But Islam was the voice of moderation for the first five hundred years of its existence: it was the intellectual bright light of the Western world until the 1600's Renaissance in Europe. During the Middle Ages, Islam kept and studied the old Greek texts the Christians were burning, did really good research into math, chemistry, and anatomy, and generally acted like they were the only reasonable path towards higher learning. They're not in the terrible twos: it's like (a very small group of) Islam has regressed to an earlier more horrible time.
Indeed this is true. It has actually regressed in the last 300 years.
Just a note: For christians the old testement represents the old "jewish" covenant. While the new testement represents the new covenant christians live by. So your arguement is superflous.
- A series of cartoons showing black people being lynched, raped, and whipped, with the word "Niggers" appearing prominently in them in various ways
- A series of cartoons showing famous molested children like Jean-Benet being graphically fondled by prominent political figures like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
- A series of cartoons graphically and gleefully depicting the 9/11 disaster victims meeting their deaths in various amusing ways
You would have a couple of mild protests about the ignorance of said papers and that would be about it. Also, the last one does actually appear in some arab papers.
Turn in your/. - geek cred immediatly! Shame on you for not including long distance upskirts/voyuerism in your short list of applications. Everyone knows that porn is what drives all new technologies.
As soon as they invent long distance bukakke as well I'm in.
Original parents assertion that no one he knows eyes have gotten worse.. all of my friends (in their 20s, as well as my sister) have had their eyes deteriorate terribly and seen their diagnosis go from -1 down to -7 or more. This does not occur if you need reading glasses, or if you have a stigmatism. This is for myopia (nearsightedness).
And I am the freakish counter example. My eyes have been stedily gettign better as I wear glasses. Going from -3.9 to my current -3.1 in the last 3 years. (both my eyes are the same prescription.)
basically make it like WoW... which has its own very publicised gold farming and RMT issues themselves. Even Diablo had hackers who duped gold so your idea doesnt work very well.
Dupes are bugs, their a problem outside of what I proposed, and Wow has gold farmers because gold is still very very useful. Item farming not so much because everything is bind on pickup. Another idea would be a commodity system where items that are farmed a lot lose value, promoting everyone hunting something different. Add supply and demand to the seller junk economy which would force farmers to think and not just farm a single area.
make gold irrelevant. Like diablo 2, gold was mostly meaningless. make all the good items bind on pickup and have no more gold sinks, make it quests. For instance instead fo 80 gold to buy a mount, make it a quest that takes 1-5 hours. instead of making your castle require upkeep in gold, make it so you have to spend a X amount of time doing administration (in the form of little games you play for a certain amoutn of time). Make gold available and make it variably avaialble based on how much is in the system, if it starts hoarding gold, make a tax system that robs anyone who hoards it. Got 1mil gold well the kingdom of astermouth will force you to tithe 10% of the first 100,000 20% of the next 400,000 and 30 of the next 500,000. Make it so having those amounts will be hard to force farmers to do more admin work. And deduct your taxes at random (say no more then X times in a period of X days totalling the entire amount. So for a 30% tax, you can take onyl a total of 30% in a 1 mo period but it's taken at random and calculated at random. may 5th it calculates, 16th 19th, 25th it withdraws a third of what the calculation woudl be) all of sudden hoarding gold seems stupid, farming it it not all that worth while. They wont' go away but at least you've made thier lives very difficult.
Only the rich will be able to afford this tech for the next 10-20 years. After that, maybe the middle class will be able to afford it. In any event, it's not something the lower class would get.
Unless your canadian then you all have to wait 50 years to get this technology and wait 4 years until a OR opens up for you. But we all get them.
I live in Italy, and the rest of Europe I don't suppose is much different (England isn't). Tell me, every guy across every counter is so lenient when you buy a prebuilt PC?
To be fair, Trump's billions are in real estate that's leveraged up to his wavy hairdo While he's pretty rich from anyone's point of view, he probably has very little free cash flow to donate to charities. BG on the other hand, is swimming in cash. A better comparison would be other billionaires with whopping piles of cash and nothing leveraged, say Lucas, for example.
Trump is an interesting study, he is basicall a shyster who is very successful at convincing people he is very successful. That is how he makes his money, his frequent bankruptcy is a result of his actual "good" but not "great" business acumen.
The problem isn't that Bill is giving money to charity: It's that he's giving my money to charity. Money that I invested in AOL. Novell. Palm. Digital Research. Sega. Apple. (Steve Jobs is making a good return for Apple investors these days, but he's the exception to the rule.) That Gates is now magnanimously giving away the money he stole -- via predatory and illegal business practices -- doesn't make me feel any more charitable about the man who robbed me.
And then there's the fact that Windows is a bloated bag of security holes masquerading as an operating system, but that's really more of an aesthetic complaint.
In that case EVERY corporation on earth has your money and the only way to fight this evil is to sell everythign and start a commune in south america. Just don't drink the cool aid.
Don't forget that Bill Gates has caused immense harm for the world too. The difference between the current situation and having an open operating system and open software being dominant (along with the correspondingly higher penetration of technology in the world and a better quality of technology) is over 1% of worldwide production. Economic rents do nothing but slow down progress and add friction to the system, and the effect is often far larger than the rent extracted.
Like any robber baron, Bill can give all his wealth to charity and the damage will be less than a tenth repaired. (my estimate is 1/100th repaired, using a discount rate of 10%, a personal wealth of $50B, a world economic loss of $500B/year, and a charity of average efficiency).
Making a buggy insecure OS that improves slowly but steadily isn't exactly equal to say aids or malaria. He didn't play nice to get where he is, and his OS could use some polish and maybe a rewritten kernel but he peddles goods, not massacres childrens. If you don't like his product go somewhere else.
My God, you are truly a pathetic nerd. He "stole" money, huh? From people who purchased his product?
Steal. v. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
If I go to your house, take away your money, but give back a "gift" in exchange, would you consider it stealing? Specially if that "gift" cannot replace the money I took away?
To put it in other words, if I FORCE YOU to buy my products, either by threatens or by AN IMPOSED MONOPOLY, I am, in fact, stealing.
Alright, you don't like the term? How about UNFAIR TAXES? To breathe, you must pay a tax. Or in this case, to run your business, you MUST purchase Microsoft Windows(TM). Of course, everything has its price...
The only difference between a monopoly and taxes, is that, unlike taxes, the owner of a monopoly does not have the legal obligation to return that money to the people. So we are, in fact, under a technological dictatorship.
See where I'm getting at?
Straining there aren't we chuck. MS has compition, there are alternatives. People are just not into learning how to use the competition no matter how easy it is. Just as VHS was successful because it was "good enough" MS is #1 because it is "good enough". They are just about as decietful and evil as anyothercompany. Us geeks dislike them because the the biggest most obvious target of what we think the tech industry is doing wrong.
How 'bout the microsoft tax I have to pay on almost every laptop and computer I don't build myself? The trials did dig out some very nasty moves made by MS to ensure that most every vendor complied with their terms. Right now, it's pretty difficult in most rich countries (piracy is rife in others and they sell you either pirated copies of windows or bumfuck linux distros and tell you where to get your windows pirated copy) to get a computer without paying for windows.
Possibly in america but in canada I just tell the guy across the counter "hey, I don't need windows. I'm installing Mandrake." to which he replies "Alright, I'll knock 100 off the price."
Libel and slander are legal terms though. In this case the government didn't revoke his scholarship, the school, who offered the scholarship in the first place, did. If I hire somebody to paint a fence and they start cursing up a storm while doing so I have every right to pay them for services rendered and kick them out and get someone else to paint the fence. Why? Becuase it's my money he is using, if the painter doesn't like my terms then they can go find someone elses fence to paint. It's the same situation here.
Of course the painter you fired is also free to take you to court for wrongful dismissal as his cursing had nothing to do with the job at hand. Ditto with the student, he can sue for damages and libel because his punishement may have been overly harsh compared to his trasngression.
When you're writing software for an air traffic control system, military avionics software, or an authentication system for the NSA, the delivered code can't afford to have bugs
So a few bugs in commercial avionics is acceptable?
Meh, they'll just chalk it up to terrorists and no one will know the difference.
I have a ruthless drive to find knowledge about China, warfare, history, cultures, technology and as of yet the internet is woefully skimpy on details and is often wrong in general. If they can archive enough online information in html format (pdf's suck) I'd pay to access it, up to $10 CND a month (hobbies have monetary limits). If it's free all the better. Unfortunately I'm a minority in this world, and most people would want it for free and most people just want to know what Bennifer II had for breakfast and how many anti-matter relays a constallation class starship has.
Oh Lord. It's the "let's be different" crowd again.
Basic conversational topic:
1. Take that is great/popular/whatever, and degrade it. 2. Take that is woefully unpopular for whatever reason, and proclaim it's the best thing since sliced bread (of course the "be different" crowd probably will proclaim that the bread was much better before they started slicing it).
Item can be coffee, tv shows, electronic devices, movies, music, or in this case a girl.
No, I'm not a huge fan of her music, and I haven't really paid enough attention to know how she acts, but as to plain appearances, Britney Spears is in the top 1-2% of girls I've ever seen (and that is the reason why the industry made her into their poster-girl: because her look alone would sell records).
I've dated girls prettier and know many more beautiful. Although none as rich. She's is pretty average. Ever see her without make up? That counts for a lot. You can do many tricks to make someone average look good but without make up she is homely. I think Jennifer lopez is very good looking, jessica/ashley simpson are very attractive, even christina aguilara is beautiful but Britany is not. I say this objectively.
Oh yeah, Forgot to add : Britney Spears listening AND buying. I mean even I couldn't help but notice that the music executives had picked a pretty hot, underage at the time, blond girl from a hick town to be their poster star, and had underdressed her and put her in some pretty suggestive songs. But I'm not among those MILLIONS of fools who paid at least 15 bucks for a whole cd of this! Some did it more than one time.
Err.. she's kinda homely. I mean her body is okay but her face is nothing to write home about. Kevin Federline is slumming, he could do better. she has bad skin, a really funny noise, eyes that seem a bit off and she's the living embodiment of slut.
Slashdot Mirror
But Islam was the voice of moderation for the first five hundred years of its existence: it was the intellectual bright light of the Western world until the 1600's Renaissance in Europe. During the Middle Ages, Islam kept and studied the old Greek texts the Christians were burning, did really good research into math, chemistry, and anatomy, and generally acted like they were the only reasonable path towards higher learning. They're not in the terrible twos: it's like (a very small group of) Islam has regressed to an earlier more horrible time.
Indeed this is true. It has actually regressed in the last 300 years.
Check out the Old Testament sometime.
Just a note: For christians the old testement represents the old "jewish" covenant. While the new testement represents the new covenant christians live by. So your arguement is superflous.
- A series of cartoons showing black people being lynched, raped, and whipped, with the word "Niggers" appearing prominently in them in various ways
- A series of cartoons showing famous molested children like Jean-Benet being graphically fondled by prominent political figures like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
- A series of cartoons graphically and gleefully depicting the 9/11 disaster victims meeting their deaths in various amusing ways
You would have a couple of mild protests about the ignorance of said papers and that would be about it. Also, the last one does actually appear in some arab papers.
No his assertion about ID is correct it is "ANTI"-scientific. It is the literal anti-thesis of Science.
Turn in your /. - geek cred immediatly! Shame on you for not including long distance upskirts/voyuerism in your short list of applications. Everyone knows that porn is what drives all new technologies.
As soon as they invent long distance bukakke as well I'm in.
Original parents assertion that no one he knows eyes have gotten worse .. all of my friends (in their 20s, as well as my sister) have had their eyes deteriorate terribly and seen their diagnosis go from -1 down to -7 or more. This does not occur if you need reading glasses, or if you have a stigmatism. This is for myopia (nearsightedness).
And I am the freakish counter example. My eyes have been stedily gettign better as I wear glasses. Going from -3.9 to my current -3.1 in the last 3 years. (both my eyes are the same prescription.)
basically make it like WoW... which has its own very publicised gold farming and RMT issues themselves. Even Diablo had hackers who duped gold so your idea doesnt work very well.
Dupes are bugs, their a problem outside of what I proposed, and Wow has gold farmers because gold is still very very useful. Item farming not so much because everything is bind on pickup. Another idea would be a commodity system where items that are farmed a lot lose value, promoting everyone hunting something different. Add supply and demand to the seller junk economy which would force farmers to think and not just farm a single area.
make gold irrelevant. Like diablo 2, gold was mostly meaningless. make all the good items bind on pickup and have no more gold sinks, make it quests. For instance instead fo 80 gold to buy a mount, make it a quest that takes 1-5 hours. instead of making your castle require upkeep in gold, make it so you have to spend a X amount of time doing administration (in the form of little games you play for a certain amoutn of time). Make gold available and make it variably avaialble based on how much is in the system, if it starts hoarding gold, make a tax system that robs anyone who hoards it. Got 1mil gold well the kingdom of astermouth will force you to tithe 10% of the first 100,000 20% of the next 400,000 and 30 of the next 500,000. Make it so having those amounts will be hard to force farmers to do more admin work. And deduct your taxes at random (say no more then X times in a period of X days totalling the entire amount. So for a 30% tax, you can take onyl a total of 30% in a 1 mo period but it's taken at random and calculated at random. may 5th it calculates, 16th 19th, 25th it withdraws a third of what the calculation woudl be) all of sudden hoarding gold seems stupid, farming it it not all that worth while. They wont' go away but at least you've made thier lives very difficult.
This is just one step in a grand conspiracy by those sneaky canucks to take over the word.
I for one welcome our touque wearing overlords.
Bush: I'm happy to be on your show and to entertain these folks.
Stewie: Well, I'd love to stay and chat, but you're a total bitch.
Only the rich will be able to afford this tech for the next 10-20 years.
After that, maybe the middle class will be able to afford it. In any event, it's not something the lower class would get.
Unless your canadian then you all have to wait 50 years to get this technology and wait 4 years until a OR opens up for you. But we all get them.
I live in Italy, and the rest of Europe I don't suppose is much different (England isn't). Tell me, every guy across every counter is so lenient when you buy a prebuilt PC?
As long as it's not a major chain.
To be fair, Trump's billions are in real estate that's leveraged up to his wavy hairdo While he's pretty rich from anyone's point of view, he probably has very little free cash flow to donate to charities. BG on the other hand, is swimming in cash. A better comparison would be other billionaires with whopping piles of cash and nothing leveraged, say Lucas, for example.
Trump is an interesting study, he is basicall a shyster who is very successful at convincing people he is very successful. That is how he makes his money, his frequent bankruptcy is a result of his actual "good" but not "great" business acumen.
The problem isn't that Bill is giving money to charity: It's that he's giving my money to charity. Money that I invested in AOL. Novell. Palm. Digital Research. Sega. Apple. (Steve Jobs is making a good return for Apple investors these days, but he's the exception to the rule.) That Gates is now magnanimously giving away the money he stole -- via predatory and illegal business practices -- doesn't make me feel any more charitable about the man who robbed me.
And then there's the fact that Windows is a bloated bag of security holes masquerading as an operating system, but that's really more of an aesthetic complaint.
In that case EVERY corporation on earth has your money and the only way to fight this evil is to sell everythign and start a commune in south america. Just don't drink the cool aid.
Don't forget that Bill Gates has caused immense harm for the world too. The difference between the current situation and having an open operating system and open software being dominant (along with the correspondingly higher penetration of technology in the world and a better quality of technology) is over 1% of worldwide production. Economic rents do nothing but slow down progress and add friction to the system, and the effect is often far larger than the rent extracted.
Like any robber baron, Bill can give all his wealth to charity and the damage will be less than a tenth repaired. (my estimate is 1/100th repaired, using a discount rate of 10%, a personal wealth of $50B, a world economic loss of $500B/year, and a charity of average efficiency).
Making a buggy insecure OS that improves slowly but steadily isn't exactly equal to say aids or malaria. He didn't play nice to get where he is, and his OS could use some polish and maybe a rewritten kernel but he peddles goods, not massacres childrens. If you don't like his product go somewhere else.
My God, you are truly a pathetic nerd. He "stole" money, huh? From people who purchased his product?
Steal. v. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
If I go to your house, take away your money, but give back a "gift" in exchange, would you consider it stealing? Specially if that "gift" cannot replace the money I took away?
To put it in other words, if I FORCE YOU to buy my products, either by threatens or by AN IMPOSED MONOPOLY, I am, in fact, stealing.
Alright, you don't like the term? How about UNFAIR TAXES? To breathe, you must pay a tax. Or in this case, to run your business, you MUST purchase Microsoft Windows(TM). Of course, everything has its price...
The only difference between a monopoly and taxes, is that, unlike taxes, the owner of a monopoly does not have the legal obligation to return that money to the people. So we are, in fact, under a technological dictatorship.
See where I'm getting at?
Straining there aren't we chuck. MS has compition, there are alternatives. People are just not into learning how to use the competition no matter how easy it is. Just as VHS was successful because it was "good enough" MS is #1 because it is "good enough". They are just about as decietful and evil as any other company. Us geeks dislike them because the the biggest most obvious target of what we think the tech industry is doing wrong.
How 'bout the microsoft tax I have to pay on almost every laptop and computer I don't build myself? The trials did dig out some very nasty moves made by MS to ensure that most every vendor complied with their terms. Right now, it's pretty difficult in most rich countries (piracy is rife in others and they sell you either pirated copies of windows or bumfuck linux distros and tell you where to get your windows pirated copy) to get a computer without paying for windows.
Possibly in america but in canada I just tell the guy across the counter "hey, I don't need windows. I'm installing Mandrake." to which he replies "Alright, I'll knock 100 off the price."
Libel and slander are legal terms though. In this case the government didn't revoke his scholarship, the school, who offered the scholarship in the first place, did. If I hire somebody to paint a fence and they start cursing up a storm while doing so I have every right to pay them for services rendered and kick them out and get someone else to paint the fence. Why? Becuase it's my money he is using, if the painter doesn't like my terms then they can go find someone elses fence to paint. It's the same situation here.
Of course the painter you fired is also free to take you to court for wrongful dismissal as his cursing had nothing to do with the job at hand. Ditto with the student, he can sue for damages and libel because his punishement may have been overly harsh compared to his trasngression.
When you're writing software for an air traffic control system, military avionics software, or an authentication system for the NSA, the delivered code can't afford to have bugs
So a few bugs in commercial avionics is acceptable?
Meh, they'll just chalk it up to terrorists and no one will know the difference.
They shut down internet porn sites but porn is freely available in pirated forms at any and all video stores I went to whiel I was there.
I have a ruthless drive to find knowledge about China, warfare, history, cultures, technology and as of yet the internet is woefully skimpy on details and is often wrong in general. If they can archive enough online information in html format (pdf's suck) I'd pay to access it, up to $10 CND a month (hobbies have monetary limits). If it's free all the better. Unfortunately I'm a minority in this world, and most people would want it for free and most people just want to know what Bennifer II had for breakfast and how many anti-matter relays a constallation class starship has.
Home computer:
price: $1100
retail profit: $150
wholesale profit: $100
manufacturers profit: $50
cost: $800 (includes warehousign and shipping)
Office desktop:
price: $1100
retail profit: $0 (sold directly)
Wholesale profit: $0 (sold directly)
manufacturers profit: $300
cost: $800 (includes warehousign and shipping)
net result: The manufacterers care lessd about you.
Oh Lord. It's the "let's be different" crowd again.
Basic conversational topic:
1. Take that is great/popular/whatever, and degrade it.
2. Take that is woefully unpopular for whatever reason, and proclaim it's the best thing since sliced bread (of course the "be different" crowd probably will proclaim that the bread was much better before they started slicing it).
Item can be coffee, tv shows, electronic devices, movies, music, or in this case a girl.
No, I'm not a huge fan of her music, and I haven't really paid enough attention to know how she acts, but as to plain appearances, Britney Spears is in the top 1-2% of girls I've ever seen (and that is the reason why the industry made her into their poster-girl: because her look alone would sell records).
I've dated girls prettier and know many more beautiful. Although none as rich. She's is pretty average. Ever see her without make up? That counts for a lot. You can do many tricks to make someone average look good but without make up she is homely. I think Jennifer lopez is very good looking, jessica/ashley simpson are very attractive, even christina aguilara is beautiful but Britany is not. I say this objectively.
I refer only to the one that comes with the xbox. It's onyl redeemed 10% of the time. not the games.
Oh yeah, Forgot to add : Britney Spears listening AND buying. I mean even I couldn't help but notice that the music executives had picked a pretty hot, underage at the time, blond girl from a hick town to be their poster star, and had underdressed her and put her in some pretty suggestive songs. But I'm not among those MILLIONS of fools who paid at least 15 bucks for a whole cd of this! Some did it more than one time.
Err.. she's kinda homely. I mean her body is okay but her face is nothing to write home about. Kevin Federline is slumming, he could do better. she has bad skin, a really funny noise, eyes that seem a bit off and she's the living embodiment of slut.