> You don't piss and moan about the standard crappy mouse&keyboard that come with your PC either.
No, I don't. I've never had to replace them because they didn't have enough functionality. Heck, it's not even as if scrollwheel or optical mice weren't shipped as standard with PCs soon after they came out!
There's no way of avoiding the fact that the single-button mouse is retardedly limited. The only reason it's remotely acceptable, is because those used to using more key modifiers etc. with one mouse button, rather than using two/more, are accustomed to doing so.
> Jesus Christ was ousted by by the Jews for claiming to be God, which is the only major divergence from Jewish orthodoxy. And that's a pretty serious divergence.
Choose the BBC. It's not perfect, but it's a huge amount better than the alternatives. The World news site does indeed cover many stories that aren't otherwise in mainstream attention.
Having the stories edited professionally is a big plus. Also, while some stories can be biased, one is likely to see differing points of view, particularly in the editorials, and ever-increasing comments sections. The "Have your say" articles are perhaps more interesting because all comments aren't published, but rather a selection of differing views from people in different locations.
They are quite accountable, with a "Newswatch" section where corrections and responses to criticism are published. Readers can email and offer comments on or corrections to any story - indeed I have done so in the past myself, and the response (changing the article) has been swift.
For a mainstream news organisation, that hails from one country, I don't think you could expect anything of a higher standard than this.
Economically, legalising pot would be crazy. Can you imagine if large sections of your population were partaking of pot regularly? It would be nuts.
Mind you - my country, Ireland, would likely be taking over the world if it weren't for alcohol. Can't imagine what the place would be like if people didn't blow huge amounts of their money on alcohol, now that we're one of the richest countries in Europe. Plus there's all the health costs, public disorder and lost productivity.
When we already have this, you would have to be stark raving mad to allow another drug to be used willynilly.
I suspect this isn't universal - in much the same way that it's perfectly fine on this side of the Atlantic (UK/IRL) to talk of a government "scheme" without meaning it in the sense of a "cunning and devious plan".
Certainly I wouldn't be at all perturbed by the use of "enormity" in the sense of "the enormity of the task", or the "enormity of the situation", while not referring to something of great evil. Enormousness on the otherhand sounds as made up as "burglarize".
There's another problem with piracy, besides the theory that the producers are out of pocket as a result.
In Ireland at least, the warning that piracy (of films in particular) supports terrorism, is quite true. While those actually pirating the stuff themselves aren't, those who buy pirated movies at the market, etc., are most likely buying from the equivalent of an IRA high street store. One of the IRA's rackets is pirated goods (the others being smuggled cigarettes, diesel, etc.)
Not sure how true the ad at the start of the movie is in the States, but just to let you know, it's not as crazy as it sounds.
Yeah, because commuting to an office 2 hours each way and sitting in a cubicle isn't soul destroying at all.
Capitalism is almost as much a lie as communism. The people at the top completely get to screw over the ordinary worker.
It may not look entirely bad in the US, but have you seen capitalism in action in places where people (including kids) work half the day (12hrs+) in appalling conditions for pittance?
Even in somewhere that's a halfway house like Eastern Europe, people often can't afford to, for example, move out of their parent's house. They're coming to places like the UK and Ireland (full work permitted by new EU members there) where for now they can get better paying jobs, but it's a system in decline. Wages will have to continue to decline in the West too - and wages will only go up slowly and to a lower plateau elsewhere.
Ultimately, capitalism and the Western system will fall too. It is a lie (look at the US deficit - an entire economy running on a gaping overdraft). It will just take longer - and may be propped up for more than a century through the continued exploitation of the rest of the world.
It may well be the case that no-one wants to buy it, that's for sure.
I want to watch with glee as MS crash and burn with Longhorn. I already am, as feature after feature doesn't make it, and the OS is still likely to be delayed.
Bwah hah hah.
Still, it's no good if someone else doesn't get in on the act. And it won't be Linux (thankfully). Hopefully something that's a departure from the past. Even better would be if IBM pull a rabbit from the hat and we get a Cell-based desktop architecture to go with some new OS(es?) and finally move on from the PC architecture.
XP indeed uses more resources, without adding much value (other than being a more recent OS and hence more supported/MS-approved).
But in terms of functionality, it acts like 2K once the happyhappyshiny stuff is disabled - that's the point of my initial sentence. People act like they'll lose all that 2K is by moving to XP, just because of how XP's interface is arranged out of the box (note, in a corporate environment, you don't/shouldn't get "out of the box" anyways).
>i think there will be a lot of people... that will have to balance xp/longhorn on one side versus linux on the other side.
Yes, and most of them will go for XP or Longhorn.* Except Longhorn won't be an option for most likely at least 2 years (until release + lead-in time to changeover). That's a long wait for MS. If they go to XP now - MS will *not* be able to get them to go to Longhorn.
*Why XP? Because it can be sanatised quite easily to simply be a more up-to-date Win2K (i.e. quite literally, Windows NT 5.1 rather than 5.0). I think it's pushing it a bit to suggest they'll jump to Linux (other issues and future developments aside).
With the eye-candy disabled, XP is just a more up-to-date Win2K - just as stable/unstable really.
The interesting thing is - what % of businesses are XP? Even if MS get some of the Win2K people to go to XP - how are they going to get the XP people to go to Longhorn? It isn't going to happen extensively!!! MS are actually possibly more screwed (at least in terms of getting people to Longhorn) if they get Win2K people to go to XP at this stage.
And it's still long time to wait for direct Win2K -> Longhorn upgrades (2 years? More? -including evaluation/install time for businesses).
That film is at E10 at most places in my locality in Ireland. I'd consider that a grand price just to have nicer quality and a new box (not to mention broadening DVD collection and less reliance on old VHS tapes).
Much of my family's VHS collection has been superceded by bargain DVDs of old films now. And it's worth it. Many of those VHS tapes have been watched many times, and are quite old - a bad combination! DVDs do need careful handling to keep them good - but unlike VHS - they generally don't degrade just through playing them (not to mention the issues with keeping a VHS player going/not eating tapes if it's not an expensive one).
Of course, DVD's in PAL are higher res than US DVDs in NTSC (625 lines rather than 480), so the incentive is possibly higher (even though our VHS tapes are better too AFAIK), as DVDs here are *really* nice.
Actually, we use the Single Transferable Vote for single position elections also. Essentially, the first preference counts are worked out first. If no candidate has an outright majority, the lowest scoring candidate is elimated. The ballots cast for them are then redistributed according to the 2nd preferences on those ballots. Rinse and repeat until you end up with one candidate having a majority.
This does mean that in the event of low votes for all candidates, there's a more representative choice made than simply first past the post.
It means that in the States, people could vote for the Third Party candidate, and if that candidate indeed doesn't win outright, the ballots cast for them are redistributed to the voters' next preference (e.g. Democrat). In theory this means people are more likely to vote third party as they won't be scared of their vote being "wasted".
Actually our general elections in Ireland specifically are a delightful show because of taking up to a week to finally sort out all constituencies. We use preferential voting with a single transferable vote. It's great craic altogether. Even if it's a likely showdown between two candidates, you can still mark your favorites as 1st, 2nd, nth choices, and still rank the two frontrunners in the order you prefer - *and your vote will always count no matter who gets knocked out*!
It's very fun to analyse as well as being very representative. Of course there's the side-effect of raving looney parties getting a few seats in parliament, but that's quite necessary to keep the government on their toes. The sole socialist party guy is actually a great influence, even if you wouldn't want many more of them getting elected! We've a few green party members. The nationalist/marxist Republicans (Sinn Féin/IRA) are an unfortunate addition, but they are shunned by the other parliament members.
Unfortunately the cumulative effect of US endeavours in the world is to re-enforce in many people's minds the idea that US=Bad.
Obviously by extension, yes, one does get the effect of people actually having harbouring ill feelings against US citizens.
Certainly the people giving in to generalisation, stereotypes, etc. are at fault. But so too are the raving looney US government, bloodsucking profiteering US corporations (and their management) and advocates of completely unrestrained capitalism and free markets. In fact, there's a significant enough bunch of people in the US who support the stereotypical US world view.
I'm in Ireland, so I have to fight the reaction to take the moral high ground against the US, UK, the rest of Europe, and go "Bwah hah hah" at all the external investment we get through devious stuff like a 12.5% corporation tax rate (third lowest in the world). We do have plenty of darker problems ourselves (the stereotypical drinking/fighting image isn't actually too far off - people are blowing all their wealth on drink and related healthcare/issues).
Dell's EMEA computers are all built in Limerick, Ireland where they employ 2000+ people directly. This meant they accounted for 6% of our GDP in 2002!
The only thing is, it seems Dell are building a plant in Poland now. And unless we in Ireland get the stuff such as servers that the US plants do now (left there for them when desktop production previously moved here), we'll be in trouble if some/all production moves to Poland (although the expanding Asian market share in particular bodes well for requiring multiple plants).
One reason Ireland has been invaluable though, is that with a E7.50 (~$9) min wage, we've had to come up with really efficient plant running improvements to continue to be competative (though our insanely low 12.5% corporation tax continues to give a big headstart!). These improvements and ideas are then continuously exported to Dell's other facilities worldwide.
I have never seen a slide rule, despite not having been allowed to use a calculator until my final two years of secondary school in Ireland (for final state examinations at age 18). The earlier state examinations at age 15 included trigonometry amongst other mathematical problems that are usually assumed to require a calculator. Admittedly we had logarithmic tables for looking up sines, cosines, square roots, etc.
Oh, and it was a pain, but the point was to deny the use of calculators for simple maths, which kids should be able to do. The state examination at age 15 is the first, and so theoretically has to examine all the previous 11 years of schooling (even if technically it's only based on the previous three).
We have no tuition fees for University in Ireland (well, for EU nationals), and grants towards maintanance for those who can't afford other expenses. Does that count?
My own University has a limited cachement area, so they are increasing their funding by continuing to expand the campus (generous alumni + govt. has to match the self-raised funding) and taking on lots of students from the US, China, etc., as these kids pay a whole whopping huge lump of money (more than the govt. pays the Uni for the Irish students).
It's working nicely. I wouldn't probably have been able to afford Uni if I'd had to pay for it, either that or I'd have had a whopping huge debt on graduation.
But then, we aren't really playing by the rules in Ireland - with our low corporation tax ensuring we're the third biggest recipient of US investment, and that's still only a quarter of overall investment in Ireland. Although I'm slightly worried about Dell being responsible for about 6% of our GDP (that was in 2002 too!).
Such action would need to go hand in hand with granting equal standing to other options than pure academic schooling (i.e. you don't all have to go to University), such as apprenticing and other tertiary education (for particular career areas that need training and knowledge, just not necessarily academic knowledge).
Not everyone is cut out for doing well in maths or languages or sciences. But it is of great importance to facilitate those who are, and apply high standards to their examination.
Here in Ireland we have the latter, but at the expense of those who aren't academically minded. The "other options" are looked down upon (despite for example a trained carpenter being worth a lot more than yet another business studies graduate).
That's absolutely appalling to think of (multiple choice, machine scanned). I'm very glad that here in Ireland I had actual real tests with real people evaluating my solutions.
Although I'll admit that having to learn to use logarithmic tables for working out Sines, Cosines, Logarithms, Square Roots, etc. was a pain, and of dubious value other than keeping calculators out of exam halls so as they couldn't be used for simpler calculations too.
Fortunately that was only for the Junior Cert state examination (~15 years old) and we got to use calculators for the final Leaving Cert state exams (~18 yrs old).
Newgrange in Ireland is older than the pyramids, with a estimated construction date of around 3200BC.
It required significant amounts of knowledge, as the inner chamber is arranged such that sunlight enters it only on the Winter solstice. Also it was built in a corbelled fashion, which was quite an accomplishment with the heavyness of the stone and size of the chamber. Complex artwork adorns the rocks at the entrance, and who knows why it was built or what it was used for (although it seems to have been for burial amongst any other purposes).
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There's a window-cleaning company in my area called "Windows 2000".
> You don't piss and moan about the standard crappy mouse&keyboard that come with your PC either.
No, I don't. I've never had to replace them because they didn't have enough functionality. Heck, it's not even as if scrollwheel or optical mice weren't shipped as standard with PCs soon after they came out!
There's no way of avoiding the fact that the single-button mouse is retardedly limited. The only reason it's remotely acceptable, is because those used to using more key modifiers etc. with one mouse button, rather than using two/more, are accustomed to doing so.
> Jesus Christ was ousted by by the Jews for claiming to be God, which is the only major divergence from Jewish orthodoxy. And that's a pretty serious divergence.
Only if he wasn't.
Choose the BBC. It's not perfect, but it's a huge amount better than the alternatives. The World news site does indeed cover many stories that aren't otherwise in mainstream attention.
Having the stories edited professionally is a big plus. Also, while some stories can be biased, one is likely to see differing points of view, particularly in the editorials, and ever-increasing comments sections. The "Have your say" articles are perhaps more interesting because all comments aren't published, but rather a selection of differing views from people in different locations.
They are quite accountable, with a "Newswatch" section where corrections and responses to criticism are published. Readers can email and offer comments on or corrections to any story - indeed I have done so in the past myself, and the response (changing the article) has been swift.
For a mainstream news organisation, that hails from one country, I don't think you could expect anything of a higher standard than this.
Economically, legalising pot would be crazy. Can you imagine if large sections of your population were partaking of pot regularly? It would be nuts.
Mind you - my country, Ireland, would likely be taking over the world if it weren't for alcohol. Can't imagine what the place would be like if people didn't blow huge amounts of their money on alcohol, now that we're one of the richest countries in Europe. Plus there's all the health costs, public disorder and lost productivity.
When we already have this, you would have to be stark raving mad to allow another drug to be used willynilly.
I suspect this isn't universal - in much the same way that it's perfectly fine on this side of the Atlantic (UK/IRL) to talk of a government "scheme" without meaning it in the sense of a "cunning and devious plan".
Certainly I wouldn't be at all perturbed by the use of "enormity" in the sense of "the enormity of the task", or the "enormity of the situation", while not referring to something of great evil. Enormousness on the otherhand sounds as made up as "burglarize".
There's another problem with piracy, besides the theory that the producers are out of pocket as a result.
In Ireland at least, the warning that piracy (of films in particular) supports terrorism, is quite true. While those actually pirating the stuff themselves aren't, those who buy pirated movies at the market, etc., are most likely buying from the equivalent of an IRA high street store. One of the IRA's rackets is pirated goods (the others being smuggled cigarettes, diesel, etc.)
Not sure how true the ad at the start of the movie is in the States, but just to let you know, it's not as crazy as it sounds.
Yeah, because commuting to an office 2 hours each way and sitting in a cubicle isn't soul destroying at all.
Capitalism is almost as much a lie as communism. The people at the top completely get to screw over the ordinary worker.
It may not look entirely bad in the US, but have you seen capitalism in action in places where people (including kids) work half the day (12hrs+) in appalling conditions for pittance?
Even in somewhere that's a halfway house like Eastern Europe, people often can't afford to, for example, move out of their parent's house. They're coming to places like the UK and Ireland (full work permitted by new EU members there) where for now they can get better paying jobs, but it's a system in decline. Wages will have to continue to decline in the West too - and wages will only go up slowly and to a lower plateau elsewhere.
Ultimately, capitalism and the Western system will fall too. It is a lie (look at the US deficit - an entire economy running on a gaping overdraft). It will just take longer - and may be propped up for more than a century through the continued exploitation of the rest of the world.
It may well be the case that no-one wants to buy it, that's for sure.
I want to watch with glee as MS crash and burn with Longhorn. I already am, as feature after feature doesn't make it, and the OS is still likely to be delayed.
Bwah hah hah.
Still, it's no good if someone else doesn't get in on the act. And it won't be Linux (thankfully). Hopefully something that's a departure from the past. Even better would be if IBM pull a rabbit from the hat and we get a Cell-based desktop architecture to go with some new OS(es?) and finally move on from the PC architecture.
XP indeed uses more resources, without adding much value (other than being a more recent OS and hence more supported/MS-approved).
But in terms of functionality, it acts like 2K once the happyhappyshiny stuff is disabled - that's the point of my initial sentence. People act like they'll lose all that 2K is by moving to XP, just because of how XP's interface is arranged out of the box (note, in a corporate environment, you don't/shouldn't get "out of the box" anyways).
>i think there will be a lot of people... that will have to balance xp/longhorn on one side versus linux on the other side.
Yes, and most of them will go for XP or Longhorn.* Except Longhorn won't be an option for most likely at least 2 years (until release + lead-in time to changeover). That's a long wait for MS. If they go to XP now - MS will *not* be able to get them to go to Longhorn.
*Why XP? Because it can be sanatised quite easily to simply be a more up-to-date Win2K (i.e. quite literally, Windows NT 5.1 rather than 5.0). I think it's pushing it a bit to suggest they'll jump to Linux (other issues and future developments aside).
With the eye-candy disabled, XP is just a more up-to-date Win2K - just as stable/unstable really.
The interesting thing is - what % of businesses are XP? Even if MS get some of the Win2K people to go to XP - how are they going to get the XP people to go to Longhorn? It isn't going to happen extensively!!! MS are actually possibly more screwed (at least in terms of getting people to Longhorn) if they get Win2K people to go to XP at this stage.
And it's still long time to wait for direct Win2K -> Longhorn upgrades (2 years? More? -including evaluation/install time for businesses).
That film is at E10 at most places in my locality in Ireland. I'd consider that a grand price just to have nicer quality and a new box (not to mention broadening DVD collection and less reliance on old VHS tapes).
Much of my family's VHS collection has been superceded by bargain DVDs of old films now. And it's worth it. Many of those VHS tapes have been watched many times, and are quite old - a bad combination! DVDs do need careful handling to keep them good - but unlike VHS - they generally don't degrade just through playing them (not to mention the issues with keeping a VHS player going/not eating tapes if it's not an expensive one).
Of course, DVD's in PAL are higher res than US DVDs in NTSC (625 lines rather than 480), so the incentive is possibly higher (even though our VHS tapes are better too AFAIK), as DVDs here are *really* nice.
Actually, we use the Single Transferable Vote for single position elections also. Essentially, the first preference counts are worked out first. If no candidate has an outright majority, the lowest scoring candidate is elimated. The ballots cast for them are then redistributed according to the 2nd preferences on those ballots. Rinse and repeat until you end up with one candidate having a majority.
This does mean that in the event of low votes for all candidates, there's a more representative choice made than simply first past the post.
It means that in the States, people could vote for the Third Party candidate, and if that candidate indeed doesn't win outright, the ballots cast for them are redistributed to the voters' next preference (e.g. Democrat). In theory this means people are more likely to vote third party as they won't be scared of their vote being "wasted".
Actually our general elections in Ireland specifically are a delightful show because of taking up to a week to finally sort out all constituencies. We use preferential voting with a single transferable vote. It's great craic altogether. Even if it's a likely showdown between two candidates, you can still mark your favorites as 1st, 2nd, nth choices, and still rank the two frontrunners in the order you prefer - *and your vote will always count no matter who gets knocked out*!
It's very fun to analyse as well as being very representative. Of course there's the side-effect of raving looney parties getting a few seats in parliament, but that's quite necessary to keep the government on their toes. The sole socialist party guy is actually a great influence, even if you wouldn't want many more of them getting elected! We've a few green party members. The nationalist/marxist Republicans (Sinn Féin/IRA) are an unfortunate addition, but they are shunned by the other parliament members.
Actually Kryptonite is synonymous in most people's minds with Krypton and Superman.
Unfortunately the cumulative effect of US endeavours in the world is to re-enforce in many people's minds the idea that US=Bad.
Obviously by extension, yes, one does get the effect of people actually having harbouring ill feelings against US citizens.
Certainly the people giving in to generalisation, stereotypes, etc. are at fault. But so too are the raving looney US government, bloodsucking profiteering US corporations (and their management) and advocates of completely unrestrained capitalism and free markets. In fact, there's a significant enough bunch of people in the US who support the stereotypical US world view.
I'm in Ireland, so I have to fight the reaction to take the moral high ground against the US, UK, the rest of Europe, and go "Bwah hah hah" at all the external investment we get through devious stuff like a 12.5% corporation tax rate (third lowest in the world). We do have plenty of darker problems ourselves (the stereotypical drinking/fighting image isn't actually too far off - people are blowing all their wealth on drink and related healthcare/issues).
Dell's EMEA computers are all built in Limerick, Ireland where they employ 2000+ people directly. This meant they accounted for 6% of our GDP in 2002!
The only thing is, it seems Dell are building a plant in Poland now. And unless we in Ireland get the stuff such as servers that the US plants do now (left there for them when desktop production previously moved here), we'll be in trouble if some/all production moves to Poland (although the expanding Asian market share in particular bodes well for requiring multiple plants).
One reason Ireland has been invaluable though, is that with a E7.50 (~$9) min wage, we've had to come up with really efficient plant running improvements to continue to be competative (though our insanely low 12.5% corporation tax continues to give a big headstart!). These improvements and ideas are then continuously exported to Dell's other facilities worldwide.
Not quite the same thing, but on WinXP, you can mount network or removable media drives in the directory structure of your HDD.
If you really for some bizarre reason wished to do so of course. I for one can't see why other than tradition.
But my "granting equal standing" was in reference to people being snobby about these alternatives. Is that not the case?
Certainly there seems to be some theory that everyone should aim for going to University cause anything else is second best.
I have never seen a slide rule, despite not having been allowed to use a calculator until my final two years of secondary school in Ireland (for final state examinations at age 18). The earlier state examinations at age 15 included trigonometry amongst other mathematical problems that are usually assumed to require a calculator. Admittedly we had logarithmic tables for looking up sines, cosines, square roots, etc.
Oh, and it was a pain, but the point was to deny the use of calculators for simple maths, which kids should be able to do. The state examination at age 15 is the first, and so theoretically has to examine all the previous 11 years of schooling (even if technically it's only based on the previous three).
We have no tuition fees for University in Ireland (well, for EU nationals), and grants towards maintanance for those who can't afford other expenses. Does that count?
My own University has a limited cachement area, so they are increasing their funding by continuing to expand the campus (generous alumni + govt. has to match the self-raised funding) and taking on lots of students from the US, China, etc., as these kids pay a whole whopping huge lump of money (more than the govt. pays the Uni for the Irish students).
It's working nicely. I wouldn't probably have been able to afford Uni if I'd had to pay for it, either that or I'd have had a whopping huge debt on graduation.
But then, we aren't really playing by the rules in Ireland - with our low corporation tax ensuring we're the third biggest recipient of US investment, and that's still only a quarter of overall investment in Ireland. Although I'm slightly worried about Dell being responsible for about 6% of our GDP (that was in 2002 too!).
Such action would need to go hand in hand with granting equal standing to other options than pure academic schooling (i.e. you don't all have to go to University), such as apprenticing and other tertiary education (for particular career areas that need training and knowledge, just not necessarily academic knowledge).
Not everyone is cut out for doing well in maths or languages or sciences. But it is of great importance to facilitate those who are, and apply high standards to their examination.
Here in Ireland we have the latter, but at the expense of those who aren't academically minded. The "other options" are looked down upon (despite for example a trained carpenter being worth a lot more than yet another business studies graduate).
That's absolutely appalling to think of (multiple choice, machine scanned). I'm very glad that here in Ireland I had actual real tests with real people evaluating my solutions.
Although I'll admit that having to learn to use logarithmic tables for working out Sines, Cosines, Logarithms, Square Roots, etc. was a pain, and of dubious value other than keeping calculators out of exam halls so as they couldn't be used for simpler calculations too.
Fortunately that was only for the Junior Cert state examination (~15 years old) and we got to use calculators for the final Leaving Cert state exams (~18 yrs old).
Newgrange in Ireland is older than the pyramids, with a estimated construction date of around 3200BC.
It required significant amounts of knowledge, as the inner chamber is arranged such that sunlight enters it only on the Winter solstice. Also it was built in a corbelled fashion, which was quite an accomplishment with the heavyness of the stone and size of the chamber. Complex artwork adorns the rocks at the entrance, and who knows why it was built or what it was used for (although it seems to have been for burial amongst any other purposes).