They are against government doing things for other people. Note that they blaim Obama for the rescue plan, that was enacted by Bush and the result of republican policies, the neo-conservative movement started with Reagan.
The most important skill in politics is NEVER to take the word of a party about what it stands for. You don't believe countries with the word democratic in their name are democracies do you?
It is like financial regulation, the banks are dead against that, but want very strict laws that enable them to collect on debts. Freedom is me telling you what I can do and you can't.
Scroogle could use the api on their servers. Really, do you know so little about the web that you think AJAX can't be run server to server? Hell, you don't even need javascript for it, any scripting language can do it if it can do html requests.
Really, I hate this stuff, because I am sometimes asked to write a scraper and it is bloody stupid. Because the moment something changes, anything changes, you have to check it and check it again. And you know, many sites change their layout all the time, if for no other reason then to fix bugs. That is nothing to say of seasonal changes.
And then there is the legal side, and the ease with which to block you.
So don't fucking scrape, especially with a well developed and documented API around. Really, scraping google? WHY!
This has to be one of the most pathetic whines ever. Oh nozers, they changed their layout now your scraper is the brokerz. CRY ME A RIVER!
The newest DS, the XL has a standard SD card slot, for playing music from. Why you would want to do that I am not sure, as there are cheaper and superior players around but it can be done.
This Jerkface Playhouse guy is just windows noob upset that the world he knows a tiny bit of is collapsing around him. People like that react with fear and hostility to anything new.
I have no idea if ChromeOS will be anything more then a thought experiment, but stranger things have happened. Right now Android is outselling the iPhone. Who would have thought eh? granted there are more android phones and they are cheaper but still. And who would have thought that with all this MS is behind EVERYONE on mobile phones. So much for 3rd time is the charm with a MS product. What release is Windows Mobile 7 by now (and no, it ain't 7)
I think Google is just seeing what sticks. It wants to break open the entire IT market and it is succeeding so far. MS ain't its enemy, MS lock-in is its enemy. Same as telecom lock-in and email provider lock-in. MS is breaking this up. more and more small companies and bigger ones use gmail. Gmail. Not exchange. BANG. Gone MS lock-in. For that matter lock-in with anyone. Granted now you got a bit of gmail lock-in although since there is far less tie in going on, you can far more easily migrate away from gmail then exchange.
If the internet becomes open then Google can sells its services to anyone. The more cheap devices are out there connecting, the more people will want to use online services (I barely ever write documents, and then often on different machines, I don't need office. I don't want office. I do use google docs. Anywhere, anytime.) and google makes money from that.
ChromeOS is just another attempt to break the lock-in. Maybe someone will make a cheap netbook with it purely for web access in the house. A cheap iPad for in the kitchen. Or maybe it will be in eternal beta. But Google is constantly trying and a lot of its succeeding.
When news broke about Android outselling the iPhone, where were all the doubters? To busy eating crow to admit they were wrong?
I am personally very intrested to see where Google is going. They are one of the freshest daring companies out there.
They are talking about spraying SALT water into the air. Normally when clouds form it comes from normally evaporating water that leaves the salt behind. That is the reason the dead sea is so salty and for that matter how salt planes form.
So, what does this system mean for salt in the rain? I seem to remember that to make a point you tear down your enemies city, plow the ground and sow it with salt so that everyone gets the point. Salt and agriculture don't mix.
It is possible that the salt will fall down quickly into the ocean, but this is not mentioned. In fact the article is very light on the details. How does it shoot water so high, how much energy does it cost? What is going to happen to our planet when it is covered in clouds? More clouds might mean more rain, rain isn't always good. Or it might fall back as snow and be locked up for millenia on a cooling planet with ever saltier seas.
I also get the feeling that it is indeed very cheap. Sea going vessels ain't cheap especially if they have to run on auto on the ocean. Manning so many vessels alone would cost a fortune alone. 3 vessels with 300.000? You can barely get a sail boat, a small one.
And a move along this path would give the US even less reason to cut its emissions, 7 billion to curb todays emission, but how much if that keeps on going? It reminds me of the futurama episode where the problem of global warming is solved FOREVER by dropping an ever larger ice-cube into the ocean. Is Bill Gates under the impression that Futurama is a howto guide?
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This is hard. What is the whole truth?
The UK recently had a telling case. A BNP politician (racist party) was canvasing and a fight broke out. On Have I Got News For You (British political comedy show) they showed the footage. The guy punched a dark skinned (probably Muslim immigrant but that would from that footage have been a presumption) in the face. Oooh bad. What they didn't show is the few seconds before that, when that guy spitted in his face.
Careful editing to show the BNP in a bad light? The BBC is famously anti-racist and no, this is NOT a good thing. The BBC is supposed, especially in election times, to be impartial and give equal time to ALL parties, including those they disagree with. This is important, after all the BBC which controls the state TV, is the state TV, could ruin any party that has in its agenda say the end of the BBC.
What makes it clear the Hignfy cast has an agenda other then fair and equal treatment of all parties is that when Prescott (labour) punched a guy who threw an egg at him, the cast pretty much applauded it. So it is okay to punch a white protester who attacks you, but not a Muslim? Talk about bias. You might agree with the bias, but it is still bias.
And that really is the problem with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The have shown the whole incident you would have had to basically spend 5 or more minutes in a comedy show to explain the full setting. Why did the argument start? Democracy calls on parties you don't like being allowed to take part in the protest. On the other hand, demonstrating against points of view you don't like is also part of it. Spitting on people is aggresive and you should expect to be punched, but if you are calling a person a waste because of his race you can hardly expect him not to react.
The problem is that how many people saw the incident only in the comedy show and not the full clip? Their point of view has now been altered by people with an agenda even if that agenda was only to get a laugh. And this is what we know about, how much else has ended up on the cutting floor of the news room? Maybe all the footage that showed the exact same ambulance in the middle east? Or the same childs body killed in different locations? How odd that was only found out later, not by the camera crew who after all had a close up look. Agenda or lousy reporting standards? And of course, I am now convinced these cases were wrong, and therefor all news from certain points of view is suspect so I now rather believe less official resources as well.
I am not suprised Obama is getting upset with all the crap "news" out there. Come on US, when you hear people claim about nazi death camps if healthcare reform is enabled, why don't you shoot the people claiming it for insulting your intelligence. Most countries in the world have social health care and no dead squads yet killing little timmy. In fact the most recent case of extreme medical behavior came from the US, where children in orphanages are forced to take part in medical experiments. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34817839637
Capitalists doing exactly what the nazi's did. Gosh, how could that be! This is what the Tea Party wants to be done to children, rather then allow anyone regardless of income to have medical care.
Truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And if you read any of this, how do you know any of which I tell you is the truth. I linked to facebook for a reason. If you want to check it, it will take you some effort. In fact to check all the claims in this post and the parent, you will have to do some digging. They are "true", but how do you know?
The press is the gatekeeper of democracy. If it starts to fail, democracy will soon follow. That boring paper with no page three girl that has boring headlines is the bastion of freedom. If all news becomes fox news or the daily mail, then the end of democracy isn't far away. And if twitter becomes the source of news we might as well kiss our asses goodbye.
Maybe it is time for a new law: You cheat, you die.
Imagine that a party leader becomes responsible for the actions of the members of his party. Some lowly member cheats, the leader gets a bullet in the head.
Open for abuse to be sure but all our leaders claim we should trust the system so surely they trust it?
It would motivate leaders to motivate their followers not to break the rules. Right now the system does exactly the reverse. As long as the leader isn't proven to have given the direct order in writing, he benefits. Everyone knows Bush cheated, yet he ruled unchallenged for 8 years. So cheating works right? Hard to argue this when the evidence is so clear.
We have come to take democracy for granted, but the recent problems in the UK have shown that such a basic thing as voting is not so simple after all. It is a complex process and without it working flawlessly, our entire system looses its validation. If you wanted to vote, went to vote but weren't allowed to, then how can you then be asked to support the government you didn't vote for?
How can you ask a soldier to die for a leader whose election process he didn't take part in? The entire basis of democracy is your loyalty in exchange for a say. Your money and your life for a vote. We are the subjects of an elected government and must follow its rules because we elected them, yes even if you didn't vote for them. That is the deal. Cheating breaks that deal.
It is hard to argue that people shouldn't go for a nasty dictator type, when the democracy isn't letting them have their say either. If you are not being listened to, you might as well have someone competent in charge instead of the monkey that cheated in a popularity contest.
So lets stick with paper and enforce extreme and rigid rules about how those papers and handled and counted and put severe penalties on anyone who messed with it. And before you say that death is far so serious. Treason still carries a death sentence in many nations, and cheating in elections is treason against nation as a whole.
Here you can see the dutch system in a "game". The site is in dutch but it should be simple enough, even for people from the colonies. Coalition game
You can select a poll to base the results on, and then select the parties you want to form a coalition with, you got to fill half of the seats to have a majority.
I will briefly list the parties to explain them to people with different political systems.
CDA: Christian Democrats, the leaders of the last government. Bakellende (sorry Balkenede) is about as popular as Blair/Bush but with the honesty or razor sharp wit. In european terms they are moderate right-wing but did take part in governments that legalized cannabis, prostitution and abortion. By American standards: Communists.
PvDA: Partij van de Allochtonen, sorry Party of labor (Allochtonen = Immigrants), a once socialist party that has become increasingly liberal. Armchair socialists. The party is split between its socialists background and its more modern liberal elite. There are clashes, because being liberal about immigrants hurts the "workers first" of the socialist backing. By American standards: Communists.
SP: Socialist Party, the protest party originally, it is now more and more the home of ex-PvDA who are "power-to-the-people" rather then tree-huggers. The party used to be lead by a charismatic guy who made the party from a tiny protest group into one of the bigger parties, but he gave up and since then the party has been in trouble. It suffers a lot from strategic voting. People who agree with them instead vote on PvDA so their vote is not "wasted". By American standards: Redder then red.
VVD: Liberals, probably closest to the lib dems. People here consider them capitalist, closest to the democrates in the US. This shows how little people here understand the US. By American standards: Communists.
PVV: Party of Liberty, Geert Wilders. The spiritual succesor to Pim Fortyun but a lot less nice, not gay and a lot more scary. The answer to everyone who is dissatisfied with the last few decades. SP if you have a heart, PVV if you don't. The party goes up and down a lot, but the signal the party is giving is that first we had Pim, he first dared to address that there might be issues with muslim immigrants. He was killed. This guy goes far further and openly blames Islam for pretty much everything. If this time the system still doesn't listen, then I fear who comes next. I don't fear Wilders, I fear the guy that comes after him. Hitler did not create the National Socialist party. There were others before him, not the same but indicators of a upcoming problem that was ignored. By American standards: Communists.
GL: Green left, prove the political spectrum goes far further then just left and right. This one is like the SP to the left of the PvDA, but also completly different from the SP, these are the tree-huggers. By American standards: Communists.
CU: Christain Union, a party impossible to really classify. Part of it is left-wing, others are right wing. Think caring conservatives, how difficult a concept that might be. Part of the last government, one of the smallest parties being given a huge role because the PvDA was to scared to form a left-wing coalition. Not the smartest move they made. By American standards: Communists.
D66: Democrats, no, not like the American ones. Yes, you know it is coming. By American standards: Communists. Liberals mostly but with a strong elitst element. In Holland the biggest struggle right now isn't so much right vs left but elitst vs man of the people. A lot of voters feel politicians don't listen to them, that they rule from an ivory tower. D66 is so far up the ivory tower they sit on gods lap. Party was decimated sometime ago, but has come back with the support of the elite who can ignore the discussion about immigration because no muslims can afford to live where they do. By American Standards: The dreamier side of the democrats
A movie has a running length of 120 minutes, but everybody leaves at 115 minutes when the credits start rolling. Conclusion: People want movies to be shorter.
Eh, no. They just don't want to sit through 5 minutes of credits.
People watch commercial TV. Conclusion: People want to watch ads every 5 minutes and overlayed on the program.
Eh no. That is just what people have to put up with.
Statistics and user figures are very easy to misinterpret. Would you take the vcr action recordings of someone watching a porn movie and apply them on how to make a regular movie?
So why apply the actions of a console beat-em-up to a RPG?
There are some games that are big for the sake of being big. Some beat-em-up is coming out, that was reviewed as having even more characters as before. So if I don't play all of their piss-poor story lines, I haven't finished the game? What if a path through an RPG doesn't appeal to me? I never bother with the evil path. Does that mean I am recorded as only playing through half of the game? I enjoyed F1 games in the past, but only with one did I do a complete realistic season (Grand Prix Legends). What if I don't do the game on nightmare mode or for that matter easy mode? What if I cheat to go straight to nightmare mode (another reason consoles suck donkey balls, locked difficulties)?
Yes of course there are people who look at an RPG and complain it takes 60 hours. So? Then that game is not for them. Because if you shorten it to 5 hours you ruin it for all your customers who love a 60 hour game.
Here is a simple sales man trick. Concentrate on selling to people who are buying. People who are not buying will always find another reason not to. But people who are buying, need only 1 to become part of them.
Thanks, that is a very good point. The earth will survive, will we?
The earth survived whatever killed the dinosaurs, but it really sucked for the dinosaurs. If we die, the planet will go on, but that is little consolation to anyone who doesn't REALLY like cockroaches.
The video is edited, as it seems to be showing the same thing twice. Perhaps to make it appear longer? Considering he doesn't have a mouse, he seems to click the image and the movie away fairly quickly.
The image is harmless, well to a European anyway, although age might be a factor, the women are to blurry to judge but how old are they? It is clearly an amateur shot, so some under-aged going on?
What remains is knowing how this votes. Is he a Republican: do as we say, don't do as we do. Who vote against gay marriage yet cheat on their wives while they are dying of cancer? Or is he a Democrat: You are the president of the most powerful country in the world and you fuck THAT?!?
Calling this "watching porn in the senate" requires an extraordinary puritan mind. Or an American one. Same thing really. In Holland two politicians posed nude in the playboy on the seats of our senate. So what. Afraid a little skin will start earth quakes or something? No human being could be that silly.
Do people really have some serious problem with the notion of FANTASY? None of these movies or tv-shows that have magic computers are documentaries. Ooh, I have another one. In real life a 30 ton machine making a sky craper leaping on the sidewalk, would go STRAIGHT through it. No just stand there. Oh and it would be collecting its gears in a paper basket, but Transformers failing to reflect this is not a reason to hate it (lousy acting is, anyone else think the movie would have been a whole lot better as pure CGI, no annoying humans to interrupt the action?)
10. Computers explode: well the article already gives the answer, because real life crashing computers are BORING to watch. Movies got to be fun to watch (fantasy ones anyway). Here is another puzzler, in porn the woman always enjoy getting it up the ass with no lube.
9. Passwords are easy to guess: Except when they aren't. It is called story. Either they get in, or they don't. It is like being able to break or kick open a door, sometimes the can't, sometimes they can't. All depends on how the writer wants the story to go. It is a bit like saying you found it unrealistic that the Allies managed to get onto the beaches in Saving Private Ryan. THAT IS THE STORY! What next, argueing that twin suns with a desert planet are not possible? Kinda missing the point. How about this puzzler, the guy no matter how nerdy and old and plain ugly, ALWAYS gets the girl.
8. This guy musn't have watched many movies. Type fast? In Alien the computer itself types even slower then me.
And it just look nice to see it like that, it makes something happen and gives slow readers time to read the message. Note that if it ain't important for the audience to read it, the message often isn't displayed at all, so we can instead see the actors reaction. And for added weirdness, car journeys always take either about 10 seconds OR the entire movie. For some reason road movies especially do this last thing a lot. Don't know why.
7. Deleted files are removed from the screen: Yes and? That is what actually happens, if I delete a file with some other means, my file explorer (at least Mac and Dolphin, reflect this life). What is so odd about it? Here is a puzzler, if the story needs to show the hidden emotion of a broken heart, the actor always finds some silly reason to display this to the audience, Keanu Reeves being the notable exception. Actors eh, can never just not show things so we can keep guessing what is happening.
6. Virusses do something visual: Visual stuff on a visual media, say it ain't SO! And in porn the male always comes outside. Do you know why? Yes? Then this the same reason. Next up, the camera zooms in on the actor displaying a significant plot related emotion and some music plays just so that you know something is going on.
5. Computers have to be controlled by the keyboard: Yes, it is called vi. I haven't touched the mouse once while ranting here. It is called being a man. Mouses are for girls.
4. The good guys always use Mac: Yes, we do.
3. You can zoom and enhance any footage: Yes, and security camera footage is often shot by a walking camera that zooms, pans and cuts between camera's. Images can indeed be enhanced but the real process is boring as hell and not very clear at all. It is the same reason NASA releases artists works as being shots of space, rather then the real stuff, because the real stuff doesn't get the juices flowing of anyone except scientists. For another puzzler, the girl the guy gets is always pretty.
2. Screens must light up peoples faces: They do, what you mean is that the screen must be reflected on the persons face. Yes, it is a way of showing something is happening. Hollywood always makes things bigger then life, that is why it is the dream factory. DREAM, larger then life. Shoot a movie in New York and put a fake extra floor on a skyscraper to make it look taller so it looks more real. That is why Hollywood rules the movie industry, because in Europe, nobody could
Selling something is hard. There are special events where street hawkers (not sure if that is the right word, people who sell stuff from a stand) compete. It is HARD, harder even then stand-up comedy. A comic can ignore or insult a heckler, but a street vendor only gets paid if the audience really likes him AND his product and can think of a reason to buy it. You need to be able to think on your feet. In a moments notice decide that HERE is a sales opporunity and then calculate cost and benefit on the spot and act on it.
The above story sounds a bit suspicious, although possible, because I have heard it in other forms. But the basic message is, think on your feet and never ignore an opportunity for some essentially free advertising. Some thing like this should have every sales clerk cumming in his pants, not sticking to his sales pitch.
Thank you subject #415780. Your cooperation has been noted. We will take immediate action to discipline the member of staff of ARIN you talked to, so that in future his replacement will say the correct thing.
You seem to be thinking that the ocean needs to be saturated with oil for it to have an effect. Most of the ocean is already dead, always has been. The whole eco-system depends on a few rich spots to feed it. Why do you think so many sea live hold such epic migrations? Because they like it?
How can a tiny bit of metal possibly kill a human being? Fine, let me stick a needle in your brain, see how long you last. Maybe a long time, maybe not long at all.
Killing the eco-system doesn't have to be whole-sale slaughter. All you have to do is knock over one part of the food-chain. It doens't even have to mean the end of life in the ocean. The wrong algea start to grow out of control, and you have plenty of life, and also death at the same time.
Will this be it? Well we better just bloody hope it isn't because else we are screwed. But the right wingers seem determined to keep trying to screw up until they finally really manage to screw us all.
Gosh, off-shore drilling isn't safe. Irak doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. Banks do need goverment control. Are republicans even capable of saying "we were wrong"?
HTML5 can easily be implemented by just using the video codecs installed on the system. There is ZERO reason the codec used has to be in the browser. It makes sense to include a default codec with the browser although 99% of the time, the OS will have its own video codec support.
But I see you got your head to far up Bill Gates as to be able to see your own fanboy nature. "IE9 will win, because IE8, IE7, totally failed, but this time, it will do it".
Go and sign up for WM7 beta, I am sure it will be a iPhone killer. This time surely, all the previous failures were just flukes.
An individual tanker isn't all that large, at least in WW2. There is a reason we call modern tankers: super-tankers.
It is like people who think CO2 emissions don't matter because volcanoes do it as well. Indeed they do, but have these people never heard of adding up. This spil comes on top of all the others. On top of the coral reefs already dying, on top of fish stocks already being over fished, on top of the plastic we have been dumping whole sale in to the ocean.
Will this be the straw that killed the camels back? Hard to say, but if fishing is hurt then that means some areas need to pay more for their food then they do now and not everyone can afford that. Plus the replacement food will have to be grown somewhere else.
And down the line, some fish migrate and others are dependent on long food chains. I don't know what grows in place X that is eaten in place Y that has an effect on populations in Z.
This isn't about one tanker sinking with the oil inside. It is about tanker after tanker being emptied in one single spot with no way to end it so far except waiting for one of the biggest oil fields to run out. And that could be REALLY bad because according to the people who want to drill everywhere, oil doesn't run out.
The apocalypse won't come in a flash of thunder, it will the eco-system slowly dying from being over-stressed. Less 2012, more YKK or Testament.
What most seem to miss here is that this is NOT just Theora vs h264. Microsoft has its own codecs and there are websites out there that use Mediaplayer to show their content. So MS own customers now have to convert all their content to h264 because MS refuses to support its own codecs in its own products?
It doesn't suprise me, MS has always been one to screw over adapters of its product (see the Zune that couldn't handle MS own music store formats) but this one is humiliating if you look past the bullshit.
It would be trivial for MS to simply let IE use whatever codec is available the same way every media player does it, in fact the way its own media player does it. Then it would have support for every codec the user has at no extra cost. Now it has to limit support to a competitors codec. Talk about cutting of your nose to spite your face.
Or is MS saying that its own codecs aren't good enough? Or are insecure?
Come on MS, make a humorous statement why you don't support your own codecs. It is not like any of the jokes who call themselves journalists will think of asking this question.
Why should the catholic church try to fix it self, when blaming others has worked so well.
Granted it may just cause disbelief in most if you blame it on the jews or homosexuality in some, but far more will believe it, especially in developing countries, the only place the church is still growing. And no I am not going to say that this proofs only non-educated people believe in god. That would not be nice. It would be the truth, but not nice.
Oh and remember, the mafia isn't real, it is a plot by communism to disrupt the west. Oh and the shroud, it is real. Never mind that nobody in the bible mentioned it. You think people would have noticed or not have bothered with the bloody shroud left on a decaying body. Mind you, there is a perfectly sensible reason why nobody at the time noticed it, IT DIDN'T FUCKING HAPPEN!
It is amazing, the entire economy is down the drain and people are still defending the system. Every single bank bonus being paid now comes straight out of welfare for bank and still people defend it.
And they erase all my memory too! All of it just gone, empty blank state every time I pull the power! And when I took out my HD and cleaned it under the tap to get the dirty bits out, Gentoo totally failed to work with my freshly cleaned drive!!!
And to remain on topic, anyone actually use system restore? Always disable that as fast as possible.
The west is being torn apart by the lack of accountability. The banks, the governments who failed to supervise the banks, the voters who elected the politicians who didn't do anything time and time again. We now have capitalists trying to tear apart European countries to make a quick buck. If a few pirates dare to interrupt shipping we send in war ships and blow their brains out, but if capitalist hold entire economies hostage we think this is good business.
Acacia is seriously hurting the economy because nobody can afford to do business without deep pockets to protect against them. It means no startup stand a change anymore once a patent troll comes looking and even big companies are constantly at the mercy of the poor saps who didn't manage to get out of jury duty.
When a flea bites you, you might shrug it off as harmless, but when you are being swarmed by parasites, you got to start killing them and go after their unborn children as well. Or you are going to die.
Ask yourself, what has been done to stop the banks and other industries from having to be bailed out again? Answer: Absolutely nothing. How many times do you think the US and EU can afford to do this? In Europe first it was Iceland that went belly up, and added a couple of thousand to Dutch and British tax payers. Now it is Greece, with the government there having deceived regulators who didn't check anything because they were not allowed but all the time we were told that the EU was good for us and that it worked so well. And now it is becoming clear that pretty much all of the garlic nations are in deep shit and just waiting to fall over. Oh goodie, we propped them up with countless donations when they joined because it would pay of in the long term. Well this is the long term and they need yet more cash.
And at no point is anybody going to jail. Or stripped of power and privilege.
If you don't punish people, you don't correct behavior. The system itself ain't broken, it is designed to be controlled from within, but when you no longer put sanctions on bad behavior and control, then it fails. Think of it as an engine. If I remove the oil, then the engine isn't broken, but it will be soon enough. The design of the engine is solid, you just need to replace the operator and put the previous operator as a warning next to it, on a spike.
Oh hell, all of slashdot is pretty much evil. It whispers to me: "Visit me, don't work, don't eat, kill your loved ones and strangers. Mod ME!" And I obey.
Slashdot Mirror
They are against government doing things for other people. Note that they blaim Obama for the rescue plan, that was enacted by Bush and the result of republican policies, the neo-conservative movement started with Reagan.
The most important skill in politics is NEVER to take the word of a party about what it stands for. You don't believe countries with the word democratic in their name are democracies do you?
It is like financial regulation, the banks are dead against that, but want very strict laws that enable them to collect on debts. Freedom is me telling you what I can do and you can't.
Scroogle could use the api on their servers. Really, do you know so little about the web that you think AJAX can't be run server to server? Hell, you don't even need javascript for it, any scripting language can do it if it can do html requests.
Really, I hate this stuff, because I am sometimes asked to write a scraper and it is bloody stupid. Because the moment something changes, anything changes, you have to check it and check it again. And you know, many sites change their layout all the time, if for no other reason then to fix bugs. That is nothing to say of seasonal changes.
And then there is the legal side, and the ease with which to block you.
So don't fucking scrape, especially with a well developed and documented API around. Really, scraping google? WHY!
This has to be one of the most pathetic whines ever. Oh nozers, they changed their layout now your scraper is the brokerz. CRY ME A RIVER!
The newest DS, the XL has a standard SD card slot, for playing music from. Why you would want to do that I am not sure, as there are cheaper and superior players around but it can be done.
This Jerkface Playhouse guy is just windows noob upset that the world he knows a tiny bit of is collapsing around him. People like that react with fear and hostility to anything new.
I have no idea if ChromeOS will be anything more then a thought experiment, but stranger things have happened. Right now Android is outselling the iPhone. Who would have thought eh? granted there are more android phones and they are cheaper but still. And who would have thought that with all this MS is behind EVERYONE on mobile phones. So much for 3rd time is the charm with a MS product. What release is Windows Mobile 7 by now (and no, it ain't 7)
I think Google is just seeing what sticks. It wants to break open the entire IT market and it is succeeding so far. MS ain't its enemy, MS lock-in is its enemy. Same as telecom lock-in and email provider lock-in. MS is breaking this up. more and more small companies and bigger ones use gmail. Gmail. Not exchange. BANG. Gone MS lock-in. For that matter lock-in with anyone. Granted now you got a bit of gmail lock-in although since there is far less tie in going on, you can far more easily migrate away from gmail then exchange.
If the internet becomes open then Google can sells its services to anyone. The more cheap devices are out there connecting, the more people will want to use online services (I barely ever write documents, and then often on different machines, I don't need office. I don't want office. I do use google docs. Anywhere, anytime.) and google makes money from that.
ChromeOS is just another attempt to break the lock-in. Maybe someone will make a cheap netbook with it purely for web access in the house. A cheap iPad for in the kitchen. Or maybe it will be in eternal beta. But Google is constantly trying and a lot of its succeeding.
When news broke about Android outselling the iPhone, where were all the doubters? To busy eating crow to admit they were wrong?
I am personally very intrested to see where Google is going. They are one of the freshest daring companies out there.
But everyone who watch the comedy NEWS show also watch the news? Have they watched that news segment?
Comedy sticks longer then a news report. How is Reagon, Thatcher etc remembered? Their news images or their spitting image dolls?
They are talking about spraying SALT water into the air. Normally when clouds form it comes from normally evaporating water that leaves the salt behind. That is the reason the dead sea is so salty and for that matter how salt planes form.
So, what does this system mean for salt in the rain? I seem to remember that to make a point you tear down your enemies city, plow the ground and sow it with salt so that everyone gets the point. Salt and agriculture don't mix.
It is possible that the salt will fall down quickly into the ocean, but this is not mentioned. In fact the article is very light on the details. How does it shoot water so high, how much energy does it cost? What is going to happen to our planet when it is covered in clouds? More clouds might mean more rain, rain isn't always good. Or it might fall back as snow and be locked up for millenia on a cooling planet with ever saltier seas.
I also get the feeling that it is indeed very cheap. Sea going vessels ain't cheap especially if they have to run on auto on the ocean. Manning so many vessels alone would cost a fortune alone. 3 vessels with 300.000? You can barely get a sail boat, a small one.
And a move along this path would give the US even less reason to cut its emissions, 7 billion to curb todays emission, but how much if that keeps on going? It reminds me of the futurama episode where the problem of global warming is solved FOREVER by dropping an ever larger ice-cube into the ocean. Is Bill Gates under the impression that Futurama is a howto guide?
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This is hard. What is the whole truth?
The UK recently had a telling case. A BNP politician (racist party) was canvasing and a fight broke out. On Have I Got News For You (British political comedy show) they showed the footage. The guy punched a dark skinned (probably Muslim immigrant but that would from that footage have been a presumption) in the face. Oooh bad. What they didn't show is the few seconds before that, when that guy spitted in his face.
Careful editing to show the BNP in a bad light? The BBC is famously anti-racist and no, this is NOT a good thing. The BBC is supposed, especially in election times, to be impartial and give equal time to ALL parties, including those they disagree with. This is important, after all the BBC which controls the state TV, is the state TV, could ruin any party that has in its agenda say the end of the BBC.
What makes it clear the Hignfy cast has an agenda other then fair and equal treatment of all parties is that when Prescott (labour) punched a guy who threw an egg at him, the cast pretty much applauded it. So it is okay to punch a white protester who attacks you, but not a Muslim? Talk about bias. You might agree with the bias, but it is still bias.
And that really is the problem with the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The have shown the whole incident you would have had to basically spend 5 or more minutes in a comedy show to explain the full setting. Why did the argument start? Democracy calls on parties you don't like being allowed to take part in the protest. On the other hand, demonstrating against points of view you don't like is also part of it. Spitting on people is aggresive and you should expect to be punched, but if you are calling a person a waste because of his race you can hardly expect him not to react.
The problem is that how many people saw the incident only in the comedy show and not the full clip? Their point of view has now been altered by people with an agenda even if that agenda was only to get a laugh. And this is what we know about, how much else has ended up on the cutting floor of the news room? Maybe all the footage that showed the exact same ambulance in the middle east? Or the same childs body killed in different locations? How odd that was only found out later, not by the camera crew who after all had a close up look. Agenda or lousy reporting standards? And of course, I am now convinced these cases were wrong, and therefor all news from certain points of view is suspect so I now rather believe less official resources as well.
I am not suprised Obama is getting upset with all the crap "news" out there. Come on US, when you hear people claim about nazi death camps if healthcare reform is enabled, why don't you shoot the people claiming it for insulting your intelligence. Most countries in the world have social health care and no dead squads yet killing little timmy. In fact the most recent case of extreme medical behavior came from the US, where children in orphanages are forced to take part in medical experiments. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34817839637
Capitalists doing exactly what the nazi's did. Gosh, how could that be! This is what the Tea Party wants to be done to children, rather then allow anyone regardless of income to have medical care.
Truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And if you read any of this, how do you know any of which I tell you is the truth. I linked to facebook for a reason. If you want to check it, it will take you some effort. In fact to check all the claims in this post and the parent, you will have to do some digging. They are "true", but how do you know?
The press is the gatekeeper of democracy. If it starts to fail, democracy will soon follow. That boring paper with no page three girl that has boring headlines is the bastion of freedom. If all news becomes fox news or the daily mail, then the end of democracy isn't far away. And if twitter becomes the source of news we might as well kiss our asses goodbye.
Maybe it is time for a new law: You cheat, you die.
Imagine that a party leader becomes responsible for the actions of the members of his party. Some lowly member cheats, the leader gets a bullet in the head.
Open for abuse to be sure but all our leaders claim we should trust the system so surely they trust it?
It would motivate leaders to motivate their followers not to break the rules. Right now the system does exactly the reverse. As long as the leader isn't proven to have given the direct order in writing, he benefits. Everyone knows Bush cheated, yet he ruled unchallenged for 8 years. So cheating works right? Hard to argue this when the evidence is so clear.
We have come to take democracy for granted, but the recent problems in the UK have shown that such a basic thing as voting is not so simple after all. It is a complex process and without it working flawlessly, our entire system looses its validation. If you wanted to vote, went to vote but weren't allowed to, then how can you then be asked to support the government you didn't vote for?
How can you ask a soldier to die for a leader whose election process he didn't take part in? The entire basis of democracy is your loyalty in exchange for a say. Your money and your life for a vote. We are the subjects of an elected government and must follow its rules because we elected them, yes even if you didn't vote for them. That is the deal. Cheating breaks that deal.
It is hard to argue that people shouldn't go for a nasty dictator type, when the democracy isn't letting them have their say either. If you are not being listened to, you might as well have someone competent in charge instead of the monkey that cheated in a popularity contest.
So lets stick with paper and enforce extreme and rigid rules about how those papers and handled and counted and put severe penalties on anyone who messed with it. And before you say that death is far so serious. Treason still carries a death sentence in many nations, and cheating in elections is treason against nation as a whole.
Here you can see the dutch system in a "game". The site is in dutch but it should be simple enough, even for people from the colonies. Coalition game
You can select a poll to base the results on, and then select the parties you want to form a coalition with, you got to fill half of the seats to have a majority.
I will briefly list the parties to explain them to people with different political systems.
CDA: Christian Democrats, the leaders of the last government. Bakellende (sorry Balkenede) is about as popular as Blair/Bush but with the honesty or razor sharp wit. In european terms they are moderate right-wing but did take part in governments that legalized cannabis, prostitution and abortion. By American standards: Communists.
PvDA: Partij van de Allochtonen, sorry Party of labor (Allochtonen = Immigrants), a once socialist party that has become increasingly liberal. Armchair socialists. The party is split between its socialists background and its more modern liberal elite. There are clashes, because being liberal about immigrants hurts the "workers first" of the socialist backing. By American standards: Communists.
SP: Socialist Party, the protest party originally, it is now more and more the home of ex-PvDA who are "power-to-the-people" rather then tree-huggers. The party used to be lead by a charismatic guy who made the party from a tiny protest group into one of the bigger parties, but he gave up and since then the party has been in trouble. It suffers a lot from strategic voting. People who agree with them instead vote on PvDA so their vote is not "wasted". By American standards: Redder then red.
VVD: Liberals, probably closest to the lib dems. People here consider them capitalist, closest to the democrates in the US. This shows how little people here understand the US. By American standards: Communists.
PVV: Party of Liberty, Geert Wilders. The spiritual succesor to Pim Fortyun but a lot less nice, not gay and a lot more scary. The answer to everyone who is dissatisfied with the last few decades. SP if you have a heart, PVV if you don't. The party goes up and down a lot, but the signal the party is giving is that first we had Pim, he first dared to address that there might be issues with muslim immigrants. He was killed. This guy goes far further and openly blames Islam for pretty much everything. If this time the system still doesn't listen, then I fear who comes next. I don't fear Wilders, I fear the guy that comes after him. Hitler did not create the National Socialist party. There were others before him, not the same but indicators of a upcoming problem that was ignored. By American standards: Communists.
GL: Green left, prove the political spectrum goes far further then just left and right. This one is like the SP to the left of the PvDA, but also completly different from the SP, these are the tree-huggers. By American standards: Communists.
CU: Christain Union, a party impossible to really classify. Part of it is left-wing, others are right wing. Think caring conservatives, how difficult a concept that might be. Part of the last government, one of the smallest parties being given a huge role because the PvDA was to scared to form a left-wing coalition. Not the smartest move they made. By American standards: Communists.
D66: Democrats, no, not like the American ones. Yes, you know it is coming. By American standards: Communists. Liberals mostly but with a strong elitst element. In Holland the biggest struggle right now isn't so much right vs left but elitst vs man of the people. A lot of voters feel politicians don't listen to them, that they rule from an ivory tower. D66 is so far up the ivory tower they sit on gods lap. Party was decimated sometime ago, but has come back with the support of the elite who can ignore the discussion about immigration because no muslims can afford to live where they do. By American Standards: The dreamier side of the democrats
A movie has a running length of 120 minutes, but everybody leaves at 115 minutes when the credits start rolling. Conclusion: People want movies to be shorter.
Eh, no. They just don't want to sit through 5 minutes of credits.
People watch commercial TV. Conclusion: People want to watch ads every 5 minutes and overlayed on the program.
Eh no. That is just what people have to put up with.
Statistics and user figures are very easy to misinterpret. Would you take the vcr action recordings of someone watching a porn movie and apply them on how to make a regular movie?
So why apply the actions of a console beat-em-up to a RPG?
There are some games that are big for the sake of being big. Some beat-em-up is coming out, that was reviewed as having even more characters as before. So if I don't play all of their piss-poor story lines, I haven't finished the game? What if a path through an RPG doesn't appeal to me? I never bother with the evil path. Does that mean I am recorded as only playing through half of the game? I enjoyed F1 games in the past, but only with one did I do a complete realistic season (Grand Prix Legends). What if I don't do the game on nightmare mode or for that matter easy mode? What if I cheat to go straight to nightmare mode (another reason consoles suck donkey balls, locked difficulties)?
Yes of course there are people who look at an RPG and complain it takes 60 hours. So? Then that game is not for them. Because if you shorten it to 5 hours you ruin it for all your customers who love a 60 hour game.
Here is a simple sales man trick. Concentrate on selling to people who are buying. People who are not buying will always find another reason not to. But people who are buying, need only 1 to become part of them.
How is the weather on your planet?
Because games have becoming shorter and shorter. Have they become cheaper?
Thanks, that is a very good point. The earth will survive, will we?
The earth survived whatever killed the dinosaurs, but it really sucked for the dinosaurs. If we die, the planet will go on, but that is little consolation to anyone who doesn't REALLY like cockroaches.
The video is edited, as it seems to be showing the same thing twice. Perhaps to make it appear longer? Considering he doesn't have a mouse, he seems to click the image and the movie away fairly quickly.
The image is harmless, well to a European anyway, although age might be a factor, the women are to blurry to judge but how old are they? It is clearly an amateur shot, so some under-aged going on?
What remains is knowing how this votes. Is he a Republican: do as we say, don't do as we do. Who vote against gay marriage yet cheat on their wives while they are dying of cancer? Or is he a Democrat: You are the president of the most powerful country in the world and you fuck THAT?!?
Calling this "watching porn in the senate" requires an extraordinary puritan mind. Or an American one. Same thing really. In Holland two politicians posed nude in the playboy on the seats of our senate. So what. Afraid a little skin will start earth quakes or something? No human being could be that silly.
Do people really have some serious problem with the notion of FANTASY? None of these movies or tv-shows that have magic computers are documentaries. Ooh, I have another one. In real life a 30 ton machine making a sky craper leaping on the sidewalk, would go STRAIGHT through it. No just stand there. Oh and it would be collecting its gears in a paper basket, but Transformers failing to reflect this is not a reason to hate it (lousy acting is, anyone else think the movie would have been a whole lot better as pure CGI, no annoying humans to interrupt the action?)
Selling something is hard. There are special events where street hawkers (not sure if that is the right word, people who sell stuff from a stand) compete. It is HARD, harder even then stand-up comedy. A comic can ignore or insult a heckler, but a street vendor only gets paid if the audience really likes him AND his product and can think of a reason to buy it. You need to be able to think on your feet. In a moments notice decide that HERE is a sales opporunity and then calculate cost and benefit on the spot and act on it.
The above story sounds a bit suspicious, although possible, because I have heard it in other forms. But the basic message is, think on your feet and never ignore an opportunity for some essentially free advertising. Some thing like this should have every sales clerk cumming in his pants, not sticking to his sales pitch.
Thank you subject #415780. Your cooperation has been noted. We will take immediate action to discipline the member of staff of ARIN you talked to, so that in future his replacement will say the correct thing.
Your commanding master, Haliburton.
You seem to be thinking that the ocean needs to be saturated with oil for it to have an effect. Most of the ocean is already dead, always has been. The whole eco-system depends on a few rich spots to feed it. Why do you think so many sea live hold such epic migrations? Because they like it?
How can a tiny bit of metal possibly kill a human being? Fine, let me stick a needle in your brain, see how long you last. Maybe a long time, maybe not long at all.
Killing the eco-system doesn't have to be whole-sale slaughter. All you have to do is knock over one part of the food-chain. It doens't even have to mean the end of life in the ocean. The wrong algea start to grow out of control, and you have plenty of life, and also death at the same time.
Will this be it? Well we better just bloody hope it isn't because else we are screwed. But the right wingers seem determined to keep trying to screw up until they finally really manage to screw us all.
Gosh, off-shore drilling isn't safe. Irak doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. Banks do need goverment control. Are republicans even capable of saying "we were wrong"?
HTML5 can easily be implemented by just using the video codecs installed on the system. There is ZERO reason the codec used has to be in the browser. It makes sense to include a default codec with the browser although 99% of the time, the OS will have its own video codec support.
But I see you got your head to far up Bill Gates as to be able to see your own fanboy nature. "IE9 will win, because IE8, IE7, totally failed, but this time, it will do it".
Go and sign up for WM7 beta, I am sure it will be a iPhone killer. This time surely, all the previous failures were just flukes.
An individual tanker isn't all that large, at least in WW2. There is a reason we call modern tankers: super-tankers.
It is like people who think CO2 emissions don't matter because volcanoes do it as well. Indeed they do, but have these people never heard of adding up. This spil comes on top of all the others. On top of the coral reefs already dying, on top of fish stocks already being over fished, on top of the plastic we have been dumping whole sale in to the ocean.
Will this be the straw that killed the camels back? Hard to say, but if fishing is hurt then that means some areas need to pay more for their food then they do now and not everyone can afford that. Plus the replacement food will have to be grown somewhere else.
And down the line, some fish migrate and others are dependent on long food chains. I don't know what grows in place X that is eaten in place Y that has an effect on populations in Z.
This isn't about one tanker sinking with the oil inside. It is about tanker after tanker being emptied in one single spot with no way to end it so far except waiting for one of the biggest oil fields to run out. And that could be REALLY bad because according to the people who want to drill everywhere, oil doesn't run out.
The apocalypse won't come in a flash of thunder, it will the eco-system slowly dying from being over-stressed. Less 2012, more YKK or Testament.
What most seem to miss here is that this is NOT just Theora vs h264. Microsoft has its own codecs and there are websites out there that use Mediaplayer to show their content. So MS own customers now have to convert all their content to h264 because MS refuses to support its own codecs in its own products?
It doesn't suprise me, MS has always been one to screw over adapters of its product (see the Zune that couldn't handle MS own music store formats) but this one is humiliating if you look past the bullshit.
It would be trivial for MS to simply let IE use whatever codec is available the same way every media player does it, in fact the way its own media player does it. Then it would have support for every codec the user has at no extra cost. Now it has to limit support to a competitors codec. Talk about cutting of your nose to spite your face.
Or is MS saying that its own codecs aren't good enough? Or are insecure?
Come on MS, make a humorous statement why you don't support your own codecs. It is not like any of the jokes who call themselves journalists will think of asking this question.
Why should the catholic church try to fix it self, when blaming others has worked so well.
Granted it may just cause disbelief in most if you blame it on the jews or homosexuality in some, but far more will believe it, especially in developing countries, the only place the church is still growing. And no I am not going to say that this proofs only non-educated people believe in god. That would not be nice. It would be the truth, but not nice.
Oh and remember, the mafia isn't real, it is a plot by communism to disrupt the west. Oh and the shroud, it is real. Never mind that nobody in the bible mentioned it. You think people would have noticed or not have bothered with the bloody shroud left on a decaying body. Mind you, there is a perfectly sensible reason why nobody at the time noticed it, IT DIDN'T FUCKING HAPPEN!
Denial, it is must be a wonderful place to live.
It is amazing, the entire economy is down the drain and people are still defending the system. Every single bank bonus being paid now comes straight out of welfare for bank and still people defend it.
Truly capitalists are the black knight.
And they erase all my memory too! All of it just gone, empty blank state every time I pull the power! And when I took out my HD and cleaned it under the tap to get the dirty bits out, Gentoo totally failed to work with my freshly cleaned drive!!!
And to remain on topic, anyone actually use system restore? Always disable that as fast as possible.
The west is being torn apart by the lack of accountability. The banks, the governments who failed to supervise the banks, the voters who elected the politicians who didn't do anything time and time again. We now have capitalists trying to tear apart European countries to make a quick buck. If a few pirates dare to interrupt shipping we send in war ships and blow their brains out, but if capitalist hold entire economies hostage we think this is good business.
Acacia is seriously hurting the economy because nobody can afford to do business without deep pockets to protect against them. It means no startup stand a change anymore once a patent troll comes looking and even big companies are constantly at the mercy of the poor saps who didn't manage to get out of jury duty.
When a flea bites you, you might shrug it off as harmless, but when you are being swarmed by parasites, you got to start killing them and go after their unborn children as well. Or you are going to die.
Ask yourself, what has been done to stop the banks and other industries from having to be bailed out again? Answer: Absolutely nothing. How many times do you think the US and EU can afford to do this? In Europe first it was Iceland that went belly up, and added a couple of thousand to Dutch and British tax payers. Now it is Greece, with the government there having deceived regulators who didn't check anything because they were not allowed but all the time we were told that the EU was good for us and that it worked so well. And now it is becoming clear that pretty much all of the garlic nations are in deep shit and just waiting to fall over. Oh goodie, we propped them up with countless donations when they joined because it would pay of in the long term. Well this is the long term and they need yet more cash.
And at no point is anybody going to jail. Or stripped of power and privilege.
If you don't punish people, you don't correct behavior. The system itself ain't broken, it is designed to be controlled from within, but when you no longer put sanctions on bad behavior and control, then it fails. Think of it as an engine. If I remove the oil, then the engine isn't broken, but it will be soon enough. The design of the engine is solid, you just need to replace the operator and put the previous operator as a warning next to it, on a spike.
Oh hell, all of slashdot is pretty much evil. It whispers to me: "Visit me, don't work, don't eat, kill your loved ones and strangers. Mod ME!" And I obey.