This is the airstrip at Bushehr, Iran. Interesting how Bushehr is available at high resolution while Tehran isn't. First to find the neighboring nuclear plant construction site wins a cookie!
Take them out and show them the conjunction. Take them out on successive nights and describe how we can figure out the heliocentric universe from the observations.
The funny thing is by the same "taking someone out and showing them", you can explain geocentric or sphere-based universes to them just as well, and they would believe it, too. And if anything remotely bad happened this weekend, they'd probably be gullible enough to believe it's because of the planets.
Because the smart thing to do in a country where they have the power to "disappear" you is to be a squeaky wheel.
Where did you learn that? Whom is that supposed to serve? Civil disobedience only works by scale. The Boston Tea Party didn't mean just throwing the occasional crate of tea into the harbour every now and then, either.
If by "being smart" you just mean survical, the solution is to be irrelevant (a good read for this is Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward", especially the dialogue between Shulubin and Kostoglotov in the second half). If, however, you want to acticely do something for your country, just being a squeaky wheel every now and then in isolation won't help anybody.
A more credible comparison is between the Soviets and the Nazis, between Stalin and Hitler, both psychopaths who murdered millions of their own citizens.
In my opinion, it's rather of secondary importance if it's your own citizens or somebody else's that are being murdered by the million.
The only thing that saved Europe from being fed into Nazi death camps was American blood.
You've got a somewhat skewed view of the war. The whole point of German aggression was conquering the western Soviet Union, as laid out in Hitler's "Mein Kampf". The Soviet Union was the main focus of German aggression and German atrocities in occupied Ukraine (for example). Among the nations participating in the War, it suffered the most casualties by a large margin. It was them who turned the Nazi offensive in the East in 1943 long before D-Day, and it was their soldiers who, after being forced to retreat some 2000 miles, marched all the way back from Moscow and Stalingrad to Berlin and took the German capital, essentially defending themselves. Even though this would have been substantially more difficult to achieve without Western (mainly British) material support, the Soviet contribution to the fall of Nazi Germany is probably greater than that of the United States.
(I'm saying this as a German who has no particular love for the Soviet Union, but a distinct interest for the European recent past.)
Perhaps you would have preferred the gulag.
Note that the Stalinist GULag was abolished during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization in the late 50s and early 60s. The Soviet Union was not completely incapable of reforming itself, realizing the wrongs Stalin's personality cult had brought on them. (What happened after Khrushchev is another story, however.)
Grow up. Learn the difference between right and wrong. Acquire the guts to combat wrong, rather than prostitute yourself by cozying up to it.
And while growing up, learn to inform yourself properly about what you're combatting, preferably before combatting it. Learn to combat the actual wrongs instead of some skewed, perceived idea of them. Learn that this may include trying to understand the other side's view of reality, too. And finally learn that once you've defeated the wrongs, you'll have to provide something real to replace them with. In Western Europe after 1945, this worked, but afterwards, it almost never did.
We are not responsible for the actions of our ancestors.
I agree with you completely. However by that logic, you can't claim any merit for them, either.
Here in Germany, I get to talk quite a lot with Americans who claim that "they" freed "us". Having never been freed by any American, especially not the ones I'm talking to, I consider that just as invalid.
asking you to prove you are not armed is not considered immoral in ANY country.
I don't know about your country, but in mine, this depends on how you're supposed to prove it. To reuse the old absurdly exaggerated example, anal probes to prove I'm not carrying C-4 up my rectum would probably be considered immoral. So would having everybody strip naked.
What would be the effect of just eliminating the cockpit door altogether? Enlarge the cockpit area to include its own head and galley. Expand the flight crew to include the usual cockpit personnel (pilot, co, nav) plus 1, maybe 2, attendants. Then, physically isolate the cockpit from the rest of the plane. Have the flight crew board through a separate entrance.
Then you'd have to make architectural changes to every single flight terminal in the world. Not counting that there are several good reasons why traffic between cockpit and cabin should be allowed (sick passengers and/or sick cockpit personnel being only two of them). The benefits of allowing traffic there far outweigh the risk, unless you're very paranoid.
Uh....right to travel, sure. But the airlines are not owned or operated by you. They are businesses, and they have the right to restrict access to their property any way they want to.
I don't know about your country, but in mine there is the notion of an "immoral contract" that is illegal and void by law due to its immoral nature.
I guess if in your country (wherever that may be) your airline forced you to subject to an anal probe or sell your daughter into slavery, that'd be OK by your standards; after all it's the airline's free decision on what grounds they want to allow access to their property. And if your municipiality forced everyone to offer the mayor the ius primae noctis, that'd be OK with you, after all it's you who wants to live on their ground. Maybe you'd even have the option of choosing another airline or living somewhere else. Maybe not, but heck, then that's your own bad luck, and probably even your fault, now that we're at it.
Well, if that's your idea of how your rights should be defined and defended, then I don't want to live in your country after all. What you describe is generally called feudalism, the only added notion being that businesses can be feudal overlords, too. We've fought quite a bit to get over this concept of freedom at the whim of the possessing.
Re:Outsourced ?.
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And was written by a member of the swedish minority there, people who get are viewed by the locals with the same benvolence extended to puerto-ricans in the US.
This is nonsense. There has been an Swedish minority in Finland ever since the country was a Swedish province; they're well established in society, and the Swedes are pretty much an integral part of the Finnish nation. Finland has a rather liberal system of minority and language rights. Finns learn Swedish at school. And while Finns might sometimes consider the Swedes somewhat arrogant and uppish, comparing them to the situation of Puerto Ricans in the US is just uninformed.
Grant Theft Auto 3, the first truly mass market game.
If you think GTA3 was the first "truly mass market game", I guess you're not around that long. I think that title belongs to Tetris on the Gameboy, which is about the only game every single one of my non-Geek friends knows. Different opinions are always welcome, of course.
Moreover, if the sky was green how would you ever get the refrigerator out of your ear? Therefore we must flatten the tires of our great tomato in order to prevent the miscarriage of granite. Only then can we labour safe in the knowledge that the world is flat.
Quite a number of commercial and amateur games are produced using GameStudio, which is pretty much what you're asking for. It's Win32 commercial software itself, unfortunately; the entry edition only costs $49, however. The graphics look quite impressive, it supports DirectX 9, and the more professional versions support stuff such as bones, pixel shaders or a physics engine. There are extensive online support libraries and forums for it, as the SDK is available for free. The program itself is rather easy to use, I have a friend here who uses it to teach a 3D game design class.
Unfortunately, at least with 3D games, making a game requires mainly 3D graphics and modelling rather than programming skills. So unless you teach kids how to do modelling in 3D Studio (and pay for that), they simply won't get the skills anywhere that it takes to program an attractive 3D game.
I find the negative view of windfarms odd. They're beautiful things.
I have a friend who lives north of a large wind farm here in Northern Germany. What drives him crazy (besides the sometimes rather considerable noise) is that the shadow from the rotor blades passes through his living room every couple seconds.
I do like the idea of wind farms in gerneral, but I also see that there might be a problem with having one in your back yard.
Excuse me, but how is that mutually exclusive? Having enough bombs to level the rest of the world doesn't stop them from levelling you. It's not a matter of who's got more bombs, it's a matter of who presses the button fast enough.
Tacitus was a clever guy, all in all, when it came to judging the state of the Roman empire [which is why I keep him in my sig;)]... Here's the quote from its original context, any parallels to present times are, of course, completely incidental:
Tacitus, Annals, 3.27: After Tarquin's expulsion, the people, to check cabals among the Senators, devised many safeguards for freedom and for the establishment of unity. Decemvirs were appointed; everything specially admirable elsewhere was adopted, and the Twelve Tables drawn up, the last specimen of equitable legislation. For subsequent enactments, though occasionally directed against evildoers for some crime, were oftener carried by violence amid class dissensions, with a view to obtain honours not as yet conceded, or to banish distinguished citizens, or for other base ends. Hence the Gracchi and Saturnini, those popular agitators, and Drusus too, as flagrant a corrupter in the Senate's name; hence, the bribing of our allies by alluring promises and the cheating them by tribunes vetoes. Even the Italian and then the Civil war did not pass without the enactment of many conflicting laws, till Lucius Sulla, the Dictator, by the repeal or alteration of past legislation and by many additions, gave us a brief lull in this process, to be instantly followed by the seditious proposals of Lepidus, and soon afterwards by the tribunes recovering their license to excite the people just as they chose. And now bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt.
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This is the North Korean nuclear site at Yongbyon, DPRK where they produced their plutonium. Look here for an explanation which building is which.
Where do I send the cookie? ;)
This is the airstrip at Bushehr, Iran. Interesting how Bushehr is available at high resolution while Tehran isn't. First to find the neighboring nuclear plant construction site wins a cookie!
Something like "We know when your daughter is coming from school?"
Or more like "You've got a very nice corporate headquarter here, would be a shame if something happened?"
*ponders*
Why should there be only these two options at all? In accepting this, you are following Bush's own logic.
If by "being smart" you just mean survical, the solution is to be irrelevant (a good read for this is Solzhenitsyn's "Cancer Ward", especially the dialogue between Shulubin and Kostoglotov in the second half). If, however, you want to acticely do something for your country, just being a squeaky wheel every now and then in isolation won't help anybody.
Democracy must not be taken for granted. It needs to be constantly fought for and won, else it will be coopted and lost.
(I'm saying this as a German who has no particular love for the Soviet Union, but a distinct interest for the European recent past.)Note that the Stalinist GULag was abolished during Khrushchev's de-Stalinization in the late 50s and early 60s. The Soviet Union was not completely incapable of reforming itself, realizing the wrongs Stalin's personality cult had brought on them. (What happened after Khrushchev is another story, however.)And while growing up, learn to inform yourself properly about what you're combatting, preferably before combatting it. Learn to combat the actual wrongs instead of some skewed, perceived idea of them. Learn that this may include trying to understand the other side's view of reality, too. And finally learn that once you've defeated the wrongs, you'll have to provide something real to replace them with. In Western Europe after 1945, this worked, but afterwards, it almost never did.
Here in Germany, I get to talk quite a lot with Americans who claim that "they" freed "us". Having never been freed by any American, especially not the ones I'm talking to, I consider that just as invalid.
Additional note: Even El Al, arguably the world's most paranoid airline, rejected this idea.
I guess if in your country (wherever that may be) your airline forced you to subject to an anal probe or sell your daughter into slavery, that'd be OK by your standards; after all it's the airline's free decision on what grounds they want to allow access to their property. And if your municipiality forced everyone to offer the mayor the ius primae noctis, that'd be OK with you, after all it's you who wants to live on their ground. Maybe you'd even have the option of choosing another airline or living somewhere else. Maybe not, but heck, then that's your own bad luck, and probably even your fault, now that we're at it.
Well, if that's your idea of how your rights should be defined and defended, then I don't want to live in your country after all. What you describe is generally called feudalism, the only added notion being that businesses can be feudal overlords, too. We've fought quite a bit to get over this concept of freedom at the whim of the possessing.
(Disclaimer: I'm neither Finnish nor Swedish.)
Quite a number of commercial and amateur games are produced using GameStudio, which is pretty much what you're asking for. It's Win32 commercial software itself, unfortunately; the entry edition only costs $49, however. The graphics look quite impressive, it supports DirectX 9, and the more professional versions support stuff such as bones, pixel shaders or a physics engine. There are extensive online support libraries and forums for it, as the SDK is available for free. The program itself is rather easy to use, I have a friend here who uses it to teach a 3D game design class.
Unfortunately, at least with 3D games, making a game requires mainly 3D graphics and modelling rather than programming skills. So unless you teach kids how to do modelling in 3D Studio (and pay for that), they simply won't get the skills anywhere that it takes to program an attractive 3D game.
I do like the idea of wind farms in gerneral, but I also see that there might be a problem with having one in your back yard.
Excuse me, but how is that mutually exclusive? Having enough bombs to level the rest of the world doesn't stop them from levelling you. It's not a matter of who's got more bombs, it's a matter of who presses the button fast enough.
And in the end, it'll be a draw, of course.