Most retail operations (with certain exceptions, such as software downloads) don't offer worldwide shipping. By far the majority ship only to their own country.
Well, my experience differs. I've been ordering things from all over for about 4-5 years, and I rarely find someone that won't ship to me. You might need to ask, but that's not going work if they are blocking your subnet entirely.;-)
Every big player, e.g. Amazon, has done this since day one. I'd say at least half of the smaller ones do as well.
How many multinational companies are there in the world versus the number of small businesses or national companies? I'd guess the number was quite small. If I sell left-handed widgets to the greater Topeka, KS area, why on earth would I ever want people from China, Brazil, or even Canada to send me e-mail?
Excuse me? If you sell on the internet, you'd be missing out not to sell globally. It's no extra effort, just sign up with an international freight company like Fed Ex, then charge accordingly. It's not often you come across a site that's not willing to ship pretty much anywhere.
In the US, many of these folks have found that the benefits of receiving email from, or allowing web traffic to, China are minimal and thus they drop the routes.
Hmm. Makes me wonder how many sites "blocked" at The Great Firewall Of China are actually blocked at the source? After all, it's far easier on the network hardware to drop the subnet at the firewall than to do it on the mail server.
I see no connection between whatsoever between race and IP firewalling. Most people you talk to would agree.
Did you READ my post. I said it was the US attitude to China that was racist, and that you can't get away from it in any thread mentioning China. Don't add "blind" or "dyslexic" to that list of popular American failings as well please...;-)
f mom can call, why did she send an email? When her son didn't reply, why not call then?
I was (trying to) be funny. Funny comments don't always make logical sense.
Your logic makes no sense. Your racism (your concern about racism barely masks it) is showing.
Because I dislike the way that the vast majority of Americans treat China, that makes me racist? How'dya figure? I don't like the way you treat Arabs either, does that make me Hitler?
If you are in any doubt of the usual anti-Chinese sentiment with any US citizen, grep/. for topics with "china" in the blurb, and read. It's sickening.
But it's your funeral. China is going to be the biggest mover in the first quarter of this century. I see them as a potential friend in this world. Where do you stand?
ergo there's no reason for ANY connection from china to pass our firewall.
How does that make anybody racist?
I never said it was, just not a good solution. I did say there will be predicable racist anti-everyone-who-is-not-white anglo-saxon-prodestant ramblings on this thread because it's about China.
And sadly, I'm proven right. Take a look around...
I get no mail of any value from China. I don't know anybody there. So I don't feel bad about automatically trashing all mail that originates in Chinese netblocks.
What if you had a friend traveling over there, that had to get in touch with you? Or someones company switches hosting to a.cn company. Or a mail gets relayed through a.cn mail server as the regular one is down for maintainence?
I guess you'll never know. Oh, your mom called; you didn't reply to her mail about the free first-class tickets she was going to send you to visit her; so you missed out.
I simply ban China and most other Asian countries at my router.
--
Ignorance is not bliss, it's annoying.
So, what's up with your sig then? Change your mind?
Honestly, I can't believe people even consider this approach. There are over 200 countries in the world, and I only know folk about 15-20 of them. Should I block the rest? Might suit for a home network, but I can't think of a multinational company that would block one of the largest population masses in the world.
Besides, most span I get is from the US, in English, selling US products, in US currency, to US people. I'd say the problem was at your end.
Isn't there some way we can identify the entire Chinese IP block and just shut them down?
Funny, most of my spam comes from THE U S of A.
Should WE just block YOUR subnets? No. Don't so fucking stupid.
Yay, another thread involving China full of racist American scum*. Jeez, get with the program guys, it's the Arabs you are supposed to be hating, commies are just sooo 60's & 70's. How are your leaders supposed to make you get behind their wars if you are hating the wrong enemy. It's Eurasia fools, not Eastasia!!!
(* yes, I am aware of the irony in saying that a whole nation of people is racist)
Because the landline phone system in many (probably most) countries absolutely SUCKS
I can't speak for anywhere else, but Europe has a reliable and cheap phone system. We've never had free local calls as a whole really though. This held back the internet some, as it was a while before we got flat-rate internet.
It's funny how these little ideosyncries shape the way things develop...
Ironically, most of us get "free" minutes as a part of the subscription, so if anything mobiles are cheaper.
First, the US has built a wired telecommunications infrastructure, and we've been doing it for so long that the wireless infrastructure is more of a "like to have" than a "need to have".
How is any other nation different, except possibly "new world" ones that are emerging? Japan and Europe have had telephones for just as long as the US. Jeez, there are still morse-code telegraph lines hooking up England to the US east coast! You aren't unique in that way at all.
Second, we have so much more land area and spread-out population that implementing anything requiring wide-scale infrastructure is far more difficult to begin with.
That is kinda contradictory. In many countries, the spread out population is what is driving wireless; it's easier than running wires everywhere.
What really cripled mobile phones in the US:
Proprietry standard, differing from the rest of the world. I got a GSM phone in '94, took it around the world in '96, including several out-of-the-way/backwards places that required long visa applications and interviews. The US was the only place it didn't work! Worked fine when I was standing on the Great Wall of China...
Crap phones, as a direct result of the previous issue. Snowball effect; no one wants to make them as the market is poor.
Free landline local calls. Tough competition!
Pay to receive messages (making the whole system socially unacceptable). Here, text sender pays and I'd say most folk text more than they call. Jeez, ringtone sales alone now outstrip music singles sales! You make more money of a 2-man-hour midi type-0 file than you can out of a CD release!
And things are only going to get worse in the US with patent system madness. Historians are going look back at these times and wonder how no one noticed the clear damage they were doing for inovation, and how they contributed to the economic crash of the US.
You'd be surprised how much purchasing power a child can have: "Mommy, I want it!"
Hmm, maybe. But 18-30 year olds working part-time/full-time jobs living at home have a lot more!
Besides, how was Wipeout more grown-up than F-Zero X?
Popular trance music, not only that, good tracks that were well suited for the genre:-) The game was very popular at post-clubbing gatherings and parties. Drunk/wasted people do not want to play games that look as though they belong on The Cartoon Network!;-)
The N64 had a Wipeout game. A very technically impressive version given the limitations of the cart.
Yeah, but it didn't have the Chemical Brothers or Leftfield on the soundtrack. The PSX was huge with the dance generation. This was a large part of it's "coolness".
I agree that the Playstation's popularity is largely due to easily available pirate game
Perhaps in it's latter years, but not in the early days. Firstly, the chips were very expensive and rare, I didn't know anybody with one back in the day. CD burners were expensive and rare, maybe if you worked in an IT company you'd have access to one. Copied games didn't really come along til a bit later, and even then the market price (ironic term) was around half of the retail price. Blank CDs were expensive at first! At some point it all went nuts tho and everyone and his dog got "chiped".
I remember groups of 4-5 folks around 18 years old, clubbing together to raise £100 + rental to get a PSX on hire from Blockbuster. This was when the PSX had just launched and it retailed for over £300. You just wouldn't get that with Nintendo. It just didn't have that "cool" factor that some of the PSX titles had.
Of course, we must also realize that the popularity of the PS1 compared to the N64 was probably due to this 'feature'...
And the fact that N64 games were $10-$20 more expensive on average, and the N64 featured almost *no* RPGs from start to finish...That was just coincidence, eh?
Face it - the PS1 had a rough start, sure, but it was the games that sold the system
Sort-of. What really sold the PS1 was the grown-up titles it had. Games like wipeout, ridge racer, tomb raider etc have a bigger market than cute cartoon characters. Not only is it a bigger market, it's a market that has more purchacing power as the 16-30 age group has a lot more money to spend than a young kid.
Coincidently, the BBC ran a story on this the other day, backing up what I'd already believed.
From the story:
According to John Houlihan, editor of Computerandvideogames.com magazine, PlayStation's contribution to how the culture of gaming came at a crucial time and its influence since has remained powerful.
"The market was growing but games back in those days were regarded as preserve of kids," he says.
Sony wanted to bring gaming into mass popular culture, not just geek culture, with the aim of making the games console the main multimedia entertainment system in homes.
"It offered a 'cool cache' to gaming. It suddenly went from being sad geeks allegedly spending all their time in the bedroom and bought it into the living room much more," says Mr Houlihan.
Back OT, Microsoft know this as well and the XBox titles are similar. I'd say PC games have been mostly this way all along.
When you have states like Kanses, Georgia, etc, in this country saying they should be taught as equally likely theories in science classes... we are doomed.
Have you seen this yet?;-) It's a new creationist museum of "learning", clearly aimed at kids. Get 'em young has always been the aim of any religion.
Does the camera know something that you don't about how to crop the thumbnail? What's the advantage?
Speed. If the image contains a lot of data, that data must be copied off the device to create the thumbnail. So, in order to preview the image in order to decide if you are going to upload it; you first have to upload it anyway.;-)
It could not be beyond the wit of engineering to produce a roulette wheel whose outcome, if not random, had such a small deviation from randomness that it would take a very long time to detect it.
It's been done, against the house! I remember reading about an engineer that used the non-random aspect of the real-world imperfect table to locate a table within the casino that had a bias. He used this and may have broken the bank.
Jeez, just googled for it, found it! From this page:
In the late nineteenth century, English engineer William Jaggers took 1.5 million francs from the Grand Casino in Monte Carlo. He had hired six clerks to record numbers from the roulette wheels for one month to find that they weren't true random number generators. He played the biased numbers for a long stretch and cashed big-time! If he could do it, so can others. This is very very tough, needing a lot of casino experience. Casinos nowadays take measures against this.
Consider what's been going on simultaneously in Sudan and nobody really cares. You know why? Because those Sudanese people are poor and Sudan doesn't have enough of an economy to make a rescue mission economically feasible. If you cornered the member nations of the UN, you'd discover that they really only want to send troops to "keep the peace" in nations that can cover the bill in the years to come.
True. Anyone who claims Iraq was done because it was "the right thing to do" or it was for "freedom" really doesn't understand the motives. Profit.
Oh, and 6,000 die of Aids every day in Africa. Nuff said.
Man you totally had me considering what you were saying until you brought up the pentagon attack.
Damn, in hindsight, I'd figured that would happen. A long post, wasted. Lets drop the issue, I've already seen the snopes take on it (urban legends have always interested me, I'm a regular there). Most of the "spot the boeing" stuff is child-like physics, but conspiracy nut-jobs asside, there is a lot of real evidence.
Also a friend of mine told me about human shield tactics that he has used, generally involving getting the gunman to leave the area to save the civilian. If you watch some news footage, there was some of this captured on film as well. I cant remember which city they were attacking in, but US troops were advancing on a bridge and the insurgents used human shields to hold thier positions.
Missed that one myself. Were they volintary shields? If so, it doesn't count and again our history is riddled with actions like that. Tianamen Square for example, one of the most memorable images in recent history? Lot's in WW2 as well, unarmed civilians taking risks to allow allies to escape.
But if they were there against their will, then clearly they are scum.
Maybe we are a young country who "doesnt get it", but after 9/11 we cant let a gathering threat gather.
Agreed, but the threat is a direct concequence on your forgeign policy. Bush is flat-out lying every time he says "they hate freedom". No, they hate what the US has done. What is a serious problem is that Iraq only added to that hatred, which was a predicatable outcome. Either Bush is an idiot and genuinely didn't realise this and wanted security; or he is a callous person who stops at nothing to acheive his goals (be it personal wealth, or ensuring that the US oil supply doesn't run out).
We felt, after years of sanctions, that Iraq couldnt be given the same opportunity to strike again. Maybe sanctions would have worked if it wasnt for the oil for food program. He got plenty of money and international support.
I don't buy that logic. If self-security were the case, Iraq would not have been one of the first targets. Unless it is intended as a foothold in the region from which to push outwards. Again I say that the Iraq war has resulted in the exact opposite of improving the security of the US.
Besides, 9/11 only killed 3000 or so people. I know I'm touching a sore-spot here, but it's really not all that big a deal. The civilian death toll in Iraq is already five times that number. Is it justified? How are the Iraqi lifes worth less than US ones? It's this hypocracy that drives me to speak out about these things. I don't know what it was, but someone managed to get it into my head at a relatively young age that a great way to think about things was to put yourself in someone elses shoes.
That being said, i think the reason the US gets alot of the credit for ww2 is that we crossed the pond to fight... we were never fighting on our own soil.
Ya, very much so. But the same applied to many other countries, but not to the same extent.
Scary times now though, with Chinese nuclear subs, political issues in Ukraine, fight over the Koreas and Taiwan.
Why should Chinese nuclear subs be scary though? It's this aspect of the US psyche that leads to many of the issues. You have subs, you have nukes, you have bio-weapons. Christ, you invented most of them, and you are the only nation to have used them. Why should I be more afraid of China than you? OK, so China is repressive, but I can see them growing leaps and bounds. And they don't have a recent history of impearialism, or trying to enforce things onto others. (Tibet; well I come from the UK and we still have many provinces like that, and our history is full of similar things). The biggest problem they will have is with corruption; a nation moving towards capitalism will likely suffer the same greed problems as the rest of us. But I the way I see it, most countries in the world have more to fear from the US than China.
Cheers for the sane chat by the way. We obviously disagree on a lot, but we've kept it adult, and this being/., I repect that a lot!!:-)
So does that mean I can re-encode my dvds to DiVX with surround sound? Or does that already do it now and I don't know it?
You've been able to do this for years. An AVI file is simply a container. It can hold any video codec you want, which is identified by a four-character identifier. Likewise for audio. If you are ripping, you can simply take the AC3 sound channel you want and throw it in there. You need to get the codec to play it, but that's a no-brainer.
OGG video, OGM, is the same idea. Both formats can also contain multiple audio tracks. Multiple video streams may also be possible, I'm not sure on that.
We are not a master race, and never claimed to be. I do remember a certain EU Member in recent history asserting they were.
That's what I was hinting towards. The Germans viewed themselves as having the best political system etc. The general population had very little idea what was going on in their name. IMHO this is similar to what is happening in America. A lifetime of pro-us propaganda makes it hard for most people to accept what their country is up to abroad. The US is entirely different in how this came about though; the Nazi's used direct propaganda produced by the government. In the US, the propaganda is self-made by the people, in the form of Hollywood, TV, the school system etc. Even news reports are self-gratifying, for example if you were to watch US coverage of an international operation, you'd only see US troops, US food aid etc. A great example is the teaching of WW2 history; the cold-war pretty much blew away any chance of recognition of the Russia's pivital role in the conflict. It pains me every time is chat to someone from the US who is under the impression that WW2 was their victory. This is likely because I come from the UK, a country who's involvement is also understated, but not to the same extent. Movies like U-571 are insulting to everyone else.
Sure, every nation has a biased view of history, but the US is well renowned elsewhere for being particularly bad about this. As an outsider, it's very obvious. Tell you what, as an/.'er, there is a fair chance you watch the odd bit of trek. Watch the series one intro to Enterprise and think about what I've been saying. It's exactly the kind of thing I am talking about.
They ARE terrorists. They attack with roadside bombs, suicide bombs, decapitations and the like.
I disagree, mostly. Yes, there are these things going on, but they are the minority. They are also largely criminal; motivated by randsoms.
Roadside bombs are no different from landmines if you ask me. The only difference are the resources available to the manufacturers.
Suicide bombs, well, I do wonder nowadays if people remember the meaning of Kamikaze nowadays. If a suicide bomber attacks a militry target, then it cannot be considered terrorism. I'd say it was more frustration and desperation. I can't recall any instances of a true suicide bomb attacking civilians in Iraq. There's been many in Israel of course, but not Iraq.
The line is crossed when they use thier own civilians as human shields, hide in mosques and claim religious amnesty while the mass in force, and blow up iraqi police officers who just want to have a job and feed thier family.
Well, taking your points here in order. Yes, human shields bad, but I've not heard of that in Iraq. Hiding in mosques; our shared history is full of people taking refuge on holy ground. The Iraqi police officers; well technically they could be considered the enemy as it is the US that is controlling and recruiting them. In the insurgents minds they are traitors, and I'm sure I don't have to remind you how we treat our traitors. Sure, it could be considered "just a job", if it wasn't in the middle of a warzone. I really feel for the Iraqis who just want to get on with their life, but I don't see a clean way out of this problem.
Even if I was fighting a foriegn army on our soil, I would not use the terrorist tactics demonstrated in Iraq.
They are a minority of the insurgents. People are dying every day over there in regular warfare. And consider this; can you imagine every one of your own countrymen having the same restraint as you with respect to an invasion? There were many despicable acts carried out on middle-eastern looking people in the US following 9/11, so I don't see why similar things wouldn't happen should a full scale invasion of the US ever take place. Especially if they were black/islamic.
Remember also that many of those fighting in Iraq have came to Iraq in response to the invasion. The US leadership ca
We changed the battlefield, but we didnt target civilians and still dont. That is the supreme difference. No warfare is moral that specifically targets civilians.
WW2, Dresden, entire civilian population deliberately firebombed, complete carpet bombing of the entire city. If you don't know what you are talking about, shut up.
Honestly, when will the yanks drop this master-race, "we can do no wrong" attitude. What, are you genetically different from the rest of us?
and nuking a whole city just to kill a handful of terrorists is not right. Now, do you think the terrorists would think twice about using a nuke on a US city?
They aren't terrorists!! They are resistance-fighters. You can't change what they are just because the retoric suits your leaders agendas. You invaded their country, get with the program.
Sniping at uniformed leadership is not a terrorist action, it is a tactic.
I don't agree with this view, but I've heard arguments that 9-11 can be justified under similar ideas. US foreign policy is dictated by commercialism, and that is represented by the economic powerhouse of New York.
Thing is, American policy and politics is fluid, it's been adapting to modern times as it has to if its leaders want their parties to stay in power. It's a self-correcting system.
Bollocks, are you suggesting that recent (20-30 years) political changes in the US can be called "correcting"? The western worlds political systems have been destroyed by the way politicians (ab)use the media. Arguing about flip-flopping and draft-dodging when you should be arguing POLICY.
And then there are the folks who have voted the same way for the whole of their lives, or those who base their vote on the religion of the candidate. Argh, they should not be allowed to vote!! It is their fault that the "swing" voters are the ones who actually control the result.
It was suggested in the movie "Wag the Dog" that TV destroyed the electoral process. I wholeheartedly agree.
When we elect ineffective presidents who wear their religion on their sleeve, as we did in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, they're not around for a second term...
Eh? Were you sleeping in Nov, or did I miss the sarcasm?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
On most chipped boxes you can get the same effect by pressing both triggers and the white & black button already! ;-)
Well, my experience differs. I've been ordering things from all over for about 4-5 years, and I rarely find someone that won't ship to me. You might need to ask, but that's not going work if they are blocking your subnet entirely. ;-)
Every big player, e.g. Amazon, has done this since day one. I'd say at least half of the smaller ones do as well.
Excuse me? If you sell on the internet, you'd be missing out not to sell globally. It's no extra effort, just sign up with an international freight company like Fed Ex, then charge accordingly. It's not often you come across a site that's not willing to ship pretty much anywhere.
Hmm. Makes me wonder how many sites "blocked" at The Great Firewall Of China are actually blocked at the source? After all, it's far easier on the network hardware to drop the subnet at the firewall than to do it on the mail server.
Did you READ my post. I said it was the US attitude to China that was racist, and that you can't get away from it in any thread mentioning China. Don't add "blind" or "dyslexic" to that list of popular American failings as well please... ;-)
I was (trying to) be funny. Funny comments don't always make logical sense.
Your logic makes no sense. Your racism (your concern about racism barely masks it) is showing.
Because I dislike the way that the vast majority of Americans treat China, that makes me racist? How'dya figure? I don't like the way you treat Arabs either, does that make me Hitler?
If you are in any doubt of the usual anti-Chinese sentiment with any US citizen, grep /. for topics with "china" in the blurb, and read. It's sickening.
But it's your funeral. China is going to be the biggest mover in the first quarter of this century. I see them as a potential friend in this world. Where do you stand?
How does that make anybody racist?
I never said it was, just not a good solution. I did say there will be predicable racist anti-everyone-who-is-not-white anglo-saxon-prodestant ramblings on this thread because it's about China.
And sadly, I'm proven right. Take a look around...
What if you had a friend traveling over there, that had to get in touch with you? Or someones company switches hosting to a .cn company. Or a mail gets relayed through a .cn mail server as the regular one is down for maintainence?
I guess you'll never know. Oh, your mom called; you didn't reply to her mail about the free first-class tickets she was going to send you to visit her; so you missed out.
--
Ignorance is not bliss, it's annoying.
So, what's up with your sig then? Change your mind?
Honestly, I can't believe people even consider this approach. There are over 200 countries in the world, and I only know folk about 15-20 of them. Should I block the rest? Might suit for a home network, but I can't think of a multinational company that would block one of the largest population masses in the world.
Besides, most span I get is from the US, in English, selling US products, in US currency, to US people. I'd say the problem was at your end.
Funny, most of my spam comes from THE U S of A.
Should WE just block YOUR subnets? No. Don't so fucking stupid.
Yay, another thread involving China full of racist American scum*. Jeez, get with the program guys, it's the Arabs you are supposed to be hating, commies are just sooo 60's & 70's. How are your leaders supposed to make you get behind their wars if you are hating the wrong enemy. It's Eurasia fools, not Eastasia!!!
(* yes, I am aware of the irony in saying that a whole nation of people is racist)
I can't speak for anywhere else, but Europe has a reliable and cheap phone system. We've never had free local calls as a whole really though. This held back the internet some, as it was a while before we got flat-rate internet.
It's funny how these little ideosyncries shape the way things develop...
Ironically, most of us get "free" minutes as a part of the subscription, so if anything mobiles are cheaper.
How is any other nation different, except possibly "new world" ones that are emerging? Japan and Europe have had telephones for just as long as the US. Jeez, there are still morse-code telegraph lines hooking up England to the US east coast! You aren't unique in that way at all.
Second, we have so much more land area and spread-out population that implementing anything requiring wide-scale infrastructure is far more difficult to begin with.
That is kinda contradictory. In many countries, the spread out population is what is driving wireless; it's easier than running wires everywhere.
What really cripled mobile phones in the US:
And things are only going to get worse in the US with patent system madness. Historians are going look back at these times and wonder how no one noticed the clear damage they were doing for inovation, and how they contributed to the economic crash of the US.
Hmm, maybe. But 18-30 year olds working part-time/full-time jobs living at home have a lot more!
Besides, how was Wipeout more grown-up than F-Zero X?
Popular trance music, not only that, good tracks that were well suited for the genre :-) The game was very popular at post-clubbing gatherings and parties. Drunk/wasted people do not want to play games that look as though they belong on The Cartoon Network! ;-)
Yeah, but it didn't have the Chemical Brothers or Leftfield on the soundtrack. The PSX was huge with the dance generation. This was a large part of it's "coolness".
I agree that the Playstation's popularity is largely due to easily available pirate game
Perhaps in it's latter years, but not in the early days. Firstly, the chips were very expensive and rare, I didn't know anybody with one back in the day. CD burners were expensive and rare, maybe if you worked in an IT company you'd have access to one. Copied games didn't really come along til a bit later, and even then the market price (ironic term) was around half of the retail price. Blank CDs were expensive at first! At some point it all went nuts tho and everyone and his dog got "chiped".
I remember groups of 4-5 folks around 18 years old, clubbing together to raise £100 + rental to get a PSX on hire from Blockbuster. This was when the PSX had just launched and it retailed for over £300. You just wouldn't get that with Nintendo. It just didn't have that "cool" factor that some of the PSX titles had.
Sort-of. What really sold the PS1 was the grown-up titles it had. Games like wipeout, ridge racer, tomb raider etc have a bigger market than cute cartoon characters. Not only is it a bigger market, it's a market that has more purchacing power as the 16-30 age group has a lot more money to spend than a young kid.
Coincidently, the BBC ran a story on this the other day, backing up what I'd already believed.
From the story:
Back OT, Microsoft know this as well and the XBox titles are similar. I'd say PC games have been mostly this way all along.
When you have states like Kanses, Georgia, etc, in this country saying they should be taught as equally likely theories in science classes... we are doomed.
Have you seen this yet? ;-) It's a new creationist museum of "learning", clearly aimed at kids. Get 'em young has always been the aim of any religion.
Speed. If the image contains a lot of data, that data must be copied off the device to create the thumbnail. So, in order to preview the image in order to decide if you are going to upload it; you first have to upload it anyway. ;-)
It's been done, against the house! I remember reading about an engineer that used the non-random aspect of the real-world imperfect table to locate a table within the casino that had a bias. He used this and may have broken the bank.
Jeez, just googled for it, found it! From this page:
True. Anyone who claims Iraq was done because it was "the right thing to do" or it was for "freedom" really doesn't understand the motives. Profit.
Oh, and 6,000 die of Aids every day in Africa. Nuff said.
Damn, in hindsight, I'd figured that would happen. A long post, wasted. Lets drop the issue, I've already seen the snopes take on it (urban legends have always interested me, I'm a regular there). Most of the "spot the boeing" stuff is child-like physics, but conspiracy nut-jobs asside, there is a lot of real evidence.
Also a friend of mine told me about human shield tactics that he has used, generally involving getting the gunman to leave the area to save the civilian. If you watch some news footage, there was some of this captured on film as well. I cant remember which city they were attacking in, but US troops were advancing on a bridge and the insurgents used human shields to hold thier positions.
Missed that one myself. Were they volintary shields? If so, it doesn't count and again our history is riddled with actions like that. Tianamen Square for example, one of the most memorable images in recent history? Lot's in WW2 as well, unarmed civilians taking risks to allow allies to escape.
But if they were there against their will, then clearly they are scum.
Maybe we are a young country who "doesnt get it", but after 9/11 we cant let a gathering threat gather.
Agreed, but the threat is a direct concequence on your forgeign policy. Bush is flat-out lying every time he says "they hate freedom". No, they hate what the US has done. What is a serious problem is that Iraq only added to that hatred, which was a predicatable outcome. Either Bush is an idiot and genuinely didn't realise this and wanted security; or he is a callous person who stops at nothing to acheive his goals (be it personal wealth, or ensuring that the US oil supply doesn't run out).
We felt, after years of sanctions, that Iraq couldnt be given the same opportunity to strike again. Maybe sanctions would have worked if it wasnt for the oil for food program. He got plenty of money and international support.
I don't buy that logic. If self-security were the case, Iraq would not have been one of the first targets. Unless it is intended as a foothold in the region from which to push outwards. Again I say that the Iraq war has resulted in the exact opposite of improving the security of the US.
Besides, 9/11 only killed 3000 or so people. I know I'm touching a sore-spot here, but it's really not all that big a deal. The civilian death toll in Iraq is already five times that number. Is it justified? How are the Iraqi lifes worth less than US ones? It's this hypocracy that drives me to speak out about these things. I don't know what it was, but someone managed to get it into my head at a relatively young age that a great way to think about things was to put yourself in someone elses shoes.
That being said, i think the reason the US gets alot of the credit for ww2 is that we crossed the pond to fight... we were never fighting on our own soil.
Ya, very much so. But the same applied to many other countries, but not to the same extent.
Scary times now though, with Chinese nuclear subs, political issues in Ukraine, fight over the Koreas and Taiwan.
Why should Chinese nuclear subs be scary though? It's this aspect of the US psyche that leads to many of the issues. You have subs, you have nukes, you have bio-weapons. Christ, you invented most of them, and you are the only nation to have used them. Why should I be more afraid of China than you? OK, so China is repressive, but I can see them growing leaps and bounds. And they don't have a recent history of impearialism, or trying to enforce things onto others. (Tibet; well I come from the UK and we still have many provinces like that, and our history is full of similar things). The biggest problem they will have is with corruption; a nation moving towards capitalism will likely suffer the same greed problems as the rest of us. But I the way I see it, most countries in the world have more to fear from the US than China.
Cheers for the sane chat by the way. We obviously disagree on a lot, but we've kept it adult, and this being /., I repect that a lot!! :-)
You've been able to do this for years. An AVI file is simply a container. It can hold any video codec you want, which is identified by a four-character identifier. Likewise for audio. If you are ripping, you can simply take the AC3 sound channel you want and throw it in there. You need to get the codec to play it, but that's a no-brainer.
OGG video, OGM, is the same idea. Both formats can also contain multiple audio tracks. Multiple video streams may also be possible, I'm not sure on that.
Who cares? Perhaps hosting companies will get the message that spam is not welcome and they shouldn't take customers that do it. ;-)
That's what I was hinting towards. The Germans viewed themselves as having the best political system etc. The general population had very little idea what was going on in their name. IMHO this is similar to what is happening in America. A lifetime of pro-us propaganda makes it hard for most people to accept what their country is up to abroad. The US is entirely different in how this came about though; the Nazi's used direct propaganda produced by the government. In the US, the propaganda is self-made by the people, in the form of Hollywood, TV, the school system etc. Even news reports are self-gratifying, for example if you were to watch US coverage of an international operation, you'd only see US troops, US food aid etc. A great example is the teaching of WW2 history; the cold-war pretty much blew away any chance of recognition of the Russia's pivital role in the conflict. It pains me every time is chat to someone from the US who is under the impression that WW2 was their victory. This is likely because I come from the UK, a country who's involvement is also understated, but not to the same extent. Movies like U-571 are insulting to everyone else.
Sure, every nation has a biased view of history, but the US is well renowned elsewhere for being particularly bad about this. As an outsider, it's very obvious. Tell you what, as an /.'er, there is a fair chance you watch the odd bit of trek. Watch the series one intro to Enterprise and think about what I've been saying. It's exactly the kind of thing I am talking about.
They ARE terrorists. They attack with roadside bombs, suicide bombs, decapitations and the like.
I disagree, mostly. Yes, there are these things going on, but they are the minority. They are also largely criminal; motivated by randsoms.
Roadside bombs are no different from landmines if you ask me. The only difference are the resources available to the manufacturers.
Suicide bombs, well, I do wonder nowadays if people remember the meaning of Kamikaze nowadays. If a suicide bomber attacks a militry target, then it cannot be considered terrorism. I'd say it was more frustration and desperation. I can't recall any instances of a true suicide bomb attacking civilians in Iraq. There's been many in Israel of course, but not Iraq.
The line is crossed when they use thier own civilians as human shields, hide in mosques and claim religious amnesty while the mass in force, and blow up iraqi police officers who just want to have a job and feed thier family.
Well, taking your points here in order. Yes, human shields bad, but I've not heard of that in Iraq. Hiding in mosques; our shared history is full of people taking refuge on holy ground. The Iraqi police officers; well technically they could be considered the enemy as it is the US that is controlling and recruiting them. In the insurgents minds they are traitors, and I'm sure I don't have to remind you how we treat our traitors. Sure, it could be considered "just a job", if it wasn't in the middle of a warzone. I really feel for the Iraqis who just want to get on with their life, but I don't see a clean way out of this problem.
Even if I was fighting a foriegn army on our soil, I would not use the terrorist tactics demonstrated in Iraq.
They are a minority of the insurgents. People are dying every day over there in regular warfare. And consider this; can you imagine every one of your own countrymen having the same restraint as you with respect to an invasion? There were many despicable acts carried out on middle-eastern looking people in the US following 9/11, so I don't see why similar things wouldn't happen should a full scale invasion of the US ever take place. Especially if they were black/islamic.
Remember also that many of those fighting in Iraq have came to Iraq in response to the invasion. The US leadership ca
WW2, Dresden, entire civilian population deliberately firebombed, complete carpet bombing of the entire city. If you don't know what you are talking about, shut up.
Honestly, when will the yanks drop this master-race, "we can do no wrong" attitude. What, are you genetically different from the rest of us?
and nuking a whole city just to kill a handful of terrorists is not right. Now, do you think the terrorists would think twice about using a nuke on a US city?
They aren't terrorists!! They are resistance-fighters. You can't change what they are just because the retoric suits your leaders agendas. You invaded their country, get with the program.
Sniping at uniformed leadership is not a terrorist action, it is a tactic.
I don't agree with this view, but I've heard arguments that 9-11 can be justified under similar ideas. US foreign policy is dictated by commercialism, and that is represented by the economic powerhouse of New York.
Bollocks, are you suggesting that recent (20-30 years) political changes in the US can be called "correcting"? The western worlds political systems have been destroyed by the way politicians (ab)use the media. Arguing about flip-flopping and draft-dodging when you should be arguing POLICY.
And then there are the folks who have voted the same way for the whole of their lives, or those who base their vote on the religion of the candidate. Argh, they should not be allowed to vote!! It is their fault that the "swing" voters are the ones who actually control the result.
It was suggested in the movie "Wag the Dog" that TV destroyed the electoral process. I wholeheartedly agree.
When we elect ineffective presidents who wear their religion on their sleeve, as we did in 1976 with Jimmy Carter, they're not around for a second term...
Eh? Were you sleeping in Nov, or did I miss the sarcasm? ;-)