Your first statement isn't true at all. You even negate it in your second statement. A lot of thought went into the randomness some people perceive.
Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", Chet Baker's "It could happen to you", Thelonious Monk's "Monk's dream" and Louis & Ella's "Ella & Louis" are very, very far from improvisation, as is Oscar Peterson & Milt Jackson's "Very Tall".
Those are some of the greatest jazz records in history. While improvisation can definitely play a role in said recordings, most of them were rigorously planned. Brubeck's "Time Out" being an interesting example of an experiment with time-signatures that was *entirely* pre-meditated and which was recorded without a note or beat being out of place.
Having said that, the records I've mentioned have been "Understood" by millions of people the world over, and still it's great jazz.
Claiming that good jazz can't be understood by the masses is a fairly pretentious and elitist statement that really has no merit. It's basically a bunch of white free-jazz and fusion cats giving the genre a bad name.
Free jazz has been said to be Charles Mingus' invention, but he once said "If only those free jazz cats could play the same tunes twice... " To cut a long story short, while I'm an avid jazz fan, free jazz is really an abomination in the eye of the Lord. I can listen to anything from bebop to classic jazz to the tinkering Steely Dan did with the genre, but at the end of the day if the cats can't play the same tune twice I'm out of there.
Then again, I'm an Oscar Peterson fan. That about says it all. I don't want "infinite variations", I want a certain groove and swing to my music, however dissonant and angry it may be. So I reserve the right to take Fred Wesley's work over a particle synthesizer any day of the week.
One of the beautiful things about music, be it Miles Davis and John Coltrane working with the Miles Davis Quintet, The Notwist's electronic work, Tom Waits' most loony tunes or Mozart's most frivolous concertos, is that it's the product of a human mind expressing its particular brand of madness.
You take the mind/soul out of the equation and you'll see me turn my ticket in by the door as I leave the venue.
I hate to say this, but the French have excellent:
- Chansons: Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg - Hip-Hop: FFF - Techno: Air - Lounge: St Germain (the artist, not the compilations - Gypsy Jazz: Paris Combo - Pop: Nouvelle Vague
And this is just my extraordinarily limited knowledge of French music. Granted, the pickings are slimmer than in the Music Export Top 3, the US, the UK and Sweden, but still there's a lot of interesting things going on there.
Same thing in Germany with people like Luna, the Notwist, Die Fantastischen Vier, Jan Delay. Then it's the same with Norway with people like Morten Abel, Kinny & Horne, Kings of Convenience, Röyksopp and in particular Madrugada. Hell, even Austria has Waldeck and Kruder & Dorfmeister.
With a name like Moses Jones I don't know where the hell you're from, but I suggest you extricate your head from your arse before you make such statements the next time.
While I agree with much of what you say, that $12.000 comment was particularly silly.
A load of raw data on top of unreliable physical media does not an archive make. I happen to work as a support engineer for e-mail and medical imaging archives, and before that I've worked with data storage, backup and recovery for 12 years of my life, and I've observed that the hard disk is irrelevant. Associated with archiving there are a couple of problems that need to be dealt with:
- Data Life Cycle. If you want to store a medical image for the lifetime of a patient, and you realize a hard disk will have a data retention span of between two to five years, you will realize you need to keep that data "alive" for 68 more years.
- Authenticity / Logical disasters. You will want to digitally sign and encrypt that data and make it read-only because at the end of the day your archive needs to be tamper-proof.
- Formatting. 100 years from now, when Adobe and Microsoft might or might not be distant memories, you will still want to be able to access and read your presidential records made in formats of those companies, so your archive will have to be able to decode/display what's stored in it.
- Physical disaster. You will want that archive to be replicated in case a disaster/malice lays waste to the original site.
- Indexed. You will want to be able to search that archive for certain phrases and you will want to get a reply to that query within a reasonable time-span. For this purpose, you can find grid-based archives with on-storage indexes of individual cells that can traverse their bit of data in a couple of seconds.
- Ownership. Some data will go public completely, some data will only need to be accessible to certain audit officers, some data will start out as being confidential and will become public record as time goes by, and something needs to facilitate that process.
Now, dumping a bunch of raw data on a bunch of hard-disks give you a time-bomb which is pretty useless anyhow because even if the disks don't fail you will never find the proverbial needle in the hay-stack and even if you do you won't be able to decipher what's written on the bugger.
That's *exactly* why a 120TB archive is *not* and *never will be* a $12.000 question.
Having said that, obesity is being treated way too nicely indeed. It's some people's problem alright, but the second law of thermodynamics is the second law of thermodynamics.
If we keep tip-toeing around the question, and we're gonna be all politically correct about it, we're never gonna get anywhere.
Why is it that a homosexual who attracts the AIDS virus can get condemned in many countries, but a fat man / woman can't be chastised for not taking care of themselves?
Why can a smoker be told to quit smoking or else, while fat people get treated with velvet gloves, as we say?
Having said all that: Obesity, in some cases cannot be helped. But in other cases it can be. I would argue that the great majority of obese people I've known simply lacked the knowledge or self-discipline to do something about it.
If I see the mother of a fat kid in the UK looking at a leaf of Basil and exclaiming "But who on earth could eat that? It's GREEN!", you have the cause for the kid's obesity nailed down right there.
Eat in moderate amounts. Fresh stuff. Mostly plants. Move your ass regularly.
There.
And no, I don't particularly feel like paying through the nose for other people's problems either. Just like my mother raised me not to become a burden to others.
They're going to let the mounties stake out his place for the next year and frisk 'm every time he walks in and out of the house to see if he has any kind of camera on 'm?
In Israel, people would just laugh at such a sentence. "Whatchugonnado" and "BFD" come to mind.
You have more than a few atheist friends? Because I sure as hell don't.
I only have a few atheist friends. Recent calculations estimate that Atheists are 2.3% of the world population. Mind you, there's a difference between non-religious and atheist, and then there's a difference between agnostic, weak atheists and strong atheists.
44% of my country is registered as non-religious (I am Dutch) but only 25-30% of the country claims to be atheist, while quite a few of those are weak atheists or religious apologetics.
Having said that I am a strong atheist. And I have a some friends. Most of whom are either atheists, agnostics or (and this deserves mention) secular Jews. But I only have two friends whom I would classify as a strong atheist, and out of those none are opposed to abortion.
There is also a difference between using abortion as the default birth control (which is slightly immoral) and using it in situations where the birth control failed, in case of rape or incest, or in case of a general mental or physical defect that would harm the child.
I guess what I'm saying is that your post didn't prove any point except that both you and your fellow debater deal in anecdotes and sweeping generalizations.
That's funny. Typically I enjoy the odd game of squash with mates and all, but some of my best socializing and "feeling happy" moments are spent while consuming:
- Coffee - Cigarettes - Large quantities of dead animal - Large quantities of Liquorice / drop / ice cream - Alcohol
And I've never had issues with sex either. Plenty of that to go around. Well, after I turned 20, but still.:-D Furthermore, my appearance is *very* healthy (no, I'm not particularly overweight) and I'm a gamer.
Buddy, I was thoroughly amazed by the fact that you actually got a serious reply to your post. Because I didn't understand a bloody word you said.
What are you smoking? The other day, when I was in Amsterdam, I bought me a couple of grams of good Skunk and I couldn't manage to sound as incoherent, disjointed and whimsical as you just did.
When they tried to make you go to rehab, don't you think you should have said "Yes, yes, yes"?
I don't agree. Look at the development and history. Two of my bullies were misfits. One came from a family with a father who had loose hands if you catch my drift. And an alcohol problem. They also had a dog that tried to fuck anything in site, including humans. I don't know if that's relevant though.:-D His sister, whom I know well and liked a lot, committed suicide at the age of 17 because of the family situation. The other was a real mean kid who came from a broken and troubled home, but with strong religious undertones. So you have major problems *and* repression in unholy matrimony.
These kids proceeded to never go anywhere in their life either. The mean kid still lives in my home town (I still hope to run into him one day as he's the asshole who gave me the skull fracture) and he's never gone anywhere or done anything in particular. My point is this: They never got "more training". Or any training for that matter. They had negligent parents and a bad situation at home and that's why they were total asshats at school. Because they could and because they were pissed off or, more likely, sad about things.
To cut a long story short: I pity the fools. And I am angry at their parents. Now this is just my experience, but at the end of the day it wouldn't surprise me if this story was common. Because I believe a bully is normally a dog who got beaten too much and now bites.
Funny thing is that Richard Dawkins argues in "The God Delusion" that altruism might be equally beneficial to the evolution of the species. And he *is* an evolutionary biologist who makes a very good case for that view.
I for one believe in the mix. Greed without altruism is just as useless as altruism without any greed.
I can't agree more. On the risk of sounding jaded/damaged, I have the following comments:
As someone that got bullied in the Netherlands I can vouch for the fact that the solution shouldn't come from outside. After many years of psychological and physical bullying (I still have a skull fracture scar to show for it), I decided to fight back at the age of 13. I did this in such a way that I immediately got left alone for the rest of my school years.
Take the biggest bully. Hurt him. A lot. Publicly. Even if you end up on the losing end of the fight at large, it's over. People might think you're a psycho, but it beats being bullied. Turning to a mobile operator to "prevent" bullying is sheer nonsense. The wankers will always find a way. It's not an Irish problem and it's not a problem of technology. It's about me sending my kid to self defense classes as soon as he's old enough.
I've found that those that excel at violence really don't need to use it.
*sarcasm* Yes, specially since Australia has always been of the Australians, and nobody has ever tried to muscle their way into the territory before. It would be a totally new concept for the continent of Australia. */sarcasm*
Good grief. At least the inhabitants of the Maldives are suggesting to *pay* for the land they're looking at. 385,925 (July 2008 est.) people should be able to find a home somewhere and it saddens me to think that people's first reaction is like yours.
Having said that, I feel for the people's plight since I am a Dutch citizen. Lord knows we won't be keeping our feet dry easily if the water levels rise that much. At present, my birth place is already 7 meters below sea level as it is. Thing is that there are 17 million of us, not ~400000.
I own Super Smash Bros Brawl, and I got really disappointed with the game in spite of all the very enthusiastic reviews. It's just... well... childish. I guess it would be better if I had gamer buddies aplenty and half a pound of Mary Jane at home all the time. Then I own No More Heroes. Which looks butt-fucking ugly and held my attention for a while, but was widely advertised as THE hardcore game to own. While a fun game, I really have issues with how bad it looks.
Now I also own The Godfather: Blackhand Edition which got horrible reviews. It was an ugly PS2 port, it had pop-in and whatnot, and it was just not valued above a score of 6.8-7.8 in reviews because of these factors. The Godfather however, is the game I played most on the Wii, because it simply kicks ass. Nothing like walking into a gang of mobsters, beating the shit out of them with a baseball bat, executing a couple of them with funky moves, and finally shoving the last one into an oven.
Having said that, I finished Super Mario Galaxy and thought it was one of the finest games I've played to date, and I'm not even a fan of the Mario franchise at all. I'm a WWII shooter person, for crying out loud. Finally we have Excite Trucks. It got slaughtered as a totally mediocre game on Gamespot, but got an 8.0 rating on IGN. Having said that, IGN still claimed the head-to-head multi-player mode was tacked on and unconvincing. Funnily enough I've played that game until my fingers bled, and I've had it at the office where I played head-to-head with the IT folks in the labs building until their fingers bled too. It's simply a great game, and I think even IGN's review doesn't give it the credit it deserves.
The moral of this story is this: Reviews say only so much about the way I will actually enjoy a game or not.
At the end of the day, I really want to play Grand Theft Auto IV, but I'll do that on my PC when it comes out. In the mean time I'll still have Day of Defeat, Max Payne 2 and GTA: San Andreas on that platform.
In the mean time my Wii has offered me a very, very good bang for my buck (Literally, if you consider Resident Evil 4) so far, and I continue to enjoy the console. Even the news-reader in the Wii menu which allows you to read stories by spinning the globe and clicking on stacks of stories per region is great.
No gaming system will ever be everything to everyone, but calling games that don't get ranked 8.5 or above by some critic "Exploitware" per default is just plain silly.
So wait, when someone asks you to invade Iraq and kill anywhere between 500.000 and 1.000.000 natives your answer would be "I'll e-mail you that this is a rather bad idea, but if you clarify the request, I'll do it"?
Great thinking there, Einstein.
If your boss asks you to do something morally questionable, tell him you can't and take the consequences.
By the book my ass. Who wrote the book anyway? Depending on the book you're reading, the consequences of such a line of thinking could be disastrous.
The Baby Boomers paid their tax dollar all their working lives, seeing it squandered on "Patriotic" Pet Wars and Lobbies Against Gun Control, and now people like you are complaining they actually want a pension? You seem to forget that the same baby boomers built the roads you drive on, the cars you drive in, the houses you sleep in and the Walmart you shop at. Hell, they even grew the potato you bought at the Walmart.
The fact that the US is 10T in the hole has much, much more to do with:
- Wasting most of your GDP on buying bibles and lobbying against the teaching of evolution and the suppressing of gay rights - Invading countries you have no business of invading - Sticking your grubby little fingers in other nations' disputes by sponsoring some faction or other - The fact that you manufacture everything to be "bigger" and "better" and hence inefficient cum artificial (Harley vs Suzuki, Buick vs Toyota, giant tasteless tomatoes) - The incessant development of Weapons of Mass Destruction - The incessant development of Counter Weapons against other nations alleged WMD's - The incessant spending on Billion Dollar Commercial campaigns for Elections - The increase in commercialism that was fostered on top of a financial structure built like house of cards in a minor storm - Trillion dollar salaries for everyone and their uncle who calls themselves a CEO or captain of industry - The popular notion that three SUV type cars with five DVD players in each are needed to take 2 kids to school - Housing 25% of the world's prisoners while only being 4.2% of the world's population - Attempting to wire tap all telephone conversations on the planet
So why don't you cut down on military spending, mind your own bloody business for a change, develop a sense of pragmatism and modesty and use some of the cash you'll save to:
- Provide medical care for your citizens - Guarantee a decent standard of living for your poor - Properly Educate the ever increasing amount of morons that roam your streets - Take decent care of your hard working, tax paying, now retired elderly - Research fruit flies
You call the above Utopian? I've got three words for you in that case: - Sweden - Switzerland - Holland
Damn, even Israel, which is a war zone by any means, has more civilized foreign policies, better literacy percentages and a higher mean age than you clowns nowadays.
Now go sit in a corner, ponder that for a while and be very, very quiet lest you put your foot in your mouth again by railing against people that make fun of Sarah Palin. The fact that the American people actually allowed for the mere possibility of putting that woman in any office of power indicates that your society has herewith become the laughing stock of this world, and I for one am squarely on the World's (TM) side with regards to that assertion.
I didn't know about the bandwidth, but I do know about violent crime statistics, car-jacking and various other problems South Africa seems to face.
When the original poster said "That's your problem", he was right and insightful. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I wouldn't want to live in Africa (you heard me, the whole continent) right now if my life depended on it. Why? Because right now it sucks being African. Life expectancy, while a lot better than in the 60's and 70's, and child mortality (which is also lower than the 60's and 70's) are indicators that the standard of living there is just not up to par.
When I say up to par one has to realize I come from the Netherlands, have lived in Sweden for six years and now reside in Israel, so I'm not entirely ignorant of the world at large. It's not like I'm in the States and too stupid to realize things might be done differently elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Your first statement isn't true at all. You even negate it in your second statement. A lot of thought went into the randomness some people perceive.
Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", Chet Baker's "It could happen to you", Thelonious Monk's "Monk's dream" and Louis & Ella's "Ella & Louis" are very, very far from improvisation, as is Oscar Peterson & Milt Jackson's "Very Tall".
Those are some of the greatest jazz records in history. While improvisation can definitely play a role in said recordings, most of them were rigorously planned. Brubeck's "Time Out" being an interesting example of an experiment with time-signatures that was *entirely* pre-meditated and which was recorded without a note or beat being out of place.
Having said that, the records I've mentioned have been "Understood" by millions of people the world over, and still it's great jazz.
Claiming that good jazz can't be understood by the masses is a fairly pretentious and elitist statement that really has no merit. It's basically a bunch of white free-jazz and fusion cats giving the genre a bad name.
Quit that.
Free jazz has been said to be Charles Mingus' invention, but he once said "If only those free jazz cats could play the same tunes twice... " To cut a long story short, while I'm an avid jazz fan, free jazz is really an abomination in the eye of the Lord. I can listen to anything from bebop to classic jazz to the tinkering Steely Dan did with the genre, but at the end of the day if the cats can't play the same tune twice I'm out of there.
Then again, I'm an Oscar Peterson fan. That about says it all. I don't want "infinite variations", I want a certain groove and swing to my music, however dissonant and angry it may be. So I reserve the right to take Fred Wesley's work over a particle synthesizer any day of the week.
One of the beautiful things about music, be it Miles Davis and John Coltrane working with the Miles Davis Quintet, The Notwist's electronic work, Tom Waits' most loony tunes or Mozart's most frivolous concertos, is that it's the product of a human mind expressing its particular brand of madness.
You take the mind/soul out of the equation and you'll see me turn my ticket in by the door as I leave the venue.
Are you shure you didn't get zem in ze Dutch East Indies, on shore leave?
I hate to say this, but the French have excellent:
- Chansons: Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg
- Hip-Hop: FFF
- Techno: Air
- Lounge: St Germain (the artist, not the compilations
- Gypsy Jazz: Paris Combo
- Pop: Nouvelle Vague
And this is just my extraordinarily limited knowledge of French music. Granted, the pickings are slimmer than in the Music Export Top 3, the US, the UK and Sweden, but still there's a lot of interesting things going on there.
Same thing in Germany with people like Luna, the Notwist, Die Fantastischen Vier, Jan Delay. Then it's the same with Norway with people like Morten Abel, Kinny & Horne, Kings of Convenience, Röyksopp and in particular Madrugada. Hell, even Austria has Waldeck and Kruder & Dorfmeister.
With a name like Moses Jones I don't know where the hell you're from, but I suggest you extricate your head from your arse before you make such statements the next time.
And no, I'm not French.
To paraphrase Bush:
The trouble with the Americans is that they have no word for renaissance.
While I agree with much of what you say, that $12.000 comment was particularly silly.
A load of raw data on top of unreliable physical media does not an archive make. I happen to work as a support engineer for e-mail and medical imaging archives, and before that I've worked with data storage, backup and recovery for 12 years of my life, and I've observed that the hard disk is irrelevant. Associated with archiving there are a couple of problems that need to be dealt with:
- Data Life Cycle.
If you want to store a medical image for the lifetime of a patient, and you realize a hard disk will have a data retention span of between two to five years, you will realize you need to keep that data "alive" for 68 more years.
- Authenticity / Logical disasters.
You will want to digitally sign and encrypt that data and make it read-only because at the end of the day your archive needs to be tamper-proof.
- Formatting.
100 years from now, when Adobe and Microsoft might or might not be distant memories, you will still want to be able to access and read your presidential records made in formats of those companies, so your archive will have to be able to decode/display what's stored in it.
- Physical disaster.
You will want that archive to be replicated in case a disaster/malice lays waste to the original site.
- Indexed.
You will want to be able to search that archive for certain phrases and you will want to get a reply to that query within a reasonable time-span. For this purpose, you can find grid-based archives with on-storage indexes of individual cells that can traverse their bit of data in a couple of seconds.
- Ownership.
Some data will go public completely, some data will only need to be accessible to certain audit officers, some data will start out as being confidential and will become public record as time goes by, and something needs to facilitate that process.
Now, dumping a bunch of raw data on a bunch of hard-disks give you a time-bomb which is pretty useless anyhow because even if the disks don't fail you will never find the proverbial needle in the hay-stack and even if you do you won't be able to decipher what's written on the bugger.
That's *exactly* why a 120TB archive is *not* and *never will be* a $12.000 question.
Having said that, obesity is being treated way too nicely indeed. It's some people's problem alright, but the second law of thermodynamics is the second law of thermodynamics.
If we keep tip-toeing around the question, and we're gonna be all politically correct about it, we're never gonna get anywhere.
Why is it that a homosexual who attracts the AIDS virus can get condemned in many countries, but a fat man / woman can't be chastised for not taking care of themselves?
Why can a smoker be told to quit smoking or else, while fat people get treated with velvet gloves, as we say?
Having said all that: Obesity, in some cases cannot be helped. But in other cases it can be. I would argue that the great majority of obese people I've known simply lacked the knowledge or self-discipline to do something about it.
If I see the mother of a fat kid in the UK looking at a leaf of Basil and exclaiming "But who on earth could eat that? It's GREEN!", you have the cause for the kid's obesity nailed down right there.
Eat in moderate amounts. Fresh stuff. Mostly plants. Move your ass regularly.
There.
And no, I don't particularly feel like paying through the nose for other people's problems either. Just like my mother raised me not to become a burden to others.
If you cut off your arm you'd be slimmer, so they could put the obese passenger next to your self-maiming ass.
Ony question I have is why you'd be inclined towards considering finding that xkcd cartoon offensive? Nothing wrong with Big Numbers (TM)
I do take offense at the gist of this thread though.
- Not all people who read /. have issues procuring geek- or other girls for sexual activity
- Not all people on /. would argue a somewhat pleasant face is enough to do marriage proposals
- Not all people on /. would even marry, because it's a religious institute which assumes some kind of mutual ownership. Who owns humans anyhow?
Apart from that, I was amused. Briefly.
Who is going to check that? Really.
They're going to let the mounties stake out his place for the next year and frisk 'm every time he walks in and out of the house to see if he has any kind of camera on 'm?
In Israel, people would just laugh at such a sentence. "Whatchugonnado" and "BFD" come to mind.
You have more than a few atheist friends? Because I sure as hell don't.
I only have a few atheist friends. Recent calculations estimate that Atheists are 2.3% of the world population. Mind you, there's a difference between non-religious and atheist, and then there's a difference between agnostic, weak atheists and strong atheists.
44% of my country is registered as non-religious (I am Dutch) but only 25-30% of the country claims to be atheist, while quite a few of those are weak atheists or religious apologetics.
Having said that I am a strong atheist. And I have a some friends. Most of whom are either atheists, agnostics or (and this deserves mention) secular Jews. But I only have two friends whom I would classify as a strong atheist, and out of those none are opposed to abortion.
There is also a difference between using abortion as the default birth control (which is slightly immoral) and using it in situations where the birth control failed, in case of rape or incest, or in case of a general mental or physical defect that would harm the child.
I guess what I'm saying is that your post didn't prove any point except that both you and your fellow debater deal in anecdotes and sweeping generalizations.
The other day I smoked myself some good Dutch Skunk, and it knocked me flat on my ass because I'm not used to it.
I wanted to get laid but couldn't because of the drug's effect, and I can tell you that my mind was:
- Fully aware of it
- Hardly pacified
- Scarcely happy
Luckily I got my own back after zoning out for a couple of hours.
Point is that your theory is not necessarily correct.
Hey! Speak for yourself, buddy!
I don't think I'm God because as opposed to God I'm relatively sure I exist.
That's funny. Typically I enjoy the odd game of squash with mates and all, but some of my best socializing and "feeling happy" moments are spent while consuming:
- Coffee
- Cigarettes
- Large quantities of dead animal
- Large quantities of Liquorice / drop / ice cream
- Alcohol
And I've never had issues with sex either. Plenty of that to go around. Well, after I turned 20, but still. :-D Furthermore, my appearance is *very* healthy (no, I'm not particularly overweight) and I'm a gamer.
So how does that compute?
In Soviet Russia, Unhappy employs You!
I do apologize. But it struck me as obligatory. Really.
Buddy, I was thoroughly amazed by the fact that you actually got a serious reply to your post. Because I didn't understand a bloody word you said.
What are you smoking? The other day, when I was in Amsterdam, I bought me a couple of grams of good Skunk and I couldn't manage to sound as incoherent, disjointed and whimsical as you just did.
When they tried to make you go to rehab, don't you think you should have said "Yes, yes, yes"?
I don't agree. Look at the development and history. Two of my bullies were misfits. One came from a family with a father who had loose hands if you catch my drift. And an alcohol problem. They also had a dog that tried to fuck anything in site, including humans. I don't know if that's relevant though. :-D His sister, whom I know well and liked a lot, committed suicide at the age of 17 because of the family situation. The other was a real mean kid who came from a broken and troubled home, but with strong religious undertones. So you have major problems *and* repression in unholy matrimony.
These kids proceeded to never go anywhere in their life either. The mean kid still lives in my home town (I still hope to run into him one day as he's the asshole who gave me the skull fracture) and he's never gone anywhere or done anything in particular. My point is this: They never got "more training". Or any training for that matter. They had negligent parents and a bad situation at home and that's why they were total asshats at school. Because they could and because they were pissed off or, more likely, sad about things.
To cut a long story short: I pity the fools. And I am angry at their parents. Now this is just my experience, but at the end of the day it wouldn't surprise me if this story was common. Because I believe a bully is normally a dog who got beaten too much and now bites.
Funny thing is that Richard Dawkins argues in "The God Delusion" that altruism might be equally beneficial to the evolution of the species. And he *is* an evolutionary biologist who makes a very good case for that view.
I for one believe in the mix. Greed without altruism is just as useless as altruism without any greed.
I can't agree more. On the risk of sounding jaded/damaged, I have the following comments:
As someone that got bullied in the Netherlands I can vouch for the fact that the solution shouldn't come from outside. After many years of psychological and physical bullying (I still have a skull fracture scar to show for it), I decided to fight back at the age of 13. I did this in such a way that I immediately got left alone for the rest of my school years.
Take the biggest bully. Hurt him. A lot. Publicly. Even if you end up on the losing end of the fight at large, it's over. People might think you're a psycho, but it beats being bullied. Turning to a mobile operator to "prevent" bullying is sheer nonsense. The wankers will always find a way. It's not an Irish problem and it's not a problem of technology. It's about me sending my kid to self defense classes as soon as he's old enough.
I've found that those that excel at violence really don't need to use it.
*sarcasm* Yes, specially since Australia has always been of the Australians, and nobody has ever tried to muscle their way into the territory before. It would be a totally new concept for the continent of Australia. */sarcasm*
Good grief. At least the inhabitants of the Maldives are suggesting to *pay* for the land they're looking at. 385,925 (July 2008 est.) people should be able to find a home somewhere and it saddens me to think that people's first reaction is like yours.
Having said that, I feel for the people's plight since I am a Dutch citizen. Lord knows we won't be keeping our feet dry easily if the water levels rise that much. At present, my birth place is already 7 meters below sea level as it is. Thing is that there are 17 million of us, not ~400000.
Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I own Super Smash Bros Brawl, and I got really disappointed with the game in spite of all the very enthusiastic reviews. It's just... well... childish. I guess it would be better if I had gamer buddies aplenty and half a pound of Mary Jane at home all the time. Then I own No More Heroes. Which looks butt-fucking ugly and held my attention for a while, but was widely advertised as THE hardcore game to own. While a fun game, I really have issues with how bad it looks.
Now I also own The Godfather: Blackhand Edition which got horrible reviews. It was an ugly PS2 port, it had pop-in and whatnot, and it was just not valued above a score of 6.8-7.8 in reviews because of these factors. The Godfather however, is the game I played most on the Wii, because it simply kicks ass. Nothing like walking into a gang of mobsters, beating the shit out of them with a baseball bat, executing a couple of them with funky moves, and finally shoving the last one into an oven.
Having said that, I finished Super Mario Galaxy and thought it was one of the finest games I've played to date, and I'm not even a fan of the Mario franchise at all. I'm a WWII shooter person, for crying out loud. Finally we have Excite Trucks. It got slaughtered as a totally mediocre game on Gamespot, but got an 8.0 rating on IGN. Having said that, IGN still claimed the head-to-head multi-player mode was tacked on and unconvincing. Funnily enough I've played that game until my fingers bled, and I've had it at the office where I played head-to-head with the IT folks in the labs building until their fingers bled too. It's simply a great game, and I think even IGN's review doesn't give it the credit it deserves.
The moral of this story is this: Reviews say only so much about the way I will actually enjoy a game or not.
At the end of the day, I really want to play Grand Theft Auto IV, but I'll do that on my PC when it comes out. In the mean time I'll still have Day of Defeat, Max Payne 2 and GTA: San Andreas on that platform.
In the mean time my Wii has offered me a very, very good bang for my buck (Literally, if you consider Resident Evil 4) so far, and I continue to enjoy the console. Even the news-reader in the Wii menu which allows you to read stories by spinning the globe and clicking on stacks of stories per region is great.
No gaming system will ever be everything to everyone, but calling games that don't get ranked 8.5 or above by some critic "Exploitware" per default is just plain silly.
Which in turn makes the electorate appear to be the biggest problem in the States.
Niccolo Machiavelli was was right.
So wait, when someone asks you to invade Iraq and kill anywhere between 500.000 and 1.000.000 natives your answer would be "I'll e-mail you that this is a rather bad idea, but if you clarify the request, I'll do it"?
Great thinking there, Einstein.
If your boss asks you to do something morally questionable, tell him you can't and take the consequences.
By the book my ass. Who wrote the book anyway? Depending on the book you're reading, the consequences of such a line of thinking could be disastrous.
You, sir, strike me as a dipshit.
The Baby Boomers paid their tax dollar all their working lives, seeing it squandered on "Patriotic" Pet Wars and Lobbies Against Gun Control, and now people like you are complaining they actually want a pension? You seem to forget that the same baby boomers built the roads you drive on, the cars you drive in, the houses you sleep in and the Walmart you shop at. Hell, they even grew the potato you bought at the Walmart.
The fact that the US is 10T in the hole has much, much more to do with:
- Wasting most of your GDP on buying bibles and lobbying against the teaching of evolution and the suppressing of gay rights
- Invading countries you have no business of invading
- Sticking your grubby little fingers in other nations' disputes by sponsoring some faction or other
- The fact that you manufacture everything to be "bigger" and "better" and hence inefficient cum artificial (Harley vs Suzuki, Buick vs Toyota, giant tasteless tomatoes)
- The incessant development of Weapons of Mass Destruction
- The incessant development of Counter Weapons against other nations alleged WMD's
- The incessant spending on Billion Dollar Commercial campaigns for Elections
- The increase in commercialism that was fostered on top of a financial structure built like house of cards in a minor storm
- Trillion dollar salaries for everyone and their uncle who calls themselves a CEO or captain of industry
- The popular notion that three SUV type cars with five DVD players in each are needed to take 2 kids to school
- Housing 25% of the world's prisoners while only being 4.2% of the world's population
- Attempting to wire tap all telephone conversations on the planet
So why don't you cut down on military spending, mind your own bloody business for a change, develop a sense of pragmatism and modesty and use some of the cash you'll save to:
- Provide medical care for your citizens
- Guarantee a decent standard of living for your poor
- Properly Educate the ever increasing amount of morons that roam your streets
- Take decent care of your hard working, tax paying, now retired elderly
- Research fruit flies
You call the above Utopian? I've got three words for you in that case:
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Holland
Damn, even Israel, which is a war zone by any means, has more civilized foreign policies, better literacy percentages and a higher mean age than you clowns nowadays.
Now go sit in a corner, ponder that for a while and be very, very quiet lest you put your foot in your mouth again by railing against people that make fun of Sarah Palin. The fact that the American people actually allowed for the mere possibility of putting that woman in any office of power indicates that your society has herewith become the laughing stock of this world, and I for one am squarely on the World's (TM) side with regards to that assertion.
In the words of John Cafferty: It's PATHETIC!
I didn't know about the bandwidth, but I do know about violent crime statistics, car-jacking and various other problems South Africa seems to face.
When the original poster said "That's your problem", he was right and insightful. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I wouldn't want to live in Africa (you heard me, the whole continent) right now if my life depended on it. Why? Because right now it sucks being African. Life expectancy, while a lot better than in the 60's and 70's, and child mortality (which is also lower than the 60's and 70's) are indicators that the standard of living there is just not up to par.
When I say up to par one has to realize I come from the Netherlands, have lived in Sweden for six years and now reside in Israel, so I'm not entirely ignorant of the world at large. It's not like I'm in the States and too stupid to realize things might be done differently elsewhere.
My advice to you:
Move to a more civilized country.