The History Channel in the UK still shows an inordinate amount of WW2/Nazi/Hitler documentaries. I mean, I can understand that being perhaps the most prevalent topic. But often it seems like they show nothing else!
If Nintendo do pull something good, nay, amazing out of the hat, they probably do stand a fair chance against Sony and MS. In fact, if those two don't get their act together, and Nintendo has plenty of consoles ready at launch with good titles, Nintendo can win.
I don't expect to see it though. I think ultimately the PS3 will come out tops despite the delayed launch(es). It looks like being the PS2 of our time:)
A lot rides too on whether the HDTV revolution does happen. By the looks of it, it may be a year at least till it really hits.
Oh, yeah, I just remembered hearing something about Nintendo revolution not being HD. If true, and the HDTV Revolution (no pun intended) actually hits, Nintendo will likely be screwed.
Why do people in the US seem fixated with Ethanol? Here in Ireland, all we hear about is rapeseed oil, which can be used in a normal diesel engine (that hasn't been used for diesel, or has had filters and stuff changed). We have a few vehicles running on that right now (the fuel, including the same taxes as petrol/diesel, is more expensive though. Set less tax though, and it would be cheaper). I'm just curious why the focus seems to be different?
In any case, there are definitely renewable resources we can burn in our vehicles. The problem is not that (once oil prices go high enough, the switch will happen *fast* and without a nasty crash), but rather power for the major consumption we have (heating, lighting, domestic, industry, etc.) Unless we go nuclear and content ourselves with increasing storage of nuclear waste, there's a major problem of how to get away from fossil fuels in power plants. A *FAR* bigger issue than vehicles.
Agricultural land we need to sustain our food supply! HAH! Here in the West, a lot of good agricultural land isn't used to produce food. And more of it is used to produce food that isn't sold (e.g. Milk)
Furthermore, we sell more food than we eat. WAY more. A whopping huge amount of it is just binned, i.e. surplus from supermarkets, restaurants.
And then we actually buy too much individually. And some of us eat either far too much, or types of food that are inefficient (and yes, we shouldn't need to give up nice foods, but far too many people eat "delicacies" constantly, and even health suffers as a result).
All these moanings of running out of farmland and not being able to feed the "surplus population" are just lies to make people feel better about our corrupt and wasteful Western society.
We are of course, possibly going to be well screwed if China continues to embrace the Western way. That will show up just how unsustainable our habits are.
Or you can stay in academia. Being paid to be a research student rocks.
Yeah, admittedly there's the question of what to do after, but one is for sure in a better position to those who just did a primary degree, or indeed didn't do third level.
Educating oneself does further one's chances.
It's important to do well at it though. Even studying say, an Arts course, the important thing is to be one of the top graduates - that is more important than the general employment prospects from a given course. So pick a course you can enjoy and excel at, not one that you mistakenly think you can easily get a job from. Qualifications are only "paper qualifications" if you haven't taken them seriously, learnt a lot and gone beyond the course content, and come out near top of the class.
Oh, and if you're in the EU, come to Ireland where third level tuition fees are paid by the government, not you!:D Yay for low corporation taxes and no royalties on intellectual property bringing jobs and lots of income and purchase tax! This country rocks!
You live in some kind of crazy place then. All the lights in shops get switched off here except for those still open (one or two supermarkets are 24 hour now), and window displays of the shops that can afford to spend money on electricity for advertising (some shops close up their window displays after hours too).
Mind you, I'm in Ireland, where we have plenty of other problems (something like the most waste packaging per head of population in Europe - we're currently trying to decide whether to burn it - i.e. incinerators, find more places to bury it or pay to ship it abroad).
Yeah - but I don't want the requirements to drop. Admittedly I'm not a poor student anymore so my opinions have changed.
But Guild Wars or Civ 4 at 1600x1200 with full graphics... drool. It does really add to the feel of a game.
That said, even my P4 3Ghz Geforce 6800 can't run Battlefield 2 at full detail (at least, not if I want a very responsive game, as one does). Although running at 1600x1200 is a killer (20" flat panel optimal res).
I may get a new graphics card for Oblivion though. Having seen the screenshots for that game (drool), it's going to deserve a monster system. Geforce 7800GT is down to 340 now with a local online retailer, so I'll not have to outlay much at all if I upgrade in a couple months time and prices drop further!
I want immersive gaming dammit!
Oh - one more thing. I paid 40 or less for the games I mentioned, while new console games are 60 or 70. The PC game prices generally drop a bit even after just a month or so. The previous generation games or budget titles are 15 or less, while for PS2 (e.g.) they are 30.
So PC gaming isn't necessarily expensive, especially if you need a PC anyways for working on, and the Net, etc. (solely the *extra* cost of good hardware is comparable to the console prices).
Interestingly, it looks like 1080i is more popular in Europe so far, which will certainly complicate matters.
At the moment one would need to be *very* *VERY* careful buying a HDTV here in Europe - as it can be unclear just how high-definition supposedly HD tvs are (as for "HD-ready"... hmmm). Games consoles are likely going with 720p, mainland Europe broadcasters and the BBC have gone for 1080i, and Sky Digital (the main UK/Irl satellite broadcaster) are hedging their bets so far. Buying a true 1080p set seems like a nice idea.
Mind you, perhaps it's wise too to hold off on the Xbox 360 till we see a broader range of games for it! Also the PS3 *might* be better (and will be a cheap Blu-ray movie player, relative to standalone players. If you're getting an HDTV, playing blu-ray (or of course HDDVD) movies will be nice), and who knows what Nintendo will pull out of the hat!
Although considering that there are plenty of (Christian and otherwise) scientists upset with the whole casting of a science vs. religion battle, and who've made very public appeals to those continuing the "battle", I think a lot of such rational explanation as to why the two domains aren't fundamentally in opposition falls on deaf ears.
Particularly in the USA anyways. We can be a bit more smug about there being less of a battle in Europe for now, although it does seem that in the UK people are beginning to look a bit more strangely at Christians due to the bad press from the US. I guess science and scientists aren't so well trusted either due to an anti-intellectual gutter press! Europe however is a lot more preoccupied with "Are Islam and Western society compatible?" (well, partly. A lot of people simply answer "Yes, of course", or "No, of course not" to that).
Heh - of course, with the XPS - it's specifically for gaming. So Dell could have set up the system to, for example, not have cruddy background processes starting in Windows.
That said, I'm happy with my off-the-shelf Dimension for gaming (after the usual Windows re-install and endless tweaking - wish I'd made an image of my clean system with all customisation done). Of course, it's hard to be unhappy with a cheap but good quality 20" flat panel at 1600x1200!
Any sensible business should be either re-installing the systems themselves after purchase, or paying someone else to do so - in both cases based on the company's actual requirements (software, network/profile setup, configuration, devices).
One size fits all doesn't work, and it's the reason for many problems with Windows even after careful configuration.
Careful configuration (switching off unneeded services for example) makes a huge difference to the resources used by Windows, and can help security also.
I find Adblock and Noscript essential for dealing with Web 2.0.
I'd give more thought to allowing myself to see ads if it wasn't for this recurring theme of waiting for a bunch of third-party servers to serve up lurid heavy-bandwidth ads arranged with broken scripting.
My favorite site to demo the difference between no-script versus vanilla firefox (or worse, MSIE) is dilbert.com.
Here in Ireland the govt. tried introduce the typical flawed e-voting (no paper trail). They got away with a trial run in a couple constituencies in one election, but the group they set up to rubber-stamp their use in the following elections came back with an unexpected (for the govt) "you've got to be joking?" We're now stuck spending millions storing the things, and the Minister responsible for wasting millions buying the things in a previous dept. is now in charge of the Dept. of Transport, spending billions each year on ill-managed road and rail projects. Still, at least we still have good old paper ballot for our Single Transferable Vote elections (even if the processing time is rather high in doing it by hand - some counts take a week or more! It makes the outcome guessing so much more fun though as each count round happens, someone is elected or eliminated, and transfers are worked out).
I wonder would the States be interested in buying some as-new Nedap electronic voting machines from us? *grin*
Hah - it's not necessarily better having proportional representation. Heck, here in Ireland we even have transferrable votes (you can vote for someone unlikely, and if they're knocked out, your vote is transferred to your next preference. Conversely those who get more votes than they need to win a seat in a constituency, have their excess votes transferred). All in all it pretty much means the country gets what it asks for.
Guess what? The "general public" are often ill-informed, misled by politicians, and have die-hard fanaticisms for certain parties even if they've been misled. They have selfish desires of what they want politicians to do for them, are led by catchy slogans and personalities, and don't care as much about what the govt. does for their fellow countryman as for them.
Looks like our next election will provide another interesting problem with multi-party politics - the mad raving looney party (Sinn Féin - who apart from their treasonous attitude to the Irish State, and rejection of the legitimate rule of the North by the UK, don't sit with the communists in the European Parliament groupings for nothing) holding the balance of power.
So a more accurate form of democracy is not necessarily going to be better.
It's amusing that in the UK you're suddenly realising the benefits of having a less democratic upper house of parliament!
A closer analogy might be click and point adventure games. I'd suggest that it'd be much better to see an attempt at reviving these rather than text games. The concept is similar, except that all the locations, objects, etc. are rendered in pretty graphics.
I can see how text games can be effective (the imagination based on text descriptions potentially rivalling any artwork) - but for those such as myself who started into computer games after the era of text adventure games - it seems far too difficult to handle compared to click and point.
Come on, new Monkey Island, Zork, etc. please!
And yes, these games are so much less effort than modern fast-paced games - regardless of the pause button availability!
Yeah, but it's like describing Canadians or Mexicans as Americans - entirely correct, but misleading nonetheless. Except that it's an even more misleading description to use "African" as a label for those from north Africa, as we're talking about people descended from Arab ethnicity - rather than the ethnicies further south in Africa.
The whole division of ethnicies comes into the North-South conflict in places like Sudan (that is not merely a religious division, but ethnic - non-Arab and Arab/Arabicized).
That's a pita if like most people, you just want a 1/4 hole (metaphorically speaking).
Of course, extending the analogy, we need something that's cheaper to make holes with (or at least competition) and also better quality.
ATM we have the equivalent of a bargain tool (which it has to be admitted, does drill holes/do the job) being sold at premium prices.
Apologies if the extension of the analogy doesn't work and this sounds like a load of nonsense. You know what I mean. Windows isn't as bad as people make out, but there should be more, cheaper and better alternatives, and Linux is not what the general (desktop-computing) populance actually needs (even if Windows isn't entirely either).
Who knows, depending on the place, stupidity/ignorance of the courts/lawmakers, you could be done for just about anything at the behest of the corporations. And in fact, the risk is just as great for some corporations that they'll get royally screwed in court.
On the other hand, it's only in the last couple centuries that long-held deposits of CO2 (locked into fossil fuels) have been dramatically released back into the cycle of things. That is unlikely to have no effect.
Add to that the CO2 released from massive deforestation by fire. And there have been recent suggestions that some past unpleasant climate changes were due to us madly deforesting areas back in past times.
But in any case, regardless of climate change, Western wastefulness, the massive use of fossil fuels and resources, is unsustainable and has many other awful side-effects, at the very least, in localised areas.
I don't want my country, Ireland, to continue to be spoilt by pollution until it's not a nice place to live, regardless of whether the pollution contributes to climate change or not. I don't want to think what other countries are like, because Ireland for example doesn't have much heavy industry, mining, large amounts of power stations, etc.
The US are in a ridiculous level of denial. And heck, Europe isn't doing that great even despite an acceptance of climate change etc.
FOX News is, I can tell you as a non-American, completely biased.
It is far too patriotic (to the US government, not the country) to be unbiased.
CNN and the other US networks may be pitifully unprofessional in presenting news, but at least they don't go so far as to try and report world news in an unbiased way while flying a US flag onscreen constantly. And even with the actual news, Fox choose interviewees who will look bad/good to support their bias. The choice of questions, time given to each, and derision of the newscasters towards comments FOX News doesn't approve of, make a mockery of their "fair and balanced" tag. It's a bit like the way people see the US. It wouldn't be half as derided or criticised if it didn't pretend to be holier than thou.
I consider the BBC one of the best news broadcasters because the news is presented professionally, with a genuine attempt to get hard-hitting facts, no matter who's in the firing line. I do see it nearly as the job of a national news broadcaster to be highly critical (and by that I do not mean "against", but rather judgemental and scrutinising) of the government and other world governments and groups.
Who has consistently had a trade deficit of billions for the past few years? And who's had the massive trade surplus?
The US is living on borrowed time (and dollars).
Some European countries (France and Germany) mightn't be able to prop up their ailing welfare services (heck, at least they have them) or fix the unemployment problems of some states (although the percentage below the poverty line isn't bad compared to the US), but it is much better off than the US. And some of us are ridiculously rich and laughing (Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland) while the ex-communist countries are likely to be better than Greece, Portugal etc. in a decade or two.
Loose coalition of countries indeed. Have you the faintest clue as to the powerful economic block that the EU is regardless of its politicking?
Most of the problems the EU has (and hey, they're not particularly worse than the US two-party Federal system stagnation and bureaucracy) are just because the big countries like UK, France, Germany see themselves as bigger than they are and more important than the EU as a whole.
Yeah, Wikipedia misses out in the cases where the majority (i.e. the less educated) are wrong.
Mostly it works because only those educated enough in an area are interested in it. But the areas that attract amateurs are either battlegrounds, or a web of misinformation.
Wikipedia is very much mob rule in its arbitration, policies or decisions also. Although it actually can be as bad when the mob aren't interested, and it becomes a small clique acting as a mob towards the few members of the "public" who are against them in such things.
It's not mindless, it's about whether you're in Camp A, or Camp B. The more people in the US supporting Boeing, the better for them. The more support for Airbus, the better for us. It's fairly elementary - and so, as a European, I support Airbus and am delighted to see its rise at the expense of Boeing.
And so, I'm unsurprisingly prejudiced and hope the concern raised in this news item doesn't turn out to be a real issue.
No point in pretending to be impartial really - as long as people aren't getting all nasty about it, being truthful about one's allegiences is better than some politically correct pretence of impartiality.
Slashdot Mirror
The History Channel in the UK still shows an inordinate amount of WW2/Nazi/Hitler documentaries. I mean, I can understand that being perhaps the most prevalent topic. But often it seems like they show nothing else!
If Nintendo do pull something good, nay, amazing out of the hat, they probably do stand a fair chance against Sony and MS. In fact, if those two don't get their act together, and Nintendo has plenty of consoles ready at launch with good titles, Nintendo can win.
:)
I don't expect to see it though. I think ultimately the PS3 will come out tops despite the delayed launch(es). It looks like being the PS2 of our time
A lot rides too on whether the HDTV revolution does happen. By the looks of it, it may be a year at least till it really hits.
Oh, yeah, I just remembered hearing something about Nintendo revolution not being HD. If true, and the HDTV Revolution (no pun intended) actually hits, Nintendo will likely be screwed.
Why do people in the US seem fixated with Ethanol? Here in Ireland, all we hear about is rapeseed oil, which can be used in a normal diesel engine (that hasn't been used for diesel, or has had filters and stuff changed). We have a few vehicles running on that right now (the fuel, including the same taxes as petrol/diesel, is more expensive though. Set less tax though, and it would be cheaper). I'm just curious why the focus seems to be different?
In any case, there are definitely renewable resources we can burn in our vehicles. The problem is not that (once oil prices go high enough, the switch will happen *fast* and without a nasty crash), but rather power for the major consumption we have (heating, lighting, domestic, industry, etc.) Unless we go nuclear and content ourselves with increasing storage of nuclear waste, there's a major problem of how to get away from fossil fuels in power plants. A *FAR* bigger issue than vehicles.
Agricultural land we need to sustain our food supply! HAH! Here in the West, a lot of good agricultural land isn't used to produce food. And more of it is used to produce food that isn't sold (e.g. Milk)
Furthermore, we sell more food than we eat. WAY more. A whopping huge amount of it is just binned, i.e. surplus from supermarkets, restaurants.
And then we actually buy too much individually. And some of us eat either far too much, or types of food that are inefficient (and yes, we shouldn't need to give up nice foods, but far too many people eat "delicacies" constantly, and even health suffers as a result).
All these moanings of running out of farmland and not being able to feed the "surplus population" are just lies to make people feel better about our corrupt and wasteful Western society.
We are of course, possibly going to be well screwed if China continues to embrace the Western way. That will show up just how unsustainable our habits are.
Or you can stay in academia. Being paid to be a research student rocks.
:D Yay for low corporation taxes and no royalties on intellectual property bringing jobs and lots of income and purchase tax! This country rocks!
Yeah, admittedly there's the question of what to do after, but one is for sure in a better position to those who just did a primary degree, or indeed didn't do third level.
Educating oneself does further one's chances.
It's important to do well at it though. Even studying say, an Arts course, the important thing is to be one of the top graduates - that is more important than the general employment prospects from a given course. So pick a course you can enjoy and excel at, not one that you mistakenly think you can easily get a job from. Qualifications are only "paper qualifications" if you haven't taken them seriously, learnt a lot and gone beyond the course content, and come out near top of the class.
Oh, and if you're in the EU, come to Ireland where third level tuition fees are paid by the government, not you!
You live in some kind of crazy place then. All the lights in shops get switched off here except for those still open (one or two supermarkets are 24 hour now), and window displays of the shops that can afford to spend money on electricity for advertising (some shops close up their window displays after hours too).
Mind you, I'm in Ireland, where we have plenty of other problems (something like the most waste packaging per head of population in Europe - we're currently trying to decide whether to burn it - i.e. incinerators, find more places to bury it or pay to ship it abroad).
Yeah - but I don't want the requirements to drop. Admittedly I'm not a poor student anymore so my opinions have changed.
But Guild Wars or Civ 4 at 1600x1200 with full graphics... drool. It does really add to the feel of a game.
That said, even my P4 3Ghz Geforce 6800 can't run Battlefield 2 at full detail (at least, not if I want a very responsive game, as one does). Although running at 1600x1200 is a killer (20" flat panel optimal res).
I may get a new graphics card for Oblivion though. Having seen the screenshots for that game (drool), it's going to deserve a monster system. Geforce 7800GT is down to 340 now with a local online retailer, so I'll not have to outlay much at all if I upgrade in a couple months time and prices drop further!
I want immersive gaming dammit!
Oh - one more thing. I paid 40 or less for the games I mentioned, while new console games are 60 or 70. The PC game prices generally drop a bit even after just a month or so. The previous generation games or budget titles are 15 or less, while for PS2 (e.g.) they are 30.
So PC gaming isn't necessarily expensive, especially if you need a PC anyways for working on, and the Net, etc. (solely the *extra* cost of good hardware is comparable to the console prices).
1360x768?
Does Xbox 360 not use 720p? i.e. 1280 x 720?
Interestingly, it looks like 1080i is more popular in Europe so far, which will certainly complicate matters.
At the moment one would need to be *very* *VERY* careful buying a HDTV here in Europe - as it can be unclear just how high-definition supposedly HD tvs are (as for "HD-ready"... hmmm). Games consoles are likely going with 720p, mainland Europe broadcasters and the BBC have gone for 1080i, and Sky Digital (the main UK/Irl satellite broadcaster) are hedging their bets so far. Buying a true 1080p set seems like a nice idea.
Mind you, perhaps it's wise too to hold off on the Xbox 360 till we see a broader range of games for it! Also the PS3 *might* be better (and will be a cheap Blu-ray movie player, relative to standalone players. If you're getting an HDTV, playing blu-ray (or of course HDDVD) movies will be nice), and who knows what Nintendo will pull out of the hat!
Very well argued.
Although considering that there are plenty of (Christian and otherwise) scientists upset with the whole casting of a science vs. religion battle, and who've made very public appeals to those continuing the "battle", I think a lot of such rational explanation as to why the two domains aren't fundamentally in opposition falls on deaf ears.
Particularly in the USA anyways. We can be a bit more smug about there being less of a battle in Europe for now, although it does seem that in the UK people are beginning to look a bit more strangely at Christians due to the bad press from the US. I guess science and scientists aren't so well trusted either due to an anti-intellectual gutter press! Europe however is a lot more preoccupied with "Are Islam and Western society compatible?" (well, partly. A lot of people simply answer "Yes, of course", or "No, of course not" to that).
Heh - of course, with the XPS - it's specifically for gaming. So Dell could have set up the system to, for example, not have cruddy background processes starting in Windows.
That said, I'm happy with my off-the-shelf Dimension for gaming (after the usual Windows re-install and endless tweaking - wish I'd made an image of my clean system with all customisation done). Of course, it's hard to be unhappy with a cheap but good quality 20" flat panel at 1600x1200!
Any sensible business should be either re-installing the systems themselves after purchase, or paying someone else to do so - in both cases based on the company's actual requirements (software, network/profile setup, configuration, devices).
One size fits all doesn't work, and it's the reason for many problems with Windows even after careful configuration.
Careful configuration (switching off unneeded services for example) makes a huge difference to the resources used by Windows, and can help security also.
I find Adblock and Noscript essential for dealing with Web 2.0.
I'd give more thought to allowing myself to see ads if it wasn't for this recurring theme of waiting for a bunch of third-party servers to serve up lurid heavy-bandwidth ads arranged with broken scripting.
My favorite site to demo the difference between no-script versus vanilla firefox (or worse, MSIE) is dilbert.com.
Here in Ireland the govt. tried introduce the typical flawed e-voting (no paper trail). They got away with a trial run in a couple constituencies in one election, but the group they set up to rubber-stamp their use in the following elections came back with an unexpected (for the govt) "you've got to be joking?" We're now stuck spending millions storing the things, and the Minister responsible for wasting millions buying the things in a previous dept. is now in charge of the Dept. of Transport, spending billions each year on ill-managed road and rail projects. Still, at least we still have good old paper ballot for our Single Transferable Vote elections (even if the processing time is rather high in doing it by hand - some counts take a week or more! It makes the outcome guessing so much more fun though as each count round happens, someone is elected or eliminated, and transfers are worked out).
I wonder would the States be interested in buying some as-new Nedap electronic voting machines from us? *grin*
Exactly, the pioneers get the arrows in the back.
Hah - it's not necessarily better having proportional representation. Heck, here in Ireland we even have transferrable votes (you can vote for someone unlikely, and if they're knocked out, your vote is transferred to your next preference. Conversely those who get more votes than they need to win a seat in a constituency, have their excess votes transferred). All in all it pretty much means the country gets what it asks for.
Guess what? The "general public" are often ill-informed, misled by politicians, and have die-hard fanaticisms for certain parties even if they've been misled. They have selfish desires of what they want politicians to do for them, are led by catchy slogans and personalities, and don't care as much about what the govt. does for their fellow countryman as for them.
Looks like our next election will provide another interesting problem with multi-party politics - the mad raving looney party (Sinn Féin - who apart from their treasonous attitude to the Irish State, and rejection of the legitimate rule of the North by the UK, don't sit with the communists in the European Parliament groupings for nothing) holding the balance of power.
So a more accurate form of democracy is not necessarily going to be better.
It's amusing that in the UK you're suddenly realising the benefits of having a less democratic upper house of parliament!
A closer analogy might be click and point adventure games. I'd suggest that it'd be much better to see an attempt at reviving these rather than text games. The concept is similar, except that all the locations, objects, etc. are rendered in pretty graphics.
I can see how text games can be effective (the imagination based on text descriptions potentially rivalling any artwork) - but for those such as myself who started into computer games after the era of text adventure games - it seems far too difficult to handle compared to click and point.
Come on, new Monkey Island, Zork, etc. please!
And yes, these games are so much less effort than modern fast-paced games - regardless of the pause button availability!
Yeah, but it's like describing Canadians or Mexicans as Americans - entirely correct, but misleading nonetheless. Except that it's an even more misleading description to use "African" as a label for those from north Africa, as we're talking about people descended from Arab ethnicity - rather than the ethnicies further south in Africa.
The whole division of ethnicies comes into the North-South conflict in places like Sudan (that is not merely a religious division, but ethnic - non-Arab and Arab/Arabicized).
That's a pita if like most people, you just want a 1/4 hole (metaphorically speaking).
Of course, extending the analogy, we need something that's cheaper to make holes with (or at least competition) and also better quality.
ATM we have the equivalent of a bargain tool (which it has to be admitted, does drill holes/do the job) being sold at premium prices.
Apologies if the extension of the analogy doesn't work and this sounds like a load of nonsense. You know what I mean. Windows isn't as bad as people make out, but there should be more, cheaper and better alternatives, and Linux is not what the general (desktop-computing) populance actually needs (even if Windows isn't entirely either).
The ../../../ one wasn't thrown out though.
Who knows, depending on the place, stupidity/ignorance of the courts/lawmakers, you could be done for just about anything at the behest of the corporations. And in fact, the risk is just as great for some corporations that they'll get royally screwed in court.
The only people winning are the legal profession.
On the other hand, it's only in the last couple centuries that long-held deposits of CO2 (locked into fossil fuels) have been dramatically released back into the cycle of things. That is unlikely to have no effect.
Add to that the CO2 released from massive deforestation by fire. And there have been recent suggestions that some past unpleasant climate changes were due to us madly deforesting areas back in past times.
But in any case, regardless of climate change, Western wastefulness, the massive use of fossil fuels and resources, is unsustainable and has many other awful side-effects, at the very least, in localised areas.
I don't want my country, Ireland, to continue to be spoilt by pollution until it's not a nice place to live, regardless of whether the pollution contributes to climate change or not. I don't want to think what other countries are like, because Ireland for example doesn't have much heavy industry, mining, large amounts of power stations, etc.
The US are in a ridiculous level of denial. And heck, Europe isn't doing that great even despite an acceptance of climate change etc.
Properly arranged, you could have it in such a way that bracing yourself against something else, and kicking outwards, you push out the entire window.
I think this procedure is sometimes used with vehicle windows if you don't have a break-glass hammer or similar implement handy.
In fact, if your double-glazing is good, you'll have enough difficulty right now breaking your windows.
FOX News is, I can tell you as a non-American, completely biased.
It is far too patriotic (to the US government, not the country) to be unbiased.
CNN and the other US networks may be pitifully unprofessional in presenting news, but at least they don't go so far as to try and report world news in an unbiased way while flying a US flag onscreen constantly. And even with the actual news, Fox choose interviewees who will look bad/good to support their bias. The choice of questions, time given to each, and derision of the newscasters towards comments FOX News doesn't approve of, make a mockery of their "fair and balanced" tag. It's a bit like the way people see the US. It wouldn't be half as derided or criticised if it didn't pretend to be holier than thou.
I consider the BBC one of the best news broadcasters because the news is presented professionally, with a genuine attempt to get hard-hitting facts, no matter who's in the firing line. I do see it nearly as the job of a national news broadcaster to be highly critical (and by that I do not mean "against", but rather judgemental and scrutinising) of the government and other world governments and groups.
Let's see... where to start.
Well, let's compare Europe to the US.
Who has consistently had a trade deficit of billions for the past few years? And who's had the massive trade surplus?
The US is living on borrowed time (and dollars).
Some European countries (France and Germany) mightn't be able to prop up their ailing welfare services (heck, at least they have them) or fix the unemployment problems of some states (although the percentage below the poverty line isn't bad compared to the US), but it is much better off than the US. And some of us are ridiculously rich and laughing (Ireland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Finland) while the ex-communist countries are likely to be better than Greece, Portugal etc. in a decade or two.
Loose coalition of countries indeed. Have you the faintest clue as to the powerful economic block that the EU is regardless of its politicking?
Most of the problems the EU has (and hey, they're not particularly worse than the US two-party Federal system stagnation and bureaucracy) are just because the big countries like UK, France, Germany see themselves as bigger than they are and more important than the EU as a whole.
Yeah, Wikipedia misses out in the cases where the majority (i.e. the less educated) are wrong.
Mostly it works because only those educated enough in an area are interested in it. But the areas that attract amateurs are either battlegrounds, or a web of misinformation.
Wikipedia is very much mob rule in its arbitration, policies or decisions also. Although it actually can be as bad when the mob aren't interested, and it becomes a small clique acting as a mob towards the few members of the "public" who are against them in such things.
It's not mindless, it's about whether you're in Camp A, or Camp B. The more people in the US supporting Boeing, the better for them. The more support for Airbus, the better for us. It's fairly elementary - and so, as a European, I support Airbus and am delighted to see its rise at the expense of Boeing.
And so, I'm unsurprisingly prejudiced and hope the concern raised in this news item doesn't turn out to be a real issue.
No point in pretending to be impartial really - as long as people aren't getting all nasty about it, being truthful about one's allegiences is better than some politically correct pretence of impartiality.