But they don't have anywhere near that level of interest or questions for my Argentinian or Indian friends, besides some awkward small talk ("ah yes, Argentina, you are neighbors with Chile, right?").
Actually I agree with what you said and initially over stated my case to make a point, to ironically contrast the post I quoted and partly to stimulate a response. Though I did expect my comment to be marked as flame-bait and drowned under a wave of patriotic hate, which in my mind would have proved my point, but it appears rather pleasantly I was actually quite wrong and the majority of the challenges to my overstated comment were reasonable and factual.
why do you care so much about random other countries?
This is an exceptionally 'American' statement that reinforces a rather negative stereotype about ignorance and moral detachment towards the rest of the world. To 95.5 percent of the worlds population, the USA is just another 'random country'.
Someone who cared about islanders would suggest they actually solve their problems (in the event those problems actually happen) by building some small seawalls or other simple structures to deal with a modest rise in sea levels. Whining and making ridiculous and destructive spectacles is useless and childish.
Limiting the areas the locals are allowed to fish to protect coral reefs is hardly a good example of government oppression. It's merely a publicity stunt to raise awareness of their plight which advertising their nation for international tourism.
Your saying that one of the poorest countries in the world would be able to exist below sea level on tiny flat islands without contaminating their fresh water supplies by building walls? Please provide more details about these magic walls and how high and thick you think they will need to be, what materials and how 100,000 fishermen could afford it?
Abolutely, then we can find the secret passage way we always suspected was behind the bookcase!
Though I'm not sure totally how Anne Frank would have responded to this technology.
>they should be fined so heavily as to send a clear message about 'selective filtering' due to political or religious (lets be honest, here) reasons.
Not sure I agree with you. Reading between the lines I get "Marketing firm lays the censorship card when falling foul of spam filter". I hope they get laughed out of court, if spam filters become suable as illegal censorship we may be back on the road to endlessly reading about penis enlargement and 28 million unclaimed tax free dollars from a deposed Nigerian dictator or how we can even loose 50 pounds of fat an hour using this weird old tip (I'm guessing sharp scissors and a hoover).
Because very few people are forced to use Apple products, but plenty of people are forced to use MS products...
I would beg to differ. Taking a random example, you cant use an ipod without installing endless Apple crap on your computer. I was forced to install quick time and iTunes and they came with other programs that auto run in the background and the updater tried repeatedly to sneakily install Safari and God knows what else. So taking one of the many iPod models, the iPod touch, thats an esimated 45 million people who have been forced to use Apple software products, hardly very few and thats just one of potentially thousands of product examples. http://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/06/total-ipod-touch-sales-estimated-at-over-45-million/
To quote the article "Future devices will constantly learn about who you are, how you live, work and play."
what they forget to add is that "Future devices will then sell all this information on to marketing firms, government agencies and your future employers."
Already my phone beams commercials to me because I want to use, for example the camera flash as a light, something that was until recently a standard addition function of almost every phone.
I find it slightly offputting that as the expense of these phones ramps up, so do the contract terms and you can end up with an out dated phone for years.
Though its nice idea of combining all your portable and home technologies into one easily losable device, it seems an increasing number of people actually gaining more devices, on old school Nokia 3310and such for phone calls and iPhones or Androids as nice toys but ultimately crap phones.
Admittedly phones have come a long way since my trusty Nokia 3310 (which still works) however if phones continue to improve over the next ten years at the same rate as they have over the last, I predict phones will have the processing power of NASA, be able to transform into a car and drive you to where you want to go before you even know you want to go there and have a battery life measurable only in milliseconds.
You would think more focus would have been on shaped gaming mice, which are almost exclusively made for righties.
I have to agree with this post. Left handed gaming mice and keyboards are all but non-existent. I eventually found a gaming mouse that had a neutral shape and buttons for both lefties and righties and yet with fundamental design problems, mouse skipping and constant locking on either X or Y access. The mouse, a Razor Lachesis turned out to be only slightly more useful as a mouse than a very expensive brick. Damn I wish I could find my receipt for that plastic lump of garbage. I have searched a few times and never seen a left handed gaming keyboard, though some gimmicks claim to be left handed friendly by allowing detachment of the gaming controls, although the layout of the buttons means you would need surgery to remove your thumb and reattach it on the other side of your hand.
It's not just hardware, games such as Dead Space for the PC were largely unplayable by left handed people. I remember just about every game I owned on ZX spectrum had redefinable keys and yet EA pulls out a game that I calculate takes up roughly 18 million times the storage space of the largest spectrum game that fails to present such a luxury and forces left handed players to play using right handed keyboard controls. That was the last time I was foolish enough buy PC version of a multi platform title from EA I hasten to add.
Some analysis of that: Position (where we are right now) we rank 1st, let's say.
Good post although many Americans claim to live in the greatest country in the world I challenge firstly what they actually mean by that and secondly how they come to this conclusion given that only a suspected 22% of Americans even have a passport (http://www.theexpeditioner.com/2010/02/17/how-many-americans-have-a-passport-2/)
For me I think that quality of life would rank pretty highly in my choice of the greatest country to live in. http://www.tripbase.com/blog/top-10-happiest-countries-in-the-world/
And to offer an opinion from a differing source, http://www.financialjesus.com/how-to-get-rich/top-10-happiest-countries/
I make the proposal that perhaps Denmark is the greatest country in the world. Anyone here that has resided in both Denmark and the USA that is happy to either confirm or deny this?
I note with little surprise that the UK where I live and the USA are both not even in the top ten.
Before we discovered...say... other galaxies. Did they not exist anyway? There was up until that point no scientific evidence that they or anything like them existed. Did they *poof* into existence when we suddenly found evidence?
At no point do I or many other scientifically minded people claim knowledge of all that exists (though I certainly cannot speak for all), we merely require some form of evidence. There are many things suspected of existing that as yet have neither been proven nor disproven and we can call these conjectures. Until they are proven or disproven we enjoy the freedom to believe or doubt these conjectures as we see fit.
Conjectures are very different from scientific theories, such as the Theory of Electricity, which can have undeniable amounts of evidence supporting them but they will always remain theories as only in pure mathamatics can you prove something as an absolute certainty.
In my opinion, religion can at best be compared to a conjecture, it is an explanation of how things came to be but one that both demands very radical changes to our lifestyles and also one that contradicts a lot of scientific theory. With no evidence to support it and plenty of evidence against it, I see no problem with disregarding the hypothesis until credible evidence is offered.
Sadly its always the way that religions get special privileges, their own schools, shops, restaurants, laws and now even search engines. If you run a search on Google for the Truth about Evolution you are presented with religious propaganda sites, it sure would be nice to be able to filter out all that crap. I would happily bet a lot of money that if an atheist search engine was set up, religious sites such as these truth about evolution sites would all be registering themselves as scientific sites.
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
Nonsense! Rejecting superstition on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence is not blind faith, it is purely logical. Would religious people accept being labeled as blind faith atheists of other deities such as Thor or Zeus? As an example, Christians reject belief in countless deities, is it really so unreasonable to merely subtract one more deity from that list without being labelled a blind faith fanatic of atheism?
Why is this suggestion of jamming devices modded Troll? After all its the only cost effective way to prevent both external network penetration as well as student collusion via short band radio transmissions such as bluetooth. The angry post below post using radio jammers being a federal offence is misleading as unless I am mistaken, it is not an offense in the USA if you get permission prior to doing this.
There is big business in cheating to get a degree these with many online 'companies' offering to write essays (even your thesis) and talk you through your exam via wireless. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8493132.stm http://www.ukessays.com/press.php
I'm not sure if game development in Europe is just that far behind the times, but it appears to be something one would have played on the Commodore 64, yet they want real money for it and their website doesn't even have a real demo of it,.
Your starting an argument knowing in advance from the previous post that 60k people already disagree with you. Also ignoring the fact that on that very website you talk about, you can play the previous version of it for free
I proudly did not RTFA. I always kill the tab when ever I'm confronted with one of these damnable pages that hold a few lines of text and a small picture before you have to click next and wait ages while they refresh endless flash advertisments, tracking cookies and sling the sperm of satan onto your hard disk. Allowing marketing firms to grind your browsing speed to a halt and slowly entice you along with a trickling breadcrumb is not something I'm keen on supporting. Still this one is relatively short, but it's the principle that matters to me.
It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single other system has any noticable effect.
You make a lot of claims but really need to back them up with something or present your statements as opinions rather than facts. For example: "Year-to-year movements in homicide rates are large, and the effects of even major changes in execution policy are barely detectable" This I have taken from (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/01/decision_analys_2.html). which rather contradicts your draconian proposal.
What bothers me most about this review is that the reviewer walked into the cinema having already seen and hated the film and full knowing he will hate it again. Why should we value what this guy has to say? A large part of the re-release was the fact that places like IMAX was fully booked out the entire time Avatar was showing right up until the moment IMAX was contractually obliged to change to the next feature of waterfalls or dolphins or whatever it is they show these days. The release is for people who wanted to see the film in such environments but couldn't last time around and adding some deleted scenes is just further enticement.
My biggest worry about the review is that this reviewer, Ryan Lambie might actually be getting paid for his jaded opinions.
Slashdot Mirror
But they don't have anywhere near that level of interest or questions for my Argentinian or Indian friends, besides some awkward small talk ("ah yes, Argentina, you are neighbors with Chile, right?").
Actually I agree with what you said and initially over stated my case to make a point, to ironically contrast the post I quoted and partly to stimulate a response. Though I did expect my comment to be marked as flame-bait and drowned under a wave of patriotic hate, which in my mind would have proved my point, but it appears rather pleasantly I was actually quite wrong and the majority of the challenges to my overstated comment were reasonable and factual.
why do you care so much about random other countries?
This is an exceptionally 'American' statement that reinforces a rather negative stereotype about ignorance and moral detachment towards the rest of the world. To 95.5 percent of the worlds population, the USA is just another 'random country'.
Whats the odds that there are people quietly trying things like this on humans somewhere?
Someone who cared about islanders would suggest they actually solve their problems (in the event those problems actually happen) by building some small seawalls or other simple structures to deal with a modest rise in sea levels. Whining and making ridiculous and destructive spectacles is useless and childish.
Limiting the areas the locals are allowed to fish to protect coral reefs is hardly a good example of government oppression. It's merely a publicity stunt to raise awareness of their plight which advertising their nation for international tourism.
Your saying that one of the poorest countries in the world would be able to exist below sea level on tiny flat islands without contaminating their fresh water supplies by building walls? Please provide more details about these magic walls and how high and thick you think they will need to be, what materials and how 100,000 fishermen could afford it?
Abolutely, then we can find the secret passage way we always suspected was behind the bookcase!
Though I'm not sure totally how Anne Frank would have responded to this technology.
>they should be fined so heavily as to send a clear message about 'selective filtering' due to political or religious (lets be honest, here) reasons.
Not sure I agree with you. Reading between the lines I get "Marketing firm lays the censorship card when falling foul of spam filter".
I hope they get laughed out of court, if spam filters become suable as illegal censorship we may be back on the road to endlessly reading about penis enlargement and 28 million unclaimed tax free dollars from a deposed Nigerian dictator or how we can even loose 50 pounds of fat an hour using this weird old tip (I'm guessing sharp scissors and a hoover).
Because very few people are forced to use Apple products, but plenty of people are forced to use MS products...
I would beg to differ. Taking a random example, you cant use an ipod without installing endless Apple crap on your computer. I was forced to install quick time and iTunes and they came with other programs that auto run in the background and the updater tried repeatedly to sneakily install Safari and God knows what else. So taking one of the many iPod models, the iPod touch, thats an esimated 45 million people who have been forced to use Apple software products, hardly very few and thats just one of potentially thousands of product examples.
http://www.macrumors.com/2010/09/06/total-ipod-touch-sales-estimated-at-over-45-million/
To quote the article "Future devices will constantly learn about who you are, how you live, work and play."
what they forget to add is that "Future devices will then sell all this information on to marketing firms, government agencies and your future employers."
Already my phone beams commercials to me because I want to use, for example the camera flash as a light, something that was until recently a standard addition function of almost every phone.
I find it slightly offputting that as the expense of these phones ramps up, so do the contract terms and you can end up with an out dated phone for years.
Though its nice idea of combining all your portable and home technologies into one easily losable device, it seems an increasing number of people actually gaining more devices, on old school Nokia 3310and such for phone calls and iPhones or Androids as nice toys but ultimately crap phones.
Admittedly phones have come a long way since my trusty Nokia 3310 (which still works) however if phones continue to improve over the next ten years at the same rate as they have over the last, I predict phones will have the processing power of NASA, be able to transform into a car and drive you to where you want to go before you even know you want to go there and have a battery life measurable only in milliseconds.
You would think more focus would have been on shaped gaming mice, which are almost exclusively made for righties.
I have to agree with this post. Left handed gaming mice and keyboards are all but non-existent. I eventually found a gaming mouse that had a neutral shape and buttons for both lefties and righties and yet with fundamental design problems, mouse skipping and constant locking on either X or Y access. The mouse, a Razor Lachesis turned out to be only slightly more useful as a mouse than a very expensive brick. Damn I wish I could find my receipt for that plastic lump of garbage.
I have searched a few times and never seen a left handed gaming keyboard, though some gimmicks claim to be left handed friendly by allowing detachment of the gaming controls, although the layout of the buttons means you would need surgery to remove your thumb and reattach it on the other side of your hand.
It's not just hardware, games such as Dead Space for the PC were largely unplayable by left handed people. I remember just about every game I owned on ZX spectrum had redefinable keys and yet EA pulls out a game that I calculate takes up roughly 18 million times the storage space of the largest spectrum game that fails to present such a luxury and forces left handed players to play using right handed keyboard controls. That was the last time I was foolish enough buy PC version of a multi platform title from EA I hasten to add.
Some analysis of that: Position (where we are right now) we rank 1st, let's say.
Good post although many Americans claim to live in the greatest country in the world I challenge firstly what they actually mean by that and secondly how they come to this conclusion given that only a suspected 22% of Americans even have a passport (http://www.theexpeditioner.com/2010/02/17/how-many-americans-have-a-passport-2/)
For me I think that quality of life would rank pretty highly in my choice of the greatest country to live in.
http://www.tripbase.com/blog/top-10-happiest-countries-in-the-world/
And to offer an opinion from a differing source, http://www.financialjesus.com/how-to-get-rich/top-10-happiest-countries/
I make the proposal that perhaps Denmark is the greatest country in the world. Anyone here that has resided in both Denmark and the USA that is happy to either confirm or deny this?
I note with little surprise that the UK where I live and the USA are both not even in the top ten.
Before we discovered...say... other galaxies. Did they not exist anyway? There was up until that point no scientific evidence that they or anything like them existed. Did they *poof* into existence when we suddenly found evidence?
At no point do I or many other scientifically minded people claim knowledge of all that exists (though I certainly cannot speak for all), we merely require some form of evidence. There are many things suspected of existing that as yet have neither been proven nor disproven and we can call these conjectures. Until they are proven or disproven we enjoy the freedom to believe or doubt these conjectures as we see fit.
Conjectures are very different from scientific theories, such as the Theory of Electricity, which can have undeniable amounts of evidence supporting them but they will always remain theories as only in pure mathamatics can you prove something as an absolute certainty.
In my opinion, religion can at best be compared to a conjecture, it is an explanation of how things came to be but one that both demands very radical changes to our lifestyles and also one that contradicts a lot of scientific theory. With no evidence to support it and plenty of evidence against it, I see no problem with disregarding the hypothesis until credible evidence is offered.
Anyone else find this could become a potentially deeply worrying form of censorship? A weapon to use against science.
Sadly its always the way that religions get special privileges, their own schools, shops, restaurants, laws and now even search engines. If you run a search on Google for the Truth about Evolution you are presented with religious propaganda sites, it sure would be nice to be able to filter out all that crap. I would happily bet a lot of money that if an atheist search engine was set up, religious sites such as these truth about evolution sites would all be registering themselves as scientific sites.
Every atheist accepts that there is no deity on blind faith and without further investigation.
Nonsense! Rejecting superstition on the grounds that there is no scientific evidence is not blind faith, it is purely logical. Would religious people accept being labeled as blind faith atheists of other deities such as Thor or Zeus? As an example, Christians reject belief in countless deities, is it really so unreasonable to merely subtract one more deity from that list without being labelled a blind faith fanatic of atheism?
Why is this suggestion of jamming devices modded Troll? After all its the only cost effective way to prevent both external network penetration as well as student collusion via short band radio transmissions such as bluetooth. The angry post below post using radio jammers being a federal offence is misleading as unless I am mistaken, it is not an offense in the USA if you get permission prior to doing this.
There is big business in cheating to get a degree these with many online 'companies' offering to write essays (even your thesis) and talk you through your exam via wireless.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8493132.stm
http://www.ukessays.com/press.php
Identify yourself and take control of the domain name.
This seems rather risky without legal consultation. It could be used to further incriminate you.
I'm not sure if game development in Europe is just that far behind the times, but it appears to be something one would have played on the Commodore 64, yet they want real money for it and their website doesn't even have a real demo of it, .
Your starting an argument knowing in advance from the previous post that 60k people already disagree with you. Also ignoring the fact that on that very website you talk about, you can play the previous version of it for free
I proudly did not RTFA. I always kill the tab when ever I'm confronted with one of these damnable pages that hold a few lines of text and a small picture before you have to click next and wait ages while they refresh endless flash advertisments, tracking cookies and sling the sperm of satan onto your hard disk. Allowing marketing firms to grind your browsing speed to a halt and slowly entice you along with a trickling breadcrumb is not something I'm keen on supporting. Still this one is relatively short, but it's the principle that matters to me.
It is a sad fact that the ONLY rehabilitation that works on criminals is a bullet through the brain. Not a single other system has any noticable effect.
You make a lot of claims but really need to back them up with something or present your statements as opinions rather than facts. For example: "Year-to-year movements in homicide rates are large, and the effects of even major changes in execution policy are barely detectable" This I have taken from (http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/01/decision_analys_2.html). which rather contradicts your draconian proposal.
Its like they say. Girlfriends are for people who cannot afford Xbox live memberships.
"Always look on the bright side of life"
It will be hard to treat yourself to a little porn. The screen would keep on shifting up or down.
Anyone else concerned by their use of the word 'treatment' rather than cure? After all you can only sell a cure once.
What bothers me most about this review is that the reviewer walked into the cinema having already seen and hated the film and full knowing he will hate it again. Why should we value what this guy has to say? A large part of the re-release was the fact that places like IMAX was fully booked out the entire time Avatar was showing right up until the moment IMAX was contractually obliged to change to the next feature of waterfalls or dolphins or whatever it is they show these days. The release is for people who wanted to see the film in such environments but couldn't last time around and adding some deleted scenes is just further enticement.
My biggest worry about the review is that this reviewer, Ryan Lambie might actually be getting paid for his jaded opinions.