To be perfectly honest, murder is probably a lesser crime. You can kill someone in a fit of rage, or by accident. You can be defending yourself. You can't accidentally rape your kids, even foster kids.
You can't accidentally murder anyone. That would be manslaughter, and it carries lower penalties. Murder is premeditated killing of a person.
To give you some scale: UK lost 2.19% of it's population in WW2. Germany lost 3.82%. France lost 4.29%. Not to mention the fact that the fighting in the West happened mostly on French soil.
References to losses in WW2 in my comment above are obviously about WW1....
Yes, it is a bit strong for americans to say that...
But the British say the same thing, you know that small country that fought in the same war and that hitler turned his attention to after beating the french?
It's easy to be brave when you have 30-240 kilometers of sea between you and your enemy.... And wasn't it the British Army who ran for their lives in Dunkerque?
The French believed they could acquiesce to Hitler's demands, and thus avoid a conflict. The reasons are that they really, really did not want to fight. The reasons for that included that at that time, Hitler was the hero, both of French Nazi's and of the French lefties, including socialists and communists, and even (quite large) parts of "center" parties
Cut the crap. The reason why France did not want to fight was because they fought an extremely bitter war with Germany few decades earlier and they hadn't yet recovered from it. To give you some scale: UK lost 2.19% of it's population in WW2. Germany lost 3.82%. France lost 4.29%. Not to mention the fact that the fighting in the West happened mostly on French soil.
But still they went to war. And they were defeated (together with UK) by the most powerful military force in the world. Should they feel ashamed by that? Hardly. Only thing that saved UK from the same fate was the Channel. And in the end it took the combined force of UK, USA, USSR, France and Canada to ultimately defeat Germany. Yet France is supposed to feel ashamed because Germany defeated them?
For comparison, USA lost whopping 0.13% of it's population in WW1.... In fact, USA has had it amazingly easy in it's wars. Look at Winter War. Had USA suffered similar casualties as Finland did, it would have meant losses of over 1 million men in a war that lasted 105 days.
There are other means of transportation than trains....
Like what? There's light rails and monorails, but those are both types of trains.
Um, bus?
Yep, a single diesel bus pollutes as much as 600 modern cars.
Well that's a load of bullshit.
when you factor in the fact that it stops at every single bus stop along the way
At least in here they only stop if there are people waving at the stop or if a passenger wants to leave at that stop....
and the bus stop you stop at isn't anywhere near where you need to go
By that logic, the only suitable means of transportation is either bike, walking or car. Mass.transit is absolutely unsuitable. And the two former are unacceptable because they are too inconvenient, am I right?
Like I said, this is about will and mentality.
With the current economy and gas prices in past few years, if buses made any sense at all in America, they would have seen a resurgence of ridership, and they haven't.
That's because of the mentality. cities in USA aren't that different when compared to cities elsewhere. I fail to see why buses work just fine just about everywhere else, but in USA they wouldn't work because......?
Sorry, I don't buy it. Many of our cities are sprawled in all directions.
And even those "sprawled" cities seem to have a lot higher population-densities than cities in Finland do.
There's no way to make an effective mass-transit system using current technologies that operates in a grid; it's just too expensive. Mass-transit only works in cities that are built in a line, such as along a river, or on a long, narrow island (like Manhattan).
There are other means of transportation than trains....
Even if you had trains connecting the major centers of town, how would you get from there to your destination?
At this point I would like to mention city of Espoo in Finland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espoo
Population-density: 778/km2, second largest city in Finland. And the interesting thing about Espoo is that it does not have a singular "downtown", but rather, it has five (seven, if you include the two smaller centers as well). And it has working mass-transit-system. Of course many residents commute to Helsinki as well.
The main thing preventing mass-transit from being implemented is the will to do so. I really don't see any indications that cities in USA are so totally different than all other cities in the world. This is mostly about will. Gasoline and cars are cheap in USA and there is no interest in mass-transit.
Of course, you could use buses, but those are extremely polluting and inefficient
Are they more polluting, inefficient and slow than a gridlock in a highway?
Um, large reason why those governments were so corrupt was because CIA organized their elected leaders to be ousted and replaced by juntas at the behest of UFC.... The juntas and the like were the corrupt governments. Your complaint about corrupt governments was caused by UFC!
And large part of the success of USA is the success of American companies. And one of those companies was UFC.
If they can identify 3% of people are using 40%, then by all means put a 'cap' on the fixed price service that *doesn't* affect the 97% of normal users.
Well, the telecoms are selling an unlimited data-service... If they start putting caps on their unlimited data-service, then it's not unlimited anymore, now is it? Those customers are paying hard cash for unlimited service, and that's what they should get. If they get less, they should also pay less.
and that our success is unfair and came at the expense of other countries
Well, there have been cases where that is true. United Fruit Company ring a bell?
The USA is too spread out for traditional mass-transit systems to work very well here, except in a very few exceptional places with high density, like NYC, SanFran, etc.
Well, in Finland just about every single town has a working mass-transit system. And those towns usually have population-densities that are fraction of population-density of NYC and the like.
Just for the sake of comparison:
population-density in Helsinki: 2,718.38/km2
population-density in Tampere: 399.54/km2
population-density in NYC: 10,606/km2
population-density in San Franciso: 6,688.4/km2
Fact is that majority of Americans live in a place where you could have a working mass-transit.
Norways oil-revenue does jack-shit for Finland, Denmark or Sweden. Or do you think that other Nordic countries get dibs on Norways oil for the sole reason that they happen to be near Norway?
Hell, compared to most other countries, Finland has no natural-resources to speak of. Most of the iron ore is in Sweden, Russians took most of our nickel-deposits after the war. Only thing we have is a bunch of trees.
Could that be because Japan doesn't have to worry about Defense spending?
Japan spends about 46 billion dollars a year on defense, 7th largest amount in the world.
It was they typical American stupid business move: they looked at the next few quarters, not the next few decades.
Last time I checked, it's now over a decade later and Apple is raking in huge profits...
But that was Jobs at the helm. And sure, after falling from 6% of the market down to below 1.5%, they've rebounded... by using 100% PC hardware and still getting people to pay 2x-3x the price of a similarly equipped PC.
If they are "similarly equipped", then why do those PC's look and feel cheap and crappy when compared to a Mac? Why aren't they as enjoyable to use?
Could it be that computers are more than just collection of parts? Could it be that you can't determine the quality of a computer by staring at a bunch of paper-specs? Audi and VW are made from largely identical parts, yet Audis cost more, and they are also higher-quality cars.
Anyone who things that two computers are similar (and therefore deserve similar prices) just because they have the same CPU or or something like that is a fucking retard.
The iPod, and even more the iPhone has been a bit of a sales booster, but that'll start to fail as the iPhone is eaten by Android over the next several years
Yeah, just like Zune is going to eat the iPod any...day...now...
But make no mistake: Jobs shutting down open MacOS licenseing ensured the dominance of the PC
Was MacOS taking over the market back when they licensed it to third-parties? No. Clones did not boost MacOS market-share since they did not take users away from Microsoft, they took users away from Apple. And that would have meant that Apple would have gone bankrupt.
There is a solution to that. Get over it.
Sure, it might sound simple, but it's not. Many people have had self-image-issues and/or self-esteem-issues for a long time, asking them to "get over it" is a bit simplistic. It's like telling a depressed person "stop being so damn depressed!".
Now, I DO go to the gym. But there's a division in the gym: there's the weight-training area, and there's the "other" are (where you can do crossing, spinning etc.). The latter is where you can find the mere mortals, whereas the weight-training is usually crowded by the folks who take their workout very seriously, and they have obviously done it for quite some time. No, I'm not saying that the guys pumping iron are judgemental or anything like that. It's just that mingling with them can be daunting.
But I have thought about starting doing weight-training. Reason being that if I wont, I will probably regret it down the road. And probably the experience will not be bad at all. But the first step is always a big step. It was a big step to start going to the gym in the first place.
Not to ebrag but when I go to the gym I burn around 700-900 calories...
Burning only 300 calories isn't go to do much of anything. You could replace that with a walk.
I normally burn about 500-800Kcal at the gym during the 1 hour I'm normally there, sometimes a bit more. My personal record is about 1900Kcal (2 hours of bodypump straight + cycling to and from the gym).
Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.
