Comment Re:Once Again (Score 0) 58
America is confronted by its absence in matters of competence, courage, integrity and enterprise.
Didn't our nuclear-powered laser robot just discover water on Mars...?
America is confronted by its absence in matters of competence, courage, integrity and enterprise.
Didn't our nuclear-powered laser robot just discover water on Mars...?
No, he's not joking.
The first armed responders to show up at the Fort Hood shooting were civilian base police.
Aaron Alexis wasn't confronted with serious armed resistance until civilian police showed up -- just one guard that he apparently got the jump on.
Tennesee armory: "Tennessee National Guard workers managed to take down a shooting suspect and hold him until police arrived..."
Fort Bragg: "Minor said that the gunman, who was firing at them, turned away. And as he did, he and Sgt. Edward Mongold tackled the man. "It was a fight for his life," Minor said. "It was a fight for our lives. Minor, Mongold and several other soldiers disarmed the shooter and held him for the military police.."
Apparently, the military bases in the incidents you linked to are real-life military bases, where for example many guards aren't allowed to load their weapons without specific orders, rather than the bristling-with-weapons-super-high-security-one-false-move-and-you're-dead military bases in your imagination.
True, some parts of military bases ARE exactly like you imagine. That's not where shootings have tended to happen, though, for obvious reasons.
If Walmart did not give them jobs, they would likely be working for less, or be unemployed.
So when Wal-Mart opens a store in an area, it results in more jobs in that area? Do you have a cite?
... the only problem that needs to be solved is how to pay all the bills.
I can't imagine how math and reading skills might help there.
This this this.
A rising tide raises all boats, but what we're seeing is the water level in the harbor being raised artificially by the big boats sinking all the smaller boats around them...
Walmart's profit margin is 3.61%. So 1.1% would be about 30% of their earnings.
I wonder how much of that 1.1% is only possible because of Wal-Mart employees on food stamps?
In other words, how much of that 1.1% is basically our tax money?
... oh, and Wal-Mart. Can't forget our continual taxpayer-funded subsidization of Wal-Mart.
What happens when the majority of economic activity requires no workers at all? Then the owner gets a pile of profits, pays no workers at all, and only owners can afford anything because everyone else is unemployed and unemployable...
It's worse than that. The owner's profits are 100% dependent on customers, and over time everyone has fewer customers. So before long, you have a few people with huge automated factories only producing one or two items a year for the other factory owners and everyone else is kept outside the fences by robots armed with blinding lasers.
Sometimes you'll hear people talking about "the redistribution of wealth" like it's a bad thing, but in truth all economic systems are methods of wealth re-distribution. Ours was built originally to encourage the creation of wealth, by distributing portions of the created wealth to all responsible, but lately it's been running into trouble; it can't handle a transition to post-scarcity and is actually set up to self-destruct before we get there. It's why our government has to subsidize so many seemingly successful businesses - agriculture, transportation, energy, et al..
Some of those able to send alerts include the American Red Cross, Federal Emergency Management Agency, World Health Organization, and government and non-government agencies in Japan and South Korea.
Others able to send alerts include anyone able to momentarily spoof Twitter into thinking they're one of the listed agencies...
Departments don't want people who would give their own mother a speeding ticket.
This kind of implies that they want people who take care of their own and will look the other way when they see one of their own committing a crime...
Paragraph 5:
"Participants first completed a word scramble task during which they either had to unscramble some of these science-related words or words that had nothing to do with science."
... that until I read the summary, I actually wasn't sure if the headline meant the Obama administration was on the side of the journalist, or was on the side of arresting journalists who record cops...
This is insightful?
Yes.
What copyright does is ENFORCE the idea of artificial scarcity,
Incorrect. Books produced without copyright ARE STILL SCARCE. They still cost something to make, and they still have intrinsic value, even if the printer doesn't pay the author. Copyright in pre-digital media is helpful BECAUSE books exist in a market that has scarcity, because you can't produce books at lower cost than someone who doesn't have to pay the author to produce the work.
The problem with copyright on the Internet is that digital copies are NOT scarce. They have zero intrinsic value, and cannot be made to behave as if they do without breaking all the computers on the Internet. An exclusive right to sell digital copies is like an exclusive right to sell body hairs to Bigfoot.
Inexpensive, interconnected computing is at least a big a deal as the Gutenberg press, but it's hard for people to see history being made this close up.
Copyright still has value enforcing authorship. You just can't build a business model around making copies anymore.
There are some fine and excellent methods for encouraging people to create things that don't require copyright. They are in use right now. You should consider reading about them on the Internet.
Why buy a new copy for $10 when I can buy an identical copy for $3?
More importantly, why SELL a new copy for $10 when an identical copy is worth $0.00?!?!
It's more apparent now than ever that granting exclusive right to sell a product that has no value is a rapidly obsolescing business model. "Publisher advances money to author, author produces work, publisher produces copies of work and tries to sell them to recoup costs" DOES NOT WORK when the value of any individual copy of the work approaches zero.
"Audience advances money to author, author produces work, audience produces copies of work" is the way of the future, people should start getting used to it.
A single IP can be used by many people at the same time. Some of them can even be out of sight of each other. This doesn't hold true for guns.
That's not quite as true as it sounds...
Happiness is twin floppies.