Comment "Newspaper"? (Score 1) 132
UFO Hits Wind Turbine
Haunted Hospital Calls in Exorcist
and famously of course from the 1980s:
Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster Puh-lease!
bitter sweet symphony by placebo...
It was by The Verve.
If they were really against they would have kicked up a row well before this.
Um, they did: For example there was this letter letter to the Financial Times on March 9th 2010 criticising the Digital Economy Bill, which says:
Put simply, blocking access as envisaged by this clause would both widely disrupt the internet in the UK and elsewhere and threaten freedom of speech and the open internet, without reducing copyright infringement as intended.
Oh, the signatories include the chairman of Talk Talk and the CEO of BT. A handy tip: if you're going to talk rubbish on the internet, make sure there isn't a public letter retrievable in about 2 seconds of googling which unambiguously demonstrates you have no idea what you're talking about.
Increasing the VAT will barely raise revenues if it does at all
Even if you're correct, it doesn't matter. The point of the VAT rise and the emergency budget in general is to secure investor confidence so that the UK can continue to borrow cheaply. People think the VAT rise will raise revenue, ergo they are happy to continue to lend to a country they are convinced will be able to repay them.
You know what else makes people indifferent and uncaring... living in New York city. Nobody can ignore a bum on the street nearly as well. Should we ban living there too?
This has been modded funny but raises an important point. Perhaps playing violent video games does incline people towards aggressive behaviour (although that seems to have been far from proven). Even if it does, that's ok, or at least it might be. The article makes the same point:
[violent video games are] a risk factor that's easy for an individual parent to deal with -- at least, easier than changing most other known risk factors for aggression and violence, such as poverty or one's genetic structure.
We naturally shudder at the thought of legislating according to these other factors that might contribute to aggressive behaviour, such as preventing adults in poverty from having children, or terminating foetuses with a certain gene. It is not enough to say that violent video games increase the probability of violent outcomes. We also need to test this against the much more serious criterion of the effect being considerable enough to warrant legislation. When that is "conclusively proven", let me know.
A formal parsing algorithm should not always be used. -- D. Gries