The rebellions in the Middle East have shaken things up but no lasting changes have yet been made. Figure heads can easily be replaced by the next dictator.
Things are happening but to say Democracy is thriving... lets wait for the first free and open elections to be held at least eh? Some of us old stick in the muds think that they are a fairly important element of democracy. Silly I know but humor us.
When not only a government has been fairly elected but ALSO one freely elected government has been freely and openly replaced by another fairly elected government can democracy be said to thrive.
Overthowing a dictator is NOT democracy. Forced free elections is not freedom either. A ruling government respecting election results that go against it. THAT is democracy.
It isn't about electric cars. It isn't about the middle east.
It is about infrastructure, long term planning, economy, the status quo and vested interests.
Oil is not just oil. Not all oil is equal for one. One of the problem with Libya is that its oil is very clean (low sulfur) and can be easily turned into petrol. Other oils especially those from the US are very poor. They are dirty and take a lot of processing to turn in to petrol.
But petrol is not all. We could survive without petrol far easier then we could survive without plastics. Most gas engines can be converted cheaply to run on gas or alcohol. Try making a pencil out of wind electricity or biomass. What about syringes? Our modern medicine needs a LOT of plastic. Made from oil. Lots of stuff is made from oil and there are no easy replacements available. When the last drop of oil is sucked out of the ground, nobody will mourn their car. They will be to busy mourning the collapse of chemical industry.
That is why there is a push to just keep drilling for more oil. The petrol companies got little to do with this. They can always switch. Far bigger concerns are all the industries that use oil not for burning but as an ingredient.
Another concern is that switching changes the status quo. The way things are done. What use is Englands good relation with Arab dictatorships if oil from the region doesn't matter as much anymore? Forget about the oil barons, the public service is heavily tied to the region. See where Gadaffi (or whatever he is called) son went to school. Who was in the class with him? Us knows us.
Turning over this multi-layered structure with its tentacles spread widely is insanely difficult. Good luck getting an oil free car. Oh, it might not RUN on oil, but it will have been build with it.
In the meantime, peoples limited understanding of the world means that getting them to accept new things is very difficult. One of the most complex concepts is to get people to understand FUEL is nothing more then a battery, an energy carrier. Hydrogen is an alternative. So is electricity. Wait, electricity is an energy carrier itself? Yes. If I generate electricity at say a windmill I am storing energry produced by motion and transport it via a wire to say a car where it is turned into motion again.
Lots of people claim of electric cars that generating the electricity is often polluting as well. Could be BUT an electric car can be fueled by electricity produced from a coal plant, a hand crank, solar energy and indeed a internal combustion engine running on petrol.
A fleet of electric cars will NOT solve our problem of needing fasts amount of energy but it WILL make it easier to SWITCH energy sources. No need for a conversion kit to make your Prius run on nuclear power instead of coal power. If we can replace petrol cars with electric cars we can THEN worry about new ways to produce electric power. Else it will remain a catch 22 forever. No investment in alternative energy production because there is not enough demand for it.
We have had oil crisisses before and frankly it seems a silly way to run an economy. of course to fix it, we actually have to start RUNNING the economy instead of letting speculators run rampant. Because the Libyan crisis should have no effect. It produces only a fraction of the world demand and other regions have already agreed to step up production. the price rices are just speculators hoping to strike it rich. Kill off wallstreet and there would be no oil price rice.
Now there is a way to make the world a better place. Make peace, kill a speculator.
Anyway, if I suggest Farmville is just SimCity 2010... am I going to be able to make it out of here before the hord descends?
For full disclosure, got neither a facebook account of played or even seen Farmville runnings. IRC and Trade Wars is where it is at. Now get of my lawn.
Your reasoning led to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam did horrible things as well and the Taliban isn't made up of angels either. The west sought to remove them from power and we all know the results.
And it is hardly the first time either. Somalia? Vietnam?
And is he a terrorist? The rebels got weapons, so they are hardly unarmed. And if you claim some of them were unarmed, well show the video footage to proof Libyan combat helicopter pilots shooting up clearly unarmed civilians and joking about it. Oh wait, there is such a video, of AMERICAN soldiers shooting up the civilians they are liberating including their childeren because well they just deserve it for being brown.
The Iraq war was started to get rid of a despotic leader who had commited countless war crimes and in doing so, the US committed war crimes. Where does it all end?
As brutal as it sounds, it might be best to just leave the Libyan people to fight their own wars, gain their own freedoms even if it is not what we like. Some Libyan rebels agree with this, they do NOT want western intervention. Others do. But any intervention will be used by some powers in the region to paint the rebels as slaves to western colonialists. That can only hurt the fight for freedom. Right now it seems Al Queda has little to do with any of the uprisings. Do you want to give them a feeding ground? The first NATO bomb to go of target will have suicide bombers seeking to reclaim their land from the western invaders.
Western intervention has been tried before. It failed. Until we have an army in the west that is disciplined enough to not start killing civilians or torturing prisoners, lets not start a third war shall we?
Instead, if you want to help the region, how about you vote out of power those western leaders who sold weapons to Libya that are now being used to kill civilians? Oh, that might mean actually having to do something yourself. Vote against the guy offering the rich a tax cut and voting for a honest guy? Nah, too hard. Easier to start yet another way. Can I presume you are not a soldier nor have ever served? Thought so.
Indeed, firing a gun is not that hard. But doing anything effective with it, IS bloody hard. Why do you think soldiers get trained? It isn't about firing the gun. I have been trained decades ago when I still could touch my toes... or even see them and most of the time was NOT spent firing guns.
Far more time was in fact spend on cleaning them. To ensure that when you intend to fire, it does fire. Oh and on discipline so that it only fires when your officer intends you to fire it. And that when you need to, you still got ammo left and not wasted it shooting a 300meter ranged weapon at an enemy a kilometer away. Ammo is always in supply in the movies. In real life combat units have a very small supply with them that is gone in seconds if you do not obey strict fire discipline.
Just play any shooting game and see how much ammo you use. Now calculate the weight. Knees buckling yet? Look at the pictures on the news. How many do you see carrying a weapon vs an ammo crate? Or even carrying a couple of clips with their new weapon?
So what happens if they encounter an enemy? They shoot their single clip and then have to go look for more. It is the chaotic fighting of a African civil war that works best against unarmed civilians. Not a trained soldier backed up by armored vehicles.
Luckily both sides are equally bad at fighting although a long bloody civil war is hardly lucky.
The claymore shows which way to point it? How helpfull. Oh okay, so now you just need to inform EVERYONE else on your side where you deployed it, not accidently have put it on your escape route. Not have a kid walk on it. Put it somewhere the enemy can't just evade it.
Your description of the AK47 is not just stupid, are you actually that silly to think that the bad guys are not going to try to stop you? Do you think a weapon on full automatic is easy to control, what is its effective range?
Really, real war is not a computer game or even a shooting range. Your targets are not there for your enjoyment, they want to kill you. Mostly for being so stupid.
That is why a well trained army makes mincemeat out of civilians. So why hasn't the Libyan elite forces make mincemeat out of the rebels? Simple, they are not well trained.
Libya is a country ruled by a leader who knows very well that if an officer gets control over an effective fighting force he can use them to grab power. See his own rise to power. So he has spend a LOT of effort in making sure that the army itself is weak and divided. Even the so called Elite forces are just relatively small units so that any uprising amongst part of them can be squashed by other forces.
War is a lot harder then it looks if you don't just want to get bogged down in ordinary street fighting or slugging matches. It requires an understanding of strategy, tactics and the communication and discipline to be able to direct your troops. Both sides lack it. The kind of fighting you propose is the one practiced in Africa, the one with massive civilian casualties and random butchering. You know the type, that drags on for decades.
There currently is a sort of stalemate. The government forces have the heavy firepower but are to ill trained to use it effectively and perhaps even not willing to go all out, it is their own people after all. They also use mercernary forces which sounds effective but a mercenary wants to collect his pay and black african mercenaries (color matters because Libya's leader has played a very good game of divide and conquer, why do you think there are so many immigrants in a country with record unemployment. And one of his threaths to the west is to open up the gates to Africans wanting to come to Europe, a very powerful threath indeed considering the rise of rightwingers in Europe) are best used against unarmed civilians not armed rebels backed by some military forces.
really, this notion that an AK47 is some kind of wonder weapon belongs in the world of the A-team where pray-and-spray works. In real life, you can carry maybe 3-4 clips and at full-auto you are out of ammo before you can say "man this thing has a kickback". Hitting a moving person who is shooting back is anything but easy. Especially if you are not going to be able to count on your squad covering your back. Why do think armies spend so much time training soldiers? So that when the order is given to do something, everyone does it, knowing everyone else is doing it. Civilians? Scatter at the first sign of trouble and will always be looking for someone else to go in front.
Anyway, supplying the rebels with weapons is interfering and interfering in the Middle East is a minefield. They also got weapons a plenty. Just watch them. All the kids carrying guns. Not ammo mind you, that isn't macho. Just a gun with a single clip... African style civil war. What fun.
I have tried Gnome 3, its sizing options are similar but not exactly the same as Gnome 3 and in part it seems they want you to drag a window to an edge of the screen to size it. So to the side, it takes up the side of a screen with max height etc.
Does it work? Part of it all is that workspaces are now far more an integral part of the setup. Not some tiny icons or obscure key commands, they are major sidebar so that you will not be minimizing apps, but switching work space with an easy option to arrange two windows next to each other for day to day tasks of reading something from X and doing something in Y.
If it would be more finished and more apps are build to work with the new flow it could be intresting. If nobody every tried anything new, we would still be stuck with computers controlled by rewiring them physically.
Not saying that I like the idea for Gnome Shell but they are moving away from the old desktop idea. Storing things on your desktop by the way has LONG been a BAD thing done only by the terminally disorganized.
For files, there are places like Documents, and program links should go in the menu. There shouldn't be anything on your desktop to look at.
I know, not how we are used to doing things, but change is not something to be feared.
Here the nobles give you flowers, egg, water, sugar, cream, strawberries, butter and YOU still complaining you don't have anything.
Go to MS, get them to listen to your demands. Tell it to Apple, see if they listen.
When Apple changes how things are done, it is design and a brave new world. If FOSS working for free does not obey your every whim, they are dictators.
Maybe if Gnome charges a hundred bucks for every point upgrade and breaks backwards compatibility on a full release you would be satisfied?
If real historians and assorted worked as these amateurs then we would be missing an awful lot of history. For instance Atlantis... only mentioned ONCE in history and it didn't cite sources, so BYE BYE Atlantis. A REAL historian simply notes the mention of Atlantis and that there is only one source with no references for it AND THAT IS IT.
That is where Wikipedia fails utterly. Mentioning that something is NOT sourced IS ENOUGH. A full record INCLUDES personal remarks and unverified claim and that is perfectly valid AS LONG as you note this. Yes, some pruning can be needed in extreme cases but the anal retentive "citation needed" is making a joke out the site. A normal encyclopedia would have no trouble saying the Hindenburg was a disaster. Wikipedia requires a citation. So? Well, they NEVER then check that the citation is ACCURATE.
So by Wikipedia and article claiming Nazi propoganda is correct would pass since there are PLENTY of sources to cite from. Just because you can cite from something does NOT make it fact.
Wikipedia is an intresting experiment but ultimately shows why volunteer work and crowdsourcing just don't work for anything important. The type of person to volunteer all to often tends to filter down eventually to the completly incompetent power hungry assholes.
Why do you think Gentoo is failing and Ubuntu is rising? Complete freedom is a bad way to get something done. And the Wikipedia editors are far to free.
When I look at Android Market I see Tucows, you know the ancient shareware site? I see a car store filled with go-faster stripes and furry dice. When people are young or a tech is new they tend to go wild and add all sorts of crap that is useless for the wow of it. Remember when marguee and the blink tag were the hot new thing? When every pixel of a webpage had to have an animated gif?
It is like "xeyes" on linux. Useless but who when they first got a desktop running didn't run this app?
And you are forgetting one important difference. Tell me what you could do on your early wonder PC, while carrying it around in your pocket.
Oh and since when do guys whose first PC was a celeron have any right to speak? You barely got the right to breath. Now go stand in the corner and feel ashamed for having this modern cheapo PC ever in your presence. UNCLEAN!
And of course that is the reason why if I pay with iDeal (dutch bank system) I don't have to pay the transaction fee that I have to pay when I use a credit card.
Not all companies do this, most just add the transaction costs to the price. But those companies that operate in more then one country clearly show just how expensive credit cards are and it is YOU that ends up paying it.
Oh and what is the monthly, yearly cost for your credit card? Mine is 10 euro's per year and I can pay in any shop and online with ease and more security.
This guy is stretching and distorting the truth to make the review positive.
An example, he only mentions the SUBSIDIZED cost of the phone but uses this price further on to compare it to a netbook BUT does NOT then use a subsidized netbook which do exist. This is like comparing two cars and taking the lease cost of one as being different from the purchase cost of the other. Well duh.
He then claims that 400 dollars for the dock is cheaper then a netbook... except a netbook is both complete and not just a dock and 400 dollars is also the mid range price for a netbook. Was he looking at Vaoi's perhaps? I can find 200-300 dollar netbooks with ease and totally "free" ones if I buy them with a phone subscription.
He then goes on about Firefox Linux not being able to run Java. Is that so? Gosh, what am I running then? What he really means to say is that this dock can't run java apparently for some reason. Firefox and Linux can't this hardware he is trying to like can't.
Really, the most standard, cheapest netbook can do what this thing does and WAY more. Even the multimedia dock is expensive. I still have all the cost and hassle of carrying a netbook besides my phone but without any of the advantages. Like oh say multiple video outs because on the move I can't always dictate what inputs are available for a screen.
And this thing as far as I read the review can't even do video. What a LOT of people seem to want netbooks to do is output video, considering the demand for 720p capability which the first netbooks lacked. What is this multimedia dock going to do for me on the move?
We have heard the "PC is dying" speech before and so far, it hasn't happened. That is because the PC, netbooks and laptops are very very good at serving the edge cases, all those uses to which we put our hardware that some exec at MS/HP/Apple or whatever didn't dream off. Just compare Android's gmail app with regular gmail AND especially a tricked out desktop with gmail tied in. It is clear gmail the app is the light edition. Sometimes that is handy but only if the ease of mobile access makes up for the restrictions.
But if I need a bag to carry a dock or whatever around, why not just carry a cheapo netbook and be done with it.
To me, a phone as a PC will only become intresting if I can skip the dock and hookup the phone directly. THEN I can use it as a tiny laptop.
The end of the Wintel domination? Not yet in sight. With efforts like this, I doubt it ever will. Come on, would it have been that hard to implement some more basic Linux apps?
You are aware that Apple is the BIGGEST (not sure if they still are the top, but they are in the top three) pc maker in the world? What is limitted about selling more then Dell?
Almost every forum has people complaining. The simple fact is that Apple is middle of the road, not top end. A mainframe, that is top end hardware. There really aren't any top end PC makers, commodity hardware and quality don't mix. The top end cars are hand build machines, they do not come of a Chinese production line.
And as for the price, really, compare the specs. I can easily get a Thinkpad that costs the same if not more. Stop comparing your cheapo Dell with a mid-range Apple.
It is the same old story, people comparing a top end Mac with a bottom end PC and then complaining about the price difference. Mac is now the first with the new intel stuff, so HOW exactly do they come up with this price comparison when there isn't a regular laptop out there with the same hardware?
Not that I think Apple is all that hot myself. They are to me the old sony. You pay a bit more then you should but know you get reasonable quality in return. In the real world, that matters. I might get the same cheaper but it might be crap or I can lots more and it can still be crap. Old Sony made good mid quality stuff that gave you the insurance that you got decent gear for an okay price. I would be wilinng to pay more for my ordinary hamburger if I knew that the service would always be great, the hamburger always hot etc etc. That MID range, decent quality for a decent price is VERY hard to nail. Cheap and crap is easy, expensive and good is easy. Hitting the middle reliable, that is where you can make a fortune.
Until you start cutting costs. Sony went bye bye. Apple is not imune to this. For all the Sony haters now, once they were a darling just like Apple is. The mighty do fall.
Patents now last so long and have been around for so long that you can't build anything anymore without using someone elses invention. Ever heard of "If I seen furthest, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants"? Well, with the patent system that is, "If I sold the most gadgets it is because I paid off everyone else".
Worse, once patents were real physical products that had to be specific enough to make an actual product from them, you could LOOK at a patent and work around it. But now that concepts have become valid patents, you can't. So rather then a screw being patented, the very idea of fixing to things together is patented so it doesn't matter if you come up with completely new system for doing it, a better system, a more efficient system, you are STILL infringing. EXACTLY what the patent system was NOT supposed to do. It was supposed to encourage invention. Patent on the diesel engine? Make a petrol engine. A LOT of combustion engine tech early on was developed to get around patents, so we got lots of different engines and the market could then pick the most efficient for their use.
Sony and others are however so tied to the current patent system they cannot let it go even if it is killing them. Why not? Without the patent system, Sony would be Sony'ed. What is that? Sony was once a toy maker from Japan. Making crap copies cheaply before SLOWLY improving them. Well, if you call the re-creation of the Japanese economy post WW2 slow.
A complex patent system favors the big companies who can use their patent portfolio as weapons. Remove it, and ANYONE can compete. You wouldn't have needed a billion dollar company to launch a new phone OS, a couple of hackers could have done it. The billions of Google are not for development cost, but legal team costs.
The patent system needs reform but the mayor players are all so indebt to it, that it would take an outsider to break it up. Maybe China can do it. They gain nothing from the patent system and if Western society continues to collapse (not actually building anything anymore except patents) then China might loose interest in pretending to obey the system.
Something needs to change before all progress is gone to countries where you can still spend more money on development then on lawyers.
So basically you want some magic situation where people have freedom but no responsibility. How typical. This is NOTHING new, everyone can install software from anywhere on the PC and the stupid have always had problems with this.
We do leave people behind here, if you are to stupid to tell what software is legit and which isn't, then you shouldn't be installing crap.
Freedom for those who can handle the responsibility, lockin for those who can't.
What does Google have to do with unofficial markets? This is NOT the Android Market place that this is happening on. The PC equivelant would be blaiming EA for virusses found in games on thepiratebay.
You seem to think Oprah is real. Well it is, for a segment of the population. Don't let the tv stereo-types fool you into believing this is how most people are. TV shows the extremes because normality doesn't make for intresting TV.
There won't be a program Deadliest code, gripping the nation season after season. O.C. Support Desk is NOT a sure fire hit. BugBusters will not be challenged by the president of the US of A.
Most teenagers? Never rebel and get along with their parents and siblings. Most women are not complete sluts in college crying they can't find a good guy while banging the soccer team. Most men do not in fact follow their cock, either that or the navy has a LOT more gay people in it then a republican can stand.
Most people lead simple sensible lives, they might screw up a little by accident but recover and move on. The real idiots are rare. Same as with criminals. Most people will NOT in fact kill to gain a fortune even if they could get away with it.
Humanity is a lot more normal. TV reality is about showing the extremes on the edges but you would be a fool to believe it. Do you believe everyone can run really fast because you just saw the olympics? Then why do you believe all people behave like the freaks on talkshows.
Ancient statistic. 50% of people loose their virginity before 18. Means over half the population does NOT.
As said below but not clearly enough, the usage of the classifier Tolkien for Elves is to seperate human style civilized elves from the Santa's helpers or fairy folk. It has NOTHING to do with Tolkien having invented them, merely that this type is most easily identified with his work. SAME as that when a movie uses realistic space travel we claim it more 2001 then Star Wars.
People like to put labels to things to make it more clear to other people of the same culture. For instance, fire engine red isn't a color and not all fire engines are red but you know what intensity of red I mean nonetheless.
Tolkien is a name with no particular selling power anymore. Nothing new is produced by Tolkien for some time, probably because he is death. There shouldn't even be a trademark involved. Imagine if other companies did the same. Everytime you say you made a xerox on a canon, your ass would be sued off in stead of copied.
Yeah yeah, extrapolating future trends by drawing a straight line between past points. That is SUCH a reliable method.
But hey, good news, by these figures IE will be at 0% in 5 years and Google at well over a 100%.
The browser ballot changed things, would the lines have been as they are now without it? Nobody knows but it is not beyond imagination that IE would have bottomed out 50% instead and might even have climbed with the release of IE9.
Basically, those who claim the ballot did not have an affect are claiming something like the new iPhone had no effect on iPhone sales. The old one was selling well, the new one sells well, ergo no change... because the old one would of course have done the same sale figures without a new release.
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The rebellions in the Middle East have shaken things up but no lasting changes have yet been made. Figure heads can easily be replaced by the next dictator.
Things are happening but to say Democracy is thriving... lets wait for the first free and open elections to be held at least eh? Some of us old stick in the muds think that they are a fairly important element of democracy. Silly I know but humor us.
When not only a government has been fairly elected but ALSO one freely elected government has been freely and openly replaced by another fairly elected government can democracy be said to thrive.
Overthowing a dictator is NOT democracy. Forced free elections is not freedom either. A ruling government respecting election results that go against it. THAT is democracy.
It isn't about electric cars. It isn't about the middle east.
It is about infrastructure, long term planning, economy, the status quo and vested interests.
Oil is not just oil. Not all oil is equal for one. One of the problem with Libya is that its oil is very clean (low sulfur) and can be easily turned into petrol. Other oils especially those from the US are very poor. They are dirty and take a lot of processing to turn in to petrol.
But petrol is not all. We could survive without petrol far easier then we could survive without plastics. Most gas engines can be converted cheaply to run on gas or alcohol. Try making a pencil out of wind electricity or biomass. What about syringes? Our modern medicine needs a LOT of plastic. Made from oil. Lots of stuff is made from oil and there are no easy replacements available. When the last drop of oil is sucked out of the ground, nobody will mourn their car. They will be to busy mourning the collapse of chemical industry.
That is why there is a push to just keep drilling for more oil. The petrol companies got little to do with this. They can always switch. Far bigger concerns are all the industries that use oil not for burning but as an ingredient.
Another concern is that switching changes the status quo. The way things are done. What use is Englands good relation with Arab dictatorships if oil from the region doesn't matter as much anymore? Forget about the oil barons, the public service is heavily tied to the region. See where Gadaffi (or whatever he is called) son went to school. Who was in the class with him? Us knows us.
Turning over this multi-layered structure with its tentacles spread widely is insanely difficult. Good luck getting an oil free car. Oh, it might not RUN on oil, but it will have been build with it.
In the meantime, peoples limited understanding of the world means that getting them to accept new things is very difficult. One of the most complex concepts is to get people to understand FUEL is nothing more then a battery, an energy carrier. Hydrogen is an alternative. So is electricity. Wait, electricity is an energy carrier itself? Yes. If I generate electricity at say a windmill I am storing energry produced by motion and transport it via a wire to say a car where it is turned into motion again.
Lots of people claim of electric cars that generating the electricity is often polluting as well. Could be BUT an electric car can be fueled by electricity produced from a coal plant, a hand crank, solar energy and indeed a internal combustion engine running on petrol.
A fleet of electric cars will NOT solve our problem of needing fasts amount of energy but it WILL make it easier to SWITCH energy sources. No need for a conversion kit to make your Prius run on nuclear power instead of coal power. If we can replace petrol cars with electric cars we can THEN worry about new ways to produce electric power. Else it will remain a catch 22 forever. No investment in alternative energy production because there is not enough demand for it.
We have had oil crisisses before and frankly it seems a silly way to run an economy. of course to fix it, we actually have to start RUNNING the economy instead of letting speculators run rampant. Because the Libyan crisis should have no effect. It produces only a fraction of the world demand and other regions have already agreed to step up production. the price rices are just speculators hoping to strike it rich. Kill off wallstreet and there would be no oil price rice.
Now there is a way to make the world a better place. Make peace, kill a speculator.
Anyway, if I suggest Farmville is just SimCity 2010... am I going to be able to make it out of here before the hord descends?
For full disclosure, got neither a facebook account of played or even seen Farmville runnings. IRC and Trade Wars is where it is at. Now get of my lawn.
No, the above poster isn't trolling.
Your reasoning led to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam did horrible things as well and the Taliban isn't made up of angels either. The west sought to remove them from power and we all know the results.
And it is hardly the first time either. Somalia? Vietnam?
And is he a terrorist? The rebels got weapons, so they are hardly unarmed. And if you claim some of them were unarmed, well show the video footage to proof Libyan combat helicopter pilots shooting up clearly unarmed civilians and joking about it. Oh wait, there is such a video, of AMERICAN soldiers shooting up the civilians they are liberating including their childeren because well they just deserve it for being brown.
The Iraq war was started to get rid of a despotic leader who had commited countless war crimes and in doing so, the US committed war crimes. Where does it all end?
As brutal as it sounds, it might be best to just leave the Libyan people to fight their own wars, gain their own freedoms even if it is not what we like. Some Libyan rebels agree with this, they do NOT want western intervention. Others do. But any intervention will be used by some powers in the region to paint the rebels as slaves to western colonialists. That can only hurt the fight for freedom. Right now it seems Al Queda has little to do with any of the uprisings. Do you want to give them a feeding ground? The first NATO bomb to go of target will have suicide bombers seeking to reclaim their land from the western invaders.
Western intervention has been tried before. It failed. Until we have an army in the west that is disciplined enough to not start killing civilians or torturing prisoners, lets not start a third war shall we?
Instead, if you want to help the region, how about you vote out of power those western leaders who sold weapons to Libya that are now being used to kill civilians? Oh, that might mean actually having to do something yourself. Vote against the guy offering the rich a tax cut and voting for a honest guy? Nah, too hard. Easier to start yet another way. Can I presume you are not a soldier nor have ever served? Thought so.
Indeed, firing a gun is not that hard. But doing anything effective with it, IS bloody hard. Why do you think soldiers get trained? It isn't about firing the gun. I have been trained decades ago when I still could touch my toes... or even see them and most of the time was NOT spent firing guns.
Far more time was in fact spend on cleaning them. To ensure that when you intend to fire, it does fire. Oh and on discipline so that it only fires when your officer intends you to fire it. And that when you need to, you still got ammo left and not wasted it shooting a 300meter ranged weapon at an enemy a kilometer away. Ammo is always in supply in the movies. In real life combat units have a very small supply with them that is gone in seconds if you do not obey strict fire discipline.
Just play any shooting game and see how much ammo you use. Now calculate the weight. Knees buckling yet? Look at the pictures on the news. How many do you see carrying a weapon vs an ammo crate? Or even carrying a couple of clips with their new weapon?
So what happens if they encounter an enemy? They shoot their single clip and then have to go look for more. It is the chaotic fighting of a African civil war that works best against unarmed civilians. Not a trained soldier backed up by armored vehicles.
Luckily both sides are equally bad at fighting although a long bloody civil war is hardly lucky.
The claymore shows which way to point it? How helpfull. Oh okay, so now you just need to inform EVERYONE else on your side where you deployed it, not accidently have put it on your escape route. Not have a kid walk on it. Put it somewhere the enemy can't just evade it.
Your description of the AK47 is not just stupid, are you actually that silly to think that the bad guys are not going to try to stop you? Do you think a weapon on full automatic is easy to control, what is its effective range?
Really, real war is not a computer game or even a shooting range. Your targets are not there for your enjoyment, they want to kill you. Mostly for being so stupid.
That is why a well trained army makes mincemeat out of civilians. So why hasn't the Libyan elite forces make mincemeat out of the rebels? Simple, they are not well trained.
Libya is a country ruled by a leader who knows very well that if an officer gets control over an effective fighting force he can use them to grab power. See his own rise to power. So he has spend a LOT of effort in making sure that the army itself is weak and divided. Even the so called Elite forces are just relatively small units so that any uprising amongst part of them can be squashed by other forces.
War is a lot harder then it looks if you don't just want to get bogged down in ordinary street fighting or slugging matches. It requires an understanding of strategy, tactics and the communication and discipline to be able to direct your troops. Both sides lack it. The kind of fighting you propose is the one practiced in Africa, the one with massive civilian casualties and random butchering. You know the type, that drags on for decades.
There currently is a sort of stalemate. The government forces have the heavy firepower but are to ill trained to use it effectively and perhaps even not willing to go all out, it is their own people after all. They also use mercernary forces which sounds effective but a mercenary wants to collect his pay and black african mercenaries (color matters because Libya's leader has played a very good game of divide and conquer, why do you think there are so many immigrants in a country with record unemployment. And one of his threaths to the west is to open up the gates to Africans wanting to come to Europe, a very powerful threath indeed considering the rise of rightwingers in Europe) are best used against unarmed civilians not armed rebels backed by some military forces.
really, this notion that an AK47 is some kind of wonder weapon belongs in the world of the A-team where pray-and-spray works. In real life, you can carry maybe 3-4 clips and at full-auto you are out of ammo before you can say "man this thing has a kickback". Hitting a moving person who is shooting back is anything but easy. Especially if you are not going to be able to count on your squad covering your back. Why do think armies spend so much time training soldiers? So that when the order is given to do something, everyone does it, knowing everyone else is doing it. Civilians? Scatter at the first sign of trouble and will always be looking for someone else to go in front.
Anyway, supplying the rebels with weapons is interfering and interfering in the Middle East is a minefield. They also got weapons a plenty. Just watch them. All the kids carrying guns. Not ammo mind you, that isn't macho. Just a gun with a single clip... African style civil war. What fun.
By your logic, the nazi's liberated Europe as well. If you add MORE oppression you are NOT a liberator. Two wrongs do not make a right.
I have tried Gnome 3, its sizing options are similar but not exactly the same as Gnome 3 and in part it seems they want you to drag a window to an edge of the screen to size it. So to the side, it takes up the side of a screen with max height etc.
Does it work? Part of it all is that workspaces are now far more an integral part of the setup. Not some tiny icons or obscure key commands, they are major sidebar so that you will not be minimizing apps, but switching work space with an easy option to arrange two windows next to each other for day to day tasks of reading something from X and doing something in Y.
If it would be more finished and more apps are build to work with the new flow it could be intresting. If nobody every tried anything new, we would still be stuck with computers controlled by rewiring them physically.
Not saying that I like the idea for Gnome Shell but they are moving away from the old desktop idea. Storing things on your desktop by the way has LONG been a BAD thing done only by the terminally disorganized.
For files, there are places like Documents, and program links should go in the menu. There shouldn't be anything on your desktop to look at.
I know, not how we are used to doing things, but change is not something to be feared.
You whining little toad.
Here the nobles give you flowers, egg, water, sugar, cream, strawberries, butter and YOU still complaining you don't have anything.
Go to MS, get them to listen to your demands. Tell it to Apple, see if they listen.
When Apple changes how things are done, it is design and a brave new world. If FOSS working for free does not obey your every whim, they are dictators.
Maybe if Gnome charges a hundred bucks for every point upgrade and breaks backwards compatibility on a full release you would be satisfied?
You do realize that once the trademarks you mention were new and not known to become so standarized?
Shows a real lack of awareness of the world around you to only be able to see things from your own time.
If real historians and assorted worked as these amateurs then we would be missing an awful lot of history. For instance Atlantis... only mentioned ONCE in history and it didn't cite sources, so BYE BYE Atlantis. A REAL historian simply notes the mention of Atlantis and that there is only one source with no references for it AND THAT IS IT.
That is where Wikipedia fails utterly. Mentioning that something is NOT sourced IS ENOUGH. A full record INCLUDES personal remarks and unverified claim and that is perfectly valid AS LONG as you note this. Yes, some pruning can be needed in extreme cases but the anal retentive "citation needed" is making a joke out the site. A normal encyclopedia would have no trouble saying the Hindenburg was a disaster. Wikipedia requires a citation. So? Well, they NEVER then check that the citation is ACCURATE.
So by Wikipedia and article claiming Nazi propoganda is correct would pass since there are PLENTY of sources to cite from. Just because you can cite from something does NOT make it fact.
Wikipedia is an intresting experiment but ultimately shows why volunteer work and crowdsourcing just don't work for anything important. The type of person to volunteer all to often tends to filter down eventually to the completly incompetent power hungry assholes.
Why do you think Gentoo is failing and Ubuntu is rising? Complete freedom is a bad way to get something done. And the Wikipedia editors are far to free.
When I look at Android Market I see Tucows, you know the ancient shareware site? I see a car store filled with go-faster stripes and furry dice. When people are young or a tech is new they tend to go wild and add all sorts of crap that is useless for the wow of it. Remember when marguee and the blink tag were the hot new thing? When every pixel of a webpage had to have an animated gif?
It is like "xeyes" on linux. Useless but who when they first got a desktop running didn't run this app?
And you are forgetting one important difference. Tell me what you could do on your early wonder PC, while carrying it around in your pocket.
Oh and since when do guys whose first PC was a celeron have any right to speak? You barely got the right to breath. Now go stand in the corner and feel ashamed for having this modern cheapo PC ever in your presence. UNCLEAN!
And of course that is the reason why if I pay with iDeal (dutch bank system) I don't have to pay the transaction fee that I have to pay when I use a credit card.
Not all companies do this, most just add the transaction costs to the price. But those companies that operate in more then one country clearly show just how expensive credit cards are and it is YOU that ends up paying it.
Oh and what is the monthly, yearly cost for your credit card? Mine is 10 euro's per year and I can pay in any shop and online with ease and more security.
This guy is stretching and distorting the truth to make the review positive.
An example, he only mentions the SUBSIDIZED cost of the phone but uses this price further on to compare it to a netbook BUT does NOT then use a subsidized netbook which do exist. This is like comparing two cars and taking the lease cost of one as being different from the purchase cost of the other. Well duh.
He then claims that 400 dollars for the dock is cheaper then a netbook... except a netbook is both complete and not just a dock and 400 dollars is also the mid range price for a netbook. Was he looking at Vaoi's perhaps? I can find 200-300 dollar netbooks with ease and totally "free" ones if I buy them with a phone subscription.
He then goes on about Firefox Linux not being able to run Java. Is that so? Gosh, what am I running then? What he really means to say is that this dock can't run java apparently for some reason. Firefox and Linux can't this hardware he is trying to like can't.
Really, the most standard, cheapest netbook can do what this thing does and WAY more. Even the multimedia dock is expensive. I still have all the cost and hassle of carrying a netbook besides my phone but without any of the advantages. Like oh say multiple video outs because on the move I can't always dictate what inputs are available for a screen.
And this thing as far as I read the review can't even do video. What a LOT of people seem to want netbooks to do is output video, considering the demand for 720p capability which the first netbooks lacked. What is this multimedia dock going to do for me on the move?
We have heard the "PC is dying" speech before and so far, it hasn't happened. That is because the PC, netbooks and laptops are very very good at serving the edge cases, all those uses to which we put our hardware that some exec at MS/HP/Apple or whatever didn't dream off. Just compare Android's gmail app with regular gmail AND especially a tricked out desktop with gmail tied in. It is clear gmail the app is the light edition. Sometimes that is handy but only if the ease of mobile access makes up for the restrictions.
But if I need a bag to carry a dock or whatever around, why not just carry a cheapo netbook and be done with it.
To me, a phone as a PC will only become intresting if I can skip the dock and hookup the phone directly. THEN I can use it as a tiny laptop.
The end of the Wintel domination? Not yet in sight. With efforts like this, I doubt it ever will. Come on, would it have been that hard to implement some more basic Linux apps?
You are aware that Apple is the BIGGEST (not sure if they still are the top, but they are in the top three) pc maker in the world? What is limitted about selling more then Dell?
Almost every forum has people complaining. The simple fact is that Apple is middle of the road, not top end. A mainframe, that is top end hardware. There really aren't any top end PC makers, commodity hardware and quality don't mix. The top end cars are hand build machines, they do not come of a Chinese production line.
And as for the price, really, compare the specs. I can easily get a Thinkpad that costs the same if not more. Stop comparing your cheapo Dell with a mid-range Apple.
It is the same old story, people comparing a top end Mac with a bottom end PC and then complaining about the price difference. Mac is now the first with the new intel stuff, so HOW exactly do they come up with this price comparison when there isn't a regular laptop out there with the same hardware?
Not that I think Apple is all that hot myself. They are to me the old sony. You pay a bit more then you should but know you get reasonable quality in return. In the real world, that matters. I might get the same cheaper but it might be crap or I can lots more and it can still be crap. Old Sony made good mid quality stuff that gave you the insurance that you got decent gear for an okay price. I would be wilinng to pay more for my ordinary hamburger if I knew that the service would always be great, the hamburger always hot etc etc. That MID range, decent quality for a decent price is VERY hard to nail. Cheap and crap is easy, expensive and good is easy. Hitting the middle reliable, that is where you can make a fortune.
Until you start cutting costs. Sony went bye bye. Apple is not imune to this. For all the Sony haters now, once they were a darling just like Apple is. The mighty do fall.
Patents now last so long and have been around for so long that you can't build anything anymore without using someone elses invention. Ever heard of "If I seen furthest, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants"? Well, with the patent system that is, "If I sold the most gadgets it is because I paid off everyone else".
Worse, once patents were real physical products that had to be specific enough to make an actual product from them, you could LOOK at a patent and work around it. But now that concepts have become valid patents, you can't. So rather then a screw being patented, the very idea of fixing to things together is patented so it doesn't matter if you come up with completely new system for doing it, a better system, a more efficient system, you are STILL infringing. EXACTLY what the patent system was NOT supposed to do. It was supposed to encourage invention. Patent on the diesel engine? Make a petrol engine. A LOT of combustion engine tech early on was developed to get around patents, so we got lots of different engines and the market could then pick the most efficient for their use.
Sony and others are however so tied to the current patent system they cannot let it go even if it is killing them. Why not? Without the patent system, Sony would be Sony'ed. What is that? Sony was once a toy maker from Japan. Making crap copies cheaply before SLOWLY improving them. Well, if you call the re-creation of the Japanese economy post WW2 slow.
A complex patent system favors the big companies who can use their patent portfolio as weapons. Remove it, and ANYONE can compete. You wouldn't have needed a billion dollar company to launch a new phone OS, a couple of hackers could have done it. The billions of Google are not for development cost, but legal team costs.
The patent system needs reform but the mayor players are all so indebt to it, that it would take an outsider to break it up. Maybe China can do it. They gain nothing from the patent system and if Western society continues to collapse (not actually building anything anymore except patents) then China might loose interest in pretending to obey the system.
Something needs to change before all progress is gone to countries where you can still spend more money on development then on lawyers.
So basically you want some magic situation where people have freedom but no responsibility. How typical. This is NOTHING new, everyone can install software from anywhere on the PC and the stupid have always had problems with this.
We do leave people behind here, if you are to stupid to tell what software is legit and which isn't, then you shouldn't be installing crap.
Freedom for those who can handle the responsibility, lockin for those who can't.
Clearly you can't.
What does Google have to do with unofficial markets? This is NOT the Android Market place that this is happening on. The PC equivelant would be blaiming EA for virusses found in games on thepiratebay.
You seem to think Oprah is real. Well it is, for a segment of the population. Don't let the tv stereo-types fool you into believing this is how most people are. TV shows the extremes because normality doesn't make for intresting TV.
There won't be a program Deadliest code, gripping the nation season after season. O.C. Support Desk is NOT a sure fire hit. BugBusters will not be challenged by the president of the US of A.
Most teenagers? Never rebel and get along with their parents and siblings. Most women are not complete sluts in college crying they can't find a good guy while banging the soccer team. Most men do not in fact follow their cock, either that or the navy has a LOT more gay people in it then a republican can stand.
Most people lead simple sensible lives, they might screw up a little by accident but recover and move on. The real idiots are rare. Same as with criminals. Most people will NOT in fact kill to gain a fortune even if they could get away with it.
Humanity is a lot more normal. TV reality is about showing the extremes on the edges but you would be a fool to believe it. Do you believe everyone can run really fast because you just saw the olympics? Then why do you believe all people behave like the freaks on talkshows.
Ancient statistic. 50% of people loose their virginity before 18. Means over half the population does NOT.
There can be only one!
So basically, I shouldn't use any freedoms because that might give fuel to someone wishing to limit them?
So gay people, don't be gay or people might forbid it.
A spine, you need one. Or afraid if you get one, people will forbid it?
As said below but not clearly enough, the usage of the classifier Tolkien for Elves is to seperate human style civilized elves from the Santa's helpers or fairy folk. It has NOTHING to do with Tolkien having invented them, merely that this type is most easily identified with his work. SAME as that when a movie uses realistic space travel we claim it more 2001 then Star Wars.
People like to put labels to things to make it more clear to other people of the same culture. For instance, fire engine red isn't a color and not all fire engines are red but you know what intensity of red I mean nonetheless.
Tolkien is a name with no particular selling power anymore. Nothing new is produced by Tolkien for some time, probably because he is death. There shouldn't even be a trademark involved. Imagine if other companies did the same. Everytime you say you made a xerox on a canon, your ass would be sued off in stead of copied.
Yeah yeah, extrapolating future trends by drawing a straight line between past points. That is SUCH a reliable method.
But hey, good news, by these figures IE will be at 0% in 5 years and Google at well over a 100%.
The browser ballot changed things, would the lines have been as they are now without it? Nobody knows but it is not beyond imagination that IE would have bottomed out 50% instead and might even have climbed with the release of IE9.
Basically, those who claim the ballot did not have an affect are claiming something like the new iPhone had no effect on iPhone sales. The old one was selling well, the new one sells well, ergo no change... because the old one would of course have done the same sale figures without a new release.