Do they honestly expect us to believe this shit?
Believe what you like, but you have obviously never worked for an Australian bank. I wouldn't be surprised if they said that they lost the punch cards. F*cktards, the lot of them.
Wow.. What complete and utter rubbish your post is. Are you seriously suggesting that we pay countries not to piss us off so we start a war with them?
Actually, your Government does that already. Unfortunately, it's not very good at it, and the outcome is usually the opposite.
Of course, it's an absurdity to say that you pay a 'country'. A country is an intellectual construct, people who treat it as a thing are usually poor thinkers. No, you pay people, not countries, and those people may be the current government, if they are willing to do your country's bidding, or the soon-to-be-government-but-currently-terrorists-and-murderers in which case its more a case of supplying arms and intel.
Yes, we were giving Afghanistan money before we invaded it.
There you go again, confusing an intellectual construct with actual people. The USG has given money to many people in Afghanistan. First, they gave money to the Taliban so they could win the cold war for you, then they didn't like the Taliban any more so they gave money to the Northern Alliance, then they realized that there was no practical way to form a government without the support of the Pashtun majority, so they resumed aid to the Taliban, but not the bad Taliban, only the good Taliban, who are no longer called the Taliban because the Taliban are now bad/terrorists/Al Qaeda/something. Strange how the people who bomb civilians are the good guys, and the ones fighting them are the terrorists. It's a mad mad world. But I digress.
Yea, there is no such thing as free health care,
Not to society, but there is for the individual.
no such thing as un-winnable wars,
That depends on your definition of 'winning'. But if you were to nuke Iraq and Afghanistan until there was not one person left alive, I guess you could call that a 'win'. Might make it hard to get the oil from Iraq though.
and no such thing as saving money while spending it on science and RnD
You have no idea what you are talking about. RnD into resource efficiency usually has a 9 month payback period, after which it is all savings. Maybe this is why your country is in so much trouble right now.
My laptop fan doesn't even come on under load running linux, but under Windows, it runs even at idle.
Turn off fast indexing service. In fact you should turn off most MS services, most of them are useless, consume idle CPU cycles and are probably attack vectors as well.
It never fails to give my inner 12-year old the giggles to contemplate that Kamikaze is commonly translated as " divine wind "
Probably incorrectly. "Kami" is better translated as 'gods' or 'spirits' and kaze is wind. The word Kamikaze comes from the storm that destroyed the invading Mongol fleet and saved Japan from the same fate suffered by China and Russia (i.e. Mongol government).
A more literal translation (in context) would be Wind of the Gods or Wind Sent by the Gods.
Seriously, that seems to have become worse here, if such a thing is possible.
Actually I have, and the general conclusion around the world (outside the US) is that CIA stands for CAN'T IDENTIFY ANYTHING.
All debate/discussion/disagreement about drugs is pointless unless you use the scientific definition of a drug i.e. any substance that passes the blood-brain barrier. Without that definition, all discussion on drugs is useless. It should also be noted that the body itself produces a variety of drugs (that meet the scientific definition above) that we are most definitely 'addicted' to, such as melatonin, seratonin, adrenaline and endorphins, just to name a few.
In fact, addiction to drugs produced by the body is how the DNA motivates the organism to survive and reproduce. In other words, addiction is both completely natural, and present in all humans (and most likely all mammals, and quite possibly all animals).
So actually, the sound logic is to say that 100% of the population is addicted to drugs,
Frankly I think being forced to use Yahoo or Bing would be a appropriate punishment.
The Corps may very well have used poor judgment that led to the disaster in New Orleans. But the law suit will not stand. In essence the Corps of Engineers is an extension of government and the publics control of funding through taxes limits both the quality and number of projects that the Corps can undertake. After the decades of budget cutting, which were a part of numerous republican presidential platforms, the failure of a project here and there could be easily foreseen. In essence the people of the United States are suing themselves. Yet the people were the ones who wanted all of the tax relief that led to this type of catastrophe. Higher courts will dump this law suit and claim sovereignty as an excuse.
The nature of this problem persists in that current policies are to simply build levies that will stand up to class III storms in New Orleans. It is a fact that class IV and class V storms will certainly hit New Orleans. Massive death and destruction will occur due to this ongoing policy.
As an aside I have also heard that this Mayan 2012 prediction is all buffoonery. They Mayans thought their the world would end just like we think the world ends after December. It was their calender for keeping track of time. I think it was implied that you just restart the calender once the cycle is over. Perhaps it is so implisit that they didn't feel the need to explain this just the same we don't put a sticker on every calender we ever make that says "Not to worry, world not ending, new calender next year!"
Actually, the Mayans believed in a ~25,000 year cycle, divided into 5 epochs of ~5000 years. The current Mayan epoch ends in December 2012. Given that Mayan civilisation effectively collapsed in the 1600s, they were probably waiting until it got closer to the date to draw up a new calendar for the new epoch closer to the end of the current one.
It should be said though, that the Mayans believed that the next epoch would be *very* different to the current one. The basis for this assertion is as yet undetermined, but to the previous poster who ridiculed Mayan civilisation, the Mayans were very capable astronomers and mathematicians. One only needs to look at the engineering of Mayan temples, aligned perfectly to either solar events or astronomical bodies to know that they were no amateurs.
Have a look for 2012: Science or Superstition. It's about 90 minutes long, contains about 8 minutes of science, and 82 minutes of superstition, but the 8 minutes of science is very interesting, and much more worthwhile of debate than skygodders who panic after seeing a movie.
Fear is the basis for your society. It's how the rich and powerful stay rich and powerful. If there is some collateral damage, then that will just be accepted as a necessary condition to maintain the status quo (and the Empire that pays for the status quo).
I think it's rather amusing to point and laugh at people who are afraid of a mythical planet crashing into them when so many in your population believe that the son of a mythical sky god is coming down to Earth to raise up the faithful at the 'end of days'.
Power, control, the matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Photosynthesis.They take in CO2, and give off O2, which we kind of need to breathe
Aahhhhhh
Plants make the beer, we drink the beer, we burp and pee to help the plants make more beer.
If only we could live on beer. The world would be a happier (if cooler) place.
So the thing to wonder about is not how do they do it without the red tape, but how do they do it despite of mountains of it.
It's a good question, and I believe the answer lies in the 'common good' argument. If some project can be framed as 'good for Japan', then it will get a lot of traction once the majority agree that it is. Japanese society is basically feudal, but can also be nationalistic given the right incentives.
I think as soon as South Korea entered the bandwidth arms race, it was a matter of national pride for the Japanese to have faster internet access. I'm sure that their telephone still costs $600 per month though
a game that looks 10 years out of date.
It's obvious you haven't played it. Nexuiz physics and gameplay are very different from previous FPS, and I've played most of them.
I know the eye candy looks a little dated, but that has everything to do with not having an art department, and nothing to do with whether the developers have created something truly new.
And believe me, they have. There are still some glitches in the game, but overall, it plays like no other FPS.
Still, the MTV generation do love the graphics, even if the game play sucks.
My only complaint with Nexuiz is that they completely change the weapon characteristics with every major release to further bias the game to their love affair with hit-scan weapons.
Ah well.
Breadth-first search is the bulldozer of science. -- Randy Goebel
