People still look at me funny when I tell them I learned english at the age of 11 and speak 5 other languages. White folks are weird.
Reminds me of a Swiss guy I met in Beijing. He was already tri-lingual by the age of 16 (Swiss French, Italian, German), then learned English and Spanish after high school before going to Taiwan to study Mandarin Chinese. He was in Beijing for sight seeing before heading to Moscow to learn Russian.
And yet hardly a month goes by without another idiotic article in the paper describing how difficult it is to learn a second language. White people... sheesh.
It's a weird thing, like a kind of bizarre Stockholm Syndrome thing where they're stuck in some product hell, and seem to enjoy it. I can't quite figure it out.
Stephen Heller tells an interesting story about a Professor, well versed in Hypnosis, who gave female staff member a post hypnotic suggestion to take off one of her shoes at the party this evening and place some flowers in it as though it were a vase.
Sure enough, later that evening that the woman saw a vase of flowers, took off her shoe and proceeded to place some flowers in it. The Professor came over to her and asked what she was doing. She told the professor that she had a flower vase at home and seeing the flowers on the table had suddenly inspired her to use her shoe as a sort of 'model' for how she would arrange the flowers at home in the unused vase.
The Professor showed his scepticism at the story and tried to point out it's absurdity to her. As he did, her story became more and more elaborate in it's rationalisation and justification, until it reached the point where the woman became very uncomfortable and started showing signs of acute distress, at which point the Professor ended the experiment.
Now when it comes to computers and cars, they are very expensive and completely pointless purchase items. One can always catch the subway, bus or walk instead of owning a car. And for most things we use a computer for these days, we used very simple items such as pencil and paper, typewriters and so forth at some time in the past. And so there you are, contemplating releasing thousands of dollars that you may have earned, or are yet to earn, on something that is purely to satisfy your ego, or indulge you in some way, and the survival mechanism from your reptile brain kicks in and attempts to disuade you from committing such a risky folly with your precious survival symbols (money). To silence that survival mechanism, you begin a process which is not unlike hypnosis, with the exception that it is exactly like hypnois. Self hypnosis.
And when your hypnotic reality is interupted and intruded on, you may react in a very similar way to the lady who placed flowers in her shoe at a party. Unless of course you are a very rational person. Then you may simple admit to yourself that a machine built by humans will always be as flawed as a human.
Assume the customer was once right, but has been made bitter and defensive by repeated arrogant IT messages (YOU have performed an illegal action and will be shut down...)
You shouldn't be using the most complex device humankind has ever created if you are going to get all upset about a few error messages. You should be fucking gratefull that you get to use such a piece of equipment at all.
The user should have got a simple, understandable message that the printer was out of paper. That's a failure of the OS designer and printer driver developer.
Actually it's a failure of the purchasing officer who doesn't know anything about printers (or which brands give you simple understandable messages that the printer is out of paper (like my $150 Lexmark which has the incredibly cryptic message 'Printer is out of paper')
The user's email software should have picked up the typo and suggested a correction (in fact, most email clients do).
And so when the software changes naol.com to aol.com (to help you) then I'm sure you will be on the phone whinging about that too. Why don't you type more carefully? Or double check your message before clicking send? Does an envelope correct your spelling when you write out the wrong address? Does your telephone automatically correct the number you are dialling?
The user is employed by your company to work. Exactly, so they shouldn't be wasting time by being too fucking lazy to check their work (or the address of an email) before they send it out to a client. In fact, any employee that wastes their time and the IT department's time and the company's time because they are a lazy moron should be fired.
The user needs to get a 75MB file to the customer. Stop whining and arrange for it to happen. Hey tell that to the post office when you try and send a Datsun through the post. Hey! I'm the customer. Stop whinging and arrange for the transport of my Datsun.
You have been a problem for so long that people believe they can use you as an excuse for their own failures. Yes, and lucky for you IT people are not very good at office politics or your lazy incompetent ass would have been fired already.
Why should anyone listen to hysterical ravings? Do scaremongers have a good track record for correct predictions of the future?
Well... they tend to have the same future predictive ability as just about anyone else, i.e. close to none. However, for the most part, the best predictors of the future generally fall into two categories.
1) Those in the process of shaping/inventing/making it and 2) Those who have studied the past (i.e. Historians)
Human behaviour doesn't change all that much. About 3000 years ago a man who we know as Zarathustra laid down principles of civil society that were very similar to the Constitution of the United States of America. Today the descendents of Zarathustra's society are living in place the British named Iran(1).
So it would be foolish to think that the USians have suddenly become history's most enlightened people and consequently will never descend into any kind of facism or totalitarianism. Additionally, one thing history does teach us is that when a society begins to move in a direction that concerns you, the best thing to do is leave that society, as historically societies that begin moving in a certain direction continue to do so until they reach the maximum point on the pendulum.
(1) The name of that country always reminds me of an eighties band called 'Flock of Seaguls'
My personaly opinion is a flat tax per gallon of gas, based on the pollution produced per gallon (obviously you shouldn't be paying as much on a cleaner blend), and the money should be converted to cash and burned
Agreed with one minor adjustment. The tax should be converted into Oxygen. (The byproduct of that process would be some kind of biomass, probably hardwood)
"And not incidentally: we don't need to "tell" people what they "need" to drive. We can tax them based on the size and/or fuel-efficiency of their vehicle, and, like true conservatives, we'll "let the market work.""
Isn't governmental taxation and regulation interference in "the market"?
No it is not, as long as the taxation is a fixed percentage. All markets are regulated. There is a great economist myth that there exists an unregulated market somewhere. Markets need to be regulated so that people with guns don't come and 'distort the market' by paying for their goods with a promise not to kill you.
In our modern markets, pollution (and greenhouse gases) is a cost of business that is not borne by the manufacturer of the product. It is borne by everyone in range of the outputs of their defective products, whether or not they are a market participant. This is a market distortion that allows the manufacturers of these defective products to profit at someone else's expense. Taxation of fuel would correct this market distortion, and would force the consumer to pay for the use of their defective product, whose hidden costs are currently paid for by someone (everyone) else.
That this is not self-evident is a great testament to both the stupidity of humanity, and the spectacular achievements of right-wing propaganda.
(admitedly I was going to make a fake moon landing joke as well, but as it has already been beaten into the ground, I am gona have to pass, wich obviously opens me up to a "you must be new here" comment, and shortly there after we should see a "In soviet russi, moon dust fakes you!", and a "I for one welcome our new fake-moondust-overlords". Oh, and don't for get the "I make fake moon dust you insensitive clod!")
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those fake moon dust generators!
Actually the best per acre might be GM algae (though the land-based fuel crops of rapeseed and mustardseed beat soybeans hands down).
Actually the highest yield oil crop is Palm Oil, although there is a lead time to a mature plant. While I agree with you on the yields of algae, the problem (currently) with algae is that it is capital intensive. The ponds and CO2 diffusers are expensive to build on a large scale. Ideally you want the ponds built right next to coal power stations, but there is usually (not always) a shortage of land.
If we can solve the cost problem of pond/diffuser establishment, then algae would be ideal. As you probably know, the department of energy has already found the highest yield algae through a selection and cross breeding process without the need for gene modification.
Soundly thrash, arrest, incarcerate, try, convict and execute anyone with a malfunctioning passport tag.
But why stop at those with malfunctioning passport tags? Surely anyone who applies for a passport to leave the land of the free/greatest country in the world/worlds greatest democracy is a subversive anyway. They are just going overseas to meet socialists in old Europe or terrorists just about everywhere else, so why not nip it in the bud? Just incarcerate and execute anyone with a valid passport.
How about straight veggie oil? Requires a bit more work on the engine side, but doesn't require the chemicals that biodiesel production requires.
Usually requires pre-heating except for very high compression engines. Most of the setups I've seen for pure vegetable oil start the vehicle on regular fuel, then use the excess heat from the engine to heat the vege oil to temperature, then you switch fuels while the vehicle is running. Pretty cool technology.
I guess if you were to carry a large battery around in the vehicle you could use it to pre-heat the oil, and then recharge the battery from the engine.
First noted by Professor Gordon Stewart, the most likely cause considered to be the pertussis component of the triple antigen vaccine. Dr PM Jeavons (The Lancet 25/10/1975) suggested seperating out the pertussis component of the triple antigen to reduce the risk of brain damage.
Has the failure in the 1950s production of polio vaccine been corrected since then?
The Polio vaccine is no longer administered (at least in the country I live, not sure about the US/UK), so it is unlikely that it is still produced in any quantity.
And since everyone in the US was vaccinated for polio, and that caused 20% of the population of the US to develop cancer, why hasn't anyone told the trial lawyers about it?
Not everyone in the US was vaccinated for Polio, it varied from state to state. The contamination was a single batch believed to be manufactured in Europe, and put an estimated millions at risk.
Are your claims of vaccination side-effect related to the vaccines themselves, or just to flawed manufacturing processes?
The vaccines themselves. And they are not claims. They are well documented side effects in medical journals. I would add citations, but every time I've tried in the past my post seems to be blocked by the lameness filter.
First you wrote: Obviously I was mistaken since you are quoting scriptures included in the Torah - obviously not the New Testament
and then you wrote:
Let's get a few things straight here, the New Testament is not a book - it is the new preaching brought by Jesus to replace the Old Testament the Jews had been following for generations. What you're probably referring to is actually a collection of scriptures written by many people in a time range of about 100 years.
and then you wrote: So yes, although the Gospels were written fairly shortly after Jesus' time on earth, many other scriptures were written after (e.g., Paul's letters to the early church)
So what part of what you are saying contradicts my statement that the New Testament (whatever it happens to be to make your point at the time) was written after Jesus's death?
And then this little gem: Frankly, your ignorance and arrogance are disgusting. How about next time you don't know about a subject you just keep your mouth shut instead of enlightening the world about how ignorant you are?
Please don't let me stop you. You sound like a typical Christian to me. Intolerant, bigoted and just plain fucking rude. Why don't you join the Krusade in Irak so that you can get to your lovely heaven all the much faster? We certainly would breath easier without you here on earth.
For some reason I thought you were talking about Christians, not Jews. Obviously I was mistaken since you are quoting scriptures included in the Torah - obviously not the New Testament preached by Jesus.
The new testament was written 50+ years after Jesus died, so that was quite an amazing feat preaching from a book that hadn't been written yet. Either that or he had a time machine...
Vaccination causes brain damage in 1 in 300,000 children in the UK. It also causes secondary diseases ( approx 30% of those vaccinated for measels developed a much more severe strain in later life), has caused cancer in ~20% of those who were polio vaccinated (from contaminated source material i.e. monkeys). It has also produced adverse reactions and secondary disease in large numbers of service personel who were vaccinated for Gulf War I.
Your proposal would lead to at least 20,000 brain damaged, and a massive increase in secondary disease. On the upside, drug company profitability would increase by many billions of dollars, so those of us who are capable of looking after our own immune system can buy drug company stock and retire.
*imagine vaccinating everyone on the planet for all diseases which require human hosts at the same time.
Imagine me putting a pickaxe through your skull and then using said pickaxe to drag you though a pit of sulphuric acid and you will come close to what it was like imagining your proposal above.
I can't resist... Fewer people are killed by blind hunters each year than by full-sighted hunters. Much safer.... there!
Right, and fewer people are injured in hunting accidents by Vice Presidents each year than by non Vice Presidents, so I suppose you think it should be legal for the Vice President to hunt as well? Oh wait...
"[your quote], whereas plain concrete gets to this strength after several days."
Did you not read the whole sentence you were quoting or did you just not expect me to?
Actually, I thought you might notice something about the site where the quote came from and realise that the "concrete" used in the pyramids is a geopolymer, not portland cement.In other words, it sets in 4 hours, not 3 days.
The base stones of the Giza pyramid weigh 100+ tons. If you had the choice between a) Quarrying a 100+ ton block and dragging up a hill, then moving it into place, aligning it by hand to an accuracy of less than 1mm b) Casting a 100+ ton block close by and then moving it into place, aligning it by hand to an accuracy of less than 1mm or c) Casting a 100+ ton block in-situ, not bothering with all that moving and aligning shit
from what you are saying, you would choose option (b), but I think those Egyptians didn't like making work for themselves and chose option (c).
But hey, I could be wrong, maybe they did quarry/cast 2 million stone blocks and move them into place with rollers and pulleys and ramps and other stuff when they could have just saved themselves the effort 2 million times by just casting them in place. After all, this was before unions and HR morale boosting initiatives, when workers just did whatever the frick they were told. So who knows?
They're part of ensuring a stable Iraqi government that will be a democracy good for its citizens rather than a tyranny.
Not so far, but they've only been at it 3 years. I say, given another 20 years or so they will have either accomplished their mission to bring stable capitalist democracy to Iraq, or they will have pulled out and let it disintegrate into 20 years of civil war. Either way, those Mummys should be proud of what their boys are accomplishing over there, and given that the IED problem is not going to just 'go away', they should send as much SillyString as they can, and hope that the cargo plane carrying all that string doesn't get shot down by the insurgents.
Being a citizen of neither the US or China, and having spent some time in both countries, I can honestly say that with the exception of being afraid of the almost constant threat of physical violence or death, I would prefer to live in the US. This choice however is almost due almost entirely to pollution and sanitation. China is filthy, and incredibly polluted.
However, the question was about access to information. Most of the Chinese people I met were very interested in the world at large, and believe it or not, that information is often freely available. It's information about China that is censored and distorted. Most of the American people I met are blissfully unaware of the world at large, and the little information they do know is some of the most bizarre one-sided propaganda I've ever heard.
This is truly the strangest thing about the USoA. Access to (accurate) information is unparalleled, and yet ignorance and misinformation is so widespread. Still, for the intelligent, curious, rational individual, the US is an information wet dream and I personally would travel there for that purpose if it didn't require giving DNA and my travelling papers to the gestapo at the border.
they couldn't have been poured in-place if that's what you're thinking, or there wouldn't be any seperation at all
Not true. If you cast a second block next to a block that has already set, there will be some separation over time. Not much, but some. The fact that you cannot insert a business card between the stones 5000 years later suggests that they were cast in place.
or why you think Egyptologists are corrupt schemers uninterested in new data.
Because Egyptologists are uninterested in any new data that invalidates their current mythology. Any new idea on how the Pyramids were built has traditionally come from those with a background in Engineering. This is because Egyptologists are versed in the tradition of what previous Egyptologists have published, not Engineering or Science. This is the probable reason why their construction mythology is so laughably stupid.
Of course, to suggest so is a heresy against Egyptology dogma, which states that white people are the first to have an advanced civilisation, and any suggestion to the contrary is just some wild conspiracy theory.
In the same way that the Romans employed scribes to denigrate and belittle Carthaginian culture, science and technology (once they had appropriated it and put Roman names down as the inventors), such that the memory of Carthage would be wiped from history and human consciousness, Egyptologists are mythologists employed to play down the achievements and antiquity of ancient Egyptian civilisation to ensure the pre-eminence of the white race in the global consciousness.
I completely agree. I am trying to leave a company at the moment, they keep offering me more money, and everytime they do it weakens my resolve.
However, you need to consider your health and your sanity. Working for incompetent fuckwits takes years off your life, and causes more sick days as well. Then you've got the stress-relief activities that cost money as well. In the end, you find that you are about as well off financially, and you are still working for incompetent fuckwits doing boring as shit work.
Go for the Perl job. You may meet people there that you will be friends for life with. In the.NET job, you are only going to meet shadows.
Sadly, they don't. The FBI has something like two guys who speak Arabic, and there are numerous instances in the news recently where some fed is bewailing the lack of language skills in his department. On a diplomatic note, how many US Ambassadors actually speak the language of their host country? It might be useful if they had some way to understand the locals.
At the time of the Islamic Revoluation, the CIA had one employee who spoke Farsi, and they weren't listening to him anyway. I can't imagine much has changed, unless they have employed some ex-patriots, like what they did with that Achmed Chalabi guy, and that was a fantastic success.
Agreed. My personal strategy that has worked very well for me so far is that if the programming is boring, then there is nothing at stake. The easiest way to make programming interesting AND take it to the next level is to find a job with a lot more risk involved. This usually involves either (1) Look for a company that is smaller by half (at least) than your current employer or (2) Be on the lookout for companies who are about to engage in something that would be considered too risky at your present location.
Now I am not recommending this approach for everyone, I'm just saying it works for me. More Risk == Better Programming
Slashdot Mirror
People still look at me funny when I tell them I learned english at the age of 11 and speak 5 other languages. White folks are weird.
... sheesh.
Reminds me of a Swiss guy I met in Beijing. He was already tri-lingual by the age of 16 (Swiss French, Italian, German), then learned English and Spanish after high school before going to Taiwan to study Mandarin Chinese. He was in Beijing for sight seeing before heading to Moscow to learn Russian.
And yet hardly a month goes by without another idiotic article in the paper describing how difficult it is to learn a second language. White people
It's a weird thing, like a kind of bizarre Stockholm Syndrome thing where they're stuck in some product hell, and seem to enjoy it. I can't quite figure it out.
Stephen Heller tells an interesting story about a Professor, well versed in Hypnosis, who gave female staff member a post hypnotic suggestion to take off one of her shoes at the party this evening and place some flowers in it as though it were a vase.
Sure enough, later that evening that the woman saw a vase of flowers, took off her shoe and proceeded to place some flowers in it. The Professor came over to her and asked what she was doing. She told the professor that she had a flower vase at home and seeing the flowers on the table had suddenly inspired her to use her shoe as a sort of 'model' for how she would arrange the flowers at home in the unused vase.
The Professor showed his scepticism at the story and tried to point out it's absurdity to her. As he did, her story became more and more elaborate in it's rationalisation and justification, until it reached the point where the woman became very uncomfortable and started showing signs of acute distress, at which point the Professor ended the experiment.
Now when it comes to computers and cars, they are very expensive and completely pointless purchase items. One can always catch the subway, bus or walk instead of owning a car. And for most things we use a computer for these days, we used very simple items such as pencil and paper, typewriters and so forth at some time in the past. And so there you are, contemplating releasing thousands of dollars that you may have earned, or are yet to earn, on something that is purely to satisfy your ego, or indulge you in some way, and the survival mechanism from your reptile brain kicks in and attempts to disuade you from committing such a risky folly with your precious survival symbols (money). To silence that survival mechanism, you begin a process which is not unlike hypnosis, with the exception that it is exactly like hypnois. Self hypnosis.
And when your hypnotic reality is interupted and intruded on, you may react in a very similar way to the lady who placed flowers in her shoe at a party. Unless of course you are a very rational person. Then you may simple admit to yourself that a machine built by humans will always be as flawed as a human.
Assume the customer was once right, but has been made bitter and defensive by repeated arrogant IT messages (YOU have performed an illegal action and will be shut down...)
You shouldn't be using the most complex device humankind has ever created if you are going to get all upset about a few error messages. You should be fucking gratefull that you get to use such a piece of equipment at all.
The user should have got a simple, understandable message that the printer was out of paper. That's a failure of the OS designer and printer driver developer.
Actually it's a failure of the purchasing officer who doesn't know anything about printers (or which brands give you simple understandable messages that the printer is out of paper (like my $150 Lexmark which has the incredibly cryptic message 'Printer is out of paper')
The user's email software should have picked up the typo and suggested a correction (in fact, most email clients do).
And so when the software changes naol.com to aol.com (to help you) then I'm sure you will be on the phone whinging about that too. Why don't you type more carefully? Or double check your message before clicking send? Does an envelope correct your spelling when you write out the wrong address? Does your telephone automatically correct the number you are dialling?
The user is employed by your company to work.
Exactly, so they shouldn't be wasting time by being too fucking lazy to check their work (or the address of an email) before they send it out to a client. In fact, any employee that wastes their time and the IT department's time and the company's time because they are a lazy moron should be fired.
The user needs to get a 75MB file to the customer. Stop whining and arrange for it to happen.
Hey tell that to the post office when you try and send a Datsun through the post. Hey! I'm the customer. Stop whinging and arrange for the transport of my Datsun.
You have been a problem for so long that people believe they can use you as an excuse for their own failures.
Yes, and lucky for you IT people are not very good at office politics or your lazy incompetent ass would have been fired already.
Why should anyone listen to hysterical ravings? Do scaremongers have a good track record for correct predictions of the future?
... they tend to have the same future predictive ability as just about anyone else, i.e. close to none. However, for the most part, the best predictors of the future generally fall into two categories.
Well
1) Those in the process of shaping/inventing/making it and
2) Those who have studied the past (i.e. Historians)
Human behaviour doesn't change all that much. About 3000 years ago a man who we know as Zarathustra laid down principles of civil society that were very similar to the Constitution of the United States of America. Today the descendents of Zarathustra's society are living in place the British named Iran(1).
So it would be foolish to think that the USians have suddenly become history's most enlightened people and consequently will never descend into any kind of facism or totalitarianism. Additionally, one thing history does teach us is that when a society begins to move in a direction that concerns you, the best thing to do is leave that society, as historically societies that begin moving in a certain direction continue to do so until they reach the maximum point on the pendulum.
(1) The name of that country always reminds me of an eighties band called 'Flock of Seaguls'
My personaly opinion is a flat tax per gallon of gas, based on the pollution produced per gallon (obviously you shouldn't be paying as much on a cleaner blend), and the money should be converted to cash and burned
Agreed with one minor adjustment. The tax should be converted into Oxygen. (The byproduct of that process would be some kind of biomass, probably hardwood)
If turbines were practical in a vehicle, they'd already be in use.
So those turbo diesel trucks don't really have a turbine in them then?
"And not incidentally: we don't need to "tell" people what they "need" to drive. We can tax them based on the size and/or fuel-efficiency of their vehicle, and, like true conservatives, we'll "let the market work.""
Isn't governmental taxation and regulation interference in "the market"?
No it is not, as long as the taxation is a fixed percentage. All markets are regulated. There is a great economist myth that there exists an unregulated market somewhere. Markets need to be regulated so that people with guns don't come and 'distort the market' by paying for their goods with a promise not to kill you.
In our modern markets, pollution (and greenhouse gases) is a cost of business that is not borne by the manufacturer of the product. It is borne by everyone in range of the outputs of their defective products, whether or not they are a market participant. This is a market distortion that allows the manufacturers of these defective products to profit at someone else's expense. Taxation of fuel would correct this market distortion, and would force the consumer to pay for the use of their defective product, whose hidden costs are currently paid for by someone (everyone) else.
That this is not self-evident is a great testament to both the stupidity of humanity, and the spectacular achievements of right-wing propaganda.
(admitedly I was going to make a fake moon landing joke as well, but as it has already been beaten into the ground, I am gona have to pass, wich obviously opens me up to a "you must be new here" comment, and shortly there after we should see a "In soviet russi, moon dust fakes you!", and a "I for one welcome our new fake-moondust-overlords". Oh, and don't for get the "I make fake moon dust you insensitive clod!")
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those fake moon dust generators!
Actually the best per acre might be GM algae (though the land-based fuel crops of rapeseed and mustardseed beat soybeans hands down).
Actually the highest yield oil crop is Palm Oil, although there is a lead time to a mature plant. While I agree with you on the yields of algae, the problem (currently) with algae is that it is capital intensive. The ponds and CO2 diffusers are expensive to build on a large scale. Ideally you want the ponds built right next to coal power stations, but there is usually (not always) a shortage of land.
If we can solve the cost problem of pond/diffuser establishment, then algae would be ideal. As you probably know, the department of energy has already found the highest yield algae through a selection and cross breeding process without the need for gene modification.
Soundly thrash, arrest, incarcerate, try, convict and execute anyone with a malfunctioning passport tag.
But why stop at those with malfunctioning passport tags? Surely anyone who applies for a passport to leave the land of the free/greatest country in the world/worlds greatest democracy is a subversive anyway. They are just going overseas to meet socialists in old Europe or terrorists just about everywhere else, so why not nip it in the bud? Just incarcerate and execute anyone with a valid passport.
How about straight veggie oil? Requires a bit more work on the engine side, but doesn't require the chemicals that biodiesel production requires.
Usually requires pre-heating except for very high compression engines. Most of the setups I've seen for pure vegetable oil start the vehicle on regular fuel, then use the excess heat from the engine to heat the vege oil to temperature, then you switch fuels while the vehicle is running. Pretty cool technology.
I guess if you were to carry a large battery around in the vehicle you could use it to pre-heat the oil, and then recharge the battery from the engine.
Which vaccination caused brain damage?
Triple antigen.
What was mechanism?
First noted by Professor Gordon Stewart, the most likely cause considered to be the pertussis component of the triple antigen vaccine. Dr PM Jeavons (The Lancet 25/10/1975) suggested seperating out the pertussis component of the triple antigen to reduce the risk of brain damage.
Has the failure in the 1950s production of polio vaccine been corrected since then?
The Polio vaccine is no longer administered (at least in the country I live, not sure about the US/UK), so it is unlikely that it is still produced in any quantity.
And since everyone in the US was vaccinated for polio, and that caused 20% of the population of the US to develop cancer, why hasn't anyone told the trial lawyers about it?
Not everyone in the US was vaccinated for Polio, it varied from state to state. The contamination was a single batch believed to be manufactured in Europe, and put an estimated millions at risk.
Are your claims of vaccination side-effect related to the vaccines themselves, or just to flawed manufacturing processes?
The vaccines themselves. And they are not claims. They are well documented side effects in medical journals. I would add citations, but every time I've tried in the past my post seems to be blocked by the lameness filter.
First you wrote:
Obviously I was mistaken since you are quoting scriptures included in the Torah - obviously not the New Testament
and then you wrote:
Let's get a few things straight here, the New Testament is not a book - it is the new preaching brought by Jesus to replace the Old Testament the Jews had been following for generations. What you're probably referring to is actually a collection of scriptures written by many people in a time range of about 100 years.
and then you wrote:
So yes, although the Gospels were written fairly shortly after Jesus' time on earth, many other scriptures were written after (e.g., Paul's letters to the early church)
So what part of what you are saying contradicts my statement that the New Testament (whatever it happens to be to make your point at the time) was written after Jesus's death?
And then this little gem:
Frankly, your ignorance and arrogance are disgusting. How about next time you don't know about a subject you just keep your mouth shut instead of enlightening the world about how ignorant you are?
Please don't let me stop you. You sound like a typical Christian to me. Intolerant, bigoted and just plain fucking rude. Why don't you join the Krusade in Irak so that you can get to your lovely heaven all the much faster? We certainly would breath easier without you here on earth.
For some reason I thought you were talking about Christians, not Jews. Obviously I was mistaken since you are quoting scriptures included in the Torah - obviously not the New Testament preached by Jesus.
...
The new testament was written 50+ years after Jesus died, so that was quite an amazing feat preaching from a book that hadn't been written yet. Either that or he had a time machine
Vaccination causes brain damage in 1 in 300,000 children in the UK. It also causes secondary diseases ( approx 30% of those vaccinated for measels developed a much more severe strain in later life), has caused cancer in ~20% of those who were polio vaccinated (from contaminated source material i.e. monkeys). It has also produced adverse reactions and secondary disease in large numbers of service personel who were vaccinated for Gulf War I.
Your proposal would lead to at least 20,000 brain damaged, and a massive increase in secondary disease. On the upside, drug company profitability would increase by many billions of dollars, so those of us who are capable of looking after our own immune system can buy drug company stock and retire.
*imagine vaccinating everyone on the planet for all diseases which require human hosts at the same time.
Imagine me putting a pickaxe through your skull and then using said pickaxe to drag you though a pit of sulphuric acid and you will come close to what it was like imagining your proposal above.
I can't resist... Fewer people are killed by blind hunters each year than by full-sighted hunters. Much safer. ... there!
...
Right, and fewer people are injured in hunting accidents by Vice Presidents each year than by non Vice Presidents, so I suppose you think it should be legal for the Vice President to hunt as well? Oh wait
"[your quote], whereas plain concrete gets to this strength after several days."
Did you not read the whole sentence you were quoting or did you just not expect me to?
Actually, I thought you might notice something about the site where the quote came from and realise that the "concrete" used in the pyramids is a geopolymer, not portland cement.In other words, it sets in 4 hours, not 3 days.
The base stones of the Giza pyramid weigh 100+ tons. If you had the choice between
a) Quarrying a 100+ ton block and dragging up a hill, then moving it into place, aligning it by hand to an accuracy of less than 1mm
b) Casting a 100+ ton block close by and then moving it into place, aligning it by hand to an accuracy of less than 1mm
or
c) Casting a 100+ ton block in-situ, not bothering with all that moving and aligning shit
from what you are saying, you would choose option (b), but I think those Egyptians didn't like making work for themselves and chose option (c).
But hey, I could be wrong, maybe they did quarry/cast 2 million stone blocks and move them into place with rollers and pulleys and ramps and other stuff when they could have just saved themselves the effort 2 million times by just casting them in place. After all, this was before unions and HR morale boosting initiatives, when workers just did whatever the frick they were told. So who knows?
They're part of ensuring a stable Iraqi government that will be a democracy good for its citizens rather than a tyranny.
Not so far, but they've only been at it 3 years. I say, given another 20 years or so they will have either accomplished their mission to bring stable capitalist democracy to Iraq, or they will have pulled out and let it disintegrate into 20 years of civil war.
Either way, those Mummys should be proud of what their boys are accomplishing over there, and given that the IED problem is not going to just 'go away', they should send as much SillyString as they can, and hope that the cargo plane carrying all that string doesn't get shot down by the insurgents.
Dude, which country would you choose to live in?
Being a citizen of neither the US or China, and having spent some time in both countries, I can honestly say that with the exception of being afraid of the almost constant threat of physical violence or death, I would prefer to live in the US. This choice however is almost due almost entirely to pollution and sanitation. China is filthy, and incredibly polluted.
However, the question was about access to information. Most of the Chinese people I met were very interested in the world at large, and believe it or not, that information is often freely available. It's information about China that is censored and distorted. Most of the American people I met are blissfully unaware of the world at large, and the little information they do know is some of the most bizarre one-sided propaganda I've ever heard.
This is truly the strangest thing about the USoA. Access to (accurate) information is unparalleled, and yet ignorance and misinformation is so widespread. Still, for the intelligent, curious, rational individual, the US is an information wet dream and I personally would travel there for that purpose if it didn't require giving DNA and my travelling papers to the gestapo at the border.
And that the concrete would need to cure for days,
..."
Ah, no.
From the link:"The geopolymeric cement reaches a compression strength of 20 Mpa after 4 hours,
they couldn't have been poured in-place if that's what you're thinking, or there wouldn't be any seperation at all
Not true. If you cast a second block next to a block that has already set, there will be some separation over time. Not much, but some. The fact that you cannot insert a business card between the stones 5000 years later suggests that they were cast in place.
or why you think Egyptologists are corrupt schemers uninterested in new data.
Because Egyptologists are uninterested in any new data that invalidates their current mythology. Any new idea on how the Pyramids were built has traditionally come from those with a background in Engineering. This is because Egyptologists are versed in the tradition of what previous Egyptologists have published, not Engineering or Science. This is the probable reason why their construction mythology is so laughably stupid.
Of course, to suggest so is a heresy against Egyptology dogma, which states that white people are the first to have an advanced civilisation, and any suggestion to the contrary is just some wild conspiracy theory.
In the same way that the Romans employed scribes to denigrate and belittle Carthaginian culture, science and technology (once they had appropriated it and put Roman names down as the inventors), such that the memory of Carthage would be wiped from history and human consciousness, Egyptologists are mythologists employed to play down the achievements and antiquity of ancient Egyptian civilisation to ensure the pre-eminence of the white race in the global consciousness.
Conspiracy? No, just typical human behaviour.
I completely agree. I am trying to leave a company at the moment, they keep offering me more money, and everytime they do it weakens my resolve.
.NET job, you are only going to meet shadows.
However, you need to consider your health and your sanity. Working for incompetent fuckwits takes years off your life, and causes more sick days as well. Then you've got the stress-relief activities that cost money as well. In the end, you find that you are about as well off financially, and you are still working for incompetent fuckwits doing boring as shit work.
Go for the Perl job. You may meet people there that you will be friends for life with. In the
Sadly, they don't. The FBI has something like two guys who speak Arabic, and there are numerous instances in the news recently where some fed is bewailing the lack of language skills in his department. On a diplomatic note, how many US Ambassadors actually speak the language of their host country? It might be useful if they had some way to understand the locals.
At the time of the Islamic Revoluation, the CIA had one employee who spoke Farsi, and they weren't listening to him anyway. I can't imagine much has changed, unless they have employed some ex-patriots, like what they did with that Achmed Chalabi guy, and that was a fantastic success.
Agreed. My personal strategy that has worked very well for me so far is that if the programming is boring, then there is nothing at stake. The easiest way to make programming interesting AND take it to the next level is to find a job with a lot more risk involved. This usually involves either (1) Look for a company that is smaller by half (at least) than your current employer or (2) Be on the lookout for companies who are about to engage in something that would be considered too risky at your present location.
Now I am not recommending this approach for everyone, I'm just saying it works for me. More Risk == Better Programming
YMMV