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Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

Does that apply to the 9/11 terrorists too, or does your statement apply only to anti-India terrorists?

I didn't have those in India on my mind when I said that "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter." Actually at the tyme I was thinking of Israeli Independence fighters, or terrorists. Irgun, the predecessor to today's Likud political party was even classified as a terrorist group by the new Israeli government after independence. Lehi, commonly called the Stern Gang, split off from Irgun, was another. Not only were these groups fighting the British with such acts as the King David Hotel bombing, but they were also in communications with NAZIs before and during WWII. In 1948 Irgun and Lehi attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where 107 were massacred. Deir Yassin is still remembered. And guess who was an Irgun leader... Menachem Begin. Ariel Sharon led Israeli troops in the Qibya massacre. Here are more crimes of Ariel Sharon. And here's a list of more massacres in Palestine.

In 1956 David Ben-Gurion said of Arab Palestinians "Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country ... There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it is simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army."

But he wasn't the only Zionist that wanted to expell Arab Palestinians. The Jewish group and magazine "Tikkun", which I read regularly, has the article The Long Path Out Of Denial: Zionism, Heartache, And A New Vision of Israel and Palestine.

Hell Israel even attacked the United States, in attacking and sinking the USS Liberty on 8 June 1967. But don't let reality and facts bother you.

Falcon

What do you mean what is my argument?

You were arguing about things other than Macs. Neither iPhone, iPad nor iPods are Macs.

Would you have purchased exports and endorsed the Nazi party in Germany

Guess what? Jews did buy from German businesses before and during WWII. Jews financially supported the NAZIs. The Haavara (Transfer) Agreement was an agreement reached in 1933 between Jewish leaders in Europe and the NAZIs for Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Any Jew who wanted to move there would have the NAZIs buy their property then the proceeds of the sale would be deposited in a German bank with a branch of the bank in Palestine. Once there Jews could then withdraw money to buy German made goods. Not only that but Jewish terrorists groups like the Irgun and the Stern Group or Lehi offered to the NAZIs to fight against the British to help the NAZIs.

My comparison was Apple to Win7. In terms of this, Apple will never even come close to value per dollar price.

You compare a company to an OS? How about apples to apples or oranges to oranges? Now if you want to try that, compare OS X Snow Leopard to Windows 7. The cheapest Win7 is Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade at $120, an upgrade, whereas the Snow Leopard upgrade is $29. The basic Windows is $90 more. How about the price of the full versions, Windows 7 Home Premium cost $200 whereas Snow Leopard is $29. And a family pack? The Snow Leopard Family Pack, which allows it to be installed on up to 5 Macs, costs $49. How much does the Windows family pack cost? Oops, I don't see a family pack. So, to upgrade 5 PCs it wold cost $600.

The Apple OS is ugly, it can not be significantly altered for user enjoyment, and is much harder to learn than windows.

All that is your subjective judgment and is not based on fact. I and many others prefer the look of OS X. OS X has as many alteration options as Windows, but it's easier to decide which version to get. And many people find OS X easier to use than Windows as well.

I learned how to use a windows computer in about 5 minutes

I learned to use a Mac in 5 minutes.

and I can use thousands of alternate set up types and arrangements for my specific utility.

If I wanted to use thousands of alternate set up types I could do that with Macs.

I can be using several dozen large programs at once, switching between them and moving files in a fraction of a second, with insane productivity levels.

Oh really? Forget having dozens of programs, who needs that many large or small programs running at the same tyme, just having two or three Windows programs running would cause my Windows PCs to have a fit. If I ran too many applications they would crash.

I use my windows computer for everything from web browing, simulation programming and design, virtual prototyping, mathematical modeling, word processing, gaming, communication, finding my way around the countries roads, learning, and anything else I want to do with it. I have yet to find anything that I can't do on my computer that a Mac can

I have yet to find something I can not do on my Mac I could do on my Windows PCs. That is except go for days and weeks without suffering a crash, which I DO NOT want to happen.

Falcon

one of several significant stimulus points

There are actually quite a few. For those that don't know them, here's a good list of the 4 I've learned of

From http://www.heretical.com/miscella/frbigsis.html:

We tell ourselves that in America we are the Free People. I wonder whether we might not better be called the Obedient People, the Passive People, or the Admonished People. I doubt that any country, anywhere, has been so regulated, controlled, and directed as we are. We are bred to obey. And obey we do.

It begins with the sheer volume of law, rules, and administrative duties. Most of the regulation makes sense in isolation, or can be made plausible. Yet there is so much of it.

Used to be if you wanted a dog, you got a dog. It wasn’t really the government’s business. Today you need a dog license, a shot card for the dog, a collar and tags, proof that the poor beast has been neutered, and you have to keep it on a leash and walk it only in designated places. It’s all so we don’t get rabies.

Or consider cars. You have to have a title, insurance, and keep it up to date; tags, country sticker, inspection sticker, emissions test. Depending where you are, you can’t have chips in the windshield, and you need a zoned parking permit. You have to wear a seatbelt. And of course there are unending traffic laws. You can get a ticket for virtually anything, usually without knowing that you were doing anything wrong.

Then there’s paperwork. If you have a couple of daughters with college funds in the stock market, annually you have to fill out three sets of federal taxes, three sets of state, and file four state and four federal estimated tax forms, per person, for a total of twenty-four. This doesn’t include personal property taxes for the country, business licenses, tangible business-assets forms, and so on.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all these laws are bad. Stupid, frequently, but evil, no. Stopping at traffic lights is probably a good idea, and certainly is if I’m crossing the street. But the laws never end. Bring a doughnut on the subway, and you get arrested. Don’t replace your windows without permission in writing from the condo association. Nothing is too trivial to be regulated. Nothing is not some government’s business.

I wonder whether the habit of constant obedience to infinitely numerous rules doesn’t inculcate a tendency to obey any rule at all. By having every aspect of one’s life regulated in detail, does one not become accustomed to detailed regulation? That is, detailed obedience?

For many it may be hard to remember freer times. Yet they existed. In 1964, when I graduated from high school in rural Virginia, there were speed limits, but nobody much enforced them, or much obeyed them. If you wanted to fish, you needed a pole, not a license. You fished where you wanted, not in designated fishing zones. If you wanted to carry your rifle to the bean field to shoot whistle pigs, you just did it. You didn’t need a license and nobody got upset.

To buy a shotgun in the country store, you needed money, not a background check, waiting period, proof of age, certificate of training, and a registration form. If your tail light burned out, then you only had one tail light. If you wanted to park on a back road with your girl friend, the cops, all both of them, didn’t care. If you wanted to swim in the creek, you didn’t need a Coast Guard approved life jacket.

It felt different. You lived in the world as you found it, and behaved because you were supposed to, but you didn’t feel as though you were in a white-collar prison. And if anybody had asked us, we would have said that the freedom was worth more to us than any slightly greater protection against rabies, thank you. Which nobody ever got anyway.

Today, the Mommy State never leaves off protecting us from things I’d just as soon not be protected from. We must wear a helmet on a motorcycle: Kevorkian can kill us, but we cannot kill ourselves. Why is it Mommy

Damn it, this is pissing me off. What can I do about this? :(

Donate to their defense fund.

Still right on the edge of suppression of free speech, and without knowing exactly what these guys printed/posted I'm not sure whether this is something I need to be concerned about or not.

This is exactly what they posted.

I believe in freedom of speech. There is a small risk that this could lead to anti-Semitism and violence, but there's a greater risk that censorship could lead to things that are as bad or worse. And I think that getting this out in the open is the best way to deal with it.

Don't the Brits still read Milton's Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty any more?

BTW, Simon Sheppard seems to have a case of arrested sexual development, even by Slashdot standards. http://www.heretical.com/sexsci/index.html Or maybe not by Slashdot standards.

Here's the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_(far-right_activist) and here's his index page http://www.heretical.com/main.html#directory I believe the British term is "nutter."

I believe in freedom of speech. There is a small risk that this could lead to anti-Semitism and violence, but there's a greater risk that censorship could lead to things that are as bad or worse. And I think that getting this out in the open is the best way to deal with it.

Don't the Brits still read Milton's Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty any more?

BTW, Simon Sheppard seems to have a case of arrested sexual development, even by Slashdot standards. http://www.heretical.com/sexsci/index.html Or maybe not by Slashdot standards.

Here's the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_(far-right_activist) and here's his index page http://www.heretical.com/main.html#directory I believe the British term is "nutter."

I believe in freedom of speech. There is a small risk that this could lead to anti-Semitism and violence, but there's a greater risk that censorship could lead to things that are as bad or worse. And I think that getting this out in the open is the best way to deal with it.

Don't the Brits still read Milton's Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty any more?

BTW, Simon Sheppard seems to have a case of arrested sexual development, even by Slashdot standards. http://www.heretical.com/sexsci/index.html Or maybe not by Slashdot standards.

Here's the Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Sheppard_(far-right_activist) and here's his index page http://www.heretical.com/main.html#directory I believe the British term is "nutter."

Their web site is called heretical.com. They apparently hate me, too.

But their writing is so discombobulated that I'd be much more concerned about the threat to my life and liberty from a government that thinks it needs to throw people in jail over this drivel than about these two nuts or their readers.

What you assume about aliens reveals more about yourself than it sheds useful light on an alien encounter. If you assume the aliens will not be hostile to us, you can only back that up using your human reasoning. If you assume aliens will be hostile and we must fight them, you can only back that up using your human reasoning as well. Step back and think about how human reasoning has changed over the years, and how different civilizations and cultures would have markedly different ways of communicating with an alien visitor.

When I think of the closest things to an alien visiting a culture, I think of the Spanish Conquistadors visiting the Americas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquistador and David Cargill visiting the Fiji Islands http://www.heretical.com/cannibal/fiji.html . Perhaps Lewis and Clarke could be considered an analogy for an alien visitation as well. The thing is all 3 of those analogies are of a people that visited a completely new culture with very different outcomes. The Conquistadors devastated a culture, David Cargill was shocked and dismayed by the culture he visited, and Lewis and Clarke went out to gather information leaving little impact on the cultures they experienced (at least at that time).

The point I want to make is we don't know what an alien visit would be like, and our imagination is limited by our experiences in the culture and world we are in. Aliens will not be limited by that. To assume they would be peaceful would be silly. Actually our experience would suggest that more advanced cultures always seem to destroy or conquer or change drastically the less advanced cultures without any exception I can think of. To assume they would be violent would be equally silly. We could turn a peaceful visit into a deadly one for us or for the aliens, and we could miss out on a treasure of knowledge and science.

We may find the aliens aren't interested in us at all (Think Star Trek 3). They may not recognize humanity as being interesting or worthy of attention at all, and may decided to be fascinated by house flies or mold. Actually that would be kind of funny to have aliens come, and basically take measures to keep people from bothering them as they go about their business, and then leave.

Look, I'm all in favor of these advanced cars lulling me into a false sense of safety. That way I can convince girls to give me road head, especially when I'm on drugs!

Indeed. Read it and weep.

Of all the nations in the world you might hope would be wary of pervasive monitoring, you'd think one that bills itself as a "jewish state" would be it.

You're surprised Jews have one standard for themselves and another for everyone else?

Haha! The yokes on you!

The creatures outside looked from nazi to jew,
and from jew to nazi, and from nazi to jew again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Indeed.

Like the Libshitz guy who gets punches in his face? LOVESHITS wtf cant jews pick better names? Heh, and they call them self the choosen people, what about the disgraced by God people.

Indeed.

From heretical.com:

MALE PRIORITY. Of course, another immediately obvious explanation for F25D3's flitting off while I was still in mid-sentence exists. It is that my conversation was unbearably boring and F25D3 had withdrawn to escape the tedium, or there may have been some other defect in my presentation. By way of response I state explicitly here that:

1. I don't believe that my conversation was boring, and in any event my conversation had certainly not been considered so by F25D3 when we had met previously and a hint had been given. I knew it to be true that people with specialized skills could be monotonous, and had even found some of my own friends so on occasion. Although such people might be thought dull, the information and skills they had were useful.

2. Compared to the utter trivia which seems to circulate in the minds of all but a tiny proportion of females, almost anything was an improvement. Even in a technologically advanced society such as the one in which we currently live, females seemed to think that their inconsequential conversations about relationships and similar immature tittle-tattle were equal to male conversations about abstract concepts and objects. [amen brotha]

3. As a male I was a wealth creator rather than (as the female) a net consumer, and reasoned that as such my desires should have priority over those of females.

4. The relatively safe and comfortable society from which females were now unreservedly taking benefit had been created by my male forebears, people like me, and their success demonstrated that my desires had more validity. The females were taking advantage of male efforts as blithely and unthinkingly as someone who believes that the blowing of a whistle is the power which sets a train in motion.

5. Whether by the medical research I had done, the organization I ran or by this study I was contributing in at least a small way to the advancement of humankind. Not only did this reinforce my conviction that my male desires should be honoured, in preference to those of females, but in addition I resented the pressure I was clearly under to indulge in dishonesty and trickery in order to fulfil my desires, especially since such dishonesty of thought, for example by selective perception and distortion of truth, was directly antagonistic to such advancement.

"The individual perceives in others the motive he denies having himself. Thus the cheat is sure that everyone else is dishonest. The would-be adulterer accuses his wife of infidelity."

"A defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that he himself has but cannot accept. It is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits."

the vast majority of Soviet leaders, both in and out of Russia were Jews. somthing like 90% of pre-war communist agitators across Europe were Jews. Jews own the media and the banks in this country. The Israeli lobby owns Congress. There are 27 high ranking Jews in the current administration. There are not 20,000,000 Jews in the world and even before the holocaust, there never have been at any one time.

That is why no one criticises Soviet gulags. They were Jewish contraptions. Stalin was not a Jew. Trotsky was. Lenin was 1/4 Jewish. View this site:

http://www.heretical.com/miscellx/bolshies.html

There is a list of all the soviet leadership in the polit bureaus and all taht shit. See how many Jews? and there are not that many Jews. Even Kruschev was married to a Jew. His children were raised Jewish. He said "we will burry you from within," and he ment the Jewbolschevicks in this country.

Every convicted Soviet spy in the 40s and 50s were Jewish. Jews like Abbie Hoffman and Emma Goldman advocated anarchy. Jews like Charles Krauthammer and Paul Wolfowitz are responsible for "neo-conservatism" which I am sure you will hate.

So, no, I don't really give half a damn that Jews allegedly got "holocausted." In fact, I believe there is sufficiant evidence to point to the gas chambers as having been concoted by the Soviet Union and the evidence given up at Nuremburg (without the benefit of allowing western allies in to check the truthfulness) was all fraudulent. the Soviet Union was largely a Jewish creation, after all.

...with pictures of peoples cats and fat girlfriends... ...so the idea of going out of my way to meet people (friends of friends of....) is a little....sad?

Perhaps if you're fat or ugly or you live in a small town and really really want to get laid by another geek then sure...

Ever heard of Projection?

I provide some discussion, and I get this back. Love it. Ever heard of projection? Cuz you just demonstrated a textbook example of it.

In his own words:

"Robotics has become a sufficiently well developed technology to warrant articles and books on its history and I have watched this in amazement, and in some disbelief, because I invented it.

No, not the technology; the word."

I tend to refer to it as 'the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom'.

Gravity is only tested to solar system scales, and in an indirect way, galactic cluster lensing effects.

Agree. And we make an awful lot of assumptions about the continuity of physics even at galactic scales.

The bottom line is that we start by assuming that because a theory fits some observed properties of the universe -and- we have not yet thought of a better (or at least more appealing to us) theory, the one we have is true. "If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

This is especially true of the really grand assumptions like "the universe has no centre and no edge" and "the en-bloc redshifting of distant objects is evidence of recession caused only by the stretching of space"; the problems these assumptions cause conventional science run deep, yet so well embedded in orthodox scientific dogma are they that the vast majority of scientists would rather reject the growing collection of conflicting data than the dogma. (see here for discussion of something even weirder).