As another manual purist I wholly agree with all of the above. The nice thing about manuals is even an old car can beat a lot of new automatics from a dead stop simply because the manual driver can torque the lower gears as long as they want. Downside of course is in heavy traffic it feels like you're walking to your destination. However, each year it becomes harder and harder to find a good manual car, and you can forget manual trucks and vans, they haven't existed in decades. Pretty soon the only people with manuals in North America will be classic car collectors.
(Godwin time!) So the holocaust was ok just because the Nazi's were democratically elected (initially)? Sorry, democracy is not a magic wand that makes evil acts acceptable. A majority does not have a right to abuse a minority, no matter how many people agree to it.
Yes, it's a great idea to use elections as metrics in a country that is in open revolt in significant part due to dissatisfaction with rigged elections.
Solid state memory, at least as much as should be necessary for saves, is dirt cheap. This is nothing less than a power grab intending to to satisfy all of the control freaks that have been behind Sony designs for decades.
Did you even read the study? Let me try to summarize it again, this time for lazy dipshits:
A) Women with the gene are more fertile and have more children
B) Males do not always express the gene or do so exclusively
C) The increased fertility of the women outweighs the few males who do express the gene as homosexual behavior
The theory is called 'sexually antagonistic selection' because it appears to benefit female reproduction at the cost of reducing male reproduction within the same lineage, but that is counterbalanced by an increased number of male offspring. It is backed up by observable demographic trends. However I don't doubt that no matter how clearly this is explained to you or how sound it is scientifically, you'll deny it because then you'd have to face uncomfortable facts about your ignorant world view.
The problem with correction is that it's not even borderline intelligent. I've been doing something of a personal project creating artist description stubs for obscure demosceners on last.fm, so I've been running into this a lot lately. I'll type in an artist name like 'Cyanid' which Google thinks I must mean 'Cyanide' except that's not the whole search string, which will be like 'Cyanid "person's name"' and Google will search for 'Cyanide "person's name"' and display 0 results. But when I tell it, no, I really did mean 'Cyanid', there will be several results. It really shouldn't be that hard to write the correction code such that it compares the "corrected" search string with the original and at least skips the "corrected" if the return is fucking ZERO.
Hate to break it to you and apparently everybody else responding, but there is evidence for a genetic component to homosexual preferences. The fundamental concept is that the gene(s) which when expressed lead to an increased sexual attraction to men work the same way in both genders, so because not all men who carry the gene express it (or do so exclusively), it leads to some female children being born with higher fertility rates, which is why the gene keeps being reproduced. Women with the gene end up having more children than those without it, and their male children are not guaranteed to express the gene, so over human history the net effect has been positive.
Actually I am relatively unfamiliar with the LOIC operation, and I said jack-all about 'social networking' because even though that's what worries governments, that's the exact opposite of Anonymous. Sounds more like you don't know what Anonymous is and you're projecting your ignorance on me. Here's a hint newfag, I used to hang on #insub before there was an ED, was reading SA when JeffK was a new feature, been on 4chan since teh Rei, and literally partied hard with Jason Fortuny (who makes fine burgers, you'd be surprised to know). The only people who have more net cred than me were around before Endless September, but thanks for giving me an excuse to whip out my e-peen.
Anonymous is literally any group of people online willing to work together on a common action. That's impossible to end because it's woven into the very fabric of social interaction of which the internet is but a subset. The internet just created a critical mass effect by allowing an effectively limitless number of people to agree to do things together virtually instaneously. Anonymous is the power of people realizing that they don't need organizations to accomplish simple goals, just people willing to agree to do something once.
Heh, an old China hand thinks he understands the Chinese mind. (If you've read Dr. Lin Yutang this reference will be immediately clear.)
You seem to think that the failure of the Chinese to resist colonialism is indicative of a failure of the Chinese socio-political character. Ask yourself this, who would the Chinese have been fighting for? The Manchurian Qing? Yeah, I'm sure the rank and file were really motivated to lay down their lives for their barbarian masters. The Qing were a dynasty of occupation, not home rule*, and morale was particularly poor after Qianlong's late reign complacency allowed corruption to destroy most of the achievements of his earlier diligent governance.
So, when the Chinese armies buckled against the Western forces in conflicts like the Opium Wars, the Qing government had really no other recourse but to start acceding to Western demands. They gave away land, signed detrimental trade agreements, whatever it took to not have to meet on the battlefield and lose even more face with armies that effectively wouldn't fight and risk the complete exasperation of a people already unhappy with the foreign rule. If you were Chinese, how fired up would you be to save your foreign ruler from another?
You imply that the Chinese world view prevents them from 'succeeding'. Depends greatly on your definition of success doesn't it? What makes you think the West is more successful? Yeah, the West was riding pretty high from the Enlightenment through World War II, but before the Renaissance and after the Cold War, China has thousands of years of being more or less the best place to be. I'd argue that several millennia of relative success is better than the roller coasters in the West. How many ups and downs have Italians, French, Germans, and English had? How many dark ages? (People forget that beyond just the difficulties of the middle ages, there was also the Greek dark ages that consisted of a intervening period between the MinoanMycenaean cultural collapse and the time of Homer.) If success looks like dark age Europe, then perhaps it is better that the Chinese are deficient and stop short of it.
China was prostrated at the beginning of the 20th Century by a strong central government apparatus controlled by weak, and narrow-minded rulers who failed to employ any of China's advantages to its benefit. Individuals were beholden to mandarins and moneylenders in much the same way that the new capitalists of China are running their sweatshops. The people were plagued with an enormous epidemic of drug addiction which the Westerners used as another lever to weaken and divide the country.
How is this different from any of the Western historical tyrannies? I could substitute many Frankish monarchies into that governmental/economic description. And as for the drug problem, that was a direct outgrowth of the inefficacy of the Qing foreign policy while it had no usable military to stand on. Lin Zexu fought the drug trade as valiantly as he could, and achieved a lot of success, but it was the British used their armies to literally force Opium upon China. They were as bad as or worse than the Columbian drug cartels ever were. How effective do you think any nation's internal policy toward drug use would be (and China's was fucking capital punishment ) if another nation was literally fighting wars to sell drugs regardless?
[...] still run by an emperor in all but name and a central bureaucracy which demands compliance to top-down standards.
This is different from the pre-democratic West how? In fact, it's not all that different from the democratic West, except that there is a show made of changing messages when people make enough noise that the politicians start worrying about their seats.
Its rulers now are relatively clever and strong, [...]
The depth of Chinese socio-political nuance is likely beyond your ken.
At least with Challenger it was still slightly abstract. You knew there were people on that machine, but you couldn't see them. Now watching people jumping to their deaths from the WTC... that was... magnitudes more visceral.
Yeah, Islam is more into stoning women who were raped. Abusing underage girls and claiming cultural/religious license to do so. Executing people like Theo van Gogh in the street for saying anything negative about Islam. Kidnapping and torturing people including aid workers until finally taping their slow, agonizing decapitation.
Yeah, Islam has quite a moral high ground there too.
It seems very likely by the way the ISPs' performance is distributed. You can see all the ones at the top are primarily cable companies, followed by providers of mostly DSL, then things even slower by nature like clearwire 802.16 or whatever they use. Verizon is solidly placed between the cable and DSL groups. So either they have the best DSL in the whole damn universe (which my personal anecdotal experience would not support), or their stats are getting bumped by the inclusion of FiOS with the DSL performance metrics.
I, for one, would like to welcome our new Chinese overlords...
... and I'm only half kidding. The Chinese culture and people are actually really fascinating and worthwhile once you study them. When you look at China's history you realize that their being a super economy was actually always inevitable. In the first place, it won't be the first time. Do you know how immense Chang'an was during the Tang dynasty? It was like four times the size of the ancient city of Rome at their respective peaks. It was the largest metropolitan area ever anywhere before the modern era.
Oh sweet, so now all I have to do is threaten some teachers, and it will be reasonable for them to stop teaching things I don't like? Awesome! I can't wait for society to become even more ignorant through base cowardice and fear of unpopularity, that's always produced such great things in history, like, you know, the holocaust and pogroms.
Sorry, no, teaching does not necessarily imply or require debate. You can teach a dog tricks. You can "re-educate" dissidents with imprisonment and regular beatings. It is simply that in social constructs where knowledge possesses value-in-itself any effort to transfer it naturally leans toward the bi-directional. (Which, further, is not necessarily implicative of 'debate'.)
This ultimately has very little if anything to do with piracy and everything to do with simple demographic realities. There are more average joes than pretentious analytical aesthetes. Mediocre, "easily understood" movies sell because they appeal to a larger base of consumers at the center of the bell curve. Nuanced and complex movies only "connect" with a smaller pool of intellectuals at the higher end of the curve. There could be no piracy at all and that would never change the ratio (notice I don't say size) of these markets relative to each other.
Most of the movies I actually like these days come from China. Now, please tell me China doesn't have a piracy problem so I can laugh in your face. The stupid thing here is that all the big name Hollywood shit gets pirated instantly. All the indie art house stuff must reach a certain threshold of popularity before pirating occurs (most of the time). So yes, add me to the chorus of people saying your logic is completely broken.
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As another manual purist I wholly agree with all of the above. The nice thing about manuals is even an old car can beat a lot of new automatics from a dead stop simply because the manual driver can torque the lower gears as long as they want. Downside of course is in heavy traffic it feels like you're walking to your destination. However, each year it becomes harder and harder to find a good manual car, and you can forget manual trucks and vans, they haven't existed in decades. Pretty soon the only people with manuals in North America will be classic car collectors.
This Oregon Trail parody movie trailer is hilarious.
As many have alluded and will allude to in this discussion, they *are* that dumb, as evidenced by the fact that they did it before.
(Godwin time!) So the holocaust was ok just because the Nazi's were democratically elected (initially)? Sorry, democracy is not a magic wand that makes evil acts acceptable. A majority does not have a right to abuse a minority, no matter how many people agree to it.
Yes, it's a great idea to use elections as metrics in a country that is in open revolt in significant part due to dissatisfaction with rigged elections.
Apparently you haven't heard of all the 'google hacks' ... searching for anything now seems to be considered hacking.
Solid state memory, at least as much as should be necessary for saves, is dirt cheap. This is nothing less than a power grab intending to to satisfy all of the control freaks that have been behind Sony designs for decades.
Did you even read the study? Let me try to summarize it again, this time for lazy dipshits:
A) Women with the gene are more fertile and have more children
B) Males do not always express the gene or do so exclusively
C) The increased fertility of the women outweighs the few males who do express the gene as homosexual behavior
The theory is called 'sexually antagonistic selection' because it appears to benefit female reproduction at the cost of reducing male reproduction within the same lineage, but that is counterbalanced by an increased number of male offspring. It is backed up by observable demographic trends. However I don't doubt that no matter how clearly this is explained to you or how sound it is scientifically, you'll deny it because then you'd have to face uncomfortable facts about your ignorant world view.
The problem with correction is that it's not even borderline intelligent. I've been doing something of a personal project creating artist description stubs for obscure demosceners on last.fm, so I've been running into this a lot lately. I'll type in an artist name like 'Cyanid' which Google thinks I must mean 'Cyanide' except that's not the whole search string, which will be like 'Cyanid "person's name"' and Google will search for 'Cyanide "person's name"' and display 0 results. But when I tell it, no, I really did mean 'Cyanid', there will be several results. It really shouldn't be that hard to write the correction code such that it compares the "corrected" search string with the original and at least skips the "corrected" if the return is fucking ZERO.
Hate to break it to you and apparently everybody else responding, but there is evidence for a genetic component to homosexual preferences. The fundamental concept is that the gene(s) which when expressed lead to an increased sexual attraction to men work the same way in both genders, so because not all men who carry the gene express it (or do so exclusively), it leads to some female children being born with higher fertility rates, which is why the gene keeps being reproduced. Women with the gene end up having more children than those without it, and their male children are not guaranteed to express the gene, so over human history the net effect has been positive.
Actually I am relatively unfamiliar with the LOIC operation, and I said jack-all about 'social networking' because even though that's what worries governments, that's the exact opposite of Anonymous. Sounds more like you don't know what Anonymous is and you're projecting your ignorance on me. Here's a hint newfag, I used to hang on #insub before there was an ED, was reading SA when JeffK was a new feature, been on 4chan since teh Rei, and literally partied hard with Jason Fortuny (who makes fine burgers, you'd be surprised to know). The only people who have more net cred than me were around before Endless September, but thanks for giving me an excuse to whip out my e-peen.
Yeah, that sure has slowed down piracy, lulz.
Anonymous is literally any group of people online willing to work together on a common action. That's impossible to end because it's woven into the very fabric of social interaction of which the internet is but a subset. The internet just created a critical mass effect by allowing an effectively limitless number of people to agree to do things together virtually instaneously. Anonymous is the power of people realizing that they don't need organizations to accomplish simple goals, just people willing to agree to do something once.
You seem to think that the failure of the Chinese to resist colonialism is indicative of a failure of the Chinese socio-political character. Ask yourself this, who would the Chinese have been fighting for? The Manchurian Qing? Yeah, I'm sure the rank and file were really motivated to lay down their lives for their barbarian masters. The Qing were a dynasty of occupation, not home rule*, and morale was particularly poor after Qianlong's late reign complacency allowed corruption to destroy most of the achievements of his earlier diligent governance.
So, when the Chinese armies buckled against the Western forces in conflicts like the Opium Wars, the Qing government had really no other recourse but to start acceding to Western demands. They gave away land, signed detrimental trade agreements, whatever it took to not have to meet on the battlefield and lose even more face with armies that effectively wouldn't fight and risk the complete exasperation of a people already unhappy with the foreign rule. If you were Chinese, how fired up would you be to save your foreign ruler from another?
You imply that the Chinese world view prevents them from 'succeeding'. Depends greatly on your definition of success doesn't it? What makes you think the West is more successful? Yeah, the West was riding pretty high from the Enlightenment through World War II, but before the Renaissance and after the Cold War, China has thousands of years of being more or less the best place to be. I'd argue that several millennia of relative success is better than the roller coasters in the West. How many ups and downs have Italians, French, Germans, and English had? How many dark ages? (People forget that beyond just the difficulties of the middle ages, there was also the Greek dark ages that consisted of a intervening period between the MinoanMycenaean cultural collapse and the time of Homer.) If success looks like dark age Europe, then perhaps it is better that the Chinese are deficient and stop short of it.
China was prostrated at the beginning of the 20th Century by a strong central government apparatus controlled by weak, and narrow-minded rulers who failed to employ any of China's advantages to its benefit. Individuals were beholden to mandarins and moneylenders in much the same way that the new capitalists of China are running their sweatshops. The people were plagued with an enormous epidemic of drug addiction which the Westerners used as another lever to weaken and divide the country.
How is this different from any of the Western historical tyrannies? I could substitute many Frankish monarchies into that governmental/economic description. And as for the drug problem, that was a direct outgrowth of the inefficacy of the Qing foreign policy while it had no usable military to stand on. Lin Zexu fought the drug trade as valiantly as he could, and achieved a lot of success, but it was the British used their armies to literally force Opium upon China. They were as bad as or worse than the Columbian drug cartels ever were. How effective do you think any nation's internal policy toward drug use would be (and China's was fucking capital punishment ) if another nation was literally fighting wars to sell drugs regardless?
[...] still run by an emperor in all but name and a central bureaucracy which demands compliance to top-down standards.
This is different from the pre-democratic West how? In fact, it's not all that different from the democratic West, except that there is a show made of changing messages when people make enough noise that the politicians start worrying about their seats.
Its rulers now are relatively clever and strong, [...]
The depth of Chinese socio-political nuance is likely beyond your ken.
[...] but it is just as easy
At least with Challenger it was still slightly abstract. You knew there were people on that machine, but you couldn't see them. Now watching people jumping to their deaths from the WTC... that was... magnitudes more visceral.
Yeah, Islam is more into stoning women who were raped.
Abusing underage girls and claiming cultural/religious license to do so.
Executing people like Theo van Gogh in the street for saying anything negative about Islam.
Kidnapping and torturing people including aid workers until finally taping their slow, agonizing decapitation.
Yeah, Islam has quite a moral high ground there too.
Religion is evil.
It seems very likely by the way the ISPs' performance is distributed. You can see all the ones at the top are primarily cable companies, followed by providers of mostly DSL, then things even slower by nature like clearwire 802.16 or whatever they use. Verizon is solidly placed between the cable and DSL groups. So either they have the best DSL in the whole damn universe (which my personal anecdotal experience would not support), or their stats are getting bumped by the inclusion of FiOS with the DSL performance metrics.
I, for one, would like to welcome our new Chinese overlords...
... and I'm only half kidding. The Chinese culture and people are actually really fascinating and worthwhile once you study them. When you look at China's history you realize that their being a super economy was actually always inevitable. In the first place, it won't be the first time. Do you know how immense Chang'an was during the Tang dynasty? It was like four times the size of the ancient city of Rome at their respective peaks. It was the largest metropolitan area ever anywhere before the modern era.
Oh sweet, so now all I have to do is threaten some teachers, and it will be reasonable for them to stop teaching things I don't like? Awesome! I can't wait for society to become even more ignorant through base cowardice and fear of unpopularity, that's always produced such great things in history, like, you know, the holocaust and pogroms.
Sorry, no, teaching does not necessarily imply or require debate. You can teach a dog tricks. You can "re-educate" dissidents with imprisonment and regular beatings. It is simply that in social constructs where knowledge possesses value-in-itself any effort to transfer it naturally leans toward the bi-directional. (Which, further, is not necessarily implicative of 'debate'.)
The Italians and Cambodians among many would certainly be breathing a sigh of relief over that arbitrary standard.
Yeah, the Yom Kippur War doesn't count. Only tens of thousand died in that. Fuck them, who cares, it would detract from my ignorant joke! Hur hur!
My first thought was 'if that's the winner, how pathetic must the losing designs have been...'
This ultimately has very little if anything to do with piracy and everything to do with simple demographic realities. There are more average joes than pretentious analytical aesthetes. Mediocre, "easily understood" movies sell because they appeal to a larger base of consumers at the center of the bell curve. Nuanced and complex movies only "connect" with a smaller pool of intellectuals at the higher end of the curve. There could be no piracy at all and that would never change the ratio (notice I don't say size) of these markets relative to each other.
Most of the movies I actually like these days come from China. Now, please tell me China doesn't have a piracy problem so I can laugh in your face. The stupid thing here is that all the big name Hollywood shit gets pirated instantly. All the indie art house stuff must reach a certain threshold of popularity before pirating occurs (most of the time). So yes, add me to the chorus of people saying your logic is completely broken.