I'm pretty sure AC understands the difference. Front National is a fascist party, not 'democratic far-right' or if that category was even possible, or any other of these convenient euphemisms.
Perhaps one day something will change. But for now Europe is on the road to cultural destruction.
That's patently absurd and just by parroting and repeating these kinds of slogans they don't become any more convincing. Luckily the number of people like you is constantly declining, just look at how people vote across Europe and you'll see a constant trend towards the center left in generations The future belongs to those who care and whose descendants show up for it.
Future generations grow up with the Internet, they know that the world is just one large community, and they travel and live all across Europe. They know way better than you. Populist and far-right voters are older, in their forties and above, and generally misinformed. They will fade away. The world was never better than now, Europe is the best place on earth to live right now, and it's going to become even better in the future.
The crucial problem with all those cases is that so many people argue radically on the basis of false dichotomies rather than opting for reasonable, though perhaps boring middle grounds. Closing down Daesh twitter accounts and Daesh Facebook pages is just a reasonable thing to do, and no, it doesn't inevitably lead to some slippery slope that automatically turns the world into a fascist dictatorship. It's a matter of balancing Pros and Cons and implementing good mechanisms for the balancing of powers and taking them away from single individuals, not of binary choices.
Never listen to people who see the world only in black and white, it's a telltale sign of being small and narrow minded.
... but also a bit naive. From a bit more pessimistic perspective, programming with modern languages and libraries is a bit like building a bridge from hundreds of uncertified components that are not really designed for the task and have mostly been developed by hobby-engineers. There are safety nets everywhere, so you cannot harm yourself easily, but in the end you'll never know whether the bridge will hold or not...
Nah, that's bollocks. Sci Fi has many subgenres and not all of them are deeply philosophical or have to be. Military fiction and Space Opera are science fiction, too, and it is possible to make good movies about any conceivable topic and genre.
The problem is that in sci fi movies silly action and horror is overrepresented and generally sci fi movies are way lower quality than science fiction in literature. That has always bothered me, and it doesn't look as if it's going to change anytime. I have no idea why, as it's not like this for other genres - e.g. crime novels and movies are much more on a par. Maybe it has to do with the production studios and film funding.
Because of the story it is based on, which I had read before. Westworld (1973) was also pretty good. Unfortunately, there are not so many good Science Fiction movies, although there are quite a few. I don't remember any good recent ones, even though I watch all of them. Metropolis with live classical piano accompaniment was also very good. They Live is also fantastic, and I also liked Solaris (1972). Many more, of course, but I'll stop there.
As incomprehensible as this may appear to some people, there are facts and it's also very easy to get down to them and discern real news from false news and its way worse cousin fake news. If some alleged news does not withstand repeated scrutinity from various different news organizations, including professional ones, and if it is not taken up by many different sources including professional ones, then it's most likely false news and might also be fake news. (The latter is even easier to spot for anyone but the mentally deranged, but see the comment below.) As for "fringe content", that is reported by news agencies every day, if you're interested in local traffic accidents, curious or funny anecdotes, etc. you should get a subscriptions to AP, Reuters, etc.
If some news is repeated by many different newspapers and TV channels, that's a good sign, because there is only one reality.
The people who think there are multiple realities are confused, they confuse opinions and editorial comments with facts and have chosen bad and unreliable sources (news aggregator sites, for instance). In my experience a principle from sound engineering describes very well what's going on when people start to get confused, babble about social constructivism or 'alternative facts': Garbage in, garbage out. If you get your 'news' primarily from Facebook, that's too bad for you.
I can't recount how often I've heard this fallacy before. By the same token and for the very same reasons, any statement that anyone ever has made would be bogus, too.
First of all, Being against Islam or Christianity is not racist at all, it's quite reasonable in my point of view. Being against something or someone doesn't make anyone a racist, certainly not according to the definition that I gave. (Did you even read my post?) Second, this is not about 'my' definition, I'm not Humpty-Dumpty, it's about the meaning of the word, which for a long time has had nothing to do with races and also isn't meant that way according to law. It concerns the deliberate discrimination of minorities. Third, yes, of course, someone who actively discriminates a white middle class US citizen just because he converted to Islam does definitely qualify as a racist.
It would be nice to have a word as strong as "racist" that works for both minorities and majorities, i.e., that points out that someone makes crass overgeneralizations and holds overly general negative stereotypes about some large group of people without pointing out any particular individuals or particular bad actions. However, this is not very important for majorities, because these can defend themselves against injustice fairly well by being in the majority.
Well, if you start arguing that way, then you'll find that there is no racism anywhere because there are no races in the sense racists would assume. The idea of a phenotypical race is considered ill-conceived and plays no substantial role in biology for a long time. Nazi talk about races is pseudo-science and everybody knows it, since the time we're able to map genes.
But "racism" as it is used nowadays, has nothing to do with races anyway, it's about marginalizing and discriminating minorities, as every educated adult including you knows. Often the word is also used to convey the original sense of chauvinism, i.e., discriminating people by their country of origin.
However, I'm pretty sure you and the/. moderators who voted you up knew all that already. What you and they reveal by your hypocritical language corrections is that your are, indeed, bigoted racists, whether you are aware of it or not. On a side note, regardless of the meaning of "racism", judging 1.6 billion people on the basis of the actions of a few dozen to maybe even a few thousands among them is just stupid.
That's not the reason why the US withdrew. US voters got tired of expensive and seemingly endless US involvement in conflicts abroad, that's the reason.
Fred S. Roberts, Barry Tesman: Applied Combinatorics, CRC Press, Special Indian Edition (way cheaper and good quality).
This book is awesome, just like all other books by Roberts. Unfortunately, I can only read it for learning some basics and taking a look the many examples, as I lack the time to really work through it.:/
Well, to be fair the games you mention aren't realistic war simulators at all, the only halfway realistic FPS-style simulator is ArmA. However, I generally agree, even ArmA is not realistic. In reality people are screaming like hell when they're hit, the guts of civilian casualties are splattered around or buried under buildings, almost everything is done with airstrikes from a safe location, and otherwise you're sitting around doing nothing or being occupied with chickenshit maintenance tasks 95% of the time. At least that's what I gather from the documentaries I've seen. But at least ArmA 3 get gets some realism points from me - I can't play it because I'm too afraid of getting shot.
I don't think so at all. Mega is awesome, and of course he's the planner behind it even though it's his wife's company. I haven't found anything comparable to Mega yet in terms of usability, similar better known services like Dropbox are way worse in almost every respect. If this new venture is anything like Mega, then it's going to be great.
It's kind of bizarre that the US is still successful in framing Megaupload as shady while Youtube always was and still is by far the largest copyright infringer on the planet and makes shitloads of money from it.
I still use them, but then I go to the airline pages and check the prices there. Sometimes individual airlines have better options, more often not.
Where I travel (EU), you can sometimes save money or get better times for round-trips by buying two one-way tickets. That used to be nearly impossible, so perhaps something has changed. I avoid "cheap" airlines because at least in Europe they are no longer really that cheap and the lousy service and delays are not worth it.
He sent encrypted messages moments before he killed four people last week, so how would unencrypted communication have prevented this? That's right, not at all, of course. Why can't they just state the obvious, that they are authoritarians who want to fully survey everyone in realtime and therefore encryption should be banned? Do voters in the UK reward hypocrisy?
It's so sad that even after Brexit people like the above commenter continue to display their ignorance and have apparently no idea how the EU works or what it actually is. Here is an executive summary:
- The president of the European Council is elected by the heads of state of all member states.
- The president of the European Commission is elected by the European Council.
- The members of the European Parliament are elected directly from the citizens of the member states.
- The president of the European Parliament is elected by the European Parliament.
- The European Commission is not democratically elected, they are civil servants, but the European Parliament can dismiss it by a vote of censure or no confidence. Legislation of the European Commission must be approved by the European Parliament and/or by the European Council (depending on the kind of legislation).
- The European Council consists of the heads of state of all EU member states, the European Commission President and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy. Obviously, the heads of states are all elected democratically by the citizens of their respective country, since the EU does not allow member states that do not satisfy high democratic standards.
Not only that, the whole structure of the EU is the result of unanimous votes of all member states, which is one of the reasons why it took so long to built this union, and the European Council usually has to decide unanimously (= not a single vote against) and only under rarer exceptions by majority. This means that (by population) smaller countries have a much larger voice in the EU than larger countries, but since voting usually has to be unanimous, this has never caused any problems. Moreover, just like the EU has been built by their member states it can also be changed by their member states. But it doesn't stop there. The EU is also ridiculously cheap, the EU budget is only about 1% of the total GDP of its member states, and the 28 current EU countries spend about 50 times more on national expenses than on the EU budget!
And here is the most ironic and sad thing about the Brexit: Since 1985, the UK got a rebate of 66% on their EU spending! No joke, they got a 66% refund, just so they don't bitch around too much. Talking about ungratefulness...
An even bigger problem is the cognitive workload for ATC and pilots who have to constantly adapt to new runway directions and approach types. I'm certainly not an aviation safety expert but this looks like a giant new source of human error possibilities to me. I also wonder how they would integrate circular runways into the current system of approach charts who describe more or less fixed vectors and maneuvers that pilots fly at most airports.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps one day something will change. But for now Europe is on the road to cultural destruction.
That's patently absurd and just by parroting and repeating these kinds of slogans they don't become any more convincing. Luckily the number of people like you is constantly declining, just look at how people vote across Europe and you'll see a constant trend towards the center left in generations The future belongs to those who care and whose descendants show up for it.
Future generations grow up with the Internet, they know that the world is just one large community, and they travel and live all across Europe. They know way better than you. Populist and far-right voters are older, in their forties and above, and generally misinformed. They will fade away. The world was never better than now, Europe is the best place on earth to live right now, and it's going to become even better in the future.
The crucial problem with all those cases is that so many people argue radically on the basis of false dichotomies rather than opting for reasonable, though perhaps boring middle grounds. Closing down Daesh twitter accounts and Daesh Facebook pages is just a reasonable thing to do, and no, it doesn't inevitably lead to some slippery slope that automatically turns the world into a fascist dictatorship. It's a matter of balancing Pros and Cons and implementing good mechanisms for the balancing of powers and taking them away from single individuals, not of binary choices.
Never listen to people who see the world only in black and white, it's a telltale sign of being small and narrow minded.
... but also a bit naive. From a bit more pessimistic perspective, programming with modern languages and libraries is a bit like building a bridge from hundreds of uncertified components that are not really designed for the task and have mostly been developed by hobby-engineers. There are safety nets everywhere, so you cannot harm yourself easily, but in the end you'll never know whether the bridge will hold or not...
Nah, that's bollocks. Sci Fi has many subgenres and not all of them are deeply philosophical or have to be. Military fiction and Space Opera are science fiction, too, and it is possible to make good movies about any conceivable topic and genre.
The problem is that in sci fi movies silly action and horror is overrepresented and generally sci fi movies are way lower quality than science fiction in literature. That has always bothered me, and it doesn't look as if it's going to change anytime. I have no idea why, as it's not like this for other genres - e.g. crime novels and movies are much more on a par. Maybe it has to do with the production studios and film funding.
I love his debut movie Dark Star but will be the first to admit that it's not for everyone.
Hard To Be A God (2013) is also good.
Because of the story it is based on, which I had read before. Westworld (1973) was also pretty good. Unfortunately, there are not so many good Science Fiction movies, although there are quite a few. I don't remember any good recent ones, even though I watch all of them. Metropolis with live classical piano accompaniment was also very good. They Live is also fantastic, and I also liked Solaris (1972). Many more, of course, but I'll stop there.
As incomprehensible as this may appear to some people, there are facts and it's also very easy to get down to them and discern real news from false news and its way worse cousin fake news. If some alleged news does not withstand repeated scrutinity from various different news organizations, including professional ones, and if it is not taken up by many different sources including professional ones, then it's most likely false news and might also be fake news. (The latter is even easier to spot for anyone but the mentally deranged, but see the comment below.) As for "fringe content", that is reported by news agencies every day, if you're interested in local traffic accidents, curious or funny anecdotes, etc. you should get a subscriptions to AP, Reuters, etc.
If some news is repeated by many different newspapers and TV channels, that's a good sign, because there is only one reality.
The people who think there are multiple realities are confused, they confuse opinions and editorial comments with facts and have chosen bad and unreliable sources (news aggregator sites, for instance). In my experience a principle from sound engineering describes very well what's going on when people start to get confused, babble about social constructivism or 'alternative facts': Garbage in, garbage out. If you get your 'news' primarily from Facebook, that's too bad for you.
Nope.
I can't recount how often I've heard this fallacy before. By the same token and for the very same reasons, any statement that anyone ever has made would be bogus, too.
First of all, Being against Islam or Christianity is not racist at all, it's quite reasonable in my point of view. Being against something or someone doesn't make anyone a racist, certainly not according to the definition that I gave. (Did you even read my post?) Second, this is not about 'my' definition, I'm not Humpty-Dumpty, it's about the meaning of the word, which for a long time has had nothing to do with races and also isn't meant that way according to law. It concerns the deliberate discrimination of minorities. Third, yes, of course, someone who actively discriminates a white middle class US citizen just because he converted to Islam does definitely qualify as a racist.
It would be nice to have a word as strong as "racist" that works for both minorities and majorities, i.e., that points out that someone makes crass overgeneralizations and holds overly general negative stereotypes about some large group of people without pointing out any particular individuals or particular bad actions. However, this is not very important for majorities, because these can defend themselves against injustice fairly well by being in the majority.
Well, if you start arguing that way, then you'll find that there is no racism anywhere because there are no races in the sense racists would assume. The idea of a phenotypical race is considered ill-conceived and plays no substantial role in biology for a long time. Nazi talk about races is pseudo-science and everybody knows it, since the time we're able to map genes.
But "racism" as it is used nowadays, has nothing to do with races anyway, it's about marginalizing and discriminating minorities, as every educated adult including you knows. Often the word is also used to convey the original sense of chauvinism, i.e., discriminating people by their country of origin.
However, I'm pretty sure you and the /. moderators who voted you up knew all that already. What you and they reveal by your hypocritical language corrections is that your are, indeed, bigoted racists, whether you are aware of it or not. On a side note, regardless of the meaning of "racism", judging 1.6 billion people on the basis of the actions of a few dozen to maybe even a few thousands among them is just stupid.
ROTFL Thanks, you've just made my day. Your posts are always good for a laugh!
That's not the reason why the US withdrew. US voters got tired of expensive and seemingly endless US involvement in conflicts abroad, that's the reason.
Fred S. Roberts, Barry Tesman: Applied Combinatorics, CRC Press, Special Indian Edition (way cheaper and good quality).
This book is awesome, just like all other books by Roberts. Unfortunately, I can only read it for learning some basics and taking a look the many examples, as I lack the time to really work through it. :/
Well, to be fair the games you mention aren't realistic war simulators at all, the only halfway realistic FPS-style simulator is ArmA. However, I generally agree, even ArmA is not realistic. In reality people are screaming like hell when they're hit, the guts of civilian casualties are splattered around or buried under buildings, almost everything is done with airstrikes from a safe location, and otherwise you're sitting around doing nothing or being occupied with chickenshit maintenance tasks 95% of the time. At least that's what I gather from the documentaries I've seen. But at least ArmA 3 get gets some realism points from me - I can't play it because I'm too afraid of getting shot.
Roughly ten years, but you can probably already get it for $50 in about five years.
Good, that makes it more likely that he offers real anonymity and is not in bed with the feds.
I don't think so at all. Mega is awesome, and of course he's the planner behind it even though it's his wife's company. I haven't found anything comparable to Mega yet in terms of usability, similar better known services like Dropbox are way worse in almost every respect. If this new venture is anything like Mega, then it's going to be great.
It's kind of bizarre that the US is still successful in framing Megaupload as shady while Youtube always was and still is by far the largest copyright infringer on the planet and makes shitloads of money from it.
a blond Customer Service Lady or these guys ...
I still use them, but then I go to the airline pages and check the prices there. Sometimes individual airlines have better options, more often not.
Where I travel (EU), you can sometimes save money or get better times for round-trips by buying two one-way tickets. That used to be nearly impossible, so perhaps something has changed. I avoid "cheap" airlines because at least in Europe they are no longer really that cheap and the lousy service and delays are not worth it.
He sent encrypted messages moments before he killed four people last week, so how would unencrypted communication have prevented this? That's right, not at all, of course. Why can't they just state the obvious, that they are authoritarians who want to fully survey everyone in realtime and therefore encryption should be banned? Do voters in the UK reward hypocrisy?
There you go! You sure showed him! He will think twice before insulting your president again!
It's so sad that even after Brexit people like the above commenter continue to display their ignorance and have apparently no idea how the EU works or what it actually is. Here is an executive summary:
- The president of the European Council is elected by the heads of state of all member states.
- The president of the European Commission is elected by the European Council.
- The members of the European Parliament are elected directly from the citizens of the member states.
- The president of the European Parliament is elected by the European Parliament.
- The European Commission is not democratically elected, they are civil servants, but the European Parliament can dismiss it by a vote of censure or no confidence. Legislation of the European Commission must be approved by the European Parliament and/or by the European Council (depending on the kind of legislation).
- The European Council consists of the heads of state of all EU member states, the European Commission President and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy. Obviously, the heads of states are all elected democratically by the citizens of their respective country, since the EU does not allow member states that do not satisfy high democratic standards.
Not only that, the whole structure of the EU is the result of unanimous votes of all member states, which is one of the reasons why it took so long to built this union, and the European Council usually has to decide unanimously (= not a single vote against) and only under rarer exceptions by majority. This means that (by population) smaller countries have a much larger voice in the EU than larger countries, but since voting usually has to be unanimous, this has never caused any problems. Moreover, just like the EU has been built by their member states it can also be changed by their member states. But it doesn't stop there. The EU is also ridiculously cheap, the EU budget is only about 1% of the total GDP of its member states, and the 28 current EU countries spend about 50 times more on national expenses than on the EU budget!
And here is the most ironic and sad thing about the Brexit: Since 1985, the UK got a rebate of 66% on their EU spending! No joke, they got a 66% refund, just so they don't bitch around too much. Talking about ungratefulness...
An even bigger problem is the cognitive workload for ATC and pilots who have to constantly adapt to new runway directions and approach types. I'm certainly not an aviation safety expert but this looks like a giant new source of human error possibilities to me. I also wonder how they would integrate circular runways into the current system of approach charts who describe more or less fixed vectors and maneuvers that pilots fly at most airports.