No. The answer to 9/11 was to do what the Israelis did in the case of Munich. Clandestine hunting down of those responsible to capture or kill them.
If that involved putting small assassination teams into Afghanistan, then the Aussies, Kiwis and Brits were always happy to lend out the SAS, the world's finest special forces, to do it.
The election is a farce, as is the Afghan government, which relies on the support of a federation of armed tribal gangs. Another fake election just like the South Vietnamese ones, held mostly to make our moron governments look good. The BBC in particular is pushing this line of bullshit, for which its members deserve to be abandoned in Afghanistan for the amusement of the locals.
Osama and his friends are long gone to Pakistan, it seems, and so the "coalition of the idiots" is now stuck in a country where every single attempt at military imposition of a government has failed, and where the largest ethnic group is more or less excluded from power (apart from Karzai, who is a puppet). The Afghans should be left to their own uncivilized devices, but that would be to admit failure (which is inevitable).
The story is that stabilizing Afghanistan is supposed to stop the terrorists from attacking us. What a pity they've all fucked off to a completely different country then. But since that's the only excuse our glorious leaders have got, we'll just have to keep hearing the same old crap, and it will go on and on until the coalition is forced to withdraw and the terrorists will have achieved their aim of doing to the West what they did to the Soviets.
"And with that, Westerner's prior dreams of humanity being led by Western cultures, with their focus on individual freedoms, (as seen in shows like Star Trek) will be dead."
At least there won't be a fucking McDonalds on the moon.
We can only hope. I don't really care who goes to the moon (well, with the possible exception of Miley Cyrus) as long as someone does.
If the US is going to dick around, then I hope the Chinese get there. The only crap thing will be the terrible English translations of the lunar broadcasts.
That's not the point. The underlying problem is the assumption that the authorities have a right to access any evidence they feel is relevant. In essence, they are saying that there is no electronic communication or form of data storage that they should not have the right to access. . Notice that nobody asked people whether they were willing to give up absolute privacy over limited aspects of their lives in order to gain some limited form of security. . What if in the future it were possible to read thoughts or extract memories by means of brain scans? Would any sane person think the authorities have any rights to invade people's own thoughts? The privacy of one's own thoughts is essential to living a human life. . If you agree with that, then you need to take into account that sometimes we store our personal thoughts in other media. An extreme example would be a thought experiment involving someone who has no long term memory who writes down everything he has to remember into his PDA (which is now functionally his "memory" - thanks to David Chalmers for this example, although I'm not sure it is originally his). From the point of view of personal privacy, there is really no difference whether one's personal private thoughts are stored in internal or external memory systems. That being so, it follows that for the police to assume they have a right to access any externalized information (such as that recorded on the man's PDA) is a gross violation of privacy and a fundamental disrespect for the value of individual personhood. . The law needs to have strict limits on what can and cannot be accessed by the authorities, and in order to protect privacy in a meaningful sense, some things must remain absolutely off limits to the police. So what if this makes crimes harder to prosecute? Either we increase the police budget or tell them to get off their asses and do some old fashioned police work to catch criminals. . The old "some people have kiddie porn, so everyone must surrender their right to privacy" argument just does not wash with me.
Most ancient philosophers, like Aristotle, believed that the earth was spherical. Aristotle reasoned that this was so because some stars were visible at certain latitudes but not others.
Modern science is not a wholesale repudiation of ancient philosophy, but a selective rejection of certain flawed aspects of it. Modern science shares the broad conception of rationality developed by the Ancient Greeks and their naturalistic approach (it's one reason why most of our words to do with science and rationality are inherited from Greek). Both modern science and ancient philosophy have a much bigger contrast with pre-philosophical mythic thought than they do with each other.
Aristotle had a scientific method set out in his Posterior Analytics. It's the first attempt to provide a general account of the structure of scientific reasoning, and in its broadest respects it is the model for all others. Of course, our scientific method is much better than his, but his is still recognizable as a scientific method appealing to reason and evidence, rather than revelation, tradition or oracles.
You can be arrogant and dismiss it, but future people will probably look at our science and scientific method and wonder how we could have been so dumb. That would be unfair, and it is unfair to do the same to our ancestors.
Yeah, the Democrats are liberal, because they would be a right wing party outside of the US. US politics are extremely right wing in comparison to the rest of the democratic world. I mean like really really right wing.
That's cool, I just wish that some Americans wouldn't act as if everyone else is abnormal. It's you guys who are out of step with everyone else. NTTAWWT
Oh please. Who wants to bet that at least some Veyron owners will be members of middle eastern royal (oil) families who are wealthy simply because they were the descendants of tyrants. And, given his previous form, I would not be surprised if Kim Jong-Il will obtain one of these cars.
Market economies do not necessarily distribute wealth according to desert or to hard work. Often there's a fair amount of luck and timing involved. Markets have nothing to do with intrinsic worth or desert. We have them because they produce good outcomes in a wide variety of human activities. People who argue otherwise invariably end up either discrediting the actual market economy we have, or appealing to magical thinking.
Despite that, the Veyron is a beautiful, if impractical car. To be honest, I'd rather have Nissan's GTR, which I like better and which is a practical road car.
New Zealand was recently rated the most peaceful country on earth to live in. Race relations in NZ, while not perfect, are considerably better than the US, Canada or UK and streaks ahead of Australia. Be aware that a lot of right wing New Zealanders constantly talk the country down because it doesn't conform to their vision of a racist free market paradise.
You are unlikely to make a fortune in New Zealand, but you don't really need one.
I've been away for ten years, but I'm moving back early next year because it's a good place to raise a family, the beaches are clean and not crowded, and the fly fishing is great.
There's also another good reason to move there. Food security is never going to be a problem in New Zealand, since it produces far more than its people could ever hope to eat. Given the way things look to be going 15-20 years from now I think that is going to be an enviable position.
It works quite well. I haven't bought a bad game yet. Part of the charm is being able to buy a good game for a couple of bucks, and the iPhone games are much better than most mobile games.
Look, if you buy a PSP (which I own) you're putting down a chunk of cash for something that is no good for anything other than playing games, and I have to buy the damn cartridges. On the other hand, a lot of people won't buy the iPhone for gaming, but they'll get bored and press the app store button on the home screen and think "what the hell, it's only a dollar/two dollars". Hell, a lot of people used to spend more than that in a hour at the arcade 20 years ago, and with the iPhone, as soon as you buy it you can play it. Works for me and everyone I know.
But I don't think we've seen anything yet. When more developers start designing around the touch screen rather than trying to mimic conventional control schemes, then we might see some really good stuff (in addition to the good games the platform already has).
Like you I just don't see the evidence for proof of fraud.
It seems to me that westerners look at Ahmadinejad and see a guy who says outrageous things, dresses like a pedophile, and has a face that resembles a novelty money box. No wonder people here find it hard to believe that he won.
This whole thing reminds me of the Ukraine mess. That was supposed to be a flowering of democracy, but it turned out to be foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of a country that has become more or less ungovernable as a result.
A lot of that is bollocks, but I would not be at all surprised about the Israeli groups doing the twitter thing, given some of the obvious manipulation of social sites by similar groups in the past and the unpleasantness of the GIYUS thing.
So he used computer technology to announce that someone was gay... and he got into legal trouble. Well, the courts are going to be swamped if the police ever find out about Halo 3.
Buy a copy of Battlestations Pacific. You can play as the Japanese side. I think you even attack Pearl Harbor. You definitely can do Kamikaze attacks.
I'd be rather pissed off if I couldn't play as both sides in a historical wargame I'd bought. I certainly wouldn't mind playing as Rommel, whom I admire.
These games aren't really about approval of one side or the other, but about re-enacting history and thinking about alternative outcomes. For example, I've often imagined that Lee won at Gettysburg, not because I wanted the Confederacy to win, but because I'd have liked to see him win it.
I wouldn't say that the people who are Civil War re-enactors on the Confederate side are racists. They are just fascinated with the (as I am) and love the history. Same goes for video games.
Oh the humanity......seriously... you behave as if this were some actually important matter, like Peter Jackson's disgusting rape of Lord of the Rings.
Philosophically speaking, everything that happened in the original series occurred, because the original Spock experienced it and he is that very same person in the new film. What happens in this film generates an alternate timeline.
The alternate timeline is the cleverest way of rebooting the series I can think of, because it leaves the original completely intact.
Saw it yesterday. It's a good movie. Everyone I know is going to see it, and most of them aren't Star Trek fans. I went because I grew up watching the original series (never bothered with the rest). I'm guessing a lot of people are in the same situation.
Obviously, if you make a good film with wide appeal, lots of people will pay to see it, whatever the subject matter. This happens to be a pretty good movie released at a time when movies in general are an ocean of tiresome shit.
It's a win for everyone. Even if you're a Star Trek purist who hates this film, a blockbuster Trek film will likely mean more future money directed towards projects more acceptable to the Trekocracy and more overall mindshare for the Trek cult.
MMORPGs are in a large part a form of status competition. Being a high ranked player on COD4 matters to some people, but you can't really get there without grinding it. Gold selling allows people to increase their status without personally working for it.
Competitive games work because you are supposed to be ranked according to a combination of skill and the time you have put in to the game. WoW doesn't really work that way, because even a lot of high level guilds who have really good players have to buy gold to be able to compete at raiding. So the whole thing involves a massive black market of influence that subverts any attempt at making it a fair game.
To be honest, WoW is pretty comical. It isn't so much a fantasy world, as just another version of the real world transferred to the virtual realm. It has a social hierarchy, bribery, corruption, nepotism, gold-digging, cheating, rudeness and a lowest common denominator sense of manners. I used to think that Azeroth was a terrible place, but then I started looking at the real world as though it were an MMO and it turns out that it isn't that much different from Azeroth (except real women look more like dwarf women than the "human" females of Azeroth).
WoW is proof that human beings are never going to create a worthwhile society, because they can't even create a decent virtual one, even with the vast amount of control that entails.
And there you have it. This is not about North Korea using such weapons offensively against others. The Korean peninsula is in permanent stalemate, because North Korea cannot attack the South without being completely defeated, and the South cannot attack the North without losing Seoul to massed artillery.
The two Koreas actually agree on one thing. Neither wants the North Korean state to fail, because that means a few million North Koreans appearing in Seoul in the first couple of days looking for something to eat, and the South simply cannot afford to deal with them.
The South Koreans are so upset by this test that a total of about 100 right wing fanatics were protesting in downtown Seoul when I passed them today. Nobody else cares, because it is a sideshow.
The real problem has always been the potential for proliferation.
They have the wrong model for the games that North Americans like to play. Like I said above, games like Halo 3 don't have a good spectator mode, so they suck to watch.
But, the economic model is also wrong. Pro teams on salary is stupid. It should be all comers and prize money only. That way the audience will have more of a stake in the tournaments.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oooh oohhh Laaady looks like a dude..."
Nah, just doesn't have the same ring to it.
No. The answer to 9/11 was to do what the Israelis did in the case of Munich. Clandestine hunting down of those responsible to capture or kill them.
If that involved putting small assassination teams into Afghanistan, then the Aussies, Kiwis and Brits were always happy to lend out the SAS, the world's finest special forces, to do it.
The election is a farce, as is the Afghan government, which relies on the support of a federation of armed tribal gangs. Another fake election just like the South Vietnamese ones, held mostly to make our moron governments look good. The BBC in particular is pushing this line of bullshit, for which its members deserve to be abandoned in Afghanistan for the amusement of the locals.
Osama and his friends are long gone to Pakistan, it seems, and so the "coalition of the idiots" is now stuck in a country where every single attempt at military imposition of a government has failed, and where the largest ethnic group is more or less excluded from power (apart from Karzai, who is a puppet). The Afghans should be left to their own uncivilized devices, but that would be to admit failure (which is inevitable).
The story is that stabilizing Afghanistan is supposed to stop the terrorists from attacking us. What a pity they've all fucked off to a completely different country then. But since that's the only excuse our glorious leaders have got, we'll just have to keep hearing the same old crap, and it will go on and on until the coalition is forced to withdraw and the terrorists will have achieved their aim of doing to the West what they did to the Soviets.
Amen brother!!
"And with that, Westerner's prior dreams of humanity being led by Western cultures, with their focus on individual freedoms, (as seen in shows like Star Trek) will be dead."
At least there won't be a fucking McDonalds on the moon.
We can only hope. I don't really care who goes to the moon (well, with the possible exception of Miley Cyrus) as long as someone does.
If the US is going to dick around, then I hope the Chinese get there. The only crap thing will be the terrible English translations of the lunar broadcasts.
That's not the point. The underlying problem is the assumption that the authorities have a right to access any evidence they feel is relevant. In essence, they are saying that there is no electronic communication or form of data storage that they should not have the right to access.
.
Notice that nobody asked people whether they were willing to give up absolute privacy over limited aspects of their lives in order to gain some limited form of security.
.
What if in the future it were possible to read thoughts or extract memories by means of brain scans? Would any sane person think the authorities have any rights to invade people's own thoughts? The privacy of one's own thoughts is essential to living a human life.
.
If you agree with that, then you need to take into account that sometimes we store our personal thoughts in other media. An extreme example would be a thought experiment involving someone who has no long term memory who writes down everything he has to remember into his PDA (which is now functionally his "memory" - thanks to David Chalmers for this example, although I'm not sure it is originally his). From the point of view of personal privacy, there is really no difference whether one's personal private thoughts are stored in internal or external memory systems. That being so, it follows that for the police to assume they have a right to access any externalized information (such as that recorded on the man's PDA) is a gross violation of privacy and a fundamental disrespect for the value of individual personhood.
.
The law needs to have strict limits on what can and cannot be accessed by the authorities, and in order to protect privacy in a meaningful sense, some things must remain absolutely off limits to the police. So what if this makes crimes harder to prosecute? Either we increase the police budget or tell them to get off their asses and do some old fashioned police work to catch criminals.
.
The old "some people have kiddie porn, so everyone must surrender their right to privacy" argument just does not wash with me.
Most ancient philosophers, like Aristotle, believed that the earth was spherical. Aristotle reasoned that this was so because some stars were visible at certain latitudes but not others.
Modern science is not a wholesale repudiation of ancient philosophy, but a selective rejection of certain flawed aspects of it. Modern science shares the broad conception of rationality developed by the Ancient Greeks and their naturalistic approach (it's one reason why most of our words to do with science and rationality are inherited from Greek). Both modern science and ancient philosophy have a much bigger contrast with pre-philosophical mythic thought than they do with each other.
Aristotle had a scientific method set out in his Posterior Analytics. It's the first attempt to provide a general account of the structure of scientific reasoning, and in its broadest respects it is the model for all others. Of course, our scientific method is much better than his, but his is still recognizable as a scientific method appealing to reason and evidence, rather than revelation, tradition or oracles.
You can be arrogant and dismiss it, but future people will probably look at our science and scientific method and wonder how we could have been so dumb. That would be unfair, and it is unfair to do the same to our ancestors.
Yeah, the Democrats are liberal, because they would be a right wing party outside of the US. US politics are extremely right wing in comparison to the rest of the democratic world. I mean like really really right wing.
That's cool, I just wish that some Americans wouldn't act as if everyone else is abnormal. It's you guys who are out of step with everyone else. NTTAWWT
Oh please. Who wants to bet that at least some Veyron owners will be members of middle eastern royal (oil) families who are wealthy simply because they were the descendants of tyrants. And, given his previous form, I would not be surprised if Kim Jong-Il will obtain one of these cars.
Market economies do not necessarily distribute wealth according to desert or to hard work. Often there's a fair amount of luck and timing involved. Markets have nothing to do with intrinsic worth or desert. We have them because they produce good outcomes in a wide variety of human activities. People who argue otherwise invariably end up either discrediting the actual market economy we have, or appealing to magical thinking.
Despite that, the Veyron is a beautiful, if impractical car. To be honest, I'd rather have Nissan's GTR, which I like better and which is a practical road car.
"I ever caught you keying ANY car, I'd break your fucking legs."
What if it was owned by Chad Kroger?
New Zealand was recently rated the most peaceful country on earth to live in. Race relations in NZ, while not perfect, are considerably better than the US, Canada or UK and streaks ahead of Australia. Be aware that a lot of right wing New Zealanders constantly talk the country down because it doesn't conform to their vision of a racist free market paradise.
You are unlikely to make a fortune in New Zealand, but you don't really need one.
I've been away for ten years, but I'm moving back early next year because it's a good place to raise a family, the beaches are clean and not crowded, and the fly fishing is great.
There's also another good reason to move there. Food security is never going to be a problem in New Zealand, since it produces far more than its people could ever hope to eat. Given the way things look to be going 15-20 years from now I think that is going to be an enviable position.
It works quite well. I haven't bought a bad game yet. Part of the charm is being able to buy a good game for a couple of bucks, and the iPhone games are much better than most mobile games.
Look, if you buy a PSP (which I own) you're putting down a chunk of cash for something that is no good for anything other than playing games, and I have to buy the damn cartridges. On the other hand, a lot of people won't buy the iPhone for gaming, but they'll get bored and press the app store button on the home screen and think "what the hell, it's only a dollar/two dollars". Hell, a lot of people used to spend more than that in a hour at the arcade 20 years ago, and with the iPhone, as soon as you buy it you can play it. Works for me and everyone I know.
But I don't think we've seen anything yet. When more developers start designing around the touch screen rather than trying to mimic conventional control schemes, then we might see some really good stuff (in addition to the good games the platform already has).
Like you I just don't see the evidence for proof of fraud.
It seems to me that westerners look at Ahmadinejad and see a guy who says outrageous things, dresses like a pedophile, and has a face that resembles a novelty money box. No wonder people here find it hard to believe that he won.
This whole thing reminds me of the Ukraine mess. That was supposed to be a flowering of democracy, but it turned out to be foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of a country that has become more or less ungovernable as a result.
A lot of that is bollocks, but I would not be at all surprised about the Israeli groups doing the twitter thing, given some of the obvious manipulation of social sites by similar groups in the past and the unpleasantness of the GIYUS thing.
So he used computer technology to announce that someone was gay... and he got into legal trouble. Well, the courts are going to be swamped if the police ever find out about Halo 3.
Americans trying to take credit for the Soviet victories yet again.
Why can't you just accept that they were good enough to kick Hitler's ass. Even if they never did anything else good, that's a gold medal right there.
Buy a copy of Battlestations Pacific. You can play as the Japanese side. I think you even attack Pearl Harbor. You definitely can do Kamikaze attacks.
I'd be rather pissed off if I couldn't play as both sides in a historical wargame I'd bought. I certainly wouldn't mind playing as Rommel, whom I admire.
These games aren't really about approval of one side or the other, but about re-enacting history and thinking about alternative outcomes. For example, I've often imagined that Lee won at Gettysburg, not because I wanted the Confederacy to win, but because I'd have liked to see him win it.
I wouldn't say that the people who are Civil War re-enactors on the Confederate side are racists. They are just fascinated with the (as I am) and love the history. Same goes for video games.
Oh the humanity... ...seriously... you behave as if this were some actually important matter, like Peter Jackson's disgusting rape of Lord of the Rings.
I disagree. I don't think this is right.
Philosophically speaking, everything that happened in the original series occurred, because the original Spock experienced it and he is that very same person in the new film. What happens in this film generates an alternate timeline.
The alternate timeline is the cleverest way of rebooting the series I can think of, because it leaves the original completely intact.
Saw it yesterday. It's a good movie. Everyone I know is going to see it, and most of them aren't Star Trek fans. I went because I grew up watching the original series (never bothered with the rest). I'm guessing a lot of people are in the same situation.
Obviously, if you make a good film with wide appeal, lots of people will pay to see it, whatever the subject matter. This happens to be a pretty good movie released at a time when movies in general are an ocean of tiresome shit.
It's a win for everyone. Even if you're a Star Trek purist who hates this film, a blockbuster Trek film will likely mean more future money directed towards projects more acceptable to the Trekocracy and more overall mindshare for the Trek cult.
MMORPGs are in a large part a form of status competition. Being a high ranked player on COD4 matters to some people, but you can't really get there without grinding it. Gold selling allows people to increase their status without personally working for it.
Competitive games work because you are supposed to be ranked according to a combination of skill and the time you have put in to the game. WoW doesn't really work that way, because even a lot of high level guilds who have really good players have to buy gold to be able to compete at raiding. So the whole thing involves a massive black market of influence that subverts any attempt at making it a fair game.
To be honest, WoW is pretty comical. It isn't so much a fantasy world, as just another version of the real world transferred to the virtual realm. It has a social hierarchy, bribery, corruption, nepotism, gold-digging, cheating, rudeness and a lowest common denominator sense of manners. I used to think that Azeroth was a terrible place, but then I started looking at the real world as though it were an MMO and it turns out that it isn't that much different from Azeroth (except real women look more like dwarf women than the "human" females of Azeroth).
WoW is proof that human beings are never going to create a worthwhile society, because they can't even create a decent virtual one, even with the vast amount of control that entails.
And there you have it. This is not about North Korea using such weapons offensively against others. The Korean peninsula is in permanent stalemate, because North Korea cannot attack the South without being completely defeated, and the South cannot attack the North without losing Seoul to massed artillery.
The two Koreas actually agree on one thing. Neither wants the North Korean state to fail, because that means a few million North Koreans appearing in Seoul in the first couple of days looking for something to eat, and the South simply cannot afford to deal with them.
The South Koreans are so upset by this test that a total of about 100 right wing fanatics were protesting in downtown Seoul when I passed them today. Nobody else cares, because it is a sideshow.
The real problem has always been the potential for proliferation.
They have the wrong model for the games that North Americans like to play. Like I said above, games like Halo 3 don't have a good spectator mode, so they suck to watch.
But, the economic model is also wrong. Pro teams on salary is stupid. It should be all comers and prize money only. That way the audience will have more of a stake in the tournaments.
WoW is a job. Blizzard should be paying you.