I never saw versions of windows less than 3.0 to be able to comment.
I saw freakin' Windows 2.0 and I'm still aching. Imagine twm on a 4-colour CGA screen. But with bugs.
Man, the real revolution was the 2.0->3.0 transition.
The appearance of Windows 3.0 (of which 3.1 was a minor modification) essentially changed the very meaning of home computing. It was the first usable GUI system widely available for DOS-based PC. It was still significantly inferior to the Mac, but it looked quite pretty - especially compared to the indescriptible ugliness of 2.0. So people flocked from DOS, and discovered all that GUI goodness. Graphical applications ! Icons ! Multitasking ! Word and Excel for Windows ! Hell, WYSIWYG editors !
People (myself included) like to diss out Microsoft, but I do have some respect for what Windows 3.0 represents : Gates had the balls to bet the whole damn company on Windows, even though DOS and text-based apps were doing pretty well. It worked, but it could have failed miserably, and early versions of Windows were no encouragement.
Of course, as an added bonus to The Bilg, it killed off Geoworks Ensemble and similar projects.
Excuse me ? Al Qaeda is explicitly a fascist organisation. Many "ideologists" of radical Islamic were admirers of Mussolini, Zawahiri being a prominent example.
Fascism, in the most basic sense, means that the important unit of civilisation is the community, not the individual. The individual is expandable, the strength of the community is the real objective. The term comes from the Latin fasces - bundles of rods - which are a metaphor of this: one rod may break, but the bundle is still strong, as long as all the rods stick together.
Religious, political and nationalistic extremists all follow the same basic pattern: a bunch of fanatics preach for the Cause (the Nation, the triumph of the Proletariat, the Faith), and of course, anyone who opposes the lunatics is an enemy of the Cause, and therefore should be eradicated. If you disagree with this, you are yourself an enemy of the Cause.
Preaching to the disaffected masses, they can indoctrinate an army of grunts which they can manipulate at will and use as cannon fodder. This is where they get their strength. The Cause is more important than the individual. Individuals can, and must, be sacrificed to the Cause. So the more people they can get, the better off they are. Of course, when by coincidence the outer world happens to follow their predictions (say, when the Great Satan invades a muslim country for apparently no reason whatsoever), this is like manna from Heaven for them. Watch the grunts flow in !
You'd think that no one would fall for that. You'd think no one would give their lives to support a bunch of lunatics in their quest for global domination. But you'd be surprised at how easy it is to take a normal guy out of the street and brainwash him into submission - especially if you can convince him that some kind of injustice is done to his "Brothers", and that the only way to defend your Brothers is to go and fight for the Cause (that is, for the fanatics).
Hell, you can even convince them that the best way to defend their Brothers is to blow these Brothers up by the hundred, as is currently happening in Iraq ! Of course, the trick here is that the ones that you blow up are not really your Brothers - they are the traitors, they are enemies of the Cause, for one simple reason: they do not submit to the fanatics. Since the fanatics and the Cause are one single thing, it is therefore perfectly normal to go and slaughter them until they give up and submit.
I also find that as a rule, Americans tend to build extravagant stereotypes and generalise individual behaviours to entire nations - in other words, attempt to extract general information from statistically insignificant samples.
Of course there are exceptions, and I have met a few Americans who understand that if your sample is large enough you'll find pretty much the same kind of people all over the world, but they're more like "exceptions that only reinforce the rule".
Microsoft is the winner right now because they're outsmarted the competition
When ? How ? Microsoft are the winner right now because they used their initial rent situation (standard OS on the IBM PC - acquired through social networking more than technological merit) to squeeze everybody else out of the market, then applied the same tactics to conquer other markets (e.g. office applications) by leveraging their monopoly position on other markets.
Wow ! Stalin = Che Guevara ?? My, time to dig up all cemetaries in South America, there's a few hundred million cadavers missing...
Same 'logic' here as in those braindead "Bush = Hitler" comments.
To get back to topic: Psychopathy is defined by lack of empathy and absence of consideration for others. You may find that in Stalin, or even in Mao, but in Che Guevara ? The guy risked (and lost) his life trying to "free the poor" !
Surely money-grabbing corporatist leaders are more fit than poor people who spend all the energy they use on staying alive, in the sense that the former's offspring will be far more likely to survive.
The probability of survival is irrelevant. What counts is the amount of genes transmitted, which is related to the number of surviving offspring.
Poor people have more children than rich people. Populations in poorer countries grow much, much faster than in richer countries. Therefore, in terms of raw evolution, poverty is a selective advantage !
Think of all the nifty features in OSX, and most of them started life as third party products that Apple decided to reimplement and give away with the next version of OSX
Yeah, Heaven forbid that innovative software could actually be reimplemented by third parties and offered for free to consumers. I mean, next thing you know they might actually make a whole OS by taking ideas here and there and start offering it for free ! Imagine the havoc on poor little OS developers worldwide !
Good thing that our modern democracies have invented software patents, so we can prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening....
Actually, in the US (or any other country in which society is not as rigidly ordered as in China), IP laws are pretty much the only way in which such a thing could happen. What is the incentive for a company to get into "sustainable" develoment which, almost by definition, implies a decrease in net throughput of material goods ? The only incentive can be based on IP. First, so that companies can actually make money on something else than industrial goods (IP is usally environment-friendly, at least more so than a car or a fridge). Second, so that companies have an incentive in inventing new sustainable devices which otherwise would probably not be economically viable.
Of course that's the theory. In practice, between the lawyer culture prevalent in America and the obvious difficulty in convincing Joe Sixpack of trading his SUV against a more "sustainable" mode of transport, I doubt much will happen on this front in here.
My guess - based on more than 20 years of purely anecdotal evidence - is that it has something to do with the rampant immaturity and mysogynism of a significant minority of the males who choose some sort of computer work for a profession.
If so, how come gender separation starts more or less as soon as it can, i.e. at university level ? In any "first-world" university, you will find the same distribution of genders: significant majority of women in biology and literature studies, overwhelming majority of men in engineering, 'hard' physics and computing.
Of course, to put things in perspective, one should remember that the most frequently cited physicist right now happens to be a woman (Hell, 10K citations !)
China isn't the first country to "filter" the internet. Other countries, such as Singapore and even "enlightened democracies" such as Australia, Norway and Sweden also filter the Internet.
There is, however, a fundamental difference. In most of the cases you mention (as well as, say, France or Germany), the restrictions were imposed by elected governments, based on publically debated laws, passed with the assent of the population.
Compare with the situation in China, where the restriction were imposed by an unelected government without consulting the public at all.
This applies to most other restrictions on free speech, such as libel or "hate speech" / anti-nazi laws, which incidentally are often the source of restrictions imposed on internet access by government or judiciary entities in democratic countries.
It is true that Mt. Fuji is made more of rock than anything resembling soil, but I expect my employees to not need a babysitter, I hired them to figure these things out.
MS Interviewer: "Man, you're SO hired ! May I kiss your shoes please ?"
If fighting terrorism triggers terrorism, how do you stop it?
Fighting terrorism does not encourage terrorism.
Invading an unrelated country and calling it 'war against terror' (cos' you know, all those dirty Arabs who don't like the US, it's, like, all the same, no ?) certainly does.
The solution is to fight terrorists, not people who have nothing to do with them, so as not to turn them into terrorists.
Read about why they did this. It was in retaliation for roles in Afghanistan partly.
And you fscking believe them ? That's just the propaganda they spout to pretend that their actions do have a justification - which they don't.
I think quite a few were stopped since obviously...they are dead.
Indeed. So why did we have to send them so many more recruits to brainwash, train and use against us (and anyone who doesn't obey them, western or moslem alike) by invading Iraq ?
You can't explain to them that Afghanistan was prompted by the terrorists themselves and nothing was done about them for years even though governments knew about them until they killed thousands of innocent people.
Of course you can't. But you could have tried to explain it to the rest of the ~1B Moslems out there. Which we didn't.
Instead we turned a bunch of fanatics into a global political force by invading an unrelated Moslem country, thereby lending credence to their braindead propaganda (at least to uneducated people with little access to medias - comments on sites such as asharqalawsat.com indicate that most educated people, even though they don't like the US, do not fall for the fanatics' BS. So there's hope after all).
America refused to accept that the world is more complex than a Bruce Willis movie and that no, sometimes beating up bad guys won't solve all your problems. If the US don't reassess their strategy quickly (as it seems they're doing by having contacts with non-Al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq), we will all going to suffer the consequences.
Thomas- PS: I'm a Frenchman living in Britain. So maybe I shouldn't have used 'we'. Except in the last sentence, of course, because we know well enough that the fanatics will use their newfound power against us as well.
The best method to rid the world of these insane fanatics is to kill them at the source. Put enough pressure on them at home so their supporters cannot afford to send the war overseas.
*sigh*
Of course. A bunch of fanatics use Moslem resentment to increase their power and launch deadly attacks against westerners and other Moslems, so what better thing to do than go and kick some (random and completely unrelated) Moslem ass ? Yeah, great idea. Funny how the rest of the world doesn't quite agree though - bah, let's just ignore them, we're the US, we've sent folks on the moon, we know better. Move off our way !
The worst thing is, I'm not exaggerating, it's exactly what happened and it's exactly what they (you) said !
Hell, the fanatics couldn't believe their luck when the US invaded Iraq - which, let me stress this again, had nothing to do with Al Qaeda *at all*. Now they can spread a simple message to Moslems throughout the world: "See, the infidels are invading us, join our holy resistance to defend your brothers !" Poor, undeducated people with little access to the media believe them, join them, are brainwashed into total submission and then used as cannon fodder for the fanatics (who of course are not interested in anything besides their own power).
Chechnia is a good example as well. Chechens wins their first independence war. Fanatics take advantage of the ensuing chaos to take hold in newly independent Chechnia, and wreak havoc in the region. Russia uses this as a pretext to reinvade and reoccupy Chechnia. A resistance movement emerges, composed on the one hand of the earlier independentists, and on the other hand of wahhabist fanatics. Unsurprisingly the leaders of the former have been decimated and their movement has dwindled, while the latter grew and thrived.
Let me make this clear: the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan (even the previous one, during the Soviet occupation - when the US thought it was a good idea to support the djihadists) did not create the fanatics. The fanatics were there long before. What these wars have done is simply to send them literally thousands of potential recruits by allowing them to present themselves as defenders of Moslems - when in fact they are only interested in expanding their own domination, and consider anyone who doesn't obey them as infidels (as can be seen currently in Iraq where the fanatics kill way more Iraqis than the US).
You and the current US administration are examples of people who simply don't get it. Your discourse is essentially: "Look, there are plenty of Arabs who don't like the West. They are bad guys. So let's go and beat up some bad guys and the problem will be solved !"
Well, guess what: no, it won't. Your 'reasoning' is akin to a child who wants to put out a fire, and he knows that you can put out candles by blowing them off - so he blows on the fire to make it go away.
You refused to accept the complexity of the world, and now we will all suffer the consequences of your simplistic worldview.
Thomas- PS: Yes, I'm French. Flame me if you like. We were fscking right and every new event since the Iraq invasion confirmed it.
what with only being able to synthesize two of their amino acids on their own
Amino-acids ? What, back in the days all they had was RNA, both for genetic materical and ribozymes catalysts ! Oh, and with only 2 bases cos' those fancy 'U' and 'C' hadn't been invented yet ! Of course that wasn't much of a problem since the total number of chemical reactions in their whole bodies was about 7.
Those were the days when men were men and guns were guns and biochemistry was almost grokable.
I am still left to wonder why they are gone and we are still here. I keep coming back to our inherent violent nature and I can't help but think that is at least a big part of the reason.
Bigger brain != intelligence or sensitivity. In particular, it seems that Neanderthal left no artistic legacy. Compare with sapiens sapiens' `cathedrals' such as Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, etc.
Which does not mean that they were dumb brutes. They had some spirituality and buried their dead with symbolic rituals (apparently involving some cannibalism and necrophagism). Also, it is possible that they did have artistic abilities, if the `Neanderthal flute' is really a flute and is really Neanderthal.
The most probable reason why we're still here and they aren't is that we were simply more clever than them. Our tools were more refined and made of more diverse materials. Our art and spirituality (burial rites and probably hunting-related 'chamanism') were more elaborate. While Neanderthal was probably more advanced than once thought, it still seems that they were no match for our own ancestors.
So overall we really are the most clever creatures ever to roam the Earth. Notwithstanding the occasional fluctuations, of course...
The Most Stupid Conspiracy Argument Ever [tm] strikes again...
Suppose that dandelion tea was an effective cure for cancer. Would Pfizer spend millions to do a ten year trial with thousands of patients? If they proved it worked then everyone would use the dandelions in their yard
If Pfizer or any respectable scientist had even the slightest hope that dandelion might cure cancer, they would immediately set out to find the active component, patent it, mass produce it and reap a tidy sum (and a Nobel Prize in the process).
If your theory about people growing plants in their garden was right Aspirin would not be the most massively profitable drug ever ! (you do know that aspirin, i.e. acetylsalicylic acid, is derived from a chemical that is present in several plants, the properties of which were already known in the times of Hippocrates, do you ?)
A certain famous one claims to have produced fish out of thin air, and also cured paralysis and blindness amongst other unprovable, highly dubious things.
He never claimed any such thing. Later authors, writing about 20-100 years after his death, claimed he did. That's not the same thing.
We have enough evidence to believe in the factual existence of Jesus and in the authenticity of some of the precepts attributed to him (the important word here is 'some'), because they can be found in different early sources (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas). However it seems that all the magical stuff like raising the dead and creating food out of thin air appears only in the later sources.
Since they already have EuroDisney, and this Fusion thingy might not pan out, the headline just as easily could have been: France to Be Site of World's Second Largest Boondogle
No way ! Not even close ! Everybody knows that the single largest boondogle in human history is Eurotunnel !
Oh wait......
Thomas- (Disclaimer: Yes, I'm French)
Re:it's an illusion alright
on
Ajax On Rails
·
· Score: 1
It's illusory alright, when I start at the US and scroll due west the first thing that I come to is the UK. Where'd all the other countries go?
Wherever you threw your eyeballs I suppose. The first country to appear should be Ireland (not taking smaller islands into account).
Slashdot Mirror
I never saw versions of windows less than 3.0 to be able to comment.
I saw freakin' Windows 2.0 and I'm still aching. Imagine twm on a 4-colour CGA screen. But with bugs.
Man, the real revolution was the 2.0->3.0 transition.
The appearance of Windows 3.0 (of which 3.1 was a minor modification) essentially changed the very meaning of home computing. It was the first usable GUI system widely available for DOS-based PC. It was still significantly inferior to the Mac, but it looked quite pretty - especially compared to the indescriptible ugliness of 2.0. So people flocked from DOS, and discovered all that GUI goodness. Graphical applications ! Icons ! Multitasking ! Word and Excel for Windows ! Hell, WYSIWYG editors !
People (myself included) like to diss out Microsoft, but I do have some respect for what Windows 3.0 represents : Gates had the balls to bet the whole damn company on Windows, even though DOS and text-based apps were doing pretty well. It worked, but it could have failed miserably, and early versions of Windows were no encouragement.
Of course, as an added bonus to The Bilg, it killed off Geoworks Ensemble and similar projects.
Thomas-
Excuse me ? Al Qaeda is explicitly a fascist organisation. Many "ideologists" of radical Islamic were admirers of Mussolini, Zawahiri being a prominent example.
Fascism, in the most basic sense, means that the important unit of civilisation is the community, not the individual. The individual is expandable, the strength of the community is the real objective. The term comes from the Latin fasces - bundles of rods - which are a metaphor of this: one rod may break, but the bundle is still strong, as long as all the rods stick together.
Religious, political and nationalistic extremists all follow the same basic pattern: a bunch of fanatics preach for the Cause (the Nation, the triumph of the Proletariat, the Faith), and of course, anyone who opposes the lunatics is an enemy of the Cause, and therefore should be eradicated. If you disagree with this, you are yourself an enemy of the Cause.
Preaching to the disaffected masses, they can indoctrinate an army of grunts which they can manipulate at will and use as cannon fodder. This is where they get their strength. The Cause is more important than the individual. Individuals can, and must, be sacrificed to the Cause. So the more people they can get, the better off they are. Of course, when by coincidence the outer world happens to follow their predictions (say, when the Great Satan invades a muslim country for apparently no reason whatsoever), this is like manna from Heaven for them. Watch the grunts flow in !
You'd think that no one would fall for that. You'd think no one would give their lives to support a bunch of lunatics in their quest for global domination. But you'd be surprised at how easy it is to take a normal guy out of the street and brainwash him into submission - especially if you can convince him that some kind of injustice is done to his "Brothers", and that the only way to defend your Brothers is to go and fight for the Cause (that is, for the fanatics).
Hell, you can even convince them that the best way to defend their Brothers is to blow these Brothers up by the hundred, as is currently happening in Iraq ! Of course, the trick here is that the ones that you blow up are not really your Brothers - they are the traitors, they are enemies of the Cause, for one simple reason: they do not submit to the fanatics. Since the fanatics and the Cause are one single thing, it is therefore perfectly normal to go and slaughter them until they give up and submit.
Thomas-
I also find that as a rule, Americans tend to build extravagant stereotypes and generalise individual behaviours to entire nations - in other words, attempt to extract general information from statistically insignificant samples.
Of course there are exceptions, and I have met a few Americans who understand that if your sample is large enough you'll find pretty much the same kind of people all over the world, but they're more like "exceptions that only reinforce the rule".
</sarcasm>
Thomas-
Microsoft is the winner right now because they're outsmarted the competition
When ? How ? Microsoft are the winner right now because they used their initial rent situation (standard OS on the IBM PC - acquired through social networking more than technological merit) to squeeze everybody else out of the market, then applied the same tactics to conquer other markets (e.g. office applications) by leveraging their monopoly position on other markets.
Thomas-
Wow ! Stalin = Che Guevara ?? My, time to dig up all cemetaries in South America, there's a few hundred million cadavers missing...
Same 'logic' here as in those braindead "Bush = Hitler" comments.
To get back to topic: Psychopathy is defined by lack of empathy and absence of consideration for others. You may find that in Stalin, or even in Mao, but in Che Guevara ? The guy risked (and lost) his life trying to "free the poor" !
Thomas-
Surely money-grabbing corporatist leaders are more fit than poor people who spend all the energy they use on staying alive, in the sense that the former's offspring will be far more likely to survive.
The probability of survival is irrelevant. What counts is the amount of genes transmitted, which is related to the number of surviving offspring.
Poor people have more children than rich people. Populations in poorer countries grow much, much faster than in richer countries. Therefore, in terms of raw evolution, poverty is a selective advantage !
Thomas-
Think of all the nifty features in OSX, and most of them started life as third party products that Apple decided to reimplement and give away with the next version of OSX
Yeah, Heaven forbid that innovative software could actually be reimplemented by third parties and offered for free to consumers. I mean, next thing you know they might actually make a whole OS by taking ideas here and there and start offering it for free ! Imagine the havoc on poor little OS developers worldwide !
Good thing that our modern democracies have invented software patents, so we can prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening....
</sarcasm>
Thomas -
Actually, in the US (or any other country in which society is not as rigidly ordered as in China), IP laws are pretty much the only way in which such a thing could happen. What is the incentive for a company to get into "sustainable" develoment which, almost by definition, implies a decrease in net throughput of material goods ? The only incentive can be based on IP. First, so that companies can actually make money on something else than industrial goods (IP is usally environment-friendly, at least more so than a car or a fridge). Second, so that companies have an incentive in inventing new sustainable devices which otherwise would probably not be economically viable.
Of course that's the theory. In practice, between the lawyer culture prevalent in America and the obvious difficulty in convincing Joe Sixpack of trading his SUV against a more "sustainable" mode of transport, I doubt much will happen on this front in here.
Thomas-
Man, that would be "Natalie Portman naked and petrified". The "hot grits" thing is a semi-independent addition. Wikipedia has more details on this.
Thomas-
even though I have explained to them time and time again that the artist makes practically nothing from CD sales..
As opposed to the exactly nothing that they make from P2P 'sharing' ?
Thomas-
My guess - based on more than 20 years of purely anecdotal evidence - is that it has something to do with the rampant immaturity and mysogynism of a significant minority of the males who choose some sort of computer work for a profession.
If so, how come gender separation starts more or less as soon as it can, i.e. at university level ? In any "first-world" university, you will find the same distribution of genders: significant majority of women in biology and literature studies, overwhelming majority of men in engineering, 'hard' physics and computing.
Of course, to put things in perspective, one should remember that the most frequently cited physicist right now happens to be a woman (Hell, 10K citations !)
Thomas-
A French bus company sues cleaning ladies who carpool.
France has a "loser pays" system. So in this case, this company will pay the full price of its own stupidity.
Thomas-
China isn't the first country to "filter" the internet. Other countries, such as Singapore and even "enlightened democracies" such as Australia, Norway and Sweden also filter the Internet.
There is, however, a fundamental difference. In most of the cases you mention (as well as, say, France or Germany), the restrictions were imposed by elected governments, based on publically debated laws, passed with the assent of the population.
Compare with the situation in China, where the restriction were imposed by an unelected government without consulting the public at all.
This applies to most other restrictions on free speech, such as libel or "hate speech" / anti-nazi laws, which incidentally are often the source of restrictions imposed on internet access by government or judiciary entities in democratic countries.
Thomas-
It is true that Mt. Fuji is made more of rock than anything resembling soil, but I expect my employees to not need a babysitter, I hired them to figure these things out.
MS Interviewer: "Man, you're SO hired ! May I kiss your shoes please ?"
Thomas-
If fighting terrorism triggers terrorism, how do you stop it?
Fighting terrorism does not encourage terrorism.
Invading an unrelated country and calling it 'war against terror' (cos' you know, all those dirty Arabs who don't like the US, it's, like, all the same, no ?) certainly does.
The solution is to fight terrorists, not people who have nothing to do with them, so as not to turn them into terrorists.
Comprende ?
Thomas-
Read about why they did this. It was in retaliation for roles in Afghanistan partly.
And you fscking believe them ? That's just the propaganda they spout to pretend that their actions do have a justification - which they don't.
I think quite a few were stopped since obviously...they are dead.
Indeed. So why did we have to send them so many more recruits to brainwash, train and use against us (and anyone who doesn't obey them, western or moslem alike) by invading Iraq ?
You can't explain to them that Afghanistan was prompted by the terrorists themselves and nothing was done about them for years even though governments knew about them until they killed thousands of innocent people.
Of course you can't. But you could have tried to explain it to the rest of the ~1B Moslems out there. Which we didn't.
Instead we turned a bunch of fanatics into a global political force by invading an unrelated Moslem country, thereby lending credence to their braindead propaganda (at least to uneducated people with little access to medias - comments on sites such as asharqalawsat.com indicate that most educated people, even though they don't like the US, do not fall for the fanatics' BS. So there's hope after all).
America refused to accept that the world is more complex than a Bruce Willis movie and that no, sometimes beating up bad guys won't solve all your problems. If the US don't reassess their strategy quickly (as it seems they're doing by having contacts with non-Al Qaeda insurgents in Iraq), we will all going to suffer the consequences.
Thomas-
PS: I'm a Frenchman living in Britain. So maybe I shouldn't have used 'we'. Except in the last sentence, of course, because we know well enough that the fanatics will use their newfound power against us as well.
The best method to rid the world of these insane fanatics is to kill them at the source. Put enough pressure on them at home so their supporters cannot afford to send the war overseas.
*sigh*
Of course. A bunch of fanatics use Moslem resentment to increase their power and launch deadly attacks against westerners and other Moslems, so what better thing to do than go and kick some (random and completely unrelated) Moslem ass ? Yeah, great idea. Funny how the rest of the world doesn't quite agree though - bah, let's just ignore them, we're the US, we've sent folks on the moon, we know better. Move off our way !
The worst thing is, I'm not exaggerating, it's exactly what happened and it's exactly what they (you) said !
Hell, the fanatics couldn't believe their luck when the US invaded Iraq - which, let me stress this again, had nothing to do with Al Qaeda *at all*. Now they can spread a simple message to Moslems throughout the world: "See, the infidels are invading us, join our holy resistance to defend your brothers !" Poor, undeducated people with little access to the media believe them, join them, are brainwashed into total submission and then used as cannon fodder for the fanatics (who of course are not interested in anything besides their own power).
Chechnia is a good example as well. Chechens wins their first independence war. Fanatics take advantage of the ensuing chaos to take hold in newly independent Chechnia, and wreak havoc in the region. Russia uses this as a pretext to reinvade and reoccupy Chechnia. A resistance movement emerges, composed on the one hand of the earlier independentists, and on the other hand of wahhabist fanatics. Unsurprisingly the leaders of the former have been decimated and their movement has dwindled, while the latter grew and thrived.
Let me make this clear: the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan (even the previous one, during the Soviet occupation - when the US thought it was a good idea to support the djihadists) did not create the fanatics. The fanatics were there long before. What these wars have done is simply to send them literally thousands of potential recruits by allowing them to present themselves as defenders of Moslems - when in fact they are only interested in expanding their own domination, and consider anyone who doesn't obey them as infidels (as can be seen currently in Iraq where the fanatics kill way more Iraqis than the US).
You and the current US administration are examples of people who simply don't get it. Your discourse is essentially: "Look, there are plenty of Arabs who don't like the West. They are bad guys. So let's go and beat up some bad guys and the problem will be solved !"
Well, guess what: no, it won't. Your 'reasoning' is akin to a child who wants to put out a fire, and he knows that you can put out candles by blowing them off - so he blows on the fire to make it go away.
You refused to accept the complexity of the world, and now we will all suffer the consequences of your simplistic worldview.
Thomas-
PS: Yes, I'm French. Flame me if you like. We were fscking right and every new event since the Iraq invasion confirmed it.
what with only being able to synthesize two of their amino acids on their own
Amino-acids ? What, back in the days all they had was RNA, both for genetic materical and ribozymes catalysts ! Oh, and with only 2 bases cos' those fancy 'U' and 'C' hadn't been invented yet ! Of course that wasn't much of a problem since the total number of chemical reactions in their whole bodies was about 7.
Those were the days when men were men and guns were guns and biochemistry was almost grokable.
Thomas-
I am still left to wonder why they are gone and we are still here. I keep coming back to our inherent violent nature and I can't help but think that is at least a big part of the reason.
Bigger brain != intelligence or sensitivity. In particular, it seems that Neanderthal left no artistic legacy. Compare with sapiens sapiens' `cathedrals' such as Lascaux, Altamira, Chauvet, etc.
Which does not mean that they were dumb brutes. They had some spirituality and buried their dead with symbolic rituals (apparently involving some cannibalism and necrophagism). Also, it is possible that they did have artistic abilities, if the `Neanderthal flute' is really a flute and is really Neanderthal.
The most probable reason why we're still here and they aren't is that we were simply more clever than them. Our tools were more refined and made of more diverse materials. Our art and spirituality (burial rites and probably hunting-related 'chamanism') were more elaborate. While Neanderthal was probably more advanced than once thought, it still seems that they were no match for our own ancestors.
So overall we really are the most clever creatures ever to roam the Earth. Notwithstanding the occasional fluctuations, of course...
Thomas-
But then how will he be able to drag her by the hair ?
Thomas-
The Most Stupid Conspiracy Argument Ever [tm] strikes again...
Suppose that dandelion tea was an effective cure for cancer. Would Pfizer spend millions to do a ten year trial with thousands of patients? If they proved it worked then everyone would use the dandelions in their yard
If Pfizer or any respectable scientist had even the slightest hope that dandelion might cure cancer, they would immediately set out to find the active component, patent it, mass produce it and reap a tidy sum (and a Nobel Prize in the process).
If your theory about people growing plants in their garden was right Aspirin would not be the most massively profitable drug ever ! (you do know that aspirin, i.e. acetylsalicylic acid, is derived from a chemical that is present in several plants, the properties of which were already known in the times of Hippocrates, do you ?)
Thomas-
Thomas did, and got to stick his fingers through the nail wounds.
Yep, and I never got rid of the smell ever since !
Thomas-
A certain famous one claims to have produced fish out of thin air, and also cured paralysis and blindness amongst other unprovable, highly dubious things.
He never claimed any such thing. Later authors, writing about 20-100 years after his death, claimed he did. That's not the same thing.
We have enough evidence to believe in the factual existence of Jesus and in the authenticity of some of the precepts attributed to him (the important word here is 'some'), because they can be found in different early sources (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas). However it seems that all the magical stuff like raising the dead and creating food out of thin air appears only in the later sources.
Thomas-
Since they already have EuroDisney, and this Fusion thingy might not pan out, the headline just as easily could have been: France to Be Site of World's Second Largest Boondogle
No way ! Not even close ! Everybody knows that the single largest boondogle in human history is Eurotunnel !
Oh wait......
Thomas-
(Disclaimer: Yes, I'm French)
It's illusory alright, when I start at the US and scroll due west the first thing that I come to is the UK. Where'd all the other countries go?
Wherever you threw your eyeballs I suppose. The first country to appear should be Ireland (not taking smaller islands into account).
Thomas-