We have passed a law about the same. But there's so few Police on patrol the law just isn't being enforced. I still see plenty of drivers hand holding a mobile, despite the fact you can get a bluetooth headset for £8 in the UK.
The trouble with this is that using a hands free phone while driving is just as dangerous as using a normal phone. _All_ studies (not sponsored by headset manufacturors) have shown this, again and again. See hereherehere and most obviously here for a few examples. From that last : "Conclusions - When drivers use a mobile phone there is an increased likelihood of a crash resulting in injury. Using a hands-free phone is not any safer.". From Wikipedia : "Driving while using a handsfree cellular device is not safer than using a hand held cell phone, as concluded by case-crossover studies.[15][16] epidemiological,[1][2] simulation,[4] and meta-analysis[6][7]. The increased "cognitive workload" involved in holding a conversation, not the use of hands, causes the increased risk.[17][18][19] One notable exception to that conclusion is a study by headset manufacturer Plantronics.
I can't believe this is not common knowledge yet. The law in the UK differentiates between hands free and normal phoning for _no_ reason whatsoever. Many of these studies were released prior to the introduction of the law in the UK. The cynic in me wonders whether the differentiation is due to the fact that police use hands free, and radios all the time, and making them illegal would make them sad:(. Just to conclude, the people who are tutting at mobile users while talking on their hands free are _just_ as dangerous as those they are frowning upon.
The products of my brain are, at least for me, akin to my children. And nobody else but me should have a right of control over my children, at least until they are old enough to decide for themselve.
Not really the best of analogies. You do not, for example, have complete control over your children - you are not free to abuse them for example.
If a work of art/ scientific breakthrough/ brilliant idea is perceived to have a worth, why should the originator of this product not gain some profit from his work?
I'm not saying they shouldn't. However, I am paying taxes to the government so that they can enforce the artificial monopoly that is copyright so that you can benefit. Also, you're implying that without copyright it would be impossible to gain profit from your work. That's not the case.
So why life? It seems a natural boundary.
Because it's way too long. 90% of copyright protected works make 90% of their money in the first few years, so it's pretty unnecessary too.
Wise people will see that, if an idea is shared and multiplied, it will blossom and become more, see e. g. the proliferation of the WWW. So I suppose, that great ideas will be put into the public domain before the originator dies. If this does not happen, one reason might be greed.
The www is a good example of an invention that has not relied on copyright, yet still has netted its inventor a good profit. Much of that profit is not direct - people don't pay to use or write it - however, indirectly, Tim Berners-Lee has become relatively wealthy as a result. I'd venture to say that had he restricted the www's use via copyright, it would never have become the success it has.
You seem to feel that you have an automatic right to say how something you've sold or given to someone else is used. This right is not automatic, it is entirely artificial, and enforced by the government. I personally agree with copyright, I think it does encourage artists to produce and release work to the public. However, the entire point of copyright originally was to foster this release to the public, and now it is having the opposite effect because of the ludicrously long terms, and nothing is getting released at all.
I understand the concept of an IP address, probably more than most people on this site. Firefox and adblock is easier than maintaining my own custom hosts file. I don't live to browse, I browse to live.
The UK has a net filter, but it's sporadic, and relies upon ISP implentation. From Wikipedia : The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) compiles and maintains a blacklist, mainly of child pornography URLs, from which 98% of commercial Internet customers in the UK are filtered.
However, the IWF did blacklist a Wikipedia page a while back, Virgin Killer (NSFW), which is an old Scorpions album, and has an image of the album cover which falls under any definition of child porn I've ever seen. Despite the blacklisting, it seemed most people were still able to access that page, so I'd be guessing that their current blacklist is pretty innefectual. To be honest I've no real urge to hunt down dodgy child porn sites to check whether the blacklist is working... Though I am obviously slightly worried that blacklist is "mainly" child porn. What else it is censoring is anyone's guess.
_All_ governments want to restrict some information, and a lot of that is valid. Some sensitive information about military operations, and covert agents, for example should be censored and restricted IMO, at least while they are operational. The question is firstly which information should be witheld, and secondly (and most importantly) : how can we set up government withholding of information so that they do not withold information they have no right to?
No one has got even close to answering that second question. Basically all current major governments have the ability to withold any information that they see fit, whether it be sensitive or in the public interest to know. There should be no need for websites like wikileaks (at least in terms of governments, companies are different beasts) - _anything_ that does not potentially compromise current or future operations that is owned by the government should be released. No quibbles. No matter if it shows someone in a bad light.
The trouble is the nature of governments, and the nature of people. No one ever wants anything released that makes them look bad, and governments very very rarely relinquish powers they gain.
Having said all that, by _far_ the best thing that New Labour did for us in the UK was introduce the Freedom of Information act, which Labour has been bitten itself by in a couple of cases, and which is what actually was used to expose the entire expenses scandal recently. That is a very important piece of legislation, and a great one, though I'll wager now they wished they never introduced it. Unfortunately the FOI act only applies to information about governmental institutions, and not about privately held stuff. The data protection act is a pretty good act too - it allows any individual to request of _any_ organisation any information that they hold on that individual. Though I personally didn't know they essentially had to pass that legislation to come into compliance with the EU until just now.
I'm not saying those laws are perfect - far from it, there are exceptions to the FOI act, and it can be vetoed by government ministers (which has happened twice). They do need to go further. However, before their implementation, there was basically no formal requirement for information transparency at all in the UK... Hopefully, some future government will give the FOI act a few more teeth (though it has already been proven very useful).
I'm not a New Labour apologist by any means, detention without trial is 100% wrong in my opinion. The Surveillance State is getting worse. The DNA database for people who have not ever been convicted of a crime is utterly wrong, and is truly questionable even for those (like myself) who have been convicted of minor offences. And for me, personally the absolute worst thing, especially coming from a "Labour" government, is that thewealthgap has become far worse. The wealth gap is a very good indicator of societal happiness in western societies : bigger gap = more unhappiness. This was a major pledge, to narrow it, from New Labour, and they've widened it. Anyway, I just started this paragraph to show I wasn't a Labour apologist, and I've ended up ranting. Oh well...
Your assumption is that artists should have absolute control over their work, which many people here, including myself disagree with. You haven't actually given a reason _why_ you should reap the benefits of your work for the rest of your life by using a government enforced monopoly.
I _think_ you're mainly talking about free speech, and claiming that the US has free speech. It doesn't. There is a reason Wikileaks is not hosted in the US, for example. The DMCA is an obvious example of legislation designed to curtail free speech too, through the back door.
If you're talking about democracy, the US has a representative democracy.... which is not a democracy. Your voice does not get heard at all if there is a person either side of you saying something different.
If you're looking for a better democracy, the Palestinian people democratically voted Hamas in, then the international community shunned them. Democracy is _not_ respected in the international community.
Free speech and democracy are not necessarily linked.
I'm not defending China here - Their restrictions on some forms of political free speech are plain wrong.
I'm simply flabbergasted that someone (the previous poster) thinks the DC Gun Ban should still be in effect. The Supreme Law is clear - the people have a right to own weapons.
Which weapons? If the supreme law gives the right to own weapons manufactured at the time it was passed, so be it. If your implication is that that supreme law gives people the right to hoard nuclear or biological weapons, I might start getting a little nervous. If you do not believe in the latter, _you_ do not believe in the absolutes of that "supreme" law.
Professors and others have been fired merely for suggesting that a woman's brain is "wired differently" than a man's brain, nevermind that this is demonstrably true.
This is demonstrably false. On average, women's brains are wired slightly differently than men's. However, there is a lot of overlap there, and there are a hell of a lot of men with more "feminine" minds than a hell of a lot of women. The actual disparity between men and women is very small - around 10% either way with very specific tasks, and with wide bell curves meaning that around 40% of men will be better at female tasks than most women, and 40% of women will be better at male tasks than men.
Ok... ignore the first part of the video, and ignore the children in the van too for now. What the helicopter did, and knew they did because it was on the audio, was fire upon someone who was trying to rescue the wounded. That is _not_ a minor military fuckup. There was zero military threat.
It _is_ kind of a problem unique to the US currently, compared to all other supposedly civilised nations. If you hadn't noticed, the US is not alone in its war in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. I'll admit, the US is in the majority, so it should have more problems than anyone else... However, there have been basically none of these kind of incidents in the UK military there (mercenaries are another matter). The UK military have been the victim of these kind of incidents, at the hands of US forces though. I am far from saying that the UK military is perfect, just that these kinds of incidents are most definitely skewed towards the US military compared to others.
The trouble is that Hawk the Slayer is only really bad compared to films that are pretty good, or average. If every film was as bad as Hawk the Slayer, you almost certainly would not like it. For a film to be so bad it's good, there's got to be a decent baseline. An example of this is government info films - Now, they're at a relatively (I use the term loosely) high standard. That's why films like reefer madness, and a whole host of other government produced media, look _so_ stupid now.
Personally, I'm a relatively big reader - However, I generally hate (or at least dislike) Tolkein and Shakespeare, though I do love loads of classic literature. I could go into why I don't like them, but that would take another post. A one word review of both would be "boring", because that's the easiest and quickest way to say that they failed to engage you.
For everyone (not parent) who is claiming kids these days don't have the attention span to watch a slow(er) moving film, you're wrong. Lost in Translation is slow as fuck, and it was pretty successful. Loads of "indie" films are slow paced, and become cult classics after being championed by teenagers and twenty-somethings. One of my favourite films of my youth was Blade Runner, which has vast swathes of dialogue (and silence too:P), and not much happening.
It's three injections: general anesthetic, paralytic, poison.
_This_ is cruel and unusual punishment. There is absolutely zero need for the paralytic when you are executing someone. The only reason for it is to disguise the subject's pain. There is no reason on earth not to use something more humane, like massive barbituate injection, or ideally oxygen deprivation (not suffocation, oxygen deprivation). Michael Portillo did a pretty good program on this for the BBC a while back. The fact is, countries that use the death penalty don't seem to mind a little bit of pain currently...
No, it's way easier than that. All you have to do is analyse their DNA, and see which of them has the Evil Bit set. I can't believe this hasn't been done yet.
ps. The evil bit in DNA is not detected by normal comparisons. You need to find a geneticist with 1337 DN4 5C4NN1NG 5K1LLZ. The median age for such geneticists is 13, interestingly.
I'm with you. Football Manager 2009 had nasty DRM, the first game I purchased which really pissed me off with it, and I vowed then and there I wouldn't ever purchase another single player PC game that required an internet connection. Hell, I didn't even have an internet connection here until a few months ago. Anyway, football manager 2010 came out, with no really nasty DRM, and I bought it, and posted a reply to my scathing forum post about 2009, saying I had bought 2010 purely because of the lack of DRM. Dragon Age : Origins was going to have heavy DRM right up until a couple of weeks prior to launch, and I was hugely pissed at that - however, they dropped the DRM and I bought it.
Anyway, I was going to buy Settlers 7, but like you, am definitely not until it gets fixed.
It's exactly the same in the UK, though it's a little worse. The BAE Saudi deal was rife with hundred of millions worth of bribes, and the investigation was stopped due to "national security". Gagging orders were placed on media, notably the Grauniad, and then super gagging orders, which prevented all newspapers from reporting that a question was even asked in the house of commons. It turns out national security wasn't really at risk, but another big contract was.
Umm, we'll let them not have abortions if they don't want; contary to what your hysterical ranting suggests, nobody is being forced to have one. However I don't see what gives them the right to push their preferences on everybody else.
You missed his point. There are people who consider abortion to be murder, and their tax money is being used to fund abortions, or murders in their opinion. Thus by paying tax, they are funding murder in their opinion. Now, I do not agree with their stance, but that's their point.
I feel the same way (though to a far lesser degree) when listening to commercial radio or watching commercial TV. I estimate that about 50% of the adverts on commercial radio in the UK are government information. I get really annoyed at this, since I'm paying for it twice - I'm paying through my taxes for the government to pay for those adverts, and I'm having to listen to the crap adverts that the government produces. If any of the political parties came out and said they'd completely squash government marketing, I'd vote for them in an instant. Adverts like this, shown over and over again on television, must have cost millions and millions, which taxpayers pay for, then have to watch. Incidently, I couldn't find that advert initially, all I could find was this one.
The videos may be funny, and I laughed at 1 I think the first time. However, I'm listening to streaming music, and they keep fucking going. I can't turn the audio off. Cheers slashdot, for being the first ever site to force me to install flashblock... seriously, never felt the need to install flashblock before now.
The passport you mention is not a right. The right is the freedom to move about. The passport infringes on your right to move about. The government isn't doing you any favors, and in fact is charging you a fee for the "privilege" of being tracked and controlled.
I do not need a passport to move about in my country. I only need a passport when I leave my government's control, because of other government's rules. My government has no juristriction there. A passport allows me to leave my country, and go to another country, it has zero effect in my own country. Basically, a passport is irrelevent to my government... it's a right granted by my government, because of agreements with countries, that lets me travel to other countries. Within my country, a passport is useless, and not required.
Basically a passport grants you rights that you would not have without it. Unless you want to do away with individual foreign governments, and their rules, you must accede that point.
I heard an interview with the woman whose PhD project this is on Today this morning I think (though could have been yesterday), and she was pretty unassuming. Basically, she said the toads have been studied for about 4 years, and their dissappearance was pretty unexpected, but she wasn't drawing any major conclusions. Seemed pretty sensible to me...
Though she didn't explitly say it, I think what she was implying was that weird occurences happen _all_ the time, and some are bound to happen just prior to an earthquake by chance. It's worth looking at weird results that seem to predict something, just in case, but it's got to be remembered that it could just be pure chance. Strange animal behaviour is _bound_ to happen just before an earthquake somewhere, because strange animal behaviour is being recorded all the time, everywhere. It's only after the fact a connection is drawn.
I'm not saying categorically that animals cannot predict earthquakes, but if animals _did_ predict earthquakes reliably, we should have lots better evidence for it with all the research that's been done thus far. There isn't any good consistent evidence, unfortunately. Looking for animal behaviour patterns that match seismic events after the event does not count, because you're always going to find some correlation with some species - prediction is key..
The idea being that "health care" is a right. It's not a right, though. It's a product.
It's a product every citizen should be able to have, just like something like a passport (which _is_ entirely provided by the government, and I would consider a right, excluding certain circumstances).
I personally have not used the NHS at all for about 2 years (last time was when I was washing up a pint glass, and it broke, and cut into the side of my hand. A few stitches, and the nerve was severed so I feel nothing on the outside of my little finger). However, I far from begrudge my taxes going to it because not having healthcare is a proper nightmare, and I think everyone deserves it. I personally believe that anything above basic education is _way_ less of a right than healthcare, yet there's not the same issues about funding that.
I do understand the difference between for example the right to bear arms and the right to healthcare. One is a right that the government cannot interfere in, the other is a right to something provided by the government. There are however plenty of things provided by the government of far less importance than basic healthcare.
Just to let you know, I thought I'd actually have a look to see if any antivirus detected anything on my disk, so I downloaded and ran MSE. It picked up a trojan in an ancient zip that I never ran because I knew it was suspicious, so fair play for that. Nothing else though, MSE detected zero apart from that one file, and nothing else suspicious. MSE then proceeded to completely hose my system. Booting into Vista produced a BSOD and immediately rebooted. I caught "bad disk" before it rebooted once. Repair did not work, system restore to before MSE was installed did.
So a quick trial of MSE actually caused me way more problems than any virus ever has. A cost/benefit analysis would produce patently obvious results. I'll stick with my way.
When you're using an alphabet, it's true that once you know the letters you will be able to pronounce any word that you come across
Not a chance in English. There are loads of rules involving combinations of letters (ce, ge, kn etx). There are loads of letters and letter combinations that don't have a set pronunciation (th, ough, etc). There are at least hundreds of downright exceptions to all the rules (get, acknowledge, etc). To learn English well, you need to memorise _all_ of these, and many of the exceptions are in common words. As an example, do you pronounce thought like though, but with a t on the end?
Just to let you know, in the US mens rea is the difference between voluntary manslaughter and murder. Just because they don't actively call is such does not mean it does not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
A bluetooth headset also is just as dangerous as using a normal mobile. See my other reply for more details.
We have passed a law about the same. But there's so few Police on patrol the law just isn't being enforced. I still see plenty of drivers hand holding a mobile, despite the fact you can get a bluetooth headset for £8 in the UK.
The trouble with this is that using a hands free phone while driving is just as dangerous as using a normal phone. _All_ studies (not sponsored by headset manufacturors) have shown this, again and again. See here here here and most obviously here for a few examples. From that last : "Conclusions - When drivers use a mobile phone there is an increased likelihood of a crash resulting in injury. Using a hands-free phone is not any safer.". From Wikipedia : "Driving while using a handsfree cellular device is not safer than using a hand held cell phone, as concluded by case-crossover studies.[15][16] epidemiological,[1][2] simulation,[4] and meta-analysis[6][7]. The increased "cognitive workload" involved in holding a conversation, not the use of hands, causes the increased risk.[17][18][19] One notable exception to that conclusion is a study by headset manufacturer Plantronics.
I can't believe this is not common knowledge yet. The law in the UK differentiates between hands free and normal phoning for _no_ reason whatsoever. Many of these studies were released prior to the introduction of the law in the UK. The cynic in me wonders whether the differentiation is due to the fact that police use hands free, and radios all the time, and making them illegal would make them sad :(. Just to conclude, the people who are tutting at mobile users while talking on their hands free are _just_ as dangerous as those they are frowning upon.
The products of my brain are, at least for me, akin to my children. And nobody else but me should have a right of control over my children, at least until they are old enough to decide for themselve.
Not really the best of analogies. You do not, for example, have complete control over your children - you are not free to abuse them for example.
If a work of art/ scientific breakthrough/ brilliant idea is perceived to have a worth, why should the originator of this product not gain some profit from his work?
I'm not saying they shouldn't. However, I am paying taxes to the government so that they can enforce the artificial monopoly that is copyright so that you can benefit. Also, you're implying that without copyright it would be impossible to gain profit from your work. That's not the case.
So why life? It seems a natural boundary.
Because it's way too long. 90% of copyright protected works make 90% of their money in the first few years, so it's pretty unnecessary too.
Wise people will see that, if an idea is shared and multiplied, it will blossom and become more, see e. g. the proliferation of the WWW. So I suppose, that great ideas will be put into the public domain before the originator dies. If this does not happen, one reason might be greed.
The www is a good example of an invention that has not relied on copyright, yet still has netted its inventor a good profit. Much of that profit is not direct - people don't pay to use or write it - however, indirectly, Tim Berners-Lee has become relatively wealthy as a result. I'd venture to say that had he restricted the www's use via copyright, it would never have become the success it has.
You seem to feel that you have an automatic right to say how something you've sold or given to someone else is used. This right is not automatic, it is entirely artificial, and enforced by the government. I personally agree with copyright, I think it does encourage artists to produce and release work to the public. However, the entire point of copyright originally was to foster this release to the public, and now it is having the opposite effect because of the ludicrously long terms, and nothing is getting released at all.
I understand the concept of an IP address, probably more than most people on this site. Firefox and adblock is easier than maintaining my own custom hosts file. I don't live to browse, I browse to live.
The UK has a net filter, but it's sporadic, and relies upon ISP implentation. From Wikipedia :
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) compiles and maintains a blacklist, mainly of child pornography URLs, from which 98% of commercial Internet customers in the UK are filtered.
However, the IWF did blacklist a Wikipedia page a while back, Virgin Killer (NSFW), which is an old Scorpions album, and has an image of the album cover which falls under any definition of child porn I've ever seen. Despite the blacklisting, it seemed most people were still able to access that page, so I'd be guessing that their current blacklist is pretty innefectual. To be honest I've no real urge to hunt down dodgy child porn sites to check whether the blacklist is working... Though I am obviously slightly worried that blacklist is "mainly" child porn. What else it is censoring is anyone's guess.
_All_ governments want to restrict some information, and a lot of that is valid. Some sensitive information about military operations, and covert agents, for example should be censored and restricted IMO, at least while they are operational. The question is firstly which information should be witheld, and secondly (and most importantly) : how can we set up government withholding of information so that they do not withold information they have no right to?
No one has got even close to answering that second question. Basically all current major governments have the ability to withold any information that they see fit, whether it be sensitive or in the public interest to know. There should be no need for websites like wikileaks (at least in terms of governments, companies are different beasts) - _anything_ that does not potentially compromise current or future operations that is owned by the government should be released. No quibbles. No matter if it shows someone in a bad light.
The trouble is the nature of governments, and the nature of people. No one ever wants anything released that makes them look bad, and governments very very rarely relinquish powers they gain.
Having said all that, by _far_ the best thing that New Labour did for us in the UK was introduce the Freedom of Information act, which Labour has been bitten itself by in a couple of cases, and which is what actually was used to expose the entire expenses scandal recently. That is a very important piece of legislation, and a great one, though I'll wager now they wished they never introduced it. Unfortunately the FOI act only applies to information about governmental institutions, and not about privately held stuff. The data protection act is a pretty good act too - it allows any individual to request of _any_ organisation any information that they hold on that individual. Though I personally didn't know they essentially had to pass that legislation to come into compliance with the EU until just now.
I'm not saying those laws are perfect - far from it, there are exceptions to the FOI act, and it can be vetoed by government ministers (which has happened twice). They do need to go further. However, before their implementation, there was basically no formal requirement for information transparency at all in the UK... Hopefully, some future government will give the FOI act a few more teeth (though it has already been proven very useful).
I'm not a New Labour apologist by any means, detention without trial is 100% wrong in my opinion. The Surveillance State is getting worse. The DNA database for people who have not ever been convicted of a crime is utterly wrong, and is truly questionable even for those (like myself) who have been convicted of minor offences. And for me, personally the absolute worst thing, especially coming from a "Labour" government, is that the wealth gap has become far worse. The wealth gap is a very good indicator of societal happiness in western societies : bigger gap = more unhappiness. This was a major pledge, to narrow it, from New Labour, and they've widened it. Anyway, I just started this paragraph to show I wasn't a Labour apologist, and I've ended up ranting. Oh well...
Your assumption is that artists should have absolute control over their work, which many people here, including myself disagree with. You haven't actually given a reason _why_ you should reap the benefits of your work for the rest of your life by using a government enforced monopoly.
Do you know what the word "criminal" even means? Exactly which unilateral worldwide accepted law is China breaking by any reasonable interpretation?
No. You're wrong on so many levels.
I _think_ you're mainly talking about free speech, and claiming that the US has free speech. It doesn't. There is a reason Wikileaks is not hosted in the US, for example. The DMCA is an obvious example of legislation designed to curtail free speech too, through the back door.
If you're talking about democracy, the US has a representative democracy.... which is not a democracy. Your voice does not get heard at all if there is a person either side of you saying something different.
If you're looking for a better democracy, the Palestinian people democratically voted Hamas in, then the international community shunned them. Democracy is _not_ respected in the international community.
Free speech and democracy are not necessarily linked.
I'm not defending China here - Their restrictions on some forms of political free speech are plain wrong.
I'm simply flabbergasted that someone (the previous poster) thinks the DC Gun Ban should still be in effect. The Supreme Law is clear - the people have a right to own weapons.
Which weapons? If the supreme law gives the right to own weapons manufactured at the time it was passed, so be it. If your implication is that that supreme law gives people the right to hoard nuclear or biological weapons, I might start getting a little nervous. If you do not believe in the latter, _you_ do not believe in the absolutes of that "supreme" law.
Professors and others have been fired merely for suggesting that a woman's brain is "wired differently" than a man's brain, nevermind that this is demonstrably true.
This is demonstrably false. On average, women's brains are wired slightly differently than men's. However, there is a lot of overlap there, and there are a hell of a lot of men with more "feminine" minds than a hell of a lot of women. The actual disparity between men and women is very small - around 10% either way with very specific tasks, and with wide bell curves meaning that around 40% of men will be better at female tasks than most women, and 40% of women will be better at male tasks than men.
Ok... ignore the first part of the video, and ignore the children in the van too for now. What the helicopter did, and knew they did because it was on the audio, was fire upon someone who was trying to rescue the wounded. That is _not_ a minor military fuckup. There was zero military threat.
It _is_ kind of a problem unique to the US currently, compared to all other supposedly civilised nations. If you hadn't noticed, the US is not alone in its war in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. I'll admit, the US is in the majority, so it should have more problems than anyone else... However, there have been basically none of these kind of incidents in the UK military there (mercenaries are another matter). The UK military have been the victim of these kind of incidents, at the hands of US forces though. I am far from saying that the UK military is perfect, just that these kinds of incidents are most definitely skewed towards the US military compared to others.
The trouble is that Hawk the Slayer is only really bad compared to films that are pretty good, or average. If every film was as bad as Hawk the Slayer, you almost certainly would not like it. For a film to be so bad it's good, there's got to be a decent baseline. An example of this is government info films - Now, they're at a relatively (I use the term loosely) high standard. That's why films like reefer madness, and a whole host of other government produced media, look _so_ stupid now.
Personally, I'm a relatively big reader - However, I generally hate (or at least dislike) Tolkein and Shakespeare, though I do love loads of classic literature. I could go into why I don't like them, but that would take another post. A one word review of both would be "boring", because that's the easiest and quickest way to say that they failed to engage you.
For everyone (not parent) who is claiming kids these days don't have the attention span to watch a slow(er) moving film, you're wrong. Lost in Translation is slow as fuck, and it was pretty successful. Loads of "indie" films are slow paced, and become cult classics after being championed by teenagers and twenty-somethings. One of my favourite films of my youth was Blade Runner, which has vast swathes of dialogue (and silence too :P), and not much happening.
It's three injections: general anesthetic, paralytic, poison.
_This_ is cruel and unusual punishment. There is absolutely zero need for the paralytic when you are executing someone. The only reason for it is to disguise the subject's pain. There is no reason on earth not to use something more humane, like massive barbituate injection, or ideally oxygen deprivation (not suffocation, oxygen deprivation). Michael Portillo did a pretty good program on this for the BBC a while back. The fact is, countries that use the death penalty don't seem to mind a little bit of pain currently...
No, it's way easier than that. All you have to do is analyse their DNA, and see which of them has the Evil Bit set. I can't believe this hasn't been done yet.
ps. The evil bit in DNA is not detected by normal comparisons. You need to find a geneticist with 1337 DN4 5C4NN1NG 5K1LLZ. The median age for such geneticists is 13, interestingly.
I'm with you. Football Manager 2009 had nasty DRM, the first game I purchased which really pissed me off with it, and I vowed then and there I wouldn't ever purchase another single player PC game that required an internet connection. Hell, I didn't even have an internet connection here until a few months ago. Anyway, football manager 2010 came out, with no really nasty DRM, and I bought it, and posted a reply to my scathing forum post about 2009, saying I had bought 2010 purely because of the lack of DRM. Dragon Age : Origins was going to have heavy DRM right up until a couple of weeks prior to launch, and I was hugely pissed at that - however, they dropped the DRM and I bought it.
Anyway, I was going to buy Settlers 7, but like you, am definitely not until it gets fixed.
It's exactly the same in the UK, though it's a little worse. The BAE Saudi deal was rife with hundred of millions worth of bribes, and the investigation was stopped due to "national security". Gagging orders were placed on media, notably the Grauniad, and then super gagging orders, which prevented all newspapers from reporting that a question was even asked in the house of commons. It turns out national security wasn't really at risk, but another big contract was.
Umm, we'll let them not have abortions if they don't want; contary to what your hysterical ranting suggests, nobody is being forced to have one. However I don't see what gives them the right to push their preferences on everybody else.
You missed his point. There are people who consider abortion to be murder, and their tax money is being used to fund abortions, or murders in their opinion. Thus by paying tax, they are funding murder in their opinion. Now, I do not agree with their stance, but that's their point.
I feel the same way (though to a far lesser degree) when listening to commercial radio or watching commercial TV. I estimate that about 50% of the adverts on commercial radio in the UK are government information. I get really annoyed at this, since I'm paying for it twice - I'm paying through my taxes for the government to pay for those adverts, and I'm having to listen to the crap adverts that the government produces. If any of the political parties came out and said they'd completely squash government marketing, I'd vote for them in an instant. Adverts like this, shown over and over again on television, must have cost millions and millions, which taxpayers pay for, then have to watch. Incidently, I couldn't find that advert initially, all I could find was this one.
The videos may be funny, and I laughed at 1 I think the first time. However, I'm listening to streaming music, and they keep fucking going. I can't turn the audio off. Cheers slashdot, for being the first ever site to force me to install flashblock... seriously, never felt the need to install flashblock before now.
The passport you mention is not a right. The right is the freedom to move about. The passport infringes on your right to move about. The government isn't doing you any favors, and in fact is charging you a fee for the "privilege" of being tracked and controlled.
I do not need a passport to move about in my country. I only need a passport when I leave my government's control, because of other government's rules. My government has no juristriction there. A passport allows me to leave my country, and go to another country, it has zero effect in my own country. Basically, a passport is irrelevent to my government... it's a right granted by my government, because of agreements with countries, that lets me travel to other countries. Within my country, a passport is useless, and not required.
Basically a passport grants you rights that you would not have without it. Unless you want to do away with individual foreign governments, and their rules, you must accede that point.
I heard an interview with the woman whose PhD project this is on Today this morning I think (though could have been yesterday), and she was pretty unassuming. Basically, she said the toads have been studied for about 4 years, and their dissappearance was pretty unexpected, but she wasn't drawing any major conclusions. Seemed pretty sensible to me...
Though she didn't explitly say it, I think what she was implying was that weird occurences happen _all_ the time, and some are bound to happen just prior to an earthquake by chance. It's worth looking at weird results that seem to predict something, just in case, but it's got to be remembered that it could just be pure chance. Strange animal behaviour is _bound_ to happen just before an earthquake somewhere, because strange animal behaviour is being recorded all the time, everywhere. It's only after the fact a connection is drawn.
I'm not saying categorically that animals cannot predict earthquakes, but if animals _did_ predict earthquakes reliably, we should have lots better evidence for it with all the research that's been done thus far. There isn't any good consistent evidence, unfortunately. Looking for animal behaviour patterns that match seismic events after the event does not count, because you're always going to find some correlation with some species - prediction is key..
The idea being that "health care" is a right. It's not a right, though. It's a product.
It's a product every citizen should be able to have, just like something like a passport (which _is_ entirely provided by the government, and I would consider a right, excluding certain circumstances).
I personally have not used the NHS at all for about 2 years (last time was when I was washing up a pint glass, and it broke, and cut into the side of my hand. A few stitches, and the nerve was severed so I feel nothing on the outside of my little finger). However, I far from begrudge my taxes going to it because not having healthcare is a proper nightmare, and I think everyone deserves it. I personally believe that anything above basic education is _way_ less of a right than healthcare, yet there's not the same issues about funding that.
I do understand the difference between for example the right to bear arms and the right to healthcare. One is a right that the government cannot interfere in, the other is a right to something provided by the government. There are however plenty of things provided by the government of far less importance than basic healthcare.
Just to let you know, I thought I'd actually have a look to see if any antivirus detected anything on my disk, so I downloaded and ran MSE. It picked up a trojan in an ancient zip that I never ran because I knew it was suspicious, so fair play for that. Nothing else though, MSE detected zero apart from that one file, and nothing else suspicious. MSE then proceeded to completely hose my system. Booting into Vista produced a BSOD and immediately rebooted. I caught "bad disk" before it rebooted once. Repair did not work, system restore to before MSE was installed did.
So a quick trial of MSE actually caused me way more problems than any virus ever has. A cost/benefit analysis would produce patently obvious results. I'll stick with my way.
When you're using an alphabet, it's true that once you know the letters you will be able to pronounce any word that you come across
Not a chance in English. There are loads of rules involving combinations of letters (ce, ge, kn etx). There are loads of letters and letter combinations that don't have a set pronunciation (th, ough, etc). There are at least hundreds of downright exceptions to all the rules (get, acknowledge, etc). To learn English well, you need to memorise _all_ of these, and many of the exceptions are in common words. As an example, do you pronounce thought like though, but with a t on the end?
Just to let you know, in the US mens rea is the difference between voluntary manslaughter and murder. Just because they don't actively call is such does not mean it does not exist.