MegaDrive (Genesis): Successful but still a flop, lost to inferior SNES
Um, no. In that particular struggle, neither console was clearly superior. The Mega Drive had a significantly faster processor, but the SNES had a better sound chip. Graphics marginally favoured the SNES, which could display 4096 simultaneous colours compared to the Mega Drive's measly 64, and could do more fancy scaling and transparency effects; the Mega Drive's standard resolution was marginally higher than the SNES', but not by enough that many people noticed.
Does that make it unreasonable for shoe salespeople to observe that laces are difficult to tie, and to publicly suggest that shoe designers could improve the situation for everyone by designing shoes that are easier to fasten, or at least by agreeing on a clear and straightforward process for lacing them?
You should think of the other side as well. An amusing clip made an amateur piecing together work done by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time in making the work is more valueable than the work of the professionals?
Who said it was more valuable? The point is not that it is priceless, but rather that it is not worthless.
It is a creative activity, and the purpose of copyright law is to promote creative activities, not to protect the jobs of professionals. We must encourage creativity from everyone, even those who turn out not to be very good at it; universal participation is the only way to guarantee that the talented will discover their abilities in time to contribute to society. If copyright law has evolved into something that is more concerned with protecting existing works than with incentivising new works -- if it has evolved into something that is stifling any form of creative expression, no matter how trivial or pointless you may think that form -- then it is broken, and should be fixed.
Besides, your "amateur piecing together work done by professionals" may be another person's "subversive genius deconstructing modern culture". Consider Duchamp's Fountain, one of the most significant sculptures of the 20th century; to a connoiseur of ceramics, no doubt it's just an amateur rotating a urinal that was manufactured by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time to developing that urinal, but for some reason more people remember the guy who rotated it than the guy who actually designed it...
The question is how do we know relaxing copyright would do harm than good?
Assuming you intended to ask "how do we know whether it would do more harm or more good", the answer is that we don't know, but we can make a fairly shrewd guess by looking at history. From history, we see that lax copyright has rarely prevented creative geniuses from producing amazing works of art.
For example, Shakespeare's works were constantly copied, with poor-quality pirate editions often hitting the streets before his authorized publishers had finished setting their type. This did not prevent him from writing more plays. On the contrary, it created a situation where he had to keep writing more plays to earn a living! If Shakespeare lived today, he could just write Hamlet and then retire, secure in the knowledge that he, his children, and even his grandchildren would have a secure source of income from the royalties. He wouldn't have any pressing financial reason to write e.g. King Lear. Perhaps he'd write it anyway; perhaps he wouldn't. People are motivated by things other than money. The point is that copyright law deals primarily with money, and modern copyright law would reduce, rather than increase, the financial incentive for a modern Shakespeare to continue to produce plays.
Can you think of any counter-examples? Are there any geniuses we can identify who only produced great works of art because they would be protected by copyright, or geniuses who refused to produce great works of art because they considered copyright protections inadequate?
(Sure, I'm cheating -- but X11 was designed for running applications remotely. You have a Linux box, so you too can run Krita "in" Windows today. Surprisingly, the performance is pretty good; not on a par with a native Windows or Qt application, but easily as good as GTK, which is a distinctly second-class citizen on Windows.)
Actually, about half of the books on my bookshelf were written over 30 years ago (yet purchased in the last 5-10). Good literature survives very well, although the authors don't - most of the authors of my older books are dead now.
This is true of my bookshelf too. However, the majority of the older books on my shelf were purchased second-hand.
In other words, the restriction of copyrights to first sales means that for physical media, such as books and CDs, the length of the copyright term is irrelevant: most books and CDs will go out of print in a few years and will never be reprinted, so effectively the author ceases to benefit from sales very quickly regardless of the length of the copyright term.
What is the benefit of keeping a work in copyright when neither the author nor the publisher is receiving any money from further sales? Any economists or lawyers around who can explain the theory behind this?
Sometimes games can be movies in their own right. Either i became to old, or does anyone else remembers Wing Commander III and IV as well ?
Wing Commander is an interesting case. The games weren't classic cinema, but they were reasonably good space opera, particularly considering the limitations of budget and technology; they were certainly the best thing Mark Hamill ever did after Star Wars.
And yet when the time came to transfer to the big screen, the resulting movie was awful even in the opinion of fans of the series.
I don't understand how they managed that -- they had an existing franchise that basically consisted of movies separated by repetitive space combat, and an existing legion of fans who loved the movies they were producing, and somehow they managed to put out a movie that was so different that the fans hated it.
That, above all, was what convinced me that video games are unlikely ever to make a successful transition to film.
Outside of GameTap, you can get the episodes direct from the developer, but at double the price, and no other content.
Let's do some arithmetic.
GameTap subscription, according to you: 1 year at $4.95/mo = $59.40 Full Sam & Max (6 episodes), direct from the developers = $35.00
Looks to me like buying direct from the developer is HALF the price, not double. If you want the GameTap extras, or if you want to get each episode two weeks earlier, then GameTap is clearly the way to go, but if all you want is the Sam & Max game, buying direct will save you a lot of money.
Even if you buy the episodes individually from the developers ($8.00 each), you still wind up only paying $48.00, i.e. you save $11.40 compared to a GameTap subscription.
Don't ever get the idea of painting in CMYK, which is as defective as saving your temporary work files in highly-compressed JPEG.
The two are not even remotely comparable. That level of exaggeration borders on lying.
Your press output will vary based on the ink and paper you use.
It will also vary with the age of the printed materials and the lighting people look at them under. If you've worked professinally, you should be perfectly aware that it is ludicrous to believe that any technique will produce a 100% accurate guaranteed conversion from what you see on your screen to what you get on paper.
Meanwhile, your monitor's RGB output will vary based on the lighting conditions in your work space, the age of the monitor, the precise viewing angle (if it's a flat panel), etc, so it's not like RGB provides significantly more accuracy... unless you sink money into setting up a colour-neutral office, calibrating everything right down to the light fittings, and replacing your monitor regularly, and once you're spending that kind of money on hardware you might as well pay a few hundred dollars more and get some professional software to go with it.
At the low end where I work, working in CMYK produces significantly better results than working in RGB. Simple fact. Since GIMP users are more likely to be low-end than high-end, it follows that GIMP needs to support CMYK. Simple logic.
Method one is RGB. Don't whine about the gamut, because there is wide-gamut RGB.
Yeah? Can wide-gamut RGB distinguish between C0 Y0 M0 K100 and C100 Y0 M0 K100? No? It's useless, then.
Method two is spot colors. You edit the color channels individually. You see them in greyscale unless you supply a profile for CMYK-to-RBG conversion. Editing tools know nothing of the color; they ONLY operate on individual channels.
This is also utterly useless, unless you can compose CMYK in your head.
Method three, on the other hand, is to use a professional graphics editor.
It composes the individual colour channels for you, using your monitor's colour profile. You can specify all CMYK colours, including all the ones that can't be represented in RGB, and you can't specify any of the many RGB colours that can't be represented in CMYK -- unless you add a spot colour channel, of course. And you get to work in colour, just like with RGB editors. The colours you see on your screen won't be quite accurate, but they'll be a damn sight closer than looking at individual channels and trying to guess.
This is why GIMP is utterly useless to professionals, and why Krita is the first free product that's actually marginally interesting.
This is good on Linux, where you KNOW everything you install is GNU unless stated otherwise and present in non-free directory
Sorry, but you appear not to know what you're talking about.
The division of packages into "free"/"non-free" groups is made by numerous Linux distributions, such as Debian, but it is not an inherent part of Linux (or even GNU/Linux).
Even in Linux distributions which make such a distinction, it is certainly not the case everything classified as "free" is GNU, for two reasons:
Not all software that uses a GNU license is GNU software. The licenses are free for anyone to use.
Not all "free" software uses a GNU license. There are dozens of non-GNU licenses that are considered Free Software licenses.
That's not rhetoric, that's sound finance for the majority of the people who use pcs. Shame they don't get it. There's no need for them to fork out one penny for an operating system.
That's why they don't.
If I want to buy a new PC today, I have two choices. Either I buy one with Windows preinstalled, or I go to considerable extra effort to buy one without. Trying to buy a pre-built PC without Windows is hard; there aren't many places that sell them, typically there are fewer configuration choices, they may even be more expensive than equivalent models with Windows preinstalled. Sure, I could buy components and build my own PC, but then I have to research components and actually build the thing.
Even laying aside the fact that a PC without Windows could easily wind up costing more than the same PC with Windows, I must consider that my time is also worth money. The price of the amount of time it could take to get a Windows-free PC and install Linux on it could easily end up being greater than the price of a retail copy of Windows. So far as I can tell, sticking with Windows saves me money. Switching to Linux, far from making economic sense, could cost me money.
(I have deliberately avoided discussing the Apple option, because I don't know what the current situation is with Mac pricing.)
While a computer ignorant person may still try to use inflection or emphasis when speaking into the computer, almost no one is stupid enough to try to use body language when speaking into it. People should already have an instinct for this, as everyone uses the phone, and knows how to speak in a clear fashion when the body isn't visible.
I fear you overestimate the technical sophistication of the average human being. Have you ever watched anyone using a phone? A frighteningly high number of people try to use body language. You even see people nodding and stuff, and clearly expecting the other person to realise they nodded.
No, there is no "instinct" that leads "everyone" to know how to communicate unambiguously over the phone. People who have not been trained in it are generally pretty poor communicators, who only get by without any problems because by and large the people they talk to most on the phone are people they know very well -- friends and family -- who can therefore pick up many more cues from their voice and the ways they phrase things.
In this case, of course, that's a good thing, because it means the body language will still be there as the Iraqi citizen speaks into the translation device. I hope our troops are being trained to read it.
Sorry, but how is Web 2.0 supposed to make Windows (or any operating system) irrelevant? All the great web apps we're seeing sprout up are new applications (wikis, social networking, etc). There aren't any web apps that replace traditional applications. For all the hype, toys like Writely are not even close to replacing rich client apps like OpenOffice.org, and nobody's even suggested using browser technology to replace Photoshop, or running Half-Life 3 in a browser.
Heck, I still use a separate email client, because webmail just doesn't seem to provide anything valuable, and the interfaces all suck (GMail sucks less, but I still can't imagine wanting to use it).
Web 2.0? Great for Wikipedia and YouTube, but it augments the desktop rather than replacing it. Wake me up when we reach Web 3.0 and browser-based apps can actually replace traditional desktop apps. Oh, wait, that still won't make operating systems irrelevant... it'll just mean that the browser has replaced the old GUI toolkit and that JavaScript has replaced C++ as the standard language for the same old rich-client desktop applications.
well the mpaa and riaa might have been itching to pick on poor little youtube but do they wanna pick a fight with google?
Probably. The AAP is already suing Google for copyright infringement over their book search thing, and the RIAA/MPAA have shown themselves to be considerably more litigation-happy than the AAP.
Britain's got a serious problem with Muslim whack jobs trying to take over the country.
Only according to white-supremacist whack-jobs.
Most of the Muslims I've known have just wanted to keep their heads down, work hard, and contribute to our society as much as they can without being targeted by racist mobs. If any of them are planning to lead a bloody jihad across the nation, they haven't shown much inclination yet.
If they applied that standard to everyine, all the "kill the infidel" crap that gets posted to UK Muslim web sites would be prosecuted too.
Uh, Abu Hamza got 7 years, remember? Radical Muslims are being prosecuted too. Hate speech is illegal regardless of what community you belong to, and Muslims aren't getting special treatment, whatever the racists might desire.
As for the smug Americans sneering that we don't have proper freedom because we have chosen to outlaw certain forms of speech, I'll accept criticism on issues of freedom from Americans when they clean up their own act. Is three years in jail for hate speech really worse than life in jail for petty theft?
Have a list that translates english math terms to your language.... Learn Farenheit, Miles, Gallons etc. I found it hard to work these terms.
This is very good advice. While the language in Britain is largely the same, and we even use miles and so on just like the Americans, it's important to remember that many things are not the same.
American pints, for example, are smaller than British pints (presumably because American beer is so horrible that nobody would want to drink a proper pint of it). Similarly, an American gallon is only about 80% of a British gallon (and there's probably a joke about fuel prices in there if anyone can be bothered to look for it).
Oh, and brush up on American spellings, too. From the number of Americans who daily make themselves look stupid on Slashdot by claiming that words like "misspelt" are misspelt, I get the impression that the American education system is not particularly comprehensive on the subject of world Englishes, and it likely follows that using anything but Webster's illogical creation on a test would get you marked down.
Wal-Mart has made their money in the grocery business in part by offering a purposely limited selection in order to drive down their costs. The last time I was in one I tried to find a mango and was met with both the absence of any mangos and widespread disbelief among the staff that such a thing as a mango even existed, which is probably part of the ploy to get people to accept the hobbled selection.
That's crazy. For comparison, my local Tesco is expanding its fruit & veg range faster than I can keep up. They stock things now that I hadn't even heard of five years ago. Upmarket places like Waitrose have even better ranges (they stock things I still haven't heard of!), but Tesco meets my grocery needs amply.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart in the UK struggles. Maybe they've met their match at last. I wonder if Tesco has any plans to expand stateside...
Every little bit helps. Sentences need a subject and a verb.
"Little" is the subject. It's a perfectly valid noun. Look it up in a decent dictionary if you don't believe me. My SOED lists the relevant sense as II.1: "a small quantity, piece, portion; a small thing; a trifle."
So, why do you Americans write "favorite" but not "serios", and "sulfur" but not "fosforus", and "alfa" but not "alfabet", and "aluminum" but not "americum"?
If there's one thing worse than archaic and illogical spellings, it's half-arsed spelling reform that leaves half the archaic and illogical spellings intact.
Slashdot Mirror
MegaDrive (Genesis): Successful but still a flop, lost to inferior SNES
Um, no. In that particular struggle, neither console was clearly superior. The Mega Drive had a significantly faster processor, but the SNES had a better sound chip. Graphics marginally favoured the SNES, which could display 4096 simultaneous colours compared to the Mega Drive's measly 64, and could do more fancy scaling and transparency effects; the Mega Drive's standard resolution was marginally higher than the SNES', but not by enough that many people noticed.
In other words, very hard to call.
Does that make it unreasonable for shoe salespeople to observe that laces are difficult to tie, and to publicly suggest that shoe designers could improve the situation for everyone by designing shoes that are easier to fasten, or at least by agreeing on a clear and straightforward process for lacing them?
Who said it was more valuable? The point is not that it is priceless, but rather that it is not worthless.
It is a creative activity, and the purpose of copyright law is to promote creative activities, not to protect the jobs of professionals. We must encourage creativity from everyone, even those who turn out not to be very good at it; universal participation is the only way to guarantee that the talented will discover their abilities in time to contribute to society. If copyright law has evolved into something that is more concerned with protecting existing works than with incentivising new works -- if it has evolved into something that is stifling any form of creative expression, no matter how trivial or pointless you may think that form -- then it is broken, and should be fixed.
Besides, your "amateur piecing together work done by professionals" may be another person's "subversive genius deconstructing modern culture". Consider Duchamp's Fountain, one of the most significant sculptures of the 20th century; to a connoiseur of ceramics, no doubt it's just an amateur rotating a urinal that was manufactured by professionals with lots of skill who devoted a lot of time to developing that urinal, but for some reason more people remember the guy who rotated it than the guy who actually designed it...
Assuming you intended to ask "how do we know whether it would do more harm or more good", the answer is that we don't know, but we can make a fairly shrewd guess by looking at history. From history, we see that lax copyright has rarely prevented creative geniuses from producing amazing works of art.
For example, Shakespeare's works were constantly copied, with poor-quality pirate editions often hitting the streets before his authorized publishers had finished setting their type. This did not prevent him from writing more plays. On the contrary, it created a situation where he had to keep writing more plays to earn a living! If Shakespeare lived today, he could just write Hamlet and then retire, secure in the knowledge that he, his children, and even his grandchildren would have a secure source of income from the royalties. He wouldn't have any pressing financial reason to write e.g. King Lear. Perhaps he'd write it anyway; perhaps he wouldn't. People are motivated by things other than money. The point is that copyright law deals primarily with money, and modern copyright law would reduce, rather than increase, the financial incentive for a modern Shakespeare to continue to produce plays.
Can you think of any counter-examples? Are there any geniuses we can identify who only produced great works of art because they would be protected by copyright, or geniuses who refused to produce great works of art because they considered copyright protections inadequate?
The one thing Krita cannot - run on Windows, wheras Gimp does.
Wanna bet?
(Sure, I'm cheating -- but X11 was designed for running applications remotely. You have a Linux box, so you too can run Krita "in" Windows today. Surprisingly, the performance is pretty good; not on a par with a native Windows or Qt application, but easily as good as GTK, which is a distinctly second-class citizen on Windows.)
Actually, about half of the books on my bookshelf were written over 30 years ago (yet purchased in the last 5-10).
Good literature survives very well, although the authors don't - most of the authors of my older books are dead now.
This is true of my bookshelf too. However, the majority of the older books on my shelf were purchased second-hand.
In other words, the restriction of copyrights to first sales means that for physical media, such as books and CDs, the length of the copyright term is irrelevant: most books and CDs will go out of print in a few years and will never be reprinted, so effectively the author ceases to benefit from sales very quickly regardless of the length of the copyright term.
What is the benefit of keeping a work in copyright when neither the author nor the publisher is receiving any money from further sales? Any economists or lawyers around who can explain the theory behind this?
Sometimes games can be movies in their own right. Either i became to old, or does anyone else remembers Wing Commander III and IV as well ?
Wing Commander is an interesting case. The games weren't classic cinema, but they were reasonably good space opera, particularly considering the limitations of budget and technology; they were certainly the best thing Mark Hamill ever did after Star Wars.
And yet when the time came to transfer to the big screen, the resulting movie was awful even in the opinion of fans of the series.
I don't understand how they managed that -- they had an existing franchise that basically consisted of movies separated by repetitive space combat, and an existing legion of fans who loved the movies they were producing, and somehow they managed to put out a movie that was so different that the fans hated it.
That, above all, was what convinced me that video games are unlikely ever to make a successful transition to film.
You know, I don't think I've ever seen a cover-highlighted 'exclusive review' where the game hasn't ended up getting 8 out of 10 or above.
Had it occurred to you that this might be because when a game turns out to be crap, the magazine doesn't bother to highlight it on their cover?
Just a thought.
I have a way to solve this problem without a bunch of emo hearings and speeches:
1) Ask the citzenry what should be done.
2) Do it.
So you want the country to be governed by what the tabloid papers tell people to think? Thanks, but I prefer a system with checks and balances.
Dang, I thought that's what we were already doing. World of WarCraft doesn't extract energy?!
It seems they forgot to plug the level treadmill in.
Outside of GameTap, you can get the episodes direct from the developer, but at double the price, and no other content.
Let's do some arithmetic.
GameTap subscription, according to you: 1 year at $4.95/mo = $59.40
Full Sam & Max (6 episodes), direct from the developers = $35.00
Looks to me like buying direct from the developer is HALF the price, not double. If you want the GameTap extras, or if you want to get each episode two weeks earlier, then GameTap is clearly the way to go, but if all you want is the Sam & Max game, buying direct will save you a lot of money.
Even if you buy the episodes individually from the developers ($8.00 each), you still wind up only paying $48.00, i.e. you save $11.40 compared to a GameTap subscription.
Don't ever get the idea of painting in CMYK, which is as defective as saving your temporary work files in highly-compressed JPEG.
The two are not even remotely comparable. That level of exaggeration borders on lying.
Your press output will vary based on the ink and paper you use.
It will also vary with the age of the printed materials and the lighting people look at them under. If you've worked professinally, you should be perfectly aware that it is ludicrous to believe that any technique will produce a 100% accurate guaranteed conversion from what you see on your screen to what you get on paper.
Meanwhile, your monitor's RGB output will vary based on the lighting conditions in your work space, the age of the monitor, the precise viewing angle (if it's a flat panel), etc, so it's not like RGB provides significantly more accuracy... unless you sink money into setting up a colour-neutral office, calibrating everything right down to the light fittings, and replacing your monitor regularly, and once you're spending that kind of money on hardware you might as well pay a few hundred dollars more and get some professional software to go with it.
At the low end where I work, working in CMYK produces significantly better results than working in RGB. Simple fact. Since GIMP users are more likely to be low-end than high-end, it follows that GIMP needs to support CMYK. Simple logic.
Method one is RGB. Don't whine about the gamut, because there is wide-gamut RGB.
Yeah? Can wide-gamut RGB distinguish between C0 Y0 M0 K100 and C100 Y0 M0 K100? No? It's useless, then.
Method two is spot colors. You edit the color channels individually. You see them in greyscale unless you supply a profile for CMYK-to-RBG conversion. Editing tools know nothing of the color; they ONLY operate on individual channels.
This is also utterly useless, unless you can compose CMYK in your head.
Method three, on the other hand, is to use a professional graphics editor.
It composes the individual colour channels for you, using your monitor's colour profile. You can specify all CMYK colours, including all the ones that can't be represented in RGB, and you can't specify any of the many RGB colours that can't be represented in CMYK -- unless you add a spot colour channel, of course. And you get to work in colour, just like with RGB editors. The colours you see on your screen won't be quite accurate, but they'll be a damn sight closer than looking at individual channels and trying to guess.
This is why GIMP is utterly useless to professionals, and why Krita is the first free product that's actually marginally interesting.
... so they can throw his ass in jail !!
Why would imprisoning a donkey help? Does he use it to carry all his luggage for him or something?
Sorry, but you appear not to know what you're talking about.
That's not rhetoric, that's sound finance for the majority of the people who use pcs. Shame they don't get it. There's no need for them to fork out one penny for an operating system.
That's why they don't.
If I want to buy a new PC today, I have two choices. Either I buy one with Windows preinstalled, or I go to considerable extra effort to buy one without. Trying to buy a pre-built PC without Windows is hard; there aren't many places that sell them, typically there are fewer configuration choices, they may even be more expensive than equivalent models with Windows preinstalled. Sure, I could buy components and build my own PC, but then I have to research components and actually build the thing.
Even laying aside the fact that a PC without Windows could easily wind up costing more than the same PC with Windows, I must consider that my time is also worth money. The price of the amount of time it could take to get a Windows-free PC and install Linux on it could easily end up being greater than the price of a retail copy of Windows. So far as I can tell, sticking with Windows saves me money. Switching to Linux, far from making economic sense, could cost me money.
(I have deliberately avoided discussing the Apple option, because I don't know what the current situation is with Mac pricing.)
While a computer ignorant person may still try to use inflection or emphasis when speaking into the computer, almost no one is stupid enough to try to use body language when speaking into it. People should already have an instinct for this, as everyone uses the phone, and knows how to speak in a clear fashion when the body isn't visible.
I fear you overestimate the technical sophistication of the average human being. Have you ever watched anyone using a phone? A frighteningly high number of people try to use body language. You even see people nodding and stuff, and clearly expecting the other person to realise they nodded.
No, there is no "instinct" that leads "everyone" to know how to communicate unambiguously over the phone. People who have not been trained in it are generally pretty poor communicators, who only get by without any problems because by and large the people they talk to most on the phone are people they know very well -- friends and family -- who can therefore pick up many more cues from their voice and the ways they phrase things.
In this case, of course, that's a good thing, because it means the body language will still be there as the Iraqi citizen speaks into the translation device. I hope our troops are being trained to read it.
Sorry, but how is Web 2.0 supposed to make Windows (or any operating system) irrelevant? All the great web apps we're seeing sprout up are new applications (wikis, social networking, etc). There aren't any web apps that replace traditional applications. For all the hype, toys like Writely are not even close to replacing rich client apps like OpenOffice.org, and nobody's even suggested using browser technology to replace Photoshop, or running Half-Life 3 in a browser.
Heck, I still use a separate email client, because webmail just doesn't seem to provide anything valuable, and the interfaces all suck (GMail sucks less, but I still can't imagine wanting to use it).
Web 2.0? Great for Wikipedia and YouTube, but it augments the desktop rather than replacing it. Wake me up when we reach Web 3.0 and browser-based apps can actually replace traditional desktop apps. Oh, wait, that still won't make operating systems irrelevant... it'll just mean that the browser has replaced the old GUI toolkit and that JavaScript has replaced C++ as the standard language for the same old rich-client desktop applications.
well the mpaa and riaa might have been itching to pick on poor little youtube but do they wanna pick a fight with google?
Probably. The AAP is already suing Google for copyright infringement over their book search thing, and the RIAA/MPAA have shown themselves to be considerably more litigation-happy than the AAP.
Then what do the governments do about the mosques where imams openly preached jihad?
Since you ask, they give the imams seven years.
How quickly and conveniently the racists forget anything that doesn't conveniently support their twisted worldview.
Britain's got a serious problem with Muslim whack jobs trying to take over the country.
Only according to white-supremacist whack-jobs.
Most of the Muslims I've known have just wanted to keep their heads down, work hard, and contribute to our society as much as they can without being targeted by racist mobs. If any of them are planning to lead a bloody jihad across the nation, they haven't shown much inclination yet.
If they applied that standard to everyine, all the "kill the infidel" crap that gets posted to UK Muslim web sites would be prosecuted too.
Uh, Abu Hamza got 7 years, remember? Radical Muslims are being prosecuted too. Hate speech is illegal regardless of what community you belong to, and Muslims aren't getting special treatment, whatever the racists might desire.
As for the smug Americans sneering that we don't have proper freedom because we have chosen to outlaw certain forms of speech, I'll accept criticism on issues of freedom from Americans when they clean up their own act. Is three years in jail for hate speech really worse than life in jail for petty theft?
(uhhh, I won't explain what kind of "image intensive sites" I'm talking about here, you can figure it out I'm sure). :)
Too easy.
Have a list that translates english math terms to your language. ... Learn Farenheit, Miles, Gallons etc. I found it hard to work these terms.
This is very good advice. While the language in Britain is largely the same, and we even use miles and so on just like the Americans, it's important to remember that many things are not the same.
American pints, for example, are smaller than British pints (presumably because American beer is so horrible that nobody would want to drink a proper pint of it). Similarly, an American gallon is only about 80% of a British gallon (and there's probably a joke about fuel prices in there if anyone can be bothered to look for it).
Oh, and brush up on American spellings, too. From the number of Americans who daily make themselves look stupid on Slashdot by claiming that words like "misspelt" are misspelt, I get the impression that the American education system is not particularly comprehensive on the subject of world Englishes, and it likely follows that using anything but Webster's illogical creation on a test would get you marked down.
Wal-Mart has made their money in the grocery business in part by offering a purposely limited selection in order to drive down their costs. The last time I was in one I tried to find a mango and was met with both the absence of any mangos and widespread disbelief among the staff that such a thing as a mango even existed, which is probably part of the ploy to get people to accept the hobbled selection.
That's crazy. For comparison, my local Tesco is expanding its fruit & veg range faster than I can keep up. They stock things now that I hadn't even heard of five years ago. Upmarket places like Waitrose have even better ranges (they stock things I still haven't heard of!), but Tesco meets my grocery needs amply.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart in the UK struggles. Maybe they've met their match at last. I wonder if Tesco has any plans to expand stateside...
Every little bit helps. Sentences need a subject and a verb.
"Little" is the subject. It's a perfectly valid noun. Look it up in a decent dictionary if you don't believe me. My SOED lists the relevant sense as II.1: "a small quantity, piece, portion; a small thing; a trifle."
So, why do you Americans write "favorite" but not "serios", and "sulfur" but not "fosforus", and "alfa" but not "alfabet", and "aluminum" but not "americum"?
If there's one thing worse than archaic and illogical spellings, it's half-arsed spelling reform that leaves half the archaic and illogical spellings intact.