While they called themselves "communism", they actually fall under fascism in most respects that matter.
First of all, it doesn't matter if they were "really" communist or not, you left them out. They were certainly atheists, so maybe you should have called them "organized atheism".
Second, we could play the same "Are they really X?" game with religion. The people who did the worst atrocities in the Crusades, as with Islam extremists today, often clearly violated the teaching of the leaders in whose name they claim to be acting. So either those people don't count as "organized religion", because they weren't "really" Christians / Muslims / whatever; or, Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao do count as "communists" (and "atheists"), because whatever Marx would have thought of them, they did see themselves as trying to follow his teaching.
You can't have it both ways: You can't tar me with the Crusades without accepting the black mark of the Killing Fields.
So you're saying that Pol Pot committed his atrocities in the name of atheism?
If not, I don't see what your point is. Its like saying that the Okhlahoma Bridge collapsed because it's designer didn't collect stamps.
Also, by definition all Buddhists are atheists, as Buddhism has no gods. Cambodia was and is, to this day, devoutly Buddhist even if Pol Pot plundered the Angkor temples to fund his state. You need to stop treating "Atheism" like some kind of organisation.
Also it is a huge misnomer (closer to a bald faced lie) to say that Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were atheist states because they were secular states. Both had a great deal of religious people, even amongst the leadership, some of whom thought that gassing Jews was gods work (to which I do not blame the catholic church for, I'm capable of splitting out a nutter from the mainstream). Russia was mainly Russian Orthadox, Stalin ran to the Russian Orthadox church for support when the Nazis invaded and Nazi Germany, they were 54% prodestant, 40% catholic, 3.5% "gottglÃubig" (literally "believers in god", what is called Agnostic in modern parlance) and 1.5% atheist.
You left out Communism., which killed far more than Fascism. Funny how you left that out and threw in "Organized Religion." That would seem hard to do if you are genuinely interested and opposed to "the most evil movements the human race has ever seen." It is actually backwards.
Communism did its damage over nearly a century and most of those deaths were unintentional consequences. Facsism achieved most of its deaths in 3 short years and those were targeted and deliberate.
Hey, but keep telling yourself Fascism is Good(TM) because Communism is bad... Its like saying you'd rather have Hepatitis E over AIDS... Personally I'd rather not have either.
Because in OCA you will be able to apply much more flexible separation standards, allowing a mix of speeds (closing), earlier climbs, later descents, less speed imposition at crossing points and just push a whole lot more aircraft through choke points without having to slow the whole lot down to the speed of the LCD.
There's a shit-ton of ways that replacing 15 minutes with no closing longitudinal time standards, with more flexible distance standards free up the speed limits that are imposed now.
Its not going to make flights any faster, it will just allow more flights to occupy the same route (allegedly, I've got my doubts about this slashvertisement). An airliner still cruises at around 900 KP/H which means you wont get there any faster. If we want to improve flight times, less time fucking about at the gate is the way to do it. Unfortunately this means somehow managing to herd the selfish, arrogant, FYIGM cats that we call people better. I'm pretty sure that we could cut 15 mins of any flight if we simply stopped things like people with excess hand luggage, people who talk in aisles and people who put their bag in a bin that is nowhere near their seat.
Also no waiting for people too busy stuffing their face or sleeping in the duty free area. The notion that "Its OK, the plane will wait for me" needs to be smacked down hard with "No, the plane will not wait for you, be at the gate before the door closing time or the plane leaves without you and your checked bags will be sent back at the airlines convenience within 2 weeks". Do that and we'll spend a lot less time waiting at the gate as the airport tannoy announces "Paging Mr and Mrs Wanktard, would Mr and Mrs Wanktard, please make yourselves known to airport personnel immediately".
Beyond that, better apron/tarmac management. But this is a hard one because big airports like London Heathrow, New York-JFK or Amsterdam Schipol have problems simply because they're so large and busy.
Already there. I bit the bullet and removed the FB app from my phone, not just because I was sick of the ads, but also sick of how slow it had become. I've now got a Firefox shortcut to FB and its much faster and consumes less battery (which is becoming quite important as my 2yr old Nexus 5x doesn't hold charge like it used to).
So I need to be in my home, on a 5 GHz wifi network (presumably non congested) with my Gaming PC on and running a game in order to play games on a tablet...
Why wouldn't I just use my gaming PC? Or my Laptop that has much of my Steam library on it?
Seems a lot of pissfarting around to play games on a screen 1/3 a big as my gaming PC, slower than my gaming PC and with peripherals far inferior than my gaming PC.
On a flat section of track, your average NFL lineman could pull a train car.
It' not about the weight,. It's about the Friction Force.
This. Top Gear towed a 747 with a JCB, Fifth gear towed the same one with a VW toerag. You could realistically do it with a 1.4L VW Polo on the nice flat Dunsfold Aerodrome, as long as you never intended to use that Polo for anything else ever again. Towing is more about the Chassis, the Toerag Fifth gear used had is chassis buckled and had to be de-registered, I'd be the same thing happened with the Model X but they aren't telling us. Like others have said, this is done a lot for advertisements for utes/pickups although that's mostly CGI these days.
In either case, Model X and 787 are both vehicles I detest travelling in. Uncomfortable and over-hyped.
Seriously. Silcon valley liberals think silencing non-politicallycorrect non-leftist posts will help their side? They will just reinforce their leftist bubble of estrangement from the rest of the country
If that was true, Twitter would simply start to die.
I've seen perfectly good forums get taken over by right-wing extremists. I checked on that forum a few months back, it's down to 3 members and a load of news bots. Its only a matter of time before the owner stops paying the hosting.
I think your real fear is that they wont die and that your extremist philosophy will be ignored out of existence.
When I think of people that are estranged from reality and are set for even worse electoral defeats, I think of the kind of person who uses the word "leftist", especially where there is no left to speak of.
Our bags have handles and compost down just fine in landfills.
And yes, I remember rain.
And the trees cut down to make new ones? I highly doubt they're from 100% sustainable sources.
The other problem with paper bags is that they aren't reusable. Here in the UK they've introduced a bag charge which has cut down on plastic waste significantly. Like I said, I have large reusable bags that I've had since I moved to the UK over 2 years ago. These two bags have literally saved me from using hundreds of bags (each weekly shop using 3-5 normal carrier bags, over 104 weeks, that's 312-520 bags). These reusable bags cost me the princely sum of £3 (50p each) and most stores will replace when broken for free.
We really do use that many bags. Now do you see why paper isn't really any better, the problem isn't the material, the problem is the wastage due to lack of re-use.
Now I'm no eco-mentalist, but it is a trivial issue to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Hell, I'm saving money by not buying stuff that just gets thrown out.
Like... whatever happened to the paper bags we used to get out groceries in? You know, environmentally friendly, renewable, cheap, QUICKLY biodegradable, strong, reusable paper bags.
Those paper bags are still there, in every supermarket. You just have to ask for them.
Paper bags are almost exclusively an American thing and aren't as environmentally friendly as you think because they are rarely made from recycled materials and often end up in landfills.
They're also terrible as carrier bags because they lack handles and have the arse fall out of them when wet (it rains a lot here in the UK). I'm a one trip kind of guy, that means I carry everything from the checkout to my car in one go, I presently do that with 2 large reusable bags.
The fact that, no Chewbacca doesn't even live on Endor is an inside joke for star wars nerds on top of that; because anyone who only saw RotJ once back in the 80s and doesn't remember it scene by scene could well accept that premise that Chewbacca was from Endor too -- but it doesn't even matter whether its true or not; its just the icing on the cake.
To be a true Star Wars nerd you would understand that originally the Wookies were meant to live on Endor but Lucas liked them so much he created the character Chewbacca to be in all 3 films and the Ewoks to fill the role of the original Wookies, hence the names are similar.
Polyethelene is less dense than water so if it's clean and empty then it will float. However an item in the bag or even a bit of sand washed inside could easilly push it over the edge into sinking.
Look, that sea cucumber paid 5p for that carrier bag from Tesco, he'll be dammed if he has to spend another 5p for a new one when he goes back.
You are suffiently ignorant to run a restaurant without online order and reservation system in 2018. But Google is supplying these for you for free rather than customers just going elsewhere with UberEats or OpenTable. Rather than grumbling about having to talk to a robot to get paid, get a hint and give customers a way to do business with you without having to spend 20 minutes on hold and then listen to your thick accent.
You on the other hand, seem sufficiently ignorant to have never run any kind of business, let alone a restaurant.
If you've got a good restaurant, you don't need UberEats or OpenTable because customers come to you. Also here in the UK delivery services like Deliveroo existed long before UberEats and given how bad UberEats is, will easily outlive it. Deliveroo isn't for restaurants, it's for fast food (McDonalds is not a restaurant according to British standards). Beyond that you don't really need to reserve at a restaurant unless as, mentioned above, it's so popular that they can afford to turn away paying customers... in which case you don't need OpenTable.
>> There's a good tech scene in all of Paris, London and Berlin and you'll get over 30 days off including bank holidays by default.
The tech scene is rather in Toulouse, Karlsruhe, München, Zürich, Geneva... Not sure where it is located in UK, italy, etc...
For the UK we have the M4 corridor which includes such hip, happening and scenic areas such as Slough, Reading, Bracknell and Staines. Its a hub for IT companies from Amazon to Dell to Microsoft and Vmware.
America didn't invent slavery, but it was the last western nation to make it illegal
You mean, besides Spain, Portugal, Cuba, Brazil, Italy, France, Netherlands, Russia, Germany, among others? Don't forget to include their full colonies and territorial possessions.
First off, you are so incorrect you deserve a QI klaxon
By western, he meant European and you knew that.
Germany as a unified state did not exist until 1871 and has never permitted slavery (if we exclude the Nazis). Spain made slavery illegal in 1818 (did not take effect until 1820) as part of a treaty with the United Kingdom (plus we had kicked their arses in the Napoleonic war). Portugal eliminated slavery in 1818 due to a treaty with the United Kingdom (we did this a lot). Italy was the same as Germany, it didn't unify until 1848 and never permitted slavery. France, Slavery was abolished in all French territories and possessions in 1794. The Netherlands made slavery illegal in their colonies in 1863. Russia abolished slavery in 1723 but retained serfdom until 1861.
The last actual slaves in the US were emancipated in 1865... Seeing as I've counted serfdom, systemic mistreatment of blacks continued under US law until 1964 (as in the Civil Rights Act of).
Ironically the one nation you could have mentioned that would have earned you points was the United Kingdom... Slavery here was not ruled illegal until 2012. Of course there was a reason for this, we never really tolerated it. We never really had a mass of slaves so it never occurred to anyone that we needed a law against it. Hell, even serfs (whom had to be paid and cared for by their lords, lords who mistreated serfs were punished) were emancipated in 1574 by Elizabeth I.
It pays to know what you're talking about, before talking about it.
because that was a big part of why the founding fathers wanted everybody armed. They wanted the militias to handle defense. Even back then it was understood that untrained citizens couldn't beat trained soldiers. We didn't really 'win' the revolutionary war so much as Britain gave up to go focus on the French (who wanted us split from the Brits to weaken their enemy).
Back then, there wasn't anything like a professional army. Most armies were raised from the peasantry, there were professional soldiers who were mostly mercenaries. Only the officer class was somewhat professional and in Britain, this was more true for the Navy than the Army because the Navy still had a job in peace time.
The main problem the British had was that according to the doctrine of the time, armies in the colonies were raised from the local population.
Standing (professional) armies for entire nations wasn't really a thing until after the Napoleonic war.
You should definitely tell those armed civilians in Afghanistan - who have fought the US military to a standstill for a decade - that they have absolutely no chance against the US military.
You should take that attitude to Ireland... Who for 300 years fought for independence from England... only to be granted it by a vote.
Or to Tibet. Or South Ossetia. See how that's working out for them.
Afghanistan and Iraq were successful because the NATO nations refuse to commit to a total war (and there are good reasons for that). In fact Afghanistan's resistance only became successful because GWB moved to Iraq and forgot about Afghanistan.
I recently bought a 2013 MBP instead of a new one. I refuse to pay 2x more for a laptop that is 2x worse. Better to prop the second hand market than these greedy fucks that work today at Apple.
I have an Asus K501 because I like paying 1/3 as much for a laptop that's 2x as good.
It's because Apple doesn't know how to test stuff. They do this over and over again, more so than any other 1st tier company.
This kind of flaw would have been discovered during routine testing of the keyboard at Lenovo out Dell. They would have aged it, blasted it with dust, tested it in 100% humidity and -10C, dropped all kinds of stuff on it...
I can only think that Apple is so desperate to keep stuff secret that they have to forgo this. They must have product engineers telling them they need to do it.
Oh yes, they most certainly do. The engineer is told to shut up and do their job.
Apple is a company run by designers, not engineers. The engineers "job" is to make what the designers envisage work even when its completely pants on head retarded. Because good engineers typically have a problem with producing sub standard crap when they can fix it and more so, being able to shut up and follow orders to do so, Apple does not keep many good engineers.
Religion as a concept *is* the true root of evil. It is, at its essence, one group of people claiming they are better than everyone else because God said so.
I largely agree with your points and am a proper atheist (I don't believe in god... I also don't care what anyone else believes or doesn't believe in, one's beliefs are one's own personal choice).
But religion is amoral, it was originally a means to explain things we couldn't comprehend, then it was co-opted by men (who can be moral or immoral) to be a method of control. Ultimately people are the root of evil, religion is simply one of the tools that is far too often abused by evil men for their own gain. No holy war has ever benefited any god, the crusades and all the other holy wars went to benefit those in power.
Religion has become less important in modern life, so much so that it now holds little power over western nations... which is why evil men have now taken to the next best method of control, nationalism.
Better solution: Fix the idiotic CC system the requires the same information to be both widely known and secret.
Even better solution: Make the storage of card details illegal with jail terms for any business and supplier of POS terminals that permit it.
This will never happen as it will force a small percentage of people back to cash, seeing as banks skim a percentage off each transaction on credit, they'll lose millions in pure profit from that small percentage.
As an aside, my solution is easier and faster to implement.
If you aren't running the mail server, then someone, somewhere is reading your email. Maybe they aren't right now, but they are a rogue sysadmin, data breach or buyout from doing so retroactively.
It's like having a conversation in public. If you want private communication, email is not and has never been that.
My memory of signing up for Gmail was that Google was quite open about using the data anonymously for various purposes, a position more honest than many others who do the same without the courtesy of saying so.
This.
Anyone thinking that other services, even paid ones like Microsoft's offering aren't doing the same thing then they're deluded. Unless you control the data end to end, someone else is reading it.
And Google have never really been shy about admitting that they're trading their free services for advertising. Its far less of a Faustian bargain than it sounds, Google's ads are unobtrusive and usually pretty far off the mark as far as targeting goes, at least for me. Gmail is fine for personal use when all I want is an account for contacting friends and family or signing up for things I want to use (I've got a hotmail account for signing up for things that I think will spam me, in fact that's all its used for, I have something like 110,000 unread emails as it's an ancient account).
Here in BC, it seems a favorite way to launder money is at the casinos and they'll be laundering more like a $100,000 in cash at a time.
I've also heard there's quite a black market for winning lottery tickets.
Its a terrible way to launder money no matter what. Much easier to run it through a series of legitimate fronts $5 at a time.
This is just an incompetent government trying to make it sound like they're "tough on crime" whilst a Royal Commission into the banking industry is turning up some really ugly skeletons that they're desperately trying to ignore. A case of "look over there and pay no attention to the cluster-fuck behind the curtain".
The black economy is usually someone paying a car mechanic, builder or joiner to do some work, while not declaring the transaction and pocketing the VAT/income tax for themselves. In rural areas, they also exchange or barter services instead of transferring cash. Sometimes payment is acceptable as bottles of wine, firewood, scrap metal, old appliances or anything else.
That is the grey economy in Australia (AKA the cash or beer economy).
The black economy is illicit trade, (drugs, firearms and other controlled items).
This move is just another "do something" from Fizzer's incompetent government on their slow, inevitable march out of office (Australia's current PM, Malcolm Turnbull is called "Fizzer" as an ex-PM described him as "A lot of fizz, but no bang").
It's more about capturing revenue that currently goes to Barclays. It's also about spreading the Apple Pay service.
Its about trying to get people to use a service they have no use for.
I know 2 people who use Apple pay and I'm fairly certain 1 of them has stopped completely. Both are hopeless fanboys who will jump through any hoop and take any abuse.
However this could easily be the end of Apple Pay, Apple presently is maintaining the line it's not a bank, therefore does not need to comply with the myriad of banking regulations in the jurisdictions it operates this service in. Right now they can claim that as Apple Pay is just a wrapper for someone else's banking product (and that is 100% legal and legit).
One Apple start issuing cards, it's going to be difficult to claim that they're not in the financial services industry and not subject to regulations.
It may suck responding to them (a process that can likely be automated) but the feedback is important data points to analyze. The level of vitriol & number of complaints can help them figure out what problems need to be addressed.
This.
We are nearly at the point with AI where such things can be entirely automated.
Lets face it, tweets and other forms of social media are losing their impact. These days if you see a poorly worded, cliche ridden tweet with terrible grammar about a business (airline, train company, fast food), you know that it was done by some frothing-at-the-mouth manchild sitting alone in their flat in their underwear you know that it's exaggerated and that it shouldn't be given the time of day. Realistically we're at the point where these things can be ignored completely, getting a robo-response is the equivalent of "we've received your complaint" emails and done exclusively for politeness.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, it doesn't matter if they were "really" communist or not, you left them out. They were certainly atheists, so maybe you should have called them "organized atheism".
Second, we could play the same "Are they really X?" game with religion. The people who did the worst atrocities in the Crusades, as with Islam extremists today, often clearly violated the teaching of the leaders in whose name they claim to be acting. So either those people don't count as "organized religion", because they weren't "really" Christians / Muslims / whatever; or, Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao do count as "communists" (and "atheists"), because whatever Marx would have thought of them, they did see themselves as trying to follow his teaching.
You can't have it both ways: You can't tar me with the Crusades without accepting the black mark of the Killing Fields.
So you're saying that Pol Pot committed his atrocities in the name of atheism?
If not, I don't see what your point is. Its like saying that the Okhlahoma Bridge collapsed because it's designer didn't collect stamps.
Also, by definition all Buddhists are atheists, as Buddhism has no gods. Cambodia was and is, to this day, devoutly Buddhist even if Pol Pot plundered the Angkor temples to fund his state. You need to stop treating "Atheism" like some kind of organisation.
Also it is a huge misnomer (closer to a bald faced lie) to say that Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany were atheist states because they were secular states. Both had a great deal of religious people, even amongst the leadership, some of whom thought that gassing Jews was gods work (to which I do not blame the catholic church for, I'm capable of splitting out a nutter from the mainstream). Russia was mainly Russian Orthadox, Stalin ran to the Russian Orthadox church for support when the Nazis invaded and Nazi Germany, they were 54% prodestant, 40% catholic, 3.5% "gottglÃubig" (literally "believers in god", what is called Agnostic in modern parlance) and 1.5% atheist.
You left out Communism., which killed far more than Fascism. Funny how you left that out and threw in "Organized Religion." That would seem hard to do if you are genuinely interested and opposed to "the most evil movements the human race has ever seen." It is actually backwards.
Communism did its damage over nearly a century and most of those deaths were unintentional consequences. Facsism achieved most of its deaths in 3 short years and those were targeted and deliberate.
Hey, but keep telling yourself Fascism is Good(TM) because Communism is bad... Its like saying you'd rather have Hepatitis E over AIDS... Personally I'd rather not have either.
Because in OCA you will be able to apply much more flexible separation standards, allowing a mix of speeds (closing), earlier climbs, later descents, less speed imposition at crossing points and just push a whole lot more aircraft through choke points without having to slow the whole lot down to the speed of the LCD.
There's a shit-ton of ways that replacing 15 minutes with no closing longitudinal time standards, with more flexible distance standards free up the speed limits that are imposed now.
Its not going to make flights any faster, it will just allow more flights to occupy the same route (allegedly, I've got my doubts about this slashvertisement). An airliner still cruises at around 900 KP/H which means you wont get there any faster. If we want to improve flight times, less time fucking about at the gate is the way to do it. Unfortunately this means somehow managing to herd the selfish, arrogant, FYIGM cats that we call people better. I'm pretty sure that we could cut 15 mins of any flight if we simply stopped things like people with excess hand luggage, people who talk in aisles and people who put their bag in a bin that is nowhere near their seat.
Also no waiting for people too busy stuffing their face or sleeping in the duty free area. The notion that "Its OK, the plane will wait for me" needs to be smacked down hard with "No, the plane will not wait for you, be at the gate before the door closing time or the plane leaves without you and your checked bags will be sent back at the airlines convenience within 2 weeks". Do that and we'll spend a lot less time waiting at the gate as the airport tannoy announces "Paging Mr and Mrs Wanktard, would Mr and Mrs Wanktard, please make yourselves known to airport personnel immediately".
Beyond that, better apron/tarmac management. But this is a hard one because big airports like London Heathrow, New York-JFK or Amsterdam Schipol have problems simply because they're so large and busy.
Game over
Already there. I bit the bullet and removed the FB app from my phone, not just because I was sick of the ads, but also sick of how slow it had become. I've now got a Firefox shortcut to FB and its much faster and consumes less battery (which is becoming quite important as my 2yr old Nexus 5x doesn't hold charge like it used to).
So I need to be in my home, on a 5 GHz wifi network (presumably non congested) with my Gaming PC on and running a game in order to play games on a tablet...
Why wouldn't I just use my gaming PC? Or my Laptop that has much of my Steam library on it?
Seems a lot of pissfarting around to play games on a screen 1/3 a big as my gaming PC, slower than my gaming PC and with peripherals far inferior than my gaming PC.
On a flat section of track, your average NFL lineman could pull a train car.
It' not about the weight,. It's about the Friction Force.
This. Top Gear towed a 747 with a JCB, Fifth gear towed the same one with a VW toerag. You could realistically do it with a 1.4L VW Polo on the nice flat Dunsfold Aerodrome, as long as you never intended to use that Polo for anything else ever again. Towing is more about the Chassis, the Toerag Fifth gear used had is chassis buckled and had to be de-registered, I'd be the same thing happened with the Model X but they aren't telling us. Like others have said, this is done a lot for advertisements for utes/pickups although that's mostly CGI these days.
In either case, Model X and 787 are both vehicles I detest travelling in. Uncomfortable and over-hyped.
Twitters new group think reinforcement feature!
Seriously. Silcon valley liberals think silencing non-politicallycorrect non-leftist posts will help their side? They will just reinforce their leftist bubble of estrangement from the rest of the country
If that was true, Twitter would simply start to die.
I've seen perfectly good forums get taken over by right-wing extremists. I checked on that forum a few months back, it's down to 3 members and a load of news bots. Its only a matter of time before the owner stops paying the hosting.
I think your real fear is that they wont die and that your extremist philosophy will be ignored out of existence.
When I think of people that are estranged from reality and are set for even worse electoral defeats, I think of the kind of person who uses the word "leftist", especially where there is no left to speak of.
Our bags have handles and compost down just fine in landfills.
And yes, I remember rain.
And the trees cut down to make new ones? I highly doubt they're from 100% sustainable sources.
The other problem with paper bags is that they aren't reusable. Here in the UK they've introduced a bag charge which has cut down on plastic waste significantly. Like I said, I have large reusable bags that I've had since I moved to the UK over 2 years ago. These two bags have literally saved me from using hundreds of bags (each weekly shop using 3-5 normal carrier bags, over 104 weeks, that's 312-520 bags). These reusable bags cost me the princely sum of £3 (50p each) and most stores will replace when broken for free.
We really do use that many bags. Now do you see why paper isn't really any better, the problem isn't the material, the problem is the wastage due to lack of re-use.
Now I'm no eco-mentalist, but it is a trivial issue to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Hell, I'm saving money by not buying stuff that just gets thrown out.
Like... whatever happened to the paper bags we used to get out groceries in? You know, environmentally friendly, renewable, cheap, QUICKLY biodegradable, strong, reusable paper bags.
Those paper bags are still there, in every supermarket. You just have to ask for them.
Paper bags are almost exclusively an American thing and aren't as environmentally friendly as you think because they are rarely made from recycled materials and often end up in landfills.
They're also terrible as carrier bags because they lack handles and have the arse fall out of them when wet (it rains a lot here in the UK). I'm a one trip kind of guy, that means I carry everything from the checkout to my car in one go, I presently do that with 2 large reusable bags.
The fact that, no Chewbacca doesn't even live on Endor is an inside joke for star wars nerds on top of that; because anyone who only saw RotJ once back in the 80s and doesn't remember it scene by scene could well accept that premise that Chewbacca was from Endor too -- but it doesn't even matter whether its true or not; its just the icing on the cake.
To be a true Star Wars nerd you would understand that originally the Wookies were meant to live on Endor but Lucas liked them so much he created the character Chewbacca to be in all 3 films and the Ewoks to fill the role of the original Wookies, hence the names are similar.
Polyethelene is less dense than water so if it's clean and empty then it will float. However an item in the bag or even a bit of sand washed inside could easilly push it over the edge into sinking.
Look, that sea cucumber paid 5p for that carrier bag from Tesco, he'll be dammed if he has to spend another 5p for a new one when he goes back.
You are suffiently ignorant to run a restaurant without online order and reservation system in 2018. But Google is supplying these for you for free rather than customers just going elsewhere with UberEats or OpenTable. Rather than grumbling about having to talk to a robot to get paid, get a hint and give customers a way to do business with you without having to spend 20 minutes on hold and then listen to your thick accent.
You on the other hand, seem sufficiently ignorant to have never run any kind of business, let alone a restaurant.
If you've got a good restaurant, you don't need UberEats or OpenTable because customers come to you. Also here in the UK delivery services like Deliveroo existed long before UberEats and given how bad UberEats is, will easily outlive it. Deliveroo isn't for restaurants, it's for fast food (McDonalds is not a restaurant according to British standards). Beyond that you don't really need to reserve at a restaurant unless as, mentioned above, it's so popular that they can afford to turn away paying customers... in which case you don't need OpenTable.
>> There's a good tech scene in all of Paris, London and Berlin and you'll get over 30 days off including bank holidays by default.
The tech scene is rather in Toulouse, Karlsruhe, München, Zürich, Geneva... Not sure where it is located in UK, italy, etc...
For the UK we have the M4 corridor which includes such hip, happening and scenic areas such as Slough, Reading, Bracknell and Staines. Its a hub for IT companies from Amazon to Dell to Microsoft and Vmware.
You mean, besides Spain, Portugal, Cuba, Brazil, Italy, France, Netherlands, Russia, Germany, among others? Don't forget to include their full colonies and territorial possessions.
First off, you are so incorrect you deserve a QI klaxon
By western, he meant European and you knew that.
Germany as a unified state did not exist until 1871 and has never permitted slavery (if we exclude the Nazis).
Spain made slavery illegal in 1818 (did not take effect until 1820) as part of a treaty with the United Kingdom (plus we had kicked their arses in the Napoleonic war).
Portugal eliminated slavery in 1818 due to a treaty with the United Kingdom (we did this a lot).
Italy was the same as Germany, it didn't unify until 1848 and never permitted slavery.
France, Slavery was abolished in all French territories and possessions in 1794.
The Netherlands made slavery illegal in their colonies in 1863.
Russia abolished slavery in 1723 but retained serfdom until 1861.
The last actual slaves in the US were emancipated in 1865... Seeing as I've counted serfdom, systemic mistreatment of blacks continued under US law until 1964 (as in the Civil Rights Act of).
Ironically the one nation you could have mentioned that would have earned you points was the United Kingdom... Slavery here was not ruled illegal until 2012. Of course there was a reason for this, we never really tolerated it. We never really had a mass of slaves so it never occurred to anyone that we needed a law against it. Hell, even serfs (whom had to be paid and cared for by their lords, lords who mistreated serfs were punished) were emancipated in 1574 by Elizabeth I.
It pays to know what you're talking about, before talking about it.
because that was a big part of why the founding fathers wanted everybody armed. They wanted the militias to handle defense. Even back then it was understood that untrained citizens couldn't beat trained soldiers. We didn't really 'win' the revolutionary war so much as Britain gave up to go focus on the French (who wanted us split from the Brits to weaken their enemy).
Back then, there wasn't anything like a professional army. Most armies were raised from the peasantry, there were professional soldiers who were mostly mercenaries. Only the officer class was somewhat professional and in Britain, this was more true for the Navy than the Army because the Navy still had a job in peace time.
The main problem the British had was that according to the doctrine of the time, armies in the colonies were raised from the local population.
Standing (professional) armies for entire nations wasn't really a thing until after the Napoleonic war.
You should definitely tell those armed civilians in Afghanistan - who have fought the US military to a standstill for a decade - that they have absolutely no chance against the US military.
You should take that attitude to Ireland... Who for 300 years fought for independence from England... only to be granted it by a vote.
Or to Tibet. Or South Ossetia. See how that's working out for them.
Afghanistan and Iraq were successful because the NATO nations refuse to commit to a total war (and there are good reasons for that). In fact Afghanistan's resistance only became successful because GWB moved to Iraq and forgot about Afghanistan.
I recently bought a 2013 MBP instead of a new one. I refuse to pay 2x more for a laptop that is 2x worse. Better to prop the second hand market than these greedy fucks that work today at Apple.
I have an Asus K501 because I like paying 1/3 as much for a laptop that's 2x as good.
It's because Apple doesn't know how to test stuff. They do this over and over again, more so than any other 1st tier company.
This kind of flaw would have been discovered during routine testing of the keyboard at Lenovo out Dell. They would have aged it, blasted it with dust, tested it in 100% humidity and -10C, dropped all kinds of stuff on it...
I can only think that Apple is so desperate to keep stuff secret that they have to forgo this. They must have product engineers telling them they need to do it.
Oh yes, they most certainly do. The engineer is told to shut up and do their job.
Apple is a company run by designers, not engineers. The engineers "job" is to make what the designers envisage work even when its completely pants on head retarded. Because good engineers typically have a problem with producing sub standard crap when they can fix it and more so, being able to shut up and follow orders to do so, Apple does not keep many good engineers.
Religion as a concept *is* the true root of evil. It is, at its essence, one group of people claiming they are better than everyone else because God said so.
I largely agree with your points and am a proper atheist (I don't believe in god... I also don't care what anyone else believes or doesn't believe in, one's beliefs are one's own personal choice).
But religion is amoral, it was originally a means to explain things we couldn't comprehend, then it was co-opted by men (who can be moral or immoral) to be a method of control. Ultimately people are the root of evil, religion is simply one of the tools that is far too often abused by evil men for their own gain. No holy war has ever benefited any god, the crusades and all the other holy wars went to benefit those in power.
Religion has become less important in modern life, so much so that it now holds little power over western nations... which is why evil men have now taken to the next best method of control, nationalism.
Solution ... don't eat at Chili's.
Better solution: Fix the idiotic CC system the requires the same information to be both widely known and secret.
Even better solution: Make the storage of card details illegal with jail terms for any business and supplier of POS terminals that permit it.
This will never happen as it will force a small percentage of people back to cash, seeing as banks skim a percentage off each transaction on credit, they'll lose millions in pure profit from that small percentage.
As an aside, my solution is easier and faster to implement.
If you aren't running the mail server, then someone, somewhere is reading your email. Maybe they aren't right now, but they are a rogue sysadmin, data breach or buyout from doing so retroactively.
It's like having a conversation in public. If you want private communication, email is not and has never been that.
My memory of signing up for Gmail was that Google was quite open about using the data anonymously for various purposes, a position more honest than many others who do the same without the courtesy of saying so.
This.
Anyone thinking that other services, even paid ones like Microsoft's offering aren't doing the same thing then they're deluded. Unless you control the data end to end, someone else is reading it.
And Google have never really been shy about admitting that they're trading their free services for advertising. Its far less of a Faustian bargain than it sounds, Google's ads are unobtrusive and usually pretty far off the mark as far as targeting goes, at least for me. Gmail is fine for personal use when all I want is an account for contacting friends and family or signing up for things I want to use (I've got a hotmail account for signing up for things that I think will spam me, in fact that's all its used for, I have something like 110,000 unread emails as it's an ancient account).
Here in BC, it seems a favorite way to launder money is at the casinos and they'll be laundering more like a $100,000 in cash at a time.
I've also heard there's quite a black market for winning lottery tickets.
Its a terrible way to launder money no matter what. Much easier to run it through a series of legitimate fronts $5 at a time.
This is just an incompetent government trying to make it sound like they're "tough on crime" whilst a Royal Commission into the banking industry is turning up some really ugly skeletons that they're desperately trying to ignore. A case of "look over there and pay no attention to the cluster-fuck behind the curtain".
The black economy is usually someone paying a car mechanic, builder or joiner to do some work, while not declaring the transaction and pocketing the VAT/income tax for themselves. In rural areas, they also exchange or barter services instead of transferring cash. Sometimes payment is acceptable as bottles of wine, firewood, scrap metal, old appliances or anything else.
That is the grey economy in Australia (AKA the cash or beer economy).
The black economy is illicit trade, (drugs, firearms and other controlled items).
This move is just another "do something" from Fizzer's incompetent government on their slow, inevitable march out of office (Australia's current PM, Malcolm Turnbull is called "Fizzer" as an ex-PM described him as "A lot of fizz, but no bang").
It's more about capturing revenue that currently goes to Barclays. It's also about spreading the Apple Pay service.
Its about trying to get people to use a service they have no use for.
I know 2 people who use Apple pay and I'm fairly certain 1 of them has stopped completely. Both are hopeless fanboys who will jump through any hoop and take any abuse.
However this could easily be the end of Apple Pay, Apple presently is maintaining the line it's not a bank, therefore does not need to comply with the myriad of banking regulations in the jurisdictions it operates this service in. Right now they can claim that as Apple Pay is just a wrapper for someone else's banking product (and that is 100% legal and legit).
One Apple start issuing cards, it's going to be difficult to claim that they're not in the financial services industry and not subject to regulations.
It may suck responding to them (a process that can likely be automated) but the feedback is important data points to analyze. The level of vitriol & number of complaints can help them figure out what problems need to be addressed.
This. We are nearly at the point with AI where such things can be entirely automated.
Lets face it, tweets and other forms of social media are losing their impact. These days if you see a poorly worded, cliche ridden tweet with terrible grammar about a business (airline, train company, fast food), you know that it was done by some frothing-at-the-mouth manchild sitting alone in their flat in their underwear you know that it's exaggerated and that it shouldn't be given the time of day. Realistically we're at the point where these things can be ignored completely, getting a robo-response is the equivalent of "we've received your complaint" emails and done exclusively for politeness.