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You could design them with frosted windows or blinds that obstruct passengers from looking at downwards angles, so they could still see the horizon and the sky.
I think I've read about a train being build through a city somewhere, where it'd pass close by residential buildings, but only briefly. This was solved by installing "Smart glass" so they windows are obscured temporarily when going past the buildings.
The way the "trapped" situation is solved for large Ferris wheels is a secondary spool of cable that you can attach to a truck and propel the system for long enough to evacuate it. That strikes me as applicable here.
I think the distinction is between software and hardware DRM. DirecTV controls the entire hardware chain. This means they can do various proper encryption schemes (public/pre-shared key etc) that are actually near impossible to crack and make it really, really hard to obtain the key by making the key write-only in the crypto-chip.
In a pure software solution, you control the hardware, and any hiding of the key is subject to reverse engineering the software.
Well, Ubuntu's unwavering pragmatism in getting GNU/Linux on the desk- and laptops of reasonably regular people has had a big impact.
But being right (even very right) in the 80s and 90s doesn't make you automatically right forever after; I found his assertion that you should starve rather than write or run a single line of unfree code[1] to be wrong and very counterproductive to spreading free and open source software.
The conspiracy theories generally hold that 9/11 wasn't perpetrated by "terrorists", regardless of their benefactors. E.g. WTC towers were brought down by explosives, not planes crashing into them, Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a plane.
The simplest and most plausible theory is simply that Bush and Cheney knew, but didn't do anything because they needed the attack to go into Iraq. Even then, at least tens of people in the White House and upper echelons of US intelligence would have known and would have known that they could have stopped this by making a few phone calls. Even 12 years later, not one of them has regretted his complicity in killing thousands of civilians and spilled the beans to a reporter.
Wouldn't it be a factor that On2 isn't/wasn't in the search space at all? Only after the Google acquisition did duck.com come to be associated with search, and then only by virtue of Google redirecting it to their main page.
There is a certain chance that this is not, in fact, an example of bad password management. This service ("MilFlip") could be an internal service on an internal, secure network (the kind of networks that, if someone was to penetrate it, you have bigger fish to fry than keeping them out of "MilFlip") that just doesn't have a good way of turning passwords off - and, to be "secure", requires a non-simple password.
You can never avoid this, but take an approach like ZipCar: http://www.zipcar.com/how/faqs/how-are-cars-cleaned
In almost two years of being a ZipCar client, I've never had any issues. Yes, the occasional coke can or candy wrapper left behind, but never a mess that I thought to be unreasonable.
If it turns out to be a bigger problem, install a camera that takes a shot when you take possession of the car, and when you relinquish it. Charge the renters credit card for messiness.
Despite the fact that nominally conservative parties implement such policies does not make those policies 'conservative' in any meaningful political-history/ideological sense. Just like Obama renewing the Patriot Act doesn't make it liberal legislation.
In what ways do you consider Sweden a conservative country? It is very socially liberal and while it's finances are run mostly sanely, it has a huge re-distributive welfare state.
You can be arrogant if you're brilliant - not the other way around. As a junior engineer (in the 'not much experience', not 'pay grade' sense), you're probably not brilliant enough to be arrogant.
I don't agree with your comments about arrogance. You can be right and strongly opinionated without being arrogant. Junior or senior -- making anyone, boss or not, look bad anywhere, but especially in front of a client is a perfect way of finding yourself at the business end of some pretty nasty social dynamics.
Practice voicing your opinion and arguing for it in a way that isn't confrontational. 9 out of 10 times, it's as simple as acknowledging the other person: "I see where you're going with this, it's a good way to solve A, B and C. But when we get to D, I fear X will bite us in the tail - Y can avoid that.". This also avoids the stinging embarrassment of being arrogant and later being proven wrong.
It bears mentioning that you obviously have a shitty boss and that you should leave at the earliest possibility.
Ah, I was thinking of a Gatling gun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_cannon), not a rail gun. The concept of rotary tubes seemed to mesh with OP's vision.
"Rail gun" could illustrate the way carriages are added to and remove from the loop.
I meant anti-discrimination as the law that keeps the GP from being fired for admitting he's gay.
As for the number of Brits being religious, I think it's easy to conclude that more than 35% of Brits celebrate Christmas. Given the origin of the poll, I would not be surprised if the question was phrased very narrowly.
It's not discriminatory to celebrate Christmas by default if your company is in a culture that predominantly observe Christmas. It would be discriminatory to make special arrangement for time off on Christmas, but not accommodating seasonal holiday requests from Muslims on Eid and Hindus on Diwali.
Since then, the city noticed that it has been far from ideal to use only OpenOffice for digital correspondence. Microsoft Office for instance is the standard for external communication, the council said.
Well, ur doin it wrong. There are vastly superior alternatives to the workflow I think this implies (e-mailing attached documents around).
Most of the negatives you mention are perhaps styled in the language of religion, but they're underpinned by deeper causes.
The Middle East isn't solely a religious conflict, it's very much an ethnic one as well. Oppressive countries are oppressive, they're not liberal countries that just happened to read in a book that they should kill and maim those that worship in the wrong way. Closely knit groups (families, societies) are going to sanction deviators regardless of religion.
That's not political correctness, that's anti-discrimination.
Political correctness is "Seasons Greetings" instead of "Merry Christmas" for fear of offending non-Christians. It's idiotic because for those not celebrating Christmas, indeed those that might be offended by mentions of Christmas, there is no season to celebrate. Don't send them a card. "Seasons greetings" is not "culture neutral", it's a code for Christmas. Pretending people are too stupid to figure out why suddenly people are eager to wish them a particular great third week of December is very offensive, IMO.
> Hate speech and anti-discrimination laws have drastically improved the lives of millions of people in the UK.
Cause and effect, dude. This happened in the same time frame in virtually every single developed country on earth with different ways of approaching the issue. Chances are that being more tolerant was simply just an idea whose time had come.
No, nobody is an atheist when they're born. Atheism is the conscious rejection of the existence of god. Agnostic, more likely.
Yes, religion is by definition irrational. Humans generally aren't very rational beings. Love is irrational, it makes us do irrational things, but I'm sure we can agree, on the balance, love is a good thing. Thus dismissing religion on irrationality grounds is not very meaningful.
I meant that sentence to make good atheists distinct from bad ones (such as various brands of communists). In general, I agree with you. It's incredibly hard to separate out religion from history - almost everything that happened in the world up until about 100 years ago was driven by religious people, and that's the core of my objection that it's a meaningless question. If there never was any religion, you'd have to rewrite literally the entire history of the world and you can't flippantly claim that the outcome would be overall better.
The point is that "app" means application. "What does an application cost?" - well, is it a CLI that prints the current time in the terminal? Or is it Microsoft Word?
You can get a fully functional well polished fart button app for both iOS and Android made for less than $4k, but I doubt you could make something like the Facebook app on even one platform for $400k.
It's a meaningless question. How would a world without religion come about? By flipping a switch, and everybody becomes well educated, peace loving, hyper-rational atheists? In that case, probably yeah, it'd be better. On the other hand, if you start lopping the heads of anyone found to be taking guidance from any teaching that isn't solidly grounded in hard science, then, no, it certainly won't be better.
It's a set of guiding principles. But you can either be pragmatic, go for the good rather than the perfect and make continuous small steps in the direction of your goals. Or you can sit back and refuse to vote for anything that isn't a pure manifestation of your utopia. Neither approach, IMO, is inherently better that the other. The latter rarely get anything done, while for the former, I've seen some examples of securing small, rather than big steps in the wrong direction being touted as successes.
Yes, if you can get other people to pay for it.
Not on it's own, no. At most, is shows that fraud wasn't widespread enough (or equally widespread on both sides) to skew the election away from the will of the people.
Also, fraud is much more effective in smaller races - of which there are lot, many of them too small to have as good poll coverage as the presidential one - so if there is fraud, those races are probably where to look for it.
I don't agree that having only bad candidates is "an edge case which only happens in thought experiments". It's easy to get blinded by the all-to-common sports team approach to party politics (My team good! Other team bad!), but issue for issue, there just isn't any appreciable difference in the candidates.
So what is the "key difference" between the parties? Rhetoric. When Republicans advocate a small contraction of the welfare state, Democrats claim that Republicans totally oppose the welfare state. And many Republicans oblige them by standing up for "liberty" and "responsibility." Similarly, when Democrats advocate a small expansion in the welfare state, Republican claim that Democrats oppose free markets. And many Democrats oblige them by saying things like "markets only benefit the rich."
This rhetorical illusion is so powerful that when a Democrat like Clinton adopts many pro-market reforms, Republicans still hate him as a 60s radical. And when Bush II sharply expands the welfare state, Democrats still hate him as a billionaire's lackey.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/09/how_dems_and_re....
Yes? And there are plenty of immoral laws. Morality and legality often intersects but neither implies the other.
FWIW, I consider compulsory voting an immoral law, even though I generally consider voting a moral obligation. A democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people, as opposed to god (theocracy) or heritage (heritable monarchy). Voting is the means by which the people reaffirm the legitimacy of the political system that is in charge. When the very same political system compels the people to vote, ie. give it legitimacy, the value of the act of voting is watered down.
Wow, you've really really drunk the kool-aid.