It's much harder for an average person to use a knife to defend themselves against another person wielding a knife - it's much easier for an untrained person to use a gun to defend themselves.
You just argued the exact opposite of what I would have.
If the citizenry were all required to take basic firearms training, know how to handle them, and were responsible and knew the consequences about its use, then I'm all for it. But the last thing we want is *untrained* people defending themselves with guns, especially people who take so little responsibility for things that can kill or seriously maim others (texting while driving, drinking and driving, road rage involving guns, etc).
Furthermore, anyone can handle just about any knife. Not saying they can use it *well*, but anyone with any brains can figure out what's the handle, and what's the blade, and how to point it. In a knife-knife fight you have at least a slim chance defending against a trained knife fighter. If nothing else, the close-quarters combat means there's a good chance the assailant will be hurt.
Gun-gun fight? Even with a five-second head start for the defender, someone trained on guns will have shot and killed the untrained person before they've figured out how to turn off the safety on an unfamiliar weapon. If the safety was already off, the untrained person might get one or two shots off, but their aim would certainly be off.
Meanwhile, a knife-fighting friend who sometimes trains with off-duty police tells me that in practice/training knife fights, they far prefer an opponent who knows what they're doing, since a newbie with a knife is very unpredictable.
That explains all the drivers doing *exactly* the speed limit on all four lanes of the turnpike/freeway when I visited a few years ago, while I was doing 80 and occasionally 90 mph between car clusters and occasionally blew past patrol cars, none of which ever came after me. I'm sure I was lucky, but not wanting to get pulled over while having no license explains a lot, too.
A normal pickup truck is only marginally safer than a car if you hit a moose, their hoods are still low enough that when you take the legs out the bulk of the moose will still go through your windshield, though if you're lucky it'll roll up and over instead. A heavy-duty pickup, or one with bull bars, would fare better though.
So, the jokers selling this contraption allow you to mount in front of the airbag--which assists the seatbelt in keeping the driver's head from smashing into the glass windshield in a head-on collision--a device with a hard glass surface that will be propelled into the driver's face when the airbag deploys??? Even more ridiculous when you consider that airbags sometimes deploy in low-speed crashes where the driver wouldn't have hit the shield anyway.
You can't fix stupid, but companies shouldn't be encouraging stupidity either... OTOH, this can be considered a Darwin-awards device for anyone stupid enough to use one. Coincidentally (or not), the in-video ad that comes up with the video on the site is for a car insurance quote.
Last December, the cheap-ass BD players cost about $100 on sale. The ones I might reasonably trust to be reliable brands and models cost $200, and even then reviews were mixed. For $100 more, I not only get a BD system that's been essentially tested by millions of people, I can also play games on it (I'm not a big gamer).
For me the one real disappointment is Youtube on PS3. It blows chunks for playing HD Youtube videos on my HD TV. There's workarounds but why are they even needed?
If everyone did start doing this (they won't; those who'd open anything without thinking will want to send the latest lolcat thing NOW) then the spammers just modify the emailer script to send a "Hi [firstname], expect a Powerpoint from me shortly", and then send the malware in the next email to them, with a couple minutes' delay to simulate an actual person attaching a document and sending it.
Yes, but please my reply above--it still marks the moment (though a minute or two in the past, by the time we hear it) that it's gone subsonic because the sound from the booms are, from that moment on, travelling faster than the shuttle toward the landing area.
I never said that was the exact moment it actually went subsonic. By the time we hear it of course the shuttle has already been subsonic for probably a minute or two, but it does "announce" (that's the word the commentators often use) that it happened, because the sound waves from the boom are now moving ahead of the flightpath faster than the shuttle itself.
I prefer not to get too pedantic over it, it's like arguing whether a stellar event is happening "now" just because its light took awhile to get here.
The video link jumps to about 9 minutes in, just before touchdown. Suggest viewers jump back to about the 6:00 minute mark, the announcer says they're 3 minutes from touchdown and then you hear the twin sonic booms indicating Atlantis has gone subsonic. They're incredibly sharp and clear-sounding in this video, even through my laptop speakers, and reverberate like canon blasts for several seconds.
Mini and Imac's need to easy to open at least being able get to the HDD
I'm not sure how it gets any easier that screwing off the bottom of a Mini to get to HD and RAM. That changed a few years ago...
You ignored the iMac bit completely. Until the 2006 refresh, it was amazingly easy to access the iMac's internals. As of the final PPC G5 refresh though, you had to remove the screen first. I get that this is the price for miniaturization and thinning the case, but with Apple making it so 3rd party replacement HDDs don't report temperature properly and causing the fans to run 100% all the time, it's clear it wasn't merely a technical decision.
To your point about grouping tasks. I hate that too--on Windows only. because it causes two inefficiencies: 1) you can't click on a specific task to minimize its window, and 2) clicking a grouped task (or hovering in Win7) requires an additional click to select a window to bring forth. Very annoying, so I disable grouping... but this means I can have two dozen tasks in the task bar, and they spill onto a second taskbar "page." Win7's "group if running out of space" is useless since I can't tell it which tasks can and should not be grouped. Alt-tabbing is a partial solution, but it's not efficient for anything other than jumping between the last 3 or 4 tasks.
On a Mac, clicking an active app in the dock brings it and all its documents forward. It even remembers which one I was working on last (i.e. it'll be in front of all the app's other docs). If Windows had these options I'd turn task grouping back on right away. And no, the horrible MDI (multiple document interface) isn't the solution--more on that later.
This stems from the different approaches Mac took vs Windows (and most other OSes), Apple went app/document centric (the solitary menu bar is more evidence of this), while Windows emphasized task/process. The latter has advantages, like being able to launch multiple instances of the same exe, like Notepad, where on a Mac you'd have to make a copy of the app first. But multiple exe instances isn't really a benefit to most users, most of the time.
Microsoft tried to copy the Mac's app-centric model with MDI but made it utterly useless by having child windows' content visible only within the parent window, and blocking background tasks and the desktop at the same time. MDI only really works when there's only going to be one, *maybe* two child window, with tiled panes and/or tabs that allow easy switching; an example is SQL Management Studio. It was completely useless for most user programs like Word, Excel, etc--which is why Microsoft changed them all back to single doc interfaces. Almost, anyway--Excel 2007 (don't know about 2010) shows as different tasks when you open a spreadsheet, but in fact usually re-uses the window, so frustration ensues when alt-tabbing back to the previous spreadsheet to find out you can't put the two side-by-side for comparison. At that point I close one of the docs, manually launch a new Excel instance, and open the doc again from the recent files list.
I rented a Playbook for a week for evaluation. Got it freshly re-installed, but even after the latest system update was applied, I found the page scrolling was jerky and sometimes inconsistent with my gestures. The barest flick would sometimes scroll 2 or 3 pages. The keyboard wouldn't trigger half the time I hit an text box, even with the damn thing zoomed in so much there was no question what I was trying to hit (I have thin-ish fingers, never been a problem on my iPhone).
And while Flash ran fine (assuming the controls weren't designed for a mouse, and only one Flash element on a page... too bad about the Flash ads...), it choked on even small (0.5-1.5 MB) Acrobat-generated PDFs, actually freezing the entire unit (no touchscreen response, not even the task switcher) for up to 10 seconds at a time. Sure I can blame Adobe for shipping a poor Reader app for Playbook... but if it's THAT poorly optimized on one of the fastest tablets today, this just proves Apple was right to ban an Adobe-provided Flash component for technical reasons alone, never mind ideological or business ones.
It wasn't all bad of course, but "the browser is nice and multitask switching is done well" don't cut it.
And the lack of mail, calendar and contact apps? At the end of the week I was giving an informal report on it, I hadn't even gotten to my negative experiences with it... when the boss heard this he nixed the idea of buying one right there.
“We explained that we are astronomers, but the local police commander approached so to be sure that we are not terrorists and that our telescope had no military application and it is not a rocket launcher. We invited him to watch M4 Star Cluster, but he didn’t like it and said that his own binocular is more powerful. He told us were a group of half-witted and nothing else. One of the police registered our names and listed all our equipment.”
Yeah this is Afghanistan, the commander was power-tripping, and western police as a whole are 100x better behaved, but the above is yet another example of the idiotic fallacy of "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" that authoritarians love trotting out to justify increased police powers and intrusions.
Today is the UN's World Population (awareness) Day. We'll pass 7 billion people soon.
The Catholic Church's stance against contraceptive birth control (I'll ignore abortion completely for this argument) is internal logic that has no basis in reality. It becomes an immoral stance, because the world's highest birth rates are in the poorest countries, where many women are physically ill-equipped to bring a baby to term, lack access to medical care if things go wrong, and results in yet another child growing in despair and hunger in regions desperately lacking food.
My only conclusion is that this illogical stance against contraception means the Church (and other "family" groups with religious fundamentalist roots) implicitly approves of and encourages human suffering.
The ipod/ipad/iphone was a knockoff on the iPaq or to be nice, a linear extrapolation adding modern technology to a already existing idea/platform known as the PDA.
... which Apple themselves created with the Newton back in 1993. Then-CEO Sculley is credited with coining the very term "personal digital assistant" in 1992.
Sure, if you go to pdadb.net you'll find a couple of devices they consider "PDAs" that came out a year or two before Newton's debut, but they had mini-keyboards and non-touch flip screens making them predecessors to netbooks, not PDAs (as the term came to be used, anyway, referring specifically to devices with large touchscreens, no built-in keyboard, etc).
I hate the current patent system as much as any/.-er, but Apple (and anyone else who could afford it) would be beyond stupid to NOT ride the broken system.
Unlike certain games, "not playing" is the surest way to lose in this world of insane IP laws.
There seems to still be debate on if the warming has stopped. Solar activity is hitting a new low which could negate, or even reverse any greenhouse effect.
Solar activity is on the rise again. True the period of low activity is longer than predicted, but consider that global averages are rising all through the period of low activity.
One thing that seems clear to me is that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is that it improves plant life. Plants are growing bigger, stronger, and faster in this atmosphere. That not only means more food for people but other nice side effects like reduced erosion and an improved capacity to soak up even more CO2.
From where I sit, it's clear to me the forests to soak in all that CO2 are being cut down at an ever-increasing rate, increasing erosion and risk of landslides. Efforts to re-forest (assuming it's not being cleared to make way for development and farmland) favour monocultures of fast-growing species of trees.
I will admit that some people will get the short end of the stick. Some places in this world will become unpleasantly warm. Some places will go under water. The end result though is cheaper and more plentiful food for everyone. There would also likely be more freshwater and livable land mass.
Those who don't die off long-term will certainly have more food. In the meantime, coastal cities will flood, deserts will spread further from the equator, eliminating livable land mass even as other areas are opened up.
There will be LESS freshwater, since a lot of it depends on runoff from melting mountain ice caps, which are replenished each year through snowfalls. Warmer climate = less snowfall + faster melting icecaps = less mountain runoff, which in turn means less evaporation to fuel snow and rain to replenish non-runoff sources of fresh water.
Freshwater locked in Arctic ice floes will melt into the ocean. It won't contribute to rising ocean levels--but melting Antarctic ice sitting on land sure will.
Buying carbon offset credits is an absolutely stupid idea, but carbon taxes and eco-fees I can sort of understand. One way would be to slap extra taxes and fees on all the cheap stuff manufactured in China and countries with poor eco-regulations. I don't mean import duties, which punish the importer directly and is then passed on to consumers (and invites retaliatory duties), I mean hit the consumers directly for thinking that stuff is actually cheap. Less consumer demand means less imports, until the maker improves their manufacturing processes (or if it's inelastic demand, like gas, then hey the government has a guaranteed source of income).
Target the cheap stuff especially--so it's not worth it to people living near countries/states to just drive across the border to get cheap crap at the Dollar Store.
The link to our hosted MS Exchange was a pain in the butt for a small business (10 people) to set up, not to mention it costs extra per month over an iPhone with ActiveSync. Seven Blackberries set up during a 2-year period, each time it took several hours to a day to get working. I don't recall details since I didn't set them up.
It was for only three employees too--the boss went through three in a single year (only once was it his fault, he said right up front it got wet). They all kept breaking, and of course incurring a full replacement fee each time. The boss in particular finally got fed up and got an iPhone. He hasn't babied it any more than his BBs, yet it's lasted almost 2 years without incident.
We're Canadian and tried supporting RIM, but they sure aren't making it easy--either with their BB, or their recent Playbook (requiring a tethered BB to enable the mail, calendar and contacts apps was a dealbreaker).
Not exactly. If that were the case the (supposedly liberal/left) Hollywood and news media wouldn't be as hung up on nudity as it is.
Media is constrained by their masters, the regulators and politicians who control them. And even they respond only to the surprising minority of the population who demand or complain about such things. For every person who complains about something, there may be 10 or 20 that don't, but there's also 50 or 100 who don't care or are okay with it. That's the true silent majority.
Violence is not bad; it is the solution to most problems, and in fact the only solution to all problems caused by violence.
People need to learn to use the threat of violence effectively. Properly, I guess; but that's a lost cause, based in personal philosophy. Fortunately, the threat of violence is strangely powerful: if being a violent asshole is likely to end badly for you, then you will probably be disinclined from being a violent asshole.
That's why we should have strong personal self defense values. People need to feel that they can stand up to violence; otherwise a few people will realize they can just pound someone's face in and take what they want, and most people will just cower and be good little slaves for fear of being pounded too.
I want a society of people who will stand together, who will see this brutal face-pounding and all crowd around to liberate the poor defenseless sap from this vicious beating and put the unruly whelp up against a dozen other people who aren't afraid to use their fists either. Instead you get a crowd that prevents the guy getting beat to death from running, and they all cheer for the chance to watch a good beating; or they just slink away and hide, 'cause sorry kid, you're on your own. No help from the cowards that call themselves men.
Look no further than the recent riots in Vancouver. More than one good person (one was a large bouncer-looking guy) tried defusing a situation or defending something from being smashed, and the crowd overwhelmed and viciously beat them down for their efforts. And they did this knowing there were live TV and personal/cell cameras all around them.
The flip side is that massive outrage occurred immediately, and grassroots efforts popped up within hours to identify and out the rioters based on video and photo evidence. "Professional" instigators may have started whipping things into a frenzy, and doubtless they and many will avoid justice, but many of the identified rioters and looters were everyday, normal people, and are already facing the consequences (fired from job, loss of scholarship, turned in by own parents, etc).
The model in the link was naked, but I sure as heck don't consider that nudity.
Maybe the print ads showed more, or the image was photoshopped, but you can barely see the profile of a nipple, which movies and TV have no problem with showing through an actress' blouse and/or bra--I've heard they even sometimes apply an ice cube on them right before a shoot, just so they stand out.
And for that, the morons at US-based Paypal froze that website's donation account. One more reason I've never had an account with them.
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It's much harder for an average person to use a knife to defend themselves against another person wielding a knife - it's much easier for an untrained person to use a gun to defend themselves.
You just argued the exact opposite of what I would have.
If the citizenry were all required to take basic firearms training, know how to handle them, and were responsible and knew the consequences about its use, then I'm all for it. But the last thing we want is *untrained* people defending themselves with guns, especially people who take so little responsibility for things that can kill or seriously maim others (texting while driving, drinking and driving, road rage involving guns, etc).
Furthermore, anyone can handle just about any knife. Not saying they can use it *well*, but anyone with any brains can figure out what's the handle, and what's the blade, and how to point it. In a knife-knife fight you have at least a slim chance defending against a trained knife fighter. If nothing else, the close-quarters combat means there's a good chance the assailant will be hurt.
Gun-gun fight? Even with a five-second head start for the defender, someone trained on guns will have shot and killed the untrained person before they've figured out how to turn off the safety on an unfamiliar weapon. If the safety was already off, the untrained person might get one or two shots off, but their aim would certainly be off.
Meanwhile, a knife-fighting friend who sometimes trains with off-duty police tells me that in practice/training knife fights, they far prefer an opponent who knows what they're doing, since a newbie with a knife is very unpredictable.
That explains all the drivers doing *exactly* the speed limit on all four lanes of the turnpike/freeway when I visited a few years ago, while I was doing 80 and occasionally 90 mph between car clusters and occasionally blew past patrol cars, none of which ever came after me. I'm sure I was lucky, but not wanting to get pulled over while having no license explains a lot, too.
A normal pickup truck is only marginally safer than a car if you hit a moose, their hoods are still low enough that when you take the legs out the bulk of the moose will still go through your windshield, though if you're lucky it'll roll up and over instead. A heavy-duty pickup, or one with bull bars, would fare better though.
So, the jokers selling this contraption allow you to mount in front of the airbag--which assists the seatbelt in keeping the driver's head from smashing into the glass windshield in a head-on collision--a device with a hard glass surface that will be propelled into the driver's face when the airbag deploys??? Even more ridiculous when you consider that airbags sometimes deploy in low-speed crashes where the driver wouldn't have hit the shield anyway.
You can't fix stupid, but companies shouldn't be encouraging stupidity either... OTOH, this can be considered a Darwin-awards device for anyone stupid enough to use one. Coincidentally (or not), the in-video ad that comes up with the video on the site is for a car insurance quote.
Last December, the cheap-ass BD players cost about $100 on sale. The ones I might reasonably trust to be reliable brands and models cost $200, and even then reviews were mixed. For $100 more, I not only get a BD system that's been essentially tested by millions of people, I can also play games on it (I'm not a big gamer).
For me the one real disappointment is Youtube on PS3. It blows chunks for playing HD Youtube videos on my HD TV. There's workarounds but why are they even needed?
If everyone did start doing this (they won't; those who'd open anything without thinking will want to send the latest lolcat thing NOW) then the spammers just modify the emailer script to send a "Hi [firstname], expect a Powerpoint from me shortly", and then send the malware in the next email to them, with a couple minutes' delay to simulate an actual person attaching a document and sending it.
Yes, but please my reply above--it still marks the moment (though a minute or two in the past, by the time we hear it) that it's gone subsonic because the sound from the booms are, from that moment on, travelling faster than the shuttle toward the landing area.
I never said that was the exact moment it actually went subsonic. By the time we hear it of course the shuttle has already been subsonic for probably a minute or two, but it does "announce" (that's the word the commentators often use) that it happened, because the sound waves from the boom are now moving ahead of the flightpath faster than the shuttle itself.
I prefer not to get too pedantic over it, it's like arguing whether a stellar event is happening "now" just because its light took awhile to get here.
The video link jumps to about 9 minutes in, just before touchdown. Suggest viewers jump back to about the 6:00 minute mark, the announcer says they're 3 minutes from touchdown and then you hear the twin sonic booms indicating Atlantis has gone subsonic. They're incredibly sharp and clear-sounding in this video, even through my laptop speakers, and reverberate like canon blasts for several seconds.
Mini and Imac's need to easy to open at least being able get to the HDD
I'm not sure how it gets any easier that screwing off the bottom of a Mini to get to HD and RAM. That changed a few years ago...
You ignored the iMac bit completely. Until the 2006 refresh, it was amazingly easy to access the iMac's internals. As of the final PPC G5 refresh though, you had to remove the screen first. I get that this is the price for miniaturization and thinning the case, but with Apple making it so 3rd party replacement HDDs don't report temperature properly and causing the fans to run 100% all the time, it's clear it wasn't merely a technical decision.
To your point about grouping tasks. I hate that too--on Windows only. because it causes two inefficiencies: 1) you can't click on a specific task to minimize its window, and 2) clicking a grouped task (or hovering in Win7) requires an additional click to select a window to bring forth. Very annoying, so I disable grouping... but this means I can have two dozen tasks in the task bar, and they spill onto a second taskbar "page." Win7's "group if running out of space" is useless since I can't tell it which tasks can and should not be grouped. Alt-tabbing is a partial solution, but it's not efficient for anything other than jumping between the last 3 or 4 tasks.
On a Mac, clicking an active app in the dock brings it and all its documents forward. It even remembers which one I was working on last (i.e. it'll be in front of all the app's other docs). If Windows had these options I'd turn task grouping back on right away. And no, the horrible MDI (multiple document interface) isn't the solution--more on that later.
This stems from the different approaches Mac took vs Windows (and most other OSes), Apple went app/document centric (the solitary menu bar is more evidence of this), while Windows emphasized task/process. The latter has advantages, like being able to launch multiple instances of the same exe, like Notepad, where on a Mac you'd have to make a copy of the app first. But multiple exe instances isn't really a benefit to most users, most of the time.
Microsoft tried to copy the Mac's app-centric model with MDI but made it utterly useless by having child windows' content visible only within the parent window, and blocking background tasks and the desktop at the same time. MDI only really works when there's only going to be one, *maybe* two child window, with tiled panes and/or tabs that allow easy switching; an example is SQL Management Studio. It was completely useless for most user programs like Word, Excel, etc--which is why Microsoft changed them all back to single doc interfaces. Almost, anyway--Excel 2007 (don't know about 2010) shows as different tasks when you open a spreadsheet, but in fact usually re-uses the window, so frustration ensues when alt-tabbing back to the previous spreadsheet to find out you can't put the two side-by-side for comparison. At that point I close one of the docs, manually launch a new Excel instance, and open the doc again from the recent files list.
Only when PC laptops got small enough did they start dropping legacy ports, and that's just due to lack of space.
Some new PCs still ship with PS/2 keyboards, for crying out loud.
I rented a Playbook for a week for evaluation. Got it freshly re-installed, but even after the latest system update was applied, I found the page scrolling was jerky and sometimes inconsistent with my gestures. The barest flick would sometimes scroll 2 or 3 pages. The keyboard wouldn't trigger half the time I hit an text box, even with the damn thing zoomed in so much there was no question what I was trying to hit (I have thin-ish fingers, never been a problem on my iPhone).
And while Flash ran fine (assuming the controls weren't designed for a mouse, and only one Flash element on a page... too bad about the Flash ads...), it choked on even small (0.5-1.5 MB) Acrobat-generated PDFs, actually freezing the entire unit (no touchscreen response, not even the task switcher) for up to 10 seconds at a time. Sure I can blame Adobe for shipping a poor Reader app for Playbook... but if it's THAT poorly optimized on one of the fastest tablets today, this just proves Apple was right to ban an Adobe-provided Flash component for technical reasons alone, never mind ideological or business ones.
It wasn't all bad of course, but "the browser is nice and multitask switching is done well" don't cut it.
And the lack of mail, calendar and contact apps? At the end of the week I was giving an informal report on it, I hadn't even gotten to my negative experiences with it... when the boss heard this he nixed the idea of buying one right there.
FTFA:
“We explained that we are astronomers, but the local police commander approached so to be sure that we are not terrorists and that our telescope had no military application and it is not a rocket launcher. We invited him to watch M4 Star Cluster, but he didn’t like it and said that his own binocular is more powerful. He told us were a group of half-witted and nothing else. One of the police registered our names and listed all our equipment.”
Yeah this is Afghanistan, the commander was power-tripping, and western police as a whole are 100x better behaved, but the above is yet another example of the idiotic fallacy of "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" that authoritarians love trotting out to justify increased police powers and intrusions.
Today is the UN's World Population (awareness) Day. We'll pass 7 billion people soon.
The Catholic Church's stance against contraceptive birth control (I'll ignore abortion completely for this argument) is internal logic that has no basis in reality. It becomes an immoral stance, because the world's highest birth rates are in the poorest countries, where many women are physically ill-equipped to bring a baby to term, lack access to medical care if things go wrong, and results in yet another child growing in despair and hunger in regions desperately lacking food.
My only conclusion is that this illogical stance against contraception means the Church (and other "family" groups with religious fundamentalist roots) implicitly approves of and encourages human suffering.
Aren't most of /. solidly against "just the cost of doing business" payments as punishment?
Or (since this is a stupid patent, like most software patents are) paying off extortionists and trolls?
The ipod/ipad/iphone was a knockoff on the iPaq or to be nice, a linear extrapolation adding modern technology to a already existing idea/platform known as the PDA.
... which Apple themselves created with the Newton back in 1993. Then-CEO Sculley is credited with coining the very term "personal digital assistant" in 1992.
Sure, if you go to pdadb.net you'll find a couple of devices they consider "PDAs" that came out a year or two before Newton's debut, but they had mini-keyboards and non-touch flip screens making them predecessors to netbooks, not PDAs (as the term came to be used, anyway, referring specifically to devices with large touchscreens, no built-in keyboard, etc).
I hate the current patent system as much as any /.-er, but Apple (and anyone else who could afford it) would be beyond stupid to NOT ride the broken system.
Unlike certain games, "not playing" is the surest way to lose in this world of insane IP laws.
There seems to still be debate on if the warming has stopped. Solar activity is hitting a new low which could negate, or even reverse any greenhouse effect.
Solar activity is on the rise again. True the period of low activity is longer than predicted, but consider that global averages are rising all through the period of low activity.
One thing that seems clear to me is that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is that it improves plant life. Plants are growing bigger, stronger, and faster in this atmosphere. That not only means more food for people but other nice side effects like reduced erosion and an improved capacity to soak up even more CO2.
From where I sit, it's clear to me the forests to soak in all that CO2 are being cut down at an ever-increasing rate, increasing erosion and risk of landslides. Efforts to re-forest (assuming it's not being cleared to make way for development and farmland) favour monocultures of fast-growing species of trees.
I will admit that some people will get the short end of the stick. Some places in this world will become unpleasantly warm. Some places will go under water. The end result though is cheaper and more plentiful food for everyone. There would also likely be more freshwater and livable land mass.
Those who don't die off long-term will certainly have more food. In the meantime, coastal cities will flood, deserts will spread further from the equator, eliminating livable land mass even as other areas are opened up.
There will be LESS freshwater, since a lot of it depends on runoff from melting mountain ice caps, which are replenished each year through snowfalls. Warmer climate = less snowfall + faster melting icecaps = less mountain runoff, which in turn means less evaporation to fuel snow and rain to replenish non-runoff sources of fresh water.
Freshwater locked in Arctic ice floes will melt into the ocean. It won't contribute to rising ocean levels--but melting Antarctic ice sitting on land sure will.
Buying carbon offset credits is an absolutely stupid idea, but carbon taxes and eco-fees I can sort of understand. One way would be to slap extra taxes and fees on all the cheap stuff manufactured in China and countries with poor eco-regulations. I don't mean import duties, which punish the importer directly and is then passed on to consumers (and invites retaliatory duties), I mean hit the consumers directly for thinking that stuff is actually cheap. Less consumer demand means less imports, until the maker improves their manufacturing processes (or if it's inelastic demand, like gas, then hey the government has a guaranteed source of income).
Target the cheap stuff especially--so it's not worth it to people living near countries/states to just drive across the border to get cheap crap at the Dollar Store.
Good luck buying any off-the-shelf replacement hard drive with a preinstalled OS...
The link to our hosted MS Exchange was a pain in the butt for a small business (10 people) to set up, not to mention it costs extra per month over an iPhone with ActiveSync. Seven Blackberries set up during a 2-year period, each time it took several hours to a day to get working. I don't recall details since I didn't set them up.
It was for only three employees too--the boss went through three in a single year (only once was it his fault, he said right up front it got wet). They all kept breaking, and of course incurring a full replacement fee each time. The boss in particular finally got fed up and got an iPhone. He hasn't babied it any more than his BBs, yet it's lasted almost 2 years without incident.
We're Canadian and tried supporting RIM, but they sure aren't making it easy--either with their BB, or their recent Playbook (requiring a tethered BB to enable the mail, calendar and contacts apps was a dealbreaker).
The government/regulators, rather than media company execs, are who I meant by "media masters."
Not exactly. If that were the case the (supposedly liberal/left) Hollywood and news media wouldn't be as hung up on nudity as it is.
Media is constrained by their masters, the regulators and politicians who control them. And even they respond only to the surprising minority of the population who demand or complain about such things. For every person who complains about something, there may be 10 or 20 that don't, but there's also 50 or 100 who don't care or are okay with it. That's the true silent majority.
Violence is not bad; it is the solution to most problems, and in fact the only solution to all problems caused by violence.
People need to learn to use the threat of violence effectively. Properly, I guess; but that's a lost cause, based in personal philosophy. Fortunately, the threat of violence is strangely powerful: if being a violent asshole is likely to end badly for you, then you will probably be disinclined from being a violent asshole.
That's why we should have strong personal self defense values. People need to feel that they can stand up to violence; otherwise a few people will realize they can just pound someone's face in and take what they want, and most people will just cower and be good little slaves for fear of being pounded too.
I want a society of people who will stand together, who will see this brutal face-pounding and all crowd around to liberate the poor defenseless sap from this vicious beating and put the unruly whelp up against a dozen other people who aren't afraid to use their fists either. Instead you get a crowd that prevents the guy getting beat to death from running, and they all cheer for the chance to watch a good beating; or they just slink away and hide, 'cause sorry kid, you're on your own. No help from the cowards that call themselves men.
Look no further than the recent riots in Vancouver. More than one good person (one was a large bouncer-looking guy) tried defusing a situation or defending something from being smashed, and the crowd overwhelmed and viciously beat them down for their efforts. And they did this knowing there were live TV and personal/cell cameras all around them.
The flip side is that massive outrage occurred immediately, and grassroots efforts popped up within hours to identify and out the rioters based on video and photo evidence. "Professional" instigators may have started whipping things into a frenzy, and doubtless they and many will avoid justice, but many of the identified rioters and looters were everyday, normal people, and are already facing the consequences (fired from job, loss of scholarship, turned in by own parents, etc).
The model in the link was naked, but I sure as heck don't consider that nudity.
Maybe the print ads showed more, or the image was photoshopped, but you can barely see the profile of a nipple, which movies and TV have no problem with showing through an actress' blouse and/or bra--I've heard they even sometimes apply an ice cube on them right before a shoot, just so they stand out.
And for that, the morons at US-based Paypal froze that website's donation account. One more reason I've never had an account with them.