There's plenty of creativity and talent in the USA. You have a very wealthy culture, though some of it may seem less so through familiarity. You do have a problem with a locked down media machine governed by the profit obsessed terrified who pressure everything to be targeted at the slap bang centre of the bell curve. Smart shows are dumbed down, shows without a love interest have one added, and so forth. Very good material slips through, but a lot is caught and strangled. The same goes with funding for projects that aren't deemed to hit a specific and defined demographic. When something new *is* successful, it is soon followed by clone after clone until the well is dry... and on after that, too.
Don't say that US culture doesn't have a lot to offer. It does. But greed kills a good percentage of it.
I think you're overlooking a lot of hypocrisy in colour. Plenty of people of both sides of this artificial division want the government to keep out of the things they disagree with it on and to step in and control the things they do agree with it on. Often these issues have nothing to do with Left or Right (and to the rest of the world they merely look Right and Far Right). The partisanship in the USA is leading people to think of everything in terms of "Left" or "Right" even when something could be judged entirely independently of these ideas.
The result is that a lot of good policies get rolled together with a lot of bad policies on either side, so that it becomes a lose-lose proposition.
Sorry, slight addendum. I've taken another look at the article I linked to and there's more in there than I remembered. Fine if you want to read some interesting stories about how the series came about, but the Eric part is in the last section bar one, about two-thirds of the way down.
Perhaps. But this sort of thing has been going on for some time, at least in the US. In the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, the writers were forced to alter the character of Eric to show how independence and rebellion led to suffering and social isolation. Read the linked article. It's distressing if you ever used to watch that series.
Who knows? Perhaps if Eric had gotten away with more, you wouldn't have the two party system you have in the States, today?;)
Predictions about the future are often wildly off. And predictions that progress in the future is going to make everything we have today look like a child's toy, might not be an exception. I'm typing this on a single core Semperon 2.2GHz machine with DDR (not DDR2) RAM and on-board graphics. That's very far from archaic, but it was low end when I bought it and that was several years ago. It manages pretty much all that I need at present. I am intending to upgrade it soon, but that's only because I have some specific programming requirements and even then I'm just going to plonk down the cash for an Athlon 64 X2 4000 or therabouts (costing £35). For most people there isn't a reason to upgrade. We've reached a plateau in requirements. We're even seeing it in some areas in software with Vista offering nothing new to customers and being rejected (offers more to developers, but that's not relevant here). The new MS Office suite is actually going backwards in quality as far as most are concerned.
I think the changes people are most interested in will be in power-consumption, size and noise. People wont be so much amazed that our graphics were only X good, or that we managed to make do with only 2GB of RAM, but that we tolerated great big fan-heavy bricks underneath all our desks and fat 8" wide wireless routers. Storage and bandwidth (outside and inside the home) will keep accelerating. We still have a great thirst for those and increases in these will help make different models of software possible (the remote office, our personal files hosted). But brute processing power? It'll go up, but we may not be so willing to pay for it. It would be interesting if Moore's Law finally failed not due to technology, but due to lack of interest.:)
I think ebook readers are a great idea, especially when they can be extended so I could get my favourite newspaper on it (the Independent in the UK). I thought this one looked better than the Amazon one and I thought about getting it. It's still too pricey for what it is, though. When these things are cheaper, I'll consider it if I can still find one then that's under my control and not some DRM infested nightmare.
Nah, ignore it. It's just yet another My Language Can Beat Up Your Language cat-fight, just like Chevy vs Ford fights.
You're saying that language vs. language arguments are without value. That would only be true if all languages were equal. You could say that they're useful for different purposes and that it's more useful to discuss this than to say one is better than the other. But then that's more or less what I said when I said I considered VB useful for small MS Office and little database apps, but not large projects. VB has a very fast learning curve - it's hyper friendly. That is an advantage to new programmers and not to experienced ones, which has an actual negative impact in some ways. This is what I'm saying.
Let me get this straight. It's pretty clearly what you're saying but I'm having a hard time actually believing it. In the USA, patent law actually forbids you to look at portions of your own DNA?
you weren't a vb programmer if you think VB is mainly dragging and dropping, you might be able to make some forms like that(bad forms at that).
You've clearly not read my comment correctly. I didn't say that VB is mainly dragging and dropping. I quite clearly stated that dragging and dropping does not make you a programmer. What I said was that VB allows dragging and dropping without thought and that there is an industry devoted to deluding people into thinking that is all that's needed. I know this because I have had to work with (and try and educate) these people. I do not see the equivalent poverty of education in C++ because it really doesn't lend itself to ignorant people.
I do find VB less elegant and effective than C++ which is the other language I have used significantly professionally. I've not used C#, so can't compare there. I've got non-professional experience with Java and found it better than VB, however. I'm standing by my general dislike of the language. VB's main quality seems to be a quickness and friendliness to learn. I don't see that as an advantage however, as it's not important to me in choice of language to use at this point in my career. It's lack of freedom is a separate issue but important in some circumstances. This is never shared by C++ or Java.
1. Insurance companies should not deny people coverage based on a genetic assessment.
2. Insurance companies should not charge a different premium based on genetic assessment.
In the US, health care is largely based on insurance, as opposed to much of Western Europe where it is seen as a basic right. Therefore, allowing different charging or even exclusion as in your number 1 scenario, would deny or impact people's access to health care in the USA to a dramatic level. This would be bad for a number of reasons, but the greatest of which is the sheer injustice of being treated worse by society for the sake of your genetic makeup. Unjust societies are not happy societies. Other areas of impact are on whether it affects someone's employability, either through risk-averse employers or because they are forced to pay more for that employee's health insurance.
Denial of health care to people or adding extra costs to their living limits people's opportunities in life and the last thing US society needs to be doing right now is limiting people's opportunities. They need every productive and successful member of society they can get. Plus the american health insurance companies are raking it in. They're one of the biggest industries going. The cost to the US citizen of health insurance is far out of whack compared to what the equivalent care costs someone via their taxes in most of Western Europe. That suggests that something is off with the industries profit margins already. The above two suggestions would be bad for society and cause quite a bit of suffering. That's reason enough, I think. I'm not sure why you think political correctness has any relevance here.
Ha! Bullshit! Everybody knows that mastering VB needs at least 30 years or so of hard work! Eight months is barely enough to start understanding what a variant is.
It's not 30 years to learn what a variant is. It's 30 years to bring yourself to use one. *shudder*;)
Agreed. I was a good VB programmer. But my VB experience was an eight-month interval between C++ jobs. I've knocked out minor MS Office applications when needed since then, but that's it. I'm sorry to say that most of the VB programmers I've worked with were very poor engineers. Admittedly I've not worked in VB for wealthy companies whilst I have in C++, so that colours things somewhat. I don't doubt that there are some good VB programmers out there. But in the cases of most of those I worked with, I could very clearly see how VB led them to be poor engineers. The amount of shortcuts and wizards and instances where they would start their program by dragging a form object onto the design panel and dumping form objects onto it was obviously a leading reason for their poor skills. VB *led* them to take this approach. It works for small Excel apps, barely for database front-ends and not well at all for large projects.
As is common with the lower end of Microsoft products, the selling point is that they make it very easy to do what they think you want to do. The ability of VB to knock out an interactive form with near-zero knowledge of programming has encouraged a lot of colleges to sell people the idea that a ten-week course of dragging and dropping text box objects is programming whilst a lot of cheap or ignorant employers have taken the graduates at their word and plunged them in over their heads.
VB is a poor language in many ways and not, imo, suited to a large or sophisticated project. But you can find good VB programmers (was one). It's just that it encourages bad ones.
Oh, the summary is also wrong. C# hasn't started springing leaks. The programmers missed a reference to objects that they were creating and the garbage collection therefore never triggered to unallocate the memory. I don't doubt it's not easy to automate a vehicle to drive any even 9 miles, but this could have been detected with more thorough debugging. At any rate, the article submitter and overseeing editor should be ashamed of twisting this into an anti-Microsoft jab. I'm a Linux programmer. I can tell you that Linux can compete happily without sinking to the level of lies and misinformation.
Yeah, it wasn't really fair to make that joke at Hellboy's expense. In it's own genre, it was very good and it too had some nice Lovecraftian elements. Plus no film with Ron Perlman can be that bad. I should have said Blade II but I can't really pin that one on del Toro as, like an opposite of the Ron Perlman rule, no film with Wesley Snipes can be that good.
I'm looking forward to AtMoM like a five year old awaits Christmas.
But if we reach another star system, then that star will already have a name that can be used. It doesn't have to start sharing the definition of the Sun. And Sol is actually the word for the Sun in some other languages. The chances of ancient Romans colonising Alpha Centauri is probably slim, but if you have a conversation with any spanish or italian speaking people there you're going to have one Hell of a frustrating conversation.
"That's not Sol, that's sol."
"Qué?"
"The planet we came from goes around Sol. This is sol."
"Qué?"
"Sol is not sol and sol is not Sol. Sol doesn't actually mean Sol, it means..." *bang*
For pity's sake, refer to things by their name - "Sun" if you're speaking english.
If we ever need a word to mean 'local star' we'll come up with something new. Sheesh!;)
What "new discoveries about the reality we live in" ? That the Sun is a star? Doesn't mean that we have to stop calling it the Sun and give it a new name. And in fact we didn't. The Sun has been known to be a star for a long time and remained being called the Sun. That other stars can have planets in orbit around them? Did that mean we suddenly stopped calling them stars and had to call them 'suns'. No. I don't get how needing to find new names for new phenomenon applies here. The word Sun has applied specifically to our own star for all of the history of the English language.
Funny you should mention Lovecraft in connection with modern movies. Guilermo del Torro is directing "At the Mountains of Madness." I'm not sure if this is the Guillermo del Toro who directed Hellboy or the one that directed Pan's Labyrynth, but either way it's going to be a Lovecraft film with an actual budget. Also, at the other end of the scale the H P Lovercraft Historical Society produced a Call of Cthulhu film last year which is actually very entertaining (really!). They've also just released the trailer for The Whisperer in Darkness which looks even more fun. (I sincerely hope I haven't just slashdotted their servers).
Well loathe though I really truly am to defend celebrity reporters, it sadly could be defended. Meteoric need not pertain to meteorites, but also meteors. And a meteor skimming the Earth's atmosphere can rise from the horizon pretty bloody quickly. It is an unfortunate expression, though I think Quantum Leap is worse.
"It's a quantum leap!"
"You mean it's too small to notice?"
"Uh... no."
A sun is a type of thing, Sol is the name of the sun that happens to be closes to us.
Oh no! No. This is as bad as all those people who have started pronouncing Uranus "your-an-us" rather than "your-a-nus" because they think it sounds more scientific that way. As if sounding "scientific" is a good thing as opposed to trying to make things as understandable as possible (and funny). A sun is not a type of thing. You can say it to mean that, put it with a lower case 's' and people will know what you mean, but we have a word that specifically means that with no ambiguity and the word is star. We have been calling the Sun "the Sun" for a long, long time. Other languages have their own words for the Sun and they are direct equivalents. They don't mean "stars" or even "stars with planets around them." Each word means, quite specifically The Sun. And the interesting thing is that one of those languages is Latin and its word for the Sun is "Sol." It is the direct equivalent word with the same meaning. Why you think translating something into another language is suddenly correct and using the native word incorrect I don't know. But I am suspicious that it is that same creeping desire on the part of some people to sound "scientific." The English speaking world has used the Sun for centuries quite happily without any ambiguity which has appeared out of nowhere in recent years.
The overwhelming majority of English speakers call it the Sun and don't mean stars and wouldn't think to mean stars. Almost nobody calls it Sol. Why introduce confusion?
What kind of freedom is it when you force it on them ?
It's still freedom and it's easy to demonstrate the validity of democracy over other forms of government. If people are obliged to behave in a particular way under a non-democratic government, then they can still choose to behave that way under a democratic government if they wish, but also have other options. Given that democracy adds new options without removing old ones, the only way you could argue that democracy wasn't better would be if you believed the power to choose how to behave was a bad thing. People have argued that, but they're not people I've agreed with.
Now the US has not been pure in their efforts to set up a democracy in Iraq. An actual representative government would probably establish friendly relations with Iran and would certainly not give away the country's oil to the US in exclusive, non-tendered and sub-market rate deals. There would also be the possibility of the country fragmenting if people were free to so choose. So by all means argue about what the US government is forcing on the Iraqi people, but don't rail against democracy by saying it is equal to any other political system. It is not. The only occasional strong argument against a "pure democracy" - one that is entirely representative - is to say that it encourages a tyranny of the majority. But that's hardly a point over which many other political systems are going to be in a position to use as ammunition.
I think trouble is...we all overestimated the intelligence and abilities of the Iraqi people. Most people, I guess, figured once they were rid of Saddam, that they'd jump at the chance to unite, and form a rational, somewhat freedom enbracing government. I mean, considering the dictatorship they'd endured, you'd think, eh?
I'm not sure I accept the "we" in the above paragraph, seeing as few of us got much say in whether or not Iraq was invaded and I'm certainly not subsuming my judgement under that of the US government. Many, many of us protested against the invasion and predicted a disaster, though I never realised how bad it would actually be.
But that aside, are you so certain that intelligence and ability was lacking on the part of the Iraqi people? Leaked timetables of the planned program of occupation by the US didn't actually allow for a democracy in Iraq anywhere near as early as one was instituted. The USA's intention was to keep Bremner's provisional authority in place at least a year longer than it actually lasted. During that time a whole host of oil deals would be signed on the Iraqi people's behalf (to in part, help pay for the invasion of their own country, naturally). Public pressure for progress "back home" along with the demand in Iraq forced the US to bring in the democratic government much sooner than they wanted to. But even then, it wasn't that democratic. The Iraqi government was still required to rubber stamp whatever laws and international agreements the US told them to. The "lack of intelligence" that you perceive, seems to me to actually be the outcome of a much better grasp of what was being done to their country than most people in the UK and the USA have today. They had no desire to become a puppet state of the US or hand over all their wealth. And as to their ability to self-govern, well after the initial invasion, numerous local leaders took on responsibility to keep things moving and functioning, down to garbage collection and banks. However, in numerous cases, this was not politically suitable for the occupiers. It is easy to reason that for an occupying force that wants to have control over the country and make decisions for it, people managing for themselves is problematic. Influential leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr who immediately stepped up to lead were dealt with (and in his case, targeted for assasination). There was a process of decapitation and dismantlement that was carried out by the US immediately after the invasion and it was deliberate. The US had consultancy companies lined up for a long time before the invasion, primed and ready to come in and take over. And they did. And we all know how outside consultants usually go. It's not fair to characterise the Iraqi peoples as lacking ability when that ability was systematically targeted by the occupiers who dismantled police forces and imprisoned community leaders.
But, it turned out not to be the case. Apparently they are pretty much all fscked in the head over there....can't get past racial/religious differences (and for God's sake how can even they tell the difference between suni and shiite?, they really do all look like one people on tv)
This I agree with - religious and racial differences need to be overcome. But the same could just as well be said about Sunni and US or Shia and US. The way you said the above kind of suggests you don't see any real difference between Sunni and Shia and that they should just realise they're all one group. I agree and have the same view about people from the US and people from Iraq. If Sunni and Shia can be told to get past racial and religious differences and stop fighting, it's hypocritical not to say the US and the Iraqi's should get past racial and religious differences and stop fighting each other.
....so, they constantly bicker and have apparently NO leaders in the group that the country can rally around.
Well let's see if we can't make it both even more clever and more absurd, then. How about we have the different lanes just play different fixed notes. With sufficient lanes, you could very easily reproduce Pachalbels Cannon, which is mainly a very limited number of notes coming in and going out at simple intervals and durations. You're driving in lane 1, producing a nice A while someone overtakes in lane 2 and plays the D, etc. Okay, I know people would have to get the speed right to play the note, but that's actually a good thing as speeders get told off for coming in to sharp.;)
not 'pushing' would say a lot about how the united states is willing to treat its allies. look at the history of the cold war -- allies were worried that the united states would not step up to the plate and defend them, if and when the time came. was washington worth paris? what is the amount of blood and treasure that the united states is willing to give up in order to pursue a goal?
I would say, and I think you must agree, that the amount of blood and "treasure" has to depend on what the goal is. In the second World War, a main goal was to drive out the invading German army and the Nazi ideology that had taken control of it. The USA's allies were the countries also fighting to liberate parts of Europe. In this case however, the allies that you think it would be so shameful to let down, are a fairly brutal and certainly oppressive monarchy of all things! People are tortured for being critical of the ruling family, people imprisoned without trial. Amputation is used as a punishment and there is virtually no legal protection for women. This is a country where people have been executed for witchcraft.
The morality of letting down one's allies is not independent of who those allies are. It's a shame that you posted as an AC as I would liked you to have read this reply.
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty of creativity and talent in the USA. You have a very wealthy culture, though some of it may seem less so through familiarity. You do have a problem with a locked down media machine governed by the profit obsessed terrified who pressure everything to be targeted at the slap bang centre of the bell curve. Smart shows are dumbed down, shows without a love interest have one added, and so forth. Very good material slips through, but a lot is caught and strangled. The same goes with funding for projects that aren't deemed to hit a specific and defined demographic. When something new *is* successful, it is soon followed by clone after clone until the well is dry... and on after that, too.
Don't say that US culture doesn't have a lot to offer. It does. But greed kills a good percentage of it.
I think you're overlooking a lot of hypocrisy in colour. Plenty of people of both sides of this artificial division want the government to keep out of the things they disagree with it on and to step in and control the things they do agree with it on. Often these issues have nothing to do with Left or Right (and to the rest of the world they merely look Right and Far Right). The partisanship in the USA is leading people to think of everything in terms of "Left" or "Right" even when something could be judged entirely independently of these ideas.
The result is that a lot of good policies get rolled together with a lot of bad policies on either side, so that it becomes a lose-lose proposition.
Sorry, slight addendum. I've taken another look at the article I linked to and there's more in there than I remembered. Fine if you want to read some interesting stories about how the series came about, but the Eric part is in the last section bar one, about two-thirds of the way down.
Perhaps. But this sort of thing has been going on for some time, at least in the US. In the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, the writers were forced to alter the character of Eric to show how independence and rebellion led to suffering and social isolation. Read the linked article. It's distressing if you ever used to watch that series.
Who knows? Perhaps if Eric had gotten away with more, you wouldn't have the two party system you have in the States, today?
Predictions about the future are often wildly off. And predictions that progress in the future is going to make everything we have today look like a child's toy, might not be an exception. I'm typing this on a single core Semperon 2.2GHz machine with DDR (not DDR2) RAM and on-board graphics. That's very far from archaic, but it was low end when I bought it and that was several years ago. It manages pretty much all that I need at present. I am intending to upgrade it soon, but that's only because I have some specific programming requirements and even then I'm just going to plonk down the cash for an Athlon 64 X2 4000 or therabouts (costing £35). For most people there isn't a reason to upgrade. We've reached a plateau in requirements. We're even seeing it in some areas in software with Vista offering nothing new to customers and being rejected (offers more to developers, but that's not relevant here). The new MS Office suite is actually going backwards in quality as far as most are concerned.
I think the changes people are most interested in will be in power-consumption, size and noise. People wont be so much amazed that our graphics were only X good, or that we managed to make do with only 2GB of RAM, but that we tolerated great big fan-heavy bricks underneath all our desks and fat 8" wide wireless routers. Storage and bandwidth (outside and inside the home) will keep accelerating. We still have a great thirst for those and increases in these will help make different models of software possible (the remote office, our personal files hosted). But brute processing power? It'll go up, but we may not be so willing to pay for it. It would be interesting if Moore's Law finally failed not due to technology, but due to lack of interest.
I think ebook readers are a great idea, especially when they can be extended so I could get my favourite newspaper on it (the Independent in the UK). I thought this one looked better than the Amazon one and I thought about getting it. It's still too pricey for what it is, though. When these things are cheaper, I'll consider it if I can still find one then that's under my control and not some DRM infested nightmare.
You're saying that language vs. language arguments are without value. That would only be true if all languages were equal. You could say that they're useful for different purposes and that it's more useful to discuss this than to say one is better than the other. But then that's more or less what I said when I said I considered VB useful for small MS Office and little database apps, but not large projects. VB has a very fast learning curve - it's hyper friendly. That is an advantage to new programmers and not to experienced ones, which has an actual negative impact in some ways. This is what I'm saying.
Let me get this straight. It's pretty clearly what you're saying but I'm having a hard time actually believing it. In the USA, patent law actually forbids you to look at portions of your own DNA?
You've clearly not read my comment correctly. I didn't say that VB is mainly dragging and dropping. I quite clearly stated that dragging and dropping does not make you a programmer. What I said was that VB allows dragging and dropping without thought and that there is an industry devoted to deluding people into thinking that is all that's needed. I know this because I have had to work with (and try and educate) these people. I do not see the equivalent poverty of education in C++ because it really doesn't lend itself to ignorant people.
I do find VB less elegant and effective than C++ which is the other language I have used significantly professionally. I've not used C#, so can't compare there. I've got non-professional experience with Java and found it better than VB, however. I'm standing by my general dislike of the language. VB's main quality seems to be a quickness and friendliness to learn. I don't see that as an advantage however, as it's not important to me in choice of language to use at this point in my career. It's lack of freedom is a separate issue but important in some circumstances. This is never shared by C++ or Java.
In the US, health care is largely based on insurance, as opposed to much of Western Europe where it is seen as a basic right. Therefore, allowing different charging or even exclusion as in your number 1 scenario, would deny or impact people's access to health care in the USA to a dramatic level. This would be bad for a number of reasons, but the greatest of which is the sheer injustice of being treated worse by society for the sake of your genetic makeup. Unjust societies are not happy societies. Other areas of impact are on whether it affects someone's employability, either through risk-averse employers or because they are forced to pay more for that employee's health insurance.
Denial of health care to people or adding extra costs to their living limits people's opportunities in life and the last thing US society needs to be doing right now is limiting people's opportunities. They need every productive and successful member of society they can get. Plus the american health insurance companies are raking it in. They're one of the biggest industries going. The cost to the US citizen of health insurance is far out of whack compared to what the equivalent care costs someone via their taxes in most of Western Europe. That suggests that something is off with the industries profit margins already. The above two suggestions would be bad for society and cause quite a bit of suffering. That's reason enough, I think. I'm not sure why you think political correctness has any relevance here.
It's not 30 years to learn what a variant is. It's 30 years to bring yourself to use one. *shudder*
Agreed. I was a good VB programmer. But my VB experience was an eight-month interval between C++ jobs. I've knocked out minor MS Office applications when needed since then, but that's it. I'm sorry to say that most of the VB programmers I've worked with were very poor engineers. Admittedly I've not worked in VB for wealthy companies whilst I have in C++, so that colours things somewhat. I don't doubt that there are some good VB programmers out there. But in the cases of most of those I worked with, I could very clearly see how VB led them to be poor engineers. The amount of shortcuts and wizards and instances where they would start their program by dragging a form object onto the design panel and dumping form objects onto it was obviously a leading reason for their poor skills. VB *led* them to take this approach. It works for small Excel apps, barely for database front-ends and not well at all for large projects.
As is common with the lower end of Microsoft products, the selling point is that they make it very easy to do what they think you want to do. The ability of VB to knock out an interactive form with near-zero knowledge of programming has encouraged a lot of colleges to sell people the idea that a ten-week course of dragging and dropping text box objects is programming whilst a lot of cheap or ignorant employers have taken the graduates at their word and plunged them in over their heads.
VB is a poor language in many ways and not, imo, suited to a large or sophisticated project. But you can find good VB programmers (was one). It's just that it encourages bad ones.
Oh, the summary is also wrong. C# hasn't started springing leaks. The programmers missed a reference to objects that they were creating and the garbage collection therefore never triggered to unallocate the memory. I don't doubt it's not easy to automate a vehicle to drive any even 9 miles, but this could have been detected with more thorough debugging. At any rate, the article submitter and overseeing editor should be ashamed of twisting this into an anti-Microsoft jab. I'm a Linux programmer. I can tell you that Linux can compete happily without sinking to the level of lies and misinformation.
Yeah, it wasn't really fair to make that joke at Hellboy's expense. In it's own genre, it was very good and it too had some nice Lovecraftian elements. Plus no film with Ron Perlman can be that bad. I should have said Blade II but I can't really pin that one on del Toro as, like an opposite of the Ron Perlman rule, no film with Wesley Snipes can be that good.
I'm looking forward to AtMoM like a five year old awaits Christmas.
But if we reach another star system, then that star will already have a name that can be used. It doesn't have to start sharing the definition of the Sun. And Sol is actually the word for the Sun in some other languages. The chances of ancient Romans colonising Alpha Centauri is probably slim, but if you have a conversation with any spanish or italian speaking people there you're going to have one Hell of a frustrating conversation.
"That's not Sol, that's sol."
"Qué?"
"The planet we came from goes around Sol. This is sol."
"Qué?"
"Sol is not sol and sol is not Sol. Sol doesn't actually mean Sol, it means..."
*bang*
For pity's sake, refer to things by their name - "Sun" if you're speaking english.
If we ever need a word to mean 'local star' we'll come up with something new. Sheesh!
What "new discoveries about the reality we live in" ? That the Sun is a star? Doesn't mean that we have to stop calling it the Sun and give it a new name. And in fact we didn't. The Sun has been known to be a star for a long time and remained being called the Sun. That other stars can have planets in orbit around them? Did that mean we suddenly stopped calling them stars and had to call them 'suns'. No. I don't get how needing to find new names for new phenomenon applies here. The word Sun has applied specifically to our own star for all of the history of the English language.
Funny you should mention Lovecraft in connection with modern movies. Guilermo del Torro is directing "At the Mountains of Madness." I'm not sure if this is the Guillermo del Toro who directed Hellboy or the one that directed Pan's Labyrynth, but either way it's going to be a Lovecraft film with an actual budget. Also, at the other end of the scale the H P Lovercraft Historical Society produced a Call of Cthulhu film last year which is actually very entertaining (really!). They've also just released the trailer for The Whisperer in Darkness which looks even more fun. (I sincerely hope I haven't just slashdotted their servers).
Well loathe though I really truly am to defend celebrity reporters, it sadly could be defended. Meteoric need not pertain to meteorites, but also meteors. And a meteor skimming the Earth's atmosphere can rise from the horizon pretty bloody quickly. It is an unfortunate expression, though I think Quantum Leap is worse.
"It's a quantum leap!"
"You mean it's too small to notice?"
"Uh... no."
Oh no! No. This is as bad as all those people who have started pronouncing Uranus "your-an-us" rather than "your-a-nus" because they think it sounds more scientific that way. As if sounding "scientific" is a good thing as opposed to trying to make things as understandable as possible (and funny). A sun is not a type of thing. You can say it to mean that, put it with a lower case 's' and people will know what you mean, but we have a word that specifically means that with no ambiguity and the word is star. We have been calling the Sun "the Sun" for a long, long time. Other languages have their own words for the Sun and they are direct equivalents. They don't mean "stars" or even "stars with planets around them." Each word means, quite specifically The Sun. And the interesting thing is that one of those languages is Latin and its word for the Sun is "Sol." It is the direct equivalent word with the same meaning. Why you think translating something into another language is suddenly correct and using the native word incorrect I don't know. But I am suspicious that it is that same creeping desire on the part of some people to sound "scientific." The English speaking world has used the Sun for centuries quite happily without any ambiguity which has appeared out of nowhere in recent years.
The overwhelming majority of English speakers call it the Sun and don't mean stars and wouldn't think to mean stars. Almost nobody calls it Sol. Why introduce confusion?
The Sun. The Stars. Uranus [rude pronunciation].
Thank you.
But that wouldn't be a Christian thing to do.
The falsifiable thing... yep - you got it in one!
The Darwin Fish. It's funny cause it's falsifiable.
It's still freedom and it's easy to demonstrate the validity of democracy over other forms of government. If people are obliged to behave in a particular way under a non-democratic government, then they can still choose to behave that way under a democratic government if they wish, but also have other options. Given that democracy adds new options without removing old ones, the only way you could argue that democracy wasn't better would be if you believed the power to choose how to behave was a bad thing. People have argued that, but they're not people I've agreed with.
Now the US has not been pure in their efforts to set up a democracy in Iraq. An actual representative government would probably establish friendly relations with Iran and would certainly not give away the country's oil to the US in exclusive, non-tendered and sub-market rate deals. There would also be the possibility of the country fragmenting if people were free to so choose. So by all means argue about what the US government is forcing on the Iraqi people, but don't rail against democracy by saying it is equal to any other political system. It is not. The only occasional strong argument against a "pure democracy" - one that is entirely representative - is to say that it encourages a tyranny of the majority. But that's hardly a point over which many other political systems are going to be in a position to use as ammunition.
I'm not sure I accept the "we" in the above paragraph, seeing as few of us got much say in whether or not Iraq was invaded and I'm certainly not subsuming my judgement under that of the US government. Many, many of us protested against the invasion and predicted a disaster, though I never realised how bad it would actually be.
But that aside, are you so certain that intelligence and ability was lacking on the part of the Iraqi people? Leaked timetables of the planned program of occupation by the US didn't actually allow for a democracy in Iraq anywhere near as early as one was instituted. The USA's intention was to keep Bremner's provisional authority in place at least a year longer than it actually lasted. During that time a whole host of oil deals would be signed on the Iraqi people's behalf (to in part, help pay for the invasion of their own country, naturally). Public pressure for progress "back home" along with the demand in Iraq forced the US to bring in the democratic government much sooner than they wanted to. But even then, it wasn't that democratic. The Iraqi government was still required to rubber stamp whatever laws and international agreements the US told them to. The "lack of intelligence" that you perceive, seems to me to actually be the outcome of a much better grasp of what was being done to their country than most people in the UK and the USA have today. They had no desire to become a puppet state of the US or hand over all their wealth. And as to their ability to self-govern, well after the initial invasion, numerous local leaders took on responsibility to keep things moving and functioning, down to garbage collection and banks. However, in numerous cases, this was not politically suitable for the occupiers. It is easy to reason that for an occupying force that wants to have control over the country and make decisions for it, people managing for themselves is problematic. Influential leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr who immediately stepped up to lead were dealt with (and in his case, targeted for assasination). There was a process of decapitation and dismantlement that was carried out by the US immediately after the invasion and it was deliberate. The US had consultancy companies lined up for a long time before the invasion, primed and ready to come in and take over. And they did. And we all know how outside consultants usually go. It's not fair to characterise the Iraqi peoples as lacking ability when that ability was systematically targeted by the occupiers who dismantled police forces and imprisoned community leaders.
This I agree with - religious and racial differences need to be overcome. But the same could just as well be said about Sunni and US or Shia and US. The way you said the above kind of suggests you don't see any real difference between Sunni and Shia and that they should just realise they're all one group. I agree and have the same view about people from the US and people from Iraq. If Sunni and Shia can be told to get past racial and religious differences and stop fighting, it's hypocritical not to say the US and the Iraqi's should get past racial and religious differences and stop fighting each other.
No leaders that the US
Well let's see if we can't make it both even more clever and more absurd, then. How about we have the different lanes just play different fixed notes. With sufficient lanes, you could very easily reproduce Pachalbels Cannon, which is mainly a very limited number of notes coming in and going out at simple intervals and durations. You're driving in lane 1, producing a nice A while someone overtakes in lane 2 and plays the D, etc. Okay, I know people would have to get the speed right to play the note, but that's actually a good thing as speeders get told off for coming in to sharp.
Reminds me of my second favourite bumpersticker - written in red it went, if these letters appear blue, you may be driving too fast.
I would say, and I think you must agree, that the amount of blood and "treasure" has to depend on what the goal is. In the second World War, a main goal was to drive out the invading German army and the Nazi ideology that had taken control of it. The USA's allies were the countries also fighting to liberate parts of Europe. In this case however, the allies that you think it would be so shameful to let down, are a fairly brutal and certainly oppressive monarchy of all things! People are tortured for being critical of the ruling family, people imprisoned without trial. Amputation is used as a punishment and there is virtually no legal protection for women. This is a country where people have been executed for witchcraft.
The morality of letting down one's allies is not independent of who those allies are. It's a shame that you posted as an AC as I would liked you to have read this reply.