Anything can be justified. The ultimate conclusion to the logic you employ (get rid of religion in case it is used again after a 1000 years to justify war even though it teaches against violence) is to get rid of everything which can usefully be used to justify anything negative. Newspapers can be used to justify war or sway public opinion with pseudo-intellectual cr-p or with pseudo-science and so they too should be removed. Oh, you say papers are free - well in a Capitalist society they're not - the owner has last say - so get rid of Capitalism too. Get rid of everything.:-) How absurd is that?
The Crusades had many motivations. We've learned to avoid them now. Christianity is no longer uses as an excuse to start wars or defend against them. Christianity itself has realised the error of its ways from within itself. The Scripture is right there - "Thou Shalt not kill", "turn the other cheek", "shake the sandals off your feet and leave" in places where they reject you and not kill them instead - and so on. These are pretty nice ideals. If we keep them we have more choice at the end - we still have freedom to follow the good and reject what we don't like - Mr Atheist can still agree with "thou shalt not kill" but reject all that supernatural stuff. Bigger choice - better value and if it helps some people get on with their lives - all the better.:-)
You have nutters all over the place, of every colour and (proclaimed) stripe/culture/religion - the problems is having those nutters in powers. Screw the reformation - the seperation of church and state, constitutions and bills of right are what makes a difference!
Are you saying that secular democracies with bills of rights are never able to put their own interests ahead of their neighbours or other states and act aggressively? Are the three things you mentioned above complete guarantors of neutral or benevolent behavior towards your own people or other people?
Hitler, like Stalin (and Pol Pot--different religion I know) de-prioritized the belief that God was most important--said belief that man-made laws were fallible (and therefore suspect) and instead replaced this inherent skepticism in all man-made works with a different dogma, based entirely on the authority of the party - Communist Party or the NSDAP. Both Nazis and Communists (Bolsheviks) were essentially the same as both were Marxists at heart. Anyhow, once you got God out of the way and the Fuhrer or First Secretary (Lenin/Stalin) became your god (as can happen in any system where supernatural gods are eliminated) the soldiers could be told to do whatever was required of them - kill Jewish and Polish (Catholic) women and children for instance and have no fear that they were being anti-God/Christ or Buddha/etc. It didn't work in all cases, as one particular Catholic - Von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler because he thought Hitler was bringing about the destruction of Germany.
Religion like all things can be manipulated for good and bad. War can be justified by any means and I think that those who think atheist based systems are foolproof and always inherently ethically good are naive or deluding themselves.
Atheism is about disbelief in supernatural gods. It has no stance on political, social or economic systems. Just because a political system (eg secular humanism, fascism or communism) may lead to state sponsored dogma does not mean that these systems are run on behalf of supernatural gods.
Monarchs help with continuity and political stability. No matter who gets elected there is always some form of continuity - national identity - some form of heritage to remind people who they are or what they stand for - even if many of those things are ascribed to modern non-absolute monarchs and may have previously been outlawed by their predecessors.
NEC VersaPro UltraLite VS or the new VC - former is an Atom 1.86Ghz CPU, latter is an Intel i5 processor. The netbook is 735g in weight, notebook is under 1kg in weight, built with Mg Alloy - 150kg weight resistance and 75cm drop height resistance on both. Then there is the Panasonic Let's Note range - water resistant keyboard, Mg Alloy case, 100kg weight resistance, 10 hour+ battery, Core2Duo or i5 CPU and 76cm drop height - weight is about 1.3kg for a 14.1inch model which includes a built in DVD Writer (which the Macbook Air does not).
In short you get a very large, sturdy and well made ultra portable and for not much more weight or form factor than an iPad with the power to run Adobe Acrobat, Lotus Notes, VPN software, Office, Photoshop etc.
The iPad as said before still requires a whole hand or arm to hold it. You may as well carry something a little heavier - not much really - and you can burn/read CD/DVDs, use any Windows/Linux app and work with any file format. Of course the iPad is lighter, always on (Netbook takes 15sec to power up Windows with the built in Toshiba SSD) but iPad is instantaneous, but at the end of the day you still end up lugging them both around - and both have advantages and disadvantages - yet the advantages of the iPad in my mind don't overcome the disadvantages of having to occupy your whole hand with a bulky device. A smart phone can just fit in your pocket (and you can make calls on it too).
I'm just curious how pointing out 'intolerance' and 'violence' which a minority of Muslims follow by using insulting depictions of their deities gonging to work to help them become more moderate. Remember you seek to impose your FOREIGN point of view on a distant culture which already sees itself as being victimised in that the West usually sides with their opponents, the West spreads pornography et al and the besides it's a foreign criticism we're talking about. It's difficult for a Westerner to understand this. The West has been imposing its POV and law on other cultures for hundreds of years but when the British decided to do this in America the War of Independence broke out and later the American Civil War when the South did not want to have Northern laws imposed on themselves. A society needs to change from within. Take Central Europe for example and Iraq. Iraq never had a history of democracy but countries like Poland did. The Poles had the second democratic constitution in the world after the American one. Guys like Lech Walesa knew very well what freedom and democracy means - it was part of their culture - when liberation came they accepted it and now there is a multiparty democracy in Poland. In Iraq however the population never had that ideal and after US liberation they turned on each other - well extremists from both groups turned on each other but there would be less extremism if Iraq had been truly democratic before Saddam Hussein.
My points are thus - understand how change has to occur. It has to be from within and it can't be imposed by foreigners especially when culturally important aspects are seen as being insulted by people far away who themselves are seen as supporting their enemy (whether that is objectively true or not). The Muslims themselves must start to make their own satire and learn to laugh at themselves before letting others laugh at them. Remember that if you in the West say you don't care about being laughed at it's really because you never had foreigners occupy your country. This is also a reason why it's OK to portray a white guy as a dimwit in some TV ads and not a black one. Blacks lived under white oppression but not vice versa.
And how conveniently did you forget about that about 800 year period where you send people off to kill and die in order to capture foreign lands where your imaginary friend had a son to control trade routes under the auspices of serving your imaginary friend. There were about six of these.
The roots of the Crusades were also political and economic i.e. secular. People paint a very simplified picture of the Crusades, yet half of Europe fell to Islamic invasion at one stage.
Or there was that Spanish mob, I forgot what they were called but no body expected them. Where it was punishable by torture or death simply to have another religion or not follow the accepted religion to an appropriate level, that went for about 150 years.
Whose influence was also exaggerated and whose death counts were probably less than those of secular courts, not to mention that it only ran in handful of the Catholic European states. Oh yes, English Protestant Propaganda you say? Once again politically inspired?
I'm not saying these things did not happen but they were not as bad as depicted and not done for entirely religious reasons meaning that without Christianity Europe and the Muslim world would also have clashed after all the Babylonians and Greeks also clashed etc.
Lets not get into the involuntary immolation of wicca shall we?
Not very accurate. You could get access to porn before 1994. Various pornographic magazines had stars on nipples though but even in high school in the early 90s kids would exchange BBS/internet porn (on floppy disks).
SA was pretty much a police state before 94 and like in Eastern Europe violent crime outside of politically inspired crime was pretty low because of the large numbers of police. Then again one could attribute this to surge in rape after 94 to an increase in reporting.
The cynic in me says that the priority is for various morality groups make it seem like they're doing something, possibly to themselves.
The problem is that if ANC actually listened to some morality groups then SA would be in a better shape. This has absolutely nothing to do with morality groups but is a about copying what everyone else is doing - China, Germany, Australia etc. Even Japan is considering banning cartoon porn. This is just an easy way out. Most people in SA do not have access to internet. The real problem in SA is a deeply misogynist society where women only recently discovered they could say NO to sex and what rape is. SA's HIV problem stems also from a culture of multiple sex partner concurrency - http://www.harvardaidsprp.org/research/halperin&epstein-why-is-hiv-prevalence-so-severe.pdf yet the government's way of controlling HIV was merely handing out condoms. The problem is that people don't want to wear them - and not for religious reasons but for cultural ones - men mostly have last say. Even outside of SA condoms in long term relationships tend not to be used consistently but that's another story.
www.caritas.pl and many other things including helping support Polish national identity through 200 years of oppression. Good enough for you? What have you done for us?
The man is a national hero. You're not Polish and so you don't understand but try to get this - for almost 200 years Poland did not exist and Polish language, culture and identity were suppressed and systematically eliminated by Russia, Prussia, Austo-Hungary, then Germany and then the Soviet Union. We therefore value people like Chopin, Marie Curie-Sklodowska and Copernicus as national heroes to help preserve our identity. Hence the man is being honoured.
You have a problem with Poland beating its chest? Which country doesn't beat its chest over its own achievements and heroes?
Copernicus is a great hero in Poland, an example to aspire to. The Catholic Church of Poland, a nation historically far more religiously tolerant than yours probably (with Jews, Protestants, Muslims, etc finding refuge there) relied on the Catholic Church to help support Polish national identity through the years of Poland's non-existence as a nation, including after it was sold out by liberal West to the Soviets (after 1945). The Church stood by us, when no-one else did. It also helped to demarcate who belonged to the Communist Party and collaborated with the Soviets and who kept his national identity and didn't.
...if Medicine wasn't such a members-only club. There's the "In" crowd and then there's the "Rest" of us.
Take other fields.... writing, education, programming, painting, online stock trading -- anyone can hop online or go down to their local bookstore,
I'm a doctor. You mean a multi-billion investment fund will take my advice where to invest their clients' money? I should just email them after having read some books?
Or perhaps the city will let me design a bridge? Or maybe I could learn to fly on Microsoft Flight Simulator and give my airline pilot advice during the next turbulent flight I encounter? Maybe I should barge in and tell the magistrate in court what they should do - I've seen Perry Mason do it and read some books.
"I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."
It's very good advice. People are not specialists. You can't be a stock broker or a computer programmer and expect to be a doctor too. It's nice to be able to read up information but don't presume you will understand it, let alone be able apply it.
So here's one for you: Why can't you fight that misinformation before the patient even steps foot in the exam room? Why don't doctors create peer-reviewed, well-written websites to counter all of the confusion and pseudo-science currently available online?
There are many such sites. In the UK the NHS has sites with information for patients. In the US the CDC (among other agencies) has similar sites. There is also WebMD. http://www.webmd.com/ It's usually helpful to start with your local Health Ministry websites and work from there. As said in the UK, this would be NHS. There's also the Health on the Net Foundation which 'certifies' sites which contain credible medical information. http://www.hon.ch/
The knowledge is there already or do you want you doctor to spell it all out for you. Should he also take you down to your local library to point out the right section for you?
As someone who was born and grew up in Eastern Europe I think countries such as those making up the Visegrad Group should push the EC, and citizens of those countries should petition the European Parliament to FINE Apple until they equalise their inventory across the EU. If Apple refuse, Apple should be kicked out of Europe. They can peddle their wares in Japan, China and the US. That's really the only approach. The European Union is meant to mean something and foreign companies which disregard that should be forced out or change their ways.
Most people don't need an ultra-portable PC. Most people just need a toy to do a little bit of web browsing (FaceBook), some IM and some portable entertainment. Those people don't need a netbook or an ultraportable PC like a tiny C2D Vaio or similar. A netbook with a decent SSD (eg Toshiba), a reasonable amount of RAM and a 1.86 GHz Atom or dual core 1.66 will be more than enough to run a VPN connection, IM, Skype, web browser, Open or Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat (not reader), Photoshop, Lotus Notes, etc and be as fast as most current laptops - at least my VersaPro UltraLite from NEC is. So this just proves that most people use laptops and netbooks as toys and not as work or productivity devices.
Well, why didn't Neil Armstrong plant a McDonald's flag then instead of the US one? Patriotism exists outside of the USA too. Gee....Japanese also love their country?
The Church did what it thought was best - in most cases rehabilitation was attempted. In some cases some Bishops covered up. Your statement is false that the whole church covered up every abuse - because they didn't. Of course I could also say that all of NASA covered up cost cutting and hence two shuttles blew up - I mean should we now no longer have space exploration because of that? Should NASA be disbanded?
Pedophilia is a difficult problem to treat. We still don't know the best way other than separating the sufferers (it's a mental condition and as such involuntary) from children. The Church was deficient and negligent in some cases but not in all. With the current fad of Catholic Church bashing in the Western media the cases where they messed up are highlighted and exaggerated but surely as you don't obtain your knowledge of rocket building from lawyers and newspapers you should not judge the church until a fair, impartial, contextualized assessment has been made.
Irrespective of the greed behind Google's ideas, time for the people of Europe to vote. The EP or EC can easily kick them out and then Google can map Wifi networks in China.
What if you know for sure you will never buy or use any of the products advertised - is it still bad? I live in a different country and most of these ads advertise services not applicable to me or my profession, the online shops don't ship to my address and so on. When you block the ad you're also saving site bandwidth and also reducing impressions and the amount of money the advertiser has to pay for displaying ads to non target audience visitors.
You should watch some films shot in Eastern Europe eg. the Decalogue series. Shot with a handful of people with no fancy pyrotechnics and expensive sets and written, edited and directed by probably the most accomplished film director of all time, Krzysztof Kieslowski. Without him there would be no Decalogue. So film, like music often belongs to the artist who wrote and/or directed it. There are other great directors who shot films on small budgets with a few actors and who created masterpieces greater than the multi-million Dollar garbage Hollywood churns out. Ingmar Bergman is another great director who shot some of his films on small budgets. This does not exclude bigger budget films either - take Kurosawa. Without Bergman, Kieslowski, Kurosawa etc many ground breaking films would have never been made.
Then there are anime directors like Makoto Shinkai who directed and produced an entire anime feature film by himself. There are many shorter animated films which were produced by small studios with a handful of people.
A good film is usually the vision of one individual. There are very few such great directors and without them we'd not have these unique gems. On the other hand Spielberg and Cameron produce assembly line entertainment pieces for the lowest common denominator and these dime a dozen films would have been made without them irrespective of the director employed, eg Titanic would have been a sentimental soap opera no matter what and even if there had never been a Titanic, someone else would have made a big budget romantic tragedy.
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Anything can be justified. The ultimate conclusion to the logic you employ (get rid of religion in case it is used again after a 1000 years to justify war even though it teaches against violence) is to get rid of everything which can usefully be used to justify anything negative. Newspapers can be used to justify war or sway public opinion with pseudo-intellectual cr-p or with pseudo-science and so they too should be removed. Oh, you say papers are free - well in a Capitalist society they're not - the owner has last say - so get rid of Capitalism too. Get rid of everything. :-) How absurd is that?
The Crusades had many motivations. We've learned to avoid them now. Christianity is no longer uses as an excuse to start wars or defend against them. Christianity itself has realised the error of its ways from within itself. The Scripture is right there - "Thou Shalt not kill", "turn the other cheek", "shake the sandals off your feet and leave" in places where they reject you and not kill them instead - and so on. These are pretty nice ideals. If we keep them we have more choice at the end - we still have freedom to follow the good and reject what we don't like - Mr Atheist can still agree with "thou shalt not kill" but reject all that supernatural stuff. Bigger choice - better value and if it helps some people get on with their lives - all the better. :-)
You have nutters all over the place, of every colour and (proclaimed) stripe/culture/religion - the problems is having those nutters in powers. Screw the reformation - the seperation of church and state, constitutions and bills of right are what makes a difference!
Are you saying that secular democracies with bills of rights are never able to put their own interests ahead of their neighbours or other states and act aggressively? Are the three things you mentioned above complete guarantors of neutral or benevolent behavior towards your own people or other people?
Hitler, like Stalin (and Pol Pot--different religion I know) de-prioritized the belief that God was most important--said belief that man-made laws were fallible (and therefore suspect) and instead replaced this inherent skepticism in all man-made works with a different dogma, based entirely on the authority of the party - Communist Party or the NSDAP. Both Nazis and Communists (Bolsheviks) were essentially the same as both were Marxists at heart. Anyhow, once you got God out of the way and the Fuhrer or First Secretary (Lenin/Stalin) became your god (as can happen in any system where supernatural gods are eliminated) the soldiers could be told to do whatever was required of them - kill Jewish and Polish (Catholic) women and children for instance and have no fear that they were being anti-God/Christ or Buddha/etc. It didn't work in all cases, as one particular Catholic - Von Stauffenberg tried to kill Hitler because he thought Hitler was bringing about the destruction of Germany.
Religion like all things can be manipulated for good and bad. War can be justified by any means and I think that those who think atheist based systems are foolproof and always inherently ethically good are naive or deluding themselves.
Atheism is about disbelief in supernatural gods. It has no stance on political, social or economic systems. Just because a political system (eg secular humanism, fascism or communism) may lead to state sponsored dogma does not mean that these systems are run on behalf of supernatural gods.
Monarchs help with continuity and political stability. No matter who gets elected there is always some form of continuity - national identity - some form of heritage to remind people who they are or what they stand for - even if many of those things are ascribed to modern non-absolute monarchs and may have previously been outlawed by their predecessors.
Dude just recovered from cancer. Not just cancer, but a type of cancer that is to cancer what most cancers are to not having cancer at all,
Cachexia is common to all cancers when they become sufficiently advanced.
NEC VersaPro UltraLite VS or the new VC - former is an Atom 1.86Ghz CPU, latter is an Intel i5 processor. The netbook is 735g in weight, notebook is under 1kg in weight, built with Mg Alloy - 150kg weight resistance and 75cm drop height resistance on both. Then there is the Panasonic Let's Note range - water resistant keyboard, Mg Alloy case, 100kg weight resistance, 10 hour+ battery, Core2Duo or i5 CPU and 76cm drop height - weight is about 1.3kg for a 14.1inch model
which includes a built in DVD Writer (which the Macbook Air does not).
In short you get a very large, sturdy and well made ultra portable and for not much more weight or form factor than an iPad
with the power to run Adobe Acrobat, Lotus Notes, VPN software, Office, Photoshop etc.
The iPad as said before still requires a whole hand or arm to hold it. You may as well carry something a little heavier - not much really - and you can burn/read CD/DVDs, use any Windows/Linux app and work with any file format.
Of course the iPad is lighter, always on (Netbook takes 15sec to power up Windows with the built in Toshiba SSD) but
iPad is instantaneous, but at the end of the day you still end up lugging them both around - and both have advantages and disadvantages - yet the advantages of the iPad in my mind don't overcome the disadvantages of having to occupy your whole hand with a bulky device. A smart phone can just fit in your pocket (and you can make calls on it too).
I'm just curious how pointing out 'intolerance' and 'violence' which a minority of Muslims follow by using insulting depictions of their deities gonging to work to help them become more moderate. Remember you seek to impose your FOREIGN point of view on a distant culture which already sees itself as being victimised in that the West usually sides with their opponents, the West spreads pornography et al and the besides it's a foreign criticism we're talking about. It's difficult for a Westerner to understand this. The West has been imposing its POV and law on other cultures for hundreds of years but when the British decided to do this in America the War of Independence broke out and later the American Civil War when the South did not want to have Northern laws imposed on themselves. A society needs to change from within. Take Central Europe for example and Iraq. Iraq never had a history of democracy but countries like Poland did. The Poles had the second democratic constitution in the world after the American one. Guys like Lech Walesa knew very well what freedom and democracy means - it was part of their culture - when liberation came they accepted it and now there is a multiparty democracy in Poland. In Iraq however the population never had that ideal and after US liberation they turned on each other - well extremists from both groups turned on each other but there would be less extremism if Iraq had been truly democratic before Saddam Hussein.
My points are thus - understand how change has to occur. It has to be from within and it can't be imposed by foreigners especially when culturally important aspects are seen as being insulted by people far away who themselves are seen as supporting their enemy (whether that is objectively true or not). The Muslims themselves must start to make their own satire and learn to laugh at themselves before letting others laugh at them. Remember that if you in the West say you don't care about being laughed at it's really because you never had foreigners occupy your country. This is also a reason why it's OK to portray a white guy as a dimwit in some TV ads and not a black one. Blacks lived under white oppression but not vice versa.
Such ridicule is the work of uneducated, uncivilised, barbarians too. Educated, cultured, civilised people don't resort to such immaturity. LOL.
And how conveniently did you forget about that about 800 year period where you send people off to kill and die in order to capture foreign lands where your imaginary friend had a son to control trade routes under the auspices of serving your imaginary friend. There were about six of these.
The roots of the Crusades were also political and economic i.e. secular. People paint a very simplified picture of the Crusades, yet half of Europe fell to Islamic invasion at one stage.
Or there was that Spanish mob, I forgot what they were called but no body expected them. Where it was punishable by torture or death simply to have another religion or not follow the accepted religion to an appropriate level, that went for about 150 years.
Whose influence was also exaggerated and whose death counts were probably less than those of secular courts, not to mention that it only ran in handful of the Catholic European states. Oh yes, English Protestant Propaganda you say? Once again politically inspired?
I'm not saying these things did not happen but they were not as bad as depicted and not done for entirely religious reasons meaning that without Christianity Europe and the Muslim world would also have clashed after all the Babylonians and Greeks also clashed etc.
Lets not get into the involuntary immolation of wicca shall we?
Keep playing the victim card good sir.
Not very accurate. You could get access to porn before 1994. Various pornographic magazines had stars on nipples though but even in high school in the early 90s kids would exchange BBS/internet porn (on floppy disks).
SA was pretty much a police state before 94 and like in Eastern Europe violent crime outside of politically inspired crime was pretty low because of the large numbers of police. Then again one could attribute this to surge in rape after 94 to an increase in reporting.
The cynic in me says that the priority is for various morality groups make it seem like they're doing something, possibly to themselves.
The problem is that if ANC actually listened to some morality groups then SA would be in a better shape. This has absolutely nothing to do with morality groups but is a about copying what everyone else is doing - China, Germany, Australia etc. Even Japan is considering banning cartoon porn. This is just an easy way out. Most people in SA do not have access to internet. The real problem in SA is a deeply misogynist society where women only recently discovered they could say NO to sex and what rape is. SA's HIV problem stems also from a culture of multiple sex partner concurrency - http://www.harvardaidsprp.org/research/halperin&epstein-why-is-hiv-prevalence-so-severe.pdf yet the government's way of controlling HIV was merely handing out condoms. The problem is that people don't want to wear them - and not for religious reasons but for cultural ones - men mostly have last say. Even outside of SA condoms in long term relationships tend not to be used consistently but that's another story.
If it wasn't for America you'd be waving the Swastika right now.
www.caritas.pl and many other things including helping support Polish national identity through 200 years of oppression. Good enough for you? What have you done for us?
The man is a national hero. You're not Polish and so you don't understand but try to get this - for almost 200 years Poland did not exist and Polish language, culture and identity were suppressed and systematically eliminated by Russia, Prussia, Austo-Hungary, then Germany and then the Soviet Union. We therefore value people like Chopin, Marie Curie-Sklodowska and Copernicus as national heroes to help preserve our identity. Hence the man is being honoured.
You have a problem with Poland beating its chest? Which country doesn't beat its chest over its own achievements and heroes?
Copernicus is a great hero in Poland, an example to aspire to.
The Catholic Church of Poland, a nation historically far more religiously tolerant than yours probably (with Jews, Protestants, Muslims, etc finding refuge there) relied on the Catholic Church to help support Polish national identity through the years of Poland's non-existence as a nation, including after it was sold out by liberal West to the Soviets (after 1945). The Church stood by us, when no-one else did. It also helped to demarcate who belonged to the Communist Party and collaborated with the Soviets and who kept his national identity and didn't.
...if Medicine wasn't such a members-only club. There's the "In" crowd and then there's the "Rest" of us.
Take other fields.... writing, education, programming, painting, online stock trading -- anyone can hop online or go down to their local bookstore,
I'm a doctor.
You mean a multi-billion investment fund will take my advice where to invest their clients' money? I should just email them after having read some books?
Or perhaps the city will let me design a bridge? Or maybe I could learn to fly on Microsoft Flight Simulator and give my airline pilot advice during the next turbulent flight I encounter?
Maybe I should barge in and tell the magistrate in court what they should do - I've seen Perry Mason do it and read some books.
"I just feel the Internet brings so much misinformation to the (exam) room that we have to fight through all that before we can get to the problem at hand."
It's very good advice. People are not specialists. You can't be a stock broker or a computer programmer and expect to be a doctor too. It's nice to be able to read up information but don't presume you will understand it, let alone be able apply it.
So here's one for you: Why can't you fight that misinformation before the patient even steps foot in the exam room? Why don't doctors create peer-reviewed, well-written websites to counter all of the confusion and pseudo-science currently available online?
There are many such sites. In the UK the NHS has sites with information for patients. In the US the CDC (among other agencies) has similar sites. There is also WebMD. http://www.webmd.com/
It's usually helpful to start with your local Health Ministry websites and work from there. As said in the UK, this would be NHS.
There's also the Health on the Net Foundation which 'certifies' sites which contain credible medical information. http://www.hon.ch/
The knowledge is there already or do you want you doctor to spell it all out for you. Should he also take you down to your local library to point out the right section for you?
As someone who was born and grew up in Eastern Europe I think countries such as those making up the Visegrad Group should push the EC, and citizens of those countries should petition the European Parliament to FINE Apple until they equalise their inventory across the EU. If Apple refuse, Apple should be kicked out of Europe. They can peddle their wares in Japan, China and the US. That's really the only approach. The European Union is meant to mean something and foreign companies which disregard that should be forced out or change their ways.
Most people don't need an ultra-portable PC. Most people just need a toy to do a little bit of web browsing (FaceBook), some IM and some portable entertainment. Those people don't need a netbook or an ultraportable PC like a tiny C2D Vaio or similar. A netbook with a decent SSD (eg Toshiba), a reasonable amount of RAM and a 1.86 GHz Atom or dual core 1.66 will be more than enough to run a VPN connection, IM, Skype, web browser, Open or Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat (not reader), Photoshop, Lotus Notes, etc and be as fast as most current laptops - at least my VersaPro UltraLite from NEC is. So this just proves that most people use laptops and netbooks as toys and not as work or productivity devices.
Well, why didn't Neil Armstrong plant a McDonald's flag then instead of the US one? Patriotism exists outside of the USA too. Gee....Japanese also love their country?
The Church did what it thought was best - in most cases rehabilitation was attempted. In some cases some Bishops covered up. Your statement is false that the whole church covered up every abuse - because they didn't. Of course I could also say that all of NASA covered up cost cutting and hence two shuttles blew up - I mean should we now no longer have space exploration because of that? Should NASA be disbanded?
Pedophilia is a difficult problem to treat. We still don't know the best way other than separating the sufferers (it's a mental condition and as such involuntary) from children. The Church was deficient and negligent in some cases but not in all. With the current fad of Catholic Church bashing in the Western media the cases where they messed up are highlighted and exaggerated but surely as you don't obtain your knowledge of rocket building from lawyers and newspapers you should not judge the church until a fair, impartial, contextualized assessment has been made.
Irrespective of the greed behind Google's ideas, time for the people of Europe to vote. The EP or EC can easily kick them out and then Google can map Wifi networks in China.
What if you know for sure you will never buy or use any of the products advertised - is it still bad? I live in a different country and most of these ads advertise services not applicable to me or my profession, the online shops don't ship to my address and so on. When you block the ad you're also saving site bandwidth and also reducing impressions and the amount of money the advertiser has to pay for displaying ads to non target audience visitors.
Bad for whom?
You should watch some films shot in Eastern Europe eg. the Decalogue series. Shot with a handful of people with no fancy pyrotechnics and expensive sets and written, edited and directed by probably the most accomplished film director of all time, Krzysztof Kieslowski. Without him there would be no Decalogue. So film, like music often belongs to the artist who wrote and/or directed it. There are other great directors who shot films on small budgets with a few actors and who created masterpieces greater than the multi-million Dollar garbage Hollywood churns out. Ingmar Bergman is another great director who shot some of his films on small budgets. This does not exclude bigger budget films either - take Kurosawa. Without Bergman, Kieslowski, Kurosawa etc many ground breaking films would have never been made.
Then there are anime directors like Makoto Shinkai who directed and produced an entire anime feature film by himself. There are many shorter animated films which were produced by small studios with a handful of people.
A good film is usually the vision of one individual. There are very few such great directors and without them we'd not have these unique gems. On the other hand Spielberg and Cameron produce assembly line entertainment pieces for the lowest common denominator and these dime a dozen films would have been made without them irrespective of the director employed, eg Titanic would have been a sentimental soap opera no matter what and even if there had never been a Titanic, someone else would have made a big budget romantic tragedy.