I think his point #1 actually is more complicated than many people give it credit for, and actually points to something positive the record labels and big movie companies provide(d). I don't like new music and movies either (though there are usually a few movies per year that I like a lot; last year was a pretty good year with classics like Inception and The King's Speech, among others) - it takes about 5-10 years at a minimum for things to percolate before I get into them. All of the bands I really, really like, I first listened to at least that long after their first release.
Even if that means being really into a band now that I ignored in high school (which was 5-10 years ago) - which can seem weird to people who know me who liked the band when they first came out. Weezer and Radiohead are two examples of bands I got into 5-10 years after their popularity peaked, and of course there's almost an endless supply of "old" music from the 80's and earlier that are just waiting to be "discovered" (from Buddy Holly and The Beatles to The Smiths, etc.)
The reason is that with time, all of the crappy stuff is forgotten. You only really hear about the really good stuff from earlier decades. So if you look up some lists of, say "Best albums of the 90's", you'll find some incredibly good stuff - even if the only music you remember hearing in the 90's was shitty boy bands and R&B (none of which will be on anyone's list).
Same with movies - most are forgettable. Look up what movies came out in past decades - for every classic, there are dozens of films that were completely forgotten. No different from today.
So how did the big companies help? Used to be that they were the arbiter, and only "good" stuff got widely released. Yeah, that almost always meant things they thought they could sell, but very few truly great artists were not picked up by a label eventually. Nowadays, if you look for new music it's a minefield - most is self-produced garbage. You still need arbiters, and even though there are good ones (plenty of websites that cover new music and help you find the good stuff) it's still a minefield. That's why I prefer to wait a few years before trying new music, because it's easier to tell what was actually good.
To be clear, I prefer today's music world where there's a lot more variety and plenty of options. Just wanted to point out that the labels weren't entirely useless pre-internet.
It's been like that ever since the introduced the feature in 3.x. It doesn't make any sense. The way Chrome handles with a new window makes lots of sense, and they make it obvious which mode each window is in so you don't make any mistakes.
There was apparently a firefox addon that did the same thing, but it's mysteriously gone from Mozilla's extensions site, or elsewhere as far as I can tell (and I don't know if it would work with 4, anyway).
I use the awesomebar in its default state (no custom configurations or addons that affect it) and I never have that kind of problem. I do type a lot of URLs in (rather than having bookmarks and so on) and the awesomebar brings up the URL I want within two letters; for example if I type "sl" it immediately shows me slashdot as the first option. I only have to type "p" for pirate bay to show up.
It comes up with strange things sometimes if I put in strings of characters that aren't in any site I normally visit... but I rarely if ever do that, because if it's not a site I normally visit, then I'm probably not going to access it by trying to make the awesomebar read my mind. I'll either type the full URL in or search for it on google.
Honestly I don't understand why people don't like it. It doesn't take away functionality the old autocomplete had - that's still there. It just adds more to it.
p.s. when I type in "rot" it comes up with the Wikipedia article for Roti, which I looked at yesterday - but I don't regularly visit rottentomatoes.com;)
I'm glad there are other geologists questioning this. I haven't seen any evidence either, just speculation that anyone could come up with. Not that it seems an unreasonable hypothesis, but that's not enough! (BTW, I too am a geologist, though not a seismologist or a vulcanologist).:)
Elsewhere in the world, bottles use a similar label system. Not sure if they're laser-etched, but they're relatively permanent.
I've spent a lot of time in Thailand, and order Coke fairly frequently at restaurants there (tastes much better than US Coke because of the real sugar) which comes in reused bottles. They must be reused hundreds of times - they're really beat up in many cases, and the labels survive fine. Of course originally the bottles didn't have labels, because it makes no sense unless the labels can last since the bottles are reused.
I do find it strange that typical beer you get in glass bottles in the US has paper labels, and that the bottles are smashed and recycled rather than reused. Seems like a lot of extra work.
Of course, Casablanca was nominated for eight academy awards, and won for best picture, best director, and best screenplay. Not that the academy awards are the end-all in these kinds of discussions by any means, but a film with that many nominations and most of the major academy awards won is really not a "throwaway" film as you assert, even if the competition wasn't particularly fierce that year. Yes, it's commonly related that it wasn't expected that it'd be anything extraordinary as you say, but it's not like it took years of replays on TV to catch on (and no, that's not entirely true for It's A Wonderful Life, either) - it only would have taken weeks or months to be recognized as something great, if not right away.
I'm not convinced that any particular film was pre-considered to be something great, as is often the case today - and just as well, because now often they get it wrong. I'm pretty sure they knew "The King's Speech" was something special ahead of time, but to be so right is quite rare. In the old days, they knew not to get their hopes up too much until they saw the final product, meaning there's nothing unusual about the story that Casablanca wasn't expected to be so popular.
I agree that recognizing great art is often difficult except in hindsight, but I'm not sure it's really true for film. Anyone can watch Casablanca, either now or upon original release, and recognize it as something great. You can't say the same for Portal, even though I thought it was a great piece of art - most people will have a hard time recognizing it as such right away.
Agreed, but your Call of Duty timeline is a bit off first of all - they had split-screen coop for the single-player mode all the way up to Call of Duty 4 (I think), and that to me is usually the most fun (especially when a game is designed around it, as with Gears of War, but even the COD games were fun that way). They also all have had 4-player splitscreen for deathmatch and so on, but no bots e.g. Perfect Dark which would indeed have helped. I played Perfect Dark on the 360 when it came out years ago and didn't like it, and it never entered the fray of local multiplayer games I played with friends at the time (I never had an N64 and only played Goldeneye at a friend's house a couple times).
The Modern Warfare and Black Ops co-op mode with the bots can be fun sometimes, but didn't hold my attention very long. It's only a quick diversion at best. The level design just didn't seem that inspired, and the difficulty levels aren't balanced very well - it's either too easy or too hard. The Zombies mode is pretty good, but never hold my attention very long either (Left 4 Dead didn't engross me much either).
The greatest game for me and my friends (back when we all lived near each other in university) was Star Wars Battlefront 2. It's an original xbox or ps2 game, but it works on the 360, and there hasn't been anything like it since. Would love to see a current-gen sequel. It has four-player splitscreen on large maps with loads of bots. The game is a Star Wars version of the Battlefield formula - back when Battlefield 1942 came out that was our game of choice for the same reason (played on a LAN in that case) - large maps with lots of bots and fun game mechanics, and you can have meaningful team games with only four people because you've got an army of bots to back you up. And occasionally if you do well you can spawn as a Jedi from the films and wreak havoc with a lightsaber, and there are lots of vehicles and so on, and you can do things like fly the speeders on Hoth and take out AT-ATs with the tow cables and so on - lots of fun mechanics in the game.
The newer Battlefield games don't have the same bot options anymore, and are focused on online play. I play them online and enjoy them - Battlefield Bad Company 2 and the recent Vietnam expansion are what I play the most these days - but they're not as good as the older games, in my opinion, and there's no option to play with friends locally.
Unless the game sucks, PS3 games don't really go below $30, and only then after quite a while. As you note, the "Greatest Hits" PS3 games are $30. I'm not sure but I think Xbox 360 "Greatest Hits" equivalent games are still $20, and there is always a bigger selection of older games at lower prices for the xbox.
This isn't just in-store, either - it's the same story online. And I never understood why people say they'll just wait until the games drop to $30 or $40 or whatever... the really good games take two or three years (more in some cases) to get to that price. I'm guessing people who say that don't actually do what they say, because it's almost never possible.
Fry's usually has decent prices for PS3 games (usually a sale for $5 or so off when new), but they don't keep older, cheaper titles in stock unless they're super popular (or unless they suck and can't get rid of them). They always seem to have Battlefield Bad Company (the first one, never mind that there's a popular sequel) for something like $15, and a couple of other games (that never interested me so I don't remember) for that price. Everything else is generally at least $30.
Buying used on Amazon or Ebay is definitely the best option if you don't mind waiting a while.
Well, he said he doesn't have the patience to go against teenagers with too much time on their hands that get really good at games like Black Ops. So, you suggest a game that you make sound even worse, in that you need six months of lots of practice just to not be absolutely obliterated every match. Makes a lot of sense.
Clever, but the wording on that is very obviously not marketing-speak, and overall it's poorly written. But, the names for each additional package are pretty funny and on the right track:)
You're correct, but it's my understanding that Japanese consumer appliances (kitchen stuff, heating/lighting, and washer/dryer) are much more efficient than what we're used to in the US.
In particular, I know that most Japanese people don't even own a washer or dryer. They have hand-operated mechanical washers and air-dry (I guess). I'm sure plenty of people nowadays do have washers and dryers, but it's only recently that they've been widely used there and most houses and apartments are quite small so people still don't have the room for them.
LA building codes are fine, and old buildings are required to be retrofitted. I'm sure they're a little lax (which is common in CA for construction) but it's not really the fault of the code itself. I mean, what would be necessary is restrictions on where you can build - problem is developers build in unsafe areas where even the building code can't save you, and suckers buy into it because they're idiots.
Japan has better codes I'm sure - they get more earthquake activity than CA - and they take things like that more seriously as an integral part of their culture.
The main thing I wanted to say, though, is that Los Angeles in particular is in no way prepared to withstand a "big one". Not even a worst-case scenario - just a fairly likely scenario given the physics of the San Andreas has the potential to wipe out LA, largely because it's built on a relatively loose-packed sedimentary basin which will shake like crazy and be affected by liquefaction.
Could Tokyo withstand a similar scenario? I think it will hold up better than Los Angeles, but there will be incredible amounts of damage - just like Kobe. I don't think you'll see collapsed high-rises and so on, though, which is highly possible in Los Angeles.
Rumor is, actually, that a new Godzilla film has been in the works for a 2012 release (which seems appropriate). The last one was in 2004. One does wonder how this event will affect the Godzilla film. Godzilla films - and I've seen them all - have swung back and forth on how much they focus on nuclear energy and radiation, with the last time radiation was a key plot point being in the early 90's. The latest series of films haven't focused on it as much (though it's always a factor... I think in Godzilla 2000 he attacks a nuclear power plant to recharge or something - been a while since I saw it).
If a new film is indeed in the works, you can pretty much guarantee there will be a heavy focus on nuclear energy in light of this event. There have already been several films depicting "the big one", but we can probably expect new films to address the issue of total destruction by earthquake, too (that's never been something addressed very often in Godzilla films though).
You're being disingenuous. They would never take down a photo in a situation as you described. They don't normally take down people's stuff that isn't their own anyway, because no one complains about it. They only look into these situations if they get complaints (typically), and usually those complaints are from the copyright holder. Presumably, your wife wouldn't complain to flickr if you posted her photo to your account.
Seriously, flickr is not the place to host the photos you found on a CD you stole from the secret service headquarters. Flickr is not Wikileaks and doesn't want to get involved in that sort of thing. Flickr regularly takes down photos that are "stolen" in the sense of being blatant copyright infringement. In this case it's both copyright infringement and legitimate theft.
Flickr *does not* remove politically charged, graphic (sex and/or violence), etc. images, either - they're neutral on such issues. You can find tons of stuff like that on flickr, including photos from protests around the world showing government officials committing crimes and violent acts against unarmed citizens (as an example). But typically you should have taken those photos yourself, or gotten permission, before posting them to flickr.
As for the examples in the second FA of a flickr staff member posting things that aren't his own work - they're a huge stretch. It's FUD.
People who say this clearly don't actually use flickr. Most of the content on there is actually the users' own work. Most people actually use it for its intended purpose (sharing your own photos).
That's not to say there aren't a significant amount of users posting other people's stuff, but it's easily under 5%, and most of it is mundane or innocuous (such as re-posting random photos of girls they probably got from 4chan or wherever else you might find random photos of girls).
Typically flickr doesn't take action on these accounts, because no one at flickr ever looks at them. When flickr receives complaints (particularly from the actual copyright holder) then they do take things down and ban users and so forth. It's not at all unprecedented or overly selective enforcement as other comments are implying.
There is plenty of stuff like this on flickr. The reason all that isn't removed while this was is because the actual people who took the photos (journalists mostly) post them to flickr themselves.
You can often just email a couple of the paper's authors - they're usually more than happy to provide you a PDF. They may even have it publicly available on their personal web site, too.
I still have a university account that works, but not everything is available through that university, so even while I was still there I had to ask authors directly a couple of times. Always got a reply with the paper I wanted. You do have to be patient, of course.
Um, what? Marine chronometers have been around since the 1700's. These are clocks accurate enough to be used for navigation. This technology was not replaced until GPS (although radio solutions were in wide use too - but not always practical at sea - and before that, calculations from the position of the moon). So there's a pretty large time in there where compasses were used for navigation, and clocks existed.
I used a similar system in a university setting with 5 accounts in thunderbird. The problem I had was that thunderbird would seem to randomly decide which email address to use, even if I specified which I wanted to use. This resulted in work email and email to students coming from my personal accounts (e.g. penguinchris, which isn't too bad) and my "spam" account I use to sign up for things, which isn't really embarrassing or anything but it'd seem weird to most.
So, your solution of keeping personal stuff truly separate is important in those kinds of settings.
Of course, I was using my own laptop so it would have been annoying to not load my personal accounts into thunderbird, so what I should have done is use a different email program altogether for my work accounts.
I've applied to somewhere between 100-200 companies in the past year. I got a couple of automated replies saying the job opening was canceled, and only one human reply (in that case I sent an email to a address meant for general inquiries at a small company asking if they were hiring - they weren't).
So to add to your small dataset of 12 companies - I think we can conclusively say that no one sends out rejection letters anymore:)
During 4th grade or so, I realized what they were making me say, and I just stopped doing it. I would stand up with everyone else so as not to draw attention to myself, but I kept my hands at my sides (you're supposed to put your hand over your heart) and just stood silent.
I don't really remember, but I think they keep doing the pledge through middle school (up to 8th grade). I really hope they don't do it through high school, anyway. In all that time I never did it, and no one (teacher or classmate) ever said anything about it as far as I recall, or even gave me a dirty/inquisitive look.
So yeah, I agree it needs to stop. But then, they're not really forcing you to take the pledge (I'm sure there are some places where you'd get in trouble for doing what I did, but I think most places are actually likely to be reasonable about it - hopefully the teachers are smart enough to realize how silly the whole thing is).
I'm not an America-hater, either - I'm actually fairly proud to be American, and while I would love to live elsewhere in the world, it's not because I despise living in the US. There are a lot of things I don't like here, but it's a trade-off - there are a lot of things about the countries I would like to live in that I don't like either, and many of them are worse overall (like the UK).
Utah is one of the most fucked-up places in the country, as far as the people who live there go. Too bad too, because physically it's an amazing place - incredible landscapes of every type, unique geological features, etc. (I'm a geologist).
It really is *not* representative of the rest of the country, even the other less-rational parts (e.g. most of the interior). Of course, a lot of people on the coasts are nuts too, but it's not like there aren't any nuts in Europe either:)
To be fair, if you think the "Utilities" folder is "scary", then what exactly are you planning on doing with the terminal?
This besides the fact that neither the folder itself (which has an icon with a couple tools on it... oooohhh...) or its contents are particularly scary, even to a novice user - no different than Control Panel on windows. If the novice user doesn't know what those things are for, either they click on them and find out because they're curious, or they ignore them.
I didn't read the article, but clicked on the link to the Gnome 3 page. Seems like an incredibly massive overhaul with loads of changes. Is this really the best article that could be come up with to start a discussion on slashdot about Gnome 3?
Personally, I like the sound of it, but the website is extremely ambiguous. I can't tell what's going on in any of the screenshots. Some screencast videos or something would be helpful. The text descriptions don't really help, either. I might have to try it out - kudos to them for providing a live CD just to test Gnome 3.
It seems heavily inspired by OS X, including some stuff we won't see until OS X 10.7. Not a bad thing at all, as I primarily use OS X these days and really like the interface and am looking forward to the improvements in 10.7. I don't see the need to rip on UI designers for copying good ideas from elsewhere, everyone does it, and it eventually makes every OS UI better (KDE 4 is still pretty shocking, though).
There are entire scenes that a lot of people claim to remember being in the film originally (or in early VHS copies) but which never were. I thought so too about a certain scene; can't remember what it was now but it was one of the more common ones to imagine. They came from various sources, but not from the actual films. One of them was in a picture book novelization or something. A quite interesting case of mass delusion, apparently.
But it was always the Clone Wars. You're misremembering that.
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I think his point #1 actually is more complicated than many people give it credit for, and actually points to something positive the record labels and big movie companies provide(d). I don't like new music and movies either (though there are usually a few movies per year that I like a lot; last year was a pretty good year with classics like Inception and The King's Speech, among others) - it takes about 5-10 years at a minimum for things to percolate before I get into them. All of the bands I really, really like, I first listened to at least that long after their first release.
Even if that means being really into a band now that I ignored in high school (which was 5-10 years ago) - which can seem weird to people who know me who liked the band when they first came out. Weezer and Radiohead are two examples of bands I got into 5-10 years after their popularity peaked, and of course there's almost an endless supply of "old" music from the 80's and earlier that are just waiting to be "discovered" (from Buddy Holly and The Beatles to The Smiths, etc.)
The reason is that with time, all of the crappy stuff is forgotten. You only really hear about the really good stuff from earlier decades. So if you look up some lists of, say "Best albums of the 90's", you'll find some incredibly good stuff - even if the only music you remember hearing in the 90's was shitty boy bands and R&B (none of which will be on anyone's list).
Same with movies - most are forgettable. Look up what movies came out in past decades - for every classic, there are dozens of films that were completely forgotten. No different from today.
So how did the big companies help? Used to be that they were the arbiter, and only "good" stuff got widely released. Yeah, that almost always meant things they thought they could sell, but very few truly great artists were not picked up by a label eventually. Nowadays, if you look for new music it's a minefield - most is self-produced garbage. You still need arbiters, and even though there are good ones (plenty of websites that cover new music and help you find the good stuff) it's still a minefield. That's why I prefer to wait a few years before trying new music, because it's easier to tell what was actually good.
To be clear, I prefer today's music world where there's a lot more variety and plenty of options. Just wanted to point out that the labels weren't entirely useless pre-internet.
It's been like that ever since the introduced the feature in 3.x. It doesn't make any sense. The way Chrome handles with a new window makes lots of sense, and they make it obvious which mode each window is in so you don't make any mistakes.
There was apparently a firefox addon that did the same thing, but it's mysteriously gone from Mozilla's extensions site, or elsewhere as far as I can tell (and I don't know if it would work with 4, anyway).
I use the awesomebar in its default state (no custom configurations or addons that affect it) and I never have that kind of problem. I do type a lot of URLs in (rather than having bookmarks and so on) and the awesomebar brings up the URL I want within two letters; for example if I type "sl" it immediately shows me slashdot as the first option. I only have to type "p" for pirate bay to show up.
It comes up with strange things sometimes if I put in strings of characters that aren't in any site I normally visit... but I rarely if ever do that, because if it's not a site I normally visit, then I'm probably not going to access it by trying to make the awesomebar read my mind. I'll either type the full URL in or search for it on google.
Honestly I don't understand why people don't like it. It doesn't take away functionality the old autocomplete had - that's still there. It just adds more to it.
p.s. when I type in "rot" it comes up with the Wikipedia article for Roti, which I looked at yesterday - but I don't regularly visit rottentomatoes.com ;)
I'm glad there are other geologists questioning this. I haven't seen any evidence either, just speculation that anyone could come up with. Not that it seems an unreasonable hypothesis, but that's not enough! (BTW, I too am a geologist, though not a seismologist or a vulcanologist). :)
Elsewhere in the world, bottles use a similar label system. Not sure if they're laser-etched, but they're relatively permanent.
I've spent a lot of time in Thailand, and order Coke fairly frequently at restaurants there (tastes much better than US Coke because of the real sugar) which comes in reused bottles. They must be reused hundreds of times - they're really beat up in many cases, and the labels survive fine. Of course originally the bottles didn't have labels, because it makes no sense unless the labels can last since the bottles are reused.
I do find it strange that typical beer you get in glass bottles in the US has paper labels, and that the bottles are smashed and recycled rather than reused. Seems like a lot of extra work.
Of course, Casablanca was nominated for eight academy awards, and won for best picture, best director, and best screenplay. Not that the academy awards are the end-all in these kinds of discussions by any means, but a film with that many nominations and most of the major academy awards won is really not a "throwaway" film as you assert, even if the competition wasn't particularly fierce that year. Yes, it's commonly related that it wasn't expected that it'd be anything extraordinary as you say, but it's not like it took years of replays on TV to catch on (and no, that's not entirely true for It's A Wonderful Life, either) - it only would have taken weeks or months to be recognized as something great, if not right away.
I'm not convinced that any particular film was pre-considered to be something great, as is often the case today - and just as well, because now often they get it wrong. I'm pretty sure they knew "The King's Speech" was something special ahead of time, but to be so right is quite rare. In the old days, they knew not to get their hopes up too much until they saw the final product, meaning there's nothing unusual about the story that Casablanca wasn't expected to be so popular.
I agree that recognizing great art is often difficult except in hindsight, but I'm not sure it's really true for film. Anyone can watch Casablanca, either now or upon original release, and recognize it as something great. You can't say the same for Portal, even though I thought it was a great piece of art - most people will have a hard time recognizing it as such right away.
Agreed, but your Call of Duty timeline is a bit off first of all - they had split-screen coop for the single-player mode all the way up to Call of Duty 4 (I think), and that to me is usually the most fun (especially when a game is designed around it, as with Gears of War, but even the COD games were fun that way). They also all have had 4-player splitscreen for deathmatch and so on, but no bots e.g. Perfect Dark which would indeed have helped. I played Perfect Dark on the 360 when it came out years ago and didn't like it, and it never entered the fray of local multiplayer games I played with friends at the time (I never had an N64 and only played Goldeneye at a friend's house a couple times).
The Modern Warfare and Black Ops co-op mode with the bots can be fun sometimes, but didn't hold my attention very long. It's only a quick diversion at best. The level design just didn't seem that inspired, and the difficulty levels aren't balanced very well - it's either too easy or too hard. The Zombies mode is pretty good, but never hold my attention very long either (Left 4 Dead didn't engross me much either).
The greatest game for me and my friends (back when we all lived near each other in university) was Star Wars Battlefront 2. It's an original xbox or ps2 game, but it works on the 360, and there hasn't been anything like it since. Would love to see a current-gen sequel. It has four-player splitscreen on large maps with loads of bots. The game is a Star Wars version of the Battlefield formula - back when Battlefield 1942 came out that was our game of choice for the same reason (played on a LAN in that case) - large maps with lots of bots and fun game mechanics, and you can have meaningful team games with only four people because you've got an army of bots to back you up. And occasionally if you do well you can spawn as a Jedi from the films and wreak havoc with a lightsaber, and there are lots of vehicles and so on, and you can do things like fly the speeders on Hoth and take out AT-ATs with the tow cables and so on - lots of fun mechanics in the game.
The newer Battlefield games don't have the same bot options anymore, and are focused on online play. I play them online and enjoy them - Battlefield Bad Company 2 and the recent Vietnam expansion are what I play the most these days - but they're not as good as the older games, in my opinion, and there's no option to play with friends locally.
Unless the game sucks, PS3 games don't really go below $30, and only then after quite a while. As you note, the "Greatest Hits" PS3 games are $30. I'm not sure but I think Xbox 360 "Greatest Hits" equivalent games are still $20, and there is always a bigger selection of older games at lower prices for the xbox.
This isn't just in-store, either - it's the same story online. And I never understood why people say they'll just wait until the games drop to $30 or $40 or whatever... the really good games take two or three years (more in some cases) to get to that price. I'm guessing people who say that don't actually do what they say, because it's almost never possible.
Fry's usually has decent prices for PS3 games (usually a sale for $5 or so off when new), but they don't keep older, cheaper titles in stock unless they're super popular (or unless they suck and can't get rid of them). They always seem to have Battlefield Bad Company (the first one, never mind that there's a popular sequel) for something like $15, and a couple of other games (that never interested me so I don't remember) for that price. Everything else is generally at least $30.
Buying used on Amazon or Ebay is definitely the best option if you don't mind waiting a while.
Well, he said he doesn't have the patience to go against teenagers with too much time on their hands that get really good at games like Black Ops. So, you suggest a game that you make sound even worse, in that you need six months of lots of practice just to not be absolutely obliterated every match. Makes a lot of sense.
What if I'm unemployed and an insomniac?
Clever, but the wording on that is very obviously not marketing-speak, and overall it's poorly written. But, the names for each additional package are pretty funny and on the right track :)
You're correct, but it's my understanding that Japanese consumer appliances (kitchen stuff, heating/lighting, and washer/dryer) are much more efficient than what we're used to in the US.
In particular, I know that most Japanese people don't even own a washer or dryer. They have hand-operated mechanical washers and air-dry (I guess). I'm sure plenty of people nowadays do have washers and dryers, but it's only recently that they've been widely used there and most houses and apartments are quite small so people still don't have the room for them.
LA building codes are fine, and old buildings are required to be retrofitted. I'm sure they're a little lax (which is common in CA for construction) but it's not really the fault of the code itself. I mean, what would be necessary is restrictions on where you can build - problem is developers build in unsafe areas where even the building code can't save you, and suckers buy into it because they're idiots.
Japan has better codes I'm sure - they get more earthquake activity than CA - and they take things like that more seriously as an integral part of their culture.
The main thing I wanted to say, though, is that Los Angeles in particular is in no way prepared to withstand a "big one". Not even a worst-case scenario - just a fairly likely scenario given the physics of the San Andreas has the potential to wipe out LA, largely because it's built on a relatively loose-packed sedimentary basin which will shake like crazy and be affected by liquefaction.
Could Tokyo withstand a similar scenario? I think it will hold up better than Los Angeles, but there will be incredible amounts of damage - just like Kobe. I don't think you'll see collapsed high-rises and so on, though, which is highly possible in Los Angeles.
Rumor is, actually, that a new Godzilla film has been in the works for a 2012 release (which seems appropriate). The last one was in 2004. One does wonder how this event will affect the Godzilla film. Godzilla films - and I've seen them all - have swung back and forth on how much they focus on nuclear energy and radiation, with the last time radiation was a key plot point being in the early 90's. The latest series of films haven't focused on it as much (though it's always a factor... I think in Godzilla 2000 he attacks a nuclear power plant to recharge or something - been a while since I saw it).
If a new film is indeed in the works, you can pretty much guarantee there will be a heavy focus on nuclear energy in light of this event. There have already been several films depicting "the big one", but we can probably expect new films to address the issue of total destruction by earthquake, too (that's never been something addressed very often in Godzilla films though).
You're being disingenuous. They would never take down a photo in a situation as you described. They don't normally take down people's stuff that isn't their own anyway, because no one complains about it. They only look into these situations if they get complaints (typically), and usually those complaints are from the copyright holder. Presumably, your wife wouldn't complain to flickr if you posted her photo to your account.
Seriously, flickr is not the place to host the photos you found on a CD you stole from the secret service headquarters. Flickr is not Wikileaks and doesn't want to get involved in that sort of thing. Flickr regularly takes down photos that are "stolen" in the sense of being blatant copyright infringement. In this case it's both copyright infringement and legitimate theft.
Flickr *does not* remove politically charged, graphic (sex and/or violence), etc. images, either - they're neutral on such issues. You can find tons of stuff like that on flickr, including photos from protests around the world showing government officials committing crimes and violent acts against unarmed citizens (as an example). But typically you should have taken those photos yourself, or gotten permission, before posting them to flickr.
As for the examples in the second FA of a flickr staff member posting things that aren't his own work - they're a huge stretch. It's FUD.
People who say this clearly don't actually use flickr. Most of the content on there is actually the users' own work. Most people actually use it for its intended purpose (sharing your own photos).
That's not to say there aren't a significant amount of users posting other people's stuff, but it's easily under 5%, and most of it is mundane or innocuous (such as re-posting random photos of girls they probably got from 4chan or wherever else you might find random photos of girls).
Typically flickr doesn't take action on these accounts, because no one at flickr ever looks at them. When flickr receives complaints (particularly from the actual copyright holder) then they do take things down and ban users and so forth. It's not at all unprecedented or overly selective enforcement as other comments are implying.
There is plenty of stuff like this on flickr. The reason all that isn't removed while this was is because the actual people who took the photos (journalists mostly) post them to flickr themselves.
You can often just email a couple of the paper's authors - they're usually more than happy to provide you a PDF. They may even have it publicly available on their personal web site, too.
I still have a university account that works, but not everything is available through that university, so even while I was still there I had to ask authors directly a couple of times. Always got a reply with the paper I wanted. You do have to be patient, of course.
Um, what? Marine chronometers have been around since the 1700's. These are clocks accurate enough to be used for navigation. This technology was not replaced until GPS (although radio solutions were in wide use too - but not always practical at sea - and before that, calculations from the position of the moon). So there's a pretty large time in there where compasses were used for navigation, and clocks existed.
I used a similar system in a university setting with 5 accounts in thunderbird. The problem I had was that thunderbird would seem to randomly decide which email address to use, even if I specified which I wanted to use. This resulted in work email and email to students coming from my personal accounts (e.g. penguinchris, which isn't too bad) and my "spam" account I use to sign up for things, which isn't really embarrassing or anything but it'd seem weird to most.
So, your solution of keeping personal stuff truly separate is important in those kinds of settings.
Of course, I was using my own laptop so it would have been annoying to not load my personal accounts into thunderbird, so what I should have done is use a different email program altogether for my work accounts.
I've applied to somewhere between 100-200 companies in the past year. I got a couple of automated replies saying the job opening was canceled, and only one human reply (in that case I sent an email to a address meant for general inquiries at a small company asking if they were hiring - they weren't).
So to add to your small dataset of 12 companies - I think we can conclusively say that no one sends out rejection letters anymore :)
During 4th grade or so, I realized what they were making me say, and I just stopped doing it. I would stand up with everyone else so as not to draw attention to myself, but I kept my hands at my sides (you're supposed to put your hand over your heart) and just stood silent.
I don't really remember, but I think they keep doing the pledge through middle school (up to 8th grade). I really hope they don't do it through high school, anyway. In all that time I never did it, and no one (teacher or classmate) ever said anything about it as far as I recall, or even gave me a dirty/inquisitive look.
So yeah, I agree it needs to stop. But then, they're not really forcing you to take the pledge (I'm sure there are some places where you'd get in trouble for doing what I did, but I think most places are actually likely to be reasonable about it - hopefully the teachers are smart enough to realize how silly the whole thing is).
I'm not an America-hater, either - I'm actually fairly proud to be American, and while I would love to live elsewhere in the world, it's not because I despise living in the US. There are a lot of things I don't like here, but it's a trade-off - there are a lot of things about the countries I would like to live in that I don't like either, and many of them are worse overall (like the UK).
Utah is one of the most fucked-up places in the country, as far as the people who live there go. Too bad too, because physically it's an amazing place - incredible landscapes of every type, unique geological features, etc. (I'm a geologist).
It really is *not* representative of the rest of the country, even the other less-rational parts (e.g. most of the interior). Of course, a lot of people on the coasts are nuts too, but it's not like there aren't any nuts in Europe either :)
To be fair, if you think the "Utilities" folder is "scary", then what exactly are you planning on doing with the terminal?
This besides the fact that neither the folder itself (which has an icon with a couple tools on it... oooohhh...) or its contents are particularly scary, even to a novice user - no different than Control Panel on windows. If the novice user doesn't know what those things are for, either they click on them and find out because they're curious, or they ignore them.
I didn't read the article, but clicked on the link to the Gnome 3 page. Seems like an incredibly massive overhaul with loads of changes. Is this really the best article that could be come up with to start a discussion on slashdot about Gnome 3?
Personally, I like the sound of it, but the website is extremely ambiguous. I can't tell what's going on in any of the screenshots. Some screencast videos or something would be helpful. The text descriptions don't really help, either. I might have to try it out - kudos to them for providing a live CD just to test Gnome 3.
It seems heavily inspired by OS X, including some stuff we won't see until OS X 10.7. Not a bad thing at all, as I primarily use OS X these days and really like the interface and am looking forward to the improvements in 10.7. I don't see the need to rip on UI designers for copying good ideas from elsewhere, everyone does it, and it eventually makes every OS UI better (KDE 4 is still pretty shocking, though).
There are entire scenes that a lot of people claim to remember being in the film originally (or in early VHS copies) but which never were. I thought so too about a certain scene; can't remember what it was now but it was one of the more common ones to imagine. They came from various sources, but not from the actual films. One of them was in a picture book novelization or something. A quite interesting case of mass delusion, apparently.
But it was always the Clone Wars. You're misremembering that.