It sounds a bit silly when you never think about media but just consume it but all the types of story telling, even story telling itself were at one time inventions made by a person and then carried on. The ancient greeks had theather, had comedy, had musical performance but they would be amazed if they were transported to our time, amazed and probably very confused. Same if you put us back in their time. You would be wondering what the fuck is going on on stage. You can see an example of it with black and white silent movies. The story telling, the acting, the presentation, they are alien to a modern audience. The only reason they survive is because some of the actors made the cross-over to talkies and longer movies and they been parodied enough that we think we get it. Except when the exaggerated acting was done back then, it was not meant to be a parody.
Lord of the Rings Online reads like an old novel, older then it even really is but it has managed to lodge itself so firmly in our modern culture that we are willing to make an exception for it. It reads just like most older novels, one were modern pacing has yet to be invented. It is NOT an action novel. It reads closer to a travelogue. A lot of people that like the general setting have never actually read the book because... well... it ain't all that interesting.
The novel of The Princess Bride is a bit different from the movie as in that the writer tells it as if he is rewriting a novel written by an older person whose description doesn't half match that of Tolkien and how he loved the book when his father read it to him but then finds out later that his father edited the book to only have the good bits as the REAL book has a lot of dry passages where the original author describes the currencies used or court procedures.
Gosh, sound familiar? The fans would scream bloody murder but what if the Tolkien books were reworked by a movie novelist into a more condensed, fun version?
I wonder how many Tolkien fans love the books because they don't quite get it and think it must be better then them. No it isn't. The books aren't hard to read because they are so good, they are hard to read because they were written for a different era. That doesn't make them better anymore then classical music is better then modern music. Yes, there is a lot of crap in modern music but so there was in ancient times. just that only the good bits survived.
Tolkien wrote an intresting bit of lore that caught a lot of peoples imagination indirectly (they read other peoples work based on Tolkiens fantasy) but that doesn't mean the books are anything else but not so good writing that goes on far to long and fails the simplest lesson of writing: Less is More.
Some people complain that the movies ruined their imagination... but Tolkien never left any room either. Pratchett is a far greater writer by leaving gaps for your imagination to fill in. If Tolkien ever wrote a one-liner he would next spend three chapters explaining it.
Europeans are pessimists, we pay for universal healthcare and unemployment benefits because IT (doom, despair and misery) could happen to us.
Americans are optimists, they hate spending a penny on someone else because IT (the lottery, the dream job, the inheritance) could happen to them.
To me the American is the homeless guy during election year that a EU news crew always find who explains why taxes on the rich are bad. Americans fundamentally believe in the American Dream.
EU people really ain't better human beings, they just think that a better social safety net is good for THEMSELVES. I don't pay taxes to support the unemployed or physically/mentally handicapped because I care for them, I care for myself and think I benefit the most from a society in which they are cared for and I am cared for if it happens to me.
Actually there is something else I would like to know. Ping time. For gaming, that is what matters most and there can be huge differences depending on your ISP. And yes, I might seem spoiled but the difference between 33ms and 300ms is far bigger to me then whether a patch takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes.
Remember that airliner that lost its top? Couldn't happen but it did and it turned out that the reason the aircraft did not fail completly were some supports operating suddenly in a manner nobody ever expected them to but they did. In an accident there are always multiple factors working together. Maybe that support is non-critical in normal flight but what if something else breaks? Might it suddenly be the piece that determines between catastrophic failure and a harrowing incident?
A simple example exists in your car, the parking break. Pretty non-essential right? But if your main brakes fail for whatever reason, they might just be the difference between having to change your pants and donating your organs to some lucky fellow human being.
Say in your house, you have non-supporting walls. So you knock them all out. Now, is that house without the non-supporting walls as strong as the same house with those non-supporting walls? In theory it should be. So let disaster strike, both houses loose one supporting wall. Is it possible that the house with the internal walls remaining MIGHT just not collapse as readily or as fully and those unimportant non-supporting walls holding up long enough for people to have a change to get out?
A lot of people like to point out that if Airbus is caught out on this, it will be the end of them. If that was true no aircraft maker would be in business today. They all been caught lying and gambling human lives for not very large amounts of money. If you think a large company is going to fail just because they kill people you are very naive. Only in China are executives held to accounts for their actions. Read up on aircraft accidents, how they are often caused by manufacturer issues and how it never ever seems to result in any form of punishment, let alone the bankruptcy of heavily subsidezed pork industries.
Except that other aircraft makers HAVE shown to do exactly what you describe. It is pretty common in fact for say Boeing to have been caught out to have tried to hide known issues that have caused deadly accidents rather then deal with the issue and save peoples lives.
When the economic incentive is big enough, human life looses all value. Look up on say Boeing doors being blown off due to known issues with the locking mechanism or indeed making the door open outward despite the obvious safety implecations vs the normal practice of opening inward.
Don't understand? Aircraft are pressured. if the door open inward the internal pressure presses it into the door frame making it near impossible to be blow out, try it yourself, kick in a door from the side it opens into, you are going to have to be pretty burly to get that done. But of course an inward opening door takes internal space you can't load cargo into that space so there is an economic incentive to have the door open outward so you can add a bit more cargo.
Boeing did it, the locking mechanism failed and people died. Multiple times and Boeing still hasn't fundementally fixed the problem by making the door open inward only. The economics of a few kilograms of extra cargo versus all the passengers on board.
Germany was only partially invaded by the western allies, the russians did the lion share including the brutal Berlin battle. Japan's final battle by comparison was relatively peaceful.
As for civilians being killed, were these the same civilians who congratulated their sons for the mass murder they committed? I note Japan has never made reparations for their many war crimes.
The world at the time was tired of war, invading all of Japan by the US alone would have created a terrible cost, not just in soldiers lost but in retaliation by US soldiers against Japanese civilians. Lots of german women were raped, not that anyone could give a shit about it but the Russian soldiers were hardly in the mood to restrain themselves after having fought through the evidence of german war crimes to be nice to those same germans.
What would US soldiers have felt about the japanese people if they had to fight through Japan with more and more evidence of Japanese war crimes to fuel the already bitter hatred of the Japanese?
I also find it highly likely that you are willing to sacrifice soldiers without actually ever having served. An armchar moralist. Gosh, we need more of them. Easy bet you think Iraq was about oil while topping up your SUV.
Statistics are just confusing numbers to you right? Do a little search on the number of models of Android phones versus WP7 devices and also note that this is ONLY WP7 and not any earlier version of MS mobile while some Android phones have gotten multiple updates.
The voters are running the asylum but I can see how you can confuse them with the insane. The simple fact is that democracy of the masses is ill suited to complex issues where "cheap vs expensive" is only a tiny aspect of a much larger puzzle. Nuclear power isn't unsafe by the nature of nuclear power but by the nature of the enormous costs and length of time involved. You can't build or operate a nuclear plant within an election cycle so cross-party support must be arranged and this invariable can only be achieved by lubricating the system. Bribes? Not directly, more the old boy network being used to extreems. Officials get jobs on boards of directors and appoint people they think got the right frame of mind (IE the same as them) and "trust" their fellow chaps.
If Fukishima had been a coal plant it would have belched forth tons of polutions and the coal might have been spread all over the place when the tidal wave hit. But these are managable. A nuclear reactor by its very nature when it goes wrong goes wrong in a big way. It has no room for compromise and half-hearted decisions. Fukishima should have been build with better protection but it wasn't because the people that were supposed to oversee it were all tied to its success.
Power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts. Some things just attract corruption. Not outright corruption with clear bribes as in say Italy where corruption is the expected norm but that veneer of corruption that means the chance of the right decision being made is very very small.
Nuclear power is unsafe not because of physics but because of human nature. Sooner or later someone will try to safe money by cutting corners. And that will go right 99% of the time... just a pity that the 1% of the time is noticed around the world.
In Holland at least every single citizen is free tor receive any radio signal. If you transmit a signal, I am free to pick it up. There are no limits to this, it is perfectly legal for a citizen to pick up military or police traffic if they want. Decrypting it is another matter of course.
So, since these shoppers are transmitting radio signals they have given explicit permission for anyone else to receive those signals and do whatever they want with it. There is no privacy because the moment you started broadcasting you gave everyone permission to use that signal. Not my fault that signal is coming out of your pants.
To suddenly make it illegal to track a radio signal just because it is a phone and not a "proper" radio signal would require massive changes in the law. What next, I can't aim my attena at the TV broadcasting tower because that is invading its privacy?
So your claim that recording the radio signals is wrong is absolute and totally falls. This should be obvious to anybody with a brain, how can it possible be illegal to capture something passing through my person and property? By my very existence I am capturing radio waves all the time with my body and all my property. What next? You want to ban ordinary radio's from receiving certain bands on the FM spectrum? Make it illegal for my garage opener to respond to your clicker? How about the light from your car charging the solar cells in my garden?
If you don't want other people receiving and processing your radio signals, then you shouldn't be broadcasting them.
Want privacy? Turn your personal tracker off. There is an app for that.
You mean Sudan that has now been split off into two countries, the new one being south-sudan which is now more free then before from the north-muslim and Iran backed mass murderers?
Sorta like a not perfect but better then before result of the embargo?
Gosh, as an example of why embargo's don't work a embargo that gave millions a change to create their own country with a better future.... why not show how the storming of the Bastille did nothing to get rid of the corrupt king. How the US decleration of dependence did not result in indepedence?
Next time before spouting off, check what actually happened.
If game companies got their head out of their asses, the PC market could be largest of them all. After all, there are far more PC's then all the consoles combined. On what are you reading this message? Your console? Didn't think so. Console owners have PC's but many a PC owner has no console.
But the PC is not a console. We don't need supersized fonts or dumbed down controls. Games like Deus EX and many other original PC games that moved to consoles and gave the PC crappy ports show that the PC has a need for a more complex but also simpler control interface. We got 101 keys on average so there is no need for optimazations in weapon selection. Take Skyrim. The game wanted to present itself as you wielding two powers at once and shifting between powers quickly. That is not how it works in reality is it? I switched quicker in Doom but then Doom was a PC game and simply used 10 keys to select one of 10 powers (weapons) and voila, it worked. In Skyrim... actually, I have up on that and played SWTOR. Nice looking world Bethseda but I knew the interface was going to be crap so I didn't buy it and instead spend over 300 dollars on SWTOR so far. Money Bethseda could have had if they sold the CE in Holland (they don't) and had made a proper PC interface like they did a long long time ago in a galazy far far away...
Games like The Sims proof and even Farmville proof that their is a huge PC market out there but you can't approach it the same way as the console market. PC gamers want more then just a shiny disk and 10 hours of gameplay with "achievements". They want something they can control, where fighting the interface and controls is not half the game. DRM isn't even that big a issue if done right. How about you simply release tiny amounts of new content continously and adjust the executable for it? Release groups are typically lazy and will crack the original release and then stop. Sure, that means you can't sell horse armour (Bethseda again) for a fortune but you give people a real reason to BUY the game to get updates that make you seem like a nice company that gives out free goodies.
It sill amazes me to see console games retail for 20 euro's more then the PC version, countless torrents for the xbox version, lousy ports but somehow piracy is to blame for Crysis bad performance... it only did half the sales of the xbox after all. No license fee and an environment where you can blame poor performance on the customers hardware rather then your own coding skills.
But hey, continue to go to consoles only... enjoy coding for hardware half a decade out of date and the console companies desperate to stretch the lifespan of their hardware while the PC keeps moving ahead. I am still spending money on gaming, feel free to take it or leave it. But I don't do consoles. And if that means no more FPS for me... I try not to loose to much sleep over it.
Why are you looking at me? I didn't steal your ship, I don't steal and anyway, I killed that guy so you can't be him. Unless you are a force ghost. Eat flame thrower!
(Bounty Hunter quest line)
The game is WoW with light sabers... YES! That is like saying your girlfriend is like a supermodel japanese school girl with red hair and green eyes with super model friends she insists on inviting over for the night AND day. Where is the bad?
Oh yeah, she keeps begging me to stop playing swtor and join her and her friends in what she calls a horizontal dance. As if!
The rant opens with a line usually reserved for cases where people are inundated by physical mail as a result of some action. In this case, the guy got one CD with a small number of files that are easily searched by computer in a common and well documented format.
Big whoop. He asked for data and he got it. And apparently after he should have been careful what he wished for, he now wants more?
Typical slashdot "word rapist" (labeling them editors is an insult to humanity itself) scaremongering.
Be careful peeps, if you go to a restaurant and ask for a drink, you might GET it!!! Scary!
A lot of liberals will say that thougher sentences don't stop repeat offenders, it shows all liberals are liars or just not very good at logic. No person put to death has ever offended again.
Anyway, why make murder illegal then? It doesn't stop people so might as well legalize it.
For those not following the news, Belgium was without a government for the longest time in history, closing in on two years before FINALLY a government formed at the end of this year.
I didn't bother for a long time, partially because I use a lot of different browsers for different needs and that meant that I needed to setup and ad-filtering proxy which is a tiny amount of work and I am very very lazy.
But ads got so annoying over time that I just installed it, made it the default on my home network (all HTTP traffic is filtered) and not just am I not annoyed anymore by ads, the speed has gone up.
Ads take just to much time. It doesn't matter where they are. Trying to read an American magazine is a game of "hunt the article". It used to be article - ad - article. Now the article between several ad pages, often only part of the page and spread all over the magazine to force you to keep hunting for it and be exposed to more ads. TV? 5 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of TV? Including ads for the program you just interrupted?
That leads me to the next thing about ads. They are so goddamn fucking stupid. A tiny handful are funny but they are shown maybe a handful of times. The ads that are in every single commercial block are the ones that make your brain want to crawl out of your ears. I don't watch TV anymore, not because I am not in the mood for mindless drivel but because even my desire for mindless drivel is insulted when the ads come on.
Ad-block can start to let ads through but lets face it, they do this for money and so, the ad that pays the most is the one that gets through. That is how all this kinda stuff works. Movie TV channels advertise with not showing ads, and then charge a premium for special offer blocks. You buy a DVD not to see ads and then they put non-skippable ads in front of the content.
It is not like there are no alternatives to ad-block.
If advertisers want to get back on my browser they need to sanitize their own industry. Get rid of all the animated ads, the ads that are slow or stupid or annoying and make them be delivered at insanely high speeds so that NEVER EVER a webpage refuses to load because of a slow ad server.
But that won't never happen and so, I got several block lists. Opera has the most userfriendly at the moment, can even be used to content on the site itself.
I have even gone to the trouble of filtering out comments on sites with drivel comments. It is easy, just write a javascript command to hide blocks with author "smallfurrycreature" and the net will be a cleaner place.
Yes, this is drivel, but at least it isn't drivel tracking your every move or taking ages to load.
And the honest truth is that there is NOTHING like seeing some internally developer solution for which off-the-shelf software exists to convince you internally developed software is a nightmare.
And there is is nothing like seeing 99% of off-the-shelf software to convince you that ANYTHING developed internally must be better.
The REAL honest truth is that 99.999% of software sucks donkey-balls. After a thorough rimming job.
It doesn't really matter where it is developed. Design flaws and bugs ALWAYS end up biting YOU in the ass. It doesn't matter where it is developed, if key developers leave, knowledge gets lost. Sure, you MIGHT think that a large software developer has processes in place to guard against this... but you would be a silly person. IT churn is high and this means any software project is always at risk of loosing the people that truly understand the system. A software house might be slightly better at it BUT will have to force its developers to maintain systems no longer relevant to it (do you want to work for a company still supporting windows 3.1 because its customers need it) while an internal development might not have anyway to keep a developer intrested with nothing but maintenance work.
There is no easy answer here. Ideally you would have internally a collection of tailored software that was mostly developed externally. Example, I might run my own webscript but use externally developed OS, database, webserver. But wait, that makes all your tailoring known only by your own staff...
The link to the test is at the bottom of the article.
Problem with the test however is that it is American centric, lots of stuff a non-American is less likely to know like the starting line of the decleration of independence. I guessed that the given sentence is not it because that is what everyone thinks and in these kinds of things, what everyone thinks is always wrong but it was a guess, not something I actually once learned in school or read because it was relevant to me... oh wait, that is just like an American. Never mind.
I hereby impose a flat-tax for 3,41 USD per day for every human being not in the western nation to be payed out to the western nations as compensation for all the western tech that benefits non-western people.
NK has a lot of personal support from Japan, lots of people there admire the "self-reliance" of the NK doctrine and donate large sums of money to the regime.
Revolution needs a seed and that seed can be bred out of a population. See former USSR countries where people embrace the free market by patiently waiting for the state to sort it out. Nobody who has not been in a concentration camp or decades in prison can possible truly comprehend what it must be like in that hell hole. Even reports from East Germany pale in comparison.
But what can you do? People are starving. Withholding aid (without killing of all smugglers and sympathizers) will mean only the rich get enough. And if thousands starve before a revolution is sparked? Then the reduction in the surplus population (Dickens) will mean that starvation sorts itself out.
Remember, that all the NK people who are in the middle, who watched people die fear what the revolution will do to them as much as the leadership.
Any NK soldier who knows what revolution means, will fear his own neck. As will his family who have benefited from the bonuses his service bought.
Instead, IF this were to even happen, and I thought trickle down economics died when Reagan's body finally followed his brain, then what would REALLY happen is that the 1% become 0.9%.
Average income, ever heard of it? Well, average income is the total of all income divivded by the number of people with an income. The more people have a high income, the more people need to make a low income to compensate.
If you got 10 people and they average an income of 1000 then the total is 10.000. But if one of them makes 10.000, then the average is still a 1000 as long as the others make zero.
Now, do a fun lookup. Research the average wage in the US and look up how much say a Bill Gates make. Then realize how many people are begging on the street so Bill Gate can be so rich.
That is how the whole 1% vs 99% works. And more people becoming millionaires doesn't do anything but make far more people poor.
Most countries have election rules that mandate that a certain percentage of the population HAS to show up to vote. If say less then 50% of people who can vote, vote, then the elections are void.
Another option is the "none of the above", which can be done by casting an invalid vote, which could be used in countries where only votes are counted.
The rules vary a lot and are difficult to trigger because those that drafted them were probably smart enough to realize that "None of the above" is the only way for a the plebs to REALLY change the system. Well, other then armed revolution followed by a REAL leadership change (see the arab revolutions that so far have not yet resulted in any real changes (economic reform)).
But I have been thinking about how to reform the political process in Holland. Unlike the US, we got a LOT of small parties. The problem is that all this does is create a LOT of old boys networks. Even pure protest parties like the SP (Socialist Party), Pim Fortyun (killed by Muslim terrorist) and PVV quickly become entrenched in old style ivory tower politics where backroom deals are how the game is played.
Forming a new party that has no policy and a leader who signs a binding contract NOT to become the leader if elected and then getting the majority vote WOULD be a way to FORCE a change. The vote not being for party X or Y but being for a complete reform of the party system.
I personally think that for democracy to survive we must go to a non-party system of referendums. In Holland we had a referendum on the EU. The dutch said no and EVERY SINGLE PARTY ignored it, even the party (D66(6)) that is supposed to be the party in favor of referendums. Referendums are apparently fine, as long as the plebs vote as their leaders want them to.
England is a good example of why the current party system just doesn't work anymore. The plebs really want nothing to do with either Labour or the Tories as they seem to trade the title of "sleeziest party" every week with the libdems trying desperately to proof that just because you are small doesn't mean you can't sleeze it up as hard as the big boys.
The biggest reform of democracy would be a simple, "none of the above" and mandatory voting. But no current party would go for it because they know damn well what the result is going to be.
That is the problem with conspiracy theories, once you start believing in them, you can't stop believing in them. Why believe one piece of "evidence" over another? To many conspiracy theorists are just haters who hate their own country and believe nothing it says and believe everything the other side says without question.
See the drivel posted by AHuxley below. Russia doesn't like Iran, it has been fighting Muslims for decades. Sure, it might be smiling at the US problems in Afghanistan but that doesn't mean it thinks the enemy of its enemy is its friend.
Proof? Russia supplied planes AND pilots to the countries surrounding Israel. However there was a tiny detail that showed their TRUE reasons for being involved. The planes flown by Arabs were just a little bit obsolete. The modern planes had Russian pilots and flew with Russian orders. Russia has NEVER sold tech it itself couldn't easily defeat (and by that Israel or any western nation) to any country they didn't trust to keep the peace. Why do you think America won so easily in Irak? Irak was fighting with hopelessly outdated tech payed with premium dollars. Only the west is stupid enough to sell current generation tech to unstable nations. The Russians KNOW who their enemies are.
So, selling a nuclear reactor for lots of money but also making sure it is never quite effective makes perfect sense. They been doing that for decades.
Going to get modded down for this but the reason there aren't dozen of distro's for BSD is because nobody uses it. If you REALLY want no fragmentation, go HURD. That is so unfragmented it got ONE install.
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It sounds a bit silly when you never think about media but just consume it but all the types of story telling, even story telling itself were at one time inventions made by a person and then carried on. The ancient greeks had theather, had comedy, had musical performance but they would be amazed if they were transported to our time, amazed and probably very confused. Same if you put us back in their time. You would be wondering what the fuck is going on on stage. You can see an example of it with black and white silent movies. The story telling, the acting, the presentation, they are alien to a modern audience. The only reason they survive is because some of the actors made the cross-over to talkies and longer movies and they been parodied enough that we think we get it. Except when the exaggerated acting was done back then, it was not meant to be a parody.
Lord of the Rings Online reads like an old novel, older then it even really is but it has managed to lodge itself so firmly in our modern culture that we are willing to make an exception for it. It reads just like most older novels, one were modern pacing has yet to be invented. It is NOT an action novel. It reads closer to a travelogue. A lot of people that like the general setting have never actually read the book because... well... it ain't all that interesting.
The novel of The Princess Bride is a bit different from the movie as in that the writer tells it as if he is rewriting a novel written by an older person whose description doesn't half match that of Tolkien and how he loved the book when his father read it to him but then finds out later that his father edited the book to only have the good bits as the REAL book has a lot of dry passages where the original author describes the currencies used or court procedures.
Gosh, sound familiar? The fans would scream bloody murder but what if the Tolkien books were reworked by a movie novelist into a more condensed, fun version?
I wonder how many Tolkien fans love the books because they don't quite get it and think it must be better then them. No it isn't. The books aren't hard to read because they are so good, they are hard to read because they were written for a different era. That doesn't make them better anymore then classical music is better then modern music. Yes, there is a lot of crap in modern music but so there was in ancient times. just that only the good bits survived.
Tolkien wrote an intresting bit of lore that caught a lot of peoples imagination indirectly (they read other peoples work based on Tolkiens fantasy) but that doesn't mean the books are anything else but not so good writing that goes on far to long and fails the simplest lesson of writing: Less is More.
Some people complain that the movies ruined their imagination... but Tolkien never left any room either. Pratchett is a far greater writer by leaving gaps for your imagination to fill in. If Tolkien ever wrote a one-liner he would next spend three chapters explaining it.
Europeans are pessimists, we pay for universal healthcare and unemployment benefits because IT (doom, despair and misery) could happen to us.
Americans are optimists, they hate spending a penny on someone else because IT (the lottery, the dream job, the inheritance) could happen to them.
To me the American is the homeless guy during election year that a EU news crew always find who explains why taxes on the rich are bad. Americans fundamentally believe in the American Dream.
EU people really ain't better human beings, they just think that a better social safety net is good for THEMSELVES. I don't pay taxes to support the unemployed or physically/mentally handicapped because I care for them, I care for myself and think I benefit the most from a society in which they are cared for and I am cared for if it happens to me.
Actually there is something else I would like to know. Ping time. For gaming, that is what matters most and there can be huge differences depending on your ISP. And yes, I might seem spoiled but the difference between 33ms and 300ms is far bigger to me then whether a patch takes 5 minutes or 50 minutes.
Remember that airliner that lost its top? Couldn't happen but it did and it turned out that the reason the aircraft did not fail completly were some supports operating suddenly in a manner nobody ever expected them to but they did. In an accident there are always multiple factors working together. Maybe that support is non-critical in normal flight but what if something else breaks? Might it suddenly be the piece that determines between catastrophic failure and a harrowing incident?
A simple example exists in your car, the parking break. Pretty non-essential right? But if your main brakes fail for whatever reason, they might just be the difference between having to change your pants and donating your organs to some lucky fellow human being.
Say in your house, you have non-supporting walls. So you knock them all out. Now, is that house without the non-supporting walls as strong as the same house with those non-supporting walls? In theory it should be. So let disaster strike, both houses loose one supporting wall. Is it possible that the house with the internal walls remaining MIGHT just not collapse as readily or as fully and those unimportant non-supporting walls holding up long enough for people to have a change to get out?
A lot of people like to point out that if Airbus is caught out on this, it will be the end of them. If that was true no aircraft maker would be in business today. They all been caught lying and gambling human lives for not very large amounts of money. If you think a large company is going to fail just because they kill people you are very naive. Only in China are executives held to accounts for their actions. Read up on aircraft accidents, how they are often caused by manufacturer issues and how it never ever seems to result in any form of punishment, let alone the bankruptcy of heavily subsidezed pork industries.
Except that other aircraft makers HAVE shown to do exactly what you describe. It is pretty common in fact for say Boeing to have been caught out to have tried to hide known issues that have caused deadly accidents rather then deal with the issue and save peoples lives.
When the economic incentive is big enough, human life looses all value. Look up on say Boeing doors being blown off due to known issues with the locking mechanism or indeed making the door open outward despite the obvious safety implecations vs the normal practice of opening inward.
Don't understand? Aircraft are pressured. if the door open inward the internal pressure presses it into the door frame making it near impossible to be blow out, try it yourself, kick in a door from the side it opens into, you are going to have to be pretty burly to get that done. But of course an inward opening door takes internal space you can't load cargo into that space so there is an economic incentive to have the door open outward so you can add a bit more cargo.
Boeing did it, the locking mechanism failed and people died. Multiple times and Boeing still hasn't fundementally fixed the problem by making the door open inward only. The economics of a few kilograms of extra cargo versus all the passengers on board.
Germany was only partially invaded by the western allies, the russians did the lion share including the brutal Berlin battle. Japan's final battle by comparison was relatively peaceful.
As for civilians being killed, were these the same civilians who congratulated their sons for the mass murder they committed? I note Japan has never made reparations for their many war crimes.
The world at the time was tired of war, invading all of Japan by the US alone would have created a terrible cost, not just in soldiers lost but in retaliation by US soldiers against Japanese civilians. Lots of german women were raped, not that anyone could give a shit about it but the Russian soldiers were hardly in the mood to restrain themselves after having fought through the evidence of german war crimes to be nice to those same germans.
What would US soldiers have felt about the japanese people if they had to fight through Japan with more and more evidence of Japanese war crimes to fuel the already bitter hatred of the Japanese?
I also find it highly likely that you are willing to sacrifice soldiers without actually ever having served. An armchar moralist. Gosh, we need more of them. Easy bet you think Iraq was about oil while topping up your SUV.
Statistics are just confusing numbers to you right? Do a little search on the number of models of Android phones versus WP7 devices and also note that this is ONLY WP7 and not any earlier version of MS mobile while some Android phones have gotten multiple updates.
The voters are running the asylum but I can see how you can confuse them with the insane. The simple fact is that democracy of the masses is ill suited to complex issues where "cheap vs expensive" is only a tiny aspect of a much larger puzzle. Nuclear power isn't unsafe by the nature of nuclear power but by the nature of the enormous costs and length of time involved. You can't build or operate a nuclear plant within an election cycle so cross-party support must be arranged and this invariable can only be achieved by lubricating the system. Bribes? Not directly, more the old boy network being used to extreems. Officials get jobs on boards of directors and appoint people they think got the right frame of mind (IE the same as them) and "trust" their fellow chaps.
If Fukishima had been a coal plant it would have belched forth tons of polutions and the coal might have been spread all over the place when the tidal wave hit. But these are managable. A nuclear reactor by its very nature when it goes wrong goes wrong in a big way. It has no room for compromise and half-hearted decisions. Fukishima should have been build with better protection but it wasn't because the people that were supposed to oversee it were all tied to its success.
Power corrupts and absolute power absolutely corrupts. Some things just attract corruption. Not outright corruption with clear bribes as in say Italy where corruption is the expected norm but that veneer of corruption that means the chance of the right decision being made is very very small.
Nuclear power is unsafe not because of physics but because of human nature. Sooner or later someone will try to safe money by cutting corners. And that will go right 99% of the time... just a pity that the 1% of the time is noticed around the world.
In Holland at least every single citizen is free tor receive any radio signal. If you transmit a signal, I am free to pick it up. There are no limits to this, it is perfectly legal for a citizen to pick up military or police traffic if they want. Decrypting it is another matter of course.
So, since these shoppers are transmitting radio signals they have given explicit permission for anyone else to receive those signals and do whatever they want with it. There is no privacy because the moment you started broadcasting you gave everyone permission to use that signal. Not my fault that signal is coming out of your pants.
To suddenly make it illegal to track a radio signal just because it is a phone and not a "proper" radio signal would require massive changes in the law. What next, I can't aim my attena at the TV broadcasting tower because that is invading its privacy?
So your claim that recording the radio signals is wrong is absolute and totally falls. This should be obvious to anybody with a brain, how can it possible be illegal to capture something passing through my person and property? By my very existence I am capturing radio waves all the time with my body and all my property. What next? You want to ban ordinary radio's from receiving certain bands on the FM spectrum? Make it illegal for my garage opener to respond to your clicker? How about the light from your car charging the solar cells in my garden?
If you don't want other people receiving and processing your radio signals, then you shouldn't be broadcasting them.
Want privacy? Turn your personal tracker off. There is an app for that.
You mean Sudan that has now been split off into two countries, the new one being south-sudan which is now more free then before from the north-muslim and Iran backed mass murderers?
Sorta like a not perfect but better then before result of the embargo?
Gosh, as an example of why embargo's don't work a embargo that gave millions a change to create their own country with a better future.... why not show how the storming of the Bastille did nothing to get rid of the corrupt king. How the US decleration of dependence did not result in indepedence?
Next time before spouting off, check what actually happened.
If game companies got their head out of their asses, the PC market could be largest of them all. After all, there are far more PC's then all the consoles combined. On what are you reading this message? Your console? Didn't think so. Console owners have PC's but many a PC owner has no console.
But the PC is not a console. We don't need supersized fonts or dumbed down controls. Games like Deus EX and many other original PC games that moved to consoles and gave the PC crappy ports show that the PC has a need for a more complex but also simpler control interface. We got 101 keys on average so there is no need for optimazations in weapon selection. Take Skyrim. The game wanted to present itself as you wielding two powers at once and shifting between powers quickly. That is not how it works in reality is it? I switched quicker in Doom but then Doom was a PC game and simply used 10 keys to select one of 10 powers (weapons) and voila, it worked. In Skyrim... actually, I have up on that and played SWTOR. Nice looking world Bethseda but I knew the interface was going to be crap so I didn't buy it and instead spend over 300 dollars on SWTOR so far. Money Bethseda could have had if they sold the CE in Holland (they don't) and had made a proper PC interface like they did a long long time ago in a galazy far far away...
Games like The Sims proof and even Farmville proof that their is a huge PC market out there but you can't approach it the same way as the console market. PC gamers want more then just a shiny disk and 10 hours of gameplay with "achievements". They want something they can control, where fighting the interface and controls is not half the game. DRM isn't even that big a issue if done right. How about you simply release tiny amounts of new content continously and adjust the executable for it? Release groups are typically lazy and will crack the original release and then stop. Sure, that means you can't sell horse armour (Bethseda again) for a fortune but you give people a real reason to BUY the game to get updates that make you seem like a nice company that gives out free goodies.
It sill amazes me to see console games retail for 20 euro's more then the PC version, countless torrents for the xbox version, lousy ports but somehow piracy is to blame for Crysis bad performance... it only did half the sales of the xbox after all. No license fee and an environment where you can blame poor performance on the customers hardware rather then your own coding skills.
But hey, continue to go to consoles only... enjoy coding for hardware half a decade out of date and the console companies desperate to stretch the lifespan of their hardware while the PC keeps moving ahead. I am still spending money on gaming, feel free to take it or leave it. But I don't do consoles. And if that means no more FPS for me... I try not to loose to much sleep over it.
Why are you looking at me? I didn't steal your ship, I don't steal and anyway, I killed that guy so you can't be him. Unless you are a force ghost. Eat flame thrower!
(Bounty Hunter quest line)
The game is WoW with light sabers... YES! That is like saying your girlfriend is like a supermodel japanese school girl with red hair and green eyes with super model friends she insists on inviting over for the night AND day. Where is the bad?
Oh yeah, she keeps begging me to stop playing swtor and join her and her friends in what she calls a horizontal dance. As if!
It is what the cool kids smoke, forget smack or weed or pot, real kids smoke potted meat!
The rant opens with a line usually reserved for cases where people are inundated by physical mail as a result of some action. In this case, the guy got one CD with a small number of files that are easily searched by computer in a common and well documented format.
Big whoop. He asked for data and he got it. And apparently after he should have been careful what he wished for, he now wants more?
Typical slashdot "word rapist" (labeling them editors is an insult to humanity itself) scaremongering.
Be careful peeps, if you go to a restaurant and ask for a drink, you might GET it!!! Scary!
A lot of liberals will say that thougher sentences don't stop repeat offenders, it shows all liberals are liars or just not very good at logic. No person put to death has ever offended again.
Anyway, why make murder illegal then? It doesn't stop people so might as well legalize it.
Well, for most of 2011 at least.
For those not following the news, Belgium was without a government for the longest time in history, closing in on two years before FINALLY a government formed at the end of this year.
I didn't bother for a long time, partially because I use a lot of different browsers for different needs and that meant that I needed to setup and ad-filtering proxy which is a tiny amount of work and I am very very lazy.
But ads got so annoying over time that I just installed it, made it the default on my home network (all HTTP traffic is filtered) and not just am I not annoyed anymore by ads, the speed has gone up.
Ads take just to much time. It doesn't matter where they are. Trying to read an American magazine is a game of "hunt the article". It used to be article - ad - article. Now the article between several ad pages, often only part of the page and spread all over the magazine to force you to keep hunting for it and be exposed to more ads. TV? 5 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of TV? Including ads for the program you just interrupted?
That leads me to the next thing about ads. They are so goddamn fucking stupid. A tiny handful are funny but they are shown maybe a handful of times. The ads that are in every single commercial block are the ones that make your brain want to crawl out of your ears. I don't watch TV anymore, not because I am not in the mood for mindless drivel but because even my desire for mindless drivel is insulted when the ads come on.
Ad-block can start to let ads through but lets face it, they do this for money and so, the ad that pays the most is the one that gets through. That is how all this kinda stuff works. Movie TV channels advertise with not showing ads, and then charge a premium for special offer blocks. You buy a DVD not to see ads and then they put non-skippable ads in front of the content.
It is not like there are no alternatives to ad-block.
If advertisers want to get back on my browser they need to sanitize their own industry. Get rid of all the animated ads, the ads that are slow or stupid or annoying and make them be delivered at insanely high speeds so that NEVER EVER a webpage refuses to load because of a slow ad server.
But that won't never happen and so, I got several block lists. Opera has the most userfriendly at the moment, can even be used to content on the site itself.
I have even gone to the trouble of filtering out comments on sites with drivel comments. It is easy, just write a javascript command to hide blocks with author "smallfurrycreature" and the net will be a cleaner place.
Yes, this is drivel, but at least it isn't drivel tracking your every move or taking ages to load.
And the honest truth is that there is NOTHING like seeing some internally developer solution for which off-the-shelf software exists to convince you internally developed software is a nightmare.
And there is is nothing like seeing 99% of off-the-shelf software to convince you that ANYTHING developed internally must be better.
The REAL honest truth is that 99.999% of software sucks donkey-balls. After a thorough rimming job.
It doesn't really matter where it is developed. Design flaws and bugs ALWAYS end up biting YOU in the ass. It doesn't matter where it is developed, if key developers leave, knowledge gets lost. Sure, you MIGHT think that a large software developer has processes in place to guard against this... but you would be a silly person. IT churn is high and this means any software project is always at risk of loosing the people that truly understand the system. A software house might be slightly better at it BUT will have to force its developers to maintain systems no longer relevant to it (do you want to work for a company still supporting windows 3.1 because its customers need it) while an internal development might not have anyway to keep a developer intrested with nothing but maintenance work.
There is no easy answer here. Ideally you would have internally a collection of tailored software that was mostly developed externally. Example, I might run my own webscript but use externally developed OS, database, webserver. But wait, that makes all your tailoring known only by your own staff...
In the end, you just got to pick your poison.
The link to the test is at the bottom of the article.
Problem with the test however is that it is American centric, lots of stuff a non-American is less likely to know like the starting line of the decleration of independence. I guessed that the given sentence is not it because that is what everyone thinks and in these kinds of things, what everyone thinks is always wrong but it was a guess, not something I actually once learned in school or read because it was relevant to me... oh wait, that is just like an American. Never mind.
I hereby impose a flat-tax for 3,41 USD per day for every human being not in the western nation to be payed out to the western nations as compensation for all the western tech that benefits non-western people.
Am I a jerk yet?
NK has a lot of personal support from Japan, lots of people there admire the "self-reliance" of the NK doctrine and donate large sums of money to the regime.
Revolution needs a seed and that seed can be bred out of a population. See former USSR countries where people embrace the free market by patiently waiting for the state to sort it out. Nobody who has not been in a concentration camp or decades in prison can possible truly comprehend what it must be like in that hell hole. Even reports from East Germany pale in comparison.
But what can you do? People are starving. Withholding aid (without killing of all smugglers and sympathizers) will mean only the rich get enough. And if thousands starve before a revolution is sparked? Then the reduction in the surplus population (Dickens) will mean that starvation sorts itself out.
Remember, that all the NK people who are in the middle, who watched people die fear what the revolution will do to them as much as the leadership.
Any NK soldier who knows what revolution means, will fear his own neck. As will his family who have benefited from the bonuses his service bought.
Divide and conquer at its worsted.
Instead, IF this were to even happen, and I thought trickle down economics died when Reagan's body finally followed his brain, then what would REALLY happen is that the 1% become 0.9%.
Average income, ever heard of it? Well, average income is the total of all income divivded by the number of people with an income. The more people have a high income, the more people need to make a low income to compensate.
If you got 10 people and they average an income of 1000 then the total is 10.000. But if one of them makes 10.000, then the average is still a 1000 as long as the others make zero.
Now, do a fun lookup. Research the average wage in the US and look up how much say a Bill Gates make. Then realize how many people are begging on the street so Bill Gate can be so rich.
That is how the whole 1% vs 99% works. And more people becoming millionaires doesn't do anything but make far more people poor.
Most countries have election rules that mandate that a certain percentage of the population HAS to show up to vote. If say less then 50% of people who can vote, vote, then the elections are void.
Another option is the "none of the above", which can be done by casting an invalid vote, which could be used in countries where only votes are counted.
The rules vary a lot and are difficult to trigger because those that drafted them were probably smart enough to realize that "None of the above" is the only way for a the plebs to REALLY change the system. Well, other then armed revolution followed by a REAL leadership change (see the arab revolutions that so far have not yet resulted in any real changes (economic reform)).
But I have been thinking about how to reform the political process in Holland. Unlike the US, we got a LOT of small parties. The problem is that all this does is create a LOT of old boys networks. Even pure protest parties like the SP (Socialist Party), Pim Fortyun (killed by Muslim terrorist) and PVV quickly become entrenched in old style ivory tower politics where backroom deals are how the game is played.
Forming a new party that has no policy and a leader who signs a binding contract NOT to become the leader if elected and then getting the majority vote WOULD be a way to FORCE a change. The vote not being for party X or Y but being for a complete reform of the party system.
I personally think that for democracy to survive we must go to a non-party system of referendums. In Holland we had a referendum on the EU. The dutch said no and EVERY SINGLE PARTY ignored it, even the party (D66(6)) that is supposed to be the party in favor of referendums. Referendums are apparently fine, as long as the plebs vote as their leaders want them to.
England is a good example of why the current party system just doesn't work anymore. The plebs really want nothing to do with either Labour or the Tories as they seem to trade the title of "sleeziest party" every week with the libdems trying desperately to proof that just because you are small doesn't mean you can't sleeze it up as hard as the big boys.
The biggest reform of democracy would be a simple, "none of the above" and mandatory voting. But no current party would go for it because they know damn well what the result is going to be.
That is the problem with conspiracy theories, once you start believing in them, you can't stop believing in them. Why believe one piece of "evidence" over another? To many conspiracy theorists are just haters who hate their own country and believe nothing it says and believe everything the other side says without question.
See the drivel posted by AHuxley below. Russia doesn't like Iran, it has been fighting Muslims for decades. Sure, it might be smiling at the US problems in Afghanistan but that doesn't mean it thinks the enemy of its enemy is its friend.
Proof? Russia supplied planes AND pilots to the countries surrounding Israel. However there was a tiny detail that showed their TRUE reasons for being involved. The planes flown by Arabs were just a little bit obsolete. The modern planes had Russian pilots and flew with Russian orders. Russia has NEVER sold tech it itself couldn't easily defeat (and by that Israel or any western nation) to any country they didn't trust to keep the peace. Why do you think America won so easily in Irak? Irak was fighting with hopelessly outdated tech payed with premium dollars. Only the west is stupid enough to sell current generation tech to unstable nations. The Russians KNOW who their enemies are.
So, selling a nuclear reactor for lots of money but also making sure it is never quite effective makes perfect sense. They been doing that for decades.
Going to get modded down for this but the reason there aren't dozen of distro's for BSD is because nobody uses it. If you REALLY want no fragmentation, go HURD. That is so unfragmented it got ONE install.
Enjoy.