If you think that the US is the last bastion of freedom of speech then you're as deluded as these Indian students.
As for your assertion that "political and religious criticism, good or bad, is necessary for a mature civalization", I'm inclined to agree.
Tell me, when was the last time you saw a candidate for President who wasn't a Christian?
And when was the last time someone was able to question why the US is involved in a "War on Terror" without being figuratively stoned to death and then fed the standard "they hate us for our freedoms" rubbish?
The US isn't as politically or religiously free as you would like to think.
Because there's no evidence of "middle ages thinking" in the US or elsewhere, is there?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't all eight Republican candidates for President stand up on stage and agree that there was still no place for gays in the US military? Isn't that "middle ages thinking"?
Aren't abortion clinics and their staff in the US regularly attacked by pro-lifers? Don't people still set up shop in a country where that type of thing is a routine event?
As for letting them "sit in the dirt and eat with their hands if they like it so much", well, remind me again what proportion of the US lives below the poverty line and/or has no health coverage?
I'm sure that Apple could go after the low end market but It's my belief that Apple intentionally avoids doing that for a number of reasons.
1. Margins at the lowest end of the market are thin if not razor thin. Certainly profit per unit isn't great, so each of these sold would mean a minimal profit, perhaps not even enough over the long term to justify any R&D, marketing and support.
2. Such a model would surely detract from sales of Apple's mid-range notebooks, as there would be a significant proportion of buyers who opted for the cheapest possible portable MacOS solution that they could lay there hands on. So, a low end model would, to some extent, cost Apple revenue, as it cannibalised sales from other, more profitable Apple notebooks.
3. Cheaper products sometimes (but not always) require corners to be cut. Apple's image (to the public) is one of quality as well as simplicity, and a low end model would perhaps change that image in a way that wouldn't suit it. Certainly Apple would not want people's first experience of the brand to be a negative one, and a low end notebook computer (from any manufacturer) is certainly the sort of product that is likely to disappoint rather than meet or exceed the average user's expectations.
The bottom line is that Apple just doesn't need to go chasing that segment of the market when doing so has so many cons and so few pros.
I have no idea where he gets his 16,000m figure from but one thing that immediately springs to mind is that he's almost certainly not looking straight down at the ocean floor.
The Marianas Trench might only be 10,900m deep but it and other parts of the oceans would be obscured by a lot more than 10,900m of ocean when viewed at an angle.
That to me seems to be one logical explanation. Another would be that, having found at least 31 sunken vessels, he's tested his software enough to be able to confidently extrapolate that it would be effective to 16,000m beneath the waves.
Uh, if this is true then it is a big dea. A very big deal.
Do you have any idea of how valuable salvage rights of all the sunken wrecks that this tool could potentially uncover would be? No? Well, here's a clue:
No. Sorry, you've got me wrong here, friend. It's not a case of "anything that looks like what the Nazis did is bad", it's a case of what he said isbad.
Abortions because of a likelyhood of low IQ or homosexuality? That doesn't abhor you? I'm all for a woman's right to choose not to have a baby (it's her body, it's her choice) but to make that choice available on the basis of likely intelligence or sexuality (or hair colour, or skin tone) is, to me and most people, a step too far.
OK, if a foetus is going to result in a severe genetic abnormality (such as a severe mental or physical disability) then I can see why the option of an abortion should be made available but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Yes, the man was part of a team that made a huge scientific breakthrough. If someone wants to argue that that makes him a genius, well, I won't start an argument on that front. But there's no doubt that Watson was (and still is) also of poor character.
He and his colleagues knowingly stole vital DNA X-ray diffraction data from Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling without their knowledge and consent (indeed, Franklin had even refused to share it), which tarnishes their acheivements.
More recently, he has called for genetic screenings before birth to weed out "really stupid" people (the bottom 10 percent or so), and he has a nice line in how to deal with homosexuality, too. He believes "that if the gene [for homosexuality] were discovered and a woman decided not to give birth to a child that may have a tendency to become homosexual, she should be able to abort the fetus." Not to put too fine a point on it, but that strikes me as being rather too close to Third Reich thinking for my liking.
He might have performed some fantastic science but, to me, his words preclude him from being considered a great scientist. Certainly they show that he's not a great human being.
I'd rather look back on the whole year rather than 11/12ths of it. Or are we just saying that December is totally irrelevant?
This ridiculous game of one-upmanship that people play with each other to try to get their annual reviews in ahead of others, etc is just ridiculous. Frankly, it just makes them look stupid.
And while I'm on the subject, why the hell does EA title the annual releases of their sports game for the following years rather than the years that they're published? Are people really stupid enough to think that when they buy Madden 2008 this year that they're somehow getting next year's game in advance?
I know that they didn't do a kernel switch. My point wasn't about the Windows kernel per se, but that those OS upgrades were different enough to appear, well, radical enough for someone who didn't grasp what was going on to suggest that Microsoft was "abandoning" the older Windows OS when all they were doing was building on it, which is exactly what this PalmOS story has done.
Belfast is hardly the typical British city, is it? Without wanting to mince words, it was practically a war zone up until a decade or so ago, so it's not entirely surprising that, in the interests of preventing terrorism and sectarian violence, CCTVs were bolted on and around any building or area of any significance.
I've no doubt that if you went to any other similar-cized city in the UK that you'd see far fewer cameras and that almost none of them would be actively-manned.
Going forward, it's still going to be the familiar PalmOS front-end. To my knowledge, the only changes are to the underlying kernel.
So (unless I have all the facts very wrong), the complete story seems to be hogwash. What this article is saying is akin to saying that Microsoft abandoned Windows when it moved from Windows 3.0 to 3.1 or from 3.1x to Windows 95.
In the UK, there are an estimated 4.2 million surveillance cameras already, and you are on average photographed 300 times a day going about your business.
1. While the claim about the total number of surveillance cameras might be close to the truth, what this kind of blanket statement doesn't tell you is where those cameras are.
The vast majority of them will be in private spaces, like shops, bars, and restaurants, where owners are primarily concerned about minor crime like theft. Then there will be a fair proportion in public spaces where crowd control and security are an issue, like tube stations and airports. And, of course, municipal buildings, such as courts, police stations and hospitals will have a chunk of cameras, too.
I'd estimate that over 80 percent of those cameras are accounted for right there. Many of them aren't recording an image more often than once every few seconds. Many will be decoys that aren't recording at all. Many are black and white. Many are of very low quality. The overwhelming majority won't be user-operated in any way or have any archived long-term storage. None of them will be networked in any meaningful way that would let anybody track you in real-time over more than a few hundred yards.
2. The idea that you'd be photographed 300 times in an average day is complete rubbish. If you woke up, got on a bus, caught a tube train, changed at a busy station, got to work, visited several shops at lunchtime, went back to work, spent a few hours socialising in a couple of places and then went home, then, perhaps, I can see you possibly passing a camera around 100 times. The likelyhood of your picture actually being taken every time? Less than the likelyhood of you winning the lottery, I'd bet.
Don't forget, one way or another, Britain has been a victim of violent terrorism for at least two generations. First there was Irish republicans, now there's Islamic extremists. The former didn't much like having their pictures taken, so cameras were an effective deterrent before the fact, as well as a vital detective tool after it. The latter aren't so easily deterred but cameras have still been of limited use in going over their attacks.
If you want proof of how "effective" CCTV is in the UK, just look at the 7th July attacks in London a couple of years back. Although they were travelling by pulic transport and their identities were known after the fact, police were able to piece together only a few shots of the attackers, all from one camera, I believe. Their whereabouts and what they did once they reached London, even though they travelled by public transport, and virtually unknown. Bottom line: in a "pull out all the stops" exercise, four people were totally lost in the crowd.
The camera footage of the attempted attacks a fortnight later weren't much better and the perpetrators were able to escape untracked through London. If these CCTV cameras were half as effective as people want to make out, then police would have been knocking on the perps' doors hours if not minutes after they escaped. The reality of the situation is different, and anybody who thinks otherwise is, frankly, an idiot.
I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of blaming any medium for the ills of society, but it's hard not to draw the conclusion that the message that some of our media sends us is less than unhealthy.
Commercial interests invariably mean that content creaters and broadcasters are almost always tunnel-visioned into producing content that is ever more graphic, explicit and/or biased. The result is a medium that too easily can either desensitise its audience or misrepresent facts. You'd have to be blind to miss that that's a serious problem.
Take just two examples: the fictional drama 24 and actual television news.
Firstly, 24. There's no doubt that 24 is one of the most popular US shows of the decade, and that Jack Bauer is a generational role model - a tough guy who'll do anything and everything in his power to do his job and protect his country - but it's almost impossible to imagine what 24 would have looked like even 10 or 20 years ago.
Compare the violence in 24 to that of, say, 1990s episodes of NYPD Blue or 1980s episodes of Miami Vice. It's like comparing chalk and cheese.
Then look at some of the dangerous messages that 24 sends us: torture is quick, torture is effective, and torture is fine when it's carried out for patriotic reasons. Whether you believe the last of these statements is down to your own moral compass (I can tell you that I certainly do not), but any expert will tell you that the first two are wishful thinking.
But, hey, if you're a TV executive and it keeps the viewers glued to your channel and your ads, then it's all OK, right?
Secondly, television news. We live in a world of instant global news, and it's a good thing. Or it would be, if the news that we got wasn't so watered down and/or distorted. Wars are bloody and brutal things, but you wouldn't know it from the actual footage that you see on your evening news reports, which (on the few occasions that they do show footage from war zones) invariably show clean, precise military operations, which paint a picture that's rosier than a flower show.
The realities of war - the death, the destruction, the senseless waste of it all - are kept hidden away, because if you showed that stuff people would soon get turned off... and change the channel. And if you're a TV executive putting out news that's so real that it makes people so uncomfortable that they'll watch whatever the competition has to offer then you've lost your ratings war, which is the only war that counts when it comes to selling those ads.
So, clean-cut, folksy, sham news is good, and hard-hitting, real, tell-it-how-it-really-is news is bad. The ridiculous subliminal message that war is no big deal that this sends is so messed up: if you showed the naked truth then more people would really start to take an interest, rather than burying their heads in the sand about the issues that will possibly shape their children's lifetimes.
Of course, you'll always have people who'll deny everything. President Nixon believed that Nick Út's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the Napalm attack on Trang Bang was staged, despite there also being overwhelming supporting evidence, including television footage, that it was the simple truth. (A US President so out of touch with reality: who would have thought it possible?)
If the H5N1 strain of avian flu was to jump species and become highly contagious in humans to the point where a pandemic was reached, then internet traffic will be the least of our worries.
I think we'd collectively be more concerned with, you know, people dropping like flies in huge numbers than we would about telecommuting or browsing YouTube, or at least I like to think that we would.
Seriously, the health and safety of my loved ones and society as a whole would be paramount in my mind, and everything else would be a distant second. This story reminds me of those Starbucks managers selling water to injured and shocked people and the idiots quoting SLAs while the World Trade Center's twin towers were falling.
What next? People posting articles about how a human H5N1 pandemic would mean more server queues for WOW players as the servers would be swamped by people skipping work for the safety of home and looking to get a few more quests done while they were off?
I haven't commented on Slashdot for a while, but your post is full of enough short-sightedness for me to have to do so here.
1. The grandparent posters examples might have stretched back a while, but you're focusing on the wrong thing. His examples illustrate that terrorism and ends-justify-the-means violence is nothing new, and that people of more than one faith are capable of doing it.
Furthermore, in a historical context, they illustrate that the current paranoia displayed to the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims because of a the actions of a tiny fraction of people of that faith is an inappropriate overreaction. The actions of a few don't dictate the beliefs and intentions of the many, so don't fall into the trap of making that mistake.
2. You quote a website that clearly has an agenda, and that agenda is colouring Islam as a religion that is based on hate and which is driven by the need to murder others. Even if their stats are 100 percent accurate, do you have similar figures for other religions? Can you honestly claim that, say, Christians, Jews, Bhuddists or people of any other faith are less destructive and can you back it up with any data?
Yes, some misguided Muslims have killed others in the name of their religion, but so have others of other faiths. Yes, some extracts of the Koran can be interpreted violently, but so can some extracts of the Bible, the Torah, etc. If you're going to sweepingly condemn people for the actions of their brethren, or for the words written in their holy texts, then I think you're going to condemn almost everybody on the planet.
Certainly, it makes me glad to be agnostic when I see people colouring things the way that you do here. I don't know if there is a God, so I don't have a side, and I certainly don't have an agenda. As someone who's walked past IRA bombs minutes before they've exploded and whose girlfriend was on a London Underground train while some were being blown up last year I'm in no doubt that you don't have to be of a certain religion, creed, colour or cause to want to kill someone.
There is one thing that I don't doubt though: it's that people who only see one worldview and who demonise those that have differing worldviews are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And in case it passes over your head, that applies to you just as much as it applies to the Al Qaedas and IRAs of this world.
I prefer to look at it this way: in the Champions League Final, Liverpool spotted AC Milan, one of the best teams on the planet, a three goal head start at half time and still walked away winners.
Of course, the fact that Liverpool have Steven Gerrard, one of the greatest footballers in the world, to deliver the goods helps immensely. See for yourself: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=steven+gerra rd.
Is Liverpool's success only down to science? Of course not. Has science played a part in it? Well, on the evidence, it certainly hasn't hurt.
The notion of Commonwealth seems to be abused too.
I remember being rather shocked a year or so back when a writer that is a favourite of mine on ESPN.com described the Commonwealth Games as basically being a European-only Olympics.
Well, that's utter rubbish, of course. Countries as geographically diverse as Canada, Australia, India and South Africa (and many, many more) are all in the Commonwealth. European nations outside of the UK, such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, are not.
Commonwealth has nothing to do with Europe but, to some people at least, the two seem to be interchangeable, which is very worrying.
For anyone that's interested, the Commonwealth is made up of those nation states, territories and dependencies that were formally part of the British Empire that want to be in it, which is pretty much all former parts of the Empire bar a few exceptions, such as the USA and the Republic of Ireland.
By the way, I'm from London and when asked for my nationality I opt for whatever's the most appropriate choice. In some cases, that'll be English but in others, such as when travelling abroad, it'll be British. But, as the parent poster has pointed out, they're definitely not interchangeable terms.
A human playing a robot playing a human comes across as "a...very human character".
Wow. Just wow.
On a connected note, I would have taken the A.I. the other way: boy finds out that he's a mecha, meets his creator, accepts his fate and then the "mother" realises that she can't let go of her "son" after all. Much more life in that (if you'll pardon the pun) than the whole "aliens giving David his one wish for a day" thing that literally gave us the usual Spielberg fairly-tale ending.
By that rationale you don't want them to have access to phones either, in case they spend all their day talking sports with their friends, or traditional mail, in case they waste their time corresponding with a pen pal in Australia...
So you judge a browser's worth by the native skin? Talk about judging a book by its cover.
More worryingly, if you're saying that popularity implies quality (and, let's face it, you are) then doesn't imply that Internet Explorer is the world's best browser?
Oh, how bitter and twisted we are. Got something against choice?
People like you make me laugh, you really do. You are aware that 90 percent of the features that are supposed to differentiate Firefox from Internet Explorer were borrowed (or, to put it more directly, copied) straight from Opera?
And, by the way, since when did popularity imply quality?
Useless? Some people like it, some people don't: seems like a good reason to make it an option to me.
Opera is cluttered? Really? Then why is it a smaller download with more core features (and better implemented ones at that) than Firefox?
And, I have to ask, if a tickbox option in the Preferences isn't the place to put this sort basic option then where would be? Where would you put it so that it would be accessible to people looking for it?
Well, the best solution is to have both options and then let the user decide on which to use, which is exactly what Opera does.
Tools > Preferences > General > Pages > Show close button on each tab.
Personally, I have a close button on each tab. And, in Opera, if I do accidentally close pages that I still wanted to use then restoring them is easy: either a couple of mouse clicks or a keyboard shortcut later and your pages are restored, with their repective browsing histories intact.
I think that you mean Gnomeregan rather than Gadgetzan. Gadgetzan is a neutral town in Tanaris, whereas Gnomergan is the fallen city of the Gnomes.
Coming back on topic (or at least this particular thread of it), I personally enjoy doing the quest chain that gives access to Onyxia's Lair. It's one of the longer, more complicated quest chains in the game but it has one or two really nice parts to it. I don't know exactly how much health and armor that Highlord Bolvar Fordragon has, but he can tank for me anytime.
The basic problem with quests in World Of Warcraft is that they have to be accessible to the average player, and by that I mean that they have to be pretty much idiot-proof. Any quest that wasn't would only:
1. Cause a disproportionate number of GM tickets (support requests from a Blizzard employee); 2. Be ignored by most players unless it offered particularly good quest rewards; 3. Be completed by 95 percent of players only after they looked up the complete solution on a site like thottbot.com or allakhazam.com.
If you want to over-analyse things then you'll find that there are only four core quest types in WOW: killing, collecting, delivering and escorting, and that all the quests are basically made up of one or more of these elements. But then there are only actually seven core stories/plots used in novels and movies, and all of them can basically be boiled down to a combination of one or more of those too.
Yes, if you just look at quests as "kill 10 murlocs" or "collect 8 murloc scales" then they will seem rather banal, but if you actually take the time to read the back stories, and the various non-quest-related texts around the world of Azeroth then there is a lot more depth to the story to appreciate.
Again, it's to WOW's credit that if you don't want to take all that in that you don't have to: if you just want to kill, collect and level up then you can do that, and have a lot of fun doing it without having to totally immerse yourself in the rich lore all around you.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think that the US is the last bastion of freedom of speech then you're as deluded as these Indian students.
As for your assertion that "political and religious criticism, good or bad, is necessary for a mature civalization", I'm inclined to agree.
Tell me, when was the last time you saw a candidate for President who wasn't a Christian?
And when was the last time someone was able to question why the US is involved in a "War on Terror" without being figuratively stoned to death and then fed the standard "they hate us for our freedoms" rubbish?
The US isn't as politically or religiously free as you would like to think.
Your level of ignorance is amazing.
Because there's no evidence of "middle ages thinking" in the US or elsewhere, is there?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't all eight Republican candidates for President stand up on stage and agree that there was still no place for gays in the US military? Isn't that "middle ages thinking"?
Aren't abortion clinics and their staff in the US regularly attacked by pro-lifers? Don't people still set up shop in a country where that type of thing is a routine event?
As for letting them "sit in the dirt and eat with their hands if they like it so much", well, remind me again what proportion of the US lives below the poverty line and/or has no health coverage?
Fool.
I'm sure that Apple could go after the low end market but It's my belief that Apple intentionally avoids doing that for a number of reasons.
1. Margins at the lowest end of the market are thin if not razor thin. Certainly profit per unit isn't great, so each of these sold would mean a minimal profit, perhaps not even enough over the long term to justify any R&D, marketing and support.
2. Such a model would surely detract from sales of Apple's mid-range notebooks, as there would be a significant proportion of buyers who opted for the cheapest possible portable MacOS solution that they could lay there hands on. So, a low end model would, to some extent, cost Apple revenue, as it cannibalised sales from other, more profitable Apple notebooks.
3. Cheaper products sometimes (but not always) require corners to be cut. Apple's image (to the public) is one of quality as well as simplicity, and a low end model would perhaps change that image in a way that wouldn't suit it. Certainly Apple would not want people's first experience of the brand to be a negative one, and a low end notebook computer (from any manufacturer) is certainly the sort of product that is likely to disappoint rather than meet or exceed the average user's expectations.
The bottom line is that Apple just doesn't need to go chasing that segment of the market when doing so has so many cons and so few pros.
I have no idea where he gets his 16,000m figure from but one thing that immediately springs to mind is that he's almost certainly not looking straight down at the ocean floor.
The Marianas Trench might only be 10,900m deep but it and other parts of the oceans would be obscured by a lot more than 10,900m of ocean when viewed at an angle.
That to me seems to be one logical explanation. Another would be that, having found at least 31 sunken vessels, he's tested his software enough to be able to confidently extrapolate that it would be effective to 16,000m beneath the waves.
Uh, if this is true then it is a big dea. A very big deal.
7 5.stm
Do you have any idea of how valuable salvage rights of all the sunken wrecks that this tool could potentially uncover would be? No? Well, here's a clue:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/66719
That's one wreck. Worth half a billion dollars. Makes you think, doesn't it?
No. Sorry, you've got me wrong here, friend. It's not a case of "anything that looks like what the Nazis did is bad", it's a case of what he said isbad.
Abortions because of a likelyhood of low IQ or homosexuality? That doesn't abhor you? I'm all for a woman's right to choose not to have a baby (it's her body, it's her choice) but to make that choice available on the basis of likely intelligence or sexuality (or hair colour, or skin tone) is, to me and most people, a step too far.
OK, if a foetus is going to result in a severe genetic abnormality (such as a severe mental or physical disability) then I can see why the option of an abortion should be made available but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
Yes, the man was part of a team that made a huge scientific breakthrough. If someone wants to argue that that makes him a genius, well, I won't start an argument on that front. But there's no doubt that Watson was (and still is) also of poor character.
He and his colleagues knowingly stole vital DNA X-ray diffraction data from Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling without their knowledge and consent (indeed, Franklin had even refused to share it), which tarnishes their acheivements.
More recently, he has called for genetic screenings before birth to weed out "really stupid" people (the bottom 10 percent or so), and he has a nice line in how to deal with homosexuality, too. He believes "that if the gene [for homosexuality] were discovered and a woman decided not to give birth to a child that may have a tendency to become homosexual, she should be able to abort the fetus." Not to put too fine a point on it, but that strikes me as being rather too close to Third Reich thinking for my liking.
He might have performed some fantastic science but, to me, his words preclude him from being considered a great scientist. Certainly they show that he's not a great human being.
I'd rather look back on the whole year rather than 11/12ths of it. Or are we just saying that December is totally irrelevant?
This ridiculous game of one-upmanship that people play with each other to try to get their annual reviews in ahead of others, etc is just ridiculous. Frankly, it just makes them look stupid.
And while I'm on the subject, why the hell does EA title the annual releases of their sports game for the following years rather than the years that they're published? Are people really stupid enough to think that when they buy Madden 2008 this year that they're somehow getting next year's game in advance?
I know that they didn't do a kernel switch. My point wasn't about the Windows kernel per se, but that those OS upgrades were different enough to appear, well, radical enough for someone who didn't grasp what was going on to suggest that Microsoft was "abandoning" the older Windows OS when all they were doing was building on it, which is exactly what this PalmOS story has done.
Belfast is hardly the typical British city, is it? Without wanting to mince words, it was practically a war zone up until a decade or so ago, so it's not entirely surprising that, in the interests of preventing terrorism and sectarian violence, CCTVs were bolted on and around any building or area of any significance.
I've no doubt that if you went to any other similar-cized city in the UK that you'd see far fewer cameras and that almost none of them would be actively-manned.
Going forward, it's still going to be the familiar PalmOS front-end. To my knowledge, the only changes are to the underlying kernel.
So (unless I have all the facts very wrong), the complete story seems to be hogwash. What this article is saying is akin to saying that Microsoft abandoned Windows when it moved from Windows 3.0 to 3.1 or from 3.1x to Windows 95.
In the UK, there are an estimated 4.2 million surveillance cameras already, and you are on average photographed 300 times a day going about your business.
1. While the claim about the total number of surveillance cameras might be close to the truth, what this kind of blanket statement doesn't tell you is where those cameras are.
The vast majority of them will be in private spaces, like shops, bars, and restaurants, where owners are primarily concerned about minor crime like theft. Then there will be a fair proportion in public spaces where crowd control and security are an issue, like tube stations and airports. And, of course, municipal buildings, such as courts, police stations and hospitals will have a chunk of cameras, too.
I'd estimate that over 80 percent of those cameras are accounted for right there. Many of them aren't recording an image more often than once every few seconds. Many will be decoys that aren't recording at all. Many are black and white. Many are of very low quality. The overwhelming majority won't be user-operated in any way or have any archived long-term storage. None of them will be networked in any meaningful way that would let anybody track you in real-time over more than a few hundred yards.
2. The idea that you'd be photographed 300 times in an average day is complete rubbish. If you woke up, got on a bus, caught a tube train, changed at a busy station, got to work, visited several shops at lunchtime, went back to work, spent a few hours socialising in a couple of places and then went home, then, perhaps, I can see you possibly passing a camera around 100 times. The likelyhood of your picture actually being taken every time? Less than the likelyhood of you winning the lottery, I'd bet.
Don't forget, one way or another, Britain has been a victim of violent terrorism for at least two generations. First there was Irish republicans, now there's Islamic extremists. The former didn't much like having their pictures taken, so cameras were an effective deterrent before the fact, as well as a vital detective tool after it. The latter aren't so easily deterred but cameras have still been of limited use in going over their attacks.
If you want proof of how "effective" CCTV is in the UK, just look at the 7th July attacks in London a couple of years back. Although they were travelling by pulic transport and their identities were known after the fact, police were able to piece together only a few shots of the attackers, all from one camera, I believe. Their whereabouts and what they did once they reached London, even though they travelled by public transport, and virtually unknown. Bottom line: in a "pull out all the stops" exercise, four people were totally lost in the crowd.
The camera footage of the attempted attacks a fortnight later weren't much better and the perpetrators were able to escape untracked through London. If these CCTV cameras were half as effective as people want to make out, then police would have been knocking on the perps' doors hours if not minutes after they escaped. The reality of the situation is different, and anybody who thinks otherwise is, frankly, an idiot.
I have to admit, I'm not a big fan of blaming any medium for the ills of society, but it's hard not to draw the conclusion that the message that some of our media sends us is less than unhealthy.
Commercial interests invariably mean that content creaters and broadcasters are almost always tunnel-visioned into producing content that is ever more graphic, explicit and/or biased. The result is a medium that too easily can either desensitise its audience or misrepresent facts. You'd have to be blind to miss that that's a serious problem.
Take just two examples: the fictional drama 24 and actual television news.
Firstly, 24. There's no doubt that 24 is one of the most popular US shows of the decade, and that Jack Bauer is a generational role model - a tough guy who'll do anything and everything in his power to do his job and protect his country - but it's almost impossible to imagine what 24 would have looked like even 10 or 20 years ago.
Compare the violence in 24 to that of, say, 1990s episodes of NYPD Blue or 1980s episodes of Miami Vice. It's like comparing chalk and cheese.
Then look at some of the dangerous messages that 24 sends us: torture is quick, torture is effective, and torture is fine when it's carried out for patriotic reasons. Whether you believe the last of these statements is down to your own moral compass (I can tell you that I certainly do not), but any expert will tell you that the first two are wishful thinking.
In fact, the show's messages on torture are so dangerous that "the US military has appealed to the producers of 24 to tone down the torture scenes because of the impact they are having both on troops in the field and America's reputation abroad." If even the US military can join the dots between Bauer's fictional planting a powerdrill into bad guys to get his info and the reality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, illegal killings, etc, then you know it's time to be worried.
But, hey, if you're a TV executive and it keeps the viewers glued to your channel and your ads, then it's all OK, right?
Secondly, television news. We live in a world of instant global news, and it's a good thing. Or it would be, if the news that we got wasn't so watered down and/or distorted. Wars are bloody and brutal things, but you wouldn't know it from the actual footage that you see on your evening news reports, which (on the few occasions that they do show footage from war zones) invariably show clean, precise military operations, which paint a picture that's rosier than a flower show.
The realities of war - the death, the destruction, the senseless waste of it all - are kept hidden away, because if you showed that stuff people would soon get turned off... and change the channel. And if you're a TV executive putting out news that's so real that it makes people so uncomfortable that they'll watch whatever the competition has to offer then you've lost your ratings war, which is the only war that counts when it comes to selling those ads.
So, clean-cut, folksy, sham news is good, and hard-hitting, real, tell-it-how-it-really-is news is bad. The ridiculous subliminal message that war is no big deal that this sends is so messed up: if you showed the naked truth then more people would really start to take an interest, rather than burying their heads in the sand about the issues that will possibly shape their children's lifetimes.
Of course, you'll always have people who'll deny everything. President Nixon believed that Nick Út's Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the Napalm attack on Trang Bang was staged, despite there also being overwhelming supporting evidence, including television footage, that it was the simple truth. (A US President so out of touch with reality: who would have thought it possible?)
But without being shown the truth, how can
If the H5N1 strain of avian flu was to jump species and become highly contagious in humans to the point where a pandemic was reached, then internet traffic will be the least of our worries.
I think we'd collectively be more concerned with, you know, people dropping like flies in huge numbers than we would about telecommuting or browsing YouTube, or at least I like to think that we would.
Seriously, the health and safety of my loved ones and society as a whole would be paramount in my mind, and everything else would be a distant second. This story reminds me of those Starbucks managers selling water to injured and shocked people and the idiots quoting SLAs while the World Trade Center's twin towers were falling.
What next? People posting articles about how a human H5N1 pandemic would mean more server queues for WOW players as the servers would be swamped by people skipping work for the safety of home and looking to get a few more quests done while they were off?
I haven't commented on Slashdot for a while, but your post is full of enough short-sightedness for me to have to do so here.
1. The grandparent posters examples might have stretched back a while, but you're focusing on the wrong thing. His examples illustrate that terrorism and ends-justify-the-means violence is nothing new, and that people of more than one faith are capable of doing it.
Furthermore, in a historical context, they illustrate that the current paranoia displayed to the overwhelming majority of peaceful Muslims because of a the actions of a tiny fraction of people of that faith is an inappropriate overreaction. The actions of a few don't dictate the beliefs and intentions of the many, so don't fall into the trap of making that mistake.
2. You quote a website that clearly has an agenda, and that agenda is colouring Islam as a religion that is based on hate and which is driven by the need to murder others. Even if their stats are 100 percent accurate, do you have similar figures for other religions? Can you honestly claim that, say, Christians, Jews, Bhuddists or people of any other faith are less destructive and can you back it up with any data?
Yes, some misguided Muslims have killed others in the name of their religion, but so have others of other faiths. Yes, some extracts of the Koran can be interpreted violently, but so can some extracts of the Bible, the Torah, etc. If you're going to sweepingly condemn people for the actions of their brethren, or for the words written in their holy texts, then I think you're going to condemn almost everybody on the planet.
Certainly, it makes me glad to be agnostic when I see people colouring things the way that you do here. I don't know if there is a God, so I don't have a side, and I certainly don't have an agenda. As someone who's walked past IRA bombs minutes before they've exploded and whose girlfriend was on a London Underground train while some were being blown up last year I'm in no doubt that you don't have to be of a certain religion, creed, colour or cause to want to kill someone.
There is one thing that I don't doubt though: it's that people who only see one worldview and who demonise those that have differing worldviews are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And in case it passes over your head, that applies to you just as much as it applies to the Al Qaedas and IRAs of this world.
I prefer to look at it this way: in the Champions League Final, Liverpool spotted AC Milan, one of the best teams on the planet, a three goal head start at half time and still walked away winners.
a rd.
Of course, the fact that Liverpool have Steven Gerrard, one of the greatest footballers in the world, to deliver the goods helps immensely. See for yourself: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=steven+gerr
Is Liverpool's success only down to science? Of course not. Has science played a part in it? Well, on the evidence, it certainly hasn't hurt.
The notion of Commonwealth seems to be abused too.
I remember being rather shocked a year or so back when a writer that is a favourite of mine on ESPN.com described the Commonwealth Games as basically being a European-only Olympics.
Well, that's utter rubbish, of course. Countries as geographically diverse as Canada, Australia, India and South Africa (and many, many more) are all in the Commonwealth. European nations outside of the UK, such as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, are not.
Commonwealth has nothing to do with Europe but, to some people at least, the two seem to be interchangeable, which is very worrying.
For anyone that's interested, the Commonwealth is made up of those nation states, territories and dependencies that were formally part of the British Empire that want to be in it, which is pretty much all former parts of the Empire bar a few exceptions, such as the USA and the Republic of Ireland.
By the way, I'm from London and when asked for my nationality I opt for whatever's the most appropriate choice. In some cases, that'll be English but in others, such as when travelling abroad, it'll be British. But, as the parent poster has pointed out, they're definitely not interchangeable terms.
A human playing a robot playing a human comes across as "a ...very human character".
Wow. Just wow.
On a connected note, I would have taken the A.I. the other way: boy finds out that he's a mecha, meets his creator, accepts his fate and then the "mother" realises that she can't let go of her "son" after all. Much more life in that (if you'll pardon the pun) than the whole "aliens giving David his one wish for a day" thing that literally gave us the usual Spielberg fairly-tale ending.
By that rationale you don't want them to have access to phones either, in case they spend all their day talking sports with their friends, or traditional mail, in case they waste their time corresponding with a pen pal in Australia...
So you judge a browser's worth by the native skin? Talk about judging a book by its cover.
More worryingly, if you're saying that popularity implies quality (and, let's face it, you are) then doesn't imply that Internet Explorer is the world's best browser?
QED.
Oh, how bitter and twisted we are. Got something against choice?
People like you make me laugh, you really do. You are aware that 90 percent of the features that are supposed to differentiate Firefox from Internet Explorer were borrowed (or, to put it more directly, copied) straight from Opera?
And, by the way, since when did popularity imply quality?
Useless? Some people like it, some people don't: seems like a good reason to make it an option to me.
Opera is cluttered? Really? Then why is it a smaller download with more core features (and better implemented ones at that) than Firefox?
And, I have to ask, if a tickbox option in the Preferences isn't the place to put this sort basic option then where would be? Where would you put it so that it would be accessible to people looking for it?
Well, the best solution is to have both options and then let the user decide on which to use, which is exactly what Opera does.
Tools > Preferences > General > Pages > Show close button on each tab.
Personally, I have a close button on each tab. And, in Opera, if I do accidentally close pages that I still wanted to use then restoring them is easy: either a couple of mouse clicks or a keyboard shortcut later and your pages are restored, with their repective browsing histories intact.
Just one of the myriad of reasons to love Opera.
Opera 8.5: http://www.opera.com/download/
Opera 9 Technology Preview 2: http://labs.opera.com/
Weekly builds of Opera 9 TP2: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/
Changelog for Opera 9 TP2: http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/w90p2.html
I think that you mean Gnomeregan rather than Gadgetzan. Gadgetzan is a neutral town in Tanaris, whereas Gnomergan is the fallen city of the Gnomes.
Coming back on topic (or at least this particular thread of it), I personally enjoy doing the quest chain that gives access to Onyxia's Lair. It's one of the longer, more complicated quest chains in the game but it has one or two really nice parts to it. I don't know exactly how much health and armor that Highlord Bolvar Fordragon has, but he can tank for me anytime.
The basic problem with quests in World Of Warcraft is that they have to be accessible to the average player, and by that I mean that they have to be pretty much idiot-proof. Any quest that wasn't would only:
1. Cause a disproportionate number of GM tickets (support requests from a Blizzard employee);
2. Be ignored by most players unless it offered particularly good quest rewards;
3. Be completed by 95 percent of players only after they looked up the complete solution on a site like thottbot.com or allakhazam.com.
If you want to over-analyse things then you'll find that there are only four core quest types in WOW: killing, collecting, delivering and escorting, and that all the quests are basically made up of one or more of these elements. But then there are only actually seven core stories/plots used in novels and movies, and all of them can basically be boiled down to a combination of one or more of those too.
Yes, if you just look at quests as "kill 10 murlocs" or "collect 8 murloc scales" then they will seem rather banal, but if you actually take the time to read the back stories, and the various non-quest-related texts around the world of Azeroth then there is a lot more depth to the story to appreciate.
Again, it's to WOW's credit that if you don't want to take all that in that you don't have to: if you just want to kill, collect and level up then you can do that, and have a lot of fun doing it without having to totally immerse yourself in the rich lore all around you.