I know some people at Australian Government funded research centres like NICTA and CSIRO. They are actually doing a lot of great stuff in both of those places. CSIRO chaired and largely drove the committee that devised the SVG standard, the first open vector graphics and multimedia standard which is really taking off in open source projects like Gnome, Wikimedia, Firefox, Inkscape. At the moment CSIRO is working on another multimedia format for interactive movies or something, I'm not sure of the specifics with that one. NICTA is a driving force behind the (open) L4 microkernel and is not only pouring huge amounts of money into research of very small, very low latancy microkernels and their associated operating systems but also is training large numbers of PhD students who can continue research when they graduate.
By the way, despite the critisims you have gotten, I totally agree with you about MS software. I use MS stuff a fair bit and I am almost always dissapointed. At my school we have 15 labs, 11 run Linux and are always running well, 3 run windows and work intermittantly. Sometimes they just loose their connection to the internet, or to the file server, or to the domain login server, or some library required for a specific application goes missing for no apparent reason, or the system freezes. The school IT department is gradually converting those labs to Linux + VMWare which works really well because they can keep a read-only image so the system is fresh each time you log on. People who wine about zealotry are either naive Linux users who have never had to use windows for something other than a game or naive windows users who can't figure linux out and who's pride stops them trying OSX. Use both for a living and you get to know the difference pretty quick.
Ok, component based open souce game infructure, that would be really good. But where the hell did that Java idea come from? Java isn't open source, Java doesn't come by default in many linux distros, Java isn't the speediest thing out there (dispite many people who keep mentioning Java's optimised JIT compiler but completely forget about normal optimizing compilers) and a Java library is almost impossible to bind to other environments and languages. The other thing is, rightly or wrongly, java just isn't that popular with open source types. Java is almost THE WORST language selection one could make.
Between Sun's marketing department and B-grade university CS programs that work like Java trade schools there is a disturbing number of people out there that think that: Java is comparitively easy to use, Java is flexible/powerful and Java is fast enough to do state of the art techniques on computers that currently exist.
No, you should fire that guy, you don't need him. Just give every person a REALLY powerful magnifying glass and tell consumers to look for prions. You get your steak at a resturant, medium rare with a dianne sauce, pull out the ol' glass and look for badly folded proteins. Man, I found one of those little fuckers once, I knew it wanted to get into my head and give me CJD but that wasn't going to happen on my watch damnit. It didn't really love me, it just loved my PrP protein and it only wanted one thing.
These days though I'm more careful. I go up the supply line inspecting the living conditions of every animal I plan to eat. One time an abatoir didn't let me in for my weekly inspection and I resolved never to eat their meat again, that will show the arseholes.
Ok, by being modded up you have proved that slashdot's small government/libertarian slant has just gone nuts. If federal government didn't regulate the safety of food and water, who would do it? Would consumers do it? Consumers don't even read the packaging properly, consumers believe that unless they put borax into their soup or leave it on the kitchen counter for three days it will be safe to eat. Maybe the local governments can turn their minds from accepting bribes for planning permissions for long enough to test every single foodstuff that is imported into their municipality. I can't wait to see the impressive testing facilities built by the town of Bumblefuck Missisippi.
If you like small government, consider moving to Somalia, a paradise on earth where the burdens of government are lifted off the population's shoulders and they are free to do whatever they like. Too bad the Kowloon walled city has been demolished, looks like there are less havens in this world, but maybe north Georgia is more to your tastes.
I've played some pretty oldschool RPGs, Exile and Ultima are two that come to mind. They both have unpickable locks and unkillable NPCs just like Oblivion. They also do not have a world as detailed as modern RPGs either. Oblivion lets you wander around the forrest, do irrelivent shit, ignore the story to a far greater extend than the norm. The invisible walls especially arn't that bad, I mean, the world has got to end somewhere doesn't it? You either have got to have an invisible wall or just a drop into blackness. I suppose maybe if it were a sphere that wrapped around it might be better, but it is essentially the same, a finite world with finite size. Limits are here as long as computers are.
Every point you have, oblivion is flawed but comes out better than average (except maybe gameplay and craftmenship).
Ever played an RPG from Japan? Squaresoft games especially suffer from the fact that there is one path to take, one set of events that WILL happen because they are scripted to do so. You have a set sequence of dungeons and fights and you will complete them all in the order that you are given. Near the end of the game you may be able to traverse the world and pick your team, but the choices are slim.
Neverwinter nights was a personal favoirite of mine, but you have just the illusion of free choice there too, there are 4 cities, you do 4 quests in the first city, 4 quests in the second city, 3 quests in the third city, 4 quests in the fourth and a long quest to reach the boss in the first city again. Each of those quests have one or two scripted solutions to kill baddies towards. That's not choice at all.
The Grand Theft Auto series are a popular twist on RPGs, but all they give you is a choice to bring a helicopter on your adventure or a motorbike (well, in the last two games). You've also got more choice in direction to compensate for the lack of levels, but it still boils down to doing the missions they've told you to.
Vampire, The Masquerade: Bloodlines is another RPG that kicked arse. That seems to have a policy of never having less than 2 solutions to a major quest which is admirable (sneaking, brute force, speed and social manipulation being the main ones). But even then you are playing though pre-defined missions in a specially designed environment designed to force you down certain paths that control your fate.
Basically there are only a three games that leave you freer than Oblivion does: Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind so you're either annoyed that Bethesda Softworks decided to tune their game in a slightly different way, or you're a twit that's never written a computer game and you are annoyed that they all seem to come with inherant restrictions in what you can do for various reasons. Why you picked the better than average Oblivion for your outlet escapes me. Either way, if you don't like Oblivion because it is too restrictive, don't play any other game for the next 10 years because statistically, that can only be worse.
What a useless post. The grandparent meant more powerful by "superior" and you should have been able to work that out. We are superior to whales, because we can kill a whale whenever we want and they can't stop us. We are safe from them but they are not safe from us. The native americans got killed by a bunch of people who had developed industry, wheras they had not, thus their attackers had guns and were more powerful than them, thus superior in a way that can be measured without going all existential or post modern. And IIRC, early humans lived in matriachal societies (humans closest relatives, the chimps and bonobos still do), male dominence was a later development. As for whale's brains, they are larger because they have more bits to control, Human brains scale linearly with body size, male brains are larger than female brains because the bigger you are, the more stuff you need to work, big people have big brains, but are not always smarter. If whales have big, complex brains it could be because they are superinteligent, but it also could be because they are the size of a city bus, one or the other because it isn't nearly big enough for both. A whale's brain is TINY compared to its body size with even smaller neocortex, suggesting that it undeveloped and not much good for doing anything apart from working its flippers.
Seriously, what's this post modern stuff about the meaning of supremicy (and male dominated hierachical societies for that matter) doing on slashdot? Here we love technology because it allows us to control our environment and makes our species powerful. Superior technology = superior society, superior aliens = technologically advanced aliens, otherwise they are just moving goo to me. So far I've been a really good sport listening to people complaining about how other seemingly primitive cultures have better societies than industrialised cultures, but taking it to the species level is going futher than I'm willing to tollerate. I like human society, we live easy, keep outselves feeling busy and useful with pointless work, have fun in many ways and keep the awkward bits of nature under control, if you don't like humanity, YOU CAN GEDDOUT!.
I'm not much of a fan of rap music, but if someone is stupid enough to think it is good and ignorent enough not to know how loud they are playing it, it's not really morally comparable to purchasing a machine designed to annoy certain demographics. One is classic youthful stupidity and egocentric thought, the other is deliberate harm.
Play a new Prince of Persia game. The original PoP revolutionised 2d platformers, taking them from something blocky and cartoonish to something dynamic with weight. Sands of Time did the same thing. It's dynamic, it's fluid, it's exciting, challenging, intuitive and immeasurably fun. The added complexity of the 3d levels allows an element of thinking, calculation and perception that was never the genre's strong point. The controls are the best feature. Move around with your arrow keys or stick, look about with your mouse or other stick, jump or roll with space (it always knows what you want), run on walls, grab stuff, swing, interact, whatever with right mouse button and unsheath/swing your sword with your left button. Just 5 controls and you can do anything you want.
Unless someone has played SOT/WW/TT they have no right to talk about any platformer because they lack context, unless they have played Ico of course, but what's the chances of that?
Nokia are pouring a hell of a lot of money into Linux. They have a large Linux team in house and have funded many external contractors like Openhand and Fluendo who deal with open source handheld and media technologies respectively. They are putting their money where their mouth has not gone yet, but that still says a lot.
One of my friends in highschool was a political refugee from Uruguay.
And this is in Australia, where the government really doesn't like admitting that people actually are political refugees when they can possibly deny it.
Still, MS sometimes gets it right and gets slammed for it by delusional governments with nothing better to do than to push their slighly optimistic opinion about who parts of the world are run by onto everyone who does business with them (yes, China and India, I'm talking about you, you don't own as much land as you say you do). Then you have Saudi Arabia who didn't like it when they heard the Koran in music so they banned a game (I'm sure not many Christians or Hindus liked "My Sweet Lord" by George Harrison but it's not illegal) they also banned a game because it insinuated that Muslims turn churches into mosques (lets just say that it's been a long time since the Haiga Sofia hosted a divine liturgy).
As much as I hate MS, it is nice to see a powerful company ruffling the feathers of a few governments that have until recently thought they can expel rationality from their shores by making declarations that 1+1=3 and laws to mandate it. I hope this "cultural insensitivity" continues.
Yes, I'll believe that you are an outsider, by your total ignorence of what you are discussing and prejudice of recent games based on a ten year old game.
GTA's characters have come a long way, they were faily prototypical in and before GTAIII but have been rather outstanding in the last two games. The of course tend to be invented for humour, rather than depth, but they tend to be fairly well developed and extremely memorable. Here's a list of my favourites:
Ken Rosenburg - a nervous coke sniffing lawyer from VC and SA has an amusing tendancy to be even more melodramatic than his dangerous but vulnerable existance warrants.
Kent Paul - an english sound engineer from VC and SA with a slightly inflated view of his own role in the adventure.
Mercedes Cortez - the promiscous daughter of a powerful Central American military officer in VC.
Catalina - the evil arch villan in III and dangerous accomplice in SA, her passion for love and lust for violence makes her personality tempestuous and scary.
Phil Cassedy - a gun crazy "veteran" from III and VC with a questionable regard for safety and even more questionable service record.
Mike Toreno - an agent from an unknown government agency in SA who's loyalties mainly lie in fighting other US government agencies.
The Truth - a parranoid drug crazy hippie from SA
OG Loc - a rapper parrody with abysmal skills that becomes famous with the help of the player in SA
Big Smoke - an overweight gangsta from SA with a passion for food and firm belief that he is insightful, despite evidence to the contrary.
There are plenty of other great charactors that I can't be bothered mentioning, including the ones on the radio. The GTA series is one of the only games I have ever played where I actually cared about the story and characters.
I voted for Labour in the last elections both in the House of Reps and the Senate, so take this as the words of someone who is not a John Howard/Liberal fan (I have never voted Liberal, ever in my life).
John Howard is the only credible leader who has run for PM for the entire time he has been in office. Beasey does not have the courage to propose legitimate solutions to Australia's problems, the voters have never seen him do anything but quibble with John Howards desisions, he isn't seen as someone who could ever make desisions of his own. He regually objects to the Howard government's treatment of refugees, what is his solution? Well, do the same thing I guess, just try to feel bad about yourself while doing it.
The Greens have principles but can confidently hold to them with the firm knowledge that they will never be held accountable to them. The Greens know that they represent what they see as right, rather than what is responsible. Which is why they can do whatever they like in front of Chineese and American government representatives without fear of repercussions to Australia. It is also why they can take a hard line on every issue they see as important without ever having to feel the consequences of the harm that even the best choices bring.
The Labor party has totally lost sight of the electorate recently. Their factional politics have made what few policies they do have into compromises between the socialist factions representing "the blue collar battlers" and the libertarian factions representing the cultural minorities. Socialism and libertarianism almost mutually exclusive and selling one to the proponents of the other is next to impossible. The ALP has been trying to sell loosening immigration, gay rights, increased aboriginal recognition, etc. to the very demographic that is the least receptive to such things, the working class.
How does JH manage to get the poor to vote for him when he shafts them time and again? The majority of Australia are racist rednecks, the middle and upper classes, not so much. This is because multiculturalism for the rich means eating at a nice exotic resturant, paying a chineese girl to polish your wife's nails, getting a lebanese man to clean your Porshe then going home to your white subburb to think about how the world would be such a nice place if everyone was as tollerant as you. It's the poor that live in the multicultural subburbs, feel alienated by people who speak different languages, feel intimidated by those who's cultures and viewpoints they don't understand and feel threatened by other racists of different races to them. John Howard knows this. He sees that the working class are more conserned about political stability than what he does to their paychecks and the way I see it, he's entitled to their votes until the ALP realises the same thing.
So with all this critisism, why do I vote for the ALP? Two reasons, the first is that I'm in the tiny demographic that the ALP actually represents. I'm often a small l liberal idealist yet I'm not particually rich. Outside of artists and musicians this is rare, but I am one of them. The second reason is that I knew Howard would win last time, but I didn't want to have to be responsible for putting him there. A Prime Minister's job is to make the nasty desisions that hurt people, for the good of stability, peace and prosperety. I do not want to be Prime Minister and I am too much of a coward to even be connected to one. So I vote Labor, though they do not deserve anyone else to vote for them.
I know that in Australia you cannot concent to assault. If something violent happened there is no way for the victim to say "no, that was all cool", this is to stop mixed up people, cronically abused people and people with low self worth from being violently abused, many battered wives wouldn't complain about their treatment but that doesn't make it acceptable. But in sexual cases, if someone is 16 or over, they can say that it was all ok. Thus the law would be rougher on S&M painless turkey slappage.
...and then put them in the context of the demise of feudalism and the emergence of nationalism, which led to many bloody secular wars as well as many religious ones. Think here of the Hundred-Year's War, of Phillip II's assault on the Templars, of the French Revolution, and of the Spanish Armada.
As much as I agree with you, you've chosen some awful examples.
IIRC the Spanish Armada was sent on behalf of the Pope to punish Elizabeth for her father leaving the Catholic church, her and her brother supporting the reformation and the nation of England for letting them get away with it. Sure, the spanish wanted power rather than piety, but the pope was in on it.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (templars) were a religious order famed for their unorthodoxy later on in the order's existance. Phillip IV was a close ally of the current pope at the time, all of his actions against the order had papal blessing whether they were the pope's idea or not.
For instance, take a look at a typical edition of Cosmopolitan magazine. Go ahead, flip through it. Don't worry, the chick next to you in line might think it's hot.
I totally agree, I absolutely love Cosmo for these reasons.
Cosmo is full of pictures of beautiful, glamourous and often scantily clothed women.
Cosmo is full of really filthy articles about doing the nasty.
Cosmo is full of really filthy articles about female masterbation.
Cosmo is full of interesting information about women.
Almost every second week cosmo features an article on women's anatomy, with pictures of exposed breasts and other facinating bits.
Cosmo is just like a men's "stroke mag" in most ways I can imagine.
Cosmo can be read by a man in broad daylight, in mixed company and women will admire him for emersing himself in female culture and female perspective, completely oblivious to his motivations, as long as he hides his erection well enough. Wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters, daughters and every other type of woman in a man's life just seem to not see it. Sure, men might look at you funny, until you show them the double page feature on breast implants, giving you 30 exposed real, large breasts and 10 fake ones to tell apart complete with answers and close ups on the next page (real article, I kid you not).
Cosmo is HOT HOT HOT and women don't get why enlightened men love it so much. Occasionally it has a male glamour shot for the target demographic to admire, which isn't my cup of tea, but it seems to be always tastefully done and never demeaning to the man involved. Cosmo, though obviously female biased in its outlook doesn't have as much latent misandry as other womens publications either, so I can feel good about myself while reading it.
I don't have an opinion, I don't care about this issue, I have said as such.
What Timothy did is hold up certain people's viewpoints above others simply because they are more original, not because they are more correct, valid, informed or popular. The world is full of minority opinions and the majority of them are minority opinions because they don't have enough merits to be accepted by the bulk of the populace. I don't see why giving them a helping hand really benifits anyone. If universities are right to control the web habits of their scholarship recipients, then their argument can stand on its own without special treatment, if it cannot, it deserves to fall into obscurity.
And how am I in a majority in this instance? I have already implied that I favour universities over jocks and facebook users (I teach at a university for a living b.t.w.), indicating that I would probably be biased into the minority if I cared about this. I just don't like seeing an unfair advantage going in either direction.
It is not a rehash of all the best comments, it is a rehash of all the comments supporting the Universities and just a couple of comments of the other side (which formed the bulk of the original discussion).
Now I don't care about this issue (Jocks and facebook users can burn in hell), I'm not usually the sort of guy who says "moderation is censorship" nor did I actually post on this the first time, but this is the most blatant and shameful case of bias on slashdot I have ever seen. To reiterate one side of a discussion and almost completely cut the other, then put the results onto the front page? What the hell kind of fair discussion is that?
I hope to never see anything like this on slashdot again.
The grandparent wasn't a troll. Carnagie was probably a not a fool, but everyone who says something that is wrong is a troll. Trolling is an antisocial behavior deliberately designed to make conversation difficult, just like making wrongful accusations towards fellow slashdotters now I think about it.
Why don't people just talk instead of having wars?
When I was 6 I was violent, now I am no longer violent and maybe now slightly diplomatic. I think this is one of the best things about growing up, violence sucks.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, despite the critisims you have gotten, I totally agree with you about MS software. I use MS stuff a fair bit and I am almost always dissapointed. At my school we have 15 labs, 11 run Linux and are always running well, 3 run windows and work intermittantly. Sometimes they just loose their connection to the internet, or to the file server, or to the domain login server, or some library required for a specific application goes missing for no apparent reason, or the system freezes. The school IT department is gradually converting those labs to Linux + VMWare which works really well because they can keep a read-only image so the system is fresh each time you log on. People who wine about zealotry are either naive Linux users who have never had to use windows for something other than a game or naive windows users who can't figure linux out and who's pride stops them trying OSX. Use both for a living and you get to know the difference pretty quick.
Between Sun's marketing department and B-grade university CS programs that work like Java trade schools there is a disturbing number of people out there that think that: Java is comparitively easy to use, Java is flexible/powerful and Java is fast enough to do state of the art techniques on computers that currently exist.
These days though I'm more careful. I go up the supply line inspecting the living conditions of every animal I plan to eat. One time an abatoir didn't let me in for my weekly inspection and I resolved never to eat their meat again, that will show the arseholes.
If you like small government, consider moving to Somalia, a paradise on earth where the burdens of government are lifted off the population's shoulders and they are free to do whatever they like. Too bad the Kowloon walled city has been demolished, looks like there are less havens in this world, but maybe north Georgia is more to your tastes.
I've played some pretty oldschool RPGs, Exile and Ultima are two that come to mind. They both have unpickable locks and unkillable NPCs just like Oblivion. They also do not have a world as detailed as modern RPGs either. Oblivion lets you wander around the forrest, do irrelivent shit, ignore the story to a far greater extend than the norm. The invisible walls especially arn't that bad, I mean, the world has got to end somewhere doesn't it? You either have got to have an invisible wall or just a drop into blackness. I suppose maybe if it were a sphere that wrapped around it might be better, but it is essentially the same, a finite world with finite size. Limits are here as long as computers are.
Ever played an RPG from Japan? Squaresoft games especially suffer from the fact that there is one path to take, one set of events that WILL happen because they are scripted to do so. You have a set sequence of dungeons and fights and you will complete them all in the order that you are given. Near the end of the game you may be able to traverse the world and pick your team, but the choices are slim.
Neverwinter nights was a personal favoirite of mine, but you have just the illusion of free choice there too, there are 4 cities, you do 4 quests in the first city, 4 quests in the second city, 3 quests in the third city, 4 quests in the fourth and a long quest to reach the boss in the first city again. Each of those quests have one or two scripted solutions to kill baddies towards. That's not choice at all.
The Grand Theft Auto series are a popular twist on RPGs, but all they give you is a choice to bring a helicopter on your adventure or a motorbike (well, in the last two games). You've also got more choice in direction to compensate for the lack of levels, but it still boils down to doing the missions they've told you to.
Vampire, The Masquerade: Bloodlines is another RPG that kicked arse. That seems to have a policy of never having less than 2 solutions to a major quest which is admirable (sneaking, brute force, speed and social manipulation being the main ones). But even then you are playing though pre-defined missions in a specially designed environment designed to force you down certain paths that control your fate.
Basically there are only a three games that leave you freer than Oblivion does: Arena, Daggerfall and Morrowind so you're either annoyed that Bethesda Softworks decided to tune their game in a slightly different way, or you're a twit that's never written a computer game and you are annoyed that they all seem to come with inherant restrictions in what you can do for various reasons. Why you picked the better than average Oblivion for your outlet escapes me. Either way, if you don't like Oblivion because it is too restrictive, don't play any other game for the next 10 years because statistically, that can only be worse.
Seriously, what's this post modern stuff about the meaning of supremicy (and male dominated hierachical societies for that matter) doing on slashdot? Here we love technology because it allows us to control our environment and makes our species powerful. Superior technology = superior society, superior aliens = technologically advanced aliens, otherwise they are just moving goo to me. So far I've been a really good sport listening to people complaining about how other seemingly primitive cultures have better societies than industrialised cultures, but taking it to the species level is going futher than I'm willing to tollerate. I like human society, we live easy, keep outselves feeling busy and useful with pointless work, have fun in many ways and keep the awkward bits of nature under control, if you don't like humanity, YOU CAN GEDDOUT!.
I'm not much of a fan of rap music, but if someone is stupid enough to think it is good and ignorent enough not to know how loud they are playing it, it's not really morally comparable to purchasing a machine designed to annoy certain demographics. One is classic youthful stupidity and egocentric thought, the other is deliberate harm.
Unless someone has played SOT/WW/TT they have no right to talk about any platformer because they lack context, unless they have played Ico of course, but what's the chances of that?
Nokia are pouring a hell of a lot of money into Linux. They have a large Linux team in house and have funded many external contractors like Openhand and Fluendo who deal with open source handheld and media technologies respectively. They are putting their money where their mouth has not gone yet, but that still says a lot.
It's only wastage if you don't play it 24/7.
If people don't want to be sufficiently hardcore, that's their own problem.
Standby is for the weak
And this is in Australia, where the government really doesn't like admitting that people actually are political refugees when they can possibly deny it.
As much as I hate MS, it is nice to see a powerful company ruffling the feathers of a few governments that have until recently thought they can expel rationality from their shores by making declarations that 1+1=3 and laws to mandate it. I hope this "cultural insensitivity" continues.
GTA's characters have come a long way, they were faily prototypical in and before GTAIII but have been rather outstanding in the last two games. The of course tend to be invented for humour, rather than depth, but they tend to be fairly well developed and extremely memorable. Here's a list of my favourites:
There are plenty of other great charactors that I can't be bothered mentioning, including the ones on the radio. The GTA series is one of the only games I have ever played where I actually cared about the story and characters.
Being in a minority just gives you more people to discriminate against.
John Howard is the only credible leader who has run for PM for the entire time he has been in office. Beasey does not have the courage to propose legitimate solutions to Australia's problems, the voters have never seen him do anything but quibble with John Howards desisions, he isn't seen as someone who could ever make desisions of his own. He regually objects to the Howard government's treatment of refugees, what is his solution? Well, do the same thing I guess, just try to feel bad about yourself while doing it.
The Greens have principles but can confidently hold to them with the firm knowledge that they will never be held accountable to them. The Greens know that they represent what they see as right, rather than what is responsible. Which is why they can do whatever they like in front of Chineese and American government representatives without fear of repercussions to Australia. It is also why they can take a hard line on every issue they see as important without ever having to feel the consequences of the harm that even the best choices bring.
The Labor party has totally lost sight of the electorate recently. Their factional politics have made what few policies they do have into compromises between the socialist factions representing "the blue collar battlers" and the libertarian factions representing the cultural minorities. Socialism and libertarianism almost mutually exclusive and selling one to the proponents of the other is next to impossible. The ALP has been trying to sell loosening immigration, gay rights, increased aboriginal recognition, etc. to the very demographic that is the least receptive to such things, the working class.
How does JH manage to get the poor to vote for him when he shafts them time and again? The majority of Australia are racist rednecks, the middle and upper classes, not so much. This is because multiculturalism for the rich means eating at a nice exotic resturant, paying a chineese girl to polish your wife's nails, getting a lebanese man to clean your Porshe then going home to your white subburb to think about how the world would be such a nice place if everyone was as tollerant as you. It's the poor that live in the multicultural subburbs, feel alienated by people who speak different languages, feel intimidated by those who's cultures and viewpoints they don't understand and feel threatened by other racists of different races to them. John Howard knows this. He sees that the working class are more conserned about political stability than what he does to their paychecks and the way I see it, he's entitled to their votes until the ALP realises the same thing.
So with all this critisism, why do I vote for the ALP? Two reasons, the first is that I'm in the tiny demographic that the ALP actually represents. I'm often a small l liberal idealist yet I'm not particually rich. Outside of artists and musicians this is rare, but I am one of them. The second reason is that I knew Howard would win last time, but I didn't want to have to be responsible for putting him there. A Prime Minister's job is to make the nasty desisions that hurt people, for the good of stability, peace and prosperety. I do not want to be Prime Minister and I am too much of a coward to even be connected to one. So I vote Labor, though they do not deserve anyone else to vote for them.
I know that in Australia you cannot concent to assault. If something violent happened there is no way for the victim to say "no, that was all cool", this is to stop mixed up people, cronically abused people and people with low self worth from being violently abused, many battered wives wouldn't complain about their treatment but that doesn't make it acceptable. But in sexual cases, if someone is 16 or over, they can say that it was all ok. Thus the law would be rougher on S&M painless turkey slappage.
As much as I agree with you, you've chosen some awful examples.
IIRC the Spanish Armada was sent on behalf of the Pope to punish Elizabeth for her father leaving the Catholic church, her and her brother supporting the reformation and the nation of England for letting them get away with it. Sure, the spanish wanted power rather than piety, but the pope was in on it.
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (templars) were a religious order famed for their unorthodoxy later on in the order's existance. Phillip IV was a close ally of the current pope at the time, all of his actions against the order had papal blessing whether they were the pope's idea or not.
The idea is not to impress women, but to get away with reading naughty filth.
I totally agree, I absolutely love Cosmo for these reasons.
- Cosmo is full of pictures of beautiful, glamourous and often scantily clothed women.
- Cosmo is full of really filthy articles about doing the nasty.
- Cosmo is full of really filthy articles about female masterbation.
- Cosmo is full of interesting information about women.
- Almost every second week cosmo features an article on women's anatomy, with pictures of exposed breasts and other facinating bits.
- Cosmo is just like a men's "stroke mag" in most ways I can imagine.
- Cosmo can be read by a man in broad daylight, in mixed company and women will admire him for emersing himself in female culture and female perspective, completely oblivious to his motivations, as long as he hides his erection well enough. Wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters, daughters and every other type of woman in a man's life just seem to not see it. Sure, men might look at you funny, until you show them the double page feature on breast implants, giving you 30 exposed real, large breasts and 10 fake ones to tell apart complete with answers and close ups on the next page (real article, I kid you not).
Cosmo is HOT HOT HOT and women don't get why enlightened men love it so much. Occasionally it has a male glamour shot for the target demographic to admire, which isn't my cup of tea, but it seems to be always tastefully done and never demeaning to the man involved. Cosmo, though obviously female biased in its outlook doesn't have as much latent misandry as other womens publications either, so I can feel good about myself while reading it.I am so tempted to go out and get a subscription.
What Timothy did is hold up certain people's viewpoints above others simply because they are more original, not because they are more correct, valid, informed or popular. The world is full of minority opinions and the majority of them are minority opinions because they don't have enough merits to be accepted by the bulk of the populace. I don't see why giving them a helping hand really benifits anyone. If universities are right to control the web habits of their scholarship recipients, then their argument can stand on its own without special treatment, if it cannot, it deserves to fall into obscurity.
And how am I in a majority in this instance? I have already implied that I favour universities over jocks and facebook users (I teach at a university for a living b.t.w.), indicating that I would probably be biased into the minority if I cared about this. I just don't like seeing an unfair advantage going in either direction.
Now I don't care about this issue (Jocks and facebook users can burn in hell), I'm not usually the sort of guy who says "moderation is censorship" nor did I actually post on this the first time, but this is the most blatant and shameful case of bias on slashdot I have ever seen. To reiterate one side of a discussion and almost completely cut the other, then put the results onto the front page? What the hell kind of fair discussion is that?
I hope to never see anything like this on slashdot again.
What if nobody but a script sees the images?
The grandparent wasn't a troll. Carnagie was probably a not a fool, but everyone who says something that is wrong is a troll. Trolling is an antisocial behavior deliberately designed to make conversation difficult, just like making wrongful accusations towards fellow slashdotters now I think about it.