Oh, come on! I was just joking about the way that sentence was written. I didn't expect some sort of spanish inquisition!

A laser diode is much more robust than a laser diode

*head explodes*

Absolutely not. The real context of my comment is that parent said the iranians had no say over the kind of government they are being subjected to, as an answer to "The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran" by grandparent (which I guess has been modded down as a flamebait).

What I can see from most answers to my post is that I've been misinterpreted when I said that they already had a chance. What I really mean isn't that they "already had their one chance and must now suffer the consequences until the end of times", but that they actually did have a chance to end tyranny without anyone else's help and installed their own government, their choice being what we see today.

This new generation is free to fix what their parents did and have their voices heard (and they should), but it doesn't automatically mean that by helping them (or not) we are admitting (or not) guilt to something that did not actually happen in this specific case - a regime installed by the western world.

Except with the fact that the Iranians did actually overthrow the brutal despot that the US helped establish, and replaced him with what we see today?

AFAIK, the Iranians already had their chance to end tyranny and establish a democracy... but instead, they chose tyranny by different hands.

Basically Valve broke their promise from last year and is now officially a greedy developer. If they intended to have Left4Dead be a technology preview all along, they should've gone and called this paid beta-testing as the Prologue version, like Gran Turismo 5.

"Valve intends to support hotly anticipated zombie survival shooter Left 4 Dead post-release with new characters, new maps, new achievements and new weapons in order to grow the community, Gabe Newell has revealed.

Speaking to VideoGamer.com at Leipzig Games Convention, the Valve co-founder and managing director said the developer intended to follow a similar downloadable content policy as it has with Team Fortress 2.

Newell said that Valve's support of the game post-launch will be essential for growing the community.

He said: "One of the things that we're doing is we seem to be in a transition between games as a package product and games more of a service. So if you look at Team Fortress 2, one of things that's really helped grow the community is the continuous updates, where we release new maps, new character classes, new unlockables, new weapons. And we tell the stories about the characters, like the meet the sniper, or meet the sandwich. And that ongoing delivery of content really seems to grow the community."
 
 

source: http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/left_4_dead/news/valve_details_post_left_4_dead_launch_plans.html

So, I guess you were joking right now, eh?

I really like what Churchill said about all this:

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

But Gasoline is more cost-effective than Ethanol where I live, for instance.

Because:
1. While Gasoline is about 42% more expensive than Ethanol, the mpg is lower on Ethanol. So, to correclty compare prices, you have to multiply the gasoline price by 0.7. When I do that, Gasoline ends up being 5% cheaper.
2. There is no control over ethanol tampering in Brazil. Quite a few gas stations add a bit of water to the tanks, and the flexible fuel cars won't stop working because of that. You just get lower mileage.
3. The temperature in our region is lower (Hey, 25ÂC is SMOKING HOT for me). We actually have a bit of snow during the winter... and Ethanol doesn't play nicely with cold temperatures. The engine deals with it by adding gasoline to the mix.

Unless you live in Sao Paulo (where ethanol is 45% cheaper when comparing prices vs mileage), it's just not worth it.

Diesel cars, the ones that are truly efficient, are not allowed in Brazil. That is because while Brazil doesn't depend on others for heavy crude oil, we have to import ALL of our light crude oil... and diesel cars would screw up the import/export balance. What about biodiesel, you say? We barely have enough volume to replace the diesel used in our trucks, nevermind fueling cars.

My experience with it says otherwise. I've had various issues with NTFS-3G when reading the hard disk on Windows. They are as follows:

1) For some reason, when a linux app tries to save a file with a question mark ("?"), which is an INVALID character on Windows, NTFS-3G will allow it to continue. You can perfectly read the file on linux (and write back to it), but Windows complains.

2) When using characters that have accents on them (like you see in romance languages - portuguese being my case), copying files back and forth is the same as begging to lose data. I've backed up my /home partition to an NTFS external HD only to find out a few days later that my Music and Videos folders had vanished. Other characters that I've had trouble with are the ones used to represent ordinal numbers in portuguese (which curiously won't show up correctly on slashdot).

In all of those cases, the partition works perfectly until you run CHKDSK, or write something to it under Windows. That pretty much undermines the main reason behind using NTFS-3G (writing to the same partition on both systems).

All in all, my opinion is either stick to Linux and EXT3 or Windows and NTFS. If you must use both, use different computers and get 'em exchanging data through SMB.

Disclaimer: I haven't researched for fixes (basically because when I found out about the issues it was too late and it didn't matter anymore) or tried to isolate the causes. What I've been using is the NTFS-3G driver supplied with Ubuntu (7.04 onwards).