Undermanned?

I'm a photojournalist who works in the borderlands quite frequently.

Law enforcement in Mexico is an entrepreneurial exercise. They could have an order of magnitude more cops than they do, and it wouldn't make any difference in the world.

The present prohibition is making a class of narcolords who make Al Capone look like a big pussy.

These narcos have more money, more power and more influence than basically any other crime syndicate presently in existence. And it's moving north. Home invasions, kidnappings and drug rips are becoming the norm in suburbia anywhere within a few hundred miles of the border.

Legalizing marijuana (and possibly cocaine) would solve 96% of the problem overnight. Not to mention creating new revenue streams for the government, and maybe allowing the US to once again step behind Russia in the running to imprison the largest percentage of the population.

To the crowd: Face it. It's illegal. But your kids smoke it, your co-workers smoke it and you/your spouse smokes it. Its illegal status is not a deterrent. Wouldn't you rather know where it's coming from and that people aren't dying over it?

Legalize marijuana.

Actually, they'll be fingerprinting people.

If the tap were turned off tomorrow, yes, people would go back to buying music. Who's to say they're not buying it now? They could be buying an album every few weeks/months in addition to everything else they're downloading for free.

If the tap were turned off, they would continue to buy that same limited number of CDs.

While I don't condone copyright infringement in the least, I accept that a download does not in any way equate to a lost sale.

Yeah totally.

I'll give you unlimited bandwidth, but at 16k during the 'peak' hours of 00:05 until 23:55. See how much you can eat then.

I agree with you on all points but credit.

As a working photojournalist, credit is nice. It's great to know that people can find out who did the work.

But from a credit standpoint, they don't take bylines at the grocery store, the bank my mortgage is though cares only about my name under a photo so long as it generates the cash to pay the bills, and saying, "But don't you know who I am?" at a restaurant won't get you very far.

The credits matter only to prevent works from becoming inadvertantly orphaned.

I just made the plunge into flat-panel land because I couldn't find a widescreen CRT I liked.

I found that, at least on my Sharp set, the sharpness and color are really very, very tweakable.

Just my two cents.

As a photographer, I completely agree.

Other than the money itself, though, part of the reason copyright has been pushed back so long is simply because guys like Eddie Adams don't want their famous war photographs entering the public domain and being used by everyone from rock bands to book jackets to shill products.

It's not always entirely about the money.

Not trying to be argumentative, but those prices are a little out of touch with reality, I'm afraid.

A quality instrument is going to start at around $700 USD these days, with lesser quality products starting at about $300.

Like most other arts, the biggest factor is the artist, but you need an axe that will hold a tune and handle the stress of being played.

I have never seen a $50 strat in a pawn shop or anywhere else. The cheap, Mexi-strats start at a minimum of $300, and a used one (that works) will command 80% of that price.

Worked for me. In the last few months, I cut my cable bill quite dramatically.

By dropping the television and phone service, my bill went from $180 to $50.

I don't miss TV at all. What little I watch tends to be baseball, and I can get every MLB game legally on my computer through a paid service offered by the league.

Additionally, Netflix's streaming and DVD-by-mail service fill in the remainder of what time I have to watch TV.

I can't believe that I was paying $1560 per year for cable TV. What a waste.

And it also lowers the value of having your voice heard to near zero.

Do you want your news coming from individuals so rich that they don't have to make money doing it?

Or maybe you want it from a busboy so busy with his day job that he can't find time to do anything other than rewrite press releases and make shit up?

Finally, maybe you want your news from a business professional who practices journalism as a hobby in spare time and on the weekends? Problem is it's a full time job to do it right AND you have to wonder where his conflicts-of-interest are.

I do the job for the love of the game, and because I believe it genuinely helps keep people informed. But at the end of the day, cameras cost money, food costs money, clothes cost money, etc.

Paid journalists do a greater service because they can dedicate their 40-60 hours (in some cases more) to the job.

Even in print journalism, the staff is much more expensive than the paper and ink. There's a reason for that.

It has nothing to do with the staff; or very, very little anyway.

Walk into the modern newsroom and you'll see that a great many of the 'embittered old dinosaurs' are kids who likely were in high school or younger when the Berlin Wall FELL.

Journalism isn't an old man's game because most people leave to go chase real paychecks outside the industry.

What fucks up the works is the shareholder and the ad-driven model. Stories need to be sexier and sexier to make another buck for the shareholders, and ads need to be sold at any cost to maximize shareholder value.

Public service will come from somewhere else.

The problem is that in the loss of the "smaller paper" most of America is desperately lacking in information about what is happening in their communities.

Everything that happens in Washington is supremely important, but it represents only one-half of the government and power that can bend you over. The other half is comprised of the state/local government and the businesses that fund them.

True, there aren't many bloggers embedded in Fallujah, but there are equally few in Tuscaloosa or Tempe. For the most part what exists isn't anything more than regurgitation of something seen somewhere else, or mere opinion presented as fact.

Journalists can't be right all the time, but we sure as hell try to be unprejudiced in our reporting.

The New York Times will be around until we're not. But again, big papers are only half the equation.

Most households can't handle their own budgets. If John and Jane Q. Public can't get their shit together, how can we expect them to get a grip on the actions of two separate governments (state and Fed.)?

Also, the ways in which government uses money are out of the realm of comprehension even to experts, at least in some cases. If John and Jaen don't 'get it,' how can they seek to better regulate it?

According to this site, nova isn't a perfectly acceptable word.

I can't pretend to know every word in every language, but my extensive travels in Mexico have not exposed me to nova at all, let alone meaning new.

In Latin, nova is a first declension feminine meaning 'new' (where 'novus' is the masculine'). In Spanish, the most common word for new is 'nuevo/a' depending on the gender of the word it modifies.

In what countries is 'nova' new? I'm genuinely interested.

Chevy had some trouble in Mexico and South America with it's 'Nova,' because the name is a play on no va, or it doesn't go.

Funny that Cuba would pick such a name for their new OS.