Those that feel victimized can make it very convincing.
Oooh, I am so badly treated in the west....
That is bad, tell you what, here is a free one way ticket to anywhere in the world where you can be with your own kind... and please tell them to stop coming over here as so many off them drown on the way and they ruin the beaches with the bloated corpses
No, I don't want to go, I have a right to be here! No, you don't have a right to go to my country and do what you want to do, but I got a right! No duties, just rights
It is like reading up on conspiracy theories, it can get very convincing until you realize you are hearing half the story.
For instance Israel attacked and killed a palestinian "terrorists"... of course, the other side of the story, a palestinian that went into an Israeli house and killed everyone inside with knife, even a baby... that doesn't get told.
If you really want to study these stories in details, make sure you read the stories that upset your world view and THEN question them.
You will be amazed by the lying.
See the BBC on this terrorist attack. EVERY single story on the BBC site mentions that he did it to avenge the killing palestinian children. Notice that the swedish killer stories did NOT have a constant mention that he did because he wanted to avenge the muslimfication of sweden.
The problem isn't migration, plenty of people do that just fine. But the good immigrants are also something else. EMIGRANTS. They leave one country and culture for another. That works... more or less, it doesn't happen often after all but there are plenty of people who left their old land and never returned.
With north african migration, this is no longer the case, they return every summer, bring their own religion, shops and places to hangout and create a little bit of home in the new country.
They weren't accepted in France? Right, the french bent of backward to accomodate, going back on decades of seperation of church and state to accomodate the Muslims. And it is not like polish or irish or any immigrant group in the US was welcomed with open arms.
But how many of those early immigrants to the US ever went back? Wanted to go back? Most had fled and vowed never to return.
In many ways, the suburbs around Paris, filled with the unwanted who do not want to be there is like a holiday resort where people go to a foreign country to shop in the same supermarkets as they do at home, drink the same drinks, eat the same food and are relieved everyone speaks their language.
It is nasty... multi-cultural? By its is own definition, it cannot work, it is a contradiction in terms. Multi-cultural is a SINGULAR culture, for it to work, EVERYONE has to subscribe to it, so how can you say multi-cultural has many cultures when all must believe in the same one? Multiple groups can live together... if they all want to and nothing happens to upset it. India was famous for its religious tolerance, the only place Jews were never prosecuted. Well, until Muslims changed it... gosh, again that same religion.
You can keep trying to come up with excuses, launch another study, talk a bit more but so far it ain't helping. And if you think Sarkosy is right wing, there are far far worse people you never ever heard off.
A lot of bleeding hearts are calling the rethoric of the likes of Wilders (Holland) the signs of the 1930's. No price for quessing the reference. They are of course full of it... IF there is a resemblance witht he past, then it is the 1920's.... what happened then you ask... yes, nobody ever told you that. The story always starts with Hitler in rising to power but never sets the scene by showing how the vacuum was created that allowed this rise. The many failed elections and parties unable to deal with the massive issues of the day that allowed the nazi much later.
Wilders, Le Pen, etc etc are not Adolf Hitler and the likes of Job Cohen are not Chamberlain... this is good because by the time the nazi's marched the battle had been lost.
But we need to act now, make it clear that in a society, there are rules, you can be a bit to the left of that and a bit to the right but NEVER to much. If you really hate a society that much, MOVE. We cannot allow a few nutters to either turn the west Muslim with Sharia law (and there are parties who want this quit openly, google Sharia4Belgium) or to become a nazi party. The real nasty bit for being tolerant and multi-cultural is that you cannot be tolerant of extremists or all cultures.
Let us not forget that the issue here is Muslims. There are a lot of Jews, Hindu's, Catholics, Christians, Boedhists and god knows what else is out there, living peacefully in the western world. ONLY Muslims are causing problems everywhere. PC might make you feel warm and fuzzy inside but at a given point you got to deal with the fact that a specific group is causing endless problems and deal with it. Or someone else will come to power and come up with a solution. And you might not like that one at all, I guarantee it won't be PC.
Hitler and those like him are the enemy, that is obvious. But your enemy should also be the people that created the vacuum of leadership, of taking responsibilty, of sorting out the common man's complaints that allowed Hitlet to convince people that he could solve their problems (which btw, he totally failed to do).
Manga unlike mainstream Comics in the US are published in chapters in magazines together with other manga's. It is a method shared with strips from the European mainland with a few differences. First of all, manga magazines are much thicker, they have a LOT of content and this makes it easier for new talent to get a chance BUT the manga industry is far more commercial in Japan with far more magazines then even at the high-time of strips in France.
So, you get a few weeks and then the magazine tests the popularity and you either go, or stay. That is why even such old hats in the industry as Rumiko Takahashi include a few nude bits in the first chapters for their manga's aimed at boys, just to help the initial poll score better. Her works are hardly pornographic or even erotic in nature but for the ones published in young men/boys magazines, the lead has a nude scene. Compare it to the lesbian kiss durings sweeps week.
Other polls are done to ask readers for their favorite character and it is not unusual for the story to change to give more prominance to a winner.
Does it work? Some high quality manga is published this way and some some very low key fan dribble where every thing is designed to be instantly appealing.
Forget light nudity, think of characters with every popular design bolted on resulting in parodies that are supposed to be taken serious.
Imagine all your content designed by book cover designers. It is one thing to have a teaser to pull the audience in and get them to give you a chance to tell them your story, and another thing when everything is constantly designed to pull you in and nothing else.
Wait a minute, why am I trying to explain this when there is a movie director out there who does this all the time? That........ who made Transformer. That is what you get if you cater solely to fans and to nobody else.
It wouldn't even that bad, if he catered to just one type of fan. Pity he tries to cater both to lovers of Megan Fox acting ability and big explosions, jarring both fans constantly by intruding either big bangs or big explosions.
All this bitching about the Raspberry in general and this case goes to show just how fucking hard it is to make a good solid product. We barely think about it but for every product out there we just use without issue, a hell of a lot of people spend a hell of a lot of time, just getting it right.
Take something as simple as a drinks can, you know the kind you get soft-drinks in. Once, they had pull of tabs, and those tabs had sharp edges and they got thrown away and people stepped on them with bare feet and got hurt. That is why nowadays, can's have a opening that opens inwards leaving all bits attached.
It took DECADES for this to change. It might now seem like rocket science but clearly it was.
Apple seems famous for good design yet its white mac-book air, the plastic one, when opened had rounded edges for the bit on your desk, and sharp edges for you to lay your hands on... not very comfortable at all. A minor issue? You would think BUT this issue is known about (how many keyboards have hard sharp edges to lay your wrist on?) and yet, Apple made this mistake again when the problem should have been known as well as the solution.
When you make a thingy like this raspberry board there a million things to think off, often things that someone somewhere has already solved but getting all that knowledge into one place has never been done (go ahead, point me to a resource where every mistake in designing say an MP3 player has been recorded, let alone with the solution) and so mistakes will be re-made and re-solved over and over again.
If you ever think of making your own product, estimate the time you need to make it, then add ten times that time to examine it against all other similar products so you can prevent making the same mistakes they did.
Good luck getting that approved for budget. So more then a hundred years after the first keyboards, we still get keyboards with hard sharp edges biting into our wrists...
Really, the first thing that comes to your mind when you are the owner of a product and your own people prefer to face your wrath by buying from the competitor to do their work rather then use their own product, is to ban them?
You wouldn't consider maybe asking them WHY the competitor product is the preferred choice?
And this is hardly news, MS pulled something similar when the Zune was flopping hard and MS employees brought their iPod's to work.
And MS yet again totally fails to ask WHY people prefer to buy ANYTHING else over their products. MS Phone 7 is just the latest in a long line. Is there even a MS tablet out there that MS employees can buy?
It doesn't even solve anything, if MS employees are forced to buy stuff they don't want, they will just hate it and their hatred will be seen by others. You want your employees to be advocates of your product. Not the condemned acting as a warning of the misery that comes with your company.
Or do you think it is good advertising for a restaurant if guests can see your employees vomiting out the employees lunch?
Cpu6502 will no doubt rush through the ranks as a manager because he has the usual manager capability to confuse the disease with the symptom.
Car companies often have the parking lot filled with the companies cars and NOT because of any guidelines (cars are after all privately bought by the people in production) but because the employees feel connected to the company and are proud of what they produce.
MS clearly is totally unable to inspire loyalty in its employees to feel proud of what they produce and want to show it. You can then put out a guideline forcing people to show fake pride but then you are just fighting the symptom, not the disease. If MS can't even build products good enough that people who want to work for you want to have the products... they got no chance in hell of selling to the rest of us. Eat your own dog food and if you got to beat the god to get it to eat, you failed.
The next stupid thing Cpu6502 says, is that this is all the same as giving staff a discount for the companies products... duh... does anyone really think that an MS employee buying a MS product with MS funds pays full price?
This is NOT just MS employees choosing to buy a rival companies product with their own money (already bad enough) but them buying another companies product for company use with company funds.
It would as if DAF trucks bought Ford trucks to deliver its trucks.
And you can then write a snooty little note that they shouldn't do that OR you can hold a very urgent and deep enquiry into why this is happening. Why are MS products so fucking bad that people risk their job promotion changes or at least incoming chairs for work related productivity tools?
If you have a restaurant and all your employees go outside to lunch, would you ban them, or test the food? Choice 1: Congrats, you are a manager. Here is your MBA and a million dollar bonus... Choice 2??? Loser.
While the fact that less music is being sold is fairly straightforward, the reasons for it are not. Especially if you don't compare it to the previous year but look at long term trends.
Cause 1: The switch to CD had ended, in previous years, people often re-bought music they already owned on LP in the new fangled CD format. This caused a sales spike with the industry selling not just new music but also old re-released music. The norm should be years in which the industry had to mostly rely on NEWLY released music for its sales.
It would be like comparing sales figures of cars with a year in which the law demanded that old inefficient cars were to be scrapped. Or comparing building figures in a country with the year before and after an earthquake.
Cause 2: A shift in musical tastes. It is no secret that musical tastes change and that the music industry tries to cater for only a part of the total population. The number of classical recordings has gone down. The number of rappers has gone up. Which audience has more to spend? The music industry limits the number of different NEW musical releases and then wonders why they sell less? Gosh, why not run 1 movie in all theather all the time and then wonder why people stop going?
Cause 3: More targets for disposable income. When I was a kid, I did not have a phone. Now kids do. They get the same pocket money, they can only spend it once. So, less will be spend on X because Y is now taking the money. Record stores have closed, mobile phone stores have opened up.
Cause 4: Musical taste stagnation. If you play an LP. you got to change it or you go mad MAD MAD I say! With a modern media player, you can have a collection of your favority songs and not have them repeat until you can sing them backwards... and then you stop adding to it, because it is good enough. When 10 CD changers became available for cars, how many people ever replaced them? Further proof? Okay, more and more specialized radio stations that repeat the same limitted play lists over and over again to the point I have noticed that some people react with near violence to a generic station that dares to play something not a 100% suited to their tastes.
Cause 5: Economic down turn. Less money to spend, so people spend less. Confused?
Congratulations slave, you have proven the Conservatives right, they believed that making the working class home owners would turn them into good reliable little workers unwilling to risk the house they can't afford with silly things such as looking for a new job, or even thinking about striking.
Why bother with capturing slaves when the feeble just whip themselves?
Mind you, you wouldn't be so bad, if the bleeding hearts wouldn't feel sorry you if you get slaughtered in the revolution. But somehow, your kind then suddenly turns into "innocent" citizens and not supporters of the regime.
Warranty is simple, it is the period of time in which you can REASONABLY expect a product to keep functioning. 2 years isn't even the upper limit, for things that you can expect to function for longer, like a washing machine, a car etc etc, it is far longer. However, after 2 years, the warranty does go down, cosmetic issues are no longer covered but if after two years your washing machine falls apart, it should STILL be repaired for free.
What the little sheep mosb1000 doesn't get that warranty is NOT about DOA, devices that are broken when you buy them, but about devices that break down to fast. Warranty is repair of any issues in device that occur that are not part of its normal deterioration of its expected lifetime.
Simply put, if I buy a oLed tablet, the blues going out after a period of time is not covered under warranty since this is to be expected. The paint on my car going off after a decade (if that is still normal) is not covered since that is expected. Rust holes forming after 5 years in a decent car IS covered since this is not to be expected anymore.
This also allows some devices to fall under 2 years, under 1 year and even shorter. If you buy a led blinker for your bike, coming back in 1 year that the battery is empty isn't covered of course. Complaining that paper decoration runs after only one winter in the rain is likely not to covered either no matter how much you sue.
But a normal customer should be able to use a device in a good condition under normal use for a reasonable amount of time and if that isn't possible, this should either be reflected in the price, have a very good reason or the producer should repair it.
The problem isn't that Apple has been getting away with it, if you insist, Apple folds pretty damn quickly, the problem is that you got to fight them. Sony tried to pull a similar stunt with the PSP and its lousy display with lots of dead pixels, Holland was the only place in the world where Sony officially agreed to replace any PSP with any malfunctioning sub-pixel. If you insisted yourself in a shop in another country you would probably have had it replaced BUT the law states that this should be the norm, not just for the customer who insists on his rights.
Apple is one of the worsed performers in this area, they have no problem charging far higher prices in the EU for the supposed thougher regulation but then try to withold the extra support that is needed. Probably because Apple is an extremely American company and they just can't grasp that in some parts of the world, they can't have it all their way.
The odd thing is that Europe is far easier to deal in, yes, there are longer warranties but then again, nobody can sue for millions for trivial cases. Warranty costs can be easily calculated and avoided with good QA (haha, Apple and QA) but frivolous lawsuits can come out at your right out of the blue.
PHP 5.4 recently was released and it has a really cool new feature. So I did all the hard work of finding a ppa (ubuntu user thingy, stop me if I get to technical) and added it and upgraded. That was pretty hard core! Uber nerd!
Once, kernel features were desperately needed. Now? Meh, they are probably very nice but I can wait for others to test and add them. Everything just works so why risk breaking it?
MS has the same problem. XP and even more so Windows 7, just works. So how to sell Windows 8? And Linux ain't selling anything so why upgrade on my own when in a few months I can just run upgrade and have it all done for me?
Maybe I just gotten lazy. I would type more, but need a nap after so much hard key pressing. *Fluffs up cowboyneal for a pillow and cuddles up with his Linus blanky*
There is a reason the people for Freedom of speech rallied behind smut peddler and general amoral person, Larry Flint. If you don't defend the objectionable when they come for them, nobody will object when they come for you. It doesn't work in simple movie heroics but the people at the frontlines of the battle between good and right often ain't all that nice. Many a freedom fighter is just one step away from being a criminal, even in the eyes of their own side. The non-silly part of Dad's army was hard line enemies of the state, who were trained by the state since it was reasoned they hated the nazi's even more then British government and could be counted upon to kill those of the British government who would colaborate with an occupying german force.
Keep waiting for a nice guy to rally behind and you might find that the battle has been lost before you ever got started.
Mind you, I got the strong suspicion that since you are an AC, you might well not mind all that much. 10 to 1 that you think DRM and Trusted Computing are all worth it, for your cause.
If you want to convince the average person to take privacy serious, NEVER use an example where you are worried a guilty person might be convicted for a crime he did in fact commit Only utter nutters think that law and order is some kind of game, that must be played "fair" with the odds in favor of the criminal. The rest of us think that guilty people should be punished. So, try again, what does an INNOCENT person have to worry about all this? He very well might, but it is the innocent person carry about. Not your guilty ass.
It is the nature of protest. When you fight the system you are fighting what the establishment has established as what is right. Very few evil rules go "Mahahahahahaah", dress in black and have a note in their agenda, be evil. Most evil people thought THEY were the good ones. So, when people fought slavery, they were the terrorists going what was clearly right. Only when they won, did the view change.
History is written by the victors and their is NO definitive version of it, when the victors change, the history will be rewritten again. If you think the persons who you are trying to defeat with your protests are just going to go "oh, we are so wrong, clearly we are evil and all our thoughts and actions are evil so we will stop and do what you want because you are right and good"... well... you might end up disappointed.
And while you are protesting a lot of people standing by the site might get quite upset. Not because they argree with the other side but just because you are causing an inconvenience. Nobody ever mentions the people having to go without their tea in Boston.
It is just a lot in any direction. Same reason you are not a stain on the ground from the massive pressure off all the air on top of you. Air pressure is all around and the same all around.
A funny thing is that in theory, if you could drill a hole through the planet and you could jump down it and there was no air resistance you would pop out at the other end at the same speed as you entered. first you accelerate and then you decelerate. Of course, it would never work in real life but it is a fun idea.
For a thought experiment, on the side of a mountain, does a plumb line (weight on end of bit of rope) hang straight down OR a bit to the side because of the mountain? What about the position of the moon? If it can pull an entire ocean around, surely a bit of lead doesn't stand a chance.
We learn a lot about science and then a lot of us kinda forget to ask the next question. That is what makes the Einsteins and Newtons so brilliant. They did continue to ask. And not get told "because".
The guy is a dickhead who violated another persons very reasonable expectation of privacy and then spread it around. Note that his defense never denied any of it, just claimed it wasn't so bad after all, haters will hate it seems and because this poor guy can be deported that another person felt so bad about having his private live revealed that he killed himself does not matter. Neither has this guy ever made a serious apology, the only thing he feels sorry for is himself.
Now, please tell me why I am a lousy human being for not feeling sorry for this dickhead and thinking poetic justice would be to put a webcam in his cell as he finds a husband during his stretch.
Society has certain rules, they are not that hard to get. Nobody could possibly think that what he did was not morally wrong, yet he did it. Now he cries that its effects on him are to big. The effects HIS actions had on his roommate don't come into it. Let him make a serious effort of atonement BEFORE the jury found him guilty. I never buy it when a criminal says he was so sorry, AFTER his lawyer wrote the speech for him. Maybe I am just not a bleeding heart anymore. And if you think, this is just what 20 year olds do... then it says a lot about you.
This proves my point, some people care about getting things done, about being able to find out how to get things done... and others about the font used for the logo.
Who cares about the function names? I can hit a dozen developers from my desk and every single one of them will have a different idea about the best naming schematic and formatting rules. I often use 3rd party libraries, I just adjust. Go ahead and work with something else if you want but don't complain when thousands who work in less exalted positions choose functionality over elegance in something nobody but a programmer will ever see.
What is amusing is that you care so much about some silly naming scheme. Buit tell me, what did you think of the recent massive security flaw in Rails. Did it have pretty names in the gigantic security hole? What value does a naming scheme really have beyond pleasing elegance?
I HATE language selling sites. Many a new language or framework has a VERY nice presentation site telling you that THIS is the answer to your problems, this language will screw your gf, kill your dog and set your house on fire, letting you concentrate on the essentials of life. Coding.
PHP is totally different, it doesn't sell itself, it has no slick presentation, just every function described in clear plain English (and many heathen tongues like Dutch for those who were not blessed by god to be born in the US of A) with informative user comments with zero SPAM!!! That is what a not so good developer like me needs. Not so good? No. Really good programmers can pull a six figure income with ease, wallstreet pays the top close to a million, top game developers drive in Ferrari's. If you are coding web pages for less then 100k per year and have a bus pass, you are just not at the top. Accept it, the world needs average people too. You don't have to be the fastest runner in the world to escape the lion of unemployment, you just have to be faster then the guy next to you. Or have a gun... and shoot the guy next to you.
What I have noticed is that there are a LOT of elitist among coders who fail at being lazy. A good coder writes NOW what he needs NOW. Coding for the future is nice but you even end writing for the past instead because by the time you have written your future proof code, the future has become the past and you missed the present. Sure for some projects, the best is needed and that is great for those who operate at such lofty levels us mere degenerate mud dwellers can not even dream off. But down in the mud, a lot of code gets written that solves a problem NOW and makes money NOW.
ID spent a fortune on the Rage engine and the Angry Birds team did not. Which game was the greater success? Not that I think ID was wrong... but I know my limitations. Do you?
Ubuntu, PHP etc are typically vilified for their common populalatiry. Meanwhile the Debian and Ruby people never quite understand why their own products just don't get to be as popular. They rail about lack of structure or security problems (note that Rails had a far bigger security hole at its core greater then PHP ever had and no Rail fans ever apologized for their slurs against PHP) and don't understand that real users simply need clear documentation.
Sometimes a coder thinks that HE has the next framework... sometimes they even ask for advice on it. My advice? Forget the code. I believe you it is good. SHOW ME THE GODDAMNS DOCS to use your new baby. And in those docs. NEVER assume that I can read your mind. I need EVERYTHING explained because what seems obvious to you is not going to be obvious to anyone else.
It is part of the reason Javascript is such a dog. The language is pretty damn good in my opinion. But there is no documentation for the average coders. php.net is the gold standard for functional documentation of a programming language. Learn from it or die in obscurity. Unless your audience enjoys coding in the dark. Some do... but I don't.
The modern Turkey was because it was a dictatorship ruled by the military who was okay with somewhat democratic leaders until they misbehaved and were stepped on. HARD!
The army enforced that the vision of Ataturk was followed and all was well, Turkey prospored and the west had a Muslim nation that leaned heavily to western ideas and values.
But the west didn't like this, democracy is the way and so Erdogan got into power and has been using the religious whankers to build his power base, relying on their fear of the westernized Turkey to build his powerbase. Roughly similar to how Republicans use fundementalist Christians. So it is moderate and liberal Muslims who favor dictatorship and fear democracy. The world is a strange and complex place and one solution definitly does not fit all. Not that the military is nice... they just are nicer then Erdogan. See Egypts military for a similar deal. A lot of Muslim nations are kept in check by military leaders who are far more modern then their supposedly democratic leaders.
Commentator: 23 voters; 26 votes. A slight anomaly...?
Bought politician: Not really -- you see, this law may look like a monkey who's been put in a suit and then strategically shaved, but it is a brilliant opportunity for a corrupt politician. The number of votes I cast is simply a reflection of how firmly I believe in getting brown envelopes.
And politicians wonder why people don't believe them anymore. You could hold a politician at gun point and tell him he and his children will die unless he says that these things make people loose fate in democracy and he just wouldn't be able to say it to save his life and those he values (The dollar bills in his pockets, not his kids). It isn't corruption, it is let them eat cake and genuinely being unable to realize that people who do not have bread, do not have cake either. If Anders Behring Breivik had done his rampage among politicians, he would be the greatest hero ever.
Such a Freudian slip of the mind shows a diseased mind that is best examined... from 2 km through a sniper scope... I should know... I read it that way too.
You know you are a nerd when your brain tries to relate any sentence with the word sex in it, to computers.
Not often a donator but donated 25 dollar. I was going to write a rather insulting post of Americans and Canadians in general but... there just isn't enough bile in the world. Improve the world, kill a Canadian. And don't moan about not all Canadians being like this, you voted for these turds and haven't voted them out.
Slashdot Mirror
Those that feel victimized can make it very convincing.
Oooh, I am so badly treated in the west....
That is bad, tell you what, here is a free one way ticket to anywhere in the world where you can be with your own kind... and please tell them to stop coming over here as so many off them drown on the way and they ruin the beaches with the bloated corpses
No, I don't want to go, I have a right to be here! No, you don't have a right to go to my country and do what you want to do, but I got a right! No duties, just rights
It is like reading up on conspiracy theories, it can get very convincing until you realize you are hearing half the story.
For instance Israel attacked and killed a palestinian "terrorists"... of course, the other side of the story, a palestinian that went into an Israeli house and killed everyone inside with knife, even a baby... that doesn't get told.
If you really want to study these stories in details, make sure you read the stories that upset your world view and THEN question them.
You will be amazed by the lying.
See the BBC on this terrorist attack. EVERY single story on the BBC site mentions that he did it to avenge the killing palestinian children. Notice that the swedish killer stories did NOT have a constant mention that he did because he wanted to avenge the muslimfication of sweden.
I wonder why that is? What do you think?
The problem isn't migration, plenty of people do that just fine. But the good immigrants are also something else. EMIGRANTS. They leave one country and culture for another. That works... more or less, it doesn't happen often after all but there are plenty of people who left their old land and never returned.
With north african migration, this is no longer the case, they return every summer, bring their own religion, shops and places to hangout and create a little bit of home in the new country.
They weren't accepted in France? Right, the french bent of backward to accomodate, going back on decades of seperation of church and state to accomodate the Muslims. And it is not like polish or irish or any immigrant group in the US was welcomed with open arms.
But how many of those early immigrants to the US ever went back? Wanted to go back? Most had fled and vowed never to return.
In many ways, the suburbs around Paris, filled with the unwanted who do not want to be there is like a holiday resort where people go to a foreign country to shop in the same supermarkets as they do at home, drink the same drinks, eat the same food and are relieved everyone speaks their language.
It is nasty... multi-cultural? By its is own definition, it cannot work, it is a contradiction in terms. Multi-cultural is a SINGULAR culture, for it to work, EVERYONE has to subscribe to it, so how can you say multi-cultural has many cultures when all must believe in the same one? Multiple groups can live together... if they all want to and nothing happens to upset it. India was famous for its religious tolerance, the only place Jews were never prosecuted. Well, until Muslims changed it... gosh, again that same religion.
You can keep trying to come up with excuses, launch another study, talk a bit more but so far it ain't helping. And if you think Sarkosy is right wing, there are far far worse people you never ever heard off.
A lot of bleeding hearts are calling the rethoric of the likes of Wilders (Holland) the signs of the 1930's. No price for quessing the reference. They are of course full of it... IF there is a resemblance witht he past, then it is the 1920's.... what happened then you ask... yes, nobody ever told you that. The story always starts with Hitler in rising to power but never sets the scene by showing how the vacuum was created that allowed this rise. The many failed elections and parties unable to deal with the massive issues of the day that allowed the nazi much later.
Wilders, Le Pen, etc etc are not Adolf Hitler and the likes of Job Cohen are not Chamberlain... this is good because by the time the nazi's marched the battle had been lost.
But we need to act now, make it clear that in a society, there are rules, you can be a bit to the left of that and a bit to the right but NEVER to much. If you really hate a society that much, MOVE. We cannot allow a few nutters to either turn the west Muslim with Sharia law (and there are parties who want this quit openly, google Sharia4Belgium) or to become a nazi party. The real nasty bit for being tolerant and multi-cultural is that you cannot be tolerant of extremists or all cultures.
Let us not forget that the issue here is Muslims. There are a lot of Jews, Hindu's, Catholics, Christians, Boedhists and god knows what else is out there, living peacefully in the western world. ONLY Muslims are causing problems everywhere. PC might make you feel warm and fuzzy inside but at a given point you got to deal with the fact that a specific group is causing endless problems and deal with it. Or someone else will come to power and come up with a solution. And you might not like that one at all, I guarantee it won't be PC.
Hitler and those like him are the enemy, that is obvious. But your enemy should also be the people that created the vacuum of leadership, of taking responsibilty, of sorting out the common man's complaints that allowed Hitlet to convince people that he could solve their problems (which btw, he totally failed to do).
Go live in a muslim country and be all the muslim you want to be.
Everyone steals, what is your point?
Manga unlike mainstream Comics in the US are published in chapters in magazines together with other manga's. It is a method shared with strips from the European mainland with a few differences. First of all, manga magazines are much thicker, they have a LOT of content and this makes it easier for new talent to get a chance BUT the manga industry is far more commercial in Japan with far more magazines then even at the high-time of strips in France.
So, you get a few weeks and then the magazine tests the popularity and you either go, or stay. That is why even such old hats in the industry as Rumiko Takahashi include a few nude bits in the first chapters for their manga's aimed at boys, just to help the initial poll score better. Her works are hardly pornographic or even erotic in nature but for the ones published in young men/boys magazines, the lead has a nude scene. Compare it to the lesbian kiss durings sweeps week.
Other polls are done to ask readers for their favorite character and it is not unusual for the story to change to give more prominance to a winner.
Does it work? Some high quality manga is published this way and some some very low key fan dribble where every thing is designed to be instantly appealing.
Forget light nudity, think of characters with every popular design bolted on resulting in parodies that are supposed to be taken serious.
Imagine all your content designed by book cover designers. It is one thing to have a teaser to pull the audience in and get them to give you a chance to tell them your story, and another thing when everything is constantly designed to pull you in and nothing else.
Wait a minute, why am I trying to explain this when there is a movie director out there who does this all the time? That ........ who made Transformer. That is what you get if you cater solely to fans and to nobody else.
It wouldn't even that bad, if he catered to just one type of fan. Pity he tries to cater both to lovers of Megan Fox acting ability and big explosions, jarring both fans constantly by intruding either big bangs or big explosions.
All this bitching about the Raspberry in general and this case goes to show just how fucking hard it is to make a good solid product. We barely think about it but for every product out there we just use without issue, a hell of a lot of people spend a hell of a lot of time, just getting it right.
Take something as simple as a drinks can, you know the kind you get soft-drinks in. Once, they had pull of tabs, and those tabs had sharp edges and they got thrown away and people stepped on them with bare feet and got hurt. That is why nowadays, can's have a opening that opens inwards leaving all bits attached.
It took DECADES for this to change. It might now seem like rocket science but clearly it was.
Apple seems famous for good design yet its white mac-book air, the plastic one, when opened had rounded edges for the bit on your desk, and sharp edges for you to lay your hands on... not very comfortable at all. A minor issue? You would think BUT this issue is known about (how many keyboards have hard sharp edges to lay your wrist on?) and yet, Apple made this mistake again when the problem should have been known as well as the solution.
When you make a thingy like this raspberry board there a million things to think off, often things that someone somewhere has already solved but getting all that knowledge into one place has never been done (go ahead, point me to a resource where every mistake in designing say an MP3 player has been recorded, let alone with the solution) and so mistakes will be re-made and re-solved over and over again.
If you ever think of making your own product, estimate the time you need to make it, then add ten times that time to examine it against all other similar products so you can prevent making the same mistakes they did.
Good luck getting that approved for budget. So more then a hundred years after the first keyboards, we still get keyboards with hard sharp edges biting into our wrists...
And you worry about a cable not clicking.
Really, the first thing that comes to your mind when you are the owner of a product and your own people prefer to face your wrath by buying from the competitor to do their work rather then use their own product, is to ban them?
You wouldn't consider maybe asking them WHY the competitor product is the preferred choice?
And this is hardly news, MS pulled something similar when the Zune was flopping hard and MS employees brought their iPod's to work.
And MS yet again totally fails to ask WHY people prefer to buy ANYTHING else over their products. MS Phone 7 is just the latest in a long line. Is there even a MS tablet out there that MS employees can buy?
It doesn't even solve anything, if MS employees are forced to buy stuff they don't want, they will just hate it and their hatred will be seen by others. You want your employees to be advocates of your product. Not the condemned acting as a warning of the misery that comes with your company.
Or do you think it is good advertising for a restaurant if guests can see your employees vomiting out the employees lunch?
Cpu6502 will no doubt rush through the ranks as a manager because he has the usual manager capability to confuse the disease with the symptom.
Car companies often have the parking lot filled with the companies cars and NOT because of any guidelines (cars are after all privately bought by the people in production) but because the employees feel connected to the company and are proud of what they produce.
MS clearly is totally unable to inspire loyalty in its employees to feel proud of what they produce and want to show it. You can then put out a guideline forcing people to show fake pride but then you are just fighting the symptom, not the disease. If MS can't even build products good enough that people who want to work for you want to have the products... they got no chance in hell of selling to the rest of us. Eat your own dog food and if you got to beat the god to get it to eat, you failed.
The next stupid thing Cpu6502 says, is that this is all the same as giving staff a discount for the companies products... duh... does anyone really think that an MS employee buying a MS product with MS funds pays full price?
This is NOT just MS employees choosing to buy a rival companies product with their own money (already bad enough) but them buying another companies product for company use with company funds.
It would as if DAF trucks bought Ford trucks to deliver its trucks.
And you can then write a snooty little note that they shouldn't do that OR you can hold a very urgent and deep enquiry into why this is happening. Why are MS products so fucking bad that people risk their job promotion changes or at least incoming chairs for work related productivity tools?
If you have a restaurant and all your employees go outside to lunch, would you ban them, or test the food? Choice 1: Congrats, you are a manager. Here is your MBA and a million dollar bonus... Choice 2??? Loser.
I hate this planet.
While the fact that less music is being sold is fairly straightforward, the reasons for it are not. Especially if you don't compare it to the previous year but look at long term trends.
Cause 1: The switch to CD had ended, in previous years, people often re-bought music they already owned on LP in the new fangled CD format. This caused a sales spike with the industry selling not just new music but also old re-released music. The norm should be years in which the industry had to mostly rely on NEWLY released music for its sales.
It would be like comparing sales figures of cars with a year in which the law demanded that old inefficient cars were to be scrapped. Or comparing building figures in a country with the year before and after an earthquake.
Cause 2: A shift in musical tastes. It is no secret that musical tastes change and that the music industry tries to cater for only a part of the total population. The number of classical recordings has gone down. The number of rappers has gone up. Which audience has more to spend? The music industry limits the number of different NEW musical releases and then wonders why they sell less? Gosh, why not run 1 movie in all theather all the time and then wonder why people stop going?
Cause 3: More targets for disposable income. When I was a kid, I did not have a phone. Now kids do. They get the same pocket money, they can only spend it once. So, less will be spend on X because Y is now taking the money. Record stores have closed, mobile phone stores have opened up.
Cause 4: Musical taste stagnation. If you play an LP. you got to change it or you go mad MAD MAD I say! With a modern media player, you can have a collection of your favority songs and not have them repeat until you can sing them backwards... and then you stop adding to it, because it is good enough. When 10 CD changers became available for cars, how many people ever replaced them? Further proof? Okay, more and more specialized radio stations that repeat the same limitted play lists over and over again to the point I have noticed that some people react with near violence to a generic station that dares to play something not a 100% suited to their tastes.
Cause 5: Economic down turn. Less money to spend, so people spend less. Confused?
Congratulations slave, you have proven the Conservatives right, they believed that making the working class home owners would turn them into good reliable little workers unwilling to risk the house they can't afford with silly things such as looking for a new job, or even thinking about striking.
Why bother with capturing slaves when the feeble just whip themselves?
Mind you, you wouldn't be so bad, if the bleeding hearts wouldn't feel sorry you if you get slaughtered in the revolution. But somehow, your kind then suddenly turns into "innocent" citizens and not supporters of the regime.
They do cost more in Europe. What is your point?
For an easy compare, see EU and US prices in iTunes compared against exchange rates.
Warranty is simple, it is the period of time in which you can REASONABLY expect a product to keep functioning. 2 years isn't even the upper limit, for things that you can expect to function for longer, like a washing machine, a car etc etc, it is far longer. However, after 2 years, the warranty does go down, cosmetic issues are no longer covered but if after two years your washing machine falls apart, it should STILL be repaired for free.
What the little sheep mosb1000 doesn't get that warranty is NOT about DOA, devices that are broken when you buy them, but about devices that break down to fast. Warranty is repair of any issues in device that occur that are not part of its normal deterioration of its expected lifetime.
Simply put, if I buy a oLed tablet, the blues going out after a period of time is not covered under warranty since this is to be expected. The paint on my car going off after a decade (if that is still normal) is not covered since that is expected. Rust holes forming after 5 years in a decent car IS covered since this is not to be expected anymore.
This also allows some devices to fall under 2 years, under 1 year and even shorter. If you buy a led blinker for your bike, coming back in 1 year that the battery is empty isn't covered of course. Complaining that paper decoration runs after only one winter in the rain is likely not to covered either no matter how much you sue.
But a normal customer should be able to use a device in a good condition under normal use for a reasonable amount of time and if that isn't possible, this should either be reflected in the price, have a very good reason or the producer should repair it.
Only complete and utter sheep think otherwise.
The problem isn't that Apple has been getting away with it, if you insist, Apple folds pretty damn quickly, the problem is that you got to fight them. Sony tried to pull a similar stunt with the PSP and its lousy display with lots of dead pixels, Holland was the only place in the world where Sony officially agreed to replace any PSP with any malfunctioning sub-pixel. If you insisted yourself in a shop in another country you would probably have had it replaced BUT the law states that this should be the norm, not just for the customer who insists on his rights.
Apple is one of the worsed performers in this area, they have no problem charging far higher prices in the EU for the supposed thougher regulation but then try to withold the extra support that is needed. Probably because Apple is an extremely American company and they just can't grasp that in some parts of the world, they can't have it all their way.
The odd thing is that Europe is far easier to deal in, yes, there are longer warranties but then again, nobody can sue for millions for trivial cases. Warranty costs can be easily calculated and avoided with good QA (haha, Apple and QA) but frivolous lawsuits can come out at your right out of the blue.
PHP 5.4 recently was released and it has a really cool new feature. So I did all the hard work of finding a ppa (ubuntu user thingy, stop me if I get to technical) and added it and upgraded. That was pretty hard core! Uber nerd!
Once, kernel features were desperately needed. Now? Meh, they are probably very nice but I can wait for others to test and add them. Everything just works so why risk breaking it?
MS has the same problem. XP and even more so Windows 7, just works. So how to sell Windows 8? And Linux ain't selling anything so why upgrade on my own when in a few months I can just run upgrade and have it all done for me?
Maybe I just gotten lazy. I would type more, but need a nap after so much hard key pressing. *Fluffs up cowboyneal for a pillow and cuddles up with his Linus blanky*
There is a reason the people for Freedom of speech rallied behind smut peddler and general amoral person, Larry Flint. If you don't defend the objectionable when they come for them, nobody will object when they come for you. It doesn't work in simple movie heroics but the people at the frontlines of the battle between good and right often ain't all that nice. Many a freedom fighter is just one step away from being a criminal, even in the eyes of their own side. The non-silly part of Dad's army was hard line enemies of the state, who were trained by the state since it was reasoned they hated the nazi's even more then British government and could be counted upon to kill those of the British government who would colaborate with an occupying german force.
Keep waiting for a nice guy to rally behind and you might find that the battle has been lost before you ever got started.
Mind you, I got the strong suspicion that since you are an AC, you might well not mind all that much. 10 to 1 that you think DRM and Trusted Computing are all worth it, for your cause.
If you want to convince the average person to take privacy serious, NEVER use an example where you are worried a guilty person might be convicted for a crime he did in fact commit Only utter nutters think that law and order is some kind of game, that must be played "fair" with the odds in favor of the criminal. The rest of us think that guilty people should be punished. So, try again, what does an INNOCENT person have to worry about all this? He very well might, but it is the innocent person carry about. Not your guilty ass.
It is the nature of protest. When you fight the system you are fighting what the establishment has established as what is right. Very few evil rules go "Mahahahahahaah", dress in black and have a note in their agenda, be evil. Most evil people thought THEY were the good ones. So, when people fought slavery, they were the terrorists going what was clearly right. Only when they won, did the view change.
History is written by the victors and their is NO definitive version of it, when the victors change, the history will be rewritten again. If you think the persons who you are trying to defeat with your protests are just going to go "oh, we are so wrong, clearly we are evil and all our thoughts and actions are evil so we will stop and do what you want because you are right and good"... well... you might end up disappointed.
And while you are protesting a lot of people standing by the site might get quite upset. Not because they argree with the other side but just because you are causing an inconvenience. Nobody ever mentions the people having to go without their tea in Boston.
Want to be loved for your actions? Win!
It is just a lot in any direction. Same reason you are not a stain on the ground from the massive pressure off all the air on top of you. Air pressure is all around and the same all around.
A funny thing is that in theory, if you could drill a hole through the planet and you could jump down it and there was no air resistance you would pop out at the other end at the same speed as you entered. first you accelerate and then you decelerate. Of course, it would never work in real life but it is a fun idea.
For a thought experiment, on the side of a mountain, does a plumb line (weight on end of bit of rope) hang straight down OR a bit to the side because of the mountain? What about the position of the moon? If it can pull an entire ocean around, surely a bit of lead doesn't stand a chance.
We learn a lot about science and then a lot of us kinda forget to ask the next question. That is what makes the Einsteins and Newtons so brilliant. They did continue to ask. And not get told "because".
The guy is a dickhead who violated another persons very reasonable expectation of privacy and then spread it around. Note that his defense never denied any of it, just claimed it wasn't so bad after all, haters will hate it seems and because this poor guy can be deported that another person felt so bad about having his private live revealed that he killed himself does not matter. Neither has this guy ever made a serious apology, the only thing he feels sorry for is himself.
Now, please tell me why I am a lousy human being for not feeling sorry for this dickhead and thinking poetic justice would be to put a webcam in his cell as he finds a husband during his stretch.
Society has certain rules, they are not that hard to get. Nobody could possibly think that what he did was not morally wrong, yet he did it. Now he cries that its effects on him are to big. The effects HIS actions had on his roommate don't come into it. Let him make a serious effort of atonement BEFORE the jury found him guilty. I never buy it when a criminal says he was so sorry, AFTER his lawyer wrote the speech for him. Maybe I am just not a bleeding heart anymore. And if you think, this is just what 20 year olds do... then it says a lot about you.
This proves my point, some people care about getting things done, about being able to find out how to get things done... and others about the font used for the logo.
Who cares about the function names? I can hit a dozen developers from my desk and every single one of them will have a different idea about the best naming schematic and formatting rules. I often use 3rd party libraries, I just adjust. Go ahead and work with something else if you want but don't complain when thousands who work in less exalted positions choose functionality over elegance in something nobody but a programmer will ever see.
What is amusing is that you care so much about some silly naming scheme. Buit tell me, what did you think of the recent massive security flaw in Rails. Did it have pretty names in the gigantic security hole? What value does a naming scheme really have beyond pleasing elegance?
I HATE language selling sites. Many a new language or framework has a VERY nice presentation site telling you that THIS is the answer to your problems, this language will screw your gf, kill your dog and set your house on fire, letting you concentrate on the essentials of life. Coding.
PHP is totally different, it doesn't sell itself, it has no slick presentation, just every function described in clear plain English (and many heathen tongues like Dutch for those who were not blessed by god to be born in the US of A) with informative user comments with zero SPAM!!! That is what a not so good developer like me needs. Not so good? No. Really good programmers can pull a six figure income with ease, wallstreet pays the top close to a million, top game developers drive in Ferrari's. If you are coding web pages for less then 100k per year and have a bus pass, you are just not at the top. Accept it, the world needs average people too. You don't have to be the fastest runner in the world to escape the lion of unemployment, you just have to be faster then the guy next to you. Or have a gun... and shoot the guy next to you.
What I have noticed is that there are a LOT of elitist among coders who fail at being lazy. A good coder writes NOW what he needs NOW. Coding for the future is nice but you even end writing for the past instead because by the time you have written your future proof code, the future has become the past and you missed the present. Sure for some projects, the best is needed and that is great for those who operate at such lofty levels us mere degenerate mud dwellers can not even dream off. But down in the mud, a lot of code gets written that solves a problem NOW and makes money NOW.
ID spent a fortune on the Rage engine and the Angry Birds team did not. Which game was the greater success? Not that I think ID was wrong... but I know my limitations. Do you?
Ubuntu, PHP etc are typically vilified for their common populalatiry. Meanwhile the Debian and Ruby people never quite understand why their own products just don't get to be as popular. They rail about lack of structure or security problems (note that Rails had a far bigger security hole at its core greater then PHP ever had and no Rail fans ever apologized for their slurs against PHP) and don't understand that real users simply need clear documentation.
Sometimes a coder thinks that HE has the next framework... sometimes they even ask for advice on it. My advice? Forget the code. I believe you it is good. SHOW ME THE GODDAMNS DOCS to use your new baby. And in those docs. NEVER assume that I can read your mind. I need EVERYTHING explained because what seems obvious to you is not going to be obvious to anyone else.
It is part of the reason Javascript is such a dog. The language is pretty damn good in my opinion. But there is no documentation for the average coders. php.net is the gold standard for functional documentation of a programming language. Learn from it or die in obscurity. Unless your audience enjoys coding in the dark. Some do... but I don't.
The modern Turkey was because it was a dictatorship ruled by the military who was okay with somewhat democratic leaders until they misbehaved and were stepped on. HARD!
The army enforced that the vision of Ataturk was followed and all was well, Turkey prospored and the west had a Muslim nation that leaned heavily to western ideas and values.
But the west didn't like this, democracy is the way and so Erdogan got into power and has been using the religious whankers to build his power base, relying on their fear of the westernized Turkey to build his powerbase. Roughly similar to how Republicans use fundementalist Christians. So it is moderate and liberal Muslims who favor dictatorship and fear democracy. The world is a strange and complex place and one solution definitly does not fit all. Not that the military is nice... they just are nicer then Erdogan. See Egypts military for a similar deal. A lot of Muslim nations are kept in check by military leaders who are far more modern then their supposedly democratic leaders.
Commentator: 23 voters; 26 votes. A slight anomaly...?
Bought politician: Not really -- you see, this law may look like a monkey who's been put in a suit and then strategically shaved, but it is a brilliant opportunity for a corrupt politician. The number of votes I cast is simply a reflection of how firmly I believe in getting brown envelopes.
And politicians wonder why people don't believe them anymore. You could hold a politician at gun point and tell him he and his children will die unless he says that these things make people loose fate in democracy and he just wouldn't be able to say it to save his life and those he values (The dollar bills in his pockets, not his kids). It isn't corruption, it is let them eat cake and genuinely being unable to realize that people who do not have bread, do not have cake either. If Anders Behring Breivik had done his rampage among politicians, he would be the greatest hero ever.
Such a Freudian slip of the mind shows a diseased mind that is best examined... from 2 km through a sniper scope... I should know... I read it that way too.
You know you are a nerd when your brain tries to relate any sentence with the word sex in it, to computers.
Not often a donator but donated 25 dollar. I was going to write a rather insulting post of Americans and Canadians in general but... there just isn't enough bile in the world. Improve the world, kill a Canadian. And don't moan about not all Canadians being like this, you voted for these turds and haven't voted them out.