Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And what's wrong with those entries? They don't conform to the shifts in public opinion among certain demographic groups?
Are you kidding? It's supposed to be an "encyclopedia", as in "have ethics". If I want biased reporting I'll watch Fox. Without starting another pointless debate, there is a lot of benefits from things like socialism and it would be nice to see a fair analysis of both the good and the bad. If a top-flight reference source allows political bias to influence it's entries, then it simply cannot be trusted. It's no different from a Chinese reference containing a "nice-guy" entry for Mao, ditto Stalin.
If the tone of an article shifts to meet the readers bias, then it's bullshit. Encyclopedia's aren't a popularity contest.
I'm all for alternative energy sources but this is a little nuts. Even if it really is only a few bucks more every month, I really don't want to "donate" money to my neighbors who are already pretty well off.
YEAH! Cos like, the domestic farm industry is litteraly rolling in money, right? In actual fact they need government subsidies and regulation to stay afloat. That's the simple matter of it.
And if the best you can do is "bad because someone receives money from it", then how the hell do you live your life? Do you mind your oil money going to even richer and textbook-"evil" Saudis?
Over here in good old-jock-land, we've been doing this for years. When we are not drinking whiskey we are building hydroelectric dams and wind power farms. Several of the electicity companies offer schemes where you pay a little more for your energy, but get a guarantee that it's coming from green sources.
It's not the feel-good factor or the money that's important. What matters is that you aren't pissing in your childrens swimming pool.
We're going to spend a $TRILLION on the Iraq War, and we're paying at least 50% more for gas than before we invaded.
What makes you think it was done for your benefit? I cannot understand how folk are confused by the price hike. Did you think it was done for you and that your cheque for share of the profits is in the post?;-)
All of the people who contributed to the last two election campaigns (and who made the presidency possible) got what they wanted. You'll need to wait in line.
It's beneficial already. We're funding corrupt regimes in oil rich countries, and tying our economic prosperity to people who are not our allies.
Hang on, the oil companies do not give a shit what regimes they prop up. No company or country does, it's all 100% self-interest. The issue here is that the benefit in switching away from oil benefits US not THEM. In fact, we've even propped up these regimes on purely political reasons, e.g. getting rid of a socialist alternative. So it's not going to happen any time soon unless it benefits those who get the decission.
We are fucked. Enjoy the world while you can, these are the "golden days" we'll look back on. Soylent Green was probably the most likely future-scenario right now; our food growth and distribution are completely married to fossil fuels. The cost of living is so tied to oil prices that the inevitable rise due to increased demand and dwindling supplies will mess our ecconomies up big time.
You do know that tweakUI was just a registry hack tool made by microsoft right?
Of course. But it makes it 100x easier, quicker and less likely to screw up your machine. Registry hacks are all well and good, but having many of them listed together (including ones you wouldn't have thought of) makes it worth the five second install.
Does it show the resulting damage?;-) rm and wildcards don't mix all that well. Personally I just use command completion and character-escaping to get rid of those pesky files.
but the more limiting item is the max_path is 255, while in typical unix it is 1024.
Windows also has a much shorter maximum command line length. A killer if you are running a java app with a huge auto-generated classpath; I had to write a custom classloader to get around this on windows. No big deal, but annoying with fours hours wasted.
Before Windows XP, you had to activate the tab character by changing a registry key.
Forget hacking the Registry, TweakUI can do this. It's an essential tool for Windows that would cause too much damage by lusers so they don't ship it out-the-box. Lot's of useful hacks.
Sorry dude, but I just can't fathom a scenario where you NEED to have two installations of the same OS for different purposes.
I do it, and I expect it's for the same reason as the grandparent. My "work" partition has web services and j2ee application servers running. Just having quicktime installed uses 2 services! To play a game I could stop all these services but in actual fact it's quicker to reboot into another OS that has no services running whatsoever. Nothing is installed other than games. It still boots like a new PC. If windows implemented runlevels I'd be all over it, but this is the best I can do. My PC is a little aging and it needs all the help it can get.
With regards to restrictive DRM, the Sony one takes the cake for being the worst. A pal of mine didn't have a computer so she used one of mine to set up her Sony portable player. She goes abroad for a few years and at some point I uninstall the "SonicStage" application. Fast-forward to a few months ago, she comes back and tries to add some new songs. It flat out refused to connect with the device without wanting to erase all of the existing music. This was purely DRM, there was no technical issue whatsoever. I tried several different versions of the software and in the end I learned of a specific version of the Japanese build was OK with this. I had to set my PC's locale into Japanese, install the application, then pair it with the device using the 100% Japanese character GUI. Thankfully it was reasonably well laid out and I figured out the options I needed after poking around. Oh, did I mention I had to hack the installers.ini file in order to get it installed? Jesus fucking christ, I was not impressed but I wasn't going to let it beat me!;-)
Another parent mentioned Microsoft might not allow mp3s. That's doubtful, all of their existing players, mobile phones and PDAs play mp3's natively. The Sony device I've just described actually needed a firmware upgrade to play mp3s. Sony basically folded to market presure, they wanted you using their formats originally.
Like your other reply, I too bought a device with a slide out keyboard. I've never seen anyone regret that decission. You might be able to use handwriting for text messages but you do not want to EVER try it with vi over ssh.;-) Also, imagine an "rm -rf" mis-recognition...
Mind you, there are some neat bluetooth keyboards you can get, such as The Virtual Keyboad, so it's not all lost if you don't have one.
I've been using my phone/pda for a year or two and I still think it's one of the coolest and most useful gadget I have. Google in my pocket, access to my home linux box, a camera and an mp3 player. Everything I'd ever need most days. One piece of advice though; get one with WiFi, this is an absolute must. It's much faster than GPRS and it's free most of the time.
because most break-ins are committed by very low-brow thieves. Most are looking for quick cash to fuel a drug habit, or by kids trying to lay hands on gear they want but can't buy (game consoles, DVDs, etc).
The drugs thing is largely a myth. They are just bad people, they steal to buy petrol and clothing as well; they just don't care. But they do know other people who are smarter, case in point: kids break into my office an steal a couple of laptops. They notice the server racks and two weeks later we are hit by professionals which cleared us out. And somehow managed to shift large amounts of obscure hardware. You don't see a lot of Sun on the black market.
I'm sure I could make a few phone calls right now to the correct people and find a purchaser for such data as was on this laptop. Six degrees of separation etc.
If they withdrew, and took our money with them, and left us our debt
It's their money, that's the point!! Not "out" money. They lent you the money so your economy would not collapse, something that is not in their interests. It's a strange set of affairs this international debt. It's like the nuclear deterent of old (discouraging warfare) but instead promises ecconomic destruction as opposed to nuclear winter.
I'm no conspiracy theorist - but in true reality, this smells like other countries making hardware under specifications that do not match ours - and therefore may pose a security risk to us.
What's the risk? This is an AGE OLD problem in IT. If you keep records, someone might use them one day! Recent examples include bittorrent tracker sites that got raided or spyware that analyses your system logs & sends them to the mothership./var/log/messages on my system lists all of my fetchmail activity, listing all of the email I receive. This hard-drive internal storage is no different. It was intended to assist the operating of the drive but like most things it can be used against you. All swords are two-edged etc etc.
We'd be 3rd-world classification without any warning.
Given the poverty levels some might argue that was the case in some areas already.
Why the hell should someone need a DNS/DHCP server to send a file from Computer A to Computer B when both computers are ALREADY on the same network?
Because that's how TCP/IP works. Why the hell should I use the steering wheel on my car when I want to drive to the shops? Oh wait, you have to.
Windows does automatically assign a 169.x.x.x IP if you cannot get a DHCP server. This is a hack designed to help you get up and running, not run a network on a permament basis. For one, it only occurs after a lengthly timeout on the propper DHCP system. Not user friendly.
I have had troubles setting up file sharing in Windows before there even WAS a built in Windows firewall.
Let me guess, permission problems? It's working as designed; if you share out something in Documents and Settings, only you can read them. And by "you", I mean your specific GUID for your user, which will be different on each box. The same username on both machines is not the same user. Try sharing out C:\Temp for a test.
This is EXACTLY the same issue on NFS that resolves you to "nobody" on machine B when on A you are "root". It makes sense when you realise why it was done; anyone could install windows, create a user "bigBossManWithFullCompanyAccess" matching the current boss, then you can browse his machine.
Also, you can rule out Firewall issues if A can see B but B cannot see A. Both A and B obviously have a hole poked in their firewall for file sharing, but B is just acting STUPID.
Your first point is wrong. Firewalls are inbound and outbound. What you have is a perfectly valid scenario. Think of it this way, your PC can see google.com, but it can't see your PC.
B isn't acting stupid. It's just not set up right.
There is the official glossy MS pamphlet way of doing it, which doesn't work, and then if you dig a bit deeper you find out the REAL instructions. Once again, stupidity, if there is a button that SAYS it does something, it should darn well do that something, not secretly require that I do 5 other steps that are not officially documented.
What non-obvious magic do you need to do? I've had windows file sharing on my home network for seven years without any issues. The only ones I can recall was the early days of firewalls where you had to open ports by hand, then when XP tightened down home shares (which was good).
It's 100% legal and this has been covered before with other goods. There's a number of movies that e.g. Columbia distribute in the UK while Buena Vista do it in the US. They don't want a UK shopper ordering the American one to save money, instead they want to charge us more, so much more that it's still cheaper for me to pay for shipping and still save a few bucks. But there's nothing they can do about this; that's why they brought in the artificial restriction of DVD regions. To artificially enforce something that they cannot legislate through other means. If they could have, they would have.
If the mother is determined to not take care of the child, make it a ward of the state. We have a system in place for this very purpose.
Agreed, that is a better option. However, it has many flaws. Some close friends of mine grew up in foster care and some of their experiences are pretty bad. Stuff I'd rather not go in to. However, I do have other friends for whom this has worked out very well of course. Secondly, adoption is less and less in demand nowadays with the explosion of fertility services. Many parents will try treatment after treatment rather than adopt. While it is an option, it's one that's dwindling. As fertility treatments advance things won't improve.
As far as the rape-only clause, let me make a quick analogy. We both agree that murder means "to kill intentionally," right?
Actually, no. The definition of murder is to wrongfully kill someone. Now, the question is; is there a situation where it is right to kill someone? You give the example of someone attacking your home and family. If it came down to it, no alternatives, do or die, then it is probably morally justified by most people's viewpoint to kill in defence. The problem is that many of the deaths in this situation are probably commited by over-zealous householders and were unneccessary.
In my eyes, an abortion because of rape is still murder, but it should be an option, because the rape victim didn't have a choice in getting herself pregnant.
I don't understand that view point to be honest. In your eyes, how can one rape justify a murder? You consider abortion murder (which I'll come back to), so if you seek to ban it based simply on that fact then you can't go making exceptions.
Now, is abortion murder? It comes down to your own beliefs and many people believe that life doesn't begin at conception. I'm not stating my own view point deliberately as it's not relevant to the argument. You argue that killing and stealing are universally agreed to be wrong. The point of conception is subjective. That's where the grey area comes in.
That's not a good analogy at all. First, what belief of mine are you trying to liken the "cars destroy the earth" belief to?
None, at least not directly. It's just an example of a topic where there are different viewpoints. If it was down to some people, cars would be banned. We are supposed to be living in democratic societies and the view on cars is that a ban is not the concensus of the population. The same applies to abortion; there aren't enough people who agree with you to make it law. In my view the current situation is probably the most desirable one. People have the right to choose for themselves meanwhile we can debate the topic and persuade others via arguments to hopefully come around to our respective viewpoints. People who undergo the operation are counsoled and given advice. It's not something entered into lightly, at least here in the UK. And it's morally frowned upon, the way it should be. It should be discouraged but ultimately it's not yours or my choice to make for someone else.
Sorry for the short reply, your post deserved much more as you make your point very well, unfortunately I don't have the time right now to respond to everything. I do agree with much of what you are saying.
Have you ever stopped to think about why that might be? Let's see, what are the most common video formats
Oh, I know the rationale behind it. It still sucks though. I watch my media on a chipped xbox. I can't watch these except in a postage stamp sized browser window in my PC, a very solitary existance (I don't watch much TV on my own). If they'd at least implement a fullscreen view I would be much happier.
Finally if your system is dropping frames it's you. Check your cpu utilization, is it spiking?
It's an old laptop I use for surfing the web. It drops frames now and then on the heaver compression systems such as mpeg4 already. Put those streams in flash and it's just not worth it.
I yearn for the "download / open in" days, I really do.
Maybe that's how it works on Linux. On windows, it does use a video overlay.
I'm not sure that's correct. Earlier implementations of DirectX only allowed one overlay at a time, in fact I believe this is also a function of the video card. I'm sure it was possible to have more than one Flash object on the screen back then. It wasn't possible with other video players that used overlays; they typically dropped to a fallback non-overlay mode that was less performant. It was noticable on low spec machines when it happened.
Please point out, at your earliest convenience, where either Stormin or myself, or any of the pro-life people in this thread, have attempted to justify our logic by means of religion?
You probably didn't, but take a look at the subject line. The topic is about religion. You may not have started it, but that's the way it went.
Inconvenience for nine months on the part of a mother who engaged in consensual sex is not extremely good cause.
There's more to it than "inconvenience" and there is certainally more to it than nine months. Unwanted children will not be cared for. If the mother is irresponsible to get pregnant by accident in the first place, what kind of child would she bring up? I've always argued that many of the problems in our society are directly linked to bad parenting. Many parents would rather watch TV than to rear their children into responsible adults.
This isn't a debate I enter often, so this may be wrong but I remember reading once about how crime statistics were linked to abortion. In places where it was outlawed, unwanted children were dropped out one after the other. Crime rates shot up as did unemployement and all the other issues associated with lazy-as-fuck parenting.
Therefore, abortion is wrong, and should be illegal, except in cases of rape or potential death of the mother.
That's bad logic. If it's wrong, it's wrong. The old adage here "two wrongs do not make a right". Potential death is of course different (as the fetus would die anyway), but I don't really understand the "rape only" clause. It's either murder or it's not.
Show we where the fuck that involves prescribing my religious beliefs on someone. Really, I'm fascinated. Please do.
Perhaps you didn't, but you are prescribing your own moral beliefs on everyone else which is just as bad. In fact, some religious people would say it is worse as they are on a "mission from god" or something.;-)
My stance on this issue is quite simple. It's a decission for the doctor and parents involved only. You can make your opposition known, but don't try to physically or legally stop them. Some people believe that cars are destroying the planet and are morally wrong for that reason. Should their beliefs trump yours? Should you give up your car?
Are Central American countries considered "Western"? I wouldn't have thought so. Other than the religious nutjobbery going on in Ireland (which there is LOTS of), the Western world IS pretty much unified on the right of people to not be ruled by other peoples religious beliefs.
Oh, and in Ireland there are MANY options to get an abortion. One involves an hour drive, the other an hour flight. There used to be a medical ship performing them outside of Irish territorial waters, but I think that's gone these days.
So why are the local papers and stations acting as PR shills for the RIAA? Are they stupid or just getting cash?
Because it's probably way more interesting that the usual weekly roundup of petty crime that my local papers cover. Oh, two cars were broken into last week, hold the front page!
I don't care if Robert Vaughn in Washington D.C. gets caught for file-sharing, but if Jimmy across the street gets a fine, well then I'd better be scared.
It sounds good in theory, but it still doesn't work. The war on drugs is proof of that; I know people who have been busted themselves that don't stop breaking the law. They just become more careful.
People generally obey the law because of their own beliefs, not because "it's the law". It just so happens that most laws are in line with most peoples beliefs, especially WRT violence. When it comes to a smoking a joint or burning a copy of a CD to keep in the car, no one really cares.
There are assholes everywhere, but it is a well-known fact that if you put nice people in positions of absolute authority over others, they turn into tyrants.
Wise words. Here's the proof:
The Milgram Experiement, which proves that most people are capable of torturing and killing given the right conditions.
Stanford prison experiment where randomly choosen guards/prisoners degraded into some of the worst abuses of authority in any experiement. It had to be stopped early it got so bad.
Flash Video is Evil. Yes, that's with a capital "E". Computer designers had video overlays nailed back in Windows 98. Remember the "Buddy Holly" video? Are you all trying to tell me now that we are throwing all that efficiency away and replacing it with a flash object painting to a browser renderer, which then paints to the screen? I can't believe my 3.0GHz dual-core is dropping frames now.
You can't save it either, nor can you zoom in / resize. I'm running at 1600x1200, your 100x100 flash video is the size of a postage stamp. "Always on top overlay mode"? Forget it.
Adobe are KILLING flash. Embedded video will never be more than a novelty thanks to them, they seem to be eating up all of the video content providers.
Grandparent is talking shit. I've got a 10 meg cable connection here in the UK and it'll max out whenever the remoter server is up to it. I usually get bittorrent running over the 1000kb/s mark, pulling in 300 meg in around four minutes or so.
Customer support is as always understaffed. But I've never had a problem with them. Perhaps no more than 24 total hours of outages (that I know of) in five years service.
Job-wise, things are pretty good right now. Been better, but has been worse (.com bubble). London pays more but they'll get it back out of you (and more) with the cost of living there. Try Scotland, we're much more fun!
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Are you kidding? It's supposed to be an "encyclopedia", as in "have ethics". If I want biased reporting I'll watch Fox. Without starting another pointless debate, there is a lot of benefits from things like socialism and it would be nice to see a fair analysis of both the good and the bad. If a top-flight reference source allows political bias to influence it's entries, then it simply cannot be trusted. It's no different from a Chinese reference containing a "nice-guy" entry for Mao, ditto Stalin.
If the tone of an article shifts to meet the readers bias, then it's bullshit. Encyclopedia's aren't a popularity contest.
YEAH! Cos like, the domestic farm industry is litteraly rolling in money, right? In actual fact they need government subsidies and regulation to stay afloat. That's the simple matter of it.
And if the best you can do is "bad because someone receives money from it", then how the hell do you live your life? Do you mind your oil money going to even richer and textbook-"evil" Saudis?
Over here in good old-jock-land, we've been doing this for years. When we are not drinking whiskey we are building hydroelectric dams and wind power farms. Several of the electicity companies offer schemes where you pay a little more for your energy, but get a guarantee that it's coming from green sources.
It's not the feel-good factor or the money that's important. What matters is that you aren't pissing in your childrens swimming pool.
What makes you think it was done for your benefit? I cannot understand how folk are confused by the price hike. Did you think it was done for you and that your cheque for share of the profits is in the post? ;-)
All of the people who contributed to the last two election campaigns (and who made the presidency possible) got what they wanted. You'll need to wait in line.
Hang on, the oil companies do not give a shit what regimes they prop up. No company or country does, it's all 100% self-interest. The issue here is that the benefit in switching away from oil benefits US not THEM. In fact, we've even propped up these regimes on purely political reasons, e.g. getting rid of a socialist alternative. So it's not going to happen any time soon unless it benefits those who get the decission.
We are fucked. Enjoy the world while you can, these are the "golden days" we'll look back on. Soylent Green was probably the most likely future-scenario right now; our food growth and distribution are completely married to fossil fuels. The cost of living is so tied to oil prices that the inevitable rise due to increased demand and dwindling supplies will mess our ecconomies up big time.
Of course. But it makes it 100x easier, quicker and less likely to screw up your machine. Registry hacks are all well and good, but having many of them listed together (including ones you wouldn't have thought of) makes it worth the five second install.
Does it show the resulting damage? ;-) rm and wildcards don't mix all that well. Personally I just use command completion and character-escaping to get rid of those pesky files.
Windows also has a much shorter maximum command line length. A killer if you are running a java app with a huge auto-generated classpath; I had to write a custom classloader to get around this on windows. No big deal, but annoying with fours hours wasted.
Forget hacking the Registry, TweakUI can do this. It's an essential tool for Windows that would cause too much damage by lusers so they don't ship it out-the-box. Lot's of useful hacks.
I do it, and I expect it's for the same reason as the grandparent. My "work" partition has web services and j2ee application servers running. Just having quicktime installed uses 2 services! To play a game I could stop all these services but in actual fact it's quicker to reboot into another OS that has no services running whatsoever. Nothing is installed other than games. It still boots like a new PC. If windows implemented runlevels I'd be all over it, but this is the best I can do. My PC is a little aging and it needs all the help it can get.
With regards to restrictive DRM, the Sony one takes the cake for being the worst. A pal of mine didn't have a computer so she used one of mine to set up her Sony portable player. She goes abroad for a few years and at some point I uninstall the "SonicStage" application. Fast-forward to a few months ago, she comes back and tries to add some new songs. It flat out refused to connect with the device without wanting to erase all of the existing music. This was purely DRM, there was no technical issue whatsoever. I tried several different versions of the software and in the end I learned of a specific version of the Japanese build was OK with this. I had to set my PC's locale into Japanese, install the application, then pair it with the device using the 100% Japanese character GUI. Thankfully it was reasonably well laid out and I figured out the options I needed after poking around. Oh, did I mention I had to hack the installers .ini file in order to get it installed? Jesus fucking christ, I was not impressed but I wasn't going to let it beat me! ;-)
Another parent mentioned Microsoft might not allow mp3s. That's doubtful, all of their existing players, mobile phones and PDAs play mp3's natively. The Sony device I've just described actually needed a firmware upgrade to play mp3s. Sony basically folded to market presure, they wanted you using their formats originally.
Like your other reply, I too bought a device with a slide out keyboard. I've never seen anyone regret that decission. You might be able to use handwriting for text messages but you do not want to EVER try it with vi over ssh. ;-) Also, imagine an "rm -rf" mis-recognition...
Mind you, there are some neat bluetooth keyboards you can get, such as The Virtual Keyboad, so it's not all lost if you don't have one.
I've been using my phone/pda for a year or two and I still think it's one of the coolest and most useful gadget I have. Google in my pocket, access to my home linux box, a camera and an mp3 player. Everything I'd ever need most days. One piece of advice though; get one with WiFi, this is an absolute must. It's much faster than GPRS and it's free most of the time.
The drugs thing is largely a myth. They are just bad people, they steal to buy petrol and clothing as well; they just don't care. But they do know other people who are smarter, case in point: kids break into my office an steal a couple of laptops. They notice the server racks and two weeks later we are hit by professionals which cleared us out. And somehow managed to shift large amounts of obscure hardware. You don't see a lot of Sun on the black market.
I'm sure I could make a few phone calls right now to the correct people and find a purchaser for such data as was on this laptop. Six degrees of separation etc.
It's their money, that's the point!! Not "out" money. They lent you the money so your economy would not collapse, something that is not in their interests. It's a strange set of affairs this international debt. It's like the nuclear deterent of old (discouraging warfare) but instead promises ecconomic destruction as opposed to nuclear winter.
What's the risk? This is an AGE OLD problem in IT. If you keep records, someone might use them one day! Recent examples include bittorrent tracker sites that got raided or spyware that analyses your system logs & sends them to the mothership. /var/log/messages on my system lists all of my fetchmail activity, listing all of the email I receive. This hard-drive internal storage is no different. It was intended to assist the operating of the drive but like most things it can be used against you. All swords are two-edged etc etc.
Given the poverty levels some might argue that was the case in some areas already.
Because that's how TCP/IP works. Why the hell should I use the steering wheel on my car when I want to drive to the shops? Oh wait, you have to.
Windows does automatically assign a 169.x.x.x IP if you cannot get a DHCP server. This is a hack designed to help you get up and running, not run a network on a permament basis. For one, it only occurs after a lengthly timeout on the propper DHCP system. Not user friendly.
Let me guess, permission problems? It's working as designed; if you share out something in Documents and Settings, only you can read them. And by "you", I mean your specific GUID for your user, which will be different on each box. The same username on both machines is not the same user. Try sharing out C:\Temp for a test.
This is EXACTLY the same issue on NFS that resolves you to "nobody" on machine B when on A you are "root". It makes sense when you realise why it was done; anyone could install windows, create a user "bigBossManWithFullCompanyAccess" matching the current boss, then you can browse his machine.
Your first point is wrong. Firewalls are inbound and outbound. What you have is a perfectly valid scenario. Think of it this way, your PC can see google.com, but it can't see your PC.
B isn't acting stupid. It's just not set up right.
What non-obvious magic do you need to do? I've had windows file sharing on my home network for seven years without any issues. The only ones I can recall was the early days of firewalls where you had to open ports by hand, then when XP tightened down home shares (which was good).
It's 100% legal and this has been covered before with other goods. There's a number of movies that e.g. Columbia distribute in the UK while Buena Vista do it in the US. They don't want a UK shopper ordering the American one to save money, instead they want to charge us more, so much more that it's still cheaper for me to pay for shipping and still save a few bucks. But there's nothing they can do about this; that's why they brought in the artificial restriction of DVD regions. To artificially enforce something that they cannot legislate through other means. If they could have, they would have.
Having a kick-ass millitary and a big checkbook do not denote greatness. Onky crazed crackpot leaders of banana republics see life that way.
Agreed, that is a better option. However, it has many flaws. Some close friends of mine grew up in foster care and some of their experiences are pretty bad. Stuff I'd rather not go in to. However, I do have other friends for whom this has worked out very well of course. Secondly, adoption is less and less in demand nowadays with the explosion of fertility services. Many parents will try treatment after treatment rather than adopt. While it is an option, it's one that's dwindling. As fertility treatments advance things won't improve.
Actually, no. The definition of murder is to wrongfully kill someone. Now, the question is; is there a situation where it is right to kill someone? You give the example of someone attacking your home and family. If it came down to it, no alternatives, do or die, then it is probably morally justified by most people's viewpoint to kill in defence. The problem is that many of the deaths in this situation are probably commited by over-zealous householders and were unneccessary.
I don't understand that view point to be honest. In your eyes, how can one rape justify a murder? You consider abortion murder (which I'll come back to), so if you seek to ban it based simply on that fact then you can't go making exceptions.
Now, is abortion murder? It comes down to your own beliefs and many people believe that life doesn't begin at conception. I'm not stating my own view point deliberately as it's not relevant to the argument. You argue that killing and stealing are universally agreed to be wrong. The point of conception is subjective. That's where the grey area comes in.
None, at least not directly. It's just an example of a topic where there are different viewpoints. If it was down to some people, cars would be banned. We are supposed to be living in democratic societies and the view on cars is that a ban is not the concensus of the population. The same applies to abortion; there aren't enough people who agree with you to make it law. In my view the current situation is probably the most desirable one. People have the right to choose for themselves meanwhile we can debate the topic and persuade others via arguments to hopefully come around to our respective viewpoints. People who undergo the operation are counsoled and given advice. It's not something entered into lightly, at least here in the UK. And it's morally frowned upon, the way it should be. It should be discouraged but ultimately it's not yours or my choice to make for someone else.
Sorry for the short reply, your post deserved much more as you make your point very well, unfortunately I don't have the time right now to respond to everything. I do agree with much of what you are saying.
Oh, I know the rationale behind it. It still sucks though. I watch my media on a chipped xbox. I can't watch these except in a postage stamp sized browser window in my PC, a very solitary existance (I don't watch much TV on my own). If they'd at least implement a fullscreen view I would be much happier.
It's an old laptop I use for surfing the web. It drops frames now and then on the heaver compression systems such as mpeg4 already. Put those streams in flash and it's just not worth it.
I yearn for the "download / open in" days, I really do.
I'm not sure that's correct. Earlier implementations of DirectX only allowed one overlay at a time, in fact I believe this is also a function of the video card. I'm sure it was possible to have more than one Flash object on the screen back then. It wasn't possible with other video players that used overlays; they typically dropped to a fallback non-overlay mode that was less performant. It was noticable on low spec machines when it happened.
You probably didn't, but take a look at the subject line. The topic is about religion. You may not have started it, but that's the way it went.
There's more to it than "inconvenience" and there is certainally more to it than nine months. Unwanted children will not be cared for. If the mother is irresponsible to get pregnant by accident in the first place, what kind of child would she bring up? I've always argued that many of the problems in our society are directly linked to bad parenting. Many parents would rather watch TV than to rear their children into responsible adults.
This isn't a debate I enter often, so this may be wrong but I remember reading once about how crime statistics were linked to abortion. In places where it was outlawed, unwanted children were dropped out one after the other. Crime rates shot up as did unemployement and all the other issues associated with lazy-as-fuck parenting.
That's bad logic. If it's wrong, it's wrong. The old adage here "two wrongs do not make a right". Potential death is of course different (as the fetus would die anyway), but I don't really understand the "rape only" clause. It's either murder or it's not.
Perhaps you didn't, but you are prescribing your own moral beliefs on everyone else which is just as bad. In fact, some religious people would say it is worse as they are on a "mission from god" or something. ;-)
My stance on this issue is quite simple. It's a decission for the doctor and parents involved only. You can make your opposition known, but don't try to physically or legally stop them. Some people believe that cars are destroying the planet and are morally wrong for that reason. Should their beliefs trump yours? Should you give up your car?
Oh, and in Ireland there are MANY options to get an abortion. One involves an hour drive, the other an hour flight. There used to be a medical ship performing them outside of Irish territorial waters, but I think that's gone these days.
Because it's probably way more interesting that the usual weekly roundup of petty crime that my local papers cover. Oh, two cars were broken into last week, hold the front page!
It sounds good in theory, but it still doesn't work. The war on drugs is proof of that; I know people who have been busted themselves that don't stop breaking the law. They just become more careful.
People generally obey the law because of their own beliefs, not because "it's the law". It just so happens that most laws are in line with most peoples beliefs, especially WRT violence. When it comes to a smoking a joint or burning a copy of a CD to keep in the car, no one really cares.
Wise words. Here's the proof:
The Milgram Experiement, which proves that most people are capable of torturing and killing given the right conditions.
Stanford prison experiment where randomly choosen guards/prisoners degraded into some of the worst abuses of authority in any experiement. It had to be stopped early it got so bad.
Flash Video is Evil. Yes, that's with a capital "E". Computer designers had video overlays nailed back in Windows 98. Remember the "Buddy Holly" video? Are you all trying to tell me now that we are throwing all that efficiency away and replacing it with a flash object painting to a browser renderer, which then paints to the screen? I can't believe my 3.0GHz dual-core is dropping frames now.
You can't save it either, nor can you zoom in / resize. I'm running at 1600x1200, your 100x100 flash video is the size of a postage stamp. "Always on top overlay mode"? Forget it.
Adobe are KILLING flash. Embedded video will never be more than a novelty thanks to them, they seem to be eating up all of the video content providers.
Grandparent is talking shit. I've got a 10 meg cable connection here in the UK and it'll max out whenever the remoter server is up to it. I usually get bittorrent running over the 1000kb/s mark, pulling in 300 meg in around four minutes or so.
Customer support is as always understaffed. But I've never had a problem with them. Perhaps no more than 24 total hours of outages (that I know of) in five years service.
Job-wise, things are pretty good right now. Been better, but has been worse (.com bubble). London pays more but they'll get it back out of you (and more) with the cost of living there. Try Scotland, we're much more fun!