If you even for a second believe the civilian death number, you are beyond naive. Afghanistan is a hell of a land, and solid rule is about the only thing that keeps people alive.
NATO broke the rule and installed local warlords, who in turns basically started to do what they did before soviets and taleban - rape their own people. I would be quite surprised if end result of civilian deaths is not going to be quite close in terms of deaths even though NATO likes to make a show of avoiding hitting civilians (but if they get caught in a crossfire, or killed by NATO stooge warlords, no need to count).
Then there's of course the hidden deaths of soldiers, due to oursourcing. If you didn't know, NATO nowadays likes to hide casualties by outsourcing many critical and dangerous jobs to civilian contractors. People who bring in fuel for example, and those who guard them are civilians. They're not in ANY of your statistics because they're not local civilians killed by NATO (which is what wikipedia counts). I know several people who work in that business, and they are pretty truthful about it when under influence - you retire if you survive about 7-10 years. Survival rate is around 70-80%. It's a high pay, high risk job and it's where the real casualty numbers lie.
You may have missed the fact that while roadside bombs are in news a lot, Karzai and NATO control pretty much Karzai's palace and their bases. And embassy region in Kabul, well most of the time as recent assault on it has shown. If mojahedeen, or taliban as we call them now want to blast the shit out of a small military outpost, they will shell it with mortars in addition to machinegun fire and such. They have a massive presence on the ground, far more powerful then that of NATO because of its transient nature, just like they had during Red Army period.
Which is in fact 1:1 scenario to that which Red Army encountered in its campaign. Weapons were slightly different back then, but realities of war were essentially the same. Everyone hated the invaders and wanted to stab them in the back whenever that was possible. War was not so much in the trenches as in the "secure" areas, as soon as local informants told resistance that bulk of forces is not here. Just like it is now.
Intriguing how the slaves shipped to Europe are completely ignored. Also intriguing how the fact that much of Africa was in fact forcibly converted to Christianity at that point and the fact that you're trying to pretend that current population split on religion and one that existed before the major islamic push in the last two centuries are actually the same.
Either placebo effect, or you have a serious health problem. Both companies use essentially the same tech after patent issues were sorted out years ago. Responsiveness is largely the same. You can set customizable "touch zones" on even my crappy 350€ HP laptop at will.
Seriously, stop comparing modern macs to seven-ten year old laptops.
I think your history teachers have really glossed over the whole slave trade part during colonisation era. It made muslim-done enslaving look like employing unionised people.
Bullshit. Mac trackpad is exactly the same as most other trackpads on modern machines, except that it's missing a button. Which shills somehow advertise as an "advantage".
There used to be a time, many years ago when apple held some key patents to multitouch and they were the only one with decent implementation of multitouch on trackpads. These times are long past us, and pretending they're still here is quite silly.
Probably because mac laptops are quite subpar for windows. They're designed for a different OS from get go, including but not limited to silly trackpad with only one button (forcing you do to some quite imho uncomfortable gestures to get right click), slightly different keyboard, etc.
In general, if you're like most people and want an x86 windows laptop, you buy from one of the companies offering one. You'll get a significantly better product for significantly less money. And you get a whole lot of more choices in what these computers will actually include.
Haven't had one break on me yet. My last acer in fact "broke" by having hinges that hold monitor to the body break off. The power/signal cable is still intact so it still works. I just have to prop the monitor part against something. Makes for a great entertainment unit in the bath, since I don't have to care about it breaking down, and been like that for over a year now.
Funnily, it still works, even with all the humidity. Cooling system seems to have finally got borked with dust being wet so it runs quite hot, but since it's a bath where it's sitting on a wooden shelf running across my tub, I don't really care if CPU is at over 90C.
Current cheapo HP trodding nicely with no problems as well. And my previous dell also still works (I think it's going 10 years on now) but that thing is just too slow to run anything modern. Funnily it has the best laptop screen I've seen to date (~14", 1600x1200). I would actually love to get a screen like that on a modern laptop but alas, these cost a small mint and I find these 350ish laptops to work just as well.
Quite a few shops offer custom jobs for the casing for reasonable prices nowadays. You can have her laptop shell have images of barbie in a pink prom dress if she wants.
You're going to have to tell us what happened to all the christian massacres that easily trumped arabs both numerically and in terms of quality (as in being quite sophisticated about the ways used to kill people). No one was as good at brutally slaughtering people in the name of the God (and his installed representative on earth, the blessed king/tsar/pope/etc) as fellow christians. Hell, the colonialist period and its massacres alone probably killed more people then arabs during entire history of islam. That's not even touching dark ages, which were full of both internal as well as external savagery. Ever wondered why we use arabic numbers? Because when islam was the progressive religion driving greatest scientific minds of its time, christian Europe was hell bent on killing and enslaving as many muslims as possible. Crusading was a great way to earn money, fame and reputation. Read about that stuff sometime.
Islam has a reeeeeeeeeeally long way to go if it actually wants to even compete for #1. Even discounting WW1 and WW2, christians have long held the trophy, and they're not going to be relinquishing it any time soon.
It's fame is for being the only country that was assigned as a "client country" in Molotov-Ribbentrop that didn't get annexed in spite of two of some of the biggest military campaigns of the world war 2, including the single biggest concentration of artillery per kilometer of frontline.
1.Not nearly every Pacific and Indian ocean nation is an island with low surface level. 2. This has happened before countless times in countless nations. I simply presented one of the most visible and well-researched examples of last decade. It was this visible and well-researched because argument behind bio-ethanol was environment sustainability and it required subsidies to be profitable. As a result, research was conducted by EU, US, Japan and several other nations who chose to subsidise bio-ethanol under these promises only to find out there was a nasty catch that made it a really hard sell to local taxpayers/voters when news broke out. 3. They do not have food because it's not grown locally. It's not grown locally because large corporations buy out land and put cash corps instead of food crops. You can't really grow palm oil palms on small scale. It's the classic cash crop that requires investment to plant and take care of. As a result, local farmers cannot really grow it.
When this low-hanging fruit was axed, companies with already-built installations to process palm oil into biodiesel moved to axing rainforests to put up plantations instead.
Right and wrong. The current system in most countries is for media devices. Not hard drives.
That's what folks in verkkokauppa.com said when they argued against, and what they saw after the payment scheme was implemented. Their sales of external HDs crashed, essentially overnight and they don't even advertise them much anymore (they used to have one for sale almost every week).
At the same time many foreign sellers sell them for same prices.
Also the lack of price difference is most likely explained by model of your choice in the comparison. I have the drive in quesiton, and it's no longer manufactured, and hasn't been for a while (it's over a year old model). That's likely why hintaseuranta.fi has only found one copy of the drive and that's in a shop that has very bad reputation for keeping site info up to date in terms of availability and amazon lists as "2 remaining in stock" for 3rd party seller.
Here is the current generation that is actually available from retailers. Price difference is very noticeable (and unlike your comparison which lists two different models, I'm listing the same model: STAC2000200
Most of the decisions, treaties and so on must be ratified by European Parliament. A great example of functionality of it is approval process of ACTA. Governments were for it, and several even ratified it. Then it came to light that majority of MEPs are against ratifying the act, and as such any and all government ratification was moot.
Protest movement across Europe got a LOT of steam from this piece of news, and soon governments that were about to ratify the agreement, facing two pronged assault from both its citizens (whom they didn't care about much before) and elected government body that could scuttle the entire agreement regardless of their decisions started to back pedal on their ratification processes hard. Suddenly news all over Europe went from "there is no news about ACTA ratification, it's coming and that's the way it should be" to "holy shit, MEPs are telling local governments they won't ratify, parliament's person responsible for working on ACTA resigned from his role citing severe problems with ACTA and we had actual protests on the streets for a while now which we conveniently forgot to report until now".
So yeah, it's powerless until really big decisions come in. Then it has little choice on telling Commission about exact wordings of directives passed, but it can veto them. But when big decisions that many oppose have to be ruled on, Parliament is a force to be reckoned with.
Another subject you may remember Parliament for scuttling is the Patent Act, which was when certain crowd tried to push software patents in EU. It sailed through Commission and local governments, and crashed and burned in Parliament to an extent where supporters essentially had to withdraw the package because in the way parliament was gutting it (as in something that had a chance to actually pass), it would end up more free "as in freedom" then much of current legislation in many member states was.
Helping the ignorant understand the link: There was a huge problem with palm oil plantations replacing food crops in several Pacific countries causing local hunger.
Palm oil was used to produce bioethanol, which was back then hailed as the replacement of gasoline. For example EU subsidised this bioethanol production with significant sums to facilitate its introduction. These subsidies were quickly cancelled after aforementioned problem came to light.
Case to point: cash crops replacing food crops causes local hunger, which was the original argument.
You may want to tell this hypothesis of yours to (formerly) hungry folks in Pacific who were starving because of ethanol drive in the 1st world some time ago. I'm sure they'd be interested.
This would be true if there was any serious competition to facebook in its field and all those people could go to someone else.
At this point however, there really isn't such a competitor. Facebook, by far and large IS the social media in most of the first world and big around the rest. There are some localized (usually by language) other similar services, but these stand little to no chance of challenging facebook outside their region.
While obvious flamebait, the post does have merit in that judaism and its successor religions like christianity and islam glorify suffering as a path to God.
Considering that its in direct conflict with our human nature to seek pleasure, it's not very surprising that reactions of those who choose suffering and then see others enjoy themselves around them are often violent. Similar reference: the sheer amount of people who are violently anti-gay that tend to end up coming out of the closet as homosexuals later in their lives.
It just seems that it's the natural defence mechanism when denying something we actually want is to attempt to destroy those who live the way we would want to live.
Problem is, their numbers are already stagnanet where valuable users are - in the wealthy first world countries. They're not longer a fast growing company there.
They are growing in developing countries, but per user value there is miniscule in comparison, which also doesn't bode well for company value.
I paid 350€ for mine. It's not "ultraportable" though, it's a 15" (because I didn't want a smaller model). HP635 shell with e-450, 4 gigs of ram and 500gb hd.
I don't know about any synthetic tests, but I can play LoL and SC2 for about three hours on my half a year old very actively used battery with external 3g stick and external mouse plugged into USB as well as BT headset and screen set to ~90% brightness and wifi on with "minimal power savings" option selected in w7 for it.
Frankly, intel's offerings without ION simply do not run these games. Well, technically they do, but they are not even remotely playable. On my laptop, it's very comfortable in low/medium in SC2 and medium/high LoL.
And before you explode in rage about synthetic benchmarks, I know from experience - my mother wanted one of those netbooks you're talking about, and since she's not in need of any serious 3d graphics, I got her intel lappy instead without ION, and I have tried running these games to see how they would run. Her netbook has a lower screen resolution too, so it was under less stress rendering the games.
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If you even for a second believe the civilian death number, you are beyond naive. Afghanistan is a hell of a land, and solid rule is about the only thing that keeps people alive.
NATO broke the rule and installed local warlords, who in turns basically started to do what they did before soviets and taleban - rape their own people. I would be quite surprised if end result of civilian deaths is not going to be quite close in terms of deaths even though NATO likes to make a show of avoiding hitting civilians (but if they get caught in a crossfire, or killed by NATO stooge warlords, no need to count).
Then there's of course the hidden deaths of soldiers, due to oursourcing. If you didn't know, NATO nowadays likes to hide casualties by outsourcing many critical and dangerous jobs to civilian contractors. People who bring in fuel for example, and those who guard them are civilians. They're not in ANY of your statistics because they're not local civilians killed by NATO (which is what wikipedia counts). I know several people who work in that business, and they are pretty truthful about it when under influence - you retire if you survive about 7-10 years. Survival rate is around 70-80%. It's a high pay, high risk job and it's where the real casualty numbers lie.
You may have missed the fact that while roadside bombs are in news a lot, Karzai and NATO control pretty much Karzai's palace and their bases. And embassy region in Kabul, well most of the time as recent assault on it has shown. If mojahedeen, or taliban as we call them now want to blast the shit out of a small military outpost, they will shell it with mortars in addition to machinegun fire and such. They have a massive presence on the ground, far more powerful then that of NATO because of its transient nature, just like they had during Red Army period.
Which is in fact 1:1 scenario to that which Red Army encountered in its campaign. Weapons were slightly different back then, but realities of war were essentially the same. Everyone hated the invaders and wanted to stab them in the back whenever that was possible. War was not so much in the trenches as in the "secure" areas, as soon as local informants told resistance that bulk of forces is not here. Just like it is now.
Intriguing how the slaves shipped to Europe are completely ignored. Also intriguing how the fact that much of Africa was in fact forcibly converted to Christianity at that point and the fact that you're trying to pretend that current population split on religion and one that existed before the major islamic push in the last two centuries are actually the same.
Either placebo effect, or you have a serious health problem. Both companies use essentially the same tech after patent issues were sorted out years ago. Responsiveness is largely the same. You can set customizable "touch zones" on even my crappy 350€ HP laptop at will.
Seriously, stop comparing modern macs to seven-ten year old laptops.
I think your history teachers have really glossed over the whole slave trade part during colonisation era. It made muslim-done enslaving look like employing unionised people.
Bullshit. Mac trackpad is exactly the same as most other trackpads on modern machines, except that it's missing a button. Which shills somehow advertise as an "advantage".
There used to be a time, many years ago when apple held some key patents to multitouch and they were the only one with decent implementation of multitouch on trackpads. These times are long past us, and pretending they're still here is quite silly.
Probably because mac laptops are quite subpar for windows. They're designed for a different OS from get go, including but not limited to silly trackpad with only one button (forcing you do to some quite imho uncomfortable gestures to get right click), slightly different keyboard, etc.
In general, if you're like most people and want an x86 windows laptop, you buy from one of the companies offering one. You'll get a significantly better product for significantly less money. And you get a whole lot of more choices in what these computers will actually include.
Haven't had one break on me yet. My last acer in fact "broke" by having hinges that hold monitor to the body break off. The power/signal cable is still intact so it still works. I just have to prop the monitor part against something. Makes for a great entertainment unit in the bath, since I don't have to care about it breaking down, and been like that for over a year now.
Funnily, it still works, even with all the humidity. Cooling system seems to have finally got borked with dust being wet so it runs quite hot, but since it's a bath where it's sitting on a wooden shelf running across my tub, I don't really care if CPU is at over 90C.
Current cheapo HP trodding nicely with no problems as well. And my previous dell also still works (I think it's going 10 years on now) but that thing is just too slow to run anything modern. Funnily it has the best laptop screen I've seen to date (~14", 1600x1200). I would actually love to get a screen like that on a modern laptop but alas, these cost a small mint and I find these 350ish laptops to work just as well.
Quite a few shops offer custom jobs for the casing for reasonable prices nowadays. You can have her laptop shell have images of barbie in a pink prom dress if she wants.
You're essentially arguing that USSR won its Afghan war.
You're going to have to tell us what happened to all the christian massacres that easily trumped arabs both numerically and in terms of quality (as in being quite sophisticated about the ways used to kill people). No one was as good at brutally slaughtering people in the name of the God (and his installed representative on earth, the blessed king/tsar/pope/etc) as fellow christians. Hell, the colonialist period and its massacres alone probably killed more people then arabs during entire history of islam. That's not even touching dark ages, which were full of both internal as well as external savagery. Ever wondered why we use arabic numbers? Because when islam was the progressive religion driving greatest scientific minds of its time, christian Europe was hell bent on killing and enslaving as many muslims as possible. Crusading was a great way to earn money, fame and reputation. Read about that stuff sometime.
Islam has a reeeeeeeeeeally long way to go if it actually wants to even compete for #1. Even discounting WW1 and WW2, christians have long held the trophy, and they're not going to be relinquishing it any time soon.
Only if you advance from the east. Else it's a slap in the face.
It's fame is for being the only country that was assigned as a "client country" in Molotov-Ribbentrop that didn't get annexed in spite of two of some of the biggest military campaigns of the world war 2, including the single biggest concentration of artillery per kilometer of frontline.
And then, there's of course this: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/suzymushu/3009425719/
(Not my flickr, just the first hit on images.google.com for "finland be afraid").
1.Not nearly every Pacific and Indian ocean nation is an island with low surface level.
2. This has happened before countless times in countless nations. I simply presented one of the most visible and well-researched examples of last decade. It was this visible and well-researched because argument behind bio-ethanol was environment sustainability and it required subsidies to be profitable. As a result, research was conducted by EU, US, Japan and several other nations who chose to subsidise bio-ethanol under these promises only to find out there was a nasty catch that made it a really hard sell to local taxpayers/voters when news broke out.
3. They do not have food because it's not grown locally. It's not grown locally because large corporations buy out land and put cash corps instead of food crops. You can't really grow palm oil palms on small scale. It's the classic cash crop that requires investment to plant and take care of. As a result, local farmers cannot really grow it.
When this low-hanging fruit was axed, companies with already-built installations to process palm oil into biodiesel moved to axing rainforests to put up plantations instead.
Right and wrong. The current system in most countries is for media devices. Not hard drives.
That's what folks in verkkokauppa.com said when they argued against, and what they saw after the payment scheme was implemented. Their sales of external HDs crashed, essentially overnight and they don't even advertise them much anymore (they used to have one for sale almost every week).
At the same time many foreign sellers sell them for same prices.
Also the lack of price difference is most likely explained by model of your choice in the comparison. I have the drive in quesiton, and it's no longer manufactured, and hasn't been for a while (it's over a year old model). That's likely why hintaseuranta.fi has only found one copy of the drive and that's in a shop that has very bad reputation for keeping site info up to date in terms of availability and amazon lists as "2 remaining in stock" for 3rd party seller.
Here is the current generation that is actually available from retailers. Price difference is very noticeable (and unlike your comparison which lists two different models, I'm listing the same model: STAC2000200
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-Goflex-Desk-3-5-inch-External/dp/B005ORY2SK/ref=pd_cp_computers_0 (89 GPB)
http://hintaseuranta.fi/tuote.aspx/427574 (cheapest at 161 EUR)
P.S. Pricerunner link is here but as usual pricerunner is out of date http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/pl/36-2632328/Hard-Drives/Seagate-FreeAgent-GoFlex-Desk-2TB-Compare-Prices
Most of the decisions, treaties and so on must be ratified by European Parliament. A great example of functionality of it is approval process of ACTA. Governments were for it, and several even ratified it. Then it came to light that majority of MEPs are against ratifying the act, and as such any and all government ratification was moot.
Protest movement across Europe got a LOT of steam from this piece of news, and soon governments that were about to ratify the agreement, facing two pronged assault from both its citizens (whom they didn't care about much before) and elected government body that could scuttle the entire agreement regardless of their decisions started to back pedal on their ratification processes hard. Suddenly news all over Europe went from "there is no news about ACTA ratification, it's coming and that's the way it should be" to "holy shit, MEPs are telling local governments they won't ratify, parliament's person responsible for working on ACTA resigned from his role citing severe problems with ACTA and we had actual protests on the streets for a while now which we conveniently forgot to report until now".
So yeah, it's powerless until really big decisions come in. Then it has little choice on telling Commission about exact wordings of directives passed, but it can veto them. But when big decisions that many oppose have to be ruled on, Parliament is a force to be reckoned with.
Another subject you may remember Parliament for scuttling is the Patent Act, which was when certain crowd tried to push software patents in EU. It sailed through Commission and local governments, and crashed and burned in Parliament to an extent where supporters essentially had to withdraw the package because in the way parliament was gutting it (as in something that had a chance to actually pass), it would end up more free "as in freedom" then much of current legislation in many member states was.
Helping the ignorant understand the link: There was a huge problem with palm oil plantations replacing food crops in several Pacific countries causing local hunger.
Palm oil was used to produce bioethanol, which was back then hailed as the replacement of gasoline. For example EU subsidised this bioethanol production with significant sums to facilitate its introduction. These subsidies were quickly cancelled after aforementioned problem came to light.
Case to point: cash crops replacing food crops causes local hunger, which was the original argument.
You may want to tell this hypothesis of yours to (formerly) hungry folks in Pacific who were starving because of ethanol drive in the 1st world some time ago. I'm sure they'd be interested.
You don't pay these fees. You order from foreign webshops instead.
Try mathematics.
And since we live in democratic countries, clearly piracy should be decriminalized.
Ah, yes, representative democracy and majority of MONEY. Never mind, carry on.
P.S. One start to wonder when one thinks about German Pirate Party and their direct democracy drive in relation to this piece of news.
This would be true if there was any serious competition to facebook in its field and all those people could go to someone else.
At this point however, there really isn't such a competitor. Facebook, by far and large IS the social media in most of the first world and big around the rest. There are some localized (usually by language) other similar services, but these stand little to no chance of challenging facebook outside their region.
While obvious flamebait, the post does have merit in that judaism and its successor religions like christianity and islam glorify suffering as a path to God.
Considering that its in direct conflict with our human nature to seek pleasure, it's not very surprising that reactions of those who choose suffering and then see others enjoy themselves around them are often violent. Similar reference: the sheer amount of people who are violently anti-gay that tend to end up coming out of the closet as homosexuals later in their lives.
It just seems that it's the natural defence mechanism when denying something we actually want is to attempt to destroy those who live the way we would want to live.
Problem is, their numbers are already stagnanet where valuable users are - in the wealthy first world countries. They're not longer a fast growing company there.
They are growing in developing countries, but per user value there is miniscule in comparison, which also doesn't bode well for company value.
I paid 350€ for mine. It's not "ultraportable" though, it's a 15" (because I didn't want a smaller model). HP635 shell with e-450, 4 gigs of ram and 500gb hd.
I don't know about any synthetic tests, but I can play LoL and SC2 for about three hours on my half a year old very actively used battery with external 3g stick and external mouse plugged into USB as well as BT headset and screen set to ~90% brightness and wifi on with "minimal power savings" option selected in w7 for it.
Frankly, intel's offerings without ION simply do not run these games. Well, technically they do, but they are not even remotely playable. On my laptop, it's very comfortable in low/medium in SC2 and medium/high LoL.
And before you explode in rage about synthetic benchmarks, I know from experience - my mother wanted one of those netbooks you're talking about, and since she's not in need of any serious 3d graphics, I got her intel lappy instead without ION, and I have tried running these games to see how they would run. Her netbook has a lower screen resolution too, so it was under less stress rendering the games.