And the response? An 'offtopic' mod, natch. Because it's completely offtopic to talk about the fact that we installed this government (and/or allowed it to seize power) and our reasons for doing so.
In case you've forgotten, we invaded this country first, because they were supposedly harboring Osama bin Laden. Remember him? He had something to do with 9/11, if my memory serves me. He was the guy who HATED Saddam Hussein and actually OFFERED HIS SOLDIERS TO HELP SAUDI ARABIA FIGHT IRAQ. The royal family of Saudi Arabia laughed at him, preferring instead to rely on American troops. He got pissed, and has been an anti-American nutjob ever since.
Oh, but I'm sorry... I'm sure I'm not telling you anything new. After all, everyone in America knows that Osama hated Saddam and that the latter had nothing to do with 9/11! Everyone knows that al-Qaeda was originally led by Osama to be an anti-Iraq and anti-Saddam milita!
...sorry, but I don't think I can keep up the Colbert-esque routine any longer:
How is it FUCKING possible that this has happened? Osama is the one responsible for 9/11, and yet trillions spent on Iraq, a country that Osama was actively trying to fight. But, you know, despite the fact that Iraq has been an unending clusterfuck, I at least assumed that things in Afghanistan--the only that actually openly supported Osama--were going semi-decently. Ok yeah, so opium production has been on the rise since we invaded--shit happens, shit happens, plus I'm not exactly a huge fan of the war on drugs anyway so it's no biggie.
But this... What the FUCK. We destroy the Taliban, and then install THIS sharia-based bullshit? Or, at the very least, we allowed this government to take power after the Taliban fell? We're busy JAMMING democracy and freedom down the throat of Iraq, but we're allowing Afghanistan to descend into the dark ages again? We're allowing them to become a breeding ground for the successor to Osama bin Laden?
I don't know what to say. Sounds like the beginning of a Lewis Black routine, but for the life of me I think of a punch line.
I don't understand. Being mindlessly pro-war is one thing. Being mindlessly pro-war vs. a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, while allowing the country that harbored and nurtured the mastermind behind 9/11 to DESCEND INTO A FUCKING TOTALITARIANISM AGAIN is just... just...
What is WRONG with you people--you jingoists, you untiring flag-wavers, you twin-tower-tattooing rednecks, you support-the-war-or-you-aren't-a-patriot fucks? Why aren't you screaming at our president for allowing Osama to get away with it? Why aren't you screaming at him to bring 'freedom' to Afghanistan, a country we originally invaded six and a half years ago, a country that was and apparently still is much more oppressive and totalitarian than Iraq ever was?
Clarification: The War on Drugs is a cash cow for *law enforcement*, which benefits tremendously both from draconian asset-seizure laws and from the fact that politicians are always willing to give them more money in the name of the War on Drugs. For the country as a whole, it is merely a tremendous economic black hole--one that, if properly filled, could (I'd wager) EASILY pay for Social Security or most other cash-intensive problems you can think of (except, perhaps, another protracted war.)
While the war on drugs is very wasteful and destructive, it doesn't register at all when compared with the destructive potential of the bankruptcy of social security.
You pretend that these things have nothing to do with one another.
Do you realize how much money is directly spent every year on the war on drugs?
Do you realize much money is pulled out of the economy because users and dealers are thrown in jail? I knew a guy who lost nearly 6 months of his life for simple possession--not only is that 6 months of his room, board, and medical expenses the government paid (how much is the average cost to keep a prisoner nowadays, something like $40k/year?), but the government also lost out on his income tax... not just for the 6 months' worth, but much more... he wound up losing his job.
This isn't directly related to pot, but do you realize how much property crime is created as a direct result of sky-high prices for drugs like heroin and cocaine? People hooked on cheap drugs, like alcohol or pot, tend to do just fine working shitty jobs all day, buying their drug of choice, then going home and consuming that drug to forget about their shitty day. People who get hopelessly hooked on fucking H or (non-crack) cocaine either have a ton of money, or they take money from whomever they can.
Do you know how much money the government could rake in if they legalized pot (and/or other drugs) and heavily taxed it?
Fact: We have more people in our prisons than any other nation has in the past 100 years, despots and dictators and former Soviet Union included (the only arguable exception is the Rwandan genocide fiasco.) The vast majority of these people are incarcerated for drug offences. The effort to hunt them down and throw them in jail--combined with the collateral economic damage wrought by such draconian measures--costs us many BILLIONS each year.
Jesus. You don't even have to agree with any particular moral position here. You can think that pot is a fucking "gateway" drug to HELL, and it STILL doesn't make sense to squander our nation's resources locking up working taxpayers and paying for their room and board for years on end.
Open your eyes, man... the war on drugs has NEVER been about stopping drug use. It's simply a MASSIVE cash cow, nothing more. I been to police auctions and I've seen with my own two eyes where they had an entire meth lab setup, hydroponics setup, etc. They confiscate the equipment, then turn around and sell it right back to other drug manufacturers!
It makes people paranoid and stupid and is linked to paranoid schizophrenia.
1. The word "linked" does not mean what you think it means. Wearing large pants is "linked" to being fat. This does not mean wearing large pants makes one fat. IIRC, tobacco has a MUCH stronger "link" to schizos. Off the top of my head, it's something like over 70% of all schizos are tobacco smokers.
2. You misspelled "Christianity." They're always suffering paranoid persecution complexes, claiming to talk to invisible people, believing falsehoods, etc. And if you find such sweeping generalizations offensive... good! Maybe you'll stop making them yourself.
You do realize that the HEPA standard was originally designed to catch dangerous radioactive dust, right? People didn't start marketing it for anti-allergy purposes until much later.
Errrr... well I suppose that's a possibility, but that's not what happened with Betamax, was it? They remained more expensive than VHS, and maintained a niche hobbyist/professional market.
Of course, in that case Betamax was arguably the superior format. HD-DVD is not, (except in terms of DRM, but then is that really important to people who are burning their own?)
The emphasis is hers--not mine. This character has lost TWO, yes TWO relatives, and just to drive this point home she uses bold on "both". (What about Bruce Wayne's parents, Superman's entire fucking family, Spiderman's uncle/girlfriend/etc...)
It's all just so cluelessly whiny I have a hard time taking it seriously. About the only thing she mentions that probably aren't VERY common with males are the sexual assaults.
Plus, the point trying to be made here is that there is a lot of history towards "unpopular male character retires or dies only to return for a later comic as needed" as well as "unpopular female character dies or get crippled or tortured only to never return".
1. She didn't make that point. All she gave was a list of female characters to whom bad things happen--we have no idea of their relative popularity, nor whether or not they were ever conveniently temporarily revived. We don't even have a similar list of dead and mangled male characters to compare it to. Considering how large the comics industry is, and for how many decades it's been popular, I don't think her list is a very big at all.
2. I didn't even realize it at first, but a lot of them apparently aren't even superheroes. OF COURSE bad shit happens to the superhero's (or supervillian's) girlfriend--bad things happening to innocent bystanders is a primary motivation for good *and* bad guys everywhere. That most superheroes (and supervillians) are male is a given--therefore, it shouldn't be surprising if most innocent-bystanders-just-waiting-to-be-killed-or-maimed-for-plot-advancement are female.
3. A lot of the non-fatal stuff she mentions (and less than half of the characters mentioned actually die) appears to be completely temporary in nature, like person X losing her powers (when I know for a fact that they regain them later on.) This is... simply absurd. I'm only a VERY casual comic fan, but I've read entire-series summaries and they typically go like this: Superman fights XYZ, loses his powers, gains powers again, gets turned into a weird green blob, gets turns back again, gets his ass kicked, makes a comeback and kicks his own ass, etc.
In short, temporary negative shit happens to every single superhero ever conceived... period. If Batman wasn't humiliated and brutalized from time to time, he wouldn't be Batman. If Superman didn't lose his powers occasionally, he'd grow tiresome (weeeeeell, he's tiresome anyway, but that's beside the point.) Shit happens, superheroes deal with it, THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT. I mean look at this crap:
* Scarlet Witch (children 'die'/vanish/are lost because they are figments of her imagination)
I know very very very little about the Scarlet Witch. As I recall, she's from the X-Men universe and she has the power to alter reality at will. I don't even know if she's a good guy or bad guy or switch hitter, but anyway--what's described there sounds like a very powerful bit of character development. Villian or hero, that sounds interesting... but according to the writer, it's just another way to degrade women. She even put "figments of her imagination" in italics, for emphasis, as if it was almost too horrible to be believed.
* Wolfsbane (locked in werewolf form for awhile, needs major therapy)
I know nothing of the character. Sounds like it's the typical "couldn't control own powers" plot line that pretty much every single goddamned superhero has had to deal with.
* Diamond Lil (kidnapped, experimented on by own government, developed benign breast tumor)
...a benign tumor. BENIGN. OMG, and Superman had a hangnail in #9375. Re: government experimentation, this is an EXTREMELY common theme with any hero who possesses superpowers (Wolverine leaps to mind.)
In short, this looks like a very lame, cherry-picked list without any male list to compare it to.
OMG, Bruce Wayne had to watch his parents die WHEN HE WAS A KID! And he acted kinda crazy and macho in the Dark Knight Returns! And Superman has turned evil and lost his powers and died and god knows what else. And all kinds of bad crap happens to Spiderman! Right there, those are the top 3 superheroes in the world... so that's proof that the comics industry HATES men!!!!
All dead superheroes will come back to life eventually, so long as they're popular enough. Neither DC nor Marvel is going to permanently kill of anyone of any gender unless they are looking unprofitable.
You were the pre-emo kid in your middle school. You were an insignificant minority
Um, no. I was the average, somewhat geeky, popularity-seeking kid at my school. I was emulating what was BY FAR the most common tastes amongst the non-black, non-wigger kids (is there a less-offensive term that means "trying extremely hard to act black" ?) at the time. Granted, this was a magnet school, which meant there were a bunch of rich, gifted, mostly white kids crammed in with a bunch of poor, delinquent, mostly black kids (this isn't a racist comment; it's the truth and it's an inevitable consequence of societal racism and the magnet school concept), so that might have polarized things and made the grunge aesthetic a little more pronounced than it would have otherwise been.
Nevertheless, a few years later in (a fairly typical) high school, when the flannel was a lot rarer, Nirvana was still extremely popular and it wasn't too rare to hear kids mention Kurt's death in the passing. Fine, maybe the death itself wasn't as earthshaking as Lennon or Hendrix, but I can safely say it was the most earthshaking thing SINCE those deaths. And Cobain's contribution to musical contribution is on par with Hendrix's (though probably not Lennon's.) I have no idea how long it took the evening news to care about Kurt; all I'm saying was that, amongst every single person my age who was of the same socioeconomic background, the effect was immediate and sustained.
Oh yes... emo sucks, fuck you very much. Grunge and gothic rock (see: AFI circa late 90s--NOT their recent shit) are completely separate genres. Emo is completely soulless and hollow and it was descended from soulless and hollow-sounding "emotional" punk, NOT grunge. What you hear on the radio today (the non-emo stuff) is grunge merged with nu metal with occasional classic-thrash elements thrown in. I'm not a huge fan of it... but holy shit man, anything is better than emo.
Completely OT: I'd have to say that the only truly interesting stuff on popular radio in the past few years has been from System of a Down (and now Serj Tankian solo) and--trust me, it PAINS me to say this--Linkin Park. SoaD should be self-explanatory--it's simply the most powerful, political, creative shit on mainstream radio... LP, I'd say, it just about the ONLY band I've heard that's manage to fuse hip hop rhythms into rock and not sound make it sound like anemic nu metal (e.g... err, just about everyone nowadays) or complete shit (e.g. Kid Rock or Limp Bizkit.) AFI has some interesting sounds on their last 2 albums, but I'm not even sure you can call it rock anymore. I wish someone would pick up where The Art of Drowning left off. (And before you mention it--their image is extremely emo, but their music never was.) Honorable mentions to Green Day's last album, Coheed and Cambria, and Tool.
OT of the OT rant: You know, when Nickleback's first big single (Leader of Men) hit the charts, I had a LOT of hope for them... it really was a neat little song. Quickly thereafter I realized I just wanted them to shut the fuck up... now here I am 5 years later, STILL waiting for them to shut the fuck up. Stations around here still play that goddamned Rockstar. Swore off radio completely for a while (in part because of Nickleback specifically), but my CD player broke and just haven't the time... ok, done ranting.
What piss me off is people disbelieving in God's existence just because they can't scientifically prove it.
Replace "God" with "leprechauns"... and the sentence holds the same meaning for me. There may indeed be little magical green men running around, only they're sooooooo sneaky and magical no one has ever seen them. Who cares? I certainly don't, and it's very disturbing to me that you're "pissed off" because I won't believe something I can't see, hear, touch, taste, feel, smell, or observe/interact (even indirectly) with complicated apparatus. For the record, I'm NOT an atheist, and I don't have a problem with most inclusive/rational thesits, but I am deeply disturbed by anyone who is threatened by my non-belief in their utterly intangible beliefs.
You think that the grunge sound was small and uninfluenced in 1994? Wow... where were you?
I can tell you where I was--in a middle school (and I live in Florida--i.e., pretty damned far from Seattle), wearing flannel on a DAILY basis unless it was over 90 degrees out, listening to Pearl Jam, Candlebox, STP, Bush, and (of course) Nirvana. The nu rock wave was still in its infancy, and I don't remember any 80s-style music being the least bit popular at this point. Perhaps things were different where you lived...
Small genre of rock? I'd say over 75% of what you hear on modern rock stations today is a direct descendant of the chugging, pseudo-punk sound he pioneered on Nevermind. (Admittedly, STP's Core--released a year later--is another major influence. A lot of people say Pearl Jam as well, but--though they are an awesome band--they really didn't inspire much beyond a few early imitators... notably Seven Mary Three and a little later, Creed.)
Granted, a lot of the music nowadays is simplistic or watered-down tripe, but there are some real gems in there, too. Nirvana KILLED hair metal/"stadium" metal. After Nevermind, it just about vanished off the face of the Earth. For the past 16+ years, nearly every new rock band has used some form of the dirty, chugging, non-melodic/very rhythm-heavy guitar style. It's gotten more staccato and dynamically compressed (and, IMO, soulless) in recent years (this is at least partially due to the nu metal scene brought to the forefront by Korn in the mid/late 90s) but the influence is still unmistakable. Maybe it existed long before Nirvana, I dunno, but pre-1991, you just didn't hear that kind of rough, non-melodic shit--not even Hendrix reached that level of (as he would call it) "earth"--and yet ever since Nevermind, it's been absolutely everywhere.
Yeah, I'm sure the governments of the world do trot out these stupid arguments occasionally, but it's complete bullshit. It costs a lot of money to keep people imprisoned. Courts cost a lot of money. DEA agents cost a LOT of money. Not being able to collect tax money on drug sales costs us a LOT of money. And, as far as "encouraging crime because of the cost"--well FUCK, if it wasn't illegal people could easily afford the shit on minimum wage. It's Economics 101, man... supply and demand. The harder the DEA cracks down, the higher the street price goes. Also, at least in the case of some drugs (Meth), a lot of the taxpayer-funded healthcare costs can be reduced if their shit wasn't contaminated with very dangerous impurities and cutting agents.
So, when Elvis died, you don't think that deserved more than a brief, passing mention in the media? And his death wasn't half as surprising as Cobain's.
I'm NOT saying every single celebrity death should be turned into a Anna Nicole-style media clusterfuck, but I do think that when a once-every-few-decades (i.e. "legendary") creative talent dies a sudden death, it deserves more than a five second mention. Even the Britney Spears of the world deserve more than that. It doesn't make the news important on the scale of, say, what's going on in Iraq right now, but life isn't *just* about the serious shit.
The problem is, mainstream media either completely ignores something because it considers its specialized or subculture (which I guess is what happened with Cobain), or it assumes something is of vital importance to EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE. I simply can't escape Britney Spears shit (and now Jamie Lynn Spears shit, too). Every single *hard rock* (not pop) station has the DJs talk about them in-between songs. Even the classic rock stations are doing it, now. And it's nothing really significant... nothing to do with their music and nothing earth-shattering like a death, just "OMG Britney shaved her head! OMG there's a picture of Britney's pussy! OMG Britney was drunk at a performance! OMG some gay emo kid posted a whiny, crying video about it all! OMG, her sister is pregnant!" Jesus Christ, I wish I didn't know all of this about her stupid stupid little life, but so long as I have ANY contact with media, I will continue to be bombarded with it.
And I'm sorry, for all her fame you just can't put her in the same fucking category as Kurt Cobain. She doesn't write her own songs. The songs she sings aren't experimental or genre-defining like Kurt's. She doesn't have a particularly remarkable singing voice (and if you think Kurt didn't either, listen to his rendition of Where Did You Sleep Last Night. Actually, pretty much anything off of Unplugged or Heart Shaped Box is extremely good.), and she doesn't play any instruments. What she has is polished image that probably had more to do with the work of the people around her. This isn't just my own bias here. Even crappy pop culture channels like VH-1 will always put Smells Like Teen Spirit at the top of any top 100 list its eligible for. He appealed to pop-culture nuts AND a wide variety of subcultures (including subcultures that actually care about musical talent and experimentation, subcultures that cared about his political statements, etc.) That makes him a hell of a lot more than just a "pop icon".
FYI, Muslims believe that Christ (Isa) was a prophet, that he was the promised messiah, and that he will return again in the final days. I know absolutely nothing about mosque naming conventions, but given all that, it wouldn't be TOO surprising to see one named in Isa's honor.
Of course, Muhammad is revered above him and it's a sin to say that Jesus is the son of God, but it's still worth pointing out that there's a lot of overlap between the two religions there. If Judaism was a video game, Christianity and Islam would be mere expansion packs--not sequels.
No... LESS people were killed (on a yearly basis) by Saddam than are (both purposely and inadvertently) killed by the USA and the new Iraqi government. Many, many, many less people, actually. You speak of freedom--what of the freedom of the Sunnis to escape the persecution from the now-in-power Shiites? What of the freedom to walk down the fucking street without worrying about insurrection bombings (which are largely a direct result of said persecution)?
Goddamn man, I WISH the world was as black and white as you apologists keep insisting, but it isn't. There is killing perpetrated by ALL involved. No ones' hands are clean.. and, at the end of the day, the streets are still redder than they were under Saddam. Give it a few more years, and I'd wager the civil rights laws are a good deal more oppressive, too (Saddam, for all his murdering and assholery, did maintain a relatively SECULAR government. What makes you think the long-oppressed Shiites are going to pass up this opportunity to pass a bunch of Shiite-inspired religious laws?)
I just assumed that, since Office is their second most important product and OOXML is obviously a carefully constructed weapon to counter the looming threat of ODF and OSS in general, they'd have enough sense to act with some sense of... subtlety or something.
For now, they may still be king but Microsoft's market share isn't the impenetrable fortress it was in the late 90s/early 00s. OS X, Linux (Ubuntu especially), Google, Firefox (and now ODF) have made a significant, measurable impact these last few years. it seemed like they were going to take the smart route and at least FEIGN an interest in open standards/open formats (kind of like Vista feigns having *nix-type security)... instead, they're now flailing around with the ole' triple-E gauntlet (Embrace/Extend/Extinguish), and this time... it's with their own proprietary standards!? Haven't they seen enough backlash to realize this is only going to hurt them in the long run? Is ANYONE at all looking beyond their next quarterly earnings report?
I guess I simply overestimated the overall sanity and intelligence of those in charge. Cue the Ballmer-chair jokes... they're juvenile, but really, what else is there to say?
He's right... their excuse is a joke. It can't be that hard--especially considering the huge profit margin on Office--to figure out a way of opening these file formats securely. It's not even executable data, for pete's sake! And if they *are* talking about macros or something, well then just disable the macro part until you figure out a way to sandbox it.
The richest tech company in the world is throwing its hands up in the air and saying that can't figure out how to make its most profitable (and presumably most actively developed) products render a human readable, non-executable data format safely--PLEASE. This is nothing more than a very clumsy (but brazen) attempt to make people upgrade. I'm surprised they have the balls to do it, what with their current OOXML circus.
To patrol something like this would require a company with resources like Google, and most likely the reason Google doesn't have such functionality.
Errr, what? If they had the resources to do it, why wouldn't they? Especially considering their overall support of open source and Wikis in particular.
Slashdot Mirror
And the response? An 'offtopic' mod, natch. Because it's completely offtopic to talk about the fact that we installed this government (and/or allowed it to seize power) and our reasons for doing so.
The fact that they made this "original" decision at all shows what kind of government we've installed/allowed to rise to power in Afghanistan.
In case you've forgotten, we invaded this country first, because they were supposedly harboring Osama bin Laden. Remember him? He had something to do with 9/11, if my memory serves me. He was the guy who HATED Saddam Hussein and actually OFFERED HIS SOLDIERS TO HELP SAUDI ARABIA FIGHT IRAQ. The royal family of Saudi Arabia laughed at him, preferring instead to rely on American troops. He got pissed, and has been an anti-American nutjob ever since.
...sorry, but I don't think I can keep up the Colbert-esque routine any longer:
Oh, but I'm sorry... I'm sure I'm not telling you anything new. After all, everyone in America knows that Osama hated Saddam and that the latter had nothing to do with 9/11! Everyone knows that al-Qaeda was originally led by Osama to be an anti-Iraq and anti-Saddam milita!
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=544 quote: [in 2005] 64 percent believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda (up slightly from 62% in November).
How is it FUCKING possible that this has happened? Osama is the one responsible for 9/11, and yet trillions spent on Iraq, a country that Osama was actively trying to fight. But, you know, despite the fact that Iraq has been an unending clusterfuck, I at least assumed that things in Afghanistan--the only that actually openly supported Osama--were going semi-decently. Ok yeah, so opium production has been on the rise since we invaded--shit happens, shit happens, plus I'm not exactly a huge fan of the war on drugs anyway so it's no biggie.
But this... What the FUCK. We destroy the Taliban, and then install THIS sharia-based bullshit? Or, at the very least, we allowed this government to take power after the Taliban fell? We're busy JAMMING democracy and freedom down the throat of Iraq, but we're allowing Afghanistan to descend into the dark ages again? We're allowing them to become a breeding ground for the successor to Osama bin Laden?
I don't know what to say. Sounds like the beginning of a Lewis Black routine, but for the life of me I think of a punch line.
I don't understand. Being mindlessly pro-war is one thing. Being mindlessly pro-war vs. a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, while allowing the country that harbored and nurtured the mastermind behind 9/11 to DESCEND INTO A FUCKING TOTALITARIANISM AGAIN is just... just...
What is WRONG with you people--you jingoists, you untiring flag-wavers, you twin-tower-tattooing rednecks, you support-the-war-or-you-aren't-a-patriot fucks? Why aren't you screaming at our president for allowing Osama to get away with it? Why aren't you screaming at him to bring 'freedom' to Afghanistan, a country we originally invaded six and a half years ago, a country that was and apparently still is much more oppressive and totalitarian than Iraq ever was?
I don't understand.
Clarification: The War on Drugs is a cash cow for *law enforcement*, which benefits tremendously both from draconian asset-seizure laws and from the fact that politicians are always willing to give them more money in the name of the War on Drugs. For the country as a whole, it is merely a tremendous economic black hole--one that, if properly filled, could (I'd wager) EASILY pay for Social Security or most other cash-intensive problems you can think of (except, perhaps, another protracted war.)
While the war on drugs is very wasteful and destructive, it doesn't register at all when compared with the destructive potential of the bankruptcy of social security.
You pretend that these things have nothing to do with one another.
Do you realize how much money is directly spent every year on the war on drugs?
Do you realize much money is pulled out of the economy because users and dealers are thrown in jail? I knew a guy who lost nearly 6 months of his life for simple possession--not only is that 6 months of his room, board, and medical expenses the government paid (how much is the average cost to keep a prisoner nowadays, something like $40k/year?), but the government also lost out on his income tax... not just for the 6 months' worth, but much more... he wound up losing his job.
This isn't directly related to pot, but do you realize how much property crime is created as a direct result of sky-high prices for drugs like heroin and cocaine? People hooked on cheap drugs, like alcohol or pot, tend to do just fine working shitty jobs all day, buying their drug of choice, then going home and consuming that drug to forget about their shitty day. People who get hopelessly hooked on fucking H or (non-crack) cocaine either have a ton of money, or they take money from whomever they can.
Do you know how much money the government could rake in if they legalized pot (and/or other drugs) and heavily taxed it?
Fact: We have more people in our prisons than any other nation has in the past 100 years, despots and dictators and former Soviet Union included (the only arguable exception is the Rwandan genocide fiasco.) The vast majority of these people are incarcerated for drug offences. The effort to hunt them down and throw them in jail--combined with the collateral economic damage wrought by such draconian measures--costs us many BILLIONS each year.
Jesus. You don't even have to agree with any particular moral position here. You can think that pot is a fucking "gateway" drug to HELL, and it STILL doesn't make sense to squander our nation's resources locking up working taxpayers and paying for their room and board for years on end.
Open your eyes, man... the war on drugs has NEVER been about stopping drug use. It's simply a MASSIVE cash cow, nothing more. I been to police auctions and I've seen with my own two eyes where they had an entire meth lab setup, hydroponics setup, etc. They confiscate the equipment, then turn around and sell it right back to other drug manufacturers!
It makes people paranoid and stupid and is linked to paranoid schizophrenia.
1. The word "linked" does not mean what you think it means. Wearing large pants is "linked" to being fat. This does not mean wearing large pants makes one fat. IIRC, tobacco has a MUCH stronger "link" to schizos. Off the top of my head, it's something like over 70% of all schizos are tobacco smokers.
2. You misspelled "Christianity." They're always suffering paranoid persecution complexes, claiming to talk to invisible people, believing falsehoods, etc. And if you find such sweeping generalizations offensive... good! Maybe you'll stop making them yourself.
You do realize that the HEPA standard was originally designed to catch dangerous radioactive dust, right? People didn't start marketing it for anti-allergy purposes until much later.
Dibs on platypus!
Vinyl degrades with each use; there is no getting around it.
:
Actually, you CAN get around it if you're willing to shell out $10k+
http://www.elpj.com/
Errrr... well I suppose that's a possibility, but that's not what happened with Betamax, was it? They remained more expensive than VHS, and maintained a niche hobbyist/professional market.
Of course, in that case Betamax was arguably the superior format. HD-DVD is not, (except in terms of DRM, but then is that really important to people who are burning their own?)
Sorry, can't resist, one more:
* Crimson Fox (both sisters dead)
The emphasis is hers--not mine. This character has lost TWO, yes TWO relatives, and just to drive this point home she uses bold on "both". (What about Bruce Wayne's parents, Superman's entire fucking family, Spiderman's uncle/girlfriend/etc...)
It's all just so cluelessly whiny I have a hard time taking it seriously. About the only thing she mentions that probably aren't VERY common with males are the sexual assaults.
Plus, the point trying to be made here is that there is a lot of history towards "unpopular male character retires or dies only to return for a later comic as needed" as well as "unpopular female character dies or get crippled or tortured only to never return".
...a benign tumor. BENIGN. OMG, and Superman had a hangnail in #9375. Re: government experimentation, this is an EXTREMELY common theme with any hero who possesses superpowers (Wolverine leaps to mind.)
1. She didn't make that point. All she gave was a list of female characters to whom bad things happen--we have no idea of their relative popularity, nor whether or not they were ever conveniently temporarily revived. We don't even have a similar list of dead and mangled male characters to compare it to. Considering how large the comics industry is, and for how many decades it's been popular, I don't think her list is a very big at all.
2. I didn't even realize it at first, but a lot of them apparently aren't even superheroes. OF COURSE bad shit happens to the superhero's (or supervillian's) girlfriend--bad things happening to innocent bystanders is a primary motivation for good *and* bad guys everywhere. That most superheroes (and supervillians) are male is a given--therefore, it shouldn't be surprising if most innocent-bystanders-just-waiting-to-be-killed-or-maimed-for-plot-advancement are female.
3. A lot of the non-fatal stuff she mentions (and less than half of the characters mentioned actually die) appears to be completely temporary in nature, like person X losing her powers (when I know for a fact that they regain them later on.) This is... simply absurd. I'm only a VERY casual comic fan, but I've read entire-series summaries and they typically go like this: Superman fights XYZ, loses his powers, gains powers again, gets turned into a weird green blob, gets turns back again, gets his ass kicked, makes a comeback and kicks his own ass, etc.
In short, temporary negative shit happens to every single superhero ever conceived... period. If Batman wasn't humiliated and brutalized from time to time, he wouldn't be Batman. If Superman didn't lose his powers occasionally, he'd grow tiresome (weeeeeell, he's tiresome anyway, but that's beside the point.) Shit happens, superheroes deal with it, THAT'S THE FUCKING POINT. I mean look at this crap:
* Scarlet Witch (children 'die'/vanish/are lost because they are figments of her imagination)
I know very very very little about the Scarlet Witch. As I recall, she's from the X-Men universe and she has the power to alter reality at will. I don't even know if she's a good guy or bad guy or switch hitter, but anyway--what's described there sounds like a very powerful bit of character development. Villian or hero, that sounds interesting... but according to the writer, it's just another way to degrade women. She even put "figments of her imagination" in italics, for emphasis, as if it was almost too horrible to be believed.
* Wolfsbane (locked in werewolf form for awhile, needs major therapy)
I know nothing of the character. Sounds like it's the typical "couldn't control own powers" plot line that pretty much every single goddamned superhero has had to deal with.
* Diamond Lil (kidnapped, experimented on by own government, developed benign breast tumor)
In short, this looks like a very lame, cherry-picked list without any male list to compare it to.
OMG, Bruce Wayne had to watch his parents die WHEN HE WAS A KID! And he acted kinda crazy and macho in the Dark Knight Returns! And Superman has turned evil and lost his powers and died and god knows what else. And all kinds of bad crap happens to Spiderman! Right there, those are the top 3 superheroes in the world... so that's proof that the comics industry HATES men!!!!
Idiot.
All dead superheroes will come back to life eventually, so long as they're popular enough. Neither DC nor Marvel is going to permanently kill of anyone of any gender unless they are looking unprofitable.
And Cobain's contribution to musical contribution
On a related note, I should probably sleep now.
You were the pre-emo kid in your middle school. You were an insignificant minority
Um, no. I was the average, somewhat geeky, popularity-seeking kid at my school. I was emulating what was BY FAR the most common tastes amongst the non-black, non-wigger kids (is there a less-offensive term that means "trying extremely hard to act black" ?) at the time. Granted, this was a magnet school, which meant there were a bunch of rich, gifted, mostly white kids crammed in with a bunch of poor, delinquent, mostly black kids (this isn't a racist comment; it's the truth and it's an inevitable consequence of societal racism and the magnet school concept), so that might have polarized things and made the grunge aesthetic a little more pronounced than it would have otherwise been.
Nevertheless, a few years later in (a fairly typical) high school, when the flannel was a lot rarer, Nirvana was still extremely popular and it wasn't too rare to hear kids mention Kurt's death in the passing. Fine, maybe the death itself wasn't as earthshaking as Lennon or Hendrix, but I can safely say it was the most earthshaking thing SINCE those deaths. And Cobain's contribution to musical contribution is on par with Hendrix's (though probably not Lennon's.) I have no idea how long it took the evening news to care about Kurt; all I'm saying was that, amongst every single person my age who was of the same socioeconomic background, the effect was immediate and sustained.
Oh yes... emo sucks, fuck you very much. Grunge and gothic rock (see: AFI circa late 90s--NOT their recent shit) are completely separate genres. Emo is completely soulless and hollow and it was descended from soulless and hollow-sounding "emotional" punk, NOT grunge. What you hear on the radio today (the non-emo stuff) is grunge merged with nu metal with occasional classic-thrash elements thrown in. I'm not a huge fan of it... but holy shit man, anything is better than emo.
Completely OT: I'd have to say that the only truly interesting stuff on popular radio in the past few years has been from System of a Down (and now Serj Tankian solo) and--trust me, it PAINS me to say this--Linkin Park. SoaD should be self-explanatory--it's simply the most powerful, political, creative shit on mainstream radio... LP, I'd say, it just about the ONLY band I've heard that's manage to fuse hip hop rhythms into rock and not sound make it sound like anemic nu metal (e.g... err, just about everyone nowadays) or complete shit (e.g. Kid Rock or Limp Bizkit.) AFI has some interesting sounds on their last 2 albums, but I'm not even sure you can call it rock anymore. I wish someone would pick up where The Art of Drowning left off. (And before you mention it--their image is extremely emo, but their music never was.) Honorable mentions to Green Day's last album, Coheed and Cambria, and Tool.
OT of the OT rant: You know, when Nickleback's first big single (Leader of Men) hit the charts, I had a LOT of hope for them... it really was a neat little song. Quickly thereafter I realized I just wanted them to shut the fuck up... now here I am 5 years later, STILL waiting for them to shut the fuck up. Stations around here still play that goddamned Rockstar. Swore off radio completely for a while (in part because of Nickleback specifically), but my CD player broke and just haven't the time... ok, done ranting.
What piss me off is people disbelieving in God's existence just because they can't scientifically prove it.
Replace "God" with "leprechauns"... and the sentence holds the same meaning for me. There may indeed be little magical green men running around, only they're sooooooo sneaky and magical no one has ever seen them. Who cares? I certainly don't, and it's very disturbing to me that you're "pissed off" because I won't believe something I can't see, hear, touch, taste, feel, smell, or observe/interact (even indirectly) with complicated apparatus. For the record, I'm NOT an atheist, and I don't have a problem with most inclusive/rational thesits, but I am deeply disturbed by anyone who is threatened by my non-belief in their utterly intangible beliefs.
You think that the grunge sound was small and uninfluenced in 1994? Wow... where were you?
I can tell you where I was--in a middle school (and I live in Florida--i.e., pretty damned far from Seattle), wearing flannel on a DAILY basis unless it was over 90 degrees out, listening to Pearl Jam, Candlebox, STP, Bush, and (of course) Nirvana. The nu rock wave was still in its infancy, and I don't remember any 80s-style music being the least bit popular at this point. Perhaps things were different where you lived...
Small genre of rock? I'd say over 75% of what you hear on modern rock stations today is a direct descendant of the chugging, pseudo-punk sound he pioneered on Nevermind. (Admittedly, STP's Core--released a year later--is another major influence. A lot of people say Pearl Jam as well, but--though they are an awesome band--they really didn't inspire much beyond a few early imitators... notably Seven Mary Three and a little later, Creed.)
Granted, a lot of the music nowadays is simplistic or watered-down tripe, but there are some real gems in there, too. Nirvana KILLED hair metal/"stadium" metal. After Nevermind, it just about vanished off the face of the Earth. For the past 16+ years, nearly every new rock band has used some form of the dirty, chugging, non-melodic/very rhythm-heavy guitar style. It's gotten more staccato and dynamically compressed (and, IMO, soulless) in recent years (this is at least partially due to the nu metal scene brought to the forefront by Korn in the mid/late 90s) but the influence is still unmistakable. Maybe it existed long before Nirvana, I dunno, but pre-1991, you just didn't hear that kind of rough, non-melodic shit--not even Hendrix reached that level of (as he would call it) "earth"--and yet ever since Nevermind, it's been absolutely everywhere.
Yeah, I'm sure the governments of the world do trot out these stupid arguments occasionally, but it's complete bullshit. It costs a lot of money to keep people imprisoned. Courts cost a lot of money. DEA agents cost a LOT of money. Not being able to collect tax money on drug sales costs us a LOT of money. And, as far as "encouraging crime because of the cost"--well FUCK, if it wasn't illegal people could easily afford the shit on minimum wage. It's Economics 101, man... supply and demand. The harder the DEA cracks down, the higher the street price goes. Also, at least in the case of some drugs (Meth), a lot of the taxpayer-funded healthcare costs can be reduced if their shit wasn't contaminated with very dangerous impurities and cutting agents.
eh, meant off of In Utero, not off of Heart Shaped Box. Specifically, was thinking of Heart Shaped Box, Rape Me, and Pennyroyal Tea.
So, when Elvis died, you don't think that deserved more than a brief, passing mention in the media? And his death wasn't half as surprising as Cobain's.
I'm NOT saying every single celebrity death should be turned into a Anna Nicole-style media clusterfuck, but I do think that when a once-every-few-decades (i.e. "legendary") creative talent dies a sudden death, it deserves more than a five second mention. Even the Britney Spears of the world deserve more than that. It doesn't make the news important on the scale of, say, what's going on in Iraq right now, but life isn't *just* about the serious shit.
The problem is, mainstream media either completely ignores something because it considers its specialized or subculture (which I guess is what happened with Cobain), or it assumes something is of vital importance to EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE. I simply can't escape Britney Spears shit (and now Jamie Lynn Spears shit, too). Every single *hard rock* (not pop) station has the DJs talk about them in-between songs. Even the classic rock stations are doing it, now. And it's nothing really significant... nothing to do with their music and nothing earth-shattering like a death, just "OMG Britney shaved her head! OMG there's a picture of Britney's pussy! OMG Britney was drunk at a performance! OMG some gay emo kid posted a whiny, crying video about it all! OMG, her sister is pregnant!" Jesus Christ, I wish I didn't know all of this about her stupid stupid little life, but so long as I have ANY contact with media, I will continue to be bombarded with it.
And I'm sorry, for all her fame you just can't put her in the same fucking category as Kurt Cobain. She doesn't write her own songs. The songs she sings aren't experimental or genre-defining like Kurt's. She doesn't have a particularly remarkable singing voice (and if you think Kurt didn't either, listen to his rendition of Where Did You Sleep Last Night. Actually, pretty much anything off of Unplugged or Heart Shaped Box is extremely good.), and she doesn't play any instruments. What she has is polished image that probably had more to do with the work of the people around her. This isn't just my own bias here. Even crappy pop culture channels like VH-1 will always put Smells Like Teen Spirit at the top of any top 100 list its eligible for. He appealed to pop-culture nuts AND a wide variety of subcultures (including subcultures that actually care about musical talent and experimentation, subcultures that cared about his political statements, etc.) That makes him a hell of a lot more than just a "pop icon".
FYI, Muslims believe that Christ (Isa) was a prophet, that he was the promised messiah, and that he will return again in the final days. I know absolutely nothing about mosque naming conventions, but given all that, it wouldn't be TOO surprising to see one named in Isa's honor.
Of course, Muhammad is revered above him and it's a sin to say that Jesus is the son of God, but it's still worth pointing out that there's a lot of overlap between the two religions there. If Judaism was a video game, Christianity and Islam would be mere expansion packs--not sequels.
No... LESS people were killed (on a yearly basis) by Saddam than are (both purposely and inadvertently) killed by the USA and the new Iraqi government. Many, many, many less people, actually. You speak of freedom--what of the freedom of the Sunnis to escape the persecution from the now-in-power Shiites? What of the freedom to walk down the fucking street without worrying about insurrection bombings (which are largely a direct result of said persecution)?
Goddamn man, I WISH the world was as black and white as you apologists keep insisting, but it isn't. There is killing perpetrated by ALL involved. No ones' hands are clean.. and, at the end of the day, the streets are still redder than they were under Saddam. Give it a few more years, and I'd wager the civil rights laws are a good deal more oppressive, too (Saddam, for all his murdering and assholery, did maintain a relatively SECULAR government. What makes you think the long-oppressed Shiites are going to pass up this opportunity to pass a bunch of Shiite-inspired religious laws?)
I just assumed that, since Office is their second most important product and OOXML is obviously a carefully constructed weapon to counter the looming threat of ODF and OSS in general, they'd have enough sense to act with some sense of... subtlety or something.
For now, they may still be king but Microsoft's market share isn't the impenetrable fortress it was in the late 90s/early 00s. OS X, Linux (Ubuntu especially), Google, Firefox (and now ODF) have made a significant, measurable impact these last few years. it seemed like they were going to take the smart route and at least FEIGN an interest in open standards/open formats (kind of like Vista feigns having *nix-type security)... instead, they're now flailing around with the ole' triple-E gauntlet (Embrace/Extend/Extinguish), and this time... it's with their own proprietary standards!? Haven't they seen enough backlash to realize this is only going to hurt them in the long run? Is ANYONE at all looking beyond their next quarterly earnings report?
I guess I simply overestimated the overall sanity and intelligence of those in charge. Cue the Ballmer-chair jokes... they're juvenile, but really, what else is there to say?
He's right... their excuse is a joke. It can't be that hard--especially considering the huge profit margin on Office--to figure out a way of opening these file formats securely. It's not even executable data, for pete's sake! And if they *are* talking about macros or something, well then just disable the macro part until you figure out a way to sandbox it.
The richest tech company in the world is throwing its hands up in the air and saying that can't figure out how to make its most profitable (and presumably most actively developed) products render a human readable, non-executable data format safely--PLEASE. This is nothing more than a very clumsy (but brazen) attempt to make people upgrade. I'm surprised they have the balls to do it, what with their current OOXML circus.
To patrol something like this would require a company with resources like Google, and most likely the reason Google doesn't have such functionality.
Errr, what? If they had the resources to do it, why wouldn't they? Especially considering their overall support of open source and Wikis in particular.