I realize he put it in a rather asinine way, but I too was shocked to hear that they called firewire obsolete. The line between pro and amateur continues to blur as technology gets cheaper and easier to use. Sweetwater Music has three pages of firewire audio interfaces, for example.
I realize this isn't quite what you're looking for, but bandcamp offers music in in basically any format imaginable, including FLAC. It's mostly smaller artists, but there are a few big names (like Amanda Palmer, for example).
He also complains about how he doesn't like the fact that currency isn't backed by precious metals and has a whole video devoted to how the grades given by Pima Community College are "unconstitutional". I realize the extreme paranoia he exhibits could come from the fringes of either political wing, but those two things seem like memes he picked up from Tea Party folks.
A good point, except that incidence of cancer or birth deformities did not sky-rocket. On any time scale. Your information has come from environmentalists who exaggerate the figures by a factor of ten.
The reality is more people die each year on the road outside my window (the A14, in the UK) than due to all the after-effects of Chernobyl put together.
Ironically, the reason the A14 is so dangerous is that car-hating enviroists keep diverting the funds to improve it onto stupid "alternative" transportation schemes.
The WHO appears to disagree:
A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident....In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.
I'm sick of people on both sides of this debate exaggerating. No, it didn't mean "instant radioactive death for ten thousand years", but pretending like it was a minor mix up and no one got hurt is simply silly and irresponsible.
No. The preamble is all very interesting, but if it's not listed as one of the powers of Congress, the President, or the Supremes, then they can't do it Constitutionally.
Fine. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
I realize we could have a debate all day about what exactly those powers are (lots of very smart people have done just that and nonetheless disagreed), but it doesn't help anyone to pretend that this kind of power had no constitutional basis at all or that state legislatures are somehow automatically more competent than their federal counterparts.
You realize redistributing wealth aka taking care of the poor is one of societies basic responsibilities right?
Yes, it is.
Alas, it's not one of the Federal government's basic responsibilities. The Constitution pretty clearly outlines what the Feds may do, and what they may not do.
And "wealth redistribution" or "taking care of the poor" isn't on the list of "what the Feds may do".
Which makes it a matter for the individual States. Each of which may handle the matter at hand in any way they desire, so long as what they do doesn't violate either the Federal Constitution or their own Constitution.
The Feds are, however, responsible for "[promoting] the general Welfare" (right after providing for the common defense in the preamble) and have the power to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), which sounds to me like they do in fact have the responsibility and power to redistribute wealth/take care of the poor.
I voted for Bush in 2004. I would have voted for him in 2000 if I was old enough. Voted for McCain in 2008. Never voted Democrat in my life. But if the Republicans nominate Palin in 2012, I will vote Obama. I don't like what he's doing to this country. He's given way too much power to unions (GM) and unfairly redistributing wealth (healthcare). But the damage he can do is minuscule when compared to what Palin would do. There is only one possible benefit I can see of Palin getting elected, and the is the complete dismantlement of the Republican party as we know it. Maybe we can finally get a party that is center-right, instead of overrun with right-wing radicals and religious nutjobs.
And this is exactly why she isn't electable. Palin might be able to muster the resources to pull off a Christine O'Donnell-esque upset in the primaries, but it will only lead to a Christine O'Donnell-esque embarrassment in the general election because you can bet that the majority of people who didn't vote for her the primary sure as hell aren't going to vote for her in the general election either. Some might vote instead for Obama, some might vote for a third party candidate, and some might just not vote at all, but pretty much no one is going to vote for her. Winning the presidential election generally means being able to win over the people who didn't vote for you in the primary and attracting support from independent voters. As far as I can tell, Palin isn't able to do either. She exerts a huge influence on a sizable group of people, but she's managed to piss off a much larger group of people on both the left (me) and the right (parent).
Ridiculous copyright length. This means you have to pay again and again for stuff that's become part of culture, i.e. as I mentioned in a previous posting quite a while back, in my view the media companies get to have a stranglehold on your memories, on nostalgia. Stuff may not be great but may be nostalgic. Why should I have to pay (again!) to watch/use it? Why should people get to be rewarded for something that may not be good, but only be enjoyable for a reason not having anything to do with its 'real' value?
I agree that the copyright length has become ridiculous in a lot of countries (especially the US), but last time I checked, the Pirate Bay hosts torrents regardless of how old the content is. For example, I used to watch a Halloween special called Mr. Boogedy every year from a tape my parents had made from the Disney channel. It became a cherished tradition for my family. Eventually the tape wore out and I was unable to find a copy for sale, so I found it on online. The costs of producing DVDs of the program probably would mean that it wouldn't make much profit for Disney, but they also didn't want to release it into the public domain. My view of TPB would be way different if that's what most of the traffic there was about.
Instead, a lot of it is people who want movies that just came out on DVD (or may even still be in theaters), music that was just released, the newest version of a particular piece of software, etc, which explains why "Scott Pilgrim vs The World" (which came out on DVD earlier this month) currently has 9305 seeds on pirate bay, but the best "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" torrent only has 199 seeds.
Copyright does need some major reform, but people who make money selling adspace on a site that makes it real easy (yes, yes, I know the actual files aren't hosted there) for people to download new music and movies for free are poor spokespeople for such a movement. Don't forget that the people who make money off of torrent trackers are middlemen who don't justly compensate the content creators, kinda like the record companies and movie studios that they're so eager to critcize.
Gaaah! Where are mod points when I need them!? Parent is absolutely right. I would be furious if I were one of the students who hadn't cheated. Think some of the students cheated? Fine, go pursue them and take the appropriate action, but don't do this bullshit where you "challenge" the students to stick by their work. The only people with something to lose in this situation are the honest students who might be falsely identified as cheaters and who will have to take the midterm AGAIN (and possibly get a lower grade because of it). The cheaters themselves are in a completely no pressure, win-win situation. If I were in the class and had not cheated, I would be sorely tempted to confess out of fear. And seriously? A test bank from a publisher for a senior-level class? What kind of bullshit is this? IMO the professor deserves some disciplinary action for conducting his course in a manner that makes cheating incredibly easy and also for punishing all of his students who didn't cheat.
I fail to see how this is any different than Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, which Disney brought to the World's Fair in 1964. I suppose you have the added element of a human actor working alongside the animatronic, but I didn't see anything interesting. Mostly I just found the thing creepy...
Mod parent up. A post from cayenne8 somewhere above extolled the values of "[learning] how [women] think" by listening to the PUA-types. After many years of being frustrated, I tried this approach. I read "The Game", started dressing a certain way, used the tips from the book and all in all tried to "alpha" myself up. To a certain extent it worked. I was actually able to talk to girls at bars and parties and get them to laugh at my jokes and succeed at getting some numbers and some casual making out only an hour or two after meeting them, but I noticed that as soon as I let the "character" I was playing slip, they would quickly become uninterested. At first this frustrated me a lot, but then I realized that this was perfectly natural since what I was doing was deceiving them. The way I was acting and presenting myself wasn't me trying to put my best foot forward (which we all do and is actually a good thing), it was me trying to convince these women that I was a completely different kind of guy. Fast forward a few months to a blind date I went on. I try my usual spiel and it seems to hold her attention, but she doesn't seem very sure of me. Then the facade slips, but this time the girl actually likes me better when I'm just being my usual, nerdy self. Fast forward to now and I have a loving, year-long relationship that isn't going anywhere because it's based on the fact that we actually, you know, like each other and have shared interests rather than her liking some persona I'm trying to adopt.
BenEnglishAtHome's story about his friend's wife might well be a similar phenomena. Just like I was pretending to be a boisterous, loud, type a, alpha male, his friend's wife could have been pretending to have a much bigger sexual appetite than she really did because she thought that all women needed to do that to attract men and when the facade came off, no one was happy. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's a good idea to dress nicely, be interesting and generally try to be the most attractive person you can be, but that trying to play psychological tricks on women (which is, after all, what the PUAs are pretty much advocating) might work for shot term liaisons, but it will never be the foundation of a good relationship and you may find out that she's putting on just as much of a show as you are.
Please don't make light of measles. It is deeply insensitive. You might try being positive instead. Give people the cure, and enjoy your instant celebrity. But beating up on people who have the answers, for no other reason than you can't accept that your child was born the way they were, is just plain evil. The people of India didn't ask for 125,565 of their people to die last year, but it happened and they're coping with that. Why on earth would you choose to make it harder than it already is by spreading junk science and FUD about the vaccine? Your passions could be towards assisting the people DYING EVERY FUCKING DAY FROM A COMPLETELY PREVENTABLE DISEASE, but instead you spend it on indulging your paranoia. And that's just sad.
I went to my MD for a severe sinus infection and chest infection some years ago. During the visit I asked for Abuterol Inhailer to assist with clearing my chest. This is standard Respiratory Therapy stuff. They gave me a puffer which I took home, used 10 or 15 puffs out of and threw it in the drawer.
I had a very similar problem to this. When I was 13 I had a bad case of bronchitis and was given an inhaler. After a few weeks, everything cleared up and I have not used one since. I am 24 now and my insurance still has me labeled as being asthmatic. The worst part is, I've had doctors, nurses, etc not believe me and complain that whatever health problem I'm visiting them for could have something to do with my "untreated asthma." Very frustrating, indeed.
"The person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he or she has the right to remain silent, and that anything the person says will be used against that person in court; the person must be clearly informed that he or she has the right to consult with an attorney and to have that attorney present during questioning, and that, if he or she is indigent, an attorney will be provided at no cost to represent her or him." source
Of course, this doesn't apply to civil cases, but the general idea is there.
Indeed, the execution of prominent communist Ernst Thälmann in Buchenwald was used for many years for propaganda purposes by the German Democratic Republic (which was ruled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany) to show that West Germany was the heir to the Nazi legacy and that East Germany was the heir to the opposition. Moral of the story? People have different sympathies associated with different different political buzzwords and politicians use these words for their own gain without caring at all about whether or not they are actually using them correctly. Many on the right will label Hitler as a "socialist" in an attempt to disingenuously link him to the atrocities in the Soviet Union and take a dirty swipe at their opponents, trying to confuse people into thinking that single-payer health insurance is somehow ideologically linked to Nazism. Many on the left will label Hitler as a "Fascist," even though he had a very different political outlook than Mussolini and use his ideas about corporatism ("Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power") to take a dirty swipe at their opponents. When you take away enough freedom from the people, the difference between state capitalism and state socialism becomes pretty much academic.
Exactly! I think using real chemicals encourages kids to pay closer attention as well. If you're using a computer, what difference does it make if you screw something up? You can just keep clicking around until you get it right. Using real (i.e. limited) materials encourages you to critically think about what's happened, why things worked/didn't work rather than just blindly trying each possible solution until one works.
The right-wing is more acquainted with logic and therefore less likely to start frothing at the mouth and looking for a way to silence the speaker (however underhanded or childish) in response to any perceived slight or insult. It's part of why Glenn Beck may be admired or respected among right-leaning people for so long as his views make sense to them, but he is not the Messianic savior that many leftists seem to think Obama is.
Which is why Glenn Beck has an online "university,"was able to get thousands of people to attend a rally with to "restore America's honor" and "take back the Civil Rights Movement" and has millions of adoring fans who tune in to watch him scream, rant, play his weird word games on the chalkboard and cry? Or why Bill O'reilly has books for children? I am always puzzled by people who seem to think that one political "wing" is composed entirely of mature, intelligent people who have thought out their positions and the other is made of emotional, illogical sheep. The unfortunate truth is that there are a lot of people from the latter category in both parties. I *wish* that the problem was just one party, but unfortunately that's not true. Some people were cynical enough to vote for Obama just because of his race, others were naive enough to believe he was some kind of messiah, but some of us didn't want to vote for a 72 year-old cancer survivor who might die and leave us with President Palin *shudders* nor vote for someone who had basically sold out everything they believed in on the campaign trail (although all candidates do at least a little selling out).
The driver's license test in Germany is also difficult (something like 30% of people fail it on the first try), expensive (around $2000) and if you screw up later on (eg drive under the influence), your hard-won, expensive diver's license can be taken away from you forever quite easily. Compare that to our test, which seems to mostly consist of making sure you're the appropriate age and have a pulse. I trust German drivers going 90 MPH. American drivers, not so much. The safety of the Autobahn has nothing to do with certain stretches of it not having a speed limit.
Mod parent up. The word "censorship" has lost all meaning these days because any time any content is made slightly less available, people cry "Wolf!" and act like they've been denied their constitutional rights. From TFA:
Customers who enter our AAFES stores and wish to reserve Medal of Honor can and should be directed to the nearest GameStop location off base.
The game itself is not contraband. Our men and women in uniform are free to purchase the game and play it as they please. People forget that it's not just soldiers who live on base, but also the spouses and children of soldiers sometimes as well. If dad is deployed in Afghanistan, the last the mom and junior should have to deal with is seeing a video game that will only increase their anxiety, not to mention the huge amount of offense a person could take at seeing such a game right after losing a loved one. All of this talk about "respecting our men and women in the military means letting them choose for themselves" and "but you can play as Nazis in WWII games" is rather glib and cute, but the hard fact is that this is not censorship and all anyone has to do if they want the game is drive off base and go pick it up. GameStop doesn't want to accidentally offend anyone in what is a rather sensitive situation and I think this is a perfectly fine solution. This isn't a free speech issue at all. Move along, nothing to see here.
$250 fine. First class, well done. You hit back at someone doing you a favour when they do a bad job. *clap clap clap*.
What a self-important moron this judge is.
A favor? They call it "jury duty" for a reason. Under the 6th Amendment, every US Citizen has the right to a speedy public trial by an impartial jury and it is the duty of all citizens to help provide for this right. Obviously the devil is in the details when it comes to finding a truly impartial jury, but it's a pretty obvious (and serious!) breach of decorum and a complete abandonment of duty to post "gonna be fun to tell the defendant they're GUILTY" on Facebook for crying out loud. If she really didn't want to be there, all she had to do was make up an extreme point of view on something and she would have been dismissed. She was letting down all parties involved in the case and all of her fellow citizens by doing this. I bet if she ever got in trouble with the law, she'd want a juror absent of anyone make snide comments about her on Facebook.
Not to mention that Turkish has 8 vowels as well as vowel harmony and Arabic has only three vowels and two dipthongs that in many cases are considered optional and are omitted when writing. It definitely sucks that there was a huge break in written history, but it has resulted in one of the most consistent orthographies in the world (something we native English speakers ought to be jealous of;-) ). I suppose there were political motivations for the change as well (and also political motivations for writing in Arabic script in the first place!), but the fact is that it led to a dramatic rise in literacy, going from 11% in 1927 to 40% in 1960. I'm not sure about the specifics of the situation in China and Japan, but to paraphrase Einstein, writing systems should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Take Germany, for example. I was there last Christmas and the people I was celebrating with had an old Bible open that was written using Fraktur script. Even though I speak German, I was unable to read it because the script was so flowery and ornate that I couldn't make out the letters. This type of printing used to be pretty much the norm for complete documents, but now is mostly used for decorative titles, etc, which I think is a *good* thing since it allows people to understand what the heck is being talked about, which is the point of writing something down in the first place.
I bought a Dell Laptop back in 2005 and one of the most frustrating things about the whole experience was the fact that there was only a weak correlation between the name of the model and the kind of specs you were getting. A Dell Inspiron could have all manner of different kinds of processor, ram, cpu, etc. I understand that they want to allow for flexibility, but after a certain point it just becomes needlessly confusing. BTW, my current computer is a Macbook Pro, so there may be something to your reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize he put it in a rather asinine way, but I too was shocked to hear that they called firewire obsolete. The line between pro and amateur continues to blur as technology gets cheaper and easier to use. Sweetwater Music has three pages of firewire audio interfaces, for example.
I realize this isn't quite what you're looking for, but bandcamp offers music in in basically any format imaginable, including FLAC. It's mostly smaller artists, but there are a few big names (like Amanda Palmer, for example).
He also complains about how he doesn't like the fact that currency isn't backed by precious metals and has a whole video devoted to how the grades given by Pima Community College are "unconstitutional". I realize the extreme paranoia he exhibits could come from the fringes of either political wing, but those two things seem like memes he picked up from Tea Party folks.
Cite?
Mod parent up. You don't get to put words in the mouths of your ideological opponents
A good point, except that incidence of cancer or birth deformities did not sky-rocket. On any time scale. Your information has come from environmentalists who exaggerate the figures by a factor of ten.
The reality is more people die each year on the road outside my window (the A14, in the UK) than due to all the after-effects of Chernobyl put together.
Ironically, the reason the A14 is so dangerous is that car-hating enviroists keep diverting the funds to improve it onto stupid "alternative" transportation schemes.
The WHO appears to disagree:
source
I'm sick of people on both sides of this debate exaggerating. No, it didn't mean "instant radioactive death for ten thousand years", but pretending like it was a minor mix up and no one got hurt is simply silly and irresponsible.
Fine. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:
I realize we could have a debate all day about what exactly those powers are (lots of very smart people have done just that and nonetheless disagreed), but it doesn't help anyone to pretend that this kind of power had no constitutional basis at all or that state legislatures are somehow automatically more competent than their federal counterparts.
Yes, it is.
Alas, it's not one of the Federal government's basic responsibilities. The Constitution pretty clearly outlines what the Feds may do, and what they may not do.
And "wealth redistribution" or "taking care of the poor" isn't on the list of "what the Feds may do".
Which makes it a matter for the individual States. Each of which may handle the matter at hand in any way they desire, so long as what they do doesn't violate either the Federal Constitution or their own Constitution.
The Feds are, however, responsible for "[promoting] the general Welfare" (right after providing for the common defense in the preamble) and have the power to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), which sounds to me like they do in fact have the responsibility and power to redistribute wealth/take care of the poor.
I voted for Bush in 2004. I would have voted for him in 2000 if I was old enough. Voted for McCain in 2008. Never voted Democrat in my life. But if the Republicans nominate Palin in 2012, I will vote Obama. I don't like what he's doing to this country. He's given way too much power to unions (GM) and unfairly redistributing wealth (healthcare). But the damage he can do is minuscule when compared to what Palin would do. There is only one possible benefit I can see of Palin getting elected, and the is the complete dismantlement of the Republican party as we know it. Maybe we can finally get a party that is center-right, instead of overrun with right-wing radicals and religious nutjobs.
And this is exactly why she isn't electable. Palin might be able to muster the resources to pull off a Christine O'Donnell-esque upset in the primaries, but it will only lead to a Christine O'Donnell-esque embarrassment in the general election because you can bet that the majority of people who didn't vote for her the primary sure as hell aren't going to vote for her in the general election either. Some might vote instead for Obama, some might vote for a third party candidate, and some might just not vote at all, but pretty much no one is going to vote for her. Winning the presidential election generally means being able to win over the people who didn't vote for you in the primary and attracting support from independent voters. As far as I can tell, Palin isn't able to do either. She exerts a huge influence on a sizable group of people, but she's managed to piss off a much larger group of people on both the left (me) and the right (parent).
I agree that the copyright length has become ridiculous in a lot of countries (especially the US), but last time I checked, the Pirate Bay hosts torrents regardless of how old the content is. For example, I used to watch a Halloween special called Mr. Boogedy every year from a tape my parents had made from the Disney channel. It became a cherished tradition for my family. Eventually the tape wore out and I was unable to find a copy for sale, so I found it on online. The costs of producing DVDs of the program probably would mean that it wouldn't make much profit for Disney, but they also didn't want to release it into the public domain. My view of TPB would be way different if that's what most of the traffic there was about.
Instead, a lot of it is people who want movies that just came out on DVD (or may even still be in theaters), music that was just released, the newest version of a particular piece of software, etc, which explains why "Scott Pilgrim vs The World" (which came out on DVD earlier this month) currently has 9305 seeds on pirate bay, but the best "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" torrent only has 199 seeds.
Copyright does need some major reform, but people who make money selling adspace on a site that makes it real easy (yes, yes, I know the actual files aren't hosted there) for people to download new music and movies for free are poor spokespeople for such a movement. Don't forget that the people who make money off of torrent trackers are middlemen who don't justly compensate the content creators, kinda like the record companies and movie studios that they're so eager to critcize.
Gaaah! Where are mod points when I need them!? Parent is absolutely right. I would be furious if I were one of the students who hadn't cheated. Think some of the students cheated? Fine, go pursue them and take the appropriate action, but don't do this bullshit where you "challenge" the students to stick by their work. The only people with something to lose in this situation are the honest students who might be falsely identified as cheaters and who will have to take the midterm AGAIN (and possibly get a lower grade because of it). The cheaters themselves are in a completely no pressure, win-win situation. If I were in the class and had not cheated, I would be sorely tempted to confess out of fear. And seriously? A test bank from a publisher for a senior-level class? What kind of bullshit is this? IMO the professor deserves some disciplinary action for conducting his course in a manner that makes cheating incredibly easy and also for punishing all of his students who didn't cheat.
I fail to see how this is any different than Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, which Disney brought to the World's Fair in 1964. I suppose you have the added element of a human actor working alongside the animatronic, but I didn't see anything interesting. Mostly I just found the thing creepy...
Mod parent up. A post from cayenne8 somewhere above extolled the values of "[learning] how [women] think" by listening to the PUA-types. After many years of being frustrated, I tried this approach. I read "The Game", started dressing a certain way, used the tips from the book and all in all tried to "alpha" myself up. To a certain extent it worked. I was actually able to talk to girls at bars and parties and get them to laugh at my jokes and succeed at getting some numbers and some casual making out only an hour or two after meeting them, but I noticed that as soon as I let the "character" I was playing slip, they would quickly become uninterested. At first this frustrated me a lot, but then I realized that this was perfectly natural since what I was doing was deceiving them. The way I was acting and presenting myself wasn't me trying to put my best foot forward (which we all do and is actually a good thing), it was me trying to convince these women that I was a completely different kind of guy. Fast forward a few months to a blind date I went on. I try my usual spiel and it seems to hold her attention, but she doesn't seem very sure of me. Then the facade slips, but this time the girl actually likes me better when I'm just being my usual, nerdy self. Fast forward to now and I have a loving, year-long relationship that isn't going anywhere because it's based on the fact that we actually, you know, like each other and have shared interests rather than her liking some persona I'm trying to adopt.
BenEnglishAtHome's story about his friend's wife might well be a similar phenomena. Just like I was pretending to be a boisterous, loud, type a, alpha male, his friend's wife could have been pretending to have a much bigger sexual appetite than she really did because she thought that all women needed to do that to attract men and when the facade came off, no one was happy. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's a good idea to dress nicely, be interesting and generally try to be the most attractive person you can be, but that trying to play psychological tricks on women (which is, after all, what the PUAs are pretty much advocating) might work for shot term liaisons, but it will never be the foundation of a good relationship and you may find out that she's putting on just as much of a show as you are.
Please don't make light of measles. It is deeply insensitive. You might try being positive instead. Give people the cure, and enjoy your instant celebrity. But beating up on people who have the answers, for no other reason than you can't accept that your child was born the way they were, is just plain evil. The people of India didn't ask for 125,565 of their people to die last year, but it happened and they're coping with that. Why on earth would you choose to make it harder than it already is by spreading junk science and FUD about the vaccine? Your passions could be towards assisting the people DYING EVERY FUCKING DAY FROM A COMPLETELY PREVENTABLE DISEASE, but instead you spend it on indulging your paranoia. And that's just sad.
I had a very similar problem to this. When I was 13 I had a bad case of bronchitis and was given an inhaler. After a few weeks, everything cleared up and I have not used one since. I am 24 now and my insurance still has me labeled as being asthmatic. The worst part is, I've had doctors, nurses, etc not believe me and complain that whatever health problem I'm visiting them for could have something to do with my "untreated asthma." Very frustrating, indeed.
Of course, this doesn't apply to civil cases, but the general idea is there.
Indeed, the execution of prominent communist Ernst Thälmann in Buchenwald was used for many years for propaganda purposes by the German Democratic Republic (which was ruled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany) to show that West Germany was the heir to the Nazi legacy and that East Germany was the heir to the opposition. Moral of the story? People have different sympathies associated with different different political buzzwords and politicians use these words for their own gain without caring at all about whether or not they are actually using them correctly. Many on the right will label Hitler as a "socialist" in an attempt to disingenuously link him to the atrocities in the Soviet Union and take a dirty swipe at their opponents, trying to confuse people into thinking that single-payer health insurance is somehow ideologically linked to Nazism. Many on the left will label Hitler as a "Fascist," even though he had a very different political outlook than Mussolini and use his ideas about corporatism ("Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power") to take a dirty swipe at their opponents. When you take away enough freedom from the people, the difference between state capitalism and state socialism becomes pretty much academic.
Exactly! I think using real chemicals encourages kids to pay closer attention as well. If you're using a computer, what difference does it make if you screw something up? You can just keep clicking around until you get it right. Using real (i.e. limited) materials encourages you to critically think about what's happened, why things worked/didn't work rather than just blindly trying each possible solution until one works.
The right-wing is more acquainted with logic and therefore less likely to start frothing at the mouth and looking for a way to silence the speaker (however underhanded or childish) in response to any perceived slight or insult. It's part of why Glenn Beck may be admired or respected among right-leaning people for so long as his views make sense to them, but he is not the Messianic savior that many leftists seem to think Obama is.
Which is why Glenn Beck has an online "university," was able to get thousands of people to attend a rally with to "restore America's honor" and "take back the Civil Rights Movement" and has millions of adoring fans who tune in to watch him scream, rant, play his weird word games on the chalkboard and cry? Or why Bill O'reilly has books for children? I am always puzzled by people who seem to think that one political "wing" is composed entirely of mature, intelligent people who have thought out their positions and the other is made of emotional, illogical sheep. The unfortunate truth is that there are a lot of people from the latter category in both parties. I *wish* that the problem was just one party, but unfortunately that's not true. Some people were cynical enough to vote for Obama just because of his race, others were naive enough to believe he was some kind of messiah, but some of us didn't want to vote for a 72 year-old cancer survivor who might die and leave us with President Palin *shudders* nor vote for someone who had basically sold out everything they believed in on the campaign trail (although all candidates do at least a little selling out).
The driver's license test in Germany is also difficult (something like 30% of people fail it on the first try), expensive (around $2000) and if you screw up later on (eg drive under the influence), your hard-won, expensive diver's license can be taken away from you forever quite easily. Compare that to our test, which seems to mostly consist of making sure you're the appropriate age and have a pulse. I trust German drivers going 90 MPH. American drivers, not so much. The safety of the Autobahn has nothing to do with certain stretches of it not having a speed limit.
Mod parent up. The word "censorship" has lost all meaning these days because any time any content is made slightly less available, people cry "Wolf!" and act like they've been denied their constitutional rights. From TFA:
The game itself is not contraband. Our men and women in uniform are free to purchase the game and play it as they please. People forget that it's not just soldiers who live on base, but also the spouses and children of soldiers sometimes as well. If dad is deployed in Afghanistan, the last the mom and junior should have to deal with is seeing a video game that will only increase their anxiety, not to mention the huge amount of offense a person could take at seeing such a game right after losing a loved one. All of this talk about "respecting our men and women in the military means letting them choose for themselves" and "but you can play as Nazis in WWII games" is rather glib and cute, but the hard fact is that this is not censorship and all anyone has to do if they want the game is drive off base and go pick it up. GameStop doesn't want to accidentally offend anyone in what is a rather sensitive situation and I think this is a perfectly fine solution. This isn't a free speech issue at all. Move along, nothing to see here.
Indeed, I'm sure she wouldn't mind living in a country where pesky things like trial by jury are done away with ;-)
$250 fine. First class, well done. You hit back at someone doing you a favour when they do a bad job. *clap clap clap*.
What a self-important moron this judge is.
A favor? They call it "jury duty" for a reason. Under the 6th Amendment, every US Citizen has the right to a speedy public trial by an impartial jury and it is the duty of all citizens to help provide for this right. Obviously the devil is in the details when it comes to finding a truly impartial jury, but it's a pretty obvious (and serious!) breach of decorum and a complete abandonment of duty to post "gonna be fun to tell the defendant they're GUILTY" on Facebook for crying out loud. If she really didn't want to be there, all she had to do was make up an extreme point of view on something and she would have been dismissed. She was letting down all parties involved in the case and all of her fellow citizens by doing this. I bet if she ever got in trouble with the law, she'd want a juror absent of anyone make snide comments about her on Facebook.
Not to mention that Turkish has 8 vowels as well as vowel harmony and Arabic has only three vowels and two dipthongs that in many cases are considered optional and are omitted when writing. It definitely sucks that there was a huge break in written history, but it has resulted in one of the most consistent orthographies in the world (something we native English speakers ought to be jealous of ;-) ). I suppose there were political motivations for the change as well (and also political motivations for writing in Arabic script in the first place!), but the fact is that it led to a dramatic rise in literacy, going from 11% in 1927 to 40% in 1960. I'm not sure about the specifics of the situation in China and Japan, but to paraphrase Einstein, writing systems should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Take Germany, for example. I was there last Christmas and the people I was celebrating with had an old Bible open that was written using Fraktur script. Even though I speak German, I was unable to read it because the script was so flowery and ornate that I couldn't make out the letters. This type of printing used to be pretty much the norm for complete documents, but now is mostly used for decorative titles, etc, which I think is a *good* thing since it allows people to understand what the heck is being talked about, which is the point of writing something down in the first place.
I bought a Dell Laptop back in 2005 and one of the most frustrating things about the whole experience was the fact that there was only a weak correlation between the name of the model and the kind of specs you were getting. A Dell Inspiron could have all manner of different kinds of processor, ram, cpu, etc. I understand that they want to allow for flexibility, but after a certain point it just becomes needlessly confusing. BTW, my current computer is a Macbook Pro, so there may be something to your reasoning.
You obviously don't understand the importance of these kinds of details...things like subtle off-white coloring..oh god, the tasteful thickness of it...