He never said the USA was perfect, or that was even acceptable. He made the statement that we are pretty free, especially compared to China. This is a very defensible statement. Lots of citizens are really pissed off about that stuff and are actively protesting and trying to change it. You can't even do that in China, which makes us an entire degree of separation better off than the Chinese. That is not lowering standards, that is pointing out what should be the fucking obvious, but apparently wasn't to YOU.
I'm not actually confusing Iraq with Iran. I'm saying that the insurgents (that is to say, many Iraqis) WANT a theocratic regime, not that they had one. I agree with everything else you are saying though.
We rebuilt a whole bunch of infrastructure that we damaged during the invasion. Then it got blown up. By Iraqis. I was totally against the Iraq war, but the reason it's in shambles right now is because there are many, many Iraqis who are perfectly willing to kill their neighbors and put their country in flames than see their religious opponents exercise their democratic majority power or exercise basic personal freedoms. If you want to blame the USA for that, go ahead and do so. But be honest and admit that what America really did by removing Saddam was free Iraqis to show the world their theocratic totalitarianism and their pure hatred they have for each other.
I think you slam-dunked it, that is going to be Virgin's downfall. I personally was not aware of this. In fact, it goes further to say that without written agreement there is no guarantee the "holder" is the copyright holder at all.
I really think that there should be a disclaimer on CC license declarations: "WARNING: without written agreement, this license means NOTHING."
I doubt the artists behind the comics would be courageous enough to make such a statement, to kill a superhero only to make a point.
I could see the excellent J Michael Strazynsci (speling?) doing this. Or individuals like Grant Morrison who routinely pervert characters to their own sociopolitical interests (I don't like my X-Men comics infused with Freudian undertones.)
"Suspension of disbelief." It's easier to be convinced by a representation of a world otherwise normal where people have psychic powers than a world where popular people never seem to stay dead, transparently for the purposes of marketing.
BTW, replying to my own post. I misrepresented the army as an organization's role in the formation of Turkey, but I just wanted to point out that a lot of people believe the modern secular Turkey is kept in place by the military. I am obviously not an expert on Turkey, but there's been like three military coups to prevent such a dissolution.:-P
Re:All this rhetoric, no understanding
on
Turkey Censors YouTube
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Here's a western-oriented Muslim country with a democratic secular government it imposed on itself.
Actually, it was imposed by the Turkish army. And every time the government has gotten out of line, the army has put it back.
I actually became aware of this when I first saw that the X-Files was shot in Toronto, at least until Duchovney married Tea Leoni and they moved production to LA so he wouldn't be far away from her. Studios can get cheaper shooting licenses in Canada.
But so what? This just bolsters my larger point, that piracy that hurts Hollywood accordingly hurts the Canadian economy. Ignore my hypothetical condition if you like, Hollywood is not going to disappear tomorrow, and the film industry in Canada depends largely on it.
American DVDs are distributed by Canadian distributors in Canada who take a cut. They are shipped to Canadian stores (often) by Canadian shipping companies, all who take a cut. American movies are shown in Canadian movie theaters who take a cut, and who employ Canadians who earn wages. The fact of the matter is, there is no Hollywood in Canada, and if America stopped selling movies in Canada tomorrow there would be (like most countries) no national equivalent to take its place and thereby employ all the Canadians benefiting from what I just listed.
I don't know if their numbers are realistic, but Canadian piracy of American movies HAS to be detrimental to the Canadian economy to some extent.
Just because it's production-ready for Sun's purposes doesn't mean it's fully tested and supported by your J2EE application server (for example.) If it's not supported, you're on your own if you have a problem. That's why corporations don't switch right away. As far as code is concerned, if it ultimately ends up being targeted for the 1.4 JVM for example, your unit tests should still work, you're not running your server out of spec, and there shouldn't be any problem IMO.
The way Diebold entered the voting machine market was to buy an existing company with existing technology, they didn't develop the technology. It probably wouldn't be that hard to spin off, it's probably already operating pretty autonomously.
When I was in high school in 1995, I was a network intern. We had a 486 Novell Netware server for the high school building. The actual admin was a LOTR fan, and named it GANDALF, others were SAMWISE, etc. One day about four years ago, a friend of mine who worked for the school district calls me and says, "hey, I saw Gandalf in the dumpster today. I thought you might want him, so I grabbed him."
Besides nostalgia, there wasn't a lot I could do with a giant, noisy 486 anymore, so I ended up just pulling the SCSI interface and drive for use in another machine I had and dumping the rest. I was living in a trailer at the time, and was using a closet as my "server room." After about six months of service, the machine died on me. Everything inside the case had a crust on it. It turned out that I had a roof leak in the closet, and it eventually soaked and killed the machine.
Anyway, it's 2007 and I'm still using that drive in a Samba print server. It's still alive despite a decade having passed and it being soaked with rainwater.
A lizard has four limbs covered in keratinious growths. So does a bird. No new features there.
Yes there are. Feathers are a macroevolutionary feature between lizards and birds. Where are the intermediate forms? Archaeopteryx doesn't count just because it has scales and feathers. Feathers are an evolutionary feature that did not spring up in one generation. You mentioned arms gradually changing to wings. We've seen this. But where are the fossils that have weird half-feather/half-scale growths?
I am firmly in the evolution camp, but this is a question that Creationists have been posing for at least a decade, and I still see evolution supporters parrot the archaeopteryx claim and ignore an if not valid, then logical sounding criticism of that argument.
For some windows, if you click into them to focus, it will activate any widget you clicked on. On others, it will only bring the window into focus and you have to click a second time. This is up to the developer. I'm pretty sure it's not like this on Windows.
A disturbing number of apps do different things with the window control buttons. See iTunes, where clicking on the zoom toggles the mini-player mode. Again, these buttons are developer-configured.
A some point it was decided that visual UI consistency was no longer necessary. I know this has been brought up to death, but Cocoa, brushed metal, and now the new iTunes look.
I'm not saying that OS X is any worse than any other system, but it's sure not any better anymore. And Finder continues to be a godawful.
BTW, for speed comparisons pop a Linux LiveCD into a Macbook pro. I don't run Linux on my MBPro, so I was surprised with the direct comparison. The UI speed difference is absolutely undeniable.
I have gotten used to the bar across the top, and I also believe it is better conceptually. However, in implementation I have found that you have to be more precise clicking on menu items. If you are off a little bit, the drop-down menu will close, and you have to start over. So, in my experience the OS X mouse precision trades off better menu location than Windows, but worse menu item navigation.
Something else not mentioned are: windowshading, focus-follows-mouse, and not having to click once to bring a window into focus, then another to hit a button. these all add speed to the desktop. In OS X, you can get Windowshading and you can get focus follows mouse with an 80 dollar app, but focus follows mouse doesn't really work right. Except for windowshading these are all nonstarters on mac, but I can set them up on Windows or Linux.
I can see advantages to this system: if you spread out the cost of software like Microsoft Office over it's lifetime, it may be better for a business or consumer to pay as they go and always get the latest version, when it's important to them. Software like antivirus which has a subscription service anyway could be enhanced by this. Maybe you only need a particular software for a month to accommodate a client's needs. Lots of good reasons.
I think the people with the biggest problem with this will be people that pirate stuff like Office, but they will not be the loudest voices for obvious reasons. The loudest voices will probably be people who want to own their software, not rent it, which is a perfectly valid position. Besides open source products that can never be taken away, I am certain that there will be a few proprietary pay-once products that will rise to prominence in response to service-software.
When I worked at Blockbuster video, a significant number of people attempted to rent the Mature-rated N64 game "Conker's Bad Fur Day" for their child. Every single person thanked me and declined to rent it after I informed them of the content of the game. I think this supports your point that people need to be jabbed to kick in their parental responsibilities sometimes. I would hope that a law would be unnecessary. I would never have rented that game to a kid unless their parent approved it, law or otherwise.
On the other hand, one of my friends would let his little girl play Mortal Kombat, but he knows full well about the content. I disagree with him on that, but it's his kid, his home and his responsibility. And to be fair, his child is perfectly well adjusted, so who am I to say what's bad for one kid and not the other? But when it comes to actually selling or renting the game, I am going to make sure the parent is an informed parent.
There actually is some evidence that video games either cause violence or potentially could. For example, studies that show that witnessing violence makes one more violent. I can't recall the location, but another study found that merely seeing a picture of a gun made one prone to violence. The problem for politicians (or maybe not, which would be worse) is that such studies would by their logic make the case for general restriction of the media rather than video games in particular. Additionally, it has been found that participation in organized sports has a high correlation with violent activities, and I would bet it would be an even higher correlation than with video games and violence. Yet I don't believe we will see any politician voting for a ban on basketball.
I don't doubt that video games COULD cause violence, there seems to be evidence that a lot of things do and it would be weird if video games would be one of the few things that didn't. The argument that video games make kids into little killing machines, that's a different kind of claim altogether. There is no such study, doing one would be completely unethical.
The article you linked to does not contain anything stating that they had to have advanced mathematics to make the pattern. It says the pattern matches a mathematical formula not discovered by the West until the 1970's, and that mathematics was thriving at the time in the area. This isn't the same thing as proving that they had to know the math to make the tiles.
You must have realized your comment was only semantic, it wouldn't appear witty otherwise. The problem is that it's wrong. Even if a lot of power is concentrated into a few hands doesn't make royalty. It's not hereditary, institutionalized, or concomitant with any claim of inherent superiority. Likewise if you want to argue that the USA is an empire, then please do so within the confines of the actual definition of the term.
What compelled you to post? Did you actually disagree with me, or was it just unacceptable to you that someone might have presented a case where the USA wasn't totally wrong?
The thing is, most of us don't see that as a bad thing, whereas you US folks have this pre-conditioned distrust of Royalty for some unfathomable reason
The concept of "Royalty" is a history-encompassing scam where brigand families who murdered and backstabbed their way to political dominance, then established the fiction that they were fundamentally superior by the grace of genetics and edict of God, and used that fiction to claim right to subjugate and torture their "subjects" when not embroiling them in self-enriching wars. They are not better than anyone else, worse in fact because they lived high on the hog on the lie that they were better. The history of most "royal" families should make being a member a mark of shame, not something to be elevated.
Even if the Royal family doesn't have power anymore, it should be as disgusting and shameful as the Confederate flag, a symbol of when one class had institutional, irrevocable license to dominate over another. I have no respect at all for even the symbolic institution of royalty. I wouldn't associate with someone who clung proudly to their ancestral plantation heritage, and likewise I wouldn't accept an honor from a false institution such as royalty. If anything, you are the one preconditioned to accept such garbage, not us to reject it.
When congress mandated low water volume flush toilets, it created a black market for toilets imported from outside the United States. They were sold to contractors whose clients kept asking for normal toilets, not the low-flush kind. So yes, I believe it will happen. It happened because tons of people HATED the new toilets. I can guarantee you that tons of people will hate switching to florescent.
I was mildly sick almost every day at work for a year after moving departments, until someone suggested it may be the florescent lighting in the new area. I got a lamp to put in my cubicle, and the problem went away. If the government mandated that I had to change all the lights in my house to florescent, I would find a way to break the law. The lights where I worked weren't CFL, but the principle is the same.
Why do you think that PMD allows customization at all? Because labelling any particular thing as "bad" is not universally agreed upon, or not appropriate for different levels of programmers.
When you're not a first-year graduate anymore, you start seeing why they're useful. They are in fact MORE clear and MORE logical than a bulky if-then-else. Where I work no one has a problem with that, so we disabled that rule and everyone is happy. You're SUPPOSED to do that.
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He never said the USA was perfect, or that was even acceptable. He made the statement that we are pretty free, especially compared to China. This is a very defensible statement. Lots of citizens are really pissed off about that stuff and are actively protesting and trying to change it. You can't even do that in China, which makes us an entire degree of separation better off than the Chinese. That is not lowering standards, that is pointing out what should be the fucking obvious, but apparently wasn't to YOU.
I'm not actually confusing Iraq with Iran. I'm saying that the insurgents (that is to say, many Iraqis) WANT a theocratic regime, not that they had one. I agree with everything else you are saying though.
We rebuilt a whole bunch of infrastructure that we damaged during the invasion. Then it got blown up. By Iraqis. I was totally against the Iraq war, but the reason it's in shambles right now is because there are many, many Iraqis who are perfectly willing to kill their neighbors and put their country in flames than see their religious opponents exercise their democratic majority power or exercise basic personal freedoms. If you want to blame the USA for that, go ahead and do so. But be honest and admit that what America really did by removing Saddam was free Iraqis to show the world their theocratic totalitarianism and their pure hatred they have for each other.
Can you provide more details? Where did you live? How did you deal with refrigeration and other high drain devices?
I think you slam-dunked it, that is going to be Virgin's downfall. I personally was not aware of this. In fact, it goes further to say that without written agreement there is no guarantee the "holder" is the copyright holder at all.
I really think that there should be a disclaimer on CC license declarations: "WARNING: without written agreement, this license means NOTHING."
I doubt the artists behind the comics would be courageous enough to make such a statement, to kill a superhero only to make a point.
I could see the excellent J Michael Strazynsci (speling?) doing this. Or individuals like Grant Morrison who routinely pervert characters to their own sociopolitical interests (I don't like my X-Men comics infused with Freudian undertones.)
"Suspension of disbelief." It's easier to be convinced by a representation of a world otherwise normal where people have psychic powers than a world where popular people never seem to stay dead, transparently for the purposes of marketing.
BTW, replying to my own post. I misrepresented the army as an organization's role in the formation of Turkey, but I just wanted to point out that a lot of people believe the modern secular Turkey is kept in place by the military. I am obviously not an expert on Turkey, but there's been like three military coups to prevent such a dissolution. :-P
Here's a western-oriented Muslim country with a democratic secular government it imposed on itself.
Actually, it was imposed by the Turkish army. And every time the government has gotten out of line, the army has put it back.
I actually became aware of this when I first saw that the X-Files was shot in Toronto, at least until Duchovney married Tea Leoni and they moved production to LA so he wouldn't be far away from her. Studios can get cheaper shooting licenses in Canada.
But so what? This just bolsters my larger point, that piracy that hurts Hollywood accordingly hurts the Canadian economy. Ignore my hypothetical condition if you like, Hollywood is not going to disappear tomorrow, and the film industry in Canada depends largely on it.
American DVDs are distributed by Canadian distributors in Canada who take a cut. They are shipped to Canadian stores (often) by Canadian shipping companies, all who take a cut. American movies are shown in Canadian movie theaters who take a cut, and who employ Canadians who earn wages. The fact of the matter is, there is no Hollywood in Canada, and if America stopped selling movies in Canada tomorrow there would be (like most countries) no national equivalent to take its place and thereby employ all the Canadians benefiting from what I just listed.
I don't know if their numbers are realistic, but Canadian piracy of American movies HAS to be detrimental to the Canadian economy to some extent.
Just because it's production-ready for Sun's purposes doesn't mean it's fully tested and supported by your J2EE application server (for example.) If it's not supported, you're on your own if you have a problem. That's why corporations don't switch right away. As far as code is concerned, if it ultimately ends up being targeted for the 1.4 JVM for example, your unit tests should still work, you're not running your server out of spec, and there shouldn't be any problem IMO.
The way Diebold entered the voting machine market was to buy an existing company with existing technology, they didn't develop the technology. It probably wouldn't be that hard to spin off, it's probably already operating pretty autonomously.
When I was in high school in 1995, I was a network intern. We had a 486 Novell Netware server for the high school building. The actual admin was a LOTR fan, and named it GANDALF, others were SAMWISE, etc. One day about four years ago, a friend of mine who worked for the school district calls me and says, "hey, I saw Gandalf in the dumpster today. I thought you might want him, so I grabbed him."
Besides nostalgia, there wasn't a lot I could do with a giant, noisy 486 anymore, so I ended up just pulling the SCSI interface and drive for use in another machine I had and dumping the rest. I was living in a trailer at the time, and was using a closet as my "server room." After about six months of service, the machine died on me. Everything inside the case had a crust on it. It turned out that I had a roof leak in the closet, and it eventually soaked and killed the machine.
Anyway, it's 2007 and I'm still using that drive in a Samba print server. It's still alive despite a decade having passed and it being soaked with rainwater.
A lizard has four limbs covered in keratinious growths. So does a bird. No new features there.
Yes there are. Feathers are a macroevolutionary feature between lizards and birds. Where are the intermediate forms? Archaeopteryx doesn't count just because it has scales and feathers. Feathers are an evolutionary feature that did not spring up in one generation. You mentioned arms gradually changing to wings. We've seen this. But where are the fossils that have weird half-feather/half-scale growths?
I am firmly in the evolution camp, but this is a question that Creationists have been posing for at least a decade, and I still see evolution supporters parrot the archaeopteryx claim and ignore an if not valid, then logical sounding criticism of that argument.
I'm not saying that OS X is any worse than any other system, but it's sure not any better anymore. And Finder continues to be a godawful.
BTW, for speed comparisons pop a Linux LiveCD into a Macbook pro. I don't run Linux on my MBPro, so I was surprised with the direct comparison. The UI speed difference is absolutely undeniable.
I have gotten used to the bar across the top, and I also believe it is better conceptually. However, in implementation I have found that you have to be more precise clicking on menu items. If you are off a little bit, the drop-down menu will close, and you have to start over. So, in my experience the OS X mouse precision trades off better menu location than Windows, but worse menu item navigation.
Something else not mentioned are: windowshading, focus-follows-mouse, and not having to click once to bring a window into focus, then another to hit a button. these all add speed to the desktop. In OS X, you can get Windowshading and you can get focus follows mouse with an 80 dollar app, but focus follows mouse doesn't really work right. Except for windowshading these are all nonstarters on mac, but I can set them up on Windows or Linux.
I can see advantages to this system: if you spread out the cost of software like Microsoft Office over it's lifetime, it may be better for a business or consumer to pay as they go and always get the latest version, when it's important to them. Software like antivirus which has a subscription service anyway could be enhanced by this. Maybe you only need a particular software for a month to accommodate a client's needs. Lots of good reasons.
I think the people with the biggest problem with this will be people that pirate stuff like Office, but they will not be the loudest voices for obvious reasons. The loudest voices will probably be people who want to own their software, not rent it, which is a perfectly valid position. Besides open source products that can never be taken away, I am certain that there will be a few proprietary pay-once products that will rise to prominence in response to service-software.
When I worked at Blockbuster video, a significant number of people attempted to rent the Mature-rated N64 game "Conker's Bad Fur Day" for their child. Every single person thanked me and declined to rent it after I informed them of the content of the game. I think this supports your point that people need to be jabbed to kick in their parental responsibilities sometimes. I would hope that a law would be unnecessary. I would never have rented that game to a kid unless their parent approved it, law or otherwise.
On the other hand, one of my friends would let his little girl play Mortal Kombat, but he knows full well about the content. I disagree with him on that, but it's his kid, his home and his responsibility. And to be fair, his child is perfectly well adjusted, so who am I to say what's bad for one kid and not the other? But when it comes to actually selling or renting the game, I am going to make sure the parent is an informed parent.
There actually is some evidence that video games either cause violence or potentially could. For example, studies that show that witnessing violence makes one more violent. I can't recall the location, but another study found that merely seeing a picture of a gun made one prone to violence. The problem for politicians (or maybe not, which would be worse) is that such studies would by their logic make the case for general restriction of the media rather than video games in particular. Additionally, it has been found that participation in organized sports has a high correlation with violent activities, and I would bet it would be an even higher correlation than with video games and violence. Yet I don't believe we will see any politician voting for a ban on basketball.
I don't doubt that video games COULD cause violence, there seems to be evidence that a lot of things do and it would be weird if video games would be one of the few things that didn't. The argument that video games make kids into little killing machines, that's a different kind of claim altogether. There is no such study, doing one would be completely unethical.
The article you linked to does not contain anything stating that they had to have advanced mathematics to make the pattern. It says the pattern matches a mathematical formula not discovered by the West until the 1970's, and that mathematics was thriving at the time in the area. This isn't the same thing as proving that they had to know the math to make the tiles.
You must have realized your comment was only semantic, it wouldn't appear witty otherwise. The problem is that it's wrong. Even if a lot of power is concentrated into a few hands doesn't make royalty. It's not hereditary, institutionalized, or concomitant with any claim of inherent superiority. Likewise if you want to argue that the USA is an empire, then please do so within the confines of the actual definition of the term.
What compelled you to post? Did you actually disagree with me, or was it just unacceptable to you that someone might have presented a case where the USA wasn't totally wrong?
The thing is, most of us don't see that as a bad thing, whereas you US folks have this pre-conditioned distrust of Royalty for some unfathomable reason
The concept of "Royalty" is a history-encompassing scam where brigand families who murdered and backstabbed their way to political dominance, then established the fiction that they were fundamentally superior by the grace of genetics and edict of God, and used that fiction to claim right to subjugate and torture their "subjects" when not embroiling them in self-enriching wars. They are not better than anyone else, worse in fact because they lived high on the hog on the lie that they were better. The history of most "royal" families should make being a member a mark of shame, not something to be elevated.
Even if the Royal family doesn't have power anymore, it should be as disgusting and shameful as the Confederate flag, a symbol of when one class had institutional, irrevocable license to dominate over another. I have no respect at all for even the symbolic institution of royalty. I wouldn't associate with someone who clung proudly to their ancestral plantation heritage, and likewise I wouldn't accept an honor from a false institution such as royalty. If anything, you are the one preconditioned to accept such garbage, not us to reject it.
When congress mandated low water volume flush toilets, it created a black market for toilets imported from outside the United States. They were sold to contractors whose clients kept asking for normal toilets, not the low-flush kind. So yes, I believe it will happen. It happened because tons of people HATED the new toilets. I can guarantee you that tons of people will hate switching to florescent.
I was mildly sick almost every day at work for a year after moving departments, until someone suggested it may be the florescent lighting in the new area. I got a lamp to put in my cubicle, and the problem went away. If the government mandated that I had to change all the lights in my house to florescent, I would find a way to break the law. The lights where I worked weren't CFL, but the principle is the same.
Why do you think that PMD allows customization at all? Because labelling any particular thing as "bad" is not universally agreed upon, or not appropriate for different levels of programmers.
When you're not a first-year graduate anymore, you start seeing why they're useful. They are in fact MORE clear and MORE logical than a bulky if-then-else. Where I work no one has a problem with that, so we disabled that rule and everyone is happy. You're SUPPOSED to do that.