Klaas
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Posts posted by Klaas
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In the European media, or atleast in Belgium since the recent violence, racism is becoming a very hot item. Several people are saying racism is being accepted too much and that even the traditional political parties are sharing the views of extreme right regarding immigrants.
In Belgium it became a hot item about 3 weeks ago. An African was beaten blind in a petrol station because he was taking too much time to clean his car window, in Antwerp an 18-year-old Belgian murdered a black au-pair, the (white) girl that was with her and shot a Turkish woman, in Bruges four skinheads beat an African in a coma, somewhere else the house of a Moroccan was burnt to ashes, etc.
Other people however are claiming that there isn't any more racism than yesterday. They say most of the items that are now coming in the media aren't related to racism at all. The African in the petrol station wasn't attacked by a Belgian but by a Turkish man, the 18-year-old murderer was just mad, the African beaten by the skinheads intervened in a fight between those skinheads and a (white) friend of his and the house was burnt down by another Moroccan because of a debt.
So, I'm wondering if there truely is more racism in Europe, and if that's so, what could be done about it.
I'm pretty sceptical about those media items. I do believe that those murders in Antwerp had racist motives, though the guy who did it obviously was mad or depressed. But I fear that the media is making conclusions too fast by calling it all racist violence. Racist violence is not violence against people of another race, but violence done to people because they are from another race or culture; it seems this is getting mixed up a little.
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Do you happen to have MSDNAA in Germany? It's a Microsoft service for teachers and students offering most MS developments software, operating systems, servers and MSDN full access for free.
In Belgium you can either get it if your college has an agreement with MS or if you buy MS-KISS (MS Office professional for €25/year).
Maybe ask around at school, perhaps they have some kind of agreement with MS, or have a look at some bookstores or software sellers.
Found MSDNAA for Germany:
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Yep nice paper Sam.
I don't really know what to think about MJ. Mainly I really don't care if it's legal or not, except when it's used as a cure. I know a few people using it to ease the pain, so I don't see why this should be prohibited.
MJ isn't very harmless however, though part of it relates to it being illegal. I've used it too and I've seen many friends using it. The thing is that some of them began using it too much and some even started experimenting with other drugs. Some of them are really worthless people ATM, not studying, not working, but only living on either their parent's money or that of the social services.
Anyway I don't believe prohibiting MJ will solve any of those problems, so that's why I really don't care about it.
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Thanks for the comments everyone.
Here's what I currently have:
http://www.kvw.be/school/index.htm
Not updated yet for IE and some images aren't really optimized very well. I added a shadow as you suggested Quacker but it still doesn't show up very well, probably because its orientation is to the other side (like the leaf, to keep it a bit consistent).
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Thanks for the info Brian
It's not such a security vulnerability though since stuff that isn't allowed to be viewed is password protected. But it's certainly a good bandwith saver
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I'm currently busy making a website for a school project. Our objective is building a website about a fictional event. I choose to do something around Italy, probably an Italian theme night or a cooking course (I'm currently learning to make pizza
).Here's what I got so far:
To create an Italian feeling I used some classical ornaments in the logo and background, used some pictures of Italian food and of course used to colors of the flag. The layout should make the visitor feel confortable by using warm colors and an old-fashoin look.
It's far from finished of course. Haven't though about where to put the navigation yet and the burning on the header needs to be fixed.
Anyway, all comments are welcome
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You could also use Java in case you're familiar with it. A dynamic array looks like this:
List<Char> myList = new ArrayList<Char>();
myList.add('b'); -
Note that this also depends on the output format. If you're viewing the output as a file it should be displayed as intended. But if you're looking in your browser you won't see any newlines, that's what html is for.
Another thing is that a newline depends on OS. You have 3 versions: \r, \n and \r\n. Don't remember anymore which type is for which OS though.
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@Caesar
Well that's a typical misunderstanding surrounding Esperanto. In fact it is a language you can use, there are quite a bit of online Esperanto communities and many countries have their own Esperanto teams. Also many books have been translated to Esperanto and in some countries there are even radio shows.
The coolest thing perhaps is that several members of the Esperanto organization offer free bed and breakfast to foreign members visiting their country.
Anyway just depends why you're learning an artificial or dead language. Esperanto is useful because of the nice community surrounding it and the creativity of the language while Latin is a lot more interesting from a philosophical, historical or religious POV.
@Nathan
Yeah same thing here. Did some online courses but due to a lack of time it's on hold :/
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Well it's done with photoshop and illustrator, not a 3D tool like 3DS Max, so it's very impressive imho.
Doens't look that photorealistic, aside from the left side, but consdering the size and detail I can imagine that it took so many layers.
Anyone has seen this already? http://www.khulsey.com/empress_large.html
Very impressive too imho
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I'm (still) busy making a website to gather some dough to purchase one of those new 20" iMac Intels. Looks like a great machine, very fancy to put in your living room
I'll tell you how it is when get one, in a few months or years if the website doesn't work out :/
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I did Latin for about 7 years and have nearly forgotten everything besides the basics. The thing is that since the fourth year we were only focussing on literature, social life, history and philosophy, the teacher did most of the translations.
If you wish to learn it you either need a lot of time or follow it at school. The basic grammar really isn't that hard, it's just a matter of knowing the rules and extending your vocabulary. But understanding texts can be a pain, especially because the good old Romans were fond of style figures and the problem that the meaning of certain sentences depends on word order and combination.
The interesting thing about Latin for me was just the texts we had to read. It's cool to jump into the mind of someone around that time, to read about their problems, passions, life, philosophy, etc.
If you want to learn an interesting language have a look at Esperanto. I know it's not that popular but it's a very creative one and actually quite fun to learn. No need to study tons of grammatical rules (like Latin) or tons of vocabulary. If you know the few basic rules and the roots of several words you're all set.
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Well I'm pretty satisfied with the AI. It's less than I expected but it's a big improvement from other games.
One thing, besides the occasional HW bug, that bothers me is that the main quest is quite repetitive, especially the oblivion gates. Oblivion itself isn't really impressive either imho, remembers me of the desert like regions of Morrowind.
But it's a fantastic game, easily the best one I've ever played.
@Titus
I think you definatly need more RAM, about 1GB or something. I have only 512MB so that's quite a bit of loading time :/
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I've been playing with it for a while and I'm not impressed. It's really just a copy of good old Geocities, the only difference being a more userfriendly interface and some semi-standard markup. But they still use deprecated xhtml elements or xhtml for styling in some cases, and this so-called AJAX page editing has been around since Geocities though the buzz around asynchronous page loading didn't exist yet back then.
What I also hate is all these people jumping on the xhtml+css/no-table bandwagon while lacking a fundamental understanding of using these technologies wisely. When looking at the source code of one of their layouts you can see a typical example of wrong use of divs (too many, too complex), css in an inline stylesheet (allowed but it totally destroys the caching features of css) and using divs where you can use other xhtml elements.
Anyway, it's a nice UI though, so thumbs up for that. But the Blogger layouts for example are still miles ahead of this.
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Yep, Flanders was also ruled by the catholic Church (Wallonia to a much lesser degree).
After the Belgian revolution Belgium was a very liberal and secular nation for its time, but it mostly went downhill after that. Quite notorious in the history of Belgium are the so-called "School Wars", a political struggle between catholics and liberals to gain power over the education system. It resulted in the current situation: two large educational institutes: state schools (20%) and catholic schools (75%). So with so many students going to catholic schools the Church still has quite a lot of power, though a lot less than before '68.
Another thing that shows the catholic influence here is that the christian democratic party has been in power almost constantly, and that the catholic trade union is by far the largest in Flanders. The influence of Rome on them has diminished quite a bit but it's still there and used to be big.
They didn't only had power over the government, schools and unions, but also for example the catholic farmer's cooperation used to be the only one until the 70s, the had power over the largest financial institutions, etc.
The turning point in Flanders is not a quiet revolution however, but a very loud one
. It's called "Leuven Vlaams" (Louvain Flemish), when many of the students of the Leuven university (catholic) began demonstrating against the authorities of the university (1968, same time as the student demonstrations in France). The main reason was because the university was still being kept francophone while it's a Flemish university, but another big reason was that the power of the bishops was too large.Anyway, a lot has changed since then, ulitmately until the late 90s when the christian democrats where doomed to the opposition in parliament and lost much of their power and ties with Rome.
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In Flanders a real delicacy is horse meat. Don't know if this sounds strange to Americans, but our English neighbours think it's horrible. Oh and we eat frogs, snails and sea snails too
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Yeah the Vatican is very impressive. Be sure to visit the dome of St Peter's. It's quite a lot of stairs but the view from inside the dome is breathtaking, as well as the "skyline" of Rome from the roof.
What's really impressive in the museums is the building itself, the rich decoration of the interior, the map rooms and of course the Sistine Chapel. Bad side however is that it's so crowded and the long waiting lines. The queue started at St Peter's square for us, so that's 3 streets
Hopefully it won't be that bad this time of year.Another impressive piece of architecture you should visit is the pantheon. If there's sun and rain at the same time the view inside is simply magical, the rain pouring in from the hole at the top of the dome with the sunlight illuminating it.
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var haystack = '<html><td></td><td></td></html>';
var matches = haystack.match(/<td>/);Should get a match. There might be some problems with other code when several lines and white space are involved. Have a look at regular expression modifiers to handle that.
Example:
for a global search: /<td>/g
for treating as a single line: /<td>/s
Some info here:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/javascript.html
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/expressions-javascript
http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/re.shtml
http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/redev.shtml
btw, what are you trying to accomplish? Are you searching through a html file for new posts that are on the page and then replacing what you've found?
Why don't you just use a replace function that instantly replaces everything that matches against the regex?
in JS its str.replace(regex, 'replacement');
You can use regex variables ($1 ... $9) to refer to a match. More info here:
http://www.phpfreaks.com/javascript_manual/page/regexp.htm
It's at the page section called " Using Parenthesized Substring Matches"
If you don't want to replace everything at once you can also split your string in an array and then perform the replace on each array element. After that you join the string together again.
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IIRC match returns an array with all matches, so that should do the trick.
If not maybe this works:
var myRegEx = new RexExp(regex);
var matchesArray = myRegEx.exec(string);
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in JS it's String.match(regexp)
Just do a google search on "javascript String methods" for everything related to searching/replacing stuff in strings.
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Indeed a good topic idea
I don't think this influence only lives in the subconcience of an atheist. The influence is there quite openly, though many atheists just don't recognise it.
Just think about it, almost every atheist won't even think about walking naked among people he doesn't know, almost every atheist fears death and feels unconfortable about it, and most of us regard marriage as an eternal bond between two people.
I'm not saying I'm against these things, but it does come from our christian background imho.
I guess it's a bit superficial to say people "created" a god just to explain things they didn't understand. That may be so in several cultures but imho it's definately not the case with the modern monotheist religions. The important thing there is morality, written rules that describe what is allowed and what not.
I regard this as both negative and positive. Negative because I rather decide myself which morals to follow, but positive because more and more people seem to have a lack of morality. It would serve those people well to realise the importance of having morals and if they aren't capable to do it on their own religion may help them to that.
Religion has definately left some scars, though not dramatically any more in Western society imho. But as Eric alludes, Islamic zealots are indeed a great threat to leave even greater scars. I'm not only talking about the way they wish to shape our society but also the way others will look on them. What I see is more and more fanatics on both sides, now only a minority but I wouldn't like to see the day when that becomes a majority.
A few scars this situation has already left on our society are witch hunts on so-called racists (eg. that "racist" email in Antwerp), people becoming scared of just any Muslim and the feeling of insecurity.
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Interesting post Adam
What I always look for in architecture is function and the sort of impression or feeling it gives to those experiencing it.
That's why I like Horta's or Gaudi's art nouveau so much, they use materials, space and shape to give a special sense. Horta's house for example isn't really big or doesn't look special from the outside but when you enter it you feel as if you've travelled to another world which feels very organic, positive and confortable.
I guess he created this feeling by using a lot of wood, glass and curves, by applying shapes you can see in nature and giving a lot of breathing space by using high ceilings and allowing a lot of light to fall inside.
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The long term plan here is to graduate from college in two years, establish my small web publishing/consulting/design business and work for a few years for a company until I feel assured enough to become fully self-employed. And of course get kids
Short term plan ... quickly finish projects for school and clients so I can finish my own websites.
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It's gone gold this week and it'll be shipping March 20
Racism in Europe
in Hall of Intellectuals
Posted
@Loonis
Yep, totally agreed
But I do think the politicians have a responsibility regarding this violence. I'm not saying it's their fault, but they do have the power to take some measures that might help.
Of course, what happened in Antwerp or the MP3-murder couldn't have been prevented, but the general rise of violence and perhaps racism can be fought.
If there's one socialist I respect a lot it's Frank Vandenbroucke. He's one of the few mainstream politicians not pointing his finger to the so-called racists all the time. He's someone who acts constructively instead of only shouting and blaming.
For example, in the city Oostende he launched a project to get more unemployed teenagers to work several months ago. Now about 38% of the unemployed have a job.
Things like that will help a lot imho, a lot more than what other politicians do.
It's sad however that most so-called progressive politicians think they can solve everything by forbidding extreme-right parties or by censuring so-called racist opinions. You can put someone in jail because he wrote or said something bad about immigrants, but that doesn't mean that person's opinion will be changed, in the contrary imho.
@SGE
I don't believe racism is strong in Europe. It is strong among certain people, eg. hooligans, skindheads and neo-nazis, but I think generally it's not. What is strong however is a negative perception of immigrants as a whole because there's a lot of crime among young immigrants.
So by acting constructively, eg. by giving those young immigrants a job, that perception and crime may lower quite a bit.