I found it an interesting movie because it does not parody the Nazis and the Nazi era like about every America movie I've ever seen about the subject, starting with Raiders of the lost ark. It shows Hitler and co. as humans, with a thin line between acceptable behaviour and monstrosity - just like any joe sixpack - which I think is closer to the truth and sends a more powerful warning that the portrayals of them as inhuman monsters ("which would never happen to us normals").
Disclaimer: I've been able to watch it sans subtitles due to grandparents, but since they emigrated before the second world war I do not experience the same guilt about my German ethnicity like contemporary citizens of the German, Austrian and even (German-speaking) Swiss states. Not being in Europe also shields me from much of the European-generated content about the subject, but unfortunately not from the American content.
I've spent some time translating Facebook into a Germanic language (before my workplace blocked access, yay) that also uses "long" words. I can say that the English way (which incidentally is thought to have entered English from French, since Anglic is also a Germanic language) can be confusing too. A simple example: "Publishing account statement": Now is it a statement about a Publishing account, or does it denote the action of publishing (verb) the account statement? (Of course, context would help a lot.) The rule in the Germanic languages is: if it's one thing, it is one word. So in the first instance we would write "Publishingaccountstatement", and in the second instance "Publishing accountstatement".
Of course, our language rules allow hyphenation if it would make things clearer. Many English words have also moved from joined, to hyphenated, to separate over the centuries.
Then of course, one can always restructure one's sentences to avoid unwieldy long words, and write something like "The volcano under the glacier of the mountain named Eyja". Longwinded, but shorter words:-)
On a side note, one should probably include the "dots" on the "o" when searching Wikipedia for Eyjafjallajökull.
.... because "People in large masses may as well be sheep. Their collective intelligence drops to that of the weakest-minded member of the group. They bleat, they panic and are easily herded to safety, or to the slaughter." - Alan Gunn
I, for one, welcome our new fascist, taser-bearing overlords. Oh, wait....
When this came out on the local news websites yesterday, a few claimed these finds where "a new species of ancient descendants of modern-day humans" (*), along with other bad logic/grammar. My first thought is that these might have been the love children of one one Julius Malema. Then again, it might just have been that the journalists have procreated....
In a seemingly unrelated incident, Philippe Gaston XI, nicknamed "The Toad", had inexplicably escaped from police holding cells when the earthquake cracked a wall.
I remember overtaking a double tanker truck climbing up a 30km twisty minor road mountain pass at 2.30am going into a blind bend because I drove the road regularly and knew that at that time of night, 4 times out of 5 I wouldn't see a single vehicle in the whole half hour drive in either direction. I was desperate to get past, and knew the risk would be in the tens of thousands to one against a head on collision and decided to go for it.
By the way, one does not need to be super-intelligent - complete with split-second probability calculations - to pull a dangerous stunt like that....
Roundabouts are all fine and dandy for low-volume, one-lane traffic, certainly. As soon as that picks up (rush hour, bumper-to-bumper traffic), the benefits are lost and a light (Green-Amber-Red, not 4-way stop) would be more efficient. Also keep in mind that, at least where I live, some roads leading to a roundabout have 2 lanes per direction.
In a setup where the one route coming in is significantly more important than the other (carries more traffic straight through), traffic from the minor route is effectively blocked by having to give way to traffic on the major route, which is always in the roundabout and needs to be yielded to.
I haven't travelled enough to know the situation in other locales, but in my country the authorities in their infinite wisdom have also added a "mini-roundabout" into the chaos, which superficially looks like the normal roundabout except for size, but has different rules (effectively a "4-way yield" with a nominal obstruction added to go around, as compared to the normal rules of yielding to traffic already in the roundabout), contribution to the confusion of already near-moronic drivers. Unfortunately these are, due to their size and cost, retrofitted to many existing intersections. They also don't require electricity to run...
They are inefficient where one car has to wait for another purely due to traffic rules, where it would be more efficient for them to carry on without waiting, and be out of each others' way. It's all the small waiting periods, added up over many cars, that cause the back-up. At least with lights, only half the cars have to wait...
I'm not really disagreeing with what you say, especially since you brought in the qualifier of being "large enough". I'm just venting some steam about the traffic where I live, and the authorities' apparent lack of thinking about the matter:-) "Large enough" is unfortunately not always practical.
I guess a more efficient solution would be a hybrid roundabout: roundabout at low volumes, traffic light at high volumes. This could be controlled by a sensor or timer. LED technology is sufficiently advanced that we don't need clumsy "3-eye" incandescent bulb traffic lights: a compact LED unit could show all 3 colours, as well as a 4th "use roundabout rules" state, and it could even show icons to distinguish them all for the benefit of colour-blind road users. I guess the completely uncontrolled intersection has not been invented yet...
Now Jason can keep one of these around to keep his Swiss bank account number on. No need for invasive butch^H^H^H^H^Hsurgery or fancy projection systems. He just needs to try to keep his fingers out of frigid sea water.
They obviously don't have that right. The real fun is in watching him get shot without being involved. (Now if it only were real shots....) Cause frankly, who wants to identify with Bruce?
I've just completed a SF book, playing some centuries in the future, where the electronic tablet-style reader/clipboard is ubiquitous. (Might I also add that this book comes from the Bean free library and is stored on a micro SD card, together with a good-sized bookshelf's worth of its ilk, and being read on my VGA-resolution PDA (sans phone).)
While I do think that that's a good way to store and read texts that you'll probably never read a second time, as opposed to the dead tree version, and while I think that size, robustness (reading in the bathtub - or shower), and battery life issues are probably going to be resolved by and by, I do not think that e-book readers are anything but a transitional phase which we will have outgrown in a century or so at the latest.
Why have a specialised device that can only do one thing? I find my PDA much more convenient, as it allows me to do word processing, spreadsheet calculations, browsing, address book and appointments, music, games, book reading, etc. etc. I've found that convergence is not a bad thing (AS LONG AS the functions are still performed adequately!).
The main game changer will be heads-up displays. I mean unobtrusive, mainstream, and of an adequate resolution. At that point you don't need to lug around a large display - optics handle the size - and computing becomes wearable. A processing unit as large as a modern mobile will provide sufficient power for most tasks and is easy enough to carry around.
So my bet is that digital functions will become closer and closer integrated with humans, and will probably be all but invisible in a century or so. Paper books? What a quaint idea. E-book reader? Your HUD in for repairs dude? Poor you. People vacantly staring into the distance on the subway, some twitching fingers at times? Quite possible.
On the other hand, that equips people just fine for government jobs where I come from - although being able to plan to "the end of the month" might already be a big disqualifier in some departments.
Not only do the various security companies use different names for the threats they identify; they don't even identify the same threats.
Doesn't make sense to me. I mean, if Schemester Antivirus wants to identify a threat that is "not the same" as the one Flybynight Computer Security wants to identify, wouldn't one expect them to use different names?
That's like saying Ford calls its car Fiesta, while Toyota calls its car Tazz, but they are not the same car. (To include the obligatory car analogy.)
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I found it an interesting movie because it does not parody the Nazis and the Nazi era like about every America movie I've ever seen about the subject, starting with Raiders of the lost ark. It shows Hitler and co. as humans, with a thin line between acceptable behaviour and monstrosity - just like any joe sixpack - which I think is closer to the truth and sends a more powerful warning that the portrayals of them as inhuman monsters ("which would never happen to us normals").
Disclaimer: I've been able to watch it sans subtitles due to grandparents, but since they emigrated before the second world war I do not experience the same guilt about my German ethnicity like contemporary citizens of the German, Austrian and even (German-speaking) Swiss states. Not being in Europe also shields me from much of the European-generated content about the subject, but unfortunately not from the American content.
Bloody criminal.
Bloody white, colonialist, cristian, elitist, democratic, bigoted (etc. etc.) criminal.
The other part of the joke is that there is no C in the Icelandic alphabet.
I've spent some time translating Facebook into a Germanic language (before my workplace blocked access, yay) that also uses "long" words. I can say that the English way (which incidentally is thought to have entered English from French, since Anglic is also a Germanic language) can be confusing too. A simple example: "Publishing account statement": Now is it a statement about a Publishing account, or does it denote the action of publishing (verb) the account statement? (Of course, context would help a lot.) The rule in the Germanic languages is: if it's one thing, it is one word. So in the first instance we would write "Publishingaccountstatement", and in the second instance "Publishing accountstatement".
Of course, our language rules allow hyphenation if it would make things clearer. Many English words have also moved from joined, to hyphenated, to separate over the centuries.
Then of course, one can always restructure one's sentences to avoid unwieldy long words, and write something like "The volcano under the glacier of the mountain named Eyja". Longwinded, but shorter words :-)
On a side note, one should probably include the "dots" on the "o" when searching Wikipedia for Eyjafjallajökull.
A4??? That IS really big for a die size. But why oh why not Legal, since Apple is American?
.... because "People in large masses may as well be sheep. Their collective intelligence drops to that of the weakest-minded member of the group. They bleat, they panic and are easily herded to safety, or to the slaughter." - Alan Gunn
I, for one, welcome our new fascist, taser-bearing overlords. Oh, wait....
When this came out on the local news websites yesterday, a few claimed these finds where "a new species of ancient descendants of modern-day humans" (*), along with other bad logic/grammar. My first thought is that these might have been the love children of one one Julius Malema. Then again, it might just have been that the journalists have procreated....
(* = In the mean time edited and corrected, but at the moment still viewable on this British site. Or in Google's caches).
.... IMproper nouns.
In a seemingly unrelated incident, Philippe Gaston XI, nicknamed "The Toad", had inexplicably escaped from police holding cells when the earthquake cracked a wall.
By the way, one does not need to be super-intelligent - complete with split-second probability calculations - to pull a dangerous stunt like that....
Roundabouts are all fine and dandy for low-volume, one-lane traffic, certainly. As soon as that picks up (rush hour, bumper-to-bumper traffic), the benefits are lost and a light (Green-Amber-Red, not 4-way stop) would be more efficient. Also keep in mind that, at least where I live, some roads leading to a roundabout have 2 lanes per direction.
In a setup where the one route coming in is significantly more important than the other (carries more traffic straight through), traffic from the minor route is effectively blocked by having to give way to traffic on the major route, which is always in the roundabout and needs to be yielded to.
I haven't travelled enough to know the situation in other locales, but in my country the authorities in their infinite wisdom have also added a "mini-roundabout" into the chaos, which superficially looks like the normal roundabout except for size, but has different rules (effectively a "4-way yield" with a nominal obstruction added to go around, as compared to the normal rules of yielding to traffic already in the roundabout), contribution to the confusion of already near-moronic drivers. Unfortunately these are, due to their size and cost, retrofitted to many existing intersections. They also don't require electricity to run...
They are inefficient where one car has to wait for another purely due to traffic rules, where it would be more efficient for them to carry on without waiting, and be out of each others' way. It's all the small waiting periods, added up over many cars, that cause the back-up. At least with lights, only half the cars have to wait...
I'm not really disagreeing with what you say, especially since you brought in the qualifier of being "large enough". I'm just venting some steam about the traffic where I live, and the authorities' apparent lack of thinking about the matter :-) "Large enough" is unfortunately not always practical.
I guess a more efficient solution would be a hybrid roundabout: roundabout at low volumes, traffic light at high volumes. This could be controlled by a sensor or timer. LED technology is sufficiently advanced that we don't need clumsy "3-eye" incandescent bulb traffic lights: a compact LED unit could show all 3 colours, as well as a 4th "use roundabout rules" state, and it could even show icons to distinguish them all for the benefit of colour-blind road users. I guess the completely uncontrolled intersection has not been invented yet...
Now Jason can keep one of these around to keep his Swiss bank account number on. No need for invasive butch^H^H^H^H^Hsurgery or fancy projection systems. He just needs to try to keep his fingers out of frigid sea water.
They obviously don't have that right. The real fun is in watching him get shot without being involved. (Now if it only were real shots....) Cause frankly, who wants to identify with Bruce?
I've just completed a SF book, playing some centuries in the future, where the electronic tablet-style reader/clipboard is ubiquitous. (Might I also add that this book comes from the Bean free library and is stored on a micro SD card, together with a good-sized bookshelf's worth of its ilk, and being read on my VGA-resolution PDA (sans phone).)
While I do think that that's a good way to store and read texts that you'll probably never read a second time, as opposed to the dead tree version, and while I think that size, robustness (reading in the bathtub - or shower), and battery life issues are probably going to be resolved by and by, I do not think that e-book readers are anything but a transitional phase which we will have outgrown in a century or so at the latest.
Why have a specialised device that can only do one thing? I find my PDA much more convenient, as it allows me to do word processing, spreadsheet calculations, browsing, address book and appointments, music, games, book reading, etc. etc. I've found that convergence is not a bad thing (AS LONG AS the functions are still performed adequately!).
The main game changer will be heads-up displays. I mean unobtrusive, mainstream, and of an adequate resolution. At that point you don't need to lug around a large display - optics handle the size - and computing becomes wearable. A processing unit as large as a modern mobile will provide sufficient power for most tasks and is easy enough to carry around.
So my bet is that digital functions will become closer and closer integrated with humans, and will probably be all but invisible in a century or so. Paper books? What a quaint idea. E-book reader? Your HUD in for repairs dude? Poor you. People vacantly staring into the distance on the subway, some twitching fingers at times? Quite possible.
My country has also developed a stealth airplane. It's so stealthy nobody has seen it yet.
Or the tax money used to develop it....
... and then some of us think that the universe is in fact a computation.
Here are some 1999 movies that explore this idea: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/.
Everyone knows that Chuck does not need a surname.
Especially on a planet where all the other vertebrates seem to favour hexapod body plans....
Do you know how many people die in beds?????
On the other hand, that equips people just fine for government jobs where I come from - although being able to plan to "the end of the month" might already be a big disqualifier in some departments.
Because they where CGI generated?
Yes, you're right. And he also specified they should live in London.
Doesn't make sense to me. I mean, if Schemester Antivirus wants to identify a threat that is "not the same" as the one Flybynight Computer Security wants to identify, wouldn't one expect them to use different names?
That's like saying Ford calls its car Fiesta, while Toyota calls its car Tazz, but they are not the same car. (To include the obligatory car analogy.)
Wait until I start to sing in the shower. They'll pay up to make me stop.
That, and my newly invented Bagpipes Automat, which only plays random notes to ensure that no published music (past or future) is infringed.
Now you're making way too much sense for a politician.