God, I'm glad someone else explained it, I'd get modded flamebait/troll into next week if I'd done that myself. Plus I could've done 3000 words (at least) on the comparison between Hitler and Bush that probably wouldn't have been read past "...comparing Hitler and Bush..." by the over-sensitive 'Murican political crowd.
I just have to check, I'd assumed you were American before, but are you really a USA resident? Because if you are, I despair for your political system if you are truly representative of the political understanding and ability to consider and form an argument of a typical American.
Please understand, that's not a personal flame against you and I don't presume to be any kind of genius on current American politics myself, but your attempt to set up such a painfully obvious straw man argument while ignoring and denying everything else in that reply is genuinely concerning. Is this really what Americans deem to be an actual intellectual engagement these days?
I'm really hoping you're just screwing with me, the world is ****ed if you aren't.
Most Americans only know about Europe what is spoon-fed by their lunatic-friendly media and their corporate-run education systems. Their government loves to tell it's people how backward the rest of the world is because it allows them to advance their own extreme left and extreme right agendas. That's not a new phenomenon: politicians and militarists have been telling Americans how lucky they are not to be in Europe for nearly 200 years (just as billions of Europeans were looking at each other with confused looks on their faces, asking each other "Is he really talking about us?" and then pissing themselves laughing.)
Here's a quote from a famous American "politician":
“Because European countries now resolve differences through negotiation and consensus, there's sometimes an assumption that the entire world functions in the same way. But let us never forget... beyond Europe's borders, in a world where oppression and violence are very real, liberation is still a moral goal, and freedom and security still need defenders.”
It's scary to think that a large fraction of American politicians think and talk pretty much the same way today.
The top trump rallying cry of those with no regard for anyone else's freedom. While I support the prevention of children accessing porn, I have greater support for maintaining cultural freedom for the majority adult population.
Imposing access controls (administered by who?) differentiated between two groups (on what criteria, exactly?) across all public networks (enforced by what means and deterrents?) will have huge costs (economic, cultural and social) that a technically and morally ignorant special interest group are trying to get the rest of us to pay for. (Profit!)
Ooooo-kay, that made me sound like a libertarian wingnut, but I'm seeing a pattern in these incidents now. As society progresses technologically and culturally, someone (eg: Mary Whitehouse) decides that something should be done to curtail the collateral damage of it's excesses. The actions taken are always overly broad and cause lots of collateral damage themselves. Someone else (eg: Mark Kermode) then has to undo the original cause of the damage and clean up the mess. The primary enabler of this cycle is politicians grandstanding for re-election. I'm looking at you, Cameron!
...ignoring the number of AAA free-to-play games like Planetside 2, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons Online, World of Tanks, Runescape, League of Legends, Tribes Ascend, Team Fortress 2, Age of Empires, Quake Live, Vindictus, Flightgear... noooo, no way of having immersive, polished, professional quality games for cheap/free/freemium at alllll...
Every article I see about this always wails about Google's capture of personal data from wifi networks. Are they cracking the encryption? No? So why is it their fault if people are sending their data over unencrypted links? If people don't want their data read by strangers, they shouldn't be broadcasting it into the street in the clear! I wish someone would force Google to delete all the data they took. Instantly Google Street View would cease to function, as would the Wifi triangulation location system that so many people probably don't realise they use. I bet there would be a far bigger outcry over that than the original "privacy" issues ever raised.
I'm not sure I entirely sympathise with the photo privacy issue either. They haven't put online anything I couldn't have seen myself by standing on top of a car. Or a wheelie bin. Or a bench. Or a phone box. Or a post box. We seem to have very strange ideas of what "privacy" really entails.
For the overwhelming majority of software development graduates over the last decade, these figures are completely irrelevant. Only a tiny fraction of them will ever actually compile something into native code that will be run as the sole task of an entire CPU. With modern hardware load-optimization techniques, especially things like Intel's Turbo Boost, even a single CPU can be a dynamic target during a single run - depending on what else the system is doing at the time.
My own personal take on this particular kind of idiocy is that when something is free (as in Beer) people have no respect for it's value because it cost them nothing to obtain. Knowledge on the Internet can be obtained for virtually no expenditure of time or resources at all, beyond that which you've already put in to gain access to the Internet, ergo people stop caring about knowledge and stop bothering to access it, even when they really should and nothing is stopping them.
Of course she was voted in again and again, she knew how to play win favour with the masses - she rattled the Jingoist sabre over the Falklands and let the middle classes buy the council homes they lived in. When you can play master strokes like that to turn around some of the worst polling results ever seen, breaking the unions was easy.
It could be said that most Socialist policies rely on the honesty of all those involved to work, as a billion examples of corruption under Communism will happily attest to. It could equally be said that most Capitalist policies rely on the self-preservation of the all those involved to work, as a billion examples of inequality under Capitalism will attest to just as happily. People are greedy and dishonest and no amount of tinkering will make either system viable to stand on it's own.
That's not quite true, the real sky-rocketing of inequality started in earnest around 1995. She may have laid the groundwork, but someone else did the dirty deeds on that one.
Oh yeah, you missed Congressman Charles Wilson, Texas 2nd Congressional District off the list of people who took down the Soviet Union. And about a quarter of a billion others as well.
Leftist ideas are just as dumb as Rightist ideas. Both socialist and capitalist designs for International economic policies are vulnerable to corruption over time. Neither is "the right way" yet continuing to keep people separated into left and right designations allows politicians to keep us at each other's throats instead of developing new mechanisms around combining the strengths of each ideology to bolster the weaknesses of the other.
Well, I say that, but then I see crowdsourced investment schemes popping up all over the place and realise that maybe some people are still trying in innovate with both Socialism and Capitalism in this inescapable hyper-capitalist vacuum we've made for ourselves.
Indeed, it is arguable that the Capitalist system is just as flawed and unworkable in the long-term than the Communist system, it's just the Capitalist system just has a slightly longer shelf-life. I guess we'll see. Crystal balls at the ready......it's so tough being centrist when everyone, including the left (or at least the ones worth listening to), is already so far to the right...
She knew how to play the politics game. Her opinion polls were absurdly bad, but she rattled the Jingoist sabre with the Falklands conflict and let the middle classes buy their council homes. That was all it took, two master-stroke policies. Whatever your opinion on the long-term effects of what she did, no-one can argue she wasn't good at doing it.
Something else to keep in mind is that the economic advice she was given at the time by Alan Greenspan was the same advice a lot of countries were getting and, on the face of it, it was working. There is little doubt in my mind that the particular brand of free-market Capitalism fostered around the world since the late-seventies / early-eighties is the prime contributor to the current financial crisis, but we are looking back on that situation with hindsight and all we can say is that she did what she thought was right at the time and it appeared to be working at the time. Even if she laid the groundwork, we can't really hold her culpable for the decisions made since she left power even if she did, which ultimately on both sides led us to the brink of complete meltdown. If we did that, we'd be out looking for the fossil of some Neanderthal who gouged another Neanderthal on the price of rocks as the root cause of all this.
Slashdot Mirror
I would say "My pleasure", but I'd be lying on many levels.
A ex-RAF regiment friend of mine and I have come to the conclusion that Afghanistan is where nations go to lose wars - including the Afghans.
God, I'm glad someone else explained it, I'd get modded flamebait/troll into next week if I'd done that myself. Plus I could've done 3000 words (at least) on the comparison between Hitler and Bush that probably wouldn't have been read past "...comparing Hitler and Bush..." by the over-sensitive 'Murican political crowd.
I just have to check, I'd assumed you were American before, but are you really a USA resident? Because if you are, I despair for your political system if you are truly representative of the political understanding and ability to consider and form an argument of a typical American.
Please understand, that's not a personal flame against you and I don't presume to be any kind of genius on current American politics myself, but your attempt to set up such a painfully obvious straw man argument while ignoring and denying everything else in that reply is genuinely concerning. Is this really what Americans deem to be an actual intellectual engagement these days?
I'm really hoping you're just screwing with me, the world is ****ed if you aren't.
FTFY:
Most Americans only know about Europe what is spoon-fed by their lunatic-friendly media and their corporate-run education systems. Their government loves to tell it's people how backward the rest of the world is because it allows them to advance their own extreme left and extreme right agendas. That's not a new phenomenon: politicians and militarists have been telling Americans how lucky they are not to be in Europe for nearly 200 years (just as billions of Europeans were looking at each other with confused looks on their faces, asking each other "Is he really talking about us?" and then pissing themselves laughing.)
Here's a quote from a famous American "politician":
“Because European countries now resolve differences through negotiation and consensus, there's sometimes an assumption that the entire world functions in the same way. But let us never forget ... beyond Europe's borders, in a world where oppression and violence are very real, liberation is still a moral goal, and freedom and security still need defenders.”
It's scary to think that a large fraction of American politicians think and talk pretty much the same way today.
I didn't think Cameron and Clegg were that easily confused.
The top trump rallying cry of those with no regard for anyone else's freedom. While I support the prevention of children accessing porn, I have greater support for maintaining cultural freedom for the majority adult population.
Imposing access controls (administered by who?) differentiated between two groups (on what criteria, exactly?) across all public networks (enforced by what means and deterrents?) will have huge costs (economic, cultural and social) that a technically and morally ignorant special interest group are trying to get the rest of us to pay for. (Profit!)
Ooooo-kay, that made me sound like a libertarian wingnut, but I'm seeing a pattern in these incidents now. As society progresses technologically and culturally, someone (eg: Mary Whitehouse) decides that something should be done to curtail the collateral damage of it's excesses. The actions taken are always overly broad and cause lots of collateral damage themselves. Someone else (eg: Mark Kermode) then has to undo the original cause of the damage and clean up the mess. The primary enabler of this cycle is politicians grandstanding for re-election. I'm looking at you, Cameron!
...ignoring the number of AAA free-to-play games like Planetside 2, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons Online, World of Tanks, Runescape, League of Legends, Tribes Ascend, Team Fortress 2, Age of Empires, Quake Live, Vindictus, Flightgear... noooo, no way of having immersive, polished, professional quality games for cheap/free/freemium at alllll...
Oh for some mod points. You want to make a point in an argument, it's up to you to support it.
You are not alone.
I think someone skimmed the summary and skipped over the word "fake".
Every article I see about this always wails about Google's capture of personal data from wifi networks. Are they cracking the encryption? No? So why is it their fault if people are sending their data over unencrypted links? If people don't want their data read by strangers, they shouldn't be broadcasting it into the street in the clear! I wish someone would force Google to delete all the data they took. Instantly Google Street View would cease to function, as would the Wifi triangulation location system that so many people probably don't realise they use. I bet there would be a far bigger outcry over that than the original "privacy" issues ever raised.
I'm not sure I entirely sympathise with the photo privacy issue either. They haven't put online anything I couldn't have seen myself by standing on top of a car. Or a wheelie bin. Or a bench. Or a phone box. Or a post box. We seem to have very strange ideas of what "privacy" really entails.
For the overwhelming majority of software development graduates over the last decade, these figures are completely irrelevant. Only a tiny fraction of them will ever actually compile something into native code that will be run as the sole task of an entire CPU. With modern hardware load-optimization techniques, especially things like Intel's Turbo Boost, even a single CPU can be a dynamic target during a single run - depending on what else the system is doing at the time.
My own personal take on this particular kind of idiocy is that when something is free (as in Beer) people have no respect for it's value because it cost them nothing to obtain. Knowledge on the Internet can be obtained for virtually no expenditure of time or resources at all, beyond that which you've already put in to gain access to the Internet, ergo people stop caring about knowledge and stop bothering to access it, even when they really should and nothing is stopping them.
...Space program funds YOU fund Space program funds YOU fund Space program funds YOU fund - ...
?OUT OF MEMORY
READY
_
If your dumb ass didn't notice, it was a two-part joke pointing directly at a very specific recent incident in American politics...
Of course she was voted in again and again, she knew how to play win favour with the masses - she rattled the Jingoist sabre over the Falklands and let the middle classes buy the council homes they lived in. When you can play master strokes like that to turn around some of the worst polling results ever seen, breaking the unions was easy.
It could be said that most Socialist policies rely on the honesty of all those involved to work, as a billion examples of corruption under Communism will happily attest to. It could equally be said that most Capitalist policies rely on the self-preservation of the all those involved to work, as a billion examples of inequality under Capitalism will attest to just as happily. People are greedy and dishonest and no amount of tinkering will make either system viable to stand on it's own.
That's not quite true, the real sky-rocketing of inequality started in earnest around 1995. She may have laid the groundwork, but someone else did the dirty deeds on that one.
Oh yeah, you missed Congressman Charles Wilson, Texas 2nd Congressional District off the list of people who took down the Soviet Union. And about a quarter of a billion others as well.
Leftist ideas are just as dumb as Rightist ideas. Both socialist and capitalist designs for International economic policies are vulnerable to corruption over time. Neither is "the right way" yet continuing to keep people separated into left and right designations allows politicians to keep us at each other's throats instead of developing new mechanisms around combining the strengths of each ideology to bolster the weaknesses of the other.
Well, I say that, but then I see crowdsourced investment schemes popping up all over the place and realise that maybe some people are still trying in innovate with both Socialism and Capitalism in this inescapable hyper-capitalist vacuum we've made for ourselves.
Indeed, it is arguable that the Capitalist system is just as flawed and unworkable in the long-term than the Communist system, it's just the Capitalist system just has a slightly longer shelf-life. I guess we'll see. Crystal balls at the ready... ...it's so tough being centrist when everyone, including the left (or at least the ones worth listening to), is already so far to the right...
She knew how to play the politics game. Her opinion polls were absurdly bad, but she rattled the Jingoist sabre with the Falklands conflict and let the middle classes buy their council homes. That was all it took, two master-stroke policies. Whatever your opinion on the long-term effects of what she did, no-one can argue she wasn't good at doing it.
Something else to keep in mind is that the economic advice she was given at the time by Alan Greenspan was the same advice a lot of countries were getting and, on the face of it, it was working. There is little doubt in my mind that the particular brand of free-market Capitalism fostered around the world since the late-seventies / early-eighties is the prime contributor to the current financial crisis, but we are looking back on that situation with hindsight and all we can say is that she did what she thought was right at the time and it appeared to be working at the time. Even if she laid the groundwork, we can't really hold her culpable for the decisions made since she left power even if she did, which ultimately on both sides led us to the brink of complete meltdown. If we did that, we'd be out looking for the fossil of some Neanderthal who gouged another Neanderthal on the price of rocks as the root cause of all this.
Grow a sense of humour already.