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Collecting photographs of kids (naked or clothed) != child molestor.

I realize this difference is hard to remember when you have been brainwashed by the bible thumping, name calling, press peddlers - but it is, nonetheless, a critically important distinction. Quite a lot of material that is now illegal in this country can be bought on the street in many others - and could here, as well, before Meese and Reagan began their campaign of puritanism. Thanks to those wonderful 80's, The Oscar-nominated Pretty Baby couldn't even be made (in the US) today; you could now be arrested for having copies of Penthouse you bought in the 70's and 80's... just a couple more shining examples of modern life in the "Land of the Free."

hell, if i'd found the stuff on his computer, i'd probably just take the guy out back and beat him fucking senseless.

Et Tu, Quoque?

Kind of like Texas? Even New York wants to copy us.

Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Mexico - well they're all just a bunch of back-woods hicks who don't know nuthin 'bout them 'puters. :)

Well, if any of you have ever driven across the US, it would be apparent that there is a whole lot of nothing out there. However, note that it is possible to bridge long distances with 802.11.
Take note of the HPWren map. They've got a wireless node 45 miles away from their base tower, and they use off-the-shelf gear operating in the ISM band. In some places they have repeater radios powered by solar panels by day and batteries by night. Surely something like that could be utilized in such a project mentioned in the article, but who would put up the money to set up some of these stations and insure they don't get vandalized or destroyed by bad weather?
Such repeater stations would be required, especially if you want to get that signal to the California coast. We have some, erm, minor obstacles.

Anything is possible with enough thought and money. I have no doubt that under such a project, major networks could be constructed in metropolitan areas. Yes, it can be done with Pringles cans. I have constructed one myself and the gain I get out of it rivals most commercial antennas, except for a parabolic.

The biggest hurdle that this project has to overcome is awareness, getting people out of "that's cool" mode and getting them to do something, bridging the huge distances, and getting the signal over mountains. Other than that, it's a piece of cake :)

Scientology is different from Christian Science, just as Christian Science is different from Christianity.

Members of the Church of Christ, Scientist, follow the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the religion near the end of the nineteenth century. Christian Scientists are not allowed by their religion to seek the assistance of modern medicine, and instead use the power of prayer and of the mind to heal themselves.

Jim Henson was a Christian Scientist, and died of pneumonia because of his beliefs.

Here. Read this. Christian Science is just as pseudo-science-y as Scientology.

6/1/93: Microsoft announces that Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the U.S. District Court of Northern California ruled today in Microsoft's favor in the Apple vs. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard copyright suit. The judge granted Microsoft's and Hewlett-Packard's motions to dismiss the last remaining copyright infringement claims against Microsoft Windows 2.03 and 3.0, as well as, the HP NewWave. -From the Microsoft Timeline

But, how old is Visicalc for the Apple II IIe or even I - wasn't it the first app for the Apple or maybe Turtle?

I believe the date for these programs would be 1977. (Visicalc 1979)

I know of several college professors at Clemson that use Apple IIe's for milk volume analysis and "calling" the cows in for milking at the Lamaster dairy Agricultural arm of Clemson too. I also know one professor that still uses VisiCalc.

Here's my opinion on some famous robots that should go into the hall of fame.

BBC Article on robots
AlexDaveRobots, highly rated
The History of Robots from about.com (formerly The Mining Company)
Robot Games 2002 - surely the winners are HoF-worthy?

Not quite right. A snippet from:
In 1950, Eckert and Mauchly were bailed out of financial trouble by Remington Rand Inc. (manufacturers of electric razors), and the "Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation" became the "Univac Division of Remington Rand." Remington Rand's lawyers unsuccessfully tried to re-negotiate the government contract for additional money. Under threat of legal action, however, Remington Rand had no choice but to complete the UNIVAC at the original price.

BTW - My first computer-related job was operating a GE-625. We didn't need no stinkin' terminals or OS.

Printer cartridges bring up an interesting viewpoint. Pardon me for rambling a bit.

According to Rick Russell: "99% of new compatible toner cartridges are manufactured in the USA; most "OEM" brand cartridges are manufactured overseas". Another site said that "Most oem brand [inkjet] cartridges are manufactured overseas". (The latter quote is here in a Google cache of this page, but some javascript keeps forwarding your browser to some Yahoo site for some reason; I saved the HTML and edited out the javascript in order to actually see the page.)

This suggests to me that corporations are making their products more and more proprietary because of the immense cloning operations going on overseas (particularly Southeast Asia), and to some extent America. Specifically, HP could produce a cartridge, which could be refilled cheaper, re-manufactured cheaper, and ultimately made cheaper by a company lacking HP's infrastructure costs (their high cost of making a sale, which I firmly blame their marketing mentality for).

In my viewpoint, corporate America apparently loves cheap labor until the cheapness threatens their own business methods. They love to outsource and export until they find their own competition from the same people. Having been unemployed for years because of stuff like this, I find myself unable to pity HP, Canon, Lexmark and the rest of them. These companies have a wholly and artificially high "cost of sale". In my opinion, it's largely due to the entrenched greed of their marketing departments, taking their cue from the huge compensation handed to company executives.

To recover from this without foolish things like lobbying and locking up designs, they should tone down their marketing strategies and return to a culture of "the product speaks for itself". HP could ensure the quality of printer cartridges to the extent that, say, a 30% increased sticker price would be worth it. But that would involve a lower profit margin since real quality assurance involves real investment on the part of the manufacturer. You'd have to bring back your facilities to a domestic location, for one.

Perhaps what I'm actually observing is that by outsourcing, one is actually creating one's own competition.

As to the benefit of local judges, you may want to think again. A local judge in the Bronx recently presided over a lawsuit in which a local jury awarded $51 million to Darryl Barnes, who was paralyzed when he drew a TEC-9 on a police officer who fired first. Bronx voters favor judges who dispense Robin Hood justice.

Similarly, local courts have made Mississippi and many other southern states "judicial hellholes" for product liability litigation according to the American Tort Reform Association. The problem here is that the voters in the court's jurisdiction tend to identify with the plaintiff. The corporations sued generally have their factories elsewhere, so it doesn't affect the local voters if jobs dry up. On the other hand, a large award can bring a lot of money to a small county. It is this abuse of discretion by local judges and juries that makes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce call for moving litigation out of local courts and into federal courts while consumer rights groups want to keep litigation in local courts.

As to your comment, "If someone has really done something so wrong that they deserve to pay out 30 billion dollars in punative damages then they should go to jail instead," I would only direct your attention to O.J. Simpson. O.J. did not go to jail (again, your beloved local justice did a fine job with him, as it did with the murderers of Emmett Till) and punitive damages were the most justice he received.

At the same time, the number of liability suits ending in bizarre awards is much smaller than most people think. Just as the press tend to exaggerate spectacular events, such as civilian casualties in Iraq, and make them seem more common than they are, they also exaggerate the frequency of liability blunders (absurd verdicts, excessive awards, etc.) and do not follow up six months later when absurd awards are thrown out on appeal.

Here are some facts, courtesy of the Center for Justice and Democracy and Public Citizen:

• 0.02% of all civil cases handled by the state courts concern product liability.
• The defendants win more than half of these cases.
• When plaintiffs do win product liability cases, more than half the awards are less than $27,000.
• Awards over $1 million are most common when the plaintiff has suffered grievous injury (paralysis, brain damage, amputation) and over half of these large awards are either reversed or reduced substantially by the trial judge or on appeal.
• Only a small fraction of a percent of all findings for the plaintiff award punitive damages. Between 1965 and 1994, there were 379 punitive damage awards in the U.S. in product liability lawsuits. Half of these awards were less than $50,000.
• According to the Consumer Federation of America, liability suits add about 0.26% to the cost of consumer goods. This number is similar to what the National Association of Insurance Commissioners found.

I am a christain (who goes to church on Sunday) and normaly I would never post anything on a subject like this, but I have noticed that atheists love these subjects for them to go on about how great they are for not falling for that whole religious crap.

So, I thought I would add this:

1. Why are atheists so anti-religious? Why should it matter what I believe?
2. For atheists, atheistism is their religion, which is quite ironic.
3. It is possible for someone to have an education and still be religious.
4. Some atheists really want famous scientists to be athiests.
5. ANY religion is better than none, for what good are we with out any spirituality?

Atheist's don't exist. If you ask anyone why they are an atheist they will proceed to explain their religion of non belief.
- Monksarnn

An atheist is a man who believes himself an accident.
- Francis Thompson

God not only plays dice. He sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.
- Stephen Hawking

I think the first computer was invented in 1936 by a German scientist, Konrad Zuse, who later had to flee to Switzerland because of the war... At least that't About.com claims.

You know, it's really funny how things can be invented in several places at the same time... Like the modern guitar as we know it was come up with in China, the Middle East and Spain at the exact same times (and not chronologically, implying that the invention would have traveled)... Or how Pythagores, Zarathustra, Buddha and Lao-Tse, who each pioneered philosophy in their own continent, were contemporaries.

For those of you who don't get the joke, click here for a written explanation.

For a more bandwidth-intensive explanation go to:
http://www.brainthink.com/amusements/bush_fooled_a gain/bush_fooled_again.php

There's a clip on that second page that's almost a meg large and I don't want the poor bastard getting /.ed--hence no hypertext link. /.'s lameness filter looks like it's putting an extra space in "again"; take out the space to get to the link.

Maybe you missed it, but I don't think the similarity between this and this is a coincidence.

And Gnome isn't a window manager. It's a desktop environment.

Maybe you missed it, but I don't think the similarity between this and this is a coincidence.

And Gnome isn't a window manager. It's a desktop environment.

Damn. If I had any mod points, you'd have gotten one. I'd have liked to have given you two or three, actually.

I was always apalled at the double standard most people in N. Am have for those of us that don't believe in the version of Jesus as some white dude who spoke like King James. I mean, I should be as free to say that I'm an apatheist as a dark-looking guy should be to say that he believes in the Mystical Turtle of Life, right? Not a chance. The swarthy fellow gets a "Wow, you have a really interesting belief system... tell me more about your culture" kind of reaction and I get one like "You're going to hell... you know that, right?"

As a white American male, I'm expected to espouse the traditional Christian myths. If I had an accent or something I could say whatever I wanted. But since I sound like a typical Californian, I have to say "Jesus saves! Praise be!" or I either get shit on or an attempt to save my soul. My wife gave me a bumper sticker that says "Jesus is coming. Look busy." You wouldn't believe the amount of grief I get for that. I think it's funny as all get-out, yet most people (Americans) don't seem to have a very open sense of humor when it comes to a white guy calling bullshit on the whole Bible story. The Turkish guy can have a "Praise Allah" sticker -- basically discounting Christianity out of hand -- and gets nothing. Is it because deep down your average Baptist or Episcopalian or whatever automatically discounts the foreign guy as a heathen? It's an "us vs. them" thing? I don't know.

I'm fine with any religion, as long as you don't try to convince me yours is the one I should believe in. You ever had a Taoist tell you that you're going to hell unless you fessed up with the sins and got with their program? When's the last time a Hindu tried to convert you? When's the last time a pair of Muslims came to your door and tried to foist their nonsensical tracts on you?

As much as people in the U.S. preach tolerance, I don't see a lot of it...

-B

females were inherently better at using telephones and the like

For some statistical records on this point one might check "Race on the Line", which also covers the strong gender tendencies of those who work by telephone.

Er, no it can't. Not by any definition of "advantage" that I'm familiar with. The psycopathic axe murderer is probably more willing to spend time killing people than the average soldier or policeman, but the trained professional is going to have the advantage when the time comes to do it.

Until 1955 this was specifically untrue. Only about 15% of soldiers were capable of fighting well, and of those, nearly half had psychopathic tendencies. This is documented in works like "Men Against Fire" (of course, the actual rate of psychopathology in military veterans is one of the more impossible things to measure, but it appears that it was in fact a useful battlefield trait).

Supposedly, improved training methods (using operatant conditioning and other textbook behavioral-psych techniques) have improved overall performance enough that violent deviants should no longer be advantaged.

nothing but produce a generation overflowing with illiterate kids who can't perform basic mathematics without a calculator. If that's where there "greater importance" of communcations skills is taking us, then please stop the ride, because I'd like to get off.

It is a surprising, but valid fact that persons from low-tech civilizations are more intelligent than those from "advanced", highly populated ones. Not only is (say) a paleolithic man free from modern electronic conveniences that sap mental development, but they've got a (slight) genetic predisposition to braininess as well. (Professor Diamond has studied and published on these tendencies as observed in tribal New Guineans)

(Hurray! I managed 3 separate links to thick books, saving me from doing any painstaking typing on my own. Don't think I'm deflecting the issues by refering away to professional writers- these subjects are extensive and subtle, and cannot be fairly treated in the space of forum posts)

Easter has always been about the resurrection of our Lord and Savior, no matter what you athiests try to say or "prove". You are just a troll.

Right. Sorry, play again:

Historical connotations of Easter

Including the egg imagery that is so prevalent. How do the eggs fit into the resurrection anyway? That's something I never understood.

Sorry to feed a true troll, but someone needs to correct this misconception if it's going to be used to attack people. This has been a fertility holiday and a welcoming of spring for much much longer than Christianity has been around. You're welcome to use it for your own purposes, but quit the nonsense about it being a purely Christian holiday.

So, how many ways can you retell Romeo and Juliet?
See http://romanticmovies.about.com/cs/underworld/ for what I'm talking about.

No, actually, piracy is still alive and kicking...

Story 1 (search the page for 'piracy' to see statistics on deaths)
Story 2
Story 3
Story 4
Story 5
Story 6
Story 7

Note that most piracy occurs in the South China Sea, and off the coast of Africa, but there is still piracy in the Caribbean, which is very close to U.S. shores.

Just because modern day pirates don't usually have eye patches, and sail in many masted schooners with a black skull-and-crossbones 'Jolly Roger' flag, doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It just tends to happen more often to pleasure craft than to cargo vessels, like it did centuries ago.

And the Renaissance was well under way and piracy was still common, as the U.S. Marine Corps was formed in 1775 specifically to combat the rampant piracy on vessels travelling to and from America. (Yes, the United States Marine Corps is technically older than the United States of America as a country.)

>We are willing to handwave aways so many instances of groups of people observing UFOs as weather balloons, swamp gas, ball lightnings or mass hallucinations.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but most of these sightings usually can be explained. The rest cannot be verified one way or the other because of lack of data. A Joe off-the-street eyewitness is probably one of the worst observers out there. Think back to the classic psychological experiments regarding eyewitnesses in surprise situations. Then there's a very small amount of anomolies out there, which are just that.

To take some anomolies and project a whole ET scenario because there were unexplained lights in the sky is simply jumping to a conclusion. Toss in the new religion that has sprung out of UFOs its its hard to get anything close to objective data. Even worse, contactees are completely out there and the supposed messages from the ETs went from "get rid of your A-Bombs" in the 50s to "We will probe your ass" in the 90s. For an amusing read check out Joe Simonton's encounter with a superior race who hands him pancakes.

Why does UFO have to translate over to "spacemen" when its probably more accurate to theorize unexplained weather events or space-time events? Using occam's razor I think its fair to say anyone with a comprehensive alien theory is really pushing it and her work probably has more in common with religion (wish fulfillment) than science.

Beware theories that are easily liked, its way too easy to be duped by them.

I hunt in my favorite car it's not going to I got to see some neet while on vacation last time I used the other IE it started to look like the the artist formerly known as the shuttle

As another European, I'd like to point out that in some major European countries you can get arrested for merely possessing items with swastikas on them.

What countries are those? That seems extreme, especially considering that the swastika had a positive meaning until it was abused by the Nazis.

This is TERRIBLE news!!

How do I know the government or my company isn't going to start another one of those survellence projects like echelon or carnivore to filter through the flushed documents!? I'd have to eat the printed TP to make sure sensitive information didn't fall into the wrong hands! And what if I'm alergic to the ink!?

Wait! If they have web browsers in the john, the government can use carnivore to track my movements! I stopped using my cellphone and pager when I heard about echelon, now I have to hold it 'til I get home!?

Oh, wait! If I just don't use the TP, they won't know I was there! Hahahha!! But this is still bad news... I'll have to put up with the guy in the next stall surfing to [profitable websites] and *censored* while I'm trying to have my necessary "discussion" with mother nature...

...mustn't forget to put the tinfoil under my hat today...

Unsurprisingly, about.com has a current events satiric humour section. Anything they don't have a section on?

Anyway, if you don't mind the popups, some of the links are actually pretty funny, and there are a lot of current events-related humour sections.

Apparently, pictures of the latest Columbia shuttle disaster were taken by an Israeli satellite. An email about this was doing the rounds on the net, but the whole story turned out to be an urban legend. But, do check out the pictures - they are kinda cool! Apparently, they are adapted from Armageddon.

You'll notice from this piece that the first public mobile phones began during the period of 1945-1947, "coincidentally" around the time of WWII. Of course, you'll probably never find the documents that say why this technology was "really" being developed, because they'd probably still be classified.

For examples: Here, , and also here

On the topic of Marching Band, I was reminded that being a cheerleader can be good training for higher level executive positions.

It's not all about brains and brawn, but it seems as if effective management takes some recognition and ability in how to rally a crowd of people.

No, not really. Why try to save the lives of 683 criminals when you can try to save 40 million unborn children?

And before you mention the fact that it's even slightly possible that perhaps one of those put to death via capital punishment is innocent, let me remind you you're comparing them to 40 million unborn children. Aren't the children innocent?

Really? 35+ other nations agree with us and vocally back the US.

9/11 gave the US an overwhelming goodwill from a lot of countries, even in traditionally anti-US places (like, say, France), and the internationally community heartily backed the war on Afghanistan. Now, 1.5 years later, the US is so strapped for friendship that it has to offer bribes (see Turkey, et al.), and make an empty boast about how many countries support them--when, in fact, an overwhelming majority does not. Why do you think this is the case?

Think about it: The old blimps were hydrogen, bad idea.

Fry an egg on a processor? Been done.

B)

Angle_slam, I am a satisfied user of SpamGourmet.com ( described here) and sneakemail.com ( described here). My favorite is SG and I really want to help it getting well known (it is free and open-source too).

My experience: sneakemail is good for one-time communications or automated services. It creates addresses that are a random string, and this jumble of letters and numbers is very hard to memorize or to simply dictate over the phone.

So you should never use sneakemail for generating email addresses that are also account names (e.g., sites such as amazon that identify you through your email address), because you'll not be able to remember them. Also, don't use them to give to people over the phone.

Spamgourmet allows you to pick a user name and then to create addresses of the form word1.word2.username@spamgourmet.com, with a possible extra prefix to avoid dictionary attacks. So if your user name is Joe6Pack, and sleazy.com wants you to register, give them something like sleazy.reg.Joe6Pack@spamgourmt.com that you'll be able to remember and that will be easy to trace. If sleazy.com starts spamming you, you just disable the address.

I tried several disposable services, and my favorite are spamgourmet and sneakemail, in that order.

Make sure you pick a new, secret, never used address to forward the emails received by these services.

Did I mention I have absolutely ZERO spam since I started using these services? Of course I had to get rid of my old address that was spammed to death.

-- SysKoll

Angle_slam, I am a satisfied user of SpamGourmet.com ( described here) and sneakemail.com ( described here). My favorite is SG and I really want to help it getting well known (it is free and open-source too).

My experience: sneakemail is good for one-time communications or automated services. It creates addresses that are a random string, and this jumble of letters and numbers is very hard to memorize or to simply dictate over the phone.

So you should never use sneakemail for generating email addresses that are also account names (e.g., sites such as amazon that identify you through your email address), because you'll not be able to remember them. Also, don't use them to give to people over the phone.

Spamgourmet allows you to pick a user name and then to create addresses of the form word1.word2.username@spamgourmet.com, with a possible extra prefix to avoid dictionary attacks. So if your user name is Joe6Pack, and sleazy.com wants you to register, give them something like sleazy.reg.Joe6Pack@spamgourmt.com that you'll be able to remember and that will be easy to trace. If sleazy.com starts spamming you, you just disable the address.

I tried several disposable services, and my favorite are spamgourmet and sneakemail, in that order.

Make sure you pick a new, secret, never used address to forward the emails received by these services.

Did I mention I have absolutely ZERO spam since I started using these services? Of course I had to get rid of my old address that was spammed to death.

-- SysKoll

if it weren't for old age we would all live to be about 400 years old; until we had a car accident or died of flu or something.

Hmm, looking up some statistics if we stayed as healthy as 25-44yos in 1995 (190 deaths/100,000), we'd have a median lifespan of about 360 odd years.
n = log(.5)/log(1-p)
Keen.

• Spam Gourmet
• Spamex
• Sneakemail
• Mailsehll
• Emailias

Briefly, I'll explain how they work in theory. After signing up with a disposable email service, they give you a disposable email address that you can, for example, enter into forms. Mail sent to that disposable email address gets automatically forwarded to your email account of choice. But here's where they supposedly come in handy. You can sign up for a different disposable email address everytime you fill in a web form. If you start getting spam, you can look at the disposable email address the spam was sent to and you can do 2 things: (1) cancel the disposable email address so you no longer get spam sent to that address; and (2) you know who gave out your disposable address and you can take whatever action you deem appropriate.

This seems like a cool product, in theory, but I haven't seen anyone with real world experience with these services. If anyone here can describe their experiences, it would be greatly appreciated.

It's not as simple as that though; otherwise I would hack my protocol stack to stick 'fast' on all my packets. My ftp downloads will fly

I guess you skipped reading my post. It was all based on the ISP charging a higher fee for faster packets!

Anyone who hacks his FTP client to request low latency will boost his usage charges, and recieve the total file in 24:36.67, instead of 24:38.12 for a normal connection (for one representative set of numerical assumptions). 1 whole second faster.

If a user feels that's an acceptable use of money, fine.

Also, when I used "fast packets" above, I was referring primarily to latency, which is different from bandwidth. You seem to be focusing on bandwidth, which is unrelated to QoS, and isn't what I was discussing. Here's a discussion about bandwidth vs latency, if you need a refresher.

If an ISP allows QoS flags to indicate that some packets need improved latency, it doesn't have to change that user's bandwidth limits at all. Regardless of the latency setting, he can still only send 150kB/s (or whatever the speed is). But, these packets will "skip over the line" at routers on his ISP (and cooperating network providers, which eventually will be most of them). They will arrive at the destination in only 25 milliseconds, insteal of 100.

That means if he's talking on the phone, or aiming a railgun at a gladiator, the response time for updates is 25% of what it had been. Yet the total data rate he can transmit remains the same.

QoS for low-latency doesn't help FTP at all. Email, IM, HTTP, and audio streaming likewise recieve no benefit. There is no incentive to request QoS for those applications. Only a few uses- voice chat, remote desktop, and gaming- can get much benefit.

The humble paperclip.

From a history of the paperclip on about.com:

"Johan Vaaler, a Norwegian inventor with a degree in electronics, science and mathematics, invented the paperclip in 1899. He received a patent for his design from Germany in 1899, since Norway had no patent laws at that time. Johan Vaaler was an employee at a local invention office when he invented the paperclip. He received an American patent in 1901 -- patent abstract "It consists of forming same of a spring material, such as a piece of wire, that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions." Johan Vaaler was the first person to patent a paperclip design, although other unpatented designs might have existed first."

Over 100 years old and still going strong...

Ethernet came a long way since it was created in 1973...

It never ceases to amaze me the ignorance of people so willing to call others dolts and morons.

For the last time, SUVs are not cars. They were started as cost cutting measures to sell trucks to morons

Actually, their history is just as traceable to station wagons as they are to trucks. More recently they are using unit body chassis like cars more then truck frame rail chassis.

They predate safety, emmisions and milage measures. And BTW, the milage and emmisions restrictions more direclty correlated to the SUV popularity then safety.

-----------------
OnRoad: Safely reporting the SUV war from the middle of the road.

It never ceases to amaze me the ignorance of people so willing to call others dolts and morons.

For the last time, SUVs are not cars. They were started as cost cutting measures to sell trucks to morons

Actually, their history is just as traceable to station wagons as they are to trucks. More recently they are using unit body chassis like cars more then truck frame rail chassis.

They predate safety, emmisions and milage measures. And BTW, the milage and emmisions restrictions more direclty correlated to the SUV popularity then safety.

-----------------
OnRoad: Safely reporting the SUV war from the middle of the road.

Pompeii and Herculaneum were something akin to the Las Vegas of Rome.

Pornography is a basic metric of human economic well-being. In any society with sufficient wealth porn and prostitution are rapidly industrialized, often preying on the least advantaged members of society to the benefit of the most advantaged.

This was as true in Rome 2000 years ago as it is in America (or Tailand) today.

--Tom

In general terms, a "utility patent" protects the way an article is used and works, while a "design patent" protects the way an article looks.

Still not really correct. The begginings of civilization - and the invention of the wheel and writing - in the area were initiated by the Sumerians, a linguistically unique group.

OK, so who invented this?

Or these?

The study of the naturalistic origins of life is called abiogenesis, and while scientists have not developed a clear explanation of how life might have developed from non living material, that has no impact on evolution. Even if life did not begin naturally but was started due to the intervention of some divine power, evolution would still stand on the evidence as our best explanation so far for how that life has developed.

Will we ever be able to prove that an intelligent designer was not involved? I doubt it. In the end we are all forced to make a faith decision to determine what we believe. I don't see science ever answering this question for us, well at least in my lifetime, which is all that is really important for decisions regarding faith. After I'm gone, it won't really matter to me what science discovers.

I have read these attacks against creation 'science'. My argument regarding chance does not ignore the concepts of natural selection, but natural selection does not explain how inorganic materials combined in a series of events to form life.

No kidding, because that's abiogenesis and is not covered by evolution.

The sources you quote also simplify the real issues, and in no way offer proof that we evolved.

You wouldn't understand the non-simplified explanation. What do you want? A free education at a tertiary level until you can understand the science? Be serious. Sometimes you have to accept that you're not going to be given everything on a silver platter. Invest your own time and effort to understand it or shutup.

They actually do a disservice to science. The fact that researchers hold certain aspects of evolution to be fact is not right, that is my point. I have read and enjoyed many of Stephen J. Gould essays, and the argument quoted here [talkorigins.org] is not necessarily valid just because Mr. Gould wrote it.

And this really sums you guys up. You complain about the simplified explanations but you have neither the experience nor the education to understand the non-simplified explanations. When the (late great) biologist Dr Gould tries to explain it in terms that even a layman can understand... you incredibly claim he's wrong!

You can't be convinced. This is why I don't bother with debate. There's no sense debating because you demand the impossible: you want to be given the non-simplistic explanation but you don't want to invest the time and effort to understand it.

... but I never said I was a creationist.

Liar.

People who do not want to believe in God tend to believe in Evolution, and those who believe in God tend to believe in some kind of intelligent design. Some people feel it is reasonable to straddle the fence between the two competing ideas, but I personally have given up on that strategy. It is either or for me.

In my opinion the assumption that life came to be without the guiding hand of a designer is impossible to be convinced of.

It is impossible to interpet these two claims of yours as anything other than you are a creationist. Unless you've somehow devised a new form of ID which doesn't involve creation!

Cage's estate actually won a lawsuit over the copyright on this work. Apparently, the estate now has a legal precedent on owning all musical works composed entirely of rests.

Well they could post all the numerous guides they missed. I had a bunch on my website, which I'll cut and paste here for Geek Dating Guide pleasure: Why Geeks Make the Best Boyfriends

"I just Want To Be Friends"

There is also the Geek Dating Flowchart

Why Girls Actually Want Geeks
Why it usually doesn't happen
and the pitfalls of dating a nerd

15+ reasons why geek guys are "not so bad at all".

How To Lose A Geek in 10 Seconds.

And cause Slashdot loves Futurama, quotes here for your reading pleasure (both said by Fry):
"What? Valentine's Day is coming up?!?! Crap! I forgot to get a girlfriend again"
"Well she was in love with the part of me that's a slob. I was in love with her with the part of me that's desperate."

And finally, have a date for Valentine's but don't know what to do? Never fear, let old 50's educational movies guide you. From what do to on a date, Do's and Don't of Dating and Beginning Dating to Going Steady and How do you Know It's Love, cheesy acting and horrible plots can show you the way.

Well they could post all the numerous guides they missed. I had a bunch on my website, which I'll cut and paste here for Geek Dating Guide pleasure: Why Geeks Make the Best Boyfriends

"I just Want To Be Friends"

There is also the Geek Dating Flowchart

Why Girls Actually Want Geeks
Why it usually doesn't happen
and the pitfalls of dating a nerd

15+ reasons why geek guys are "not so bad at all".

How To Lose A Geek in 10 Seconds.

And cause Slashdot loves Futurama, quotes here for your reading pleasure (both said by Fry):
"What? Valentine's Day is coming up?!?! Crap! I forgot to get a girlfriend again"
"Well she was in love with the part of me that's a slob. I was in love with her with the part of me that's desperate."

And finally, have a date for Valentine's but don't know what to do? Never fear, let old 50's educational movies guide you. From what do to on a date, Do's and Don't of Dating and Beginning Dating to Going Steady and How do you Know It's Love, cheesy acting and horrible plots can show you the way.