It's amusing because it does make them look a bit special, but it is in itself a sign of their intelligence. It's believed that dogs tilt their heads because the muzzle obscures part of their vision and by doing so it allows them to better see your facial expressions when looking at you - in particular your mouth.
The fact you're asking a question and they do this shows that they're aware that you're asking something of them and they're trying to interpret what you're asking of them, this is one of the reasons dogs are deemed to be particularly intelligent because they can read meaning in your voice and do look for other cues as to what you're asking of them.
Microsoft have a lot of digital content too. In my experience no one buys an X1 for just Skype, even if they're not primarily using it for gaming they're subscribing to and paying for some digital content and/or paying for Xbox Live Gold to access such features, so Microsoft cashes in pretty well even without games purchases.
Fortunately though for Microsoft it just doesn't matter.
Last generation had the worst hardware do best, with the best hardware doing worst.
We got Minecraft, one of the single most succesful games of all time proving that it's not about the graphics.
Anyone who thinks the technical details matter at this point are completely missing the point.
More than anything the battle will be lost or won on marketing and exclusives. The real reason Microsoft is behind has really absolutely nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the fact that it got itself off to a catastrophic marketing failure from the off and it takes time to shake that image. Even here, a technical news site where people should be uptodate on technical news people still parrot nonsense about how Kinect is manadatory and spies on you (it isn't and doesn't, you can unplug it and everything works well, and there's no unexplained data transfers across the network that could be a video stream).
Microsoft needs to make it clearer than ever that the console no longer requires phone home (something even Steam requires FWIW) and that Kinect isn't mandatory to be plugged in. I disagree with the premise that Kinect should be made optional though, Microsoft made the right choice is ensuring it's standard precisely because it means we can have everything from a decent controllerless way of managing the console when using it as a media centre through to games where we can use hand signals and voice commands to order our squad or whatever. Because it's guaranteed to be available developers can put the proper amount of effort in to make it worthwhile because it's not just some addon that only a fringe few will have.
Full disclosure: I have all current gen consoles including the WiiU, I like them all for different reasons. In no cases is that reason hardware performance though - the WiiU is woefully underpowered compared to the PS4 and X1 but games like Pikmin 3 look absolutely fucking beautiful regardless and is perfectly smooth to boot.
This is sensible advice. I wrote an aimbot, speed hack, and auto dispenser detonate for Quake/TF but I only ever used it on a private server with the full knowledge of everyone else on the server because I was well aware of both the consequences of it's use and the ethics of using such a thing (frankly, I fucking hate cheaters, and I hate hypocrits, so it'd be stupid to ever use it live).
It was one of the most valuable learning experiences I've ever had, I learnt a hell of a lot about network programming, Windows internals, security, and game math.
It's a thing that I'd absolutely say is worth doing as a learning experience without a doubt, but don't ever actually do it in a manner that genuinely effects other players at least without their consent, otherwise you get what you deserve.
"If you dare to oppose, your news will be boring, which makes your ratings drop, which also has the "nice" side effect that fewer people are going to hear it."
It doesn't even reach that stage, move away from the tightly controlled US military escort and dare to report the real war in a war zone and your press convoy gets strafed by an A-10 or an Apache picks you off from a km away because pickup trucks look like T-72s and cameras look like RPGs. Apparently.
You're not making any sense, why would the stuff we mine be "low radioactive" as you illiterately put it. If it was it'd be no use, the whole point in nuclear energy is we use the highly radioactive properties to generate energy as a result of the reactions triggered. If the resultant waste was more radioactive then we wouldn't need to pursue fusion because our existing fission would be churning out constantly more energetic materials forever but that's not how it works. The materials become depleted as we produce energy with them which means they're less radioactive than they were to start with.
So never mind you telling me to learn how my country handles waste to educate myself, perhaps instead you should learn at least 3rd grade English and Science before mouthing off like an idiot.
"What about economies of scale and the more appliance like, smaller scale fission reactor developed by Taylor Wilson? Wikipedia repeatedly has nuclear power as one of the cheapest sources available in different locations, if not the cheapest."
Right, naturally it is, but the problem is that we're not paying the price nowadays of nuclear power plants in a competitive market because the remaining firms that can and will do the projects are able to price gouge due to lack of competition. That drastically increases the real actual price - as I pointed out the cost of the UK's new nuclear will be double what we currently pay which makes it drastically more expensive than any current power generation option.
The UK doesn't have the in-house nuclear power plant building skills anymore so it can never ever access that theoretical cheap rate of nuclear power in practice because to have nuclear it's at the whim of foreign companies as to how much they want to charge.
"The HS2 rail project is reported to cost anywhere from £28 billion (with less tunneling) to £80 billion."
No one seriously thinks it'll cost £28 billion, I'm not even sure where that figure is from. The budget is £50bn and such projects are never, ever on or below budget.
"Did you leave out the price of labor to have the panels installed?"
I'm assuming you used headline numbers for a private installation or some such but a large percentage of those numbers consists of tax - the labourers alone will be taxed at least 20% on their income through income tax alone, and then there's NI, and most of what's left will be spent and incur VAT. There's corporation tax for the company involved, and import tariffs on panels if bought outside the EU and so on and so forth. There's also profit for the installation company itself. There's also a return on power sold back to industry and possibly even overseas as it would generate a surplus which can reasonably be included as it's not as if this is something that could be done overnight.
I'm not saying we should go down this route, I'm actually personally a fan of nuclear so if your key point is that, that I shouldn't hate on nuclear then hey, I'm completely with you. But without spending even more to build up a new indigenous nuclear power plant building industry than we're just never going to see that cheap nuclear, it's always going to be more expensive as we're held to ransom over it. It's cheap if you can do it yourself and tell predatory overseas companies to go fuck themselves, but the UK stupidly threw away that option in the past. It's just not open to us anymore.
Yeah sorry, just had a look to refresh my memory. EDF dropped their originally bid as a single entity, and Fujitsu dropped out completely as did the others.
The Chinese stake is 40% though, I wouldn't call that small by any measure. They're also free to take up to 100% eventually.
Put it back where you found the elements in the first place?
If we're okay to have them buried deep underground in their unspent pre-mined state then why care about having them there in their spent post-fuel state?
If you have an irrational fear of buried nuclear isotopes then you should probably be more scared about the unspent versions that occur naturally.
Right, what you say is spot on, but unfortunately it doesn't map to the reality of what the stock market deems a "successful" company - one that grows and hence expands it's share price. Too many investors are of the buy low, sell high variety, rather than the dividends variety, so if you don't want to cater to that mindset you should probably just go private else you can only expect to carry on hearing people tell you you're a "failure" because you only pulled in $20bn last quarter instead of $22bn.
Yes it's silly, yes it's stupid, but it's unfortunately the reality There are actually many barely known but absolutely massive companies that stay private for precisely the reasons described here though.
Waste isn't the issue, it's the cost. Look at the problems the UK has had with trying to get a new nuclear plant built. Unless you're willing to let the handful of companies with the expertise to build a safe modern nuclear plant rip you the fuck off then you can't have one.
The British government had to agree to let them double the already insanely high energy price per kilowatt in the UK to get a part Chinese bid to agree to build the plant after all the other bidders such as France's EDF dropped out. So for a doubling of the cost of energy generated by the plant, a government subsidy, and allowing the Chinese government to have power over a major British energy source we were able to get ourselves a new nuclear plant. Is it worth it? I don't think so for a second.
There seems not to be a functioning nuclear power plant market and if the price per kilowatt they're demanding is legit then it's too prohibitively expensive compared to just using genuine renewables.
This said I figured out for the price of the pointless HS2 rail project in the UK that no one with any sense wants we could build two new nuclear power plants and still have change left over to literally pay for solar panels to be installed on every single house in the country. So even though it's all insanely expensive it's still not retardedly expensive as some pet projects I suppose.
Don't expect any rationality over the UK system. It's actually very good as it means anyone can get a degree equally no matter how poor or wealthy you are and the burden on paying it only depends on how successful you are in life after you have graduated. If your degree doesn't work out in getting you paid a reasonable wage then you never pay, if it does, you pay it back to society.
The problem is our government is a coalition and the Tories needed something to slam the Lib Dems with ahead of the electoral system change referendum and this was the perfect tool.
As such all the stuff surrounding tuition fees in the UK is mostly complete fucking nonsense. It really is a good sensible system that actually makes university MORE affordable for the poor because their requirement to pay back only ever depends on their ability to do so. Previously it was a smaller sum total to pay back, but you had to pay it back even if you could much less afford to. There's even a limit on it so that if you don't pay it all off by the time you're about 35, you never have to pay the rest so it doesn't even hold you back forever even if you're at the lower end of the required pay it back bracket.
I don't think so. I think that even if all the wolves leave with this ice bridge that the moose population will boom, but then when the next ice bridge comes it means the wolves will move back there en-masse due to the utter abundance of prey.
Nature is pretty good at dealing with these sorts of scenarios, each time we interfere we just fuck it up completely. We just need to get past our short term view of "OMG THEY'RE ALL GOING TO LEAVE!" - I'd wager it's not the first time wolf populations have left such an island only to return sometime later.
Right, but the UK isn't the EU. In fact, the UK wants to leave the EU precisely because it's mostly populated by ignorant xenophobic pricks who still hold imperial era fantasies of what our country is so it's about as far from a typical example of an EU state as you can get. The UK actually lowers the average level of freedom, respect, and rights of the EU by quite a large amount due to a combination of it's size and it's over the top support for things like America's extraordinary rendition and other rights violations and restrictive and oppressive laws. Without the UK the EU would look far better as an example of freedoms and rights than pretty much anywhere else in the world. The US would pip it to the post on official freedom of speech laws, though I think the US censors more through the back channels - ICE domain seizures, attempting to silence Wikipedia through cutting funding sources, assassination of Islamic preachers with drones, crippling the Phelps with a politically motivated and financially destructive legal ruling and so on and so forth - in other words the US censors just as much if not more, it just uses other methods to skirt the inconvenience of the constitution. But the EU would beat it by a long shot on other issues like not supporting torture, freedom and fairness of justice systems etc.
"Hey, don't get all riled up here - I'm not really saying that anybody ought to like the bible, or consider its contents valuable, or even respect it"
Right, but the person I was responding to originally was:
"By doing that, you treated an important book with total disregard and disrespect."
Why do you think I responded in an "Oh no, god forbid anyone defy the important book!" manner?
"It seems to me that you want to call the bible unimportant because you dislike it"
I want to call it unimportant because I do not deem it to be important. I've already explained why, I am not alone. If I viewed it as important, I would own a copy, I don't, because to me, it's not.
This means that contrary to the OP's claims that we shouldn't treat it with disregard or disrespect it doesn't matter the level of importance, respect, or regards with which he holds it. Anyone who doesn't view it as important is free to treat it with as much disrespect and disregard as they see fit, and not be condemned for doing so.
"Worse than that. A lot of countries outside the US would likely use ICANN to restrict content."
So what would change? The US already does this. The ICE domain seizures of legitimate overseas businesses were only possible because ICANN is a US entity and this was worse than Chinese censorship because it was cross-border international censorship carried out unilaterally by the US. At least in an international setting the censorship would merely be local or shot down due to lack of consensus. Right now the US arbitrarily censors what it doesn't like such as gambling for everyone across the whole globe.
Even without ICANN censorship still occurs anyway, so it's a pretty irrelevant argument.
I'm not against ICANN staying in the US, but the problem is that currently any backwater redneck state judge can order seizure of a domain regardless of how corrupt or biased they are. ICANN is bigger and more important than any one state or country so at absolute minimum the US needs a law change, a constitutional amendment if need be that individual states have exactly zero power over ICANN, but ideally even removing power over it from the federal courts and placing any legal seizures/disputes under control of something like the International Criminal Court but given that the US doesn't even recognise the ICC when it comes to far more grave crimes like warcrimes I don't think this will happen.
What's not acceptable is the current status quo where state level judges can demand seizure of domains from ICANN. That has to change, and until it does you can expect there to be continued demands that the US relinquish control of ICANN. If nothing else if state level judicial demands of ICANN are removed then you can expect that support for removal of ICANN from the US to shrink drastically.
So rather than screaming "censorship" and other such nonsense arguments (nonsense because we already have censorship under the current US system - you're just oblivious to it because it's Western censorship that you obviously think is okay and no big deal), consider that perhaps the best thing you can do is lobby for your own country (assuming you're American) to better protect ICANN and so hence remove any valid argument for taking it away from the US in the first place. I'm anti-censorship and right now I can't support US control because it's in such a precariously weak position to prevent censorship and has failed to date. If that changes such that ICANN is better protected in the US then I'll be all for retaining US control. I suspect I'm not alone in that viewpoint, I suspect there are a lot of people that would more strongly support US control if the US could put in place legal guarantees to protect it as a special entity that cannot be touched by purely national or state interests.
I think the point is that upon closer and closer scrutiny Bush seemed to be losing votes rather than the figures staying roughly the same. The question is therefore whether further fraud was being uncovered each time. Statistically after 3 counts if there are no fraud and counting was done reasonable each time you would expect it to increase in his favour once or twice such that it stayed roughly the same as an average across 3 counts. If it goes down every single time then it's a pointer to the fact that something might be wrong which should be more closely investigated, but the Supreme Court stamped out any chance of that.
That's the problem. Yes you're right Bush won in all those areas you suggested, but it doesn't change the fact you're trying to gloss over the downwards trend of Bush's votes over each recount.
FWIW I'm not American, I certainly don't like Bush, but I'm not exactly a fan of Obama nowadays - at least Bush had the courtesy to treat us (the British) with respect for backing you on so many controversial issues, whilst Obama expects us to back you and still acts like a condescending cock to us.
I do think you're being a bit hypocritical in suggesting people are just being bitter about the vote and they should just accept it because the very declining vote count you point to is problematic in itself so your argument effectively comes down to "Yes, there was a worrying statistical trend in the vote count but I don't care because supreme court blah blah blah".
Exactly, sometimes being pragmatic about the reality of dealing with the general public is simply far more important than being a pedantic ass like the guy I was responding to.
It's a hard enough job moving people between units, let alone also trying to have to explain the difference to mass and weight to them even though it'll never make any practical difference because if you do have to explain that to them then they're sure as hell not going to be in line for a moon trip in the first place:)
I'll be honest, the level of retardation on Slashdot nowadays is such that I couldn't really tell if you were being sarcastic, or if you actually genuinely held that belief because there are all too many people here now that really are that fucking stupid as to post such a thing seriously.
I figured I better post the obvious just in case it was another case of Slashdot retardation.
But I both apologise and congratulate you if you were just being humorous. Your sarcasm was effective enough that it genuinely was indistinguishable from the idiots you mock:)
Not really, the point I was actually making is simply that you were bitching at someone for daring to not treat the bible as an important book. I was only really arguing for the sake of that - I think it's arrogant to demand someone treat something with respect just because you think it's deserved, even if they do not.
Did it really not cross your mind to consider that perhaps whilst it may be important to you, there are many others of us who really could not give the slightest shit about it nor see any merit in it?
To me a book that is a factually incorrect portrayal of history muddled with a bit of fantasy doesn't become important simply because some people are gullible enough to take it as gospel (literally). I'd rather place more importance on works that have actually furthered humanity, whether it's Plato's writings on philosophy, Newton's principia, or Turing and Godel's papers on computability theory. All of these have had a much more drastic impact on furthering progress for humanity. The Bible? It's just an old story book that far too many people put too much weight on - that's my view, don't bitch at people if they have the same opinion and hence refuse to treat it with respect.
The problem is that the Bible offers nothing really unique, if it's the philosophy within you're after then it's basically a rehashing of older more foundational works. If it's historical perspective then it's of little merit because it's no more historically accurate than any other work of fiction - you can point to some events in the bible and say something like this roughly happened, but you can similarly point to the battles of middle earth and claim they are references to human events.
I do not think mere number of buyers of a book over the years is in itself a measure of importance or value - christ, the Sun newspaper and The Daily Mail have been the UK's most popular papers but it doesn't mean they have the most value, merit, or worth given that they're normally factually incorrect - for the 3 million that do buy that tosh there's another 57 million that have opted not to buy one of them. Many others will agree so don't try and pretend their point has no merit because they don't attach the same arbitrary value of worth to it as you do.
I also often hope that people who like to try and appear smart by being pedantic don't end up just making themselves look stupid, but unfortunately one of us at least has just been disappointed in our expectations.
I think all those measures are rather arbitrary. One book is no more important than any other.
Newton's Principia may have sold far less copies than the bible, it may not be as old, but it's sure as hell been the basis for the largest improvements to technology and quality of life for humanity in the years since. The technological advances stemming from the knowledge within have saved and improved far more lives.
Similarly there are writings that are much older than the Bible without which the Bible would likely not even exist.
You may place a lot of emphasis and value on the Bible but that's entirely your subjective view, you're claiming objectivity where there is only subjectivity. It was far more relevant hundreds of years ago, but in modern times it's for example, sold less copies than Harry Potter in a similar time period, and arguably more importantly, has been read by less people because even most owners have never read the bible but few have copies of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and so forth without ever having read them.
I used Harry Potter as a popular example of book, not because I genuinely really give a shit about it, but consider this - people have died for Harry Potter too given that the Taliban have executed people for owning a copy due to perceiving it as "un-Islamic" so not only does it fulfil your criteria of more copies in it's lifetime, if you switch to a more objective ratio of units sold per year of existence, it's also had people die for it and it's arguably even been more influential since it's writing.
To cut a long story short, you can dream up arbitrary measures of importance for just about any book on earth. Those measures don't result in an objective declaration of worth though, only a subjective declaration precisely because the measures are arbitrary.
No, but it can be used perfectly well as one because the NHS doesn't operate in any environments where the disparity between weight and mass become clear.
Until we open a doctors surgery in space or whatever then it's entirely irrelevant.
Kilograms are used because they're both widely known being an SI unit, and fully functional for the purpose in question. It'd be really stupid to expect people to have any degree of knowledge of physics just to deal with healthcare issues.
Then just ignore them. If you're catering to the whiny few luddites then you're only exacerbating the problem.
We have multiple measurements for historic reasons only, and just like we got over using shillings and so forth and moved to a base 10 currency system we'll get over using old measures like stones.
Or in other words we have picked one measurement. We've opted for SI units. It's just getting some folk to stick with it that's the problem.
I'm pretty sure NASA didn't find the moon. In fact, I'm quite certain that humans knew it was there long before they even knew the American continent existed let alone a nation state that borrows the same name.
In fact on that note America, you didn't "find" that name either, so it's not yours to use, in fact for most of you it's not even your country to live in as you didn't find it. It belongs to the native Americans, the Scandinavians, or the British who all found it previously.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amusing because it does make them look a bit special, but it is in itself a sign of their intelligence. It's believed that dogs tilt their heads because the muzzle obscures part of their vision and by doing so it allows them to better see your facial expressions when looking at you - in particular your mouth.
The fact you're asking a question and they do this shows that they're aware that you're asking something of them and they're trying to interpret what you're asking of them, this is one of the reasons dogs are deemed to be particularly intelligent because they can read meaning in your voice and do look for other cues as to what you're asking of them.
Microsoft have a lot of digital content too. In my experience no one buys an X1 for just Skype, even if they're not primarily using it for gaming they're subscribing to and paying for some digital content and/or paying for Xbox Live Gold to access such features, so Microsoft cashes in pretty well even without games purchases.
Fortunately though for Microsoft it just doesn't matter.
Last generation had the worst hardware do best, with the best hardware doing worst.
We got Minecraft, one of the single most succesful games of all time proving that it's not about the graphics.
Anyone who thinks the technical details matter at this point are completely missing the point.
More than anything the battle will be lost or won on marketing and exclusives. The real reason Microsoft is behind has really absolutely nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the fact that it got itself off to a catastrophic marketing failure from the off and it takes time to shake that image. Even here, a technical news site where people should be uptodate on technical news people still parrot nonsense about how Kinect is manadatory and spies on you (it isn't and doesn't, you can unplug it and everything works well, and there's no unexplained data transfers across the network that could be a video stream).
Microsoft needs to make it clearer than ever that the console no longer requires phone home (something even Steam requires FWIW) and that Kinect isn't mandatory to be plugged in. I disagree with the premise that Kinect should be made optional though, Microsoft made the right choice is ensuring it's standard precisely because it means we can have everything from a decent controllerless way of managing the console when using it as a media centre through to games where we can use hand signals and voice commands to order our squad or whatever. Because it's guaranteed to be available developers can put the proper amount of effort in to make it worthwhile because it's not just some addon that only a fringe few will have.
Full disclosure: I have all current gen consoles including the WiiU, I like them all for different reasons. In no cases is that reason hardware performance though - the WiiU is woefully underpowered compared to the PS4 and X1 but games like Pikmin 3 look absolutely fucking beautiful regardless and is perfectly smooth to boot.
This is sensible advice. I wrote an aimbot, speed hack, and auto dispenser detonate for Quake/TF but I only ever used it on a private server with the full knowledge of everyone else on the server because I was well aware of both the consequences of it's use and the ethics of using such a thing (frankly, I fucking hate cheaters, and I hate hypocrits, so it'd be stupid to ever use it live).
It was one of the most valuable learning experiences I've ever had, I learnt a hell of a lot about network programming, Windows internals, security, and game math.
It's a thing that I'd absolutely say is worth doing as a learning experience without a doubt, but don't ever actually do it in a manner that genuinely effects other players at least without their consent, otherwise you get what you deserve.
"If you dare to oppose, your news will be boring, which makes your ratings drop, which also has the "nice" side effect that fewer people are going to hear it."
It doesn't even reach that stage, move away from the tightly controlled US military escort and dare to report the real war in a war zone and your press convoy gets strafed by an A-10 or an Apache picks you off from a km away because pickup trucks look like T-72s and cameras look like RPGs. Apparently.
You're not making any sense, why would the stuff we mine be "low radioactive" as you illiterately put it. If it was it'd be no use, the whole point in nuclear energy is we use the highly radioactive properties to generate energy as a result of the reactions triggered. If the resultant waste was more radioactive then we wouldn't need to pursue fusion because our existing fission would be churning out constantly more energetic materials forever but that's not how it works. The materials become depleted as we produce energy with them which means they're less radioactive than they were to start with.
So never mind you telling me to learn how my country handles waste to educate myself, perhaps instead you should learn at least 3rd grade English and Science before mouthing off like an idiot.
"What about economies of scale and the more appliance like, smaller scale fission reactor developed by Taylor Wilson? Wikipedia repeatedly has nuclear power as one of the cheapest sources available in different locations, if not the cheapest."
Right, naturally it is, but the problem is that we're not paying the price nowadays of nuclear power plants in a competitive market because the remaining firms that can and will do the projects are able to price gouge due to lack of competition. That drastically increases the real actual price - as I pointed out the cost of the UK's new nuclear will be double what we currently pay which makes it drastically more expensive than any current power generation option.
The UK doesn't have the in-house nuclear power plant building skills anymore so it can never ever access that theoretical cheap rate of nuclear power in practice because to have nuclear it's at the whim of foreign companies as to how much they want to charge.
"The HS2 rail project is reported to cost anywhere from £28 billion (with less tunneling) to £80 billion."
No one seriously thinks it'll cost £28 billion, I'm not even sure where that figure is from. The budget is £50bn and such projects are never, ever on or below budget.
"Did you leave out the price of labor to have the panels installed?"
I'm assuming you used headline numbers for a private installation or some such but a large percentage of those numbers consists of tax - the labourers alone will be taxed at least 20% on their income through income tax alone, and then there's NI, and most of what's left will be spent and incur VAT. There's corporation tax for the company involved, and import tariffs on panels if bought outside the EU and so on and so forth. There's also profit for the installation company itself. There's also a return on power sold back to industry and possibly even overseas as it would generate a surplus which can reasonably be included as it's not as if this is something that could be done overnight.
I'm not saying we should go down this route, I'm actually personally a fan of nuclear so if your key point is that, that I shouldn't hate on nuclear then hey, I'm completely with you. But without spending even more to build up a new indigenous nuclear power plant building industry than we're just never going to see that cheap nuclear, it's always going to be more expensive as we're held to ransom over it. It's cheap if you can do it yourself and tell predatory overseas companies to go fuck themselves, but the UK stupidly threw away that option in the past. It's just not open to us anymore.
Yeah sorry, just had a look to refresh my memory. EDF dropped their originally bid as a single entity, and Fujitsu dropped out completely as did the others.
The Chinese stake is 40% though, I wouldn't call that small by any measure. They're also free to take up to 100% eventually.
Put it back where you found the elements in the first place?
If we're okay to have them buried deep underground in their unspent pre-mined state then why care about having them there in their spent post-fuel state?
If you have an irrational fear of buried nuclear isotopes then you should probably be more scared about the unspent versions that occur naturally.
Right, what you say is spot on, but unfortunately it doesn't map to the reality of what the stock market deems a "successful" company - one that grows and hence expands it's share price. Too many investors are of the buy low, sell high variety, rather than the dividends variety, so if you don't want to cater to that mindset you should probably just go private else you can only expect to carry on hearing people tell you you're a "failure" because you only pulled in $20bn last quarter instead of $22bn.
Yes it's silly, yes it's stupid, but it's unfortunately the reality There are actually many barely known but absolutely massive companies that stay private for precisely the reasons described here though.
Waste isn't the issue, it's the cost. Look at the problems the UK has had with trying to get a new nuclear plant built. Unless you're willing to let the handful of companies with the expertise to build a safe modern nuclear plant rip you the fuck off then you can't have one.
The British government had to agree to let them double the already insanely high energy price per kilowatt in the UK to get a part Chinese bid to agree to build the plant after all the other bidders such as France's EDF dropped out. So for a doubling of the cost of energy generated by the plant, a government subsidy, and allowing the Chinese government to have power over a major British energy source we were able to get ourselves a new nuclear plant. Is it worth it? I don't think so for a second.
There seems not to be a functioning nuclear power plant market and if the price per kilowatt they're demanding is legit then it's too prohibitively expensive compared to just using genuine renewables.
This said I figured out for the price of the pointless HS2 rail project in the UK that no one with any sense wants we could build two new nuclear power plants and still have change left over to literally pay for solar panels to be installed on every single house in the country. So even though it's all insanely expensive it's still not retardedly expensive as some pet projects I suppose.
Don't expect any rationality over the UK system. It's actually very good as it means anyone can get a degree equally no matter how poor or wealthy you are and the burden on paying it only depends on how successful you are in life after you have graduated. If your degree doesn't work out in getting you paid a reasonable wage then you never pay, if it does, you pay it back to society.
The problem is our government is a coalition and the Tories needed something to slam the Lib Dems with ahead of the electoral system change referendum and this was the perfect tool.
As such all the stuff surrounding tuition fees in the UK is mostly complete fucking nonsense. It really is a good sensible system that actually makes university MORE affordable for the poor because their requirement to pay back only ever depends on their ability to do so. Previously it was a smaller sum total to pay back, but you had to pay it back even if you could much less afford to. There's even a limit on it so that if you don't pay it all off by the time you're about 35, you never have to pay the rest so it doesn't even hold you back forever even if you're at the lower end of the required pay it back bracket.
I don't think so. I think that even if all the wolves leave with this ice bridge that the moose population will boom, but then when the next ice bridge comes it means the wolves will move back there en-masse due to the utter abundance of prey.
Nature is pretty good at dealing with these sorts of scenarios, each time we interfere we just fuck it up completely. We just need to get past our short term view of "OMG THEY'RE ALL GOING TO LEAVE!" - I'd wager it's not the first time wolf populations have left such an island only to return sometime later.
Right, but the UK isn't the EU. In fact, the UK wants to leave the EU precisely because it's mostly populated by ignorant xenophobic pricks who still hold imperial era fantasies of what our country is so it's about as far from a typical example of an EU state as you can get. The UK actually lowers the average level of freedom, respect, and rights of the EU by quite a large amount due to a combination of it's size and it's over the top support for things like America's extraordinary rendition and other rights violations and restrictive and oppressive laws. Without the UK the EU would look far better as an example of freedoms and rights than pretty much anywhere else in the world. The US would pip it to the post on official freedom of speech laws, though I think the US censors more through the back channels - ICE domain seizures, attempting to silence Wikipedia through cutting funding sources, assassination of Islamic preachers with drones, crippling the Phelps with a politically motivated and financially destructive legal ruling and so on and so forth - in other words the US censors just as much if not more, it just uses other methods to skirt the inconvenience of the constitution. But the EU would beat it by a long shot on other issues like not supporting torture, freedom and fairness of justice systems etc.
FWIW yes I'm British, yes I live in the UK.
"Hey, don't get all riled up here - I'm not really saying that anybody ought to like the bible, or consider its contents valuable, or even respect it"
Right, but the person I was responding to originally was:
"By doing that, you treated an important book with total disregard and disrespect."
Why do you think I responded in an "Oh no, god forbid anyone defy the important book!" manner?
"It seems to me that you want to call the bible unimportant because you dislike it"
I want to call it unimportant because I do not deem it to be important. I've already explained why, I am not alone. If I viewed it as important, I would own a copy, I don't, because to me, it's not.
This means that contrary to the OP's claims that we shouldn't treat it with disregard or disrespect it doesn't matter the level of importance, respect, or regards with which he holds it. Anyone who doesn't view it as important is free to treat it with as much disrespect and disregard as they see fit, and not be condemned for doing so.
"Worse than that. A lot of countries outside the US would likely use ICANN to restrict content."
So what would change? The US already does this. The ICE domain seizures of legitimate overseas businesses were only possible because ICANN is a US entity and this was worse than Chinese censorship because it was cross-border international censorship carried out unilaterally by the US. At least in an international setting the censorship would merely be local or shot down due to lack of consensus. Right now the US arbitrarily censors what it doesn't like such as gambling for everyone across the whole globe.
Even without ICANN censorship still occurs anyway, so it's a pretty irrelevant argument.
I'm not against ICANN staying in the US, but the problem is that currently any backwater redneck state judge can order seizure of a domain regardless of how corrupt or biased they are. ICANN is bigger and more important than any one state or country so at absolute minimum the US needs a law change, a constitutional amendment if need be that individual states have exactly zero power over ICANN, but ideally even removing power over it from the federal courts and placing any legal seizures/disputes under control of something like the International Criminal Court but given that the US doesn't even recognise the ICC when it comes to far more grave crimes like warcrimes I don't think this will happen.
What's not acceptable is the current status quo where state level judges can demand seizure of domains from ICANN. That has to change, and until it does you can expect there to be continued demands that the US relinquish control of ICANN. If nothing else if state level judicial demands of ICANN are removed then you can expect that support for removal of ICANN from the US to shrink drastically.
So rather than screaming "censorship" and other such nonsense arguments (nonsense because we already have censorship under the current US system - you're just oblivious to it because it's Western censorship that you obviously think is okay and no big deal), consider that perhaps the best thing you can do is lobby for your own country (assuming you're American) to better protect ICANN and so hence remove any valid argument for taking it away from the US in the first place. I'm anti-censorship and right now I can't support US control because it's in such a precariously weak position to prevent censorship and has failed to date. If that changes such that ICANN is better protected in the US then I'll be all for retaining US control. I suspect I'm not alone in that viewpoint, I suspect there are a lot of people that would more strongly support US control if the US could put in place legal guarantees to protect it as a special entity that cannot be touched by purely national or state interests.
I think the point is that upon closer and closer scrutiny Bush seemed to be losing votes rather than the figures staying roughly the same. The question is therefore whether further fraud was being uncovered each time. Statistically after 3 counts if there are no fraud and counting was done reasonable each time you would expect it to increase in his favour once or twice such that it stayed roughly the same as an average across 3 counts. If it goes down every single time then it's a pointer to the fact that something might be wrong which should be more closely investigated, but the Supreme Court stamped out any chance of that.
That's the problem. Yes you're right Bush won in all those areas you suggested, but it doesn't change the fact you're trying to gloss over the downwards trend of Bush's votes over each recount.
FWIW I'm not American, I certainly don't like Bush, but I'm not exactly a fan of Obama nowadays - at least Bush had the courtesy to treat us (the British) with respect for backing you on so many controversial issues, whilst Obama expects us to back you and still acts like a condescending cock to us.
I do think you're being a bit hypocritical in suggesting people are just being bitter about the vote and they should just accept it because the very declining vote count you point to is problematic in itself so your argument effectively comes down to "Yes, there was a worrying statistical trend in the vote count but I don't care because supreme court blah blah blah".
Exactly, sometimes being pragmatic about the reality of dealing with the general public is simply far more important than being a pedantic ass like the guy I was responding to.
It's a hard enough job moving people between units, let alone also trying to have to explain the difference to mass and weight to them even though it'll never make any practical difference because if you do have to explain that to them then they're sure as hell not going to be in line for a moon trip in the first place :)
I'll be honest, the level of retardation on Slashdot nowadays is such that I couldn't really tell if you were being sarcastic, or if you actually genuinely held that belief because there are all too many people here now that really are that fucking stupid as to post such a thing seriously.
I figured I better post the obvious just in case it was another case of Slashdot retardation.
But I both apologise and congratulate you if you were just being humorous. Your sarcasm was effective enough that it genuinely was indistinguishable from the idiots you mock :)
Not really, the point I was actually making is simply that you were bitching at someone for daring to not treat the bible as an important book. I was only really arguing for the sake of that - I think it's arrogant to demand someone treat something with respect just because you think it's deserved, even if they do not.
Did it really not cross your mind to consider that perhaps whilst it may be important to you, there are many others of us who really could not give the slightest shit about it nor see any merit in it?
To me a book that is a factually incorrect portrayal of history muddled with a bit of fantasy doesn't become important simply because some people are gullible enough to take it as gospel (literally). I'd rather place more importance on works that have actually furthered humanity, whether it's Plato's writings on philosophy, Newton's principia, or Turing and Godel's papers on computability theory. All of these have had a much more drastic impact on furthering progress for humanity. The Bible? It's just an old story book that far too many people put too much weight on - that's my view, don't bitch at people if they have the same opinion and hence refuse to treat it with respect.
The problem is that the Bible offers nothing really unique, if it's the philosophy within you're after then it's basically a rehashing of older more foundational works. If it's historical perspective then it's of little merit because it's no more historically accurate than any other work of fiction - you can point to some events in the bible and say something like this roughly happened, but you can similarly point to the battles of middle earth and claim they are references to human events.
I do not think mere number of buyers of a book over the years is in itself a measure of importance or value - christ, the Sun newspaper and The Daily Mail have been the UK's most popular papers but it doesn't mean they have the most value, merit, or worth given that they're normally factually incorrect - for the 3 million that do buy that tosh there's another 57 million that have opted not to buy one of them. Many others will agree so don't try and pretend their point has no merit because they don't attach the same arbitrary value of worth to it as you do.
I also often hope that people who like to try and appear smart by being pedantic don't end up just making themselves look stupid, but unfortunately one of us at least has just been disappointed in our expectations.
I think all those measures are rather arbitrary. One book is no more important than any other.
Newton's Principia may have sold far less copies than the bible, it may not be as old, but it's sure as hell been the basis for the largest improvements to technology and quality of life for humanity in the years since. The technological advances stemming from the knowledge within have saved and improved far more lives.
Similarly there are writings that are much older than the Bible without which the Bible would likely not even exist.
You may place a lot of emphasis and value on the Bible but that's entirely your subjective view, you're claiming objectivity where there is only subjectivity. It was far more relevant hundreds of years ago, but in modern times it's for example, sold less copies than Harry Potter in a similar time period, and arguably more importantly, has been read by less people because even most owners have never read the bible but few have copies of Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and so forth without ever having read them.
I used Harry Potter as a popular example of book, not because I genuinely really give a shit about it, but consider this - people have died for Harry Potter too given that the Taliban have executed people for owning a copy due to perceiving it as "un-Islamic" so not only does it fulfil your criteria of more copies in it's lifetime, if you switch to a more objective ratio of units sold per year of existence, it's also had people die for it and it's arguably even been more influential since it's writing.
To cut a long story short, you can dream up arbitrary measures of importance for just about any book on earth. Those measures don't result in an objective declaration of worth though, only a subjective declaration precisely because the measures are arbitrary.
No, but it can be used perfectly well as one because the NHS doesn't operate in any environments where the disparity between weight and mass become clear.
Until we open a doctors surgery in space or whatever then it's entirely irrelevant.
Kilograms are used because they're both widely known being an SI unit, and fully functional for the purpose in question. It'd be really stupid to expect people to have any degree of knowledge of physics just to deal with healthcare issues.
Then just ignore them. If you're catering to the whiny few luddites then you're only exacerbating the problem.
We have multiple measurements for historic reasons only, and just like we got over using shillings and so forth and moved to a base 10 currency system we'll get over using old measures like stones.
Or in other words we have picked one measurement. We've opted for SI units. It's just getting some folk to stick with it that's the problem.
I'm pretty sure NASA didn't find the moon. In fact, I'm quite certain that humans knew it was there long before they even knew the American continent existed let alone a nation state that borrows the same name.
In fact on that note America, you didn't "find" that name either, so it's not yours to use, in fact for most of you it's not even your country to live in as you didn't find it. It belongs to the native Americans, the Scandinavians, or the British who all found it previously.