...no one in their right mind takes them seriously (on both sides of the fence: I have seen ToS's with joke clauses).
Two dangerous assumptions:
1. The lawyers who draft ToS's are in their right minds. Nobody in their right mind goes to school for 17 years of their life, racks up $200k in student loans, and chooses to work 80 hours a week for $35k/yr to write ToS's all day. 2. Some of the rediculous clauses are jokes. That ToS that said "if you violate our ToS we will eat your babies" was not a joke. They were serious.
How are American citizens going to know about these candidates without corporate interests buying and paying for their radio, tv, internet, and billboard advertising? (Hint: it won't be because our existing 'representatives' will rewrite the laws to make campaigning a fair fight based on ideological positions and personal qualifications)
I nominate Westboro Baptist Church, for the following reasons:
1. The church is a small, tight-knit group of mostly family members. 2. They won't back down from their mission, regardless of personal cost. 3. They all share the same very narrow-minded world view, so the possibility of moral conflicts or dissent in any form will be quite limited. Risk of mutiny would be all but eliminated. 4. Sound does not travel through the vacuum of space, and radio transmissions will grow weaker and take longer the further they travel away from earth. 5. They live under the threat of death everyday from every extremist group on the planet, and also from a few ordinary people as well, so the perils and dangers of deep space travel will not be a challenge to them. 6. The mission will be a great way to get them off this planet. 7. If the mission suffered a catastrophic failure and the entire crew was lost, there would be no negative sentiment from the American public and the space programs could proceed unaffected except by the financial and project timeline setbacks. 8. Since the life, safety, and comfort of the crew would be of no concern at all, the vessel and enclosed equipment could be constructed with record-breaking cost savings. 9. If cosmic radiation renders the crew sterile and unable to reproduce - two birds, one stone. 10. Cut the costs in half by making the voyage a one-way trip.
I wonder how many convictions and court judgments relied solely on DKIM evidence that an email came from a defendant, all other evidence being circumstantial. I wonder what potential exist for such decisions to be overturned.
Except that Sturgeon's Law seems to be inverted when it comes to art. The worst 10% of the worst crap is praised by "intellectual" and cultural elites who summarily dismiss works of art that are embraced by the common populace. A good example might be the art found in contemporary PC and console games. Even the creations you can find on digitalblasphemy.com have greater appeal to me than many works you find in top-dollar galleries.
Art is not necessarily decorative. Sometimes it's provocative in a social and cultural sense. Sounds like that was the artist's intent.
I'm OK with art that has a provocative message. But then the value of the art lies within the value of the message, even if you disagree with the view the artist was trying to convey. Imagine a painting of Mitt Romney at a banquet table taking the only piece of cake from a platter while saying "Please, help yourselves" to guests at the table that look like starved holocaust survivors. Now that would be a provocative image whether you or not you are offended by the artwork. And, no, it doesn't have to be political. But if the art is supposed to have a provocative message, it is still waste if there is no practical objective to be gained from the audiences reaction. "Made you gasp!" or "made you vomit!" is not in itself a reasonable objective even for provocative art. Art with such a limited objective is nothing more than aesthetic terrorism. Those who create, purchase, display, and advocate such works are just self-serving, or self-loathing, sadistic psychopaths.
Personally, the sight of dead rabbits hanging from a tree would turn my stomach. It would evoke all kinds of feelings about animal cruelty, public health, offensive eyesore, etc. But assuming I could look past that for a moment, I might try to find some kind of message, such as tree of life/death, overpopulation, doomed humanity, some kind of civic spin on nihilism, and so on. It's disgusting but it's still art because the artist intended it to be such. Of course, whether it's good art is an entirely different discussion.
The traditional academic view of art tends to be "art for art's sake". There is also some sort of universal consensus that 'art is important' or has 'intrinsic value'. For some reason art is one of the view 'academic' subjects that is allowed to be taught and studied in a vacuum with little regard for other academic disciplines such as economics, ethics, political science, and others. For example, when discussing 'great art' and the 'importance' of promoting the appreciation of or advocating the preservation of such 'great art', there is little or no mention of the opportunity cost of creating, appreciating, and preserving such art. To what degree do tax-payer-supported endowments become a form of cultural welfare for artists who cannot sustain themselves from the direct sale or showing of their artwork? Or how is it justifiable to spend $1million to preserve an artifact that will generate little or no revenue when the money could have been put to use buying toothbrushes for workers in Bangladesh who are paid such a low wage that they can only scrub their teeth with their finger each morning? In fact, "supporting the arts" is perhaps one of the most selfish of "charities" because the contributor is very likely to benefit directly from the very performance their gift funded.
What if the artist in the Winnipeg example killed the rabbits used in the display with the intent to protest animal cruelty? Shouldn't rational though enter the equation for the value of the art, such as the likelihood that the work would be greeted with disgust and have no effect to reduce the abuse of animals, the consumption of meat and fur, or the use of terminal pest control techniques? Maybe the artist shares a tea-party mind
Same can be said for the "modern art" most favored by academics in our institutes of higher learning. Most of it is also randomly generated. Most likely this randomly generated math paper baffled the reviewer. Instead of having enough confidence or ability to see if there was any validity to the paper, he just went forward with it, probably presuming that whoever could write such a baffling paper had to be more intelligent than he was. And he certainly wasn't going to be made a fool by questioning the work of such a brilliant mind.
Likewise, pseudo-intellectual art critics and academics over the last century fell for one of the greatest practical jokes of all time - modern art - except that the pranksters died before revealing the humor behind it all. The art academics, fearful of being exposed for being less intelligent than their peers in science, history, mathematics, and other fields, couldn't take the risk of challenging the "art" of what might be a superior mind. Ever since, to be accepted as art in modern academic circles the creator must be high on bath salts, suffering from dimentia, or have some other mental illness. Most of the "greatest" works of our modern time have been the result of randomly flicking, throwing, smearing, dripping, and pouring paint on a canvas. More "creative" works involved letting chickens run through paint, leaving footprints on canvas, or painting with different shades of feces. After all this, people still get upset when I suggest that perhaps artists have not necessarily improved our civilization on the same scales as scientists and engineers.
An effective robocaller could be simply a PC, some software, and an anonymous prepaid cell phone. Or a VOIP connection originating from outside the US. You could even originate from within the US, dial through another country, then back into the US. Unless you make it difficult to cheaply procure such anonymous phone numbers or difficult to spoof them you can't stop robocalls. The best defense is to give phone customers an option for all calls meeting certain profiles to pass through an automatic privacy screen - like a voice message that answers the suspect calls and prompts the user to state their name and dial three or four digits to proceed. Most robocallers won't be able to get past this step. Most human telemarketers and scammers won't bother to waste time on this step (most use autodialers so they do not spend much time waiting for a call to be answered).
Such profiles for suspect calls could be any call not on your contact list, calls outside your area code, calls from area codes most commonly used by robocallers, and calls with blocked or missing CID info.
Such systems do exist but they are not readily available for all phones and rarely ever free. If you are not hounded by robocalls then such a privacy screen may not be worth the cost.
Clearly the OP was using satire. And in satire he makes a good point. Personally, I think the guy who made and released the movie was a punk, but that's about as far as I will go. I will not demand that our government prosecute him for offending the sensitivities of others. But regarding such sensitivities, we in this country, and in the West, have grown used to "taking it on the chin" so to speak. Even if you burn our flag, put shoes on it, and call for your god to curse us all, we either find it amusing and laugh, change the channel, or maybe return the insult, but we have learned to control our anger and reserve violence only when it becomes a practical necessity to protect our life and property. In the Western world, in response to such anger or hatred, you will find more empathy and more people willing to take action to try to understand the hostility and to try to address the underlying causes in an effort to create a more peaceful and harmonious world to live in. You will also find racists and violent idiots, but it doesn't take much study to see that in the West most of the people shun and directly oppose the extremists.
Outside the West (in which I would also include peaceful developed nations like Japan, South Korea, and a few other countries) such widespread tolerance is not the norm (nor was it in the West in the not-too-distant past). In some regions there is an uneasy co-existence, while in others society is fully aligned with the dominant worldview (religious in the Middle East and Central Asia; political in Myanmar and North Korea). In these rigid societies, dissent is not permitted, disertion from the dominant worldview or conversion to another is punished, and minorities holding a different worldview are barely tolerated, and usually only if they are indigineous to the area before the worldview was established or if they came to visit or settle in the area after the worldview was established. Such minorities will face significant discrimination, occassional bigotry and abuse, and in some cases violent pogroms or expulsion from citizens and/or their government.
Given that unfavorable speech is going to be received with violence in the less tolerant parts of the world, care should be taken to insulate the free speech of the West from such a violent audience. This should be the responsibility of the regimes that control and perpetuate the intolerant worldview. Western nations should also implement an "intolerance test" to be administered to all immigrants. The test could be a multimedia presentation showing words, images, and actions that are permitted in the free society, and after each segment the test subject should answer a multiple choice test with questions like "what would be your response if this insult was directed toward you" or "how would you feel if someone committed this act in your place of worship on its holiest day". Answers could be limited to responses such as: a. I would join in b. It wouldn't bother me c. It would affect me personally. I might even cry. d. I would shout "How dare you! Leave this place at once! May the feet of swine desecrate the graves of your ancestors!" e. I would spare their lives but I would kill their pets and burn their homes. or f. I would grab the nearest blunt object and throw it at them.
The order of the possible answers should be random so that the violent response is not always "e." or "f." Most questions should have more than one violent response as an option, and at least one question needs to be answered "none of the above" with all the other responses being violent in nature. One question should be a user generated (typed, not handwritten) response to let them answer how they would prefer to respond to the most obscene and blasphemous mockery of the most sacred belief that they hold to. This response would have to be evaluated by a well-trained test administrator.
On their way out from the test there would be one final challenge. There would be objects (paper weights, works of art, etc.)
I agree that Universal is getting rather extreme with this, but I could understand the concern on their part that anybody could record a newly released top hit in high fidelity, and add just enough content to suggest that the music was "incidental" when in reality the true intent was to freely distribute the music to a worldwide audience.
That said, I am beginning to believe that patents and copyrights are just a corporate entitlement that leads to bigger government. Big government is bad, so maybe we're all better off getting rid of the whole dang system.
But, conversely, publishing was not as profitable in 1776, thus insufficient lobbying funds were available to draft appropriate legislation. Now that publishing is much more profitable, much more effective legislation has been procured from the profits generated. And now with even more profits protected and secured, there will be even more lobbying money available in the near future to come up with even more innovative legislation.
Everybody wins! Don't you feel more secure knowing that the IP you purchased today will be available at a similar or perhaps even higher price in the future? Wouldn't you feel bad if you spent $20 for one license to play a song on the personal private device of your choosing (preferrably with headphones to keep freeloaders from dilluting you musical experience), only to find out in just a few months or years that other people are allowed to listen to the same music for which you paid so much while they only have to pay a fraction of that amount? Or even without paying at all! The fixed market price you pay for your music is a benefit that the industry provides you with, and the industry has worked how and taken significant risks to fix this price for you, the consumers. If you didn't pay so much you likely would not appreciate the IP you claim to enjoy as you do when you do pay for it. High prices make consumers good stewards of their property. If you only had enough money to buy just one song, and if all songs were about the same price (a feat difficult to achieve for most businesses, but look what the industry has done for you), I guarantee you would take your time, think real hard, and buy the best song that ever was and ever will be. You would cherish that song, protect it like a newborn baby, and play that song all day (preferrably with headphones). You would appreciate it way more that if you could just pick it up for free like a discarded fruit peel. You should all be thanking the industry for making it so.
My business model is similar to breathing, but I don't control what other people choose to breathe. But when they walk by my store and breathe in the aroma of my scented candles and then walk away without paying, how fair is that? People should not expect the government to just hand out entitlements like healthcare, housing, food stamps, disability and SSI, but we do need a system of entitlements for those of us who actually pay taxes to protect our rackets. We have patents, copyrights, and contracts, but that is not enough. It's about time for government to protect our aroma property rights as well. Who's with me?
Just a reminder, that those who are not paying any income tax are struggling to pay what would have been an equal amount to social security and medicare - and there's no tax break for them here. Only the first $100k of income contributes toward these taxes. So all of those making over $100k for most of their careers but still expect to draw social security and qualify for medicare coverage, why not continue to make proportional payments on the remainder of your income? There are already enough people cashing in on more than they put in to give 1%'ers such a break. The 1% do want to be responsible, don't they? So why do they resist contributing more, considering that they could theoretically lose all their assets in a lawsuit or bad investment and end up just as poor as the rest of us? Hey, it has happened. Plenty of times.
Extreme right and left are ripping up the country and our economy. Which is why we have a "free market" healthcare system that is the joke of the world, where insurance companies engage in processing delays, "lost forms", slow-pay, low-pay, unjust denials, and other tactics; while ER rooms have the obligatation to stabilize every patient regardless of coverage or ability to pay; where medicaid, medicare, CHIP, and countless other government programs, charities, and provider discounts and medical debt write-offs and bankruptcies skew the actual market price to a point where nobody really knows the fair market value of medical treatment. A system where medical doctors expect personal incomes in the $100k-$400k range and are constantly caught cheating medicare, medicaid, and insurance companies. They cheat patients too, but there are fewer resources to investigate those. But I have several anecdotes from my small circle of friends.
Those who studied hard, invested in their education, worked their way up through their respective career ladder, are now joining the ranks of the "irresponsible" who can no longer afford their bills, especially if they've fallen through our very factured medical system. I'm sure that most teachers, EMTs, fire fighters, police officers, social workers, park rangers and foreign aid workers thought that they were being responsible when they chose their important but low-paid careers. But now when sooner or later they get sick and need care, or their spouse or children require care that is mandated by the state, they have to pay the price chosen by a select few who control an oligopoly on medicine and practice. And when they run up medical bills and can no longer afford their car or mortgage payments, they are cast into the lot of "irresponsible" debtors who should have planned from childhood to run private equity firms instead of saving your life, protecting your property, or teaching your children.
Meanwhile, the ignorants who vote to maintain this morally irreprehensible "system" do so because they either fantasize that they too could be a wealthy and powerful CEO, real estate mogul, or rap star. Or their pastor told them which party will do more to protect the unborn. Even more so, these ignorants are either not aware or refuse to believe that Americans are denied access even to relatively primitive care such as the mere simple removal of an abscess tooth or the critical but relatively easy removal of a skin tumor before it metastasizes. I could use pliers myself to remove the abscess tooth, or sterilize my pocket knife to cut out the tumor. I could do it for free for friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers if I wasn't overrun by the horde of the medically needy. I could even do it for tips, like you would pay a waiter, and probably make a good living. But the "free market" prohibits me from doing so, because I am unlicensed.
The ignorants believe that there are programs and charities out there that make sure that everyone gets the treatments they truly need. Simply because many diabetics get insulin shots daily at the ER does not mean that any working-class guy can get cancer treatment. And when medicaid does cover, it leaves middle class families living on the edge of poverty, regardless of hours worked or what profession.
Modern understanding of good hygiene, sanitation, vermin control, physical activity, accident prevention, and adequate clothing, shelter, and HVAC systems contribute most to longevity. Those in the medical profession would have you think that you are living twice as long as you would have were it not for all of their medications, treatments, surgeries and other procedures. Of all the medical "miracles", only antibiotics and insulin have had enough effect to substantially increase life expectancy for the general population. Most of the millions of dollars spent on healthcare, whether privately or publicly funded, go toward "heroic" efforts to prolong life well beyond where it should have been allowed a more graceful and comfortable ending, or in some cases on virtually quack medical treatments that may cause ailments just as dangerous and/or painful than the underlying condition without even slowing down the disease, all because some statistics seemed to indicate that 3-5% of patients showed some improvement. There is a lot of money to be made in the sales and marketing of hope and hype in clear, empty bottles.
Now there are specific cases where a person has been allowed to live a much longer and greater quality of life due to certain advances in medicine and surgery. Most of these are in the cases of transplants, where, in the USA at least, one person gets unlucky, dies, and their estate billed tens of thousands of dollars, while a needy patient pays tens of thousands of dollars (even with insurance) to receive a healthy replacement organ. Most of us will not benefit substantially from medical care, but we will likely be depleting what savings we may have aquired through hard work and frugal living when at the end of our lives we are placed in a nursing home or hospice care for weeks, months, or years paying for someone to change our bedpans, wash our soiled sheets, and feed us preprocessed institutional food.
One of the few areas where medicine can do the most good is to catch and correct problems at the very earliest stage when they are easiest and most affordable to treat. But in the USA, policy makers and insurance executives, in their infinite wisdom, have erected cost barriers along every step of medical care to "consumerise" health care choices, with the presumption that Americans drive up the cost of health care by over-consuming medical services. The end result is that patients inevitably drive up the cost of care by either choosing to ignore early problematic symptoms to save money or they simply do not have the money to afford medical diagnosis or early treatment. So problems are not treated until they get out of hand, when a family decides that medical treatment is more important than little Johnny's college fund, the tax and penalties of withdrawing from a retirement account, or in many cases, paying rent, mortgage, or car payments. Even with insurance, if the medical problem is serious enough there will likely be so many uncovered expenses, travel, time off work, etc., that a family will burn through their paychecks, emergency fund, home equity, and college/retirement savings in the first few months or years of treatment. For some it will be only weeks. And then there will be life threatening delays as hospitals with multi-million dollar endowments and non-profit tax status withhold treatment while a family struggles with bureaucrats, case managers, and charity providers to convince them that they are needy and should qualify for aid. If they are lucky and quickly and correctly discover, fill out, and submit the appropriate applications and grant requests, and if there aren't too many doubts about how many assets they are retaining for themselves (usually $2,000.00 max. per family), and if their incomes still are not too high, they might receive just enough help to treat some of their "qualifying" conditions, but usually only if they are or have minor children or are legally disabled.
Presumably, any attempt to surpass the speed of light would required taking actions that will likely kill you. But if you succeeded you would be in a completely separate alternate universe. Since religion has taught us for millenia that you pass on to an alternate universe when you die, maybe the ancients were on to something. Since spirit beings would have zero mass they could theoretically, if they existed, shift into hyperspace. Test pilots just better hope there's a physical being on the other side to serve as a host body. I'm still waiting for the Heaven's Gate explorers to send back their message to let us know if they succeeded or not.
Not a Chinook. I've been going to airshows my whole life, so quite familiar with those. Imagine one set of counter-rotating blades from the second image, only instead of blades it looks more like a double-stacked oval frisbee, with no Chinook body/fuselage. I considered the possibility that it may have been a Chinook seen straight on. That would explain counter rotating objects one on top of the other, but the motion across the sky, right to left from my perspective, was very inconsistent with the typical operation of a Chinook (though technically not impossible). And the conspicuous absence of a Chinook-like fuselage hanging beneath the blades/ovals/whatever-they-were. Even if head-on, the Chinook would still look like it had some sort of cockpit hanging beneath the rotating elements.
zipping by, then stopped and started doing zig zags, figure 8s, circles, box shapes and moved in other unsatelliteish ways for about 20-30 minutes before it took off....The best i could come up with was a weather balloon, but that doesnt fit with the movements of w.e this was.
Yes, it was a weather balloon. Haven't you seen those cartoons when Wylie Coyote is trying to drop an anvil onto Roadrunner from a balloon - but then Roadrunner shows up behind the balloon, pecks it just once, and then the balloon starts doing zig zags, figure 8s, circles, box shapes and moved in other unsatelliteish ways for about 20-30 minutes before crashing into a mesa wall. Then Coyote, flat against the canyon wall, exhausted and with resignation slides to the bottom, limply holding up a white flag on a stick.
The myth of "space aliens" flying the saucers just made it easier to sweep actual sightings under the rug and dismiss the whole Cold War UFO phenomenon as just another wacky conspiracy theory. With such a surveillance craft at your disposal, you could virtually hover for minutes at a time, getting close-in photos or observe operations, and your only risk is that photos of your spy plane would end up on the back cover of The National Inquirer next to Nessie and Goat-Boy.
Not unreasonable to believe that such craft could be loaned out to FBI and other domestic spy agencies to keep tabs on suspected communists. It was the 1950's, and the Communist next door was the 2nd greatest threat next to Kruschev's nukes. Plans are in place today for police departments to procure their own drones to spy, I mean conduct surveillance, on the urban population.
More likely an attempt to reverse engineer experimental craft or designs for such captured by the allies near the end of WWII. Long range guided missiles, line-of-site remote controlled bombs, helicopter gunships, CCTV, the assault rifle, jet fighters and the Uranium used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were all conceived, designed, built and with the exception of nuclear weapons, deployed by the Germans. This technology and the scientists who ended up on the western half of the iron curtain were employed to develop America's nuclear deterrent of ICBMs and the space program.
If Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor and if Hitler had not attacked Russia, Germany would probably still occupy most of Europe and would have placed a NAZI flag on the moon in 1959.
Slashdot Mirror
...no one in their right mind takes them seriously (on both sides of the fence: I have seen ToS's with joke clauses).
Two dangerous assumptions:
1. The lawyers who draft ToS's are in their right minds. Nobody in their right mind goes to school for 17 years of their life, racks up $200k in student loans, and chooses to work 80 hours a week for $35k/yr to write ToS's all day.
2. Some of the rediculous clauses are jokes. That ToS that said "if you violate our ToS we will eat your babies" was not a joke. They were serious.
How are American citizens going to know about these candidates without corporate interests buying and paying for their radio, tv, internet, and billboard advertising? (Hint: it won't be because our existing 'representatives' will rewrite the laws to make campaigning a fair fight based on ideological positions and personal qualifications)
I nominate Westboro Baptist Church, for the following reasons:
1. The church is a small, tight-knit group of mostly family members.
2. They won't back down from their mission, regardless of personal cost.
3. They all share the same very narrow-minded world view, so the possibility of moral conflicts or dissent in any form will be quite limited. Risk of mutiny would be all but eliminated.
4. Sound does not travel through the vacuum of space, and radio transmissions will grow weaker and take longer the further they travel away from earth.
5. They live under the threat of death everyday from every extremist group on the planet, and also from a few ordinary people as well, so the perils and dangers of deep space travel will not be a challenge to them.
6. The mission will be a great way to get them off this planet.
7. If the mission suffered a catastrophic failure and the entire crew was lost, there would be no negative sentiment from the American public and the space programs could proceed unaffected except by the financial and project timeline setbacks.
8. Since the life, safety, and comfort of the crew would be of no concern at all, the vessel and enclosed equipment could be constructed with record-breaking cost savings.
9. If cosmic radiation renders the crew sterile and unable to reproduce - two birds, one stone.
10. Cut the costs in half by making the voyage a one-way trip.
I wonder how many convictions and court judgments relied solely on DKIM evidence that an email came from a defendant, all other evidence being circumstantial. I wonder what potential exist for such decisions to be overturned.
Par for the course, not just in art but in almost any field.
Except that Sturgeon's Law seems to be inverted when it comes to art. The worst 10% of the worst crap is praised by "intellectual" and cultural elites who summarily dismiss works of art that are embraced by the common populace. A good example might be the art found in contemporary PC and console games. Even the creations you can find on digitalblasphemy.com have greater appeal to me than many works you find in top-dollar galleries.
Art is not necessarily decorative. Sometimes it's provocative in a social and cultural sense. Sounds like that was the artist's intent.
I'm OK with art that has a provocative message. But then the value of the art lies within the value of the message, even if you disagree with the view the artist was trying to convey. Imagine a painting of Mitt Romney at a banquet table taking the only piece of cake from a platter while saying "Please, help yourselves" to guests at the table that look like starved holocaust survivors. Now that would be a provocative image whether you or not you are offended by the artwork. And, no, it doesn't have to be political. But if the art is supposed to have a provocative message, it is still waste if there is no practical objective to be gained from the audiences reaction. "Made you gasp!" or "made you vomit!" is not in itself a reasonable objective even for provocative art. Art with such a limited objective is nothing more than aesthetic terrorism. Those who create, purchase, display, and advocate such works are just self-serving, or self-loathing, sadistic psychopaths.
Personally, the sight of dead rabbits hanging from a tree would turn my stomach. It would evoke all kinds of feelings about animal cruelty, public health, offensive eyesore, etc. But assuming I could look past that for a moment, I might try to find some kind of message, such as tree of life/death, overpopulation, doomed humanity, some kind of civic spin on nihilism, and so on. It's disgusting but it's still art because the artist intended it to be such. Of course, whether it's good art is an entirely different discussion.
The traditional academic view of art tends to be "art for art's sake". There is also some sort of universal consensus that 'art is important' or has 'intrinsic value'. For some reason art is one of the view 'academic' subjects that is allowed to be taught and studied in a vacuum with little regard for other academic disciplines such as economics, ethics, political science, and others. For example, when discussing 'great art' and the 'importance' of promoting the appreciation of or advocating the preservation of such 'great art', there is little or no mention of the opportunity cost of creating, appreciating, and preserving such art. To what degree do tax-payer-supported endowments become a form of cultural welfare for artists who cannot sustain themselves from the direct sale or showing of their artwork? Or how is it justifiable to spend $1million to preserve an artifact that will generate little or no revenue when the money could have been put to use buying toothbrushes for workers in Bangladesh who are paid such a low wage that they can only scrub their teeth with their finger each morning? In fact, "supporting the arts" is perhaps one of the most selfish of "charities" because the contributor is very likely to benefit directly from the very performance their gift funded.
What if the artist in the Winnipeg example killed the rabbits used in the display with the intent to protest animal cruelty? Shouldn't rational though enter the equation for the value of the art, such as the likelihood that the work would be greeted with disgust and have no effect to reduce the abuse of animals, the consumption of meat and fur, or the use of terminal pest control techniques? Maybe the artist shares a tea-party mind
Same can be said for the "modern art" most favored by academics in our institutes of higher learning. Most of it is also randomly generated. Most likely this randomly generated math paper baffled the reviewer. Instead of having enough confidence or ability to see if there was any validity to the paper, he just went forward with it, probably presuming that whoever could write such a baffling paper had to be more intelligent than he was. And he certainly wasn't going to be made a fool by questioning the work of such a brilliant mind.
Likewise, pseudo-intellectual art critics and academics over the last century fell for one of the greatest practical jokes of all time - modern art - except that the pranksters died before revealing the humor behind it all. The art academics, fearful of being exposed for being less intelligent than their peers in science, history, mathematics, and other fields, couldn't take the risk of challenging the "art" of what might be a superior mind. Ever since, to be accepted as art in modern academic circles the creator must be high on bath salts, suffering from dimentia, or have some other mental illness. Most of the "greatest" works of our modern time have been the result of randomly flicking, throwing, smearing, dripping, and pouring paint on a canvas. More "creative" works involved letting chickens run through paint, leaving footprints on canvas, or painting with different shades of feces. After all this, people still get upset when I suggest that perhaps artists have not necessarily improved our civilization on the same scales as scientists and engineers.
An effective robocaller could be simply a PC, some software, and an anonymous prepaid cell phone. Or a VOIP connection originating from outside the US. You could even originate from within the US, dial through another country, then back into the US. Unless you make it difficult to cheaply procure such anonymous phone numbers or difficult to spoof them you can't stop robocalls. The best defense is to give phone customers an option for all calls meeting certain profiles to pass through an automatic privacy screen - like a voice message that answers the suspect calls and prompts the user to state their name and dial three or four digits to proceed. Most robocallers won't be able to get past this step. Most human telemarketers and scammers won't bother to waste time on this step (most use autodialers so they do not spend much time waiting for a call to be answered).
Such profiles for suspect calls could be any call not on your contact list, calls outside your area code, calls from area codes most commonly used by robocallers, and calls with blocked or missing CID info.
Such systems do exist but they are not readily available for all phones and rarely ever free. If you are not hounded by robocalls then such a privacy screen may not be worth the cost.
Hey - I think that worked in an Austin Powers movie.
can stop robocalls.
Clearly the OP was using satire. And in satire he makes a good point. Personally, I think the guy who made and released the movie was a punk, but that's about as far as I will go. I will not demand that our government prosecute him for offending the sensitivities of others. But regarding such sensitivities, we in this country, and in the West, have grown used to "taking it on the chin" so to speak. Even if you burn our flag, put shoes on it, and call for your god to curse us all, we either find it amusing and laugh, change the channel, or maybe return the insult, but we have learned to control our anger and reserve violence only when it becomes a practical necessity to protect our life and property. In the Western world, in response to such anger or hatred, you will find more empathy and more people willing to take action to try to understand the hostility and to try to address the underlying causes in an effort to create a more peaceful and harmonious world to live in. You will also find racists and violent idiots, but it doesn't take much study to see that in the West most of the people shun and directly oppose the extremists.
Outside the West (in which I would also include peaceful developed nations like Japan, South Korea, and a few other countries) such widespread tolerance is not the norm (nor was it in the West in the not-too-distant past). In some regions there is an uneasy co-existence, while in others society is fully aligned with the dominant worldview (religious in the Middle East and Central Asia; political in Myanmar and North Korea). In these rigid societies, dissent is not permitted, disertion from the dominant worldview or conversion to another is punished, and minorities holding a different worldview are barely tolerated, and usually only if they are indigineous to the area before the worldview was established or if they came to visit or settle in the area after the worldview was established. Such minorities will face significant discrimination, occassional bigotry and abuse, and in some cases violent pogroms or expulsion from citizens and/or their government.
Given that unfavorable speech is going to be received with violence in the less tolerant parts of the world, care should be taken to insulate the free speech of the West from such a violent audience. This should be the responsibility of the regimes that control and perpetuate the intolerant worldview. Western nations should also implement an "intolerance test" to be administered to all immigrants. The test could be a multimedia presentation showing words, images, and actions that are permitted in the free society, and after each segment the test subject should answer a multiple choice test with questions like "what would be your response if this insult was directed toward you" or "how would you feel if someone committed this act in your place of worship on its holiest day". Answers could be limited to responses such as:
a. I would join in
b. It wouldn't bother me
c. It would affect me personally. I might even cry.
d. I would shout "How dare you! Leave this place at once! May the feet of swine desecrate the graves of your ancestors!"
e. I would spare their lives but I would kill their pets and burn their homes.
or
f. I would grab the nearest blunt object and throw it at them.
The order of the possible answers should be random so that the violent response is not always "e." or "f." Most questions should have more than one violent response as an option, and at least one question needs to be answered "none of the above" with all the other responses being violent in nature. One question should be a user generated (typed, not handwritten) response to let them answer how they would prefer to respond to the most obscene and blasphemous mockery of the most sacred belief that they hold to. This response would have to be evaluated by a well-trained test administrator.
On their way out from the test there would be one final challenge. There would be objects (paper weights, works of art, etc.)
No, but when the US starts planting flags on more heavenly bodies, they may be able to define them as "Federal Land", subject to BLM regulation.
I agree that Universal is getting rather extreme with this, but I could understand the concern on their part that anybody could record a newly released top hit in high fidelity, and add just enough content to suggest that the music was "incidental" when in reality the true intent was to freely distribute the music to a worldwide audience.
That said, I am beginning to believe that patents and copyrights are just a corporate entitlement that leads to bigger government. Big government is bad, so maybe we're all better off getting rid of the whole dang system.
But, conversely, publishing was not as profitable in 1776, thus insufficient lobbying funds were available to draft appropriate legislation. Now that publishing is much more profitable, much more effective legislation has been procured from the profits generated. And now with even more profits protected and secured, there will be even more lobbying money available in the near future to come up with even more innovative legislation.
Everybody wins! Don't you feel more secure knowing that the IP you purchased today will be available at a similar or perhaps even higher price in the future? Wouldn't you feel bad if you spent $20 for one license to play a song on the personal private device of your choosing (preferrably with headphones to keep freeloaders from dilluting you musical experience), only to find out in just a few months or years that other people are allowed to listen to the same music for which you paid so much while they only have to pay a fraction of that amount? Or even without paying at all! The fixed market price you pay for your music is a benefit that the industry provides you with, and the industry has worked how and taken significant risks to fix this price for you, the consumers. If you didn't pay so much you likely would not appreciate the IP you claim to enjoy as you do when you do pay for it. High prices make consumers good stewards of their property. If you only had enough money to buy just one song, and if all songs were about the same price (a feat difficult to achieve for most businesses, but look what the industry has done for you), I guarantee you would take your time, think real hard, and buy the best song that ever was and ever will be. You would cherish that song, protect it like a newborn baby, and play that song all day (preferrably with headphones). You would appreciate it way more that if you could just pick it up for free like a discarded fruit peel. You should all be thanking the industry for making it so.
My business model is similar to breathing, but I don't control what other people choose to breathe. But when they walk by my store and breathe in the aroma of my scented candles and then walk away without paying, how fair is that? People should not expect the government to just hand out entitlements like healthcare, housing, food stamps, disability and SSI, but we do need a system of entitlements for those of us who actually pay taxes to protect our rackets. We have patents, copyrights, and contracts, but that is not enough. It's about time for government to protect our aroma property rights as well. Who's with me?
Just a reminder, that those who are not paying any income tax are struggling to pay what would have been an equal amount to social security and medicare - and there's no tax break for them here. Only the first $100k of income contributes toward these taxes. So all of those making over $100k for most of their careers but still expect to draw social security and qualify for medicare coverage, why not continue to make proportional payments on the remainder of your income? There are already enough people cashing in on more than they put in to give 1%'ers such a break. The 1% do want to be responsible, don't they? So why do they resist contributing more, considering that they could theoretically lose all their assets in a lawsuit or bad investment and end up just as poor as the rest of us? Hey, it has happened. Plenty of times.
Extreme right and left are ripping up the country and our economy. Which is why we have a "free market" healthcare system that is the joke of the world, where insurance companies engage in processing delays, "lost forms", slow-pay, low-pay, unjust denials, and other tactics; while ER rooms have the obligatation to stabilize every patient regardless of coverage or ability to pay; where medicaid, medicare, CHIP, and countless other government programs, charities, and provider discounts and medical debt write-offs and bankruptcies skew the actual market price to a point where nobody really knows the fair market value of medical treatment. A system where medical doctors expect personal incomes in the $100k-$400k range and are constantly caught cheating medicare, medicaid, and insurance companies. They cheat patients too, but there are fewer resources to investigate those. But I have several anecdotes from my small circle of friends.
Those who studied hard, invested in their education, worked their way up through their respective career ladder, are now joining the ranks of the "irresponsible" who can no longer afford their bills, especially if they've fallen through our very factured medical system. I'm sure that most teachers, EMTs, fire fighters, police officers, social workers, park rangers and foreign aid workers thought that they were being responsible when they chose their important but low-paid careers. But now when sooner or later they get sick and need care, or their spouse or children require care that is mandated by the state, they have to pay the price chosen by a select few who control an oligopoly on medicine and practice. And when they run up medical bills and can no longer afford their car or mortgage payments, they are cast into the lot of "irresponsible" debtors who should have planned from childhood to run private equity firms instead of saving your life, protecting your property, or teaching your children.
Meanwhile, the ignorants who vote to maintain this morally irreprehensible "system" do so because they either fantasize that they too could be a wealthy and powerful CEO, real estate mogul, or rap star. Or their pastor told them which party will do more to protect the unborn. Even more so, these ignorants are either not aware or refuse to believe that Americans are denied access even to relatively primitive care such as the mere simple removal of an abscess tooth or the critical but relatively easy removal of a skin tumor before it metastasizes. I could use pliers myself to remove the abscess tooth, or sterilize my pocket knife to cut out the tumor. I could do it for free for friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers if I wasn't overrun by the horde of the medically needy. I could even do it for tips, like you would pay a waiter, and probably make a good living. But the "free market" prohibits me from doing so, because I am unlicensed.
The ignorants believe that there are programs and charities out there that make sure that everyone gets the treatments they truly need. Simply because many diabetics get insulin shots daily at the ER does not mean that any working-class guy can get cancer treatment. And when medicaid does cover, it leaves middle class families living on the edge of poverty, regardless of hours worked or what profession.
Peace, Love, and F**K You B**CH
Modern understanding of good hygiene, sanitation, vermin control, physical activity, accident prevention, and adequate clothing, shelter, and HVAC systems contribute most to longevity. Those in the medical profession would have you think that you are living twice as long as you would have were it not for all of their medications, treatments, surgeries and other procedures. Of all the medical "miracles", only antibiotics and insulin have had enough effect to substantially increase life expectancy for the general population. Most of the millions of dollars spent on healthcare, whether privately or publicly funded, go toward "heroic" efforts to prolong life well beyond where it should have been allowed a more graceful and comfortable ending, or in some cases on virtually quack medical treatments that may cause ailments just as dangerous and/or painful than the underlying condition without even slowing down the disease, all because some statistics seemed to indicate that 3-5% of patients showed some improvement. There is a lot of money to be made in the sales and marketing of hope and hype in clear, empty bottles.
Now there are specific cases where a person has been allowed to live a much longer and greater quality of life due to certain advances in medicine and surgery. Most of these are in the cases of transplants, where, in the USA at least, one person gets unlucky, dies, and their estate billed tens of thousands of dollars, while a needy patient pays tens of thousands of dollars (even with insurance) to receive a healthy replacement organ. Most of us will not benefit substantially from medical care, but we will likely be depleting what savings we may have aquired through hard work and frugal living when at the end of our lives we are placed in a nursing home or hospice care for weeks, months, or years paying for someone to change our bedpans, wash our soiled sheets, and feed us preprocessed institutional food.
One of the few areas where medicine can do the most good is to catch and correct problems at the very earliest stage when they are easiest and most affordable to treat. But in the USA, policy makers and insurance executives, in their infinite wisdom, have erected cost barriers along every step of medical care to "consumerise" health care choices, with the presumption that Americans drive up the cost of health care by over-consuming medical services. The end result is that patients inevitably drive up the cost of care by either choosing to ignore early problematic symptoms to save money or they simply do not have the money to afford medical diagnosis or early treatment. So problems are not treated until they get out of hand, when a family decides that medical treatment is more important than little Johnny's college fund, the tax and penalties of withdrawing from a retirement account, or in many cases, paying rent, mortgage, or car payments. Even with insurance, if the medical problem is serious enough there will likely be so many uncovered expenses, travel, time off work, etc., that a family will burn through their paychecks, emergency fund, home equity, and college/retirement savings in the first few months or years of treatment. For some it will be only weeks. And then there will be life threatening delays as hospitals with multi-million dollar endowments and non-profit tax status withhold treatment while a family struggles with bureaucrats, case managers, and charity providers to convince them that they are needy and should qualify for aid. If they are lucky and quickly and correctly discover, fill out, and submit the appropriate applications and grant requests, and if there aren't too many doubts about how many assets they are retaining for themselves (usually $2,000.00 max. per family), and if their incomes still are not too high, they might receive just enough help to treat some of their "qualifying" conditions, but usually only if they are or have minor children or are legally disabled.
Presumably, any attempt to surpass the speed of light would required taking actions that will likely kill you. But if you succeeded you would be in a completely separate alternate universe. Since religion has taught us for millenia that you pass on to an alternate universe when you die, maybe the ancients were on to something. Since spirit beings would have zero mass they could theoretically, if they existed, shift into hyperspace. Test pilots just better hope there's a physical being on the other side to serve as a host body. I'm still waiting for the Heaven's Gate explorers to send back their message to let us know if they succeeded or not.
Not a Chinook. I've been going to airshows my whole life, so quite familiar with those. Imagine one set of counter-rotating blades from the second image, only instead of blades it looks more like a double-stacked oval frisbee, with no Chinook body/fuselage. I considered the possibility that it may have been a Chinook seen straight on. That would explain counter rotating objects one on top of the other, but the motion across the sky, right to left from my perspective, was very inconsistent with the typical operation of a Chinook (though technically not impossible). And the conspicuous absence of a Chinook-like fuselage hanging beneath the blades/ovals/whatever-they-were. Even if head-on, the Chinook would still look like it had some sort of cockpit hanging beneath the rotating elements.
And the government required that they install lights for future missions to earth to remain in compliance with FAA regulations.
Man can make the phone smart, but the phone cannot make the man ... I forget the rest.
zipping by, then stopped and started doing zig zags, figure 8s, circles, box shapes and moved in other unsatelliteish ways for about 20-30 minutes before it took off....The best i could come up with was a weather balloon, but that doesnt fit with the movements of w.e this was.
Yes, it was a weather balloon. Haven't you seen those cartoons when Wylie Coyote is trying to drop an anvil onto Roadrunner from a balloon - but then Roadrunner shows up behind the balloon, pecks it just once, and then the balloon starts doing zig zags, figure 8s, circles, box shapes and moved in other unsatelliteish ways for about 20-30 minutes before crashing into a mesa wall. Then Coyote, flat against the canyon wall, exhausted and with resignation slides to the bottom, limply holding up a white flag on a stick.
Yes, dadelbunts, that is what you saw.
Case Closed,
US Dept. of Counter-Intelligence
The myth of "space aliens" flying the saucers just made it easier to sweep actual sightings under the rug and dismiss the whole Cold War UFO phenomenon as just another wacky conspiracy theory. With such a surveillance craft at your disposal, you could virtually hover for minutes at a time, getting close-in photos or observe operations, and your only risk is that photos of your spy plane would end up on the back cover of The National Inquirer next to Nessie and Goat-Boy.
Not unreasonable to believe that such craft could be loaned out to FBI and other domestic spy agencies to keep tabs on suspected communists. It was the 1950's, and the Communist next door was the 2nd greatest threat next to Kruschev's nukes. Plans are in place today for police departments to procure their own drones to spy, I mean conduct surveillance, on the urban population.
It's true. I drove through New Mexico once and saw hundreds of aliens. I'm pretty sure some of them were undocumented and illegal.
More likely an attempt to reverse engineer experimental craft or designs for such captured by the allies near the end of WWII. Long range guided missiles, line-of-site remote controlled bombs, helicopter gunships, CCTV, the assault rifle, jet fighters and the Uranium used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were all conceived, designed, built and with the exception of nuclear weapons, deployed by the Germans. This technology and the scientists who ended up on the western half of the iron curtain were employed to develop America's nuclear deterrent of ICBMs and the space program.
If Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbor and if Hitler had not attacked Russia, Germany would probably still occupy most of Europe and would have placed a NAZI flag on the moon in 1959.