You seem to be mistaking Avril Lavigne, who is known for such songs as Sk8r Boi and Complicated with Alanis Morissette, who is known for writing a song called Ironic, in which the only actual irony was that the song had nothing to do with irony.
It's ok... they're both Canadian. You're allowed to confuse us all. I do know Bob from Calgary, but he never mows his lawn and his igloo is in really bad repair.
Should a native English speaking student not be entitled to have a course taught in something approximately close to the English most American's speak ?
There is no "English most Americans speak" though. The accents in different parts of your country are incredibly disparate, depending on where you are, to the point of almost being considered separate languages. (well, dialects, at least). Between accents and vocabulary differences, and other regional differences, how do you decide what accent somebody should be teaching in? Should somebody from deep in Louisiana have to go through the same language normalization so that they can be allowed to speak in California? How about somebody from the Bronx who wants to work in Florida?
I'm all for people who have trouble being understood undergoing elocution coaching. Especially in a job like teaching, it's important that your audience can understand you. But as long as you can be understood, then there's really no point in going through language training. It's also worth mentioning that in order to actually get the qualifications you need to teach at the primary level in the US (where it might actually make a big difference), you need to re-qualify domestically. You can teach at the University level with a PhD from overseas, but in the US you still need a B.Ed, and most teachers' unions don't recognize foreign qualifications on it, so you'd have to re-do your B.Ed in the US to be allowed to teach at that level. That's at least 2 more years of schooling, in a degree where your ability to be understood is enough to turn a perfect grade into a fail.
I work for ma bell, and frequently have to call enough different numbers that there's no point in putting it in speed dial (some of which only ever get called once). That said, while I do have muscle memory for the dialling, there's a really easy solution that I'm surprised that the submitter hadn't considered:
Use your left hand to dial a phone, your right hand to use a calculator/numpad. *gasp* different set of muscles, different muscle memory. That's assuming you're actually in a situation where you could benefit from it.
There's no reason a Cortex A7 dual core @ 800MHz wouldn't be able to handle both of the tasks you listed with ease. It could even handle basic gaming if you have a discreet video card to handle the load. Most people don't do the kind of number crunching that a modern high end desktop CPU would allow.
The gamer crowd, absolutely. I can fully understand why they would want a high end processor. Even games that aren't that graphics intensive, like Civilization, are very heavy on number crunching. The office crowd, however, could easily be serviced by a low end low power ARM CPU. I could easily replace my desktop with an ARM-powered nettop without adjusting my computing habits at all, and I'm already running a multi-head setup.
Actually, the lack of Ephedrine OTC inhalers probably has something to do with how easy it is to make crystal meth out of Ephedrine... it's *almost* as easy using Pseudoephedrine, but the reaction chain with Ephedrine is shorter, cheaper, and doesn't involve turning it into a volatile explosive.
Asthma sufferers aren't the only ones who've been screwed over by that particular industry... Ephedrine remains one of the most effective sinus medications on the planet, but it's almost impossible to get any more. People have to make do with Pseudoephedrine, which is significantly less potent.
Unless, of course, you meant something other than Ephedrine inhalers?
As a general rule, you shouldn't feed the trolls.:) The GP was clearly trolling, IMO, because he was spewing an obvious right-wing shill statement about paying his own way... one he'll happily keep spewing as long as his largest medical expense is a $50 prescription, but as soon as he has to pay out of pocket for a $100,000 operation, he'll start nattering about insurance and paying his own way... completely forgetting that insurance is an industry built on spreading that kind of cost around so that every pays a small portion of it, rather than making the individual pay the whole cost. It boggles the mind, but people who fall into that category also don't seem to understand that limiting tort and having a socialized health care system like most of the civilized world has done actually reduces costs for everybody involved.
I'm in Canada, and several in my family have asthma... I've seen two types of inhalers: the salbutamol inhalers, and the steroid inhalers (beclometasone). I have seen epinephrine in the form of an auto-injector pen, but it strikes me as though an inhaler for anaphylaxis wouldn't be that useful....
While I see your point, Dell is a bad example. They're one of the few major manufacturers that openly and actively supports Linux, and that make it pretty easy for consumers to buy Linux-based systems without having to pay the Windows tax. They always have a couple of systems in their current line that have Ubuntu LTS preinstalled on them. In fact, I'm typing this post on a laptop that's less than 2 months old, which came with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS preinstalled on it. (and now has something else, because I don't like Ubuntu)
Some other manufacturers, however, I'd absolutely see how they may leap on the opportunity to lock people in to the preinstalled OS.
I suspect I know where you're coming from for the 'vette, but it's worth pointing out that you can buy the mother of all Subaru Imprezas for half the cost of a 'vette, and get better straight line speed and acceleration, not to mention have a car that can actually go around corners at speed. And that's to say nothing about the interior... if I were considering buying a car for the reasons you'd buy a 'vette, and money weren't an object, I'd buy a Lotus Elise. (which costs about the same as a similarly powerful 'vette, and has a hell of a lot more comfortable interior)
Similarly, the Solstice convertible is a beautiful car, but there's nicer-looking cars that cost less. My personal favourite in that category is a Peugeot 208CC.
If you're naive enough to have bought a car with OnStar in it in the first place... as a general rule, the equivalent car from a Japanese or European manufacturer will handle better, will get better mileage, will be cheaper to insure, and will cost less to buy. The *only* reason to get a GM car is if you want to opt in to OnStar, or if you live in one of those places where people start egging your house if you don't buy American. (and in that case, buy a Ford... they're generally better cars than GM, and they don't have OnStar either.)
people need greenspace. it's good for the psyche. if you want to live in high density housing, then move into an apartment complex where the number of residences per acre they can fit is limited only by how high they can build (in some cities, we're talking thousands of residences per acre). If you have the money, and don't mind the commute to the city center, then you should be within your rights to buy up a plot of land and put up low density housing.
what should be illegal is tearing down old growth forests and ecologically significant wetlands to build houses.
If you have a decent data plan on your phone, or if you have very low data use (using your phone for e-mail only, for example, will probably not break 50mbyte/month), then there isn't really any point in having wifi on at all. I'll turn it on to update apps, because it's generally faster, but for casual surfing or e-mailing, HSPA (7.2mbit) is fast enough, and uses a fraction of the energy anyway, as most smartphones will already do what TFA is talking about with cellular data: switching to 3G when they need the speed, but generally sticking to 2G for stuff like e-mail push, SMS, etc. 2G uses a fraction of the energy that 3G does, and if I'm not playing games on the phone, it's not uncommon for me to get 3 or 4 days life out of it before I need to charge it.
That TP Link router doesn't actually need OpenWRT or DD-WRT though... it has a very well-designed firmware which supports almost all of the features that OpenWRT brings to the table.
I mean, I can understand installing that on a PoS router that doesn't have these features, but the TP-WR1043ND isn't on that list... it supports just about every feature from DD-WRT or Tomato that I ever used on previous routers, and when I started using the TP Link router, I had no reason at all to install a custom firmware. It's nice that it's fully supported by the firmware, but I don't see the point in voiding the warranty without adding extra value.
For one, it's not the Palestinian nation that's firing rockets, it's individuals within, and for two, most of the rockets they're firing don't actually have a warhead, and aren't actually any more dangerous than a bottle rocket. Rather different than using live ammunition and launching rocket air strikes, no?
I have never said that either side is without fault. I am, however, drawing issue with people who seem to believe that no fault at all lies at the feet of the Israelis. As I said previously, it's mutual, and it's not ever going to end if they keep on down the current road they're taking. Somebody needs to put down the weapons, and take the other side seriously, and frankly, I think it should be the ones using live ammunition, bombing schools and hospitals, and running a blockade preventing even basic construction supplies from entering the other side's territory that should be making a few concessions here. They're essentially holding the entire west bank hostage, and that's not a negotiating position... it drives the people within to acts of desperation. If they want the rocket attacks to stop, then perhaps they should stop doing things that make people desperate enough to start lobbing rockets their way.
I mean, do you understand the economic opportunity Israel is giving up on with the way they're handling the west bank? Most of it is arable farm land, in an area that's mostly desert. If the news reports of the rent situation in Israel are to be believed, there's a major economic problem developing in Israel in the near future, and having a supply of cheap food should be a high priority. If they took the Palestinians seriously, they have an opportunity to develop a major bread basket for the area, and work with the Palestinians to develop sustainable economic prosperity. but apparently, they'd rather just kill each other.
There's some interesting numbers regarding the numbers killed by each side that may help you to understand why I'm less than sympathetic to the Israelis... nearly 10x as many Palestinians have been killed by Israelis as have been Israelis by Palestinians, and that's using the Israelis' own numbers. I'm not particularly sympathetic to the people shooting rockets into Israel either, but it's naive to believe that Israel is doing no wrong here. As I said in my previous post, neither side is without fault, and both sides are doing wrong to the other. It's not going to end until somebody matures enough to put down their fucking gun and start taking the other side seriously.
Israel does a pretty good job of demonizing itself, thank you. Something about using live ammunition, air strikes, trade embargoes, and blockades against a civilian population. Bombing schools, red cross installations/hospitals, and UN facilities doesn't help, either.
The Palestinians aren't without fault either in this, but if you seriously believe that it's all just anti-Israel propaganda then you may want to start thinking critically about the situation in that part of the world. It's been going on long enough that nobody really knows who threw the first punch, but the reality is that it's not going to get cleaned up and fixed until somebody puts down their damned gun and starts talking. It may interest you to know that most of the cease fires that've been negotiated between the Palestine and Israel in the last 15 years have been broken by Israel, not Palestine.
Palestine isn't officially recognized as a state right now, and would fall under Israel's admittance. It's internal politics in Israel itself that's keeping Palestine out at this point, not CERN itself.
Let's see what happens after this week's UN vote on whether Palestine should be admitted as a state before we start throwing around statements like yours, yes?
No, RIM's real problem is that their upper management doesn't understand their market. The reason the Playbook failed wasn't the lack of apps, it was because they insisted on tethering it to a Blackberry for basic functions like e-mail to work. They tried for lock-in, and they failed, because the market doesn't want a device that's basically useless unless you have this other device from the same company, so they ended up buying something like an iPad, which costs the same and doesn't have that limitation. The lack of multitasking on an iPad really isn't as much of a limitation as you'd think, and at the end of the day, the fruity product is a better buy than the Playbook.
Similarly, the Blackberry is a great business tool, has tons of control when it's hooked up to an Exchange server, and businesses love it. But RIM makes it insanely difficult for people to develop apps for it (not that it's particularly hard, just that it's a lot of hurdles to jump through in order to develop it and then get it accepted into the app market), which means that the app market is quite limited when compared against something like Android or the iPhone. Yet again, RIM doesn't understand what the market wants, and sets artificial limits and restrictions that end up hurting themselves in the end. They're making a product that you can use for business, and only business, and people end up buying something they can use in their off hours as well... since both iOS and Android support Exchange, there really isn't a case to be made for buying Blackberry over those platforms for business any more.
Finally, their hardware is too expensive for what you're getting. Others have mentioned build quality, and that's part of it... goodness knows my LG Shine Plus (Ally in the US, Aloha in Europe) has survived more falls and abuse than any Blackberry would survive, but it's also that their phones feel cheap, and plasticky. They're supposed to be a high end product for business use, and it feels like you're getting something that was made at a third-rate knockoff factory in China. Why on earth would I spend $600 for a Blackberry when I can get a better Android phone for half that, and pick up a global messaging app from the market? (assuming you don't have global texting on your cell plan already, which I do... let's face it, BBM is really the only avantage BB has over iOS and Android any more, and that's disappearing now that cell carriers are actually offering decent plans)
You're forgetting that it's Rogers. I have personally seen torrent traffic suddenly drop to 2kbit/s when they start traffic shaping my connection. 2am, not a very busy time of day, I'm saturating my cable connection, and then poof, within the space of 3 seconds, my connection has dropped from multiple megabits to 2kbit/s, and stay there, consistently, for multiple hours. And I have seen the same behaviour when downloading large files such as ISO images.
That's not network congestion that's causing it, that's traffic shaping. And if they're applying those rules to game servers, those game servers become unusable until they're whitelisted.
I don't even play WoW any more, nor any other online game. But there are multiple reasons why I won't do business with Rogers, and this is one of them. If I'm paying them for a 20mbit connection, that 20mbit should be mine to use as I see fit. I understand that congestion and QoS rules may cause certain uses to slow down a little during peak hours. It's the unfortunate reality of how the technology works. But that kind of traffic shaping is unacceptable. And that's something my current ISP understands, as they are quite happy to let me saturate my connection when they have the bandwidth to spare.
This reminds me of back in grade school when we'd have a section on genetic traits. There was always one kid who couldn't possibly have inherited all of his/her traits from both parents. (Eye color, hair color, blood type, etc.)
While I realize that this probably wasn't in the curriculum at the grade school level... have you ever heard of recessive or double recessive genes? Red hair is a double recessive, blonde his a recessive. You could have inherited the red gene from one parent, the blonde from the other, and have blonde hair, even though your parents both have black hair (which is a dominant genetic trait). Curly hair is another recessive dealing with hair... your parents could both have straight hair (also dominant), and you could have curly hair, because ancestors on both sides, if you go back far enough, had curly hair and the gene got passed on.
Case in point, both of my parents are relatively short, and both have brown hair and dark eyes. My mum's eyes are hazel, my dad's are brown. My maternal grandfather was very tall, and had blue eyes, and reportedly, my dad had blond hair and blue eyes when he was younger. I am a 6' tall blonde, with blue eyes. Certain traits do resemble my parents, though some can't be explained if you only look at my parents. If you look back farther than that, however, many people in the family say that I'm much closer to my maternal grandmother in build and stature than I am to either of my parents. There's no skeletons in the closet there: the reason I don't look much like my parents is because I didn't inherit the dominant genes that they did from their parents.
3, actually. Cain, Abel, and Seth. Cain and Seth are the ones documented to have wives, if you believe the way it's written, and Abel never took a wife. People tend to forget about Seth, because the bigger part of that story is the feud between Cain and Abel. There's not really any discussion of where the wives came from, and the biblical scholars I know are divided on the subject: the literalists believe that the wives were their sisters, and the rest believe it's an allegory and not to be taken literally.
That said, I don't really get along with Yahweh, nor with the notion that he's a supreme and divine being. If you concede his existence, he strikes me as a rather petty, cliquish, and vindictive god who deliberately tries to keep his followers down by discouraging them from seeking certain kinds of knowledge. Certainly not a deity worthy of my respect, let alone my worship. There are much more interesting, and believable, deities in other faiths that I'd rather spend time with, if it were a choice I had to make.
"modern man" refers to the species H. Sapiens, which has been around for almost 200,000 years, and has been developing tools and technology for about 50,000 years. While there have been pronounced differences in things like height over the last 50,000 years (or even the last 1,000 years), those are mostly due to improved nutrition and medicine, not changes to the genetic structure or the development of a new species. Assuming you're fertile and could travel in time, you could have a child with a human from 200,000 years ago and have a perfectly viable baby that, given modern medicine and nutrition, would grow up to be just as tall/healthy as any modern child.
As another poster stated, however, it's a tautology to say that modern man interbred with our evolutionary ancestors. Given that I am alive today, it's a given that at least some of my ancestors bred with other ancestors.... we didn't all pop out of the gods' foreheads.
They're more likely to declare that ARM-based platforms are low-end cloud devices, and advise people who want Office on it to buy a sub to Office Live. http://www.officelive.com/en-us/
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the more I read about Windows 8, the more I think it's a step in Microsoft's eventual plan to remove the ability to run arbitrary code at all on the OS. They look at what Apple has with iOS, and want the same for their own software. I would prefer to be able to run my own code on my own system, but most users don't really care, they just want something that works. It's a lot easier for Microsoft to only have to write a browser that follows standards (insert joke about them taking 17 years and counting) for each platform, and then simply design their programs to follow those web standards than it is for them to cross-compile their programs and redesign their UIs for multiple platforms and architectures. Truthfully, all Win8 needs to be productive on a tablet is a decent HTML5-capable browser and an input method that doesn't make you want to pull your hair out.
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You seem to be mistaking Avril Lavigne, who is known for such songs as Sk8r Boi and Complicated with Alanis Morissette, who is known for writing a song called Ironic, in which the only actual irony was that the song had nothing to do with irony.
It's ok... they're both Canadian. You're allowed to confuse us all. I do know Bob from Calgary, but he never mows his lawn and his igloo is in really bad repair.
Should a native English speaking student not be entitled to have a course taught in something approximately close to the English most American's speak ?
There is no "English most Americans speak" though. The accents in different parts of your country are incredibly disparate, depending on where you are, to the point of almost being considered separate languages. (well, dialects, at least). Between accents and vocabulary differences, and other regional differences, how do you decide what accent somebody should be teaching in? Should somebody from deep in Louisiana have to go through the same language normalization so that they can be allowed to speak in California? How about somebody from the Bronx who wants to work in Florida?
I'm all for people who have trouble being understood undergoing elocution coaching. Especially in a job like teaching, it's important that your audience can understand you. But as long as you can be understood, then there's really no point in going through language training. It's also worth mentioning that in order to actually get the qualifications you need to teach at the primary level in the US (where it might actually make a big difference), you need to re-qualify domestically. You can teach at the University level with a PhD from overseas, but in the US you still need a B.Ed, and most teachers' unions don't recognize foreign qualifications on it, so you'd have to re-do your B.Ed in the US to be allowed to teach at that level. That's at least 2 more years of schooling, in a degree where your ability to be understood is enough to turn a perfect grade into a fail.
I work for ma bell, and frequently have to call enough different numbers that there's no point in putting it in speed dial (some of which only ever get called once). That said, while I do have muscle memory for the dialling, there's a really easy solution that I'm surprised that the submitter hadn't considered:
Use your left hand to dial a phone, your right hand to use a calculator/numpad. *gasp* different set of muscles, different muscle memory. That's assuming you're actually in a situation where you could benefit from it.
There's no reason a Cortex A7 dual core @ 800MHz wouldn't be able to handle both of the tasks you listed with ease. It could even handle basic gaming if you have a discreet video card to handle the load. Most people don't do the kind of number crunching that a modern high end desktop CPU would allow.
The gamer crowd, absolutely. I can fully understand why they would want a high end processor. Even games that aren't that graphics intensive, like Civilization, are very heavy on number crunching. The office crowd, however, could easily be serviced by a low end low power ARM CPU. I could easily replace my desktop with an ARM-powered nettop without adjusting my computing habits at all, and I'm already running a multi-head setup.
Actually, the lack of Ephedrine OTC inhalers probably has something to do with how easy it is to make crystal meth out of Ephedrine... it's *almost* as easy using Pseudoephedrine, but the reaction chain with Ephedrine is shorter, cheaper, and doesn't involve turning it into a volatile explosive.
Asthma sufferers aren't the only ones who've been screwed over by that particular industry... Ephedrine remains one of the most effective sinus medications on the planet, but it's almost impossible to get any more. People have to make do with Pseudoephedrine, which is significantly less potent.
Unless, of course, you meant something other than Ephedrine inhalers?
As a general rule, you shouldn't feed the trolls. :) The GP was clearly trolling, IMO, because he was spewing an obvious right-wing shill statement about paying his own way... one he'll happily keep spewing as long as his largest medical expense is a $50 prescription, but as soon as he has to pay out of pocket for a $100,000 operation, he'll start nattering about insurance and paying his own way... completely forgetting that insurance is an industry built on spreading that kind of cost around so that every pays a small portion of it, rather than making the individual pay the whole cost. It boggles the mind, but people who fall into that category also don't seem to understand that limiting tort and having a socialized health care system like most of the civilized world has done actually reduces costs for everybody involved.
I'm in Canada, and several in my family have asthma... I've seen two types of inhalers: the salbutamol inhalers, and the steroid inhalers (beclometasone). I have seen epinephrine in the form of an auto-injector pen, but it strikes me as though an inhaler for anaphylaxis wouldn't be that useful....
While I see your point, Dell is a bad example. They're one of the few major manufacturers that openly and actively supports Linux, and that make it pretty easy for consumers to buy Linux-based systems without having to pay the Windows tax. They always have a couple of systems in their current line that have Ubuntu LTS preinstalled on them. In fact, I'm typing this post on a laptop that's less than 2 months old, which came with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS preinstalled on it. (and now has something else, because I don't like Ubuntu)
Some other manufacturers, however, I'd absolutely see how they may leap on the opportunity to lock people in to the preinstalled OS.
I suspect I know where you're coming from for the 'vette, but it's worth pointing out that you can buy the mother of all Subaru Imprezas for half the cost of a 'vette, and get better straight line speed and acceleration, not to mention have a car that can actually go around corners at speed. And that's to say nothing about the interior... if I were considering buying a car for the reasons you'd buy a 'vette, and money weren't an object, I'd buy a Lotus Elise. (which costs about the same as a similarly powerful 'vette, and has a hell of a lot more comfortable interior)
Similarly, the Solstice convertible is a beautiful car, but there's nicer-looking cars that cost less. My personal favourite in that category is a Peugeot 208CC.
If you're naive enough to have bought a car with OnStar in it in the first place... as a general rule, the equivalent car from a Japanese or European manufacturer will handle better, will get better mileage, will be cheaper to insure, and will cost less to buy. The *only* reason to get a GM car is if you want to opt in to OnStar, or if you live in one of those places where people start egging your house if you don't buy American. (and in that case, buy a Ford... they're generally better cars than GM, and they don't have OnStar either.)
If you *really* want to make money in this day and age, take an apprenticeship for a skilled trade.
Seriously.
Don't believe me, ask the 24-year old who lives next-door to me, and is making $80k/year as an electrician.
people need greenspace. it's good for the psyche. if you want to live in high density housing, then move into an apartment complex where the number of residences per acre they can fit is limited only by how high they can build (in some cities, we're talking thousands of residences per acre). If you have the money, and don't mind the commute to the city center, then you should be within your rights to buy up a plot of land and put up low density housing.
what should be illegal is tearing down old growth forests and ecologically significant wetlands to build houses.
If you have a decent data plan on your phone, or if you have very low data use (using your phone for e-mail only, for example, will probably not break 50mbyte/month), then there isn't really any point in having wifi on at all. I'll turn it on to update apps, because it's generally faster, but for casual surfing or e-mailing, HSPA (7.2mbit) is fast enough, and uses a fraction of the energy anyway, as most smartphones will already do what TFA is talking about with cellular data: switching to 3G when they need the speed, but generally sticking to 2G for stuff like e-mail push, SMS, etc. 2G uses a fraction of the energy that 3G does, and if I'm not playing games on the phone, it's not uncommon for me to get 3 or 4 days life out of it before I need to charge it.
I take it you've never left your phone off for a couple of days while people were texting you, eh?
They already get buffered at the cell company, and all get delivered at the same time when you turn your phone on.
That TP Link router doesn't actually need OpenWRT or DD-WRT though... it has a very well-designed firmware which supports almost all of the features that OpenWRT brings to the table.
I mean, I can understand installing that on a PoS router that doesn't have these features, but the TP-WR1043ND isn't on that list... it supports just about every feature from DD-WRT or Tomato that I ever used on previous routers, and when I started using the TP Link router, I had no reason at all to install a custom firmware. It's nice that it's fully supported by the firmware, but I don't see the point in voiding the warranty without adding extra value.
For one, it's not the Palestinian nation that's firing rockets, it's individuals within, and for two, most of the rockets they're firing don't actually have a warhead, and aren't actually any more dangerous than a bottle rocket. Rather different than using live ammunition and launching rocket air strikes, no?
I have never said that either side is without fault. I am, however, drawing issue with people who seem to believe that no fault at all lies at the feet of the Israelis. As I said previously, it's mutual, and it's not ever going to end if they keep on down the current road they're taking. Somebody needs to put down the weapons, and take the other side seriously, and frankly, I think it should be the ones using live ammunition, bombing schools and hospitals, and running a blockade preventing even basic construction supplies from entering the other side's territory that should be making a few concessions here. They're essentially holding the entire west bank hostage, and that's not a negotiating position... it drives the people within to acts of desperation. If they want the rocket attacks to stop, then perhaps they should stop doing things that make people desperate enough to start lobbing rockets their way.
I mean, do you understand the economic opportunity Israel is giving up on with the way they're handling the west bank? Most of it is arable farm land, in an area that's mostly desert. If the news reports of the rent situation in Israel are to be believed, there's a major economic problem developing in Israel in the near future, and having a supply of cheap food should be a high priority. If they took the Palestinians seriously, they have an opportunity to develop a major bread basket for the area, and work with the Palestinians to develop sustainable economic prosperity. but apparently, they'd rather just kill each other.
You may want to read this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7375994.stm
There's some interesting numbers regarding the numbers killed by each side that may help you to understand why I'm less than sympathetic to the Israelis... nearly 10x as many Palestinians have been killed by Israelis as have been Israelis by Palestinians, and that's using the Israelis' own numbers. I'm not particularly sympathetic to the people shooting rockets into Israel either, but it's naive to believe that Israel is doing no wrong here. As I said in my previous post, neither side is without fault, and both sides are doing wrong to the other. It's not going to end until somebody matures enough to put down their fucking gun and start taking the other side seriously.
Israel does a pretty good job of demonizing itself, thank you. Something about using live ammunition, air strikes, trade embargoes, and blockades against a civilian population. Bombing schools, red cross installations/hospitals, and UN facilities doesn't help, either.
The Palestinians aren't without fault either in this, but if you seriously believe that it's all just anti-Israel propaganda then you may want to start thinking critically about the situation in that part of the world. It's been going on long enough that nobody really knows who threw the first punch, but the reality is that it's not going to get cleaned up and fixed until somebody puts down their damned gun and starts talking. It may interest you to know that most of the cease fires that've been negotiated between the Palestine and Israel in the last 15 years have been broken by Israel, not Palestine.
Turkey actually straddles Europe and Asia... the line between the two continents goes right through Istanbul.
Palestine isn't officially recognized as a state right now, and would fall under Israel's admittance. It's internal politics in Israel itself that's keeping Palestine out at this point, not CERN itself.
Let's see what happens after this week's UN vote on whether Palestine should be admitted as a state before we start throwing around statements like yours, yes?
No, RIM's real problem is that their upper management doesn't understand their market. The reason the Playbook failed wasn't the lack of apps, it was because they insisted on tethering it to a Blackberry for basic functions like e-mail to work. They tried for lock-in, and they failed, because the market doesn't want a device that's basically useless unless you have this other device from the same company, so they ended up buying something like an iPad, which costs the same and doesn't have that limitation. The lack of multitasking on an iPad really isn't as much of a limitation as you'd think, and at the end of the day, the fruity product is a better buy than the Playbook.
Similarly, the Blackberry is a great business tool, has tons of control when it's hooked up to an Exchange server, and businesses love it. But RIM makes it insanely difficult for people to develop apps for it (not that it's particularly hard, just that it's a lot of hurdles to jump through in order to develop it and then get it accepted into the app market), which means that the app market is quite limited when compared against something like Android or the iPhone. Yet again, RIM doesn't understand what the market wants, and sets artificial limits and restrictions that end up hurting themselves in the end. They're making a product that you can use for business, and only business, and people end up buying something they can use in their off hours as well... since both iOS and Android support Exchange, there really isn't a case to be made for buying Blackberry over those platforms for business any more.
Finally, their hardware is too expensive for what you're getting. Others have mentioned build quality, and that's part of it... goodness knows my LG Shine Plus (Ally in the US, Aloha in Europe) has survived more falls and abuse than any Blackberry would survive, but it's also that their phones feel cheap, and plasticky. They're supposed to be a high end product for business use, and it feels like you're getting something that was made at a third-rate knockoff factory in China. Why on earth would I spend $600 for a Blackberry when I can get a better Android phone for half that, and pick up a global messaging app from the market? (assuming you don't have global texting on your cell plan already, which I do... let's face it, BBM is really the only avantage BB has over iOS and Android any more, and that's disappearing now that cell carriers are actually offering decent plans)
You're forgetting that it's Rogers. I have personally seen torrent traffic suddenly drop to 2kbit/s when they start traffic shaping my connection. 2am, not a very busy time of day, I'm saturating my cable connection, and then poof, within the space of 3 seconds, my connection has dropped from multiple megabits to 2kbit/s, and stay there, consistently, for multiple hours. And I have seen the same behaviour when downloading large files such as ISO images.
That's not network congestion that's causing it, that's traffic shaping. And if they're applying those rules to game servers, those game servers become unusable until they're whitelisted.
I don't even play WoW any more, nor any other online game. But there are multiple reasons why I won't do business with Rogers, and this is one of them. If I'm paying them for a 20mbit connection, that 20mbit should be mine to use as I see fit. I understand that congestion and QoS rules may cause certain uses to slow down a little during peak hours. It's the unfortunate reality of how the technology works. But that kind of traffic shaping is unacceptable. And that's something my current ISP understands, as they are quite happy to let me saturate my connection when they have the bandwidth to spare.
This reminds me of back in grade school when we'd have a section on genetic traits. There was always one kid who couldn't possibly have inherited all of his/her traits from both parents. (Eye color, hair color, blood type, etc.)
While I realize that this probably wasn't in the curriculum at the grade school level... have you ever heard of recessive or double recessive genes? Red hair is a double recessive, blonde his a recessive. You could have inherited the red gene from one parent, the blonde from the other, and have blonde hair, even though your parents both have black hair (which is a dominant genetic trait). Curly hair is another recessive dealing with hair... your parents could both have straight hair (also dominant), and you could have curly hair, because ancestors on both sides, if you go back far enough, had curly hair and the gene got passed on.
Case in point, both of my parents are relatively short, and both have brown hair and dark eyes. My mum's eyes are hazel, my dad's are brown. My maternal grandfather was very tall, and had blue eyes, and reportedly, my dad had blond hair and blue eyes when he was younger. I am a 6' tall blonde, with blue eyes. Certain traits do resemble my parents, though some can't be explained if you only look at my parents. If you look back farther than that, however, many people in the family say that I'm much closer to my maternal grandmother in build and stature than I am to either of my parents. There's no skeletons in the closet there: the reason I don't look much like my parents is because I didn't inherit the dominant genes that they did from their parents.
3, actually. Cain, Abel, and Seth. Cain and Seth are the ones documented to have wives, if you believe the way it's written, and Abel never took a wife. People tend to forget about Seth, because the bigger part of that story is the feud between Cain and Abel. There's not really any discussion of where the wives came from, and the biblical scholars I know are divided on the subject: the literalists believe that the wives were their sisters, and the rest believe it's an allegory and not to be taken literally.
That said, I don't really get along with Yahweh, nor with the notion that he's a supreme and divine being. If you concede his existence, he strikes me as a rather petty, cliquish, and vindictive god who deliberately tries to keep his followers down by discouraging them from seeking certain kinds of knowledge. Certainly not a deity worthy of my respect, let alone my worship. There are much more interesting, and believable, deities in other faiths that I'd rather spend time with, if it were a choice I had to make.
"modern man" refers to the species H. Sapiens, which has been around for almost 200,000 years, and has been developing tools and technology for about 50,000 years. While there have been pronounced differences in things like height over the last 50,000 years (or even the last 1,000 years), those are mostly due to improved nutrition and medicine, not changes to the genetic structure or the development of a new species. Assuming you're fertile and could travel in time, you could have a child with a human from 200,000 years ago and have a perfectly viable baby that, given modern medicine and nutrition, would grow up to be just as tall/healthy as any modern child.
As another poster stated, however, it's a tautology to say that modern man interbred with our evolutionary ancestors. Given that I am alive today, it's a given that at least some of my ancestors bred with other ancestors.... we didn't all pop out of the gods' foreheads.
They're more likely to declare that ARM-based platforms are low-end cloud devices, and advise people who want Office on it to buy a sub to Office Live. http://www.officelive.com/en-us/
That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the more I read about Windows 8, the more I think it's a step in Microsoft's eventual plan to remove the ability to run arbitrary code at all on the OS. They look at what Apple has with iOS, and want the same for their own software. I would prefer to be able to run my own code on my own system, but most users don't really care, they just want something that works. It's a lot easier for Microsoft to only have to write a browser that follows standards (insert joke about them taking 17 years and counting) for each platform, and then simply design their programs to follow those web standards than it is for them to cross-compile their programs and redesign their UIs for multiple platforms and architectures. Truthfully, all Win8 needs to be productive on a tablet is a decent HTML5-capable browser and an input method that doesn't make you want to pull your hair out.