Humodour

I think some people wish he had of committed crimes against humanity so that their neat little dichotomy of "communism evil, capitalism good" would be preserved. But most likely he just confused Lenin with Stalin. A pretty big confusion, true.

Strange how those who actually live there differ from your opinion. Turkey's not perfect. It's behind most Western European countries. But Morgoth's blanket vilification of Turks (rather than, say, the Turkish government, specifically the current Islamist party) is offensive. It's disturbing that he sees nothing wrong with that, either. At times he raises some valid points about integration of immigrant cultures but then he blows it by acting like a bit of racist jerk. I don't know, maybe Morgoth's language in this thread is fine with everybody else, but it makes my skin crawl.

Turkey seems one of Europe/Mid East's shining beacons. 90 years of secular democracy, NATO member, continually developing, good example for Arabs, etc. The animosity a lot of Europeans have for Turks (Morgoth being a classic example) is almost comical from where I'm standing.

Are you asking whether Bush was a bad president or whether Bush is an unintelligent person? Quite a difference, but you seem to merge the two in your tangent at the end. I don't really believe he is stupid, myself. I imagine he has an above average IQ (say, 110 or so). He doesn't appear to have strong willpower based on his substance abuse issues, and he didn't do well at uni. But a smart person could fail in these areas, too. I certainly think he's made a lot of stupid choices but what I put down to stupidity could simply be learned ideology which he's justified away in his head. It doesn't help that a lot of people saw him as a puppet of Cheney, myself included.

Don't make me come over there.

9.04 itself didn't exactly lag in performance improvements, either, but it's less than a month after the release of 9.04 and already the first alpha of Karmic Koala is zooming ahead! The performance increases vary from 5% to something like 200%. Specifically, the SQLite regression has been fixed as the kernel has been updated! That means Firefox and other SQLite-based apps will now run probably 2 to 3 times faster on Ubuntu (i.e. at the same speed as in OS X, Windows, and older Ubuntu versions). It's a shame they couldn't fit this into 9.04, because it really is pretty big. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=arti...lpha1&num=2 Also, Ubuntu has launched a cloud services package called Ubuntu One. It aims to tackle Microsoft. The first 2Gb of online storage are free, than $10 for 10Gb. It operates over Amazon's cloud it seems. Looks only available to Ubuntu users (of which there are over 10 million). I am not sure what the rest of its offerings are, but it makes clear it has a plans to branch out. Invite only beta atm. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10169249-62.html And in terms of the bigger picture between Ubuntu and software-as-a-service/cloud computing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10169249-62.html

My new Mac Mini doesn't run Beyond Good and Evil properly because the game wasn't coded with dual cores in mind. *sigh* I hope I don't have problems with the IE games. Haven't tested them yet.

Except it's not caught three times its "some random copyright holder (or note even) suspects you downloaded a copy of their work and gave you a strike". But hey, it might just be limited to Hollywood since Sarkozy is all powsy wowsy with them, so we're in safe hands right? Anyway, the EU has determined that this three strikes law is illegal, so it'll probably exist for all of 6 months if it gets passed (and heck, it might not even reach the EU if the French Supreme Court blasts it first, which is probable).

Well, I think Australia does it right. You set limits, boundaries, and frameworks. We significantly lowered our intake of sub-Saharans at one point because they were simply not integrating well. It's completely reasonable to expect your immigrants to obey your laws, learn your language (but not lose their own), arrive with savings, and find a job (hence why skilled workers are given priority). I believe part of the problem in Europe, and I've done a little research on the Netherlands and France, is that in the 1970's or so (from memory), the governments of the time pitched these massive immigration pushes to places like Turkey and the Middle East for cheap labour at the height of the baby boom. Unfortunately they didn't bother to screen those arrivals, didn't bother to plan for what would would happen 10 years later (perhaps they expected them to simply go home?), didn't bother to ensure the arrivals had saved to pay for their stay, and didn't bother to integrate them from the start. Well, these are the people who are growing up in a societity that despises their own moral believes and own agenda by living in anxiety because most classes (read above: up to 90% immigrants per class, most of them Turks) mob everyone else, thus making it impossible for these young people to develop their own strengths. If you get forced my Turkish kids to "play along" with nthem every day, you start to feel like an outsider, get frustrated and therefor lose any believe into a multi-culty society that theoretically could work well, but doesn't because there are these particular subjects that don't blend into society, but force everyone else to belnd to their believes. Integrationis an effort that has to work from both sides, but many muslim immigrants make this impossible. I'm all for a multi-culty society that embraces education, tolerance and performance, but having these parallel structures emerging that pulls your own culture down into the dirt makes this effort zilch. Multi-Culty yes, but there needs to be a larger EU wide dialog about if the Islam is even compatible with our western views. Uh...

Increased freedom? Increased tolerance? Increased opportunities? Increased knowledge of the world? I could go on, but I suspect you've already determined that you don't like multiculturalism. Now now, you sound like these neo-liberal dreamer politicians. We're talking reality. Who has to deal with immigrants the most? That's right, pupils/students. And when they grow up and always get mobbed, feeling like they're alien in their own country, do you really consider this an improvement? Um, neo-liberals are right-wing economic conservatives. I'm pretty sure I don't sound like them. Also, you lost me at the bit about students being mobbed and feeling like aliens?

Increased freedom? Increased tolerance? Increased opportunities? Increased knowledge of the world? I could go on, but I suspect you've already determined that you don't like multiculturalism.

I would say that in Australia at least, man is a part of nature and man-made fires is the natural order of things, since the aboriginies have been doing it for 40,000 years. For man to suddenly stop man-made fires in Australia's bushland, is not the natural thing to do. Fires lit by aborigines have been limited in scope and certainly not large enough or frequent enough to lead to widespread evolutionary changes in the short time they've had access to fire (they certainly haven't been doing their signature controlled burning since they first set foot on here as Africans). Moreover, Australian flora has been relying on fire to reproduce for millions of years, which kind of nullifies whatever silly point you were trying to make anyway. Those who claim controlled backburning is wrong annoy me, but you are no better; the same kind of zealot, just with the opposite agenda.

lol, I'm pretty sure arsonists didn't control the weather, though. Arsonists light fires with no wind and 25 degree heat: minor bushfires. Arsonists light fires in freak wind conditions and 45 degree heat: once in a century bush fires.

It works really well in Australia (minor kerfuffles such as those moronic Cronulla riots where drunk bogans and low-life gangs had a bit of a tiff), but we have the advantage of being an isolated island in the middle of nowhere. Actually, I'm not sure that's such an advantage since it means we have a massive border to cover. Still, Australia's basic cultural framework is immigration - at any one point in time, 25% of Australians weren't born here. We have an intake of about 100,000 to 300,000 new arrivals each year (it varies each year). A significant portion of them are Muslims, but the key thing to consider is that a) they are thoroughly vetted (typically for skills like doctors, bricklayers, etc, as well as their English), and b) they are accepted alongside many more immigrants from other countries/faiths which helps strengthen that somewhat ephemeral sense of multiculturalism. The biggest problem would probably be some gang activity in Sydney's less well-off Western surburbs, but that's usually blown out of proportion by the Daily Telegraph. Certainly the hyped up threat of the moment is gangs of a different sort - bikie gangs, which is predominately middle-aged white males. But yeah, I'm not sure how well immigration policy is working in other countries. Many European countries have had largely closed borders up until the middle of last century. I imagine opening them so swiftly would have caused a bit of a culture shock. Australia has had immigrants coming in since inception - Chinese, Afghanistanis, Italians, you name it. Still, I see Europeans as somewhat xenophobic and less multicultural and integrated than Canada, America, New Zealand and Australia (I'd include Britain but there seems to be a fair bit of racial tension there). That's my take at least. Haven't been to Europe personally yet.

Whoa, calm down mate. I've explained myself honestly; there's no reason for you to get so worked up. I'm really not sure why you feel the need to hurl such paranoid vitriol but it'd be nice if you kept it in your head next time you have a bad day eh?

I couldn't handle ToEE. It was pathetic. I say this as a massive Fallout, Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc fan.

In that case, I think your mouse skills need some have mods to be of any use. Seriously, silenced SMG = BEST GUN EVAR. One mouse click to their head and they go down without a sound. My main problem was the recoil. In any case a stand-up fire just wasn't fun. T'was with the flame thrower. Whatch them dance!

That's true for Mac laptops and the Mini, which are not usually used for gaming (I, for example, only intend to play pre-2009 games + Diablo 3 and Starcraft 3, which will run on old hardware). The higher end Macs tend to be top of the line (in part due to their popularity for use in things like the film industry, although they've largely been superseded by Linux there now). My point about the i7 was that it seems to be following the same trajectory as the Pentium D or Itanium.

This is a bit of a shocker. I won't believe it fully till I hear a Microsoft press release confirm it, but it's a pretty convincing article (coupled with other news articles I've been reading lately about MS and ARM): http://eetimes.eu/uk/217200966 I'm cautiously supportive of the move, as Intel is almost as anti-competitive as Microsoft is, but receives little to no negative reputation for such (it's currently about to get a billion dollar fine in the EU courts for anti-competitive practices against AMD similar to the one Microsoft got from the EU a few years ago). So a move to increase chip-maker competition is a good thing.

And Craps Macs are? Why did you write 'Craps' then cross it out?

i7's don't seem to be a long-term investment at all.

Alternatively, I quoted a news report I read today, which is obviously easy to access compared to a news report I read about a week ago which is clearly about 100,000 or more pages distant from this one in Google news, and which I can't remember enough key phrases of to find on Google (similar to the one where the US declared a national emergency because of swine flu - or do you not believe that either?). It's not worth my time to dig it up as I was not overly trying to prove a point, merely point out something interesting. It's amusing to see how hard you are taking it, however.

This relationship is OVER!

But every time I've had a type error in Python it specifically tells me why the error occurred: e.g. argument is of type int but I sent a string. Python is still strongly typed because Python actively tracks types, even if we aren't required to. Fair enough. I don't know much at all about shell programming. I have a feeling I'm actually mischaracterising OS X's shell switching method by way of ignorance.