I think you're confused. They don't like images in the likeness of Mohammed (never mind that no one knows that the heck he looks like anyway, probably partly because of this same prohibition). I don't think they care much about images of themselves, especially not while wearing burqas. I do remember a ridiculous case a while ago of some muslim woman in Florida who tried to make a court case out of driver's license photos, because she refused to have her photo taken without a burqa, and the DMV refused to issue her a driver's license without actually seeing her face (after all, what's the point of a photo ID if the person is wearing a mask that covers their whole head?).
Wow, thanks for the informative post. What's your impression of Spain? Or how about the Basque area, that seems like it might be different? Or some places in eastern Europe like Czech Republic or Croatia? Can you elaborate on St. Petersburg? How about Ireland?
Just in case I ever decide to move to Europe, I'd like to know which places are good and which places to avoid, so this is actually very helpful, so thanks again.
No, I can at least understand that mentality, even though I don't buy into it myself.
The problem with him is that he's insane. On one hand, he's constantly terrified and needs a giant vehicle to "feel safe". But on the other hand, he rides a motorcycle. Well, which is it? Are you reckless, or are you in fear of your life when you drive? Motorcyclists have a terrible accident rate, and there's no shortage of (former) motorcyclists who are in wheelchairs, are paralyzed, are missing limbs, or at the least have a permanent limp and walk with a cane or crutch because of a motorcycle accident. I'm not saying that this fate is guaranteed if you ride a motorcycle, as obviously lots of people do it, but your chances of being maimed or killed are much higher riding a motorcycle than riding in any 4-wheel vehicle, so it just isn't something that people do if they're paranoid about road accidents. It's a totally opposite mentality from the mentality you describe, so for one person to have both mentalities is a clear indication of insanity.
What's disappointing there is that the asshole wasn't prosecuted for that. What's to stop him from getting another job at a Wendy's or McDonald's down the street? It's not like they're going to check his background and previous employment, call up his previous employer and find out what he did to get fired.
Sorry, but I don't see the difference. How exactly are you going to define the threshold between "surveillance" and someone taking a video with their cellphone, or with a video camera? Are you going to set some time limit on it or something? How are you going to get cops to enforce that? Have them watch people taking videos and use a stopwatch to make sure they're not recording for too long at a time? That's insane.
And proposing a law banning people from taking photos in public is just plain stupid.
I think there might be a couple different issues here. You're talking about geoblocking so that a company doesn't violate laws in some other country or locale, but I think what the Australians are griping about is geoblocking that either prevents them from accessing services that people in other countries are allowed to access (namely streaming video services, digital downloads, etc.), or charges them differently (and much more) than people in other areas.
I can't imagine why anyone would have a problem with using geoblocking to avoid breaking weird laws that various different countries have implemented. If the German government requires your website to have some certain features to comply with the law there or else be barred from doing business there, then fine, but that doesn't mean you should have to force this on all your customers worldwide. However, using geoblocking so you can charge Australians twice as much for a streaming video download than Americans is wrong. So in that case, I think the answer is simple. Australia isn't likely to get the American government to ban such things, and while Australia could ban it themselves, that may have a limited effect on US-based companies. I think what Australia should do is ban the practice of giving Australians higher prices than people in any other market, and if a company does not comply, or even refuses to offer their goods or services in Australia as a result, then it's perfectly legal to either import those items (without permission from the mfgr of course), or if it's digital, it's perfectly legal to copy it.
If people have been using wastefulness to show off throughout thousands of years of human history, I don't see how you're going to convince people to be efficient now.
You "feel safer" in a big, giant vehicle, but then you ride a motorcycle much of the time? You're a moron. What do you think happens to you when someone driving an SUV (or a car) hits you on your Harley?
Wrong. Others have already said the same thing, but SUVs suck for carrying cargo. If you want to carry lumber, sheets of plywood, etc., a pickup is generally the best choice, or a cargo van. These vehicles are usually also much cheaper. Cheaper pickups may be becoming rare though, in sizes that can carry plywood; unfortunately, you need a larger cargo bed to fit a 4' wide sheet of plywood (the compact pickups probably aren't wide enough), but those only come on the bigger pickups with V8 engines, and those have been moving upmarket because of all the morons who use them for commuting and driving to the mall and demand luxury appointments in them.
Personally, I think the best solution for relatively lightweight but bulky cargo like this is to forget about trucks and SUVs altogether, and just get a nice small car with a 4-cyl engine (or a 4-cyl compact pickup), put a trailer hitch on the back, and buy yourself a 4x8 utility trailer from Harbor Freight for ~$300. A utility trailer sits very close to the ground, so it's much, much easier to load than a full-size pickup truck, and as long as you're not transporting over about 7-800 pounds of cargo, it's perfectly adequate. Then, when you don't need to transport any cargo, you can simply unhitch the trailer and drive around without it at 30+ mpg without being saddled by all the problems a real pick-up has (bad fuel economy, little passenger room, poor handling).
Can't be done. Lowering an SUV goes against its whole purpose, which is to have extra ground clearance as you mention, for off-road capability. Changing the aerodynamics will change the styling, which will make SUV buyers not want it: they want something that's boxy and ugly, because they like to pretend they're in the military or going on a safari or some such. "Rip out all the extra weight": what extra weight? It's not like they put in a bunch of lead weights for no reason; the SUV weighs that much because when you build a vehicle that large, out of stamped and spot-welded steel, and design it to meet modern crash safety standards, that's how much it weighs. You could save weight using various strategies, but these are the exact same strategies used in other vehicles to reduce weight: using lighter materials primarily. However, this costs a lot of money; there are some aluminum-bodied cars out there, but they're quite expensive. There's also some composite-bodied cars out there (carbon fiber), but these cost $1M+ (Ferrari Enzo for example). SUVs are made for the masses of soccer moms and for commuters, not for ultra-wealthy people (who usually buy Rolls-Royces, Maybachs, and the like).
The only thing that's going to really "fix" the SUV phenomenon is higher fuel prices. The higher fuel prices we have now (compared to a decade ago) have already put a pretty serious dent in SUV sales; fuel prices are only going to rise from this point, so it'll be a self-correcting problem. Notice that in Europe, SUVs aren't very popular, since fuel costs several times what it does here in the USA. I've heard stories of American tourists going to rental car agencies in Europe and asking for SUVs, only to be given weird looks or laughed at.
Quite possibly. However, I wonder how the divorce rates compare to other westernized and industrialized nations, like those in Europe, Canada, Aus/NZ, and even Japan. Is the US exceptionally dysfunctional, or is it a problem over all of western culture?
No, I don't. If you ban surveillance, then you also have to ban all photography in public, which is utterly ridiculous. Are you saying tourists shouldn't be able to walk around London and take photos of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, or any random street, unless there's precisely zero people present? I certainly wouldn't want to live in a world where I'm not allowed to take a photo when I'm walking around some city streets, or anywhere else in public for that matter.
If you don't want your face seen in public, don't go out in public. It's that simple.
Note that this is not the same as government surveillance. I'm NOT ok with the government surveilling citizens constantly. However, I don't have a problem with random private individuals taking pictures wherever they want in public (except obvious exceptions, like public restrooms, or following a certain person wherever they go, which is stalking).
When one person acts violent by himself (on the street somewhere), that can be assumed to be an oddball. When three people act violent in concert, it's cause for mild concern. When three people, on the job in a position that requires dealing with the general public every day, act violent in concert, and then the police have no interest in investigating, it's indicative of a society with a serious problem.
Notice also that another poster here, who's lived in France, testifies that this behavior is actually quite normal there.
I never said ALL home chefs get better results, only that it's possible to do better at home because you have the luxury of time. If you want to spend hours making a meal totally from scratch, using a very complex recipe, and know how to do it, you can, and you don't have to spend $100/plate like you would at a restaurant that can pull off that same quality of meal. For the restaurants that only cost $20-25/plate, you're not going to get such a complex recipe.
Perhaps, but even in more expensive sit-down restaurants, the line cooks don't really make that much money either (probably a fair bit better than McD's, but still not all that great).
Do you have a particular section you'd like to point out to us? I'm not going to read through the whole thing.
Plus, surveillance in public (mostly by private entities, not the government) is ubiquitous in the UK, so it's not just the US where you have no expectation of privacy in public. You can't walk anywhere in London without being on someone's camera.
You sound like you've been around to a fair number of countries. In your opinion, what are the most civilized ones? How do the other western European nations fare?
I did say this was in theory. Logically, the corporation would try to take all variability out of it, but I guess the minimum-wage workers manage to screw things up no matter how simple they try to make it.
Oh, sorry, I was just talking about the process of preparing the food inside the restaurant's kitchen, not the processes used before it gets there. Yes, I imagine McD's gets their ingredients as cheaply as possible, rather than using real beef and other farm products. That bit about the corn stalks is pretty horrifying.
Sure, why not? If it provides your body with the fuel and nutrients it needs to continue, then it's "food". It may not be "good food", but even slop is still food.
Finally, in theory, an industrial process should be able to produce very good food too. In fact, many higher-end restaurants, while not refining it down quite as much as McD's, still do make food preparation as industrialized and mechanical as possible. Recipes call for very specific steps, very specific amounts of ingredients, and very specific cooking times and temperatures to achieve the same result every time. Chefs don't like it when line cooks try to do things their own way; this gets the line cooks screamed at (I've seen it). And restaurant food, even at high-end restaurants, isn't as good as what a talented chef (even amateur) can do at home; restaurants simplify their recipes so they can be produced at higher speeds by underpaid line cooks; customers want consistency and they don't want to wait 2 hours for their food. They would never put on the menu something found in some fancy cookbook, because it's just too complex and would take too long to make.
LOL right, that's what I read on here every night.....and also love letters to George Bush. Uh......are you sure you've actually read Slashdot?
I don't know how you have your friends/foes list set up, but I see tons and tons of comments here parroting the Republican/tea party agenda, supporting the wars, etc. I also see a fair number of opposing comments, but those mostly seem to be from non-Americans.
Going to Mars is IMO a stepping stone in that it helps get people out into space and building experience in sending people farther than an easy 3-day trip to the Moon. Also, we don't need to focus on going to the rest of the galaxy first, we need to get comfortable just leaving our own planet first, and in addition, there's plenty of stuff for us to do right here in our own solar system (and maybe even right around our own planet): energy harvesting, asteroid/moon mining, setting up systems to divert any asteroids on collision courses, tourism, etc. Besides, suppose something happened and we really did need to make an exodus from Earth (suppose the planet's atmosphere started turning unbreathable, so that in a few decades we'd be unable to live outside sealed structures); right now, we'd be screwed, but if we already have experience sending humans to other planets and building large structures in space, it wouldn't be quite so much of a stretch to contemplate building some generation ships, or at least building permanent off-world habitats for very large populations of humans.
The responses from all the asshole ugly Americans here doesn't surprise me one bit. This country (USA) isn't civilized anyway, it's more like what you'd get if Zimbabwe won the lottery.
What surprises me is that this happened in France. I guess France isn't as civilized as I thought.
Unfortunately for this guy and many, many other parents, their kids don't agree with numbers 1-3, and won't shut up until they're taken to a McDonald's to eat.
The Muslim nation probably doesn't care too much about people taking photos of them since they're all unidentifiable in those burqas anyway. But Americans scream and bitch about anyone taking their photo instead of taking steps to avoid the problem.
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I think you're confused. They don't like images in the likeness of Mohammed (never mind that no one knows that the heck he looks like anyway, probably partly because of this same prohibition). I don't think they care much about images of themselves, especially not while wearing burqas. I do remember a ridiculous case a while ago of some muslim woman in Florida who tried to make a court case out of driver's license photos, because she refused to have her photo taken without a burqa, and the DMV refused to issue her a driver's license without actually seeing her face (after all, what's the point of a photo ID if the person is wearing a mask that covers their whole head?).
Wow, thanks for the informative post. What's your impression of Spain? Or how about the Basque area, that seems like it might be different? Or some places in eastern Europe like Czech Republic or Croatia? Can you elaborate on St. Petersburg? How about Ireland?
Just in case I ever decide to move to Europe, I'd like to know which places are good and which places to avoid, so this is actually very helpful, so thanks again.
No, I can at least understand that mentality, even though I don't buy into it myself.
The problem with him is that he's insane. On one hand, he's constantly terrified and needs a giant vehicle to "feel safe". But on the other hand, he rides a motorcycle. Well, which is it? Are you reckless, or are you in fear of your life when you drive? Motorcyclists have a terrible accident rate, and there's no shortage of (former) motorcyclists who are in wheelchairs, are paralyzed, are missing limbs, or at the least have a permanent limp and walk with a cane or crutch because of a motorcycle accident. I'm not saying that this fate is guaranteed if you ride a motorcycle, as obviously lots of people do it, but your chances of being maimed or killed are much higher riding a motorcycle than riding in any 4-wheel vehicle, so it just isn't something that people do if they're paranoid about road accidents. It's a totally opposite mentality from the mentality you describe, so for one person to have both mentalities is a clear indication of insanity.
What's disappointing there is that the asshole wasn't prosecuted for that. What's to stop him from getting another job at a Wendy's or McDonald's down the street? It's not like they're going to check his background and previous employment, call up his previous employer and find out what he did to get fired.
Sorry, but I don't see the difference. How exactly are you going to define the threshold between "surveillance" and someone taking a video with their cellphone, or with a video camera? Are you going to set some time limit on it or something? How are you going to get cops to enforce that? Have them watch people taking videos and use a stopwatch to make sure they're not recording for too long at a time? That's insane.
And proposing a law banning people from taking photos in public is just plain stupid.
I think there might be a couple different issues here. You're talking about geoblocking so that a company doesn't violate laws in some other country or locale, but I think what the Australians are griping about is geoblocking that either prevents them from accessing services that people in other countries are allowed to access (namely streaming video services, digital downloads, etc.), or charges them differently (and much more) than people in other areas.
I can't imagine why anyone would have a problem with using geoblocking to avoid breaking weird laws that various different countries have implemented. If the German government requires your website to have some certain features to comply with the law there or else be barred from doing business there, then fine, but that doesn't mean you should have to force this on all your customers worldwide. However, using geoblocking so you can charge Australians twice as much for a streaming video download than Americans is wrong. So in that case, I think the answer is simple. Australia isn't likely to get the American government to ban such things, and while Australia could ban it themselves, that may have a limited effect on US-based companies. I think what Australia should do is ban the practice of giving Australians higher prices than people in any other market, and if a company does not comply, or even refuses to offer their goods or services in Australia as a result, then it's perfectly legal to either import those items (without permission from the mfgr of course), or if it's digital, it's perfectly legal to copy it.
If people have been using wastefulness to show off throughout thousands of years of human history, I don't see how you're going to convince people to be efficient now.
You "feel safer" in a big, giant vehicle, but then you ride a motorcycle much of the time? You're a moron. What do you think happens to you when someone driving an SUV (or a car) hits you on your Harley?
Wrong. Others have already said the same thing, but SUVs suck for carrying cargo. If you want to carry lumber, sheets of plywood, etc., a pickup is generally the best choice, or a cargo van. These vehicles are usually also much cheaper. Cheaper pickups may be becoming rare though, in sizes that can carry plywood; unfortunately, you need a larger cargo bed to fit a 4' wide sheet of plywood (the compact pickups probably aren't wide enough), but those only come on the bigger pickups with V8 engines, and those have been moving upmarket because of all the morons who use them for commuting and driving to the mall and demand luxury appointments in them.
Personally, I think the best solution for relatively lightweight but bulky cargo like this is to forget about trucks and SUVs altogether, and just get a nice small car with a 4-cyl engine (or a 4-cyl compact pickup), put a trailer hitch on the back, and buy yourself a 4x8 utility trailer from Harbor Freight for ~$300. A utility trailer sits very close to the ground, so it's much, much easier to load than a full-size pickup truck, and as long as you're not transporting over about 7-800 pounds of cargo, it's perfectly adequate. Then, when you don't need to transport any cargo, you can simply unhitch the trailer and drive around without it at 30+ mpg without being saddled by all the problems a real pick-up has (bad fuel economy, little passenger room, poor handling).
Can't be done. Lowering an SUV goes against its whole purpose, which is to have extra ground clearance as you mention, for off-road capability. Changing the aerodynamics will change the styling, which will make SUV buyers not want it: they want something that's boxy and ugly, because they like to pretend they're in the military or going on a safari or some such. "Rip out all the extra weight": what extra weight? It's not like they put in a bunch of lead weights for no reason; the SUV weighs that much because when you build a vehicle that large, out of stamped and spot-welded steel, and design it to meet modern crash safety standards, that's how much it weighs. You could save weight using various strategies, but these are the exact same strategies used in other vehicles to reduce weight: using lighter materials primarily. However, this costs a lot of money; there are some aluminum-bodied cars out there, but they're quite expensive. There's also some composite-bodied cars out there (carbon fiber), but these cost $1M+ (Ferrari Enzo for example). SUVs are made for the masses of soccer moms and for commuters, not for ultra-wealthy people (who usually buy Rolls-Royces, Maybachs, and the like).
The only thing that's going to really "fix" the SUV phenomenon is higher fuel prices. The higher fuel prices we have now (compared to a decade ago) have already put a pretty serious dent in SUV sales; fuel prices are only going to rise from this point, so it'll be a self-correcting problem. Notice that in Europe, SUVs aren't very popular, since fuel costs several times what it does here in the USA. I've heard stories of American tourists going to rental car agencies in Europe and asking for SUVs, only to be given weird looks or laughed at.
Quite possibly. However, I wonder how the divorce rates compare to other westernized and industrialized nations, like those in Europe, Canada, Aus/NZ, and even Japan. Is the US exceptionally dysfunctional, or is it a problem over all of western culture?
Do you agree that this is not desirable?
No, I don't. If you ban surveillance, then you also have to ban all photography in public, which is utterly ridiculous. Are you saying tourists shouldn't be able to walk around London and take photos of Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, or any random street, unless there's precisely zero people present? I certainly wouldn't want to live in a world where I'm not allowed to take a photo when I'm walking around some city streets, or anywhere else in public for that matter.
If you don't want your face seen in public, don't go out in public. It's that simple.
Note that this is not the same as government surveillance. I'm NOT ok with the government surveilling citizens constantly. However, I don't have a problem with random private individuals taking pictures wherever they want in public (except obvious exceptions, like public restrooms, or following a certain person wherever they go, which is stalking).
When one person acts violent by himself (on the street somewhere), that can be assumed to be an oddball. When three people act violent in concert, it's cause for mild concern. When three people, on the job in a position that requires dealing with the general public every day, act violent in concert, and then the police have no interest in investigating, it's indicative of a society with a serious problem.
Notice also that another poster here, who's lived in France, testifies that this behavior is actually quite normal there.
I never said ALL home chefs get better results, only that it's possible to do better at home because you have the luxury of time. If you want to spend hours making a meal totally from scratch, using a very complex recipe, and know how to do it, you can, and you don't have to spend $100/plate like you would at a restaurant that can pull off that same quality of meal. For the restaurants that only cost $20-25/plate, you're not going to get such a complex recipe.
I suggest reading 'Fast Food Nation' and moving to Europe or New Zealand.
The problem with moving to Europe is that, at least in France, you're likely to be assaulted.
As bad as fast-food restaurants are here in the US, I've never had to worry much about that here. Such a thing is unheard of.
Perhaps, but even in more expensive sit-down restaurants, the line cooks don't really make that much money either (probably a fair bit better than McD's, but still not all that great).
Do you have a particular section you'd like to point out to us? I'm not going to read through the whole thing.
Plus, surveillance in public (mostly by private entities, not the government) is ubiquitous in the UK, so it's not just the US where you have no expectation of privacy in public. You can't walk anywhere in London without being on someone's camera.
You sound like you've been around to a fair number of countries. In your opinion, what are the most civilized ones? How do the other western European nations fare?
I did say this was in theory. Logically, the corporation would try to take all variability out of it, but I guess the minimum-wage workers manage to screw things up no matter how simple they try to make it.
Oh, sorry, I was just talking about the process of preparing the food inside the restaurant's kitchen, not the processes used before it gets there. Yes, I imagine McD's gets their ingredients as cheaply as possible, rather than using real beef and other farm products. That bit about the corn stalks is pretty horrifying.
Sure, why not? If it provides your body with the fuel and nutrients it needs to continue, then it's "food". It may not be "good food", but even slop is still food.
Finally, in theory, an industrial process should be able to produce very good food too. In fact, many higher-end restaurants, while not refining it down quite as much as McD's, still do make food preparation as industrialized and mechanical as possible. Recipes call for very specific steps, very specific amounts of ingredients, and very specific cooking times and temperatures to achieve the same result every time. Chefs don't like it when line cooks try to do things their own way; this gets the line cooks screamed at (I've seen it). And restaurant food, even at high-end restaurants, isn't as good as what a talented chef (even amateur) can do at home; restaurants simplify their recipes so they can be produced at higher speeds by underpaid line cooks; customers want consistency and they don't want to wait 2 hours for their food. They would never put on the menu something found in some fancy cookbook, because it's just too complex and would take too long to make.
LOL right, that's what I read on here every night.....and also love letters to George Bush. Uh......are you sure you've actually read Slashdot?
I don't know how you have your friends/foes list set up, but I see tons and tons of comments here parroting the Republican/tea party agenda, supporting the wars, etc. I also see a fair number of opposing comments, but those mostly seem to be from non-Americans.
Going to Mars is IMO a stepping stone in that it helps get people out into space and building experience in sending people farther than an easy 3-day trip to the Moon. Also, we don't need to focus on going to the rest of the galaxy first, we need to get comfortable just leaving our own planet first, and in addition, there's plenty of stuff for us to do right here in our own solar system (and maybe even right around our own planet): energy harvesting, asteroid/moon mining, setting up systems to divert any asteroids on collision courses, tourism, etc. Besides, suppose something happened and we really did need to make an exodus from Earth (suppose the planet's atmosphere started turning unbreathable, so that in a few decades we'd be unable to live outside sealed structures); right now, we'd be screwed, but if we already have experience sending humans to other planets and building large structures in space, it wouldn't be quite so much of a stretch to contemplate building some generation ships, or at least building permanent off-world habitats for very large populations of humans.
The responses from all the asshole ugly Americans here doesn't surprise me one bit. This country (USA) isn't civilized anyway, it's more like what you'd get if Zimbabwe won the lottery.
What surprises me is that this happened in France. I guess France isn't as civilized as I thought.
Unfortunately for this guy and many, many other parents, their kids don't agree with numbers 1-3, and won't shut up until they're taken to a McDonald's to eat.
The Muslim nation probably doesn't care too much about people taking photos of them since they're all unidentifiable in those burqas anyway. But Americans scream and bitch about anyone taking their photo instead of taking steps to avoid the problem.