I'm late to the party, but that was quite fun to watch. Reminds me in some ways of watching the interviews with Battlebots builders and then the actual matches.

I bet these will pick up some steam here on the sift once more people check it out.


**edit**
Oh, and the neon didn't bother me. I bet the pilots need some high-contrast visual cues to help them navigate; might not need to be neon, but something. If enough people object to the neon in particular, I'm sure they will experiment with alternatives.

Thank god, I thought I was the only one, started for me a few weeks back. I use Firefox normally, I haven't tried using anything else yet for contrast.

"When someone did shoot Bin Laden, everyone cheered. If someone seriously assaulted Bieber, even people who are annoyed by him would say that's going too far. "

@ChaosEngine

You are waaaay to kind to people...I've said that before, and the answer has always been dismissed, but it seems true.

If Justin was assaulted with a knife in an alley many people would definitely laugh. They almost jizzed when he had shit thrown at his face and I know a few irl who wished it had broken shit on his face.

My own two cents. I wouldn't hurt him personally but I would feel relieved if he were to be struck by a car and seriously hurt. Why? One less self-entitled, whiny, addict, asshole that no longer influence the America my children will be raised in. Hopefully it would happen while he was drunk or stoned so it teaches kids a lesson.

Callus? Of course. Evil? No. But it shows contrasts. Those people who are good I value as very precious, go out of my way to help and more. People like Justin are comparatively worth negative capital. And yes, many would be glad to see him hurt.

Wow. Quite possibly their most beautiful video yet. I'm surprised they were able to achieve such good contrast in sunlight. The tall guy really needs to change his natty rags already, though.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to go overboard, and it's been pointed out that I may have misunderstood the video in the first place. I hate the things you mention as much as you do when they are employed against me.

I will say that I'm not downplaying the evils of government as much as I'm upplaying the huge number of benefits it provides, as contrasted with the horrors of slavery.

Again I apologize for the tone of my argument.

Interesting to see how, after Germany was defeated in WW 2, West Germany resorted to free market Capitalism in effort to build strength in the short term. Germany is still living off of the prosperity they created. (East Germany, by contrast, employed more of the Bernie-Sanders-type of thinking and, well, it didn't go as well there).

This video is a bit misleading. Very few kids here in Japan travel completely alone to school unless they live in very rural areas (and even then, they probably go with older siblings). As you see later in the clip, most kids go to school together with friends in small groups, at a minimum a pair but sometimes in huge groups. In my neighborhood, at around 8:45 in the morning, you can see virtually the entire local elementary school walking together towards the public school. They might not be under direct adult supervision, but they are rarely alone and there is always an adult nearby because people are usually commuting to work on the same roads/trains that the kids are using to get to school.

And like they said, the reason this can happen is that violent crimes against children such as kidnapping are almost non-existent here. Adults are far more likely to end up missing/dead here. Contrast that with Western countries like the U.S. or Australia and it quickly becomes apparent why people are escorting or bussing their kids to school in those countries.

I will say that there is a negative side to the "independence" they are touting in this video, which is that these same children often run completely free after school with zero adult supervision. Some of them can get a little wild (throwing rocks at passing cars and stuff or making way too much noise in a crowded residential area) but the cultural attitude here is that it's just "kids being kids," although I sometimes suspect that's code for "we don't want to actually have to parent our kids unless someone forces us to."

Your statement that other forms of preventable death have no bearing on the argument may be correct for your interpretation of that argument, but you are clearly missing the point of the comparison. Nobody is saying that we shouldn't regulate guns because people smoke. The comparison is that if society can sit by and watch people die from totally preventable deaths due to cigarettes and alcohol, at a rate 35x higher than gun related deaths, then why not start there, or even include guns, alcohol and cigs in the same crackdown? In the hands of responsible people, who are the majority of owners, guns are a very low threat and can serve a purpose other than killing people. Cigarettes, in contrast, are perfect killing machines, and 100% of the time are harmful to anyone who sticks them in their mouth and serve one purpose and one purpose only - to degrade your health. If you're fortunate enough to be stuck near someone who smokes, they are harming your health as well. If those who wish to start imposing limits or controls on peoples personal freedoms by controlling access to things that kill people, why not start with something that affects 35x more people than guns do? And if anyone tells you death by gunshot is a gruesome horrible death that nobody should have to endure (and hyped to be so by media and anti-gun activists), go spend some time in a cancer ward to experience what these poor bastards go through during a prolonged death from lung cancer. Give me a bullet any time over that.

So much glorious art. And then there's a Coors stubby (Australian for bottle of beer) on the table...

Contrast much? X D

This tech came from an app called WordLens that Google bought a year or two ago. I successfully used it in a few different European countries.

The bigger, less-stylized, more-contrasting the text, the better it works. Try it out, it feels like the future!

Might be interesting to compare and contrast how we in the US have handled our laundry list of "bad things we've done in the past" compared to, say, Germany.

I know that the Nazi flag and other imagery are outright banned / censored in Germany. From what I understand, WW2 history taught in schools in Germany is handled very carefully, if not largely glossed over.

In the US, the only bit of history that gets treatment similar to that (in my experience/opinion) is the Vietnam war. I know my High School history classes definitely glossed over it and didn't want to get into any details about why, how, or whether or not we should have been in the war at all.

Compare that to WW2, which was covered in pretty great detail. Very much including actively encouraging students to consider their own thoughts on controversial things like dropping not just one but two atomic bombs on Japan.

The Civil War is also covered much more openly and honestly. I don't think I can recall anyone ever seriously suggesting that the single, most important root cause of the Civil War wasn't slavery. Other umbrella labels like "states rights" might be referred to as the impetus, but yes, any and all of those things really boil down to slavery.



One thing that scares me about the German approach (sweep under the rug and don't talk about it) is that it sort of all too conveniently ignores the reality that these terrible things were done by people who were (disturbingly) not very different from us. OK, Hitler himself might have been a 1 in a million or 1 in a billion combination of evil, crazy, and powerful. But Joe Average from today ... not so different from Hans Average from 1930s Germany.

Celebrating one's heritage and past is OK, sometimes even good. Especially when one can honestly own and try to understand the bad along with the good. I think it is OK to appreciate the Confederate flag, along with historical figures like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is possible to accept that their core motivations were done in support of a very bad and evil institution (slavery), but to still respect or even admire their accomplishments as human beings. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves too, but we are willing to look beyond that when considering his legacy.

Maybe the Confederate flag is tied too closely to the institution of slavery for it ever to be uncoupled from that. Maybe a government that prides itself on being democratic should consider that that connection creates a conflict with many of its constituents. But I hope we never sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened.

Fallout 1 was a technically antiquated VGA (that's right, 640x480, 256 colours) post-apocalyptic turn-based tactical RPG where you could not control you team mates during combat. It was a bit buggy (and so was F2). It was Mad Max, without cars.

And yet.

Fallout is arguably the best world-building work in the history of video games. People are probably going to dispute that, but most other games are built on pre-existing lore or works, or do not have that scope*. Fallout built its world pretty much from scratch, conflating a pre-war 1950's, golden-era, overly-optimistic world-view with the bleak desolation of the nuclear holocaust that ensued (to clarify for those who really know nothing about Fallout: in this universe a nuclear war happened in the 50s**. all that's left is from that era). Beside its content which was plentiful in and of itself, this created a contrasted, yet highly coherent and mature world (and by mature I don't just mean killing friendly NPC, I mean doing Morally Very Bad Things that don't necessarily result in graphic scenes). An open world that you could roam freely, be surprised by a new discovery that you made, and at the same time find these discoveries to fit perfectly with the game's logic. In most large games you just access new areas or are carried by the story, in Fallout you would go "Holy shit I'm in the middle of a city populated by centenarian ghouls!", shortly followed by "ho, of course it's full of ghouls, that's perfectly normal". There are not many games that have this mix of unexpected/logical and dark/humorous content.

Fallout 2 had the same ho-my-God-how-could-they-get-away-with-it VGA engine (so next to zero evolution there), but quadrupled the world map (with a minimum overlap with the one from F1) and brought it fifty or so years forward, expanding the world greatly (there are now rival quasi-city-states, and your action may influence their future), while also building on the first one: some antagonists 'classes' from F1 have now grown their own identity and became NPC, and some characters are still around -- a young character you saved in F1 went back to her settlement, became its leader, built it into a town, and is now in the process of expanding it into a new state...So Fallout 2 is basically the same game, except they did that one important thing: push the game world's boundaries even more. You could never guess what next city would be like, but you could bet it would have some crazy shit in it, and yet somehow still make sense.

That's why many people don't like Fallout 3. It is not in itself a bad game, but comparatively, it's kind of coasting. Also it's too damn easy.

I'm sorry, I got carried away, you were asking if you should play the previous ones? No, you 'should' not. But you could, and for F1 & F2 you would certainly not lose your time if you know what you're getting into. And if you don't, at least go and watch their intro on Youtube, they'll give you the feel of the world.

* Possible contenders in terms of "original video game world": Elder Scrolls (vast, but less original), Deus ex (not as large), Bioshock (same), Final Fantasy (original and vast, but not as complex). Any other idea?
** Technically not the 1950s, but in practice the 50s + a bunch of high tech gizmo.

There was a whole host of contraceptive methods that I didn't mention. That some methods are more effective than others doesn't stop the existence of accidental pregnancies. I hope nobody is coming here for contraceptive advice, but if they are I'll thank you for the additional information anyway. I wouldn't recommend a 19 year old male has a vasectomy under most circumstances, though, any more than I would a hysterectomy for a similarly aged woman.

Sex isn't 'designed' for anything at all. It's a verb. It is no more designed than 'driving' is (a reasonable argument may exist that it is less designed than driving). It has many functions, procreation isn't the only one (which is why sex seldom results in pregnancy even when intended (I think its about 0.3% to 1% effective at causing pregnancy per attempt). The analogy is not the thing, the important point is the linguistic parallel rather than the similarity of action. One of a car's purposes, as you hint at, is to collide with things. This is not the norm, but it exists - whether it is for science or entertainment. Also, some people buy cars so that they can crash them for insurance purposes. Thus, one can crash a car deliberately, or by accident. Like a pregnancy. The fact that the car was built in a factory and the body was built through billions of years of evolution is not important.

An accidental pregnancy is a socially useful label used to describe the phenomena when people who have sex get pregnant, though pregnancy was not the intent of their sex. It is in contrast to a planned pregnancy in which the couple intends, as one of the outcomes of the sex, to procreate.

These tips never really sit properly with me.. I want to know why the rule is important, perhaps contrasting it with pictures that are similar but somehow fail to meet the same standard, or maybe offset the picture slightly from it's normal alignment and show that it doesn't work as well.

When it says "use natural frames like windows and doors!" and shows a few pics of windows and doors, that's not evidence of how good windows and doors are for framing pictures, it just shows that some pictures of windows and doors are nice. Diagonals create movement? Well the first pic was of a kid running, and the second one in the snow looked perfectly still to me.

I've yet to see one of these that really sells me on the idea that composition trumps subject matter.. the pictures are always of interesting things, and whilst i'm willing to believe the composition makes it interesting, it hasn't proved that to me, and i can always find or create examples that don't work within the rule.

Assume a great deal? Imagine you know about how governments are supposed to operate on paper in contrast to how they are manipulated by men with power? Insult people much here on this site with obsessive tomes? Been reading some of your comments here-Damn son, how's it feel to hijack a website?