I wasn't the one who brought up the subject, I was replying to the guy that did. If someone's going to bring up one aspect of a story is it criminal to reply and refute the assertions that they make?
Is it US-bashing to point out hypocrisy and double standards? Really?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the ideal of America is beautiful but the reality of what it's becoming is becoming increasingly ugly. Now, if saying that is America-bashing, then I'm guilty as charged.
Nobody wants to see the US fail - well, I know I don't - but they do want the US to live up to its own lofty high standards.
A super-power should be an inspiration to all, not a concern. On the international stage, the US has gone from having the support of virtually every nation to being condemned by all but a few in a few short years.
Pissing away all the goodwill and favour that was so apparent in the aftermath of September 11th (which, lest you forget, was a tragedy that killed citizens from all over the world) and pissing it away so quickly is one hell of an achievement.
So illegal internment without the right to legal representation, or even access rights for your family, doesn't worry you in the slightest? Because that's what hundreds upon hundreds of American citizens of Islamic faith and Middle Eastern descent went through as a knee-jerk reaction to September 11th.
Funny though, there were no similar reaction seeking to oppress the rights of gun-toting militia men in middle America in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, were there?
And don't even begin to use Saddam Hussein as an excuse for anything. When he was gassing Kurds, he was doing it with the blessing of the West, including the US, who had sold him his chemical stockpiles in the first place and were quite happy to have him running around being a madman, starting wars with Iran, etc, when it suited Western agendas. The chemical attacks that you're talking about, and countless similar atrocities were hushed up by the West as best as possible and it was aid agencies and human rights organisations who brought these events to light.
Ah, there's irony for you, huh? You're happy to talk about China's shortcomings but not those of your own nation, the one that's supposedly "the land of the free".
Look, I don't live in a utopian society where everything is perfect - nobody does - but I think you have to at least acknowledge that, if your an American, measuring your freedoms against those of China (or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Wherever You Want To Invade Today (TM)), rather than against, say, your own Constitution is a sad state of affairs.
When you start accepting the small injustices and intolerances, even the ones that don't affect you, then you've let the door open a little bit. From there on, opening it wider and wider becomes easier than you think.
Freedom isn't the freedom to say just the popular things, it's the freedom to say the most unpopular stuff, even the stuff that makes 99 percent of people want to puke. Start oppressing one person's rights and you've oppressed everyone's.
Bottom line: if you're the land of the free then be the land of the free, not the land of the mostly free.
So Britain is a fascist society now? There was me thinking that we have a Human Rights Act enshrined in law, etc.
Meanwhile, in the US rights are being stripped away bit by bit: DCMA, USA PATRIOT Act, etc. Illegal internments, Camp X-Ray, etc.
If there were CCTV cameras every 50 metres, don't you think we'd see the police using the footage in high profile murder investigations? Or are you one of those that thinks that the cameras are invisible and/or the footage is just kept on file for our appearances in Room 101?
Well, I'm sure one negative experience makes you an expert. I have no idea what reason someone would want to track you as you ate some ice cream so I won't comment beyond adding that I can only assume that there was either someone being trained or perhaps bored beyond belief at the other end.
What I will say is that 99 percent of CCTVs are fixed to point at set locations and are unmanned, so you were pretty unfortunate to come across one that could be manually operated at all, let alone one that looked as if it were tracking you.
Moral panic? In the US, how much time was wasted as people huffed and puffed about a one-second exposure to part of Janet Jackson's right breast during this year's Super Bowl half-time show?
And how is it that a film like Saving Private Ryan can't be shown on US television for fear of somehow corrupting people?
Moral panic? Moral panic? I'm sorry, did you miss the US elections where the guy who won was the one selling a message of fear rather than the one selling a message of hope?
God, I'm so tired of reading this sort of uninformed bullshit on Slashdot from people who have little or no experience of the typical British town or city.
Let's just sprinkle in some facts:
1. There aren't CCTV surveillance cameras every 50 metres in Britain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying through their teeth or delusional.
2. The majority of the cameras that are installed are privately owned, in shops, etc to deter shoplifters, etc.
3. A great deal of the "publicly operated" cameras are in places like train stations, airports and major roads to monitor things like passenger and traffic flow, and around sensitive government buildings like police stations to improve security.
Most of the latter were installed at a time when organisations like the IRA were hell-bent on blowing up everything from Christmas shoppers to military barracks to politicians to financial institutions, and the images that they output are almost always recorded to nothing more advanced than video tape at poor (black and white) quality.
4. There is no all-seeing "Enemy Of The State"-type network of cameras that can track your every movement. (Think about it: if there was, wouldn't it be used to totally eradicate crime?)
5. If you want to see what footage of you someone might have, then the law says that they must provide it to you. All you have to do is ask for it in writing, providing details of when and where you believe you may have been caught on camera. Oh, and you might have to pay a nominal fee (around £10, if I remember correctly) to cover the cost of the exercise.
6. Big Brother isn't watching you. Watching the every move of an entire population undetected isn't feasibly possible. Even trying to do so is prohibitively expensive, both financially and logistically, and is doomed to failure, as the failed experiment that was East Germany proved.
7. Lastly - and I realise this may come as a shock to some of the tin foil hat brigade - when you're out in public you don't suddenly become invisible. A CCTV isn't any more pervasive than any pair of eyes that happen to glance at you as you go about your business.
I didn't prove your point. I proved what a ignorant prat you are.
China producing propaganda material with a consistent message and China jumping up and down saying "look at me, look at me!" aren't the same thing. The assumption that you seem to have made that the two are one and the same is just one area where you just don't get it.
Again, because you're quite clearly backward, I'll repeat the salient part of my original post that you just don't seem to be able to get through your thick skull. I'll even put some words that you need to look up in the dictionary in bold:
"The Chinese aren't going there as a big PR exercise. If you haven't noticed, the Chinese aren't big on grand, meaningless showboating: they do what they do because it furthers their long-term objectives, not because it wins them short-term positive press coverage."
In other words, thicko, they didn't set off to go to Dome A just so they could boast about it this week before they move onto something else to boast about next week. They did it because it gets them one step closer to achieving their long-term goals, whatever they may ultimately be.
Now, with that said, you can get back to your life of "stoopidity".
Sorry, youare calling me "stoopid"? Isn't that a bit like Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft calling Karl Marx a fascist?
Reread my post (assuming that you actually did read it the first time): see that bit where it says "they do what they do because it furthers their long-term objectives, not because it wins them short-term positive press coverage"? I know that there are some words there longer than two syllables long, but do you really need me to explain what that means as if you're a five-year-old?
Pay particular attention (sorry, two long words there: ask an adult if you get stuck) to the phrase "short-term positive press coverage", and especially (yep, that's another long one) the word "press".
Now think about how much free press there is in China. (Here's a hint: next to none, if any at all.) So, when I said press I was referring to foreign press, those media that cater to people who aren't Chinese. How much "we're so much better than you and here's how" coverage do you see in your paper or on the news about what mesage China's selling today? (Here's another hint: next to none again.)
China hosting the Olympics is more about the message that the Central Committee of the Party wants to sell to its people than it is about the message it wants to sell to anyone else. Same with just about any other story that you care to mention.
You say that they control their media and that it's all about national pride? No shit, Sherlock. The first rule about running a dictatorship (whichever end of the political spectrum it is at) is controlling what people see, hear, read and hence think. He who controls the past controls the future. (Hey, there's a tip: go read 1984 because you might learn something valuable. In fact, go read any book, because if anyone needs to feed their mind it's obviously you.)
The Chinese (as in the Peoples' Republic of China) "publish[es] military statistics in the Taiwan media"? Well, given as Taiwan has a free press, and a free press that's not buddy-buddy with China (PRC), I doubt your assertion that China (PRC) is the one doing the publishing, or even that the free press is acting in a Quisling-like fashion and printing every last word that China wants to see printed.
Of course, I've no doubt that when China carries out a major military exercise in the Formosa Strait or tests a new missile system that the free press in Taiwan don't have too many more pressing news stories to cover, but there's a difference between reporting a potential threat and churning out propaganda for the other team, which is what you're suggesting.
And, beyond a few words, I won't even start to waste my time explaining what "short-term" means. Suffice to say that we in the West live in a 24-hour news cycle, where yesterday's news is forgotten almost as soon as it rolls off the presses, whereas in China, much like in any dictatorial society, the same underlying message is sold to the masses again and again and again, day after day after day...
But, hey, thanks for dropping by and producing such a lucid, well-thought out argument. Repeat after me: "Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
An exam question on Momentum, Heat and Mass transfer: Is hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Justify your argument.
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law or some variant.
One student however wrote the following:
First, we must postulate that if souls exist they must have mass. If they do then a mole of soles can have mass. So at what rate are souls entering Hell and at what rate are they leaving?
Making the assumptions that once in Hell a soul cannot leave. Therefore no souls are leaving.
To determine how many are entering we must look at the different religions.
Some religions state that if you are not a member of their religion you will go to Hell.
Because there is more than one religion that states this and no one is a member of one of more religion we can postulate that all people, and therefore all souls, go to Hell.
With birth and death rates as they are we can assume that the number of souls in Hell are increasing exponentially.
Now look at the rate of change of volume in hell.
Boyle's law states that in order for the temperature and pressure to say the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant.
Case 1: If Hell is expanding at a rate slower than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell lets loose.
Case 2: If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature ad pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it?
If we accept the postulate by Theresa Banyan during my first year " it will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you" and taking into account I have not had sexual relations with her, Case 2 cannot be correct.
The Chinese aren't going there as a big PR exercise. If you haven't noticed, the Chinese aren't big on grand, meaningless showboating: they do what they do because it furthers their long-term objectives, not because it wins them short-term positive press coverage.
The long-term thinking and objectives behind this sort of expedition is space exploration. If the Chinese can successfully establish a base in one of the least hospitable places on the planet, and overcome the physical, logistical, pyschological and other hurdles that such an endeavour involves, then they will have gained valuable experience and climed another rung up the ladder towards the eventual establishment of a populated lunar or Martian base.
They aren't going there for the scenery, they're going there to take some hard knocks and learn from them.
Does it matter whether Wal-Mart pays Sony for the CD before or after the sale? If the CD is stolen, that's still one CD that Wal-Mart for which it has to pay Sony but for which it doesn't recoup even its purchase price.
In the case of physical theft, the situation is exactly as the grandparent post described it: the retailer loses out but the media corporation/distributor that sold the CD to them in the first place does not.
Complacency? Probably not in this case...
on
Firefox News Roundup
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, I can believe that. Remember, Microsoft changed the windowing behaviour of its Office applications so that different documents appear in different windows, as opposed to the same window.
So, if you have two Word documents open, they appear in two different windows and appear like two seperate instances of Word (although only one instance of the application is actually running). This change was made at the introduction of Office 2000, and I'm sure it's a result of usability feedback from less savvy users who were "losing" their documents when they opened another one, etc.
Essentially, the change makes it easier to immediately see and switch between all the Word (or Excel, etc) documents that you've got open at any one time but when you have more than a few open it can really clutter the taskbar, hence creating a whole new usability issue.
Bottom line: I'm sure Microsoft's usability experts regard the windowing behaviour of MSIE as better the way that it is than the way that it could be if they switched to tabbed browsing.
And, before anyone says brings it up, let me just say that even offering people a choice of tabbed and non-tabbed browsing raises yet more usability issues. You might prefer a tabbed approach, and henc select such an option if it were available, but what happens when your technophobic work colleague needs to use your PC for five minutes? Sometimes, from a software engineering point of view, giving users as few options as possible is the preferable path.
And how many were web designers just downloading yet another browser for compatability checking purposes? I know that that's the reason why I did, and I'm sure there are countless others that fit that description too.
Keep backtracking and pretend that you didn't describe people willing to pay for Opera as dumb or scared or a whole raft of other things.
There are a lot of reasons why people use Opera. Speed is one of them, but it's far from being the only one. As I've said in this thread and elsewhere, most of the features of Firefox that people rave about are taken from Opera, but not as well implemented.
Opera is a smaller, faster, more feature-packed, better implemented, better integrated browser than Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, MSIE, etc. It innovates (tabs, mouse gestures, wand, notes, M2) whilst others play catch-up and "me too".
I swear that 99 percent of the bullshit that I'm reading in the comments here about Opera are from open source only fanboys who've barely used Opera ever if at all, let alone a recent version, and who'd rave about Opera until the end of the Earth if only it was a free open source product.
Fine, you don't want to pay for your web browser and you don't like the virtually unnoticable advertisements: you did notice that I said "in almost every case", didn't you?
And, if it's not too much to ask, why the hell did you try it out if you knew you weren't going to want to pay for it no matter how good it turned out to be or if you knew that the ads were going to be a major issue? (Just how small is your screen resolution if a small ad is taking up that much of your screen real estate? 800 by 600?)
Lastly, as for Firefox doing everything Opera does? LMFAO! Please, get your facts straight before you making sweeping statements like that one.
Take tabs, for example. Sure, Firefox supports tabbed browsing (an Opera innovation, by the way), but does it let you save tabs or save them automatically for you in the event of a system crash? Can you reorder tabbed browser windows simply by dragging and dropping? Can you have one web page open with images on and one open with images off side-by-side? Can you drag a tabbed window off on its own so it appears in its own individual window? Can you do all this out of the box? No, you can't, so stop pretending that you can.
And, because I dare take a critical view of your analysis of Opera users, I must be living in a reality distortion field, or whatever it is your category #2 refers to exactly.
Your own beloved Mozilla isn't without its own quirks, including CSS support, but I'm sure in your little world those don't exist at all, do they?
Maybe I should emulate you and come up with an equally stupid list of reasons why people use Mozilla or Firefox and then neatly pigeonhole you into one of them for my own convenience. The fact that half the reasons would be distorted and that the other half would be complete and utter crap won't bother you in the slightest, will it?
So you're suggesting the people who buy licences for Opera after having had the chance to test drive the free version indefinitely are doing so because they feel sorry for Opera the underdog, for speed over compatibility (care to share with us your list of Opera's incompatibilities?), because they get a warm fuzzy feeling spending money when they don't have to or because they've been duped into doing it because they don't know anything about computers and are either too scared or too stupid to know any better?
I hope your post was a deliberate attempt at trolling because, quite frankly, you're an idiot if you believe even one of those is true.
People buy Opera licences because they like the software, they consider it to be of benefit and they consider the $39 cost of a licence money well spent. It's that simple.
Take Firefox's top ten most raved about features. I guarantee you at least half, if not almost all of them, were Opera innovations: tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, etc all were developed by Opera first and copied by others later. And, if you want these features in a fast, tightly integrated packaged, Opera still wipes the floor with Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, MSIE and any other browser you care to name.
Slashdot Mirror
Not. Talk about screwing over the average guy just to make a fast buck.
So, you're attacking my every move, calling me a jerk, etc, and if I respond then that makes me a defensive jerk? OK, gothcha.
Who died and made you God?
Oh, I see, now presenting a lucid argument makes me a jerk. Thanks.
As for my manhood, well, insult away. It's not like what you say is going to change the fact that I'm quite comfortable about my sexuality, etc.
So I can relieve myself of critical peer review just by adding "don't nit-pick what I've said" to all of my posts? Gee, thanks for the tip!
I wasn't the one who brought up the subject, I was replying to the guy that did. If someone's going to bring up one aspect of a story is it criminal to reply and refute the assertions that they make?
Is it US-bashing to point out hypocrisy and double standards? Really?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the ideal of America is beautiful but the reality of what it's becoming is becoming increasingly ugly. Now, if saying that is America-bashing, then I'm guilty as charged.
Nobody wants to see the US fail - well, I know I don't - but they do want the US to live up to its own lofty high standards.
A super-power should be an inspiration to all, not a concern. On the international stage, the US has gone from having the support of virtually every nation to being condemned by all but a few in a few short years.
Pissing away all the goodwill and favour that was so apparent in the aftermath of September 11th (which, lest you forget, was a tragedy that killed citizens from all over the world) and pissing it away so quickly is one hell of an achievement.
So illegal internment without the right to legal representation, or even access rights for your family, doesn't worry you in the slightest? Because that's what hundreds upon hundreds of American citizens of Islamic faith and Middle Eastern descent went through as a knee-jerk reaction to September 11th.
Funny though, there were no similar reaction seeking to oppress the rights of gun-toting militia men in middle America in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, were there?
And don't even begin to use Saddam Hussein as an excuse for anything. When he was gassing Kurds, he was doing it with the blessing of the West, including the US, who had sold him his chemical stockpiles in the first place and were quite happy to have him running around being a madman, starting wars with Iran, etc, when it suited Western agendas. The chemical attacks that you're talking about, and countless similar atrocities were hushed up by the West as best as possible and it was aid agencies and human rights organisations who brought these events to light.
Ah, there's irony for you, huh? You're happy to talk about China's shortcomings but not those of your own nation, the one that's supposedly "the land of the free".
Look, I don't live in a utopian society where everything is perfect - nobody does - but I think you have to at least acknowledge that, if your an American, measuring your freedoms against those of China (or Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Wherever You Want To Invade Today (TM)), rather than against, say, your own Constitution is a sad state of affairs.
When you start accepting the small injustices and intolerances, even the ones that don't affect you, then you've let the door open a little bit. From there on, opening it wider and wider becomes easier than you think.
Freedom isn't the freedom to say just the popular things, it's the freedom to say the most unpopular stuff, even the stuff that makes 99 percent of people want to puke. Start oppressing one person's rights and you've oppressed everyone's.
Bottom line: if you're the land of the free then be the land of the free, not the land of the mostly free.
So Britain is a fascist society now? There was me thinking that we have a Human Rights Act enshrined in law, etc.
Meanwhile, in the US rights are being stripped away bit by bit: DCMA, USA PATRIOT Act, etc. Illegal internments, Camp X-Ray, etc.
If there were CCTV cameras every 50 metres, don't you think we'd see the police using the footage in high profile murder investigations? Or are you one of those that thinks that the cameras are invisible and/or the footage is just kept on file for our appearances in Room 101?
Well, I'm sure one negative experience makes you an expert. I have no idea what reason someone would want to track you as you ate some ice cream so I won't comment beyond adding that I can only assume that there was either someone being trained or perhaps bored beyond belief at the other end.
What I will say is that 99 percent of CCTVs are fixed to point at set locations and are unmanned, so you were pretty unfortunate to come across one that could be manually operated at all, let alone one that looked as if it were tracking you.
Moral panic? In the US, how much time was wasted as people huffed and puffed about a one-second exposure to part of Janet Jackson's right breast during this year's Super Bowl half-time show?
And how is it that a film like Saving Private Ryan can't be shown on US television for fear of somehow corrupting people?
Moral panic? Moral panic? I'm sorry, did you miss the US elections where the guy who won was the one selling a message of fear rather than the one selling a message of hope?
God, I'm so tired of reading this sort of uninformed bullshit on Slashdot from people who have little or no experience of the typical British town or city.
Let's just sprinkle in some facts:
1. There aren't CCTV surveillance cameras every 50 metres in Britain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying through their teeth or delusional.
2. The majority of the cameras that are installed are privately owned, in shops, etc to deter shoplifters, etc.
3. A great deal of the "publicly operated" cameras are in places like train stations, airports and major roads to monitor things like passenger and traffic flow, and around sensitive government buildings like police stations to improve security.
Most of the latter were installed at a time when organisations like the IRA were hell-bent on blowing up everything from Christmas shoppers to military barracks to politicians to financial institutions, and the images that they output are almost always recorded to nothing more advanced than video tape at poor (black and white) quality.
4. There is no all-seeing "Enemy Of The State"-type network of cameras that can track your every movement. (Think about it: if there was, wouldn't it be used to totally eradicate crime?)
5. If you want to see what footage of you someone might have, then the law says that they must provide it to you. All you have to do is ask for it in writing, providing details of when and where you believe you may have been caught on camera. Oh, and you might have to pay a nominal fee (around £10, if I remember correctly) to cover the cost of the exercise.
6. Big Brother isn't watching you. Watching the every move of an entire population undetected isn't feasibly possible. Even trying to do so is prohibitively expensive, both financially and logistically, and is doomed to failure, as the failed experiment that was East Germany proved.
7. Lastly - and I realise this may come as a shock to some of the tin foil hat brigade - when you're out in public you don't suddenly become invisible. A CCTV isn't any more pervasive than any pair of eyes that happen to glance at you as you go about your business.
I didn't prove your point. I proved what a ignorant prat you are.
China producing propaganda material with a consistent message and China jumping up and down saying "look at me, look at me!" aren't the same thing. The assumption that you seem to have made that the two are one and the same is just one area where you just don't get it.
Again, because you're quite clearly backward, I'll repeat the salient part of my original post that you just don't seem to be able to get through your thick skull. I'll even put some words that you need to look up in the dictionary in bold:
"The Chinese aren't going there as a big PR exercise. If you haven't noticed, the Chinese aren't big on grand, meaningless showboating: they do what they do because it furthers their long-term objectives, not because it wins them short-term positive press coverage."
In other words, thicko, they didn't set off to go to Dome A just so they could boast about it this week before they move onto something else to boast about next week. They did it because it gets them one step closer to achieving their long-term goals, whatever they may ultimately be.
Now, with that said, you can get back to your life of "stoopidity".
Sorry, youare calling me "stoopid"? Isn't that a bit like Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft calling Karl Marx a fascist?
Reread my post (assuming that you actually did read it the first time): see that bit where it says "they do what they do because it furthers their long-term objectives, not because it wins them short-term positive press coverage"? I know that there are some words there longer than two syllables long, but do you really need me to explain what that means as if you're a five-year-old?
Pay particular attention (sorry, two long words there: ask an adult if you get stuck) to the phrase "short-term positive press coverage", and especially (yep, that's another long one) the word "press".
Now think about how much free press there is in China. (Here's a hint: next to none, if any at all.) So, when I said press I was referring to foreign press, those media that cater to people who aren't Chinese. How much "we're so much better than you and here's how" coverage do you see in your paper or on the news about what mesage China's selling today? (Here's another hint: next to none again.)
China hosting the Olympics is more about the message that the Central Committee of the Party wants to sell to its people than it is about the message it wants to sell to anyone else. Same with just about any other story that you care to mention.
You say that they control their media and that it's all about national pride? No shit, Sherlock. The first rule about running a dictatorship (whichever end of the political spectrum it is at) is controlling what people see, hear, read and hence think. He who controls the past controls the future. (Hey, there's a tip: go read 1984 because you might learn something valuable. In fact, go read any book, because if anyone needs to feed their mind it's obviously you.)
The Chinese (as in the Peoples' Republic of China) "publish[es] military statistics in the Taiwan media"? Well, given as Taiwan has a free press, and a free press that's not buddy-buddy with China (PRC), I doubt your assertion that China (PRC) is the one doing the publishing, or even that the free press is acting in a Quisling-like fashion and printing every last word that China wants to see printed.
Of course, I've no doubt that when China carries out a major military exercise in the Formosa Strait or tests a new missile system that the free press in Taiwan don't have too many more pressing news stories to cover, but there's a difference between reporting a potential threat and churning out propaganda for the other team, which is what you're suggesting.
And, beyond a few words, I won't even start to waste my time explaining what "short-term" means. Suffice to say that we in the West live in a 24-hour news cycle, where yesterday's news is forgotten almost as soon as it rolls off the presses, whereas in China, much like in any dictatorial society, the same underlying message is sold to the masses again and again and again, day after day after day...
But, hey, thanks for dropping by and producing such a lucid, well-thought out argument. Repeat after me: "Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
Note to self (and tip for others): in future, don't try to close a bold tag with an italic one. That shit ain't ever gonna work.
An exam question on Momentum, Heat and Mass transfer: Is hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Justify your argument.
Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law or some variant.
One student however wrote the following:
First, we must postulate that if souls exist they must have mass. If they do then a mole of soles can have mass. So at what rate are souls entering Hell and at what rate are they leaving?
Making the assumptions that once in Hell a soul cannot leave. Therefore no souls are leaving.
To determine how many are entering we must look at the different religions.
Some religions state that if you are not a member of their religion you will go to Hell.
Because there is more than one religion that states this and no one is a member of one of more religion we can postulate that all people, and therefore all souls, go to Hell.
With birth and death rates as they are we can assume that the number of souls in Hell are increasing exponentially.
Now look at the rate of change of volume in hell.
Boyle's law states that in order for the temperature and pressure to say the same, the ratio of the mass of souls and volume needs to stay constant.
Case 1: If Hell is expanding at a rate slower than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell lets loose.
Case 2: If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature ad pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it?
If we accept the postulate by Theresa Banyan during my first year " it will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you" and taking into account I have not had sexual relations with her, Case 2 cannot be correct.
Thus Hell is exothermic- QED!
The Chinese aren't going there as a big PR exercise. If you haven't noticed, the Chinese aren't big on grand, meaningless showboating: they do what they do because it furthers their long-term objectives, not because it wins them short-term positive press coverage.
The long-term thinking and objectives behind this sort of expedition is space exploration. If the Chinese can successfully establish a base in one of the least hospitable places on the planet, and overcome the physical, logistical, pyschological and other hurdles that such an endeavour involves, then they will have gained valuable experience and climed another rung up the ladder towards the eventual establishment of a populated lunar or Martian base.
They aren't going there for the scenery, they're going there to take some hard knocks and learn from them.
Does it matter whether Wal-Mart pays Sony for the CD before or after the sale? If the CD is stolen, that's still one CD that Wal-Mart for which it has to pay Sony but for which it doesn't recoup even its purchase price.
In the case of physical theft, the situation is exactly as the grandparent post described it: the retailer loses out but the media corporation/distributor that sold the CD to them in the first place does not.
Well, I can believe that. Remember, Microsoft changed the windowing behaviour of its Office applications so that different documents appear in different windows, as opposed to the same window.
So, if you have two Word documents open, they appear in two different windows and appear like two seperate instances of Word (although only one instance of the application is actually running). This change was made at the introduction of Office 2000, and I'm sure it's a result of usability feedback from less savvy users who were "losing" their documents when they opened another one, etc.
Essentially, the change makes it easier to immediately see and switch between all the Word (or Excel, etc) documents that you've got open at any one time but when you have more than a few open it can really clutter the taskbar, hence creating a whole new usability issue.
Bottom line: I'm sure Microsoft's usability experts regard the windowing behaviour of MSIE as better the way that it is than the way that it could be if they switched to tabbed browsing.
And, before anyone says brings it up, let me just say that even offering people a choice of tabbed and non-tabbed browsing raises yet more usability issues. You might prefer a tabbed approach, and henc select such an option if it were available, but what happens when your technophobic work colleague needs to use your PC for five minutes? Sometimes, from a software engineering point of view, giving users as few options as possible is the preferable path.
And how many were web designers just downloading yet another browser for compatability checking purposes? I know that that's the reason why I did, and I'm sure there are countless others that fit that description too.
Wow. Matt Drudge is a fellow Opera user? All of a sudden, I feel dirty.
Keep backtracking and pretend that you didn't describe people willing to pay for Opera as dumb or scared or a whole raft of other things.
There are a lot of reasons why people use Opera. Speed is one of them, but it's far from being the only one. As I've said in this thread and elsewhere, most of the features of Firefox that people rave about are taken from Opera, but not as well implemented.
Opera is a smaller, faster, more feature-packed, better implemented, better integrated browser than Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, MSIE, etc. It innovates (tabs, mouse gestures, wand, notes, M2) whilst others play catch-up and "me too".
I swear that 99 percent of the bullshit that I'm reading in the comments here about Opera are from open source only fanboys who've barely used Opera ever if at all, let alone a recent version, and who'd rave about Opera until the end of the Earth if only it was a free open source product.
Fine, you don't want to pay for your web browser and you don't like the virtually unnoticable advertisements: you did notice that I said "in almost every case", didn't you?
And, if it's not too much to ask, why the hell did you try it out if you knew you weren't going to want to pay for it no matter how good it turned out to be or if you knew that the ads were going to be a major issue? (Just how small is your screen resolution if a small ad is taking up that much of your screen real estate? 800 by 600?)
Lastly, as for Firefox doing everything Opera does? LMFAO! Please, get your facts straight before you making sweeping statements like that one.
Take tabs, for example. Sure, Firefox supports tabbed browsing (an Opera innovation, by the way), but does it let you save tabs or save them automatically for you in the event of a system crash? Can you reorder tabbed browser windows simply by dragging and dropping? Can you have one web page open with images on and one open with images off side-by-side? Can you drag a tabbed window off on its own so it appears in its own individual window? Can you do all this out of the box? No, you can't, so stop pretending that you can.
Wow. The site is down. How convenient for you.
And, because I dare take a critical view of your analysis of Opera users, I must be living in a reality distortion field, or whatever it is your category #2 refers to exactly.
Your own beloved Mozilla isn't without its own quirks, including CSS support, but I'm sure in your little world those don't exist at all, do they?
Maybe I should emulate you and come up with an equally stupid list of reasons why people use Mozilla or Firefox and then neatly pigeonhole you into one of them for my own convenience. The fact that half the reasons would be distorted and that the other half would be complete and utter crap won't bother you in the slightest, will it?
So you're suggesting the people who buy licences for Opera after having had the chance to test drive the free version indefinitely are doing so because they feel sorry for Opera the underdog, for speed over compatibility (care to share with us your list of Opera's incompatibilities?), because they get a warm fuzzy feeling spending money when they don't have to or because they've been duped into doing it because they don't know anything about computers and are either too scared or too stupid to know any better?
I hope your post was a deliberate attempt at trolling because, quite frankly, you're an idiot if you believe even one of those is true.
People buy Opera licences because they like the software, they consider it to be of benefit and they consider the $39 cost of a licence money well spent. It's that simple.
Take Firefox's top ten most raved about features. I guarantee you at least half, if not almost all of them, were Opera innovations: tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop-up blocking, etc all were developed by Opera first and copied by others later. And, if you want these features in a fast, tightly integrated packaged, Opera still wipes the floor with Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, MSIE and any other browser you care to name.