The Speed Limit is designed to be a universally safe speed. This includes a half-blind old person driving a poorly maintained SUV during heavy traffic. It is not an actual "limit" on the safest speed.
Actually, it is. I think you need to think about tractor-trailer trucks when thinking about safe speed limits. Think in terms of slowing down for exits, turning on curves in the highway, etc. Now consider that most people need to be doing about the same speed as those trucks for traffic to flow smoothly and safely.
Also, on a well-maintained highway, at a time when there is little or no other traffic, with a good driver and a well maintained vehicle, the fact that a person is driving 85 in a 55 does not necessarily mean that he is presenting an unreasonable risk to himself or others.
Yes it probably does, just not right at that second. A driver who drives like that is in the habit of driving like that and will do so in heavier traffic. I know because I and many of my friends are or have been drivers like that. I'm older and wiser now that I've suffered economic consequences for that kind of driving.
Speed raises the lethality of an accident, and it's unexpected speed differences that cause most accidents and traffic jams on the highway. If the flow of traffic is 70 in a 55 (as is common where I live), then your person driving 85 in a 55 is driving 15 MPH faster than every car around him. This kind of driver is always an unsafe driver unless he has a clear lane in front of him. Otherwise, he'll mostly likely zip around other cars or tailgate rather than slow down and keep a respectable distance.
Speaking of unsafe drivers, let me use an experience of my own as an example for a little bit. Back in May of this year, I got in an accident that lost me a good car that I'd intended to keep for several more years. This accident was due to me speeding and being unable to react properly to an unattentive idiot driver on the road.
I was driving 75 in a 55 in the leftmost lane when the flow of traffic was 70. As I'm going south on this highway, there's an on-ramp which enters from the left side and continues as the new leftmost lane. Most people join the highway at around 45-55 and speed up until they can safely get over. About 1/4 mile after this on-ramp is an exit on the right side. In the mornings when the highway that crosses the one I drive gets backed up, people like to get onto the southbound highway and cross over the exit.
So, I'm driving along and this white van comes up from the on ramp going 45 (30 MPH slower than me). Before the on ramp fully joins the highway, he crosses the solid lines without signaling directly in front of me only two car lengths away. There's a car on the right side of me, and I do not have sufficient room to brake. My only option is to swerve into the lane he just left.
Now had I been going 65 or even 70, I would not have lost control. However, because of my speed, I lost traction, spun out, and totalled my car on the side wall of the bridge. Fortunately, no one was injured, but now I'm out $9000 after insurance and a new used car. I couldn't afford the car I'd been saving for, and now I'm going to be driving this one instead for several years.
The moral of this story is that if I'd been following the speed limit more closely, I would not have lost my car to the poor driving skills of another person. Driving slower gives you more time to react to other drivers. You never know when some idiot is going to enter the road and become a problem for you. Safe driving means assuming that that could happen at any time.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions.....and it's evil that treads it. What's the point in getting to space if we can't figure out how to sustain life support indefinitely once we get out there?
Ugh. I forgot to switch it back from when I was originally blockquoting material. Here's my post in readable format:
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
No, conservation is about using your resources efficiently. Just look at the Japanese. They have no oil or coal resources of their own and have to pay through the nose for all their energy and material costs. This hits their bottom line hard. The Japanese decided to conserve. Their manufacturing industry uses signficantly less energy than ours. They recycle everything. They designed their cities so that 70% of the population can take public transit. As a result, despite crippling energy and material costs and a ten-year long "depression" (thanks to the damage done by land speculation), they still had the second largest GDP of any nation in the world until China took off, and they now still sit at third.
What's the conservation endgame?
There isn't one. That's the whole point -- to not have an endgame. Why should acting efficiently without waste have an endgame?
The alternative is global economic meltdown and brutal war over the scraps. Fresh water rights are already becoming an issue in certain parts of the world (particularly the Middle East). Arable land will become more and more at a premium as desertification increases due to global warming. Energy costs will soar as people turn up the air conditioning to avoid death by heat stroke (see the deadly heat have in the American Southwest this month). We may in fact be looking at peak oil production right now, and there's no effort to make better use of what we have, and it's only a matter of time until the largest nations decide that the only way to continue their way of life is to deny others access (see the recent Unocal purchase block).
Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Did you know that the Middle East -- the so-called Fertile Crescent -- used to be forested and well farmed? The flag of Lebanon has a cedar tree on it because the things used to grow all over the place there! However, an unsustainable lumber industry destroyed the forests to the point that they could no longer regrow and the area is largely a desert now. A little conservation here could've left us with a forested Lebanon today.
We're seeing the same thing with many of the ocean's seafood species. We're overfishing several species to the point that they're in danger, and our methods of fishing for some species (like dragging nets for shrimp) are destroying many others. A little conservation here could mean that our grandchildren know what seafood tastes like (assuming we haven't dumped enough mercury from our coal plants to make it unsafe for them).
Conservation is about having enough to work with in our life and for not stealing the future from our descendents. It's about treating resources as what they are -- finite though in many cases renewable -- and acting with the wisdom to get the most out of them that you and your descendents can.
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
No, conservation is about using your resources efficiently. Just look at the Japanese. They have no oil or coal resources of their own and have to pay through the nose for all their energy and material costs. This hits their bottom line hard.
The Japanese decided to conserve. Their manufacturing industry uses signficantly less energy than ours. They recycle everything. They designed their cities so that 70% of the population can take public transit. As a result, despite crippling energy and material costs and a ten-year long "depression" (thanks to the damage done by land speculation), they still had the second largest GDP of any nation in the world until China took off and now sit at third.
What's the conservation endgame?
There isn't one. That's the whole point -- to not have an endgame. Why should acting efficiently without waste have an endgame?
The alternative is global economic meltdown and brutal war over the scraps. Fresh water rights are already becoming an issue in certain parts of the world (particularly the Middle East). Arable land will become more and more at a premium as desertification increases due to global warming. Energy costs will soar as people turn up the air conditioning to avoid death by heat stroke (see the deadly heat have in the American Southwest this month). We may in fact be looking at peak oil production right now, and there's no effort to make better use of what we have, and it's only a matter of time until the largest nations decide that the only way to continue their way of life is to deny others access (see the recent Unocal purchase block).
Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Did you know that the Middle East -- the so-called Fertile Crescent -- used to be forested and well farmed? The flag of Lebanon has a cedar tree on it because the things used to grow all over the place there! However, an unsustainable lumber industry destroyed the forests to the point that they could no longer regrow and the area is largely a desert now. A little conservation here could've left us with a forested Lebanon today.
We're seeing the same thing with many of the ocean's seafood species. We're overfishing several species to the point that they're in danger, and our methods of fishing for some species (like dragging nets for shrimp) are destroying many others. A little conservation here could mean that our grandchildren know what seafood tastes like (assuming we haven't dumped enough mercury from our coal plants to make it unsafe for them).
Conservation is about having enough to work with in our life and for not stealing the future from our descendents. It's about treating resources as what they are -- finite though in many cases renewable -- and acting with the wisdom to get the most out of them that you and your descendents can.
Re:Japanese Gaming Aesthetic
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[S]eems like every Japanese school kid can draw a respectable comic strip. Whereas you'd catch American teenagers scribbling lyrics or rock band logos on their notebooks in class, Japanese kids would be free-hand drawing Dragonball Z.
Not really. It's not significantly more prevalent to doodle on things than it is here though what they doodle may be different, and the kids that get really into it are about as socially outcast as the "weird art kids" here. It's actually a bit nerdier of a thing to do all the time there since it ties straight into being considered an otaku instead of being a considered a guy with access to good music and good drugs.
I would strongly disagree
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Narrative is in fact one of the strongest focuses of the Japanese game industry after game play whereas Western games focus far more on exploring an interesting setting. (See the Final Fantasy series vs. the Wizardry series.) The problem you are having is with the Japanese having a lack of insistence on cut-and-dry, tie-it-all-up endings (or with a lack of exposure to the good stuff).
Japanese film and games focus far more on the situation and the characters than the events and the resolution. They are also extremely fond of in media res introductions. This is most prevalent in their drama, psycho-thriller, and ultra-high budget action movies, their more cryptic and cerebral anime, and in their RPGs. This tends to upset American fans who want their to be a nice resolution about how all the people with robots beat all the bad guys up rather than about how the main character got over his crippling self-doubt and isolation. (*cough* Evangelion *cough*)
Just because the director doesn't tie everything up and spoon feed it to you like Jerry Bruckheimer would doesn't mean that they can't tell a story.
(Side note: The ending to Akira sucked because they expected you to have read the manga. I think it's possibly one of the weakest anime titles out there, but people love it because it was one of the first things they saw and the visuals rocked. I'm not very fond of the movie.)
Well, it was UNIX -- an IRIX 4Dwm desktop environment to be specific, even though all the interaction was with a custom app on it. Cut them some slack. It's probably one of the only accurate mentions of a computer operating system in any movie. I mean, compare it to The Net, Hackers, Office Space, Independence Day, etc.
Thus, saying "those silly republicans don't mind killing killers but don't want a fetus killed" implies the fetus is indeed alive, which is contradictory to most pro choice advocates will have you believe.
I think what both people on either side of pro-life / pro-choice debate fail to see is that the each side is striving for the most compassionate and human choice given a core set of assumptions. Just this morning I was listening to Air America radio, and I heard callers impugn pro-life people opposed to stem cell research as being motivated by profit for drug companies and as being heartless towards suffering people with diabetes and spinal cord injuries. I've heard pro-life people call pro-choice people heartless baby-killers with no care for anyone but themselves.
Both sides are wrong about each other. Both sides are trying to do what they see as best with a compassionate heart. The core question about abortion is, "Is the unborn a human being?"
For those who answer, "Yes," pro-life is the only sane and humane choice. If we must treat the retard, the senile, the newly born, and others with undeveloped minds who are dependent on the care of others as having a right to life, we must treat the unborn similarly and must give that right to exist the highest priority. That life must not be sacrificed for the convenience of others when that life has done no deliberate harm to anyone. That is preserving the life and freedoms of the innocent.
For those who answer, "No," pro-choice is the only sane and humane choice. A woman must have the right to choose whether she is ready for motherhood and must not have it trust upon her. She must be allowed the freedom of control over what happens to her body. People who are dying of preventable diseases must have access to medicine that could save them regardless of the religious beliefs of other people. Their lives and freedoms have higher precedent than the offended sensibilities of others. That too is about preserving life and freedoms the innocent.
You'll find extremely few pro-lifers who don't believe that a fetus is a living child. You'll find extremely few pro-choicers who do believe that a fetus is a living child. It's this fundamental question of the humanity of the fetus that is at the core of the argument. Since neither side really wants to address this argument, they cast aspersions on the character of the other side. No one really wants to sit down and discuss this because the lines were drawn before I was born. It's kind of sad because I think that the argument is one that it important and there are secular and religious arguments for both sides.
Close. The case was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad from 1886. It had to do with an assessment for taxation purposes and the arbitrary application of procedure in that assessment in violation of the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal protection under the law to all persons within a jurisdiction.
Basically, the government arbitrarily assessed fences that the company built along the roadside at $300/mile when they had no authority to do so when assessing the road. The rail company argued successfully in court that this was not within their right to do, and the Supreme Court basically refused to hear the county government's arguments in the case after it worked its way up to them stating that they believed that the 14 Amendment applied to corporations as well as individuals.
As a scientist, I suggest that considering themselves the "watchdog of government" invalidates the media's credibility by any objective scientific standard. It injects a massive anti-government bias that overwhelms the media's well-known liberal bias. As the "watchdog of government," the media needs to find government impropriety -- or make it up if they can't -- to justify their existence. Such a bias would not be tolerated in science, in law or in any other honest field of human endeavor.
[...]
In World War II we had censorship of the media. We won that war. In the Vietnam conflict we suffered the consequences of allowing our mass media unrestricted access to flood our homes with grisly scenes of battlefield combat. These powerful images overwhelmed the emotions of a gullible public and destroyed all sense of perspective. Even if we had had the technology in World War II that we have today, broadcasting the photographs of all 12,520 combatants killed in the battle for Okinawa alone would have required a television channel devoted to nothing else.
I'm not even sure if one can respond to this, much less how. The author of this article seems to be deluded into thinking that if the American public were merely kept in the dark about what was going on in Vietnam, we would have won. If only winning a war was so simple was keeping a democratic country's public fooled about the truth so that they will dissent as little as people under the protective arms of a good old dictatorship. Wouldn't that be nice?
Anonymity is essential to fighting corruption and tyranny. The author of the article argues that no scientist needs anonymous sources to find the truth, but since when has a particle accelerator failed to give up a new particle because of the fear of retribution? Whistleblowers need protection from retribution, and our thin veil of laws protecting them mean little in the face of the fact that most whistleblowers will never work in their former industry ever again. As long as people cannot safely give over information without fear of losing the jobs that they and their families depend on, corruption will spread unchecked.
Remember all it takes for evil to propser is for good men to do nothing. If we do not shield good men shining light on corruption from harm, then we will find very few people willing to step up for what is right.
Of course, I gather that this is the sort of thing that the author of the article prefers. He seems to have nothing but contempt for the media and for the concept of an informed public. His deepest desire is to have people called into court and grilled over any information they leak that might challenge those in power. In essence, the author of this article is a fascist, and it is frightening to see this sort of sentiment spreading in our country.
Seems broken to me. 2GB is large, but not large enough to be rare. I, for one, would not run an implementation possibly requiring application rewrites, especially when the future of SCO doesn't look promising.
This isn't much different from how many other UNIX variants dealt with adding support for 64-bit file i/o. For example, look at Solaris's fopen64() and related transitional functions for dealing with 64-bit files while compiling a 32-bit application.
SCO desperately needs backwards compatibility since most vendors stay with SCO to avoid costly upgrades. As such, the old APIs must still be supported for old binaries while newer programs take advantage of the new APIs. The alternative to multiple interfaces is to change the datatypes and structures for file i/o and force developers to rewrite anything that relies on 32-bit size of relevant members. This is a hostile step that SCO can't afford. They have to take the route of making developers choose to support 64-bit file sizes rather than forcing them into it.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is one the few warhawks on the left side of things in America. If you want to read more on what the neocons are thinking, you should go to the Project for the New American Century, where they're quite open about their desires.
Brzezinski wrote in 2004 a book that heavily criticizes the approach of the current administration called, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. If you liked reading The Grand Chessboard, pick this one up too.
That article makes me wonder whether racial hatred is in part inspired by this "team strip" concept in the butterflies. In other words, the white protagonists are acting on their animal instincts to use "reinforcement" (as the article calls it) to encourage speciation.
Yeah, basically. Of course, skin color is just one very easy way of setting up an "us vs. them" dichotomy. Humans have an instinctive animal urge to form groups, to ignore the flaws of the group they are in, and to demonize others based on their flaws (real or imagined). It's primative pack rivalry.
Pick up a copy of the book "The Lucifer Principle" sometime. I think you'd like it. There are aspects of it that I find a little personally offensive given the somewhat callous treatment of religion in the book, but the core topics about social organisms and primitive animal instincts that exist in man and shape our behaviors makes for a fascinating read.
A big software company gets mad at a researcher giving a speech on a security flaw in their software and attempts to sue them. They get the FBI involved before realizing that they're taking a lot of PR damage and then suddenly act all buddy-buddy with the person they went on the attack against. In the meantime, the FBI doesn't give up just because the company now wants to polish its image, and the researcher's life is negatively impacted.
Sounds like Adobe and Dmitri Sklyarov, doesn't it?
I don't know about that. I think there's a difference between fantasizing about violence (through video games) and actually practicing violence (on the football field).
How many teenage rapists has you heard about in the news that were video game nerds vs. football players? How many nerds liked to team up on a single guy and beat him up? On the other hand, nerds to get the greater number of mass murders, but I think that trend was true long before video games.
However, lacking epidemiological studies, it's all just scaremongering.
You are correct. "Tax and spend" doesn't really cover the current Republican party. At the very least taxing to raise revenue first instead of putting off revenue generation off until that debt has had time to accrue interest would be too fiscally responsible to describe the current government.
I prefer, "Charge it!" over "Tax and Spend."
The GOP is acting a lot like an irresponsible teenager with a credit card. They're piling up debt recklessly without regards for the future. The only difference is that a teenager can't rewrite the law so that someone else will have to pick up their share of the debt when they're done like the Republican leadership is doing to the middle class by slashing taxes for the rich. That money's going to come from somewhere, and the Republican politicians and their friends are dedicated to making sure that it isn't them all while feeding at the trough of taxpayers money.
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That's a ridiculous question - dogs, cats, etc. are legally property. People are not.
Do you justify all of your ethical decisions based on what the law says? Would it be okay to hit a slave if slavery was still legal?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the idea of hitting a pet to avoid causing an accident, but your argument really, really stinks.
The Speed Limit is designed to be a universally safe speed. This includes a half-blind old person driving a poorly maintained SUV during heavy traffic. It is not an actual "limit" on the safest speed.
Actually, it is. I think you need to think about tractor-trailer trucks when thinking about safe speed limits. Think in terms of slowing down for exits, turning on curves in the highway, etc. Now consider that most people need to be doing about the same speed as those trucks for traffic to flow smoothly and safely.
Also, on a well-maintained highway, at a time when there is little or no other traffic, with a good driver and a well maintained vehicle, the fact that a person is driving 85 in a 55 does not necessarily mean that he is presenting an unreasonable risk to himself or others.
Yes it probably does, just not right at that second. A driver who drives like that is in the habit of driving like that and will do so in heavier traffic. I know because I and many of my friends are or have been drivers like that. I'm older and wiser now that I've suffered economic consequences for that kind of driving.
Speed raises the lethality of an accident, and it's unexpected speed differences that cause most accidents and traffic jams on the highway. If the flow of traffic is 70 in a 55 (as is common where I live), then your person driving 85 in a 55 is driving 15 MPH faster than every car around him. This kind of driver is always an unsafe driver unless he has a clear lane in front of him. Otherwise, he'll mostly likely zip around other cars or tailgate rather than slow down and keep a respectable distance.
Speaking of unsafe drivers, let me use an experience of my own as an example for a little bit. Back in May of this year, I got in an accident that lost me a good car that I'd intended to keep for several more years. This accident was due to me speeding and being unable to react properly to an unattentive idiot driver on the road.
I was driving 75 in a 55 in the leftmost lane when the flow of traffic was 70. As I'm going south on this highway, there's an on-ramp which enters from the left side and continues as the new leftmost lane. Most people join the highway at around 45-55 and speed up until they can safely get over. About 1/4 mile after this on-ramp is an exit on the right side. In the mornings when the highway that crosses the one I drive gets backed up, people like to get onto the southbound highway and cross over the exit.
So, I'm driving along and this white van comes up from the on ramp going 45 (30 MPH slower than me). Before the on ramp fully joins the highway, he crosses the solid lines without signaling directly in front of me only two car lengths away. There's a car on the right side of me, and I do not have sufficient room to brake. My only option is to swerve into the lane he just left.
Now had I been going 65 or even 70, I would not have lost control. However, because of my speed, I lost traction, spun out, and totalled my car on the side wall of the bridge. Fortunately, no one was injured, but now I'm out $9000 after insurance and a new used car. I couldn't afford the car I'd been saving for, and now I'm going to be driving this one instead for several years.
The moral of this story is that if I'd been following the speed limit more closely, I would not have lost my car to the poor driving skills of another person. Driving slower gives you more time to react to other drivers. You never know when some idiot is going to enter the road and become a problem for you. Safe driving means assuming that that could happen at any time.
Guess not. Oh, and the new Mercedes Benz Mixed Tape (#8) is out, so I grabbed that torrent, too.
You have a blog, right? Please give us the link so that we can follow more of the fascinating minutae of your daily life.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions.. ...and it's evil that treads it. What's the point in getting to space if we can't figure out how to sustain life support indefinitely once we get out there?
Astral projection? Isn't that what a planetarium does?
Ugh. I forgot to switch it back from when I was originally blockquoting material. Here's my post in readable format:
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
No, conservation is about using your resources efficiently. Just look at the Japanese. They have no oil or coal resources of their own and have to pay through the nose for all their energy and material costs. This hits their bottom line hard. The Japanese decided to conserve. Their manufacturing industry uses signficantly less energy than ours. They recycle everything. They designed their cities so that 70% of the population can take public transit. As a result, despite crippling energy and material costs and a ten-year long "depression" (thanks to the damage done by land speculation), they still had the second largest GDP of any nation in the world until China took off, and they now still sit at third.
What's the conservation endgame?
There isn't one. That's the whole point -- to not have an endgame. Why should acting efficiently without waste have an endgame?
The alternative is global economic meltdown and brutal war over the scraps. Fresh water rights are already becoming an issue in certain parts of the world (particularly the Middle East). Arable land will become more and more at a premium as desertification increases due to global warming. Energy costs will soar as people turn up the air conditioning to avoid death by heat stroke (see the deadly heat have in the American Southwest this month). We may in fact be looking at peak oil production right now, and there's no effort to make better use of what we have, and it's only a matter of time until the largest nations decide that the only way to continue their way of life is to deny others access (see the recent Unocal purchase block).
Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Did you know that the Middle East -- the so-called Fertile Crescent -- used to be forested and well farmed? The flag of Lebanon has a cedar tree on it because the things used to grow all over the place there! However, an unsustainable lumber industry destroyed the forests to the point that they could no longer regrow and the area is largely a desert now. A little conservation here could've left us with a forested Lebanon today.
We're seeing the same thing with many of the ocean's seafood species. We're overfishing several species to the point that they're in danger, and our methods of fishing for some species (like dragging nets for shrimp) are destroying many others. A little conservation here could mean that our grandchildren know what seafood tastes like (assuming we haven't dumped enough mercury from our coal plants to make it unsafe for them).
Conservation is about having enough to work with in our life and for not stealing the future from our descendents. It's about treating resources as what they are -- finite though in many cases renewable -- and acting with the wisdom to get the most out of them that you and your descendents can.
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit. No, conservation is about using your resources efficiently. Just look at the Japanese. They have no oil or coal resources of their own and have to pay through the nose for all their energy and material costs. This hits their bottom line hard. The Japanese decided to conserve. Their manufacturing industry uses signficantly less energy than ours. They recycle everything. They designed their cities so that 70% of the population can take public transit. As a result, despite crippling energy and material costs and a ten-year long "depression" (thanks to the damage done by land speculation), they still had the second largest GDP of any nation in the world until China took off and now sit at third. What's the conservation endgame? There isn't one. That's the whole point -- to not have an endgame. Why should acting efficiently without waste have an endgame? The alternative is global economic meltdown and brutal war over the scraps. Fresh water rights are already becoming an issue in certain parts of the world (particularly the Middle East). Arable land will become more and more at a premium as desertification increases due to global warming. Energy costs will soar as people turn up the air conditioning to avoid death by heat stroke (see the deadly heat have in the American Southwest this month). We may in fact be looking at peak oil production right now, and there's no effort to make better use of what we have, and it's only a matter of time until the largest nations decide that the only way to continue their way of life is to deny others access (see the recent Unocal purchase block). Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Did you know that the Middle East -- the so-called Fertile Crescent -- used to be forested and well farmed? The flag of Lebanon has a cedar tree on it because the things used to grow all over the place there! However, an unsustainable lumber industry destroyed the forests to the point that they could no longer regrow and the area is largely a desert now. A little conservation here could've left us with a forested Lebanon today. We're seeing the same thing with many of the ocean's seafood species. We're overfishing several species to the point that they're in danger, and our methods of fishing for some species (like dragging nets for shrimp) are destroying many others. A little conservation here could mean that our grandchildren know what seafood tastes like (assuming we haven't dumped enough mercury from our coal plants to make it unsafe for them). Conservation is about having enough to work with in our life and for not stealing the future from our descendents. It's about treating resources as what they are -- finite though in many cases renewable -- and acting with the wisdom to get the most out of them that you and your descendents can.
[S]eems like every Japanese school kid can draw a respectable comic strip. Whereas you'd catch American teenagers scribbling lyrics or rock band logos on their notebooks in class, Japanese kids would be free-hand drawing Dragonball Z.
Not really. It's not significantly more prevalent to doodle on things than it is here though what they doodle may be different, and the kids that get really into it are about as socially outcast as the "weird art kids" here. It's actually a bit nerdier of a thing to do all the time there since it ties straight into being considered an otaku instead of being a considered a guy with access to good music and good drugs.
Narrative is in fact one of the strongest focuses of the Japanese game industry after game play whereas Western games focus far more on exploring an interesting setting. (See the Final Fantasy series vs. the Wizardry series.) The problem you are having is with the Japanese having a lack of insistence on cut-and-dry, tie-it-all-up endings (or with a lack of exposure to the good stuff).
Japanese film and games focus far more on the situation and the characters than the events and the resolution. They are also extremely fond of in media res introductions. This is most prevalent in their drama, psycho-thriller, and ultra-high budget action movies, their more cryptic and cerebral anime, and in their RPGs. This tends to upset American fans who want their to be a nice resolution about how all the people with robots beat all the bad guys up rather than about how the main character got over his crippling self-doubt and isolation. (*cough* Evangelion *cough*)
Just because the director doesn't tie everything up and spoon feed it to you like Jerry Bruckheimer would doesn't mean that they can't tell a story.
(Side note: The ending to Akira sucked because they expected you to have read the manga. I think it's possibly one of the weakest anime titles out there, but people love it because it was one of the first things they saw and the visuals rocked. I'm not very fond of the movie.)
Well, it was UNIX -- an IRIX 4Dwm desktop environment to be specific, even though all the interaction was with a custom app on it. Cut them some slack. It's probably one of the only accurate mentions of a computer operating system in any movie. I mean, compare it to The Net, Hackers, Office Space, Independence Day, etc.
Thus, saying "those silly republicans don't mind killing killers but don't want a fetus killed" implies the fetus is indeed alive, which is contradictory to most pro choice advocates will have you believe.
I think what both people on either side of pro-life / pro-choice debate fail to see is that the each side is striving for the most compassionate and human choice given a core set of assumptions. Just this morning I was listening to Air America radio, and I heard callers impugn pro-life people opposed to stem cell research as being motivated by profit for drug companies and as being heartless towards suffering people with diabetes and spinal cord injuries. I've heard pro-life people call pro-choice people heartless baby-killers with no care for anyone but themselves.
Both sides are wrong about each other. Both sides are trying to do what they see as best with a compassionate heart. The core question about abortion is, "Is the unborn a human being?"
For those who answer, "Yes," pro-life is the only sane and humane choice. If we must treat the retard, the senile, the newly born, and others with undeveloped minds who are dependent on the care of others as having a right to life, we must treat the unborn similarly and must give that right to exist the highest priority. That life must not be sacrificed for the convenience of others when that life has done no deliberate harm to anyone. That is preserving the life and freedoms of the innocent.
For those who answer, "No," pro-choice is the only sane and humane choice. A woman must have the right to choose whether she is ready for motherhood and must not have it trust upon her. She must be allowed the freedom of control over what happens to her body. People who are dying of preventable diseases must have access to medicine that could save them regardless of the religious beliefs of other people. Their lives and freedoms have higher precedent than the offended sensibilities of others. That too is about preserving life and freedoms the innocent.
You'll find extremely few pro-lifers who don't believe that a fetus is a living child. You'll find extremely few pro-choicers who do believe that a fetus is a living child. It's this fundamental question of the humanity of the fetus that is at the core of the argument. Since neither side really wants to address this argument, they cast aspersions on the character of the other side. No one really wants to sit down and discuss this because the lines were drawn before I was born. It's kind of sad because I think that the argument is one that it important and there are secular and religious arguments for both sides.
Close. The case was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad from 1886. It had to do with an assessment for taxation purposes and the arbitrary application of procedure in that assessment in violation of the 14th Amendment's requirement of equal protection under the law to all persons within a jurisdiction.
Basically, the government arbitrarily assessed fences that the company built along the roadside at $300/mile when they had no authority to do so when assessing the road. The rail company argued successfully in court that this was not within their right to do, and the Supreme Court basically refused to hear the county government's arguments in the case after it worked its way up to them stating that they believed that the 14 Amendment applied to corporations as well as individuals.
Well, to clarify, they're blocking their students ears. As a public entity, that's a huge difference as well.
Put me in the "70% happy with the decision" camp.
As a scientist, I suggest that considering themselves the "watchdog of government" invalidates the media's credibility by any objective scientific standard. It injects a massive anti-government bias that overwhelms the media's well-known liberal bias. As the "watchdog of government," the media needs to find government impropriety -- or make it up if they can't -- to justify their existence. Such a bias would not be tolerated in science, in law or in any other honest field of human endeavor.
[...]
In World War II we had censorship of the media. We won that war. In the Vietnam conflict we suffered the consequences of allowing our mass media unrestricted access to flood our homes with grisly scenes of battlefield combat. These powerful images overwhelmed the emotions of a gullible public and destroyed all sense of perspective. Even if we had had the technology in World War II that we have today, broadcasting the photographs of all 12,520 combatants killed in the battle for Okinawa alone would have required a television channel devoted to nothing else.
I'm not even sure if one can respond to this, much less how. The author of this article seems to be deluded into thinking that if the American public were merely kept in the dark about what was going on in Vietnam, we would have won. If only winning a war was so simple was keeping a democratic country's public fooled about the truth so that they will dissent as little as people under the protective arms of a good old dictatorship. Wouldn't that be nice?
Anonymity is essential to fighting corruption and tyranny. The author of the article argues that no scientist needs anonymous sources to find the truth, but since when has a particle accelerator failed to give up a new particle because of the fear of retribution? Whistleblowers need protection from retribution, and our thin veil of laws protecting them mean little in the face of the fact that most whistleblowers will never work in their former industry ever again. As long as people cannot safely give over information without fear of losing the jobs that they and their families depend on, corruption will spread unchecked.
Remember all it takes for evil to propser is for good men to do nothing. If we do not shield good men shining light on corruption from harm, then we will find very few people willing to step up for what is right.
Of course, I gather that this is the sort of thing that the author of the article prefers. He seems to have nothing but contempt for the media and for the concept of an informed public. His deepest desire is to have people called into court and grilled over any information they leak that might challenge those in power. In essence, the author of this article is a fascist, and it is frightening to see this sort of sentiment spreading in our country.
You're missing the point. Baby penguins makes it political. Baby ducks just makes it senselessly cruel.
So, ha! I counter your unfunny pedantry with my own!
Seems broken to me. 2GB is large, but not large enough to be rare. I, for one, would not run an implementation possibly requiring application rewrites, especially when the future of SCO doesn't look promising.
This isn't much different from how many other UNIX variants dealt with adding support for 64-bit file i/o. For example, look at Solaris's fopen64() and related transitional functions for dealing with 64-bit files while compiling a 32-bit application.
SCO desperately needs backwards compatibility since most vendors stay with SCO to avoid costly upgrades. As such, the old APIs must still be supported for old binaries while newer programs take advantage of the new APIs. The alternative to multiple interfaces is to change the datatypes and structures for file i/o and force developers to rewrite anything that relies on 32-bit size of relevant members. This is a hostile step that SCO can't afford. They have to take the route of making developers choose to support 64-bit file sizes rather than forcing them into it.
Some country uses the Rand as its unit of currency?
What is it backed by, "enlightened self-interest?"
Zbigniew Brzezinski is one the few warhawks on the left side of things in America. If you want to read more on what the neocons are thinking, you should go to the Project for the New American Century, where they're quite open about their desires.
Brzezinski wrote in 2004 a book that heavily criticizes the approach of the current administration called, The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership. If you liked reading The Grand Chessboard, pick this one up too.
That article makes me wonder whether racial hatred is in part inspired by this "team strip" concept in the butterflies. In other words, the white protagonists are acting on their animal instincts to use "reinforcement" (as the article calls it) to encourage speciation.
Yeah, basically. Of course, skin color is just one very easy way of setting up an "us vs. them" dichotomy. Humans have an instinctive animal urge to form groups, to ignore the flaws of the group they are in, and to demonize others based on their flaws (real or imagined). It's primative pack rivalry.
Pick up a copy of the book "The Lucifer Principle" sometime. I think you'd like it. There are aspects of it that I find a little personally offensive given the somewhat callous treatment of religion in the book, but the core topics about social organisms and primitive animal instincts that exist in man and shape our behaviors makes for a fascinating read.
Is anyone else feeling a little deja vu here?
A big software company gets mad at a researcher giving a speech on a security flaw in their software and attempts to sue them. They get the FBI involved before realizing that they're taking a lot of PR damage and then suddenly act all buddy-buddy with the person they went on the attack against. In the meantime, the FBI doesn't give up just because the company now wants to polish its image, and the researcher's life is negatively impacted.
Sounds like Adobe and Dmitri Sklyarov, doesn't it?
I don't know about that. I think there's a difference between fantasizing about violence (through video games) and actually practicing violence (on the football field).
How many teenage rapists has you heard about in the news that were video game nerds vs. football players? How many nerds liked to team up on a single guy and beat him up? On the other hand, nerds to get the greater number of mass murders, but I think that trend was true long before video games.
However, lacking epidemiological studies, it's all just scaremongering.
You are correct. "Tax and spend" doesn't really cover the current Republican party. At the very least taxing to raise revenue first instead of putting off revenue generation off until that debt has had time to accrue interest would be too fiscally responsible to describe the current government.
I prefer, "Charge it!" over "Tax and Spend."
The GOP is acting a lot like an irresponsible teenager with a credit card. They're piling up debt recklessly without regards for the future. The only difference is that a teenager can't rewrite the law so that someone else will have to pick up their share of the debt when they're done like the Republican leadership is doing to the middle class by slashing taxes for the rich. That money's going to come from somewhere, and the Republican politicians and their friends are dedicated to making sure that it isn't them all while feeding at the trough of taxpayers money.
Party of small government, my ass...
What do you have to be running to see anything other than a blank page?
"Mr. T vs." websites
"Ate my Balls" websites
Time Cube
Alex Chiu
Micropayments
Best. Satire. Ever.