send all your articles to Xarciv for free.

Naw, just run them through Dreamweaver and post them to Angelfire.com or livejournal.

Everyone that does actual work does not get payed for it by the publication.

That's "paid," homeslice. Thanks for submitting.

As in many cases, their costs are mostly to hire people who are capable of making intelligent editing decisions as well as doing the bulk work of editing.

Who do you want in charge of the place where you're submitting a paper? Someone who has little education, low intelligence and low personality skills, thus is paid very little? Or a relatively highly-paid, educated, personable and intelligent editor?

If you want quality, it costs all the way. It's not limited to the scientists alone. You will need to hire a competent editorial staff and that is far from free.

The camera built into my laptop most certainly can be turned off or completely disabled. It also has a little LED next to it that lights when it's active, so it's easy to know when it's on.

Actually, this can be circumvented, and as this case shows us, it has been done before.

and visual interfaces that may record motions I make that I do not intend to go into a computer.

I then go on to talk about visual gestures and how I don't want those recorded.

You seem to have mis-read the original message. I would apologize, but after having re-read it, I don't think it's unclear. I often read things hastily as well, and that can lead to this kind of misunderstanding.

While I'm all for new and exciting technology, I'm not sure I like having cameras around that can be hacked, and visual interfaces that may record motions I make that I do not intend to go into a computer.

The simplest example would be idly picking my nose, and then coming back later to find those exciting strokes recorded. For those of you who are pornography enthusiasts, a similar problem exists.

Although keyboards are arguably pretty bad, they don't interpret my actions for me. I have to deliberately seek out the keyboard and type on it. It can't watch me or misinterpret me.

Now my only enemy is my own tendency toward tyops and speeling errors.

You get your own graphics and theme music so it is so worth it.

If someone would consider making a video game about the event, with its own devil-worshipping heavy metal soundtrack, I might consider it.

Actually, I wouldn't. Pointless tragedy crushes my soul. I'd be more likely to fake one to mock the media circus than actually pull off a mass shooting. School shootings especially always seem to me like the emotional equivalent of a truckload of dead kittens.

Since we have not means to read another persons mind a lot of modern psychology involves analysis of the self. After doing so it is hard to think highly of oneself or other humans ever again.
While chemically complex, we are pretty trivial beings.

That reminds me of this essay:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/sorry-but-your-soul-just-died-1276509.html

However, I'd say there's a few counter-arguments.

1. We can become less trivial. Our culture encourages triviality through consumerism, or individualism, or egoism or something like that. Narcissism? It's an -ism, and it means we're basically "amusing ourselves to death" as Neil Postman says. We could fix that.

2. Compassion. I imagine most people think dogs are trivial. I love dogs. They are pure-hearted. Compassion encourages us to not worry so much about triviality.

3. Discover new worlds. There are other planets, new challenges, possibly other dimensions to explore. Maybe we're just bored and underchallenged, like students at public high schools?

Maybe not as impressive as I hoped it would be when I first thought of this message, but there it is.

Any time anyone mentions making health care (let alone mental health care) more accessible in this country for people who need it everyone starts screaming; "SOCIALISM IS EVIL! HOTDOGS AND APPLE PIE! COMMUNISTS ARE GOING TO TAKE OUR FORD TRUCK! FIREWORKS!", and other random capricious propaganda.
Then a school shooting happens and people start screaming we need to make health care more accessible for people who need it.

You just can't win either way.

I can see how this is frustrating.

However, what I'm talking about here is more that we don't view mental health care as something that can occur outside a casual context or a criminal context.

The casual context is having $200/hour to spend on your psychologist for what's basically mediated discussion.

The criminal context is that the only other option is to declare someone a threat to society and basically imprison them.

I don't know how the funding works out, but there needs to be something that's more like a hospital stay, but without the stigma of being called crazy and without the possibility of law enforcement involvement.

As far as how to pay for health care, it seems complicated: the more we regulate and socialize, the more expensive it gets. One solution is to regulate much less and see if we can simply lower the cost to the point where people can pay for this. Another is to encourage pharmaceutical companies to continue providing low-cost generic versions of their own drugs to people with less than buckets of money. Something tells me that this one is a "think outside the box" type issue.

People don't know the cause of school shootings, so they're trying to chip away at the methods used to achieve them. Banning guns, video games, heavy metal, etc. all fit into this in that people perceive these as being contributing factors to why people shoot up schools.

But what makes them want to shoot up schools? I'd say there are two issues here:

1. Mental health, especially undiagnosed mental health issues. In this society, all you can do if someone has issues is either pay for them to get treatment, or start a process that's going to get them confined in mental institutions.

2. Media coverage, because if you shoot up a school and get a high enough kill count, you're going to be on the front page of CNN etc. for weeks.

In this society we have an ugly tendency to assume that methods and not inner motivations, including ability and mental health, are important. We think that memorizing facts is more important than having mental ability; we look at whether people are obedient to social norms rather than whether what they're doing is right.

These types of situations suggest our society has some pathological need to avoid looking at our motivations. Perhaps we're afraid we'll find nothing but making money, watching TV, and eating Taco Bell.

I hope not.

I don't know what the truth of the situation is in Syria, but I know that:

(a) Western media seems to present a similar point of view no matter which source you're watching/reading

(b) Western governments seem to agree with the media

(c) There are few opposing voices in government or media

For this reason, it means that anyone with a contrary viewpoint is facing a giant media bloc composed of the most powerful governments and media producers in history.

Hacking is an equalizer. With relatively few people, and relatively low investment, it allows hackers to use the notoriety of the hack to present their point of view.

It seems to me that this company hopes to make money off of this project, and in part as a result, wants to maintain control over the project and its vision.

What use is inventing something if someone will immediately fork it into another project that will both be more popular, and avoid what makes it different from the other projects out there.

I think it's a new maxim of the internet that over time, all projects eventually devolve to being social media. I wouldn't want that to happen to my open document project...

You're on a per-hour, right?

You're going to walk him through the code; answer questions; answer the phone; bill a minimum for each. This is just good consultant practice. After that, you're on a per-hour basis to fix what he can't. No problem there, because these are the conditions under which you formed the contract.

However, you might want to pitch the writing of some documentation so he has a roadmap to your code and a description of how each (major) function/routine works. That's more hours for you, and less helplessness for him; this is important because when you're on another contract, you really don't want to take a couple hours out to put out fires at a dead-end gig (for you).