The most famous example is the Wright Brothers. Ignoring the massive contributions by George Cayley, Wenham, Santos-Dumont and the rest, the Americans pretend that the Wrights somehow invented flying out of nothing.
In essence, they did. I know that it hurts European pride to realize that we're so much better that you, but you're just going to have to accept it.
It's one thing to make what is just a very large and very expensive paper airplane. It's something else to make a lighter-than-air vessel. And it's something almost completely different to make a heaver-than-air vehicle that can actually gain altitude.
The guy on the line of invention that actually makes something that works is the guy that gets the credit. And America is very, very good at doing that last step. (From Democracy to the Moon landing, the US took someone else's idea and made it actually work.)
entertainingly, the new US show "American Inventor" credited the invention of the motor car and the computer to the Americans last week. doooooh!
The automobile is one of those trophy inventions that every country would like to take credit for and no one country really can. Considering that Henry Ford made it practical with the assembly line, I think we've got at least as much claim as the frenchmen who made an off-road steam engine or the British who poked around with internal combustion.
And as for the computer -- The first real implementation of non-human computers was the company that would become IBM for the American Census of 1890.
It is nowadays a "convention" that the Prime Minister is an MP - a "convention" being a concept in British constitutional law that is generally observed but does not have force of law.
Or, in other words, it's nothing more than a custom. If she could get Parliment to assent to it, the Queen could ask any random bloke off the street to become the Prime Minister. It's a big "If", but that's a heck of a lot more than, oh, some random guy being turned into the President without any Congressional oversight.
Pedantically focussing on the mechanics behind this is just as silly as claiming that the President is elected by the people because of the mechanics of the electoral college.
The elections cast for President are useful only in determining who becomes President. While they are grouped by state and abstracted through electors, it's very much a "vote for President" in the way that voting for the most-local counterpart is a "vote for mayor."
As for being silly --> if Tony Blair suddenly decided he was a Muslim Wahabbist, he could be removed from being Prime Minister in a manner of days. If George W. Bush decided the same, we'd still be stuck with him as POTUS until January 2009.
""Durable" isn't Alienware's value-argument, and it isn't Ferarri's, either." Despite the grammar error, this is a true statement, as far as it goes, which isn't very far.
That's a perfectly acceptable three-part sentence. The additional comma before the final term may be optional and almost a colloquialism, but it doesn't rise to the level of a grammar error. (The "either" is a distinct phrase unto itself, serving to reinforce the corellation between the two preceding phrases. Without that comma, it's a two-part sentence with less emphasis on the dissimilarity and almost a mere statement of fact.)
Both "Alienware" and "Ferarri" are properly made into posessives by the standard method -- I will admit to the possible presence of typos, but those are errors of spelling, not grammar.
Oh, and on that topic--don't use the Ellipsis (...) as a semicolon. It's acceptable to use it in original text as the end of a phrase to emphasize an unspoken possibility, but there's nothing in your phrase to indicate that your list of three faults carries on.
Anyway, back to content:
Opinions, stated as fact, backed by bad analogies... this is considerered "Insightful" on Slashdot these days.
The proper way to state an opinion about abstracts (such as "should", or the meanings of a word) is to state it as fact. And, apparantly, someone agreed with my analogy enough to spend a moderation point on me.
Bad analogy - computers aren't cars. Besides, I can fix a non-durable computer with a single screwdriver.
No, you can't. A "non-durable" -- that is, top-of-the-line -- computer requres more than a single screwdriver to fix. (And I wasn't the one to make the "Alienware makes cars" analogy, either.)
While it's admirable that the poster was consistent in his grammar error, this is simply stupid:
I surmise that you are concluding that my error is the possessive of "Ferrari." Which, you are actually correct in noting that I misued it here.
The implication is that someone that owns a Ferrari built it themselves, or in other words: Someone that builds their own computer is superior to someone that buys it pre-built from Alienware
1: No, the implication is that the whole "cars are computers" analogy that Alienware made is foolish. A sentiment that you agreed with, by the way.
2: Someone who "builds" their own personal computer is superior to someone who buys it from Alienware, in both their applied technical knowledge on the subject and in the pride they can derive from the achievement. Another applicable comparison of the same principle is that one can take more pride from a "hand-assembled" table than a pre-built one, more pride in a "made from wood" table than a "hand-assemlbed" one, and more pride in a "made from trees you grew" than the "made from someone else's wood" table.
One final thing:
Again, opinion, without any supporting argument.
Please don't make absolute statements which are so easily proven wrong. An opinion without supporting argument is, at most, a few lines. You may not agree with either the conclusion nor the character of my supporting arguments, but to deny their very existance is to leave all possiblity of rational discussion aside.
Whatever. I've been using macs for over a decade now, and all us old mac users remember the little "Fuck You" messages from MS,
"Over a decade now" is only 1996, dude. You're closer to the time where Microsoft lent stock to Apple than the time that MS really had to worry about Macintosh competition.
System-wide bugs from installing an Office Suite, a web browser, or a media-application are properly MS's fault, but I suspect it's more due to the relative size and cojones of the Apple-development team at MS than any actual malevolence. Those applications @#$!'d up Windows 95-98 when you installed them as well, just not quite as much.
With regards to the DVD -- unless you can show a link to Microsoft actually providing some of the software for this one, you'll just have to chalk it up to a software/DVD bug. The only link I found claims that other DVDs had the same problem.
Oh, and all those sites that wouldn't support Netscape 3-4 were due to browser wars that had NOTHING to do with Apple at all.
Please note: I was countering a point (raised by Marxist Hakcer 42) that the ADA is not a violation of the Constitutional freedom to associate, as the law does not (AFAIK) require anything more than taking reasonable steps to accomodate the handicapped. Target has to build wheelchair ramps and make their website effecively accessable to the blind, but they don't have to actually let either folk in wheelchair or the blind actually enter or purchase anything.
Sorry, but absolute XHTML 1.0 compliance IS reasonable action to accomodate persons with disabilities.
Even strict XHTML compliance doesn't translate to a total accomodation towards ADA. Yes, if you follow the spirit and intent you'll wind up following ADA, but that's due to the fact that "accessability" is in the same box as "standards-compliant" when it comes to "good web design."
No. Complying to the letter of the law fulfills their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders.
That "no" is uncalled for. IF, after compling with all legal requiremnets, Target can fulfill their fiduciary responsibility by turning away the blind, they can (will?) turn away the blind. It's almost hard to think of a situation in which turning away customers whom you've already spent money to make allowances for is ever a good idea -- maybe on an extremely busy shopping day when the crowd is so busy Target can't reasonably ensure the safety of the blind or the wheelchair-bound.
But, since you're so knowledgeable about the ADA--care to point out the applicable section that requires websites to accomodate the blind? Government websites are so bound, but it's hardly settled law that the website of even a public company needs to be accessable to the blind. (Similar to how neither newspapers nor catalogs are required to be printed in braile.)
Tony Blair is the legitimately elected MP representing Sedgefield. And he's also the legitimately elected leader of the Labour Party, as voted for by the MPs of that party. And you could quite reasonably argue that, as the leader and the "face" of Labour, his party's overall victory in the last three general elections is an additional (indirect) endorsement by British voters.
True enough. It's certainly "Democracy" for all intents and purposes, which is all that REALLY matters.
The British Prime Minister doesn't even need to be an MP?
Wikipedia: "Ministers do not, however, legally have to come from Parliament, though that is the modern day custom."
Whether or not he knows better, at least [Tony Blair] was elected.
Actually, he wasn't.
Britain is a Parlimentary System, and as such Tony Blair is elected, in truth, only by the members of his particular party. He doesn't even need to have been a Member of Parliment.
And when you get right down to it, bypassing the House of Lords on a truly pressing matter is simply a matter of walking the papers to the Queen and convincing her to sign them.
Y'know, "durable" isn't a word one applies to anything top-of-the-line. It's almost not even a design consideration.
A durable car can be driven after a serious accident. A durable car puts up with no maintenance for 20,000 miles. A durable car can be fixed by someone with less than $500 worth of tools.
In the same way -- a durable computer keeps chugging along with four cubic inches of dust inside the case. A durable computer is still usable with a blown capacitaotor and a failing hard drive. A durable computer can be kicked and given to a two-year old and still used.
"Durable" isn't Alienware's value-argument, and it isn't Ferarri's, either. (Although, really, it's a laughable comparison. Alienware doesn't build Ferarri's; they build pre-pimped rice burners.)
The president has committed a felony by ordering domestic wiretapping without judicial oversight.
Ah, no. The President is largely exempt from civil or criminal liability while he carries out his Constitutional duties. In order to rise above this standard, the President's high crime must be so agregious that it in no way could be construed as an attempt at fulfilling his Oath of Office.
POTUS has shown a clear disregard for the rule of law, in taking action to prevent a law from being passed that would make their actions totally permissable or even informing Congress of their actions. This is not, and can not, be a felony -- although it should be enough for, if not impeachment, then at least a censure.
Target MUST take all reasonable actions to accomodate persons with disabilities.
They MAY, even with the ADA, turn away persons who happen to have disabilities without stating a reason why. So long as they can show that the mere cost of complaince was not the issue, they are free to randomly turn away anyone and everyone that they want.
(I mean, provided that in doing so their managment fulfills their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, that is.)
How about "We reserve the right not to do business with those we choose not to do business with without explaination?" This is about a lot more than just website accessibility- it speaks to (but probably won't come up) the constitutionality of the ADA itself.
Target can still decide not to let this guy -- or, even, any blind person at all -- conduct business with them. Having to make allowances for a disability does not keep you from turning people away.
If you can figure out how to unlock it yourself, then great, but there is simply no reason for a wireless provider to help you switch to another network.
Sure there is.
Your customers ARE going to switch. All it takes is one moron in customer service, and BAM--they're down to your competitor in the shopping mall.
If you make it easy for them to take the phone you sold them and go, then you make it even easier for them to take that same phone and come back.
Oh, and there is that whole FCC interopability thing, y'know.
I break into your house, rape your wife, and shoot you and your children in the head. After I forced you to watch. I am a murderer, 100% black.
I am a working-class stiff. I make a bit more than I need for myself, I don't own any assets of worth, and I give all of my excess money away to what I feel are worhty 501(c)(3) organizations. I don't even get the tax benefits. 100% white.
Is the world complex and nuanced? Yes. Does that mean that the extremes never happen? No.
Let's start with the basics: Movies only get R and PG-13 if they have an ammount of violence, sex, or profanity that is beyond what the MPAA considers appropriate for everyone. PG is movies that might not be appropriate for young children. You complaining that a movie that isn't G has something that your "family" doesn't want to watch is like complaining that your frozen TV-dinner is frozen solid.
As to the point you actually made, that Hollywood is making films "for itself" -- some of the biggest grossing movies ever have nothing at all to do with sex or profanity, and the violence in them is violence akin to that in scripture (either an exmaple of villiany or as a proper response to the same). In fact, according to IMDB:
1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824 2. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665 3. Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036 4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) $434,949,459 5. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $431,065,444 6. Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375 7. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) $380,262,555 8. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) $377,019,252 9. Spider-Man 2 (2004) $373,377,893 10. The Passion of the Christ (2004)
So, 1 movie with a sex scene -- and it's a tradgedy about love, nonetheless--, six fantasy movies with little to no profanity or sex but rather appropriate violence, a movie intended for families before anything else, and a religious movie.
Thus, science doesn't recognize the term "race", and even if it did, it wouldn't be what you and Mrs. Robinson mean with "race".
"Science" -- we'll just ignore the lack of a monlotlithic scientific body here -- doesn't decide what words mean. Yes, (almost) all humans are the same species and sub-species, able to comfortably interbreed without reproductive difficulty. But there is a clear difference between the people who lived in Europe in 0 C.E. and those that lived in Japan or Africa in the same year. Just as there was a clear, physical difference between the people of one tribe and their hated enemies across the sea.
There are few serious studies of the difference between this that use the term "race" becase it is, as the Times points out, "a sensitive issue." Much better to use a different term entirely than to have to risk political backlash when the politician who helped fund you gets called a racist.
I can give you a gene to study, and you cannot tell me what "race" this gene's carrier is (I'll give you 1000 samples in order to weed out guesses and make a statistically accurate falsification of your lies). That is the ultimate test of "race".
I'll give you 22 entire chromosones to study, and you cannot tell me what "gender" the chromosone's carrier is. Obviously, this statistically disproves your naive notion that there is any difference at all between "men" and "women."
Race is a set of physical characteristics that is borne out by physical examination. The slender genetic differences needed to carry these characteristics does not, in any way, invalidate the idea itself. In fact, if you give me 1000 RELEVENT genes, I can tell you with close to 100% accuracy what race the subjects are.
No. This is simply not so, because warriors (in the original example) don't mate with warriors; they mate with females, who are carriers of the whole population's gene pool.
*sigh* Please go back and read the article. Here, I'll quote it for you and markup the relevant word you missed:
Napoleon Chagnon for many decades studied the Yanomamo, a warlike people who live in the forests of Brazil and Venezuela. He found that men who had killed in battle had three times as many children as those who had not. Since personality is heritable, this would be a mechanism for Yanomamo nature to evolve and become fiercer than usual.
I think that's all the rebuttal I need for that point.
Republicans get more kids, and these kids must then make their offspring with another republican, otherwise your thesis falls
Nope. The premise just has to be that Republicans tend to raise Republicans and have more children than non-Republicans. If we had the kind of discrepency that the Yanomamo had, with say two kids for Democrats and six for Republicans, we'd have a Republican slant unless every Democrat married a republican(1) and managed at least an 88% poliitcal conversion rate (2).
Oh, and I already told you how my shaky premise could be shot full of holes when you apply it to America.
In order to dismiss the claim, you'd have to show that either warriors/republicans tend not to raise children that grow up to be warriors/repulicans, or that a significant ammount of warriors/republicans die before having children, or that the tribe as a whole is distinct enough that its sub-groups don't influence each other at all.
(1): Presuming equal starting populations of Republicans and Democrats and unstaggered generations for ease of illustration, this makes for 1/3 pure republican, 1/3 male republican, and 1/3 female republican households in the second generation. With reproductive frequency linked to the male as it is in the Yanomamo, that'd give us 43% of the children in pure-Republican homes and 57% of the children in mixed homes.
(2): That is, rate of raising their children to be like them instead of the other parent. Even if we presumed that all Republicans had more kids, this would still need to be at least a 75% conversion or we'd have a slant.
1. genes govern everything we are and are not, and everybody has a different set of genes (with the exception of twins). Thus, no one is actually created equal, in the sense you are suggesting.
Let's you and I, and ten other people, all take a (12 oz) bottle of drinking water, get together, and run some scientific tests. All twelve bottles will have different mineral content, salinity, and various other factors, but despite these minor variations they are all "equal" bottles of water.
To put the rebuttal another way: there has never been a solid proof that genetics really do determine human behavior. It's an influence, but not a greater influence that paternity, upbrining, or self-determination. It's certainly not a factor in the success rate of persons attemting equal goals with equal resources resolve.
What this basically means is that we are all the same on the group level; this is not just politically correct, but also scientifically correct. A few discrepancies such as resistance to malaria, skin color, hair color and other minute genome changes donät change this.
Saying that there are no such thing as human races is an untenable abuse of language. The right term, perhaps, would be "there are only minor changes between the races" or rather "there is almost universal interbreeding between the races." No ammount of genetics will ever change the fact that children look like their parents, and genetically different groups have identifiable physical differences.
we tend to categorize people by their looks. Japanese and Chinese are all small, and this must be because of their genes, right?
No, it's because of their diet. The distinguishing oriental characteristics are slanted eye shape and color, and "yellow" skin tone. Just like the distinguishing african characteristics are "brown" skin and a particular facial characteritics, and the distinguishing "Caucaisan" characterisics are (again) skin tone and face shape.
(do you know who Yao Ming is?)
He's an oriental basketball player. And, apparantly, a bad strawman on your part.
TFA mentions that some warriors tend to have three times as many babies as non-warriors, and that this would have a social effect, making the tribe more aggressive on the whole. That is such rubbish that I can't even start to think about its national socialist roots; it doesn't work that way, since others still have babies at a significant rate.
Sheesh. If sub-group A (let's call them Republicans) has more children than sub-group B (let's call them Democrats), then the tribe that contains both sub-groups will, generation after generation, tend to be more like sub-group A.
In order to dismiss the claim, you'd have to show that either warriors/republicans tend not to raise children that grow up to be warriors/repulicans, or that a significant ammount of warriors/republicans die before having children, or that the tribe as a whole is distinct enough that its sub-groups don't influence each other at all.
-No keyboard at a time with mobile computing is moving to keyboards: check
Rebuttal 1.a: Mobile computing has been solidly in-keyboards since, oh, the days of the Palm III. I've owned a PDA constantly since then, and I've always had a keyboard --a real, touch-typable keyboard--only a simple setup away.
Rebuttal 1.b: It has a keyboard, same as tablet PCs have keyboards.
-It's basically a big PDA at a time when the PDA market is on it's death bead: check
Annoyance: It's death BED. As in, what you lie in whilst you are dying. It's not a death bead, able to be strung along a string. (I understand typos, but mistakes that are a totally different word demand correction.)
Rebuttal 2: The PDA market is, like most markets, one of cycles. There is a solid market for an electronic organizer / personal computer, and there always will be -- attached to or seperate from a cell phone.
-It's not a phone at a time when the smartphone market is growing rapidly: check
Yes, exactly. A phone has to do a whole bunch of things -- like actually be comfortable held up to the ear -- that any other portable device doesn't. Remember the N-Gage?
But this is getting creepy, GPL3 is just a license, to protect information, over one simple filosophical belive: Free of information.
Philosophical Belief!
And GPL3 is a significant break in the Free-Computing "Church", as it is said, in intent, to limit what you can do with the software that you write. Somewhat akin to requiring the avaliabity of code with any installation of the software, not just distribution.
If it were simple--well, if it were simple, it'd be the BSD license.
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The most famous example is the Wright Brothers. Ignoring the massive contributions by George Cayley, Wenham, Santos-Dumont and the rest, the Americans pretend that the Wrights somehow invented flying out of nothing.
In essence, they did. I know that it hurts European pride to realize that we're so much better that you, but you're just going to have to accept it.
It's one thing to make what is just a very large and very expensive paper airplane. It's something else to make a lighter-than-air vessel. And it's something almost completely different to make a heaver-than-air vehicle that can actually gain altitude.
The guy on the line of invention that actually makes something that works is the guy that gets the credit. And America is very, very good at doing that last step. (From Democracy to the Moon landing, the US took someone else's idea and made it actually work.)
Whether this is less democratic or more democratic than the US system is arguable.
Oh, that part of it is certainly more Democratic. It's not necessarily more in tune with the rule of law, though.
"It's a type of computer circuit, important to modern PCs."
How's that?
entertainingly, the new US show "American Inventor" credited the invention of the motor car and the computer to the Americans last week. doooooh!
The automobile is one of those trophy inventions that every country would like to take credit for and no one country really can. Considering that Henry Ford made it practical with the assembly line, I think we've got at least as much claim as the frenchmen who made an off-road steam engine or the British who poked around with internal combustion.
And as for the computer -- The first real implementation of non-human computers was the company that would become IBM for the American Census of 1890.
It is nowadays a "convention" that the Prime Minister is an MP - a "convention" being a concept in British constitutional law that is generally observed but does not have force of law.
Or, in other words, it's nothing more than a custom. If she could get Parliment to assent to it, the Queen could ask any random bloke off the street to become the Prime Minister. It's a big "If", but that's a heck of a lot more than, oh, some random guy being turned into the President without any Congressional oversight.
Pedantically focussing on the mechanics behind this is just as silly as claiming that the President is elected by the people because of the mechanics of the electoral college.
The elections cast for President are useful only in determining who becomes President. While they are grouped by state and abstracted through electors, it's very much a "vote for President" in the way that voting for the most-local counterpart is a "vote for mayor."
As for being silly --> if Tony Blair suddenly decided he was a Muslim Wahabbist, he could be removed from being Prime Minister in a manner of days. If George W. Bush decided the same, we'd still be stuck with him as POTUS until January 2009.
The important stuff first:
""Durable" isn't Alienware's value-argument, and it isn't Ferarri's, either."
Despite the grammar error, this is a true statement, as far as it goes, which isn't very far.
That's a perfectly acceptable three-part sentence. The additional comma before the final term may be optional and almost a colloquialism, but it doesn't rise to the level of a grammar error. (The "either" is a distinct phrase unto itself, serving to reinforce the corellation between the two preceding phrases. Without that comma, it's a two-part sentence with less emphasis on the dissimilarity and almost a mere statement of fact.)
Both "Alienware" and "Ferarri" are properly made into posessives by the standard method -- I will admit to the possible presence of typos, but those are errors of spelling, not grammar.
Oh, and on that topic--don't use the Ellipsis (...) as a semicolon. It's acceptable to use it in original text as the end of a phrase to emphasize an unspoken possibility, but there's nothing in your phrase to indicate that your list of three faults carries on.
Anyway, back to content:
Opinions, stated as fact, backed by bad analogies... this is considerered "Insightful" on Slashdot these days.
The proper way to state an opinion about abstracts (such as "should", or the meanings of a word) is to state it as fact. And, apparantly, someone agreed with my analogy enough to spend a moderation point on me.
Bad analogy - computers aren't cars. Besides, I can fix a non-durable computer with a single screwdriver.
No, you can't. A "non-durable" -- that is, top-of-the-line -- computer requres more than a single screwdriver to fix. (And I wasn't the one to make the "Alienware makes cars" analogy, either.)
While it's admirable that the poster was consistent in his grammar error, this is simply stupid:
I surmise that you are concluding that my error is the possessive of "Ferrari." Which, you are actually correct in noting that I misued it here.
The implication is that someone that owns a Ferrari built it themselves, or in other words: Someone that builds their own computer is superior to someone that buys it pre-built from Alienware
1: No, the implication is that the whole "cars are computers" analogy that Alienware made is foolish. A sentiment that you agreed with, by the way.
2: Someone who "builds" their own personal computer is superior to someone who buys it from Alienware, in both their applied technical knowledge on the subject and in the pride they can derive from the achievement. Another applicable comparison of the same principle is that one can take more pride from a "hand-assembled" table than a pre-built one, more pride in a "made from wood" table than a "hand-assemlbed" one, and more pride in a "made from trees you grew" than the "made from someone else's wood" table.
One final thing:
Again, opinion, without any supporting argument.
Please don't make absolute statements which are so easily proven wrong. An opinion without supporting argument is, at most, a few lines. You may not agree with either the conclusion nor the character of my supporting arguments, but to deny their very existance is to leave all possiblity of rational discussion aside.
Whatever. I've been using macs for over a decade now, and all us old mac users remember the little "Fuck You" messages from MS,
"Over a decade now" is only 1996, dude. You're closer to the time where Microsoft lent stock to Apple than the time that MS really had to worry about Macintosh competition.
System-wide bugs from installing an Office Suite, a web browser, or a media-application are properly MS's fault, but I suspect it's more due to the relative size and cojones of the Apple-development team at MS than any actual malevolence. Those applications @#$!'d up Windows 95-98 when you installed them as well, just not quite as much.
With regards to the DVD -- unless you can show a link to Microsoft actually providing some of the software for this one, you'll just have to chalk it up to a software/DVD bug. The only link I found claims that other DVDs had the same problem.
Oh, and all those sites that wouldn't support Netscape 3-4 were due to browser wars that had NOTHING to do with Apple at all.
Please note: I was countering a point (raised by Marxist Hakcer 42) that the ADA is not a violation of the Constitutional freedom to associate, as the law does not (AFAIK) require anything more than taking reasonable steps to accomodate the handicapped. Target has to build wheelchair ramps and make their website effecively accessable to the blind, but they don't have to actually let either folk in wheelchair or the blind actually enter or purchase anything.
Sorry, but absolute XHTML 1.0 compliance IS reasonable action to accomodate persons with disabilities.
Even strict XHTML compliance doesn't translate to a total accomodation towards ADA. Yes, if you follow the spirit and intent you'll wind up following ADA, but that's due to the fact that "accessability" is in the same box as "standards-compliant" when it comes to "good web design."
No. Complying to the letter of the law fulfills their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders.
That "no" is uncalled for. IF, after compling with all legal requiremnets, Target can fulfill their fiduciary responsibility by turning away the blind, they can (will?) turn away the blind. It's almost hard to think of a situation in which turning away customers whom you've already spent money to make allowances for is ever a good idea -- maybe on an extremely busy shopping day when the crowd is so busy Target can't reasonably ensure the safety of the blind or the wheelchair-bound.
But, since you're so knowledgeable about the ADA--care to point out the applicable section that requires websites to accomodate the blind? Government websites are so bound, but it's hardly settled law that the website of even a public company needs to be accessable to the blind. (Similar to how neither newspapers nor catalogs are required to be printed in braile.)
Tony Blair is the legitimately elected MP representing Sedgefield. And he's also the legitimately elected leader of the Labour Party, as voted for by the MPs of that party. And you could quite reasonably argue that, as the leader and the "face" of Labour, his party's overall victory in the last three general elections is an additional (indirect) endorsement by British voters.
True enough. It's certainly "Democracy" for all intents and purposes, which is all that REALLY matters.
The British Prime Minister doesn't even need to be an MP?
Wikipedia: "Ministers do not, however, legally have to come from Parliament, though that is the modern day custom."
Whether or not he knows better, at least [Tony Blair] was elected.
Actually, he wasn't.
Britain is a Parlimentary System, and as such Tony Blair is elected, in truth, only by the members of his particular party. He doesn't even need to have been a Member of Parliment.
And when you get right down to it, bypassing the House of Lords on a truly pressing matter is simply a matter of walking the papers to the Queen and convincing her to sign them.
Y'know, "durable" isn't a word one applies to anything top-of-the-line. It's almost not even a design consideration.
A durable car can be driven after a serious accident. A durable car puts up with no maintenance for 20,000 miles. A durable car can be fixed by someone with less than $500 worth of tools.
In the same way -- a durable computer keeps chugging along with four cubic inches of dust inside the case. A durable computer is still usable with a blown capacitaotor and a failing hard drive. A durable computer can be kicked and given to a two-year old and still used.
"Durable" isn't Alienware's value-argument, and it isn't Ferarri's, either. (Although, really, it's a laughable comparison. Alienware doesn't build Ferarri's; they build pre-pimped rice burners.)
The president has committed a felony by ordering domestic wiretapping without judicial oversight.
Ah, no. The President is largely exempt from civil or criminal liability while he carries out his Constitutional duties. In order to rise above this standard, the President's high crime must be so agregious that it in no way could be construed as an attempt at fulfilling his Oath of Office.
POTUS has shown a clear disregard for the rule of law, in taking action to prevent a law from being passed that would make their actions totally permissable or even informing Congress of their actions. This is not, and can not, be a felony -- although it should be enough for, if not impeachment, then at least a censure.
Sheesh. Let me spell it out for you.
Target MUST take all reasonable actions to accomodate persons with disabilities.
They MAY, even with the ADA, turn away persons who happen to have disabilities without stating a reason why. So long as they can show that the mere cost of complaince was not the issue, they are free to randomly turn away anyone and everyone that they want.
(I mean, provided that in doing so their managment fulfills their fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, that is.)
How about "We reserve the right not to do business with those we choose not to do business with without explaination?" This is about a lot more than just website accessibility- it speaks to (but probably won't come up) the constitutionality of the ADA itself.
Target can still decide not to let this guy -- or, even, any blind person at all -- conduct business with them. Having to make allowances for a disability does not keep you from turning people away.
If you can figure out how to unlock it yourself, then great, but there is simply no reason for a wireless provider to help you switch to another network.
Sure there is.
Your customers ARE going to switch. All it takes is one moron in customer service, and BAM--they're down to your competitor in the shopping mall.
If you make it easy for them to take the phone you sold them and go, then you make it even easier for them to take that same phone and come back.
Oh, and there is that whole FCC interopability thing, y'know.
nothing is black and white, dammit!
I break into your house, rape your wife, and shoot you and your children in the head. After I forced you to watch. I am a murderer, 100% black.
I am a working-class stiff. I make a bit more than I need for myself, I don't own any assets of worth, and I give all of my excess money away to what I feel are worhty 501(c)(3) organizations. I don't even get the tax benefits. 100% white.
Is the world complex and nuanced? Yes. Does that mean that the extremes never happen? No.
No, that was the point I was making.
He was saying "Hollywood sucks, they should do X!", and I was countering with "Hey, they already do X."
Studies have indeed shown a causal relationship between video games and hyperactivity, attention deficit, and violence.
Link, please. Your unquoted assertion and my unquoted assertion (1) cancel each other out, and can only be resolved by a real quote.
(1): It was implied. Explicity, "No, that's never been proven conclusively in an accredited study."
Yep. http://video.google.com/
Not everything is out there, but it's more than nothing.
iTMS is also a possibility, but it might require either a new player or a lengthty conversion.
Sheesh.
Let's start with the basics: Movies only get R and PG-13 if they have an ammount of violence, sex, or profanity that is beyond what the MPAA considers appropriate for everyone. PG is movies that might not be appropriate for young children. You complaining that a movie that isn't G has something that your "family" doesn't want to watch is like complaining that your frozen TV-dinner is frozen solid.
As to the point you actually made, that Hollywood is making films "for itself" -- some of the biggest grossing movies ever have nothing at all to do with sex or profanity, and the violence in them is violence akin to that in scripture (either an exmaple of villiany or as a proper response to the same). In fact, according to IMDB:
1. Titanic (1997) $600,779,824
2. Star Wars (1977) $460,935,665
3. Shrek 2 (2004) $436,471,036
4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) $434,949,459
5. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) $431,065,444
6. Spider-Man (2002) $403,706,375
7. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (2005) $380,262,555
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) $377,019,252
9. Spider-Man 2 (2004) $373,377,893
10. The Passion of the Christ (2004)
So, 1 movie with a sex scene -- and it's a tradgedy about love, nonetheless--, six fantasy movies with little to no profanity or sex but rather appropriate violence, a movie intended for families before anything else, and a religious movie.
"Science" -- we'll just ignore the lack of a monlotlithic scientific body here -- doesn't decide what words mean. Yes, (almost) all humans are the same species and sub-species, able to comfortably interbreed without reproductive difficulty. But there is a clear difference between the people who lived in Europe in 0 C.E. and those that lived in Japan or Africa in the same year. Just as there was a clear, physical difference between the people of one tribe and their hated enemies across the sea.
There are few serious studies of the difference between this that use the term "race" becase it is, as the Times points out, "a sensitive issue." Much better to use a different term entirely than to have to risk political backlash when the politician who helped fund you gets called a racist.
I can give you a gene to study, and you cannot tell me what "race" this gene's carrier is (I'll give you 1000 samples in order to weed out guesses and make a statistically accurate falsification of your lies). That is the ultimate test of "race".
I'll give you 22 entire chromosones to study, and you cannot tell me what "gender" the chromosone's carrier is. Obviously, this statistically disproves your naive notion that there is any difference at all between "men" and "women."
Race is a set of physical characteristics that is borne out by physical examination. The slender genetic differences needed to carry these characteristics does not, in any way, invalidate the idea itself. In fact, if you give me 1000 RELEVENT genes, I can tell you with close to 100% accuracy what race the subjects are.
No. This is simply not so, because warriors (in the original example) don't mate with warriors; they mate with females, who are carriers of the whole population's gene pool.
*sigh* Please go back and read the article. Here, I'll quote it for you and markup the relevant word you missed:
I think that's all the rebuttal I need for that point.
Republicans get more kids, and these kids must then make their offspring with another republican, otherwise your thesis falls
Nope. The premise just has to be that Republicans tend to raise Republicans and have more children than non-Republicans. If we had the kind of discrepency that the Yanomamo had, with say two kids for Democrats and six for Republicans, we'd have a Republican slant unless every Democrat married a republican(1) and managed at least an 88% poliitcal conversion rate (2).
Oh, and I already told you how my shaky premise could be shot full of holes when you apply it to America.
(1): Presuming equal starting populations of Republicans and Democrats and unstaggered generations for ease of illustration, this makes for 1/3 pure republican, 1/3 male republican, and 1/3 female republican households in the second generation. With reproductive frequency linked to the male as it is in the Yanomamo, that'd give us 43% of the children in pure-Republican homes and 57% of the children in mixed homes.
(2): That is, rate of raising their children to be like them instead of the other parent. Even if we presumed that all Republicans had more kids, this would still need to be at least a 75% conversion or we'd have a slant.
1. genes govern everything we are and are not, and everybody has a different set of genes (with the exception of twins). Thus, no one is actually created equal, in the sense you are suggesting.
Let's you and I, and ten other people, all take a (12 oz) bottle of drinking water, get together, and run some scientific tests. All twelve bottles will have different mineral content, salinity, and various other factors, but despite these minor variations they are all "equal" bottles of water.
To put the rebuttal another way: there has never been a solid proof that genetics really do determine human behavior. It's an influence, but not a greater influence that paternity, upbrining, or self-determination. It's certainly not a factor in the success rate of persons attemting equal goals with equal resources resolve.
What this basically means is that we are all the same on the group level; this is not just politically correct, but also scientifically correct. A few discrepancies such as resistance to malaria, skin color, hair color and other minute genome changes donät change this.
Saying that there are no such thing as human races is an untenable abuse of language. The right term, perhaps, would be "there are only minor changes between the races" or rather "there is almost universal interbreeding between the races." No ammount of genetics will ever change the fact that children look like their parents, and genetically different groups have identifiable physical differences.
we tend to categorize people by their looks. Japanese and Chinese are all small, and this must be because of their genes, right?
No, it's because of their diet. The distinguishing oriental characteristics are slanted eye shape and color, and "yellow" skin tone. Just like the distinguishing african characteristics are "brown" skin and a particular facial characteritics, and the distinguishing "Caucaisan" characterisics are (again) skin tone and face shape.
(do you know who Yao Ming is?)
He's an oriental basketball player. And, apparantly, a bad strawman on your part.
TFA mentions that some warriors tend to have three times as many babies as non-warriors, and that this would have a social effect, making the tribe more aggressive on the whole. That is such rubbish that I can't even start to think about its national socialist roots; it doesn't work that way, since others still have babies at a significant rate.
Sheesh. If sub-group A (let's call them Republicans) has more children than sub-group B (let's call them Democrats), then the tribe that contains both sub-groups will, generation after generation, tend to be more like sub-group A.
In order to dismiss the claim, you'd have to show that either warriors/republicans tend not to raise children that grow up to be warriors/repulicans, or that a significant ammount of warriors/republicans die before having children, or that the tribe as a whole is distinct enough that its sub-groups don't influence each other at all.
To use any feature on that site requires javascript...
Well, yes. They'll get it working first, and worry about the no-script audience later, if at all.
-No keyboard at a time with mobile computing is moving to keyboards: check
Rebuttal 1.a: Mobile computing has been solidly in-keyboards since, oh, the days of the Palm III. I've owned a PDA constantly since then, and I've always had a keyboard --a real, touch-typable keyboard--only a simple setup away.
Rebuttal 1.b: It has a keyboard, same as tablet PCs have keyboards.
-It's basically a big PDA at a time when the PDA market is on it's death bead: check
Annoyance: It's death BED. As in, what you lie in whilst you are dying. It's not a death bead, able to be strung along a string. (I understand typos, but mistakes that are a totally different word demand correction.)
Rebuttal 2: The PDA market is, like most markets, one of cycles. There is a solid market for an electronic organizer / personal computer, and there always will be -- attached to or seperate from a cell phone.
-It's not a phone at a time when the smartphone market is growing rapidly: check
Yes, exactly. A phone has to do a whole bunch of things -- like actually be comfortable held up to the ear -- that any other portable device doesn't. Remember the N-Gage?
But this is getting creepy, GPL3 is just a license, to protect information, over one simple filosophical belive: Free of information.
Philosophical Belief!
And GPL3 is a significant break in the Free-Computing "Church", as it is said, in intent, to limit what you can do with the software that you write. Somewhat akin to requiring the avaliabity of code with any installation of the software, not just distribution.
If it were simple--well, if it were simple, it'd be the BSD license.