I consider the 2 biggest threats to world peace to be Iraq (and as a direct result Iran), and Israel/Palestine.
The invasion of iraq used the excuse of al-qaeda and the taliban in afghanistan to justify an imperialistic expansion into iraq, primarily to provide america with greater strategic control over the middle east. Although I of course consider this morally wrong, I do not consider it an especially great threat to world peace. The consequences of this adventure however, are a vastly more legitimate position for "al-qaeda" (as the umbrella term for various militant fundamentalist islamic groups, rather than some broadly fictitious shadowy global terrorist network). Whereas before the invasion of iraq "al-qaeda" were terrorist aggressors, as a resistance to the american (and, sadly, british) occupation of iraq there is now a sympathetic argument that these individuals are freedom fighters, resisting this illegal occupation. A groundswell of support across the middle east for this position is the result, countless ordinary people have been radicalised and it is not unreasonable to believe that at this point in time there are 10 times the number of "jihadists" than there were up to the September the 11th attack.
The cause of world peace has suffered.
Furthermore, by demonstrating that the USA does not have the military resources to successfully prosecute a war in Afghanistan simultaneously with a war in Iraq, states whose actions may have been tempered by a fear of US military might are now able to advance their agendas with little or no fear of military reprisals. I am talking about Iran, brazenly pressing ahead with a nuclear programme, safe in the knowledge that the USA does not have the resources or the political support to invade Iran to prevent this. Had the GWB administration contented itself with dealing thoroughly with the Taliban in Afghanistan then it would be in a stronger position to deal with Iran, but Iran knows it has a few years to make as much nuclear progress as possible before any effective international action can be taken. Once the nuclear cat is out of the bag, it would be foolish and irresponsible of any state not to develop a nuclear deterrent, so I presume that within 5 years Iran will be a nuclear power. This has happened on GWB adminstration's watch and as a direct result of their actions in Iraq.
The cause of world peace has suffered.
It is widely accepted that the Israel/Palestine conflict is the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East. While this conflict rumbles on, anti-semitism breeds as does resentment against the West. While there are terrorists in Lebanon and Palestinian territories, Israel's response to terrorist threats is utterly disproportionate. Israel's stated policy is to ensure that for every Israeli citizen killed by a suicide bomb etc, many "terrorists" die. It achieves this by bombing, amongst other military objectives, towns refugee camps etc. While I am not able to comment upon the number of "terrorists" that their policy neutralises, it is certain that huge numbers of civilians and innocents are caught up in this. Again, as has happened in iraq, many ordinary people caught up in this have become radicalised. This is demonstrated by the fact the Palestinian people in their democratic elections have voted for _Hamas_, an organisation considered by the EU and the US to be terrorist!! Think about it for a second - the depredations some of these people suffer at the hands of the Israelis are so severe they feel the Palestinian Authority must be led by an organisation whose leaders (according to Human Rights Watch) "should be held accountable for the war crimes and crimes against humanity". There have been over 100 UN resolutions condemning Israel's actions which Israel generally ignores with the tacit support of the USA. America provides huge numbers of Arms exports to Israel, and it is generally accepted that Israel as a state would be unlikely to exist without its American backing. More controversially, some observers conte
And what if the US becomes the next China, Iran, etc...
Considering the US is a militaristic, expansionistic country seeking to exert dominance over most of the world's regions, I'd say it already is the next china/iran.
In the last 5 years it has certainly been the biggest impediment to world peace.
I agree its a moral dilemma. If I was a woman I would be as reluctant to take the female contraceptive pill as I am the male contraceptive pill. I think I'm just selfish.
...there is no chance of me (as a man) ever using this!
They say no side effects, but look at "safe" female contraception which may lead to increased chance of certain cancers (although decreased chance of others).
Not that I'm going to stop my gf taking the pill though...
There is shed loads of down time. On my server, There is often lag or lagspikes (unacceptable when a spell cast promptly means the difference between life and death), queues to get into the server, various server reboots with little or no warning at arbitrary times, periodic kicks from the server, and from time to time, the server doesn't come back up from the weekly maintenance for a day or two.
With blizzard earning at least 1 billion/year from subscriptions, this performance is absolutely unacceptable when someone like google can provide such an ultra reliable service (for me google's been unavailable twice in 5 years).
Still, I continue to subscribe to the world of warcrack.
Don't forget the millennium dome^H^H^H^H fiasco, the ultimate embodiment of hubris and arrogance. Tony and his cronies have completely got away with that and not been called to account. Unbelievable.
My mate was trying to get me to play warcraft for about 2 months and I refused because like you I become obsessed with the games I play (I will nto put a game down until I've completed it, even if I don't rate it that highly) and I knew I'd get addicted to warcraft if I started playing. Eventually he came round my house on a pretext, installed warcraft, showed me how to play, and I obviouslyt got addicted - then after about 2 months he stopped playing! and I've not stopped since. bah
Whether or not the editor is being sarcastic is completely orthogonal to whether or not he understands and has correctly made use of the word "coincidence"!
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Could the editor have in mind scenarios like the following?
1) plaintiff blames videogame makers and seeks out a well known crusader against violent games to represent - jack thompson 2) plaintiff blames videogames makers and heads to their nearest lawyer who happens to be jack thompson, the well known crusader against violent games
in scenario 1 it is not a coincidence that Jack Thompson represents, in scenario 2 it is a coincidence that Jack Thompson represents the plaintiff.
As far as I can tell, the editor knows exactly what a coincidence is...parent doesn't have a clue. Read some books mate and you might understand english a bit better.
hear, hear. I have had no end of problems with 2 different soundblaster lives. In both cases, creative's own drivers refused to install claiming no soundblaster product existed in my system. For reasons known only to creative, they wrap their drivers in some shite installer that fails to detect their soundcards in many cases. They cripple their drivers so that they cannot be installed through the normal windows hardware detection routines, so when their installer doesn't work, you're fucked. Why Creative? Why?
To compound it all, if you think to download the latest drivers which may now be fixed, well the drivers they make available on their website are not full drivers in their own right, merely upgrades to the ones provided on cd with the product - WHICH DON'T FUCKING INSTALL!
I went through their customer support process and they were reasonably helpful to the point of posting me a new driver cd - but when that didn't work either, I just gave up.
Creative's soundcards are full of gimmicky features and never live up to marketing promises. For example creative advertised their soundblaster live cards as being upgradeable - promising new features via their "liveware" sytem (i.e. some kind of firmware on the device I suppose)...guess what, when I get my soundblaster live, the liveware was at version 3, and at no time since I bought the card has Creative released a new version of "liveware" beyond incremental bugfixes. Lying bastards.
Creative are not an engineering company, they are a scummy den of marketing snakes and it is in nobody's interest to buy from them.
Even their name is a joke - no serious creative professional would touch a creative card with a bargepole.
"I'd still happily get the nearly-free replacement printer, because it will surely cut into HP's profit, rather than increasing their profit. Yes, I'm just vindictive that way."
I don't think that's vindictive in the slightest. HP have distorted the market and successfully manipulated consumers into paying far more than a fair price for printer cartridges (face it, they should be £2 or £3 each not £20 or £30), so a perfectly legitimate response for the consumer is to do exactly what you describe.
HP are getting away with this anti-market behaviour because the power in the relationship between HP and the consumer is vested in the single large entity, much like the relationship between employers and employees. A notable difference in that relationship is that employees are often members of unions which provide collective bargaining, whereas the customers who have as little power or influence as un-unionised employees have no such representation or collective bargaining rights.
Do customers therefore need collective representation in their relationship with big business?
Of course the reason they're pushing this document converter to save all this space (who else reckons any savings aren't even gonna approach 70%!) is to get as many documents as possible into Office XML format to gain as much "traction" as possible for said format....although I think "traction" is a word more appropriately used in the context of an enormous slow-moving vehicle mired in mud...maybe not so inappropriate after all.
"- The British government can lock up anyone incommunicado for 28 days without charges being filed."
Whats worse they keep trying to get it up to 90 days which is absolutely disgusting, because if someone is dubiously arrested on flimsy evidence and incarcerated for 90 days, there is zero chance that their job will still be waiting for them when they are released.
FTA: "One thing that the Trident engine that underlies Internet Explorer has had for many releases is editing support. A number of products have been built on top of this editing support in the past and it's quite a strong piece of our underlying infrastructure."
Their html editing control is crap crap crap. I'm talking about the control thats been used in Outlook 2003, MSIMN/Outlook Express etc, I assume the interviewee is too. * It is very easy to get paragraphs that are indented to the right. Yet it can be absolutely impossible to remove the indentation and align the paragraph with the rest of the text in the email. I suspect it barfs when it has to deal with nested tables. * Deleting some text or formatting can drastically alter the following paragraph. * You can read in perfectly valid html then it refactors it into gibberish.
Anyway its absolutely effing hilarious that they think its a strong html editor control.
I have always thought that the offence of statutory rape should be redefined.
There were some figures in the guardian today showing most girls in the UK lost their virginity at 15/16, whereas for boys it was 6 months - 1 year later. Presumably reflecting delayed sexual development.
if ~ 1/3 of UK girls are losing their virginity at 15 then thats an awful lot of statutory rape.
Slashdot Mirror
I consider the 2 biggest threats to world peace to be Iraq (and as a direct result Iran), and Israel/Palestine.
The invasion of iraq used the excuse of al-qaeda and the taliban in afghanistan to justify an imperialistic expansion into iraq, primarily to provide america with greater strategic control over the middle east. Although I of course consider this morally wrong, I do not consider it an especially great threat to world peace.
The consequences of this adventure however, are a vastly more legitimate position for "al-qaeda" (as the umbrella term for various militant fundamentalist islamic groups, rather than some broadly fictitious shadowy global terrorist network). Whereas before the invasion of iraq "al-qaeda" were terrorist aggressors, as a resistance to the american (and, sadly, british) occupation of iraq there is now a sympathetic argument that these individuals are freedom fighters, resisting this illegal occupation. A groundswell of support across the middle east for this position is the result, countless ordinary people have been radicalised and it is not unreasonable to believe that at this point in time there are 10 times the number of "jihadists" than there were up to the September the 11th attack.
The cause of world peace has suffered.
Furthermore, by demonstrating that the USA does not have the military resources to successfully prosecute a war in Afghanistan simultaneously with a war in Iraq, states whose actions may have been tempered by a fear of US military might are now able to advance their agendas with little or no fear of military reprisals. I am talking about Iran, brazenly pressing ahead with a nuclear programme, safe in the knowledge that the USA does not have the resources or the political support to invade Iran to prevent this. Had the GWB administration contented itself with dealing thoroughly with the Taliban in Afghanistan then it would be in a stronger position to deal with Iran, but Iran knows it has a few years to make as much nuclear progress as possible before any effective international action can be taken. Once the nuclear cat is out of the bag, it would be foolish and irresponsible of any state not to develop a nuclear deterrent, so I presume that within 5 years Iran will be a nuclear power. This has happened on GWB adminstration's watch and as a direct result of their actions in Iraq.
The cause of world peace has suffered.
It is widely accepted that the Israel/Palestine conflict is the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East. While this conflict rumbles on, anti-semitism breeds as does resentment against the West. While there are terrorists in Lebanon and Palestinian territories, Israel's response to terrorist threats is utterly disproportionate. Israel's stated policy is to ensure that for every Israeli citizen killed by a suicide bomb etc, many "terrorists" die. It achieves this by bombing, amongst other military objectives, towns refugee camps etc. While I am not able to comment upon the number of "terrorists" that their policy neutralises, it is certain that huge numbers of civilians and innocents are caught up in this.
Again, as has happened in iraq, many ordinary people caught up in this have become radicalised. This is demonstrated by the fact the Palestinian people in their democratic elections have voted for _Hamas_, an organisation considered by the EU and the US to be terrorist!! Think about it for a second - the depredations some of these people suffer at the hands of the Israelis are so severe they feel the Palestinian Authority must be led by an organisation whose leaders (according to Human Rights Watch) "should be held accountable for the war crimes and crimes against humanity".
There have been over 100 UN resolutions condemning Israel's actions which Israel generally ignores with the tacit support of the USA. America provides huge numbers of Arms exports to Israel, and it is generally accepted that Israel as a state would be unlikely to exist without its American backing. More controversially, some observers conte
Nah, china's not expansionist.
c.f. Tibet, Taiwan.
And what if the US becomes the next China, Iran, etc...
Considering the US is a militaristic, expansionistic country seeking to exert dominance over most of the world's regions, I'd say it already is the next china/iran.
In the last 5 years it has certainly been the biggest impediment to world peace.
I agree its a moral dilemma. If I was a woman I would be as reluctant to take the female contraceptive pill as I am the male contraceptive pill. I think I'm just selfish.
...there is no chance of me (as a man) ever using this!
They say no side effects, but look at "safe" female contraception which may lead to increased chance of certain cancers (although decreased chance of others).
Not that I'm going to stop my gf taking the pill though...
Just make sure your company doesn't own your work produced on both on- and off-company time. Ugh.
That is both abhorent and morally wrong. Unlucky to get caught out by a contract term like that - I hope you got paid a lot of money for it!
There is shed loads of down time. On my server, There is often lag or lagspikes (unacceptable when a spell cast promptly means the difference between life and death), queues to get into the server, various server reboots with little or no warning at arbitrary times, periodic kicks from the server, and from time to time, the server doesn't come back up from the weekly maintenance for a day or two.
With blizzard earning at least 1 billion/year from subscriptions, this performance is absolutely unacceptable when someone like google can provide such an ultra reliable service (for me google's been unavailable twice in 5 years).
Still, I continue to subscribe to the world of warcrack.
Don't forget the millennium dome^H^H^H^H fiasco, the ultimate embodiment of hubris and arrogance. Tony and his cronies have completely got away with that and not been called to account. Unbelievable.
What makes you think I want to stop playing it?!
My mate was trying to get me to play warcraft for about 2 months and I refused because like you I become obsessed with the games I play (I will nto put a game down until I've completed it, even if I don't rate it that highly) and I knew I'd get addicted to warcraft if I started playing. Eventually he came round my house on a pretext, installed warcraft, showed me how to play, and I obviouslyt got addicted - then after about 2 months he stopped playing! and I've not stopped since. bah
so punish physical threats with incarceration, and non-physical criminals with financial sanctions?
Whether or not the editor is being sarcastic is completely orthogonal to whether or not he understands and has correctly made use of the word "coincidence"!
l2p
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Could the editor have in mind scenarios like the following?
1) plaintiff blames videogame makers and seeks out a well known crusader against violent games to represent - jack thompson
2) plaintiff blames videogames makers and heads to their nearest lawyer who happens to be jack thompson, the well known crusader against violent games
in scenario 1 it is not a coincidence that Jack Thompson represents, in scenario 2 it is a coincidence that Jack Thompson represents the plaintiff.
As far as I can tell, the editor knows exactly what a coincidence is...parent doesn't have a clue. Read some books mate and you might understand english a bit better.
Stay the hell away from anything by Creative.
hear, hear. I have had no end of problems with 2 different soundblaster lives. In both cases, creative's own drivers refused to install claiming no soundblaster product existed in my system. For reasons known only to creative, they wrap their drivers in some shite installer that fails to detect their soundcards in many cases. They cripple their drivers so that they cannot be installed through the normal windows hardware detection routines, so when their installer doesn't work, you're fucked. Why Creative? Why?
To compound it all, if you think to download the latest drivers which may now be fixed, well the drivers they make available on their website are not full drivers in their own right, merely upgrades to the ones provided on cd with the product - WHICH DON'T FUCKING INSTALL!
I went through their customer support process and they were reasonably helpful to the point of posting me a new driver cd - but when that didn't work either, I just gave up.
Creative's soundcards are full of gimmicky features and never live up to marketing promises. For example creative advertised their soundblaster live cards as being upgradeable - promising new features via their "liveware" sytem (i.e. some kind of firmware on the device I suppose)...guess what, when I get my soundblaster live, the liveware was at version 3, and at no time since I bought the card has Creative released a new version of "liveware" beyond incremental bugfixes. Lying bastards.
Creative are not an engineering company, they are a scummy den of marketing snakes and it is in nobody's interest to buy from them.
Even their name is a joke - no serious creative professional would touch a creative card with a bargepole.
I fail to see how not upgrading the PCs company wide and remaining on XP, thus saving money actually puts companies at a competitive disadvantage!
Roland Piquepaille's articles are shit and a waste of time.
Thanks.
"Let me say it again, OSS is never free."
This is like saying commercial software always costs more than the invoiced price.
How come the GP post is modded insightful +1 while parent isn't modded at all! Parent should be +1 funny and the GP should be -1 redundant.
"I'd still happily get the nearly-free replacement printer, because it will surely cut into HP's profit, rather than increasing their profit. Yes, I'm just vindictive that way."
I don't think that's vindictive in the slightest. HP have distorted the market and successfully manipulated consumers into paying far more than a fair price for printer cartridges (face it, they should be £2 or £3 each not £20 or £30), so a perfectly legitimate response for the consumer is to do exactly what you describe.
HP are getting away with this anti-market behaviour because the power in the relationship between HP and the consumer is vested in the single large entity, much like the relationship between employers and employees. A notable difference in that relationship is that employees are often members of unions which provide collective bargaining, whereas the customers who have as little power or influence as un-unionised employees have no such representation or collective bargaining rights.
Do customers therefore need collective representation in their relationship with big business?
Of course the reason they're pushing this document converter to save all this space (who else reckons any savings aren't even gonna approach 70%!) is to get as many documents as possible into Office XML format to gain as much "traction" as possible for said format....although I think "traction" is a word more appropriately used in the context of an enormous slow-moving vehicle mired in mud...maybe not so inappropriate after all.
"- The British government can lock up anyone incommunicado for 28 days without charges being filed."
Whats worse they keep trying to get it up to 90 days which is absolutely disgusting, because if someone is dubiously arrested on flimsy evidence and incarcerated for 90 days, there is zero chance that their job will still be waiting for them when they are released.
Absolutely disgusting.
FTA: "One thing that the Trident engine that underlies Internet Explorer has had for many releases is editing support. A number of products have been built on top of this editing support in the past and it's quite a strong piece of our underlying infrastructure."
Their html editing control is crap crap crap. I'm talking about the control thats been used in Outlook 2003, MSIMN/Outlook Express etc, I assume the interviewee is too.
* It is very easy to get paragraphs that are indented to the right. Yet it can be absolutely impossible to remove the indentation and align the paragraph with the rest of the text in the email. I suspect it barfs when it has to deal with nested tables.
* Deleting some text or formatting can drastically alter the following paragraph.
* You can read in perfectly valid html then it refactors it into gibberish.
Anyway its absolutely effing hilarious that they think its a strong html editor control.
c.f. "statutory rape" and "rape".
I have always thought that the offence of statutory rape should be redefined.
There were some figures in the guardian today showing most girls in the UK lost their virginity at 15/16, whereas for boys it was 6 months - 1 year later. Presumably reflecting delayed sexual development.
if ~ 1/3 of UK girls are losing their virginity at 15 then thats an awful lot of statutory rape.
hear, hear