It depends on the book. A lot of the page count in many books is descriptive text that accounts for a few seconds in a film. On the other hand many short novels like Dune, which isn't burdened with an extra hundred pages of bullshit like many post word processor novels, do not fit in an hour thirty.
Even stuff like Harry Potter needs everything but the main plot removed to fit within the time constraints of cinema.
Most JRPG's fall under the first part of my post. JRPG's in general only have a memorable story because of the way you interact with the characters, which can't be translated to a non-interactive medium*.
*With games "story" is distinct from "story telling" in a way that it isn't for movies. Very few movies are adventurous in the way they tell the story (something like Memento puts a lot of people off because it isn't linear A to B with five acts).
To turn USB autorun off on Windows XP you have to edit the registry. The GUI options do not apply to USB drives for some retarded reason.
I was alerted to this when I bought a USB drive that came with autorunning software (to do encryption and other rubbish) and was surprised that it ran despite me turning autorun off as a part of standard configuration since the late 90's.
No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products. This is the broken window fallacy, that a child who throws a rock through a window is stimulating the economy.
I download movies and tv shows because I don't like watching broadcast TV. Any that deserve a repeat viewing get bought on DVD (which is probably about 80%). If they shutdown illegal downloads they wouldn't get more money from me because I have little to spare, they are more likely to get less as I would just shift to other forms of entertainment or free to access media (I have started watching local legal tv streaming sites, which has dropped the amount I illegally download and later purchase).
This isn't the 1990's where the big publishers had little competition. There is so much free or cheap content out there that I don't buy before I try.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Afghani insurgents have.50 HMG's and AA cannons which is why the US does not normally operate helos in mountain regions with high amounts of insurgent activity (and when they do they go in force). There have been numerous incidents of helos being shot down or forced to turn back from an extraction because of this and numerous fire bases have been over run or had insurgents get inside the wire because helo support could not be provided in time. Secondly, a few hundred pounds of fertiliser will take care of any tank or MRAP.
And the reason the US plays "nice" is because it is worthless to win a war if you kill all the civilians, or in attempting to win the war turn the civilians against you through the extremity of your violence.
"Wipe the city of the map" tactics have to my knowledge only ever worked to generate more support for resistance to the enemy (eg the Battle of Britain, and the various allied bombing campaigns). You have to be willing to threaten total annihilation to use it as a rrsl threat (which is what the US nuclear bombings of Japan did). The US government can't threaten to wipe out its own people as the end result would be worse for the elite then losing the war.
You are applying some post-modernist perspective to economics and confusing MONEY with WEALTH. The basis of WEALTH is human labour and resources (which can only be made useful with human labour). MONEY is just an IOU that we use because carrying around a chicken to pay minor debts is inconvenient. Economic reality hasn't changed just societies understanding of the differences between MONEY and WEALTH. These kinds of short term trades create a lot of MONEY (either by siphoning it from investment funds, or when reserve banks just print more MONEY) but it doesn't transform any resources (WEALTH creation).
Long term investment gives MONEY to efficient companies so they can create more WEALTH by paying labour to transform resources into a useful form. If we adopted the "new" method the economy would focus solely on "creating" new MONEY until either the investment stopped or the WEALTH value of MONEY plunged absurdly because of the all the newly printed MONEY. This would quickly lead to economic collapse shortly followed by the collapse of civilisation as basic services depend upon the efficient distribution of MONEY.
The current MONEY making games are as a previous poster said nothing more than pass the parcel. Eventually the music will stop and people will realise the MONEY isn't useful for getting WEALTH.
Except the New Testament takes precedence over the Old Testament for Christians. People like this are more like Jews than they are Christians in attempting to bring about a theocracy (of course some portion of them think they ARE the lost tribes of Israel). You can only use the Bible to justify almost anything if you take bits and pieces out of context and ignore the major themes. Which orthodox denominations don't do.
No, they wouldn't as I am a member of a mainstream protestant denomination (in Australia). Many American Christian leaders are saying the same things I have said.
Sorry, but if someone consistently acts in a way against the beliefs* espoused by their claimed religion they aren't really followers of that religion. Christianity was the dominate religion in the West and unfortunately still has large numbers of cultural followers in some countries. These people espouse vaguely Christian thinking but would fail the doctrine of faith of any major denomination. "Decency" and a belief in a Get-out-of-jail-free card isn't Christianity.
Saying "you need Jesus" is Christian. Saying "You can't say $#*! on broadcast TV!" isn't.
If people like this actually acted out the faith of Christianity no one would have a bad word to say against Christians.
* Like not judging unbelievers. Putting the good of the "widow, orphan, and alien" ahead of personal gain. Sacrificing personal rights for the good of others.
Yeah cause you never hear people say "shit" or much worse in about any situation I have ever been in during my life. I heard it at my Catholic primary school. This is what happens when "Christians*" live in little gated communities and become completely out of touch with reality and the wider community.
* I am a Christian. Most of the people that whine about this stuff aren't really Christians. They just believe in ritual and "decency", they seem to miss that Jesus was mocking this kind of Pharisaical behaviour. Well actually they generally miss most of what Jesus said or at least fail to apply it.
PETA is to animals as Hitler was to Jews. Hitler "liberated" a few million Jews from their "suffering", which is what PETA does to animals. Many people think PETA exists to stop abuse of animals (like many other organisations), but they actually exist to stop human dependence on animals. Which if taken to its conclusion would result in a hell of a lot less animals being around on the planet. In their world view it is better for a cow to be dead than to be in "bondage" to a farmer.
Oh, and high ranking members of PETA have been caught supporting eco-terrorists. They are Earth worshippers who should be declared a religious cult so that they don't go around warping kids minds by pretending to have some secular agenda.
If you are a Christian and oppose to this maybe you should apologize and then fight it.
Right, because Christianity is a monolithic religion and I can just organise a vote against stupid moralistic laws at the next meeting of the world wide body that governs Christianity. Oh wait....
Honestly, it is like a sibling breaking a window. Instead of apologizing and getting him to not do it again you say that he isn't representative of the family and anyone saying the family is bad can fuck off.
Anyone who says a family is bad because of one sibling is using very poor logic, so I don't follow your analogy.
You are eager to put political leaders on trial but wish for people to ignore religious leaders.
And where did I indicate people should ignore the wrong doings of religious leaders? I was specifically talking about how governments regularly pass minority supported legislation (due to "campaign contributions") right after an election so by the time of the next election the public consciousness has forgotten about it.
But the vast majority of these crazy groups ARE religious (or are made up of highly religious people). That should be an indicator to you.
The vast majority of them are also families with children, and predominately white. What does that indicate? And I actually know of plenty of batshit insane lobby groups that wouldn't be seen within a city block of anything religious. That some people shut down their higher brain functions in favour of ideology is not restricted to "religions". While some atheists delude themselves into thinking religion is the cause of non-rational thinking and that humans are naturally, or can be taught to be, fully rational is not founded in the scientific evidence. People stick with crazy non-rational ideologies based on flimsy evidence because that is an exaggeration of the normal human cognitive system. If religion was done away with then people would just fight over secular ethics (which already happens, disputes between American individual liberty types and social welfare types are hardly examples of calm reasoned discourse).
Speaking as a Christian, Lobby groups can go fuck themselves. It is ludicrous that any tiny minority that is good at fund raising, or has deep corporate pockets, can be allowed to go around parliament and have private "chats" with legislators. The way people should influence their representatives is via letters and local meetings (and the representatives should be required to keep office hours in the non-sitting season that allows workers to visit them).
Groups like the ACL don't even represent most Christians just a tiny vocal minority.
What is likely to happen here is that Rudd and Conroy will pull a Howard and pass the legislation once returned to power because they now have a "mandate". Honestly we should bring back the Greek/Roman practise and try elected officials once they have left office.
The issue is that commercial airliners have no instrumentation capable of detecting ash clouds (normal clouds are detected via the radar return from water vapour) let alone telling if the density is at a safe level. Even if commercial airliners carried this sort of instrumentation there is insufficient data to decide if a given ash concentration is just going to mean an engine needs replacement earlier or cause the engine to catastrophically fail. So the onus is on the airlines to pay for this if they want to be able to fly during extreme conditions like this.
Real trouble shooters pull RAM first* because mis-seated and bad RAM is the cause of most hardware errors. After that you pull the PSU and then the GPU. If that still doesn't find the culprit you test those parts in known good machines and then swap out the CPU to isolate it or the MB. This guy didn't even have a serious problem, a real hardware gremlin is when you have combination issues and can't isolate a single faulty component. A month in the trenches of front line support teaches you these lessons that you won't learn from a lifetime of building the occasional machine for yourself.
That said if I had a frigging ENGINEERING SAMPLE anything I would pull that first. Anyone who knows anything about hardware production knows engineering samples are for troubleshooting and not freebies for journalists. It is like over clocking, far too many people expect that OCing is guaranteed and stable because most gear these days has some head room. I have seen people whining and blaming the manufacturers because their hardware didn't get the OC that everyone else got.
*And if the user has been OCing or fiddling with BIOS you set that to default as well.
Wikipedia doesn't want full depth coverage of specific areas. Once they wanted to contain the "sum of human knowledge" (including catch rates for pokemon) but these days they want to be an online encyclopaedia based on reputable sources. They encourage you to go off and make your own wiki if you want to have deep coverage of a particular area.
For example the article on 4chan contains superficial background information. There is another entire wiki dedicated to the full history of 4chan and the memes it generates. The wikipedia article focuses on Project Chanology and/b/ because that is probably what got 4chan the most press coverage (which is what wikipedia admins like to base articles on, but hardly covers all knowledge of a subject).
Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.
The problem with console to PC ports is that consoles are designed with the limitations of game controllers in mind and so therefore are often "simplified" compared to native PC titles. That isn't what this is about. This is about porting between the different touch based smart phones which are all so similar in capability that it is like porting between Windows, Linux, or OSX (which works fine if you don't target a propriety platform to begin with). This is solely about Steve Jobs trying to turn his beachhead in the mobile market into an occupation.
Actually it is likely to be worse because instead of the bullet penetrating through (which happens most of the time) all the kinetic energy will be dumped into you and the shockwave will probably shatter blood vessels and organs anyway. Pistol rounds don't normally shatter, and rifle rounds have way too much KE for this to be a good idea.
Considering how obese we are getting in the West these days 2-inches of penetration probably wouldn't pierce the fat layer. Hah, and people say obesity is a problem!
The motivators won't become extinct because these are exactly the external motivators these kids will get in the workforce. If there was an easy and cheap way to instil "love of learning" we would already be doing it. Behaviourists would also argue that, outside of the handful of biological urges, intrinsic motivators are the result of conditioning anyway. Most adults don't do a job because they love it, they do it because they need to pay the bills. And that is a good thing because there are plenty of boring or shit jobs that hardly anyone would do for the love of it.
I think this sort of technology is going to be as useful as Internet self-diagnosis. Most people have multiple "markers for disease" that aren't indicative of real disease or are of non-clinical forms. Bayesian probability* tells us that doing wide screen testing like this will just lead to lots of false positives and unnecessary medical procedures ('cause if the doctor does nothing and it isn't a false positive they will get sued). Some doctor's argue that screening for PSA (prostate specific antigen) causes more Years of Life Lost to unnecessary prostate removals than is saved by catching some cancers early.
Unfortunately the general public is not getting the reality that medicine is not a magic bullet that can detect and cure all disease with 100% accuracy. And counter-intuitively to decrease statistics like Years lost to Disability or Illness we might have to test less.
Requiring resumes to be in the proprietary and platform-specific Word.doc format, instead of.pdf,.html, or.txt formats, is a nifty little test early on in the hiring process.
I can't remember when I last worried about.doc compatibility. It has been about five years since I had a real problem with converting basic.doc documents in OpenOffice, and when making them myself I can't recall a serious problem in even longer. I have never seen "must be in.docx format" (which can be a problem) and 99% of HR drones wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway. HTML and (potentially) PDF* are just security risks.
This guy is either using a very dated joke or is a massive zealot.
* Not to mention you need a non-Adobe client to get a good experience with PDF.
I don't think the euthanasia stuff is particularly religiously motivated because we allow all sorts of other things that fundamentalists are against (abortion, non-abstinence sex ed etc). I think it had more to do with the general knee jerk reaction of the public to the notion of assisted suicide. Our pollies will jump on pretty much anything that makes them poll well (Afghanistan is stable enough now to kick out Afghani asylum seekers right?).
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It depends on the book. A lot of the page count in many books is descriptive text that accounts for a few seconds in a film. On the other hand many short novels like Dune, which isn't burdened with an extra hundred pages of bullshit like many post word processor novels, do not fit in an hour thirty.
Even stuff like Harry Potter needs everything but the main plot removed to fit within the time constraints of cinema.
Most JRPG's fall under the first part of my post. JRPG's in general only have a memorable story because of the way you interact with the characters, which can't be translated to a non-interactive medium*.
*With games "story" is distinct from "story telling" in a way that it isn't for movies. Very few movies are adventurous in the way they tell the story (something like Memento puts a lot of people off because it isn't linear A to B with five acts).
Most video games have stories that straight-to-DVD movies would be ashamed of*.
Other than that it is because Uwe Boll makes 90% of game movies.
*The games with good stories general can not compress a 20-40 hour experience into an hour thirty.
To turn USB autorun off on Windows XP you have to edit the registry. The GUI options do not apply to USB drives for some retarded reason.
I was alerted to this when I bought a USB drive that came with autorunning software (to do encryption and other rubbish) and was surprised that it ran despite me turning autorun off as a part of standard configuration since the late 90's.
No money is lost to the economy due to copyright infringement as some MAFIA groups try to argue. It is just not given to publishers for those movies/songs/games that are pirated. But it is spent on other products. This is the broken window fallacy, that a child who throws a rock through a window is stimulating the economy.
I download movies and tv shows because I don't like watching broadcast TV. Any that deserve a repeat viewing get bought on DVD (which is probably about 80%). If they shutdown illegal downloads they wouldn't get more money from me because I have little to spare, they are more likely to get less as I would just shift to other forms of entertainment or free to access media (I have started watching local legal tv streaming sites, which has dropped the amount I illegally download and later purchase).
This isn't the 1990's where the big publishers had little competition. There is so much free or cheap content out there that I don't buy before I try.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Afghani insurgents have .50 HMG's and AA cannons which is why the US does not normally operate helos in mountain regions with high amounts of insurgent activity (and when they do they go in force). There have been numerous incidents of helos being shot down or forced to turn back from an extraction because of this and numerous fire bases have been over run or had insurgents get inside the wire because helo support could not be provided in time. Secondly, a few hundred pounds of fertiliser will take care of any tank or MRAP.
And the reason the US plays "nice" is because it is worthless to win a war if you kill all the civilians, or in attempting to win the war turn the civilians against you through the extremity of your violence.
"Wipe the city of the map" tactics have to my knowledge only ever worked to generate more support for resistance to the enemy (eg the Battle of Britain, and the various allied bombing campaigns). You have to be willing to threaten total annihilation to use it as a rrsl threat (which is what the US nuclear bombings of Japan did). The US government can't threaten to wipe out its own people as the end result would be worse for the elite then losing the war.
You are applying some post-modernist perspective to economics and confusing MONEY with WEALTH. The basis of WEALTH is human labour and resources (which can only be made useful with human labour). MONEY is just an IOU that we use because carrying around a chicken to pay minor debts is inconvenient. Economic reality hasn't changed just societies understanding of the differences between MONEY and WEALTH. These kinds of short term trades create a lot of MONEY (either by siphoning it from investment funds, or when reserve banks just print more MONEY) but it doesn't transform any resources (WEALTH creation).
Long term investment gives MONEY to efficient companies so they can create more WEALTH by paying labour to transform resources into a useful form. If we adopted the "new" method the economy would focus solely on "creating" new MONEY until either the investment stopped or the WEALTH value of MONEY plunged absurdly because of the all the newly printed MONEY. This would quickly lead to economic collapse shortly followed by the collapse of civilisation as basic services depend upon the efficient distribution of MONEY.
The current MONEY making games are as a previous poster said nothing more than pass the parcel. Eventually the music will stop and people will realise the MONEY isn't useful for getting WEALTH.
Except the New Testament takes precedence over the Old Testament for Christians. People like this are more like Jews than they are Christians in attempting to bring about a theocracy (of course some portion of them think they ARE the lost tribes of Israel). You can only use the Bible to justify almost anything if you take bits and pieces out of context and ignore the major themes. Which orthodox denominations don't do.
No, they wouldn't as I am a member of a mainstream protestant denomination (in Australia). Many American Christian leaders are saying the same things I have said.
Sorry, but if someone consistently acts in a way against the beliefs* espoused by their claimed religion they aren't really followers of that religion. Christianity was the dominate religion in the West and unfortunately still has large numbers of cultural followers in some countries. These people espouse vaguely Christian thinking but would fail the doctrine of faith of any major denomination. "Decency" and a belief in a Get-out-of-jail-free card isn't Christianity.
Saying "you need Jesus" is Christian. Saying "You can't say $#*! on broadcast TV!" isn't.
If people like this actually acted out the faith of Christianity no one would have a bad word to say against Christians.
* Like not judging unbelievers. Putting the good of the "widow, orphan, and alien" ahead of personal gain. Sacrificing personal rights for the good of others.
Yeah cause you never hear people say "shit" or much worse in about any situation I have ever been in during my life. I heard it at my Catholic primary school. This is what happens when "Christians*" live in little gated communities and become completely out of touch with reality and the wider community.
* I am a Christian. Most of the people that whine about this stuff aren't really Christians. They just believe in ritual and "decency", they seem to miss that Jesus was mocking this kind of Pharisaical behaviour. Well actually they generally miss most of what Jesus said or at least fail to apply it.
1) The ocean isn't a flat surface which prevents easy skimming from working.
2) There is gold particles in sea water as well, that doesn't mean it is economical to extract it.
PETA is to animals as Hitler was to Jews. Hitler "liberated" a few million Jews from their "suffering", which is what PETA does to animals. Many people think PETA exists to stop abuse of animals (like many other organisations), but they actually exist to stop human dependence on animals. Which if taken to its conclusion would result in a hell of a lot less animals being around on the planet. In their world view it is better for a cow to be dead than to be in "bondage" to a farmer.
Oh, and high ranking members of PETA have been caught supporting eco-terrorists. They are Earth worshippers who should be declared a religious cult so that they don't go around warping kids minds by pretending to have some secular agenda.
If you are a Christian and oppose to this maybe you should apologize and then fight it.
Right, because Christianity is a monolithic religion and I can just organise a vote against stupid moralistic laws at the next meeting of the world wide body that governs Christianity. Oh wait ....
Honestly, it is like a sibling breaking a window. Instead of apologizing and getting him to not do it again you say that he isn't representative of the family and anyone saying the family is bad can fuck off.
Anyone who says a family is bad because of one sibling is using very poor logic, so I don't follow your analogy.
You are eager to put political leaders on trial but wish for people to ignore religious leaders.
And where did I indicate people should ignore the wrong doings of religious leaders? I was specifically talking about how governments regularly pass minority supported legislation (due to "campaign contributions") right after an election so by the time of the next election the public consciousness has forgotten about it.
But the vast majority of these crazy groups ARE religious (or are made up of highly religious people). That should be an indicator to you.
The vast majority of them are also families with children, and predominately white. What does that indicate? And I actually know of plenty of batshit insane lobby groups that wouldn't be seen within a city block of anything religious. That some people shut down their higher brain functions in favour of ideology is not restricted to "religions". While some atheists delude themselves into thinking religion is the cause of non-rational thinking and that humans are naturally, or can be taught to be, fully rational is not founded in the scientific evidence. People stick with crazy non-rational ideologies based on flimsy evidence because that is an exaggeration of the normal human cognitive system. If religion was done away with then people would just fight over secular ethics (which already happens, disputes between American individual liberty types and social welfare types are hardly examples of calm reasoned discourse).
Speaking as a Christian, Lobby groups can go fuck themselves. It is ludicrous that any tiny minority that is good at fund raising, or has deep corporate pockets, can be allowed to go around parliament and have private "chats" with legislators. The way people should influence their representatives is via letters and local meetings (and the representatives should be required to keep office hours in the non-sitting season that allows workers to visit them).
Groups like the ACL don't even represent most Christians just a tiny vocal minority.
What is likely to happen here is that Rudd and Conroy will pull a Howard and pass the legislation once returned to power because they now have a "mandate". Honestly we should bring back the Greek/Roman practise and try elected officials once they have left office.
The issue is that commercial airliners have no instrumentation capable of detecting ash clouds (normal clouds are detected via the radar return from water vapour) let alone telling if the density is at a safe level. Even if commercial airliners carried this sort of instrumentation there is insufficient data to decide if a given ash concentration is just going to mean an engine needs replacement earlier or cause the engine to catastrophically fail. So the onus is on the airlines to pay for this if they want to be able to fly during extreme conditions like this.
Real trouble shooters pull RAM first* because mis-seated and bad RAM is the cause of most hardware errors. After that you pull the PSU and then the GPU. If that still doesn't find the culprit you test those parts in known good machines and then swap out the CPU to isolate it or the MB. This guy didn't even have a serious problem, a real hardware gremlin is when you have combination issues and can't isolate a single faulty component. A month in the trenches of front line support teaches you these lessons that you won't learn from a lifetime of building the occasional machine for yourself.
That said if I had a frigging ENGINEERING SAMPLE anything I would pull that first. Anyone who knows anything about hardware production knows engineering samples are for troubleshooting and not freebies for journalists. It is like over clocking, far too many people expect that OCing is guaranteed and stable because most gear these days has some head room. I have seen people whining and blaming the manufacturers because their hardware didn't get the OC that everyone else got.
*And if the user has been OCing or fiddling with BIOS you set that to default as well.
Wikipedia doesn't want full depth coverage of specific areas. Once they wanted to contain the "sum of human knowledge" (including catch rates for pokemon) but these days they want to be an online encyclopaedia based on reputable sources. They encourage you to go off and make your own wiki if you want to have deep coverage of a particular area.
For example the article on 4chan contains superficial background information. There is another entire wiki dedicated to the full history of 4chan and the memes it generates. The wikipedia article focuses on Project Chanology and /b/ because that is probably what got 4chan the most press coverage (which is what wikipedia admins like to base articles on, but hardly covers all knowledge of a subject).
Wikipedia wants you to write encyclopedia articles. They don't just want an infodump of "non-encyclopaedic" information. If you do the latter they will tell you to take you "non-notable fancruft" to another wiki.
The problem with console to PC ports is that consoles are designed with the limitations of game controllers in mind and so therefore are often "simplified" compared to native PC titles. That isn't what this is about. This is about porting between the different touch based smart phones which are all so similar in capability that it is like porting between Windows, Linux, or OSX (which works fine if you don't target a propriety platform to begin with). This is solely about Steve Jobs trying to turn his beachhead in the mobile market into an occupation.
Actually it is likely to be worse because instead of the bullet penetrating through (which happens most of the time) all the kinetic energy will be dumped into you and the shockwave will probably shatter blood vessels and organs anyway. Pistol rounds don't normally shatter, and rifle rounds have way too much KE for this to be a good idea.
Considering how obese we are getting in the West these days 2-inches of penetration probably wouldn't pierce the fat layer. Hah, and people say obesity is a problem!
The motivators won't become extinct because these are exactly the external motivators these kids will get in the workforce. If there was an easy and cheap way to instil "love of learning" we would already be doing it. Behaviourists would also argue that, outside of the handful of biological urges, intrinsic motivators are the result of conditioning anyway. Most adults don't do a job because they love it, they do it because they need to pay the bills. And that is a good thing because there are plenty of boring or shit jobs that hardly anyone would do for the love of it.
I think this sort of technology is going to be as useful as Internet self-diagnosis. Most people have multiple "markers for disease" that aren't indicative of real disease or are of non-clinical forms. Bayesian probability* tells us that doing wide screen testing like this will just lead to lots of false positives and unnecessary medical procedures ('cause if the doctor does nothing and it isn't a false positive they will get sued). Some doctor's argue that screening for PSA (prostate specific antigen) causes more Years of Life Lost to unnecessary prostate removals than is saved by catching some cancers early.
Unfortunately the general public is not getting the reality that medicine is not a magic bullet that can detect and cure all disease with 100% accuracy. And counter-intuitively to decrease statistics like Years lost to Disability or Illness we might have to test less.
*(http://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/30002.6.shtml)
Requiring resumes to be in the proprietary and platform-specific Word .doc format, instead of .pdf, .html, or .txt formats, is a nifty little test early on in the hiring process.
I can't remember when I last worried about .doc compatibility. It has been about five years since I had a real problem with converting basic .doc documents in OpenOffice, and when making them myself I can't recall a serious problem in even longer. I have never seen "must be in .docx format" (which can be a problem) and 99% of HR drones wouldn't be able to tell the difference anyway. HTML and (potentially) PDF* are just security risks.
This guy is either using a very dated joke or is a massive zealot.
* Not to mention you need a non-Adobe client to get a good experience with PDF.
I don't think the euthanasia stuff is particularly religiously motivated because we allow all sorts of other things that fundamentalists are against (abortion, non-abstinence sex ed etc). I think it had more to do with the general knee jerk reaction of the public to the notion of assisted suicide. Our pollies will jump on pretty much anything that makes them poll well (Afghanistan is stable enough now to kick out Afghani asylum seekers right?).