I'm not going to argue with you when you try and reduce the argument to a single irrelevant point and then try and extrapolate that back to suggest the rest of your argument is right. This is a classical logical fallacy, and if you cannot argue based on a sound logical argument then you are a lost cause. Either respond to the full argument where all factors are rightly taken into account, or don't waste my time with irrelevant meaningless fallacies that bear no connection to the real question at hand.
The fact you've stooped to this level says all that needs to be said about argument though- you don't have one, and hence, you are wrong.
"The point is its all a step backwards, the system is designed to keep the big boys raking it in and anyone else out so they don't have to compete."
Rubbish. It's designed to make sure the key areas don't get flooded with low quality crap whilst still giving low quality crap developers somewhere to publish. There are numerous examples of XBox Live Indie games that were of sufficiently high quality that Microsoft gave them the option to publish on XBox Live Arcade with all the quality games and developers using exactly the same APIs they do. In other words, if you can produce a game to the quality of the "big boys", then you can release with the "big boys", if not, you stay in the bargain bin and don't make a mess of the main store.
"They restrict the languages you can use, restrict the price you can sell for, the size of game you can produce and force you to use their distribution channel exclusively."
You realise the "big boys" have all these sorts of restrictions too right? Well, except the last one, which is outright false. You can publish to XBLIG and whereever the hell else you want too, that was kinda the whole point of XNA- develop once, run on any Microsoft platform, and no license restrictions preventing you porting elsewhere.
"All of this will ensure that Indie games are always perceived as inferior to the big name studios."
Well that's because they are, and when they're not, they are indeed allowed to graduate to live arcade and play in the same park and with the same toys as the "big boys".
"The high costs of DEV kits holds down the small guys. Also Xbox Live Indie Games has limits that are in place to make it hard to make a game on the level of the big guys."
Yes, I understand, free is pretty fucking expensive. Those evil limits too, I mean, how dare Microsoft require that you need to know a bit about game development to erm, make a game.
"XBLIG games do not have achievements or leaderboards, nor are they listed on a player's "Gamer Card (why does this need to locked out?) at least have leaderboards."
Actually they do have leaderboards. Achievements are the only missing component but this is a harder problem to solve. If you have hundreds of indie games out there where quality control is done by the community then you're going to get massive gamerscore inflation as people buy the cheapest easiest games just to boost making gamerscore meaningless. I'm not sure how Microsoft can solve this one without a separate achievement system for indie games.
It all wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Facebook built up it's userbase around taking information from things like MSN, your e-mail contacts and so forth.
Worse, I've had a Facebook recommendation from Facebook for someone I've only ever spoken to via MSN and have no real life friend connections, and both of us are tech savvy such that neither of us let Facebook import friends from Outlook, MSN etc. and we both live at opposite ends of the country and have never met IRL so I'm still to this day a little perplexed as to how the hell Facebook made that link. It kind of implies that Facebook has had access to MSN data even when explicit permission wasn't given.
In this respect it's sheer hypocrisy, I mean what the hell is wrong with them? It's fine for them to build their business off the back of others, but not for someone else to do the same with them?
"And then you sue them for libel and get it unblocked - in the meantime, setting up a website on a different domain to get your point across."
But how many viewers do you lose in the domain change? where do you find the time and money for the court case?
For what it's worth I also think it's wrong to treat China as a whole, you have a lot more freedom in terms of political speech in Hong Kong and Taiwan than you do as a resident of Guantanamo bay at least. If however you're in Xinjiang province or Tibet then you'll have a much harder time getting your message out than you will in Beijing or Shanghai where dissent is becoming at least slightly tolerated nowadays.
But for me perhaps the biggest point is that China is becoming more philosophical about the idea of freedom of speech, it wants to go there and the upper echelons of the Chinese administration want to take it there, but they want to do so in a way that wont just lead to collapse of a 1.3bn person nation in the way Egypt/Tunisia fell. Whilst some may believe it'd be nice to see China fall we should remember the Chinese Communist Party has 80 million members- if we have regions trying to break free then there wont be an overwhelming majority support that makes the leadership's position untenable, there'll be massive strife, and it'll spin much of Asia into Chaos (Vietnamese/Russian border disputes will reach boiling point, North Korea will collapse etc.).
Now I don't really like the status quo, but I think there has to be some understanding that a jump to greater freedom in China can't be done overnight- but at least they're becoming appreciative of the concept as a longer term goal. One major drive for this is that affluent and influential Chinese businessmen are coming into ever more contact with Westerners, with China's booming industry links to the outside world are becoming more numerous and ever stronger- in that scenario you can't keep Chinese citizens in the dark forever, and so levelling their freedoms to be the same as that of much of the Western world is in itself important to avoid revolt from the growing and ever more affluent middle class too.
This is the problem with the US- in contrast it seems to have spent the last decade eliminating ever more rights and freedoms, and it seems to be working to continue down that path. If things carry on as is there will likely be a crossing point in the next 50 years where China becomes more free than the US.
It's probably the beauty of roman roads that allowed that to be the case. There's any number of junctions where you literally have no visibility left or right onto a 70mph road because there's some 4th century wall or something that can't be knocked down so you basically just close your eyes, keep your fingers crossed and pull out.
It might have worked fine when the fastest thing going down it was a peasant with some half-worn pieces of leather strapped to his foot with a bit of bendy twig, but nowadays many legacy roads here aren't really well designed for cars.
Of course, things like this don't help much either:
Meh, classic Slashdot over reaction stemming from a complete lack of imagination.
I can think of a number of situations in which this would be useful- training being one of them. What better than to use this as an interactive teacher for teaching sign language for example? or even better- allowing people who can't speak to communicate with otherwise voice based systems using sign language.
What about doing things like teaching people to juggle? It could tell them what they're doing wrong, or how to improve.
You might not like the suggest paranoia laced suggestions in the summary, and I'd tend to agree, but I can see this being a very important, very useful bit of research and can certainly lead to systems that I absolutely would want.
This is something I've experienced recently in the UK, a major roundabout on my commute combining two main roads at peak now has lights on it. The combination of lights/roundabout is definitely better than just roundabout used to be at busy periods, but at off-peak periods, or during school holidays when roads are quiet the roundabout alone without lights was much better.
But the other week one of the lights half way round was out, no problem for me, but sucked for those trying to come off that road though not a big deal, they still managed without much of a tail back. Two days later they fixed that light, but didn't sync the lights after they fixed it, it took 30mins to get down the offramp, and round the roundabout, and heading north the other side of the motorway queuing to get onto the roundabout stretched my entire commute on that road- a 10mile+ standstill tail back all because the lights weren't properly in sync!
It really drove home for me how important getting things like lights is, and it shows how bad lights can be far far more problematic than a roundabout will ever be even at the worst of times as prior to the lights it was never ever that bad.
"Had they given a shit about the terrorist attacks or people getting their heads cut off they would have helped a bit more and got these fuckers brought to justice much sooner."
Right, and if you hadn't entered a pointless war in Iraq seeking cheap oil such that it had absolutely nothing to do with Al Qaeda because Iraq was majority shiite and Al Qaeda was Sunni and so tend to hate each other's guts then those people wouldn't have got their heads cut off in the first place would they?
But no it's all their fault. You're obviously too young to remember 9/11 properly or something like that judging by your utter ignorance of the situation, but if you did remember it you'd remember candle light vigils in countries like Pakistan and Iran supporting the US people in their hour of distress. Of course, that didn't stop Bush attacking them or anything, which forced them onto the side of extremism because you made it quite clear you didn't want them on your side so where else were they meant to go? If your hold out your hand and offer to help someone against your enemy and they bitch slap you in the face, is it really any suprise they then go help your enemy instead? That's exactly what the US did to the muslim world.
"Muslim lead countries actively suppress these fundamental rights amongst their citizens. The Muslim countries display little or no tolerance towards others and they have an annoying habit of bringing their intolerance with them when they immigrate to the west. They demand respect but offer none in return."
This is the irony of comments from people like you, you show you don't actually have any idea what you're on about.
Ignoring the fact that there are 1.3 billion muslims across the world, and many varied nations in which they are no less open than the US, some countries problems actually step from the fact they are too open.
Unlike the US, much of Pakistan is ungoverned in terms of for example, how you drive your car- there are no rules of the road, and if you have a crash you sort it out between yourselves, the law doesn't determine that. Sex with young teens isn't illegal under some jurisdictions but herein lies the problem- you surely recognise that laws governing these things in the west are actually beneficial? This is really the fallacy of the US mindset of freedom- it's a false ideal, you think you have freedom, and/or you think you want more freedom, but really some freedoms you would say no to- you wouldn't support the right to murder whoever you want without punishment, and so the question is really about where the line is drawn in terms of freedom- even your precious freedom of speech has limitations in that you can be punished for some speech.
The problem isn't muslims, or islam, it's a lack of fundamental respect and understanding of them by people like you living in your shroud of ignorance. Sure some muslims too are guilty of precisely this, but I assure you out of 1.3 billion of them, many are perfectly decent, nice, friendly, helpful people who wouldn't care too much about what you want to say or do. Many muslims particularly in those freshly liberated countries who have recently had or in the midst of revolutions still support a secular state despite their religious belief, yet in the US there is an ever strong push for it to be a religious christian state- where some muslim nations are going forward, the US is going backwards. Many people in places like Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand et al. cringed when they saw Americans celebrating over Osama's death by firing guns in the air- do you realise how similar such celebrations looked to us to the celebrations you saw in places like Iraq when a US citizens had been captured and killed and the population were firing AK-47s in the air? It was a rather creepy resemblance.
Things aren't black and white, the US shares many problems with the nations you are talking about, and herein lies the problem- you need to sort your own back yard out before you criticise others.
"That mistake is being repeated right as we speak, by the way - US is now indiscriminately handing out weapons to Libyan rebels, a sizable chunk of which are fundamentalists (heck, al-Qaeda has officially supported them and said they have units on the ground there!)."
There was an amusing interview a couple of months back a BBC guy did with one of the fighters who claimed to have been an insurgent that had come over from Iraq to fight witht he Libyans, when the reporter asked him if he felt it was a bit hypocritical that he was now relying on air support from the very military from which he had actually killed US soldiers he replied along the lines of "No, Gaddaffi is a bigger infidel so it's okay".
In this context I'm not sure who are the bigger hypocrites- the US et al. or the militants themselves. They seem to be as bad as each other.
"The religious tensions I am sure had nothing to do with the fact that they came over here and fucking killed us."
Yes, and why did they do that exactly? Nothing to do with US meddling in and fucking up their country for the 20 years previous or anything was it?
The attack on Afghanistan was somewhat justified as a response to 9/11, but the attack on Iraq was wholly unjustified, coupled with Bush turning down an opportunity to work with Iran after 9/11 and instead declaring it part of the axis of evil it was these actions that turned it into a religious war. The increase in tensions between east and west has become far worse since 9/11, purely because of the way Bush handled it- the Muslim world condemned the action en-masse and rather than reaching out to them to foster understanding and a combined stance against extremism Bush attacked them, and made things a whole lot worse, he gave Al Qaeda more power and credibility than they could ever have dreamed of, he boosted the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas beyond anything they had previously by making the US a hate target which they could rally against and gain ever more support against.
Oh nevermind, you're too ignorant to understand. Your signature gives it away.
"I do not like people that have simple minds. They are easily swayed by emotions at first then can never be moved my fact again."
It's probably not healthy to talk about yourself like that, self-hate is often a sure path to suicide. It's ironic that you are the clear epitome of ignorance, yet seem to think you're smarter than other people... how very amusing.
"he has proven himself to be just like the retard he replaced in most respects. reform my ass."
Well, as a foreigner there's at least one area we can be thankful you have Obama, and that's that at least Obama is just fucking your country up, in contrast, Bush managed to fuck everyone's country up between managing to drastically increase religious tension in the world and nurture policies that brought the world economy to near collapse.
I suppose you could be thankful that he at least hasn't started any new trillion dollar wars too, that's got to be something right? look at the positive side and all that? bit of a ray of sunshine there no? No okay, I guess not. Perhaps you're right.
I'm trying to tell you the reasoning is completely different.
People have children to pass on their genes, and to have someone to look after them in their old age amongst other things.
People have dogs for companionship, or fun.
You can't compare the two, they're completely different things, yet still you're basing your argument on false analogies which proves how fundamentally flawed and invalid your argument is. Until you can grasp that your argument is based on false premises you wont be able to realise why you're wrong. It requires you to be capable of basic logical deduction. Work on it, perhaps you'll get it eventually.
Stop teasing them, stop attacking them first or whatever you're doing.
Thank you for demonstrating why it's you that is the problem, not the dogs. It's unlikely that anyone would get attacked by a single dog in their lifetime, to get attacked by 4 demonstrates that there is something very very wrong with you and that you are the problematic common factor.
"The fact that you think it makes no scientific sense that dogs can bite people shows where your view of the world lies. Agression has not been bread completely out of ANY dog."
Yes, and it's not bred out of any human either, but that doesn't mean you'd expect to be attacked by a buddhist monk when you walk by does it? To get that aggression out of dogs where aggression has been selected away from, you have to do something to provoke them. Just like you would have to do something to provoke the buddhist- you know, like make him feel his life is in danger from you.
"You are no better than the guy that thinks it is safe to shoot his gun off in town."
Right, and you're no better than the guy who bullies a kid at school, then wonders why the kid just lost it one day and shot him. You blame the kid, you blame the gun, but really, it was you.
You talk about self-selection, why don't you realise that if you really have done nothing to provoke the animals, that to get attacked by 1, let alone 4 dogs you have to be the unluckiest person of the ~6.5billion in the world, and that your opinion might therefore be completely and utterly out of whack with reality because it's been swayed by a massively unlikely statistical occurance? It's like Steve Irwin claiming from the afterlife that stingrays are the most dangerous fish in the sea, based on the fact he was the first person to be killed by one in about a hundred years. I can see why he would reach that conclusion, just like I can see why you've reached yours, but you're still completely and utterly wrong.
None of that makes sense, because GFW allows all that, and the overlay is certainly no worse than the Steam one at least although I agree, both could be much better.
The whole point of GFW was to bring XBox friends list, voice/text chat, achievements and so forth to Windows so I don't really get your point about social interactions, communications and so forth? That was one of the main reasons it was built. Are you sure you've actually ever even used it?
"There is nothing this gang will do that will be in Google's interest."
You mean except Sony whose major smartphone interest right now is Android?
Really, this consortium covers iPhone, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and yes, Android interests. I'm not sure there will be much that will come of it frankly. I think everyone was bidding in this case for defensive patents. Obviously Google could've outbid them but it probably feels at $4bn the risk of being succesfully sued to that tune is pretty much non-existent, and I think they're probably right.
"You are a perfect example of why there is such a big problem. You would take a dangerous animal and give it to someone, telling them that it is a safe loving creature that won't maul some little kid. You are a danger to society."
Actually on the contrary, it shows you're ignorant and simply don't know what the fuck you're on about, have no knowledge of dogs, and no knowledge of animal behaviour in general. It's well documented that some breeds of dogs have simply had aggression bred out of them, and abuse will not bring this back, so your argument doesn't even make sense scientifically.
As it is clear you don't even understand the topic at hand I wonder why you would even feel qualified to comment. Alternatively, you could go to your local dog rescue centre, ask them how many dogs they rehomed that were abused have ever gone on to bite anyone, and you'll find the figure is an absolutely irrelevant minority and where it has happened it's been with breeds known to be problematic.
But most likely you'll continue to bask in your utter ignorance of the topic but still feel the need to pretend you know what you're on about, when you simply clearly do not.
Of course it has to do with buying and selling because by buying you create market demand, and by creating market demand you exagerate the problem needlessly.
You can't try and separate the two, because they're inextricably linked.
That's simply not true, just because an animal has been abused doesn't make it aggressive. Animals, like people, respond in very different ways to abuse- some show fear reactions to humans and will never trust them again, others regain their trust in humans with some loving care, and others never really stop loving humans, even after abuse, which is perhaps the most heartbreaking of scenarios, because I've seen even long serving officers brought to tears when a dog still tries to cuddle up to them and display affection by licking them right after they've rescued it from some horrendous abuse.
There is certainly a danger in the case of dangerous breeds who have abused and who have a fear reaction (aggression) towards humans, but in other cases where the dogs have demonstrably got over it, or not shown that reaction at all then it's silly to suggest they can't be put back in public as they're no different at that point to an animal that hasn't been abused.
"You also believe I have never been to any rescue centres and that I have not taken advice from rescue centre staff, even though I said that I had in my first post. "
This is not what I believe, but your comments imply that if you actually have been to a centre and spoken to rescue centre staff that you didn't take any knowledge away from it because your comments contradict reality.
"No, because while I agree that rescuing dogs is a good thing and appropriate for some, you insist that no alternative to rescuing can ever be permitted. "
This is not entirely true, I believe it shouldn't be permitted right now because there is a big enough selection of strays available for it to be pointless and contributory to the problem. Should the rescue problem be resolved down to a manageable level through neutering of adoptions, and greaters levels of adoptions followed by falling levels of strays then certainly breeding begins to hold a purpose.
"Is it wrong to decide to have your own children rather than adopting one of them?"
Yet another false analogy of the same level as the illogical arguments that you keep resorting to. Having your own children is about passing on your genes, buying a dog and adopting a dog has nothing to do with this.
A correct analogy would, if you couldn't have children of your own, be the difference between buying a child from someone who breeds to sell, and adopting a child from an adoption centre. I guess this more correct analogy doesn't fit well with your world view though as yes, I think most people would agree that breeding children to sell is rather pointless when there are plenty of less fortunate ones available to adopt.
But maybe now you've had the flaw in your analogy pointed out and a more correct analogy returned to you based on your own example you'll get it? Probably not though, and to spin your final comment back to you- I'm sure many parents would be very keen to hear your justification as to why breeding of children for sale when you can't have your own makes sense when there are plenty available for adoption who would love nothing more than a nice home? I don't think you really thought that analogy through did you?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to argue with you when you try and reduce the argument to a single irrelevant point and then try and extrapolate that back to suggest the rest of your argument is right. This is a classical logical fallacy, and if you cannot argue based on a sound logical argument then you are a lost cause. Either respond to the full argument where all factors are rightly taken into account, or don't waste my time with irrelevant meaningless fallacies that bear no connection to the real question at hand.
The fact you've stooped to this level says all that needs to be said about argument though- you don't have one, and hence, you are wrong.
"The point is its all a step backwards, the system is designed to keep the big boys raking it in and anyone else out so they don't have to compete."
Rubbish. It's designed to make sure the key areas don't get flooded with low quality crap whilst still giving low quality crap developers somewhere to publish. There are numerous examples of XBox Live Indie games that were of sufficiently high quality that Microsoft gave them the option to publish on XBox Live Arcade with all the quality games and developers using exactly the same APIs they do. In other words, if you can produce a game to the quality of the "big boys", then you can release with the "big boys", if not, you stay in the bargain bin and don't make a mess of the main store.
"They restrict the languages you can use, restrict the price you can sell for, the size of game you can produce and force you to use their distribution channel exclusively."
You realise the "big boys" have all these sorts of restrictions too right? Well, except the last one, which is outright false. You can publish to XBLIG and whereever the hell else you want too, that was kinda the whole point of XNA- develop once, run on any Microsoft platform, and no license restrictions preventing you porting elsewhere.
"All of this will ensure that Indie games are always perceived as inferior to the big name studios."
Well that's because they are, and when they're not, they are indeed allowed to graduate to live arcade and play in the same park and with the same toys as the "big boys".
"The high costs of DEV kits holds down the small guys. Also Xbox Live Indie Games has limits that are in place to make it hard to make a game on the level of the big guys."
Yes, I understand, free is pretty fucking expensive. Those evil limits too, I mean, how dare Microsoft require that you need to know a bit about game development to erm, make a game.
"XBLIG games do not have achievements or leaderboards, nor are they listed on a player's "Gamer Card (why does this need to locked out?) at least have leaderboards."
Actually they do have leaderboards. Achievements are the only missing component but this is a harder problem to solve. If you have hundreds of indie games out there where quality control is done by the community then you're going to get massive gamerscore inflation as people buy the cheapest easiest games just to boost making gamerscore meaningless. I'm not sure how Microsoft can solve this one without a separate achievement system for indie games.
It all wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Facebook built up it's userbase around taking information from things like MSN, your e-mail contacts and so forth.
Worse, I've had a Facebook recommendation from Facebook for someone I've only ever spoken to via MSN and have no real life friend connections, and both of us are tech savvy such that neither of us let Facebook import friends from Outlook, MSN etc. and we both live at opposite ends of the country and have never met IRL so I'm still to this day a little perplexed as to how the hell Facebook made that link. It kind of implies that Facebook has had access to MSN data even when explicit permission wasn't given.
In this respect it's sheer hypocrisy, I mean what the hell is wrong with them? It's fine for them to build their business off the back of others, but not for someone else to do the same with them?
"And then you sue them for libel and get it unblocked - in the meantime, setting up a website on a different domain to get your point across."
But how many viewers do you lose in the domain change? where do you find the time and money for the court case?
For what it's worth I also think it's wrong to treat China as a whole, you have a lot more freedom in terms of political speech in Hong Kong and Taiwan than you do as a resident of Guantanamo bay at least. If however you're in Xinjiang province or Tibet then you'll have a much harder time getting your message out than you will in Beijing or Shanghai where dissent is becoming at least slightly tolerated nowadays.
But for me perhaps the biggest point is that China is becoming more philosophical about the idea of freedom of speech, it wants to go there and the upper echelons of the Chinese administration want to take it there, but they want to do so in a way that wont just lead to collapse of a 1.3bn person nation in the way Egypt/Tunisia fell. Whilst some may believe it'd be nice to see China fall we should remember the Chinese Communist Party has 80 million members- if we have regions trying to break free then there wont be an overwhelming majority support that makes the leadership's position untenable, there'll be massive strife, and it'll spin much of Asia into Chaos (Vietnamese/Russian border disputes will reach boiling point, North Korea will collapse etc.).
Now I don't really like the status quo, but I think there has to be some understanding that a jump to greater freedom in China can't be done overnight- but at least they're becoming appreciative of the concept as a longer term goal. One major drive for this is that affluent and influential Chinese businessmen are coming into ever more contact with Westerners, with China's booming industry links to the outside world are becoming more numerous and ever stronger- in that scenario you can't keep Chinese citizens in the dark forever, and so levelling their freedoms to be the same as that of much of the Western world is in itself important to avoid revolt from the growing and ever more affluent middle class too.
This is the problem with the US- in contrast it seems to have spent the last decade eliminating ever more rights and freedoms, and it seems to be working to continue down that path. If things carry on as is there will likely be a crossing point in the next 50 years where China becomes more free than the US.
It's probably the beauty of roman roads that allowed that to be the case. There's any number of junctions where you literally have no visibility left or right onto a 70mph road because there's some 4th century wall or something that can't be knocked down so you basically just close your eyes, keep your fingers crossed and pull out.
It might have worked fine when the fastest thing going down it was a peasant with some half-worn pieces of leather strapped to his foot with a bit of bendy twig, but nowadays many legacy roads here aren't really well designed for cars.
Of course, things like this don't help much either:
http://m8motorway.tripod.com/m8_glasgow_j15.htm
Meh, classic Slashdot over reaction stemming from a complete lack of imagination.
I can think of a number of situations in which this would be useful- training being one of them. What better than to use this as an interactive teacher for teaching sign language for example? or even better- allowing people who can't speak to communicate with otherwise voice based systems using sign language.
What about doing things like teaching people to juggle? It could tell them what they're doing wrong, or how to improve.
You might not like the suggest paranoia laced suggestions in the summary, and I'd tend to agree, but I can see this being a very important, very useful bit of research and can certainly lead to systems that I absolutely would want.
This is something I've experienced recently in the UK, a major roundabout on my commute combining two main roads at peak now has lights on it. The combination of lights/roundabout is definitely better than just roundabout used to be at busy periods, but at off-peak periods, or during school holidays when roads are quiet the roundabout alone without lights was much better.
But the other week one of the lights half way round was out, no problem for me, but sucked for those trying to come off that road though not a big deal, they still managed without much of a tail back. Two days later they fixed that light, but didn't sync the lights after they fixed it, it took 30mins to get down the offramp, and round the roundabout, and heading north the other side of the motorway queuing to get onto the roundabout stretched my entire commute on that road- a 10mile+ standstill tail back all because the lights weren't properly in sync!
It really drove home for me how important getting things like lights is, and it shows how bad lights can be far far more problematic than a roundabout will ever be even at the worst of times as prior to the lights it was never ever that bad.
"Had they given a shit about the terrorist attacks or people getting their heads cut off they would have helped a bit more and got these fuckers brought to justice much sooner."
Right, and if you hadn't entered a pointless war in Iraq seeking cheap oil such that it had absolutely nothing to do with Al Qaeda because Iraq was majority shiite and Al Qaeda was Sunni and so tend to hate each other's guts then those people wouldn't have got their heads cut off in the first place would they?
But no it's all their fault. You're obviously too young to remember 9/11 properly or something like that judging by your utter ignorance of the situation, but if you did remember it you'd remember candle light vigils in countries like Pakistan and Iran supporting the US people in their hour of distress. Of course, that didn't stop Bush attacking them or anything, which forced them onto the side of extremism because you made it quite clear you didn't want them on your side so where else were they meant to go? If your hold out your hand and offer to help someone against your enemy and they bitch slap you in the face, is it really any suprise they then go help your enemy instead? That's exactly what the US did to the muslim world.
"Muslim lead countries actively suppress these fundamental rights amongst their citizens. The Muslim countries display little or no tolerance towards others and they have an annoying habit of bringing their intolerance with them when they immigrate to the west. They demand respect but offer none in return."
This is the irony of comments from people like you, you show you don't actually have any idea what you're on about.
Ignoring the fact that there are 1.3 billion muslims across the world, and many varied nations in which they are no less open than the US, some countries problems actually step from the fact they are too open.
Unlike the US, much of Pakistan is ungoverned in terms of for example, how you drive your car- there are no rules of the road, and if you have a crash you sort it out between yourselves, the law doesn't determine that. Sex with young teens isn't illegal under some jurisdictions but herein lies the problem- you surely recognise that laws governing these things in the west are actually beneficial? This is really the fallacy of the US mindset of freedom- it's a false ideal, you think you have freedom, and/or you think you want more freedom, but really some freedoms you would say no to- you wouldn't support the right to murder whoever you want without punishment, and so the question is really about where the line is drawn in terms of freedom- even your precious freedom of speech has limitations in that you can be punished for some speech.
The problem isn't muslims, or islam, it's a lack of fundamental respect and understanding of them by people like you living in your shroud of ignorance. Sure some muslims too are guilty of precisely this, but I assure you out of 1.3 billion of them, many are perfectly decent, nice, friendly, helpful people who wouldn't care too much about what you want to say or do. Many muslims particularly in those freshly liberated countries who have recently had or in the midst of revolutions still support a secular state despite their religious belief, yet in the US there is an ever strong push for it to be a religious christian state- where some muslim nations are going forward, the US is going backwards. Many people in places like Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand et al. cringed when they saw Americans celebrating over Osama's death by firing guns in the air- do you realise how similar such celebrations looked to us to the celebrations you saw in places like Iraq when a US citizens had been captured and killed and the population were firing AK-47s in the air? It was a rather creepy resemblance.
Things aren't black and white, the US shares many problems with the nations you are talking about, and herein lies the problem- you need to sort your own back yard out before you criticise others.
"That mistake is being repeated right as we speak, by the way - US is now indiscriminately handing out weapons to Libyan rebels, a sizable chunk of which are fundamentalists (heck, al-Qaeda has officially supported them and said they have units on the ground there!)."
There was an amusing interview a couple of months back a BBC guy did with one of the fighters who claimed to have been an insurgent that had come over from Iraq to fight witht he Libyans, when the reporter asked him if he felt it was a bit hypocritical that he was now relying on air support from the very military from which he had actually killed US soldiers he replied along the lines of "No, Gaddaffi is a bigger infidel so it's okay".
In this context I'm not sure who are the bigger hypocrites- the US et al. or the militants themselves. They seem to be as bad as each other.
"The religious tensions I am sure had nothing to do with the fact that they came over here and fucking killed us."
Yes, and why did they do that exactly? Nothing to do with US meddling in and fucking up their country for the 20 years previous or anything was it?
The attack on Afghanistan was somewhat justified as a response to 9/11, but the attack on Iraq was wholly unjustified, coupled with Bush turning down an opportunity to work with Iran after 9/11 and instead declaring it part of the axis of evil it was these actions that turned it into a religious war. The increase in tensions between east and west has become far worse since 9/11, purely because of the way Bush handled it- the Muslim world condemned the action en-masse and rather than reaching out to them to foster understanding and a combined stance against extremism Bush attacked them, and made things a whole lot worse, he gave Al Qaeda more power and credibility than they could ever have dreamed of, he boosted the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas beyond anything they had previously by making the US a hate target which they could rally against and gain ever more support against.
Oh nevermind, you're too ignorant to understand. Your signature gives it away.
"I do not like people that have simple minds. They are easily swayed by emotions at first then can never be moved my fact again."
It's probably not healthy to talk about yourself like that, self-hate is often a sure path to suicide. It's ironic that you are the clear epitome of ignorance, yet seem to think you're smarter than other people... how very amusing.
"he has proven himself to be just like the retard he replaced in most respects. reform my ass."
Well, as a foreigner there's at least one area we can be thankful you have Obama, and that's that at least Obama is just fucking your country up, in contrast, Bush managed to fuck everyone's country up between managing to drastically increase religious tension in the world and nurture policies that brought the world economy to near collapse.
I suppose you could be thankful that he at least hasn't started any new trillion dollar wars too, that's got to be something right? look at the positive side and all that? bit of a ray of sunshine there no? No okay, I guess not. Perhaps you're right.
So I guess you're voting for the Republican candidate in 2012 then?
I'm trying to tell you the reasoning is completely different.
People have children to pass on their genes, and to have someone to look after them in their old age amongst other things.
People have dogs for companionship, or fun.
You can't compare the two, they're completely different things, yet still you're basing your argument on false analogies which proves how fundamentally flawed and invalid your argument is. Until you can grasp that your argument is based on false premises you wont be able to realise why you're wrong. It requires you to be capable of basic logical deduction. Work on it, perhaps you'll get it eventually.
Stop teasing them, stop attacking them first or whatever you're doing.
Thank you for demonstrating why it's you that is the problem, not the dogs. It's unlikely that anyone would get attacked by a single dog in their lifetime, to get attacked by 4 demonstrates that there is something very very wrong with you and that you are the problematic common factor.
"The fact that you think it makes no scientific sense that dogs can bite people shows where your view of the world lies. Agression has not been bread completely out of ANY dog."
Yes, and it's not bred out of any human either, but that doesn't mean you'd expect to be attacked by a buddhist monk when you walk by does it? To get that aggression out of dogs where aggression has been selected away from, you have to do something to provoke them. Just like you would have to do something to provoke the buddhist- you know, like make him feel his life is in danger from you.
"You are no better than the guy that thinks it is safe to shoot his gun off in town."
Right, and you're no better than the guy who bullies a kid at school, then wonders why the kid just lost it one day and shot him. You blame the kid, you blame the gun, but really, it was you.
You talk about self-selection, why don't you realise that if you really have done nothing to provoke the animals, that to get attacked by 1, let alone 4 dogs you have to be the unluckiest person of the ~6.5billion in the world, and that your opinion might therefore be completely and utterly out of whack with reality because it's been swayed by a massively unlikely statistical occurance? It's like Steve Irwin claiming from the afterlife that stingrays are the most dangerous fish in the sea, based on the fact he was the first person to be killed by one in about a hundred years. I can see why he would reach that conclusion, just like I can see why you've reached yours, but you're still completely and utterly wrong.
No, it's not. Trust me, I've developed with this API, the GfW DRM does not do that, that's external DRM implemented by the company who made the game.
Achievements are triggered by simple API calls that do not require anything like that kind of invasiveness.
That's not GfW, that's some game building DRM around it.
It's also unfortunately not a GfW games problem, more and more DRM does this type of thing.
The real problem here is bad DRM (or, well, DRM in general).
None of that makes sense, because GFW allows all that, and the overlay is certainly no worse than the Steam one at least although I agree, both could be much better.
The whole point of GFW was to bring XBox friends list, voice/text chat, achievements and so forth to Windows so I don't really get your point about social interactions, communications and so forth? That was one of the main reasons it was built. Are you sure you've actually ever even used it?
"There is nothing this gang will do that will be in Google's interest."
You mean except Sony whose major smartphone interest right now is Android?
Really, this consortium covers iPhone, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and yes, Android interests. I'm not sure there will be much that will come of it frankly. I think everyone was bidding in this case for defensive patents. Obviously Google could've outbid them but it probably feels at $4bn the risk of being succesfully sued to that tune is pretty much non-existent, and I think they're probably right.
"You are a perfect example of why there is such a big problem. You would take a dangerous animal and give it to someone, telling them that it is a safe loving creature that won't maul some little kid. You are a danger to society."
Actually on the contrary, it shows you're ignorant and simply don't know what the fuck you're on about, have no knowledge of dogs, and no knowledge of animal behaviour in general. It's well documented that some breeds of dogs have simply had aggression bred out of them, and abuse will not bring this back, so your argument doesn't even make sense scientifically.
As it is clear you don't even understand the topic at hand I wonder why you would even feel qualified to comment. Alternatively, you could go to your local dog rescue centre, ask them how many dogs they rehomed that were abused have ever gone on to bite anyone, and you'll find the figure is an absolutely irrelevant minority and where it has happened it's been with breeds known to be problematic.
But most likely you'll continue to bask in your utter ignorance of the topic but still feel the need to pretend you know what you're on about, when you simply clearly do not.
What new act are you referring to that supposedly made censorship legal?
Censorship has always been legal in one way or another- IWF, BBFC etc.
Of course it has to do with buying and selling because by buying you create market demand, and by creating market demand you exagerate the problem needlessly.
You can't try and separate the two, because they're inextricably linked.
That's simply not true, just because an animal has been abused doesn't make it aggressive. Animals, like people, respond in very different ways to abuse- some show fear reactions to humans and will never trust them again, others regain their trust in humans with some loving care, and others never really stop loving humans, even after abuse, which is perhaps the most heartbreaking of scenarios, because I've seen even long serving officers brought to tears when a dog still tries to cuddle up to them and display affection by licking them right after they've rescued it from some horrendous abuse.
There is certainly a danger in the case of dangerous breeds who have abused and who have a fear reaction (aggression) towards humans, but in other cases where the dogs have demonstrably got over it, or not shown that reaction at all then it's silly to suggest they can't be put back in public as they're no different at that point to an animal that hasn't been abused.
"You also believe I have never been to any rescue centres and that I have not taken advice from rescue centre staff, even though I said that I had in my first post. "
This is not what I believe, but your comments imply that if you actually have been to a centre and spoken to rescue centre staff that you didn't take any knowledge away from it because your comments contradict reality.
"No, because while I agree that rescuing dogs is a good thing and appropriate for some, you insist that no alternative to rescuing can ever be permitted. "
This is not entirely true, I believe it shouldn't be permitted right now because there is a big enough selection of strays available for it to be pointless and contributory to the problem. Should the rescue problem be resolved down to a manageable level through neutering of adoptions, and greaters levels of adoptions followed by falling levels of strays then certainly breeding begins to hold a purpose.
"Is it wrong to decide to have your own children rather than adopting one of them?"
Yet another false analogy of the same level as the illogical arguments that you keep resorting to. Having your own children is about passing on your genes, buying a dog and adopting a dog has nothing to do with this.
A correct analogy would, if you couldn't have children of your own, be the difference between buying a child from someone who breeds to sell, and adopting a child from an adoption centre. I guess this more correct analogy doesn't fit well with your world view though as yes, I think most people would agree that breeding children to sell is rather pointless when there are plenty of less fortunate ones available to adopt.
But maybe now you've had the flaw in your analogy pointed out and a more correct analogy returned to you based on your own example you'll get it? Probably not though, and to spin your final comment back to you- I'm sure many parents would be very keen to hear your justification as to why breeding of children for sale when you can't have your own makes sense when there are plenty available for adoption who would love nothing more than a nice home? I don't think you really thought that analogy through did you?