Second, why would anybody want to revive some corpses at huge expense when making a few children more is so much easier?
On an impersonal level, they'd do it from curiosity, love of 'impossible' challenges, the urge to use a particular related talent in a new/interesting way, a drive to become famous, greed. On the more personal level, they'd be acting on the wish to preserve/'save' somebody that they already know, care about, and/or admire, whether the individual was "great" in society's eyes or just in the eyes of others around them.
Also, you'd evidently be surprised how many people have those urges so strongly that it replaces/overrides any interest they may have had in reproducing, regardless of how they feel about children in general; in rare cases, it's so powerful that it takes the place of the drives to find a long-term mate and/or have sex. As I once saw one such person remark: why on Earth would I cast aside someone that has already proven to be an asset to others' lives in favor of spending my time/energy gambling on the crappy odds of producing an individual that, with 20+ years of massive effort & money, *might* turn out to be remotely as worthy?
First: you should try a KDE-specific distro like SimplyMepis or OpenSUSE, as they focus on integrating & polishing -- Debian deliberately leaves environments in their default state for users to customize/integrate. Debian is also famously *not* for newbies; if you want your father to give Linux a try, put him in front of a distro that specializes in the environment, is user-friendly and has a newbie-welcoming community. (SimplyMepis again is what I strongly recommend for KDE 4 -- you'd have to ask around for suggestions regarding other environments.)
90% of your rant didn't actually apply to KDE (I'm not even sure how much it applied to recent releases of the other environments)... However, the only reason "Activities" popped up because you evidently clicked on the wrong button. (That I feel is the KDE team's fault; I did the same thing, since they have it in the corner and the normal menu off by one space.) That said, when I did a new install to test SimplyMepis 12 a few months ago, I noticed the "activities" icon in the panel alongside the normal menu, deleted it, and moved on.
Looking at my desktop, which is pretty standard for KDE 4.5+, it's no more complex or confusing than Windows 7 is: all of the windows follow the same visual theme, icons are consistent; the programs/windows have the same sorts of titles that they would in any OS: System Settings, Firefox, Open Office. You won't find anything different from Windows 7 or OS X in that department. LXRandR isn't in KDE -- we control our monitors through System Settings, and optionally can run a utility specific to KDE that lets us do it from the system tray if we want to.
*Any* operating system or environment a person sits down to that's markedly different from the one(s) they're used to is going to require some degree of adjustment & learning new terms. That said, most of your reported conversation with your father could just as easily apply to Ubuntu/Unity:
"...you're using Ubuntu." "I though I was using Linux." "You are, it's the Ubuntu distribution." "[What is Unity, then?]" "That's the desktop environment."
"This says I'm using X windows" "That's the underlying display architecture..." Users of Windows don't know what GDI is unless they're looking for it. Same with Quartz and Mac OS X.
Average/non-geek users of KDE 4 don't know about it either, because terms like "X-Windows" don't appear -- just ones like "display" or "monitors." Relatively few technical terms appear these days, for that matter.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "modern" as you claim the term applies to Ubuntu when colorful looks have been trending. Similar for your use of "unified," considering KDE, Trinity, MATE, etc each apply a color scheme & theme to virtually all windows. (Snarky aside: "unless by 'unified' you mean all users locked to the devs' preferred look?") Just as importantly, they let their userbase share themes regardless of what distro we're in, helping ensure that all users of an environment can have the desktops be as modern, retro, colorful, or drab as we wish... After all, we're all Linux OS users first & foremost, and which distro (customized copy of Linux) we use is and should be secondary.
Exactly. I use a 2GHz/1GB Pentium M Thinkpad, and it's fast & stable under a typical KDE install in SimplyMepis, with its average load looking like this: System Settings, QMMP, Konsole, a few Dolphin windows, TEA text editor, KeepNote +1-3 of these: Firefox (15-25 tabs, approx 30 extensions), OpenOffice with 20-300Kb Writer file, Calibre, GIMP
I do have to note that some of it is because SimplyMepis tends to have better performance & hw compatibility than other distros I've tried, though ymmv and all that.
I've encountered the same sense of peace (and a variety of other things) a few times growing up, since I had serious medical crises several times due to birth defects. However, it gave me a powerful drive to accomplish things, teach, learn, improve society, make a difference in others' lives, etc. in whatever ways my body/brain let me, and the nothingness of death is terrifying. The only time I haven't felt that way was when I was in agonizing physical or emotional pain (including an attempt to self-treat PTSD/depression), and then I was primarily interested in escaping the pain, not death in particular.
I hope that you have plenty of things in your life to enjoy while you do exist, and if you're using to handle mental health problems (as is the case for drug/alcohol users I've been close to) that decent, reliable help becomes a real option.
The key is to avoid the big-name assfaces whenever possible; much like the major cell carriers, they don't give a shill if they lose any particular customer, as long as their bottom line isn't affected. Regional places like Sonic.net or DSL Extreme are MUCH better for any geek to go with, for example -- neither uses caps/throttling or minds home servers, and while both block port 25, DSL Extreme's TOS states they will open it if asked.
The thing is, regional ISPs are rarely well known even in their area, so a lot of people have no clue that there's any options beyond the cable/phone companies. Even if you've never heard of any independent ISPs existing in your area, spend some time searching the web for a local one (they can be very hard to find) and ask at BroadbandReports & Craigslist's Forum area before signing up with a national ISP. It takes some extra time, but it's worth it.
...it begs the question; Is there any one country that reeally does uphold these principles? Anyone care to name somewhere?
We'd have to define the principles first, as the libertarian, true liberal, Democrat liberal, and conservative ideas of both conflict. The best we can do is to define it only in terms of how much attention the government pays to our communications & movements.
Also, while I'm nowhere near a grammar geek (I'm lucky if I'm correct by accident most of the time), I've seen enough point out: "begs the question" doesn't mean "demands an explanation" or similar, it means "gives a circular argument." For example, "he can't get any on-the-job experience in this field because employers won't hire someone that lacks on-the-job experience in the field."
Ting's the cheapest for the lightest usage for 1-2 smartphones as well, thanks to their lack of bundling. I researched the different price plans of every MVNO & carrier available in my area -- nobody rivaled them for 2+ users, and while T-Mobile's $30/"unlimited" (texts/min *or* data, not both) was close for a single user, it left no margin for changes or error.
It should also be mentioned that Ting has extremely good prices on refurbished phones, and...well, I've been tempted to ask on their blog whether they spike their service reps' food with MDMA, because they're so friendly and eager to please that it's kind of creepy.
Sex is a definite drive ("need" is semantic), but reproduction as a drive is questionable for humans. A *lot* of people have great sex drives, but spend their lives either not caring either way whether they have kids, preferring not to, or actively repelled by the idea -- social pressure is what leads them to reproduce, not an innate drive. (By "social pressure" I'm referring to the mix of casual "when are you having kids" or "all women loooove kids" type comments, the nagging "when will you give me grandkids" ones, losing friends that decide to only hang with other parents, or the nastier "you're not a real man/woman, you haven't had kids" / "you're an evil child-hater if you don't love babies" style.)
It's not something that you notice if you're among the crowd that *is* interested, or that always just assumed it was simply what you do and never thought about where the idea came from (especially if you're male), but many childless & childfree adults can attest it's quite strong. It's akin to religion in that sense: actively religious types rarely notice the pressure to be a "believer" and just assume it's what a person does, but many agnostics/atheists definitely feel it.
The social pressure factor is one of the reasons child abuse is such a huge problem. Many of those parents knew they didn't particularly want kids, but either caved in to pressure directly (possibly because their spouse threatened to leave them) or decided they "couldn't" end an unexpected pregnancy. Alternately, the majority of the ones left never even thought realistically about whether they'd be happy as a parent or were capable of giving the kid a mentally & physically healthy life, and/or had overly-idealistic notions of what it's like -- because they just assumed it was part of the mandatory life script and bred without thinking it over.
As long as the female soldiers get some choice male & female "partners" to get their rocks off with -- believe it or not, most women *do* have a sex drive that's comparable to what a guy has. (If anything, the women might need the "companionship" more, as we can't masturbate with just our hands remotely as easily as a guy, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to use a noisy vibrator where others could hear it.)
However, having hookers available isn't going to prevent the female soldiers or locals from being raped by our troops (in the classic sense of knowingly forcing oneself onto someone), since rapists of both genders attack because they get off on the power of violent domination, not because they're unable to find a willing partner. Like police, most soldiers have a drive for physical power, try to use it constructively, but in some cases do start misusing it to dominate others; add in the need to turn their empathy off to do their jobs, and it's not a surprise that rape isn't uncommon.
Problematically, I've heard that the presence of hookers can sometimes increase the rate of rapes, not decrease it. When someone's in a situation where 90% of the people in a particular category that they see are there to serve them, then it's very easy for them to fall into the habit of expecting it from the other 10% -- not because they're bad people, but just because human brains work that way -- and, if they've been under a ton of stress for long enough, are angry about various things, etc. a "no" at the wrong moment could make the soldier do something he/she wouldn't normally do.
You guys are doing your gender a real disservice by promoting the "thwarted male=rapist" codswallop. Try to imagine yourself attacking and forcing yourself onto a decent person that trusted you enough to let their guard down a bit (as rapists are almost always people the victim knows well) and ask yourself if you'd totally do that if you could, or if you figure your male friends would do it. It doesn't make sense to spread the idea that you would if it's not true -- or at least, I sure wouldn't encourage negative stereotypes about my gender, let alone a horrific one like that.
FWIW just because some folks below keep using the term wrong, those are the views of a feminist geek -- someone that sees guys as people to fight alongside, not fight against. (Mentioning that because I've seen too many people spreading the 70s-vintage "feminists all hate men and want to cut your balls off and keep you from having sex omg" FUD in this discussion.)
No, the women you're thinking of are conservatives. The vast majority of modern feminists just want to wipe out the stupid old stereotype of women having weaker sex drives. Both sexes have roughly the same range of strong, average, weak, and zero sex drives -- the main difference is that our society hasn't quite gotten rid of the old double-standard where guys are praised for getting laid while girls/women are condemned.
Speaking of the subconscious, anyone notice ErectionLand in the lower-right part of 2013's ocean? (I'm interpreting the oddly-shaped "island" as ErectionLand's target; better that than a spooge puddle or horrifying scrotal growth.)
The icons are a great metaphor for the UI's progression: detail & focus eroded while more effort was devoted to making it look flashy on the surface. (Of course, given they weren't paying attention to details, they probably didn't do it entirely on purpose...)
Based on my image gallery, mine already seems to have a variant on that: whenever I ask it to take a picture of something outside my car, it waits until it detects that it's aimed at my steering wheel, dashboard, side mirror, etc. instead. (I've heard it's related to the well-known one that waits to photograph a pet until they're either in motion or showing off their privates.)
Not if you know how to wipe properly & have decent TP. The benefit in bidets is that they avoid the risk of getting germs on your hands; most people that grew up using TP know how to use it to get their butts completely clean under normal circumstances.
Thousands of people in Japan are getting hot water sprayed up their asses right now.
Do they consider that desirable or undesirable? Japanese culture has always been a bit difficult for me to understand.
Well, *up* the ass wouldn't be, but *on* the ass would be desirable (if it's not too hot) since it's the expected function of a bidet. (I've never used or even seen one, all I did was read the Wikipedia article.)
A lot of them feel the same way about toilet paper... AFAIK the jets of water do an excellent job on their own without the person touching themselves, so the people used to them feel that using TP results in getting our hands filthy with germs and the urine/feces being smeared around & left behind in a thin hopefully-undetectable layer.
Well, since it's a Japanese toilet, probably a lot -- Wikipedia listed some of the *basic* features:
While the toilet looks like a Western-style toilet at first glance, there are numerous additional features—such as blow dryer, seat heating, massage options, water jet adjustments, automatic lid opening, automatic flushing, wireless control panel, room heating and air conditioning for the room—included either as part of the toilet or in the seat. These features can be accessed by an (often wireless) control panel attached to the seat or mounted on a nearby wall.
To me, as an American, that's the real issue. I don't know, and frankly am not terribly concerned, about Australian NBN.
There's actually one good reason for us to care about their NBN project as Americans -- since Australia is highly similar to the USA in many ways, we can use their successes as evidence if we want to get similar projects moving in individual states or regions.
gun control is so dangerous to the average person. Once you have no ability to do violence you have very little power to enforce your authority, and authority that cant be enforced isn't real.
First, as the Middle Ages, martial arts, thugs, etc. have proven, we don't need a gun to be violent or violently enforce authority. (I have little need for a gun because being threatened enrages me enough that if I let myself react violently rather than intelligently cooperating -- as anyone armed with a gun is supposed to do, given showing a gun drastically increases the chances of being shot -- I'd be too focused on using the item to bludgeon the person to bother shooting it.)
Second, genuine authority comes from being highly respected for one's abilities, knowledge, wisdom, and so forth -- the sort of person people want as a leader, doctor, etc. -- not from being physically feared. "Authority" that comes from physical fear is tentative at best, as the other individual has no respect or interest in you as a leader and will seek to gain the upper hand the first moment they can. To use a childhood comparison, the difference between real & pseudo-authority is seen in school: students are far less prone to obeying a teacher that flaunts their disciplinary power than a teacher that they look up to.
I'm positive there is a field in psychology dealing exactly with how individuals behave in a crowd, how they follow the crowd, and how the take on the identify of the crowd.
There is -- it's part of the field of social psychology and sometimes its sibling sociology.
If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend taking a college course -- even if you're not in college, both are commonly taught at community colleges, often at night so adults & high school students can attend.
The Finnish version of "Starman" sounds like it's unintentionally hilarious. Could "girl-prince" be a reference to the old stereotype of girls being princesses that wait idly for a prince/knight whisk them away to a charmed life, while the boy/prince proves his worth via exciting adventures?
That email has been around for a long time doesn't automatically mean it's "antiquated" or in need of a rewrite. It fulfills the most important goals: -- send & receive messages over a secure connection -- use any client we want, whether local, networked, web, in a remote shell... -- read & send when it's convenient (non-live) -- email back-and-forth right away (eg. if chat services aren't allowed) -- style the letter as a document via WYSIWYG editor or hand-coded HTML -- or send plain text, no formatting/HTML -- embed all forms of media -- request to be notified when our recipient reads the message -- refuse to let our client notify someone that asked when we open it;) -- download the messages as an archive, leave them on a server, or both -- interact with anybody regardless of what companies host the accounts -- host our own servers & personal domain
Let's be honest here... If our generation(s) of developers tried to create an equivalent "electronic mail" type of service, we wouldn't get a standardized protocol for all servers to follow -- we'd end up with a ton of little competing services that would dictate how we access/send the messages, which competing mail services they're compatible with, and basically everything else, just like the norm in the blogging & social networking arenas. (Or incompatible pre-Internet networks like CompuServe & AOL, except those didn't sell our private data or plaster ads on the screen, and doubtless today's tech would.)
I didn't use eBay for several years because of its problems, especially with sellers ripping people off. A few months ago, I noticed *Amazon* now has that problem with their tech equipment -- dollar-store quality no-name chargers sent in place of brand-specific ones, counterfeit items, broken stuff, fly-by-night companies reneging on warranties, etc. -- and stopped buying stuff there after discovering firsthand that Amazon's won't intervene when problems like that crop up even if the items were (supposedly) brand-new & sold on the item's main page.
So I tried eBay out of desperation and found they've really cleaned up their act. Their filters can go into a lot more detail, and the site now has a customer satisfaction guarantee...if we run into any problems, they intervene, forcibly refund our money and potentially discipline the seller. It's still nowhere near perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than risking being effectively robbed by Amazon's sellers.
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Second, why would anybody want to revive some corpses at huge expense when making a few children more is so much easier?
On an impersonal level, they'd do it from curiosity, love of 'impossible' challenges, the urge to use a particular related talent in a new/interesting way, a drive to become famous, greed. On the more personal level, they'd be acting on the wish to preserve/'save' somebody that they already know, care about, and/or admire, whether the individual was "great" in society's eyes or just in the eyes of others around them.
Also, you'd evidently be surprised how many people have those urges so strongly that it replaces/overrides any interest they may have had in reproducing, regardless of how they feel about children in general; in rare cases, it's so powerful that it takes the place of the drives to find a long-term mate and/or have sex. As I once saw one such person remark: why on Earth would I cast aside someone that has already proven to be an asset to others' lives in favor of spending my time/energy gambling on the crappy odds of producing an individual that, with 20+ years of massive effort & money, *might* turn out to be remotely as worthy?
First: you should try a KDE-specific distro like SimplyMepis or OpenSUSE, as they focus on integrating & polishing -- Debian deliberately leaves environments in their default state for users to customize/integrate. Debian is also famously *not* for newbies; if you want your father to give Linux a try, put him in front of a distro that specializes in the environment, is user-friendly and has a newbie-welcoming community. (SimplyMepis again is what I strongly recommend for KDE 4 -- you'd have to ask around for suggestions regarding other environments.)
90% of your rant didn't actually apply to KDE (I'm not even sure how much it applied to recent releases of the other environments)... However, the only reason "Activities" popped up because you evidently clicked on the wrong button. (That I feel is the KDE team's fault; I did the same thing, since they have it in the corner and the normal menu off by one space.) That said, when I did a new install to test SimplyMepis 12 a few months ago, I noticed the "activities" icon in the panel alongside the normal menu, deleted it, and moved on.
Looking at my desktop, which is pretty standard for KDE 4.5+, it's no more complex or confusing than Windows 7 is: all of the windows follow the same visual theme, icons are consistent; the programs/windows have the same sorts of titles that they would in any OS: System Settings, Firefox, Open Office. You won't find anything different from Windows 7 or OS X in that department. LXRandR isn't in KDE -- we control our monitors through System Settings, and optionally can run a utility specific to KDE that lets us do it from the system tray if we want to.
*Any* operating system or environment a person sits down to that's markedly different from the one(s) they're used to is going to require some degree of adjustment & learning new terms. That said, most of your reported conversation with your father could just as easily apply to Ubuntu/Unity:
"...you're using Ubuntu." "I though I was using Linux." "You are, it's the Ubuntu distribution." "[What is Unity, then?]" "That's the desktop environment."
"This says I'm using X windows" "That's the underlying display architecture..." Users of Windows don't know what GDI is unless they're looking for it. Same with Quartz and Mac OS X.
Average/non-geek users of KDE 4 don't know about it either, because terms like "X-Windows" don't appear -- just ones like "display" or "monitors." Relatively few technical terms appear these days, for that matter.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "modern" as you claim the term applies to Ubuntu when colorful looks have been trending. Similar for your use of "unified," considering KDE, Trinity, MATE, etc each apply a color scheme & theme to virtually all windows. (Snarky aside: "unless by 'unified' you mean all users locked to the devs' preferred look?") Just as importantly, they let their userbase share themes regardless of what distro we're in, helping ensure that all users of an environment can have the desktops be as modern, retro, colorful, or drab as we wish... After all, we're all Linux OS users first & foremost, and which distro (customized copy of Linux) we use is and should be secondary.
Exactly. I use a 2GHz/1GB Pentium M Thinkpad, and it's fast & stable under a typical KDE install in SimplyMepis, with its average load looking like this:
System Settings, QMMP, Konsole, a few Dolphin windows, TEA text editor, KeepNote
+1-3 of these: Firefox (15-25 tabs, approx 30 extensions), OpenOffice with 20-300Kb Writer file, Calibre, GIMP
I do have to note that some of it is because SimplyMepis tends to have better performance & hw compatibility than other distros I've tried, though ymmv and all that.
I've encountered the same sense of peace (and a variety of other things) a few times growing up, since I had serious medical crises several times due to birth defects. However, it gave me a powerful drive to accomplish things, teach, learn, improve society, make a difference in others' lives, etc. in whatever ways my body/brain let me, and the nothingness of death is terrifying. The only time I haven't felt that way was when I was in agonizing physical or emotional pain (including an attempt to self-treat PTSD/depression), and then I was primarily interested in escaping the pain, not death in particular.
I hope that you have plenty of things in your life to enjoy while you do exist, and if you're using to handle mental health problems (as is the case for drug/alcohol users I've been close to) that decent, reliable help becomes a real option.
The key is to avoid the big-name assfaces whenever possible; much like the major cell carriers, they don't give a shill if they lose any particular customer, as long as their bottom line isn't affected. Regional places like Sonic.net or DSL Extreme are MUCH better for any geek to go with, for example -- neither uses caps/throttling or minds home servers, and while both block port 25, DSL Extreme's TOS states they will open it if asked.
The thing is, regional ISPs are rarely well known even in their area, so a lot of people have no clue that there's any options beyond the cable/phone companies. Even if you've never heard of any independent ISPs existing in your area, spend some time searching the web for a local one (they can be very hard to find) and ask at BroadbandReports & Craigslist's Forum area before signing up with a national ISP. It takes some extra time, but it's worth it.
...it begs the question; Is there any one country that reeally does uphold these principles? Anyone care to name somewhere?
We'd have to define the principles first, as the libertarian, true liberal, Democrat liberal, and conservative ideas of both conflict. The best we can do is to define it only in terms of how much attention the government pays to our communications & movements.
Also, while I'm nowhere near a grammar geek (I'm lucky if I'm correct by accident most of the time), I've seen enough point out: "begs the question" doesn't mean "demands an explanation" or similar, it means "gives a circular argument." For example, "he can't get any on-the-job experience in this field because employers won't hire someone that lacks on-the-job experience in the field."
Ting's the cheapest for the lightest usage for 1-2 smartphones as well, thanks to their lack of bundling. I researched the different price plans of every MVNO & carrier available in my area -- nobody rivaled them for 2+ users, and while T-Mobile's $30/"unlimited" (texts/min *or* data, not both) was close for a single user, it left no margin for changes or error.
It should also be mentioned that Ting has extremely good prices on refurbished phones, and...well, I've been tempted to ask on their blog whether they spike their service reps' food with MDMA, because they're so friendly and eager to please that it's kind of creepy.
The discussion still exists, but yeah, it's gone from the list of articles...WTF?
Sex is a definite drive ("need" is semantic), but reproduction as a drive is questionable for humans. A *lot* of people have great sex drives, but spend their lives either not caring either way whether they have kids, preferring not to, or actively repelled by the idea -- social pressure is what leads them to reproduce, not an innate drive. (By "social pressure" I'm referring to the mix of casual "when are you having kids" or "all women loooove kids" type comments, the nagging "when will you give me grandkids" ones, losing friends that decide to only hang with other parents, or the nastier "you're not a real man/woman, you haven't had kids" / "you're an evil child-hater if you don't love babies" style.)
It's not something that you notice if you're among the crowd that *is* interested, or that always just assumed it was simply what you do and never thought about where the idea came from (especially if you're male), but many childless & childfree adults can attest it's quite strong. It's akin to religion in that sense: actively religious types rarely notice the pressure to be a "believer" and just assume it's what a person does, but many agnostics/atheists definitely feel it.
The social pressure factor is one of the reasons child abuse is such a huge problem. Many of those parents knew they didn't particularly want kids, but either caved in to pressure directly (possibly because their spouse threatened to leave them) or decided they "couldn't" end an unexpected pregnancy. Alternately, the majority of the ones left never even thought realistically about whether they'd be happy as a parent or were capable of giving the kid a mentally & physically healthy life, and/or had overly-idealistic notions of what it's like -- because they just assumed it was part of the mandatory life script and bred without thinking it over.
As long as the female soldiers get some choice male & female "partners" to get their rocks off with -- believe it or not, most women *do* have a sex drive that's comparable to what a guy has. (If anything, the women might need the "companionship" more, as we can't masturbate with just our hands remotely as easily as a guy, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to use a noisy vibrator where others could hear it.)
However, having hookers available isn't going to prevent the female soldiers or locals from being raped by our troops (in the classic sense of knowingly forcing oneself onto someone), since rapists of both genders attack because they get off on the power of violent domination, not because they're unable to find a willing partner. Like police, most soldiers have a drive for physical power, try to use it constructively, but in some cases do start misusing it to dominate others; add in the need to turn their empathy off to do their jobs, and it's not a surprise that rape isn't uncommon.
Problematically, I've heard that the presence of hookers can sometimes increase the rate of rapes, not decrease it. When someone's in a situation where 90% of the people in a particular category that they see are there to serve them, then it's very easy for them to fall into the habit of expecting it from the other 10% -- not because they're bad people, but just because human brains work that way -- and, if they've been under a ton of stress for long enough, are angry about various things, etc. a "no" at the wrong moment could make the soldier do something he/she wouldn't normally do.
You guys are doing your gender a real disservice by promoting the "thwarted male=rapist" codswallop. Try to imagine yourself attacking and forcing yourself onto a decent person that trusted you enough to let their guard down a bit (as rapists are almost always people the victim knows well) and ask yourself if you'd totally do that if you could, or if you figure your male friends would do it. It doesn't make sense to spread the idea that you would if it's not true -- or at least, I sure wouldn't encourage negative stereotypes about my gender, let alone a horrific one like that.
FWIW just because some folks below keep using the term wrong, those are the views of a feminist geek -- someone that sees guys as people to fight alongside, not fight against. (Mentioning that because I've seen too many people spreading the 70s-vintage "feminists all hate men and want to cut your balls off and keep you from having sex omg" FUD in this discussion.)
No, the women you're thinking of are conservatives. The vast majority of modern feminists just want to wipe out the stupid old stereotype of women having weaker sex drives. Both sexes have roughly the same range of strong, average, weak, and zero sex drives -- the main difference is that our society hasn't quite gotten rid of the old double-standard where guys are praised for getting laid while girls/women are condemned.
Speaking of the subconscious, anyone notice ErectionLand in the lower-right part of 2013's ocean? (I'm interpreting the oddly-shaped "island" as ErectionLand's target; better that than a spooge puddle or horrifying scrotal growth.)
The icons are a great metaphor for the UI's progression: detail & focus eroded while more effort was devoted to making it look flashy on the surface. (Of course, given they weren't paying attention to details, they probably didn't do it entirely on purpose...)
Based on my image gallery, mine already seems to have a variant on that: whenever I ask it to take a picture of something outside my car, it waits until it detects that it's aimed at my steering wheel, dashboard, side mirror, etc. instead. (I've heard it's related to the well-known one that waits to photograph a pet until they're either in motion or showing off their privates.)
Not if you know how to wipe properly & have decent TP. The benefit in bidets is that they avoid the risk of getting germs on your hands; most people that grew up using TP know how to use it to get their butts completely clean under normal circumstances.
Thousands of people in Japan are getting hot water sprayed up their asses right now.
Do they consider that desirable or undesirable? Japanese culture has always been a bit difficult for me to understand.
Well, *up* the ass wouldn't be, but *on* the ass would be desirable (if it's not too hot) since it's the expected function of a bidet. (I've never used or even seen one, all I did was read the Wikipedia article.)
A lot of them feel the same way about toilet paper... AFAIK the jets of water do an excellent job on their own without the person touching themselves, so the people used to them feel that using TP results in getting our hands filthy with germs and the urine/feces being smeared around & left behind in a thin hopefully-undetectable layer.
Well, since it's a Japanese toilet, probably a lot -- Wikipedia listed some of the *basic* features:
While the toilet looks like a Western-style toilet at first glance, there are numerous additional features—such as blow dryer, seat heating, massage options, water jet adjustments, automatic lid opening, automatic flushing, wireless control panel, room heating and air conditioning for the room—included either as part of the toilet or in the seat. These features can be accessed by an (often wireless) control panel attached to the seat or mounted on a nearby wall.
To me, as an American, that's the real issue. I don't know, and frankly am not terribly concerned, about Australian NBN.
There's actually one good reason for us to care about their NBN project as Americans -- since Australia is highly similar to the USA in many ways, we can use their successes as evidence if we want to get similar projects moving in individual states or regions.
gun control is so dangerous to the average person. Once you have no ability to do violence you have very little power to enforce your authority, and authority that cant be enforced isn't real.
First, as the Middle Ages, martial arts, thugs, etc. have proven, we don't need a gun to be violent or violently enforce authority. (I have little need for a gun because being threatened enrages me enough that if I let myself react violently rather than intelligently cooperating -- as anyone armed with a gun is supposed to do, given showing a gun drastically increases the chances of being shot -- I'd be too focused on using the item to bludgeon the person to bother shooting it.)
Second, genuine authority comes from being highly respected for one's abilities, knowledge, wisdom, and so forth -- the sort of person people want as a leader, doctor, etc. -- not from being physically feared. "Authority" that comes from physical fear is tentative at best, as the other individual has no respect or interest in you as a leader and will seek to gain the upper hand the first moment they can. To use a childhood comparison, the difference between real & pseudo-authority is seen in school: students are far less prone to obeying a teacher that flaunts their disciplinary power than a teacher that they look up to.
Absolutely. And artists must starve, else where will they acquire the angst needed to create art?
Reading Slashdot comments?
I'm positive there is a field in psychology dealing exactly with how individuals behave in a crowd, how they follow the crowd, and how the take on the identify of the crowd.
There is -- it's part of the field of social psychology and sometimes its sibling sociology.
If you're interested in the topic, I highly recommend taking a college course -- even if you're not in college, both are commonly taught at community colleges, often at night so adults & high school students can attend.
The Finnish version of "Starman" sounds like it's unintentionally hilarious. Could "girl-prince" be a reference to the old stereotype of girls being princesses that wait idly for a prince/knight whisk them away to a charmed life, while the boy/prince proves his worth via exciting adventures?
That email has been around for a long time doesn't automatically mean it's "antiquated" or in need of a rewrite. It fulfills the most important goals: ;)
-- send & receive messages over a secure connection
-- use any client we want, whether local, networked, web, in a remote shell...
-- read & send when it's convenient (non-live)
-- email back-and-forth right away (eg. if chat services aren't allowed)
-- style the letter as a document via WYSIWYG editor or hand-coded HTML
-- or send plain text, no formatting/HTML
-- embed all forms of media
-- request to be notified when our recipient reads the message
-- refuse to let our client notify someone that asked when we open it
-- download the messages as an archive, leave them on a server, or both
-- interact with anybody regardless of what companies host the accounts
-- host our own servers & personal domain
Let's be honest here... If our generation(s) of developers tried to create an equivalent "electronic mail" type of service, we wouldn't get a standardized protocol for all servers to follow -- we'd end up with a ton of little competing services that would dictate how we access/send the messages, which competing mail services they're compatible with, and basically everything else, just like the norm in the blogging & social networking arenas. (Or incompatible pre-Internet networks like CompuServe & AOL, except those didn't sell our private data or plaster ads on the screen, and doubtless today's tech would.)
I didn't use eBay for several years because of its problems, especially with sellers ripping people off. A few months ago, I noticed *Amazon* now has that problem with their tech equipment -- dollar-store quality no-name chargers sent in place of brand-specific ones, counterfeit items, broken stuff, fly-by-night companies reneging on warranties, etc. -- and stopped buying stuff there after discovering firsthand that Amazon's won't intervene when problems like that crop up even if the items were (supposedly) brand-new & sold on the item's main page.
So I tried eBay out of desperation and found they've really cleaned up their act. Their filters can go into a lot more detail, and the site now has a customer satisfaction guarantee...if we run into any problems, they intervene, forcibly refund our money and potentially discipline the seller. It's still nowhere near perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than risking being effectively robbed by Amazon's sellers.