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"There just *ain't* too many pure Gandhis** on this planet,"

Just a thought here. Maybe you don't understand Ghandi as well as you think you do?

"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
Ghandi WANTED arms for India, but because arms were denied, he used alternative forms of resistance.

You should read Ghandi's biography. One possible starting point, http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/gandhi.html

Gandhi, for the major part of his life, worshipped British imperialism and too often proudly proclaimed himself a lover of the Empire. He was Kipling's Gunga Din in flesh and blood.

To understand Gandhi's politics in South Africa, it is essential to note the three fundamental trends which all along persisted underneath all his activities. They were: (1) his loyalty to the British Empire, (2) his apathy with regard to the Indian "lower castes", India's indigenous population, and (3) his virulent anti-African racism.

Very similar groups of Black people in Asia reside in relative small numbers in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand in Southeast Asia. In Thailand they are commonly called Sakai. In Malaysia they have been called Orang Asli (Original Man). Pejoratively they are known as Semang, with the connotation of savage. It is very unfortunate that the contributions of these small Black people to monumental high-cultures characterized by urbanization, metallurgy, agricultural science and scripts remain essentially unexamined.

The presence of diminutive Africoids (whom Chinese historians called "Black Dwarfs") in early southern China during the period of the Three Kingdoms (ca. 250 C.E.) is recorded in the book of the Official of the Liang Dynasty (502-556 C.E.). In Taiwan there are recollections of a group of people now said to be extinct called "Little Black Man."

"They were described as short, dark-skinned people with short curly hair....These people, presumably Negritos, disappeared about 100 years ago. Their existence was mentioned in many Chinese documents of the Ching Dynasty concerning Taiwan."

Similar groups of Black people have been identified in Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia, and it seems almost certain that at one time a belt of Black populations of this type covered much of Asia.

None, but NASA. Sure, they're a big, slow moving organization... but try to do what they've done with a smaller organization. It won't work.

A slightly smaller but faster moving organization could have done more. For example, one could have built five or so International Space Stations for the price of the one that was actually built. Space probes are still built using mostly original or "one off" designs. And are built only in singles or pairs so there are no economies of scale exploited. For example, if NASA had doubled the money spent on the two rovers, they probably could have placed another 4 rovers on the surface of Mars.

Besides much of what NASA has done has been quite counterproductive. My take is that manned space exploration has been taken back by the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. And there was a period in the 80's and 90's when NASA helped thwart competition in the launch industry. For example, there have been claims of anti-competitive actions against Beal Aerospace and E Prime Aerospace. When Beal Aerospace quit the business, the chairman, Andrew Beal cited NASA and US government subsidies to existing launch platforms as the main reason for ceasing operations. Keep in mind that Beal Aerospace would have competed directly with the heavy launch vehicles from Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Ican't find similar documented complaints from E Prime Aerospace. Supposedly they experienced during their MX missile conversion program (converting these missiles to launch vehicles) bureaucratic obstructions sparked by NASA and the above prime contractors.

Then there's the Launch Services Purchase Act and subsequent legislation that attempts to force NASA to use commercially available launch services instead of its own. This legislation wasn't inspired in a vacuum or by special interests, but comes from NASA's continuning anti-competitive behavior up to that point.

Finally, keep in mind that most of the NASA-bashers used to be big fans of NASA. There is probably no organization on Earth (except for some religious organizations like the Roman Catholic Church) that has squandered as much firmly placed good will and trust as NASA did in the decades after the manned landings on the Moon. The current plague of NASA-bashing is directly a result of decades of short-sighted and often destructive behavior by NASA, by various favored prime contractors, and through political decisions by Congress and various US presidents. To be blunt, things have fallen to the point that NASA's existence is at stake.

If NASA gets out of the launch services business then the implication is that it will sell off a large part of its launch service infrastructure.

NASA has been out of the "launch services business" for some time. The Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 requires NASA to purchase launches of satellites from the private sector expect in those cases where unique attributes of the payload require it to be launched by the shuttle. The only launch vehicle that NASA operates is the shuttle, and had already been forbidden from launching commercial payloads by an executive order in the aftermath of the Challenger accident.

At one time NASA (somehow) explicitly denied any private company from returning a payload to Earth.

NASA has no regulatory authority over commercial spaceflight. That responsibility lies with the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

So they are not worshiping the cross-idol but the christ-idol?

I had assumed you were a Christian... Anyway, yes, they are worshipping Jesus.

Since when is Jesus god?

Since He and the Bible say so:

John 1:1,14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

John 8:58
Jesus said unto them, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am."

John 10:30
"I and my Father are one."

And don't give me that trinity crap, it's totally baseless.

Here's a page that has a pretty good look at some of the Biblical evidence for the Trinity:

The Doctrine of the Trinity

People perhaps are SUPPOSED to revere but not worship the cross, their bible, jesus, saints, etc.

Well, we are supposed to worship Jesus. Of the other things and people you mention, people don't consider them gods, so they don't worship them as idols, no matter how much they reverence them.

This is the problem with having idols to begin with, which is why jews/christians are not supposed to have them.

What we are not supposed to have is false gods. As long as we don't consider a statue or something like that to be a god, then it's not a false god. It's not the images themselves that are bad (God Himself commanded images to be made, such as the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant, the bronze serpent, etc.) but what we do with them.

By the way, according to what you said, we shouldn't keep Bibles around, since you think they are a temptation to idolatry. That is, it would seem that you think "jews/christians are not supposed to have" the Bible, since "stupid people, or people not paying attention all the time, can slip into the habit of worshiping the pointer and not the thing it points to."

But his wife is immediate and tangible... it's hard to confure a photo of her with her. Religious concepts are not so easy.

The point is that his wife is not immediate and tangible. Just like Jesus, she exists, but not in a visible way to the soldier or Christian, as the case may be.

In reality people worship jesus and cross' in place of their god.

People do worship Jesus, but no one worships the cross.

Yesterday I came across the same offer on Coastal Web Online's home page while looking at colocation deals. Here is a direct link to their product page: www.cwo.com/3xs-index.html.

They are claiming 3x the performance -- "if your modem gets 52k, 3XS will increase it up to 156k." Hrm... Costs regular dialup account price plus $8/month. So almost $30/month.

I think it is pretty dumb as regular HTML isn't all that bad. I only get highly annoyed when I'm downloading software or viewing largish binary data like images. Now if only the ISP would turn on compression on their end everything would be sweet (*).

* Yeah, I had broadband, yeah, I don't now. I moved to a rural area that has both cable and DSL but the contract lengths or costs are just too stupid to consider while living in a short term apartment.

Yesterday I came across the same offer on Coastal Web Online's home page while looking at colocation deals. Here is a direct link to their product page: www.cwo.com/3xs-index.html.

They are claiming 3x the performance -- "if your modem gets 52k, 3XS will increase it up to 156k." Hrm... Costs regular dialup account price plus $8/month. So almost $30/month.

I think it is pretty dumb as regular HTML isn't all that bad. I only get highly annoyed when I'm downloading software or viewing largish binary data like images. Now if only the ISP would turn on compression on their end everything would be sweet (*).

* Yeah, I had broadband, yeah, I don't now. I moved to a rural area that has both cable and DSL but the contract lengths or costs are just too stupid to consider while living in a short term apartment.

The Tasmanians not only hunted Tigers until their extinction. Before this they hunted people read on:

On May 7, 1876, Truganini, the last full-blood Black person in Tasmania, died at seventy-three years of age. Her mother had been stabbed to death by a European. Her sister was kidnapped by Europeans. Her intended husband was drowned by two Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her.
Read more here http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/tasmania.html

• Tasmania has a long history of electing Greens so in 1998 our "major parties" put aside their pretentions of difference and attempted to send the Greens extinct by reducing the number of state poiticians.
• More than fifty years before the last thylacine died in captivity, the last full blood Tasmanian aborigine died, a race that had been isolated from the rest of humanity for more than ten thousand years.
• Thirty years ago, the Tasmanian environmental movement was galvanised by the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to stop the then all-powerful Hydro Electic Commission from building a dam which would drown the remote and ultimately iconic original Lake Pedder. Proposals to drain the dam and restore the original lake persist.
• A decade later, a similar campaign against the proposed Gordon below Franklin dam was successful and South West Tasmania gained World Heritage recognition, including the aboriginal art in Fraser Cave named for our then Prime Minister in an attempt to enhance his environmental awareness.
• In the last few months it looks as though another predator, the fox, might be trying to get established in Tasmania. I'm sure I heard a report of some more recent evidence that they may indeed have a breeding population which defies thinking about given today's level of environmental awareness.
• The Tasmanian government recently retreated from its undertaking to support the outcome of the Tasmania Together process with respect to the unpopular logging of old growth forests to support huge (by Tasmanian standards earnings from wood chip export.
• On the other side of Bass Strait, there is growing environmental opposition to the Basslink Project to connect the Tasmanian electrical grid to the Australian mainland grid.