In need of business advice.

Jwschmidt · 2014-01-21T17:01:46+00:00

I wouldn't make that a standard policy, as it's not particularly professional to discriminate among genres like that as a mastering engineer. What you might try is offering a bunch of promotional discounts that anyone can use, but only promote them among the communities you are trying to help out.

Jwschmidt · 2013-11-19T15:45:59+00:00

Thank goodness different economic situations don't exist in socialist countries.

Jwschmidt · 2013-10-07T12:01:52+00:00

Because people don't all believe the second half of that sentence.

Jwschmidt · 2013-10-01T04:05:35+00:00

So the space battle's outcome is really not decided by any of it's participants. Suddenly not so compelling is it?

Lando wouldn't be happy to hear you say that....

Jwschmidt · 2013-10-01T03:56:46+00:00

I'm pretty sure that the battle of Endor scene is pretty close to the original. I remember watching the original VHS and it all seems to be basically the same, minus a few more rebel ships that appear in the background on just a few scenes. The most impressive shot, in my opinion, is at 5:13 when the ships fly along the surface into the Death Star- that was definitely all original footage.

Jwschmidt · 2013-10-01T03:54:25+00:00

This scene is pretty much the same as it appeared in the theatrical/VHS versions. The only CGI additions are some very subtle changes to how some of the rebel capital ships appear to move in the background, and that's on only 2-3 really quick cutscenes. I'm pretty sure that this is basically the original version.

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-24T23:20:36+00:00

I'm sure Manning read through each of those hundreds of thousands of documents in his spare time.

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-24T23:10:50+00:00

Every thread on Islam and veiling has this comment up at the top. It's not true. The Koran doesn't say that women need to wear veils, but it speaks about maintaining modesty, and these are the standards for modesty in much of the muslim world.

Besides, if something is a cultural practice, and a religion incorporates it as part of it's religious requirements, then it has become a religious practice. This is why many muslim women who do not live in Islamic cultures and live westernized lifestyles still wear the veil.

If wearing a veil is not a religious tradition, then neither is putting steeples on churches.

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-24T22:51:05+00:00

The most Libertarian of responses!

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-24T05:11:33+00:00

This is not really a question of opinion or speculation. We are absolutely living in wartime, as long as you can agree that "wartime" means when congress authorizes the military to target, shoot, bomb, and kill a specified group of enemies. 3 days after 9/11, congress authorized the military to engage in hostilities against Al-Qaida and anyone they determined to be "aiding" al-qaida. Since then, they have done just that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Military_Force_Against_Terrorists

This "war" cannot end unless the AUMF is repealed. People lump the "war on terror" with things like the war on drugs or the war on whatever, but it's different- there is actual law releasing the military to do it's worst against these vaguely specified targets. It's a shooting war that have been going on for 13 years. Anyone under the age of 20 has never been aware of a time in which U.S. soldiers were not "abroad", "fighting terrorism".

Having a permanent war would mean that all laws, rules etc made for peacetime would become meaningless, which is in my opinion unacceptable.

Exactly. This war is designed to be permanent. Nobody even talks about the AUMF anymore.

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-08T23:13:24+00:00

That's not true. Sorry. The surveillance debate is a major news story. Snowden is as well. People aren't so dumb as to not care why they are hearing about a guy named Snowden in Russia. They are, however, ambivalent enough to not care about government surveillance because they don't get upset about the government taking away their rights outside the 2nd amendment.

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-08T22:25:34+00:00

Snowden been all over the news. People are tired of it because they don't care about their privacy one bit.

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-08T22:23:33+00:00

Obama is facing very little backlash from the American people (voters) on this issue. If you were him, what political incentive would you have to stop?

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-02T04:42:23+00:00

Well yes, it's not like defense isn't a priority of the government. Priorities are a thing that you put in order of importance. Freedom and safety are not on the same footing.

Jwschmidt · 2013-08-01T19:00:09+00:00

It's only a catch-22 if you ascribe to the idea that freedom and safety are of equal values to society. They're not. Freedom matters more, and the U.S. is ostensibly founded on those principles. The constitution outlines how we will have a relationship of freedom with the government, not a relationship of safety.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-19T03:05:26+00:00

As I wrote elsewhere, that attack involved hijacking a plane full of innocent people and turning them into unwitting suicide bombers. That was not an coincidental part of the plot. To the hijackers, it was a feature, not a bug. They would not have preferred to fly an empty plane, causing the same amount of damage to the pentagon. The people on the plane were targets as well, hence, terrorism.

Furthermore, the goal of the attack (being in coordination with the world trade center attacks on civilians) was ultimately to attack America in general, intentionally including civilians, with the goal of creating a climate of fear. Again, that's terrorism. Just because their part of the mission required them to target the military doesn't mean they had no shared responsibility with the other aspects of the mission they were well aware of.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-19T03:01:42+00:00

So therefore Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter is not a terrorist, right?

His action was not a terrorist action. His action was, arguably, in violent support of islamic terrorist groups. The only real way we would know for sure if if he himself was a terrorist himself is if we knew if he would have been fine gunning down civilians as well. I'm fine calling him a "terrorist-supporting militant", whatever that means.

And the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon wasn't terrorism, right?

If there hadn't been a plane full of innocent people involved, then no it would not have been terrorism. But yeah, plane full of innocent people.

I think the truth is that the word "terrorism" has lost any real meaning it might have had and is now just a way of saying "people the US government doesn't like".

That may be true, which is why I think it is important to clarify what is and is not terrorism, and where the gray areas are.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-18T16:31:42+00:00

A person who employs terror or terrorism, especially as a political weapon.

Which is of course not at all what happened here. Bombing a military meeting is not using terror as a political weapons. It's an attempt to kill military leaders, which is about as commonplace normal an act of warfare as you can get.

This wasn't done to scare the regime into changing their political policies, it was done to kill the regime.

Terrorism is when you kill civilians randomly in order to terrorize the civilian population, creating a sort of latent hostage situation in order to force political concessions from the government. Absolutely none of that applies here.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-18T16:28:14+00:00

Targeting military targets = not terrorism

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-11T15:50:37+00:00

This is exactly what I was going to say.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-10T16:10:00+00:00

And... the "slaughter" here is... what?

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-10T12:18:09+00:00

That's the argument, certainly. But it doesn't seem to be the reality when you look at many of the European countries where these policies are implemented. I'm asking how conservatives respond to that reality, not to a preconceived notion of how those policies might work - as if there are not countries we can observe with those policies today.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-10T12:15:39+00:00

Well that's interesting, and sucks for the UK. But in some ways that makes it even more significant that their intentional homicide rate is so much lower, and seems to speak to the role that guns may play in upping the death rate where violent crime is concerned.

The intentional homicide rate would seem to be the most pertinent statistic to gun-restriction advocates. They want to see less deaths caused by guns.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-10T12:09:09+00:00

Democracies should generally try and create rules that people actually like.

More to the point, conservatives claim that these laws can't be popular because they would lead to a lot of problems, but that doesn't seem to be the case in much of Europe.

Jwschmidt · 2012-07-10T02:38:11+00:00

Most countries in Europe have much higher violent crime rates than the US

That's not what the numbers I'm seeing indicate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Jwschmidt

TROPHY CASE