Maybe the fact that the Romans and the Mongols never tried to conquer Afghanistan was the result of an intelligent reticence. Even in the Byzantine era (who still called themselves "Romans") when Heraclius more or less replicated Alexander the Great's feat of conquering the Persian Empire, he promptly turned around and went home without touching Afghanistan.
But like an earlier comment mentioned, as ruthless and (in my opinion) needlessly violent as the USA's recent conduct as been, the Romans would not have tolerated an insurgency. I once heard the journalist Seymour Hersch (I probably misspelled his name) allege that in the Project for a New American Century circles such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Third Punic War is bandied about as lot as an example of what the USA should do (As in, after two huge wars against Carthage, one of them involving Hannibal running riot across Italy for ten years, the Romans had effectively cowed Carthage into little more than a vestige of what it once was. When there were rumblings of possibly a third major conflict, the Romans responded by simply killing everyone they wanted to, selling the few survivors into slavery, and famously sowing their land with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again.)
I'm reminded of a great quote by the grouchy Roman historian Tacitus - "The Romans make a desert and call it 'peace.'"
Both sports are called "football" because they are played ON FOOT, as opposed to being played on horseback such as the more patrician sports like polo. Manipulation of the ball with your foot has nothing to do with the name.
His parents had to go to someone else's house to see his performance in the Tour de France because they don't even own a TV.
Wow, so devoted to their lifestyle that they have to go all the way to their neighbor's house to breach it! I may get modded flamebait for this, but seriously, what does their objection to that technology even mean if it can be so easily disregarded. Oh, God doesn't mind or isn't looking if it's for a special occasion? How do they know? And if so, then why can't they just own a TV and call every day a special occasion?
I'd have more respect for them if they simply didn't own a television by choice and watched it at their neighbor's place, rather than out of some showy religious gesture.
Also check out Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's samurai adaptation of Macbeth, in Japanese, with a few minor story alterations, and naturally none of the original text.
And while a scottish guy who happens to be black would be fine in a production of Macbeth, it's a little naive to think that race could or should just disappear. In modern settings and contexts, in multiracial countries where race and nationality are distinct, then casting should be colorblind, but in productions set in certain historical settings or in racially homogenous societies, it wouldn't work.
I was mentioning it in the original post just based on my memory of when it originally hit the news, and responded with a TheRegister article that I got form a quick google search as I was heading out the door. I must have missed the retraction at the time and all that had hung in my memory was the initial controversy (which probably made sense to me given their somewhat controversial entry into the Mainland Chinese market.)
So, I'm sorry I cited that as an example, though I DO think it still stands as an example of Google Maps causing a political fracas, the fact that it was amended doesn't REALLY eliminate that point. Anyway, thanks for the correction.
One of the main things a map communicates is the relationship that the landscape of our world has with human beings, as such it will always be, on some level, an observation or a statement about people almost more than landscape. When you think about it, the first human imposed addition to any map, borders and walls, are just demarcations of division. Once you have these on a map it doesnt take long for the mere annotation or position of these to be the catalyst for violent conflict (look at the India / Pakistan border commission in the 40s, a line on a map drawn by a man who had never been there resulting in the deaths of millions, or the status of israel in western maps versus palestine in middle eastern maps)
It really shouldnt be surprising that google earth has caused some controversy, they already label Taiwan as a province of the People's Republic of China, so they have already made political statements with the program
"Either sell advertising to cover the cost and charge people who do watch it online through the website."
Unlike the BBC, who charge a TV License tax in lieu of advertising, RTE charge a TV License tax AND include liberal amounts of advertising. All this and they don't even produce anything that comes close to the amount or quality of original programming that the BBC produces.
Actually, even though the parent may be intended as an IRA joke, Fianna FaÃl, the current ruling party (whose failed policies have made Ireland perhaps nation worst hit by the global downturn, and who were responsible for buying all these voting machines in the first place), refer to themselves as "The Republican Party."
Though yes it refers to a different political and historical movement than the G.O.P. in the US, Fianna FaÃl have been ruling long enough with terrible enough policies and arrogance that I would consider the two analogous.
The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...
There are only so many plots: Man vs Man Man vs Nature Man vs Self
and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.
At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them.
This is not a question of getting older, it's been noticed as early as 2,000 years ago by Aristotle
Even though a study of story theory and realizing there are only 7 or so possible stories that exist, it would be a mistake to say that it diminishes the potential enjoyment of a story. In some ways, knowledge of it just makes a well executed story (Casablanca, Star Wars) that much more astonishing and enjoyable.
Personally, Fallout 3's appeal was not in the story, it was in the setting and world at large and getting the chance to exist and scavenge within it.
Well the incorrect part wasn't to stop playing, from the sound of it his son was owning him 1v1 for a half hour and was relentless and had no sense of good sportsmanship. There's no opportunity to have fun or improve in such an environment.
It would be like if your son was a college football linebacker, and you wanted to toss the pigskin with him in the backyard and all he did whenever you had the ball was hurl himself at you, knocking you to the ground, breaking a few ribs in the process, then running straight to what he figured was the endzone, then kept repeating this despite your pleas to go easy on you. His son was being rather immature even for a 17 year old.
BUT
That doesn't excuse a father calling his son names and declaring he'd never play with him again, all over a video game.
The correct response is, "Gee, that's all for me today I think..."
Then when he's in school, you fire up Xbox live, practice at the game for a while, learn the ropes and learn some trick in a nice competitive environment, and then challenge your son to a rematch now that the learning curve is overcome (if he played Halo 2 how long could that possibly take?)
So yeah, a bit of bad parenting there, but also an immature kid.
Exactly! I'm tired of all these dusty grammarians too ashamed of the fact that English is not a Romance language to admit that it can be free of some of the rigid systems that those languages are burdened with.
Another equally egregious offender is the insistence that a "Split Infinitive" is incorrect (IE 'To quickly run' as opposed to 'To run quickly') This is only a rule because it is actually utterly impossible to do in latin and romance languages because the infinitive is ONE WORD. In English it's two. No sense pretending it's one.
And all sci fi geeks should be united with me in this, otherwise no one would be able "To boldly go where no one has gone before"...
That's interesting (And of course I really should have thought of that), it's also counter to my own experience, which may not be a typical one. My parents declined to inform me how they voted, they figured the anonymity of voting was fairly important apparently, so I was left to make my own judgements, however fair or not I could make them.
For instance, younger - me decided to hope that Clinton would win the 1996 election, while much later I learned my dad had voted for Perot.
Doesn't that just say that those who guess the winner of the election most accurately are those who are the most detached from real issues, nuance, and anything truly complex and long term about politics and only see the surface-level soap opera that the Cable news presents?
Maybe I'm being too cruel to the children, when I was a kid I wouldn't have liked my opinions demeaned, but I also know that when I was a kid in American schools I was never given an appreciation for the suffering that military adventures like the Gulf War cause, among loads of other issues. All I saw were the ebbs and flows of emotional popularity as I could determine from the TV news.
The worrying part is that this statistic is not so much a credit to the political perception of children as it is the startling immaturity of the average american voter.
Indeed, I always find the vaunted Free Market economy to be quite heartless in practice and devoid of most empathy.
To take your example of wheelchair access, there was a survey done of Pubs in the capital of Ireland, Dublin. These were all in the city center and are VERY lucrative. HUGELY profitable.
The survey group went around to 20 of them in one night with one member of the group in a wheelchair. Zero of them were wheelchair accessible. The best they found was a place where the bouncers offered to carry the guy and his wheelchair up a set of stairs. The worst was a place that told them their elevator was temporarily broken until they had to admit that they did not actually have an elevator. On top of that, most of the places were found to be using their Handicapped Toilets as storage rooms, so after a wheelchair bound customer had a drink or two, and naturally needed to take a leak, he or she simply couldn't.
And these are some of the most profitable businesses in the country frequented by millions of people.
Slashdot Mirror
Hexagons! Just like real life!
Like the misattributed / made-up quotation allegedly said by Stalin went: "Death solves all problems — no man, no problem."
Maybe the fact that the Romans and the Mongols never tried to conquer Afghanistan was the result of an intelligent reticence. Even in the Byzantine era (who still called themselves "Romans") when Heraclius more or less replicated Alexander the Great's feat of conquering the Persian Empire, he promptly turned around and went home without touching Afghanistan.
But like an earlier comment mentioned, as ruthless and (in my opinion) needlessly violent as the USA's recent conduct as been, the Romans would not have tolerated an insurgency. I once heard the journalist Seymour Hersch (I probably misspelled his name) allege that in the Project for a New American Century circles such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Third Punic War is bandied about as lot as an example of what the USA should do (As in, after two huge wars against Carthage, one of them involving Hannibal running riot across Italy for ten years, the Romans had effectively cowed Carthage into little more than a vestige of what it once was. When there were rumblings of possibly a third major conflict, the Romans responded by simply killing everyone they wanted to, selling the few survivors into slavery, and famously sowing their land with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again.)
I'm reminded of a great quote by the grouchy Roman historian Tacitus - "The Romans make a desert and call it 'peace.'"
The fact that you can't tell means he passed the test.
I hate this argument.
Both sports are called "football" because they are played ON FOOT, as opposed to being played on horseback such as the more patrician sports like polo. Manipulation of the ball with your foot has nothing to do with the name.
And if you build your own flying combat suit (perhaps with a red and gold color scheme...) you can listen to it every time you take off!
As someone with an artificial aortic valve and artificial aorta, that is, as an actual cyborg, this Warwick guy is an embarrassment to cyborgs too.
Replying here in lieu of being able to reply all 4 replies,
Well, looks like I made a very stupid post without actually investigating what I was talking about. I was wrong. I apologize.
His parents had to go to someone else's house to see his performance in the Tour de France because they don't even own a TV.
Wow, so devoted to their lifestyle that they have to go all the way to their neighbor's house to breach it! I may get modded flamebait for this, but seriously, what does their objection to that technology even mean if it can be so easily disregarded. Oh, God doesn't mind or isn't looking if it's for a special occasion? How do they know? And if so, then why can't they just own a TV and call every day a special occasion?
I'd have more respect for them if they simply didn't own a television by choice and watched it at their neighbor's place, rather than out of some showy religious gesture.
Also check out Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's samurai adaptation of Macbeth, in Japanese, with a few minor story alterations, and naturally none of the original text.
And while a scottish guy who happens to be black would be fine in a production of Macbeth, it's a little naive to think that race could or should just disappear. In modern settings and contexts, in multiracial countries where race and nationality are distinct, then casting should be colorblind, but in productions set in certain historical settings or in racially homogenous societies, it wouldn't work.
Oops.
I was mentioning it in the original post just based on my memory of when it originally hit the news, and responded with a TheRegister article that I got form a quick google search as I was heading out the door. I must have missed the retraction at the time and all that had hung in my memory was the initial controversy (which probably made sense to me given their somewhat controversial entry into the Mainland Chinese market.)
So, I'm sorry I cited that as an example, though I DO think it still stands as an example of Google Maps causing a political fracas, the fact that it was amended doesn't REALLY eliminate that point. Anyway, thanks for the correction.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/04/taiwan_google_earth/
One of the main things a map communicates is the relationship that the landscape of our world has with human beings, as such it will always be, on some level, an observation or a statement about people almost more than landscape. When you think about it, the first human imposed addition to any map, borders and walls, are just demarcations of division. Once you have these on a map it doesnt take long for the mere annotation or position of these to be the catalyst for violent conflict (look at the India / Pakistan border commission in the 40s, a line on a map drawn by a man who had never been there resulting in the deaths of millions, or the status of israel in western maps versus palestine in middle eastern maps)
It really shouldnt be surprising that google earth has caused some controversy, they already label Taiwan as a province of the People's Republic of China, so they have already made political statements with the program
"Either sell advertising to cover the cost and charge people who do watch it online through the website."
Unlike the BBC, who charge a TV License tax in lieu of advertising, RTE charge a TV License tax AND include liberal amounts of advertising. All this and they don't even produce anything that comes close to the amount or quality of original programming that the BBC produces.
RTE have none of my sympathy or support.
Actually, even though the parent may be intended as an IRA joke, Fianna FaÃl, the current ruling party (whose failed policies have made Ireland perhaps nation worst hit by the global downturn, and who were responsible for buying all these voting machines in the first place), refer to themselves as "The Republican Party."
Though yes it refers to a different political and historical movement than the G.O.P. in the US, Fianna FaÃl have been ruling long enough with terrible enough policies and arrogance that I would consider the two analogous.
The older you get, the more everything starts looking the same...
There are only so many plots:
Man vs Man
Man vs Nature
Man vs Self
and the concept of Tragedy and Comedy.
At the very core of storytelling there are only so many stories, no matter how you decorate them.
This is not a question of getting older, it's been noticed as early as 2,000 years ago by Aristotle
Even though a study of story theory and realizing there are only 7 or so possible stories that exist, it would be a mistake to say that it diminishes the potential enjoyment of a story. In some ways, knowledge of it just makes a well executed story (Casablanca, Star Wars) that much more astonishing and enjoyable.
Personally, Fallout 3's appeal was not in the story, it was in the setting and world at large and getting the chance to exist and scavenge within it.
Yooouuu want some more? ...
Yooouuu want some more?
Well the incorrect part wasn't to stop playing, from the sound of it his son was owning him 1v1 for a half hour and was relentless and had no sense of good sportsmanship. There's no opportunity to have fun or improve in such an environment.
It would be like if your son was a college football linebacker, and you wanted to toss the pigskin with him in the backyard and all he did whenever you had the ball was hurl himself at you, knocking you to the ground, breaking a few ribs in the process, then running straight to what he figured was the endzone, then kept repeating this despite your pleas to go easy on you. His son was being rather immature even for a 17 year old.
BUT
That doesn't excuse a father calling his son names and declaring he'd never play with him again, all over a video game.
The correct response is, "Gee, that's all for me today I think..."
Then when he's in school, you fire up Xbox live, practice at the game for a while, learn the ropes and learn some trick in a nice competitive environment, and then challenge your son to a rematch now that the learning curve is overcome (if he played Halo 2 how long could that possibly take?)
So yeah, a bit of bad parenting there, but also an immature kid.
Exactly! I'm tired of all these dusty grammarians too ashamed of the fact that English is not a Romance language to admit that it can be free of some of the rigid systems that those languages are burdened with.
Another equally egregious offender is the insistence that a "Split Infinitive" is incorrect (IE 'To quickly run' as opposed to 'To run quickly') This is only a rule because it is actually utterly impossible to do in latin and romance languages because the infinitive is ONE WORD. In English it's two. No sense pretending it's one.
And all sci fi geeks should be united with me in this, otherwise no one would be able "To boldly go where no one has gone before"...
Hey, sometimes random number plates can be pretty unambiguous
http://www.manbottle.com/picture_library/ass_orgy_license_plate
That's interesting (And of course I really should have thought of that), it's also counter to my own experience, which may not be a typical one. My parents declined to inform me how they voted, they figured the anonymity of voting was fairly important apparently, so I was left to make my own judgements, however fair or not I could make them.
For instance, younger - me decided to hope that Clinton would win the 1996 election, while much later I learned my dad had voted for Perot.
Doesn't that just say that those who guess the winner of the election most accurately are those who are the most detached from real issues, nuance, and anything truly complex and long term about politics and only see the surface-level soap opera that the Cable news presents?
Maybe I'm being too cruel to the children, when I was a kid I wouldn't have liked my opinions demeaned, but I also know that when I was a kid in American schools I was never given an appreciation for the suffering that military adventures like the Gulf War cause, among loads of other issues. All I saw were the ebbs and flows of emotional popularity as I could determine from the TV news.
The worrying part is that this statistic is not so much a credit to the political perception of children as it is the startling immaturity of the average american voter.
I thought Massachusetts was the Commonwealth?
Indeed, I always find the vaunted Free Market economy to be quite heartless in practice and devoid of most empathy.
To take your example of wheelchair access, there was a survey done of Pubs in the capital of Ireland, Dublin. These were all in the city center and are VERY lucrative. HUGELY profitable.
The survey group went around to 20 of them in one night with one member of the group in a wheelchair. Zero of them were wheelchair accessible. The best they found was a place where the bouncers offered to carry the guy and his wheelchair up a set of stairs. The worst was a place that told them their elevator was temporarily broken until they had to admit that they did not actually have an elevator. On top of that, most of the places were found to be using their Handicapped Toilets as storage rooms, so after a wheelchair bound customer had a drink or two, and naturally needed to take a leak, he or she simply couldn't.
And these are some of the most profitable businesses in the country frequented by millions of people.
...But what does God need with a download service?