This is actually par for the course when it comes to Japanese organized crime syndicates. The Yakuza have always been quick responders to natural disasters and their cleanup efforts. Japanese criminal syndicates aren't entirely illicit operations and run a lot of legitimate businesses as well, and are heavily involved in the construction industry in particular. Being generally faster and more efficient than the bureaucracy-laden government, (and not restricted by those silly "laws") whenever there's a major natural disaster, the Yakuza have always been some of the first on the scene to distribute food and medical supplies, and do cleanup and reconstruction for really low rates. They gain goodwill in the community and an opportunity to expand their power base, and the government saves money and hassle in the cleanup effort. Heck, half of Kobe was rebuilt by Yakuza after the great Hanshin quake. The whole thing is an open secret really.
That they're doing this now is really to be expected, and not as alarming or terrible as the article would seem to suggest. This has been going on with criminal groups in Japan for generations, and isn't likely to stop any time soon.
Most of the cold-calling charities are totally bogus anyway, and only charities in the loosest sense of the word. I keep getting harassed by the local Chiefs of Police Association and when I checked online on a charity watch site I saw something like 79% of their money goes to fundraising, 15% to administrative, and like 6% to actual charity work. Combine that with the audacity to once claim that I had made a prior commitment to give them money and an abject refusal to remove me from their list they're every bit as bad as people selling you garbage if not worse IMO.
The "it's OK to call if you have a prior business relationship" clause needs to go too I think. Just because I use Verizon for my cell phone doesn't give you the right to attempt to sell me your stupid DSL over the phone every day.
Seriously, everyone has something to hide. Even if you don't think you do, you do.
As TFA says, maybe that something isn't something illegal, per se. But who out there doesn't have something personal and private about their lives that they would be upset or embarrassed if it was known to the public at large, or even just a few random strangers? I don't think I've ever committed any crime in my life worse than jaywalking and I still don't want other people reading my email or listening in on my phone conversations; it's none of their goddamn business. Show me someone that's comfortable with anything and everything about their lives being aired to the public and I'll show you someone with serious psychological issues.
This more than anything else is why privacy laws are so important--in fact I'd go as far to say that if that means that some people pull off crimes or whatever that they might not have gotten away with sans privacy, that's just the price to pay. I'd be willing to take the chance that something awful might happen to me or a loved one because quite frankly, without privacy life would suck.
It was also one of the first games to have the ability to have characters off in various stages of the game with the ability to switch back and forth between them.
Stuart Smith's Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves had this ability and it was made in 1981, 6 years before the first Final Fantasy, let alone VII. I can think of at least a half-dozen others that also had this feature that predated Final Fantasy VII, including the masterful Wasteland (which really deserves to be on the top 100 games of all time IMHO)
Not at all. The selfish gene point of view is that the gene, rather than the organism, is what is being selected. Therefore, there is altruism toward relatives, because those relatives are likely to hold copies of your own genes. This can eventually expand to (and even beyond) the same species.
However breeding with your siblings, while in the short run is beneficial from a gene's point of view simply in terms of numbers, is ultimately detrimental because of the greater chance of inheriting a deadly recessive trait. Organisms that favored inbreeding would be more likely to be victims of said traits, which is a death knell for the genes in those bodies--you can't reproduce if your "host" body is dead! If a gene's primary interest is long-term survival, it would do best to guide its host toward less potentially dangerous mates.
Read The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins, all this stuff is covered in there. They're great books too.
A couple problems with that: Fossils aren't that common, and to the layman they might not even look like bones. (since what they really are are bone-shaped rocks) Reconstructions of entire skeletons wasn't something that was done since until very recently. Contrary to what you see in cartoons and the like, fossils don't look like "big skeletons intact in the wall," they're usually mass jumbles of bones strewn over large areas of space. Ancient people might (and I stress the word "might") have been able to tell from a fossilized bone in the ground that it was a reptile-like animal, but not being able to reconstruct the skeleton, they would have had to have used a referent of an animal they already knew of when guessing what it looked like. (ie snakes/crocodiles)
Basically it's very unlikely that even if they were a factor, fossilized dinosaurs alone are responsible for dragon myths. They're too rare, and were too hard to identify to be the deciding factor.
It's pretty well established that the large flying dinosaurs were long extinct before the dawn of human beings; remember it took a long time since the extinction of dinosaurs before anything even remotely resembling homonids started appearing.
What's more likely is that tales of dragons grew out of another animal--namely pre-existing reptiles, snakes and crocodilians. All primates have an innate, instinctual fear of snakes--in fact it's been argued that primate eyes evolved the way they did because of snakes. (Do a google search on "primate evolution snakes"--there's some interesting stuff to be read) As for fear of the crocodilians, that's a no-brainer--they're big, hungry, and can tear off your leg. While I don't know about western dragons, I read an article several years ago that argued quite well that stories of Chinese dragons grew out of crocodiles.
But it makes sense--you want to think up a scary animal, make a big honking version of an animal that people are already instinctually afraid of--snakes. And make 'em fly too for good measure.
I dunno, I have to disagree. Of course I'm biased, being a ColdFusion developer myself. I really like the ability to create custom tags, and it has a lot of built-in functions that you can use to combat cross-side scripting and SQL injection that can be a real bear to program otherwise. It's also fairly easily to program in, at least compared to PHP. (the only other DHTML language I'm any bit familiar with) Of course our operation is very small so I don't know how it would stand up to huge loads...
Can't say I'm happy to see it on the list of dying technologies...it limits any future career opportunities for me, at the very least.:)
That's all well and good, but it doesn't take into account how often DMCA notices have been issued inaccurately.
From my experience, that's not very often at all. I happen to be one of those unlucky slobs that has to deal with DMCA notices at a university. 95% of the time it's legit, the other 5% are where the computer in question was part of a botnet and was serving out the offending material over IRC unbeknownst to the user. I can't honestly remember ever dealing with a false positive, though it may have happened.
About 10 years ago, I lived in the PRC for a couple of months doing database work. I remember going one of those big Samusung stores--the kind that are like computer bazaars with tons of vendors--and there were cops who stood outside and searched everyone's bags as they left to make sure that they didn't have any porn.
Later on, I got pickpocketed at a bus stop. When I went to the police station to report the crime, there were a bunch of cops in a lounge there watching an American porno movie.
Guess that explains what happens to the porn that the cops "confiscate" outside of those computer stores in China...
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This is actually par for the course when it comes to Japanese organized crime syndicates. The Yakuza have always been quick responders to natural disasters and their cleanup efforts. Japanese criminal syndicates aren't entirely illicit operations and run a lot of legitimate businesses as well, and are heavily involved in the construction industry in particular. Being generally faster and more efficient than the bureaucracy-laden government, (and not restricted by those silly "laws") whenever there's a major natural disaster, the Yakuza have always been some of the first on the scene to distribute food and medical supplies, and do cleanup and reconstruction for really low rates. They gain goodwill in the community and an opportunity to expand their power base, and the government saves money and hassle in the cleanup effort. Heck, half of Kobe was rebuilt by Yakuza after the great Hanshin quake. The whole thing is an open secret really.
That they're doing this now is really to be expected, and not as alarming or terrible as the article would seem to suggest. This has been going on with criminal groups in Japan for generations, and isn't likely to stop any time soon.
Most of the cold-calling charities are totally bogus anyway, and only charities in the loosest sense of the word. I keep getting harassed by the local Chiefs of Police Association and when I checked online on a charity watch site I saw something like 79% of their money goes to fundraising, 15% to administrative, and like 6% to actual charity work. Combine that with the audacity to once claim that I had made a prior commitment to give them money and an abject refusal to remove me from their list they're every bit as bad as people selling you garbage if not worse IMO. The "it's OK to call if you have a prior business relationship" clause needs to go too I think. Just because I use Verizon for my cell phone doesn't give you the right to attempt to sell me your stupid DSL over the phone every day.
Seriously, everyone has something to hide. Even if you don't think you do, you do.
As TFA says, maybe that something isn't something illegal, per se. But who out there doesn't have something personal and private about their lives that they would be upset or embarrassed if it was known to the public at large, or even just a few random strangers? I don't think I've ever committed any crime in my life worse than jaywalking and I still don't want other people reading my email or listening in on my phone conversations; it's none of their goddamn business. Show me someone that's comfortable with anything and everything about their lives being aired to the public and I'll show you someone with serious psychological issues.
This more than anything else is why privacy laws are so important--in fact I'd go as far to say that if that means that some people pull off crimes or whatever that they might not have gotten away with sans privacy, that's just the price to pay. I'd be willing to take the chance that something awful might happen to me or a loved one because quite frankly, without privacy life would suck.
It was also one of the first games to have the ability to have characters off in various stages of the game with the ability to switch back and forth between them.
Stuart Smith's Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves had this ability and it was made in 1981, 6 years before the first Final Fantasy, let alone VII. I can think of at least a half-dozen others that also had this feature that predated Final Fantasy VII, including the masterful Wasteland (which really deserves to be on the top 100 games of all time IMHO)
Not at all. The selfish gene point of view is that the gene, rather than the organism, is what is being selected. Therefore, there is altruism toward relatives, because those relatives are likely to hold copies of your own genes. This can eventually expand to (and even beyond) the same species.
However breeding with your siblings, while in the short run is beneficial from a gene's point of view simply in terms of numbers, is ultimately detrimental because of the greater chance of inheriting a deadly recessive trait. Organisms that favored inbreeding would be more likely to be victims of said traits, which is a death knell for the genes in those bodies--you can't reproduce if your "host" body is dead! If a gene's primary interest is long-term survival, it would do best to guide its host toward less potentially dangerous mates.
Read The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins, all this stuff is covered in there. They're great books too.
A couple problems with that: Fossils aren't that common, and to the layman they might not even look like bones. (since what they really are are bone-shaped rocks) Reconstructions of entire skeletons wasn't something that was done since until very recently. Contrary to what you see in cartoons and the like, fossils don't look like "big skeletons intact in the wall," they're usually mass jumbles of bones strewn over large areas of space. Ancient people might (and I stress the word "might") have been able to tell from a fossilized bone in the ground that it was a reptile-like animal, but not being able to reconstruct the skeleton, they would have had to have used a referent of an animal they already knew of when guessing what it looked like. (ie snakes/crocodiles)
Basically it's very unlikely that even if they were a factor, fossilized dinosaurs alone are responsible for dragon myths. They're too rare, and were too hard to identify to be the deciding factor.
It's pretty well established that the large flying dinosaurs were long extinct before the dawn of human beings; remember it took a long time since the extinction of dinosaurs before anything even remotely resembling homonids started appearing.
What's more likely is that tales of dragons grew out of another animal--namely pre-existing reptiles, snakes and crocodilians. All primates have an innate, instinctual fear of snakes--in fact it's been argued that primate eyes evolved the way they did because of snakes. (Do a google search on "primate evolution snakes"--there's some interesting stuff to be read) As for fear of the crocodilians, that's a no-brainer--they're big, hungry, and can tear off your leg. While I don't know about western dragons, I read an article several years ago that argued quite well that stories of Chinese dragons grew out of crocodiles.
But it makes sense--you want to think up a scary animal, make a big honking version of an animal that people are already instinctually afraid of--snakes. And make 'em fly too for good measure.
I dunno, I have to disagree. Of course I'm biased, being a ColdFusion developer myself. I really like the ability to create custom tags, and it has a lot of built-in functions that you can use to combat cross-side scripting and SQL injection that can be a real bear to program otherwise. It's also fairly easily to program in, at least compared to PHP. (the only other DHTML language I'm any bit familiar with) Of course our operation is very small so I don't know how it would stand up to huge loads...
:)
Can't say I'm happy to see it on the list of dying technologies...it limits any future career opportunities for me, at the very least.
Here's a funny story on hypocrisy in that vein:
About 10 years ago, I lived in the PRC for a couple of months doing database work. I remember going one of those big Samusung stores--the kind that are like computer bazaars with tons of vendors--and there were cops who stood outside and searched everyone's bags as they left to make sure that they didn't have any porn.
Later on, I got pickpocketed at a bus stop. When I went to the police station to report the crime, there were a bunch of cops in a lounge there watching an American porno movie.
Guess that explains what happens to the porn that the cops "confiscate" outside of those computer stores in China...