Quite so, but most of those reforms were done by Hindus. Hindus are hated even more because they reformed. The hatred stems from those communities and political groups who do not show the same propensity for reform as Hindus, and, instead of observing and learning from them, wind up loathing them instead. The dynamic of anti-Hindu bigotry is basically the same as that of Anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle east. Jews were/are hated primarily for their social and cultural pliability by Anti-Semites, as are Hindus by Anti-Hindus.
You can't really chalk up a wandering squad of goons to "fighting anti-Hinduism". That as about as logical as justifying a bunch of country yokels in white hoods as just "fighting anti-white people-ness".
So you're saying that Israel does not have an intrinsic right to exist as a Jewish State? You might want to read something about the long and tragic history of Antisemitism in Europe and the Middle East before reaching such a radical conclusion. How about the Irish? Didn't they have a fundamental and intrinsic right to fight anti-Irish persecution and discrimination by the English for the preservation of their right to exist? Hindus are doing just that. Fighting with increasing desperation for their right to exist without fear of persecution or discrimination.
No, there is no intrinsic right for their culture to be preserved. If it died it died if it was subsumed into a larger culture so be it, if it mutates into something else fine. Individual rights should always trump "culture" since "culture" is just a particular set of values that are mutable. A culture will grow, will shrink, will die.
In my view, I consider such a statement to be itself a racist one, though perhaps in an "equal opportunity offender" sense. Every culture has a fundamental right to survive and grow, so long as it is not at the expense of others (a very significant proviso). To hold a view that is as radical as yours creates an atmosphere of conflict and violence between cultures, and sounds too much like political anarchism for comfort.
Think hard about this statement. For one culture to grow another must shrink. What I'm saying is merely what exists. Cultures come and go. Rise and fall, grow and recede. Culture is so mutable that modern "Jews" would be unrecognizable to middle-ages Jews. It is in a sense a different culture. Thats how it works. grow, change, shrink, die. To ascribe cultures "rights" is to invite racism, ethnocentrism, and massive logical fallacies. For instance lets say we have a culture of "nerds". And lets say this group dwindled into just a hundred individuals. They all happen to be men and all happen to be massively repellent to women, that is why there is only 100 left. By your logic they should be allowed to forcefully bring women into their community to rape them, to keep their culture going. No. If a culture cannot stand on its own, it will die eventually or shrink to insignificance. If it is small but self perpetuating then more power to them, but the culture itself should have no rights. People have rights, ideas should not.
I don't disagree that violence is a last refuge, but when a people are being systematically persecuted, attacked and their collective backs are against a wall, and when those who hate and loathe them intransigently refuse to engage in "negotiations" or "diplomacy",what is left to do, other than the "last refuge"? You should perhaps read about the often brutal and genocidal nature of anti-Hindu persecution in the history of South Asia before you arrive at your perorations.
Past wrongs do not justify current wrongs. My great-great grand father may have been abused by his white employers while he made the Canadian railroads but it doe snot justify me taking it out on that employers great grand son. One of my ex-GF was massively oppressed for being non-Muslim in Indonesia but that would not justify her blowing up Jakarta. The idea is they should find other avenues or they simply invite reprisal in kind. If there is no group large enough to hit them in kind then your arguments about "back against the wall" is ridiculous. Either way these tactics just invite bad PR, more violence, and animosity.
If a comment and a report converts you into an anti-Hindu bigot then I suppose debating with you is a waste of time, but here goes. Hindus have the same rights to protect, preserve and practice their faith, culture and society as anyone else. While I do not support mindless violence, the only reason why these people have gone that far is because they have been pushed there by the Communist-dominated Indian government, polity and intelligentsia, who spend a good deal of their time and political power creating a culture of hatred against Hindus in general.
I fully agree that Hindu's have the exact same right as other cultures ot preserve themselves. That is to say NONE. No culture has any intrinsic right to exist. It is simply a secondary trait of large groups of people. Cultures grows, mutates, recede, fades. Usually "cultural protection" is just another name for racism (see Indonesia/malaysia/France). I haven't a good ideas of how "anti-Hindu" the "communist" government is but a lot of the reforms that I am aware of that effect Hindu's tend to be positive human rights related things (laws regarding the untouchables).
Not in the real world. The real world often require defense with weapons and armies. Otherwise America and her allies could never have liberated Germany from the Reich, and India would never have liberated a brutally persecuted Bengali population from Pakistan in 1971. Those wars were violent, but necessary.
The truly competent devised the Marshall plan, avoiding a third world war through diplomacy and foresight. A truly competent organization would foresee such problems as the bitterness of a highly capable German populace after WWI and not written the treaty of versalles. Hind sight is 20/20 but generally the competent find other avenues and violence is a last resort. See Sun Tsu's treaty on the subject of war. I will agree that violence has it place but you explore other avenues first. The incompetent run to violence fastest because they have so few other options due to their lack or wisdom, intelligence, and guile.
That's overblown -- the origin of Shiv Sena is due to local Maharashtrian culture having been swamped by influx from every other part of the country -- a unique burden that Maharashtrians have to bear.
As for RSS, they were created not out of theological compulsions, but as a backlash to Islamic activism -- not so unfounded considering that ethnic group split the country.
No culture has any innate right to exist. Culture is simply a secondary trait of large groups of people. If a culture is diminishing then either it had to shape up to survive or it fades away. A good sign of a dying culture is this type of fascist/nationalist thuggery. It means rational options for maintaining the culture are not available. It also tend to make enemies further speeding this up. I have nothing against Hindu's and form the sounds of things "real" Hindu's dislike these people and their tactics every bit as much as I do. A culture that needs violence to prop it up is likely in danger of being washed away by the sands of time and no one will shed a tear for it.
Bhere is right, your comment and the report of RSS and Shiv Sena actions have greatly diminished my idea of Hindu's. Although I respect his position more and I assume he is a Hindu. Violence is the last resort of the incompetent and the action reported in the article clearly high light this. If they were competent they would ignore the small slights and aim for larger political goals. Instead they storm around like goods giving Hindu's a bad name.
Square was the king maker in the PS1 vs Saturn vs n64 generation.
Square was one of the king makers in the PS2 vs Dreamcast vs GC vs Xbox.
There is no doubt that a FF XIII exclusive will allow Sony to compete int his generation. Tiem will tell if that is alsoa king maker. At the very least it'll pull #3 sony in to #2.
FFXII is all over the map and spreads itself too thin, and thus appears daunting to the casual gamer. Not to mention that it's not as story-driven or character-driven as the others, so casual gamers don't have as much of a desire to see what's next and they aren't as attached to the main characters and they don't really care about making them survive or making their world better.
Considerign how well it sold This is purely incorrect conjecture. It's as deep or as shallow as you want it to be. It doesn't demand you do the deep stuff you can easily beat the game with very crappy set ups and occasional manual commands. Of you can munchkin like a fiend and have a set up to beat all the optional bosses. Most of the 3rd best weapons and armour are store bought, and they allow you to easily handle the end game.
Intel Turbo Memory lets your notebook actually learn your habits to provide better system response. That's because it stores frequently used information near the processor, where it's more quickly available. Better CPUs run better with Intel Turbo Memory.
This entirely new system innovation for Windows Vista PCs is based on Performance Intel® NAND Flash Memory (like the memory in an iPod* or USB 'thumb' drive), together with supporting software. It works alongside your system's RAM to increase the efficiency of data movement between the processor and hard disk.
Sounds like slow off chip cache, a la certain L3 Cache made of flash memory. I wonder what makes it notable? Size? cost? speed? Does it really help anything? It seems a large enough main ram would invalidate this or even the mere presence of on chip cache.
If you thought over packaging was bad now. Imagine a cereal box with 1/4 of it reserve for the battery that powers the digital paper display and 1/4 reserved for the speaker. The remaining 1/2 will be food facimille made of phosoric acid, aspertame, Hydrogenated vegetable oil, and recycled newspaper print.
Whoever at PA who thought this up is a pure marketing gennius. For the cost of a long distance call to a lunatic they managed to garner huge amounts of free publicity. No matter what crazy old jack did they would garner publicity. Pure genius.
The PS3 seems (so far) to be the most reliable of the bunch. Everyone knows of the 360's red-ring problem, and the Wii has had some bricking issues with firmware updates and issues with graphical artifacts due either to a badly-applied heatsink or a faulty graphics chip (in fact, mine's currently in for repair for this issue..:/ )
The only widespread thing I've seen about the PS3 is that it'll crash if it runs too hot, but if you're not a dumbass and you actually give it some airflow, you won't have that issue. Besides that, it seems like a quite solid machine and reliability complaints have been very, very rare for it.
Mine is a very very solid PS2 with a blu-ray player stuck on it. I kid but I actually loev the machine. IF only those exclusives start rolling in so I can say "i own a ps3" without getting looks of pitty. It provides a lot of extra utility to my big screen.
I enjoyed FF XII but I'm not going to spend what will likely be $660 to play XIII, especially since there will be versions released on every other console ever made (except the 360, apparently). I think Square lost sight of what makes FF a good game, for me it was never about the graphics. Final Fantasy XII will no doubt have beautiful graphics but the chances of it being a good FF experience are slim to none, probably due to too much energy being put into the graphics.
In the PS1 era I think people were shocked by how far graphics had come and Squaresoft used this intelligently at the time. Good graphics just arent that much of a shock anymore. I saw someone playing 360 the other day, a basketball game, and at first I thought he was WATCHING basketball on TV. Wow!! Then a minute later I saw the pixels, the seams, it wasnt as impressive as it had been at first glance. I got over the jump in graphics from the original xbox in less than 5 minutes. The improvement is there, definitely, but it's just not as big a deal as it used to be.
I think thats nostalgia since I thought the PS1 era was a bit sloppy in FFVII and tight but with a stupdi story in FFVIII and just utterly bland in FFIX. FFX was a little sloppy and focused on design philosophy of "how can we frustrate the player". I felt FFVI and FFIV were all much tighter in story pacing and action. But that could be nostalgia too. I felt FFXII was tighly made and oozed quality although the story wasn't as epic as I would have liked I had more fun playign it then X IX VIII. It's int he top 3 for me.
Yeah, I know, there are some twists concerning that last statement in the story, but the concept of the first several minutes of a story is to hook the audience. Introducing a whole slew of characters and then *killing every last one of them* (even if it later turns out they miraculously survived) does not create a compelling story. Especially when the main character they randomly dump on you turns out to be, hands down, the most annoying Final Fantasy character I can recall.
Did you happen to skip FFX? Because Tidus and Wicca are the two most annoying characters in the entire series. Vaan can be accused of being bland but he's not outright whiny and over emoting like Tidus or as outright stupid as Wicca.
Does it really surprise anyone though? FF is huge (perhaps as an understatement) in Japan where Microsoft has a pretty tiny share.
There is no doubt that FF is a juggaurnaut on both sides of the ocean. However it's more successful her ein NA then in JApan. In JApan Dragon Quest is the huge franchise and FF is #2/#3 in RPG's. Here in NA FF is the #1 and Dragon quest is down the line.
Wait a minute, the specs didn't call for her to be hot... It just said 5'4" and Asian...
So we could be talking about a chunky girl with mosquito bites, and a mouth full of crooked teeth, a strict no-sex-before-marriage policy, and a really foul attitude... Like the kind that would be all screaming at you in Cantonese every night, unless you cater to her every whim, as uttered in broken, thickly-accented English - and then if you give her the boot she sneaks back into your place and steals or destroys all your stuff...
See? SEE? Now do you understand why it's important to clearly and thoroughly define the requirements of your software before coding begins?
I prefer my personal impelmentation of "5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0". It's a great improvement over "5'3 blonde German Girl friend v9.5" who was actually an upgrade on "5'5 filipina stripper Girl Friend v6.9". I still fondly remember the one I started with "5'1 half filipina half chinese Girl friend v.5.0" however that implementation was not as asthetically pleaseing as the other three and came with "waiting for marriage" DRM but was more stable then two of the other three.
The current one ("5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0") is both stable, DRM free, include the "hot" feature and "sane" feature which some of the previous versions lacked. I was thinking of trying make the "threesome" feature but I might be pushing my luck:D
And just what exactly do you think Al Gore (inventor of the great internet, mind you) did with his movie? He showed only the subset of evidence which supports global warming, when there's plenty of evidence against it too. It's nothing new to only be getting half the truth from either side.
Likely because the evidence ont he other side is very very sparse and comes from mostly "vested" parties (ie. EXXON) or noted shills (Seitz et al). Mostly non-peer reviewed corporate paid studies.
Btw, if you didn't see Al Gore's movie, let me sum it up for you: "OHH NOOOOEZ!!! The world is coming to an end!!!"
I hadn't seen it since I avoid propaganda from btohs sides but the whole "OMG we're Fucked!" camp annoy me. At the very very worse we'll have famine and violent storms. It wont' kill us all, and I'm certain we can deal with it.
The only way they could claim ignorance at this point is by making a concerted effort to maintain said ignorance by ignoring any of the multitude of reports out there that contradict them. Going to that much effort to remain ignorant in order to avoid changing your opinion is evil in itself.
A reformulation of CLarks third law by J. Porter Clark: "sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
Did they finally add the "write my code for me" command? It seems to be one of the few things emacs hasn't implemented. I suppose a "materialize a 5'4 asian Girl Friend" command would be useful too. I think we should push for that in the next revision.
I had 2 identical systems a while back. old P4 1.8gz with asus mother boards I got from a dealer friend who couldn't moev them. They were unopened cpu's and new, just not cuttign edge. We needed 2 comps one for me one for my brother. At the time I had been Nvidia exclusive since about the first GeForce. I was advised that for that generation the ATI 9600 was the best bang for the buck. While my brother already had my hand me down GeForce MX. My system was crashing consistantly at least twice a day and the error message ont he windows systems traced it back to the aTI drivers. My brothers computer was stable and fine. So I went back to nvidia after that. It might have had great bang for the buck but crashign twice a day is not acceptable.
PS. And no windows in general does not crash twice a day on my systems. So it's acceptable.
Sounds like we outsourced our presidency and vice-presidency to Haliburton from your description.
Thats an interesting way to put it. I might agree with that assessment of my comment.
As a member of our military I am all for outsourcing of duties. It is just like corporate America, if you can completely define a subtask, lighten your load by outsourcing it. I would rather pay a little more now for someone to happily complete my task ontime than to give it to a government/military employee that will get bored, take forever, and eventually retire with an expensive pension.
I'm corporate, I can assure you we wouldn't do it with much more enthusiasm or efficiency and anyone here who isn't eventually going to draw a corprate pension isn't worth employing in general. I don't forsee any real benifits in outsourcign except we'll charge you 150% of what you wouldn't have paid a non-com staff to do the same job.
However, I feel our problem is when you outsource the decision makers. At that point you enter into a issues of fraud and ethical misbehavior. It is really hard for our military to keep highly skilled intelligence officers as they are highly recruited by corporate America. So, that means our "intelligence" officers are the middle of the road guys. Those good enough to get promoted but not good enough to get recruited. Wouldn't you want to outsource too?
I can see your problem and Am aware of it. I have a good friend who works for Canadian DOD. For him all the skilled labor is working to get their training for free and at the end of their term they go civ in that field making 5 times what they made in the military. The problem with outsorcing those skilsl though is if you need that position full time your goign to pay more for it since there is now a third party collecting a profit.
Lets say you offer payment X and civ corps offer 1.5X pay. Any intelligent person will jump on board with the civ corp. Now lets say you outsource to buy that expertise you lost back. Civ Corp isn't going just to lend you it's staff, it wants profit. So it'll charge 3X to loan you. Would it then not make economic sense just to offer a competative wage? Out sourcing makes sense when you don't need that ability full time so paying 3x for it temporarily is better then doing so in times when you don't need it. However this particular instance and in many corps they are out sourcing to get less skilled labour (endangering yrou life) to save a few bucks (often not). They do it because it's in vogue in management and it's perceived to be the thing to do.
HR in the military is a completely different beast and unless you have been in the military or worked as a contractor it is hard to believe how screwed up it really is.
I can imagine. Just remember that any suitably large organization has some gong show in one place or another.
You're right -- it's trollish, mainly because it's wrong. Go to fact check here for the actual truth. Cheney has received some deferred compensation and turned over a bunch of his stock options to charity. Apart from that, he has no continuing interest.
Which is still complete bullshit. At the end of his term Haliburton will be paying Mr. Cheney plenty for speaking engagements or as a advisory. He's done what he can to defuse the direct appearance of corruption but still makes numerous choices to benefit this one organization at the expense of US tax payers and US future interests. Why were so many no bid contracts awarded to a company he had an association with? Both the president and the vice were major parts of this company. Why is so much money flowing in that direction. You basically have 2 Amoral corporate agents posing as your head of state and alternate.
Congratulations on the rapidly declining dollar. A direct consequence of people like you who ignore the big picture and dwell on simple PR talking points and who feel overly invested in a political position that has not worked in your interest for a long time now. You international political and economic influence is waning and you continue to make decision in both government and corporately to expedite the fall of the American empire.
If anyone has noticed, Best Buy has begun to scale back their Blu-Ray section. HD-DVD offerings outnumber it significantly now. Not sure if this is any indication on the "format wars", but I am going to guess the whole UMD fiasco is probably making retailers pulling out quicker than normal this time around.
I've been there often int he last few weeks looking for movies. I have not noticed this. Future shop/Best buy have exactly the same shelf space for each.
You just can't beat the numbers. If there is a 256 bit keyspace and a secure algorithm, you are not going to be able to crack the machine. I suppose that perhaps American and European law enforcement could take a page out of Israel's book and start using "strong persuasion" to get keys from suspects, but I don't imagine that happening any time soon.
Um... never over estimate the morals of national security officers/police.
The reason Cavedog failed was because of TA: Kingdoms which was a horridly crappy game. I only wish I could have returned the thing. Their online play was very demanding on connections as well with massive numbers of bullets and other things to send. Dialup connections of the day had some troubles with that. Bonyards wasn't available right away either, and while it was a great idea, it was poorly done. Not that Starcraft was immune with de-synced games and the like, but it was way better than Boneyards. (Losing their top designers due to pointy haired bosses hurt them badly too)
Total Annihilation was our game of choice for lan parties and with good players it could take 3-4 hours in an eight player game to win. I think the relative simplicity of Starcraft was simply appealing to more players and games typically lasted less time. For many, more games played = more enjoyment.
You can argue sales numbers all day long, but does that make "The Sims" better than every other game in existance? Everything is subjective with terms like "better." I feel it's better than Starcraft, but eh, I've got them both. I enjoyed them both. I still play TA with friends. Havn't played Starcraft in years.
As I said in another post, More units != greater depth. TA sported longer games but the over all number of valid tactics is close to the same as SC. The key concepts differ on focus. In TA it was focused on defense, in SC it was focused on offense. I still play SC/War 3 and haven't touched TA. Even my romance with SupCom was short. No one I know around here is that hardcore into but I know 3 hardcore war3 players and most of my friends still break out SC. TA attracted some rabid fans because it turned out to be the underdog but it was not "better" in many senses then SC. It sported some technical superiority in it's engine but SC beat on on feature integration, range of machines it would run on, and it did sport depth. TA had 2 nearly identical sides with slight difference, SC had 3 drastically different races. SC was polished and had an enthralling story, TA had a bare bones FPS style story. SC was designed around shorter matches which fueled addictions more readily, TA went the command and conquer route. The style of play of TA even with some of it's better features over SC never felt as deep. The strategies were basically exactly the same as with Command and Conquer since really the majority of the units only differed in range, damage and HP. In SC you have much more special abilities to separate it out and there was less redundancy. IT was Tank 1 with little HP and fire power, Tank 2 with more power and hp, and tank 3 with a lot of hp and power. In SC it A marine serves a drastically different function then a seigetank or goliath and can still be valid late game while a pewee late game is just cannon fodder.
perhaps I slag TA too hard to throw it back at TA fanboys. I remember TA fondly and when me and my friend were int he mood for a 2h RTS romp with out newbie friends we had 1 game of TA. When we felt like fierce battles and lots of short matches we went with SC, and shit talked all the while. The defensive nature of TA appealed a lot more to our newbie friends. The end was inevitable but they felt the 1 hour they survived and 1 hour waiting for us to finish was better then the quick 10 min deaths they had in SC and the 10 min wait for us to finish.
Or rather.. it's a bit like faulting the construction company when the wall in your house fell over because somebody knocked on the door.
Anywho, anti-virus and personal firewalls are ridicilous concepts. You shouldn't have userland applications necessary for keeping other userland applications out of the actual operating system.
Even if Vista was as secure as OS X or a tinfoil hat version of linux you'd still have to contend with insecure applications and stupid users. Apple's install base tends to have more of a clue then Windows users and Linux boys can at the very least ID when their infected or comprimised. Thus there is a natural market for AV on Windows irregardless of how secure it is and there is regulatory concerns about MS inserting an anti-virus program.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite so, but most of those reforms were done by Hindus. Hindus are hated even more because they reformed. The hatred stems from those communities and political groups who do not show the same propensity for reform as Hindus, and, instead of observing and learning from them, wind up loathing them instead. The dynamic of anti-Hindu bigotry is basically the same as that of Anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle east. Jews were/are hated primarily for their social and cultural pliability by Anti-Semites, as are Hindus by Anti-Hindus.
You can't really chalk up a wandering squad of goons to "fighting anti-Hinduism". That as about as logical as justifying a bunch of country yokels in white hoods as just "fighting anti-white people-ness".
So you're saying that Israel does not have an intrinsic right to exist as a Jewish State? You might want to read something about the long and tragic history of Antisemitism in Europe and the Middle East before reaching such a radical conclusion. How about the Irish? Didn't they have a fundamental and intrinsic right to fight anti-Irish persecution and discrimination by the English for the preservation of their right to exist? Hindus are doing just that. Fighting with increasing desperation for their right to exist without fear of persecution or discrimination.
No, there is no intrinsic right for their culture to be preserved. If it died it died if it was subsumed into a larger culture so be it, if it mutates into something else fine. Individual rights should always trump "culture" since "culture" is just a particular set of values that are mutable. A culture will grow, will shrink, will die.
In my view, I consider such a statement to be itself a racist one, though perhaps in an "equal opportunity offender" sense. Every culture has a fundamental right to survive and grow, so long as it is not at the expense of others (a very significant proviso). To hold a view that is as radical as yours creates an atmosphere of conflict and violence between cultures, and sounds too much like political anarchism for comfort.
Think hard about this statement. For one culture to grow another must shrink. What I'm saying is merely what exists. Cultures come and go. Rise and fall, grow and recede. Culture is so mutable that modern "Jews" would be unrecognizable to middle-ages Jews. It is in a sense a different culture. Thats how it works. grow, change, shrink, die. To ascribe cultures "rights" is to invite racism, ethnocentrism, and massive logical fallacies. For instance lets say we have a culture of "nerds". And lets say this group dwindled into just a hundred individuals. They all happen to be men and all happen to be massively repellent to women, that is why there is only 100 left. By your logic they should be allowed to forcefully bring women into their community to rape them, to keep their culture going. No. If a culture cannot stand on its own, it will die eventually or shrink to insignificance. If it is small but self perpetuating then more power to them, but the culture itself should have no rights. People have rights, ideas should not.
I don't disagree that violence is a last refuge, but when a people are being systematically persecuted, attacked and their collective backs are against a wall, and when those who hate and loathe them intransigently refuse to engage in "negotiations" or "diplomacy",what is left to do, other than the "last refuge"? You should perhaps read about the often brutal and genocidal nature of anti-Hindu persecution in the history of South Asia before you arrive at your perorations.
Past wrongs do not justify current wrongs. My great-great grand father may have been abused by his white employers while he made the Canadian railroads but it doe snot justify me taking it out on that employers great grand son. One of my ex-GF was massively oppressed for being non-Muslim in Indonesia but that would not justify her blowing up Jakarta. The idea is they should find other avenues or they simply invite reprisal in kind. If there is no group large enough to hit them in kind then your arguments about "back against the wall" is ridiculous. Either way these tactics just invite bad PR, more violence, and animosity.
If a comment and a report converts you into an anti-Hindu bigot then I suppose debating with you is a waste of time, but here goes. Hindus have the same rights to protect, preserve and practice their faith, culture and society as anyone else. While I do not support mindless violence, the only reason why these people have gone that far is because they have been pushed there by the Communist-dominated Indian government, polity and intelligentsia, who spend a good deal of their time and political power creating a culture of hatred against Hindus in general.
I fully agree that Hindu's have the exact same right as other cultures ot preserve themselves. That is to say NONE. No culture has any intrinsic right to exist. It is simply a secondary trait of large groups of people. Cultures grows, mutates, recede, fades. Usually "cultural protection" is just another name for racism (see Indonesia/malaysia/France). I haven't a good ideas of how "anti-Hindu" the "communist" government is but a lot of the reforms that I am aware of that effect Hindu's tend to be positive human rights related things (laws regarding the untouchables).
Not in the real world. The real world often require defense with weapons and armies. Otherwise America and her allies could never have liberated Germany from the Reich, and India would never have liberated a brutally persecuted Bengali population from Pakistan in 1971. Those wars were violent, but necessary.
The truly competent devised the Marshall plan, avoiding a third world war through diplomacy and foresight. A truly competent organization would foresee such problems as the bitterness of a highly capable German populace after WWI and not written the treaty of versalles. Hind sight is 20/20 but generally the competent find other avenues and violence is a last resort. See Sun Tsu's treaty on the subject of war. I will agree that violence has it place but you explore other avenues first. The incompetent run to violence fastest because they have so few other options due to their lack or wisdom, intelligence, and guile.
That's overblown -- the origin of Shiv Sena is due to local Maharashtrian culture having been swamped by influx from every other part of the country -- a unique burden that Maharashtrians have to bear.
As for RSS, they were created not out of theological compulsions, but as a backlash to Islamic activism -- not so unfounded considering that ethnic group split the country.
No culture has any innate right to exist. Culture is simply a secondary trait of large groups of people. If a culture is diminishing then either it had to shape up to survive or it fades away. A good sign of a dying culture is this type of fascist/nationalist thuggery. It means rational options for maintaining the culture are not available. It also tend to make enemies further speeding this up. I have nothing against Hindu's and form the sounds of things "real" Hindu's dislike these people and their tactics every bit as much as I do. A culture that needs violence to prop it up is likely in danger of being washed away by the sands of time and no one will shed a tear for it.
Bhere is right, your comment and the report of RSS and Shiv Sena actions have greatly diminished my idea of Hindu's. Although I respect his position more and I assume he is a Hindu. Violence is the last resort of the incompetent and the action reported in the article clearly high light this. If they were competent they would ignore the small slights and aim for larger political goals. Instead they storm around like goods giving Hindu's a bad name.
Square was the king maker in the PS1 vs Saturn vs n64 generation.
Square was one of the king makers in the PS2 vs Dreamcast vs GC vs Xbox.
There is no doubt that a FF XIII exclusive will allow Sony to compete int his generation. Tiem will tell if that is alsoa king maker. At the very least it'll pull #3 sony in to #2.
FFXII is all over the map and spreads itself too thin, and thus appears daunting to the casual gamer. Not to mention that it's not as story-driven or character-driven as the others, so casual gamers don't have as much of a desire to see what's next and they aren't as attached to the main characters and they don't really care about making them survive or making their world better.
Considerign how well it sold This is purely incorrect conjecture. It's as deep or as shallow as you want it to be. It doesn't demand you do the deep stuff you can easily beat the game with very crappy set ups and occasional manual commands. Of you can munchkin like a fiend and have a set up to beat all the optional bosses. Most of the 3rd best weapons and armour are store bought, and they allow you to easily handle the end game.
Intel Turbo Memory lets your notebook actually learn your habits to provide better system response. That's because it stores frequently used information near the processor, where it's more quickly available. Better CPUs run better with Intel Turbo Memory.
y /index.htm">Intel® Turbo Memory
This entirely new system innovation for Windows Vista PCs is based on Performance Intel® NAND Flash Memory (like the memory in an iPod* or USB 'thumb' drive), together with supporting software. It works alongside your system's RAM to increase the efficiency of data movement between the processor and hard disk.
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/turbomemor
Sounds like slow off chip cache, a la certain L3 Cache made of flash memory. I wonder what makes it notable? Size? cost? speed? Does it really help anything? It seems a large enough main ram would invalidate this or even the mere presence of on chip cache.
If you thought over packaging was bad now. Imagine a cereal box with 1/4 of it reserve for the battery that powers the digital paper display and 1/4 reserved for the speaker. The remaining 1/2 will be food facimille made of phosoric acid, aspertame, Hydrogenated vegetable oil, and recycled newspaper print.
Whoever at PA who thought this up is a pure marketing gennius. For the cost of a long distance call to a lunatic they managed to garner huge amounts of free publicity. No matter what crazy old jack did they would garner publicity. Pure genius.
The PS3 seems (so far) to be the most reliable of the bunch. Everyone knows of the 360's red-ring problem, and the Wii has had some bricking issues with firmware updates and issues with graphical artifacts due either to a badly-applied heatsink or a faulty graphics chip (in fact, mine's currently in for repair for this issue.. :/ )
The only widespread thing I've seen about the PS3 is that it'll crash if it runs too hot, but if you're not a dumbass and you actually give it some airflow, you won't have that issue. Besides that, it seems like a quite solid machine and reliability complaints have been very, very rare for it.
Mine is a very very solid PS2 with a blu-ray player stuck on it. I kid but I actually loev the machine. IF only those exclusives start rolling in so I can say "i own a ps3" without getting looks of pitty. It provides a lot of extra utility to my big screen.
I enjoyed FF XII but I'm not going to spend what will likely be $660 to play XIII, especially since there will be versions released on every other console ever made (except the 360, apparently). I think Square lost sight of what makes FF a good game, for me it was never about the graphics. Final Fantasy XII will no doubt have beautiful graphics but the chances of it being a good FF experience are slim to none, probably due to too much energy being put into the graphics.
In the PS1 era I think people were shocked by how far graphics had come and Squaresoft used this intelligently at the time. Good graphics just arent that much of a shock anymore. I saw someone playing 360 the other day, a basketball game, and at first I thought he was WATCHING basketball on TV. Wow!! Then a minute later I saw the pixels, the seams, it wasnt as impressive as it had been at first glance. I got over the jump in graphics from the original xbox in less than 5 minutes. The improvement is there, definitely, but it's just not as big a deal as it used to be.
I think thats nostalgia since I thought the PS1 era was a bit sloppy in FFVII and tight but with a stupdi story in FFVIII and just utterly bland in FFIX. FFX was a little sloppy and focused on design philosophy of "how can we frustrate the player". I felt FFVI and FFIV were all much tighter in story pacing and action. But that could be nostalgia too. I felt FFXII was tighly made and oozed quality although the story wasn't as epic as I would have liked I had more fun playign it then X IX VIII. It's int he top 3 for me.
Yeah, I know, there are some twists concerning that last statement in the story, but the concept of the first several minutes of a story is to hook the audience. Introducing a whole slew of characters and then *killing every last one of them* (even if it later turns out they miraculously survived) does not create a compelling story. Especially when the main character they randomly dump on you turns out to be, hands down, the most annoying Final Fantasy character I can recall.
Did you happen to skip FFX? Because Tidus and Wicca are the two most annoying characters in the entire series. Vaan can be accused of being bland but he's not outright whiny and over emoting like Tidus or as outright stupid as Wicca.
Does it really surprise anyone though? FF is huge (perhaps as an understatement) in Japan where Microsoft has a pretty tiny share.
There is no doubt that FF is a juggaurnaut on both sides of the ocean. However it's more successful her ein NA then in JApan. In JApan Dragon Quest is the huge franchise and FF is #2/#3 in RPG's. Here in NA FF is the #1 and Dragon quest is down the line.
Wait a minute, the specs didn't call for her to be hot... It just said 5'4" and Asian...
:D
So we could be talking about a chunky girl with mosquito bites, and a mouth full of crooked teeth, a strict no-sex-before-marriage policy, and a really foul attitude... Like the kind that would be all screaming at you in Cantonese every night, unless you cater to her every whim, as uttered in broken, thickly-accented English - and then if you give her the boot she sneaks back into your place and steals or destroys all your stuff...
See? SEE? Now do you understand why it's important to clearly and thoroughly define the requirements of your software before coding begins?
I prefer my personal impelmentation of "5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0". It's a great improvement over "5'3 blonde German Girl friend v9.5" who was actually an upgrade on "5'5 filipina stripper Girl Friend v6.9". I still fondly remember the one I started with "5'1 half filipina half chinese Girl friend v.5.0" however that implementation was not as asthetically pleaseing as the other three and came with "waiting for marriage" DRM but was more stable then two of the other three.
The current one ("5'4 Asian Girl Friend v10.0") is both stable, DRM free, include the "hot" feature and "sane" feature which some of the previous versions lacked. I was thinking of trying make the "threesome" feature but I might be pushing my luck
And just what exactly do you think Al Gore (inventor of the great internet, mind you) did with his movie? He showed only the subset of evidence which supports global warming, when there's plenty of evidence against it too. It's nothing new to only be getting half the truth from either side.
Likely because the evidence ont he other side is very very sparse and comes from mostly "vested" parties (ie. EXXON) or noted shills (Seitz et al). Mostly non-peer reviewed corporate paid studies.
Btw, if you didn't see Al Gore's movie, let me sum it up for you: "OHH NOOOOEZ!!! The world is coming to an end!!!"
I hadn't seen it since I avoid propaganda from btohs sides but the whole "OMG we're Fucked!" camp annoy me. At the very very worse we'll have famine and violent storms. It wont' kill us all, and I'm certain we can deal with it.
The only way they could claim ignorance at this point is by making a concerted effort to maintain said ignorance by ignoring any of the multitude of reports out there that contradict them. Going to that much effort to remain ignorant in order to avoid changing your opinion is evil in itself.
A reformulation of CLarks third law by J. Porter Clark: "sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
Naah. What was that quote about never attribute to evil what can be sufficiently explained by ignorance...?
I do think we're dealing with a bit of both here.
Hanlon's razor
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
Ignorance is too kind a word for this. It's purposeful and willful stupidity.
Did they finally add the "write my code for me" command? It seems to be one of the few things emacs hasn't implemented. I suppose a "materialize a 5'4 asian Girl Friend" command would be useful too. I think we should push for that in the next revision.
I had 2 identical systems a while back. old P4 1.8gz with asus mother boards I got from a dealer friend who couldn't moev them. They were unopened cpu's and new, just not cuttign edge. We needed 2 comps one for me one for my brother. At the time I had been Nvidia exclusive since about the first GeForce. I was advised that for that generation the ATI 9600 was the best bang for the buck. While my brother already had my hand me down GeForce MX. My system was crashing consistantly at least twice a day and the error message ont he windows systems traced it back to the aTI drivers. My brothers computer was stable and fine. So I went back to nvidia after that. It might have had great bang for the buck but crashign twice a day is not acceptable.
PS. And no windows in general does not crash twice a day on my systems. So it's acceptable.
Sounds like we outsourced our presidency and vice-presidency to Haliburton from your description.
Thats an interesting way to put it. I might agree with that assessment of my comment.
As a member of our military I am all for outsourcing of duties. It is just like corporate America, if you can completely define a subtask, lighten your load by outsourcing it. I would rather pay a little more now for someone to happily complete my task ontime than to give it to a government/military employee that will get bored, take forever, and eventually retire with an expensive pension.
I'm corporate, I can assure you we wouldn't do it with much more enthusiasm or efficiency and anyone here who isn't eventually going to draw a corprate pension isn't worth employing in general. I don't forsee any real benifits in outsourcign except we'll charge you 150% of what you wouldn't have paid a non-com staff to do the same job.
However, I feel our problem is when you outsource the decision makers. At that point you enter into a issues of fraud and ethical misbehavior. It is really hard for our military to keep highly skilled intelligence officers as they are highly recruited by corporate America. So, that means our "intelligence" officers are the middle of the road guys. Those good enough to get promoted but not good enough to get recruited. Wouldn't you want to outsource too?
I can see your problem and Am aware of it. I have a good friend who works for Canadian DOD. For him all the skilled labor is working to get their training for free and at the end of their term they go civ in that field making 5 times what they made in the military. The problem with outsorcing those skilsl though is if you need that position full time your goign to pay more for it since there is now a third party collecting a profit.
Lets say you offer payment X and civ corps offer 1.5X pay. Any intelligent person will jump on board with the civ corp. Now lets say you outsource to buy that expertise you lost back. Civ Corp isn't going just to lend you it's staff, it wants profit. So it'll charge 3X to loan you. Would it then not make economic sense just to offer a competative wage? Out sourcing makes sense when you don't need that ability full time so paying 3x for it temporarily is better then doing so in times when you don't need it. However this particular instance and in many corps they are out sourcing to get less skilled labour (endangering yrou life) to save a few bucks (often not). They do it because it's in vogue in management and it's perceived to be the thing to do.
HR in the military is a completely different beast and unless you have been in the military or worked as a contractor it is hard to believe how screwed up it really is.
I can imagine. Just remember that any suitably large organization has some gong show in one place or another.
You're right -- it's trollish, mainly because it's wrong. Go to fact check here for the actual truth. Cheney has received some deferred compensation and turned over a bunch of his stock options to charity. Apart from that, he has no continuing interest.
Which is still complete bullshit. At the end of his term Haliburton will be paying Mr. Cheney plenty for speaking engagements or as a advisory. He's done what he can to defuse the direct appearance of corruption but still makes numerous choices to benefit this one organization at the expense of US tax payers and US future interests. Why were so many no bid contracts awarded to a company he had an association with? Both the president and the vice were major parts of this company. Why is so much money flowing in that direction. You basically have 2 Amoral corporate agents posing as your head of state and alternate.
Congratulations on the rapidly declining dollar. A direct consequence of people like you who ignore the big picture and dwell on simple PR talking points and who feel overly invested in a political position that has not worked in your interest for a long time now. You international political and economic influence is waning and you continue to make decision in both government and corporately to expedite the fall of the American empire.
If anyone has noticed, Best Buy has begun to scale back their Blu-Ray section. HD-DVD offerings outnumber it significantly now. Not sure if this is any indication on the "format wars", but I am going to guess the whole UMD fiasco is probably making retailers pulling out quicker than normal this time around.
I've been there often int he last few weeks looking for movies. I have not noticed this. Future shop/Best buy have exactly the same shelf space for each.
You just can't beat the numbers. If there is a 256 bit keyspace and a secure algorithm, you are not going to be able to crack the machine. I suppose that perhaps American and European law enforcement could take a page out of Israel's book and start using "strong persuasion" to get keys from suspects, but I don't imagine that happening any time soon.
Um... never over estimate the morals of national security officers/police.
The reason Cavedog failed was because of TA: Kingdoms which was a horridly crappy game. I only wish I could have returned the thing. Their online play was very demanding on connections as well with massive numbers of bullets and other things to send. Dialup connections of the day had some troubles with that. Bonyards wasn't available right away either, and while it was a great idea, it was poorly done. Not that Starcraft was immune with de-synced games and the like, but it was way better than Boneyards. (Losing their top designers due to pointy haired bosses hurt them badly too)
Total Annihilation was our game of choice for lan parties and with good players it could take 3-4 hours in an eight player game to win. I think the relative simplicity of Starcraft was simply appealing to more players and games typically lasted less time. For many, more games played = more enjoyment.
You can argue sales numbers all day long, but does that make "The Sims" better than every other game in existance? Everything is subjective with terms like "better." I feel it's better than Starcraft, but eh, I've got them both. I enjoyed them both. I still play TA with friends. Havn't played Starcraft in years.
As I said in another post, More units != greater depth. TA sported longer games but the over all number of valid tactics is close to the same as SC. The key concepts differ on focus. In TA it was focused on defense, in SC it was focused on offense. I still play SC/War 3 and haven't touched TA. Even my romance with SupCom was short. No one I know around here is that hardcore into but I know 3 hardcore war3 players and most of my friends still break out SC. TA attracted some rabid fans because it turned out to be the underdog but it was not "better" in many senses then SC. It sported some technical superiority in it's engine but SC beat on on feature integration, range of machines it would run on, and it did sport depth. TA had 2 nearly identical sides with slight difference, SC had 3 drastically different races. SC was polished and had an enthralling story, TA had a bare bones FPS style story. SC was designed around shorter matches which fueled addictions more readily, TA went the command and conquer route. The style of play of TA even with some of it's better features over SC never felt as deep. The strategies were basically exactly the same as with Command and Conquer since really the majority of the units only differed in range, damage and HP. In SC you have much more special abilities to separate it out and there was less redundancy. IT was Tank 1 with little HP and fire power, Tank 2 with more power and hp, and tank 3 with a lot of hp and power. In SC it A marine serves a drastically different function then a seigetank or goliath and can still be valid late game while a pewee late game is just cannon fodder.
perhaps I slag TA too hard to throw it back at TA fanboys. I remember TA fondly and when me and my friend were int he mood for a 2h RTS romp with out newbie friends we had 1 game of TA. When we felt like fierce battles and lots of short matches we went with SC, and shit talked all the while. The defensive nature of TA appealed a lot more to our newbie friends. The end was inevitable but they felt the 1 hour they survived and 1 hour waiting for us to finish was better then the quick 10 min deaths they had in SC and the 10 min wait for us to finish.
Or rather.. it's a bit like faulting the construction company when the wall in your house fell over because somebody knocked on the door.
Anywho, anti-virus and personal firewalls are ridicilous concepts. You shouldn't have userland applications necessary for keeping other userland applications out of the actual operating system.
Even if Vista was as secure as OS X or a tinfoil hat version of linux you'd still have to contend with insecure applications and stupid users. Apple's install base tends to have more of a clue then Windows users and Linux boys can at the very least ID when their infected or comprimised. Thus there is a natural market for AV on Windows irregardless of how secure it is and there is regulatory concerns about MS inserting an anti-virus program.