This is no more about religious belief as it is about believing in freedom. Everyone believes you should be free to do with your body what you want, and everyone believes that murder should be wrong. The disagreement is when does "your body" become "their body". If you think you have an answer to that question, that defines which side of the line you are on.
Ok, so let us assume you are on neither side of the line, so you don't think you have an answer to that question. So you admit that both sides may be wrong. In that case, which side is safer to join from your conscience point of view. Is it better to deny women "right to their body" and be wrong, or is it better to allow killing of innocent unborns and be wrong?
For me the answer is clear. As somebody said, if you're not sure if poison is in the glass, do you risk drinking?
Cheers
Raf
P.S. There is this Australian pro-abortion bio-ethic, don't remember his name, but he is one of few pro-abortion people who really does the argument properly and logically correct, without attack on emotions. What he says is that as we don't know and probably won't know the answer to your question, and if we have any answer - it is just a point of view. So he changes the point of view radically and redefines humanity. And the result is that he considers killing an infant as same crime as killing a dog or a chimp. And though it is drastic, I like the way he thinks. If somebody agrees with abortion, especially late abortion, then being against killing even healthy newborns is hypocritical.
For MRAM to become a viable replacement for HDDs, it has to become as cheap as HDDs.
To become a viable replacement - yes. To become a viable addition - not quite. In fact with quite cheap 4GB flashroms I am surprised that this has not taken off yet - all software installed on flashrom with user files saved to HDD - no problem (or not much of a problem) with number of writes and all the benefit of fast boot times.
On the machine I am writing it on, I have fairly complete Debian installation, with almost full KDE, OpenOffice, Tex/LaTeX and all that is necessary for writing PhD thesis (gnuplot, octave etc.) - and still it is barely above 2GB. So, 4GB MRAM would be more than enough for me as a storage for the OS.
Well, I don't have much experience with upper management, but I have quite a lot of experience with female lower and middle managemers. I would say, just from gut feeling, on average they manage (heh, not intended pun;-) ) better than males, but "the distribution" has somehow a "long tail" - you meet from time to time female managers sooooo mean and stupid that it is just unbelievable. Hmm, now that I think of it, this tail stretches in both ways - all but one of the best managers I worked with are women as well!
Since these temperatures only occurs naturally in space, why not build a super, big cluster of these things, hook them up to a satallite and launch it into orbit.
Maybe because heat dissipation in space is poor? I know you can do magic with water evaporation under such low pressure to dissipate heat, but how much water would you need to send up there to provide cooling for reasonable time?
Me neither in China, neither in Russia, but pretty close -in Poland and we can buy movie-only DVDs, usually with original soundtrack, but sometimes only with Polish overvoice, for less than 8 euros. While not really cheap, it is affordable. And I have noticed, that now I spend more money on DVDs than before. I can rarely justify spending 30-40 Euros on one movie, however, I can easily justify spending 30-40 Euros monthly on a couple of DVDs of movies I would otherwise download from P2P.
And anyway, I still eagerly spend even 50 Euros for special packs like LotR's 4 disc edition.
So, anecdotical as it is, in my case reducing prices reduced piracy dramatically. And I know of a lot of people in Poland who also started to buy DVDs now in heaps.
Cheers
Raf
BTW, at least in one case (Anime, Akira or GitS, don't remember) translation on this bargain CD was from a guy who did it for pirate divx and then got paid to include it on legal CD!
Wow, a real atheist fossil from the times of The Real Communists and French Revolution. There is so much flamebaiting in your post, that I will happily ignore it, but to one thing - I will bite:
Religion keeps us from taking ownership of Humanity's OUR OWN PROBLEMS. Keeps us from realizing that WE ALONE are responsible for the state of our community.
Twice in our history your postulate was made into fact: during French Revolution and as a result of communist revolutions, be it Soviet Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia... Twice it led to unbelievable manslaughter.
Of course, religious wars were also pretty bloody (think: Thirty Years War or exterminations in Ireland), but this just proves that getting rid of religions doesn't help - in fact I would also say that it does more bad than good. Why? Because I can mention a lot of peaceful religious periods in human history, while it is quite difficult to find comparably peacefull atheist states. Probably todays France is closest with its policy to ban any manifestations of faith from public space, but it is still quite "relaxed" way : religion is OK, as long as you do it in private, compared with "your grandfather's brother was a priest - life sentence in gulag" approach.
He's then hit by something which screws up the chip in his head; and since his brain has come to rely on it as memory storage, he starts getting scrambled memories, and acts as if they were real, losing touch with reality.
And how is this different from damage to organic brain? People with brain damage can behave also pretty weird, have all kinds of hallucinations or weird perception distortions like being unable to percept one side (left or right depending on the placement of damage).
I would be more afraid on effects of perfect memory and availability of such huge amounts of data on one's emotional state.
Well, Acer in Poland sells notebooks with "Linux for booting". Don't know, what does it mean precisely, but for sure it means that you shouldn't expect to be able to actually use it - it is just a workaround for laws forbidding sale of computers without an operating system. There is no mention what distribution they use (maybe DSL;-) ).
And I think that many retailers in the US sell PCs with FreeDOS preinstalled.
I certainly respect the Muslims who feel offended, but if they are going to live in a liberal democracy, they're going to have to just accept the fact that they're going to be offended.
Tell this to gays or Jews - in Europe you can be sentenced to prison if you say that Holocaust was a hoax or if you say that homosexual activities are sin.
Seems that each culture has its holy cows.
Disclaimer: I am not against gay-rights and only a total moron or a sick fuck-head can claim that Holocaust is a hoax. But the truth is: for most people free speech is OK as long as it is them speaking.
I am late for this discussion, so my post will probably be lost in the crowd...
Anyway, I remember Solidarity movement in Poland - one of its main successes was to have all censorship in newspapers marked with something like "removed in line with blahblah Act". In fact it became a kind of national sport to read newspapers and guess what was removed. Sometimes something like half of the article was cut - which was even more interesting. "Wow - there must be something really interesting about this subject" - that's what everybody thought seeing such censored removals.
It is the same here: it is a big difference if you put "Tiananmen" into a search box and get only results like "city guided tours" or pages of travel agencies or if you get these along with "some results to your query have been removed to comply with Chinese regulations".
An example: you hear a rumour, that something is going on in some city. You put the name of this city into google.cn and get this anouncement that some results were removed - bang! and you have confirmation that something important is going on.
As they say it "it is not true until they deny it". In this case: it is not important/dissident/interesting unless they censor it.
ODF is being adopted in many public institutions in Poland
Exactly! I've just googled for "Open Document Format" with results in Polish only and one of the first hits is a document from the Polish goverment describing "minimal requirements for IT systems in public institutions" in Poland (text in Polish). If you scroll down to the section called "File formats" and a paragraph about text documents you will find 5 different formats: txt, rtf, pdf, doc and odf. Further details are even more interesting: requirement is that IT systems in institutions must be able to read doc documents - default format for read and write exchange of documents is either txt, rtf or odf.
Wow. I am mighty impressed: there is so much fuss about different countries/cities/states which are about to introduce some kind of such regulations while in my native Poland it is already done and it is not even news.
Cheers
Raf
P.S. And PNG and SVG are listed among graphics formats!
what're you talking about? I remember paying $20-25 for a CD when they were new, and now they're, at most, $15, and you often pay $9.99 for them...
Oh you lucky Americans! As far as I can see prices in all CD shops here in Poland, CDs of the Big Four are rarely below 15$. Typically they are in the 20$-25$ range. 15$ ones are labelled "reasonable price". This excluding local artists, whose CDs sell usually for ~10$.
And remember that average wage in Poland is something like 500$ a month so it's not a surprise that p2p plus cheap bootlegs from Moldova or Ukraine are really popular here.
I say we just abandon New Orleans if the damage is too extensive to rebuild. Just leave it be. I doubt this will happen, but it would be better in the long run then supporting a city BELOW sea level.
Tell this to Dutch people. No doubt they will be delighted. How would it go? "I doubt this will happen, but it would be better in the long run then supporting a country BELOW sea level."
There are many places around the world below the sea level and quite densily populated. If the sea level rises probably they will have to be abandoned, but most probably not without an enormous effort before to prevent them from being taken by the sea.
Raf
Disclaimer: OK, I know that not the whole Netherlands are below the sea level, just exaggerated a bit for the sake of interesting discussion;-)
Distinction between work and personal life is a very fresh concept, connected with capitalism and work for hire. As someone already mentioned it does not exist if you run a restaurant. It doesn't exist if you are a farmer. Hell, it probably doesn't exist if you run any kind of private small-scale businness.
It didn't exist in pre-capitalism era: families worked together, dined together. Even if you were hired, quite often your brother/sister worked at the same place. Women were taking their babies to work or were gathering together to spin wool or linen, to sew and so on.
So it seems that this distinction was artificial and caused by a fact that if some people have to be in the same physical location to work and they have to commute - it is more efficient to separate their work time and leisure time. But with introduction of modern communication methods more and more jobs take different trend: work at home, feel comfortable, manage your time yourself, your employer is only interested in results, not means. And this means switch from time based work to task based work - which in fact is a return to natural state.
Wouldn't you like to spend your day at home, with your family, just retreating to your home office if you need to focus a bit more on work, have a lunch at home with your wife and kids than to commute everyday, order a pizza for lunch, and then spend an hour and a half driving back home? Do you like explaining to your boss that you have to take a day-off because of some reconstruction in your house or something?
With a laptop I can do my work while laying on my sofa and listening to my favourite music on my home stereo - and that is when I am really productive.
I am certain it is possible to devise a genuinely non-lethal weapon.
No, it is not. If you want something to control riots you need something that:
- stops people from running towards you, throwing stones, Molotov's coctails and what else
- has to be able to stop young healthy testosterone- and adrenaline- filled thugs
- has to stop many of them at once.
Remember: even drugs, despite all their testing, have adverse reactions. You will always find a person which has some undiscovered condition which will cause a drug to cause harm. Now remember that drugs are prescribed and administered in an extremely controlled environment compared to a riot.
So if you find something capable of controlling a riot, always in some situations it will be lethal. To stop the aforementioned adrenaline-high thug running at you with a Molotov coctail you need something really shocking.
OK, pepper gas is supposingly harmless, but then it causes people to panic - and stampede kills as surely as any weapon.
Did any of the Kirtland Air Force Base participants have a pre existing heart condition? I bet they didnt let pregnant women participate.
Well, I would say that a riot is not a healthy place for pregnant women or people with heart diseases. And remember that riots have to be controlled otherwise they turn into street-war with demolishion of shops, cars, smashing of windows and so on. So it is not a choice of "use this microwave thing or use nothing" but rather use microwaves vs. use tear gas vs. use brute force i.e. guys with rubber bats.
And remember - if things go out of control sooner or later you have guns in action - and this thing is much better than guns, even if it might kill somebody.
Guess what: water gun, rubber bats or rubber bullets - they also can kill. If you go to a riot - you have to consider being injured or killed. That's how it is.
Naked tree branches against evening sky? Ripples on a surface of a lake? Patterns on a weathered rock? Animal trail on a smooth snow-covered field?
All these things are beautiful but are not art, as there is no purpose, no execution, no communication, no human factor. They just happen to be beautiful - or they don't.
It is the same with these pictures. Some of them are nice, some are beautiful, but beautiful != art.
The fact that there needs to be fewer Mac support forums (I only know of one ACTUAL Mac support forum, which is Apple's, please tell me about others, I like to help) doesn't count for much, I guess.
One was Polish usenet group pl.comp.sys.macintosh, another one was on www.macosx.com (is it the Apple's one?), there might have been another one, but I am not too sure...
BTW, your English skills (along with the fact that your post is littered with American English slang) make me wonder how desperately you need Polski localisation
Wow, this AE slang has to be learnt here on/.:-D I am crazy about British culture and have spent 2 years in Britain, so I speak BE, but it seems that US-dominated/. has some influence on me.
Well, I feel very comfortable with English but when I buy something in Poland I expect it to be catered to Poles: labels on products, ingredients lists, menus in computers and media devices and so on. And anyway, this laptop will be primarily used by my girlfriend who's English skills are not good enough for comfortable work with English software. Well, she would manage, but then the whole useability factor of MacOSX would dissapear.
it's under International in System Preferences, you know, the icon with the UN flag where you can choose from 84 localisations
Another post says the same. I will have to go and check. AFAIRead it used to be so that these settings would change date and currency format, keyboard layout and some other things but menus would remain English. Anyway, I'll better go and check (or ask in the shop) than go on ranting;-).
BTW, have you noticed I was modded troll??:-] For the first time in my 12 years long Internet use (including 8 busy years on usenet:-) )
The user should not have to edit any config file, and helpful support forums.
Yeah, right, like I've never had to go to support forums while I still was using windows - and even more now when my friends call me and ask what to do when something goes wrong in XP. And instead of editing well commented text config files I have to edit this bloody registry.
And are you sure MacOS X is that much better? I was considering buying a Mac Mini and an iBook, but when I went to the shop to play with MacOS X a bit, I've noticed that finder is not localised (I am Polish). As the shop was crowded I decided not to wait to ask shop assistants but returned home to do some googling. O my goodness!! There is a plenty of Mac forums all crowded with users having problems!! And sometimes not trivial ones ("How do I eject CD?") but much more troubling (like safari spitting some weird errors or keyboard layout returning to US English again and again instead of just sticking to chosen Polish, or Software Update being fucked by localisation and so on and so on). So support forums and bugs are not just the Linux thing.
And by the way, I have dual booting Win-Lin machine and it was Windows XP that had problems with my perfectly ordinary GeForce card, not linux, no hardware acceleration, and no, download from nvidia didn't help, I had to... guess what? Browse support forums!
but its not okay if my xyz media file does not work
Yet another thing: compare pleasure of using Xine or Mplayer happily playing any known video format (albeit not-so legally sometimes;-) ) to this nice info from WMP that codec was not found.
Wow, that was a long one:-)
Raf
P.S. And no, probably I am not going to by an iBook, cause if I pay 1000 Euro I expect it to work perfectly in my local language, like KDE happily has been doing since 1.x releases:-)
No evidence, I've heard it on the radio while driving. And it was about popular magazines, both for women and men, so about Cosmo, Elle and so on, and about Playboy, FHM, Loaded and so on.
We can argue if it is wrong or rigth, but you won't convince me it's coherent.
Of course what you quote is not coherent, because what you quote is a mix of:
- devots exclamations - poor sermons - media interpretations.
Let's check in detail:
"Touch" yourself and you'll burn in hell, or go blind for it. Remember, God sees everything
Well, first of all I haven't heard a sermon or whatever with hell in it for a long time now, and I go to Mass every Sunday. In fact quite a few Catholic thinkers alarm, that today's vision of Heaven is something along "me and a paedophil and Hitler and whoelse sitting together and singing Taizee songs as God plays guitar" - meaning that God's mercy is mistaken with "everybody has their reasons for doing so-called evil". So that's about it when it comes to Hell.
As for masturbation: Catechism calls masturbation (together with pre-marriage sex) "lack of order in sex life". The reasoning is that if you jerk-off everytime you get erection and there is no willing woman in the vincinity, you are a slave of your instincts.
God forbid you try sex before marriage, you may get to completly know your mate before signing an ethernal agreement with him/her.
This one is more difficult... One thing: Church considers sex very important nowadays and that is why it says: "give it just to your spouse". And as for getting to know somebody completely before marriage: that is not true. People say: I want to live with him/her before I decide if s/he is the one. And the view of CC is a bit different, a bit akin to words of Gandalf to Elrond when Frodo volunteered for going to Mordor: probably if a couple knew through what troubled times together they would go, they'd never decided to marry, but if they love each other, they would regret their cowardice. Love is a choice in Christianity, not a pure emotion or basic instinct.
Bugger, that's a difficult thing, so probably my explanations were not enough, whatever...
Don't ever use condoms. Sex's objective is reproductive and doing it just for fun is a sin. How to breed 8 children is your problem, though.
Yes, doing it for fun is sin. But it is not just for reproduction, but also to share your love with your spouse, develop even closer intimity and so on. As for condoms - if you decide to make love, you should always open to the possibility of having a child. It doesn't mean it is only about reproduction, it means it must not be disconnected from reproduction. It is like with eating, but even more: you can eat to taste food, not just because you are hungry, but eating is means to feed. If you eat to taste and then vomit to be able to eat (taste) more - you sin. I hope you get it, even if you don't agree.
Homosexuality is a sin. Or an illness. Or both
CC doesn't say if it is an illness. And for sure it is not a sin. Homosexual acts are a sin, just as any out-of-marriage sexual contacts.
And marriage happens between a man and a woman ("and you will be like one" was said to Adam and Eve, not to Adam and John) - and this of course many will argue, but if you accept it as one of fundamets, things get coherent again.
Gee, instead of doing my work I spread the Gospel:-/
Now all you agnostics, atheists, pagans, new-agers - please mod me down for being not progressive enough;-)
Why are there way more women on magazine covers than men? Because in general, men like looking at pretty women... and woman like looking at pretty women too, albeit for reasons other than sexual attraction in most cases.
Well, women look at pretty women as at dominant females. It is the same as posters of Jordans and Beckhams and who else in male teenagers' rooms.
But true, this is weird. While guys like to watch sportsmen and actors (dominant males) and women like to watch actors and models (for sexual reasons), magazines with female photos on the cover sell better - and AFAIK it has been proven. Men are allowed on covers only if accompanied by a woman or with a baby or, seldom, if they are really, really mega celebrities.
Physical contact is not inherently sexual, it's just christianity's fucked up relationship with sexuality that makes it so.ty's fucked up relationship with sexuality that makes it so.
I'd say that rather your view of Christianity is rather fucked up. Somehow in Eastern, Orthodox Europe it is OK for males to kiss for greeting in the lips, somehow in Poland, supposedly extreme-Catholic country, it is OK for males to walk and talk hugging each other. OK, maybe walking hand in hand would be considered gay, or rather "feminine", not even gay, but many other physical contacts between males are really OK, without any homesexual undertones.
AFAIK it is the same (or even more) in Italy, Spain, Greece. I don't know...
So, have you considered, that this fuck-up happened rather in Anglosaxon culture than in "christianity"? OK, it might be something protestant in the background, but I don't know enough about Protestants to draw any conclusions.
And Christian (well, at least Catholic and Orthodox) view of sexuality, while it might seem restrictive from the outside, is coherent and based on viable basis. Of course, there are some devots who still think it is much worse to show a tit in TV than to show dead bodies of terrorist bombing victims, but I don't think it has much to do with Christianity either.
So before you rant, please do some investigation in the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so let us assume you are on neither side of the line, so you don't think you have an answer to that question. So you admit that both sides may be wrong. In that case, which side is safer to join from your conscience point of view. Is it better to deny women "right to their body" and be wrong, or is it better to allow killing of innocent unborns and be wrong?
For me the answer is clear. As somebody said, if you're not sure if poison is in the glass, do you risk drinking?
Cheers
Raf
P.S. There is this Australian pro-abortion bio-ethic, don't remember his name, but he is one of few pro-abortion people who really does the argument properly and logically correct, without attack on emotions. What he says is that as we don't know and probably won't know the answer to your question, and if we have any answer - it is just a point of view. So he changes the point of view radically and redefines humanity. And the result is that he considers killing an infant as same crime as killing a dog or a chimp. And though it is drastic, I like the way he thinks. If somebody agrees with abortion, especially late abortion, then being against killing even healthy newborns is hypocritical.
To become a viable replacement - yes. To become a viable addition - not quite. In fact with quite cheap 4GB flashroms I am surprised that this has not taken off yet - all software installed on flashrom with user files saved to HDD - no problem (or not much of a problem) with number of writes and all the benefit of fast boot times.
On the machine I am writing it on, I have fairly complete Debian installation, with almost full KDE, OpenOffice, Tex/LaTeX and all that is necessary for writing PhD thesis (gnuplot, octave etc.) - and still it is barely above 2GB. So, 4GB MRAM would be more than enough for me as a storage for the OS.
Cheers
Raf
Well, I don't have much experience with upper management, but I have quite a lot of experience with female lower and middle managemers. I would say, just from gut feeling, on average they manage (heh, not intended pun ;-) ) better than males, but "the distribution" has somehow a "long tail" - you meet from time to time female managers sooooo mean and stupid that it is just unbelievable. Hmm, now that I think of it, this tail stretches in both ways - all but one of the best managers I worked with are women as well!
Maybe because heat dissipation in space is poor? I know you can do magic with water evaporation under such low pressure to dissipate heat, but how much water would you need to send up there to provide cooling for reasonable time?
Cheers
Raf
Me neither in China, neither in Russia, but pretty close -in Poland and we can buy movie-only DVDs, usually with original soundtrack, but sometimes only with Polish overvoice, for less than 8 euros. While not really cheap, it is affordable. And I have noticed, that now I spend more money on DVDs than before. I can rarely justify spending 30-40 Euros on one movie, however, I can easily justify spending 30-40 Euros monthly on a couple of DVDs of movies I would otherwise download from P2P.
And anyway, I still eagerly spend even 50 Euros for special packs like LotR's 4 disc edition.
So, anecdotical as it is, in my case reducing prices reduced piracy dramatically. And I know of a lot of people in Poland who also started to buy DVDs now in heaps.
Cheers
Raf
BTW, at least in one case (Anime, Akira or GitS, don't remember) translation on this bargain CD was from a guy who did it for pirate divx and then got paid to include it on legal CD!
Twice in our history your postulate was made into fact: during French Revolution and as a result of communist revolutions, be it Soviet Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia... Twice it led to unbelievable manslaughter.
Of course, religious wars were also pretty bloody (think: Thirty Years War or exterminations in Ireland), but this just proves that getting rid of religions doesn't help - in fact I would also say that it does more bad than good. Why? Because I can mention a lot of peaceful religious periods in human history, while it is quite difficult to find comparably peacefull atheist states. Probably todays France is closest with its policy to ban any manifestations of faith from public space, but it is still quite "relaxed" way : religion is OK, as long as you do it in private, compared with "your grandfather's brother was a priest - life sentence in gulag" approach.
Cheers
Raf
And how is this different from damage to organic brain? People with brain damage can behave also pretty weird, have all kinds of hallucinations or weird perception distortions like being unable to percept one side (left or right depending on the placement of damage).
I would be more afraid on effects of perfect memory and availability of such huge amounts of data on one's emotional state.
cheers
Raf
Well, Acer in Poland sells notebooks with "Linux for booting". Don't know, what does it mean precisely, but for sure it means that you shouldn't expect to be able to actually use it - it is just a workaround for laws forbidding sale of computers without an operating system. There is no mention what distribution they use (maybe DSL ;-) ).
And I think that many retailers in the US sell PCs with FreeDOS preinstalled.
Cheers
Raf
Tell this to gays or Jews - in Europe you can be sentenced to prison if you say that Holocaust was a hoax or if you say that homosexual activities are sin.
Seems that each culture has its holy cows.
Disclaimer: I am not against gay-rights and only a total moron or a sick fuck-head can claim that Holocaust is a hoax. But the truth is: for most people free speech is OK as long as it is them speaking.
Cheers
Raf
I am late for this discussion, so my post will probably be lost in the crowd...
Anyway, I remember Solidarity movement in Poland - one of its main successes was to have all censorship in newspapers marked with something like "removed in line with blahblah Act". In fact it became a kind of national sport to read newspapers and guess what was removed. Sometimes something like half of the article was cut - which was even more interesting. "Wow - there must be something really interesting about this subject" - that's what everybody thought seeing such censored removals.
It is the same here: it is a big difference if you put "Tiananmen" into a search box and get only results like "city guided tours" or pages of travel agencies or if you get these along with "some results to your query have been removed to comply with Chinese regulations".
An example: you hear a rumour, that something is going on in some city. You put the name of this city into google.cn and get this anouncement that some results were removed - bang! and you have confirmation that something important is going on.
As they say it "it is not true until they deny it". In this case: it is not important/dissident/interesting unless they censor it.
Cheers
Raf
Exactly! I've just googled for "Open Document Format" with results in Polish only and one of the first hits is a document from the Polish goverment describing "minimal requirements for IT systems in public institutions" in Poland (text in Polish). If you scroll down to the section called "File formats" and a paragraph about text documents you will find 5 different formats: txt, rtf, pdf, doc and odf. Further details are even more interesting: requirement is that IT systems in institutions must be able to read doc documents - default format for read and write exchange of documents is either txt, rtf or odf.
Wow. I am mighty impressed: there is so much fuss about different countries/cities/states which are about to introduce some kind of such regulations while in my native Poland it is already done and it is not even news.
Cheers
Raf
P.S. And PNG and SVG are listed among graphics formats!
You mean like those guys that blew themselves up in the London Underground or these who burn cars and shops in France?
Yeah, probably it was easier to persuade them to vote...
Raf
Oh you lucky Americans! As far as I can see prices in all CD shops here in Poland, CDs of the Big Four are rarely below 15$. Typically they are in the 20$-25$ range. 15$ ones are labelled "reasonable price". This excluding local artists, whose CDs sell usually for ~10$.
And remember that average wage in Poland is something like 500$ a month so it's not a surprise that p2p plus cheap bootlegs from Moldova or Ukraine are really popular here.
Raf
Tell this to Dutch people. No doubt they will be delighted. How would it go? "I doubt this will happen, but it would be better in the long run then supporting a country BELOW sea level."
There are many places around the world below the sea level and quite densily populated. If the sea level rises probably they will have to be abandoned, but most probably not without an enormous effort before to prevent them from being taken by the sea.
Raf
Disclaimer: OK, I know that not the whole Netherlands are below the sea level, just exaggerated a bit for the sake of interesting discussion
Distinction between work and personal life is a very fresh concept, connected with capitalism and work for hire. As someone already mentioned it does not exist if you run a restaurant. It doesn't exist if you are a farmer. Hell, it probably doesn't exist if you run any kind of private small-scale businness.
It didn't exist in pre-capitalism era: families worked together, dined together. Even if you were hired, quite often your brother/sister worked at the same place. Women were taking their babies to work or were gathering together to spin wool or linen, to sew and so on.
So it seems that this distinction was artificial and caused by a fact that if some people have to be in the same physical location to work and they have to commute - it is more efficient to separate their work time and leisure time. But with introduction of modern communication methods more and more jobs take different trend: work at home, feel comfortable, manage your time yourself, your employer is only interested in results, not means. And this means switch from time based work to task based work - which in fact is a return to natural state.
Wouldn't you like to spend your day at home, with your family, just retreating to your home office if you need to focus a bit more on work, have a lunch at home with your wife and kids than to commute everyday, order a pizza for lunch, and then spend an hour and a half driving back home? Do you like explaining to your boss that you have to take a day-off because of some reconstruction in your house or something?
With a laptop I can do my work while laying on my sofa and listening to my favourite music on my home stereo - and that is when I am really productive.
Cheers
Raf
No, it is not. If you want something to control riots you need something that:
- stops people from running towards you, throwing stones, Molotov's coctails and what else
- has to be able to stop young healthy testosterone- and adrenaline- filled thugs
- has to stop many of them at once.
Remember: even drugs, despite all their testing, have adverse reactions. You will always find a person which has some undiscovered condition which will cause a drug to cause harm. Now remember that drugs are prescribed and administered in an extremely controlled environment compared to a riot.
So if you find something capable of controlling a riot, always in some situations it will be lethal. To stop the aforementioned adrenaline-high thug running at you with a Molotov coctail you need something really shocking.
OK, pepper gas is supposingly harmless, but then it causes people to panic - and stampede kills as surely as any weapon.
Raf
Well, I would say that a riot is not a healthy place for pregnant women or people with heart diseases. And remember that riots have to be controlled otherwise they turn into street-war with demolishion of shops, cars, smashing of windows and so on. So it is not a choice of "use this microwave thing or use nothing" but rather use microwaves vs. use tear gas vs. use brute force i.e. guys with rubber bats.
And remember - if things go out of control sooner or later you have guns in action - and this thing is much better than guns, even if it might kill somebody.
Guess what: water gun, rubber bats or rubber bullets - they also can kill. If you go to a riot - you have to consider being injured or killed. That's how it is.
Raf
Is it art?
Naked tree branches against evening sky?
Ripples on a surface of a lake?
Patterns on a weathered rock?
Animal trail on a smooth snow-covered field?
All these things are beautiful but are not art, as there is no purpose, no execution, no communication, no human factor. They just happen to be beautiful - or they don't.
It is the same with these pictures. Some of them are nice, some are beautiful, but beautiful != art.
Raf
The fact that there needs to be fewer Mac support forums (I only know of one ACTUAL Mac support forum, which is Apple's, please tell me about others, I like to help) doesn't count for much, I guess.
/. :-D I am crazy about British culture and have spent 2 years in Britain, so I speak BE, but it seems that US-dominated /. has some influence on me.
;-).
:-] For the first time in my 12 years long Internet use (including 8 busy years on usenet :-) )
One was Polish usenet group pl.comp.sys.macintosh, another one was on www.macosx.com (is it the Apple's one?), there might have been another one, but I am not too sure...
BTW, your English skills (along with the fact that your post is littered with American English slang) make me wonder how desperately you need Polski localisation
Wow, this AE slang has to be learnt here on
Well, I feel very comfortable with English but when I buy something in Poland I expect it to be catered to Poles: labels on products, ingredients lists, menus in computers and media devices and so on. And anyway, this laptop will be primarily used by my girlfriend who's English skills are not good enough for comfortable work with English software. Well, she would manage, but then the whole useability factor of MacOSX would dissapear.
it's under International in System Preferences, you know, the icon with the UN flag where you can choose from 84 localisations
Another post says the same. I will have to go and check. AFAIRead it used to be so that these settings would change date and currency format, keyboard layout and some other things but menus would remain English. Anyway, I'll better go and check (or ask in the shop) than go on ranting
BTW, have you noticed I was modded troll??
Cheers
Raf
The user should not have to edit any config file, and helpful support forums.
;-) ) to this nice info from WMP that codec was not found.
:-)
:-)
Yeah, right, like I've never had to go to support forums while I still was using windows - and even more now when my friends call me and ask what to do when something goes wrong in XP. And instead of editing well commented text config files I have to edit this bloody registry.
And are you sure MacOS X is that much better? I was considering buying a Mac Mini and an iBook, but when I went to the shop to play with MacOS X a bit, I've noticed that finder is not localised (I am Polish). As the shop was crowded I decided not to wait to ask shop assistants but returned home to do some googling. O my goodness!! There is a plenty of Mac forums all crowded with users having problems!! And sometimes not trivial ones ("How do I eject CD?") but much more troubling (like safari spitting some weird errors or keyboard layout returning to US English again and again instead of just sticking to chosen Polish, or Software Update being fucked by localisation and so on and so on). So support forums and bugs are not just the Linux thing.
And by the way, I have dual booting Win-Lin machine and it was Windows XP that had problems with my perfectly ordinary GeForce card, not linux, no hardware acceleration, and no, download from nvidia didn't help, I had to... guess what? Browse support forums!
but its not okay if my xyz media file does not work
Yet another thing: compare pleasure of using Xine or Mplayer happily playing any known video format (albeit not-so legally sometimes
Wow, that was a long one
Raf
P.S. And no, probably I am not going to by an iBook, cause if I pay 1000 Euro I expect it to work perfectly in my local language, like KDE happily has been doing since 1.x releases
I bought a Dual G5 to put linux on it in a lab at work. I got one of there "cluster node" Xserves that is now running Gentoo Linux PPC64.
Course... that being said, I do still have a x86 PC running linux on my desktop.
This is oh sooooo cool!!
Mac in the server room, Linux on the desktop *grin*
Raf
You care to give some evidence of that?
No evidence, I've heard it on the radio while driving. And it was about popular magazines, both for women and men, so about Cosmo, Elle and so on, and about Playboy, FHM, Loaded and so on.
Raf
We can argue if it is wrong or rigth, but you won't convince me it's coherent.
:-/
;-)
Of course what you quote is not coherent, because what you quote is a mix of:
- devots exclamations
- poor sermons
- media interpretations.
Let's check in detail:
"Touch" yourself and you'll burn in hell, or go blind for it. Remember, God sees everything
Well, first of all I haven't heard a sermon or whatever with hell in it for a long time now, and I go to Mass every Sunday. In fact quite a few Catholic thinkers alarm, that today's vision of Heaven is something along "me and a paedophil and Hitler and whoelse sitting together and singing Taizee songs as God plays guitar" - meaning that God's mercy is mistaken with "everybody has their reasons for doing so-called evil". So that's about it when it comes to Hell.
As for masturbation: Catechism calls masturbation (together with pre-marriage sex) "lack of order in sex life". The reasoning is that if you jerk-off everytime you get erection and there is no willing woman in the vincinity, you are a slave of your instincts.
God forbid you try sex before marriage, you may get to completly know your mate before signing an ethernal agreement with him/her.
This one is more difficult... One thing: Church considers sex very important nowadays and that is why it says: "give it just to your spouse". And as for getting to know somebody completely before marriage: that is not true. People say: I want to live with him/her before I decide if s/he is the one. And the view of CC is a bit different, a bit akin to words of Gandalf to Elrond when Frodo volunteered for going to Mordor: probably if a couple knew through what troubled times together they would go, they'd never decided to marry, but if they love each other, they would regret their cowardice. Love is a choice in Christianity, not a pure emotion or basic instinct.
Bugger, that's a difficult thing, so probably my explanations were not enough, whatever...
Don't ever use condoms. Sex's objective is reproductive and doing it just for fun is a sin. How to breed 8 children is your problem, though.
Yes, doing it for fun is sin. But it is not just for reproduction, but also to share your love with your spouse, develop even closer intimity and so on. As for condoms - if you decide to make love, you should always open to the possibility of having a child. It doesn't mean it is only about reproduction, it means it must not be disconnected from reproduction. It is like with eating, but even more: you can eat to taste food, not just because you are hungry, but eating is means to feed. If you eat to taste and then vomit to be able to eat (taste) more - you sin. I hope you get it, even if you don't agree.
Homosexuality is a sin. Or an illness. Or both
CC doesn't say if it is an illness. And for sure it is not a sin. Homosexual acts are a sin, just as any out-of-marriage sexual contacts.
And marriage happens between a man and a woman ("and you will be like one" was said to Adam and Eve, not to Adam and John) - and this of course many will argue, but if you accept it as one of fundamets, things get coherent again.
Gee, instead of doing my work I spread the Gospel
Now all you agnostics, atheists, pagans, new-agers - please mod me down for being not progressive enough
Raf
Well, women look at pretty women as at dominant females. It is the same as posters of Jordans and Beckhams and who else in male teenagers' rooms.
But true, this is weird. While guys like to watch sportsmen and actors (dominant males) and women like to watch actors and models (for sexual reasons), magazines with female photos on the cover sell better - and AFAIK it has been proven. Men are allowed on covers only if accompanied by a woman or with a baby or, seldom, if they are really, really mega celebrities.
Raf
I'd say that rather your view of Christianity is rather fucked up. Somehow in Eastern, Orthodox Europe it is OK for males to kiss for greeting in the lips, somehow in Poland, supposedly extreme-Catholic country, it is OK for males to walk and talk hugging each other. OK, maybe walking hand in hand would be considered gay, or rather "feminine", not even gay, but many other physical contacts between males are really OK, without any homesexual undertones.
AFAIK it is the same (or even more) in Italy, Spain, Greece. I don't know...
So, have you considered, that this fuck-up happened rather in Anglosaxon culture than in "christianity"? OK, it might be something protestant in the background, but I don't know enough about Protestants to draw any conclusions.
And Christian (well, at least Catholic and Orthodox) view of sexuality, while it might seem restrictive from the outside, is coherent and based on viable basis. Of course, there are some devots who still think it is much worse to show a tit in TV than to show dead bodies of terrorist bombing victims, but I don't think it has much to do with Christianity either.
So before you rant, please do some investigation in the subject.
Raf