So, has Microsoft signed any business agreements with companies that downgrade protections from external connections in their firewall like the downgraded protections in their adware tool for Claria?
Since everyone else is really ignoring the MMORPG part of the question, I'll chime in with one of my favorite table-top gaming stories: The Head of Vecna What better quest than one set up by rival players that involves deceit, trickery, backstabbing, and inter-party murder?
Actually the loss would be negligable going from MP3 to CD to MP3.
It would still exist. That's why I said to repeat the steps until it became evident. The same compression engine will not fail to find something to drop to make the image/music look/sound almost as good as the last iteration.
The point wasn't to change the quality, it was to get rid of DRM, so it's more like open a JPEG, save it as a TIFF. Open the TIFF, and save it as a PNG. Sure, it will be worse quality than your normal PNG, but it'll be the same quality as your original JPEG.
Of course it will -- PNG uses lossless compression scheme. Try going from JPEG2000 to JPEG to make the analogy more apt.
So, you take a lossy compression scheme, faithfully transfer all of its losses to a lossless format, and then lossy recompress that?
Let's make a visual exercise to show you why this is a bad idea. Open a JPEG in an image editor. Save it as a TIFF. Open the up the TIFF. Save it as a JPEG with decent compression. Repeat this enough times for the lesson to become clear.
America's Army is a game meant to advertise joining up for the army by being fun and entertaining. The goal is to make people want to sign up for the governments message because it's fun.
There's no way in hell that this rumored game could be fun. There's no way that people would voluntarily sign up for this. This is likely to be forced on people or to become just another ritual to go through to prove one's loyalty to the government.
That's why you should always preview (and, yes, I am a hypocrite too on this one). Be thankful that Slashcode strips that. Otherwise, you would've created some long, unknown, and unclosed HTML tag that a browser would've ignored.
If you know HTML, you can still use a "<" by typing "<". (FYI, if you want to quote an HTML escape code, then use "&" instead of the ampersand itself.)
Now if your vomiting is from a reaction from something besides taste and burning mouth, you screwed.
Capsaicin is an irritant to all parts of the body, not just the mouth. If he's sensitive enough to throw up from a single habanero, then this pill would really mess with his stomach lining.
Incidentally, birds are not sensitive to capsaicin. This may be why chili peppers evolved to be hot since only they rely on birds (and birds alone) to eat the pods and spread their seeds around.
I wouldn't go so far as to say "no matter how wide the skill difference." I would say that if you need more than a 4 stone handicap, then it doesn't matter if you opponent gives you a 9 stone handicap -- you're gonna get curb-stomped.
These too are merely manmade replacements for what already exists. Its no big deal. Assembly lines, machines, and existing robots are merely doing what people have once done. The only exception is that they have lower variability in results, don't get tired, etc.
Incidentally, this has helped lead to the ending of one of the greatest provider of high paying, good benefits jobs for unskilled labor. It's not the only factor behind it by a long shot, but if you don't find scary the idea of potentially replacing all unskilled labor jobs with robots, you aren't really thinking about the long term ramifications.
The economic ripples are terrifying to think about. The labor movement's already dead thanks to globalization and automation. Is the minimum wage next when there aren't enough jobs where it's cheaper to hire people at minimum wage than buy robots? What does that mean for a society when people already can't get by on the minimum wage?
If we ever develop AI, it will be the single most important invention mankind has ever invented. Ever. It will change the world even more than the printing press did. Nothing could ever top the effects that it will have on how people live short of "curing" aging and death.
Here's one of mine: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" - Lord Kelvin
Kelvin conceded that the only two clouds on the horizon of physics were the results of the Michaelson-Morley experiment and the ultraviolet catastrophe.. Those two problems would lead the complete disruption of classical physics and the establishment of both general relativity and quantum mechanics.
(Also, if I ever formed a band, I would call it "The Ultraviolet Catastrophe" because that name rocks.)
The same people that are using the welfare and free healthcare happen to be the ones that are reproducing the fastest, and continuing to give them gifts just escalates the problem. Eventually, there will not be enough wealthy people to support everyone else, and then we'll all be screwed. As uncaring as it may sound, I just can't find any logic in a society intentionally growing the weakest link at the expense of the stronger ones.
You've fallen into the myth of the Welfare Queen. People who honestly don't work are extremely rare, especially after 90s welfare-to-work reform. Most people who fall under the poverty line have jobs -- often multiple jobs -- and still can't make ends meet. Housing can eat up half your after-tax paycheck on a minimum wage job with utilities, transportation, and food consuming the rest.
People who you might consider parasites are edge cases. The vast majority of people who would benefit from universal coverage would be working poor and the middle class -- the backbone of the American economy. In my opinion, you shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I suppose that is one of the ideas behind socialism; letting everyone be equal and distributing care equally. Except everyone is not equal, some people go to work every day and bust their asses. Some people are hugely intelligent and capable of making worth while achievments. Other people are lazy and do not work. So why should everyone be rewarded equally?
Well, one of the problems with capitalism is that it often doesn't reward people based on effort or contribution to society either. It does a better job than anything else we've tried, but it's hardly perfect. The guy who invents a patent that saves a company may get a pittance for his achievement; a CEO who drives a company into the ground may have negotiated a multi-million dollar golden parachute before he started. A person who does absolutely nothing but lend his fortune to other people may rake mountains of cash for no real effort while someone who puts their life on the line for their country in a foreign land may earn as much as a bus driver or janitor.
Those people who have the glamorless jobs that are essential to society are getting the shaft, and there's a serious question of moral principles here about living in a country that could (but doesn't) prevent people from dying and suffering for things beyond their control like disease.
You may believe that the unfit should simply die off, but is one's ability to rake in money a sufficient measure of who is worthy? Capitalism rewards its ideals of fitness much like evolution does: in a way that considers morality, intelligence, and compassion as secondary to domination of one's environment. This is why Social Darwinism is a bad, bad idea.
(P.S. I know that my introductory paragraph was inflammatory, but did you read the rest of my post? Very little of what I proposed was socialistic in nature.)
Neither of those things will make your health care affordable though, the only way it will be affordable is if you tax wealthy Americans more and use their money to pay for it. Which to me, just seems a bit too socialist.
Right... and any hint of filthy, filthy Socialism is far worse than letting a significant chunk of the American populace go without any healthcare or get nearly wiped out by an emergency (especially now that it's significantly harder to declare bankruptcy in those situations).
There are many ways to make healthcare more affordable. You touch on one with the malpractice damage caps for "pain and suffering" (which isn't as much of a cost as politicians like to scream about). Limiting it would help some though. You could also allow imported drugs and run the Medicare prescription drug benefit like the VA runs theirs for a significant saving of taxpayer dollars.
There are other things that you could do. You could put an end to the mass advertising of drug companies both to the public and to individual doctor's offices which is huge chunk of their costs in America. (Limiting the expensive wining and dining of doctors should come after universal coverage because a lot of poorer people get free medicine from the samples given out by clinics afterwards.)
You could reverse the Reagan-era change of law that allowed hospitals to be run as for-profit entities instead of having to be non-profits. You could force a standardization of computer data exchange across the nation to match the impressive organization of VA hospitals and save a lot of money on record keeping while preventing the a lot of accidents relating to drugs going to the wrong people as both Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich are advocating.
Just getting rid of the redundancies and the overhead costs of the for-profit insurance industry would bring down overall costs for the nation. Furthermore, encouraging free checkups and preventative medicine would greatly reduce the numbers of people waiting until a health problem becomes an expensive disaster that they can't avoid dealing with (which is what most poor people do). This would also avoid the use of the emergency room as your doctor that raises average healthcare costs.
We pay about twice what Canadians pay for healthcare (through taxes), and we live shorter lives on average. It's not just Canada -- every country with universal healthcare pays less and most have citizens with longer lives. What are we getting for our money? We should look to other countries for what they're doing because they're obviously doing something that we're not.
If you would expect a lot of errors or "bad" data, how was this company able to issue a credit card without human interaction?
A healthy, heaping, helping of Not Caring. The cost in dealing with erroneous information is smaller than the costs of processing thousands of applications every day by human hand.
You can opt in, opt out for 5 years, or opt out permanently.
Be warned however that if they don't have your address quite right, you will be taken to an automatic voice recognition system to fix it; there is no human contact allowed. While the system is impressive in its capabilities, it can't handle things like apartment numbers that start with numbers and ending letters. (It thinks 20C is 2060. Don't even try saying "C as in Charles" either.)
Sure. Check out this blog post about Google censorship of the violent imagery loving sites Ogrish.com and Rotten.com and the white supremacist site Stormfront.org.
I feel that they shouldn't be censored, but I always feel a sort of queasy moral indefensibility about that stance when defending the truly repugnant speech. Even so, slippery slopes and all that.
The reason China was singled out is because of their heavy censoring of politically undesireable facts. France and Germany are listed because of anti-Nazi speech laws. Both countries have successfully sued Google to force them to take down such content.
Now, you say that teachers have little power to stop it. Well no shit: schools aren't allowed to apply corporal punishment any more! Even worse, they aren't allowed to kick the problem kids out of school altogether. No wonder we have a problem.
Yes, you see the problem now. However, you seem to think that teachers like this situation and that it's all a conspiracy by them to make it continue.
Maybe if we did this in the public schools too, we'd have better test scores, better educations, and less bullying. Sure, we'd have a few bullies out on the street with less than an 8th grade education, but we have prisons for people like that, and with these creatures kept out of schools where they hurt other kids, maybe less people overall will develop criminal tendencies.
Quite the opposite in fact. Most bullies grow out of it, some partially and some completely. I knew people who gave me a lot of crap when we were in middle school that matured enough to be friends by my senior year of high school. (I also had to work through a lot of problems with arrogance issues over being smart and bossy first.)
The alternative to trying to educate everybody is that we put people with violent tendencies (and often a bit of a superiority or inferiority complex) out on the streets with no real job prospects and no future, many of whom had poor parental support. That's a recipe for a sharp rise in violent crime if there ever was one. That's why schools don't kick out problem students and instead try to help them get past it. High school aged kids are still kids and don't have the best of judgement, after all. There are places to take the truly unworkable kids, but most bullies are worth not giving up on completely since they do tend to straighten out later.
So you think this is a valid excuse to physically assault people. You are a sick person, and since you've stated you have many family members who are also teachers, this shows what a sick attitude teachers in this society have. You and your disgusting teacher friends and family are obviously part of the problem, since you simply defend the status quo.
What a strange lens you seem to view reality through. Where exactly did I say that this is a valid excuse to physically assault people? Go back and read the actual lines I wrote instead of what your own frustration and anger projected in between them.
I said that this is the cause of the problem and that teachers aren't the ones to blame for what is unfortunately a base human instinct in the teenage populace who has yet to learn how to work through peer pressure. You read a positive judgement of this into the statement because you want to believe that teachers (and their advocates) are evil because they are the authority figures in the situation. In reality, a lot of my personal philosophy and political beliefs come from how dangerous I view these instincts to be.
I suspect that you're still young yourself and may be going through bullying right now and unable to objectively see the situation from the outside. Give it a few years, lick your wounds, and you'll be able to look back on just how stupid everyone you knew acted, including yourself. The world does not revolve around high school (thank God), and the unfairness of the situation is not because there's a vast conspiracy of evil teachers creating the social barriers that exist for those who don't conform. It's because kids are being kids, with all the petty nastiness and melodrama that that entails.
Regardign console style RPG.. its been a while, but how exactly do you make an RPG console style? They ported FF7 to the PC and it played just fine for me. So I don't think its any technical limitations there.
It's the limitations of consoles that define the difference instead of the limitations of PCs. Memory for maintaining the game world status and for saving character progress has been limited. There is no keyboard interface, so interactions with the world are limited. This means that the simulation-heavy style of PC RPG gaming doesn't really work out so well.
Instead, console RPGs focus on delivering a consistent story with varying attempts at making console-controllable combat fun. This is usually divided between the adventure RPG genre like the Ys series, Star Ocean 3, and the recent Tales games where some reflex skills are needed, strategy RPGs like Disgaea and Final Fantasy Tactics, and the more traditional mainstream RPG like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. Overall, though, the emphasis is on the plot.
This plot vs. simulation conflict is what leads PC gamers to decry that console RPGs are too linear and that leads console gamers to dislike PC RPGs for being too unfocused. They're both perfectly valid styles of game, but people who play one or the other tend to lump them all together and say that their way is the "true way."
Seriously, though, there are a good number of games for which the console controller are superior to a mouse and keyboard. No one released PC games that depend on a standardized controller because there isn't one that comes with them.
You won't see a Soulcaliber or a Dead or Alive for the PC. You won't see a console-style RPG for the PC which instead favors RPGs like Elder Scrolls and the Ultima series. PC racing games have always sucked, and so have the sports games.
If you like those genres, get a console. If you like exploration-based RPGs, RTS games, FPS games, etc. then get a PC because those games are better on a PC.
Bullies have long enjoyed power in America's schools, and teachers and school administrations and school boards have done everything they can to preserve this status quo.
You are so amazingly full of crap. Is this just some sort of bitter defense mechanism over your time in school and the fact that you very obviously weren't a likeable person?
I'm the son of two teachers. Most of my parent's friends are teachers. My sister is a teacher at an inner city elementary school. I know what goes on behind the scenes, and I knew it even when I was in school getting bullied.
Teachers do care in general. They do try to stop it, but most bullying goes on out of sight of the administration, and they know that they have little power to stop it. You can punish bullies, but it does nothing to improve their thuggish attitudes since you can't use force against them. All you can do is slap them in a room by themselves for a few days to do nothing but homework (that they won't do anyway).
You can call the parents, but the parents are usually the source of the problem in every single case of bullying that I've ever seen or heard about. They're either apathetic, believe that the school is out to persecute "their little angel", were bullies themselves and think it's funny, or have been beating the kid at home and feeding the violent frustration that leads them to pick on people weaker than them in the first place. (My personal bully was so obviously beaten at home that I even felt pity for him at the time.) This is really the problem -- the lack of positive parental involvement and the inability of teachers to do anything about the behavior of kids when the parents won't step up to the plate.
Teachers that I knew for the most part hate bullies (with the exception of some coaches that I knew) and honestly wish the school could be rid of them but don't want to see them fail to get an education and only further slip from decent society. You do get the occasional disciplinary administrator who like to hit the nail that sticks out or believes that "it takes two to fight," but most people I knew really did try to do something about it.
Also, anti-intellectualism isn't something that school systems encourage -- pop culture encourages it. Look back on how well smart kids (with a good attitude) were treated by everyone other than coaches compared kids who didn't do well or who were anti-social. It's the other kids that exclude you because you're different and don't conform. Young people are very succeptible to forming pecking orders and aversion to people who are different because their those parts of the brain are being activated for the first time in middle school and high school. Most teachers couldn't care less unless you're making an obvious effort to be an anti-social freak and lashing out at everyone around you.
I know I shouldn't respond, but the thing is that I already did in my original post:
I'm not saying that we should give up on holding them to a higher standard but that we should be a little more honest about how much effort it took us to get here and to be careful about our own recent backsliding.
There's a difference between saying, "Hey those people should stop killing people and grow up," and saying, "Screw them, they're just a bunch of savages, and we're better than them." The difference there is in whether or not we are interested in helping them to get to where we are or in just liking to thump our chests about how much better we are (without really looking at our own failings) and joyfully sneer at them.
We just recently got ourselves out of this mess and suddenly everyone else is supposed to have already beaten us to it too? That's bull, and it serves no purpose other than to take a hit off the Pride crack-rock for a cheap, numbing, feel-good buzz. We need to look at why they aren't where we are in terms of tolerance and realize that we weren't too different a few hundred years ago either. Without understaning how we moved forward, we can't understand how to bring others with us and avoid going back ourselves.
Incidentally, truly civilized people would not say, "If they were just killing and maiming other arabs, I'd go along with you." Truly civilized people would be horrified at the deaths of anyone. People like you are why outrages like Darfur, Rwanda, and other African genocides were allowed to happen -- because they weren't hurting US.
They mention that a better name would be something like "Attention Inconsistency Disorder".
Yeah, but who wants to say that their kid has AID? All jokes aside...
As somebody diagnosed with ADD in college, I believe it's a real thing. My attentional mechanisms are definitely different than most people. I am very distractable, and can also be very focused in certain rare circumstancess.
Same here (except that I was diagnosed as a kid and dosed up on Ritalin). I have a very simplified theory of what ADD is -- boredom. The problem with people like us is that we can't concentrate on boring things. We crave stimulation and seek it out when the thing that we're working on isn't stimulating. When it is, it grips our attention fully and less stimulating things are ignored. Have you ever had trouble concentrating on something that you wanted to do that was interesting?
Is it any wonder then that there is a direct correlation between the number of hours a kid watches TV and the probability that they become ADD? Modern society overstimulates people and leaves them incapable of dealing with long periods of downtime.
This is why I'm websurfing right now instead of working -- my job is too boring to concentrate on, and I haven't tuned into talk radio yet to keep my brain active while I slog through the job. (Oh well, at least it pays well.)
Slashdot Mirror
So, has Microsoft signed any business agreements with companies that downgrade protections from external connections in their firewall like the downgraded protections in their adware tool for Claria?
Since everyone else is really ignoring the MMORPG part of the question, I'll chime in with one of my favorite table-top gaming stories: The Head of Vecna What better quest than one set up by rival players that involves deceit, trickery, backstabbing, and inter-party murder?
Actually the loss would be negligable going from MP3 to CD to MP3.
It would still exist. That's why I said to repeat the steps until it became evident. The same compression engine will not fail to find something to drop to make the image/music look/sound almost as good as the last iteration.
The point wasn't to change the quality, it was to get rid of DRM, so it's more like open a JPEG, save it as a TIFF. Open the TIFF, and save it as a PNG. Sure, it will be worse quality than your normal PNG, but it'll be the same quality as your original JPEG.
Of course it will -- PNG uses lossless compression scheme. Try going from JPEG2000 to JPEG to make the analogy more apt.
So, you take a lossy compression scheme, faithfully transfer all of its losses to a lossless format, and then lossy recompress that?
Let's make a visual exercise to show you why this is a bad idea. Open a JPEG in an image editor. Save it as a TIFF. Open the up the TIFF. Save it as a JPEG with decent compression. Repeat this enough times for the lesson to become clear.
America's Army is a game meant to advertise joining up for the army by being fun and entertaining. The goal is to make people want to sign up for the governments message because it's fun.
There's no way in hell that this rumored game could be fun. There's no way that people would voluntarily sign up for this. This is likely to be forced on people or to become just another ritual to go through to prove one's loyalty to the government.
That's why you should always preview (and, yes, I am a hypocrite too on this one). Be thankful that Slashcode strips that. Otherwise, you would've created some long, unknown, and unclosed HTML tag that a browser would've ignored.
If you know HTML, you can still use a "<" by typing "<". (FYI, if you want to quote an HTML escape code, then use "&" instead of the ampersand itself.)
Now if your vomiting is from a reaction from something besides taste and burning mouth, you screwed.
Capsaicin is an irritant to all parts of the body, not just the mouth. If he's sensitive enough to throw up from a single habanero, then this pill would really mess with his stomach lining.
Incidentally, birds are not sensitive to capsaicin. This may be why chili peppers evolved to be hot since only they rely on birds (and birds alone) to eat the pods and spread their seeds around.
"We 3 Katamari of Orient are / trying to roll up a great big star?"
I wouldn't go so far as to say "no matter how wide the skill difference." I would say that if you need more than a 4 stone handicap, then it doesn't matter if you opponent gives you a 9 stone handicap -- you're gonna get curb-stomped.
These too are merely manmade replacements for what already exists. Its no big deal. Assembly lines, machines, and existing robots are merely doing what people have once done. The only exception is that they have lower variability in results, don't get tired, etc.
Incidentally, this has helped lead to the ending of one of the greatest provider of high paying, good benefits jobs for unskilled labor. It's not the only factor behind it by a long shot, but if you don't find scary the idea of potentially replacing all unskilled labor jobs with robots, you aren't really thinking about the long term ramifications.
The economic ripples are terrifying to think about. The labor movement's already dead thanks to globalization and automation. Is the minimum wage next when there aren't enough jobs where it's cheaper to hire people at minimum wage than buy robots? What does that mean for a society when people already can't get by on the minimum wage?
If we ever develop AI, it will be the single most important invention mankind has ever invented. Ever. It will change the world even more than the printing press did. Nothing could ever top the effects that it will have on how people live short of "curing" aging and death.
Here's one of mine:
"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement" - Lord Kelvin
Kelvin conceded that the only two clouds on the horizon of physics were the results of the Michaelson-Morley experiment and the ultraviolet catastrophe.. Those two problems would lead the complete disruption of classical physics and the establishment of both general relativity and quantum mechanics.
(Also, if I ever formed a band, I would call it "The Ultraviolet Catastrophe" because that name rocks.)
The same people that are using the welfare and free healthcare happen to be the ones that are reproducing the fastest, and continuing to give them gifts just escalates the problem. Eventually, there will not be enough wealthy people to support everyone else, and then we'll all be screwed. As uncaring as it may sound, I just can't find any logic in a society intentionally growing the weakest link at the expense of the stronger ones.
You've fallen into the myth of the Welfare Queen. People who honestly don't work are extremely rare, especially after 90s welfare-to-work reform. Most people who fall under the poverty line have jobs -- often multiple jobs -- and still can't make ends meet. Housing can eat up half your after-tax paycheck on a minimum wage job with utilities, transportation, and food consuming the rest.
People who you might consider parasites are edge cases. The vast majority of people who would benefit from universal coverage would be working poor and the middle class -- the backbone of the American economy. In my opinion, you shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I suppose that is one of the ideas behind socialism; letting everyone be equal and distributing care equally. Except everyone is not equal, some people go to work every day and bust their asses. Some people are hugely intelligent and capable of making worth while achievments. Other people are lazy and do not work. So why should everyone be rewarded equally?
Well, one of the problems with capitalism is that it often doesn't reward people based on effort or contribution to society either. It does a better job than anything else we've tried, but it's hardly perfect. The guy who invents a patent that saves a company may get a pittance for his achievement; a CEO who drives a company into the ground may have negotiated a multi-million dollar golden parachute before he started. A person who does absolutely nothing but lend his fortune to other people may rake mountains of cash for no real effort while someone who puts their life on the line for their country in a foreign land may earn as much as a bus driver or janitor.
Those people who have the glamorless jobs that are essential to society are getting the shaft, and there's a serious question of moral principles here about living in a country that could (but doesn't) prevent people from dying and suffering for things beyond their control like disease.
You may believe that the unfit should simply die off, but is one's ability to rake in money a sufficient measure of who is worthy? Capitalism rewards its ideals of fitness much like evolution does: in a way that considers morality, intelligence, and compassion as secondary to domination of one's environment. This is why Social Darwinism is a bad, bad idea.
(P.S. I know that my introductory paragraph was inflammatory, but did you read the rest of my post? Very little of what I proposed was socialistic in nature.)
I don't like Bush, but I'd rather elect an Idiot than a Liar.
Cheer up -- with Bush, you can have both!
Neither of those things will make your health care affordable though, the only way it will be affordable is if you tax wealthy Americans more and use their money to pay for it. Which to me, just seems a bit too socialist.
Right... and any hint of filthy, filthy Socialism is far worse than letting a significant chunk of the American populace go without any healthcare or get nearly wiped out by an emergency (especially now that it's significantly harder to declare bankruptcy in those situations).
There are many ways to make healthcare more affordable. You touch on one with the malpractice damage caps for "pain and suffering" (which isn't as much of a cost as politicians like to scream about). Limiting it would help some though. You could also allow imported drugs and run the Medicare prescription drug benefit like the VA runs theirs for a significant saving of taxpayer dollars.
There are other things that you could do. You could put an end to the mass advertising of drug companies both to the public and to individual doctor's offices which is huge chunk of their costs in America. (Limiting the expensive wining and dining of doctors should come after universal coverage because a lot of poorer people get free medicine from the samples given out by clinics afterwards.)
You could reverse the Reagan-era change of law that allowed hospitals to be run as for-profit entities instead of having to be non-profits. You could force a standardization of computer data exchange across the nation to match the impressive organization of VA hospitals and save a lot of money on record keeping while preventing the a lot of accidents relating to drugs going to the wrong people as both Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich are advocating.
Just getting rid of the redundancies and the overhead costs of the for-profit insurance industry would bring down overall costs for the nation. Furthermore, encouraging free checkups and preventative medicine would greatly reduce the numbers of people waiting until a health problem becomes an expensive disaster that they can't avoid dealing with (which is what most poor people do). This would also avoid the use of the emergency room as your doctor that raises average healthcare costs.
We pay about twice what Canadians pay for healthcare (through taxes), and we live shorter lives on average. It's not just Canada -- every country with universal healthcare pays less and most have citizens with longer lives. What are we getting for our money? We should look to other countries for what they're doing because they're obviously doing something that we're not.
Seems to me censorship isn't that bad in the US when the "censored" site is listed number one on the result list.
My bad. I forgot that there were acceptable levels of censorship when maintaining a free society.
If you would expect a lot of errors or "bad" data, how was this company able to issue a credit card without human interaction?
A healthy, heaping, helping of Not Caring. The cost in dealing with erroneous information is smaller than the costs of processing thousands of applications every day by human hand.
You can opt in, opt out for 5 years, or opt out permanently.
Be warned however that if they don't have your address quite right, you will be taken to an automatic voice recognition system to fix it; there is no human contact allowed. While the system is impressive in its capabilities, it can't handle things like apartment numbers that start with numbers and ending letters. (It thinks 20C is 2060. Don't even try saying "C as in Charles" either.)
Sure. Check out this blog post about Google censorship of the violent imagery loving sites Ogrish.com and Rotten.com and the white supremacist site Stormfront.org.
I feel that they shouldn't be censored, but I always feel a sort of queasy moral indefensibility about that stance when defending the truly repugnant speech. Even so, slippery slopes and all that.
The reason China was singled out is because of their heavy censoring of politically undesireable facts. France and Germany are listed because of anti-Nazi speech laws. Both countries have successfully sued Google to force them to take down such content.
Now, try using this search on Google and scroll to the bottom: scientology site:xenu.net
Woo-hoo! Land of the free!
Now, you say that teachers have little power to stop it. Well no shit: schools aren't allowed to apply corporal punishment any more! Even worse, they aren't allowed to kick the problem kids out of school altogether. No wonder we have a problem.
Yes, you see the problem now. However, you seem to think that teachers like this situation and that it's all a conspiracy by them to make it continue.
Maybe if we did this in the public schools too, we'd have better test scores, better educations, and less bullying. Sure, we'd have a few bullies out on the street with less than an 8th grade education, but we have prisons for people like that, and with these creatures kept out of schools where they hurt other kids, maybe less people overall will develop criminal tendencies.
Quite the opposite in fact. Most bullies grow out of it, some partially and some completely. I knew people who gave me a lot of crap when we were in middle school that matured enough to be friends by my senior year of high school. (I also had to work through a lot of problems with arrogance issues over being smart and bossy first.)
The alternative to trying to educate everybody is that we put people with violent tendencies (and often a bit of a superiority or inferiority complex) out on the streets with no real job prospects and no future, many of whom had poor parental support. That's a recipe for a sharp rise in violent crime if there ever was one. That's why schools don't kick out problem students and instead try to help them get past it. High school aged kids are still kids and don't have the best of judgement, after all. There are places to take the truly unworkable kids, but most bullies are worth not giving up on completely since they do tend to straighten out later.
So you think this is a valid excuse to physically assault people. You are a sick person, and since you've stated you have many family members who are also teachers, this shows what a sick attitude teachers in this society have. You and your disgusting teacher friends and family are obviously part of the problem, since you simply defend the status quo.
What a strange lens you seem to view reality through. Where exactly did I say that this is a valid excuse to physically assault people? Go back and read the actual lines I wrote instead of what your own frustration and anger projected in between them.
I said that this is the cause of the problem and that teachers aren't the ones to blame for what is unfortunately a base human instinct in the teenage populace who has yet to learn how to work through peer pressure. You read a positive judgement of this into the statement because you want to believe that teachers (and their advocates) are evil because they are the authority figures in the situation. In reality, a lot of my personal philosophy and political beliefs come from how dangerous I view these instincts to be.
I suspect that you're still young yourself and may be going through bullying right now and unable to objectively see the situation from the outside. Give it a few years, lick your wounds, and you'll be able to look back on just how stupid everyone you knew acted, including yourself. The world does not revolve around high school (thank God), and the unfairness of the situation is not because there's a vast conspiracy of evil teachers creating the social barriers that exist for those who don't conform. It's because kids are being kids, with all the petty nastiness and melodrama that that entails.
Regardign console style RPG.. its been a while, but how exactly do you make an RPG console style? They ported FF7 to the PC and it played just fine for me. So I don't think its any technical limitations there.
It's the limitations of consoles that define the difference instead of the limitations of PCs. Memory for maintaining the game world status and for saving character progress has been limited. There is no keyboard interface, so interactions with the world are limited. This means that the simulation-heavy style of PC RPG gaming doesn't really work out so well.
Instead, console RPGs focus on delivering a consistent story with varying attempts at making console-controllable combat fun. This is usually divided between the adventure RPG genre like the Ys series, Star Ocean 3, and the recent Tales games where some reflex skills are needed, strategy RPGs like Disgaea and Final Fantasy Tactics, and the more traditional mainstream RPG like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. Overall, though, the emphasis is on the plot.
This plot vs. simulation conflict is what leads PC gamers to decry that console RPGs are too linear and that leads console gamers to dislike PC RPGs for being too unfocused. They're both perfectly valid styles of game, but people who play one or the other tend to lump them all together and say that their way is the "true way."
Because it won't play PS3 games, duh.
Seriously, though, there are a good number of games for which the console controller are superior to a mouse and keyboard. No one released PC games that depend on a standardized controller because there isn't one that comes with them.
You won't see a Soulcaliber or a Dead or Alive for the PC. You won't see a console-style RPG for the PC which instead favors RPGs like Elder Scrolls and the Ultima series. PC racing games have always sucked, and so have the sports games.
If you like those genres, get a console. If you like exploration-based RPGs, RTS games, FPS games, etc. then get a PC because those games are better on a PC.
Bullies have long enjoyed power in America's schools, and teachers and school administrations and school boards have done everything they can to preserve this status quo.
You are so amazingly full of crap. Is this just some sort of bitter defense mechanism over your time in school and the fact that you very obviously weren't a likeable person?
I'm the son of two teachers. Most of my parent's friends are teachers. My sister is a teacher at an inner city elementary school. I know what goes on behind the scenes, and I knew it even when I was in school getting bullied.
Teachers do care in general. They do try to stop it, but most bullying goes on out of sight of the administration, and they know that they have little power to stop it. You can punish bullies, but it does nothing to improve their thuggish attitudes since you can't use force against them. All you can do is slap them in a room by themselves for a few days to do nothing but homework (that they won't do anyway).
You can call the parents, but the parents are usually the source of the problem in every single case of bullying that I've ever seen or heard about. They're either apathetic, believe that the school is out to persecute "their little angel", were bullies themselves and think it's funny, or have been beating the kid at home and feeding the violent frustration that leads them to pick on people weaker than them in the first place. (My personal bully was so obviously beaten at home that I even felt pity for him at the time.) This is really the problem -- the lack of positive parental involvement and the inability of teachers to do anything about the behavior of kids when the parents won't step up to the plate.
Teachers that I knew for the most part hate bullies (with the exception of some coaches that I knew) and honestly wish the school could be rid of them but don't want to see them fail to get an education and only further slip from decent society. You do get the occasional disciplinary administrator who like to hit the nail that sticks out or believes that "it takes two to fight," but most people I knew really did try to do something about it.
Also, anti-intellectualism isn't something that school systems encourage -- pop culture encourages it. Look back on how well smart kids (with a good attitude) were treated by everyone other than coaches compared kids who didn't do well or who were anti-social. It's the other kids that exclude you because you're different and don't conform. Young people are very succeptible to forming pecking orders and aversion to people who are different because their those parts of the brain are being activated for the first time in middle school and high school. Most teachers couldn't care less unless you're making an obvious effort to be an anti-social freak and lashing out at everyone around you.
I know I shouldn't respond, but the thing is that I already did in my original post:
I'm not saying that we should give up on holding them to a higher standard but that we should be a little more honest about how much effort it took us to get here and to be careful about our own recent backsliding.
There's a difference between saying, "Hey those people should stop killing people and grow up," and saying, "Screw them, they're just a bunch of savages, and we're better than them." The difference there is in whether or not we are interested in helping them to get to where we are or in just liking to thump our chests about how much better we are (without really looking at our own failings) and joyfully sneer at them.
We just recently got ourselves out of this mess and suddenly everyone else is supposed to have already beaten us to it too? That's bull, and it serves no purpose other than to take a hit off the Pride crack-rock for a cheap, numbing, feel-good buzz. We need to look at why they aren't where we are in terms of tolerance and realize that we weren't too different a few hundred years ago either. Without understaning how we moved forward, we can't understand how to bring others with us and avoid going back ourselves.
Incidentally, truly civilized people would not say, "If they were just killing and maiming other arabs, I'd go along with you." Truly civilized people would be horrified at the deaths of anyone. People like you are why outrages like Darfur, Rwanda, and other African genocides were allowed to happen -- because they weren't hurting US.
They mention that a better name would be something like "Attention Inconsistency Disorder".
Yeah, but who wants to say that their kid has AID? All jokes aside...
As somebody diagnosed with ADD in college, I believe it's a real thing. My attentional mechanisms are definitely different than most people. I am very distractable, and can also be very focused in certain rare circumstancess.
Same here (except that I was diagnosed as a kid and dosed up on Ritalin). I have a very simplified theory of what ADD is -- boredom. The problem with people like us is that we can't concentrate on boring things. We crave stimulation and seek it out when the thing that we're working on isn't stimulating. When it is, it grips our attention fully and less stimulating things are ignored. Have you ever had trouble concentrating on something that you wanted to do that was interesting?
Is it any wonder then that there is a direct correlation between the number of hours a kid watches TV and the probability that they become ADD? Modern society overstimulates people and leaves them incapable of dealing with long periods of downtime.
This is why I'm websurfing right now instead of working -- my job is too boring to concentrate on, and I haven't tuned into talk radio yet to keep my brain active while I slog through the job. (Oh well, at least it pays well.)