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This word has been thrown around by drug warriors for so long it has lost any meaning which we can agree on. One man's addiction is another man's "problem" is another man's recreational activity. This is addressed in depth in Sullum's Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use.

Right now thousands upon thousands of people are compulsively attached to SOMETHING. They are not healthy. This does not mean that the THING is what caused the problem, it lies in the person. They lack willpower. In fact we all do a bit. It's just how we manage it--some people have simply given up. As Erich Fromm wrote, "All of us are more or less insane, or more or less asleep." You can choose not to get out of bed, but of course that wouldn't work out in the long run.

Thomas Szasz has argued much of the same. Addiction lies in the individual, who chooses to start and stop all behaviors. Reject "voodoo pharmacology"!

As for specific advice: If you are worried about your internet usage, unplug it. Live without it for a while. Meditate. Step back. Let go. You can do it.

There's a favorite letter of mine from a Nobel Prize winner named George Wald, who is a biologist at Harvard. He wrote it in response to an argument about the starting of a Nobel laureate sperm bank. Some irate feminist wrote into the paper saying, "Sperm banks, they should have an egg bank. Why just sperm?" He says:

You're right, Pauline. It takes an egg as well as a sperm to start a Nobel laureate. Everyone of them has had a mother as well as a father. Say all you want of fathers, their contribution to conception Is really rather small.

Nobel laureates aside, there isn't much technically in the way of starting an egg bank. There are some problems but nothing so hard as involved in the other kinds of breeder reactors.

But think of a man so vain as to insist on getting a superior egg from an egg bank. Then he has to fertilize it. And when it's fertilized, where does he go with it, To his wife? "Here, dear," you can hear him saying, "I just got this superior egg from an egg bank and just fertilized it myself. Will you take care of it?" "I've got eggs of my own to worry about," she replies. "You know what you can do with your superior egg. Go rent a womb, and while you're at it, you better rent a room too."

You see, it just won't work. For the truth is that what one really needs is not Nobel laureates but love. How do you think one gets to be a Nobel laureate? Wanting love, that's how. Wanting it so bad one works all the time and ends up a Nobel laureate. It's a consolation prize.

What matters is love. Forget sperm banks and egg banks. Banks and love are incompatible. If you don't know that, you don't know bankers. So just practice loving. Love a Russian. You'd be surprised how easy it is, and how it will brighten up your morning. Love whales, Iranians, Vietnamese, not just here but everywhere. When you've gotten really good you can even try loving some of our politicians."

Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongued voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fan in the stand. Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth from people that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm, or team spirit. Booing, cat-calls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are the people trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering, discontent and stress.

The idea was to use the TiVo's to record several hours of several stations' election coverage. We went with TiVo vs. ReplayTV because we could easily move video to a TiVo with a DVD burner to archive content.

With Replays WITH ethernet starting at $79, 6 of those with a patch panel and a stand-alone DVD burner would have been a better buy.

I've got an integrated DVD-R/TiVo unit with a 300 GB harddrive (an easily performed hack, or you can get PTV Upgrade to do it). Works very well, uses the TiVo desktop software to gateway pictures from my Mac's iPhoto database and mp3s from my Mac's iTunes database. The network interface is attached through a USB port on the back of the DVD-R/TiVo unit, and a number of wired and wireless adapters are supported.

My one gripe is that the TiVo doesn't support AAC files yet. TiVo keeps promising that they are working on it, but do not provide a delivery date estimate. This has been the case for over a year.

Other than that gripe, it works great. My only real gripe is that if you transfer a show over the network to this TiVo from another TiVo using the Home Media Option, the TiVo won't burn it to a DVD-R... their notion of DRM.

Oh yeah... and of course, being a TiVo it runs Linux, so all sorts of hacks are available for it.

Moderated as insightful, yet flamebait seems more justified.
Turgid, maybe you should relieve your ignorance on the subject by reading a good book.

Buddhism does not teach the concept of reincarnation. In Buddhism there is no concept of soul or afterlife. Here is a FAQ about it. I believe what you meant is Hinduism which teaches reincarnation with the end goal of reaching Nirvana.

psxndc

First of all, it's not about the US alone
>If people don't want to work so hard, why do they do it? Because its an opportunity...
It's not a opportunity...
Imagine, some people don't have the problem to choose between a Playstation 2 and a X-Box.
Either they work, or they and their family would starve.

It's either you work or one of the 100 other people waiting for the job would do it.

>The way to not support sweat shops if you don't like them is to NOT buy their products
Now, don't say that a bad treatement of their employees would have an negative impact on their sales.
You and most other people (myself included) have no idea, under which conditions my clothing or shoes. Did you know how Nike produce(d?) some shoes?
Or do you ask about it? Will someone tell you about it? (Excuse me sir, are those shoes produced with child labor? How are the working conditions?)

>It's terrible labor laws and government intervention that has made America impossible to produce in

In what ways did the US (and other industrial nations) suffer from the increased cost, due to protection laws?
IRC, the total amount of wealth increased. The difference between the poorer countries and the richer countries increased, same with the rich and the poor in the US.

> End it the capitalist consumer way, don't get government involved.

It seems to me that most person have forgotten where those govermental regulations and unions did stem from and how working conditions in the industrial nations (today one should say information nations) where before(e.g. US) those regulations.
Did you read Dickens "Oliver Twist" by any chance?

Nowadays, in most industrial nations most legislations seem to be unnecessary and maybe even are.
But most nations in the world have not reached this level of wealth, where it's up to choose between more or less comfort in exchange for more or less money, but between something to eat and nothing.