However, what we should be discussing is the irritation of over-analysis and what happens when people try to sound deeper and more sophisticated than they really are. That's what produces questions like the one posed here.
Indeed I posit that... oh wait, my bad.
Srsly though, "unobtainium"? That's the best name he could come up with? Lame.
Except that what they said caused the floating mountains was a "vortex". They didn't really go into it. Heavy magnetism would make sense if the mountains were loaded with the unobtainium. But then, why not mine the mountains? They would have to be very rich in unobtainium to float. And on the flip side, why wasn't the massive deposite under the great tree floating? Even though it wasn't near the "vortex", I would think that big of a deposite would have required a much smaller magnetic field to rip out of the ground.
The unobtainium was under the great tree, not inside the floating mountains. They said the area with the floating mountains was near some sort of "vortex" and left it at that. It was this vortex that screwed up the instruments, and they did not say the soul-tree was at the heart of the vortex, it was simply hidden in the area. Had the unobtainium been been responsible for the floating mountains, they obviusly would have mined those first, since they would have had to be mostly unobtainium if that was what was causing them to float.
Also if you noticed, the unobtainium didn't float without being on that device which suspended it.
Last but not least to me, I thought unobtainium was a retarded name for it. They could have gone with a more standard made-up metal like adamantium, or just given it a less stupid sounding name. It was nothing more than a plot device to explain what the greedy corporation was doing there, otherwise it had no real bearing on the story. Even when they destroyed the great tree they didn't move in and start mining the unobtainium, they decided to try and destroy the soul tree instead.
Other than that though I thought the movie was awesome, and was more an encouragement to respect your environment than anything else, which I think is a good thing.
We have been increasing spending on education more than inflation every year, yet over the last 50 years we have been consistantly slipping in the quality of the education. Just an example, but one figure I heard was that in the 50's the average student had a 40-50,000 word vocabulary, while today it is in the 20,000 word range. What gives?
I was fortunate enough to have parents willing to sacrifice to get my brothers and sister and me into a private school, who's average student was far better educated than the public school counterpart, and tuition was less than half of what the state was spending per child. It varies by state, but I think only one or two states in the US spends less than $9,000 per student, and some states with the worst education spend over $14,000 per student. Obviously it's not the amount of money that is the problem. More than likely it's where the money goes, and every bump in education spending just continues to send it to the wrong places.
If you think about it, $10,000 per student in a 20 student classroom (which is very small, most are 30+) is $200,000 to run that class for a year. Paying the teacher $50,000 a year (about average), books are only going to be maybe $2,000 for everybody (surely you can get 2-3 years out of most of the books). Probably another $3-4,000 for teaching materials as well. Let's say we feed them too, at $5 per meal twice a day for 9 months. That's about $110,000 total. I'm leaving out sports programs, because schools are making parents pay for those as well now. So we are looking at $90,000, almost half the money spent per child, on things that have nothing to do with the child or their education. I couldn't see a class this size contributing more than $5,000 to the overall school maintenance budget, but let's say it's $10,000 including the bus service for the kids. Where the hell does the rest of it go?
There isn't much you can't do with VB, and you don't need the hacks with anything newer than VB6 (which was released in 98).
C# is virtually identical to VB, but it might be better to use if you want to transition into C/C++ as it has the same general syntax rules. Curley braces and all that jazz. The IDE gives a lot of help, which makes it easier to remember what you've taught them. Eventually you can turn the little squirt into a hard-core text-only programmer if you want, and he'll definitely have a leg up in the job market if he ends up going that way when he grows up.
Really, most of the hassle is at the screeners getting into the area of the airport with the terminals.
Every carry on is inspected by TSA, laptops have to be removed from bag and X-rayed separately. Since the shoe-bomber (who was caught, by the way, proving that what we had was adequate already), we have to remove our shoes and those have to be X-rayed.
You are generally restricted to two carry ons, but that is more of a weight/space restriction than anything. A lot of carriers are beginning to charge extra for any baggage, but that has nothing to do with security.
Most of the screening problems are because TSA is so goddamned slow, they'll have 100 people in line and 3/4 of the screening stations closed, preferring to let 5 people do all the screenings. Bastards.
And, to top it off, they don't catch shit. My coworker accidentally carried a box cutter - you know, the weapon used to hijack the planes on 9/11 - through at least a half dozen checkpoints in his carry-on before he realized it was there and removed it.
Dateline does those investigative reports all the time where they try to sneak stuff on planes, and they get through TSA a lot more than they get stopped.
If they were dirt farmers in Sudan or Ethiopia, we wouldn't give a shit because they are Sudanese or Ethiopians. We care about the Americans murdered because we are Americans.
Money never entered the equation, not even the significant economic impact of the destruction of the Trade Center really factored in. They killed 3,000 of our own people, and we would not let that stand unanswered.
As far as the "increased" airport security, all it is there to do is make us sheep feel safer. It really does jack-all to prevent the kinds of attack that was carried out on 9/11.
Case in point, a coworker of mine accidentally carried a box cutter in his carry-on luggage through a half dozen TSA checkpoints before -he- realized it was there and took it out. If you don't recall, the 19 hijackers used this exact same type of razor-knife to hijack the planes on 9/11.
And really, even if they caught all knives that snuck onto planes, a hard plastic knife is just as deadly (no not a plastic butter knife), and could be used just as well as a steel knife. Even carelessly hidden the screeners will never pick that up, so what's the point? Why not just have security on each flight and a simple, old-school screening at the airport? It would work better, be cheaper, and save us a hell of a lot of trouble. It just doesn't "feel" like we're "doing enough".
Problem is a great deal more died than the documented level. its over 1 million.
Since we aren't using facts any more, I claim the terrorists killed a billion US citizens!
They can save people better, faster, and much much easier in this war (not being a jungle helps a ton) but that doesn't mean they don't die LATER when it doesn't count in the official tally (or they off themselves as a direct result of their experiences - and what if they flip out and kill other people?) We don't get good official numbers for a reason.
For that very reason, vehicle related deaths are likely much higher than estimated. What's your point? There must be a cutoff somewhere, because not everybody who is injured and later dies died because of the injury. After a certain point it becomes very difficult to tell.
Also, you've got to be joking if you think it is easier to fight in an urban environment than a jungle. The urban environment is like a concrete jungle, except the terrorists have a hell of a lot more places that they can hide and not be seen while attacking soldiers below.
Furthermore, I imagine a lot of "civilians" in the unofficiall, undocumented, made up number are actually terrorists. Since the terrorists are too gutless to distinguish themselves, unlike the American soldiers and their allies, it is impossible to tell who is civilian and who is not until they shoot at you or try to blow you up.
Last but not least, the Americans and their allies in Iraq do their best to avoid killing civilians - the terrorists do not. So, who do you think is really responsible for the high civilian casualty rate?
The reason we dropped "the bomb" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was because estimates of American deaths to finish the war in a traditional assault on Japan were in the millions.
We (of course, I mean our military leaders) decided that the only way to weaken Japan's resolve and end the war was to kill several hundred thousand Japanese civilians. By showing the willingness to use the weapon, we made it clear to Japan that if they did not surrender, we would drop the bomb on more cities until they did. It was a terrible thing, yes, but it saved millions of lives in the long run - both American and Japanese.
You should also note that the target cities, while not tiny, were definitely not among Japan's largest cities. This was to kill as few people as possible and still break Japan's will to continue the war.
"The Bomb" has never been used callously, as evidenced by the fact that it has never been used since then, and you must consider the terrible position the American leaders were in. Do you kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and end the war? Or do you send millions of soldiers to their deaths killing millions more Japanese soldiers to end the war? The Japanese culture at the time was a culture of victory or death. Soldiers did not yield when it was only their lives on the line - they would kill themselves trying to kill the enemy.
So don't bemoan the use of the atomic bomb while ignoring the consequences of not using it. Would it be better if the bomb never existed? Perhaps, but we must face reality, not live in fantasy. The bomb would have been invented by someone else eventually, better to use it to prevent more deaths than cause more destruction with it.
All they really need to make it exciting is have a camera crew running up to it with a commentator talking about the history of the mission on the way. Nice and easy.
The Bear Grills formula works people, you could even make the commentator act like a dumbshit (hey lets see what happens if I jump off this boulder!) on the way if you want to stick to the formula rigorously.
I feel the same way when I hear about 3 inches of snow in New York plastered all over the national news.
That is until they mention the hundreds of car crashes, then I just think New York drivers must be dumbasses. Holy shit! It's snow! Snow is slick! Slow the hell down! ZOMGWTFBBQ! I still don't know why it makes national news though. We get two feet and it only makes local news because the school busses probably couldn't run that day.
I hate to break it to you, but dogs, numerous as they are, are just a small subset of the canine species.
Wolves cannot (at least so far) be tamed. Neither can hyennas, or coyotes, or foxes (though foxes are close). Dogs with some wolf ancestry tend to be very wild and difficult to control, for example. For dogs and cats, our beloved houshold companions, it has taken thousands of years to get them to where they are today.
Thing is, that fox killed another animal each day, each week, however often they eat, I dont know how often foxes kill other animals. So, if we guess the fox lived a year, and it killed another animal every other day (Im sure they scavenge food too), then thats 180 odd animals dead. Im sure thats more than the amount killed for any cotton clothes I have!
You have a strange way of arguing against killing foxes, don't kill foxes so they can kill more animals? The fox would have killed those animals and more regardless of whether the hunter killed it for food and fur. Killing the fox prevented the death of hundreds of other weaker animals that would have been consumed by the fox. However, the cotton farm destroyed the habitat for thousands of animals immediately, wiping out hundreds of future generations. Killing a fox doesn't even compare to that kind of death and destruction. You're all about freedom and humane treatment of animals, yet you are perfectly ok with driving animals to the edge of extinction with things like cotton farms.
Raising animals for their death will never be an acceptable proposition to me, or other ethical vegans. I wouldnt advocate for anything to do with so called "welfare" or "humane" standards.
It seems to me you can only hold your viewpoint by blinding yourself to all the death and destruction your very existance causes. The clothes you wear caused hundreds, if not thousands, of animals to die. The food you eat, yes all that vegan goodness, is on your table because some farmer turned natural animal habitat into farmland to grow that food. That probably has more impact than your clothes, really. The car you drive, animals died. The fuel in your car, animals died, and I'm not even counting the fact that the fuel is MADE of dead animals. If you happen to drive electric, kudos, but animals still had to die to produce the chemical plants that allow the batteries to be made in factories that caused the deaths of animals.
You used the term "humane", are you aware what a buzzword that is?
Humane is not a buzzword, it's a word with a meaning and it has been around for a long time. Check a dictionary, not Wikipedia.
Also, there are many animals that dont get killed, one I was reading about today is the Elephant. Many of the absolute largest and strongest animals are herbivores ("vegan"), the Elephant, Giraffe, Gorilla, Cattle...
Again, I think you should watch some real live nature footage. Those large Elephants, in particular baby elephants and sick elephants, are eaten, sometimes alive, by things like lions and aligators. Mother giraffes kick their young when they are born, because if they cannot make it to their feet and begin running within seconds after birth then both mother and baby are at great risk of death at the hands of lions and hyennas. If the baby giraffe does not stand in seconds, the mother abandons it. How's that for kind? For gentle? Nature is not kind, it is not gentle. It is relentless, heartless, and unforgiving. One mistake in nature, and you die. That's the truth of it.
Being a herbivore doesnt make you a pansy, just think of all the "sports cars" named after animals. Over in America, I guess theres the "Mustang", but even desirable brands can be NAMED after animals, Ferrari has the prancing horse (is prancing manly?), Lamborghini has a Bull. Both are doing well, on the other hand, Jaguar has been sold to every little boys favourite brand, Tata motors...
I don't know why you think you're a pansy, but I've never thought of vegans a pansies. On the contrary I admire the willingness to stick to a conviction that a life-long vegan has. I just think you are being very selective about the what you allow yourself to see, and the nature of the world around you. I also have great admiration for animals, as do most people. The Mustang is a horse, it is admired for its g
Fact is, foxes eat other animals, so if you are going on "death" based on what happens to produce an item, there are still many more than one for a fox.
Should I point out that the fox he killed was not able to kill any more animals, actually giving him a negative animal kill rate per dead fox?
You also must be for the extermination of foxes then, eh? Excellent! Where do I sign up?
Seems to me, killing the wild fox does the lesser damage, if we are looking solely at number of animals killed (since for the 1 fox it is actually a negative number, thanks to the animals that won't be killed by the fox in the future) especially considering all the animal habbitat that was razed to create the farmland for the cotton. There are millions, if not billions of animals that never lived because of cotton farms created a hundred years ago, however killing the fox makes less competition for other foxes, which fill in the gaps left behind, so there are no fewer foxes in the future than there would have been, and for the short term there are a few more small animals. Again, cotton looses to wild fur. This is even true when an animal is hunted to the edge of extinction (thanks to the negative number per fox, which remains true), though in the last hundred years or so we've gotten smarter about it and started raising animals, eliminating the problem altogether.
To sum up, raising foxes for the specific purpose of obtaining there fur does less harm than both wild fur gathering and cotton farming combined.
Damn I live hypothetical arguments!
P.S. You know all animals get eaten by something, right? They don't exactly live happy-go-lucky lives in the wild, it's either fear, conflict, starvation, or desease every minute of every day, and often many of those are combined. Kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, ring any bells? Frankly, killing the wild animal quickly was about the most humane thing he could do for it. And the average hunter does eat the meat, as any good predator would. That's half the point. The hat is just a bonus worth several hundred dollars. You should watch some of those nature predator shows, you know with the aligators eating waterbuffalo, lions taking down antelope, etc. That's not once in a while stuff, that's every day life for all animals everywhere - there is no exception in the wild. That is, in fact, why we call it "the wild".
I don't get the philosophical Vegan. I mean, it's cool you care about animals that much to go vegan (and frankly, it would creep me out a bit if you cared that much and didn't), but I don't understand caring that much about animals in the first place. They are animals - their lives when free in the wild are not exactly cozy to begin with. To me, life in a cage with the sole purpose of eventually being killed and skinned is not particularly worse than the daily life or death struggle for the sole purpose of eventually becoming some other creature's food - and all animals are ALWAYS something else's food eventually. Add to that the fact that most of the ways animals die in the wild - starvation, disease, getting eaten (old age is not exactly common) are far, far more painful than a slit throat, and I don't see why people get so upset about it.
With the exception of those who truly believe animals should be free for the sake of being free, you're fooling yourself if you think even the worst players in the food or fur industries are causing significantly greater discomfort to an animal than it would recieve in the wild. Wild animals, particularly non-predatory animals, live in constant fear and conflict on a minute by minute basis. This is why wild animals are never friendly - they would die if they were. If you think animals are happy in the wild, you've never seen animals in the wild.
It's just an opinion, and I do believe we have a responsibility to not cause more discomfort than necessary for animals in our care even if their intended purpose is ultimately death - that is simply a dignity thing, and reflects what kind of character a person has.
And yes, I love my cat, which I rescued from the pound, and I treat him very well, and I would be very sad if he died. I don't really care about your cat, though, except as a reflection of you - i.e. I care if you're a piece of shit who beats animals, or if you are sad because your favorite pet died.
You're close, it isn't the alchohol, it's the impurities.
Generally, really high quality alchohol (wine in particular, but any aged liquor will too) has some bitchin impurities that give it such wonderful flavors and aromas. The sole purpose of the aging process in any fine liquor is to add impurities from the barrels they are aged in - the aging serves no other purpose and aging in anything that does not impart impurities does nothing at all to the alchohol. Stuff like good scotch, bourbon, rum, gin, brandy, all wines, spiced drinks like ciders and mulled wines, etc. will all give you nasty hangovers if you over do it. The longer it is aged the higher the impurity, and the higher the impurity the better the quality. In other words, Quality = Hangover.
Because of this, low-impurity alchohols like vodka or beer (different kind of impurities there), and cheap kill-you-if-you-over-drink stuff like grain alchohol will rarely give you a hangover.
If you finish off the night with a glass of milk or some ice cream the enzymes therein will take care of a lot of the impurities, taking the edge off the hangover. Egg-nog is great for this if you want to keep getting drunk;).
That depends entirely upon where you live and who provides service in your area.
There is no way in hell I'll ever get FiOS where I am, and getting the phone company to run new lines to handle the kind of load a popular website could generate would probably cost me into the tens of thousands of dollars, if not much higher given that I'm in a residential neighborhood, and not likely to be anywhere near one of their business lines.
Yeah, I can get a "business line" at home, but that's basically just a 10 mbit line with a high upload rate and few restrictions. It's not the kind of line that would be able to handle hundreds of visitors accessing the site at once without some severe lag problems. Those business lines are for businesses to allow internet access to their employees, not to serve websites out of. Sure, you can manage a small, niche website that way, but not anything major.
For a site like that you need a server at a hub - an ISP in one of the big ISP hotspots. That's what this guy is talking about. You might be able to get it with a business FiOS connection, I don't know what those top out at, but pretty much anything else is going to be too slow to reasonably handle the throughput, even one of the big 30-50mb connections would be iffy if the website is popular enough.
Actually saying "A recently confirmed rumor" gives you a whole lot of information without having to walk you through it step by step.
They are saying that there was a rumor that the first tablet with a Pixel Qi screen was on the way, and that rumor has been confirmed as true. Thus, a recently confirmed rumor.
Being a rumor does not automatically mean it is false. It simply means it is unreliable. With no evidence to back it up, it could be true or false, and to anybody who does not actually know the truth it is just a guess. But someone does know which it is, and usually it is more than one person who knows which it is. Speculation and guesses are totally different, and are generally proven correct, not confirmed that the statement was true. I.e. speculation that the real estate market might be a bubble was proven true when the market crashed, and the lottery winner's wild-ass guess was correct.
Rumors, however, depend entirely on the source. If the source is making shit up, the rumor will eventually be shown to be untrue. If the source is an insider that actually knows what is going on, the rumor will be confirmed when whatever company anounces it publicly.
See the difference? A completely different set of criteria prove rumors compared to speculation and guesses (speculation is nothing more than an educated guess). A rumor is a known fact to someone from the very beginning (whether true or false, it doesn't matter), whereas speculation and guesses are unknowns to everyone until proven true or false.
There is this little guy, it doesn't seem to be vaporware but they are still in their beta phase, which means what you would get right now will not be as good as whatever they release next year. They seem to be on top of orders right now, but again it's not a completely polished product.
It sure looks slick though, I've been thinking of getting one myself.
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I don't think he's native american, so he'll probably just shoot you.
What's that wooshing sound I hear?
However, what we should be discussing is the irritation of over-analysis and what happens when people try to sound deeper and more sophisticated than they really are. That's what produces questions like the one posed here.
Indeed I posit that... oh wait, my bad.
Srsly though, "unobtainium"? That's the best name he could come up with? Lame.
Except that what they said caused the floating mountains was a "vortex". They didn't really go into it. Heavy magnetism would make sense if the mountains were loaded with the unobtainium. But then, why not mine the mountains? They would have to be very rich in unobtainium to float. And on the flip side, why wasn't the massive deposite under the great tree floating? Even though it wasn't near the "vortex", I would think that big of a deposite would have required a much smaller magnetic field to rip out of the ground.
The unobtainium was under the great tree, not inside the floating mountains. They said the area with the floating mountains was near some sort of "vortex" and left it at that. It was this vortex that screwed up the instruments, and they did not say the soul-tree was at the heart of the vortex, it was simply hidden in the area. Had the unobtainium been been responsible for the floating mountains, they obviusly would have mined those first, since they would have had to be mostly unobtainium if that was what was causing them to float.
Also if you noticed, the unobtainium didn't float without being on that device which suspended it.
Last but not least to me, I thought unobtainium was a retarded name for it. They could have gone with a more standard made-up metal like adamantium, or just given it a less stupid sounding name. It was nothing more than a plot device to explain what the greedy corporation was doing there, otherwise it had no real bearing on the story. Even when they destroyed the great tree they didn't move in and start mining the unobtainium, they decided to try and destroy the soul tree instead.
Other than that though I thought the movie was awesome, and was more an encouragement to respect your environment than anything else, which I think is a good thing.
We have been increasing spending on education more than inflation every year, yet over the last 50 years we have been consistantly slipping in the quality of the education. Just an example, but one figure I heard was that in the 50's the average student had a 40-50,000 word vocabulary, while today it is in the 20,000 word range. What gives?
I was fortunate enough to have parents willing to sacrifice to get my brothers and sister and me into a private school, who's average student was far better educated than the public school counterpart, and tuition was less than half of what the state was spending per child. It varies by state, but I think only one or two states in the US spends less than $9,000 per student, and some states with the worst education spend over $14,000 per student. Obviously it's not the amount of money that is the problem. More than likely it's where the money goes, and every bump in education spending just continues to send it to the wrong places.
If you think about it, $10,000 per student in a 20 student classroom (which is very small, most are 30+) is $200,000 to run that class for a year. Paying the teacher $50,000 a year (about average), books are only going to be maybe $2,000 for everybody (surely you can get 2-3 years out of most of the books). Probably another $3-4,000 for teaching materials as well. Let's say we feed them too, at $5 per meal twice a day for 9 months. That's about $110,000 total. I'm leaving out sports programs, because schools are making parents pay for those as well now. So we are looking at $90,000, almost half the money spent per child, on things that have nothing to do with the child or their education. I couldn't see a class this size contributing more than $5,000 to the overall school maintenance budget, but let's say it's $10,000 including the bus service for the kids. Where the hell does the rest of it go?
Did you happen to try buying it online from the AT&T store? Because you would not have been able to. They aren't selling it.
The title was wrong, but the summary and story are both correct. It's getting bad if people can't even bother to read the whole summary.
Quite the contrary, now days it's "Wait, I can do that too? ZOMGWTFBBQ!!". It's still there, it's just different.
There isn't much you can't do with VB, and you don't need the hacks with anything newer than VB6 (which was released in 98).
C# is virtually identical to VB, but it might be better to use if you want to transition into C/C++ as it has the same general syntax rules. Curley braces and all that jazz. The IDE gives a lot of help, which makes it easier to remember what you've taught them. Eventually you can turn the little squirt into a hard-core text-only programmer if you want, and he'll definitely have a leg up in the job market if he ends up going that way when he grows up.
Really, most of the hassle is at the screeners getting into the area of the airport with the terminals.
Every carry on is inspected by TSA, laptops have to be removed from bag and X-rayed separately. Since the shoe-bomber (who was caught, by the way, proving that what we had was adequate already), we have to remove our shoes and those have to be X-rayed.
You are generally restricted to two carry ons, but that is more of a weight/space restriction than anything. A lot of carriers are beginning to charge extra for any baggage, but that has nothing to do with security.
Most of the screening problems are because TSA is so goddamned slow, they'll have 100 people in line and 3/4 of the screening stations closed, preferring to let 5 people do all the screenings. Bastards.
And, to top it off, they don't catch shit. My coworker accidentally carried a box cutter - you know, the weapon used to hijack the planes on 9/11 - through at least a half dozen checkpoints in his carry-on before he realized it was there and removed it.
Dateline does those investigative reports all the time where they try to sneak stuff on planes, and they get through TSA a lot more than they get stopped.
Some security, huh?
If they were dirt farmers in Sudan or Ethiopia, we wouldn't give a shit because they are Sudanese or Ethiopians. We care about the Americans murdered because we are Americans.
Money never entered the equation, not even the significant economic impact of the destruction of the Trade Center really factored in. They killed 3,000 of our own people, and we would not let that stand unanswered.
As far as the "increased" airport security, all it is there to do is make us sheep feel safer. It really does jack-all to prevent the kinds of attack that was carried out on 9/11.
Case in point, a coworker of mine accidentally carried a box cutter in his carry-on luggage through a half dozen TSA checkpoints before -he- realized it was there and took it out. If you don't recall, the 19 hijackers used this exact same type of razor-knife to hijack the planes on 9/11.
And really, even if they caught all knives that snuck onto planes, a hard plastic knife is just as deadly (no not a plastic butter knife), and could be used just as well as a steel knife. Even carelessly hidden the screeners will never pick that up, so what's the point? Why not just have security on each flight and a simple, old-school screening at the airport? It would work better, be cheaper, and save us a hell of a lot of trouble. It just doesn't "feel" like we're "doing enough".
Sounds better than just leaving it there.
Which is what we do now.
Problem is a great deal more died than the documented level. its over 1 million.
Since we aren't using facts any more, I claim the terrorists killed a billion US citizens!
They can save people better, faster, and much much easier in this war (not being a jungle helps a ton) but that doesn't mean they don't die LATER when it doesn't count in the official tally (or they off themselves as a direct result of their experiences - and what if they flip out and kill other people?) We don't get good official numbers for a reason.
For that very reason, vehicle related deaths are likely much higher than estimated. What's your point? There must be a cutoff somewhere, because not everybody who is injured and later dies died because of the injury. After a certain point it becomes very difficult to tell.
Also, you've got to be joking if you think it is easier to fight in an urban environment than a jungle. The urban environment is like a concrete jungle, except the terrorists have a hell of a lot more places that they can hide and not be seen while attacking soldiers below.
Furthermore, I imagine a lot of "civilians" in the unofficiall, undocumented, made up number are actually terrorists. Since the terrorists are too gutless to distinguish themselves, unlike the American soldiers and their allies, it is impossible to tell who is civilian and who is not until they shoot at you or try to blow you up.
Last but not least, the Americans and their allies in Iraq do their best to avoid killing civilians - the terrorists do not. So, who do you think is really responsible for the high civilian casualty rate?
The reason we dropped "the bomb" on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was because estimates of American deaths to finish the war in a traditional assault on Japan were in the millions.
We (of course, I mean our military leaders) decided that the only way to weaken Japan's resolve and end the war was to kill several hundred thousand Japanese civilians. By showing the willingness to use the weapon, we made it clear to Japan that if they did not surrender, we would drop the bomb on more cities until they did. It was a terrible thing, yes, but it saved millions of lives in the long run - both American and Japanese.
You should also note that the target cities, while not tiny, were definitely not among Japan's largest cities. This was to kill as few people as possible and still break Japan's will to continue the war.
"The Bomb" has never been used callously, as evidenced by the fact that it has never been used since then, and you must consider the terrible position the American leaders were in. Do you kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and end the war? Or do you send millions of soldiers to their deaths killing millions more Japanese soldiers to end the war? The Japanese culture at the time was a culture of victory or death. Soldiers did not yield when it was only their lives on the line - they would kill themselves trying to kill the enemy.
So don't bemoan the use of the atomic bomb while ignoring the consequences of not using it. Would it be better if the bomb never existed? Perhaps, but we must face reality, not live in fantasy. The bomb would have been invented by someone else eventually, better to use it to prevent more deaths than cause more destruction with it.
All they really need to make it exciting is have a camera crew running up to it with a commentator talking about the history of the mission on the way. Nice and easy.
The Bear Grills formula works people, you could even make the commentator act like a dumbshit (hey lets see what happens if I jump off this boulder!) on the way if you want to stick to the formula rigorously.
I feel the same way when I hear about 3 inches of snow in New York plastered all over the national news.
That is until they mention the hundreds of car crashes, then I just think New York drivers must be dumbasses. Holy shit! It's snow! Snow is slick! Slow the hell down! ZOMGWTFBBQ! I still don't know why it makes national news though. We get two feet and it only makes local news because the school busses probably couldn't run that day.
I hate to break it to you, but dogs, numerous as they are, are just a small subset of the canine species.
Wolves cannot (at least so far) be tamed. Neither can hyennas, or coyotes, or foxes (though foxes are close). Dogs with some wolf ancestry tend to be very wild and difficult to control, for example. For dogs and cats, our beloved houshold companions, it has taken thousands of years to get them to where they are today.
Thing is, that fox killed another animal each day, each week, however often they eat, I dont know how often foxes kill other animals. So, if we guess the fox lived a year, and it killed another animal every other day (Im sure they scavenge food too), then thats 180 odd animals dead. Im sure thats more than the amount killed for any cotton clothes I have!
You have a strange way of arguing against killing foxes, don't kill foxes so they can kill more animals? The fox would have killed those animals and more regardless of whether the hunter killed it for food and fur. Killing the fox prevented the death of hundreds of other weaker animals that would have been consumed by the fox. However, the cotton farm destroyed the habitat for thousands of animals immediately, wiping out hundreds of future generations. Killing a fox doesn't even compare to that kind of death and destruction. You're all about freedom and humane treatment of animals, yet you are perfectly ok with driving animals to the edge of extinction with things like cotton farms.
Raising animals for their death will never be an acceptable proposition to me, or other ethical vegans. I wouldnt advocate for anything to do with so called "welfare" or "humane" standards.
It seems to me you can only hold your viewpoint by blinding yourself to all the death and destruction your very existance causes. The clothes you wear caused hundreds, if not thousands, of animals to die. The food you eat, yes all that vegan goodness, is on your table because some farmer turned natural animal habitat into farmland to grow that food. That probably has more impact than your clothes, really. The car you drive, animals died. The fuel in your car, animals died, and I'm not even counting the fact that the fuel is MADE of dead animals. If you happen to drive electric, kudos, but animals still had to die to produce the chemical plants that allow the batteries to be made in factories that caused the deaths of animals.
You used the term "humane", are you aware what a buzzword that is?
Humane is not a buzzword, it's a word with a meaning and it has been around for a long time. Check a dictionary, not Wikipedia.
Also, there are many animals that dont get killed, one I was reading about today is the Elephant. Many of the absolute largest and strongest animals are herbivores ("vegan"), the Elephant, Giraffe, Gorilla, Cattle...
Again, I think you should watch some real live nature footage. Those large Elephants, in particular baby elephants and sick elephants, are eaten, sometimes alive, by things like lions and aligators. Mother giraffes kick their young when they are born, because if they cannot make it to their feet and begin running within seconds after birth then both mother and baby are at great risk of death at the hands of lions and hyennas. If the baby giraffe does not stand in seconds, the mother abandons it. How's that for kind? For gentle? Nature is not kind, it is not gentle. It is relentless, heartless, and unforgiving. One mistake in nature, and you die. That's the truth of it.
Being a herbivore doesnt make you a pansy, just think of all the "sports cars" named after animals. Over in America, I guess theres the "Mustang", but even desirable brands can be NAMED after animals, Ferrari has the prancing horse (is prancing manly?), Lamborghini has a Bull. Both are doing well, on the other hand, Jaguar has been sold to every little boys favourite brand, Tata motors...
I don't know why you think you're a pansy, but I've never thought of vegans a pansies. On the contrary I admire the willingness to stick to a conviction that a life-long vegan has. I just think you are being very selective about the what you allow yourself to see, and the nature of the world around you. I also have great admiration for animals, as do most people. The Mustang is a horse, it is admired for its g
Fact is, foxes eat other animals, so if you are going on "death" based on what happens to produce an item, there are still many more than one for a fox.
Should I point out that the fox he killed was not able to kill any more animals, actually giving him a negative animal kill rate per dead fox?
You also must be for the extermination of foxes then, eh? Excellent! Where do I sign up?
Seems to me, killing the wild fox does the lesser damage, if we are looking solely at number of animals killed (since for the 1 fox it is actually a negative number, thanks to the animals that won't be killed by the fox in the future) especially considering all the animal habbitat that was razed to create the farmland for the cotton. There are millions, if not billions of animals that never lived because of cotton farms created a hundred years ago, however killing the fox makes less competition for other foxes, which fill in the gaps left behind, so there are no fewer foxes in the future than there would have been, and for the short term there are a few more small animals. Again, cotton looses to wild fur. This is even true when an animal is hunted to the edge of extinction (thanks to the negative number per fox, which remains true), though in the last hundred years or so we've gotten smarter about it and started raising animals, eliminating the problem altogether.
To sum up, raising foxes for the specific purpose of obtaining there fur does less harm than both wild fur gathering and cotton farming combined.
Damn I live hypothetical arguments!
P.S. You know all animals get eaten by something, right? They don't exactly live happy-go-lucky lives in the wild, it's either fear, conflict, starvation, or desease every minute of every day, and often many of those are combined. Kill or be killed, survival of the fittest, ring any bells? Frankly, killing the wild animal quickly was about the most humane thing he could do for it. And the average hunter does eat the meat, as any good predator would. That's half the point. The hat is just a bonus worth several hundred dollars. You should watch some of those nature predator shows, you know with the aligators eating waterbuffalo, lions taking down antelope, etc. That's not once in a while stuff, that's every day life for all animals everywhere - there is no exception in the wild. That is, in fact, why we call it "the wild".
I dunno, that slashdot ID is pretty darn low...
I don't get the philosophical Vegan. I mean, it's cool you care about animals that much to go vegan (and frankly, it would creep me out a bit if you cared that much and didn't), but I don't understand caring that much about animals in the first place. They are animals - their lives when free in the wild are not exactly cozy to begin with. To me, life in a cage with the sole purpose of eventually being killed and skinned is not particularly worse than the daily life or death struggle for the sole purpose of eventually becoming some other creature's food - and all animals are ALWAYS something else's food eventually. Add to that the fact that most of the ways animals die in the wild - starvation, disease, getting eaten (old age is not exactly common) are far, far more painful than a slit throat, and I don't see why people get so upset about it.
With the exception of those who truly believe animals should be free for the sake of being free, you're fooling yourself if you think even the worst players in the food or fur industries are causing significantly greater discomfort to an animal than it would recieve in the wild. Wild animals, particularly non-predatory animals, live in constant fear and conflict on a minute by minute basis. This is why wild animals are never friendly - they would die if they were. If you think animals are happy in the wild, you've never seen animals in the wild.
It's just an opinion, and I do believe we have a responsibility to not cause more discomfort than necessary for animals in our care even if their intended purpose is ultimately death - that is simply a dignity thing, and reflects what kind of character a person has.
And yes, I love my cat, which I rescued from the pound, and I treat him very well, and I would be very sad if he died. I don't really care about your cat, though, except as a reflection of you - i.e. I care if you're a piece of shit who beats animals, or if you are sad because your favorite pet died.
Is there something wrong with your "V" key? Cause that ain't how you spell vodka. You may pronounce it that way... if you have a Russian accent.
You're close, it isn't the alchohol, it's the impurities.
Generally, really high quality alchohol (wine in particular, but any aged liquor will too) has some bitchin impurities that give it such wonderful flavors and aromas. The sole purpose of the aging process in any fine liquor is to add impurities from the barrels they are aged in - the aging serves no other purpose and aging in anything that does not impart impurities does nothing at all to the alchohol. Stuff like good scotch, bourbon, rum, gin, brandy, all wines, spiced drinks like ciders and mulled wines, etc. will all give you nasty hangovers if you over do it. The longer it is aged the higher the impurity, and the higher the impurity the better the quality. In other words, Quality = Hangover.
Because of this, low-impurity alchohols like vodka or beer (different kind of impurities there), and cheap kill-you-if-you-over-drink stuff like grain alchohol will rarely give you a hangover.
If you finish off the night with a glass of milk or some ice cream the enzymes therein will take care of a lot of the impurities, taking the edge off the hangover. Egg-nog is great for this if you want to keep getting drunk ;).
That depends entirely upon where you live and who provides service in your area.
There is no way in hell I'll ever get FiOS where I am, and getting the phone company to run new lines to handle the kind of load a popular website could generate would probably cost me into the tens of thousands of dollars, if not much higher given that I'm in a residential neighborhood, and not likely to be anywhere near one of their business lines.
Yeah, I can get a "business line" at home, but that's basically just a 10 mbit line with a high upload rate and few restrictions. It's not the kind of line that would be able to handle hundreds of visitors accessing the site at once without some severe lag problems. Those business lines are for businesses to allow internet access to their employees, not to serve websites out of. Sure, you can manage a small, niche website that way, but not anything major.
For a site like that you need a server at a hub - an ISP in one of the big ISP hotspots. That's what this guy is talking about. You might be able to get it with a business FiOS connection, I don't know what those top out at, but pretty much anything else is going to be too slow to reasonably handle the throughput, even one of the big 30-50mb connections would be iffy if the website is popular enough.
Actually saying "A recently confirmed rumor" gives you a whole lot of information without having to walk you through it step by step.
They are saying that there was a rumor that the first tablet with a Pixel Qi screen was on the way, and that rumor has been confirmed as true. Thus, a recently confirmed rumor.
Being a rumor does not automatically mean it is false. It simply means it is unreliable. With no evidence to back it up, it could be true or false, and to anybody who does not actually know the truth it is just a guess. But someone does know which it is, and usually it is more than one person who knows which it is. Speculation and guesses are totally different, and are generally proven correct, not confirmed that the statement was true. I.e. speculation that the real estate market might be a bubble was proven true when the market crashed, and the lottery winner's wild-ass guess was correct.
Rumors, however, depend entirely on the source. If the source is making shit up, the rumor will eventually be shown to be untrue. If the source is an insider that actually knows what is going on, the rumor will be confirmed when whatever company anounces it publicly.
See the difference? A completely different set of criteria prove rumors compared to speculation and guesses (speculation is nothing more than an educated guess). A rumor is a known fact to someone from the very beginning (whether true or false, it doesn't matter), whereas speculation and guesses are unknowns to everyone until proven true or false.
There is this little guy, it doesn't seem to be vaporware but they are still in their beta phase, which means what you would get right now will not be as good as whatever they release next year. They seem to be on top of orders right now, but again it's not a completely polished product.
It sure looks slick though, I've been thinking of getting one myself.