Or (if I didn't want to be torn limb to limb, the black ghetto bear? Meanwhile the asian honey bear is taking all the jobs and education out of the US of A...
Some say the best defence against the cheapest nastiest bears is a desert eagle. I don't see it, you are being charged by trailer trash bears, how is having a large angry bird on your arm going to help? Now some kind of big hand gun. That would be useful. Although how you load a gun with bear(s you) shot without first shooting some bears I just don't get.
I apologize for the above jokes, but how often do you have a change to use them on slashdot? And I am dutch, the closet we in the EU get to hunting jokes is telling the waiter what lobster we want.
This time, we are not fighting the man, the elite, the rich. We are fighting U2, the media, the free press. The press has a role in democracy as the watcher of the entire political system BUT this only worked when newspapers were separate enough and not forced to report on issues that go against their own interests.
In Holland, commercial radio licenses are up for auction to the highest bidder. Commercial radio presenters always very quick to bitch about other people going on strike saw no issue with taking the radio waves hostage to protest a new auction round that might jeopardize their own million euro jobs. Bye bye fair and balanced reporting, hello self interest.
The traditional newspaper is already dead, most are now part of vast media empires and that means that the press when reporting on media is reporting about it self. You wouldn't expect a newspaper owned by the Ford company to report fairly on cars would you? Then how can you expect newspapers owned by Murdoch to report fairly on media affairs? The BBC has been called out for unfair media practices and conveniently, the BBC itself completely failed to report on this, how odd.
When the likes of Bono from U2 call out the US on food aid, or make a song about British war crimes in Ireland, that is as expected but do you hear him about a certain 2 letter band performing in South Africa during the apartheid? Do you see media thriving on interviews from the band, reporting on it?
For the free press to work as part of the checks and balances of our system, the free press needs not to be just free from government control but from any form of control, including its share holders. But that hasn't been the case for a long time.
Take Futurama, it has done an episode that could have been payed for by the MPAA but it wasn't. It didn't need to pay for it since the two are rubbing the same belly, a totally one sides presentation of copyright because the person doing the telling has both the means to tell it and the motivation to tell it. What TV producer is going to present a balanced approach to copyright when their salary so clearly comes from one side of the story?
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An example that might require some abstract thinking:
Do you trust the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" to honestly award the oscars based on the quality of the movies submitted? Well, you might or might not but they are after all industry experts or at least members of the industry.
BUT even if you accept the Oscars are unbiased, do you expect these same people to give an unbiased answer to the following: "How important are movies to our civilization"...
THINK really hard about that question. It is is asking a surgeon if an operation is the right medical procedure to cure something. A make up retailer on whether women need to wear make-up. A car dealer on how important it is to own a car.
A fundemental question that we need to answer when dealing with copyright is whether we need the content that needs copyright. No commercial musician, tv producer, movie maker or writer is going to say "no, for thousands of years content/art has been produced without copyright so we don't need it even if it means I no longer can earn a living with it because art will survive through people who do it for fun, not for the money".
Even if the discussion comes up in the media, the premise that we NEED commercially produced art, is not up for discussion.
Does this matter?
The car industry had to be called out in the past on cars being unsafe. This only was possible because there were people outside the industry with a hearable voice who dared to pose the concept that cars did not have to be dead traps. That it was possible to work towards a goal of zero car fatalities. How would the move to safer cars have gone IF the entire discussion had only been done by people who had taken it for granted that each model would kill a few dozen people as an unchangeable fixed constant?
It is becoming clear that the patent and copyright
Then why was literacy so long the domain of Monks? Who were not known for their richness...
Even back then an education was of limited wealth. A person needs a baker each and every day but how often do you need a letter written when you are a lumberjack or a small farmer?
Star Trek never touched upon the problem of what all those billions of people making up the rest of humanity were doing. It had some episodes with miners in them but they made no sense if you wondered why people would mine for stuff in a world with replicator technology. Count the number of episodes where they still desperately need a part despite a working replicator sitting in every cabin.
The simple fact is that the western economy post WW2 survived on the factory worker and the harvester (miners etc) when those jobs disappeared entire regions grew depressed and never really recovered. Meanwhile modern media kept showing "Friends" with people with jobs that never require them to simply be in from 9/5 doing just average not very interesting work. The entire economy (if you believe the media) runs on odd jobs paying enough to afford gigantic flats in the heart of New York and more time off then a Greek working for the state.
Walmart is celebrated by these people as offering very cheap goods without anybody wondering that if nobody local gets payed to make these goods and if the people selling them don't get payed much either... then who can afford these goods in the long run?
Go ahead, go to a store and try to buy western made goods... oh, they still exist, somewhat... e-reader. Name one made in the west. Tablets? MADE in the west? Where is the factory with the production line paying dozens if not of hundreds of people funding an entire large city producing iPads?
It isn't just about engineers who make iPads, it is about engineers who make brake pads. Just as most scientist end up working in a production facility doing the same tests over and over, most engineers do not make ground breaking tecnology, but keeping that development on break pads going with all the production know how, that can keep an entire town in business. Jobs for the average person, a reason for the highly educated to come back to their home town.
Remember a little game called SimCity? Fun game right? Do you remember how it was very easy to create slum areas by accident because there weren't enough jobs near by?
Okay... now enlarge SimCity to SimWorld and remove all the factory from that little corner of the world called the west and put all the work and housing the "Asia"... what happens? Do the endless living areas with only shops become an affluent area or,,, do they become Detroit? Manchester? De Bijlmer (pure living area now being torn down in Amsterdam Holland, do you think bad planning are a US problem only?)
Douglas Adam spoke of three arks, what were the A and C arks again? And what ark are we keeping here? Think about it, we outsourced production (c ark) and now the research is following (a ark)... that makes us the B ark... better start collecting those leaves.
Rapidshare is from Germany and the krauts have other issues to fry as well as feeling very uncomfortable about anything that even reeks of censorship. They currently have an issue with the president having apparently tried to supress an article about an illicit loan. The loan isn't the real issue but the mere idea that the president who is supposed to guard the democracy tried to supress the press... OOPS.
Attempts have been made against Rapidshare but the german courts have better things to do, the german police have repeatedly said that they will flat out refuse to go after filesharers unless all other crimes are solved and the german politicians got other headaches then to worry about what Hollywood thinks of them.
New Zealand on the other hand is a vasal state of the US of A in all but name.
Oh, so I can make music and stop the copyright industry from collecting on it despite me not wanting them to do so?
Oh, wait, I can't.
And the copyright industry has more then once been found guilty in a courts of laws around the world for both taking content they did not own AND not paying artist for royalties they collected.
You are aware that once our planet spun far faster and that far away moon practically skimmed the tree tops? Things change, the world we know as earth would have been unregonizable a few hundred million years ago, which for astronomy is yesterday.
I hope that you just wanted to post quickly without thinking about what you said:
I totally believe that if you produce something you should be paid...
I just produced this post, pay me.
A lot of "art" is produced with claimed values without anybody at any time offering to pay any amount at all for it. Statue goes missing with a value in the hundred thousands because that is what the "artist" claimed so that is what the value must be...
In the real world the model is very different, you get paid, so you produce something. There is a direct link between labor and pay and it is not for person doing the labor to just do the labor and claim the pay they want. A plumber does not get to claim a magic number for his work that he did without someone asking him to do it.
A lot of MPAA/RIAA problem is that artist have gotten used to being payed insane amounts for not doing very much and they want more of it. Money for every blank CD found because some might contain their content. What about where I bought their CD and made a copy of it for my own use only as a back-up? I still got to pay extra?
These devices look great in the movies but in daily life... well, there are a LOT of people who think tablets will take the place of computers, these thoughtful posts often being written on PC's has of course no bearing on their value...
The problem is that cost, convenience and usability, just don't measure up. Say I see an email I want to respond to on my window... do I then reply to it on the window? Try it, it isn't nearly as comfortable as it seems. Same with things like the weather, the amount of time really spend checking the weather is very very low and the TV which is already in the house is more then happy to report on it.
Your early morning routine just doesn't fit a dozen gadgets all begging for your attention. The people who have enough time to spend in the kitchen looking at their window can't afford it (the unemployed) and the people who can, have better things to do.
It as with the intelligent fridges that have been just around the corner for god knows how long now. People that do the shopping "mum's" are like the soviets, rather then spending a billion dollars creating a pen that works in zero gravity, they use a piece of paper and pencil and call it a shopping list. The early adopters who could afford the early models just don't do shopping that way.
These widgets all seem nice, as nice as when MS called it Active Desktop, which died. Then Vista something or other, which died and now in Windows 8 again, I am supposed to be looking at my desktop rather then at the program I have opened full screen obscuring it completely.
Even on a tech site such as this, I am fairly certain that 99% of you life in a house that is no more techie then that of your parents. For that matter, lights turned off by clapping, once the next tech, how many are still around?
Windows in houses are often the oddest sizes, go ahead, see if what happens if you break one of yours, almost certain a replacement has to be custom made to fit. They are often very large indeed, so that any tech window replacing them, is going to be highly expensive. Until they get within reach of the common geek software for them will be in short supply making them less usable and until companies start working together instead of fighting each other (wanna bet your Samsung Window conspires with your Philips dishwasher to kill off the iPhone?)
Once I specifically made sure I could watch shows like Beyond 2000. Back then I was young and hopeful. Now I am old and angry I just feel bitter that I still don't have my sex robot... eh flying car. I have come to realize that most of the World of the Future stuff just isn't practical.
I mean, a weather widget on a window? What is it going to tell me, what the weather looks like outside? I am not interested enough to pay for an expensive screen, the cost of installing it and for that matter getting up to check. I just look at the cat. sprawles on the kitchen floor (hot), on the window sill huddled up (okayish), buried with the wife in a pile of blankets on the bed (nice and brisk (ducks pillow thrown at him) sorry cold).
You could hire computing cycles for a long time, there have been companies hiring out temporary server hosting, for however short or long as you want for decades... and of course for the really old, hiring a certain amount of performance on a larger system is exactly what mainframes were about.
Of course, it has become easier but that is because computing has come down into the general market of the last few decades. More people can now afford computing in general including buying access time on mainframes, oops the cloud. It isn't the cloud doing it, it is that computing is simply becoming cheaper and cheaper. That CPU power on the phone in your pocket once would have set you back a small fortune in rented time on a university machine.
But surely it being cheap, it means it is now available for all... eh no. If you want to create a Pixar like experience you still need to spend a small fortune on renting either a server farm or renting access time on "the cloud" or buying your own server farm.
Because here is the clincher, the cost of computing has gone down but the demand for computing has gone up. Every new movie Pixar releases raises the bar, forcing anyone who wishes to compete to rent even more computing time to keep up (because god knows, trying to figure out just why Pixar releases awe inspiring movie one after another beyond sheer computing power is far to hard).
So little bobby with a budget of a 100 bucks is still not going to be able to make the next Pixar movie... unless of course he simply renders it on his and his friends PC's for "free" and pours instead his heart into it that made the lamp animation that can now easily be done in realtime on a modern PC still look damned fucking good...
The cloud wants to be payed... and the nature of rendering means that while the cost per unit might go down, the amount of units needed goes up.
It as with running a website, everytime there is news your home connection might soon (but never where you live) go up to being fast enough to serve a real website, the demands for a website go up and you still need a fucking server to run one. Just check the size of even a text only site like slashdot now we are all on 100mbit fiber (why not damn you!) vs when we were all on dial-up.
Martin Luther (not King) was instrumental in getting the Bible out of the domain of the church where only the clergy who were trained in latin, the language of the bible in Germany at the time, he by insisting it was translated into the local language, which in itself helped make that the official language of Germany, helped give people their own version of the bible to read rather then have to take the word of their religious leader about its true contents.
But he was also a rabid anti-semite and one of the ground layers for what would centuries later result in the holocaust and the countless violent outburst against Jews. He both gave people more freedom were to get their information from but also spewd his own vile hatred through this new means of obtaining info.
The internet is much the same, often if you read sources that do not follow the mainstream you also run into a lot of utter drivel from the outright insane to hate speech. Do you believe the mainstream media are full of it? Read the stuff on TOR... it makes Fox news look sane and balanced in comparison.
There have been a rather large number of cases in history where the official textbooks have rather dubious links to reality BUT the alternative isn't always much better. The official line of Japanese history books might be that Japan has not committed war crimes but the alternative versions do NOT automatically tell the truth instead. Just because someone doesn't tell the same lie doesn't mean they are telling the truth. Just because Iraq had no weapons of WMD doesn't mean the war was all about oil automatically.
Ideally, in our modern age when so much information is available we should each as individuals be able to select the information that is correct... rather then what we want to believe... and everyone will have a pony too.
In the adult industry the trick of the trade is to show just enough free content to convert people who want to see more without giving them to much. The to much is very simple, if they "come" before they join, they don't join.
Conversion ratios are very low, 1% would make many an adult web site owner cream his pants. But the idea that you can get 100% if only you do X has yet to take hold although companies that sell anti-piracy scams sure are trying.
PC gaming has a LOT of "gamers" who want to try a game, or have zero budget. They are the equivelant of kiddies watching the scambled porn channel for just enough signal to "get off". People with ancient PC's downloading games they can't play or afford. There is no way to convert them to paying customers but the anti-piracy scam industry, the makers of DRM or the anti-piracy lawyers, sell the idea that those 1 million downloads from brazil where computers are 486's for the rich can be turned into paying customers for Crysis 2.
The proof? I got none EXCEPT that completely and utterly crap games or very early releases that barely work or 3D CAD software only people with engineering degrees can use are STILL downloaded in their millions. I am not saying piracy doesn't have an effect, I myself pirate games I once would have bought because the companies behavior disgusts me (Bethseda, fuck you and your horse armor) but its total effect is over-rated. A game like Anno 2070 has a niche appeal, a lot of the people downloading it just don't really want to play it, they are not even trying it out as a demo, they just want the "street cred" for having had it, played an hour or so and then discard it. Ubisoft might be having a wet dream that if there is no option to pirate it, then they would pay full price for it, but that just isn't there.
If piracy goes away, the sales might double, that sounds amazing but Ubisoft is dreaming of a 1000% increase, remember that they think every illegal download is a missed sale. But with DRM sales actually decrease because for a lot of people, they just got to many bad experiences. Like me and Betsheda game.I am not even bothering with a single player RPG anymore until it latest "expansion" pack has been announced and someone wrapped it all up with some user made bug fixes and released it. The pirate experience both in DRM and in getting the "whole" game has become fastly superior to the bought experience. Smart move Betsheda in limiting certain starter packs to certain regions, gods knows RPG players are not known for being completionists who want to experience everything and so you force them to pirate sides to get content already included in the game but withheld from them because they bought it at store X instead of store Y. That is like forcing a good kid to get his coca-cola from the coke dealer because you don't want them to know about drugs. No that makes no sense and neither does region restricted content in the modern age.
So rather then dealing with the easily cracked DRM of the PC, you accept the complete and total DRM of the console? That is like saying you hate the eroding freedom in the west and move to North-Korea.
Ah but you are trolling because you suddenly draw in drivers which have nothing to do with DRM anyway. Oh and if consoles are PC's now, you don't mind donating your PC and reading the net from your console from now on do you? Oh, thought so.
MS behaved once like a complete asshole and it slowly found itself in a world where nobody liked it anymore and it was starting to hurt the company. Nothing like outright revenge but in its proposed standards being ignored and its rivals providing each other with support just because. Or do you think IBM has no alterior motive in supporting Linux then because it doesn't care what it sells support for? IBM doesn't just sell patents to google for the hell of it either to fight Apple, or do you think IBM liked it when Apple ditched their CPU? Oh, not that it made much difference, Apple was a very small buyer but why help Google for just a tiny bit of cash with patents that IBM might one day need themselves?
Reputation matters. How much? Well so much that MS has bought advertising space from GOOGLE to advertise its own browser despite that everyone who can USE Internet Explorer has it installed by default (it comes with Windows). Paying your competition to advertise a product given away for free... that was not the Internet Bill Gates envisioned in the 90's.
Apple had a good reputation, god knows what for, pre-OSX the only time I saw Apples, they were crashing but still, it was a good rep, intresting devices and it never hurts to be considered the plucky underdog against the mega-corp. But right now, a LOT of mainstream media, at least in Holland, is presenting these cases as the relatively small Apple bullying the "small" mega-corp and super diversified semi-government Samsung... it would be like comparying say Harley Davidson against Yamaha. Sure both build motor cycles but HD isn't even in the same class when it comes to business clout.
And yet in this case, many are starting to see Apple as the big evil giant stamping on its smaller cuddlier competitors. When Samsung becomes cute, you know you are doing something wrong with your image.
Yet, the tablets do like a lot alike. Gosh, what do you know, so do many e-readers and for that matter phones. How many phones do you know that are rectangle with a rectangular screen and 12-15 buttons below it? Some form factors just belong to a type of product. Go ahead, redesign the refrigerator with a unique design that has not been seen before since the days of cupboards making started god knows how many centuries ago. Good thing Apple wasn't around when Gutenberg copied the printing press from the Chinese. We would have a thousand different book designs for each and every publisher.
It would be better if plenty of people hadn't already found evidence of how many if not all of Apples own designs had been done by others before.
Everybody copies from everybody else, in science they are even proud of it "if I seen furthest, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". Artists are inspired by their predecessors but suddenly in our society the slightest hint of similarity is evil. And for what? To protect your profits so you don't have to innovate (compare the iPad 2 to say a device like the Asus Transformer or the Samsung Note)? That works, for about as long until someone passes you (IE6 anyone?)
It doesn't surprise me that the "new" iPhone is just a small update and that none of them have really upped the stakes let alone tried anything NEW. Smaller, bigger, new design... just updates.
If you want a color e-ink display, you got to go to Korea. Not silicon valley, korea. Go to China and you can buy mobile phones that run rings around western models, laptops with features and specs you just can't get here. The west has become so obsessed with lawsuits, real innovation has stopped. Sure, maybe Apple can stop Samsung now on one of its many different markets but what if next some Chinese company comes up with a NEW idea that Apple wants to copy? Oops, it just introduced around the world that implementing the same broad design as someone else is illegal. Apple and MS have both been in court before for this where they claimed the other copied something only to find they themselves copied it too.
Democracy should not be "winner takes all" if you win with a 51% majority, you should take into account that the 49% have to be accounted for in your policies and not gloated over and made to regret voting against you. You are elected by 51% as the leader of all.
If as in the US, the parties are so evenly split, then the message should be clear, the populace as a whole wants neither extreme and therefor a middle ground must be reached. Abortion rights but with a strict process. Socialized health care but a sober one perhaps.
In Holland we are experiencing something far more extreme. The VVD (Liberal, pro-business or as Americans would label them, pinkos) is the current ruling party IN a coalition but the polls say that they are now sharing the largest party title with the SP (Socialist protest party (logo red thrown tomato), or as Americans would label them... lets not kid ourselves Americans would run screaming in terror at so much red)... so... should they rule together as the leader of the SP has suggested?
A few years ago, the killed Pim Fortyun and the now retired SP leader had a similar dilemma, both grown very large on the disatfication with the existing parties BUT showing that the dissatifaction lead people both to to the left AND the right. And not extreme right or extreme left either no matter what some extremists like to claim to further their own cause.
It is easy to go for "winner takes all" and ignore the other half but all that leads to is US style politics in which it is all out war between the parties and nothing gets done anymore because the next election might swing the vote in your favor so why agree to anything the current winner suggests?
She is called a programming prodigy but no evidence is given, the only "evidence" is a MS certification on a site where MS certification is a gigantic red flag. Certification in general tends not to be popular and the ones from MS are often considered to have less value then the paper they were written upon if the paper was made of shit.
The article writer probably knows this and also knows that controversy sells ad impressions.
The simple fact is that a young person died who had some minor accomplishments that most on/, simply do not value since they know adults with the same who are the waste of IT. Maybe if the article poster had given some examples of actual code she had written? Something that would actually impress other developers? But the only links I seen so far are to software that is frankly not that impressive to people from a generation that had to create their own computer from scratch. Don't forget, there are REAL rocket scientists on Slashdot. People that built their own home computer before there were home computers are supposed to be all impressed with a kid that made a calculator in a modern development environment? Not even a very good calculator.
It might be hard for a 9 year old to do that particular exam but so what? Coders judge other coders on code, not certificates.
All this is to me is a young person who died who seems to have gotten some minor press attention for an achievement I do not value. Show me her 3D engine, new sorting algorithm, something that makes her a true child prodigy and not just a very boring kid who read a training manual cover to cover.
Sad she died, but millions die each day. What makes her worthy of special attention? I just don't like fake emotion from people who shed tears over this but never made a donation to stop people from dying or to cure a disease. Slashdot doesn't need human interest stories.
Then why do north european countries with socialized healthcare and education AND social security still get hit by copper thieves?
There are always people who want still more. Claim social security and go out stealing copper to get more money. Or do you think thieves are such noble people they don't claim social security because they got another source of income?
Like many a carebear you do not get what racism really is.
"95% of black males in Washington are criminal" is NOT a racist statement IF it is true. If it is true, then it is simply an observation of fact.
"95% of black makes are criminal" has a small chance of not being racist but since it is highly unlikely the 95% of mid/south Africa males are criminal, it most likely is racist.
Racism: Blacks can't see well at night and are therefor not suited to be soldiers.
Medical diagnosis: This black person suffers from night blindness.
The first btw was a real racist piece of dogma that was used to keep blacks out of the American army pre-WW2.
It is extremely dangerous for people trying not to be racist to fall over into the overly politically correct and start to deny facts. The high crime rates among blacks MIGHT be racial OR they might be cultural OR they might be economic, but you can't deal with them unless you are able to acknowledge the numbers exist.
Japanese can't hold their liquor. Racist? No, it is a medical fact, the japanese have a lesser capability to digest alcohol, making them drunk sooner even if accounting for possible differences in body mass. So... if implenting safe alcohol levels, do you go politically correct OR be a racist?
Well, we ARE sexist. When stating save drinking levels, men are told they can drink more glasses then females. Should we advise Asian women to drink even less to be under the limit? Why not?
I am not defending Ron Paul. Far from it, I agree with your assesment. BUT to properly fight racists you got to fight them with the absolute truth not with how you would want the world to look.
Don't deny that in areas where the poor are mostly black, most of the blacks are also poor. Show that in areas where the poor are mostly white or another race, the crime statistics reflect this as well. Don't descend to the bigots level by manipulating figures.
The cases for making nuclear reactors more safe are from more ancient history and from other parts of the world as well.
And single the only nukes ever fell on Japan by US bombers clearly the US is safe from nuclear attack?
Congrats on a near perfect example of thinking the US is not part of the rest of the world. Hope your magic border stops things that happened elsewhere from happening within your country.
Lets talk smuggling, it happens, you would be a fool to deny it. Recently a couple was caught with small animals stuffed everywhere in the clothing and luggage. It is the job of customs to stop them. Surely nobody here thinks it is okay to smuggle endangered animals, a practice that not just endangers the smuggled animals but if they escape the local wildlife?
Now, there are some tourists stupid enough to carry illegal animals in broad daylight but the pro will try to hide them. How then to find them? Should customs only open those packages clearly labelled "contains illegal stuff"? No... they should use some kind of intuition to try to find normal looking packages that nonetheless contain illegal stuff.
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/collections/seized/display/girder.aspx a simple but funny example, a building girder filled with cigarettes. Lets not get bogged down in a discussion on drug laws, tariffs and what more. Customs has the task of enforcing the laws passed by government which was elected by the people. Want to change it? Vote for someone else then the guy promising tax cuts which never ever happen.
Smugglers are amazingly inventive in where they hide their goods. The double lining in the suitcase is very old hat and only used by the truly desperate (drug mules). There have even been cases of the pallets on which perfectly normal goods were transported to be stuffed with smuggled goods. Pretty clever, when looking in the package, do you ever look at the actual package itself? Hiding in plain sight.
Now, terrorists, they have a lot in common with smugglers as in that that want to get things past customs. But how? As the DHS article mentions but many a/. kiddie still can't accept, terrorist don't carry three sticks of a dynamite with an alarm clock attached. They will smuggle their bombs and weapons in anyway they think that might get past customs.
You get a lot of armchair kiddies screaming when a child is padded down but there have been numerous documented cases of children, even babies being used to carry smuggle ware. If people are willing to cut open a child to stuff it with drugs for a few bucks, then why would a religous extremists who believes his actions are sanctioned by god not do the same? Terrorists now have higher morals then drug smugglers?
How then do you stop them? We know from history that when airport security was lax, hijackings were the norm. Ask yourself why El-Al has a very good record on not getting hijacked regardless of being the most obvious target for Islamic extremists? Because the DHS is childsplay compared to El-Al security.
People that think that a cupcake in a jar can't possibly be a bomb really should visit a museum on smuggling or espionage. Info from WW2 is slowly being released and while most of the stuff seems old hat because movie writers showed them to the general public first, the real thing shows that they were really used.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/kUfgCl7bRaaYVYUocLy-iQ this might look quant to us, a radio in a suitcase but once this was high tech stuff and you had better not be the german soldier who thought "oh that is just a suitcase, no need to look inside". The secret hidden in the everyday to avoid closer inspection.
The fact is that bombs can be disguised and that how the next one will be disguised is up the ingenuity of people with nothing else to do who can afford to be wrong 100 times for the 1 time they get it right. 2 documented and proven cases of liquid bombs on aircraft exist (note that the deniers don't even mention the Philippine case because you know, 2 proven cases might not go well with a denial) can "we" afford a 3rd one with a more lethal result?
1 person is dead because customs failed to stop one bomb. If it was someone you cared for (and gosh it says a lot about you if you say you don't care someone died) would you have wished customs had done a better job?
There is a threat, it relies on its effectiveness on being difficult
A bit of proof for what you write was done by a Dutch columnist who as a pure racists wrote that HE did note hate the Muslim cashier serving him and therefor there was no need for fear or war... HER opinion was never mentioned as it does not matter to the likes of him. Muslims are not human beings capable of having their own desires and motivations but simple pets to be pitied and coddled unable to be held accountable for their actions any more then a retarded child.
It takes two to tango, it only takes one to start a war. Love is a two way street, hate isn't.
By stating only HIS own lack of hate for that girl he states that what SHE is thinking of him is of no account, the powerfull westerner vs the immigrant (and of course, he simply assumes that a girl with a headscarf is a Muslim (head scarfs are often worn by western women to keep their hair under control, see series like Last of the Summers Wine) and indeed an immigrant).
Their exist pictures on the net in which you see white people partying while two black people are hanging after lynching as some kind of macarbe party decoration. Did those two men hate white people? Those white people in particular? How are the hate lines drawn?
The conflict between Islam and Islam and Islam and the West are extremely complex. It is not just Islam vs the West, in Afghanistan there used to be Buddhist statues of great age until they were destroyed despite the fact that Japan was a great donor of aid to Afghanistan long before the current conflict. For centuries those statues stood, why did they have to be destroyed?
Conflict is a difficult thing and understanding it is not helped by 12 year old boys who want to see the world burn joining the discussion. There is not a single case of a Muslim force treathing western prisoners respectfully. Not one. Yet that is not part of the discussion for most. Why?
To many who protest about some western soldiers loosing it, the Muslim is not a full human being, they don't consider them on an equal level so when countless western prisoners are abused and degraded, they don't see it on the same level. Double standards.
True equality is holding everyone to the same standards. If you think a barely passing school grade is a sign of mediocrity in a white person it is then wrong to celebrate it if a small percentage of immigrants manage it. It re-enforces the idea that "they" are below "us".
See the ancient disuccions about Dresden and the use of nukes on Japan. The protesters never hold the german and japanse people accountable for the countless atrocities committed with their full support (did the mothers who died at Dresden refuse to talk to their SS sons? Did the japanese sisters refuse to acknowledge their child raping brothers?) and thereby make it the norm for Germans and Japanese to be inhuman monsters and only the Allies are held to have any morals to be held to accountable to.
It is dangerous to base your own morals on those of others (if they do it, we can do it) but it is equally dangerous to just accept low moral standards as normal in "them" even if you think that doing so makes you a great humanitarian. One of the most racist thing to say about another groups action that goes against your own morals is to say "oh well, it is cultural".
It was once German culture gas people. it was the american south culture to enslave people. Did we let them do it just because it was their local system? No? then why don't we hold Muslims to the same morals and judge their mistreatment of prisoners and minorities as we would judge ourselves?
Chrome was designed a certain way, if you don't like the design, then don't use it. What next, you are going to file bug reports with Ford because you want only 2 wheels on your car and four is a bug?
Why can't I file a bug with MS for making windows have the close button on the top right where I don't want it and no way to change it?
A bug is something where something does not work as intended.
When something is working as intended but you want it to work a different way, that is called a feature request. And yours was turned down. Google, MS and nobody else owes it to you to implement YOUR feature requests in THEIR product. If you want to dictate how a program should be designed, pay its development.
But of course that won't wash with your sort, everyone should do everything exactly as you want it for no pay.
Easy bet that you yourself have never done anything for anyone else ever in your entire life.
Blizzard got a 100 million reasons for going online with Diablo. It is the 100 million dollars coming in each and every month for WoW for year after year. 10 million subscribers x $10 bucks.
Oh the actuall amount might be slightly different depending on actual subscription costs around the world and the income from other services related to WoW but still, that is more money then most game companies make on a full single player release. Star Wars The Old Republic is rumored to be the most expensive MMO ever, with a budget of 100 million. 5 years of developer. For Blizzard, in those same 5 years they took in 5 BILLION.
And piracy? Not an issue for Blizzard at all. Every WoW player payed them for it. Can you say the same with Diablo 1-2? Star Craft?
They got two models, one which made them a lot of money in the past but they also found another model that them a shit load of money and keeps on making it long after anyone would be able to expect any money from a single player game that old.
100 million dollars each month. That is a powerful incentive to get rid of offline single playe games. Don't like it? Then don't buy it. I am sure other companies are just dying to make single player games designed for the PC. Oh wait.
Ranma 1/2, has the titles hero father be a martial artist who turns into a panda when wet. So the idea is hardly new even back in the days of WC3 (Unless you believe Blizzards people aren't nerds)
Slashdot Mirror
Or (if I didn't want to be torn limb to limb, the black ghetto bear? Meanwhile the asian honey bear is taking all the jobs and education out of the US of A...
Some say the best defence against the cheapest nastiest bears is a desert eagle. I don't see it, you are being charged by trailer trash bears, how is having a large angry bird on your arm going to help? Now some kind of big hand gun. That would be useful. Although how you load a gun with bear(s you) shot without first shooting some bears I just don't get.
I apologize for the above jokes, but how often do you have a change to use them on slashdot? And I am dutch, the closet we in the EU get to hunting jokes is telling the waiter what lobster we want.
This time, we are not fighting the man, the elite, the rich. We are fighting U2, the media, the free press. The press has a role in democracy as the watcher of the entire political system BUT this only worked when newspapers were separate enough and not forced to report on issues that go against their own interests.
In Holland, commercial radio licenses are up for auction to the highest bidder. Commercial radio presenters always very quick to bitch about other people going on strike saw no issue with taking the radio waves hostage to protest a new auction round that might jeopardize their own million euro jobs. Bye bye fair and balanced reporting, hello self interest.
The traditional newspaper is already dead, most are now part of vast media empires and that means that the press when reporting on media is reporting about it self. You wouldn't expect a newspaper owned by the Ford company to report fairly on cars would you? Then how can you expect newspapers owned by Murdoch to report fairly on media affairs? The BBC has been called out for unfair media practices and conveniently, the BBC itself completely failed to report on this, how odd.
When the likes of Bono from U2 call out the US on food aid, or make a song about British war crimes in Ireland, that is as expected but do you hear him about a certain 2 letter band performing in South Africa during the apartheid? Do you see media thriving on interviews from the band, reporting on it?
For the free press to work as part of the checks and balances of our system, the free press needs not to be just free from government control but from any form of control, including its share holders. But that hasn't been the case for a long time.
Take Futurama, it has done an episode that could have been payed for by the MPAA but it wasn't. It didn't need to pay for it since the two are rubbing the same belly, a totally one sides presentation of copyright because the person doing the telling has both the means to tell it and the motivation to tell it. What TV producer is going to present a balanced approach to copyright when their salary so clearly comes from one side of the story?
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An example that might require some abstract thinking:
Do you trust the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" to honestly award the oscars based on the quality of the movies submitted? Well, you might or might not but they are after all industry experts or at least members of the industry.
BUT even if you accept the Oscars are unbiased, do you expect these same people to give an unbiased answer to the following: "How important are movies to our civilization"...
THINK really hard about that question. It is is asking a surgeon if an operation is the right medical procedure to cure something. A make up retailer on whether women need to wear make-up. A car dealer on how important it is to own a car.
A fundemental question that we need to answer when dealing with copyright is whether we need the content that needs copyright. No commercial musician, tv producer, movie maker or writer is going to say "no, for thousands of years content/art has been produced without copyright so we don't need it even if it means I no longer can earn a living with it because art will survive through people who do it for fun, not for the money".
Even if the discussion comes up in the media, the premise that we NEED commercially produced art, is not up for discussion.
Does this matter?
The car industry had to be called out in the past on cars being unsafe. This only was possible because there were people outside the industry with a hearable voice who dared to pose the concept that cars did not have to be dead traps. That it was possible to work towards a goal of zero car fatalities. How would the move to safer cars have gone IF the entire discussion had only been done by people who had taken it for granted that each model would kill a few dozen people as an unchangeable fixed constant?
It is becoming clear that the patent and copyright
Once Japan was the cheap knock-off country copying the west.
And don't you think it is VERY telling that China is copying the high speed trains for Japan... NOT from the USA.
Oh, and how are those US trains doing by btw? Amtrak still the non-running joke?
Then why was literacy so long the domain of Monks? Who were not known for their richness...
Even back then an education was of limited wealth. A person needs a baker each and every day but how often do you need a letter written when you are a lumberjack or a small farmer?
Star Trek never touched upon the problem of what all those billions of people making up the rest of humanity were doing. It had some episodes with miners in them but they made no sense if you wondered why people would mine for stuff in a world with replicator technology. Count the number of episodes where they still desperately need a part despite a working replicator sitting in every cabin.
The simple fact is that the western economy post WW2 survived on the factory worker and the harvester (miners etc) when those jobs disappeared entire regions grew depressed and never really recovered. Meanwhile modern media kept showing "Friends" with people with jobs that never require them to simply be in from 9/5 doing just average not very interesting work. The entire economy (if you believe the media) runs on odd jobs paying enough to afford gigantic flats in the heart of New York and more time off then a Greek working for the state.
Walmart is celebrated by these people as offering very cheap goods without anybody wondering that if nobody local gets payed to make these goods and if the people selling them don't get payed much either... then who can afford these goods in the long run?
Go ahead, go to a store and try to buy western made goods... oh, they still exist, somewhat... e-reader. Name one made in the west. Tablets? MADE in the west? Where is the factory with the production line paying dozens if not of hundreds of people funding an entire large city producing iPads?
It isn't just about engineers who make iPads, it is about engineers who make brake pads. Just as most scientist end up working in a production facility doing the same tests over and over, most engineers do not make ground breaking tecnology, but keeping that development on break pads going with all the production know how, that can keep an entire town in business. Jobs for the average person, a reason for the highly educated to come back to their home town.
Remember a little game called SimCity? Fun game right? Do you remember how it was very easy to create slum areas by accident because there weren't enough jobs near by?
Okay... now enlarge SimCity to SimWorld and remove all the factory from that little corner of the world called the west and put all the work and housing the "Asia"... what happens? Do the endless living areas with only shops become an affluent area or ,,, do they become Detroit? Manchester? De Bijlmer (pure living area now being torn down in Amsterdam Holland, do you think bad planning are a US problem only?)
Douglas Adam spoke of three arks, what were the A and C arks again? And what ark are we keeping here? Think about it, we outsourced production (c ark) and now the research is following (a ark)... that makes us the B ark... better start collecting those leaves.
Rapidshare is from Germany and the krauts have other issues to fry as well as feeling very uncomfortable about anything that even reeks of censorship. They currently have an issue with the president having apparently tried to supress an article about an illicit loan. The loan isn't the real issue but the mere idea that the president who is supposed to guard the democracy tried to supress the press... OOPS.
Attempts have been made against Rapidshare but the german courts have better things to do, the german police have repeatedly said that they will flat out refuse to go after filesharers unless all other crimes are solved and the german politicians got other headaches then to worry about what Hollywood thinks of them.
New Zealand on the other hand is a vasal state of the US of A in all but name.
Oh, so I can make music and stop the copyright industry from collecting on it despite me not wanting them to do so?
Oh, wait, I can't.
And the copyright industry has more then once been found guilty in a courts of laws around the world for both taking content they did not own AND not paying artist for royalties they collected.
Grow a spine, you jellyfish.
You are aware that once our planet spun far faster and that far away moon practically skimmed the tree tops? Things change, the world we know as earth would have been unregonizable a few hundred million years ago, which for astronomy is yesterday.
I hope that you just wanted to post quickly without thinking about what you said:
I totally believe that if you produce something you should be paid...
I just produced this post, pay me.
A lot of "art" is produced with claimed values without anybody at any time offering to pay any amount at all for it. Statue goes missing with a value in the hundred thousands because that is what the "artist" claimed so that is what the value must be...
In the real world the model is very different, you get paid, so you produce something. There is a direct link between labor and pay and it is not for person doing the labor to just do the labor and claim the pay they want. A plumber does not get to claim a magic number for his work that he did without someone asking him to do it.
A lot of MPAA/RIAA problem is that artist have gotten used to being payed insane amounts for not doing very much and they want more of it. Money for every blank CD found because some might contain their content. What about where I bought their CD and made a copy of it for my own use only as a back-up? I still got to pay extra?
These devices look great in the movies but in daily life... well, there are a LOT of people who think tablets will take the place of computers, these thoughtful posts often being written on PC's has of course no bearing on their value...
The problem is that cost, convenience and usability, just don't measure up. Say I see an email I want to respond to on my window... do I then reply to it on the window? Try it, it isn't nearly as comfortable as it seems. Same with things like the weather, the amount of time really spend checking the weather is very very low and the TV which is already in the house is more then happy to report on it.
Your early morning routine just doesn't fit a dozen gadgets all begging for your attention. The people who have enough time to spend in the kitchen looking at their window can't afford it (the unemployed) and the people who can, have better things to do.
It as with the intelligent fridges that have been just around the corner for god knows how long now. People that do the shopping "mum's" are like the soviets, rather then spending a billion dollars creating a pen that works in zero gravity, they use a piece of paper and pencil and call it a shopping list. The early adopters who could afford the early models just don't do shopping that way.
These widgets all seem nice, as nice as when MS called it Active Desktop, which died. Then Vista something or other, which died and now in Windows 8 again, I am supposed to be looking at my desktop rather then at the program I have opened full screen obscuring it completely.
Even on a tech site such as this, I am fairly certain that 99% of you life in a house that is no more techie then that of your parents. For that matter, lights turned off by clapping, once the next tech, how many are still around?
Windows in houses are often the oddest sizes, go ahead, see if what happens if you break one of yours, almost certain a replacement has to be custom made to fit. They are often very large indeed, so that any tech window replacing them, is going to be highly expensive. Until they get within reach of the common geek software for them will be in short supply making them less usable and until companies start working together instead of fighting each other (wanna bet your Samsung Window conspires with your Philips dishwasher to kill off the iPhone?)
Once I specifically made sure I could watch shows like Beyond 2000. Back then I was young and hopeful. Now I am old and angry I just feel bitter that I still don't have my sex robot... eh flying car. I have come to realize that most of the World of the Future stuff just isn't practical.
I mean, a weather widget on a window? What is it going to tell me, what the weather looks like outside? I am not interested enough to pay for an expensive screen, the cost of installing it and for that matter getting up to check. I just look at the cat. sprawles on the kitchen floor (hot), on the window sill huddled up (okayish), buried with the wife in a pile of blankets on the bed (nice and brisk (ducks pillow thrown at him) sorry cold).
You could hire computing cycles for a long time, there have been companies hiring out temporary server hosting, for however short or long as you want for decades... and of course for the really old, hiring a certain amount of performance on a larger system is exactly what mainframes were about.
Of course, it has become easier but that is because computing has come down into the general market of the last few decades. More people can now afford computing in general including buying access time on mainframes, oops the cloud. It isn't the cloud doing it, it is that computing is simply becoming cheaper and cheaper. That CPU power on the phone in your pocket once would have set you back a small fortune in rented time on a university machine.
But surely it being cheap, it means it is now available for all... eh no. If you want to create a Pixar like experience you still need to spend a small fortune on renting either a server farm or renting access time on "the cloud" or buying your own server farm.
Because here is the clincher, the cost of computing has gone down but the demand for computing has gone up. Every new movie Pixar releases raises the bar, forcing anyone who wishes to compete to rent even more computing time to keep up (because god knows, trying to figure out just why Pixar releases awe inspiring movie one after another beyond sheer computing power is far to hard).
So little bobby with a budget of a 100 bucks is still not going to be able to make the next Pixar movie... unless of course he simply renders it on his and his friends PC's for "free" and pours instead his heart into it that made the lamp animation that can now easily be done in realtime on a modern PC still look damned fucking good...
The cloud wants to be payed... and the nature of rendering means that while the cost per unit might go down, the amount of units needed goes up.
It as with running a website, everytime there is news your home connection might soon (but never where you live) go up to being fast enough to serve a real website, the demands for a website go up and you still need a fucking server to run one. Just check the size of even a text only site like slashdot now we are all on 100mbit fiber (why not damn you!) vs when we were all on dial-up.
Martin Luther (not King) was instrumental in getting the Bible out of the domain of the church where only the clergy who were trained in latin, the language of the bible in Germany at the time, he by insisting it was translated into the local language, which in itself helped make that the official language of Germany, helped give people their own version of the bible to read rather then have to take the word of their religious leader about its true contents.
But he was also a rabid anti-semite and one of the ground layers for what would centuries later result in the holocaust and the countless violent outburst against Jews. He both gave people more freedom were to get their information from but also spewd his own vile hatred through this new means of obtaining info.
The internet is much the same, often if you read sources that do not follow the mainstream you also run into a lot of utter drivel from the outright insane to hate speech. Do you believe the mainstream media are full of it? Read the stuff on TOR... it makes Fox news look sane and balanced in comparison.
There have been a rather large number of cases in history where the official textbooks have rather dubious links to reality BUT the alternative isn't always much better. The official line of Japanese history books might be that Japan has not committed war crimes but the alternative versions do NOT automatically tell the truth instead. Just because someone doesn't tell the same lie doesn't mean they are telling the truth. Just because Iraq had no weapons of WMD doesn't mean the war was all about oil automatically.
Ideally, in our modern age when so much information is available we should each as individuals be able to select the information that is correct... rather then what we want to believe... and everyone will have a pony too.
In the adult industry the trick of the trade is to show just enough free content to convert people who want to see more without giving them to much. The to much is very simple, if they "come" before they join, they don't join.
Conversion ratios are very low, 1% would make many an adult web site owner cream his pants. But the idea that you can get 100% if only you do X has yet to take hold although companies that sell anti-piracy scams sure are trying.
PC gaming has a LOT of "gamers" who want to try a game, or have zero budget. They are the equivelant of kiddies watching the scambled porn channel for just enough signal to "get off". People with ancient PC's downloading games they can't play or afford. There is no way to convert them to paying customers but the anti-piracy scam industry, the makers of DRM or the anti-piracy lawyers, sell the idea that those 1 million downloads from brazil where computers are 486's for the rich can be turned into paying customers for Crysis 2.
The proof? I got none EXCEPT that completely and utterly crap games or very early releases that barely work or 3D CAD software only people with engineering degrees can use are STILL downloaded in their millions. I am not saying piracy doesn't have an effect, I myself pirate games I once would have bought because the companies behavior disgusts me (Bethseda, fuck you and your horse armor) but its total effect is over-rated. A game like Anno 2070 has a niche appeal, a lot of the people downloading it just don't really want to play it, they are not even trying it out as a demo, they just want the "street cred" for having had it, played an hour or so and then discard it. Ubisoft might be having a wet dream that if there is no option to pirate it, then they would pay full price for it, but that just isn't there.
If piracy goes away, the sales might double, that sounds amazing but Ubisoft is dreaming of a 1000% increase, remember that they think every illegal download is a missed sale. But with DRM sales actually decrease because for a lot of people, they just got to many bad experiences. Like me and Betsheda game.I am not even bothering with a single player RPG anymore until it latest "expansion" pack has been announced and someone wrapped it all up with some user made bug fixes and released it. The pirate experience both in DRM and in getting the "whole" game has become fastly superior to the bought experience. Smart move Betsheda in limiting certain starter packs to certain regions, gods knows RPG players are not known for being completionists who want to experience everything and so you force them to pirate sides to get content already included in the game but withheld from them because they bought it at store X instead of store Y. That is like forcing a good kid to get his coca-cola from the coke dealer because you don't want them to know about drugs. No that makes no sense and neither does region restricted content in the modern age.
So rather then dealing with the easily cracked DRM of the PC, you accept the complete and total DRM of the console? That is like saying you hate the eroding freedom in the west and move to North-Korea.
Ah but you are trolling because you suddenly draw in drivers which have nothing to do with DRM anyway. Oh and if consoles are PC's now, you don't mind donating your PC and reading the net from your console from now on do you? Oh, thought so.
MS behaved once like a complete asshole and it slowly found itself in a world where nobody liked it anymore and it was starting to hurt the company. Nothing like outright revenge but in its proposed standards being ignored and its rivals providing each other with support just because. Or do you think IBM has no alterior motive in supporting Linux then because it doesn't care what it sells support for? IBM doesn't just sell patents to google for the hell of it either to fight Apple, or do you think IBM liked it when Apple ditched their CPU? Oh, not that it made much difference, Apple was a very small buyer but why help Google for just a tiny bit of cash with patents that IBM might one day need themselves?
Reputation matters. How much? Well so much that MS has bought advertising space from GOOGLE to advertise its own browser despite that everyone who can USE Internet Explorer has it installed by default (it comes with Windows). Paying your competition to advertise a product given away for free... that was not the Internet Bill Gates envisioned in the 90's.
Apple had a good reputation, god knows what for, pre-OSX the only time I saw Apples, they were crashing but still, it was a good rep, intresting devices and it never hurts to be considered the plucky underdog against the mega-corp. But right now, a LOT of mainstream media, at least in Holland, is presenting these cases as the relatively small Apple bullying the "small" mega-corp and super diversified semi-government Samsung... it would be like comparying say Harley Davidson against Yamaha. Sure both build motor cycles but HD isn't even in the same class when it comes to business clout.
And yet in this case, many are starting to see Apple as the big evil giant stamping on its smaller cuddlier competitors. When Samsung becomes cute, you know you are doing something wrong with your image.
Yet, the tablets do like a lot alike. Gosh, what do you know, so do many e-readers and for that matter phones. How many phones do you know that are rectangle with a rectangular screen and 12-15 buttons below it? Some form factors just belong to a type of product. Go ahead, redesign the refrigerator with a unique design that has not been seen before since the days of cupboards making started god knows how many centuries ago. Good thing Apple wasn't around when Gutenberg copied the printing press from the Chinese. We would have a thousand different book designs for each and every publisher.
It would be better if plenty of people hadn't already found evidence of how many if not all of Apples own designs had been done by others before.
Everybody copies from everybody else, in science they are even proud of it "if I seen furthest, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants". Artists are inspired by their predecessors but suddenly in our society the slightest hint of similarity is evil. And for what? To protect your profits so you don't have to innovate (compare the iPad 2 to say a device like the Asus Transformer or the Samsung Note)? That works, for about as long until someone passes you (IE6 anyone?)
It doesn't surprise me that the "new" iPhone is just a small update and that none of them have really upped the stakes let alone tried anything NEW. Smaller, bigger, new design... just updates.
If you want a color e-ink display, you got to go to Korea. Not silicon valley, korea. Go to China and you can buy mobile phones that run rings around western models, laptops with features and specs you just can't get here. The west has become so obsessed with lawsuits, real innovation has stopped. Sure, maybe Apple can stop Samsung now on one of its many different markets but what if next some Chinese company comes up with a NEW idea that Apple wants to copy? Oops, it just introduced around the world that implementing the same broad design as someone else is illegal. Apple and MS have both been in court before for this where they claimed the other copied something only to find they themselves copied it too.
Apple is fighting a legal battle it i
Democracy should not be "winner takes all" if you win with a 51% majority, you should take into account that the 49% have to be accounted for in your policies and not gloated over and made to regret voting against you. You are elected by 51% as the leader of all.
If as in the US, the parties are so evenly split, then the message should be clear, the populace as a whole wants neither extreme and therefor a middle ground must be reached. Abortion rights but with a strict process. Socialized health care but a sober one perhaps.
In Holland we are experiencing something far more extreme. The VVD (Liberal, pro-business or as Americans would label them, pinkos) is the current ruling party IN a coalition but the polls say that they are now sharing the largest party title with the SP (Socialist protest party (logo red thrown tomato), or as Americans would label them... lets not kid ourselves Americans would run screaming in terror at so much red)... so... should they rule together as the leader of the SP has suggested?
A few years ago, the killed Pim Fortyun and the now retired SP leader had a similar dilemma, both grown very large on the disatfication with the existing parties BUT showing that the dissatifaction lead people both to to the left AND the right. And not extreme right or extreme left either no matter what some extremists like to claim to further their own cause.
It is easy to go for "winner takes all" and ignore the other half but all that leads to is US style politics in which it is all out war between the parties and nothing gets done anymore because the next election might swing the vote in your favor so why agree to anything the current winner suggests?
She is called a programming prodigy but no evidence is given, the only "evidence" is a MS certification on a site where MS certification is a gigantic red flag. Certification in general tends not to be popular and the ones from MS are often considered to have less value then the paper they were written upon if the paper was made of shit.
The article writer probably knows this and also knows that controversy sells ad impressions.
The simple fact is that a young person died who had some minor accomplishments that most on /, simply do not value since they know adults with the same who are the waste of IT. Maybe if the article poster had given some examples of actual code she had written? Something that would actually impress other developers? But the only links I seen so far are to software that is frankly not that impressive to people from a generation that had to create their own computer from scratch. Don't forget, there are REAL rocket scientists on Slashdot. People that built their own home computer before there were home computers are supposed to be all impressed with a kid that made a calculator in a modern development environment? Not even a very good calculator.
It might be hard for a 9 year old to do that particular exam but so what? Coders judge other coders on code, not certificates.
All this is to me is a young person who died who seems to have gotten some minor press attention for an achievement I do not value. Show me her 3D engine, new sorting algorithm, something that makes her a true child prodigy and not just a very boring kid who read a training manual cover to cover.
Sad she died, but millions die each day. What makes her worthy of special attention? I just don't like fake emotion from people who shed tears over this but never made a donation to stop people from dying or to cure a disease. Slashdot doesn't need human interest stories.
Then why do north european countries with socialized healthcare and education AND social security still get hit by copper thieves?
There are always people who want still more. Claim social security and go out stealing copper to get more money. Or do you think thieves are such noble people they don't claim social security because they got another source of income?
Except that Einstein and astronomers don't hide their stuff, they publish and answer questions and invite scrutiny of their claims.
That is the difference between conmen and real scientists, real scientist want you to look behind the screen, in fact, there is no screen.
Like many a carebear you do not get what racism really is.
"95% of black males in Washington are criminal" is NOT a racist statement IF it is true. If it is true, then it is simply an observation of fact.
"95% of black makes are criminal" has a small chance of not being racist but since it is highly unlikely the 95% of mid/south Africa males are criminal, it most likely is racist.
Racism: Blacks can't see well at night and are therefor not suited to be soldiers.
Medical diagnosis: This black person suffers from night blindness.
The first btw was a real racist piece of dogma that was used to keep blacks out of the American army pre-WW2.
It is extremely dangerous for people trying not to be racist to fall over into the overly politically correct and start to deny facts. The high crime rates among blacks MIGHT be racial OR they might be cultural OR they might be economic, but you can't deal with them unless you are able to acknowledge the numbers exist.
Japanese can't hold their liquor. Racist? No, it is a medical fact, the japanese have a lesser capability to digest alcohol, making them drunk sooner even if accounting for possible differences in body mass. So... if implenting safe alcohol levels, do you go politically correct OR be a racist?
Well, we ARE sexist. When stating save drinking levels, men are told they can drink more glasses then females. Should we advise Asian women to drink even less to be under the limit? Why not?
I am not defending Ron Paul. Far from it, I agree with your assesment. BUT to properly fight racists you got to fight them with the absolute truth not with how you would want the world to look.
Don't deny that in areas where the poor are mostly black, most of the blacks are also poor. Show that in areas where the poor are mostly white or another race, the crime statistics reflect this as well. Don't descend to the bigots level by manipulating figures.
The cases for making nuclear reactors more safe are from more ancient history and from other parts of the world as well.
And single the only nukes ever fell on Japan by US bombers clearly the US is safe from nuclear attack?
Congrats on a near perfect example of thinking the US is not part of the rest of the world. Hope your magic border stops things that happened elsewhere from happening within your country.
Lets talk smuggling, it happens, you would be a fool to deny it. Recently a couple was caught with small animals stuffed everywhere in the clothing and luggage. It is the job of customs to stop them. Surely nobody here thinks it is okay to smuggle endangered animals, a practice that not just endangers the smuggled animals but if they escape the local wildlife?
Now, there are some tourists stupid enough to carry illegal animals in broad daylight but the pro will try to hide them. How then to find them? Should customs only open those packages clearly labelled "contains illegal stuff"? No... they should use some kind of intuition to try to find normal looking packages that nonetheless contain illegal stuff.
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/maritime/collections/seized/display/girder.aspx a simple but funny example, a building girder filled with cigarettes. Lets not get bogged down in a discussion on drug laws, tariffs and what more. Customs has the task of enforcing the laws passed by government which was elected by the people. Want to change it? Vote for someone else then the guy promising tax cuts which never ever happen.
Smugglers are amazingly inventive in where they hide their goods. The double lining in the suitcase is very old hat and only used by the truly desperate (drug mules). There have even been cases of the pallets on which perfectly normal goods were transported to be stuffed with smuggled goods. Pretty clever, when looking in the package, do you ever look at the actual package itself? Hiding in plain sight.
Now, terrorists, they have a lot in common with smugglers as in that that want to get things past customs. But how? As the DHS article mentions but many a /. kiddie still can't accept, terrorist don't carry three sticks of a dynamite with an alarm clock attached. They will smuggle their bombs and weapons in anyway they think that might get past customs.
You get a lot of armchair kiddies screaming when a child is padded down but there have been numerous documented cases of children, even babies being used to carry smuggle ware. If people are willing to cut open a child to stuff it with drugs for a few bucks, then why would a religous extremists who believes his actions are sanctioned by god not do the same? Terrorists now have higher morals then drug smugglers?
How then do you stop them? We know from history that when airport security was lax, hijackings were the norm. Ask yourself why El-Al has a very good record on not getting hijacked regardless of being the most obvious target for Islamic extremists? Because the DHS is childsplay compared to El-Al security.
People that think that a cupcake in a jar can't possibly be a bomb really should visit a museum on smuggling or espionage. Info from WW2 is slowly being released and while most of the stuff seems old hat because movie writers showed them to the general public first, the real thing shows that they were really used.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/kUfgCl7bRaaYVYUocLy-iQ this might look quant to us, a radio in a suitcase but once this was high tech stuff and you had better not be the german soldier who thought "oh that is just a suitcase, no need to look inside". The secret hidden in the everyday to avoid closer inspection.
The fact is that bombs can be disguised and that how the next one will be disguised is up the ingenuity of people with nothing else to do who can afford to be wrong 100 times for the 1 time they get it right. 2 documented and proven cases of liquid bombs on aircraft exist (note that the deniers don't even mention the Philippine case because you know, 2 proven cases might not go well with a denial) can "we" afford a 3rd one with a more lethal result?
1 person is dead because customs failed to stop one bomb. If it was someone you cared for (and gosh it says a lot about you if you say you don't care someone died) would you have wished customs had done a better job?
There is a threat, it relies on its effectiveness on being difficult
A bit of proof for what you write was done by a Dutch columnist who as a pure racists wrote that HE did note hate the Muslim cashier serving him and therefor there was no need for fear or war... HER opinion was never mentioned as it does not matter to the likes of him. Muslims are not human beings capable of having their own desires and motivations but simple pets to be pitied and coddled unable to be held accountable for their actions any more then a retarded child.
It takes two to tango, it only takes one to start a war. Love is a two way street, hate isn't.
By stating only HIS own lack of hate for that girl he states that what SHE is thinking of him is of no account, the powerfull westerner vs the immigrant (and of course, he simply assumes that a girl with a headscarf is a Muslim (head scarfs are often worn by western women to keep their hair under control, see series like Last of the Summers Wine) and indeed an immigrant).
Their exist pictures on the net in which you see white people partying while two black people are hanging after lynching as some kind of macarbe party decoration. Did those two men hate white people? Those white people in particular? How are the hate lines drawn?
The conflict between Islam and Islam and Islam and the West are extremely complex. It is not just Islam vs the West, in Afghanistan there used to be Buddhist statues of great age until they were destroyed despite the fact that Japan was a great donor of aid to Afghanistan long before the current conflict. For centuries those statues stood, why did they have to be destroyed?
Conflict is a difficult thing and understanding it is not helped by 12 year old boys who want to see the world burn joining the discussion. There is not a single case of a Muslim force treathing western prisoners respectfully. Not one. Yet that is not part of the discussion for most. Why?
To many who protest about some western soldiers loosing it, the Muslim is not a full human being, they don't consider them on an equal level so when countless western prisoners are abused and degraded, they don't see it on the same level. Double standards.
True equality is holding everyone to the same standards. If you think a barely passing school grade is a sign of mediocrity in a white person it is then wrong to celebrate it if a small percentage of immigrants manage it. It re-enforces the idea that "they" are below "us".
See the ancient disuccions about Dresden and the use of nukes on Japan. The protesters never hold the german and japanse people accountable for the countless atrocities committed with their full support (did the mothers who died at Dresden refuse to talk to their SS sons? Did the japanese sisters refuse to acknowledge their child raping brothers?) and thereby make it the norm for Germans and Japanese to be inhuman monsters and only the Allies are held to have any morals to be held to accountable to.
It is dangerous to base your own morals on those of others (if they do it, we can do it) but it is equally dangerous to just accept low moral standards as normal in "them" even if you think that doing so makes you a great humanitarian. One of the most racist thing to say about another groups action that goes against your own morals is to say "oh well, it is cultural".
It was once German culture gas people. it was the american south culture to enslave people. Did we let them do it just because it was their local system? No? then why don't we hold Muslims to the same morals and judge their mistreatment of prisoners and minorities as we would judge ourselves?
Chrome was designed a certain way, if you don't like the design, then don't use it. What next, you are going to file bug reports with Ford because you want only 2 wheels on your car and four is a bug?
Why can't I file a bug with MS for making windows have the close button on the top right where I don't want it and no way to change it?
A bug is something where something does not work as intended.
When something is working as intended but you want it to work a different way, that is called a feature request. And yours was turned down. Google, MS and nobody else owes it to you to implement YOUR feature requests in THEIR product. If you want to dictate how a program should be designed, pay its development.
But of course that won't wash with your sort, everyone should do everything exactly as you want it for no pay.
Easy bet that you yourself have never done anything for anyone else ever in your entire life.
Blizzard got a 100 million reasons for going online with Diablo. It is the 100 million dollars coming in each and every month for WoW for year after year. 10 million subscribers x $10 bucks.
Oh the actuall amount might be slightly different depending on actual subscription costs around the world and the income from other services related to WoW but still, that is more money then most game companies make on a full single player release. Star Wars The Old Republic is rumored to be the most expensive MMO ever, with a budget of 100 million. 5 years of developer. For Blizzard, in those same 5 years they took in 5 BILLION.
And piracy? Not an issue for Blizzard at all. Every WoW player payed them for it. Can you say the same with Diablo 1-2? Star Craft?
They got two models, one which made them a lot of money in the past but they also found another model that them a shit load of money and keeps on making it long after anyone would be able to expect any money from a single player game that old.
100 million dollars each month. That is a powerful incentive to get rid of offline single playe games. Don't like it? Then don't buy it. I am sure other companies are just dying to make single player games designed for the PC. Oh wait.
Ranma 1/2, has the titles hero father be a martial artist who turns into a panda when wet. So the idea is hardly new even back in the days of WC3 (Unless you believe Blizzards people aren't nerds)