Good roads: yeah, the highways are kept in a fairly good conditions but local roads can be really bad...especially in the winter...
This seems to vary a lot depending on where in Sweden you live, since you complain about local trains I'm assuming you live in the Stockholm or Malmö areas, try moving somewhere where the local authorities aren't confused and scared every year when the first snow falls (really, both those cities are horrible when it comes to clearing the roads of snow).
Low crime: Dream on! At the moment I think we're at the top of the list for rapes in Europe and there are large areas of some cities, e.g. Malmö, where the fire department and ambulances won't enter without police escort...
The rape statistics are also related to the fact that swedish law is a lot more "liberal" in what it considers rape compared to a lot of other countries, not to mention that for decades there have been campaigns to convince women to actually report when they get raped.
As for the problems with areas such as Rosengård in Malmö that's mostly a Stockholm and Malmö problem and very localised, in the rest of Sweden it's not really a problem.
Free schooling: True, but a frightening number of kids leave school without being able to read, write and do maths...universities are only partly free...you can borrow money from the state to finance the rest though...
Every school system has its problems but for those kids who actually pay attention the swedish school system works just fine (it's really mostly the "problematic" children that fall through the cracks). And university studies are free (although you do have to pay for your own textbooks if you don't want to borrow them from the university library, and you still have to pay for your own rent and food but you can get low-interest loans from CSN for that).
Efficient public transport: if you don't mind being late for work because the local trains can't handle cold and snow then I guess you can call it efficient...
Perhaps you should try living in a city that isn't Stockholm and thus isn't stuck with Stockholms Lokaltrafik, seeing as how they are completely baffled by the arrival of winter every year...
Yeah, because you just know you'll never get cancer or get hit by a car. Or maybe you've got some special ability to plan this not to happen right after you got laid off from a job?
...who don't drive much...
Taxes also pay for other pieces of infrastructure including bicycle paths and subsidies for public transport.
...and are long-ago graduates...
"Hey! I got my free cake courtesy of my parents' generation, now why should I pay for the next generation's free cake?!"
...with no children...
Ok, you may have a point here, were it not for a concept known as "solidarity" (look it up, the word is in practically every dictionary).
...pay to support people who want to freeload off the government.
Most people who are receiving more money than they're contributing tend to feel pretty bad about this but most of the time it's also not as easy as "oh well I guess I'll stop having cancer/being paralyzed/being unemployed and start paying more taxes!". The current swedish government did some amazing arithmetics prior to the last election and claimed over and over and over again that the reason unemployment was so high wasn't because there weren't enough jobs but because those who were unemployed simply weren't looking for jobs hard enough, naturally they ignored people pointing out that all available numbers showed that for every available job there were something like 4-5 unemployed people, kind of hard to get rid of unemployment just by "trying harder to get a job" under those circumstances...
No worker is truely a slave. You chose to get hired. You can choose to walk away.
I'd have to say that there are exceptions to this statement, such as those working as outsourced first line tech support and customer service drones (and no, they're not all high school dropouts, when I worked first line DSL tech support after college most of my coworkers where people who lost their jobs in the dot bomb fallout or CS/CE graduates who couldn't find anything better), in those jobs it almost seems like a lot of employers try to keep everyone afraid of losing their jobs (and definitely not considering quitting without finding another job first since that would result in no income which kind of sucks when you're working 25-35 hours per week for $12/hour before taxes and have no savings (+ student loans/mortgage to pay if you're really unlucky)).
Those people are many times just a modern western take on slaves, the employers have just figured out that it's a lot easier to let them clothe and feed themselves, that way they can handwave away any complaints about the pay, hours or general work environment with "well, why don't you just quit then?" (even though they know most of their employees no matter how qualified can't "just quit" since they don't have any savings).
I can't help but feel that a scheme like this would be loved by telcos all over the world, all they'd need would be a law that forbids email without this "feature" coupled with some sort of licensing scheme that required server operators to jump through a whole bunch of hoops plus pay a large yearly fee (perhaps labeled as a "downpayment" on that year's transfer fees so technically you'd only have to get the money once and then you could use the money for last year this year again but it would still be too expensive for startups and home users wanting to run their own server) and they'd have a de-facto monopoly on email and could start charging their users $0.05 per email or something silly like that, of course if you buy the "Email XL" plan you'd get 200 free emails per month and any further emails would be sent at the "discount" rate of $0.02....
By disallowing spamming an ISP has a specific line in the TOS that they can point to when a customer calls in screaming about their "intarwebs" being unreachable. "Yes sir, I understand that you are upset but it appears that we got several reports that large amounts of unsolicited email was being sent from your home, upon further monitoring by our technicians it was established that several thousand spam emails were being sent from your home and in accordance with paragraph 713 in the terms of service we disabled your internet connection, attempted to call you and also sent your a letter explaining the reason for us disabling your connection, if you want to have your connection re-enabled you will have to ensure that your equipment is no longer attempting to send out unsolicited email. You should also know that if this activity continues after we re-enabled your connection your connection will be permanently disconnected.".
Yes, I used to handle abuse cases for an ISP and got to explain things like this way too often, that was basically the opening explanation, most customers would bitch and moan for 10-20 minutes about how we had no right to cut off their precious internets and would claim that their computer was our responsibility (to which I would often reply with a car analogy along the lines of "If you let a stranger load your car full of explosives and walmart refuses to let you park your car in the parking lot, is it then walmart's fault that you can't be bothered keeping your car free of explosives?".
I'm not so sure that the new *nix geek and "switcher" Mac users won't jump ship if Apple ever tries to pull something like that, and it seems a lot of Mac users these days are either people who migrated from IRIX/Solaris/AIX/HP-UX (possibly via Linux) or people who switched from Windows because they desperately wanted to get away from it, sticking these users with Windows is likely to drive them to some other *nix OS...
I'm still hoping for them to reveal a "real" tablet PC, that is, not a glorified ebook-reader but something more like what's already on the tablet PC market but well-designed instead of the clunky designs that have been available so far (most seem to have been typical "pro" or "ultra portable/executive" laptops with a monitor that you can flip around plus an incredibly crappy digitizer at a price that no one but the boardroom boys can afford). And considering the improvements in touch support they've been adding to OS X I don't think all hope is lost just yet...
Well then, what about the Photoshop users? and the developers using XCode? Do you think Apple truly believes they'll stick with the platform if they're forced into some (in their and my eyes) horribly restricted modal operating system?
I actually think one of the primary reasons that the Windows world is still filled with "fullscreen only" apps is because there are lots of users and developers who grew up thinking that way due to their computers being set to run at 800x600 or 1024x768 for way too long (Mac and *nix users seemed to crave higher resolutions to a much higher degree), hell I still have friends who insist on running their $2,500 gaming rigs hooked up to some crappy old 17" CRT running at 1280x960@75Hz "because CRTs are better than LCD monitors (and I'm too cheap to buy a new monitor)". Not to mention that pre-XP most Windows users were used to not being able to run more than one app at a time (hell, any random combination of telnet client + irc client + web browser + winamp used to be enough to cause Win9x to crash at least once every couple of hours), and while that may also have been true for Mac OS prior to Mac OS X most Mac users still seemed to crave higher resolutions (not to mention that if you bought a Mac back in those days you generally did so somewhere where the choice in monitors probably didn't include 14-15" monitors barely capable of crapping out 1024x768@75Hz).
As an example, my boss, former coder turned CIO, he still runs all apps fullscreen and seems to spend more time trying to find the right window but absolutely refuses to trying running his apps "un-maximised" because he has always run his apps maximised...
Do you have anything to back up your claims that "Apple is looking into killing the Mac as we know it." in the sense that they're looking to kill it as a general purpose computer? Or are you simply doing the tired old "mac = lock-in = for idiots = gaytardz fagetry lulz!!11" thing?
Us europeans pretty much always end up with the short end of the stick as well (when it's american companies providing the service, at best they'll provide their service to the US + UK (+ maybe France) but mostly it's just the US), but like Tanuki64 I just interpret Apple's silence regarding tv episodes in the iTunes store and Hulu's refusal to allow us swedes to use their service as "Please use Bittorrent".
Not really, most places around here simply have a minimum order for delivery, they won't deliver a single small pizza but if you order a two medium pizzas or a single large pizza they'll happily deliver it at the same cost as they and others charge for eating in the pizzeria or picking it up.
I have seen a couple of places that had a "If you order for less than $AMOUNT then there's an extra delivery fee" thing, but those places that I've tried have been pretty crappy.
Ah, but the janitor(s) going on strike will not result in the CxOs being unable to go to the bathroom the very same day, a week later there might be a problem but they are not required to be available 24/7. If the lights in the upper floor hallway in building 5E start flickering your entire business won't grind to a halt, but if the the CFO is unable to logon because he managed to screw up his profile for the sixth time this month due to porn surfing there will be a problem. Not to mention what happens when shoddy ten year-old servers that IT has requested a replacement budget for since 2004 start going down...
Good thing you're not in Sweden, here the right-wingers generally do the following (sorry if any swedish right-wingers take offense but seriously, this happens all the time in towns and cities here):
Something is unprofitable (or is made to seem unprofitable for ideological "the government shouldn't own $FOO" reasons).
Sell it cheaply and rent it back at a yearly cost close to what it was sold for (or we simply get rid of it completely if it's minor enough and no politician stands to gain anything from the sale).
Of course, our left-wing politicians aren't much better but at least when they promise to raise taxes and spend more money they're somewhat honest about their intentions, now if we could only get some politicians who don't think free speech, personal integrity and copyright are minor issues best decided by whatever lobbyist spends the most money on them...
Quicksort? Oh my, I haven't actually had any reason to actually write my own implementation of that since I was a student and I can honestly say that I don't really remember much about it except that it involved splitting an array/a list by picking some point in the list and making sure all elements with a lower/higher (depending on sort order) value end up before that element and then recursively sorting bits and pieces, I definitely don't remember what the best practice for picking where to first split the list is but I'm sure if I ever end up having to write a quicksort function again I could re-learn it pretty quickly.
That said, I don't think throwing a bunch of theoretical concepts at prospective employees is the best way to weed out the incompetent ones, most likely there are lots of competent and experienced developers who, like me, just haven't had any reason to keep the formal definitions of various algorithms and concepts accurately stored in their heads since a lot of that stuff is useful to have encountered if only to have knowledge of its existence but just isn't used in everyday development. So what you end up with if you demand perfect textbook knowledge of every little intricacy of computer science you'll end up hiring a bunch of fresh grads who still have all of it fresh enough in their minds that they are able to explain it by simply quoting their college textbooks, but three years from now they'll have forgotten a lot of those details anyway...
Or with Bind you could create an empty master zone conf that returns NXDOMAIN for everything and then tell Bind it's the master server for tynt.com and tell it to use the empty zone file, that's what I do with annoying junk domains and I only have to change it in one place to change it for my entire network.
I'm not sure it's fair to call Europe (which in the eyes of many isn't a "real" continent but actually part of the larger Eurasian continent since they're actually part of the same tectonic plate) "a little patch of land to the north", it may be smaller than Africa but considering Congo is barely 1/4 of the size of Europe and Mauritania is about 1/10 of the size of Europe I just don't see that adding up to Europe being "a little larger" (unless your definition of Congo being "a whole bunch of stuff outside the country actually called Congo" but in that case you should have defined your variables a bit more carefully).
I noticed a couple of things, first off you didn't write "a god", you wrote "god" in a way that implies that you assume there is a specific god.
Secondly, an atheist is generally considered "one who believes that there is no deity" (from my dictionary and from what I can tell most dictionaries seem to agree with that definition) which would basically make fanatic atheism some form of fanatic disbelief.
One Word. Cintiq from Wacom. I used the 21" one for over a year.
Too expensive for my tastes (the pricing for the Cintiq seems to be at least partially "we're the only ones with something like this on the market so we can charge whatever we want").
Got tired of my hand covering up the damn screen. I'll stick to a Wacom tablet and a screen.
I tried a Cintiq a few years back and immediately wished I could replace my regular Wacom tablet with it for two reasons:
You can rotate it, I often rotate the paper when drawing and a lot of otherwise very good apps (like Sketchbook Pro) don't let you rotate the workspace without actually changing the image you're working on.
It also allowed me to do typical "CG" things to stuff I was drawing without doing the whole "sketch first, then scan, then modify in photoshop/painter" routine, if I wanted to undo something or erase the same line for the 20th time then this had little impact on the final result (try erasing and redrawing the same line on a piece of paper 20 times and see how good that looks).
I doubt anyone will get much precision using a finger. A Wacom is at least 2400 point per inch. A tablet using a finger cannot have that precision.
I'm still hoping that the Apple tablet will have some sort of stylus capability, in fact, I've wondered for quite some time why those doing multitouch surface research with large multi-user tables and the like don't implement something similar to a switch between "pen mode" and "hand mode" (like a virtual button which is the only part that is always activated by fingers touching it and which can be used to toggle non-stylus interaction).
Smoking is a bit of an edge case since smoking does not cause intoxication, especially among adolescents there has for a long time been a strong social pressure in favor of smoking and nicotine is extremely physically addictive.
But when you talk about "real" drugs there are definitely a lot of people who risk getting addicted regardless of what substance they use.
So your argument is that you are not stupid and that if Francis Crick, Kary Mullis and Steve Jobs all feel that precisely what you consider stupid is not stupid then it is because they are the stupid ones since they think they're not stupid and you are not stupid because you think you are not stupid?
I never claimed that drugs don't affect those who use them, I merely stated that the higher occurrence of mental illness among drug addicts (as opposed to casual users) is to a large degree explained by many of those individuals using said drugs to self-medicate.
Also, the vast majority of casual drug users do not end up abusing drugs (unless you use the legal newspeak definition of abuse where any use is abuse since it's illegal) or becoming addicted, this is especially true if you don't count those casual users who are genetically predisposed to substance addiction or who have various other risk factors (e.g. schizophrenia or other mental ilnesses) that are very likely to lead to addiction.
Please define what you mean by "a clear mind" because it sounds to me like you're implying that anyone who for any reason wishes to use any kind of drug for recreational purposes is insane or at least stupid, something which I suspect Francis Crick, Kary Mullis, Steve Jobs and many others would disagree with.
Slashdot Mirror
Good roads: yeah, the highways are kept in a fairly good conditions but local roads can be really bad...especially in the winter...
This seems to vary a lot depending on where in Sweden you live, since you complain about local trains I'm assuming you live in the Stockholm or Malmö areas, try moving somewhere where the local authorities aren't confused and scared every year when the first snow falls (really, both those cities are horrible when it comes to clearing the roads of snow).
Low crime: Dream on! At the moment I think we're at the top of the list for rapes in Europe and there are large areas of some cities, e.g. Malmö, where the fire department and ambulances won't enter without police escort...
The rape statistics are also related to the fact that swedish law is a lot more "liberal" in what it considers rape compared to a lot of other countries, not to mention that for decades there have been campaigns to convince women to actually report when they get raped.
As for the problems with areas such as Rosengård in Malmö that's mostly a Stockholm and Malmö problem and very localised, in the rest of Sweden it's not really a problem.
Free schooling: True, but a frightening number of kids leave school without being able to read, write and do maths...universities are only partly free...you can borrow money from the state to finance the rest though...
Every school system has its problems but for those kids who actually pay attention the swedish school system works just fine (it's really mostly the "problematic" children that fall through the cracks). And university studies are free (although you do have to pay for your own textbooks if you don't want to borrow them from the university library, and you still have to pay for your own rent and food but you can get low-interest loans from CSN for that).
Efficient public transport: if you don't mind being late for work because the local trains can't handle cold and snow then I guess you can call it efficient...
Perhaps you should try living in a city that isn't Stockholm and thus isn't stuck with Stockholms Lokaltrafik, seeing as how they are completely baffled by the arrival of winter every year...
/Mikael
Which means that healthy people...
Yeah, because you just know you'll never get cancer or get hit by a car. Or maybe you've got some special ability to plan this not to happen right after you got laid off from a job?
...who don't drive much...
Taxes also pay for other pieces of infrastructure including bicycle paths and subsidies for public transport.
...and are long-ago graduates...
"Hey! I got my free cake courtesy of my parents' generation, now why should I pay for the next generation's free cake?!"
...with no children...
Ok, you may have a point here, were it not for a concept known as "solidarity" (look it up, the word is in practically every dictionary).
...pay to support people who want to freeload off the government.
Most people who are receiving more money than they're contributing tend to feel pretty bad about this but most of the time it's also not as easy as "oh well I guess I'll stop having cancer/being paralyzed/being unemployed and start paying more taxes!". The current swedish government did some amazing arithmetics prior to the last election and claimed over and over and over again that the reason unemployment was so high wasn't because there weren't enough jobs but because those who were unemployed simply weren't looking for jobs hard enough, naturally they ignored people pointing out that all available numbers showed that for every available job there were something like 4-5 unemployed people, kind of hard to get rid of unemployment just by "trying harder to get a job" under those circumstances...
/Mikael
No worker is truely a slave. You chose to get hired. You can choose to walk away.
I'd have to say that there are exceptions to this statement, such as those working as outsourced first line tech support and customer service drones (and no, they're not all high school dropouts, when I worked first line DSL tech support after college most of my coworkers where people who lost their jobs in the dot bomb fallout or CS/CE graduates who couldn't find anything better), in those jobs it almost seems like a lot of employers try to keep everyone afraid of losing their jobs (and definitely not considering quitting without finding another job first since that would result in no income which kind of sucks when you're working 25-35 hours per week for $12/hour before taxes and have no savings (+ student loans/mortgage to pay if you're really unlucky)).
Those people are many times just a modern western take on slaves, the employers have just figured out that it's a lot easier to let them clothe and feed themselves, that way they can handwave away any complaints about the pay, hours or general work environment with "well, why don't you just quit then?" (even though they know most of their employees no matter how qualified can't "just quit" since they don't have any savings).
/Mikael
I can't help but feel that a scheme like this would be loved by telcos all over the world, all they'd need would be a law that forbids email without this "feature" coupled with some sort of licensing scheme that required server operators to jump through a whole bunch of hoops plus pay a large yearly fee (perhaps labeled as a "downpayment" on that year's transfer fees so technically you'd only have to get the money once and then you could use the money for last year this year again but it would still be too expensive for startups and home users wanting to run their own server) and they'd have a de-facto monopoly on email and could start charging their users $0.05 per email or something silly like that, of course if you buy the "Email XL" plan you'd get 200 free emails per month and any further emails would be sent at the "discount" rate of $0.02....
/Mikael
They get to pay extra to use email, of course! Clearly this is an "advantage" that everyone will want..
/Mikael
By disallowing spamming an ISP has a specific line in the TOS that they can point to when a customer calls in screaming about their "intarwebs" being unreachable. "Yes sir, I understand that you are upset but it appears that we got several reports that large amounts of unsolicited email was being sent from your home, upon further monitoring by our technicians it was established that several thousand spam emails were being sent from your home and in accordance with paragraph 713 in the terms of service we disabled your internet connection, attempted to call you and also sent your a letter explaining the reason for us disabling your connection, if you want to have your connection re-enabled you will have to ensure that your equipment is no longer attempting to send out unsolicited email. You should also know that if this activity continues after we re-enabled your connection your connection will be permanently disconnected.".
Yes, I used to handle abuse cases for an ISP and got to explain things like this way too often, that was basically the opening explanation, most customers would bitch and moan for 10-20 minutes about how we had no right to cut off their precious internets and would claim that their computer was our responsibility (to which I would often reply with a car analogy along the lines of "If you let a stranger load your car full of explosives and walmart refuses to let you park your car in the parking lot, is it then walmart's fault that you can't be bothered keeping your car free of explosives?".
/Mikael
I'm not so sure that the new *nix geek and "switcher" Mac users won't jump ship if Apple ever tries to pull something like that, and it seems a lot of Mac users these days are either people who migrated from IRIX/Solaris/AIX/HP-UX (possibly via Linux) or people who switched from Windows because they desperately wanted to get away from it, sticking these users with Windows is likely to drive them to some other *nix OS...
/Mikael
I'm still hoping for them to reveal a "real" tablet PC, that is, not a glorified ebook-reader but something more like what's already on the tablet PC market but well-designed instead of the clunky designs that have been available so far (most seem to have been typical "pro" or "ultra portable/executive" laptops with a monitor that you can flip around plus an incredibly crappy digitizer at a price that no one but the boardroom boys can afford). And considering the improvements in touch support they've been adding to OS X I don't think all hope is lost just yet...
/Mikael
Well then, what about the Photoshop users? and the developers using XCode? Do you think Apple truly believes they'll stick with the platform if they're forced into some (in their and my eyes) horribly restricted modal operating system?
/Mikael
I actually think one of the primary reasons that the Windows world is still filled with "fullscreen only" apps is because there are lots of users and developers who grew up thinking that way due to their computers being set to run at 800x600 or 1024x768 for way too long (Mac and *nix users seemed to crave higher resolutions to a much higher degree), hell I still have friends who insist on running their $2,500 gaming rigs hooked up to some crappy old 17" CRT running at 1280x960@75Hz "because CRTs are better than LCD monitors (and I'm too cheap to buy a new monitor)". Not to mention that pre-XP most Windows users were used to not being able to run more than one app at a time (hell, any random combination of telnet client + irc client + web browser + winamp used to be enough to cause Win9x to crash at least once every couple of hours), and while that may also have been true for Mac OS prior to Mac OS X most Mac users still seemed to crave higher resolutions (not to mention that if you bought a Mac back in those days you generally did so somewhere where the choice in monitors probably didn't include 14-15" monitors barely capable of crapping out 1024x768@75Hz).
As an example, my boss, former coder turned CIO, he still runs all apps fullscreen and seems to spend more time trying to find the right window but absolutely refuses to trying running his apps "un-maximised" because he has always run his apps maximised...
/Mikael
Do you have anything to back up your claims that "Apple is looking into killing the Mac as we know it." in the sense that they're looking to kill it as a general purpose computer? Or are you simply doing the tired old "mac = lock-in = for idiots = gaytardz fagetry lulz!!11" thing?
/Mikael
Us europeans pretty much always end up with the short end of the stick as well (when it's american companies providing the service, at best they'll provide their service to the US + UK (+ maybe France) but mostly it's just the US), but like Tanuki64 I just interpret Apple's silence regarding tv episodes in the iTunes store and Hulu's refusal to allow us swedes to use their service as "Please use Bittorrent".
/Mikael
Not really, most places around here simply have a minimum order for delivery, they won't deliver a single small pizza but if you order a two medium pizzas or a single large pizza they'll happily deliver it at the same cost as they and others charge for eating in the pizzeria or picking it up.
I have seen a couple of places that had a "If you order for less than $AMOUNT then there's an extra delivery fee" thing, but those places that I've tried have been pretty crappy.
/Mikael
Ah, but the janitor(s) going on strike will not result in the CxOs being unable to go to the bathroom the very same day, a week later there might be a problem but they are not required to be available 24/7. If the lights in the upper floor hallway in building 5E start flickering your entire business won't grind to a halt, but if the the CFO is unable to logon because he managed to screw up his profile for the sixth time this month due to porn surfing there will be a problem. Not to mention what happens when shoddy ten year-old servers that IT has requested a replacement budget for since 2004 start going down...
/Mikael
Good thing you're not in Sweden, here the right-wingers generally do the following (sorry if any swedish right-wingers take offense but seriously, this happens all the time in towns and cities here):
Of course, our left-wing politicians aren't much better but at least when they promise to raise taxes and spend more money they're somewhat honest about their intentions, now if we could only get some politicians who don't think free speech, personal integrity and copyright are minor issues best decided by whatever lobbyist spends the most money on them...
/Mikael
Quicksort? Oh my, I haven't actually had any reason to actually write my own implementation of that since I was a student and I can honestly say that I don't really remember much about it except that it involved splitting an array/a list by picking some point in the list and making sure all elements with a lower/higher (depending on sort order) value end up before that element and then recursively sorting bits and pieces, I definitely don't remember what the best practice for picking where to first split the list is but I'm sure if I ever end up having to write a quicksort function again I could re-learn it pretty quickly.
That said, I don't think throwing a bunch of theoretical concepts at prospective employees is the best way to weed out the incompetent ones, most likely there are lots of competent and experienced developers who, like me, just haven't had any reason to keep the formal definitions of various algorithms and concepts accurately stored in their heads since a lot of that stuff is useful to have encountered if only to have knowledge of its existence but just isn't used in everyday development. So what you end up with if you demand perfect textbook knowledge of every little intricacy of computer science you'll end up hiring a bunch of fresh grads who still have all of it fresh enough in their minds that they are able to explain it by simply quoting their college textbooks, but three years from now they'll have forgotten a lot of those details anyway...
/Mikael
The 1918 flu caused 650,000 deaths.
Actually, most estimates put it at 50,000,000 to 100,000,000 deaths.
/Mikael
Or with Bind you could create an empty master zone conf that returns NXDOMAIN for everything and then tell Bind it's the master server for tynt.com and tell it to use the empty zone file, that's what I do with annoying junk domains and I only have to change it in one place to change it for my entire network.
/Mikael
I'm not sure it's fair to call Europe (which in the eyes of many isn't a "real" continent but actually part of the larger Eurasian continent since they're actually part of the same tectonic plate) "a little patch of land to the north", it may be smaller than Africa but considering Congo is barely 1/4 of the size of Europe and Mauritania is about 1/10 of the size of Europe I just don't see that adding up to Europe being "a little larger" (unless your definition of Congo being "a whole bunch of stuff outside the country actually called Congo" but in that case you should have defined your variables a bit more carefully).
/Mikael
Atheist: someone who denies the existence of god
I noticed a couple of things, first off you didn't write "a god", you wrote "god" in a way that implies that you assume there is a specific god.
Secondly, an atheist is generally considered "one who believes that there is no deity" (from my dictionary and from what I can tell most dictionaries seem to agree with that definition) which would basically make fanatic atheism some form of fanatic disbelief.
/Mikael
One Word. Cintiq from Wacom. I used the 21" one for over a year.
Too expensive for my tastes (the pricing for the Cintiq seems to be at least partially "we're the only ones with something like this on the market so we can charge whatever we want").
Got tired of my hand covering up the damn screen. I'll stick to a Wacom tablet and a screen.
I tried a Cintiq a few years back and immediately wished I could replace my regular Wacom tablet with it for two reasons:
I doubt anyone will get much precision using a finger. A Wacom is at least 2400 point per inch. A tablet using a finger cannot have that precision.
I'm still hoping that the Apple tablet will have some sort of stylus capability, in fact, I've wondered for quite some time why those doing multitouch surface research with large multi-user tables and the like don't implement something similar to a switch between "pen mode" and "hand mode" (like a virtual button which is the only part that is always activated by fingers touching it and which can be used to toggle non-stylus interaction).
/Mikael
Smoking is a bit of an edge case since smoking does not cause intoxication, especially among adolescents there has for a long time been a strong social pressure in favor of smoking and nicotine is extremely physically addictive.
But when you talk about "real" drugs there are definitely a lot of people who risk getting addicted regardless of what substance they use.
/Mikael
So your argument is that you are not stupid and that if Francis Crick, Kary Mullis and Steve Jobs all feel that precisely what you consider stupid is not stupid then it is because they are the stupid ones since they think they're not stupid and you are not stupid because you think you are not stupid?
/Mikael
I never claimed that drugs don't affect those who use them, I merely stated that the higher occurrence of mental illness among drug addicts (as opposed to casual users) is to a large degree explained by many of those individuals using said drugs to self-medicate.
Also, the vast majority of casual drug users do not end up abusing drugs (unless you use the legal newspeak definition of abuse where any use is abuse since it's illegal) or becoming addicted, this is especially true if you don't count those casual users who are genetically predisposed to substance addiction or who have various other risk factors (e.g. schizophrenia or other mental ilnesses) that are very likely to lead to addiction.
/Mikael
Please define what you mean by "a clear mind" because it sounds to me like you're implying that anyone who for any reason wishes to use any kind of drug for recreational purposes is insane or at least stupid, something which I suspect Francis Crick, Kary Mullis, Steve Jobs and many others would disagree with.
/Mikael