I'm just an amateur, I have no ability to critically distinguish between the works of such genius like Beethoven and say "this is good" and "skip that". I think all Beethoven's quartets are worth listening to. The early ones are light and like, a bit shallow when compared to the old ones, but they still sound great and on many occasions I preferred to listen to them than to the later ones.
It's not like you were the only one to grow up. Beethoven did it, too. Did you ever listen to Beethoven's late string quartets? They're legendary and noone in their right mind could call them "pompous", "whiny" or "annoying".
Besides, Mahler is also a bit pompous (but I like his music).
The garbage can dwellers of Poland on the other hand seem an insignificant "collateral casualty" of the "lets get rich quick!" mentality which seems to become the leading force over there.
You're not living in Poland and I do. Stop propagating such falsehoods about my country or I'll drop a line or two about those filthy Canadians which cannot see a furry animal without beating it to death with a club and peeling it's skin, sometimes in reverse order. How nice is that?
As I said, we have problems. Nobody is satisfied totally with the current state of affairs. You have nicely cut out my arguments (a bit of statistics) which proved that Poland is not a neo-liberal country. Hell, the biggest part of Polish state budget expenditure is pensions and welfare. We'd like very much to have a shiny welfare system which takes good care of everyone who really need it, but sorry, we currently just can't afford it. Let me tell you that Poland, with its 'shock therapy' was the first post-communist country to come out of depression caused by the collapse of artificial communist economy. Those countries which delayed reforms in order to reduce the 'shock' part were left with no therapy and are years behind (Ukraine, Bulgaria, etc.) Initially, Poland was in much worse shape (whopping inflation) than its neighbours. We found our medicind for that. It included also IMF advice, but there was some time in 1991 when our most liberal prime minister ignored some IMF advice and did to the contrary of it, because he thought it would be better for Poland (and it was). So painting Poland as an IMF puppet is only a product of your imagination.
Note also that for the French this was a national point of shame, complete with resignations of ministers and emergency measures.
But when the French government proposed a "Solidarity Day", to scrap one irrelevant holiday so that the day's earnings would be directed towards the care of elder people, the French public revolted. So I guess it's solidarity and shame as long as someone else pays for it. Typical socialist thinking.
Really? You mean to tell me that the national healthcare actually has doctors on duty in public hospitals, fully equipped? Not closing continuously due to lack of supplies or telling patients to bring in their own families to care for them due to lack of funds? I must have been hearing this from some other Poland then.
Yes, we have doctors in hospitals and I suppose they're "fully equipped", though you might wish to ask their wives about it. Honestly, it depends on what you demand. I'm pretty sure that an average German public hospital is better equipped than average Polish hospital, but there are hospitals in Poland which do the state-of-the-art medicine, for public money. Anyway, my grandmother has been to a hospital 6 months ago, with a broken leg which needed a surgery. She was operated as soon as her condition allowed it and nobody asked for cash. It is true that the care in hospitals is not perfect and we needed to take care after her to some extent, but we'd visit her anyway: we have not reached the stage when you just dump the old wreck in the hospital and leave a delivery address. Guess it's different in Canada.
Speaking of lies, I happen to know people with families in Poland whose elderly parents would find the care certainly and decidedly unaffordable, were it not for a constant stream of money being sent their way from their children abroad.
Only a small fraction of pensioners have families abroad (and those Poles abroad are probably your main source of information). If what you were saying was true, the other should be now starving. I know perfectly this is not so. In fact, the social group which faces most economic difficulties are not pensioners, with a stead albeit trickling source of income, but young couples with children. Their main problem is lack of jobs. Poland has 18% unemployment, because of the rigid work law which makes it unattractive to hire employers and high ta
From your sudden attack on Poland I gather you are a Pole;-)
Right. The French decided that working like dogs for a fraction of their pay (see: Poland), ... and for a fraction of the living costs, to add.
having elderly people siff through garbage for food after their pensions are deflated to the point of the absurd (see: Poland)
While noone could deny that poverty is not a problem in Poland, it's not like there are no homeless people in France. And in Poland, old people at least do not die like flies in hot summer.
having medical care only for the rich (see: Poland)
This is absurd. Poland has national health care and quite affordable (I'm not earning much but I can afford a private -- no insurance -- dentist who does a really good job) private sector. We have a whole lot of problems in health care, corruption and low payment to doctors being the biggest, but the OP suggested Poland has not national health care; this is a lie.
and a long list of other "world's worst social ideas" straight from Utah imported oh-so-gleefully by the Poles
I don't know why you picked Utah, but calling Poland, a country which has a 5% GNP budget deficit, redistributes ca 45% of GNP and subsidies big state enterprises, a "neocon's brainchild" (for starters, Jeffrey Sachs is definitely not one) is totall bollocks. And the stuff about "Catholic madness" just shows who's biased around here.
That is what the nutty "free-market constitution" meant for Europe, turning the whole place into Poland/Utah (replace Mormon madness with Catholic one) with a Truly Undemocratic and Fully Bureucratic Hell thrown in just as an icing on the cake. Contrary to some popular opinion in the USA, the French do not seem too eager to surrender. Good for them.
This treaty was heavily influenced by the French from the beginning. Ommission of the "advocatio Dei" and the like. It *was* a compromise, which the French later rejected, opting, apparently, for 100% compliance with their wishes or not at all. If the French do not want to make compromises, let the give away CAP subsidies, since the rest of Europe does not see any sense in subsidising the richest farmers on the continent.
For those not in the know: Poland's economy is a brainchild of the neocons and was shaped chiefly by Goeffrey Sachs, the idiot who thought up the "economic shock therapy" (think Russian Oligarchs and Yeltsin). It is at present a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the IMF. Imagine a far-out right-wing economic idea and chances are Poland has implemented it. And it has worked wonders! (if you don't mind elderly people sleeping amongst thrash-cans all over the place, organized crime that makes the Mafia resemble a nursery and politicians so corrupt that they make Nixon look like a paragon of integrity and honesty).
For those not in the know, this is almost verbal excerpt from Polish far-left (or far-right, does not matter) newspapers.
Software is not a feild of technology, software is a feild of mathematics.
I don't think many mathematicians would agree. This particular position is held by programmers and computer science people, to dignify themselves. One could as well argue that industrial engineering is a field of physics.
I smell a lot of bullshit in your post. First of all, you claim that We don't need the EU to have affinity and treaties and co-defence and economic agreements. We don't need the EU to feel close to each other. These things exist outside of some pile of red tape, eurocrat wet-dream 400+ page consitution.. So, as I understand it, you claim that such things like common defence exist outside the EU. Pray tell me where they are to find, because the last time I checked, each European country had a separate army. There is no such thing, as you surely know, as European common foreign policy. We have economic integration, but this is strictly within this "fascist EU". It does not take a lot of thinking that you cannot have neither a common foreign policy nor a common defence without some common political structure. Needless to say, we would imagine such structure to be quite different than the current EU. But having just national government, with all their known vices, which you point out quite nicely in your post (though I disagree with you on the subject of referendums, not having a referendum on ratifying an international treaty is OK with me, as the government which had it signed and parliament which is to ratify it both came to being as a result of democratical elections in which responsible adults expressed their political preferences), is even more different. It may come as a shock to you, but most people who supported this so-called Constitution (which it wasn't, it was just a treaty with a huge PR campaign for and against it -- think Maastricht Treaty to the power N) are as critical as you are about the remoteness of the EU's political institution from the ordinary citizens. In fact, this treaty was made to amend it, by making a step towards more integration, and giving more power to the European Parliament. It wasn't enough for many people (myself included), but one needs to start somewhere. I don't see how we are going to get more direct democracy in the EU by rejecting the treaty. It will be extremely hard now to find consensus behind another attempt. Just think how long it took to shape this one.
Why the hurry anyway? Why can't we keep trying till it's right? We were doing this since the days of Schuman. But rejecting anything which does not meet in 100% your expectations is not a way to achieve anything. It's just immature wishful thinking.
Why is anyone opposed to the absurd notion of a 400+pg consitution suddenly a xenophobe? First of all, this was not a real constitution. It was long and boring international treaty, which by some idiotic (in hindsight) PR decision has been nicknamed "the constitution". The EU cannot have a constitution because it is not one state. When the EU eventually becomes a one state, it will have a constitution which will be much shorter. Second, there's no denying that xenophobia played a role. While the fear of Turkish membership has played not that big role as it was originally thought, all France was talking about the "Polish plumber" (see the famous photo here)
crazy from fear before those dreadful Eastern Europeans. The word "xenophobia" somehow springs to mind.
The French said they voted "no" to protect their social model. Well guess what, not everyone in the EU is so enchanted with their way of life. If we ever are to have a common Europe, we must make some compromises. The French people declared they do not want to make compromises. So much about their will of integration.
I don't think I agree with you. It is true that after Michelson-Morley's experiment there was all data available to everybody to put forward Einstein's theory. However, it took Einstein to pluck up the courage and propose it.
Each object in the Universe has its own coordinate system (a thing equivalent to an observer), in which it is always at rest. To put it shortly, it's observing itself. The time measured in this coordinate system is called a proper time. I guess we can say that it's been ca 100 years of proper time of the manuscript of Einstein's article...
NL it seems did some "questionable" accounting by selling LOTR toys to a sister company, thus robbing PJ of his cut.
Here is the problem I have with this story. Everybody takes PJ's side -- just because he made a famous movie, I think. We don't know who is right, contracts are a delicate thing. Maybe PJ thinks he deserver more than what he was promised? Why do everybody take his version for literal truth? Let's wait and see how things develop. Try to be more objective, people.
Same goes for NL, if I made Billions off a movie and PJ wanted to sue for a bit more cash say between 20-100million, wtf do I care, I just made 4 BILLION dollars... The thats just a silly amount of money i can barly comprehend.
The guys running the New Line Cinema are legally required to maximize profits. They can't just shrug and say "fuck 20 million bucks". This would be just like Enron.
In Linux, you can craft your own iptable script, too. I did it for myself a long time ago. It's not hard. And I know exactly the behaviour that I'm to expect, and want. Just as with BSD. Maybe pf is better in technical terms (more possibilites, or whatever), but the possibility to hand-craft your firewall is the same in Linux as in BSD. Saying otherwise is spreading anti-Linux FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
You're a fanatic who can't keep up a decent discussion without name-calling. EOT.
I'm just an amateur, I have no ability to critically distinguish between the works of such genius like Beethoven and say "this is good" and "skip that". I think all Beethoven's quartets are worth listening to. The early ones are light and like, a bit shallow when compared to the old ones, but they still sound great and on many occasions I preferred to listen to them than to the later ones.
"Lied von der Erde".
String quartets op. 127 (128?) and beyond. You know what an opus is.
Cities care about how they look, that's why people can't build just anything they want.
You mean this kind of self-regulation we had in the stone age?
Sure. After all, we all know Ckwop would conduct Beethoven's 5th as well as Toscanini, don't we?
It's sad how many of your assertions are false.
Thank you. It's not that I dislike democracy, but we should be aware of its vices as well as of virtues.
It's not like you were the only one to grow up. Beethoven did it, too. Did you ever listen to Beethoven's late string quartets? They're legendary and noone in their right mind could call them "pompous", "whiny" or "annoying".
Besides, Mahler is also a bit pompous (but I like his music).
The garbage can dwellers of Poland on the other hand seem an insignificant "collateral casualty" of the "lets get rich quick!" mentality which seems to become the leading force over there.
You're not living in Poland and I do. Stop propagating such falsehoods about my country or I'll drop a line or two about those filthy Canadians which cannot see a furry animal without beating it to death with a club and peeling it's skin, sometimes in reverse order. How nice is that?
As I said, we have problems. Nobody is satisfied totally with the current state of affairs. You have nicely cut out my arguments (a bit of statistics) which proved that Poland is not a neo-liberal country. Hell, the biggest part of Polish state budget expenditure is pensions and welfare. We'd like very much to have a shiny welfare system which takes good care of everyone who really need it, but sorry, we currently just can't afford it. Let me tell you that Poland, with its 'shock therapy' was the first post-communist country to come out of depression caused by the collapse of artificial communist economy. Those countries which delayed reforms in order to reduce the 'shock' part were left with no therapy and are years behind (Ukraine, Bulgaria, etc.) Initially, Poland was in much worse shape (whopping inflation) than its neighbours. We found our medicind for that. It included also IMF advice, but there was some time in 1991 when our most liberal prime minister ignored some IMF advice and did to the contrary of it, because he thought it would be better for Poland (and it was). So painting Poland as an IMF puppet is only a product of your imagination.
Note also that for the French this was a national point of shame, complete with resignations of ministers and emergency measures.
But when the French government proposed a "Solidarity Day", to scrap one irrelevant holiday so that the day's earnings would be directed towards the care of elder people, the French public revolted. So I guess it's solidarity and shame as long as someone else pays for it. Typical socialist thinking.
Really? You mean to tell me that the national healthcare actually has doctors on duty in public hospitals, fully equipped? Not closing continuously due to lack of supplies or telling patients to bring in their own families to care for them due to lack of funds? I must have been hearing this from some other Poland then.
Yes, we have doctors in hospitals and I suppose they're "fully equipped", though you might wish to ask their wives about it. Honestly, it depends on what you demand. I'm pretty sure that an average German public hospital is better equipped than average Polish hospital, but there are hospitals in Poland which do the state-of-the-art medicine, for public money. Anyway, my grandmother has been to a hospital 6 months ago, with a broken leg which needed a surgery. She was operated as soon as her condition allowed it and nobody asked for cash. It is true that the care in hospitals is not perfect and we needed to take care after her to some extent, but we'd visit her anyway: we have not reached the stage when you just dump the old wreck in the hospital and leave a delivery address. Guess it's different in Canada.
Speaking of lies, I happen to know people with families in Poland whose elderly parents would find the care certainly and decidedly unaffordable, were it not for a constant stream of money being sent their way from their children abroad.
Only a small fraction of pensioners have families abroad (and those Poles abroad are probably your main source of information). If what you were saying was true, the other should be now starving. I know perfectly this is not so. In fact, the social group which faces most economic difficulties are not pensioners, with a stead albeit trickling source of income, but young couples with children. Their main problem is lack of jobs. Poland has 18% unemployment, because of the rigid work law which makes it unattractive to hire employers and high ta
From your sudden attack on Poland I gather you are a Pole ;-)
... and for a fraction of the living costs, to add.
Right. The French decided that working like dogs for a fraction of their pay (see: Poland),
having elderly people siff through garbage for food after their pensions are deflated to the point of the absurd (see: Poland)
While noone could deny that poverty is not a problem in Poland, it's not like there are no homeless people in France. And in Poland, old people at least do not die like flies in hot summer.
having medical care only for the rich (see: Poland)
This is absurd. Poland has national health care and quite affordable (I'm not earning much but I can afford a private -- no insurance -- dentist who does a really good job) private sector. We have a whole lot of problems in health care, corruption and low payment to doctors being the biggest, but the OP suggested Poland has not national health care; this is a lie.
and a long list of other "world's worst social ideas" straight from Utah imported oh-so-gleefully by the Poles
I don't know why you picked Utah, but calling Poland, a country which has a 5% GNP budget deficit, redistributes ca 45% of GNP and subsidies big state enterprises, a "neocon's brainchild" (for starters, Jeffrey Sachs is definitely not one) is totall bollocks. And the stuff about "Catholic madness" just shows who's biased around here.
That is what the nutty "free-market constitution" meant for Europe, turning the whole place into Poland/Utah (replace Mormon madness with Catholic one) with a Truly Undemocratic and Fully Bureucratic Hell thrown in just as an icing on the cake. Contrary to some popular opinion in the USA, the French do not seem too eager to surrender. Good for them.
This treaty was heavily influenced by the French from the beginning. Ommission of the "advocatio Dei" and the like. It *was* a compromise, which the French later rejected, opting, apparently, for 100% compliance with their wishes or not at all. If the French do not want to make compromises, let the give away CAP subsidies, since the rest of Europe does not see any sense in subsidising the richest farmers on the continent.
For those not in the know: Poland's economy is a brainchild of the neocons and was shaped chiefly by Goeffrey Sachs, the idiot who thought up the "economic shock therapy" (think Russian Oligarchs and Yeltsin). It is at present a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the IMF. Imagine a far-out right-wing economic idea and chances are Poland has implemented it. And it has worked wonders! (if you don't mind elderly people sleeping amongst thrash-cans all over the place, organized crime that makes the Mafia resemble a nursery and politicians so corrupt that they make Nixon look like a paragon of integrity and honesty).
For those not in the know, this is almost verbal excerpt from Polish far-left (or far-right, does not matter) newspapers.
Software is not a feild of technology, software is a feild of mathematics.
I don't think many mathematicians would agree. This particular position is held by programmers and computer science people, to dignify themselves. One could as well argue that industrial engineering is a field of physics.
I smell a lot of bullshit in your post. First of all, you claim that We don't need the EU to have affinity and treaties and co-defence and economic agreements. We don't need the EU to feel close to each other. These things exist outside of some pile of red tape, eurocrat wet-dream 400+ page consitution.. So, as I understand it, you claim that such things like common defence exist outside the EU. Pray tell me where they are to find, because the last time I checked, each European country had a separate army. There is no such thing, as you surely know, as European common foreign policy. We have economic integration, but this is strictly within this "fascist EU". It does not take a lot of thinking that you cannot have neither a common foreign policy nor a common defence without some common political structure. Needless to say, we would imagine such structure to be quite different than the current EU. But having just national government, with all their known vices, which you point out quite nicely in your post (though I disagree with you on the subject of referendums, not having a referendum on ratifying an international treaty is OK with me, as the government which had it signed and parliament which is to ratify it both came to being as a result of democratical elections in which responsible adults expressed their political preferences), is even more different. It may come as a shock to you, but most people who supported this so-called Constitution (which it wasn't, it was just a treaty with a huge PR campaign for and against it -- think Maastricht Treaty to the power N) are as critical as you are about the remoteness of the EU's political institution from the ordinary citizens. In fact, this treaty was made to amend it, by making a step towards more integration, and giving more power to the European Parliament. It wasn't enough for many people (myself included), but one needs to start somewhere. I don't see how we are going to get more direct democracy in the EU by rejecting the treaty. It will be extremely hard now to find consensus behind another attempt. Just think how long it took to shape this one.
Why the hurry anyway? Why can't we keep trying till it's right? We were doing this since the days of Schuman. But rejecting anything which does not meet in 100% your expectations is not a way to achieve anything. It's just immature wishful thinking.
Why is anyone opposed to the absurd notion of a 400+pg consitution suddenly a xenophobe? First of all, this was not a real constitution. It was long and boring international treaty, which by some idiotic (in hindsight) PR decision has been nicknamed "the constitution". The EU cannot have a constitution because it is not one state. When the EU eventually becomes a one state, it will have a constitution which will be much shorter. Second, there's no denying that xenophobia played a role. While the fear of Turkish membership has played not that big role as it was originally thought, all France was talking about the "Polish plumber" (see the famous photo here) crazy from fear before those dreadful Eastern Europeans. The word "xenophobia" somehow springs to mind.
The French said they voted "no" to protect their social model. Well guess what, not everyone in the EU is so enchanted with their way of life. If we ever are to have a common Europe, we must make some compromises. The French people declared they do not want to make compromises. So much about their will of integration.
Poor innocent Japanese... BTW, what were they doing in China at the time?
I don't think I agree with you. It is true that after Michelson-Morley's experiment there was all data available to everybody to put forward Einstein's theory. However, it took Einstein to pluck up the courage and propose it.
You know who is to blame for nuking Japan? The Japanese. They only had not to attack Pearl Harbour.
Each object in the Universe has its own coordinate system (a thing equivalent to an observer), in which it is always at rest. To put it shortly, it's observing itself. The time measured in this coordinate system is called a proper time. I guess we can say that it's been ca 100 years of proper time of the manuscript of Einstein's article...
NL it seems did some "questionable" accounting by selling LOTR toys to a sister company, thus robbing PJ of his cut.
Here is the problem I have with this story. Everybody takes PJ's side -- just because he made a famous movie, I think. We don't know who is right, contracts are a delicate thing. Maybe PJ thinks he deserver more than what he was promised? Why do everybody take his version for literal truth? Let's wait and see how things develop. Try to be more objective, people.
Same goes for NL, if I made Billions off a movie and PJ wanted to sue for a bit more cash say between 20-100million, wtf do I care, I just made 4 BILLION dollars... The thats just a silly amount of money i can barly comprehend.
The guys running the New Line Cinema are legally required to maximize profits. They can't just shrug and say "fuck 20 million bucks". This would be just like Enron.
In Linux, you can craft your own iptable script, too. I did it for myself a long time ago. It's not hard. And I know exactly the behaviour that I'm to expect, and want. Just as with BSD. Maybe pf is better in technical terms (more possibilites, or whatever), but the possibility to hand-craft your firewall is the same in Linux as in BSD. Saying otherwise is spreading anti-Linux FUD.
Nonsense. It's cheaper to curb the greenhouse gases emission, but who'd think of such simple measures?
I used to think 3-month warranty is on used products. At least where I live, you get at least 1 year, or 33 months on HDD's in particular.
W/r to moral #1, this HDD of mine has much lower RPM value than modern drives. Maybe this is the reason...
I used to replace a lot of a particular model IBM Deathsar at the time too.
Was it by any chance an IBM DTLA ca. 30GB model, assembled in Romania?
One WD 1.6GB drive I bought in 1996 is still working well in my mother's PC. Any comments?