America is number one. Number two is France. Number three is Britain. Number four is China, that's the first vaguely realistic candidate for an opponent. Number five is Russia; if that one breaks out then it's not going to be about tanks and planes, and we're all fucked no matter how much we spend. Then come Japan, Germany, Italy. What, you're afraid they'll try to get the old band together again? Then Saudi Arabia. Hmm, just about possible, but right now they're an ally. Then South Korea who are an ally, India who are currently shooting pirates while the rest of us watch and clap politely, then Australia. I'm still not scared. Then Brazil, Turkey (yes they're Muslims, they're also NATO allies), Canada, Iraq, I mean one of these countries is an occupied territory with an American puppet government. Then Spain, Holland - I didn't know they even had a military - Poland, Taiwan, Israel, Greece, are we seeing potential enemies here? No? Next Pakistan. Again I suppose it could happen, but as with Saudi Arabia right now they're a friend. Then Singapore - Singapore! One city! - Sweden, then Iran.
There you go. An actual enemy. A nation whose leadership actually does hate America's guts and that might realistically have to be fought in the foreseeable future. Iran. Number 26 on the list with a $6.3bn defence budget. As compared to America's $711 billion, and pretty much everyone else above them on that list who are allies of America.
I mean for fuck's sake. Who do you think you're going to fight, Martians? I thought the enemy was terrorists. What use is an F-22 against them?
Maybe something like Sid Myer's Alpha Centauri would work. Money should be measured in kJ or something like that.
Cue hyperinflation when someone finally gets a fusion reactor working. Or hyperdeflation when we run out of oil.
This is the problem with money being based on commodities - any commodity. Gold wasn't so bad, because it's pretty rare, so there wasn't likely ever to be a flood of it all arriving on the market at once, right? Whoops, we just plundered Tenochtitlan... there goes the economy. Or we've had an industrial revolution, we've grown the economy tenfold, there's far more goods and services on offer, but we don't have any extra gold to issue more money so we get deflation... whoops again. Plus there's the sheer lunacy of expending resources and effort to dig gold up from one hole in the ground, only to bury it immediately in another hole in the ground.
Perhaps it's best to view currency as being based upon the economy as a whole. If I hold ten euro, they have value insofar as the people of the eurozone will provide me with ten euro worth of goods or services in exchange. If I think that European goods or services are worth having, and that the European economies are stable and reliably able to provide those goods or services on demand, then I'll value euro very highly. However, if I don't, I won't. What do you think of Zimbabwean goods and services, and the ability of their economy to provide them reliably and on demand? Yeah, didn't think so.
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to guess that you couldn't fix a light in another building from your phone. And that a Citroen C4 doesn't transform into a dancing robot.
Next you'll be telling me Irn-Bru isn't made from girders.
According to the rules the immoral (or perhaps amorel sociopathic) leaders of my country set forth, then waterboarding was ethical. It was WRONG, but not unethical.
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
It's set in a world where the majority of people are packing guns, lasers, and rocket launchers. I can't imagine Iraq is much fun if you decide the only way you're going to go into combat is by hitting people in the face either.
If Sonny Bono had had any appreciation for history and politics, we wouldn't have to suffer copyright in excess of 100 years, Mickey Mouse would be free and I wouldn't recognize the background music in most car commercials as having been an integral part of my childhood. (Yes, I'm a boomer.)
Wait... if that music were public domain, the car companies wouldn't be using it in commercials? How does that work?
I think the problem here is poor definition of "left" vs. "right." Ask a question pertaining to abortion, and most of the answers here are "anything goes," which sounds left-wing. Ask a question about the economy, and the answers are more "government isn't your sugar daddy," which sounds right-wing. I think the most common/. viewpoint is best described as "libertarian," which can be summed up as "leave us alone and don't tell us what to do."
Precisely. The tendency is towards old-fashioned American rugged individualism.
Now personally I don't see abortion as a left / right issue at all: 'left wing' to my mind is all about strong unions fighting for the workers' interests in labour relations, and a preference for high taxation to pay for comprehensive state provision of services, with the extreme left favouring wholesale nationalisation of industries. It's purely economics. I would think that a left-wing opinion on abortion might be 'The abortion clinics should be state owned and free at the point of need', while a right-wing opinion might be 'Abortions for all - who can afford them'.
Whether abortions should be allowed in the first place is a completely different question. I see no particular reason that a Communist should favour abortion, or any reason why an Ayn Rand free market fundamentalist should oppose abortion. I think the fact that the moralistic Christian tendency happens to be aligned with the right wing parties is a quirk of American politics; if you listen to European religious leaders such as the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope, they often tend to preach a left-wing message of social justice and collective effort, rather than the individualistic 'devil take the hindmost' philosophy of capitalism.
You're kidding right? Slashdot is overwhelmingly left. Not that that's good/bad, but if you think slashdot is a right-wing haven, then your right/left equilibrium is completely out of touch with reality.
Slashdot has a very strong right-wing bias. Seriously. Read any discussion along the lines of 'Unions: good thing or bad thing?' and tell me this crowd's left-wing. The consensus here seems to be 'Unions are a Bad Thing and we should all negotiate individually with the bosses, even if that means programmers end up working 80-hour weeks with unpaid overtime'. That's pretty dedicated right-wing ideology. A left-wing group would be all in favour of workers' collectives striving to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof.
After all, the President-Elect is an expert on the Constitution
Given the astonishing number of right-wingers usually to be found on/., I give it about ten minutes now before someone demands to see a birth certificate.
Evolution optimizes for efficiency only when it matters to survival or reproduction.
The brain alone accounts for 20% of the human body's oxygen consumption and 25% of glucose consumption. If 90% of the brain is surplus to requirements, then optimising for efficiency could produce a saving of 22.5% of the body's glucose supply and 18% of the oxygen supply. Does the ability to survive on 22.5% less food matter to survival?
Try to build a gun that big and you'll be shot by Mossad. Or possibly by the Iranians. Or the Iraqis. Or the CIA. Or MI6. Or the KGB. Nobody's quite certain. You don't make a lot of friends in that line of work.
Most creative work, upon hitting the public domain, has already been out of print for decades.
Again, how is this an argument for longer copyright periods? Surely if this is a problem, we ought to see to it that works enter the public domain sooner?
You, French, of all the people should know that taking foreign country's help to protest against your government leads nowehere.
It worked in Britain. Having taken a dislike to the king, certain powers behind the throne invited the Dutch to invade and replace him. When the Dutch army arrived, most of the British army didn't turn up, and those that did sided with the invaders. As did the navy. The regime change was handled remarkably smoothly.
Well, in England at least. Scotland gave the new king some trouble. And Ireland, well... ask there about King William III and you'll find some colourful opinions.
* Seek culture, but not at the expense of liberty
* Seek liberty, but not at the expense of truth
* Seek truth, but not at the expense of privacy
* Seek privacy, but not at the expense of life
* Seek life, and enjoy free culture.
I'm not certain it's actually necessary to fix it. The atmosphere would be stripped away on a timescale of millions of years. If you're capable of terraforming Mars to begin with, you're capable of replacing lost air faster than the Sun can strip it away. It's probably cheaper to do that than to rig up some enormous artificial magnetic shield.
When Ford makes a car that stops working immediately after the warranty expires, people just shrug and act like it's expected.
Eh? You can't fling a brick in most cities without hitting a ten-year-old Ka or Fiesta still in daily use. I'm pretty sure they're all long since out of warranty.
But then, the UK isn't much of a country anymore, now is it?
Trollish, but inadvertently making quite a good point. You don't really see Union flags anywhere outside government buildings, apart from maybe on the Shankill Road, or outside the homes of people to be found listed on Wikileaks. You see rather more flags of St George or St Andrew, especially when there's a football match on, and walking around Cardiff you'll see far more Red Dragons than Union flags.
What with devolution to the composite nations of the Union on one hand, and increasing European federalism on the other, the British identity as such is wearing away, to be replaced by more distinct English, Scottish and Welsh identities. This was already true in Scotland and Wales, but now that more of the English have started identifying as such, the Union's days are probably numbered.
Duh, me English, me not have patriotism. Me not see difference between wave flag and light flag on fire.
I don't think the flag was supposed to be on fire. I believe the idea was that flag-waving is such primitive behaviour that it might be thought more appropriate to people who have only just discovered how to use fire.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the list.
America is number one. Number two is France. Number three is Britain. Number four is China, that's the first vaguely realistic candidate for an opponent. Number five is Russia; if that one breaks out then it's not going to be about tanks and planes, and we're all fucked no matter how much we spend. Then come Japan, Germany, Italy. What, you're afraid they'll try to get the old band together again? Then Saudi Arabia. Hmm, just about possible, but right now they're an ally. Then South Korea who are an ally, India who are currently shooting pirates while the rest of us watch and clap politely, then Australia. I'm still not scared. Then Brazil, Turkey (yes they're Muslims, they're also NATO allies), Canada, Iraq, I mean one of these countries is an occupied territory with an American puppet government. Then Spain, Holland - I didn't know they even had a military - Poland, Taiwan, Israel, Greece, are we seeing potential enemies here? No? Next Pakistan. Again I suppose it could happen, but as with Saudi Arabia right now they're a friend. Then Singapore - Singapore! One city! - Sweden, then Iran.
There you go. An actual enemy. A nation whose leadership actually does hate America's guts and that might realistically have to be fought in the foreseeable future. Iran. Number 26 on the list with a $6.3bn defence budget. As compared to America's $711 billion, and pretty much everyone else above them on that list who are allies of America.
I mean for fuck's sake. Who do you think you're going to fight, Martians? I thought the enemy was terrorists. What use is an F-22 against them?
Cue hyperinflation when someone finally gets a fusion reactor working. Or hyperdeflation when we run out of oil.
This is the problem with money being based on commodities - any commodity. Gold wasn't so bad, because it's pretty rare, so there wasn't likely ever to be a flood of it all arriving on the market at once, right? Whoops, we just plundered Tenochtitlan... there goes the economy. Or we've had an industrial revolution, we've grown the economy tenfold, there's far more goods and services on offer, but we don't have any extra gold to issue more money so we get deflation... whoops again. Plus there's the sheer lunacy of expending resources and effort to dig gold up from one hole in the ground, only to bury it immediately in another hole in the ground.
Perhaps it's best to view currency as being based upon the economy as a whole. If I hold ten euro, they have value insofar as the people of the eurozone will provide me with ten euro worth of goods or services in exchange. If I think that European goods or services are worth having, and that the European economies are stable and reliably able to provide those goods or services on demand, then I'll value euro very highly. However, if I don't, I won't. What do you think of Zimbabwean goods and services, and the ability of their economy to provide them reliably and on demand? Yeah, didn't think so.
Next you'll be telling me Irn-Bru isn't made from girders.
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
Last I checked, wasn't Japan a major world leader in the science of robotics?
You lost pretty much all sympathy there. More accurately it should have been
all sorts of restrictions on nasty intelligence-gathering
and I'm quite sure you can manage perfectly well without torturing people, although I'll grant that it might be less fun for you that way.
TROGG CAN PUNCH BETTER!
1.4 gigapixes, although since this is digital data I'm sure someone will come along shortly to insist it's more like 1.304.
Wait... if that music were public domain, the car companies wouldn't be using it in commercials? How does that work?
Precisely. The tendency is towards old-fashioned American rugged individualism.
Now personally I don't see abortion as a left / right issue at all: 'left wing' to my mind is all about strong unions fighting for the workers' interests in labour relations, and a preference for high taxation to pay for comprehensive state provision of services, with the extreme left favouring wholesale nationalisation of industries. It's purely economics. I would think that a left-wing opinion on abortion might be 'The abortion clinics should be state owned and free at the point of need', while a right-wing opinion might be 'Abortions for all - who can afford them'.
Whether abortions should be allowed in the first place is a completely different question. I see no particular reason that a Communist should favour abortion, or any reason why an Ayn Rand free market fundamentalist should oppose abortion. I think the fact that the moralistic Christian tendency happens to be aligned with the right wing parties is a quirk of American politics; if you listen to European religious leaders such as the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Pope, they often tend to preach a left-wing message of social justice and collective effort, rather than the individualistic 'devil take the hindmost' philosophy of capitalism.
Slashdot has a very strong right-wing bias. Seriously. Read any discussion along the lines of 'Unions: good thing or bad thing?' and tell me this crowd's left-wing. The consensus here seems to be 'Unions are a Bad Thing and we should all negotiate individually with the bosses, even if that means programmers end up working 80-hour weeks with unpaid overtime'. That's pretty dedicated right-wing ideology. A left-wing group would be all in favour of workers' collectives striving to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof.
Given the astonishing number of right-wingers usually to be found on /., I give it about ten minutes now before someone demands to see a birth certificate.
The brain alone accounts for 20% of the human body's oxygen consumption and 25% of glucose consumption. If 90% of the brain is surplus to requirements, then optimising for efficiency could produce a saving of 22.5% of the body's glucose supply and 18% of the oxygen supply. Does the ability to survive on 22.5% less food matter to survival?
Try to build a gun that big and you'll be shot by Mossad. Or possibly by the Iranians. Or the Iraqis. Or the CIA. Or MI6. Or the KGB. Nobody's quite certain. You don't make a lot of friends in that line of work.
Again, how is this an argument for longer copyright periods? Surely if this is a problem, we ought to see to it that works enter the public domain sooner?
It worked in Britain. Having taken a dislike to the king, certain powers behind the throne invited the Dutch to invade and replace him. When the Dutch army arrived, most of the British army didn't turn up, and those that did sided with the invaders. As did the navy. The regime change was handled remarkably smoothly.
Well, in England at least. Scotland gave the new king some trouble. And Ireland, well... ask there about King William III and you'll find some colourful opinions.
* Through free culture, my chains are broken.
This, you write as part of an argument in favour of 150+ year copyrights?
To a good first approximation, everybody drinks alcohol. Do stoners drink more alcohol than average?
Retard the onset, or just make it harder for anybody to tell the difference?
I'm not certain it's actually necessary to fix it. The atmosphere would be stripped away on a timescale of millions of years. If you're capable of terraforming Mars to begin with, you're capable of replacing lost air faster than the Sun can strip it away. It's probably cheaper to do that than to rig up some enormous artificial magnetic shield.
Eh? You can't fling a brick in most cities without hitting a ten-year-old Ka or Fiesta still in daily use. I'm pretty sure they're all long since out of warranty.
You know regular expressions, but conflate 'carriage return' and 'line feed'?
Trollish, but inadvertently making quite a good point. You don't really see Union flags anywhere outside government buildings, apart from maybe on the Shankill Road, or outside the homes of people to be found listed on Wikileaks. You see rather more flags of St George or St Andrew, especially when there's a football match on, and walking around Cardiff you'll see far more Red Dragons than Union flags.
What with devolution to the composite nations of the Union on one hand, and increasing European federalism on the other, the British identity as such is wearing away, to be replaced by more distinct English, Scottish and Welsh identities. This was already true in Scotland and Wales, but now that more of the English have started identifying as such, the Union's days are probably numbered.
I don't think the flag was supposed to be on fire. I believe the idea was that flag-waving is such primitive behaviour that it might be thought more appropriate to people who have only just discovered how to use fire.