For me there are two categories of books - "average" books that I like, but not incredibly, that I get as ebooks, and there are those that I really treasure that I get as hard-covers. It must be something about the physical nature of books that ebooks just dont do for me. Admittedly a part of me is also always preparing for the post-apocalyptic scenario where there is no power - you dont see e-books giving you a 2% increase in skills.

On the contrary - before the atomic bombs the emperor had quite a few conditions on the surrender - in fact it was more of a peace treaty then a surrender - including retaining power, the army being responsible for order, no occupation of either the home islands or Korea (Which Japan considered rightfully theirs) etc. In fact some of the more belligerent members were pushing for Manchuria as well. It was completely and utterly unreasonable.

Secondly - even just keeping the imperial court in place, which is indirectly or directly responsible for the war and its horrendous conduct IS too much to ask for - and they should have never even gotten that. Likely as a result of this Japan has never properly come to terms with its conduct in the war, which they still refer to as a "calamity" or "disaster" rather than a war they started and lost, and the history books they use in school are full of revisionist bs.

In that particular case the Japanese brought it onto themselves. Their conduct showed few morals and quite frankly it was a good call given the information available at the time.

Japan was defeated but they refused an unconditional surrender. Everything at the time indicated that they would fight to the last man. What are you supposed to do?

Its difficult to explain in a logical fact-based way why that perception might be the case (and I don't know enough locals to say one way or another) but Persians do dislike (hate?) Arabs. Persians feel their culture is superior to that of Arabs. The current regime has in the past and currently cracked down on certain cultural traditions that are not in line with Islam. This has been interpreted by some commentators as Arab cultural imperialism - and from there its not hard to see how an perception that their leaders are (culturally if nothing else) Arabic.

Give it a while - with some stuff you tend to fight it and then later realise its actually useful. For instance I've never used libraries before as I like to make my own directory structure and windows usually insists on its own for libraries - but for win 7 you can specify multiple directories to link to that library - so for games - some of which are in the steam folder, some of which are in a games folder - I can use the games library as a single point of entry for both.

As for the control panel I agree with you - I've found it difficult to use (why the subtle name changes?) - however the search bar on the start menu allows you to directly access all of the things in the control panel so I have never had to go there again!

The direct x10,11 thing is a bit of a dirty trick to force the high end folk to win 7, but I guess they cannot support xp forever.

That's fine, but are you sure others share your opinion? Do you think you would manage to keep that opinion while starving? What about those in the 3rd world who take jobs they know are going to kill them through poisons / poor safety etc. just so they can survive / feed their family etc. If they took that option would it not be too far to argue that faced with what I outlined they would take that choice? After all, desperation has driven people to do all sorts of things.

My key point (whether you think its valid or not) is that this is not a choice in isolation, it is an alternative to what would be conceivably be their "normal life". What I am saying is that animals face such desperate conditions in their normal life that it might actually make this choice the more "moral" choice of the two.

You are ignoring the very real fact that living a "free and normal life" for animals is almost constant suffering. Unless you are a apex predator life is very scary, even if you are, you are cold in the winter, constantly hungry and you best hope you dont get sick or injured as its all over in a very nasty way.

The life they have on farms etc, it a lot better than this and the death they get at the end is better than almost any way you can die in the wild. Its nice and all to talk about "freedom and a normal life" but are you sure that is what they would want?

Is it really immoral to eat/kill animals without the explicit need? Remember that the great majority of those animals would not exist if it weren't for their eventual use as meat. So they get a life of relative leisure - free from the dangers of predators, fed as necessary, health looked after etc. and all we as for in return is a relatively painless death at some time in the future (a fate they are not aware of either - so no stress from this).

That seems a pretty good deal to me. In fact, that seems a much better deal then living in the wild, constantly cold, hungry and scared - not to mention a death filled with much pain and suffering. Which is what I assume is the alternative that is being proposed for them.

What marines do, and other such task based training do is get you to create strong "fast track" links in your brain from input A to output B. This allows you to do simple tasks quicker - and importantly under stress. These sorts of things generally dont have much carry over to other tasks, since they are strongly dependent of a particular kind of input A, and a particular kind of output B.

What this study is about, however, is task independent patter recognition. Since this study works with a task that all the participants are unfamiliar with, it comes down to how good their patter recognition is in a generic sense.

Yes video games require specific skills, but the conclusion of this study is that they also improve your skills in a generic sense as well. I'm not sure what it has to do with physical coordination or communication since this study is about pattern recognition. As for situations not being rule based, unless you are talking about stochastic systems, they all are rules based, and the key to good decision making is working out those rules quickly and accurately, which is what this study concludes gaming helps you do.

That's quite not how it works - the government passes certain kinds of legislation (known as enabling acts) that grants specific groups the ability to "fill in the details" within a set area. They absolutely do need legislation to allow them to do this and for NBNCo or the minister to regulate internet content they would need a specific provision say that they are to develop regulations on content that is allowed to pass through the service.

Now the question is whether current legislation has already allowed them to do this - but they certainly cannot say that its is outside the purvey of the house or that they haven't specifically denied it so they are allowed!

Here is a summary of the situation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_laden#Conflicting_reports_of_his_death_and_his_survival_since_9.2F11

Looks like despite the apparently regular and authentic tapes that are released, quite a few people suspect that he has been dead for some time.

Gasoline doesn't magically appear at the pump either - you have to expend energy to find oil and extract it, then expend energy to process it into gas (aka petrol), then deliver it to the pump and then use it. Given that its significantly cheaper to run an electric car then a petrol car (in terms of fuel cost only) a simple analysis would suggest electric is more efficient overall.

Were is the evidence for this? I've seen people make this claim but I cannot find much about him that would suggest this.

I think you are overstating the case. You have to keep in mind the precedents at the time. Mining the shore + harbours was a standard war time action and would have garnered very little international outcry (ie. Russia often did this to themselves to prevent approach and landings on their shores), whereas unrestricted submarine warfare was brand new at the time. I'm not sure what you mean by the Germans didn't intend to kill the passengers - they fired a torpedo at it and a sub cannot rescue large numbers of people - ie. only one outcome was possible from firing a torpedo.

Whether the US should have intervened or not can be a large debate, but the "right" side was no doubt the allies, as they were fighting a defensive war, against a country that violated a number of taboos of war at the time (ie. Belgium etc.). That Wilson was keen to intervene I think is true, but sending war supplies doesn't actually break neutrality (and there are many examples of this throughout different wars).

I'm not sure what you mean by Wilson being evil - his contribution to the treaty of Versailles were largely symbolic thanks to his idealistic nature and were ignored by the other powers. Wilson along with elements of the British were against the harsher measures of the treaty, and it was largely at the insistence of the French that they were included.

I would like to interject that the large powerful government causing imperialism is bullshit, given the level of centralisation and government oversight of the entire [insert your pre-16th century empire here] was insignificant in comparison to almost any modern country. In many cases the reasons for aggression is simply due to individual personalities, often it is a case of we could so we did, for glory etc.