Conservatism in its purist form is the opposite of ideology, it is a type of cynicism. It is the belief that the average decision made by a human is more likely to be bad than good. Ideology is a strong belief in a cause and the desire to base ones choices around this belief.
People like Dubya get mislabeled as conservatives as a bit of a euphemism, but conservative governments are careful, slow to act and even indecisive. George Bush however is a cowboy and could never be any such things (with the exception of Hurricane Katrina I guess), he likes to start silly wars with dubious causes, he tries to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, this isn't conservative at all, this is changing the status quo. A conservative government would have stayed out of Iraq and just bombed Afghanistan until they were sorry for helping Osama.
If you want to see conservative, you need to look at Japan, in Japan the bureaucracy has the power so nothing ever happens, laws take decades to pass (child porn was only banned in 1998 IIRC) and havn't invaded a country for 65 years. The American government knew that if Japan was to loose its bad habits its government would need to be slowed to the point of total stagnation and now they are a nice country that everyone but China likes.
And by the way, how can something be biased because it is totally open? A person can be biased for sure, but society as a whole tends to be right about most things political, because politics are dictated by society. Which leads me to my next point, society has thought some really crazy things over the years, but its always been right about it. These days ephebophilia is out but homosexuality is in, who could have seen that coming a century ago? Back in the 70s western women were fighting for equal rights at the same time Muslim women were putting their headscarves on for the first time in almost a millennium. Portugal deposed its hardline Catholic government at almost the same time as Iran had its Islamic revolution and brought about a theocracy. Being conservative is to acknowledge society's indecisiveness and leave it alone. This is cynicism to the highest degree.
Yeah, 2k3 sucked, but UT2k4 was better than either of the previous ones. More levels, return of the sniper rifle, a pile of new game modes, less gritty looking characters returning the original feel, clones of all your favourite UT99 levels, return of the much lamented Assult (this time with more balanced levels) and vehicles if you feel like playing them. I hated 2k3 but wouldn't dream of returning to UT after 2k4, I just hope that 2k7 is as good.
As for San Andreas, you havn't played it much have you? One's you get past all of the "yo, brotherz gotta represent da hood, yo down fo it niggaz" bullshit that the game starts with, it is a far superior game. The huge world gives a variety of environments to drive in like urban, highway, forest and desert each with their own challanges. The sheer number of missions is insane, and there is always something more to do, like getting gold in every school, doing the countless races, finding the obscene amount of hidden things, doing the train/vehicle missions, stealing all the cars for export, courting all the ladies etc. I conjecture that you havn't played it enough to realise quite how much of a leap it is beyond 3 and VC.
Games are getting more and more fun in leaps and bounds, but fogies like you are just getting more cynical faster.
Yeah, but Iran and North Korea are run in the wrong way. Iran for instance has organised religion controlling politics and North Korea is run by the spoiled, incompetant son of a former President.
But seriously, no matter how much I might bag out America on/. it IS different, there are worse Presidents than Bush on this earth, worse regiemes than the Republican party and I think the Iranian theocracy who puts a cleric in charge of the country and the DPRK's isolationism which is so feeble that the country doesn't have electricity both fit into that catagory.
I know a lot of people are fuming about the nature of Steam and having patches forced upon you, I understand that because I've hated steam from day one.
But does anyone else think this is a really, really good idea? If a weapon is popular, it becomes expensive, if a weapon is unpopular, it becomes cheap. This will ensure that a fair price is given for every weapon, a diversity of weapons are used and the game isn't saturated by the same overpowered weapons. Weapons will cost the right amount because they cost what people are willing to pay for them. Isn't this every game balancer's dream?
The problem is that it sounds a bit like one of those shifty real money for virtual items scams that game manufacturers are running these days. Which of course it isn't, They should call it "laissez-faire pricing" or "free-market weapons" costs or something that sounds like the inbuilt game feature it is, rather than a exploitative "service".
Ha Ha, impedance in a low bandwidth, 40 year old communications protocol going a few metres?
Sounds like the electrical engineering equivalent to a computer scientist berating Aunt Tillie for using a spreadsheet to calculate her finances because of "costly floating point operations".
In my own country (Australia) our best universities are government owned and regulated (like is the case in Califorina I believe with the wonderful UC and very little else of note). Twenty years ago they were totally free, and back then it was exactly the opposite of how you discribed. Public funded insitiutions were tightly controlled by the beurocracy to make sure Degrees were only granted by institutions with good reputations for quality education (around 15 universities in the whole country). Student numbers were limited by government so that they trained what they saw as how many degrees were needed.
I think the problem with places that have private universities is that the market is just no good at regulating degrees. Governments have obligation to their country, so they grant as many degrees as they can. Private insitutions artificially limit supply to crank up the value (Ivy League). Governments also have finite resources so they can only grant finite degrees. Private universities make money from their students so they have insentive to train as many as they can, even if the students will never need a degree, causing devaluation of education and compulsary wastes of 4 years if someone ever wants to join the middle class (community collages). Governments should grant degrees for the same reason they should be in charge of printing money, because they will never have a reason to produce a harmful amount.
As for MIT, Harvard and Yale. That problem is solved too. Do you know what happens to the government univer
sities that everyone wants to go to? The government makes them get bigger to take more students. It's most common here at least for the best universities (Monash, UNSW, USyd, UM, UQ), to have more than 40k students. It is easy for a Harvard student to pretend he is something special when there is only 19k other people that can say the same thing at any given time. However if it were state run, they couldn't get away with that for a second. It would be forced to bloat to the size of an Australian University or even bigger by the government so that the brag value is eroded away to dust.
There is a problem with free education and it has nothing to do with anything you mentioned, it is the reason we have to pay for about 1/3rd of our tuition through an interest free loan these days. It's because the government was granting the wrong people the wrong degrees. You tell someone that they can spend 4 years studying philosophy, history or sociology for free and they are going to take you up on that offer. It's not as if there are too many of those degrees in the job market, because there is no job market for these degrees, its just that we needed another teacher or engineer trained and we didn't get them because we just spent $50k training someone to read latin and quote the classics. In a state run system, the degrees belong to the people and it becomes an issue when the important ones are given to the wrong people, like medicine degrees given to people who won't spend long being doctors. The biggest problem by far though isn't employment below one's station, its becoming a housewife by choice at the age of 25 three years after finishing a degree costing the state the same price as a small house, saying this is common amongst middle class Australian women in their 40s and 50s is an understatement and sadly you just can't tell a woman that since she is educated that she isn't allowed to quit work and raise a family fulltime whenever she feels like it. Costing money later on though is a great way to see if someone is really committed.
The USSR had the problem in that it was pumping out too many degrees for purely ideological reasons, focusing unhealthily on mathematics and certain types of physics because they are cheaper to teach than other hard sciences and nothing but a hard science would do. This is more of a case of national idealism ruining everything than a flaw in the more pragmatic socialism practiced in democratic countries. If they had trained people in useful things, rather than cheap and showy things, your friend would have a perpose for his degrees (presuming he's ex-soviet, which I'd guess 'cause the Chinese education system is so small and underfunded they seem to send everyone over here).
I was about to click on the "parent" link to see what had you so pissed off. Then I noticed it didn't exist, your well aimed retort was aimed at, well, no one really. The story just reports the figures, there is no grandparent, so what's making you so mad? What your posts remind me of is when a radical feminist claims that what a bunch of men are thinking right now is wrong after wrongly guessing what they were actually thinking.
Leave your angry rebuttals until there is something to rebut, until then, chill out and be happy.
Discrete mathematics harmed by Oblivion? You can learn it through oblivion:
Modular arithmatic: Find the optimal amount of skills to beat up baddies before you go up a level and the baddies become as hard as they were when you started
Set theory: Find the intersection of the set of skills you can go up levels in without swimming around for an hour L and the set of skills that are actually useful U.
Graph theory: Find the shortest sequence of levels between when you start the game and when Merunes Dagon is destroyed.
Predicate calculus: Prove that for each mission M, there exists a path P for which P does not cause the game to crash.
Sometimes large quantities of them seem to be used to cast doubt on a particualar statement for some political reason. Once I was reading an article about something to do with Islam. It had the [citation needed] tag everywhere, even directly after links to verses in the Qua'ran (i.e. the supreme citation in Islam). The article was well referenced, being only a few paragraphs long with over 20 citations, so it was clear that the editor wanted to make the article look badly researched. My opinion is one should find a citation, find a counter citation or just leave that damn thing alone. It should be obvious to anyone with any bit of accademic skill when a point isn't sourced, it doesn't need to be made explicit. The other thing is that a citation doesn't need to be a footnote, having a reference inline is fine, especially in theology where the same texts seem to come up a lot.
Re:Why Australians hate the US so
on
Steve Irwin Dead
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· Score: 1
Well, that's an interesting question. Australia was settled by whites in 1788 and propper genocide had largely become somewhat unfasionable by then. But none the less, we managed to give them all smallpox by accident, wiping out their numbers just as well as if we had done it on purpose with bad blankets or with guns and horses. The rest of their culture we distroyed through extensive, brutal and misguided education policies, aimed at making them British, but really only severing their family ties and making them hate themselves and us.
So basically, we managed to reduce our native population to a small remnant with social and identity damage without the government firing a shot. The post Wilberforce British empire was able to distroy people in the same way it had before, but through largely well meaning social programs. It's all quite sad really. In regards to the natives, I think we both did it wrongly.
We don't even hate Americans either, we just think you are jerks. Australia considers the United States to be a friend, even if we don't always agree. Don't forget, we have been at your side in every war you've sent ground troops into. We were at Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq again. Many times the only reason we've been there is when a friend gets into a fight, you've got to help them out, whether they were right to pick the fight or not. The last time you helped us out in a war, Japaneese troops had already landed in an Australian protectorate. Australians know that it's our duty to invade everyone you invade because that's what we always do, that's what friends do for each other. That's why Australians generally blame George W. Bush for Iraq not John Howard, because if we hadn't sent our Navy, Special Forces, Engineers, Air Force etc. the useless, unjust war would have still happened, but we wouldn't have done what we are expected to and the war wouldn't have gone so smoothly since the force would be smaller. That's why we really hate your foreign policy, because it will become our policy whether we like it or not.
It's a complex relationship.
Why Australians hate the US so
on
Steve Irwin Dead
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Because when there are two countries that both are similar in many ways, the differences stand out more.
Americans particualarly admire success over good to the community, Australians see most rich as morally inferior since they spend money themselves which could help someone else more (this is also why the Australian middle and upper classes are impossible to distinguish without finantial records). Americans haven't got a welfare system that an unempoyable individual could live on, America doesn't have a heavily subsidised healthcare system for all citizens, America has education on a local basis so poor people have underfunded schools. This is so the most prosperous indivduals can pay less and the military can get more. Americans have the death penalty which Australians think is barbaric. America has handguns and assult weapons for civilians, Australians think that means a society is warlike and uncouth. Australian think about these differences every time they watch it on an American sitcom (which many Australians love to watch).
There are worse places in the world than America of course, but Australians don't see it like that. Because Americans speak English, like Jesus, vote for their leaders, like eating beef, chicken, carrots, potatoes and white bread with penut butter, play sports that somewhat resembling cricket and rugby, like to watch television at the end of the day and many other similarities; to Australians, Americans are not just another exotic race with a strange culture, Americans are Australians that have gone astray. We do actually care about you guys and it's like your brother has done something that you disapprove of. We both came to the New World to form a new identity, we just think you did it wrongly.
It's not everyone who dislikes you guys anyway, just the ones you're likely to meet, much of the Australian working class admires the United States and love their music and TV shows. The Australian middle class largely can't stand American music or TV shows, despite large amounts of it being around in the media. This is a lot to do with American nationalism that comes through movies and tv shows, flag waving, jingoism, insularism, etc. Nationalism is very uncommon in Australian society (perhaps too uncommon) and every nationalist (from any nation, even our own) is seen as distasteful. Australians REALLY get pissed off when Americans start describing themselves as the freest, capital of the free world and that President is the Leader of the Free world (there are many democracies out there with rights for individuals). Also, stuff like hearing about the Baseball "World Series" that Japan, Mexico, Cuba and ourselves are not invited to play in makes us pissed off because it is insular and disrespectful. Thus, their intense dislike of American media rubbs off on their opinion of Americans in general. If American media stopped coming to Australia, this would stop rather quickly. Thanks to the American media we all know a LOT about your history, geography, politics etc. which helps us work out what exactly we don't like about you.
If you want Australians to like Americans, you should campaign to ban all TV and Movie exports to Australia. I sure will miss Southpark, Futurama and House, but the image of America will go up the less we think about you.
We live in a world of botnets, phishing, viruses, Nigerian scams and spam and you're thinking that the most harm an incompetent user can cause is bad spelling. Incompetent users have computers that can be hijacked and used to destroy the infrastructure we use every day through DDOS and spam. Having some bad spelling around isn't going to hurt anyone, we know what it means when someone confuses "then and than", "affect and effect". "their and there", "principal and principle" and uses the wrong vowels whenever it is humanly possible, what harm does it do to anyone? Bad grammar can make something difficult to understand, but spelling is arbitrary, especially in English. Let it go and get some perspective.
Ok, I'm replying far too late for anyone to actually read this, but that was so full of crap I need to respond.
The ridiculous American idea that there is only one democratic country really pisses the rest of the world off. There are scores of countries worldwide that have regular, real multi-party elections and only moderately corrupt bureaucracies. Furthermore, in some of these countries there is no appending of bills to other bills and rigid campaign finance laws where individual politicians cannot receive contributions and parties may only receive a small, fixed amount. Some countries have education systems on a national or state level, where a child in a disadvantaged school will recieve the same amount, or more funding than the same in a wealthy area and thus have the same chance to be a leader in the future. Some of these countries have parliamentary government systems, where the executive is actually forced to answer for their decisions to an assembly of representatives.
Do you really think that in the rest of the world you need to pay a bribe to the police officer for them to look for your car, or pay a bribe to the judge for a fair trial? Do you really think that in the world's countless democracies the government can just take peoples stuff when it suits them? And maybe every country but America has shut down political satire and anti-government current affairs programs because they don't contribute to the purity of the national ideology? If you don't believe me, go to a country in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or quite a few other countries, walk up to a police officer and say to them. "Hello officer, your national leader's actions show a lack of integrity" and see if you get locked up.
Why is it that you guys can live just south of one of the freest countries in the world, who share a lot of your culture, customs, have similar accents and huge amounts of trade with you guys but still think that there is no other free country on earth. The Canadians elect their government too, the Canadians have free speech too, the Canadian government respects the rights of individuals just like yours does. I know many Canadians and they all love their country and love each other, whereas the Americans I know either do one or the other.
I'm not saying America is a particularly bad country by world standards, I mean you guys still get to elect your government when the votes are counted properly and corruption isn't insane. But its pretty average for a developed country, that's all. There's a lot right about how you guys do things, but just as much wrong.
For an outsider the US looks a lot like the USSR did ten years ago.
You mean broken up for the last five years? The USSR broke up in 1991, 1996 was the height of the period that nobody was really running Russia in, let alone the FSB.
I realise in hindsight that the reason I'd stop sexually harassing if my peers dissaproved is possibly part of the reason that I wouldn't start sexually harassing to begin with (the other part being my unreconsilable fear of anything with ovaries), so it might not be that useful. Would someone in the sexual harassment community care to comment?
As for point 5, maybe a better idea would be to find an appropriate agent, preferably a male friend of the offending party, explain the situation to him and ask him to pull the guy into line. Nothing socially good can come of being responsible for a firing, people will fear you even if it was deserved. Discretely and informally dealing with a bad situation on the other hand brings honour and respect. I know that if I was sexually harassing a woman (which I hope is very unlikely, since I'm too gynophobic to dare) but found out that my peers knew about and disaproved of it, I'd stop right away out of shame.
As for single gender groups, I wonder if any large enough companies have ever considered an all female project team, just to see what would happen as far as teamwork, culture and end product is conserned. Naturally you couldn't hire additional employees from outside for it because that would be illegal discrimination, but reassign a bunch of current employees. I'd really like to see how well it worked, because it has never been done before.
Generally it should be easy enough to tell if a woman is going to likely to sue you. Some people like to have victim mentalities, they love to think that some attribute in their life makes what they do more difficult, they love to think that they are being mistreated, they have low self esteems and love to blame their failings on whatever they can. Thats the sort of person who would falsely accuse someone of sexual harrasment.
Women like that may end up in male dominated fields, often because they are ostricised by other women. But they really stick out, so if a woman doesn't often complain abount mistreatment and doesn't highlight her disadvantages she's probably fairly safe to talk to. If she does, then your policy is absolutely correct, stay the hell away.
It's the same here. Recently a man who was arrested in Pakistan and extrodited to Australia was freed because the prosecution used evidence obtained through coersion in Pakistan. Illegal evidence cannot be used in a court, it's the same in all common law countries like the UK, NZ etc.
The convict buisiness was but a small part of Australias settlement, most of Australia's population came here as free settlers looking for a fresh life in the new world, don't forget that the colonies that are now parts of the US and Canada both had numerous penal settlements that predate the Australian ones.
Penal settlement had fairly little affect on Australian law, the Australian colonial legal systems basically were part of English common law until it established a seperate system, so in effect penal settlement ended 40 years before we even got a legal system. Interestingly enough, Australia's legal system only technically became wholly seperated from the UK in 1986, though it was functionally autonomous since 1901. English law until 1901 holds in Australia the same way it does up until 1776 in the US.
As for John Howard. That's a trickier one. I sure as hell didn't vote for him and he is indeed very cozy with GWB, but I think he has his own reasons for his foreign relations. The following is my theory about why he's going so pro-us, especially with this war nonsence.
John Howard's platform, which has kept him in office for ten years consists of two key points: ecconomic growth and (more subtly) controlling immigration. Economic growth is what he trumpets as much as he can, and he has a brilliant reputation for it, his administration is by far the most successful in Australia's history, we have no more government debt whatsoever and have had solid growth through this long period of worldwide ecconomic stagnation. Immigration is a slightly more touchy subject that is hard for even John Howard to control. When you vote for John Howard's Liberal party, you know that their policy is that no one but hand picked super-immigrants are allowed entry. Refugees, uneducated migrants and muslims, are all fairly unpopular with much of Australian society at the moment for reasons totally unrelated to terrorism and little Johnny is able to make some massive political capital by playing to it.
I think we do have a relitively good reputation overseas. Beer, good humour, lots of land, lots of money, the second highest HDI on earth, a good education system, not a hell of a lot of culture of course, but most people don't like culture. Also, previous Australian governments, like the Whitlem, Hawk, Keating and to a lesser extent Frazer administrations have had a very friendly, welcoming style of diplomacy, aimed to make us look nice on the world stage, open to all. Americans have some stereotypes about being violent, hotheaded and insular. British have stereotypes about being cold and rigid. Most of Europe has some stereotype that is rarely nice associated with them. But although Australians are generally thought of as being uncultured, overly laid back and maybe a little dopey, I don't think any of that would make someone not like Australia.
Now the thing is, lots of people now want to come to Australia illegally because of it they think that Australia is a great place, and the Australian people are tollerable. However, John Howard knows that if every 3rd world Muslim saw a bunch of nationalistic army jocks with Australian flags on their combat uniforms walking down their street, Australia isn't going to look real good to them. If they all heard about the Taliban being gutted every night by the SASR special forces, Australia is going to loose its friendly, good humoured and welcoming image. That's what I think all of this nonsence is about. Australia is shunned by the people that John Howard's voters don't want in Australia, mission complete. But that's just my speculation.
John Howard is a shrewed, cunning and manipulative arsehole, his comical appearance merely throws people off guard and makes him mor
I didn't say whether OJ did or didn't do it. I just said that the media was involved (supporting both sides) to a level which made a fair trial difficult. That and it was made a racial issue far too quickly, is every defendant from a racial minority just accused because they are being persecuted?
Another example, from my own country (Australia) is the murder of Azaria Chamberlin. That is the one that coined the nationalally embarrasing phrase: "A dingo ate my baby". After huge media coverage, the entire country's population decided her mother was guilty because she didn't seem sad enough so the judge pretty much had to find her the same way. She was pardoned by the prime minister two years later. I think that's what it means by "trial by media", which is about as just as trial by combat or trial by water.
Ok, so you are bringing up the third reich when discussing a law protecting defendants from media interference before their trial. Yeah, keeping the media away from the accused until they can be fairly tried, yep, that's very faciest. Nazi Germany in particualar was very opposed to things like show trials etc. which is why they didn't publicise those accused of crimes and for example Ernst Rohm's charge of sodomy was so quietly, privately and fairly delt with.
If the US had similar laws the OJ trial might have not turned into a complete circus.
Hey, just because other people were being jerks doesn't give you the right to be a jerk to someone who wasn't being one. I think you're just trying to rationalise now. Maybe some of them wern't attacking her, but were complaining because they think a space program should be used for science, not as a holiday for rich people. Frankly, I think that if Roskosmos is managing to fund itself through space tourism then its fair enough, given the amount of real science they also do, I mean its not as if NASA, ESA etc. don't launch commercial satilites for money. Though it is kind of ironic that President Putin's government is busy eliminating private industry in Russia and locking up rich entrepenours while Russia is copping flack from NASA for their space tourism program.
Also, a dollar isn't a SI unit. When you want to use a SI multiplyer you put it at the end, like $300K to remove ambiguity with things like US$, CA$ NZ$ AU$ etc. M$ means microsoft on slashdot and given your slashdot UID is lower than mine, you should know that by now.
Yep, that was the easy part. Earning those M$ starting out as an immigrant girl - that was the hard part. Try to do better, and then comment.
The parent was defending her, don't flame him. Why is it the internet always turns ordinary people into arseholes?
By the way, when you mean dollars not Microsoft, you don't have to put the letter M in front of it, unless Morroco, Mexico, Myanmar, Madagascar or somewhere else switches to dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
Conservatism in its purist form is the opposite of ideology, it is a type of cynicism. It is the belief that the average decision made by a human is more likely to be bad than good. Ideology is a strong belief in a cause and the desire to base ones choices around this belief.
People like Dubya get mislabeled as conservatives as a bit of a euphemism, but conservative governments are careful, slow to act and even indecisive. George Bush however is a cowboy and could never be any such things (with the exception of Hurricane Katrina I guess), he likes to start silly wars with dubious causes, he tries to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, this isn't conservative at all, this is changing the status quo. A conservative government would have stayed out of Iraq and just bombed Afghanistan until they were sorry for helping Osama.
If you want to see conservative, you need to look at Japan, in Japan the bureaucracy has the power so nothing ever happens, laws take decades to pass (child porn was only banned in 1998 IIRC) and havn't invaded a country for 65 years. The American government knew that if Japan was to loose its bad habits its government would need to be slowed to the point of total stagnation and now they are a nice country that everyone but China likes.
And by the way, how can something be biased because it is totally open? A person can be biased for sure, but society as a whole tends to be right about most things political, because politics are dictated by society. Which leads me to my next point, society has thought some really crazy things over the years, but its always been right about it. These days ephebophilia is out but homosexuality is in, who could have seen that coming a century ago? Back in the 70s western women were fighting for equal rights at the same time Muslim women were putting their headscarves on for the first time in almost a millennium. Portugal deposed its hardline Catholic government at almost the same time as Iran had its Islamic revolution and brought about a theocracy. Being conservative is to acknowledge society's indecisiveness and leave it alone. This is cynicism to the highest degree.
Yeah, 2k3 sucked, but UT2k4 was better than either of the previous ones. More levels, return of the sniper rifle, a pile of new game modes, less gritty looking characters returning the original feel, clones of all your favourite UT99 levels, return of the much lamented Assult (this time with more balanced levels) and vehicles if you feel like playing them. I hated 2k3 but wouldn't dream of returning to UT after 2k4, I just hope that 2k7 is as good.
As for San Andreas, you havn't played it much have you? One's you get past all of the "yo, brotherz gotta represent da hood, yo down fo it niggaz" bullshit that the game starts with, it is a far superior game. The huge world gives a variety of environments to drive in like urban, highway, forest and desert each with their own challanges. The sheer number of missions is insane, and there is always something more to do, like getting gold in every school, doing the countless races, finding the obscene amount of hidden things, doing the train/vehicle missions, stealing all the cars for export, courting all the ladies etc. I conjecture that you havn't played it enough to realise quite how much of a leap it is beyond 3 and VC.
Games are getting more and more fun in leaps and bounds, but fogies like you are just getting more cynical faster.
Yeah, but Iran and North Korea are run in the wrong way. Iran for instance has organised religion controlling politics and North Korea is run by the spoiled, incompetant son of a former President.
But seriously, no matter how much I might bag out America on /. it IS different, there are worse Presidents than Bush on this earth, worse regiemes than the Republican party and I think the Iranian theocracy who puts a cleric in charge of the country and the DPRK's isolationism which is so feeble that the country doesn't have electricity both fit into that catagory.
I know a lot of people are fuming about the nature of Steam and having patches forced upon you, I understand that because I've hated steam from day one.
But does anyone else think this is a really, really good idea? If a weapon is popular, it becomes expensive, if a weapon is unpopular, it becomes cheap. This will ensure that a fair price is given for every weapon, a diversity of weapons are used and the game isn't saturated by the same overpowered weapons. Weapons will cost the right amount because they cost what people are willing to pay for them. Isn't this every game balancer's dream?
The problem is that it sounds a bit like one of those shifty real money for virtual items scams that game manufacturers are running these days. Which of course it isn't, They should call it "laissez-faire pricing" or "free-market weapons" costs or something that sounds like the inbuilt game feature it is, rather than a exploitative "service".
Ha Ha, impedance in a low bandwidth, 40 year old communications protocol going a few metres?
Sounds like the electrical engineering equivalent to a computer scientist berating Aunt Tillie for using a spreadsheet to calculate her finances because of "costly floating point operations".
In my own country (Australia) our best universities are government owned and regulated (like is the case in Califorina I believe with the wonderful UC and very little else of note). Twenty years ago they were totally free, and back then it was exactly the opposite of how you discribed. Public funded insitiutions were tightly controlled by the beurocracy to make sure Degrees were only granted by institutions with good reputations for quality education (around 15 universities in the whole country). Student numbers were limited by government so that they trained what they saw as how many degrees were needed.
I think the problem with places that have private universities is that the market is just no good at regulating degrees. Governments have obligation to their country, so they grant as many degrees as they can. Private insitutions artificially limit supply to crank up the value (Ivy League). Governments also have finite resources so they can only grant finite degrees. Private universities make money from their students so they have insentive to train as many as they can, even if the students will never need a degree, causing devaluation of education and compulsary wastes of 4 years if someone ever wants to join the middle class (community collages). Governments should grant degrees for the same reason they should be in charge of printing money, because they will never have a reason to produce a harmful amount.
As for MIT, Harvard and Yale. That problem is solved too. Do you know what happens to the government univer sities that everyone wants to go to? The government makes them get bigger to take more students. It's most common here at least for the best universities (Monash, UNSW, USyd, UM, UQ), to have more than 40k students. It is easy for a Harvard student to pretend he is something special when there is only 19k other people that can say the same thing at any given time. However if it were state run, they couldn't get away with that for a second. It would be forced to bloat to the size of an Australian University or even bigger by the government so that the brag value is eroded away to dust.
There is a problem with free education and it has nothing to do with anything you mentioned, it is the reason we have to pay for about 1/3rd of our tuition through an interest free loan these days. It's because the government was granting the wrong people the wrong degrees. You tell someone that they can spend 4 years studying philosophy, history or sociology for free and they are going to take you up on that offer. It's not as if there are too many of those degrees in the job market, because there is no job market for these degrees, its just that we needed another teacher or engineer trained and we didn't get them because we just spent $50k training someone to read latin and quote the classics. In a state run system, the degrees belong to the people and it becomes an issue when the important ones are given to the wrong people, like medicine degrees given to people who won't spend long being doctors. The biggest problem by far though isn't employment below one's station, its becoming a housewife by choice at the age of 25 three years after finishing a degree costing the state the same price as a small house, saying this is common amongst middle class Australian women in their 40s and 50s is an understatement and sadly you just can't tell a woman that since she is educated that she isn't allowed to quit work and raise a family fulltime whenever she feels like it. Costing money later on though is a great way to see if someone is really committed.
The USSR had the problem in that it was pumping out too many degrees for purely ideological reasons, focusing unhealthily on mathematics and certain types of physics because they are cheaper to teach than other hard sciences and nothing but a hard science would do. This is more of a case of national idealism ruining everything than a flaw in the more pragmatic socialism practiced in democratic countries. If they had trained people in useful things, rather than cheap and showy things, your friend would have a perpose for his degrees (presuming he's ex-soviet, which I'd guess 'cause the Chinese education system is so small and underfunded they seem to send everyone over here).
I've never been to the US, but are there really still people out there that don't know Celsius?
I was about to click on the "parent" link to see what had you so pissed off. Then I noticed it didn't exist, your well aimed retort was aimed at, well, no one really. The story just reports the figures, there is no grandparent, so what's making you so mad? What your posts remind me of is when a radical feminist claims that what a bunch of men are thinking right now is wrong after wrongly guessing what they were actually thinking. Leave your angry rebuttals until there is something to rebut, until then, chill out and be happy.
- Modular arithmatic: Find the optimal amount of skills to beat up baddies before you go up a level and the baddies become as hard as they were when you started
- Set theory: Find the intersection of the set of skills you can go up levels in without swimming around for an hour L and the set of skills that are actually useful U.
- Graph theory: Find the shortest sequence of levels between when you start the game and when Merunes Dagon is destroyed.
- Predicate calculus: Prove that for each mission M, there exists a path P for which P does not cause the game to crash.
There you go, that should have got you 80% easy!Sometimes large quantities of them seem to be used to cast doubt on a particualar statement for some political reason. Once I was reading an article about something to do with Islam. It had the [citation needed] tag everywhere, even directly after links to verses in the Qua'ran (i.e. the supreme citation in Islam). The article was well referenced, being only a few paragraphs long with over 20 citations, so it was clear that the editor wanted to make the article look badly researched. My opinion is one should find a citation, find a counter citation or just leave that damn thing alone. It should be obvious to anyone with any bit of accademic skill when a point isn't sourced, it doesn't need to be made explicit. The other thing is that a citation doesn't need to be a footnote, having a reference inline is fine, especially in theology where the same texts seem to come up a lot.
Well, that's an interesting question. Australia was settled by whites in 1788 and propper genocide had largely become somewhat unfasionable by then. But none the less, we managed to give them all smallpox by accident, wiping out their numbers just as well as if we had done it on purpose with bad blankets or with guns and horses. The rest of their culture we distroyed through extensive, brutal and misguided education policies, aimed at making them British, but really only severing their family ties and making them hate themselves and us.
So basically, we managed to reduce our native population to a small remnant with social and identity damage without the government firing a shot. The post Wilberforce British empire was able to distroy people in the same way it had before, but through largely well meaning social programs. It's all quite sad really. In regards to the natives, I think we both did it wrongly.
We don't even hate Americans either, we just think you are jerks. Australia considers the United States to be a friend, even if we don't always agree. Don't forget, we have been at your side in every war you've sent ground troops into. We were at Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iraq again. Many times the only reason we've been there is when a friend gets into a fight, you've got to help them out, whether they were right to pick the fight or not. The last time you helped us out in a war, Japaneese troops had already landed in an Australian protectorate. Australians know that it's our duty to invade everyone you invade because that's what we always do, that's what friends do for each other. That's why Australians generally blame George W. Bush for Iraq not John Howard, because if we hadn't sent our Navy, Special Forces, Engineers, Air Force etc. the useless, unjust war would have still happened, but we wouldn't have done what we are expected to and the war wouldn't have gone so smoothly since the force would be smaller. That's why we really hate your foreign policy, because it will become our policy whether we like it or not.
It's a complex relationship.Because when there are two countries that both are similar in many ways, the differences stand out more.
Americans particualarly admire success over good to the community, Australians see most rich as morally inferior since they spend money themselves which could help someone else more (this is also why the Australian middle and upper classes are impossible to distinguish without finantial records). Americans haven't got a welfare system that an unempoyable individual could live on, America doesn't have a heavily subsidised healthcare system for all citizens, America has education on a local basis so poor people have underfunded schools. This is so the most prosperous indivduals can pay less and the military can get more. Americans have the death penalty which Australians think is barbaric. America has handguns and assult weapons for civilians, Australians think that means a society is warlike and uncouth. Australian think about these differences every time they watch it on an American sitcom (which many Australians love to watch).
There are worse places in the world than America of course, but Australians don't see it like that. Because Americans speak English, like Jesus, vote for their leaders, like eating beef, chicken, carrots, potatoes and white bread with penut butter, play sports that somewhat resembling cricket and rugby, like to watch television at the end of the day and many other similarities; to Australians, Americans are not just another exotic race with a strange culture, Americans are Australians that have gone astray. We do actually care about you guys and it's like your brother has done something that you disapprove of. We both came to the New World to form a new identity, we just think you did it wrongly.
It's not everyone who dislikes you guys anyway, just the ones you're likely to meet, much of the Australian working class admires the United States and love their music and TV shows. The Australian middle class largely can't stand American music or TV shows, despite large amounts of it being around in the media. This is a lot to do with American nationalism that comes through movies and tv shows, flag waving, jingoism, insularism, etc. Nationalism is very uncommon in Australian society (perhaps too uncommon) and every nationalist (from any nation, even our own) is seen as distasteful. Australians REALLY get pissed off when Americans start describing themselves as the freest, capital of the free world and that President is the Leader of the Free world (there are many democracies out there with rights for individuals). Also, stuff like hearing about the Baseball "World Series" that Japan, Mexico, Cuba and ourselves are not invited to play in makes us pissed off because it is insular and disrespectful. Thus, their intense dislike of American media rubbs off on their opinion of Americans in general. If American media stopped coming to Australia, this would stop rather quickly. Thanks to the American media we all know a LOT about your history, geography, politics etc. which helps us work out what exactly we don't like about you.
If you want Australians to like Americans, you should campaign to ban all TV and Movie exports to Australia. I sure will miss Southpark, Futurama and House, but the image of America will go up the less we think about you.
We live in a world of botnets, phishing, viruses, Nigerian scams and spam and you're thinking that the most harm an incompetent user can cause is bad spelling. Incompetent users have computers that can be hijacked and used to destroy the infrastructure we use every day through DDOS and spam. Having some bad spelling around isn't going to hurt anyone, we know what it means when someone confuses "then and than", "affect and effect". "their and there", "principal and principle" and uses the wrong vowels whenever it is humanly possible, what harm does it do to anyone? Bad grammar can make something difficult to understand, but spelling is arbitrary, especially in English. Let it go and get some perspective.
Ok, I'm replying far too late for anyone to actually read this, but that was so full of crap I need to respond.
The ridiculous American idea that there is only one democratic country really pisses the rest of the world off. There are scores of countries worldwide that have regular, real multi-party elections and only moderately corrupt bureaucracies. Furthermore, in some of these countries there is no appending of bills to other bills and rigid campaign finance laws where individual politicians cannot receive contributions and parties may only receive a small, fixed amount. Some countries have education systems on a national or state level, where a child in a disadvantaged school will recieve the same amount, or more funding than the same in a wealthy area and thus have the same chance to be a leader in the future. Some of these countries have parliamentary government systems, where the executive is actually forced to answer for their decisions to an assembly of representatives.
Do you really think that in the rest of the world you need to pay a bribe to the police officer for them to look for your car, or pay a bribe to the judge for a fair trial? Do you really think that in the world's countless democracies the government can just take peoples stuff when it suits them? And maybe every country but America has shut down political satire and anti-government current affairs programs because they don't contribute to the purity of the national ideology? If you don't believe me, go to a country in Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or quite a few other countries, walk up to a police officer and say to them. "Hello officer, your national leader's actions show a lack of integrity" and see if you get locked up.
Why is it that you guys can live just south of one of the freest countries in the world, who share a lot of your culture, customs, have similar accents and huge amounts of trade with you guys but still think that there is no other free country on earth. The Canadians elect their government too, the Canadians have free speech too, the Canadian government respects the rights of individuals just like yours does. I know many Canadians and they all love their country and love each other, whereas the Americans I know either do one or the other.
I'm not saying America is a particularly bad country by world standards, I mean you guys still get to elect your government when the votes are counted properly and corruption isn't insane. But its pretty average for a developed country, that's all. There's a lot right about how you guys do things, but just as much wrong.
You mean broken up for the last five years? The USSR broke up in 1991, 1996 was the height of the period that nobody was really running Russia in, let alone the FSB.
Mr Anderson
I realise in hindsight that the reason I'd stop sexually harassing if my peers dissaproved is possibly part of the reason that I wouldn't start sexually harassing to begin with (the other part being my unreconsilable fear of anything with ovaries), so it might not be that useful. Would someone in the sexual harassment community care to comment?
As for point 5, maybe a better idea would be to find an appropriate agent, preferably a male friend of the offending party, explain the situation to him and ask him to pull the guy into line. Nothing socially good can come of being responsible for a firing, people will fear you even if it was deserved. Discretely and informally dealing with a bad situation on the other hand brings honour and respect. I know that if I was sexually harassing a woman (which I hope is very unlikely, since I'm too gynophobic to dare) but found out that my peers knew about and disaproved of it, I'd stop right away out of shame.
As for single gender groups, I wonder if any large enough companies have ever considered an all female project team, just to see what would happen as far as teamwork, culture and end product is conserned. Naturally you couldn't hire additional employees from outside for it because that would be illegal discrimination, but reassign a bunch of current employees. I'd really like to see how well it worked, because it has never been done before.
Generally it should be easy enough to tell if a woman is going to likely to sue you. Some people like to have victim mentalities, they love to think that some attribute in their life makes what they do more difficult, they love to think that they are being mistreated, they have low self esteems and love to blame their failings on whatever they can. Thats the sort of person who would falsely accuse someone of sexual harrasment.
Women like that may end up in male dominated fields, often because they are ostricised by other women. But they really stick out, so if a woman doesn't often complain abount mistreatment and doesn't highlight her disadvantages she's probably fairly safe to talk to. If she does, then your policy is absolutely correct, stay the hell away.
It's the same here. Recently a man who was arrested in Pakistan and extrodited to Australia was freed because the prosecution used evidence obtained through coersion in Pakistan. Illegal evidence cannot be used in a court, it's the same in all common law countries like the UK, NZ etc.
The convict buisiness was but a small part of Australias settlement, most of Australia's population came here as free settlers looking for a fresh life in the new world, don't forget that the colonies that are now parts of the US and Canada both had numerous penal settlements that predate the Australian ones.
Penal settlement had fairly little affect on Australian law, the Australian colonial legal systems basically were part of English common law until it established a seperate system, so in effect penal settlement ended 40 years before we even got a legal system. Interestingly enough, Australia's legal system only technically became wholly seperated from the UK in 1986, though it was functionally autonomous since 1901. English law until 1901 holds in Australia the same way it does up until 1776 in the US.
As for John Howard. That's a trickier one. I sure as hell didn't vote for him and he is indeed very cozy with GWB, but I think he has his own reasons for his foreign relations. The following is my theory about why he's going so pro-us, especially with this war nonsence.
John Howard's platform, which has kept him in office for ten years consists of two key points: ecconomic growth and (more subtly) controlling immigration. Economic growth is what he trumpets as much as he can, and he has a brilliant reputation for it, his administration is by far the most successful in Australia's history, we have no more government debt whatsoever and have had solid growth through this long period of worldwide ecconomic stagnation. Immigration is a slightly more touchy subject that is hard for even John Howard to control. When you vote for John Howard's Liberal party, you know that their policy is that no one but hand picked super-immigrants are allowed entry. Refugees, uneducated migrants and muslims, are all fairly unpopular with much of Australian society at the moment for reasons totally unrelated to terrorism and little Johnny is able to make some massive political capital by playing to it.
I think we do have a relitively good reputation overseas. Beer, good humour, lots of land, lots of money, the second highest HDI on earth, a good education system, not a hell of a lot of culture of course, but most people don't like culture. Also, previous Australian governments, like the Whitlem, Hawk, Keating and to a lesser extent Frazer administrations have had a very friendly, welcoming style of diplomacy, aimed to make us look nice on the world stage, open to all. Americans have some stereotypes about being violent, hotheaded and insular. British have stereotypes about being cold and rigid. Most of Europe has some stereotype that is rarely nice associated with them. But although Australians are generally thought of as being uncultured, overly laid back and maybe a little dopey, I don't think any of that would make someone not like Australia.
Now the thing is, lots of people now want to come to Australia illegally because of it they think that Australia is a great place, and the Australian people are tollerable. However, John Howard knows that if every 3rd world Muslim saw a bunch of nationalistic army jocks with Australian flags on their combat uniforms walking down their street, Australia isn't going to look real good to them. If they all heard about the Taliban being gutted every night by the SASR special forces, Australia is going to loose its friendly, good humoured and welcoming image. That's what I think all of this nonsence is about. Australia is shunned by the people that John Howard's voters don't want in Australia, mission complete. But that's just my speculation.
John Howard is a shrewed, cunning and manipulative arsehole, his comical appearance merely throws people off guard and makes him mor
I didn't say whether OJ did or didn't do it. I just said that the media was involved (supporting both sides) to a level which made a fair trial difficult. That and it was made a racial issue far too quickly, is every defendant from a racial minority just accused because they are being persecuted?
Another example, from my own country (Australia) is the murder of Azaria Chamberlin. That is the one that coined the nationalally embarrasing phrase: "A dingo ate my baby". After huge media coverage, the entire country's population decided her mother was guilty because she didn't seem sad enough so the judge pretty much had to find her the same way. She was pardoned by the prime minister two years later. I think that's what it means by "trial by media", which is about as just as trial by combat or trial by water.
Ok, so you are bringing up the third reich when discussing a law protecting defendants from media interference before their trial. Yeah, keeping the media away from the accused until they can be fairly tried, yep, that's very faciest. Nazi Germany in particualar was very opposed to things like show trials etc. which is why they didn't publicise those accused of crimes and for example Ernst Rohm's charge of sodomy was so quietly, privately and fairly delt with.
If the US had similar laws the OJ trial might have not turned into a complete circus.
Hey, just because other people were being jerks doesn't give you the right to be a jerk to someone who wasn't being one. I think you're just trying to rationalise now. Maybe some of them wern't attacking her, but were complaining because they think a space program should be used for science, not as a holiday for rich people. Frankly, I think that if Roskosmos is managing to fund itself through space tourism then its fair enough, given the amount of real science they also do, I mean its not as if NASA, ESA etc. don't launch commercial satilites for money. Though it is kind of ironic that President Putin's government is busy eliminating private industry in Russia and locking up rich entrepenours while Russia is copping flack from NASA for their space tourism program.
Also, a dollar isn't a SI unit. When you want to use a SI multiplyer you put it at the end, like $300K to remove ambiguity with things like US$, CA$ NZ$ AU$ etc. M$ means microsoft on slashdot and given your slashdot UID is lower than mine, you should know that by now.
The parent was defending her, don't flame him. Why is it the internet always turns ordinary people into arseholes?
By the way, when you mean dollars not Microsoft, you don't have to put the letter M in front of it, unless Morroco, Mexico, Myanmar, Madagascar or somewhere else switches to dollars.