Just how do you make a black character that can't be called either a stereo-type the moment you give him/her anything more then a skin for being black? And if you make him generic, you will be accused of making him white, accused of claiming the only good way to be is to act like a white person.
Like it or not, stereo-types is what we define race by.
In the series frasier, there are no black characters except one. Winston, an upper neighbour. I didn't realize he was supposed to be black until later in the series when his mother is introduced. He has no stereo-typical black features other then a dark skin, talks like a brit, acts snobbish, he is in a way whiter then frasier.
So does he count as black man in a white series OR is he just an actor and his skin color irrelevant as it was to me?
That is the hard part about creating a character. Just putting a bra on a 3d model doesn't make the player character female. She got to do something feminine. Nothing to complex because we got a game to play but something that CLEARLY makes the it a her. Ask yourself this, Lara Croft. Woman or boy with tits? From the start, she really doesn't act female at all. You do not control her as if she was female. She is you with tits and you is a male. There are other games as well where you play a female but it never really chances the way you play the game. Hell my MMORPG characters tend to be female often for little better reason they look better and obscure less of the scenery. I certainly don't play them as if they were women.
For that matter, how would I know how to play a woman? I ain't one. Neither am I black. Either a black character I play or interact with is going to have to do something I associate with being black or it is just going to be a skin color with no relevance.
Skin color having no relevance might be what Martin Luther King dreamed about, it ain't what the PC crowd dreams about. They want minorities to be seen in a positive light. Winston from Frasier ain't a positive minority to me because I never realized he was part of a minority. But how do you accentuate that someone is a minority without adding some stereo-types to show this person is a minority?
You can't. Lara Croft is not a positive role-model for women because she ain't a woman. She is whoever the player is because her sex never enters into the gameplay. Leisure Suit Larry did that, it changed your character at one point to a female and you played a woman because it stereo-typed you as a slut who used sex to gain access to new areas. You had to think as a "woman" (how many of men can get a doorwoman to allow us in by giving cunninglus?) but not in a way that is exactly positive.
In GTA, you are a very stereo-typical character, but if you weren't a blacker black then any black person has ever been, how do you get white guys whose closest connection to the hood is that they seen it on tv to play a "black" character? Lets not forget that an awful lot of games allow you to choose your own skin color without it ever making a difference. So either you play a stereo-typical character or a generic "white" avatar with no background.
Don't mistake basic story telling with a racist agenda. Do people complain that Puss In Boots in Shrek was a speciest slur against dogs? Why can't dogs be shown to be cute and cuddly and capable of wearing boots?
You ever even seen a motorcycle?
Good luck riding between cars in a traffic jam with a sidespan. Or leaning it heavily into a corner. Or pulling a wheelie.
No real motorcycle has a windshield of any significance. You are talking about a moped or a girls bike.
Good job however on completely missing the point.
Partly. Linux doesn't try to sell anything. Linux after all is either the community or the kernel, neither of which is in a position to sell anything to anyone.
Red Hat might be trying to sell something that uses Linux (the community and the kernel) as its basis BUT it creates its own product out of that. Talk to Red Hat if you want car-motor-cycle hybrid.
Linux, the community (GNU/linux and a thousand other things) is an untamable beast because it ain't a single beast. Nobody controls it because there is not one thing to control. Red Hat the distro is tameable. It is controlled and its controller can be easily found.
BUT however hard it may be to get Linux the community to do anything, consider this. When was the last time you got a single person at Microsoft to listen to you? Or for that matter Oracle?
But I agree, those who try to claim to sell Linux should be more honest, they are selling a product BASED on Linux, not the community. If Red Hat has a lousy audio interface they should fix it. On the same cost-benefit analysis Microsoft used when it broke major soundcard functionality in Vista.
The system as it existed worked on faith. Not facts. Faith that an industry that produces nothing and adds no value can be the most significant industry nonetheless and make EVERYTHING else secondary. It is not the first time.
During the internet bubble, real businesses that produced real goods that real people bought with real money were considered to be worthless. The future was in... well pets.com and what not. Pipe dreams, ad based revenue. It became hard for ordinary businesses to even find investment because they didn't promise the sky.
Of course, you can't say that the financial industry is much the same, that all these speculators add nothing, are fluff. But that is what happened, we had the financial industry fluffing itself up by selling itself its own products over and over again. This whole mortage reselling would be similar to Ford and Chrysler (apologies if they are the same) buying each others cars over and over and counting that as total production. The financial industry obtained a far larger share of the total market then it really is supposed to have. It worked because everyone believed it, believed that Wall Street really is important. It isn't.
Then it collapsed, people did indeed loose fate. Somewhere someone burst the bubble. What we got now is not so much a reccesion, as a re-appreasal. We now got to decide what exactly the role of the financial industry is supposed to be. Is it a service industry to the rest of the industry (exactly like say a cleaning company is a service industry) or is everyone else in the service of the financial industry.
Do we want banks to be just banks, lend our money to others for a profit that they partly keep and partly give to us or speculators, driving up prices, investing only in their own profit margins rather then investing long term in other industries.
A few economists, even as high up as the world bank are daring to question the system right now. That perhaps we should see the bank again as it once was, a service to society rather then the controller of the entire economy. No longer should the financial industry have a 40% share of the economy but rather something closer to 4%, back to REAL industry that actually produces value being the motor again, not shoveling money around.
Frankly I been watching the developments with great intrest. Right now I think a LOT of goverments are showing their true colors, bailing out banks that were never trustworthy, never played by the rules to help out the rich who put their money in their high risk accounts at the cost of the working mans taxes.
We get people who at least seems to have asked others vs a single you. If you were smarter you would understand the irony in your statement. A lone observer complaining about a lone observer.
Car anologies are of course famous on slashdot, but I won't do that. I will do instead something radically new. A MOTORcycle anology. Yes, you saw it here first!
What is wrong with motor-cycles.
They offer no protection against the rain.
There is no seatbelt to keep you on your seat in a collision.
With just two wheels they easily fall over.
Only room for a single passenger.
The law says you got to wear a helmet making it impossible to either drink coffee or fix your make-up depending on gender/sexual preference.
The list goes on. Any of them can be fixed BUT the moment you do that, you no longer have a motorcycle. You got something else.
Back to linux. The NATURE of linux is that it is free. Not just free as in beer or whatever but free as to what anyone does to it. Anyone can create a distro or a new UI or whatever because that is what it is all about.
Change that and you change the nature of linux and you get... well depending on who does it. A Red Hat or a Windows or an OSX. It might be BASED on linux, but it ain't Linux. Same as OSX ain't BSD. It uses it at its core but it ain't BSD. Similar to how Mandriva ain't Suse.
The suggestions made CAN apply to a distro, even perhaps a collection of distro's but NEVER to Linux.
It ain't just about the name, the author talks about kernel interfaces and X11 as if they are the same thing or indeed got anything to do with each other. They don't.
There are already efforts to standarize Linux distro's making them use the same directory layout.
But to make any such effort to official, that is the way into development hell that Windows and for that matter all gigantic software has become.
Notice that Linux constantly improves, constantly changes. Well those two things go together. Either you get Linux that is a constant moving target or you get MS Windows that doesn't change in years and then breaks everything at once. Oh yeah, remember how Vista was such a dud because all its interfaces changed and none of the drivers work? Well guess what, to fix that, the next windows won't change... so you get a NEW OS in the a couple of years that hasn't improved at all, just a few bug fixes, if you are lucky.
Apple knows this and just threw everything overboard two times already, last time with OSX because sometimes if you want to move on, you just got to break things.
GNU/Linux is what it is because of what it is. Change that and you get something different and that might be to big a price to pay to end up with yet another commitee developed OS. We had those. You can get PLENTY of unixes developed by a single entity. Not a single one of them is a popular as linux. (Oh alright OSX might be more popular but that ruins my argument so I am ignoring it)
This is also the reason why rape and child abuse should always be reported no matter how hard it may be at the time. To have the crimes on record so at a later time the system KNOWS what they are dealing with.
Really, talk to a lawyer, they law might be on your side a lot more then you think.
The US without a doubt has attacked civilian on purpose, but so has every other country INCLUDING the supposed victim in your own example who bombed entirely undefended cities, slaughtered million of civilians and forced childeren into sexual slavery.
If you said "countries" instead of US, your argument would hold a lot more water. Now it just seems that you want to bash a certain country that just happened to have the biggest bomb in a war of city bombing.
If you know a bit about the japanese in WW2 you know they do NOT make good victims. A country that threathed everyone not of that country as lesser beings, does NOT get my sympathy if they after a dirty war just happened to be hit harder then they managed to do. If you punch Mike Tyson in the guts don't expect me to cry when he beats you into a pulp afterwards.
So why don't you mention the city bombings STARTED by the japanese against entirely undefended cities?
Zaandam, holland. Where most of the worlds chocolate is produced. Do you know what happens if a pipe bursts and chocolate spills on the floor? It is scooped up and put back into the system. Dead bugs on the floor? People who walked in from outside with no real cleaning system except a token one by one entrance? Not a problem, all scoped up with cacoa -mass and put back in, ready to be transported to candy producing factories around the world.
Mmmm, yummy! Trust me, after working there for a while, I didn't eat chocolate for a LONG time. Although that might have something to do with EVERYTHING smelling of chocolate after a while.
Same with slaughter houses. You just never should see how meat is handled. Hygiene is a very abstract concept especially when the customers always wants it cheaper. Steak falls on the floor or has been stuck for a day on a belt? Just put it back in the system. To much hassle to throw it away and might hurt production targets.
You forget that you might be a bit to smart for your own good. The problem with smart people is that they presume other people are the same. They are not.
There are people out there who REALLY think milk comes from the factory. That meat is produced in a machine. They really have no idea where an egg comes from.
I might have lived close enough to farms to know the real deal, to know why the idea of "fresh milk" is so idiotic in ads, but a lot of people have no idea.
These shock videos are needed NOT for people who know where their meat comes from, but for those who don't.
Godwin time perhaps, but did you know that for years after WW2 the holocaust was just not known about. The images of the concentration camp you might be so familiar with just weren't known, not distruted. UNTIL these SHOCK images were distributed the holocaust was unknown, how could people say "Never again" if they never knew it happened?
Sometimes, if you want people to become aware of something, you must shock them first. Show them the truth, because else they just don't know. It ain't just ignorance. The world is complex and filled with information, you can't know everything. If I told you a tsunami killed millions that would mean little to you, if you didn't know what a tsunami is, what killed means or how much a million is. That of course is just basic english, but you can see what I mean, without knowning what something really means, you can't react to it. In the same way, until we see something bad, we can't really feel it.
The simple fact is that shock images work. The fact that you protest about them shows they work. They make people have to face what they are doing. Images of concetration camps FORCED the world to accept it happened. Images of the tsunami disaster forced the world to see the scope of this disaster. And images of diseased livestock being mistreated forces people one way or another to think about where they food comes from.
People that protest about these images seem to me to want to life in their fantasy world where hamburgers come from McDonalds.
As a mainland european, my jaw is digging its way to australia reading this.
You get paid THE MOMENT you enter the workfloor and stop being paid once you leave. What else is possible?
The notion that somehow you only get paid once your employer thinks you are doing something useful is so ripe with exploits it really shows why captalism is evil to the core.
Imagine a surgeon only getting paid while he is cutting. Not while studying the case, looking at x-rays, talking to the patient, the relatives etc etc. What would that do to medical care.
As you said, in restaurants, if you only get paid while preparing food, cleaning standards are going to drop like mad.
It is as bad as the idea waiters make their money from tips. I prefer the japanese method. You want to be paid, you get a salary, not hand outs. If you run any type of industry you got to pay the salary people need to make a living or just fucking go bankrupt and stop trading.
Because while the workers get shafted like this, don't think for a second that management when they are not productive cut their own salary. Oh no, they get paid the same no matter how much they screw up and a bonus if they do so badly they actually have to be fired.
Frankly, that this lawsuit even has to happen shows you that the neo-con's have been in power way to long. Lets see if Obama can change some of this non-sense.
The goal of the mars rovers is of course first most to collect data from marse but just as important is learning from this mission how to plan future missions.
It seems that some people at NASA greatly over-estimated the harshness of the mars landscape. Some basic equipment that could have been installed to prolong the live of the rovers wasn't, because they wouldn't last long enough to make use of for instance solar cell cleaners. But the rovers did last, their wheels did not break off (or at when it happened wasn't the mission killer it was feared to be).
Future mars missions can learn from this, not just in the design phase (build in more redundancy and self-repair facilities) but in the operation as it shows that if you can actually land a vehicle it can be kept going for far longer. Perhaps make use of this in advance by giving options for joint missions with other rovers that might land later?
Now that everyone knows two small rovers designed for just 3 months can survive for this long, perhaps it is worthwhile for the next mission to go for an even longer duration and perhaps end up with a vehicle going for a decade, and because it has a long live expectancy build in, perhaps be build to travel further (the rovers only covered a few miles because they were never expected to life long enough to travel further but now that they can life long enough to travel further they could have been designed to travel further)
Space exploration is not just about finding data from space, it is about finding out what works and what doesn't. The rovers worked, that is important data. See the next rover being send, bigger, and with its own power supply that is hopefully going to last for longer without the rover constantly being depended on the sun allowing it to travel continounsly. The new rover is a combo of the old and the new. From that mission data the next rover will be developed. Maybe bigger, maybe smaller, all depends on what is learned next. To builders, the soil data is just so much gobbligook. The mission data, now that gives engineers/designers whatever a major hardon.
Please, remain calm and seated behind a computer. An expect team will be along shortly to remove these dangerous notions that NASA has long since perfected stellar and interstellar travel and has been keeping the united states public in the dark because the seats are to small for the average american behind.
What REALLY happened is this: Every security hole that MS discovered on its own, was exploited BUT we are supposed to be happy because in 40% of the cases MS correctly predicted that it would be exploited.
Let me translate. I left fish out on the kitchen counter, EVERY single time it was eaten by my cat, but don't worry, I predicted he would correctly 4 times. Ain't I a genius.
This prediction ain't just bad by MS, it is idiotic. EVERY SECURITY HOLE WAS EXPLOITED. As you would expect it to be. Then claiming that you are smart by claiming you saw this coming 40% of the time is meaningless.
Coin tossing. If flip a coin and predict 40% of the time that it will land face side up, nobody would assume you have any special powers, it would just be down to randomness. Harmless and useless. But this is not what MS predicted. MS predicted that 40% of the time a coin flipped into the air, would come back down. That ain't a good guess, it shows that MS has a fundemental lack of understanding software security. Then again, that is hardly going to come as a suprise to anyone who has been following them for the last 2 decades.
Where coffee is grown does make a difference. Different plants require different amounts of light. Mountains give three kinds of sunlight, shade side, sun side and the valley. Well the bit on top too but that is generally hard to farm as people fall off and mountain goats keep eating your crops.
So there is a difference between where in mountanous terrain the coffee is grown because it determines how much sunlight it gets.
Same as for instance in holland there is an exception to the rule that no sugar may be added for the production of wine. In warmer climates this is reasonable, but the cold climate of holland does not produce enough sugar of its own for the fermentation process.
Currently the debate if coffee is about shade-grown vs sun-grown. Traditionally coffee was grown under trees, this however makes the coffee bean mature slower. To ease production and make it quicker, farmers cut the trees down exposing the coffee shrub to the sun. This however is bad for the enviroment.
So now the shift is slowly going back to shade-grown coffee.
Wether mountain grown is a valid or non-valid term, is up for debate, BUT the part of critical thinking is to FULLY examine ALL elements of a claim. I am missing that in your post. There is a difference where the coffee been grows at least in the amount of sunlight it gets. Wether you can taste the difference (I got lousy taste buds) is up for debate, but mountain grown itself is an odd term (do they mean shade or sunside of the mountain) but the implication that were the coffee is grown matters is not. Shade-grown coffee is preferable, not for the taste but because it is better for the enviroment.
Mind you, what would be worse in this job interview. Finding yourself handcuffed when signing the contract or getting a rejection letter. "Thank you for your intrest in joining our Federal "PitA" Program but at this time we feel we are not going to make use of your services, kind regards, FBI."
That rape victim who went along willingly is all to common. From date rape to battered wives. People and women especially, are not raised to be... well skeptics, to always question, to always wonder "what do they want of me".
There are two toilets at your place of work, one is occupied, the other isn't. Why do you want in front of the one that is occupupied? Because a very small sign tells you to. A simple sign has the power to command you without questioning why you are holding it up while a perfectly fine toilet is available. People EVEN do this if they are in a place were NONE of the opposite sex are present or ever likely to be present.
Yes she was greedy, and I have little sympathy for her, but in a way, she is just the result of our world were in order to function as a group we must obey countless rules without questioning because they just have to be. Why do we drive on the right side of the road, even if the road is deserted, why do we stop for a red light even if there is no other traffic etc etc. I can drive a forklift in a deserted warehouse and I will STILL drive on the right of a road that is nothing more then the empty space between goods.
Most people here know about scams like this but recently I was sent a scam mail myself on anonymized service (no email, url, etc is allowed through just plain text) that makes scams impossible since the person talking to you can't contact you directly in anyway. So I had to ask "what the hell does the poster want" as I could not make sense of it. Turned out it was a scam, just an automated one sent by people who didn't know the system filters messages to such an extent.
Thrown into a situation where the rules you and I normally use to judge messages were different, my spam detector failed (it is a help service and many messages are garbled as people write them in great emotional distress at times and people then don't always make sense).
Yes, she is stupid and she should be fired from her job but being gullible and going along with a scam is also very human. Candid camera programs prove this. We really expect things to be true, for people not to lie because else the world doesn't work.
Check it yourself. Do you go blindly into the men's room without checking it is the men's room, just because a small sign says you won't be sued for entering it? A sign you have no reason is there legitamate?
A 2nd hand game is old, has been out for a while obvious, its manual will have been read, the disc will have some wear and tear. Go look at 2nd hand games, they don't have the newness of the new boxes.
Games themselves age, this clearly proven by the game industry as they discount older titles. In fact 2nd hand games got a very odd market as they must be sold quickly before the discount game itself becomes cheaper then the 2nd hand game.
The wear and tear is there, NOT in degredation of the actual product but in the time delay between release and you getting to play a 2nd hand game. Same as for books.
No, sorry, your argument doesn't hold much water. It doesn't work for the book and music industry, so the question remains, why does the game industry feel it can change the rules.
Who wrote the bible? It is known that the christian testaments WERE selected by a SINGLE individual who deciced what and what not to include from a host of other authors. How much did he leave out? Did he add anything? What was his agenda?
Same with Islam, it was written by a pedo who had sex with a girl only about 6 years old. And it is from HIS writings that the rest of the religion takes its que as to the acceptable age of marriage. Chicken and the egg anyone? How much did the prophet introduce his own leanings into the supposed godly teachings?
Same with the old testament, how can there be a people of Israel if all people are from the same two? Who wrote the original testaments? We have accounting of the actual telling of the testaments by god to the scribes, they just seem to have popped up somewhere. Slightly odd, at least most of the new testaments are supposed to be eye witness accounts even if 2nd or 3rd hand ones. But who witnessed or was told genesis?
Scientology just makes it bloody obvious that religions should be questioned as to the motivations of its founders. 2000 or 6000 years don't suddenly make it possible to ignore the question: "Where is the money".
These damn dunes are in the way, meters high mounds of sand, and yet they say the ocean is right there, at eyes high on the other side. Bloody dunes, best they be done away with. I want to see the OCEAN!
(Check height map of The Netherlands), it is part of the low countries for a reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Just how do you make a black character that can't be called either a stereo-type the moment you give him/her anything more then a skin for being black? And if you make him generic, you will be accused of making him white, accused of claiming the only good way to be is to act like a white person.
Like it or not, stereo-types is what we define race by.
In the series frasier, there are no black characters except one. Winston, an upper neighbour. I didn't realize he was supposed to be black until later in the series when his mother is introduced. He has no stereo-typical black features other then a dark skin, talks like a brit, acts snobbish, he is in a way whiter then frasier.
So does he count as black man in a white series OR is he just an actor and his skin color irrelevant as it was to me?
That is the hard part about creating a character. Just putting a bra on a 3d model doesn't make the player character female. She got to do something feminine. Nothing to complex because we got a game to play but something that CLEARLY makes the it a her. Ask yourself this, Lara Croft. Woman or boy with tits? From the start, she really doesn't act female at all. You do not control her as if she was female. She is you with tits and you is a male. There are other games as well where you play a female but it never really chances the way you play the game. Hell my MMORPG characters tend to be female often for little better reason they look better and obscure less of the scenery. I certainly don't play them as if they were women.
For that matter, how would I know how to play a woman? I ain't one. Neither am I black. Either a black character I play or interact with is going to have to do something I associate with being black or it is just going to be a skin color with no relevance.
Skin color having no relevance might be what Martin Luther King dreamed about, it ain't what the PC crowd dreams about. They want minorities to be seen in a positive light. Winston from Frasier ain't a positive minority to me because I never realized he was part of a minority. But how do you accentuate that someone is a minority without adding some stereo-types to show this person is a minority?
You can't. Lara Croft is not a positive role-model for women because she ain't a woman. She is whoever the player is because her sex never enters into the gameplay. Leisure Suit Larry did that, it changed your character at one point to a female and you played a woman because it stereo-typed you as a slut who used sex to gain access to new areas. You had to think as a "woman" (how many of men can get a doorwoman to allow us in by giving cunninglus?) but not in a way that is exactly positive.
In GTA, you are a very stereo-typical character, but if you weren't a blacker black then any black person has ever been, how do you get white guys whose closest connection to the hood is that they seen it on tv to play a "black" character? Lets not forget that an awful lot of games allow you to choose your own skin color without it ever making a difference. So either you play a stereo-typical character or a generic "white" avatar with no background.
Don't mistake basic story telling with a racist agenda. Do people complain that Puss In Boots in Shrek was a speciest slur against dogs? Why can't dogs be shown to be cute and cuddly and capable of wearing boots?
You ever even seen a motorcycle? Good luck riding between cars in a traffic jam with a sidespan. Or leaning it heavily into a corner. Or pulling a wheelie. No real motorcycle has a windshield of any significance. You are talking about a moped or a girls bike. Good job however on completely missing the point.
Partly. Linux doesn't try to sell anything. Linux after all is either the community or the kernel, neither of which is in a position to sell anything to anyone.
Red Hat might be trying to sell something that uses Linux (the community and the kernel) as its basis BUT it creates its own product out of that. Talk to Red Hat if you want car-motor-cycle hybrid.
Linux, the community (GNU/linux and a thousand other things) is an untamable beast because it ain't a single beast. Nobody controls it because there is not one thing to control. Red Hat the distro is tameable. It is controlled and its controller can be easily found.
BUT however hard it may be to get Linux the community to do anything, consider this. When was the last time you got a single person at Microsoft to listen to you? Or for that matter Oracle?
But I agree, those who try to claim to sell Linux should be more honest, they are selling a product BASED on Linux, not the community. If Red Hat has a lousy audio interface they should fix it. On the same cost-benefit analysis Microsoft used when it broke major soundcard functionality in Vista.
The system as it existed worked on faith. Not facts. Faith that an industry that produces nothing and adds no value can be the most significant industry nonetheless and make EVERYTHING else secondary. It is not the first time.
During the internet bubble, real businesses that produced real goods that real people bought with real money were considered to be worthless. The future was in... well pets.com and what not. Pipe dreams, ad based revenue. It became hard for ordinary businesses to even find investment because they didn't promise the sky.
Of course, you can't say that the financial industry is much the same, that all these speculators add nothing, are fluff. But that is what happened, we had the financial industry fluffing itself up by selling itself its own products over and over again. This whole mortage reselling would be similar to Ford and Chrysler (apologies if they are the same) buying each others cars over and over and counting that as total production. The financial industry obtained a far larger share of the total market then it really is supposed to have. It worked because everyone believed it, believed that Wall Street really is important. It isn't.
Then it collapsed, people did indeed loose fate. Somewhere someone burst the bubble. What we got now is not so much a reccesion, as a re-appreasal. We now got to decide what exactly the role of the financial industry is supposed to be. Is it a service industry to the rest of the industry (exactly like say a cleaning company is a service industry) or is everyone else in the service of the financial industry.
Do we want banks to be just banks, lend our money to others for a profit that they partly keep and partly give to us or speculators, driving up prices, investing only in their own profit margins rather then investing long term in other industries.
A few economists, even as high up as the world bank are daring to question the system right now. That perhaps we should see the bank again as it once was, a service to society rather then the controller of the entire economy. No longer should the financial industry have a 40% share of the economy but rather something closer to 4%, back to REAL industry that actually produces value being the motor again, not shoveling money around.
Frankly I been watching the developments with great intrest. Right now I think a LOT of goverments are showing their true colors, bailing out banks that were never trustworthy, never played by the rules to help out the rich who put their money in their high risk accounts at the cost of the working mans taxes.
We get people who at least seems to have asked others vs a single you. If you were smarter you would understand the irony in your statement. A lone observer complaining about a lone observer.
Car anologies are of course famous on slashdot, but I won't do that. I will do instead something radically new. A MOTORcycle anology. Yes, you saw it here first!
What is wrong with motor-cycles.
The list goes on. Any of them can be fixed BUT the moment you do that, you no longer have a motorcycle. You got something else.
Back to linux. The NATURE of linux is that it is free. Not just free as in beer or whatever but free as to what anyone does to it. Anyone can create a distro or a new UI or whatever because that is what it is all about.
Change that and you change the nature of linux and you get... well depending on who does it. A Red Hat or a Windows or an OSX. It might be BASED on linux, but it ain't Linux. Same as OSX ain't BSD. It uses it at its core but it ain't BSD. Similar to how Mandriva ain't Suse.
The suggestions made CAN apply to a distro, even perhaps a collection of distro's but NEVER to Linux.
It ain't just about the name, the author talks about kernel interfaces and X11 as if they are the same thing or indeed got anything to do with each other. They don't.
There are already efforts to standarize Linux distro's making them use the same directory layout.
But to make any such effort to official, that is the way into development hell that Windows and for that matter all gigantic software has become.
Notice that Linux constantly improves, constantly changes. Well those two things go together. Either you get Linux that is a constant moving target or you get MS Windows that doesn't change in years and then breaks everything at once. Oh yeah, remember how Vista was such a dud because all its interfaces changed and none of the drivers work? Well guess what, to fix that, the next windows won't change... so you get a NEW OS in the a couple of years that hasn't improved at all, just a few bug fixes, if you are lucky.
Apple knows this and just threw everything overboard two times already, last time with OSX because sometimes if you want to move on, you just got to break things.
GNU/Linux is what it is because of what it is. Change that and you get something different and that might be to big a price to pay to end up with yet another commitee developed OS. We had those. You can get PLENTY of unixes developed by a single entity. Not a single one of them is a popular as linux. (Oh alright OSX might be more popular but that ruins my argument so I am ignoring it)
There is a HUGE difference between a hunting rifle and an automatic pistol. Try to conceal one.
Grandparents might not have visitation rights.
This is also the reason why rape and child abuse should always be reported no matter how hard it may be at the time. To have the crimes on record so at a later time the system KNOWS what they are dealing with.
Really, talk to a lawyer, they law might be on your side a lot more then you think.
The US without a doubt has attacked civilian on purpose, but so has every other country INCLUDING the supposed victim in your own example who bombed entirely undefended cities, slaughtered million of civilians and forced childeren into sexual slavery.
If you said "countries" instead of US, your argument would hold a lot more water. Now it just seems that you want to bash a certain country that just happened to have the biggest bomb in a war of city bombing.
If you know a bit about the japanese in WW2 you know they do NOT make good victims. A country that threathed everyone not of that country as lesser beings, does NOT get my sympathy if they after a dirty war just happened to be hit harder then they managed to do. If you punch Mike Tyson in the guts don't expect me to cry when he beats you into a pulp afterwards.
So why don't you mention the city bombings STARTED by the japanese against entirely undefended cities?
Zaandam, holland. Where most of the worlds chocolate is produced. Do you know what happens if a pipe bursts and chocolate spills on the floor? It is scooped up and put back into the system. Dead bugs on the floor? People who walked in from outside with no real cleaning system except a token one by one entrance? Not a problem, all scoped up with cacoa -mass and put back in, ready to be transported to candy producing factories around the world.
Mmmm, yummy! Trust me, after working there for a while, I didn't eat chocolate for a LONG time. Although that might have something to do with EVERYTHING smelling of chocolate after a while.
Same with slaughter houses. You just never should see how meat is handled. Hygiene is a very abstract concept especially when the customers always wants it cheaper. Steak falls on the floor or has been stuck for a day on a belt? Just put it back in the system. To much hassle to throw it away and might hurt production targets.
You forget that you might be a bit to smart for your own good. The problem with smart people is that they presume other people are the same. They are not.
There are people out there who REALLY think milk comes from the factory. That meat is produced in a machine. They really have no idea where an egg comes from.
I might have lived close enough to farms to know the real deal, to know why the idea of "fresh milk" is so idiotic in ads, but a lot of people have no idea.
These shock videos are needed NOT for people who know where their meat comes from, but for those who don't.
Godwin time perhaps, but did you know that for years after WW2 the holocaust was just not known about. The images of the concentration camp you might be so familiar with just weren't known, not distruted. UNTIL these SHOCK images were distributed the holocaust was unknown, how could people say "Never again" if they never knew it happened?
Sometimes, if you want people to become aware of something, you must shock them first. Show them the truth, because else they just don't know. It ain't just ignorance. The world is complex and filled with information, you can't know everything. If I told you a tsunami killed millions that would mean little to you, if you didn't know what a tsunami is, what killed means or how much a million is. That of course is just basic english, but you can see what I mean, without knowning what something really means, you can't react to it. In the same way, until we see something bad, we can't really feel it.
The simple fact is that shock images work. The fact that you protest about them shows they work. They make people have to face what they are doing. Images of concetration camps FORCED the world to accept it happened. Images of the tsunami disaster forced the world to see the scope of this disaster. And images of diseased livestock being mistreated forces people one way or another to think about where they food comes from.
People that protest about these images seem to me to want to life in their fantasy world where hamburgers come from McDonalds.
Remember, all the water in the world has been used countless times and pee ain;'t even the worsed of it.
As a mainland european, my jaw is digging its way to australia reading this.
You get paid THE MOMENT you enter the workfloor and stop being paid once you leave. What else is possible?
The notion that somehow you only get paid once your employer thinks you are doing something useful is so ripe with exploits it really shows why captalism is evil to the core.
Imagine a surgeon only getting paid while he is cutting. Not while studying the case, looking at x-rays, talking to the patient, the relatives etc etc. What would that do to medical care.
As you said, in restaurants, if you only get paid while preparing food, cleaning standards are going to drop like mad.
It is as bad as the idea waiters make their money from tips. I prefer the japanese method. You want to be paid, you get a salary, not hand outs. If you run any type of industry you got to pay the salary people need to make a living or just fucking go bankrupt and stop trading.
Because while the workers get shafted like this, don't think for a second that management when they are not productive cut their own salary. Oh no, they get paid the same no matter how much they screw up and a bonus if they do so badly they actually have to be fired.
Frankly, that this lawsuit even has to happen shows you that the neo-con's have been in power way to long. Lets see if Obama can change some of this non-sense.
The goal of the mars rovers is of course first most to collect data from marse but just as important is learning from this mission how to plan future missions.
It seems that some people at NASA greatly over-estimated the harshness of the mars landscape. Some basic equipment that could have been installed to prolong the live of the rovers wasn't, because they wouldn't last long enough to make use of for instance solar cell cleaners. But the rovers did last, their wheels did not break off (or at when it happened wasn't the mission killer it was feared to be).
Future mars missions can learn from this, not just in the design phase (build in more redundancy and self-repair facilities) but in the operation as it shows that if you can actually land a vehicle it can be kept going for far longer. Perhaps make use of this in advance by giving options for joint missions with other rovers that might land later?
Now that everyone knows two small rovers designed for just 3 months can survive for this long, perhaps it is worthwhile for the next mission to go for an even longer duration and perhaps end up with a vehicle going for a decade, and because it has a long live expectancy build in, perhaps be build to travel further (the rovers only covered a few miles because they were never expected to life long enough to travel further but now that they can life long enough to travel further they could have been designed to travel further)
Space exploration is not just about finding data from space, it is about finding out what works and what doesn't. The rovers worked, that is important data. See the next rover being send, bigger, and with its own power supply that is hopefully going to last for longer without the rover constantly being depended on the sun allowing it to travel continounsly. The new rover is a combo of the old and the new. From that mission data the next rover will be developed. Maybe bigger, maybe smaller, all depends on what is learned next. To builders, the soil data is just so much gobbligook. The mission data, now that gives engineers/designers whatever a major hardon.
Please, remain calm and seated behind a computer. An expect team will be along shortly to remove these dangerous notions that NASA has long since perfected stellar and interstellar travel and has been keeping the united states public in the dark because the seats are to small for the average american behind.
How exactly does implanting optic wires into your brain do anything except give you a possible headache.
We have had electrodes for ages, so anyone wanting to create a brain-computer interface already had the tech. Oooh, and they already done it.
Mind you, you are the perfect sample for my next paper. "Tinfoil-hats linked to permanent brain damage."
What REALLY happened is this: Every security hole that MS discovered on its own, was exploited BUT we are supposed to be happy because in 40% of the cases MS correctly predicted that it would be exploited.
Let me translate. I left fish out on the kitchen counter, EVERY single time it was eaten by my cat, but don't worry, I predicted he would correctly 4 times. Ain't I a genius.
This prediction ain't just bad by MS, it is idiotic. EVERY SECURITY HOLE WAS EXPLOITED. As you would expect it to be. Then claiming that you are smart by claiming you saw this coming 40% of the time is meaningless.
Coin tossing. If flip a coin and predict 40% of the time that it will land face side up, nobody would assume you have any special powers, it would just be down to randomness. Harmless and useless. But this is not what MS predicted. MS predicted that 40% of the time a coin flipped into the air, would come back down. That ain't a good guess, it shows that MS has a fundemental lack of understanding software security. Then again, that is hardly going to come as a suprise to anyone who has been following them for the last 2 decades.
Where coffee is grown does make a difference. Different plants require different amounts of light. Mountains give three kinds of sunlight, shade side, sun side and the valley. Well the bit on top too but that is generally hard to farm as people fall off and mountain goats keep eating your crops.
So there is a difference between where in mountanous terrain the coffee is grown because it determines how much sunlight it gets.
Same as for instance in holland there is an exception to the rule that no sugar may be added for the production of wine. In warmer climates this is reasonable, but the cold climate of holland does not produce enough sugar of its own for the fermentation process.
Currently the debate if coffee is about shade-grown vs sun-grown. Traditionally coffee was grown under trees, this however makes the coffee bean mature slower. To ease production and make it quicker, farmers cut the trees down exposing the coffee shrub to the sun. This however is bad for the enviroment.
So now the shift is slowly going back to shade-grown coffee.
Wether mountain grown is a valid or non-valid term, is up for debate, BUT the part of critical thinking is to FULLY examine ALL elements of a claim. I am missing that in your post. There is a difference where the coffee been grows at least in the amount of sunlight it gets. Wether you can taste the difference (I got lousy taste buds) is up for debate, but mountain grown itself is an odd term (do they mean shade or sunside of the mountain) but the implication that were the coffee is grown matters is not. Shade-grown coffee is preferable, not for the taste but because it is better for the enviroment.
Says a lot of about us really doesn't it.
Mind you, what would be worse in this job interview. Finding yourself handcuffed when signing the contract or getting a rejection letter. "Thank you for your intrest in joining our Federal "PitA" Program but at this time we feel we are not going to make use of your services, kind regards, FBI."
That rape victim who went along willingly is all to common. From date rape to battered wives. People and women especially, are not raised to be... well skeptics, to always question, to always wonder "what do they want of me".
There are two toilets at your place of work, one is occupied, the other isn't. Why do you want in front of the one that is occupupied? Because a very small sign tells you to. A simple sign has the power to command you without questioning why you are holding it up while a perfectly fine toilet is available. People EVEN do this if they are in a place were NONE of the opposite sex are present or ever likely to be present.
Yes she was greedy, and I have little sympathy for her, but in a way, she is just the result of our world were in order to function as a group we must obey countless rules without questioning because they just have to be. Why do we drive on the right side of the road, even if the road is deserted, why do we stop for a red light even if there is no other traffic etc etc. I can drive a forklift in a deserted warehouse and I will STILL drive on the right of a road that is nothing more then the empty space between goods.
Most people here know about scams like this but recently I was sent a scam mail myself on anonymized service (no email, url, etc is allowed through just plain text) that makes scams impossible since the person talking to you can't contact you directly in anyway. So I had to ask "what the hell does the poster want" as I could not make sense of it. Turned out it was a scam, just an automated one sent by people who didn't know the system filters messages to such an extent.
Thrown into a situation where the rules you and I normally use to judge messages were different, my spam detector failed (it is a help service and many messages are garbled as people write them in great emotional distress at times and people then don't always make sense).
Yes, she is stupid and she should be fired from her job but being gullible and going along with a scam is also very human. Candid camera programs prove this. We really expect things to be true, for people not to lie because else the world doesn't work.
Check it yourself. Do you go blindly into the men's room without checking it is the men's room, just because a small sign says you won't be sued for entering it? A sign you have no reason is there legitamate?
Dumbest fucking person on Earth. Right, so the republicans will snap her right up and have her for president in 2012. Admit it america, you want her.
A 2nd hand game is old, has been out for a while obvious, its manual will have been read, the disc will have some wear and tear. Go look at 2nd hand games, they don't have the newness of the new boxes.
Games themselves age, this clearly proven by the game industry as they discount older titles. In fact 2nd hand games got a very odd market as they must be sold quickly before the discount game itself becomes cheaper then the 2nd hand game.
The wear and tear is there, NOT in degredation of the actual product but in the time delay between release and you getting to play a 2nd hand game. Same as for books.
No, sorry, your argument doesn't hold much water. It doesn't work for the book and music industry, so the question remains, why does the game industry feel it can change the rules.
Who wrote the bible? It is known that the christian testaments WERE selected by a SINGLE individual who deciced what and what not to include from a host of other authors. How much did he leave out? Did he add anything? What was his agenda?
Same with Islam, it was written by a pedo who had sex with a girl only about 6 years old. And it is from HIS writings that the rest of the religion takes its que as to the acceptable age of marriage. Chicken and the egg anyone? How much did the prophet introduce his own leanings into the supposed godly teachings?
Same with the old testament, how can there be a people of Israel if all people are from the same two? Who wrote the original testaments? We have accounting of the actual telling of the testaments by god to the scribes, they just seem to have popped up somewhere. Slightly odd, at least most of the new testaments are supposed to be eye witness accounts even if 2nd or 3rd hand ones. But who witnessed or was told genesis?
Scientology just makes it bloody obvious that religions should be questioned as to the motivations of its founders. 2000 or 6000 years don't suddenly make it possible to ignore the question: "Where is the money".
These damn dunes are in the way, meters high mounds of sand, and yet they say the ocean is right there, at eyes high on the other side. Bloody dunes, best they be done away with. I want to see the OCEAN!
(Check height map of The Netherlands), it is part of the low countries for a reason.
If it is only minor improvements, then why is it not a service pack, or like 95 and 98 SE versions?
Why do you feel these small chances are worth another full price release?