kimmy

It's another business model... printing shops like Shapeways have not just printing facilities, but also an online community of content creators. You can look at someone's designs, decide "hey that's cool I want one", and click the order button, put in your PayPal information, and in a few weeks you've got your product. The designer gets paid for their design, the printing shop gets paid for building it, and you get your bangles. Everybody wins, except for brick-and-mortar retailers. But again, the cost of a custom-designed, 3d-printed object is high compared to the cost of a mass-market object produced by conventional high-volume manufacturing techniques. To bring this back to the "cutting the cord" theme, it's once again about consumers wanting more choices, and technology arising to meet the demand. As things stand, if I wanted to order HBO Canada to watch Game of Thrones, Shaw Cable will bleed me for an extra $50 per month for 3 months. Because Shaw won't just let me order HBO Canada. Shaw requires me to upgrade my basic cable package, upgrade my equipment, and order the premium package of which HBO Canada is just one part. As much as I love the show, I won't pay $15 per episode for it, especially when most of that would be going to Shaw rather than the creators of the program. HBO will get their money from me. And hopefully sooner or later they will come up with alternative means of delivery that allows people to buy their programming without giving so much money to the middlemen. -k

As I understand it, operating a 3d printer isn't "free", or even cheap. And they're tricky and time-consuming. And you have a limited range of materials and colors that you can work with. And the stuff you make has an unfinished look, and would need to be painted afterward. So... that's an awful lot of hassle to go through for a $10 knick-knack. I have used a commercial 3d printing service called Shapeways. I was searching for a product that didn't actually exist, but somebody had drawn up a 3d model of what I was looking for and posted it on a website. I emailed the model to Shapeways, and a few weeks later had exactly what I wanted. It wasn't cheap, though. -k

Leaving comparisons to Canada aside, are any members of Team America actually of the opinion that campaign finance rules in America are good, or that this ruling and Citizens United were positive steps? -k

So apparently Kit Harrington is a Leafs fan. -k

I agree with all of this. For me, the major driver behind all of the CD and BluRay purchases I've made in the past several years has been that I really enjoyed the material. In the case of music, it's often that I listened to it on Youtube or some other online streaming service, and wanted to buy the whole CD. There's an interview with the Game Of Thrones creators where they were asked what they thought about being the most pirated product in the history of the internet. They said that it's the best advertising possible. I walked through my local Indigo store yesterday, and there was a fiesta of Game of Thrones books and merchandise on display. The thing has become a phenomenon. And it wouldn't have reached this level without piracy. People pirate the show, get hooked on the show, get their friends hooked on it, and everybody winds up purchasing the BluRays when they come out, and the books, and a Lannister beer mug and a Stark t-shirt and probably a lot of people order HBO just for GoT as well. I almost bought a Khaleesi bobblehead yesterday. So cute! -k

People who use their computers to do work still use Windows by a wide margin over its so-called competition. There is a massive library of software for Windows computers that simply doesn't exist for other operating systems. If Windows machines suddenly ceased to exist, many businesses would have to run Windows emulation on some other operating system. I personally found upgrading to Windows 8 to be a painless experience. And once you have it set up to boot directly to desktop, it's a seamless transition from Windows 7. I have yet to have a single system freeze-up under Windows 8, and I expect many years of use out of this computer. I put this machine together in 2008, upgraded the processor in 2010, the video card in 2011, and added a solid state drive as the main drive in 2013. All of this stuff is so fast and powerful that it blazes through almost every task. The only thing I ever do that slows it down is converting video files to different formats, and I doubt new computers fair much better at that task. And I seldom do that anyway. The solid state drive is an amazing upgrade, by the way... highly recommended. I think most computer users are in a similar situation. The desire for more processing power or more disc space or better graphics no longer drives computer sales. Unless you use your computer for specialized tasks (hardcore gaming, sound/image/video processing, certain scientific and technical applications...) the computer you bought 5 years ago has all the power and graphics and disc space you need. So what drives mainstream computer sales now? Unless your hardware fails and you need to replace it, what makes you buy a new computer? -k

Oh, I see. You're reducing the data-set to "former child stars". So, uh, what conclusion did you want the "kids" to draw from Shirley Temple's voting preferences? Since I wasn't a child star either, maybe I shouldn't care what conclusions might be drawn from a data set that's been limited to former child stars. -k

The whole Noah story , if told using only the detail provided in the Bible, would make for an awfully short movie. I read somewhere that the "Watchers" were based on the Nephalim, which are not well described in scripture but are considered by some to be fallen angels. Aronofsky felt that fallen angels would not necessarily be dudes with wings (indeed, the dudes with wings concept of angels doesn't have a scriptural basis.) I have been mulling over whether I want to see Noah. In a book with a lot of stupid stories, the Noah's Ark story is probably the stupidest, and I'm a bit curious to see how Aronofsky tries to dress it up to make it easier for modern audiences to swallow. Yeah, or like who did Cain and Seth marry? Hiyoooo! -k

Because it made me laugh. -k

Who blocks off 2 lanes of a gas station for 15 minutes because they were dissatisfied with a $6 car wash? Does anybody here know an adult who would do something like that? The CBC panel discussion I saw yesterday kind of snickered at the idea that a $6 car wash is national news and asked whether the news media is screwing up by reporting this. On its own it wouldn't be, but in light of other issues surrounding her, it might be. One member of the panel said that a lot of waiters and servers in downtown Ottawa have bad stories about Eve Adams. Somebody on the panel said that she shouted "I'm a Member of Parliament!" at the gas station owner, which ... what can you say about that? She sounds like she's still stuck in high-school. -k

There's a municipality in BC that has no residents, no homes, and no taxable property. It's a town that doesn't actually exist. But it does have a mayor, a town council, and an annual budget of $200k per year, all provided by the provincial government. http://www.columbiavalleypioneer.com/?p=11810 Seriously. This municipality exists as part of a plan to develop a controversial ski resort that's been in on the drawing board forever. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/time-is-running-out-for-jumbo-glacier-resort/article16657533/ The whole business smells kind of funny. -k

But more men than women appear to be atheists, based on the statistics I've seen. If the religions' treatment of women was the reason for women to be atheist, we would expect the opposite to be true. I'd suggest that women leave religion (or don't join religion) for, in most cases, the same reasons as men. -k

Ed Asner is a Democrat who has had a long, healthy, successful life. Kids: draw a conclusion. Ted Nugent has been in legal trouble for having sex with under-age women, and he literally crapped his pants to convince the draft board that he wasn't fit to serve in the military. And he votes Republican. Kids: draw a conclusion. Seriously, August, what conclusion do you expect people to draw from one random data-point in a sea of millions of data points? I thought you were a mathematician. That is very well said. -k

I think there might be an argument to be made that even a purely empirical world view involves some assumptions that could be called "faith". There's a whole branch of philosophy, "epistemology", devoted to the study of knowledge and how we can be sure we know what we know. I don't know anything about the subject, but I think the short version is that it's not nearly as cut-and-dried as one might imagine. -k

I was kind of "meh" the first time I listened to it, but it sort of stuck in my head afterward and it kind of grew on me. I think I was initially put off by some of the vocalist's overdramatic stylings (the couple of times where he kind of growls the words out). Cool! I like it. Personally, I think the Black Keys are the best thing to hit the mainstream in quite a while. That's very cool, Gost! -k

I recently watched "The To Do List". It stars Aubrey Plaza as a high-achieving but socially awkward valedictorian who is determined to gain sexual experience before she heads off to college. I was not familiar with Aubrey Plaza, but she's part of the cast of the Parks And Recreation TV program. This compilation clip seems to represent her style pretty well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2_V1Y4ekkM After seeing some of her Parks And Recreation clips, I figured she's a comic actress with a great deadpan delivery. But then after watching some of her interviews on talk shows, I started to wonder if she's actually acting or maybe she's just like that. Like, what if people thinks she's hilarious but she's actually got Asperger syndrome or she's somewhere autistic spectrum? It's hard to tell if she's being deliberately awkward for comic effect, or she's just that socially inept. It's hard to know whether to laugh or cringe. Anyway, that's more or less what she's like in "The To Do List" as well. The movie is built around her socially awkward character and most of the laughs come at her expense. It's 1993, Brandy Klark has just graduated high school, and her two friends have convinced her that she needs to get sexual experience before she goes to college. Brandy is an A-list student and she tackles the task in the way she knows best: she turns it into a research project. She makes a "to do list" of all the things she needs to learn before the summer is over. The result is a series of humiliating misadventures. Brandy's summer job as a lifeguard at the community pool provides the setting for most of the shenanigans. Brandy isn't the most likable protagonist... she's completely self-centered and oblivious to the people around her. But it's not because she's a bad person, she's just clueless. What I liked about Brandy Klark is that nothing ever really gets her down. She's somewhat aware that nobody likes her, but doesn't seem particularly concerned about it. No matter how badly things go, she's right back at the pool the next day to carry on, dauntless. No daunts given. Ultimately, her journey is less about learning to give a hummer, and more about learning about interacting with people. Aside from Aubrey Plaza, the only people in this movie that I recognized were Clark Gregg ("Agent Phil" from the Avengers movies) as Brandy's overprotective father, and Rachel Bilson as Brandy's hilariously mean and stupid older sister. Anyway, this probably isn't for everybody, but I enjoyed it. -k

I go through the same sort of thing each year, at roughly the time I am filling out my taxes. Seeing how much money the government takes from my salary all added up in one place kind of stirs up the emotions. I agree about this much, but would add a couple more things... the necessities of getting a job. We could provide a mailing address and telephone, for example. A transit pass, maybe. I don't actually know what we provide for people, but I think that if someone's problem is that they can't get work, having a phone and a mailing address and a way to get to work would be helpful a job. I'm not sure who we're actually talking about. There are some people who would like to work but can't get jobs for some reason or another. There are other people who have no interest in working and have figured out how to get free money from the government some way or another... fake medical disability in one case I'm personally familiar with. There's still more who are at the fringes of society who I have no idea how they continue to survive. I don't know what proportion of people fall into which categories. I think there's different sets of problems in each case and there's no one-size-fits-all solution. In the bigger picture, what's the actual breakdown of money spent assisting the poor in the overall budget? How does it stack up against subsidies to big businesses, for example? And how much overlap is there in services provided through different programs? For example in the case of aboriginal people, who constitute an overwhelming majority of street-people where I live... do we have Canada Human Resources and Indian Affairs throwing money at the same problems from different angles? -k

It makes me pretty sad that CNN has been putting psychics on TV to get their "readings" on what might have happened to the plane. Or have host Don Lemon asking if it's possible that a "mini Black Hole" might have made the plane disappear. I thought the information age was supposed to make people smarter, but instead it's just giving stupid people more access to stupid ideas. -k

Nancy Grace brings her hard-hitting brand of journalism to the Pistorius case! -k

"When The Man Comes Around" is one of my favorite Johnny Cash songs. It was featured in a recent episode of "The Blacklist" TV show, providing the soundtrack as Reddington makes a series of deadly visits to people who participated in a plot against him. It was also featured a few years ago in a chilling scene in "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" TV show, in which a doomed SWAT team wages a hopeless firefight against a foe they can't stop. It's one of the last songs Cash recorded, and was released just a year before he died. It's full of Biblical imagery, and one must imagine that his own mortality was on his mind as he penned this. I am not religious, but this always puts shivers up my spine. I think it's the piano. Not very many songs use the bottom octave of a grand piano... this one does, and those deep notes are just glorious. Who wouldn't want more Cash! Everybody's familiar with Johnny Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails "Hurt", which became better known than the original. A few years earlier, Cash recorded a cover version of "Rusty Cage" by Soundgarden. The Cash version sounds nothing like the Soundgarden one... but I like it a lot better. -k

This sort of topic often seems to devolve into widespread generalizations... "atheists are like this, and religious people are like that". "atheist societies are like this and religious societies are like that". I personally don't want to get wrapped up in that sort of thing. I'd like to address a few themes though... "There's no bad religions, just bad people. When people use religious doctrines to justify harmful things, it's not religion's fault." I wouldn't go so far as to label a whole religion as bad, but there are certainly bad doctrines. The treatment of women in Islamic countries. Mass executions of people in Islamic countries for various and sundry religious reasons. African Christians killing "witches" and homosexuals. The anti-vaccine church that has caused a measles outbreak here in BC. Religious kooks who would let their children die rather than seek medical treatment. And the reply is "yeah b-b-but Islam doesn't *require* that women be treated like cattle" or "b-b-but Christianity as a whole doesn't forbid medical treatment, that's just a fringe group." Well yes and no. There might be parts of the world where Islam has more modern interpretations, but in large swaths of the Muslim world, that's exactly how that religion is understood. Yes, obviously the people who die of easily treatable illnesses are a fringe-group, but that is their religion. That their belief is not shared by other Christians does not negate the fact that for these kooks, that is exactly what their religion tells them. So yes, there is such thing as bad religious doctrine. It is not difficult to find examples where bad beliefs-- not bad people but bad beliefs-- cause harm. -k

A sense of community is one of the few tangible benefits of church that I can see. Some atheists attend Universalist Unitarian congregations for that reason. -k

I think the original point of the thread was not so much to start a discussion about women and religion, and more to point out that Pat Robertson is a fricking idiot. As for the extent to women are atheists, the only statistics I can find are American numbers that indicate that a higher percentage of women than men are religious. Why this might be, I don't really know. -k

Your point was clear but remains ridiculous. Dress it up as you wish, but your argument remains what I said it was: "why worry about the government when you're more likely to be a victim of criminals?" And if we followed that argument to its conclusion we wouldn't be spending billions of dollars fighting "the war on terror" because we're all far more likely to die from traffic accidents. Your argument fails because it fails to differentiate between things that can be changed and things that can't. "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." We can't go stand on a street corner with a megaphone and shout "All you computer hackers, stop hacking!" Well, we could, but they wouldn't listen. Our government institutions and elected officials, on the other hand, are accountable to us. Theoretically, at least. And wouldn't you know it, just this week Barack Obama, after spending the last 9 months vigorously defending the NSA's programs, announced that "reforms" are in the works. We'll see how that actually pans out, but it illustrates the point. Here in Canada, we have had no Edward Snowden of our own, and unlike in the United States our media has done little to look into this issue. There's good reason to believe that our government's methods are just as greasy as those used by the NSA, and at least some of that is borne out in Snowden leaks that reference inter-agency cooperation amongst US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, the "Five Eyes". The line that you shouldn't be afraid unless you've got something to hide is BS. These programs create a massive cookie jar of information, and they create an incentive for lawmakers and law-enforcement agencies to find new and inventive ways to get their fingers into the cookie jar. Create extraordinary powers to fight terrorism, and lawmakers will start expanding the definition of terrorism-- this is already happening, as I've pointed out before. -k