I don't know about worse, but a possible competitor for similarly bad, albeit in different ways. Her domestic policies seemed pretty solid (as long as you aren't a far right-winger I suppose.)
Her foreign policy on the other hand.. was looking somewhat scary. Even during the campaign it seemed like she was gearing up to do her best to piss off Russia. Up for grabs how far she would have taken that. Or what she would have done with regards to North Korea's recent threats. Add in her questionable (if not illegal) history as secretary of state and even with the tragic comedy of Trump's first few months, I would still hesitate to claim with certainty that Clinton would have been better overall.
And third in line is who? Paul Ryan? That's not exactly a step up either. You have to go quite far down the roster before you find someone who isn't so far right that they're almost falling off the spectrum. Which I guess is great if you're rich and a dedicated Christian but not so much for the other 99% of the country.
Trump's baffoonery may be silly and ridiculous, and can sometimes distract from the fact that he has the potential to do real damage, but on the upside it seems to also be distracting him and making it much harder for him to push through the laws he wants considering that both houses are Republican.
Depends entirely on who the special prosecutor is and what he thinks about Trump's politics. It may be that he can remain unbiased and pursues the investigation to whatever conclusion. Or it could be a dog and pony show just to appease the public while they sit on the actual investigation for the next 4-8 years until Trump's gone from office (or worse, they falsify a conclusion and it goes away completely in the short term and the blows up into a disaster later when someone decides to re-checks fact.)
I don't know Robert Mueller's history or political associations, so I can only posit possibilities, but simply having him appointed in itself doesn't really say much given the circus that the current administration is constantly putting on. This could well be just another act.
What the hell are you talking about? Name one thing that couldn't be said or written while net neutrality is active? Companies may not be allowed to implement a business plan that amounts to "shove a large rod up our customers' rear ends" under net neutrality, but they could still write it if they wanted with or without net neutrality.
Maybe you should try again with the 2nd or maybe the 18th amendment? I mean you're not even bothering to justify that claim never mind doing so in any sort of logical sense, so why not insist that net neutrality is inhibiting the sale of alcohol? It makes just as much sense.
Well sure if you have a show that originally sucks and you essentially give it a brand new script that doesn't suck, then that's great. But that's not really due to it being dubbed -- that's due to it being rewritten. If you rewrote the script to not suck in the original language it would be better as well. Dubbing just gives them a second shot at it.
Being able to completely scrap (or at least substantially alter) the original script removes or at least reduces many of the problems with dubbing -- in particular the need to simultaneously match meaning and lip syncing at the same time, which is the source of most of the forced sounding dialogue in dubs. If you're willing to forego lip syncing, you can translate basically all of the meaning (barring true cultural differences) but the many, many memes about old Chinese karate films show how well that goes over.
On the other hand, if you're willing to forego meaning, you still are somewhat restricted by the lip syncing but you have far more flexibility in choosing your words since you can make up whatever crap sounds good and not worry about whether it makes sense in the (original) context. Fourth wall breaking is a common practice when they do this because then they don't even have to make sense in the new context either.
But of course I wasn't really talking about the rare cases where they throw away the original script, much as those can be fun (I still love Samurai Pizza Cats!) I was talking about legitimate translation efforts, which are the vast majority. And its not because translators suck. Its not because the voice actors suck. Its simply because languages mostly don't follow the same vocal and lip movement patterns.
For a bit of an aside, Square-Enix' recent Final Fantasy games (starting at FF13 I believe) have been designed so that the characters' mouth movements are matched to the local dialog rather than being fixed to the original (Japanese) dialog and having the lip syncing issues that their previous games had (for the same reason as movies.) Of course, that's much easier in CG since the mouth movements are less precise to begin with, and they control the full animation frame by frame (as opposed to say a DVD where the animation is fixed at the time the DVD is pressed -- though they could theoretically re-animate the mouth movements for the primary language of each DVD region.) That doesn't really apply to real actors in movies and whatnot of course (even if you wanted to do it per-region, you would have to re-shoot the scene for each language.. which obviously isn't cost-effective.)
You may not know any personally, but there's no shortage of stories about doctors behaving like assholes toward their nurses and even patients, never mind what they do outside of the office.
It's not a problem in the US or in societies based on free markets.
Bwahahaha. Nice one. I believe you mean its still a problem in the US, even with all of the anti-discrimination laws.
I don't know much about the UK so I won't try to make any statements about how it compares, but the US is far from free of discrimination, whether its by race or sex or sexual orientation or any number of other factors.
it is absolutely not "great" or even "acceptable" that the federal government gets involved in questions of whether men are behaving nicely towards women at work
Its absolutely not "great" or "acceptable" that that the government feels the need to get involved. Unfortunately there's too many shitty people in the world for that to be resolved without some form of higher power intervening, and God doesn't seem to be interested.
I can only assume that you're a straight, white male as I imagine too many other groups of people who aren't thankful as balls that we have anti-discrimination laws.
I'm not saying the government has always made the correct choices when designing such laws, but I can guarantee you that rampant discrimination isn't a problem that solves itself. If anything, its self-reinforcing when people are left to their own devices.
No, back in the grown up mature world it goes both ways. Its expected that you try not to say or do anything blatantly offensive, and its also expected that if you say something that I happen to take offense to that I let it slide.
The problem comes when you're always saying offensive shit. And even more so if you're regularly saying offensive shit specifically targeted to someone in the office.
And yes, people who take offense to every little thing and are constantly making a snit also tend to be ostracized in their offices as well. You just don't hear nearly as much about them because they're usually not wrong so much as they are annoying as opposed to some ass who's always spouting racist, sexist, homophobic, etc remarks that are (at least by modern standards) considered to be impolite at best and often flat out rude and hateful.
That said, context is important. If you're among a bunch of low-class dudes then maybe bragging about your sexual conquests is OK. That doesn't mean its OK to continue like that after you hire a female employee. That changes the context and you're expected to change with it (at least in any sort of sane organization.)
PS: There is no context where its OK for me to call you "The Awesome Duke of Danger That I Service Every Night."
When you start hitting numbers like 1000 though, its kind of gone beyond just occasional hookups. I mean even if that's over a 10 year period, that's on average a bit under 2 different partners per week.
At that point its somewhat beyond not having to be in love with the person and into the territory of not even caring that they are a person. Complete desensitization. And that's somewhat evidenced by the related claim that he refuses to wear condoms -- implying that he doesn't really care about either his partners' health or even his own to any great extent. At that point he's just having sex because he can and has built up an expectation for himself that he should, more than because he enjoys it.
The old saying "moderation in all things" really does apply to pretty much all things, no matter how much it seems like it shouldn't in some cases.
You can have discussions (even regarding sex -- even joking about sex) in mixed company without acting like a total ass.
If you wouldn't say it to, in front of, or about your mother, you probably shouldn't say it to, in front of, or about your female coworkers either. And that's just a pretty simple rule of thumb (especially if your mother's pretty uncouth herself and is OK with that kind of talk!)
Treating women equally does not necessarily mean treating them identically (and vice-versa of course, though historically speaking there hasn't been much need to worry about things going the other direction.) There are of course obvious differences between boys and girls and there's no problem with recognizing that. Where the problem comes in is when you use that as an excuse to degrade women, abuse them, pay them lower wages, or any of the many other shitty ways men have treated women throughout most of human history.
Wow. That's a hell of a lot of ranting and generalization over a single word! I hope you remembered to take your blood pressure meds before letting that one out.
But I'm going to respond to one particular point because its not just an overzealous and underthought opinion, but actually borders into dangerous stupidity:
note they are MUSLIMS, no other religion comes close to the 30,000 plus murders committed by radical MUSLIMS in the past 17 years in the name of Islam
There is a vast difference between the statement "most terrorists are Muslim" and "most Muslims are terrorists." While your statement may be factually true, the conclusion you're implying from it is not.
I mean hell if we want to take your line of thinking to a stupid extreme: Straight men have started and controlled pretty much every war and tragedy in human history, so I guess we should just get rid of them? Time for heterophobia to get going already! Oh wait, your logic should only apply when you want it to? How convenient.
Yeah but the time differential between him taking the bikers' clothes and him saving John is about 2 minutes or something.. its pretty close in any case (and that scene is right near the beginning of the movie to boot,) so the amount of movie "spoiled" is quite minimal.
Compare that with say, a trailer that showed 3/4 of the climactic office storming scene and then him being lowered into the smelter. That's more the level of spoiler we're seeing a lot these days.
It seems a little pessimistic to blame everything that's wrong with movies today on breaking them down into 15 chunks instead of just 3 chunks. Yeah that's certainly more fine-grained and therefore less flexible, but its still giving the screenwriter 4-8 minutes of freedom for each "beat" (depending on the length of the film.)
There are lots of other issues going on as well though: - High risk-avoidance leading to a continual stream of remakes and sequels rather than allowing fresh ideas.
- The desire to appeal to foreign audiences (so more explosions and fighting and other dialogue-minimal scenes to avoid translations, as those always suck at least a little. Which means less time and words available to generate story and character content.)
- Competition from non-blockbuster sources such as Netflix originals, HBO's array of amazing TV shows (Game of Thrones might be the most well known, but they've produced a lot of other good ones as well) and indie films, which either previously didn't exist at all or were such low quality that they weren't really competitive. Even if all copyright infringement somehow disappeared overnight, Hollywood would still be in trouble due to this completely legitimate competition.
All of that combines in ways that make everything suck for classic Hollywood studios. This isn't like copyright infringement where they can just pass it off to their lawyers and call it a day. This time they're going to have to learn how to adjust to the new world, or die out while clinging to the old. Netflix in particular has been a massive game changer but at this point even losing Netflix wouldn't put the genie back in the bottle -- there's enough other Netflix-like companies that another one would just fill the void if somehow Netflix went away.
There's a whole confluence of things going on here: - Sure, the price may track well with some vague metric of inflation, but wages have not, so as a wage ratio the price to an individual is still higher. Add onto that that we've got a bunch of other costs (cell phone, internet, Netflix) that many or even most of us didn't have two decades ago, and even $20 can getting stretched a bit thin if you're in the lower end of the middle class or below -- which is a large portion of the population.
- Large, really good TVs are cheap. Cheap enough that even many below the poverty line have one. Even a full "home theater" (ie: hook up a decent sound system to your TV) is reasonable these days. Why bother with lines and crowds and overpriced popcorn when you can get basically the same experience at home with a couple of friends?
- Movies have become more of a commodity than a luxury at this point. 20 years ago if you wanted to watch a movie you either a) went to a theater or b) rented a VHS tape to play on your tiny crappy TV. There really wasn't a middle ground, and you usually could only do that a couple times a month due to the cost and the time investment. Now with Netflix and other streaming services (never mind less legitimate sources,) we frequently just throw something on as background noise without even caring about or paying attention to it.
- And following that, competition. 20 years ago, there was only a small handful of studios that would push movies to an even smaller number of (national) theater chains and unless you were really into the artsy type scene with connections to source lesser-known stuff from, you really had little choice in the matter -- it was between Disney's new AAA title or Newline's new AAA title. Now that theaters aren't such a limiting factor (that whole good TV thing,) there are dozens if not hundreds of studios producing at least decent movies even if they're not AAA. A lot of TV shows have become competitive as well, which is a whole new realm of competition that never really existed before. So far we don't have much international competition at least -- Hollywood still does AAA better than almost anyone else, and they're (mostly) in English so that's a huge leg up over imported films that have to be translated -- most people don't like reading subtitles and even good dubs usually sound a bit forced and miss lots of subtleties.
If MS really wants to make people do updates promptly, they need to get their heads back out of their asses. In the late WinXP and into the early Win7 era, there was a strong push for security and the updates were usually both relevant and easy to install.
Fast forward to now, and half the updates you get are MS pushing their latest piece of crapware (*coughskypecough*) that you don't want, and like 90% of them require a full computer reboot -- which they'll happily do with our without your input and hope to hell you saved your work that day.
If MS wants people to install critical updates then: a) Stop calling every fucking sales pitch "critical," and b) Go back to putting in the effort to avoid reboots. I know its easier to just reset and not worry about internal version conflicts and whatnot, but its a serious detriment to anyone who doesn't normally shut off their computer in the first place (and those people are the ones who least need to be force into an unwanted reboot!)
Unfortunately MS has decided to do the exact opposite of that and compensate by giving you no choice -- enjoy losing your work.. what're you gonna do about it? Switch to Mac? Oh you are? Well fuck.
I'd be surprised if no one read it. Why even offer the site if that was the case?
Most likely, it will be a handful of interns and other low-level staff who go through and tally up yay/nay on whatever list of pre-defined concerns/issues someone decided on. And when the tallying is done, they'll present the totals to their bosses (possibly with some quotes from the better comments) who will take it into account when they make their decisions.
This is of course a bit of a biased process -- whoever defined the list of concerns to tally up, and which intern happens to read any specific comment, could both influence the interpretation of the results. And then of course the decision makers are still free to just ignore the results and do whatever they want anyway.
Government bureaucracy is well known for doing things slowly and inefficiently, but they don't often do things pointlessly (at least assuming you allow for more than your own political views as having a point..)
Given the current government's propensity for lying even when there's no reason to do so, I wouldn't be surprised if this "DDoS" really was "just can't handle the load," but chances are the site itself was legitimately and honestly setup to do what they claim and they just didn't allocate sufficient resources.
Yes. But "talking about it" is not the same as "scaremongering." If you ask just a random person on the street about nuclear power, they will either go off on a tirade about how its too dangerous and just look at Fukushima and we shouldn't build any more plants. Or you'll get that Fukushima was a rare event and nuclear is fine.
Few of them will talk about the problems with disposal areas and other things you mentioned, or bring up the fact that Fukushima was 50 or 60 years old and a decade+ past its operating lifespan, or that TEPCO had already been warned that such a thing could happen and ignored it because they did their risk/reward calculations and decided to make a bad gamble in order to avoid costs.
Sure people talk about those things, and most of the people on the ground are doing the best they can with the resources available. But its not the same as the "AMG NUCLEAR BAD" fear that's been generated about the prospect of new construction projects. Mostly it comes down to how much of the public knows/cares about it -- if the public has a strong opinion (even if its a stupid opinion) then politicians take notice and action (again, even if its stupid) gets taken. If its something that only a few thousand people in specific areas even know about, then it just becomes a line item in the budget that nobody pays attention to, whether its appropriately funded or not.
We seem to be pretty bad at handling basically every sort of pollution -- we've got the great garbage patch in the Pacific and smaller ones in basically all of the other oceans because we can't handle plastics. We've got CO2 and other greenhouse gases because we can't handle fossil fuels. We've got Superfund sites all over the US (and many similar, frequently even worse sites, around the world) because we can't handle any number of chemical processes.
Hell, go back a couple hundred years (and even in modern times in some places) and we have all sorts of diseases running rampant due to being unable to handle our own literal shit.
And of course in basically all of those cases, its not so much "we cannot handle it" as "we don't want to handle it." The real problem is that there's no significant deterrent to just walking away from a disaster you caused. Sure your company can be sued but oh well you just pay yourself a huge severance package and leave whoever takes over the company to declare bankruptcy and oops.. now there's nobody left to do the clean up. The Superfund was built to handle this of course, but regardless of the superlative name they've only got so many resources and for the most part nobody really cares unless one of those sites happens to be in their own back yard, so funding isn't usually a big priority in any political process. Never mind all of the disasters in other countries that don't have a Superfund equivalent.
That's kind of an irrelevant argument. I mean you could also argue that the FCC should just be renamed FCIC (Federal Communications & Internet Commision) in the same way that the ATF covers three pretty separate sets of regulations.
Not to mention the hassle you'd have when you consider the fact that telephone, cellular and TV (all definitely under FCC purview) are by far the primary providers of internet access. So putting internet under a different organization would mean two independent bodies both trying to regulate the same lines (and sometimes even the same protocols in the case of things like VOIP,) leading to all sort of potential regulatory conflicts.
It makes perfect sense from all angles I can think of to call the internet a communications medium. Specific labels like "common carrier" are a bit more up for grabs (at least if you're greedy and want to abuse consumers,) but the FCC already regulates plenty of things unrelated to common carriers (cable TV for example) so that's not much of an argument either.
That would have to go through US courts though. The Austrian government can't just claim property on US soil arbitrarily, even if that child was sole owner of the asset.
Now the US courts will likely take the Austrian ruling into account, and essentially decide whether to uphold the request or not. But they Austrian government still has to go through the procedure in the US.
The FB thing is a totally different issue. Because the internet is globally connected, some neo-Nazi jackass in Utah can post some racist hate speech on FB, which would likely be stored on FB's US servers, but an Austrian citizen could potentially still discover it.
Lots of countries (including my own here -- Canada) have been trying to apply their internet rulings worldwide because of this. Jurisdiction is a heck of a problem though and courts around the world are essentially just testing their boundaries because there's no real precedent for how to deal with the problem of cross-jurisdictional information.
Eventually I imagine we're going to have to end up with some sort of internet court where countries can bring these complaints and that does have jurisdiction over such border-spanning issues. I don't know whether that will be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run, but I can't see anything good coming out of the current situation -- the absolute best scenario is that we keep the status quo where countries can only enforce rulings within their borders that are essentially meaningless due to the border-agnostic nature of the internet.
Hopefully by 12,000 AD we'll have come up with a better disposal and recovery solution than "bury it and look the other way." Either that or we'll all be dead there won't be anyone left to care. The critters that happen to be on top of the hole will die and the rest of whatever's left of the environment will carry on as usual. We're the only species that gives a crap about life on an individual level.
Scaremongering really is needed though. The only way anything's going to get done, not just at that site but with all of the old sites, is if people start worrying about their back yards.
Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear regime has directed all of the scariness of nuclear in the wrong direction: We're petrified of new, safer nuclear options while we simultaneously ignore the old, decaying nuclear sites that already exist and are at moderate to extreme risk of disaster due to neglect and simply being well past their design spec age.
So what we need is not to stop the scaremongering. What we need to do is redirect the scaremongering to the issues that are actually relevant now rather than theoretical future issues that may or may not ever come up.
Predicated on pessimistic bullshit. Even if all crime magically disappeared, the government would still be needed to enforce national security on the outward side, maintain infrastructure, settle (non-criminal) disputes, deal with natural disasters, and so on.
While I don't deny that making everyone a criminal provides the government a certain amount of power over them, I certainly question the necessity of doing so. I tend to prefer Hanlon's razor in situations like this -- "Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding."
I mean I'm sure some of our elected officials are truly working against the people for reasons of their own, but mostly I would guess that they're just busy (not necessarily productively busy..) and uncaring and will sign in anything that sounds good in an elevator pitch without bothering to consider the negative consequences.
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I don't know about worse, but a possible competitor for similarly bad, albeit in different ways. Her domestic policies seemed pretty solid (as long as you aren't a far right-winger I suppose.)
Her foreign policy on the other hand.. was looking somewhat scary. Even during the campaign it seemed like she was gearing up to do her best to piss off Russia. Up for grabs how far she would have taken that. Or what she would have done with regards to North Korea's recent threats. Add in her questionable (if not illegal) history as secretary of state and even with the tragic comedy of Trump's first few months, I would still hesitate to claim with certainty that Clinton would have been better overall.
And third in line is who? Paul Ryan? That's not exactly a step up either. You have to go quite far down the roster before you find someone who isn't so far right that they're almost falling off the spectrum. Which I guess is great if you're rich and a dedicated Christian but not so much for the other 99% of the country.
Trump's baffoonery may be silly and ridiculous, and can sometimes distract from the fact that he has the potential to do real damage, but on the upside it seems to also be distracting him and making it much harder for him to push through the laws he wants considering that both houses are Republican.
Depends entirely on who the special prosecutor is and what he thinks about Trump's politics. It may be that he can remain unbiased and pursues the investigation to whatever conclusion. Or it could be a dog and pony show just to appease the public while they sit on the actual investigation for the next 4-8 years until Trump's gone from office (or worse, they falsify a conclusion and it goes away completely in the short term and the blows up into a disaster later when someone decides to re-checks fact.)
I don't know Robert Mueller's history or political associations, so I can only posit possibilities, but simply having him appointed in itself doesn't really say much given the circus that the current administration is constantly putting on. This could well be just another act.
What the hell are you talking about? Name one thing that couldn't be said or written while net neutrality is active? Companies may not be allowed to implement a business plan that amounts to "shove a large rod up our customers' rear ends" under net neutrality, but they could still write it if they wanted with or without net neutrality.
Maybe you should try again with the 2nd or maybe the 18th amendment? I mean you're not even bothering to justify that claim never mind doing so in any sort of logical sense, so why not insist that net neutrality is inhibiting the sale of alcohol? It makes just as much sense.
Well sure if you have a show that originally sucks and you essentially give it a brand new script that doesn't suck, then that's great. But that's not really due to it being dubbed -- that's due to it being rewritten. If you rewrote the script to not suck in the original language it would be better as well. Dubbing just gives them a second shot at it.
Being able to completely scrap (or at least substantially alter) the original script removes or at least reduces many of the problems with dubbing -- in particular the need to simultaneously match meaning and lip syncing at the same time, which is the source of most of the forced sounding dialogue in dubs. If you're willing to forego lip syncing, you can translate basically all of the meaning (barring true cultural differences) but the many, many memes about old Chinese karate films show how well that goes over.
On the other hand, if you're willing to forego meaning, you still are somewhat restricted by the lip syncing but you have far more flexibility in choosing your words since you can make up whatever crap sounds good and not worry about whether it makes sense in the (original) context. Fourth wall breaking is a common practice when they do this because then they don't even have to make sense in the new context either.
But of course I wasn't really talking about the rare cases where they throw away the original script, much as those can be fun (I still love Samurai Pizza Cats!) I was talking about legitimate translation efforts, which are the vast majority. And its not because translators suck. Its not because the voice actors suck. Its simply because languages mostly don't follow the same vocal and lip movement patterns.
For a bit of an aside, Square-Enix' recent Final Fantasy games (starting at FF13 I believe) have been designed so that the characters' mouth movements are matched to the local dialog rather than being fixed to the original (Japanese) dialog and having the lip syncing issues that their previous games had (for the same reason as movies.) Of course, that's much easier in CG since the mouth movements are less precise to begin with, and they control the full animation frame by frame (as opposed to say a DVD where the animation is fixed at the time the DVD is pressed -- though they could theoretically re-animate the mouth movements for the primary language of each DVD region.) That doesn't really apply to real actors in movies and whatnot of course (even if you wanted to do it per-region, you would have to re-shoot the scene for each language.. which obviously isn't cost-effective.)
You may not know any personally, but there's no shortage of stories about doctors behaving like assholes toward their nurses and even patients, never mind what they do outside of the office.
It's not a problem in the US or in societies based on free markets.
Bwahahaha. Nice one. I believe you mean its still a problem in the US, even with all of the anti-discrimination laws.
I don't know much about the UK so I won't try to make any statements about how it compares, but the US is far from free of discrimination, whether its by race or sex or sexual orientation or any number of other factors.
it is absolutely not "great" or even "acceptable" that the federal government gets involved in questions of whether men are behaving nicely towards women at work
Its absolutely not "great" or "acceptable" that that the government feels the need to get involved. Unfortunately there's too many shitty people in the world for that to be resolved without some form of higher power intervening, and God doesn't seem to be interested.
I can only assume that you're a straight, white male as I imagine too many other groups of people who aren't thankful as balls that we have anti-discrimination laws.
I'm not saying the government has always made the correct choices when designing such laws, but I can guarantee you that rampant discrimination isn't a problem that solves itself. If anything, its self-reinforcing when people are left to their own devices.
No, back in the grown up mature world it goes both ways. Its expected that you try not to say or do anything blatantly offensive, and its also expected that if you say something that I happen to take offense to that I let it slide.
The problem comes when you're always saying offensive shit. And even more so if you're regularly saying offensive shit specifically targeted to someone in the office.
And yes, people who take offense to every little thing and are constantly making a snit also tend to be ostracized in their offices as well. You just don't hear nearly as much about them because they're usually not wrong so much as they are annoying as opposed to some ass who's always spouting racist, sexist, homophobic, etc remarks that are (at least by modern standards) considered to be impolite at best and often flat out rude and hateful.
That said, context is important. If you're among a bunch of low-class dudes then maybe bragging about your sexual conquests is OK. That doesn't mean its OK to continue like that after you hire a female employee. That changes the context and you're expected to change with it (at least in any sort of sane organization.)
PS: There is no context where its OK for me to call you "The Awesome Duke of Danger That I Service Every Night."
When you start hitting numbers like 1000 though, its kind of gone beyond just occasional hookups. I mean even if that's over a 10 year period, that's on average a bit under 2 different partners per week.
At that point its somewhat beyond not having to be in love with the person and into the territory of not even caring that they are a person. Complete desensitization. And that's somewhat evidenced by the related claim that he refuses to wear condoms -- implying that he doesn't really care about either his partners' health or even his own to any great extent. At that point he's just having sex because he can and has built up an expectation for himself that he should, more than because he enjoys it.
The old saying "moderation in all things" really does apply to pretty much all things, no matter how much it seems like it shouldn't in some cases.
You can have discussions (even regarding sex -- even joking about sex) in mixed company without acting like a total ass.
If you wouldn't say it to, in front of, or about your mother, you probably shouldn't say it to, in front of, or about your female coworkers either. And that's just a pretty simple rule of thumb (especially if your mother's pretty uncouth herself and is OK with that kind of talk!)
Treating women equally does not necessarily mean treating them identically (and vice-versa of course, though historically speaking there hasn't been much need to worry about things going the other direction.) There are of course obvious differences between boys and girls and there's no problem with recognizing that. Where the problem comes in is when you use that as an excuse to degrade women, abuse them, pay them lower wages, or any of the many other shitty ways men have treated women throughout most of human history.
Wow. That's a hell of a lot of ranting and generalization over a single word! I hope you remembered to take your blood pressure meds before letting that one out.
But I'm going to respond to one particular point because its not just an overzealous and underthought opinion, but actually borders into dangerous stupidity:
note they are MUSLIMS, no other religion comes close to the 30,000 plus murders committed by radical MUSLIMS in the past 17 years in the name of Islam
There is a vast difference between the statement "most terrorists are Muslim" and "most Muslims are terrorists." While your statement may be factually true, the conclusion you're implying from it is not.
I mean hell if we want to take your line of thinking to a stupid extreme: Straight men have started and controlled pretty much every war and tragedy in human history, so I guess we should just get rid of them? Time for heterophobia to get going already! Oh wait, your logic should only apply when you want it to? How convenient.
Yeah but the time differential between him taking the bikers' clothes and him saving John is about 2 minutes or something.. its pretty close in any case (and that scene is right near the beginning of the movie to boot,) so the amount of movie "spoiled" is quite minimal.
Compare that with say, a trailer that showed 3/4 of the climactic office storming scene and then him being lowered into the smelter. That's more the level of spoiler we're seeing a lot these days.
It seems a little pessimistic to blame everything that's wrong with movies today on breaking them down into 15 chunks instead of just 3 chunks. Yeah that's certainly more fine-grained and therefore less flexible, but its still giving the screenwriter 4-8 minutes of freedom for each "beat" (depending on the length of the film.)
There are lots of other issues going on as well though: - High risk-avoidance leading to a continual stream of remakes and sequels rather than allowing fresh ideas.
- The desire to appeal to foreign audiences (so more explosions and fighting and other dialogue-minimal scenes to avoid translations, as those always suck at least a little. Which means less time and words available to generate story and character content.)
- Competition from non-blockbuster sources such as Netflix originals, HBO's array of amazing TV shows (Game of Thrones might be the most well known, but they've produced a lot of other good ones as well) and indie films, which either previously didn't exist at all or were such low quality that they weren't really competitive. Even if all copyright infringement somehow disappeared overnight, Hollywood would still be in trouble due to this completely legitimate competition.
All of that combines in ways that make everything suck for classic Hollywood studios. This isn't like copyright infringement where they can just pass it off to their lawyers and call it a day. This time they're going to have to learn how to adjust to the new world, or die out while clinging to the old. Netflix in particular has been a massive game changer but at this point even losing Netflix wouldn't put the genie back in the bottle -- there's enough other Netflix-like companies that another one would just fill the void if somehow Netflix went away.
There's a whole confluence of things going on here:
- Sure, the price may track well with some vague metric of inflation, but wages have not, so as a wage ratio the price to an individual is still higher. Add onto that that we've got a bunch of other costs (cell phone, internet, Netflix) that many or even most of us didn't have two decades ago, and even $20 can getting stretched a bit thin if you're in the lower end of the middle class or below -- which is a large portion of the population.
- Large, really good TVs are cheap. Cheap enough that even many below the poverty line have one. Even a full "home theater" (ie: hook up a decent sound system to your TV) is reasonable these days. Why bother with lines and crowds and overpriced popcorn when you can get basically the same experience at home with a couple of friends?
- Movies have become more of a commodity than a luxury at this point. 20 years ago if you wanted to watch a movie you either a) went to a theater or b) rented a VHS tape to play on your tiny crappy TV. There really wasn't a middle ground, and you usually could only do that a couple times a month due to the cost and the time investment. Now with Netflix and other streaming services (never mind less legitimate sources,) we frequently just throw something on as background noise without even caring about or paying attention to it.
- And following that, competition. 20 years ago, there was only a small handful of studios that would push movies to an even smaller number of (national) theater chains and unless you were really into the artsy type scene with connections to source lesser-known stuff from, you really had little choice in the matter -- it was between Disney's new AAA title or Newline's new AAA title. Now that theaters aren't such a limiting factor (that whole good TV thing,) there are dozens if not hundreds of studios producing at least decent movies even if they're not AAA. A lot of TV shows have become competitive as well, which is a whole new realm of competition that never really existed before. So far we don't have much international competition at least -- Hollywood still does AAA better than almost anyone else, and they're (mostly) in English so that's a huge leg up over imported films that have to be translated -- most people don't like reading subtitles and even good dubs usually sound a bit forced and miss lots of subtleties.
If MS really wants to make people do updates promptly, they need to get their heads back out of their asses. In the late WinXP and into the early Win7 era, there was a strong push for security and the updates were usually both relevant and easy to install.
Fast forward to now, and half the updates you get are MS pushing their latest piece of crapware (*coughskypecough*) that you don't want, and like 90% of them require a full computer reboot -- which they'll happily do with our without your input and hope to hell you saved your work that day.
If MS wants people to install critical updates then:
a) Stop calling every fucking sales pitch "critical," and
b) Go back to putting in the effort to avoid reboots. I know its easier to just reset and not worry about internal version conflicts and whatnot, but its a serious detriment to anyone who doesn't normally shut off their computer in the first place (and those people are the ones who least need to be force into an unwanted reboot!)
Unfortunately MS has decided to do the exact opposite of that and compensate by giving you no choice -- enjoy losing your work.. what're you gonna do about it? Switch to Mac? Oh you are? Well fuck.
If you bias the questions and cherry pick the results, you can get pretty much any statistic you want.
Who woulda thunk it?
I'd be surprised if no one read it. Why even offer the site if that was the case?
Most likely, it will be a handful of interns and other low-level staff who go through and tally up yay/nay on whatever list of pre-defined concerns/issues someone decided on. And when the tallying is done, they'll present the totals to their bosses (possibly with some quotes from the better comments) who will take it into account when they make their decisions.
This is of course a bit of a biased process -- whoever defined the list of concerns to tally up, and which intern happens to read any specific comment, could both influence the interpretation of the results. And then of course the decision makers are still free to just ignore the results and do whatever they want anyway.
Government bureaucracy is well known for doing things slowly and inefficiently, but they don't often do things pointlessly (at least assuming you allow for more than your own political views as having a point..)
Given the current government's propensity for lying even when there's no reason to do so, I wouldn't be surprised if this "DDoS" really was "just can't handle the load," but chances are the site itself was legitimately and honestly setup to do what they claim and they just didn't allocate sufficient resources.
Yes. But "talking about it" is not the same as "scaremongering." If you ask just a random person on the street about nuclear power, they will either go off on a tirade about how its too dangerous and just look at Fukushima and we shouldn't build any more plants. Or you'll get that Fukushima was a rare event and nuclear is fine.
Few of them will talk about the problems with disposal areas and other things you mentioned, or bring up the fact that Fukushima was 50 or 60 years old and a decade+ past its operating lifespan, or that TEPCO had already been warned that such a thing could happen and ignored it because they did their risk/reward calculations and decided to make a bad gamble in order to avoid costs.
Sure people talk about those things, and most of the people on the ground are doing the best they can with the resources available. But its not the same as the "AMG NUCLEAR BAD" fear that's been generated about the prospect of new construction projects. Mostly it comes down to how much of the public knows/cares about it -- if the public has a strong opinion (even if its a stupid opinion) then politicians take notice and action (again, even if its stupid) gets taken. If its something that only a few thousand people in specific areas even know about, then it just becomes a line item in the budget that nobody pays attention to, whether its appropriately funded or not.
Define "cannot handle."
We seem to be pretty bad at handling basically every sort of pollution -- we've got the great garbage patch in the Pacific and smaller ones in basically all of the other oceans because we can't handle plastics. We've got CO2 and other greenhouse gases because we can't handle fossil fuels. We've got Superfund sites all over the US (and many similar, frequently even worse sites, around the world) because we can't handle any number of chemical processes.
Hell, go back a couple hundred years (and even in modern times in some places) and we have all sorts of diseases running rampant due to being unable to handle our own literal shit.
And of course in basically all of those cases, its not so much "we cannot handle it" as "we don't want to handle it." The real problem is that there's no significant deterrent to just walking away from a disaster you caused. Sure your company can be sued but oh well you just pay yourself a huge severance package and leave whoever takes over the company to declare bankruptcy and oops.. now there's nobody left to do the clean up. The Superfund was built to handle this of course, but regardless of the superlative name they've only got so many resources and for the most part nobody really cares unless one of those sites happens to be in their own back yard, so funding isn't usually a big priority in any political process. Never mind all of the disasters in other countries that don't have a Superfund equivalent.
That's kind of an irrelevant argument. I mean you could also argue that the FCC should just be renamed FCIC (Federal Communications & Internet Commision) in the same way that the ATF covers three pretty separate sets of regulations.
Not to mention the hassle you'd have when you consider the fact that telephone, cellular and TV (all definitely under FCC purview) are by far the primary providers of internet access. So putting internet under a different organization would mean two independent bodies both trying to regulate the same lines (and sometimes even the same protocols in the case of things like VOIP,) leading to all sort of potential regulatory conflicts.
It makes perfect sense from all angles I can think of to call the internet a communications medium. Specific labels like "common carrier" are a bit more up for grabs (at least if you're greedy and want to abuse consumers,) but the FCC already regulates plenty of things unrelated to common carriers (cable TV for example) so that's not much of an argument either.
That would have to go through US courts though. The Austrian government can't just claim property on US soil arbitrarily, even if that child was sole owner of the asset.
Now the US courts will likely take the Austrian ruling into account, and essentially decide whether to uphold the request or not. But they Austrian government still has to go through the procedure in the US.
The FB thing is a totally different issue. Because the internet is globally connected, some neo-Nazi jackass in Utah can post some racist hate speech on FB, which would likely be stored on FB's US servers, but an Austrian citizen could potentially still discover it.
Lots of countries (including my own here -- Canada) have been trying to apply their internet rulings worldwide because of this. Jurisdiction is a heck of a problem though and courts around the world are essentially just testing their boundaries because there's no real precedent for how to deal with the problem of cross-jurisdictional information.
Eventually I imagine we're going to have to end up with some sort of internet court where countries can bring these complaints and that does have jurisdiction over such border-spanning issues. I don't know whether that will be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run, but I can't see anything good coming out of the current situation -- the absolute best scenario is that we keep the status quo where countries can only enforce rulings within their borders that are essentially meaningless due to the border-agnostic nature of the internet.
Hopefully by 12,000 AD we'll have come up with a better disposal and recovery solution than "bury it and look the other way." Either that or we'll all be dead there won't be anyone left to care. The critters that happen to be on top of the hole will die and the rest of whatever's left of the environment will carry on as usual. We're the only species that gives a crap about life on an individual level.
Scaremongering really is needed though. The only way anything's going to get done, not just at that site but with all of the old sites, is if people start worrying about their back yards.
Unfortunately, the anti-nuclear regime has directed all of the scariness of nuclear in the wrong direction: We're petrified of new, safer nuclear options while we simultaneously ignore the old, decaying nuclear sites that already exist and are at moderate to extreme risk of disaster due to neglect and simply being well past their design spec age.
So what we need is not to stop the scaremongering. What we need to do is redirect the scaremongering to the issues that are actually relevant now rather than theoretical future issues that may or may not ever come up.
Predicated on pessimistic bullshit. Even if all crime magically disappeared, the government would still be needed to enforce national security on the outward side, maintain infrastructure, settle (non-criminal) disputes, deal with natural disasters, and so on.
While I don't deny that making everyone a criminal provides the government a certain amount of power over them, I certainly question the necessity of doing so. I tend to prefer Hanlon's razor in situations like this -- "Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding."
I mean I'm sure some of our elected officials are truly working against the people for reasons of their own, but mostly I would guess that they're just busy (not necessarily productively busy..) and uncaring and will sign in anything that sounds good in an elevator pitch without bothering to consider the negative consequences.