead-based paints, tainted food, etc. is propaganda, ploys by the US government to divert attention from their own inadequacies, to divert our attention from their own wrongdoings by selling out to the highest bidder. It is the beginnings of the anti-China PR, preparation for when China surpasses the US as an economic powerhouse and rends the US irrelevant in the global community. This way, the US populace will agree to a war on China or something to that effect when the time comes.
The war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on terror...the US government needs wars, needs an enemy, needs some kind of scapegoat in order to justify its continuous power-grabbing. After all, power attracts those who want power, and those who want power will always want more.
Regardless, it's hard to look legitimate pointing fingers at someone else when our own hands are just as red.
The first question to ask her or for her to ask is: "Why?"
A little introspection goes a long way, especially when one can make a firm commitment being true to oneself. Most psychological problems are caused by conflict that arises from denying reality, by trying to shut it out, lay blame on someone else, or however else to make it easier to cope with. A person who denies reality must make a convincing fantasy. Unfortunately, when the properties of that fantasy does not conform to observation, then the mind simply goes insane in trying to reconcile the real and the fake (likely, the reason why people who have high creative intelligence are more prone to schizophrenia is because their fantasies are very 'real' and hence they sometimes fail to distinguish reality from fantasy).
People subconsciously pick this easy road; not everyone has the strength to face their demons.
Your acquaintance must first honestly confront herself, figure out the source of the problem--admit that it is a problem at all. Then, she can go about trying to solve the problem, however it needs to be solved. The latter she does not have to do alone, but the former is something she and only she can do. AA tries to convince people that the former can be communal (in fact, that it is only through external intervention that it can happen), but the effects of that thinking are largely temporary; most people who recover through AA have to continue to go and continue to abstain, or they will lapse. Others can only provide support and assistance during and after the act of confrontation--in a way, this is the purpose of seeing a shrink. But the self must make the commitment, and actually carry out the act, and only the self can know the truthfulness of the answers. Those who can do this will be quickly free of whatever the undesired behavior is (said undesired behavior could be 'being nice to others' and this method would still work).
Drinking is an interesting addiction. Alcohol allows people to temporarily forget their demons, usually when they pass out. It also gives a certain high from the pain it causes during and afterwards. And, its effects are quite consistent, allowing for a level of stability in the mind. She could be drinking for one or more of these and other reasons. Her behavioral changes may be an attempt to compensate for whatever she lost when she stopped her consumption.
If you're writing for a magazine for not much pay, the magazine probably owns the copyright. You probably wouldn't be an owner unless you're a freelancer. But then, you wouldn't really be average-paid.
Not that it matters. There's very little need to protect printed content, no matter what the industry might say, and even less need to protect printed content of the magazine variety. There are several reasons for this, the major ones being the price of the media is acceptable, there are already social stigmas against it (plagiarism), and the printed format is more convenient and has far more value than any electronic equivalent (imagine dropping your Kindle into the toilet).
So no, your example does not apply.
The reality is, copyright law protects both the big and the small players. Read up on Tolkien to see what might happen when copyright law gets neutered. But the big players are twisting it into something draconian, in such a way that even the small players lose. And that's really what needs to be stated--that there's a need to go back to the state of affairs in the mid-80's and rethink copyright reform from that starting point.
The laws of physics can be defied. So-called laws are concrete, immutable statements. If a statement is wrong or has an exception case and no other explanation exists that would also be consistent with the existing law, then the law has been defied, and it must be changed to accomodate the new observation.
However, physics (and all other sciences) itself cannot be defied. Nor do the laws of physics constitute the entirety physics. They are only phemenon that, based on our observations, hold true at every level in every situation.
Nonetheless, I'm not quite sure which law has been defied in this case...
And when the '09 numbers come in, which is when the WGA strike will impact the movie studios the most, they'll still blame piracy for the decline in their revenue stream.
"Piracy" is the scapegoat for the MPAA and RIAA's real problems. So long as it exists, they will have something to blame for their woes.
On the other hand, they might just keep finger pointing until it's too late.
[emphasis mine]
This is bipartisan hatred-of-consumers. As a human being, that term is offensive. Consumption is not my purpose in life, it is a means to an end. What you meant to say is:
It is bipartisan hatred of the people whom they purport to represent.
The whole consumer thinking is the reason why we the people get shafted left and right by the entertainment industry and yet we are OK with it.
This works right now because sites are using your browser and the information your browser knows to relay the information back to facebook.
However, it is conceivable, and quite possible for sites to do the sending to facebook from the back-end (using a cgi script, for example), effectively removing you from the loop. All this would require is reading your cookie once and associating your username on said site with your facebook account. And such informaton could be sent without facebook displaying it. You wouldn't even know it if facebook has your information.
This is why cookies are considered a security risk, and why it's important to be able to manage them in an intelligent manner. Even Firefox 2 and all its extensions do not yet have the capability to combat such data gathering. What's necessary is the ability to restrict cookies to particular tabs/windows, automatically prune cookies upon closing a tab/window, and the ability to delete cookies upon navigating away from a domain.
Agreed. I've long had suspicions about the integrity of some of gamespot's reviews. When I started reading game reviews (and note that this was when gamespot was in its infancy) I slowly began to feel that hyped games received a higher score and games with a lower marketing would receive a lower score. In fact, I'd several times gone as far as to wonder if games in direct competition with well-marketed games would receive a deflated score. It's only a gut feeling that I'd get once every so often though, which is why I've never outright made such a claim (and I still am not).
This news doesn't surprise me at all. In fact, it only serves to strengthen my gut feeling that gamespot is and has been corrupt from the very start. I wouldn't generalize it to all the journalists working there (at least one seems to have integrity). Regardless, the inconsistent quality of the reviews meant I was better off just going elsewhere. And I haven't looked back since.
Just wait until these kids start applying for colleges and jobs, unaware that reality deals harshly with those unprepared to earn their place in the world.
That's when they turn to their mommies and daddies and ask them to sue anyone they can get their hands on. And mommy and daddy, not having enough money to hire a good lawyer, will instead turn to the government and push their nanny agenda on the govnerment, from local to federal...which will in turn send a mass of lawsuits flying every which way.
The interesting thing is, while Quicktime might not have two users, as an embedded player for online media, it has largely been supplanted as the defacto online media player and format by flash and flash videos. It seems while Quicktime's use might not be declining, it hasn't been gaining either even while online videos grow ever-more popular. The same could be said for WMV.
Not that it matters, as all it takes is one bad site with an embedded malicious video...
What do people expect? A programmer expects something different from a layman. A person familiar with a certain mapping of symbol to action will expect something different from a person familiar with a different mapping.
At the end of the day, we have to go back to the beginning, when everyone's expectations are roughly the same. That is to say, we have to go back to how we would expect something to happen before we learned through trial and error that things don't always happen the way we expect.
Think like children, but don't dumb down the interface to a childish one; abstract the concepts and apply it to the UI.
The largest problem with today's UI is that there's nothing that reproduces the basics of human interfacing. The keyboard as an interface is terrible, as we typically visualize spatially in two dimensions and temporally in one (not three spatial dimensions--we learn to draw before learning how to mold with clay), while the keyboard provides a spatially one-dimensional and temporally one-dimension interface. Using the keyboard for navigation is completely unnatural, which is why people prefer MS Word (WYSIWYG) over console emacs over vim.
So the mouse is a step up from the keyboard in terms of interface. But we're still restricted to one mouse doing one thing at a time, when we're naturally inclined to using two hands to do the majority of what we want to do (there are notable exceptions, like writing, drawing, wiping our asses, etc.). So even with the mouse, we're still forcing ourselves into an unnatural state of mind.
Multi-touch interfaces seem so much more intuitive for this reason, because we're suddenly able to use both of our hands to do things. Ideally, that's what we want--two actors for our two hands. And we want the actions of those actors to reflect what we'd do with our hands in the real world.
But any more and things will get problematic again. Besides a few things that require more than two actors (like playing an instrument), two is the limit. Any more, and it'll require learning again (like learning how to play an instrument).
A) The eye compresses images even before it gets sent to the brain.
B) We don't memorize the entirety of whole scenes (not even those with photographic memories, though they're close). We use pattern recognition. That's why you can tell coke can is a coke can given from a slightly dented coke can to a crushed coke can, and can tell that even a crushed coke can isn't a crushed coke bottle. You memorize the patterns that make up a particular concept, match any given object to your set of memorized patterns (reducing the result space of the object with every recognized pattern), and if there are no exact matches, you deduce what would be the most likely match given how important certain patterns are to the object's identity.
c) Memory is not perfect. In fact, we fabricate memories to fill in the gaps that inadvertently appear. We use a combination of what we think we remember, what we logically deduce, and what we want to know, to create these gaps. How well we remember things is dependent on the strength of the former two, and how susceptible we are to the latter.
This will continue until tasers are given the same respect firearms have.
Power is power, no matter the instrument. If you gave the same people nightsticks, they'd be just as likely to bludgeon someone to death. Give these people training, and they'll only bludgeon their victims to near-death or to whatever limits they're given within the law.
What makes tasers particularly bad is that its range of effects are politicized; the desirable effects are emphasized, and the undesirable ones get swept under the rug. We know what a gun can do, and will likely do. We know what a club or knife or sword of flail can and will likely do. But not everyone knows that tasers can kill. This results in lax regulation of its use and the circumstances under which it can be used, which results in overuse, to sometimes very bad results.
Regardless, even if tasers are acknowledged to be potentially fatal (though less so than a firearm), the human element of recklessly using power remains.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Nowadays, people want everything handed to them.
I know plenty of people who dropped out of high school and worked their way to vast amounts of wealth. They began from the very bottom, but through hard work, they ended at the top (or at least near the top). There are plenty of opportunities. They're out there. But none of it involves comfort, including the comfort of a stable job or a consistent routine. Sometimes, it's a matter of switching from a dead-end job to something better. Sometimes, it's a matter of perservering through the endless rejections. Sometimes, it's a matter of saving up a little, and then taking a (educated) leap of faith.
I'm not saying that education is unnecessary. Education is necessary. College education is unnecessary.
Where there is a will, there is a way--provided the will is strong enough.
No, if you vote, you're willingly participating in a democratic government. The corrupt parts comes from whom you vote. If you vote Democrat or Republican just because, then you've no right to complain; you reap what you sow.
You have to understand that the system isn't corrupt. The system cannot be corrupted. It is the people in the system that are corrupt. And the only time you cannot complain is when you'd voted for that person.
Well, you could make it so that if you voted one way, your paper would be marked of one color, and if you voted another way, your marking would be of another color. Or a different marking equally as visible (the party's designated symbol for example). Thus, it'd be easy to know when the count is off.
The system prints out the piece of paper. The paper either goes into the shredder (wrong) or the box (right). Only one piece of paper gets to get put in the box per person. Anything can be shredded, and there's no limit to the amount of reprints. If the machine isn't spitting out the right kind of paper (someone tampered with it or it ran out of material), the marking can be done manually.
A button on the outside sets and resets the machine on the inside. There are always people from different sides watching on the outside and ready to call foul at first hint of a problem.
Have separate machines that sort and count. Sort first (based on symbol), then like money-counting machines, count the sorted ballots in front of a large number of witnesses (some of whom are undisclosed election officials). Submit the results to the total electronically (everyone interested gets to see the number submitted), and at the same time, print the totals onto a piece of paper in front of the witnesses and put into a sealed, box with a unique serial carved into the box. Send/carry the sealed box (guarded by local and federal law enforcement) to the place that collects results. Witnesses should be encouraged to accompany.
If that box gets lost, the witnesses can verify the correct number was sent, and the serial of the location gets changed. Otherwise, just match up the box and the sent number. If there's a difference, poll the witnesses. Obviously under oath and signature.
Obviously, there's room for someone to slip in extra ballots and places where numbers can be changed despite the redundancy. It's impossible to eliminate the most dedicated election defrauders. However, it's easy to make large-scale fraud difficult.
They should've just made a Youtube for comics. Allow people to make and publish their own comics with their custom software. And their content library would've been perfect to spark interest.
They can make money via advertising, via "premium" accounts with value-added featuers, via merchandising (where the money goes to the author, but they get a cut), etc. That seems to be the model that a lot of web comics follow. The problem is that the barrier to entry is still particularly high. Imagine if the barriers of entery was as low as popping videos onto Youtube...
The problem is that these older media companies are still stuck in their box of owning and charging for content wherever whenever. That kind of thinking is no longer valid. Anyone can create content these days and promote it online. It's a matter of creating a central place where people can conveniently find the content, as well as filter out the good from the bad. The faster media companies realize their role is that of a service provider rather than a content provider, the quicker they'll expand into the online realm.
That is to say, it isn't impossible to charge for new content. It's just that old content can't be milked. Slashdot's subscription model seems to work fine for new content.
Slashdot Mirror
From the summary ('cause having been indoctrinated into the
Which is to say, now that this has happened, next time, the next guy in the same position might think twice about 'just doing his job.' And that would be a (very) small victory in an increasingly hopeless war to prevent the government from amassing more power.
Our representative democracy was designed such that the government feared the people. The failure of representative democracies is often that the government would only pay lip service to the people while it strengthened itself. The failure of our current representative democracy is that of education. Most of the US is uneducated, and know squat about its history, much less the ideal it embodies. And the few who are educated and do know can't be bothered to care.
It's not wrong to duck if they think they've been seen.
The government is absolutely stupid enough to get caught.
The government is vast and composed almost entirely of low-paid operatives.
Unfortunately, while the first part is correct (that the government is stupid), the second is not. The government compensates its employees very well, just not always in the salary department. But the people who work at the upper echelons of the government are very well paid, in addition to everything else. That doesn't mean they're not any more or less stupid; they were just ambitious enough to get themselves to their position. In fact, the bottom rungs tend to contain smarter people than the top.
This is a boycott, it isn't civil disobedience. You're not required to buy anything...
Civil disobedience is when the law says X, but you refuse to. This usually results in punishment by the government (which is the whole point of civil disobedience). Look up Thoreau for what civil disobedience is. Or Ghandi for that matter.
The last one is a non-issue. Forks cannot exist under the same name, as these are all trademarked by Xiph. They need only to keep supporting the official codebase.
Agreed. The US is so busy trying to police the rest of the world...
All of this, between the lead-based paints, tainted food, etc. is propaganda, ploys by the US government to divert attention from their own inadequacies, to divert our attention from their own wrongdoings by selling out to the highest bidder. It is the beginnings of the anti-China PR, preparation for when China surpasses the US as an economic powerhouse and rends the US irrelevant in the global community. This way, the US populace will agree to a war on China or something to that effect when the time comes.
The war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on terror...the US government needs wars, needs an enemy, needs some kind of scapegoat in order to justify its continuous power-grabbing. After all, power attracts those who want power, and those who want power will always want more.
Regardless, it's hard to look legitimate pointing fingers at someone else when our own hands are just as red.
The first question to ask her or for her to ask is: "Why?"
A little introspection goes a long way, especially when one can make a firm commitment being true to oneself. Most psychological problems are caused by conflict that arises from denying reality, by trying to shut it out, lay blame on someone else, or however else to make it easier to cope with. A person who denies reality must make a convincing fantasy. Unfortunately, when the properties of that fantasy does not conform to observation, then the mind simply goes insane in trying to reconcile the real and the fake (likely, the reason why people who have high creative intelligence are more prone to schizophrenia is because their fantasies are very 'real' and hence they sometimes fail to distinguish reality from fantasy).
People subconsciously pick this easy road; not everyone has the strength to face their demons.
Your acquaintance must first honestly confront herself, figure out the source of the problem--admit that it is a problem at all. Then, she can go about trying to solve the problem, however it needs to be solved. The latter she does not have to do alone, but the former is something she and only she can do. AA tries to convince people that the former can be communal (in fact, that it is only through external intervention that it can happen), but the effects of that thinking are largely temporary; most people who recover through AA have to continue to go and continue to abstain, or they will lapse. Others can only provide support and assistance during and after the act of confrontation--in a way, this is the purpose of seeing a shrink. But the self must make the commitment, and actually carry out the act, and only the self can know the truthfulness of the answers. Those who can do this will be quickly free of whatever the undesired behavior is (said undesired behavior could be 'being nice to others' and this method would still work).
Drinking is an interesting addiction. Alcohol allows people to temporarily forget their demons, usually when they pass out. It also gives a certain high from the pain it causes during and afterwards. And, its effects are quite consistent, allowing for a level of stability in the mind. She could be drinking for one or more of these and other reasons. Her behavioral changes may be an attempt to compensate for whatever she lost when she stopped her consumption.
if you are an average-wage magazine column writer
If you're writing for a magazine for not much pay, the magazine probably owns the copyright. You probably wouldn't be an owner unless you're a freelancer. But then, you wouldn't really be average-paid.
Not that it matters. There's very little need to protect printed content, no matter what the industry might say, and even less need to protect printed content of the magazine variety. There are several reasons for this, the major ones being the price of the media is acceptable, there are already social stigmas against it (plagiarism), and the printed format is more convenient and has far more value than any electronic equivalent (imagine dropping your Kindle into the toilet).
So no, your example does not apply.
The reality is, copyright law protects both the big and the small players. Read up on Tolkien to see what might happen when copyright law gets neutered. But the big players are twisting it into something draconian, in such a way that even the small players lose. And that's really what needs to be stated--that there's a need to go back to the state of affairs in the mid-80's and rethink copyright reform from that starting point.
The laws of physics can be defied. So-called laws are concrete, immutable statements. If a statement is wrong or has an exception case and no other explanation exists that would also be consistent with the existing law, then the law has been defied, and it must be changed to accomodate the new observation.
However, physics (and all other sciences) itself cannot be defied. Nor do the laws of physics constitute the entirety physics. They are only phemenon that, based on our observations, hold true at every level in every situation.
Nonetheless, I'm not quite sure which law has been defied in this case...
And when the '09 numbers come in, which is when the WGA strike will impact the movie studios the most, they'll still blame piracy for the decline in their revenue stream.
"Piracy" is the scapegoat for the MPAA and RIAA's real problems. So long as it exists, they will have something to blame for their woes.
On the other hand, they might just keep finger pointing until it's too late.
It is bipartisan hatred of the people whom they purport to represent.
The whole consumer thinking is the reason why we the people get shafted left and right by the entertainment industry and yet we are OK with it.
This works right now because sites are using your browser and the information your browser knows to relay the information back to facebook.
However, it is conceivable, and quite possible for sites to do the sending to facebook from the back-end (using a cgi script, for example), effectively removing you from the loop. All this would require is reading your cookie once and associating your username on said site with your facebook account. And such informaton could be sent without facebook displaying it. You wouldn't even know it if facebook has your information.
This is why cookies are considered a security risk, and why it's important to be able to manage them in an intelligent manner. Even Firefox 2 and all its extensions do not yet have the capability to combat such data gathering. What's necessary is the ability to restrict cookies to particular tabs/windows, automatically prune cookies upon closing a tab/window, and the ability to delete cookies upon navigating away from a domain.
Hey firefox devs, are you listening?
Agreed. I've long had suspicions about the integrity of some of gamespot's reviews. When I started reading game reviews (and note that this was when gamespot was in its infancy) I slowly began to feel that hyped games received a higher score and games with a lower marketing would receive a lower score. In fact, I'd several times gone as far as to wonder if games in direct competition with well-marketed games would receive a deflated score. It's only a gut feeling that I'd get once every so often though, which is why I've never outright made such a claim (and I still am not).
This news doesn't surprise me at all. In fact, it only serves to strengthen my gut feeling that gamespot is and has been corrupt from the very start. I wouldn't generalize it to all the journalists working there (at least one seems to have integrity). Regardless, the inconsistent quality of the reviews meant I was better off just going elsewhere. And I haven't looked back since.
Just wait until these kids start applying for colleges and jobs, unaware that reality deals harshly with those unprepared to earn their place in the world.
That's when they turn to their mommies and daddies and ask them to sue anyone they can get their hands on. And mommy and daddy, not having enough money to hire a good lawyer, will instead turn to the government and push their nanny agenda on the govnerment, from local to federal...which will in turn send a mass of lawsuits flying every which way.
Man is it a good time to go into law or what?
The interesting thing is, while Quicktime might not have two users, as an embedded player for online media, it has largely been supplanted as the defacto online media player and format by flash and flash videos. It seems while Quicktime's use might not be declining, it hasn't been gaining either even while online videos grow ever-more popular. The same could be said for WMV.
Not that it matters, as all it takes is one bad site with an embedded malicious video...
That doesn't really mean anything...
What do people expect? A programmer expects something different from a layman. A person familiar with a certain mapping of symbol to action will expect something different from a person familiar with a different mapping.
At the end of the day, we have to go back to the beginning, when everyone's expectations are roughly the same. That is to say, we have to go back to how we would expect something to happen before we learned through trial and error that things don't always happen the way we expect.
Think like children, but don't dumb down the interface to a childish one; abstract the concepts and apply it to the UI.
The largest problem with today's UI is that there's nothing that reproduces the basics of human interfacing. The keyboard as an interface is terrible, as we typically visualize spatially in two dimensions and temporally in one (not three spatial dimensions--we learn to draw before learning how to mold with clay), while the keyboard provides a spatially one-dimensional and temporally one-dimension interface. Using the keyboard for navigation is completely unnatural, which is why people prefer MS Word (WYSIWYG) over console emacs over vim.
So the mouse is a step up from the keyboard in terms of interface. But we're still restricted to one mouse doing one thing at a time, when we're naturally inclined to using two hands to do the majority of what we want to do (there are notable exceptions, like writing, drawing, wiping our asses, etc.). So even with the mouse, we're still forcing ourselves into an unnatural state of mind.
Multi-touch interfaces seem so much more intuitive for this reason, because we're suddenly able to use both of our hands to do things. Ideally, that's what we want--two actors for our two hands. And we want the actions of those actors to reflect what we'd do with our hands in the real world.
But any more and things will get problematic again. Besides a few things that require more than two actors (like playing an instrument), two is the limit. Any more, and it'll require learning again (like learning how to play an instrument).
A) The eye compresses images even before it gets sent to the brain.
B) We don't memorize the entirety of whole scenes (not even those with photographic memories, though they're close). We use pattern recognition. That's why you can tell coke can is a coke can given from a slightly dented coke can to a crushed coke can, and can tell that even a crushed coke can isn't a crushed coke bottle. You memorize the patterns that make up a particular concept, match any given object to your set of memorized patterns (reducing the result space of the object with every recognized pattern), and if there are no exact matches, you deduce what would be the most likely match given how important certain patterns are to the object's identity.
c) Memory is not perfect. In fact, we fabricate memories to fill in the gaps that inadvertently appear. We use a combination of what we think we remember, what we logically deduce, and what we want to know, to create these gaps. How well we remember things is dependent on the strength of the former two, and how susceptible we are to the latter.
This will continue until tasers are given the same respect firearms have.
Power is power, no matter the instrument. If you gave the same people nightsticks, they'd be just as likely to bludgeon someone to death. Give these people training, and they'll only bludgeon their victims to near-death or to whatever limits they're given within the law.
What makes tasers particularly bad is that its range of effects are politicized; the desirable effects are emphasized, and the undesirable ones get swept under the rug. We know what a gun can do, and will likely do. We know what a club or knife or sword of flail can and will likely do. But not everyone knows that tasers can kill. This results in lax regulation of its use and the circumstances under which it can be used, which results in overuse, to sometimes very bad results.
Regardless, even if tasers are acknowledged to be potentially fatal (though less so than a firearm), the human element of recklessly using power remains.
Only if "National Security" meant keeping those currently in power in power. Which seems to be what the US government is for these days.
However, if "National Security" meant the security of the nation, which is the ideology in the case of the US, then there'd be no problems.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Nowadays, people want everything handed to them.
I know plenty of people who dropped out of high school and worked their way to vast amounts of wealth. They began from the very bottom, but through hard work, they ended at the top (or at least near the top). There are plenty of opportunities. They're out there. But none of it involves comfort, including the comfort of a stable job or a consistent routine. Sometimes, it's a matter of switching from a dead-end job to something better. Sometimes, it's a matter of perservering through the endless rejections. Sometimes, it's a matter of saving up a little, and then taking a (educated) leap of faith.
I'm not saying that education is unnecessary. Education is necessary. College education is unnecessary.
Where there is a will, there is a way--provided the will is strong enough.
No, if you vote, you're willingly participating in a democratic government. The corrupt parts comes from whom you vote. If you vote Democrat or Republican just because, then you've no right to complain; you reap what you sow.
You have to understand that the system isn't corrupt. The system cannot be corrupted. It is the people in the system that are corrupt. And the only time you cannot complain is when you'd voted for that person.
Well, you could make it so that if you voted one way, your paper would be marked of one color, and if you voted another way, your marking would be of another color. Or a different marking equally as visible (the party's designated symbol for example). Thus, it'd be easy to know when the count is off.
The system prints out the piece of paper. The paper either goes into the shredder (wrong) or the box (right). Only one piece of paper gets to get put in the box per person. Anything can be shredded, and there's no limit to the amount of reprints. If the machine isn't spitting out the right kind of paper (someone tampered with it or it ran out of material), the marking can be done manually.
A button on the outside sets and resets the machine on the inside. There are always people from different sides watching on the outside and ready to call foul at first hint of a problem.
Have separate machines that sort and count. Sort first (based on symbol), then like money-counting machines, count the sorted ballots in front of a large number of witnesses (some of whom are undisclosed election officials). Submit the results to the total electronically (everyone interested gets to see the number submitted), and at the same time, print the totals onto a piece of paper in front of the witnesses and put into a sealed, box with a unique serial carved into the box. Send/carry the sealed box (guarded by local and federal law enforcement) to the place that collects results. Witnesses should be encouraged to accompany.
If that box gets lost, the witnesses can verify the correct number was sent, and the serial of the location gets changed. Otherwise, just match up the box and the sent number. If there's a difference, poll the witnesses. Obviously under oath and signature.
Obviously, there's room for someone to slip in extra ballots and places where numbers can be changed despite the redundancy. It's impossible to eliminate the most dedicated election defrauders. However, it's easy to make large-scale fraud difficult.
They should've just made a Youtube for comics. Allow people to make and publish their own comics with their custom software. And their content library would've been perfect to spark interest.
They can make money via advertising, via "premium" accounts with value-added featuers, via merchandising (where the money goes to the author, but they get a cut), etc. That seems to be the model that a lot of web comics follow. The problem is that the barrier to entry is still particularly high. Imagine if the barriers of entery was as low as popping videos onto Youtube...
The problem is that these older media companies are still stuck in their box of owning and charging for content wherever whenever. That kind of thinking is no longer valid. Anyone can create content these days and promote it online. It's a matter of creating a central place where people can conveniently find the content, as well as filter out the good from the bad. The faster media companies realize their role is that of a service provider rather than a content provider, the quicker they'll expand into the online realm.
That is to say, it isn't impossible to charge for new content. It's just that old content can't be milked. Slashdot's subscription model seems to work fine for new content.
What happens when that's not a bank, but the mob?