You'll get no argument from me on whether giving piles and piles of aid is The Right Thing, and I for one am very happy to admit that the US in the case of this disaster are being absolute stars.
On the subject of whether it suggests that the US isn't trying to Blow Up and Invade And Pollute The World, probably the easiest way to put it is: there are a lot of different opinions in the US and a lot of conflicting motivations, meaning that the US often disagrees with itself. That means for example that there are stunningly bright people in the US with outstanding foresight and understanding of any one issue.
The problem tends to arise when different specialities conflict, such as economics versus environmentalism or economics versus politics, etc. Many of my American friends and acquaintances tend to use the term 'schitzophrenic' when discussing American policies, presumably for this reason.
So I hand it to you that you aren't, as a seamless mass, trying to Blow Up and Invade And Pollute The World. You are a large and diverse group of people and have all sorts of different aims in mind. One of them is to be kind and nice and helpful. Others are to make a lot of money, to prop up political structures, or to promote ideologies. Few if any of these aims are universal within the US population.
So yes, you do care about the rest of the world, in all sorts of different ways and depending on all sorts of different uses of the term 'care'. And yes, we do disagree on the specifics.
And yes, this is enough to cause an awful lot of people to feel extreme and sincere dislike, which is usually inadequately well targeted since really people should be saying "I hate the Republican stand on xyz" or "the Democratic stand on abc", rather than yelling "bloody America!". Sadly, and I do mean sadly, people just find it easiest to blame the entire country.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
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You might well be right. I'd definitely like it if you were - fingers crossed!:-)
The thing is, it is unacceptable that people are denied equal rights just because they happen to be homosexual, and it is unacceptable that prison rape occurs, and it is unacceptable that drug addiction is so unreasonably dealt with.
All of these things are unacceptable, most particularly the first case since drug-taking is after all relatively speaking a choice, whereas outside fundamentalist theorising neither homosexuality nor being born female are 'a choice'. And yes if a country started stringing people up for the crime of being homosexual, I'd be thinking it was very much time for the rest of Planet Earth to react on that matter. So what's your point?
I find a good solution to cultural relativism is the Declaration of Human Rights, which you can find right here. Although I realise that we here on slashdot apparently hold the UN in deepest contempt, this particular document is worth taking a good look at. As far as I am concerned, it solves a lot of problems, as one can look at situations within which one might be tempted to invoke cultural relativism and say: is this against human rights? If it is, it's not OK to just shrug and go "strange places, strange people", and if it isn't, shrug away... Cultural relativism is a useful concept when it comes to accepting weirdnesses and overcoming culture shock, but it is not a catch-all excuse.
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Most of those victims were largely military personnel while terrorists' victims were civilians.
Er, no.
Those 100,000 deaths and counting quoted in the message above are from the Lancet article of a few months ago, and I quote the Guardian summary on this subject:
About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.
Civilians. Not military. The Lancet article was focusing on civilian deaths. Here's the Guardian article: article:
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
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a) Pearl Harbour is as you know a controversial topic. World War II was as you know a rather different situation to the present day. As a metaphor it makes no sense, since Pearl Harbour caused America to declare war on the instigators of Pearl Harbour, whereas September 11 caused America to declare war on Afghanistan, followed by an apparently unrelated Iraq, based on the principle that, err...
b) The Iraqis were apparently scared shitless of Saddam Hussein, meaning that violent revolution in the streets, etc., was more or less unheard of. Whereas today, there are supposedly 200,000 insurgents who are fearless enough and/or pissed off enough to turn the TV off, get their lazy arses out of bed, and go commit violence and/or slaughter. So I'd be curious to hear your metric for measuring 'better' explained on that one.
Hitler's Nazis were incredibly credulous. The sort of crap they swallowed makes "I've been abducted by aliens... three times!" sound almost believable. One minute it was bloody Odin, the next black magic, then it was Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy. Himmler believed he was the reincarnation of one Heinrich I. Mengele was into phrenology. Oh, and they pretty much all believed they were the children of Atlantis.
The Third Reich would be better described as "a bunch of gullible though evil assholes" than "atheists". Go to Nuremburg and take a look at their attempt at building a Third Reich size street; you'll soon get the idea.
As an English person in Britain, what am I supposed to do... when I'm planning on learning Dutch? (this is a serious question btw).
I can't even download Dutch TV, since it's all subtitled!!
On a totally irrelevant sidenote, you'd be amazed at how useful just a little familiarity with Dutch was to me today... we got an email from someone hoping to buy one of our domains from us. The someone in question was claiming to be the administrative contact of the.com variety of the domain in question, who wanted to buy the.org from us "as users might otherwise be confused". So my boss sent the mail around on the internal mailing list.
After staring at it for a minute I realised what was bugging me about it: the return mail address was willem.van.oranje @ rather well known freemail provider. Aside from the statistical unlikelihood that a chap based in Israel would have a name like that, I don't see why a famous Dutch dead guy would be particularly interested in buying our domain...
Now that I've said that it's probably going to turn out that it was all legit, and our correspondent just has an irrational weakness for webmail and a healthy dose of hero worship for the "Vader des vaderlands". Riiiight.
The slackware x.org package doesn't come with xf86cfg for some reason
The reason is because slackware doesn't come with xf86 any more. It comes with x.org. (I know, you said it). Logically therefore the configuration program is no longer known as xf86cfg, but as xorgcfg:-)
However you're probably better off with xorgsetup.
Perhaps you do not see any reason why a page about supervolcanos in general would see fit to categorise 'information about Yellowstone' under the keyword 'Yellowstone caldera', as part of an index referencing links to information about a variety of supervolcanoes. In this case, you'll just have to take it on faith that to the vast majority of those members of the human race that deal with any large quantity of text, this particular idea (essentially 'concept mapping') is blindingly obvious. I believe you'll find that most paper encyclopedias have a similar system involving 'keywords', 'indexes' and 'references', by which they separate the knowledge accumulated by the human race into convenient bite-size chunks.
For the record, what leads me to believe that 'their infrequency would be obvious' is essentially that the initial wikipedia link makes it perfectly clear that supervolcano eruption is nigh upon an extinction event, which would surely imply to anybody with any sort of grasp on sense that supervolcano eruptions aren't an everyday occurrence. The precise frequencies are useful supporting details. To quote the page originally linked, the sheer volume of extruded magma is immense enough to radically alter the landscape and severely impact global climate for years, with a cataclysmic effect on life.
In your case, you'd probably be better off buying a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. You'll be happy to know that such information as the frequency of Yellowstone's eruptions is available in the book, and that to find it, you'll either have to use the dreaded index, or work through several hundred pages on fascinating subjects such as fossil records, radioactivity, sub-atomic particles and earthquakes. (Sarcasm aside, they really are fascinating pages). You will of course be happiest taking approach 2, since this is as near as publishing ever gets to plastering all the information deemed of any interest about a large and tangentially related group of topics on one extraordinarily swollen page for those of us who cannot be bothered to learn to click on links.
Take a look at uni-deutsch.de. Then, make damn sure you don't do it the way they did, which is to say: do not use quicktime libraries in your java applets, because the result will crash nearly everything.
Outside this small technical flaw, though, you'd probably find some inspiration in the course content, which is for advanced learners of German as a foreign language. They've included a lot of multimedia elements, movies, audio streaming and so on, and a lot of (vaguely) fun puzzles of the 'join the weird expression to the obsecure verb it sounds best with' variety.
And do a bloody Japanese distance learning course for a reasonable price. No bugger on Earth offers one (except for Leeds or Sheffield or somewhere, who charge 1,000 pounds for it, which is a bit too much to pay for modest squiggle success). And when you've set it up - and it doesn't have to be technically complicated, a set of reading comprehension and modest writing practice exercises in unicode would be an excellent start - let me know...:-P
Given the expected result of a supervolcano eruption it is probably fortunate that they don't erupt all that often. For your information, Yellowstone erupts approximately once every 600,000 years; that information was available on Wikipedia - you simply have to click on "Yellowstone caldera". I would have thought their infrequency to be obvious, seeing that the last supervolcano eruption - Toba in Sumatra, 74,000 years ago - covered 4 million square kilometres in ash and created a global catastrophe, artificial winter, famine, the whole lot.
If Yellowstone went off, everything within a thousand mile radius would be obliterated entirely and the entire US would be covered in ash, if not lava. Then it'd get extremely dark for a long time and the whole planet would starve. Generally speaking, you notice supervolcano eruptions. They're frankly just a bit bloody hard to miss.
The only guy I ever met who actually seemed to enjoy using VS.net had actually managed to con his boss into buying him a second monitor. He seemed rather proud of it, but personally I feel that an interface that needs to be dual-headed onto two giant monitors is probably an interface that could seriously do with a diet.
Personally, I spent a year on 1024x768 with the damn software. After two months I gave up on it entirely and started using vi, make and the commandline tools. Granted it was a total clusterfuck, but at least my eyestrain went away.
And as an incidental bonus, vi doesn't take three minutes to load on a 500mhz PC.
I have gone through the two language limit problem, with French and Spanish. Eventually it goes away, or at least it did in my case. In the meantime it is really very annoying and can play merry hell with your vocabulary. The trick is to consciously put yourself into a lot (a lot lot) of situations that trigger the confusion. The immediate result of this is a headache, but eventually it should begin to settle down as your mind develops strategies to switch more quickly.
Handy situations you can try include taking German-language Spanish courses. First thing with this is it will make you feel better about your language competencies, and the second thing is that it will force you to use the two foreign languages back-to-back, to translate between Spanish and German and so on.
Oh, and the other trick is not to stress if you feel like you're losing fluency in the one or the other of them. You aren't, your brain is just in an intermediate stage of rearranging itself to suit requirements.
Having said that, the thing I haven't managed to beat yet is the instant conversational language switch. It's ok between my first language and another (eg. a hybrid french-english or german-english conversation), but between foreign languages it's horrible.
For example, one time in a pub in Luxembourg with a German friend. The barman spoke only French, my friend spoke only German. The danger in that situation is you forget what foreign language is what and start using them in the wrong order. I haven't got any idea how to stop that happening (less beer, possibly...)
No offense to you, and admittedly slightly off-topic, but here is a generalised plea; I am so fed up of people justifying various things in Germany by "Don't forget the use made of [whatever] during the Third Reich". I've heard exactly the same argument made about various things, for example, the availability of childcare, the age at which school becomes compulsory, and right here on the subject of the German nationality, and it always seems to lead to the most convenient result for the arguer (as opposed, say, to the most logical response to the actual issue as stated), just like mentioning the Nazis does in other political situations. If you ask me, discussions in Germany on subjects surrounding society desperately need to invoke a modified form of Godwin's law: the first one to mention "the use of X during the Third Reich" loses. Do as the poor German ambassador so kindly requested of the British (although rather misguidedly to the Sun, for whom, incidentally, I apologise) and try not to mention the war...
Aside from that comment on the choice of rhetoric, however, the only TV I could possibly watch on my computer is media streamed from the Internet, and I most respectfully suggest that if I did not choose to buy a television, it is simply because I have no interest in any German broadcast media. So this move is to do with incrimination; this move translates into the language of the cynic as, "Aha! but you could, if ready to overcome the technical and logical difficulties, theoretically, if sufficiently motivated, sneak a peak at our television streams! Which we put up on the web with this eventual intention! We do not of course seriously believe that you would bother, as we know that almost all of you have TVs, but we will nonetheless treat the situation as though you are a sneak TV thief! Haha!"
The logical difficulties with this move: if I had wanted TV, I'd have bought a TV plus a license. 18 euros a month, plus a hundred or so for a TV one-off. If I chose to buy DSL instead, it is already clear that I have spent 30 per month for the T-DSL enabled phone connection, plus another twenty or so for the always-on connection, plus a few hundred for a computer, plus the best part of a hundred for the modem. This seems to be the most ridiculously torturous way of achieving access to a TV stream, ever. Or are we now claiming that Web.de occasional dialup users make regular use of streaming video?
This move doubles the cost of my DSL access. It suggests that I cannot survive without watching German TV (whereas quite the reverse is in fact the case). It assumes automatic dishonesty on the part of every internet user in Germany. To which I respond, yah boo and sucks to the GEZ. And even for those who pick up the odd stream, wow, 18 euros per month for a damn wmv??? To quote Eddie Izzard, they can fuck right off with that.
This, just like a whole lot of other German policies, makes me suggest acquiring the rights to Aretha Franklin's "Respect", and infinite-looping the catchier passages in the Bundestag (and, what the hell, everywhere else too). Maybe the message would eventually begin to sink in. But it's blindingly obvious that this has not, as yet, occurred.
Or Bulgaria does not see why Germany cannot deal with people having dual passports, given that much although not all of 'Old Europe' gets on with it just fine. If you look up Bulgarian policy, you will discover that they indeed do permit dual nationality... What are they supposed to do, fall over backwards to help their citizens deal with Germany's half-baked ideas?
As for 'complaining' about aging population, you were clearly not in my Deutsch als Fremdsprache courses and have, unsurprisingly, never read the course material... otherwise, you would realise the emphasis that is placed on the issue. And as for forcing people to mate, who asked you to? One could make it a bearable place for all those (German-speaking, European, Christian if you must) foreign immigrants to move into, thus partially solving your age-pyramid -- but why should you, right? Let the immigrants work it out.
See, people like myself and my Bulgarian friend move to Germany, learn the language, get used to the culture (and the food), and then get it in the neck when it comes to immigration policy. Fortunately, it doesn't matter for me (being a UK citizen and thus in the EU), except of course that I have no vote, but you better believe it impacts on other peoples' lives. Psychologically if for no other reason; if I were to move to France to marry, gaining dual nationality would be simple (although it takes about a year, most of that is just waiting). If I went there to study or to live it would take between four and seven years' residence. Spanish friends of mine who moved to the UK have gained UK nationality by waiting until they got past the minimum legal residency time and applying. Whereas if they would have moved to Germany... forget it.
Now maybe Germany thinks it's in a Special Peoples' Club and shouldn't share passports with any other lot, but that Bulgarian PhD is disgusted enough to leave the country; and that after getting her Oberstufe German by the way, thus making her unusually literate even by German standards according to the PISA report... a better immigration policy might persuade people like that to stay.
You're actually displaying an attitude that I see in Germany all the time, which is a) superior and b) far from serious. Realise that a partial solution to the age-pyramid problem is to recruit (welcome!) all the Bulgarian PhDs you can get, dual nationality or not. Or at least actually defend the current policy... don't just sit there blaming everybody else for failing to fit in with German policy, actually tell me what precisely is wrong with allowing German-speaking immigrants to share the nationality in a sane, sensible manner.
and on the other hand, he wasn't sure if He spoke through him.
Then you asked, which is it?
According to all good sense, these statements go together perfectly well. Accepted for the sake of argument that God speaks to him and provides him with instruction as to what he should do and say, it does not necessarily follow that his own speech is a reflection of God's actual speech or intent to speak.
I think it's perfectly understandable for a person of religious leaning to question themselves as to whether they are really capable of translating God's will into spoken English. Not to question oneself would presumably imply somewhat extreme egotism.
Which, I might note in passing, is many peoples' problem with Bush, and could be encapsulated into the following; "Who died and made him a prophet?".
Hm. Maybe you can have two passports if you were born in Germany - I have the vague memory of some recently passed law on the subject - but rest absolutely assured that Germany remains extraordinarily hostile to the immigrant in general terms. A friend of mine (from Bulgaria, as though it matters) came to Germany to marry a rather nice chap, and though she was permitted residence she was not allowed dual citizenship, which due to some interesting legal tangles implied that if she wished to become German, it would have meant losing the property that she owned back home...
Germany's attitude to immigration is not far from the Queen of England's approach to casual sex. And then they have the guts to complain about their aging population and lack of workforce. But this is another rant.
Slightly odd random fact: there's a private company originally founded in Germany, that specialise in disposal of nuclear waste and so on; for some strange reason (and no evident sense of irony) they decided to call themselves the NUKEM group.
Hopefully, since the date this company was founded, the importance of marketing has become rather more accepted in the industry.
That's not actually an entirely new idea in the UK. A mate of mine had a car accident last spring, to which the police was called as they were on private land. At the time of course the police reacted with sublime disinterest (so what else is new, I've seen them react with utter disinterest to armed theft before now), but as they're stressing the 'Better Driving' thing at the moment, he got a letter through the door a couple of weeks later saying, "Either admit your guilt and pay us 200 quid, or we'll take you to court, where the fines could reach 5,000". Obviously no sane being is going to go with the court case option, even if they were in posession of video evidence and ten witnesses... it just isn't worth it.
I see this sort of practice as cheapening the idea of justice, since it practically commands you to plead guilty and take your (potentially unjustly given) lumps, and to hell with any of that truth bollocks. Plus, it's politically excellent since more people will plead guilty, thus increasing the apparent success of the justice system. And you don't have a right to a free lawyer just because the Crown is threatening to prosecute, which means that if you're a bit strapped for cash you have to decide all on your little own. Sigh.
The UK desperately needs a bit more backbone, a bit of basic ethics, a bit less obsessiveness on the "ooh! scary nasty criminals are all around!" front, and a change of political direction; this political grandstanding stuff is just not doing it for me, quite frankly. I'm quite aware that criminals exist - I spent the tech recession working in a booze shop so I could hardly fail to have noticed - but I'm also aware that most of the adult criminals I've come across were pretty good pals of the local cops, that the police have no ability whatsoever to control teenage offenders, and that successful prosecution generally only occurs on the most inoffensive of targets. "Innocent men have nothing to fear" could also be stated as "Innocent men have everything to lose, and are therefore that much more frightened". Unfortunately.
Hah, I wrote to my MP about that one... he responded essentially that it was a total joke, a waste of a perfectly good gong and an example of the pointlessness of the current honours system. Funny, given that the guy has a CBE himself, but it has been said that the ability to laugh at yourself is a sign of balanced mental health:-)
Actually it was an interesting event all round, as it provided me with an excellent illustration of precisely why Jeremy Paxman gets so uptight about the honours system. Until then I had it down as a meaningless eccentricity of the Her Majesty in-crowd... it made it abundantly obvious just how many opportunities it gives idiot/corrupt politicians to embarrass the country.
You, dear sir, deserve intense modding-up for this comment. Wives (as with husbands...) do indeed need love, and it is not entirely unreasonable of them to expect it either.
I think what a lot of guys miss about the giving-gifts relationship "solution" is that, essentially, it makes women feel sorry for men to see them crawl. It makes them feel pity. Not love. This is good only on occasion, if, for example, you did something to severely piss the girl in question off. The fact that this use of present-giving is relatively one-sided probably tells one something about the human condition, though I'm damned if I know what. The fact that certain guys think it equals love definitely speaks volumes about the low expectations of the human male. One would've thought that if this were entirely necessary, the marriage vows would say something about "taking this woman as lifetime recipient of one's surplus finances".
For some reason, there's a small but significant subset of men out there who are apparently unable to sense the difference between love and pity, although I am not saying that Mr. 200 dollars of red roses is one of these people (bidding for her pity is probably a reasonable way out at that stage, though I could think of better). People with this problem would be best-off working it out at an early stage; the novelty of feeling pity for a guy eventually wears off, so they will presumably find themselves dumped as soon as the lady gets bored with pity as sole motive...
Personally I sigh every time I see a bunch of roses heading my way, since I know it probably means that the bloke in my life has done or decided to do something that he already knows will piss me off... like standing on my Psion 5, totalling the laser printer, or accidentally throwing away urgent governmental correspondence.
Note that whilst the Mezquita was altered to become a Christian church (built in a rather incongruous manner within a few of the arches of the Mezquita), the mosque was itself built on a demolished church, way back when. Apparently, one Abd-ar Rahman the first bought and subsequently demolished the Christian church that originally stood on that spot, and constructed the mosque there. And outstandingly beautiful it is too.
So the Mezquita is actually an example of both of these phenomena, the land in question having gone from Christian to Moslem and back to Christian.
I myself find it more impressive as an example of the utter lack of taste exhibited by the 16th century idiots who tried to 're-christianise' the building by sticking a sodding great Catholic style monstrosity right in the middle of it... and I'm not the only one; Charles V, the twerp who ordered it to be done, said on seeing the results that, "You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world."
Sure, that's fine. But they ain't all human. I had a chap come in the one time, look at my vcr, fiddle with it, and claim to see something in the static. Consider: the aerial was broken and flapping in the wind. This was why I was not using the television, because I could not in fact receive TV. The VCR tunes itself on initial setup (most do), but had apparently such awesomely good reception that it couldn't decide whether to flash 4pm or 12:00.
He therefore claimed I needed a tv licence... I said not. He then changed his tune, seeing that I had a computer, pointed at it, said "Computers can receive TV signals, you owe us anyway". I pointed out the lack of a TV card and told him that (in fact) he has to catch me at a time when the TV equipment is actually set up to watch TV (not static, you know, TV, where you see little moving figures on a screen). Twitching increased. He said, "The law says everybody with a TV has to pay". I said not... he said, "it changed". I said, prove it... he hugged his clipboard o'papers and refused. In the end I paid to get the freak out of the house and canceled as soon as I could, but it was a hell of a waste of money.
Single women should not have to deal with six foot six unwanted nutters lying about the law in their living rooms; so I since developed a policy that I don't let them in unless a) they are female, b) I have company, or c) they bring police escort. This cut down on visits nicely, and noone sued me yet. All the TV I watch is on DVD/video. Unfortunately, this means I'm going to be the last one to see the new Doctor Who, so I'll just have to go to a mate's house and make it a social event...
OTOH, here in Germany, it's wholly illegal to own a TV at all unless you pay a licence (but they aren't allowed inside your house to check). As I own no TV, this is no problem, but they do phone up every now and then to check, often with the most amusing methods of extracting the truth. "We would like to ask you your opinions of [some apparently popular tv series]", etc. So I simply lisp at them "Was bedeutet 'Fernseher'?" and they go away, often quite fast.
The stupid thing is, I would quite like to be able to watch the BBC, and don't object to paying when and if I actually do. I just object to having to get into such cruddy situations merely because I don't watch the freaking thing. In the defence of TV licensing, it has to be said that they have often been reasonable - at Uni for example I was probably the only one in my kitchen group who didn't have one, and they accepted that after a phone call. I'd have shown them personally, but they kept on turning up during my quantum mechanics lectures and leaving sniffy notes.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll get no argument from me on whether giving piles and piles of aid is The Right Thing, and I for one am very happy to admit that the US in the case of this disaster are being absolute stars.
On the subject of whether it suggests that the US isn't trying to Blow Up and Invade And Pollute The World, probably the easiest way to put it is: there are a lot of different opinions in the US and a lot of conflicting motivations, meaning that the US often disagrees with itself. That means for example that there are stunningly bright people in the US with outstanding foresight and understanding of any one issue.
The problem tends to arise when different specialities conflict, such as economics versus environmentalism or economics versus politics, etc. Many of my American friends and acquaintances tend to use the term 'schitzophrenic' when discussing American policies, presumably for this reason.
So I hand it to you that you aren't, as a seamless mass, trying to Blow Up and Invade And Pollute The World. You are a large and diverse group of people and have all sorts of different aims in mind. One of them is to be kind and nice and helpful. Others are to make a lot of money, to prop up political structures, or to promote ideologies. Few if any of these aims are universal within the US population.
So yes, you do care about the rest of the world, in all sorts of different ways and depending on all sorts of different uses of the term 'care'. And yes, we do disagree on the specifics.
And yes, this is enough to cause an awful lot of people to feel extreme and sincere dislike, which is usually inadequately well targeted since really people should be saying "I hate the Republican stand on xyz" or "the Democratic stand on abc", rather than yelling "bloody America!". Sadly, and I do mean sadly, people just find it easiest to blame the entire country.
You might well be right. I'd definitely like it if you were - fingers crossed! :-)
The thing is, it is unacceptable that people are denied equal rights just because they happen to be homosexual, and it is unacceptable that prison rape occurs, and it is unacceptable that drug addiction is so unreasonably dealt with.
All of these things are unacceptable, most particularly the first case since drug-taking is after all relatively speaking a choice, whereas outside fundamentalist theorising neither homosexuality nor being born female are 'a choice'. And yes if a country started stringing people up for the crime of being homosexual, I'd be thinking it was very much time for the rest of Planet Earth to react on that matter. So what's your point?
I find a good solution to cultural relativism is the Declaration of Human Rights, which you can find right here. Although I realise that we here on slashdot apparently hold the UN in deepest contempt, this particular document is worth taking a good look at. As far as I am concerned, it solves a lot of problems, as one can look at situations within which one might be tempted to invoke cultural relativism and say: is this against human rights? If it is, it's not OK to just shrug and go "strange places, strange people", and if it isn't, shrug away... Cultural relativism is a useful concept when it comes to accepting weirdnesses and overcoming culture shock, but it is not a catch-all excuse.
Er, no.
Those 100,000 deaths and counting quoted in the message above are from the Lancet article of a few months ago, and I quote the Guardian summary on this subject:
Civilians. Not military. The Lancet article was focusing on civilian deaths. Here's the Guardian article: article:
a) Pearl Harbour is as you know a controversial topic. World War II was as you know a rather different situation to the present day. As a metaphor it makes no sense, since Pearl Harbour caused America to declare war on the instigators of Pearl Harbour, whereas September 11 caused America to declare war on Afghanistan, followed by an apparently unrelated Iraq, based on the principle that, err...
b) The Iraqis were apparently scared shitless of Saddam Hussein, meaning that violent revolution in the streets, etc., was more or less unheard of. Whereas today, there are supposedly 200,000 insurgents who are fearless enough and/or pissed off enough to turn the TV off, get their lazy arses out of bed, and go commit violence and/or slaughter. So I'd be curious to hear your metric for measuring 'better' explained on that one.
Hitler's atheistic Nazis
Are you kidding?
Hitler's Nazis were incredibly credulous. The sort of crap they swallowed makes "I've been abducted by aliens... three times!" sound almost believable. One minute it was bloody Odin, the next black magic, then it was Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy. Himmler believed he was the reincarnation of one Heinrich I. Mengele was into phrenology. Oh, and they pretty much all believed they were the children of Atlantis.
The Third Reich would be better described as "a bunch of gullible though evil assholes" than "atheists". Go to Nuremburg and take a look at their attempt at building a Third Reich size street; you'll soon get the idea.
Yeah, but the problem is:
.com variety of the domain in question, who wanted to buy the .org from us "as users might otherwise be confused". So my boss sent the mail around on the internal mailing list.
As an English person in Britain, what am I supposed to do... when I'm planning on learning Dutch? (this is a serious question btw).
I can't even download Dutch TV, since it's all subtitled!!
On a totally irrelevant sidenote, you'd be amazed at how useful just a little familiarity with Dutch was to me today... we got an email from someone hoping to buy one of our domains from us. The someone in question was claiming to be the administrative contact of the
After staring at it for a minute I realised what was bugging me about it: the return mail address was willem.van.oranje @ rather well known freemail provider. Aside from the statistical unlikelihood that a chap based in Israel would have a name like that, I don't see why a famous Dutch dead guy would be particularly interested in buying our domain...
Now that I've said that it's probably going to turn out that it was all legit, and our correspondent just has an irrational weakness for webmail and a healthy dose of hero worship for the "Vader des vaderlands". Riiiight.
The slackware x.org package doesn't come with xf86cfg for some reason
:-)
The reason is because slackware doesn't come with xf86 any more. It comes with x.org. (I know, you said it). Logically therefore the configuration program is no longer known as xf86cfg, but as xorgcfg
However you're probably better off with xorgsetup.
Now I've done my bit for Patrick too!!!
Perhaps you do not see any reason why a page about supervolcanos in general would see fit to categorise 'information about Yellowstone' under the keyword 'Yellowstone caldera', as part of an index referencing links to information about a variety of supervolcanoes. In this case, you'll just have to take it on faith that to the vast majority of those members of the human race that deal with any large quantity of text, this particular idea (essentially 'concept mapping') is blindingly obvious. I believe you'll find that most paper encyclopedias have a similar system involving 'keywords', 'indexes' and 'references', by which they separate the knowledge accumulated by the human race into convenient bite-size chunks.
For the record, what leads me to believe that 'their infrequency would be obvious' is essentially that the initial wikipedia link makes it perfectly clear that supervolcano eruption is nigh upon an extinction event, which would surely imply to anybody with any sort of grasp on sense that supervolcano eruptions aren't an everyday occurrence. The precise frequencies are useful supporting details. To quote the page originally linked, the sheer volume of extruded magma is immense enough to radically alter the landscape and severely impact global climate for years, with a cataclysmic effect on life.
In your case, you'd probably be better off buying a copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. You'll be happy to know that such information as the frequency of Yellowstone's eruptions is available in the book, and that to find it, you'll either have to use the dreaded index, or work through several hundred pages on fascinating subjects such as fossil records, radioactivity, sub-atomic particles and earthquakes. (Sarcasm aside, they really are fascinating pages). You will of course be happiest taking approach 2, since this is as near as publishing ever gets to plastering all the information deemed of any interest about a large and tangentially related group of topics on one extraordinarily swollen page for those of us who cannot be bothered to learn to click on links.
Take a look at uni-deutsch.de. Then, make damn sure you don't do it the way they did, which is to say: do not use quicktime libraries in your java applets, because the result will crash nearly everything.
:-P
Outside this small technical flaw, though, you'd probably find some inspiration in the course content, which is for advanced learners of German as a foreign language. They've included a lot of multimedia elements, movies, audio streaming and so on, and a lot of (vaguely) fun puzzles of the 'join the weird expression to the obsecure verb it sounds best with' variety.
And do a bloody Japanese distance learning course for a reasonable price. No bugger on Earth offers one (except for Leeds or Sheffield or somewhere, who charge 1,000 pounds for it, which is a bit too much to pay for modest squiggle success). And when you've set it up - and it doesn't have to be technically complicated, a set of reading comprehension and modest writing practice exercises in unicode would be an excellent start - let me know...
Except for the 50% of us who are 'sisters'?
Given the expected result of a supervolcano eruption it is probably fortunate that they don't erupt all that often. For your information, Yellowstone erupts approximately once every 600,000 years; that information was available on Wikipedia - you simply have to click on "Yellowstone caldera". I would have thought their infrequency to be obvious, seeing that the last supervolcano eruption - Toba in Sumatra, 74,000 years ago - covered 4 million square kilometres in ash and created a global catastrophe, artificial winter, famine, the whole lot.
If Yellowstone went off, everything within a thousand mile radius would be obliterated entirely and the entire US would be covered in ash, if not lava. Then it'd get extremely dark for a long time and the whole planet would starve. Generally speaking, you notice supervolcano eruptions. They're frankly just a bit bloody hard to miss.
The only guy I ever met who actually seemed to enjoy using VS.net had actually managed to con his boss into buying him a second monitor. He seemed rather proud of it, but personally I feel that an interface that needs to be dual-headed onto two giant monitors is probably an interface that could seriously do with a diet.
Personally, I spent a year on 1024x768 with the damn software. After two months I gave up on it entirely and started using vi, make and the commandline tools. Granted it was a total clusterfuck, but at least my eyestrain went away.
And as an incidental bonus, vi doesn't take three minutes to load on a 500mhz PC.
I have gone through the two language limit problem, with French and Spanish. Eventually it goes away, or at least it did in my case. In the meantime it is really very annoying and can play merry hell with your vocabulary. The trick is to consciously put yourself into a lot (a lot lot) of situations that trigger the confusion. The immediate result of this is a headache, but eventually it should begin to settle down as your mind develops strategies to switch more quickly.
Handy situations you can try include taking German-language Spanish courses. First thing with this is it will make you feel better about your language competencies, and the second thing is that it will force you to use the two foreign languages back-to-back, to translate between Spanish and German and so on.
Oh, and the other trick is not to stress if you feel like you're losing fluency in the one or the other of them. You aren't, your brain is just in an intermediate stage of rearranging itself to suit requirements.
Having said that, the thing I haven't managed to beat yet is the instant conversational language switch. It's ok between my first language and another (eg. a hybrid french-english or german-english conversation), but between foreign languages it's horrible.
For example, one time in a pub in Luxembourg with a German friend. The barman spoke only French, my friend spoke only German. The danger in that situation is you forget what foreign language is what and start using them in the wrong order. I haven't got any idea how to stop that happening (less beer, possibly...)
No offense to you, and admittedly slightly off-topic, but here is a generalised plea; I am so fed up of people justifying various things in Germany by "Don't forget the use made of [whatever] during the Third Reich". I've heard exactly the same argument made about various things, for example, the availability of childcare, the age at which school becomes compulsory, and right here on the subject of the German nationality, and it always seems to lead to the most convenient result for the arguer (as opposed, say, to the most logical response to the actual issue as stated), just like mentioning the Nazis does in other political situations. If you ask me, discussions in Germany on subjects surrounding society desperately need to invoke a modified form of Godwin's law: the first one to mention "the use of X during the Third Reich" loses. Do as the poor German ambassador so kindly requested of the British (although rather misguidedly to the Sun, for whom, incidentally, I apologise) and try not to mention the war...
Aside from that comment on the choice of rhetoric, however, the only TV I could possibly watch on my computer is media streamed from the Internet, and I most respectfully suggest that if I did not choose to buy a television, it is simply because I have no interest in any German broadcast media. So this move is to do with incrimination; this move translates into the language of the cynic as, "Aha! but you could, if ready to overcome the technical and logical difficulties, theoretically, if sufficiently motivated, sneak a peak at our television streams! Which we put up on the web with this eventual intention! We do not of course seriously believe that you would bother, as we know that almost all of you have TVs, but we will nonetheless treat the situation as though you are a sneak TV thief! Haha!"
The logical difficulties with this move: if I had wanted TV, I'd have bought a TV plus a license. 18 euros a month, plus a hundred or so for a TV one-off. If I chose to buy DSL instead, it is already clear that I have spent 30 per month for the T-DSL enabled phone connection, plus another twenty or so for the always-on connection, plus a few hundred for a computer, plus the best part of a hundred for the modem. This seems to be the most ridiculously torturous way of achieving access to a TV stream, ever. Or are we now claiming that Web.de occasional dialup users make regular use of streaming video?
This move doubles the cost of my DSL access. It suggests that I cannot survive without watching German TV (whereas quite the reverse is in fact the case). It assumes automatic dishonesty on the part of every internet user in Germany. To which I respond, yah boo and sucks to the GEZ. And even for those who pick up the odd stream, wow, 18 euros per month for a damn wmv??? To quote Eddie Izzard, they can fuck right off with that.
This, just like a whole lot of other German policies, makes me suggest acquiring the rights to Aretha Franklin's "Respect", and infinite-looping the catchier passages in the Bundestag (and, what the hell, everywhere else too). Maybe the message would eventually begin to sink in. But it's blindingly obvious that this has not, as yet, occurred.
Or Bulgaria does not see why Germany cannot deal with people having dual passports, given that much although not all of 'Old Europe' gets on with it just fine. If you look up Bulgarian policy, you will discover that they indeed do permit dual nationality... What are they supposed to do, fall over backwards to help their citizens deal with Germany's half-baked ideas?
As for 'complaining' about aging population, you were clearly not in my Deutsch als Fremdsprache courses and have, unsurprisingly, never read the course material... otherwise, you would realise the emphasis that is placed on the issue. And as for forcing people to mate, who asked you to? One could make it a bearable place for all those (German-speaking, European, Christian if you must) foreign immigrants to move into, thus partially solving your age-pyramid -- but why should you, right? Let the immigrants work it out.
See, people like myself and my Bulgarian friend move to Germany, learn the language, get used to the culture (and the food), and then get it in the neck when it comes to immigration policy. Fortunately, it doesn't matter for me (being a UK citizen and thus in the EU), except of course that I have no vote, but you better believe it impacts on other peoples' lives. Psychologically if for no other reason; if I were to move to France to marry, gaining dual nationality would be simple (although it takes about a year, most of that is just waiting). If I went there to study or to live it would take between four and seven years' residence. Spanish friends of mine who moved to the UK have gained UK nationality by waiting until they got past the minimum legal residency time and applying. Whereas if they would have moved to Germany... forget it.
Now maybe Germany thinks it's in a Special Peoples' Club and shouldn't share passports with any other lot, but that Bulgarian PhD is disgusted enough to leave the country; and that after getting her Oberstufe German by the way, thus making her unusually literate even by German standards according to the PISA report... a better immigration policy might persuade people like that to stay.
You're actually displaying an attitude that I see in Germany all the time, which is a) superior and b) far from serious. Realise that a partial solution to the age-pyramid problem is to recruit (welcome!) all the Bulgarian PhDs you can get, dual nationality or not. Or at least actually defend the current policy... don't just sit there blaming everybody else for failing to fit in with German policy, actually tell me what precisely is wrong with allowing German-speaking immigrants to share the nationality in a sane, sensible manner.
Err...
On the one hand he stated:
God does speak to all his children
and on the other hand, he wasn't sure if He spoke through him.
Then you asked, which is it?
According to all good sense, these statements go together perfectly well. Accepted for the sake of argument that God speaks to him and provides him with instruction as to what he should do and say, it does not necessarily follow that his own speech is a reflection of God's actual speech or intent to speak.
I think it's perfectly understandable for a person of religious leaning to question themselves as to whether they are really capable of translating God's will into spoken English. Not to question oneself would presumably imply somewhat extreme egotism.
Which, I might note in passing, is many peoples' problem with Bush, and could be encapsulated into the following; "Who died and made him a prophet?".
Hm. Maybe you can have two passports if you were born in Germany - I have the vague memory of some recently passed law on the subject - but rest absolutely assured that Germany remains extraordinarily hostile to the immigrant in general terms. A friend of mine (from Bulgaria, as though it matters) came to Germany to marry a rather nice chap, and though she was permitted residence she was not allowed dual citizenship, which due to some interesting legal tangles implied that if she wished to become German, it would have meant losing the property that she owned back home...
Germany's attitude to immigration is not far from the Queen of England's approach to casual sex. And then they have the guts to complain about their aging population and lack of workforce. But this is another rant.
Slightly odd random fact: there's a private company originally founded in Germany, that specialise in disposal of nuclear waste and so on; for some strange reason (and no evident sense of irony) they decided to call themselves the NUKEM group.
Hopefully, since the date this company was founded, the importance of marketing has become rather more accepted in the industry.
In UK it's totally different, however - most people have a credit card (and gullible people have lots of them)
That's not actually an entirely new idea in the UK. A mate of mine had a car accident last spring, to which the police was called as they were on private land. At the time of course the police reacted with sublime disinterest (so what else is new, I've seen them react with utter disinterest to armed theft before now), but as they're stressing the 'Better Driving' thing at the moment, he got a letter through the door a couple of weeks later saying, "Either admit your guilt and pay us 200 quid, or we'll take you to court, where the fines could reach 5,000". Obviously no sane being is going to go with the court case option, even if they were in posession of video evidence and ten witnesses... it just isn't worth it.
I see this sort of practice as cheapening the idea of justice, since it practically commands you to plead guilty and take your (potentially unjustly given) lumps, and to hell with any of that truth bollocks. Plus, it's politically excellent since more people will plead guilty, thus increasing the apparent success of the justice system. And you don't have a right to a free lawyer just because the Crown is threatening to prosecute, which means that if you're a bit strapped for cash you have to decide all on your little own. Sigh.
The UK desperately needs a bit more backbone, a bit of basic ethics, a bit less obsessiveness on the "ooh! scary nasty criminals are all around!" front, and a change of political direction; this political grandstanding stuff is just not doing it for me, quite frankly. I'm quite aware that criminals exist - I spent the tech recession working in a booze shop so I could hardly fail to have noticed - but I'm also aware that most of the adult criminals I've come across were pretty good pals of the local cops, that the police have no ability whatsoever to control teenage offenders, and that successful prosecution generally only occurs on the most inoffensive of targets. "Innocent men have nothing to fear" could also be stated as "Innocent men have everything to lose, and are therefore that much more frightened". Unfortunately.
Hah, I wrote to my MP about that one... he responded essentially that it was a total joke, a waste of a perfectly good gong and an example of the pointlessness of the current honours system. Funny, given that the guy has a CBE himself, but it has been said that the ability to laugh at yourself is a sign of balanced mental health :-)
Actually it was an interesting event all round, as it provided me with an excellent illustration of precisely why Jeremy Paxman gets so uptight about the honours system. Until then I had it down as a meaningless eccentricity of the Her Majesty in-crowd... it made it abundantly obvious just how many opportunities it gives idiot/corrupt politicians to embarrass the country.
You, dear sir, deserve intense modding-up for this comment. Wives (as with husbands...) do indeed need love, and it is not entirely unreasonable of them to expect it either.
I think what a lot of guys miss about the giving-gifts relationship "solution" is that, essentially, it makes women feel sorry for men to see them crawl. It makes them feel pity. Not love. This is good only on occasion, if, for example, you did something to severely piss the girl in question off. The fact that this use of present-giving is relatively one-sided probably tells one something about the human condition, though I'm damned if I know what. The fact that certain guys think it equals love definitely speaks volumes about the low expectations of the human male. One would've thought that if this were entirely necessary, the marriage vows would say something about "taking this woman as lifetime recipient of one's surplus finances".
For some reason, there's a small but significant subset of men out there who are apparently unable to sense the difference between love and pity, although I am not saying that Mr. 200 dollars of red roses is one of these people (bidding for her pity is probably a reasonable way out at that stage, though I could think of better). People with this problem would be best-off working it out at an early stage; the novelty of feeling pity for a guy eventually wears off, so they will presumably find themselves dumped as soon as the lady gets bored with pity as sole motive...
Personally I sigh every time I see a bunch of roses heading my way, since I know it probably means that the bloke in my life has done or decided to do something that he already knows will piss me off... like standing on my Psion 5, totalling the laser printer, or accidentally throwing away urgent governmental correspondence.
Note that whilst the Mezquita was altered to become a Christian church (built in a rather incongruous manner within a few of the arches of the Mezquita), the mosque was itself built on a demolished church, way back when. Apparently, one Abd-ar Rahman the first bought and subsequently demolished the Christian church that originally stood on that spot, and constructed the mosque there. And outstandingly beautiful it is too.
So the Mezquita is actually an example of both of these phenomena, the land in question having gone from Christian to Moslem and back to Christian.
I myself find it more impressive as an example of the utter lack of taste exhibited by the 16th century idiots who tried to 're-christianise' the building by sticking a sodding great Catholic style monstrosity right in the middle of it... and I'm not the only one; Charles V, the twerp who ordered it to be done, said on seeing the results that, "You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world."
But I am sadly off topic.
Sure, that's fine. But they ain't all human. I had a chap come in the one time, look at my vcr, fiddle with it, and claim to see something in the static. Consider: the aerial was broken and flapping in the wind. This was why I was not using the television, because I could not in fact receive TV. The VCR tunes itself on initial setup (most do), but had apparently such awesomely good reception that it couldn't decide whether to flash 4pm or 12:00.
He therefore claimed I needed a tv licence... I said not. He then changed his tune, seeing that I had a computer, pointed at it, said "Computers can receive TV signals, you owe us anyway". I pointed out the lack of a TV card and told him that (in fact) he has to catch me at a time when the TV equipment is actually set up to watch TV (not static, you know, TV, where you see little moving figures on a screen). Twitching increased. He said, "The law says everybody with a TV has to pay". I said not... he said, "it changed". I said, prove it... he hugged his clipboard o'papers and refused. In the end I paid to get the freak out of the house and canceled as soon as I could, but it was a hell of a waste of money.
Single women should not have to deal with six foot six unwanted nutters lying about the law in their living rooms; so I since developed a policy that I don't let them in unless a) they are female, b) I have company, or c) they bring police escort. This cut down on visits nicely, and noone sued me yet. All the TV I watch is on DVD/video. Unfortunately, this means I'm going to be the last one to see the new Doctor Who, so I'll just have to go to a mate's house and make it a social event...
OTOH, here in Germany, it's wholly illegal to own a TV at all unless you pay a licence (but they aren't allowed inside your house to check). As I own no TV, this is no problem, but they do phone up every now and then to check, often with the most amusing methods of extracting the truth. "We would like to ask you your opinions of [some apparently popular tv series]", etc. So I simply lisp at them "Was bedeutet 'Fernseher'?" and they go away, often quite fast.
The stupid thing is, I would quite like to be able to watch the BBC, and don't object to paying when and if I actually do. I just object to having to get into such cruddy situations merely because I don't watch the freaking thing. In the defence of TV licensing, it has to be said that they have often been reasonable - at Uni for example I was probably the only one in my kitchen group who didn't have one, and they accepted that after a phone call. I'd have shown them personally, but they kept on turning up during my quantum mechanics lectures and leaving sniffy notes.