And the view I take supports this. I buy games in order to say "I like this game, make more of this." I also buy games in order to make it a statement when I don't buy Spore or Far Cry 2. For other games, I think it's important to note that just about everyone I know who pirates does it in two stages.
The first stage consists of "Am I going to buy this product? Do I have the money to buy it? Is it worth the money?" If the answer is yes then we buy it. If no then we move on to the next stage.
The second stage is simply "Do I want this product despite not being able to afford it / thinking it's not worth the money?" If no, then it is ignored - if yes, then it is pirated.
Now, I don't know about other people out there, but if you want to buy me every Nina Simone record ever, every Metallica record ever, blah blah until I have about 150 GB of 320 kB/s and less, then feel free. To me that wouldn't be a trivial amount of money, in fact it's more money than I have ever had. So either buy me the records yourself or recognise that piracy is not as big a problem as everyone not having infinite money.
I think this kind of hits the nail on the head. The problem with plagiarism detection is that if you're writing a paper on the Russo-German war of 1941, or classical conditioning, or yaddah yaddah yaddah, is that unless you have found some significant new information, which is highly doubtful, everything you write will have been written before. The purpose of writing these papers - in general, at least - isn't in order to educate the entire field but to show that you have the ability to put together a coherent piece of work.
In this day and age plagiarism is a bit like cheatbot.exe. When you can subcontract your work out to Indian PhDs, and Turnitin.com make every piece of work handed in to them, ever, available for download for a small fee, the only possible defence against plagiarism is decent teachers working decent hours and getting to know their pupils well enough to recognise their work. Admittedly, that isn't exactly ironclad but it's the best method for teaching anyway and it's the best way to avoid false positives, which is a priority for me since I don't plagiarise.
If I understand what you are saying then you are suggesting that you sell Linux for profit. Well, most distros do let you do that - that's kind of the point of the GPL IIRC. You'd just have a tricky job stopping people from realising they could get the same thing for free.
piracy is not a required part of that and the monk analogy does not fit piracy.
Of course, the other reason that the monk analogy does not fit that seems to be oft overlooked is that the monks did not make record profits as printing became increasingly common. My anecdotal evidence, and quite a few studies, show that:
A) Downloading music and movies and games for free actually makes people more likely to buy them, not less - my movie collection was tiny back when I just had to watch whatever was on TV or the cinema. A couple of months ago I had to buy a new set of shelves to keep my new DVDs on.
B) Probably most importantly in this argument my money is now freed up to spend on other stuff, and no, by that I do not mean pizza. I mean that since I can download a discography of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for free while I actually only own four or five albums of theirs that the $50 or so (?) I just saved can be spent going to see / buy albums from less well known bands that need the money to pay rent and bills, rather than buy another Bugatti Veyron so when their friends come round they can race.
Yeah, for those few of us that get decent upload speeds and an unlimited quantity of transfer. The main problem with filesharing isn't really the protocols or the legal rubbish, since they can't fit millions of people into a courtroom without taking so long the original ones are back out and have had kids that are now also seeding. The problem is that most people have rubbish internet connections and don't really grasp how torrenting et al work - most people just don't get that the more you upload the faster your download will be. Anyways, that's my two cents.
You submit a search query to Amazon -- this is you asking a question.
Amazon returns a result -- this is Amazon answering your question, i.e. Amazon saying something to you.
Any detail of the algorithm Amazon uses to come to its response -- including 'run algorithm X and then drop out certain results that algorithm would return' -- is merely Amazon choosing what to say.
Except that when you ask Amazon a question about Amazon, you could reasonably expect that if they are aware of the answer they would either tell you the answer or not. Them choosing not to answer, or to answer "Go away, we don't want to tell you." is well within their rights. No one is saying it isn't. When they intentionally add an algorithm simply for the purpose of lying without so much as a footnote or a ToS notification that is pretty bad.
As a bad car analogy, you walk into the dealer's place and say you want to buy the car he sells the most of. He thinks "Well, the answer is Car A, but I already sell lots of those. If I try to sell him Car B I might make more money, so I will say Car B." He then sells you Car B. The dealer has acted immorally in this case, even if the car he sold you was better. Freedom of speech and freedom to lie about business practice are very, very different issues and should not get mixed up.
This thinking, which seems so very prevalent at the minute, is what frustrates me so much. I agree that this is the thinking of Joe Sixpack, but it simply isn't true. Okay, it generally is true for the attemptedly-professional-level software like GIMP, but I installed Windoze on this laptop I'm typing fom a month ago and Ubuntu 8.10 two days ago. Guess which one is working better? Cheating, I know, but guess which one tells me how to watch DVDs? How to listen to any audio file I want?
In terms of usability desktop flavours of Linux like Ubuntu win hands down. Windoze works a little better right out of the box, but as a normal human being an hour or two into using any OS you will run into difficulties. If you are using Linux you go to some of the handily automatically linked to help pages, man pages, or forums, or just Google whatever message gets thrown up - usually within two minutes you've done something about the problem and learned what sudo means! On Windoze it's just possible that you'll be foolish enough to try the Helpful Wizard!TM and spend half an hour telling it you've drawn the diagram of every wire in the room and it still doesn't read the DVD you just stuck in the drive.
What a weird thing to say. I've taken photos of several schools, around schools, friends wth schools in the background, and the police never questioned me about it. I also once took a picture of some friends and there were people in the background! I know, crazy, right? I didn't even have to blur out their faces before I showed the pictures to people! So why people stood in a public place should have privacy, just because it's from Google rather than me, or a tourist, or an art student, or anyone with eyes, I'm not exactly sure...
...and I'm sure it's much easier to get famous when people have to pay you just in order to listen to your music. In fact, why not extend the point? It is, in fact, harder to give something away for free than sell it for extortionate sums! And incidentally, I am a musician and would never, ever charge for my music, beyond the costs of distribution - just with my laptop, a few bits and bobs and my trusty SM57 I could make an album tomorrow, master it the next day, and be giving it away the day after with no capital outlay whatsoever outside of what I have spent on treats for myself - and I'm learning to program almost specifically for the purpose of not charging for it. So, that's your experience out the window. So...
it turns out that none of these laws are actually needed to sucessfully prosecute terrorists.
Yup, who'd have thought that planning to murder people, building bombs, and distributing material suggesting other people should commit murder has been illegal for a long, long time?
In the UK non [sic] of the recent anti-terrorism laws appear to have been used against terrorists who cannot be portrayed as "Islamic".
But they have been used against protesters, random people who look a bit shifty, and my mate who left his bike locked up outside a train station, apparently calling up a terror alert in case he'd filled the frame with nitroglycerine and nails.
All those terror laws actually did was mean the police don't need to remember the names of so many laws and acts, or have reasonable suspicion that you have committed a crime before they search you. Huzzah for democracy! Mob rule dressed up as mob rule, and somehow people seem to think it's a social panacea. I suppose those people are the mob... they're probably so innocent they've got nothing to fear, too...
I agree wholeheartedly. I know a guy in Manchester who ran a website - just one of those collections of offensive jokes, pictures of mutilated corpses, all that crap. Needless to say, they didn't take it very seriously and neither did anyone else - I mean, these guys trolled on their own forum. Well, one day dawn broke to the sound of their door, which was also broken thanks to the police battering ram. No, they weren't hosting pictures of child abuse - they had some hentai on their site and had neglected to state clearly that the individuals portrayed as being chopped in half while being tentacle raped were 18. Eventually the case was dropped when the police realised they had no case, and to this day those guys use stolen police evidence bags as baggies for weed - possibly the most ironic thing I have ever encountered first hand. Last I heard it was a year after the police had dropped the case and they still didn't have the domain, or even their PCs, back.
OK, so most people are really, really ignorant, not to mention lazy. And OK, so politicians are spineless psychopaths that have passed through a strict filtering process to weed out anyone with any principles whatsoever. And OK, so the tabloid press are a load of reactionary vultures.
It's still the case that when you are talking to one of these incredibly ignorant lazy morons, who probably shouldn't be given a vote if we want any chance of utopia, that they are surprised and at least seem to care when they find out about the starving millions, or the fact that Norton antivirus has backdoors specifically for the FBI/CIA/NSA etc. Admittedly, they forget and move on with their lives, and then are surprised and seem to care the next time they find out, but people at least consider changing their minds when faced with the fact that there is leaked police footage of cops making monkey noises and dancing and shouting nigger at a completely innocent black guy, or when they realise that they could just get shot when they get on a train. I digress.
Pretending that 'the people', or even most people, have opinions that are worth anything at all while also assuming they are completely under informed is fallacy. A large proportion of the population supported the Daily Mail back in the thirties when they ran headlines about how we shouldn't let the the filthy Jews in, and when the owner was sending telegrams to Hitler saying 'Good luck! Hopefully soon the British will be calling you Adolf the Great!'
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If I interpret the law correctly, that was not a violation of Godwin's law as it was a direct historical reference rather than a comparison. However, I am not a lawyer.
Yes, it is cynical, and a very defeatist attitude. Not to sound naive, but freedom is only as dead as you let it become.
Sorry, but the school I went to (sometimes) allowed me the fun game of watching pupils (that is, 13 and 14 year old kids) punching teachers in the face without any kind of retribution, and here comes the fun part, then those same kids would turn around and punch me, while the teacher watches and does nothing.
I am now aware this isn't an entirely normal school experience, but I wasn't at the time. If I was late for class the excuse "Well, my nose is bleeding, I have bruises on my face and twigs in my hair and mud on my clothes from being beaten up and thrown down a hill into a bush, and then I had to limp here" simply would not do. A defeatist attitude may have been to simply curl up into a ball, skip as much class as possible and leave as soon as possible, but instead I took a can-do, proactive approach of trying to do things and to get things done.
For that reason I now cannot think of anyone as innately good unless I've known them for years, can't do formal education or sometimes public places because I still get panic attacks, and am only just learning, six years on, that maybe not everyone starts off in a default position of being amused by my pain. Sometimes, when you actually are defeated, a defeatist attitude is more correctly defined as a realistic attitude.
Hope is the tool of con men and tyrants - remember that.
What? You wouldn't say the word 'fire' in a theatre? Okay, fair enough, don't shout 'BOMB!!!' in an airport, but saying that you simply can't say words like 'bomb' is getting a bit ridiculous. What next - I won't be able to talk about policemen on the Underground?
(In 2005, in London, a man called Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on the Underground because a soldier was having a widdle. True story.)
Couldn't agree more. For some time I had a lot of difficulty understanding this, and it bothered me in the head. I'd see a group of young black or Asian or whatever people and start to get scared. I now realise that the reason I'm scared of those poeple is, primarily at least, because they wear tracksuits and listen to gangsta rap in a not-at-all-ironic way, and generally the image they are trying to put across to the world is 'I want to stab you up'. This is easy to notice the first time you meet a few hippy/goth/whatever folks that just so happen to be 'ethnic', or whatever the word is today - it's easy not to notice at all.
And this is where racial bias comes in - if I saw some white kids that wanted my phone, I'd just think 'tw@'. If they are black, I think 'Tw@. Oh crap, I just looked at a black person and thought they were a tw@. I must be a racist! Racists are bad! Therefore I am bad!'.
Similarly, I generally have a pretty permanent scowl - I try working on it, but it just looks like I have a creepy smile instead. Anyways, this leads me to not want to look at minorities of any kind, because my generic expression is either one of seething hatred or psychosis, and I don't want them thinking they got a dirty look when they just got a look from someone dirty. It's a difficult balance to strike, because you should take people's differences and similarities into account, but constantly being aware of who I might offend makes for an uneasy bus ride as well as a subconscious desire not to be around 'minorities' because of the unease it instills in me by virtue of my liberal upbringing.
I think this is great, because until recently I had an account with Virgin. This was supposed to be 20Mb, which is roughly equivalent to 2.5MB, of which - if we were lucky - we got maybe 1MB of connection, on a really good day. So, by my calculations, 100Mb in actual terms means roughly 5MB connectivity to the internet. Doesn't sound so shocking now, does it?
Those trees might take 20+ years to grow, but that doesn't mean you decide what kind of house you want, design it and pick materials for it, and then plant some trees and wait the 20+ years. If you did, I suspect a great many fewer people would live in wooden houses.
Hmm. If it is abortion then all IVF is also abortion? I just scratched my arm a bit too hard and now it's a bit red - that was 'aborting' a mass of living human cells. Does that make the act of scratching morally indefensible?
No one who has thought about this rather sensitive issue thinks that validity matters - that's just a way for 'pro-lifers' to make abortion illegal not now, not tomorrow, but a few years from now when fertilised eggs are viable. Arguements generally surround at what point the foetus can be said to have a nervous system - IIRC, between sixteen and twenty four weeks. The human brain existing is what change has occurred.
I would happily argue that people should not be kept on life support just because we can. I ceratinly would not want to be. If someone wants them alive it should be there and it should be free, but if no one's even around to claim the vegetable in the case that they wake up then turn off the plug. I would also put it to you that it isn't worth the effort and expense of attempting - with very poor odds - to keep a 24 week old foetus alive if no one wants it alive. I'm sure, though, that you could personally email every hospital in America and tell them the happy news that any conceivably (har, har) viable bunch of cells should be cared for and brought up at your expense, whatever the cost!
I live in England, and we here limies are quite a long way from the Arctic. Yet when I am out on a walk and have neglected to bring a compass I can tell North from South quite accurately with the sun and a watch, even at midday. The same midday that means my house has quite a shadow to the North. You're talkin' a load of bullhooey!
I have seen men referred to on/. and 'blokes', 'fellas' etc. and never seen a single complaint, or even mention past the obligatory 'so you're from the nation that uses that colloquialism, then?'. Seems to me there's every chance they used that term because the fact that they were talking about a woman wasn't important to them - they just wanted to keep it casual. And why is 'chick' a derogatory term anyway? Female comes from the Latin femina, which had noticeable derogatory overtones.
Umm... You seem to live a very different life to me. Never in my life have I even considered dressing up specifically for a photo in clothes that I will wear once and then throw away, or even just clothes I wouldn't normally wear.
Admittedly, I am a bit of a trollface, and I always look awful in photos, so maybe there is something to this whole 'shallowness' angle you're pushing.
'Whoops! I clicked the 'spend $1000' button!' Hilarious.
If this is the case then you, my friend, do not deserve a 'spend $1000' button, not to mention that anyone that cares about losing $1000 probably doesn't want a 'spend $1000' button on their phone.
If the Director of this here library decided to give himself permission to take all of the computers home and make them all his personal property, would that be acceptable? I most certainly think not. He may have the right to allow or refuse access, but not to give them away. If, one day, he just took home all the books, tables, computers and wall hangings, he would be sacked summarily and police would get a warrant to go to his house and take back all the stuff. That's why this is a story - if he had just allowed the Feds to sit at the computer and do what they wanted without a library card, that would be a different story entirely.
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And the view I take supports this. I buy games in order to say "I like this game, make more of this." I also buy games in order to make it a statement when I don't buy Spore or Far Cry 2. For other games, I think it's important to note that just about everyone I know who pirates does it in two stages.
The first stage consists of "Am I going to buy this product? Do I have the money to buy it? Is it worth the money?" If the answer is yes then we buy it. If no then we move on to the next stage.
The second stage is simply "Do I want this product despite not being able to afford it / thinking it's not worth the money?" If no, then it is ignored - if yes, then it is pirated.
Now, I don't know about other people out there, but if you want to buy me every Nina Simone record ever, every Metallica record ever, blah blah until I have about 150 GB of 320 kB/s and less, then feel free. To me that wouldn't be a trivial amount of money, in fact it's more money than I have ever had. So either buy me the records yourself or recognise that piracy is not as big a problem as everyone not having infinite money.
I think this kind of hits the nail on the head. The problem with plagiarism detection is that if you're writing a paper on the Russo-German war of 1941, or classical conditioning, or yaddah yaddah yaddah, is that unless you have found some significant new information, which is highly doubtful, everything you write will have been written before. The purpose of writing these papers - in general, at least - isn't in order to educate the entire field but to show that you have the ability to put together a coherent piece of work.
In this day and age plagiarism is a bit like cheatbot.exe. When you can subcontract your work out to Indian PhDs, and Turnitin.com make every piece of work handed in to them, ever, available for download for a small fee, the only possible defence against plagiarism is decent teachers working decent hours and getting to know their pupils well enough to recognise their work. Admittedly, that isn't exactly ironclad but it's the best method for teaching anyway and it's the best way to avoid false positives, which is a priority for me since I don't plagiarise.
If I understand what you are saying then you are suggesting that you sell Linux for profit. Well, most distros do let you do that - that's kind of the point of the GPL IIRC. You'd just have a tricky job stopping people from realising they could get the same thing for free.
piracy is not a required part of that and the monk analogy does not fit piracy.
Of course, the other reason that the monk analogy does not fit that seems to be oft overlooked is that the monks did not make record profits as printing became increasingly common. My anecdotal evidence, and quite a few studies, show that:
A) Downloading music and movies and games for free actually makes people more likely to buy them, not less - my movie collection was tiny back when I just had to watch whatever was on TV or the cinema. A couple of months ago I had to buy a new set of shelves to keep my new DVDs on.
B) Probably most importantly in this argument my money is now freed up to spend on other stuff, and no, by that I do not mean pizza. I mean that since I can download a discography of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for free while I actually only own four or five albums of theirs that the $50 or so (?) I just saved can be spent going to see / buy albums from less well known bands that need the money to pay rent and bills, rather than buy another Bugatti Veyron so when their friends come round they can race.
Yeah, for those few of us that get decent upload speeds and an unlimited quantity of transfer. The main problem with filesharing isn't really the protocols or the legal rubbish, since they can't fit millions of people into a courtroom without taking so long the original ones are back out and have had kids that are now also seeding. The problem is that most people have rubbish internet connections and don't really grasp how torrenting et al work - most people just don't get that the more you upload the faster your download will be. Anyways, that's my two cents.
You submit a search query to Amazon -- this is you asking a question.
Amazon returns a result -- this is Amazon answering your question, i.e. Amazon saying something to you.
Any detail of the algorithm Amazon uses to come to its response -- including 'run algorithm X and then drop out certain results that algorithm would return' -- is merely Amazon choosing what to say.
Except that when you ask Amazon a question about Amazon, you could reasonably expect that if they are aware of the answer they would either tell you the answer or not. Them choosing not to answer, or to answer "Go away, we don't want to tell you." is well within their rights. No one is saying it isn't. When they intentionally add an algorithm simply for the purpose of lying without so much as a footnote or a ToS notification that is pretty bad.
As a bad car analogy, you walk into the dealer's place and say you want to buy the car he sells the most of. He thinks "Well, the answer is Car A, but I already sell lots of those. If I try to sell him Car B I might make more money, so I will say Car B." He then sells you Car B. The dealer has acted immorally in this case, even if the car he sold you was better. Freedom of speech and freedom to lie about business practice are very, very different issues and should not get mixed up.
This thinking, which seems so very prevalent at the minute, is what frustrates me so much. I agree that this is the thinking of Joe Sixpack, but it simply isn't true. Okay, it generally is true for the attemptedly-professional-level software like GIMP, but I installed Windoze on this laptop I'm typing fom a month ago and Ubuntu 8.10 two days ago. Guess which one is working better? Cheating, I know, but guess which one tells me how to watch DVDs? How to listen to any audio file I want?
In terms of usability desktop flavours of Linux like Ubuntu win hands down. Windoze works a little better right out of the box, but as a normal human being an hour or two into using any OS you will run into difficulties. If you are using Linux you go to some of the handily automatically linked to help pages, man pages, or forums, or just Google whatever message gets thrown up - usually within two minutes you've done something about the problem and learned what sudo means! On Windoze it's just possible that you'll be foolish enough to try the Helpful Wizard!TM and spend half an hour telling it you've drawn the diagram of every wire in the room and it still doesn't read the DVD you just stuck in the drive.
What a weird thing to say. I've taken photos of several schools, around schools, friends wth schools in the background, and the police never questioned me about it. I also once took a picture of some friends and there were people in the background! I know, crazy, right? I didn't even have to blur out their faces before I showed the pictures to people! So why people stood in a public place should have privacy, just because it's from Google rather than me, or a tourist, or an art student, or anyone with eyes, I'm not exactly sure...
This reminds me of an old saying - you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
you'd better be pretty famous already
...and I'm sure it's much easier to get famous when people have to pay you just in order to listen to your music. In fact, why not extend the point? It is, in fact, harder to give something away for free than sell it for extortionate sums! And incidentally, I am a musician and would never, ever charge for my music, beyond the costs of distribution - just with my laptop, a few bits and bobs and my trusty SM57 I could make an album tomorrow, master it the next day, and be giving it away the day after with no capital outlay whatsoever outside of what I have spent on treats for myself - and I'm learning to program almost specifically for the purpose of not charging for it. So, that's your experience out the window. So...
Revenue = ($0 * units) + donations = $some
Distribution costs = ($x * units) - ($x * units) = $0
Initial costs = $0
Money from playing live = $quite a bit - $a little bit = $some
Total profit = $some + $0 + $0 + $some = 2*$some
it turns out that none of these laws are actually needed to sucessfully prosecute terrorists.
Yup, who'd have thought that planning to murder people, building bombs, and distributing material suggesting other people should commit murder has been illegal for a long, long time?
In the UK non [sic] of the recent anti-terrorism laws appear to have been used against terrorists who cannot be portrayed as "Islamic".
But they have been used against protesters, random people who look a bit shifty, and my mate who left his bike locked up outside a train station, apparently calling up a terror alert in case he'd filled the frame with nitroglycerine and nails.
All those terror laws actually did was mean the police don't need to remember the names of so many laws and acts, or have reasonable suspicion that you have committed a crime before they search you. Huzzah for democracy! Mob rule dressed up as mob rule, and somehow people seem to think it's a social panacea. I suppose those people are the mob... they're probably so innocent they've got nothing to fear, too...
I agree wholeheartedly. I know a guy in Manchester who ran a website - just one of those collections of offensive jokes, pictures of mutilated corpses, all that crap. Needless to say, they didn't take it very seriously and neither did anyone else - I mean, these guys trolled on their own forum. Well, one day dawn broke to the sound of their door, which was also broken thanks to the police battering ram. No, they weren't hosting pictures of child abuse - they had some hentai on their site and had neglected to state clearly that the individuals portrayed as being chopped in half while being tentacle raped were 18. Eventually the case was dropped when the police realised they had no case, and to this day those guys use stolen police evidence bags as baggies for weed - possibly the most ironic thing I have ever encountered first hand. Last I heard it was a year after the police had dropped the case and they still didn't have the domain, or even their PCs, back.
OK, so most people are really, really ignorant, not to mention lazy. And OK, so politicians are spineless psychopaths that have passed through a strict filtering process to weed out anyone with any principles whatsoever. And OK, so the tabloid press are a load of reactionary vultures.
It's still the case that when you are talking to one of these incredibly ignorant lazy morons, who probably shouldn't be given a vote if we want any chance of utopia, that they are surprised and at least seem to care when they find out about the starving millions, or the fact that Norton antivirus has backdoors specifically for the FBI/CIA/NSA etc. Admittedly, they forget and move on with their lives, and then are surprised and seem to care the next time they find out, but people at least consider changing their minds when faced with the fact that there is leaked police footage of cops making monkey noises and dancing and shouting nigger at a completely innocent black guy, or when they realise that they could just get shot when they get on a train. I digress.
Pretending that 'the people', or even most people, have opinions that are worth anything at all while also assuming they are completely under informed is fallacy. A large proportion of the population supported the Daily Mail back in the thirties when they ran headlines about how we shouldn't let the the filthy Jews in, and when the owner was sending telegrams to Hitler saying 'Good luck! Hopefully soon the British will be calling you Adolf the Great!'
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If I interpret the law correctly, that was not a violation of Godwin's law as it was a direct historical reference rather than a comparison. However, I am not a lawyer.
Yes, it is cynical, and a very defeatist attitude. Not to sound naive, but freedom is only as dead as you let it become.
Sorry, but the school I went to (sometimes) allowed me the fun game of watching pupils (that is, 13 and 14 year old kids) punching teachers in the face without any kind of retribution, and here comes the fun part, then those same kids would turn around and punch me, while the teacher watches and does nothing.
I am now aware this isn't an entirely normal school experience, but I wasn't at the time. If I was late for class the excuse "Well, my nose is bleeding, I have bruises on my face and twigs in my hair and mud on my clothes from being beaten up and thrown down a hill into a bush, and then I had to limp here" simply would not do. A defeatist attitude may have been to simply curl up into a ball, skip as much class as possible and leave as soon as possible, but instead I took a can-do, proactive approach of trying to do things and to get things done.
For that reason I now cannot think of anyone as innately good unless I've known them for years, can't do formal education or sometimes public places because I still get panic attacks, and am only just learning, six years on, that maybe not everyone starts off in a default position of being amused by my pain. Sometimes, when you actually are defeated, a defeatist attitude is more correctly defined as a realistic attitude.
Hope is the tool of con men and tyrants - remember that.
What? You wouldn't say the word 'fire' in a theatre? Okay, fair enough, don't shout 'BOMB!!!' in an airport, but saying that you simply can't say words like 'bomb' is getting a bit ridiculous. What next - I won't be able to talk about policemen on the Underground?
(In 2005, in London, a man called Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead on the Underground because a soldier was having a widdle. True story.)
Couldn't agree more. For some time I had a lot of difficulty understanding this, and it bothered me in the head. I'd see a group of young black or Asian or whatever people and start to get scared. I now realise that the reason I'm scared of those poeple is, primarily at least, because they wear tracksuits and listen to gangsta rap in a not-at-all-ironic way, and generally the image they are trying to put across to the world is 'I want to stab you up'. This is easy to notice the first time you meet a few hippy/goth/whatever folks that just so happen to be 'ethnic', or whatever the word is today - it's easy not to notice at all.
And this is where racial bias comes in - if I saw some white kids that wanted my phone, I'd just think 'tw@'. If they are black, I think 'Tw@. Oh crap, I just looked at a black person and thought they were a tw@. I must be a racist! Racists are bad! Therefore I am bad!'.
Similarly, I generally have a pretty permanent scowl - I try working on it, but it just looks like I have a creepy smile instead. Anyways, this leads me to not want to look at minorities of any kind, because my generic expression is either one of seething hatred or psychosis, and I don't want them thinking they got a dirty look when they just got a look from someone dirty. It's a difficult balance to strike, because you should take people's differences and similarities into account, but constantly being aware of who I might offend makes for an uneasy bus ride as well as a subconscious desire not to be around 'minorities' because of the unease it instills in me by virtue of my liberal upbringing.
I think this is great, because until recently I had an account with Virgin. This was supposed to be 20Mb, which is roughly equivalent to 2.5MB, of which - if we were lucky - we got maybe 1MB of connection, on a really good day. So, by my calculations, 100Mb in actual terms means roughly 5MB connectivity to the internet. Doesn't sound so shocking now, does it?
Those trees might take 20+ years to grow, but that doesn't mean you decide what kind of house you want, design it and pick materials for it, and then plant some trees and wait the 20+ years. If you did, I suspect a great many fewer people would live in wooden houses.
Hmm. If it is abortion then all IVF is also abortion? I just scratched my arm a bit too hard and now it's a bit red - that was 'aborting' a mass of living human cells. Does that make the act of scratching morally indefensible?
No one who has thought about this rather sensitive issue thinks that validity matters - that's just a way for 'pro-lifers' to make abortion illegal not now, not tomorrow, but a few years from now when fertilised eggs are viable. Arguements generally surround at what point the foetus can be said to have a nervous system - IIRC, between sixteen and twenty four weeks. The human brain existing is what change has occurred.
I would happily argue that people should not be kept on life support just because we can. I ceratinly would not want to be. If someone wants them alive it should be there and it should be free, but if no one's even around to claim the vegetable in the case that they wake up then turn off the plug. I would also put it to you that it isn't worth the effort and expense of attempting - with very poor odds - to keep a 24 week old foetus alive if no one wants it alive. I'm sure, though, that you could personally email every hospital in America and tell them the happy news that any conceivably (har, har) viable bunch of cells should be cared for and brought up at your expense, whatever the cost!
I live in England, and we here limies are quite a long way from the Arctic. Yet when I am out on a walk and have neglected to bring a compass I can tell North from South quite accurately with the sun and a watch, even at midday. The same midday that means my house has quite a shadow to the North. You're talkin' a load of bullhooey!
You tell him! Strike a blow for humour*!
*Humor for you Americans and your crazy talkin'.
I have seen men referred to on /. and 'blokes', 'fellas' etc. and never seen a single complaint, or even mention past the obligatory 'so you're from the nation that uses that colloquialism, then?'. Seems to me there's every chance they used that term because the fact that they were talking about a woman wasn't important to them - they just wanted to keep it casual. And why is 'chick' a derogatory term anyway? Female comes from the Latin femina, which had noticeable derogatory overtones.
Umm... You seem to live a very different life to me. Never in my life have I even considered dressing up specifically for a photo in clothes that I will wear once and then throw away, or even just clothes I wouldn't normally wear.
Admittedly, I am a bit of a trollface, and I always look awful in photos, so maybe there is something to this whole 'shallowness' angle you're pushing.
'Whoops! I clicked the 'spend $1000' button!' Hilarious.
If this is the case then you, my friend, do not deserve a 'spend $1000' button, not to mention that anyone that cares about losing $1000 probably doesn't want a 'spend $1000' button on their phone.
Just my $999.02 cents...
If the Director of this here library decided to give himself permission to take all of the computers home and make them all his personal property, would that be acceptable? I most certainly think not. He may have the right to allow or refuse access, but not to give them away. If, one day, he just took home all the books, tables, computers and wall hangings, he would be sacked summarily and police would get a warrant to go to his house and take back all the stuff. That's why this is a story - if he had just allowed the Feds to sit at the computer and do what they wanted without a library card, that would be a different story entirely.