I think there is a strong case for america only truly approaching a modern western type of democracy after the civil war with reformation and the granting to the freed slaves their freedom and a full right to vote. Alternatively women may consider it the introduction of sufferage for women, in which case New Zealand beats everyone. It is true that america had a democratic government of soughts, but especially with slavery in the south this resembled more the ancient republics with a ruling class of citizens and an underclass of slaves than the modern democracies seen in the 20th century.
Absolutely, as a chemist working in the US, everything is and should be metric in my world. Also Al is aluminium NOT aluminum (which is an old marketing tradename and not a metal).
I unfortunatly live in Michigan that has a 2.00 am pub closing rule. Most states bordering have at least a 4.00 am closing I think. At the same time the state governer is now thinking about why their cities aren't seen as "hip" cities. I know closing hours aren't the whole story, but it tells alot about the attitude of the Michigan. Detroit is the birth place of techno, yet officially no club can open past 2:00pm. Conversly no head-line dj from around the worl usually come on on till at least 1:30 am in most places in the world.
...as real pubs don't have wait staff, they have bar staff who you ask for a new jug/pitcher from when and if you need one. If y
The most annoying though is guys in the toilet in some bars that are there for the sack of tips. I mean really I know how to wash my hands, and dry them to. The're only reason as far as I can see is to basically squirt soup on my hands and after washin my hands to dry with paper towels, and then for me to give a tip for a task I could have completed in half the time if I had done it by myself. In fact I consider very tacky for a bar to do this, it insults the intellgence and cleanliness of its clients.
No this is not a software patent, you have improved the process of making steel but the process in the way you have implemented it requires the use of a computer to control it. The physical process of making steel is different and patent that. I mean by this is not a software issue, the patent for this should cover the same process being implemented for everything from something like a analogue electromechanical system to someone doing this level of control manually.
Interesting little note, I was educated at an expensive private school. When I was at the school there was no internet access. Anyway fast forward 5 years and there is a need for internet access and to control it. With a bit of fanfare the school launches a system to track website access by person and detect inappropriate activity like accessing porn sites, which I read about in the old boys paper. Who was the first person to be caught and kicked out of the school for inappropriate web access (ie porn sites), the headmaster! This was in 2002, it was all over the local papers.
Well it depends really, this isn't exactly cheap and if anything this is an attempt to counter the biggest bother to MS in the last decade or so, anti-monopolistic legal actions against them.
The real concern here is that the MPlayer fully installed is dubious legally. That is why Suse and probably a few other distros only come with crippled versions that can not play WMV files and the like, though for suse a fully capable binary install exist elsewhere, but obviously this is out of the scope of the Suse companies legal culpibility. In the plan put forth your really paying for a licence to use the said technology, as the implementation has already been around in linux for a while now.
Lead is on of the problems in many landfill sites with contamination of ground water, and also increasing the cost of reuse of the land after the dump has stopped operating, as inevitable some lead has found its way there, the old common culprit being car batteries and the like.
Computers and other electrical goods are a lesser but probably more common concern these days as it makes up a large volume of waste, I think most people know to dispose of car batteries and other things with large amounts of lead and other heavy metals properly now or at least the shop that changed it does and the high concentration of lead makes extraction and recycling practical.
A computer game can never account for a truly open game play of a human. The freedom to do anything, bith but dumb and stupid, but more importantly ingenious without running along the usual rails of a computer game set out by the game developer a year ago is the compeling aspect of game play for a human DM.
Cricket and Baseball have are the same sport culturally (especially if you compare Australia and the US). Designed for spending summer days playing it or drinking beer watching it. Insane statistical analysis. Bewilderment from anyone not versed in the arcane laws and peculiarities of the sport. And the most important of all, the creation of grand myths and legends, like Donald Bradman and Babe Ruth, from fairly ordinary people. They are the same sport with completely different rules.
Cricket doesn't have a diverse appeal? The subcontinent, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka is a diverse country unto itself, then there is the West Indies (collection of Carribean countries). Plus South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and of course England.
North America, both head to head in popularity well into the 19th century, as an example the first sports match by University of Michigan against another university was a cricket match (can't remember the exact date though,1862 sounds right). Canadians started playing Baseball at about the same time the US probably due a similar way the US adopted Ice Hockey and many other cultural influences between northern states and Canada are often shared.
Now Latin America is definately part of the sphere of American imperialism, and has been for a very long time. The Far East, I assume you mean Japan, after WW2 was totally redirected and rebuilt by America, and America still has a very big miltary influence in Japan, and a consequent cultural influence over the last 60 years. Get my point, the two areas,the ex-british Empire countries adopted cricket, and American Empire countries have adopted Baseball.
Wal-mart are the biggest seller of CDs in the country, and they are also very adept company at playing hardball with suppliers to get their way. The RIAA member companies would be very stupid to piss off Wal-mart.
America has money which helps a lot. This is apparent right through funding for science, not just the big ticket items like space exploration. This money attracts many bright people from other countries to america to tap into these funding sources. Space exploration costs 100's of millions of dollars to do anything at all, most other single countries don't have the size of economies to fund these types of endeavors so they concentrate in other areas, or piggy back on american missions (like the ill-fated beagle2 did).
It's not the point though. This is really a case of pissing off the best allies of america. America is doubting the legal system of your closest allies and pissing of important business men from those countries and also discouraging tourism. Not a good way to shore up increasingly shakey international relations.
I would say that even the old profs are changing, especially as the older thay get the harder it is to walk to the library. I know plenty of profs in the range of 60 to 70 years old that have stopped going to the library to read a paper journal, or subscribing to their own personal copies of journals as they can get everything online. They do print out everything before they read it though.
"Trust me, you do not want to live in a country with socialized medical care. Been there, done that. Not fun at all. Medical care costs a crapload in the US because people want a much higher standard of care here - more drugs, more tech, no waiting lists"
America has a very good medical system, and it is true you get what you pay for. The truth of the matter there isn't really any choice below this premium priced product. This is why there is such a problem with affordability of health care in the US. Now i only know about Australia but many countries with socialised healthcare probably have similar systems, there are two levels of health-care, the government funded health care system, with a restricted set of drugs, poorer facilities, long waiting lists, then there is a premium product, the private healthcare industry with better facilities, more staff per patient, no waiting lists, wider range of drugs that are paid for etc. Which is paid for by taking out US style health insurance policies.
I this is actually bulls__t, though it could be tough to fight as gambling is legal in some areas of the US, and so why should those people have a monopoly over that gambling revenue when an overseas online website isn't allowed to compete for it.
Anyway the real hypocrisy in WTO and all free trade treaties and agreements is agricultural trade and the massive distortions that occur because of the subsidises and trade restrictions the US and Europe give to their farmers (paid for by tax payers of course). These policies are most obvious in the massive distortion of the world sugar market, which even the sugar lobby in the US recognises is totally f--- up, but through some weird logic come to the conclusion that US trade restrictions and subsidises shouldn't be change in anyway so that they stay isolate from the distorted world market that is their own creation until some magically event when every country in the world decides the get rid totally of these policies. Of course real free trade agreements actually work best by incremental changes between individual countries and have never really worked well on a global scale, thus it is a way of diplomatically saying that we don't care how buggered the market is, and we know our policies have largely caused it, but we're not budging an inch.
Sorry but my family are wheat farmers in Australia, and I am frankly sick of them being shafted continually by unfair US and European agricultural trade policies. I use sugar as just the classic example, and one that nearly (and probably should have stopped) a free trade agreement happening between the US and Australia. My family have a high efficiency farm that can turn a profit exposed to the real world market, if your farmers can't do the same then frankly they should look for another career and have some rationalisation of the sector (bigger farms, less workers, and thus smaller country populations, all the stuff that has happened in my home region over the last 20-30 yrs or so). Farming is a business and not a way of life, and should be treated as such.
Or if its Detroit, see all those dollars going to casinos in Windsor Canada (Canadian satellite city/suburb across the border from Detroit). Look at your underfunded already crime ridden city and say "what do we have to lose?", and then legalise casinos.
You just don't think in the right timeframe, some of the isotopes are radioactive for well over 10000 years, that longer than civilisation has existed, thats way longer than the idea of currency let alone interest and investing or the concept of employment. No country/civilisation has been politically stable for anything like this amount of time (maybe 1000 yrs or so max). How do you know records will even exist of where this stuff is buried in a thousand years, let alone 10000. In this context earning 6% a year and "4.14 million per year in perpetuity" is laughable.
Engineering and economics just can't deal with this kind of problem permanently due to the length of time involved, shooting it into the sun or into deep space gets rid of it in a place that it can never comeback from and thus is dealt with permanently. Storage of longlived isotopes on earth is not a solution, its just delays the problem indefinately (till the money runs out, civilisation collapses, or people have just plain forgotten what is there).
>atheism is not a religion. there are many types of atheism, >but basically it's about not *believing* in God, NOT >believing there isn't a God. there is a difference.
Nope, Atheist are more anti-god, stating firmly that god doesn't exist. Agnostics take the view that there is no good evidence that god exists, then again there is evidence that he doesn't but we tend to lean towards no god, this is your erroneous description of an atheist. So Agnostics take the view that there is no compelling reason to get on either side of this debate, just don't bug me about it unless you can prove without a doubt your position. To put my position another way, agnostics don't want to spend the time and energy on a stupid fight over a stupid point, believe what you want and stay out of my face and we can all be happy. This still includes opposing religion in school and government and other inappropriate venues. Atheist are more annoyed by the existence of religion at all and actively fight against it.
An observation I have made is atheist tend to be from religious backgrounds, and often the only way to move away from that is a complete, and nearly violent rejection of religion. Fighting the strong religious influence with a similarly strong rejection of god at some point in their life.
In away ebay isn't the right forum for selling or buying new or almost new items that are easily available through other online means. New electronics being a classic example, any money you save is really a trade off for higher risk or being scammed, or no warranty and as such isn't as great a deal as it may seem.
Wierd collector items, and other second hand stuff is what ebay is for. If you stick to these items your likelyhood of being scammed is lower. I personally avoid ebay but my parents use it alot, but only for collecting antique items. For example magic lantern slides, vintage car parts and other antique type items. The markets for these are narrowly defined and dispersed internationally. They live in Australia but buy alot of things from the US. They haven't got scammed, and often get very hard to find items from all over at good prices. For example my dad bought for $80 bucks a parts manual from the US for a car from 1918 that he is restoring, to my dad this book is worth far more than that as the car he's restoring is worth well over $100,000 (Its a rare model, 150 made of which 3 are known to still exist, of which my dad has the only right hand drive version, and so it's value depends on how well it does at auction) this book can tell him important aspects of what parts are missing and what is interchangable from other models from the same maker in the same year and what isn't, and even how the components are screwed together making the process easier. If it wasn't for ebay the likelyhood of finding something like this is tiny, as there is really no other appropriate forum for selling to an international audience such small low cost specialty items. Sure traditional auctions for items worth several thousand dollars, but something worth $80(to my dad), where else can you sell that and find the person who really wants it. Otherwise it may have found it's way to a book store or some swap meat and sold for $5 to $10 to some guy with some curiosity in the make of car, but with no practical use for that manual.
But if a man with hemophilia were to pass on his genes to the next generation it will increase the prevalence of hemophilia in his grandchildrens generation. He can't pass it to his son, but any daughter he has will be a hemophilia carrier guaranteed. Also if his marries a women with the recessive hemophilia genes it will then be 50% probability that his children, both male and female could be affected, not just males. Should a daughter with hemophilia have children, then all her sons will have it, and all her daughters will be carriers.
Exactly, there are plenty of men that will in a committed, loving and otherwise perfect relationship, resort to pornogrraphy when he doesn't get some or when his beloved doesn't want to do something in particular. Thus he resorts to satisfing himself through fantasy via porn, it is male nature.
I think that extrordianary enough regular sex only increases the sex drive, the more rooting you do the more you think about it. Not to mention the other most important aspect of porn to men in commited relationships, vicarious rooting of other women without actually cheating.
In short porn will never die will we have a sex drive. Those sexy curve press to many feel good buttons in our brains to stop.
I think there is a strong case for america only truly approaching a modern western type of democracy after the civil war with reformation and the granting to the freed slaves their freedom and a full right to vote. Alternatively women may consider it the introduction of sufferage for women, in which case New Zealand beats everyone. It is true that america had a democratic government of soughts, but especially with slavery in the south this resembled more the ancient republics with a ruling class of citizens and an underclass of slaves than the modern democracies seen in the 20th century.
Absolutely, as a chemist working in the US, everything is and should be metric in my world. Also Al is aluminium NOT aluminum (which is an old marketing tradename and not a metal).
I unfortunatly live in Michigan that has a 2.00 am pub closing rule. Most states bordering have at least a 4.00 am closing I think. At the same time the state governer is now thinking about why their cities aren't seen as "hip" cities. I know closing hours aren't the whole story, but it tells alot about the attitude of the Michigan. Detroit is the birth place of techno, yet officially no club can open past 2:00pm. Conversly no head-line dj from around the worl usually come on on till at least 1:30 am in most places in the world.
...as real pubs don't have wait staff, they have bar staff who you ask for a new jug/pitcher from when and if you need one. If y
The most annoying though is guys in the toilet in some bars that are there for the sack of tips. I mean really I know how to wash my hands, and dry them to. The're only reason as far as I can see is to basically squirt soup on my hands and after washin my hands to dry with paper towels, and then for me to give a tip for a task I could have completed in half the time if I had done it by myself. In fact I consider very tacky for a bar to do this, it insults the intellgence and cleanliness of its clients.
No this is not a software patent, you have improved the process of making steel but the process in the way you have implemented it requires the use of a computer to control it. The physical process of making steel is different and patent that. I mean by this is not a software issue, the patent for this should cover the same process being implemented for everything from something like a analogue electromechanical system to someone doing this level of control manually.
Interesting little note, I was educated at an expensive private school. When I was at the school there was no internet access. Anyway fast forward 5 years and there is a need for internet access and to control it. With a bit of fanfare the school launches a system to track website access by person and detect inappropriate activity like accessing porn sites, which I read about in the old boys paper. Who was the first person to be caught and kicked out of the school for inappropriate web access (ie porn sites), the headmaster! This was in 2002, it was all over the local papers.
Well it depends really, this isn't exactly cheap and if anything this is an attempt to counter the biggest bother to MS in the last decade or so, anti-monopolistic legal actions against them.
The real concern here is that the MPlayer fully installed is dubious legally. That is why Suse and probably a few other distros only come with crippled versions that can not play WMV files and the like, though for suse a fully capable binary install exist elsewhere, but obviously this is out of the scope of the Suse companies legal culpibility. In the plan put forth your really paying for a licence to use the said technology, as the implementation has already been around in linux for a while now.
Lead is on of the problems in many landfill sites with contamination of ground water, and also increasing the cost of reuse of the land after the dump has stopped operating, as inevitable some lead has found its way there, the old common culprit being car batteries and the like.
Computers and other electrical goods are a lesser but probably more common concern these days as it makes up a large volume of waste, I think most people know to dispose of car batteries and other things with large amounts of lead and other heavy metals properly now or at least the shop that changed it does and the high concentration of lead makes extraction and recycling practical.
A computer game can never account for a truly open game play of a human. The freedom to do anything, bith but dumb and stupid, but more importantly ingenious without running along the usual rails of a computer game set out by the game developer a year ago is the compeling aspect of game play for a human DM.
Cricket and Baseball have are the same sport culturally (especially if you compare Australia and the US). Designed for spending summer days playing it or drinking beer watching it. Insane statistical analysis. Bewilderment from anyone not versed in the arcane laws and peculiarities of the sport. And the most important of all, the creation of grand myths and legends, like Donald Bradman and Babe Ruth, from fairly ordinary people. They are the same sport with completely different rules.
England in Paris-1900. Though this doesn't really count for many reasons I won't go into.
Cricket doesn't have a diverse appeal? The subcontinent, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka is a diverse country unto itself, then there is the West Indies (collection of Carribean countries). Plus South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and of course England.
North America, both head to head in popularity well into the 19th century, as an example the first sports match by University of Michigan against another university was a cricket match (can't remember the exact date though,1862 sounds right). Canadians started playing Baseball at about the same time the US probably due a similar way the US adopted Ice Hockey and many other cultural influences between northern states and Canada are often shared.
Now Latin America is definately part of the sphere of American imperialism, and has been for a very long time. The Far East, I assume you mean Japan, after WW2 was totally redirected and rebuilt by America, and America still has a very big miltary influence in Japan, and a consequent cultural influence over the last 60 years. Get my point, the two areas,the ex-british Empire countries adopted cricket, and American Empire countries have adopted Baseball.
Wal-mart are the biggest seller of CDs in the country, and they are also very adept company at playing hardball with suppliers to get their way. The RIAA member companies would be very stupid to piss off Wal-mart.
America has money which helps a lot. This is apparent right through funding for science, not just the big ticket items like space exploration. This money attracts many bright people from other countries to america to tap into these funding sources. Space exploration costs 100's of millions of dollars to do anything at all, most other single countries don't have the size of economies to fund these types of endeavors so they concentrate in other areas, or piggy back on american missions (like the ill-fated beagle2 did).
It's not the point though. This is really a case of pissing off the best allies of america. America is doubting the legal system of your closest allies and pissing of important business men from those countries and also discouraging tourism. Not a good way to shore up increasingly shakey international relations.
I would say that even the old profs are changing, especially as the older thay get the harder it is to walk to the library. I know plenty of profs in the range of 60 to 70 years old that have stopped going to the library to read a paper journal, or subscribing to their own personal copies of journals as they can get everything online. They do print out everything before they read it though.
"Trust me, you do not want to live in a country with socialized medical care. Been there, done that. Not fun at all. Medical care costs a crapload in the US because people want a much higher standard of care here - more drugs, more tech, no waiting lists"
America has a very good medical system, and it is true you get what you pay for. The truth of the matter there isn't really any choice below this premium priced product. This is why there is such a problem with affordability of health care in the US. Now i only know about Australia but many countries with socialised healthcare probably have similar systems, there are two levels of health-care, the government funded health care system, with a restricted set of drugs, poorer facilities, long waiting lists, then there is a premium product, the private healthcare industry with better facilities, more staff per patient, no waiting lists, wider range of drugs that are paid for etc. Which is paid for by taking out US style health insurance policies.
I this is actually bulls__t, though it could be tough to fight as gambling is legal in some areas of the US, and so why should those people have a monopoly over that gambling revenue when an overseas online website isn't allowed to compete for it.
Anyway the real hypocrisy in WTO and all free trade treaties and agreements is agricultural trade and the massive distortions that occur because of the subsidises and trade restrictions the US and Europe give to their farmers (paid for by tax payers of course). These policies are most obvious in the massive distortion of the world sugar market, which even the sugar lobby in the US recognises is totally f--- up, but through some weird logic come to the conclusion that US trade restrictions and subsidises shouldn't be change in anyway so that they stay isolate from the distorted world market that is their own creation until some magically event when every country in the world decides the get rid totally of these policies. Of course real free trade agreements actually work best by incremental changes between individual countries and have never really worked well on a global scale, thus it is a way of diplomatically saying that we don't care how buggered the market is, and we know our policies have largely caused it, but we're not budging an inch.
Sorry but my family are wheat farmers in Australia, and I am frankly sick of them being shafted continually by unfair US and European agricultural trade policies. I use sugar as just the classic example, and one that nearly (and probably should have stopped) a free trade agreement happening between the US and Australia. My family have a high efficiency farm that can turn a profit exposed to the real world market, if your farmers can't do the same then frankly they should look for another career and have some rationalisation of the sector (bigger farms, less workers, and thus smaller country populations, all the stuff that has happened in my home region over the last 20-30 yrs or so). Farming is a business and not a way of life, and should be treated as such.
Or if its Detroit, see all those dollars going to casinos in Windsor Canada (Canadian satellite city/suburb across the border from Detroit). Look at your underfunded already crime ridden city and say "what do we have to lose?", and then legalise casinos.
You just don't think in the right timeframe, some of the isotopes are radioactive for well over 10000 years, that longer than civilisation has existed, thats way longer than the idea of currency let alone interest and investing or the concept of employment. No country/civilisation has been politically stable for anything like this amount of time (maybe 1000 yrs or so max). How do you know records will even exist of where this stuff is buried in a thousand years, let alone 10000. In this context earning 6% a year and "4.14 million per year in perpetuity" is laughable.
Engineering and economics just can't deal with this kind of problem permanently due to the length of time involved, shooting it into the sun or into deep space gets rid of it in a place that it can never comeback from and thus is dealt with permanently. Storage of longlived isotopes on earth is not a solution, its just delays the problem indefinately (till the money runs out, civilisation collapses, or people have just plain forgotten what is there).
>atheism is not a religion. there are many types of atheism, >but basically it's about not *believing* in God, NOT >believing there isn't a God. there is a difference.
Nope, Atheist are more anti-god, stating firmly that god doesn't exist. Agnostics take the view that there is no good evidence that god exists, then again there is evidence that he doesn't but we tend to lean towards no god, this is your erroneous description of an atheist. So Agnostics take the view that there is no compelling reason to get on either side of this debate, just don't bug me about it unless you can prove without a doubt your position. To put my position another way, agnostics don't want to spend the time and energy on a stupid fight over a stupid point, believe what you want and stay out of my face and we can all be happy. This still includes opposing religion in school and government and other inappropriate venues. Atheist are more annoyed by the existence of religion at all and actively fight against it.
An observation I have made is atheist tend to be from religious backgrounds, and often the only way to move away from that is a complete, and nearly violent rejection of religion. Fighting the strong religious influence with a similarly strong rejection of god at some point in their life.
In away ebay isn't the right forum for selling or buying new or almost new items that are easily available through other online means. New electronics being a classic example, any money you save is really a trade off for higher risk or being scammed, or no warranty and as such isn't as great a deal as it may seem.
Wierd collector items, and other second hand stuff is what ebay is for. If you stick to these items your likelyhood of being scammed is lower. I personally avoid ebay but my parents use it alot, but only for collecting antique items. For example magic lantern slides, vintage car parts and other antique type items. The markets for these are narrowly defined and dispersed internationally. They live in Australia but buy alot of things from the US. They haven't got scammed, and often get very hard to find items from all over at good prices. For example my dad bought for $80 bucks a parts manual from the US for a car from 1918 that he is restoring, to my dad this book is worth far more than that as the car he's restoring is worth well over $100,000 (Its a rare model, 150 made of which 3 are known to still exist, of which my dad has the only right hand drive version, and so it's value depends on how well it does at auction) this book can tell him important aspects of what parts are missing and what is interchangable from other models from the same maker in the same year and what isn't, and even how the components are screwed together making the process easier. If it wasn't for ebay the likelyhood of finding something like this is tiny, as there is really no other appropriate forum for selling to an international audience such small low cost specialty items. Sure traditional auctions for items worth several thousand dollars, but something worth $80(to my dad), where else can you sell that and find the person who really wants it. Otherwise it may have found it's way to a book store or some swap meat and sold for $5 to $10 to some guy with some curiosity in the make of car, but with no practical use for that manual.
But if a man with hemophilia were to pass on his genes to the next generation it will increase the prevalence of hemophilia in his grandchildrens generation. He can't pass it to his son, but any daughter he has will be a hemophilia carrier guaranteed. Also if his marries a women with the recessive hemophilia genes it will then be 50% probability that his children, both male and female could be affected, not just males. Should a daughter with hemophilia have children, then all her sons will have it, and all her daughters will be carriers.
Exactly, there are plenty of men that will in a committed, loving and otherwise perfect relationship, resort to pornogrraphy when he doesn't get some or when his beloved doesn't want to do something in particular. Thus he resorts to satisfing himself through fantasy via porn, it is male nature.
I think that extrordianary enough regular sex only increases the sex drive, the more rooting you do the more you think about it. Not to mention the other most important aspect of porn to men in commited relationships, vicarious rooting of other women without actually cheating.
In short porn will never die will we have a sex drive. Those sexy curve press to many feel good buttons in our brains to stop.