You can't think of international diplomacy like high school, where you've got friends and you've got foes. All alliances between nations are ones of convenience, and not of any sort of emotional bond.
Straw man and irrelevant. If you believe the alliances between the U.S. and its Western allies have not been hurt by the spying revelations, you are blind.
In fact, the U.S's "closest allies" are all nations we've waged war or proxy war against in the past: U.K., Canada, Germany, Japan. Realpolitik dominates international diplomacy(and its best buddy, espionage), and not without reason.
You're not really helping the U.S. here. If you had included examples of 'Realpolitik' by countries other than the U.S., it would have been stronger.
No, this is pretty much normal spying. If you had a spy agency and didn't monitor your enemies for strategic advantage, you'd wonder what the hell they were doing.
FTFY.
'Allies' is supposed to mean more than "we buy each others' stuff".
On the other hand, there are still about 80.000 people (out of 17.000.000 inhabitants; ~0,5%) requiring immediate medical care yearly due to accidents on their bicycle (although many of them are older people breaking their hip): http://www.veiligheid.nl/cijfers/fietsongevallen-algemeen (Dutch)
Best way to turn almost all compression artifacts into regular noise. Your brain is great at perceiving that as being higher quality imagery. Using post resize noise or post resize sharpening (MPC-HC or MPC-BE sharpen complex 2) also works great to turn 720p content into '1080p'.
Imagine living in a town called that: "The virus family he discovered was eventually given the name Coxsackie, for the town of Coxsackie, New York, a small town on the Hudson River where Dalldorf had obtained the first fecal specimens.[3]" "The village name is a native word mak-kachs-hack-ing, and when purchased by the Dutch settlers was written as Koxhackung.[1] It is generally translated as "Hoot-owl place"[2] or "place of many owls"."
But I'm pretty sure Dalldorf et al didn't care about the latter and still giggle when hearing their peers say Coxsackievirus.
It's not the (old) technology, it's the people using it, why and how they're using it.
I did the whole earpiece+mic communication thing in 2003, but quickly decided that unless there was a really good reason for it, it was just terribly annoying to everybody around me. Holding a device up to your ear is a (reasonably) clear social signal that you're talking to somebody on your phone. Unless the technology or people using it support a different equivalent social signal, it will always cause confusion. Instances of confusion coupled with the almost inevitable scorning "I'm not talking to you" from the calling party, form a solid basis for wanting to punch them in the face.
Shift+F8 is a possibility, although the window for being able to press it can be prohibitively short: "The trick is to hold the Shift button and mash the F8 key, this will sometimes boot you into the new advanced “recovery mode”, where you can choose to see advanced repair options." ( http://www.howtogeek.com/107511/ )
Sorry, but that is about the same as saying 'The more we accept McDonalds-type food...'
We need to accept - on all terrains - that as a collective, we are a bunch of naked monkeys. Our biological makeup (or evolutionary history, if you will) makes us vulnerable to having our primitive behavior elicited by marketing techniques and other forms of manipulation. For an individual that may not be a problem, but for a collective, it is. Especially when the collective is a source of resources for for-profit organizations. Yes, I am talking about the free market.
The problem in your reasoning, imho, is that the current state of the (Hollywood-)system is somehow mainly due to the evilness of MBA's and 'industry types', where in reality the nature of the free market is thus that it eventually finds the most profitable way to make a profit. That includes (ab)using our (most) common vulnerabilities and treating us all like naked apes. Every sufficiently mature free market does this, simply because it is profitable, not because it is run by a bunch of malicious bastards.
Politiclowns are the LEAST informed and the most swayed by public opinion. Now add in the fact that they earnestly want to *shape* public opinion, and you'll see what I don't believe anything emitted by a government organ.
Because everybody who works for the government is a 'politiclown'. All humans are and will be (for the time being) fallible and prone to corruption, which is why the design of the system should mitigate that. Separation of powers, transparent evaluation processes, etc.
The big difference with private corporations is that citizens can and should demand openness about how public processes take place and that 'regulations' for the government aren't seen as evil economy and freedom-killing blasphemy by half the country.
by regulations and taxi unions in bed with government.
So you're saying that the government is corrupt enough to be manipulated by private entities that are mainly interested in making as much money as possible?
Sounds about right. I'm not sure you're blaming the right people, though.
The idea of a love analogy is good, but in reality it is the rest of the Western world that has opened its eyes to the abusive relationship with the USA it is in.
The once present blind love for everything 'USA' (a lot of clothes sporting American text or imagery were made and worn in the rest of the world) has turned into a palpable disdain for the same. The more apt analogy for the current feelings would be: 'How can we get out of this relationship without that asshole going psycho on us?'
Mini-USB indeed has issues with that. Micro-USB is a very different story. For the 32+ combinations of devices, adapters and cables I've tried, the seating has always been impeccable. Especially considering that among some of those are extremely cheap DealExtreme ones.
a brand new USB drive that you can hardly touch during a data transfer for fear of the connection breaking thanks to a crappy connector.
Wait, what? A harddrive/flashdrive with a micro-USB connector? Where and why the hell are you buying those?
There are actually devices with micro USB sockets that are so crappy you can push the micro USB connector into them up-side-down
Considering we were talking about the design of micro-USB, that is a pretty stupid thing to say. You do understand the difference between design and implementation, right?
MCI broke the 'Bells back in the early 1980s, Apple broke the 'traditional' mini-computer industry, FOX broke CNN, Internet pr0n killed the nudie mags and DVDs, Netflix/Hulu/etc is now threatening to kill the physical disc-based (DVD/Blu-Ray) movie industry, Apple's iPhone rose up and slammed the cozy BlackBerry/Palm/Nokia/Carrier relationships, and so on, and so on...
Remember that the GP's point was this: "when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation." The markets you mention currently aren't exactly the best counterexamples for 'consolidation'. They're more or less all dominated by about two entities.
As for collusion: any rational being can see that collusion is just an arbitrary (legal) relabeling of cooperation. Considering that natural selection has shown us that cooperation is a highly effective strategy, it is borderline idiotic to argue that collusion is incidental, or caused by anything other than being inherently highly effective.
This line of thinking is at the core of understanding why 'governmental intervention' is absolutely essential in a lot of cases (it has to be done right, though). In a completely free market, the players in that market will inevitably find everything worth finding. That is both the power and the danger of a free market. Players will find awesome new products and innovative services. They will also find collusion/cooperation, outsourcing, slave labor, child labor, murderous working conditions, misleading financial products, false advertising, lies about ingredients, etc. If you believe such can be avoided by improving individual morality, then you don't really understand how evolution works.
"It is an organization mainly made up of blind and visually impaired people" Yes, it is a bad name for such an organization, causing confusion among lazy snarky people everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
waste time undoing users' community-given fixes for problems, like adding RAM to remove a virus
Did it help when you made them remove the added RAM?
Great example, man.
A tu quoque?
That is shameful.
You can't think of international diplomacy like high school, where you've got friends and you've got foes. All alliances between nations are ones of convenience, and not of any sort of emotional bond.
Straw man and irrelevant.
If you believe the alliances between the U.S. and its Western allies have not been hurt by the spying revelations, you are blind.
In fact, the U.S's "closest allies" are all nations we've waged war or proxy war against in the past: U.K., Canada, Germany, Japan. Realpolitik dominates international diplomacy(and its best buddy, espionage), and not without reason.
You're not really helping the U.S. here. If you had included examples of 'Realpolitik' by countries other than the U.S., it would have been stronger.
No, this is pretty much normal spying. If you had a spy agency and didn't monitor your enemies for strategic advantage, you'd wonder what the hell they were doing.
FTFY.
'Allies' is supposed to mean more than "we buy each others' stuff".
In the Netherlands, kids take a fairly thorough cycling exam to learn this stuff:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&prev=_dd&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.veiligverkeernederland.nl%2Fverkeersexamen
Theory examples:
http://www.veiligverkeernederland.nl/node/67294 (Dutch, but it doesn't really matter)
On the other hand, there are still about 80.000 people (out of 17.000.000 inhabitants; ~0,5%) requiring immediate medical care yearly due to accidents on their bicycle (although many of them are older people breaking their hip):
http://www.veiligheid.nl/cijfers/fietsongevallen-algemeen (Dutch)
If an option, use ffdshow. Add noise.
Best way to turn almost all compression artifacts into regular noise. Your brain is great at perceiving that as being higher quality imagery.
Using post resize noise or post resize sharpening (MPC-HC or MPC-BE sharpen complex 2) also works great to turn 720p content into '1080p'.
No doubt your highly analytical mind was able to see past what these researchers' colleagues and reviewers thought to be science
You have no idea what arXiv is, do you?
Imagine living in a town called that: "The virus family he discovered was eventually given the name Coxsackie, for the town of Coxsackie, New York, a small town on the Hudson River where Dalldorf had obtained the first fecal specimens.[3]"
"The village name is a native word mak-kachs-hack-ing, and when purchased by the Dutch settlers was written as Koxhackung.[1] It is generally translated as "Hoot-owl place"[2] or "place of many owls"."
But I'm pretty sure Dalldorf et al didn't care about the latter and still giggle when hearing their peers say Coxsackievirus.
It's not the (old) technology, it's the people using it, why and how they're using it.
I did the whole earpiece+mic communication thing in 2003, but quickly decided that unless there was a really good reason for it, it was just terribly annoying to everybody around me. Holding a device up to your ear is a (reasonably) clear social signal that you're talking to somebody on your phone. Unless the technology or people using it support a different equivalent social signal, it will always cause confusion. Instances of confusion coupled with the almost inevitable scorning "I'm not talking to you" from the calling party, form a solid basis for wanting to punch them in the face.
Shift+F8 is a possibility, although the window for being able to press it can be prohibitively short:
"The trick is to hold the Shift button and mash the F8 key, this will sometimes boot you into the new advanced “recovery mode”, where you can choose to see advanced repair options." ( http://www.howtogeek.com/107511/ )
Today nobody would blink twice at that.
Blink: No.
Feel the urge to repeatedly punch them in the face? Yes.
The more we accept "Hollywood-model" games ...
Sorry, but that is about the same as saying 'The more we accept McDonalds-type food ...'
We need to accept - on all terrains - that as a collective, we are a bunch of naked monkeys. Our biological makeup (or evolutionary history, if you will) makes us vulnerable to having our primitive behavior elicited by marketing techniques and other forms of manipulation. For an individual that may not be a problem, but for a collective, it is. Especially when the collective is a source of resources for for-profit organizations. Yes, I am talking about the free market.
The problem in your reasoning, imho, is that the current state of the (Hollywood-)system is somehow mainly due to the evilness of MBA's and 'industry types', where in reality the nature of the free market is thus that it eventually finds the most profitable way to make a profit. That includes (ab)using our (most) common vulnerabilities and treating us all like naked apes. Every sufficiently mature free market does this, simply because it is profitable, not because it is run by a bunch of malicious bastards.
See also, Cow Clicker, for a remarkable example of (ab)using vulnerabilities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker
http://www.bogost.com/blog/cow_clicker_1.shtml
a new report suggests that advertising ROI is much higher on iOS than Android.
That Facebook advertising ROI is much higher on iOS than Android.
Politiclowns are the LEAST informed and the most swayed by public opinion. Now add in the fact that they earnestly want to *shape* public opinion, and you'll see what I don't believe anything emitted by a government organ.
Because everybody who works for the government is a 'politiclown'. All humans are and will be (for the time being) fallible and prone to corruption, which is why the design of the system should mitigate that. Separation of powers, transparent evaluation processes, etc.
The big difference with private corporations is that citizens can and should demand openness about how public processes take place and that 'regulations' for the government aren't seen as evil economy and freedom-killing blasphemy by half the country.
by regulations and taxi unions in bed with government.
So you're saying that the government is corrupt enough to be manipulated by private entities that are mainly interested in making as much money as possible?
Sounds about right. I'm not sure you're blaming the right people, though.
Just get a hold of lex & yaxx, antlr or your favoriate tools and write your own language. You could probabyl abuse Lisp macros anough to do this too.
It seems you are already well underway!
Behold the beauty of the free market. Libertarians and anti-regulation-zealots rejoice!
Apple is exercising its god-given right to freedom!
The idea of a love analogy is good, but in reality it is the rest of the Western world that has opened its eyes to the abusive relationship with the USA it is in.
The once present blind love for everything 'USA' (a lot of clothes sporting American text or imagery were made and worn in the rest of the world) has turned into a palpable disdain for the same. The more apt analogy for the current feelings would be: 'How can we get out of this relationship without that asshole going psycho on us?'
I wish it were different.
they do not sit firmly in the socket
Mini-USB indeed has issues with that.
Micro-USB is a very different story. For the 32+ combinations of devices, adapters and cables I've tried, the seating has always been impeccable. Especially considering that among some of those are extremely cheap DealExtreme ones.
a brand new USB drive that you can hardly touch during a data transfer for fear of the connection breaking thanks to a crappy connector.
Wait, what?
A harddrive/flashdrive with a micro-USB connector? Where and why the hell are you buying those?
There are actually devices with micro USB sockets that are so crappy you can push the micro USB connector into them up-side-down
Considering we were talking about the design of micro-USB, that is a pretty stupid thing to say. You do understand the difference between design and implementation, right?
MCI broke the 'Bells back in the early 1980s, Apple broke the 'traditional' mini-computer industry, FOX broke CNN, Internet pr0n killed the nudie mags and DVDs, Netflix/Hulu/etc is now threatening to kill the physical disc-based (DVD/Blu-Ray) movie industry, Apple's iPhone rose up and slammed the cozy BlackBerry/Palm/Nokia/Carrier relationships, and so on, and so on...
Remember that the GP's point was this: "when in reality the natural state of business is collusion and consolidation."
The markets you mention currently aren't exactly the best counterexamples for 'consolidation'. They're more or less all dominated by about two entities.
As for collusion: any rational being can see that collusion is just an arbitrary (legal) relabeling of cooperation. Considering that natural selection has shown us that cooperation is a highly effective strategy, it is borderline idiotic to argue that collusion is incidental, or caused by anything other than being inherently highly effective.
This line of thinking is at the core of understanding why 'governmental intervention' is absolutely essential in a lot of cases (it has to be done right, though). In a completely free market, the players in that market will inevitably find everything worth finding. That is both the power and the danger of a free market. Players will find awesome new products and innovative services. They will also find collusion/cooperation, outsourcing, slave labor, child labor, murderous working conditions, misleading financial products, false advertising, lies about ingredients, etc.
If you believe such can be avoided by improving individual morality, then you don't really understand how evolution works.
for those utterly lacking in a sense of humor, the above is not meant to be taken literally
So.. Funny is what you were going for here?
*silence, followed by booing and heckling*
Conclusion: your house is made of crappy materials.
In volume, no. In number of neurons: yes.
See:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_neurons
The number of layers present in the cerebral cortex is also thought to be of importance (possibly coinciding with levels of abstraction)
See:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_cortex#Layered_structure
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neocortex
- http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=are-whales-smarter-than-we-are
"It is an organization mainly made up of blind and visually impaired people"
Yes, it is a bad name for such an organization, causing confusion among lazy snarky people everywhere.
Obligatory The Onion Video:
http://www.theonion.com/video/ultrarealistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiti,14382/