There are a few (theoretical) good reasons. Accessibility for disabled people for one- it'd be no good if 70% of the fleet were low-riding luxury sedans (note, in my jurisdiction there is no mandated vehicle, and this is a real problem- most popular vehicles are VW Passats (plus Skoda/Seat variants), Mercedes E Classes and Vauxhaul Vectras- none are particularly disability friendly). Another would be safety. A third would be "image"- fleets of similar-looking taxis are an iconic part of NYC mythology (and ditto other cities- think of the London Hackney Carriages). Also there's air quality- not a minor thing in cities where cabs make up a significant part of the traffic (like down town NYC).
That said, I can't see any of that being applied here. It looks like Bloomberg has just picked a car at random. Even assuming there are shady reasons for him picking Nissan, it's not like Nissan don't make plenty of other vehicles to choose from...
I find it depressing that the word "fascist" is being used without irony for someone who passed a law about soda cup size. Have we forgotten, perhaps, what genuine fascists are like? It's the political equivalent of someone with a runny nose complaining that they have flu...
If it has been broken into several pieces, or had any material chipped off of it, then the problem has gotten worse following this incident. If all of the orbitting mass was in one convenient lump, it would be easy to avoid.
I am NOT going to have 0.000236588 cubic meters of coffee or sugar; I'm going to have a cup. (I may even have a quarter liter of coffee over that, but that isn't SI).
Why would you use cubic metres for your sugar measurement, rather than litres (the SI volume measure) or grams (the weight measure, which is what all my cookbooks use for any large quantity of dry mass)?
Why do you think a quarter of a litre isn't SI? You can express metric measures as fractions (1/4 litres) if you want; you can apply any mathematical operations to metric measures you like, just like any other numbers. I would happily walk into a shop and order half a litre or quarter of a kilo of something; they know that I mean 0.5 or 0.25 of one.
You're just looking for things to complain about. Whether converting to metric is worth the US's time and money is one valid question. But there's no question about whether metric is a useful system for day to day life- just ask one of the billions of people in the world who use it just fine.
You revive gun rights instead. Let's dispense with the boilerplate bullshit about how having a gun might not have saved him and just face a simple fact here. This would be substantially less likely to work in the US because terrorists know that such acts of violence would very likely end with them being met with a hail of bullets from bystanders or the police. In the US, random acts of savagery typically only happen in those areas where criminals know the citizenry cannot be lawfully armed. That those areas also tend to be minimally secured by the government to counter this fact is probably also a feature to them as well...
If we had extensive gun ownership, they would not have been stabbing their victim- they would have hit him with a hail of bullets, probably killing bystanders in the process. The hail of bullets from other panicked bystanders would probably have killed yet more innocent people on the crowded London street.
Nothing is likely to save someone from a targeted ambush; it's a simple fact of life that no matter how well armed you are, if people you don't know want to kill you by surprise on a busy street, you probably won't be able to get away. With that in mind, what's left to say? In an act of so-called terrorism in the UK, one victim was killed, the perpetrators were killed themselves, and no-one else was hurt. That's a fantastic result which you would be unlikely to have seen if our country had been flooded with guns.
I had an appendectomy when I was 15 or so. That would cost, on the private healthcare market, something like £30,000. Free on the NHS, obviously. I had another operation on the NHS a few years later- that must have been about £20,000. I've also used A&E for broken bones on 3 occasions- that's about another £5,000. My education (all state-funded), allegedly cost £8000 (according to a quick Google search), which for 14 years or so would therefore have cost £112,000. Have I paid £167,000 in taxes yet? I'm paid pretty decently, but I doubt it. And that's not counting all the other stuff I get to use- subsidised railways and roads, protection by the Police, fire brigade, etc...
So yeah, I'd say so far I'm doing pretty well out of the tax-and-spend relationship. I should swing back into "credit" after a few more years of tax-paying (and not getting ill), but I won't begrudge that as I would have had no way to find that sort of money at that early stage in my life. And I know that if I ever need it again (another serious illness, or my house catches on fire, or whatever) that it'll be there for me again.
So I don't begrudge losing ~30% of my pay-cheque barely but at all.
There are many anti-virus programmes for Mac, including most of the same big names as for Windows. A quick Google search led me to this site with reviews and whatnot: http://www.antivirusformac.org/
They're out there for Linux too (not least the ever trusty ClamAV). If you don't have AV on your Mac or Linux box, it's because you don't think you need it, not because it isn't available.
Don't you love your grandma? The woman who is partially responsible for your existence? Why are grandparents always painted as if they are stupid? (while the rest of everyone else is painted as if they aren't?)
I love both my grandmas, and neither of them are stupid. But neither of them would know which way up a computer is supposed to go, let alone how to protect one from malware. Neither of them have ever owned a computer, so they know as much about them as I do about sailing a boat (which is to say- nothing).
My grandparents-in-law DO own a computer- I built them their first ever computer last year, at their request (Ubuntu, since you ask). Again, bright and clever people both of them, and they've taught themselves how to use it; but they're still at the "I click on the picture of a fox and type in Yahoo email in order to see what my daughter has sent me" stage of computer use; pretty much all they know about viruses is that they're bad and that if anything happens on their computer which seems out of the ordinary they should call me and ask for advice.
New Labour is, thankfully, almost dead. If Miliband manages to win the next election, it will probably be buried. Why do you think grandees like Blair and Mandelson are so quick to put the boot in to him? They're terrified he might win by pursuing a platform other than New Labour. If Miliband loses, it'll throw Labour right back into the throes of New Labour again, in the belief that it's the "only way to win".
Of course they said the same about Cameron and the Tory "Nasty Party", and that didn't exactly turn out well. But we can but hope.
We in the gamer world have been complaining about lens flare for about a decade and a half now. It's a relatively cheap gimmick which is fine, as all cheap gimmicks are, if used occasionally. In video games which overuse it, it is extremely irritating.
I've not seen Star Trek, but if they overuse it then it is a bad thing, whatever Mr Pegg has to say on the subject. I think it's fair to say that sci-fi fans have seen enough CGI action shots in their time to know when a visual effect is overused.
That would be a good feat, seeing as Hadrian's Wall is dozens of miles (more than 100 miles at one point) south of the Scottish border for most of it's length. For that stonework to now be all over Scotland (but not all over England) would imply those Scots are some seriously greedy pillaging bastards!
(It's a common misconception that it is on the Scottish/English border. It was built by Romans to keep out Picts, two groups who have long since gone extinct and who's borders were only passingly related to the borders between the two Anglo-Saxon groups, the English and the Lowland Scots, who would come to inhabit the area centuries later.)
Replace X which worked with Wayland/Whatever, which has fewer features and doesn't work as well. Replace gnome with Unity which runs slower and lets you do less and is unusable on many setups. Now, replacing a package manager which is common, well-supported, and works with one which will be none of those things.
No comment on the Pulse Audio saga, but as for the other three- - Everyone, on all major distros, is replacing X. Most of them are replacing it with Wayland. Ubuntu have announced that they will be replacing it with something else (called "Mir"). The controversy was around Wayland supporters being cross that Ubuntu wasn't joining their party; if you don't like the concept of replacing X with Wayland (as your post implies) then you should be no more cross with Ubuntu than with all the rest. - Unity is not slower than Gnome 3. Unity was forked from Gnome 3 due to the terrible unpopularity of that platform; although Unity is up for a lot of criticism, there aren't many people arguing they should have stuck with Gnome. The most popular opinion seems to be that they should have ditched Gnome (as they did) with either a Gnome 2 fork (al a MATE) or that they should have forked Gnome 3 but made different design choices than they did with Unity (al a Cinnamon, which looks at first glance like a KDE 3 clone). - They aren't replacing dpkg, they're adding a new second package management scheme. As per the details, it looks like this is mostly intended as a way of distributing Ubuntu Touch (phone & tablet) programmes in a less process-intensive way than APT does, for performance reasons (remember that Ubuntu Phones are going to be targeting the budget-smartphone sector). I don't have an opinion at this point as to whether that's sensible, but I can't see anything fundamentally wrong with the concept.
Basically, don't be hysterical. Each of their moves had sound logic behind them, even if the results aren't great (I don't hate Unity, but I'd hardly hold it up as a shining example of brilliance either). If you're using Mint instead of Ubuntu, you're still using an OS that ditched Gnome, uses Pulse Audio, and intends to migrate to Wayland. Hardly makes the case for switching compelling for "in-the-know-nerds". Most of the people who switched to Mint will have done so either because they prefer MATE/Cinnamon to Unity, or over the privacy shenanigans. The rest will have just been the usual nerd hipsters who insist on always using the next great "fringe" product.
The UK's monarch can have her own opinion. She can even state her own opinion (although this one, wisely, doesn't). But she cannot voice her opinion on that exact moment, because at that moment her job is to voice the opinion of "her" government. In theory the government has been appointed by the monarch to act on her behalf; the Queen's Speech is her formal way of affirming that they are acting with her consent. If she refused to giver her consent to their plans, it would trigger a constitutional crisis.
Note that giving consent for something is not the same thing as believing it is the best thing to do.
Agreed. The alternative, US style at least, a politically motivated president that we treat with honour and respect? No thanks. Lets keep our politicians where they stand, a PM that we can hate and bad mouth in the commons and a powerless head of state to do the ceremonial guff who we can treat with honour and respect.
Contrary to popular belief, the monarch still has a fairly important, if theoretical, role in the UK. I would far rather that that theoretical power be held in accountable democratic hands than that of someone chosen by the fickle finger of birth-right. I mean we all agree that Liz has done a good job; but must we play genetic roulette once every generation? I think Prince Charles already gets far too involved in politics for someone with no democratic mandate, so I dread to think what a meddling petty autocrat he'll be when he's king...
To address the question in your title- the 1st/2nd/3rd world thing is a throwback to the Cold War. Traditionally it was defined as 1st World = America, Western Europe, Australasia + Allies, 2nd World = USSR, China, other communist countries + Allies, 3rd World = everyone who isn't 1st or 2nd World, in practice most of Africa, South America and south Asia. The connotation of 3rd World being impoverished is based on the fact that 3rd World meant "not aligned to a super power".
The whole terminology is largely meaningless now, but 3rd World remains a convenient shorthand for "less economically developed countries" (the official term).
Well, under Sharia is it not true that a women is worth half a man with regard to evidence? is it not true that men can get more than an equal share of inheritance than a woman? is it not true that there is 'stealth polygamy' in Western countries as allowed under Sharia (the answer is yes, as recent studies have found out). Now you may not personally have a problem with this, but as a proponent of equality between men and women and Enlightenment values I do. Just because Sharia is not used in criminal cases (yet) does not mean that it should not be opposed. Sharia is antithetical to Enlightenment values - if you know anything about Sharia other than the name this would be obvious. The fact that the UK has already accepted Sharia on principle means the country doesn't really believe in standing up for *universal* human rights an Enlightenment values for *everyone* (no exceptions, not even if you are a women).
You miss my point. I do not like Sharia courts. I think, to put it in very simple terms, they are a bad thing. However they have simply slotted themselves in to a perfectly acceptable pre-existing place in English law. The UK hasn't "accepted" them, per se- they've cropped up in a perfectly legitimate slot in our legal system, and we haven't as a nation gone out of our way to single them out for a specific banning. Seeing as the same legal slot is used by a number of other legitimate organisations (including as I said Christian church Ecclesiastical Courts, but also including while we're on the subject Jewish Beth Din courts), it would be impossible to ban them without singling them out for specific criticism; which would be quite an incendiary attack on a sizeable minority of our citizens. It also needs to be remembered that none of these courts can contradict or overrule the law of the land- being found innocent of a crime in a kangaroo court does not make you innocent of it in the eyes of the law, and any judgement it makes in a litigation matters are subject to tests of fairness and legality by the civil courts.
You seem to have a lot of confused views about religion in general. Islam certainly has some violent tracts of nonsense in it (and as an atheist, you will find no hesitation from me in criticising it). But then so do all religions; these are things that were written in the Middle Ages at the latest, and the Bronze Age at the earliest, and those people had some screwed up notions by our modern standards. Take this chestnut from the Old Testament- Numbers 31:14-18- Moses' army has taken the women and children of their enemies captive, and he instructs them to kill every women who has slept with a man, kill every boy, and keep the remaining virginal women "for themselves". The overwhelming majority of modern Christians ignore these grizzly bits of nastiness, just as the overwhelming majority of Muslims ignore the grizzly bits of the Quran- it is only the hardliners who insist on interpreting these things literally, and those hardliners are what we usually call "extremists". It is unfortunately true that the Middle East is packed full of crazy dictators who would fall into this hardliner camp, but that has more to do with geopolitics than it does to do with religion.
I have nothing against Israel. I don't have a problem with "zionism" necessarily. I don't see any reason why Israel shouldn't remain a happy and modern country right where it is. But I equally have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians; 4+ million people who also want autonomy and a country to call their own. I support a two state solution (as does Israel, officially), but I think that the hard-right politicians in Israel seem to be doing more to work against it than they do to work for it. Violent and vitriolic Hamas in Palestine are to blame too. I think that building settlements on occupied land is a bad thing. I think that bulldozing neighbourhoods is a bad thing. I also think that firing rockets into civilians (as Hamas is wont) is a bad thing too. I want everyone to stop doing bad things a
Although folk etymologies are always a dangerous game. Sometimes words (especially short ones) can be the same simply by pure coincidence. This fits in with the linguistic concept of the False Cognate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate
It's almost a distant cousin of trolling. It's where you basically post something which you know will cause a nerd to "nerd out", with the intention specifically of getting them all fired up. The meme-maker was probably this XKCD comic: http://xkcd.com/356/
Other examples might be asking in a sci-fi forum about which spaceship was bigger, the Battlestar Galactica from the reboot series or the Mothership from the computer game Homeworld 2. Suddenly the whole place descends into heated discussion about the pixel count of the cockpit on the video game fighter-craft versus the size of the maintenance hatches on Cylon Raiders, in a passionate forum thread that runs for 6 months and 50 pages of comments. That would be a "nerd snip".
I wonder idly if he has drawn every frame and they are now sat on a server waiting to be served up each hour, or if he's still drawing frames for it as it goes. Obviously he must have drawn them with at least some buffer space, but I wonder how much? A day? A week? If he's drawing them as he goes, is he going to keep it up forever?
I don't want to get involved in any discussions about whether it's high art or low nerd sniping or whatnot, but you've got to hand it to that guy for dedication to the art of internet stick men. Between this one, the massive pannable one, and his excellent log-scale ones, he's a man who puts some serious effort into his website...
I glanced at your video- but seeing as it was an anti-UN video by a group called "The Jerusalem Institute of Justice", I'm going to guess that there's a rather hefty dose of bias in that video. If you want to cite sources at me, at least cite reputable ones. There are plenty of legitimate investigative news sources out there- I'm sure at least one of them must agree with you, if true.
OIC might be, as you claim, a powerful voting block. But unless you're claiming that it includes every nation in the world bar two, then you're still barking up the wrong conspiracy theory.
I don't understand your comment about Sharia courts in the UK. If you know about the UK justice system, you'll know we have a category of body for non-systemic arbitration. Thousands of arbitration organisations exist, including private ones which get involved in union/employer disputes, in contract disputes, etc. These function essentially under contract law- you agree, under civil law, that you'll be bound by the arbiter's decision. As in all contract law, the contract is entirely superseded by other criminal and civil law; that is, if you think the contract infringes your legal rights, you can still take it to a proper court. The Sharia courts have slotted themselves into this bracket; they are entirely underneath, not instead of, real courts.
Personally, I don't like the fact we have Sharia courts in the UK. As a big old atheist, I think it's wrong that people are allowing genuine legal grievances to be decided by their local holyman than by a real court. Further, I think they can be used to bully vulnerable people into not taking up real legal proceedings when they have suffered a genuine crime, which decreases access to the legal system to those who need it most. But I do see the point of them, all the same; they're for settling religious disputes in something which the laws of the land cares nothing about. They have an equivalent system in Christianity for the same purpose- Ecclesiastical Courts are run by both the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans.
I get blazing fast reliable internet.... I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up.
Bless! Rural America must be, from a technological point of view, hell. The cheapest package that I'm able to buy in my area (literally, the most budget of the budget packages) is 20 MB down. And I get it too- Speed Test tells me that I'm getting 19.5 MB today.
You do know that the United Nations has become so corrupt that no one takes its resolutions seriously, yes? I...
I guess the huge UN bias against Israel matches your political agenda perfectly, which is why you never even stop to consider whether you are being objective or not.
Right back at ya, in reverse. The UN isn't saying what you want them to say, so they must be corrupt.
That resolution was voted against only by the US and Israel. Do you know what that means? It wasn't opposed by my country- the UK. My democratically elected government voted for it. The democratically elected governments of most democratic countries in the world supported it. In what way is this corrupt? Is it corrupt just because my government disagrees with your government? Is your government right, while mine is wrong?
The UK government voted the way that I wanted them to vote, and the way that the majority of people in my country wanted them to vote. Hardly a pattern for "corruption".
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There are a few (theoretical) good reasons. Accessibility for disabled people for one- it'd be no good if 70% of the fleet were low-riding luxury sedans (note, in my jurisdiction there is no mandated vehicle, and this is a real problem- most popular vehicles are VW Passats (plus Skoda/Seat variants), Mercedes E Classes and Vauxhaul Vectras- none are particularly disability friendly). Another would be safety. A third would be "image"- fleets of similar-looking taxis are an iconic part of NYC mythology (and ditto other cities- think of the London Hackney Carriages). Also there's air quality- not a minor thing in cities where cabs make up a significant part of the traffic (like down town NYC).
That said, I can't see any of that being applied here. It looks like Bloomberg has just picked a car at random. Even assuming there are shady reasons for him picking Nissan, it's not like Nissan don't make plenty of other vehicles to choose from...
I find it depressing that the word "fascist" is being used without irony for someone who passed a law about soda cup size. Have we forgotten, perhaps, what genuine fascists are like? It's the political equivalent of someone with a runny nose complaining that they have flu...
If it has been broken into several pieces, or had any material chipped off of it, then the problem has gotten worse following this incident. If all of the orbitting mass was in one convenient lump, it would be easy to avoid.
I am NOT going to have 0.000236588 cubic meters of coffee or sugar; I'm going to have a cup. (I may even have a quarter liter of coffee over that, but that isn't SI).
Why would you use cubic metres for your sugar measurement, rather than litres (the SI volume measure) or grams (the weight measure, which is what all my cookbooks use for any large quantity of dry mass)?
Why do you think a quarter of a litre isn't SI? You can express metric measures as fractions (1/4 litres) if you want; you can apply any mathematical operations to metric measures you like, just like any other numbers. I would happily walk into a shop and order half a litre or quarter of a kilo of something; they know that I mean 0.5 or 0.25 of one.
You're just looking for things to complain about. Whether converting to metric is worth the US's time and money is one valid question. But there's no question about whether metric is a useful system for day to day life- just ask one of the billions of people in the world who use it just fine.
And yet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society
You revive gun rights instead. Let's dispense with the boilerplate bullshit about how having a gun might not have saved him and just face a simple fact here. This would be substantially less likely to work in the US because terrorists know that such acts of violence would very likely end with them being met with a hail of bullets from bystanders or the police. In the US, random acts of savagery typically only happen in those areas where criminals know the citizenry cannot be lawfully armed. That those areas also tend to be minimally secured by the government to counter this fact is probably also a feature to them as well...
If we had extensive gun ownership, they would not have been stabbing their victim- they would have hit him with a hail of bullets, probably killing bystanders in the process. The hail of bullets from other panicked bystanders would probably have killed yet more innocent people on the crowded London street.
Nothing is likely to save someone from a targeted ambush; it's a simple fact of life that no matter how well armed you are, if people you don't know want to kill you by surprise on a busy street, you probably won't be able to get away. With that in mind, what's left to say? In an act of so-called terrorism in the UK, one victim was killed, the perpetrators were killed themselves, and no-one else was hurt. That's a fantastic result which you would be unlikely to have seen if our country had been flooded with guns.
I had an appendectomy when I was 15 or so. That would cost, on the private healthcare market, something like £30,000. Free on the NHS, obviously. I had another operation on the NHS a few years later- that must have been about £20,000. I've also used A&E for broken bones on 3 occasions- that's about another £5,000. My education (all state-funded), allegedly cost £8000 (according to a quick Google search), which for 14 years or so would therefore have cost £112,000. Have I paid £167,000 in taxes yet? I'm paid pretty decently, but I doubt it. And that's not counting all the other stuff I get to use- subsidised railways and roads, protection by the Police, fire brigade, etc...
So yeah, I'd say so far I'm doing pretty well out of the tax-and-spend relationship. I should swing back into "credit" after a few more years of tax-paying (and not getting ill), but I won't begrudge that as I would have had no way to find that sort of money at that early stage in my life. And I know that if I ever need it again (another serious illness, or my house catches on fire, or whatever) that it'll be there for me again.
So I don't begrudge losing ~30% of my pay-cheque barely but at all.
There are many anti-virus programmes for Mac, including most of the same big names as for Windows. A quick Google search led me to this site with reviews and whatnot:
http://www.antivirusformac.org/
They're out there for Linux too (not least the ever trusty ClamAV). If you don't have AV on your Mac or Linux box, it's because you don't think you need it, not because it isn't available.
Don't you love your grandma? The woman who is partially responsible for your existence? Why are grandparents always painted as if they are stupid? (while the rest of everyone else is painted as if they aren't?)
I love both my grandmas, and neither of them are stupid. But neither of them would know which way up a computer is supposed to go, let alone how to protect one from malware. Neither of them have ever owned a computer, so they know as much about them as I do about sailing a boat (which is to say- nothing).
My grandparents-in-law DO own a computer- I built them their first ever computer last year, at their request (Ubuntu, since you ask). Again, bright and clever people both of them, and they've taught themselves how to use it; but they're still at the "I click on the picture of a fox and type in Yahoo email in order to see what my daughter has sent me" stage of computer use; pretty much all they know about viruses is that they're bad and that if anything happens on their computer which seems out of the ordinary they should call me and ask for advice.
New Labour is, thankfully, almost dead. If Miliband manages to win the next election, it will probably be buried. Why do you think grandees like Blair and Mandelson are so quick to put the boot in to him? They're terrified he might win by pursuing a platform other than New Labour. If Miliband loses, it'll throw Labour right back into the throes of New Labour again, in the belief that it's the "only way to win".
Of course they said the same about Cameron and the Tory "Nasty Party", and that didn't exactly turn out well. But we can but hope.
We in the gamer world have been complaining about lens flare for about a decade and a half now. It's a relatively cheap gimmick which is fine, as all cheap gimmicks are, if used occasionally. In video games which overuse it, it is extremely irritating.
I've not seen Star Trek, but if they overuse it then it is a bad thing, whatever Mr Pegg has to say on the subject. I think it's fair to say that sci-fi fans have seen enough CGI action shots in their time to know when a visual effect is overused.
That would be a good feat, seeing as Hadrian's Wall is dozens of miles (more than 100 miles at one point) south of the Scottish border for most of it's length. For that stonework to now be all over Scotland (but not all over England) would imply those Scots are some seriously greedy pillaging bastards!
(It's a common misconception that it is on the Scottish/English border. It was built by Romans to keep out Picts, two groups who have long since gone extinct and who's borders were only passingly related to the borders between the two Anglo-Saxon groups, the English and the Lowland Scots, who would come to inhabit the area centuries later.)
Replace X which worked with Wayland/Whatever, which has fewer features and doesn't work as well.
Replace gnome with Unity which runs slower and lets you do less and is unusable on many setups.
Now, replacing a package manager which is common, well-supported, and works with one which will be none of those things.
No comment on the Pulse Audio saga, but as for the other three-
- Everyone, on all major distros, is replacing X. Most of them are replacing it with Wayland. Ubuntu have announced that they will be replacing it with something else (called "Mir"). The controversy was around Wayland supporters being cross that Ubuntu wasn't joining their party; if you don't like the concept of replacing X with Wayland (as your post implies) then you should be no more cross with Ubuntu than with all the rest.
- Unity is not slower than Gnome 3. Unity was forked from Gnome 3 due to the terrible unpopularity of that platform; although Unity is up for a lot of criticism, there aren't many people arguing they should have stuck with Gnome. The most popular opinion seems to be that they should have ditched Gnome (as they did) with either a Gnome 2 fork (al a MATE) or that they should have forked Gnome 3 but made different design choices than they did with Unity (al a Cinnamon, which looks at first glance like a KDE 3 clone).
- They aren't replacing dpkg, they're adding a new second package management scheme. As per the details, it looks like this is mostly intended as a way of distributing Ubuntu Touch (phone & tablet) programmes in a less process-intensive way than APT does, for performance reasons (remember that Ubuntu Phones are going to be targeting the budget-smartphone sector). I don't have an opinion at this point as to whether that's sensible, but I can't see anything fundamentally wrong with the concept.
Basically, don't be hysterical. Each of their moves had sound logic behind them, even if the results aren't great (I don't hate Unity, but I'd hardly hold it up as a shining example of brilliance either). If you're using Mint instead of Ubuntu, you're still using an OS that ditched Gnome, uses Pulse Audio, and intends to migrate to Wayland. Hardly makes the case for switching compelling for "in-the-know-nerds". Most of the people who switched to Mint will have done so either because they prefer MATE/Cinnamon to Unity, or over the privacy shenanigans. The rest will have just been the usual nerd hipsters who insist on always using the next great "fringe" product.
The UK's monarch can have her own opinion. She can even state her own opinion (although this one, wisely, doesn't). But she cannot voice her opinion on that exact moment, because at that moment her job is to voice the opinion of "her" government. In theory the government has been appointed by the monarch to act on her behalf; the Queen's Speech is her formal way of affirming that they are acting with her consent. If she refused to giver her consent to their plans, it would trigger a constitutional crisis.
Note that giving consent for something is not the same thing as believing it is the best thing to do.
Agreed. The alternative, US style at least, a politically motivated president that we treat with honour and respect? No thanks. Lets keep our politicians where they stand, a PM that we can hate and bad mouth in the commons and a powerless head of state to do the ceremonial guff who we can treat with honour and respect.
The US style is not the only style of presidency out there. Take the German style as a far better alternative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_President
Contrary to popular belief, the monarch still has a fairly important, if theoretical, role in the UK. I would far rather that that theoretical power be held in accountable democratic hands than that of someone chosen by the fickle finger of birth-right. I mean we all agree that Liz has done a good job; but must we play genetic roulette once every generation? I think Prince Charles already gets far too involved in politics for someone with no democratic mandate, so I dread to think what a meddling petty autocrat he'll be when he's king...
To address the question in your title- the 1st/2nd/3rd world thing is a throwback to the Cold War. Traditionally it was defined as 1st World = America, Western Europe, Australasia + Allies, 2nd World = USSR, China, other communist countries + Allies, 3rd World = everyone who isn't 1st or 2nd World, in practice most of Africa, South America and south Asia. The connotation of 3rd World being impoverished is based on the fact that 3rd World meant "not aligned to a super power".
The whole terminology is largely meaningless now, but 3rd World remains a convenient shorthand for "less economically developed countries" (the official term).
Well, under Sharia is it not true that a women is worth half a man with regard to evidence? is it not true that men can get more than an equal share of inheritance than a woman? is it not true that there is 'stealth polygamy' in Western countries as allowed under Sharia (the answer is yes, as recent studies have found out). Now you may not personally have a problem with this, but as a proponent of equality between men and women and Enlightenment values I do. Just because Sharia is not used in criminal cases (yet) does not mean that it should not be opposed. Sharia is antithetical to Enlightenment values - if you know anything about Sharia other than the name this would be obvious. The fact that the UK has already accepted Sharia on principle means the country doesn't really believe in standing up for *universal* human rights an Enlightenment values for *everyone* (no exceptions, not even if you are a women).
You miss my point. I do not like Sharia courts. I think, to put it in very simple terms, they are a bad thing. However they have simply slotted themselves in to a perfectly acceptable pre-existing place in English law. The UK hasn't "accepted" them, per se- they've cropped up in a perfectly legitimate slot in our legal system, and we haven't as a nation gone out of our way to single them out for a specific banning. Seeing as the same legal slot is used by a number of other legitimate organisations (including as I said Christian church Ecclesiastical Courts, but also including while we're on the subject Jewish Beth Din courts), it would be impossible to ban them without singling them out for specific criticism; which would be quite an incendiary attack on a sizeable minority of our citizens. It also needs to be remembered that none of these courts can contradict or overrule the law of the land- being found innocent of a crime in a kangaroo court does not make you innocent of it in the eyes of the law, and any judgement it makes in a litigation matters are subject to tests of fairness and legality by the civil courts.
You seem to have a lot of confused views about religion in general. Islam certainly has some violent tracts of nonsense in it (and as an atheist, you will find no hesitation from me in criticising it). But then so do all religions; these are things that were written in the Middle Ages at the latest, and the Bronze Age at the earliest, and those people had some screwed up notions by our modern standards. Take this chestnut from the Old Testament- Numbers 31:14-18- Moses' army has taken the women and children of their enemies captive, and he instructs them to kill every women who has slept with a man, kill every boy, and keep the remaining virginal women "for themselves". The overwhelming majority of modern Christians ignore these grizzly bits of nastiness, just as the overwhelming majority of Muslims ignore the grizzly bits of the Quran- it is only the hardliners who insist on interpreting these things literally, and those hardliners are what we usually call "extremists". It is unfortunately true that the Middle East is packed full of crazy dictators who would fall into this hardliner camp, but that has more to do with geopolitics than it does to do with religion.
I have nothing against Israel. I don't have a problem with "zionism" necessarily. I don't see any reason why Israel shouldn't remain a happy and modern country right where it is. But I equally have a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians; 4+ million people who also want autonomy and a country to call their own. I support a two state solution (as does Israel, officially), but I think that the hard-right politicians in Israel seem to be doing more to work against it than they do to work for it. Violent and vitriolic Hamas in Palestine are to blame too. I think that building settlements on occupied land is a bad thing. I think that bulldozing neighbourhoods is a bad thing. I also think that firing rockets into civilians (as Hamas is wont) is a bad thing too. I want everyone to stop doing bad things a
Although folk etymologies are always a dangerous game. Sometimes words (especially short ones) can be the same simply by pure coincidence. This fits in with the linguistic concept of the False Cognate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_cognate
I'm not sure that's quite right as a definition.
It's almost a distant cousin of trolling. It's where you basically post something which you know will cause a nerd to "nerd out", with the intention specifically of getting them all fired up. The meme-maker was probably this XKCD comic:
http://xkcd.com/356/
Other examples might be asking in a sci-fi forum about which spaceship was bigger, the Battlestar Galactica from the reboot series or the Mothership from the computer game Homeworld 2. Suddenly the whole place descends into heated discussion about the pixel count of the cockpit on the video game fighter-craft versus the size of the maintenance hatches on Cylon Raiders, in a passionate forum thread that runs for 6 months and 50 pages of comments. That would be a "nerd snip".
I wonder idly if he has drawn every frame and they are now sat on a server waiting to be served up each hour, or if he's still drawing frames for it as it goes. Obviously he must have drawn them with at least some buffer space, but I wonder how much? A day? A week? If he's drawing them as he goes, is he going to keep it up forever?
I don't want to get involved in any discussions about whether it's high art or low nerd sniping or whatnot, but you've got to hand it to that guy for dedication to the art of internet stick men. Between this one, the massive pannable one, and his excellent log-scale ones, he's a man who puts some serious effort into his website...
I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire
Be careful with that sentiment, it can be dangerous!
https://soundcloud.com/dirigibleplums/john-finnemores-souvenir
I glanced at your video- but seeing as it was an anti-UN video by a group called "The Jerusalem Institute of Justice", I'm going to guess that there's a rather hefty dose of bias in that video. If you want to cite sources at me, at least cite reputable ones. There are plenty of legitimate investigative news sources out there- I'm sure at least one of them must agree with you, if true.
OIC might be, as you claim, a powerful voting block. But unless you're claiming that it includes every nation in the world bar two, then you're still barking up the wrong conspiracy theory.
I don't understand your comment about Sharia courts in the UK. If you know about the UK justice system, you'll know we have a category of body for non-systemic arbitration. Thousands of arbitration organisations exist, including private ones which get involved in union/employer disputes, in contract disputes, etc. These function essentially under contract law- you agree, under civil law, that you'll be bound by the arbiter's decision. As in all contract law, the contract is entirely superseded by other criminal and civil law; that is, if you think the contract infringes your legal rights, you can still take it to a proper court. The Sharia courts have slotted themselves into this bracket; they are entirely underneath, not instead of, real courts.
Personally, I don't like the fact we have Sharia courts in the UK. As a big old atheist, I think it's wrong that people are allowing genuine legal grievances to be decided by their local holyman than by a real court. Further, I think they can be used to bully vulnerable people into not taking up real legal proceedings when they have suffered a genuine crime, which decreases access to the legal system to those who need it most. But I do see the point of them, all the same; they're for settling religious disputes in something which the laws of the land cares nothing about. They have an equivalent system in Christianity for the same purpose- Ecclesiastical Courts are run by both the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans.
I get blazing fast reliable internet. ... I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up.
Bless! Rural America must be, from a technological point of view, hell. The cheapest package that I'm able to buy in my area (literally, the most budget of the budget packages) is 20 MB down. And I get it too- Speed Test tells me that I'm getting 19.5 MB today.
You do know that the United Nations has become so corrupt that no one takes its resolutions seriously, yes? I ...
I guess the huge UN bias against Israel matches your political agenda perfectly, which is why you never even stop to consider whether you are being objective or not.
Right back at ya, in reverse. The UN isn't saying what you want them to say, so they must be corrupt.
That resolution was voted against only by the US and Israel. Do you know what that means? It wasn't opposed by my country- the UK. My democratically elected government voted for it. The democratically elected governments of most democratic countries in the world supported it. In what way is this corrupt? Is it corrupt just because my government disagrees with your government? Is your government right, while mine is wrong?
The UK government voted the way that I wanted them to vote, and the way that the majority of people in my country wanted them to vote. Hardly a pattern for "corruption".
FYI, the Daily Mail isn't a news source, it's a comic strip. The quality of reporting is roughly on par with Garfield.