How can any society claim to be "free" when the state can go through your private, often commercially sensitive, informations every time you cross a border in the US? How can any society make a claim to be "free" when many states do not permit women to have control over their own bodies?
For one thing GOA have a website that requires Flash in order to work, breaking the first rule of the web: accessiblity.
To my fellow website implementors: if you must have Flash on your website, for zod's sake don't make it obligatory; make sure you have a pure-HTML version as well or you will be losing my (and others') business:-)
Maybe you should check out the 6 videos, > 600 screenshots, and > 250 A4 pages of developer journals that have been released, not to mention a signed publisher and a 2008 release date. It's obvious to any reasonable person that the game is very real.
As for WAR, they just axed a huge chunk of their game after horrid beta reviews and successive release date pushbacks. that's aside from the fact that WAR is another generic WOW-style copycat game with outdated graphics and un-innovative gameplay.
well, fat people are still a burden - adjustments to seats and seating to accomodate ginormous flabby arses, the environmental cost of feeding the fat fuckers and transporting them around cause they're too lazy to walk/cycle, etc etc.
the overall cost to the community is higher if you're a lardarse, than if you eat reasonably well and occasionally exert yourself physically.
Note that genes only predispose individuals to becoming fat - they do not *make* you fat. The vast majority of individuals who are fat are fat because they eat too much, eat the wrong foods, and are lazy lardasses.
"Eating fewer calories than you burn" to lose fat is just as true as "Avoiding everything that will kill you" to live forever and "making more money than you spend" to become independently wealthy. The devil is in the details.
No, it's a biochemical fact that if you consume less than you burn in daily activities that you will lose weight.
Even though you may be eating healthily, you are eating too much, or not telling the full truth about what you eat or drink (alcohol is a huge source of kilojoules).
At the physiological level, it's very simple: net difference = kilojoules consumed - kilojoules burnt in daily activities. if the net difference is positive, you gain weight, if it is negative, you lose weight.
You sir, are either eating/drinking too much, exercising too little, or lying about something - your genes have nothing to do with it.
So, what if I have good genes.... and you have bad? If we are willing to open up the can of worms of risk assignment, then why should we ignore science and not surcharge those people who have doomed genetics? What, exactly, entitles people with weaker genes to a health discount at the expense of someone else?
You can't help your genes, but you *can* help being a fat, lazy lardass. There's a big difference.
Studies show that less than 1% of fat lardasses are due to genetic abnormalities.
Well, for starters, allergy refers specifically to a hypersensitivity of the immune system to a chemical irritant. you can't be allergic to radio waves, sorry.
WoW is a horrible game. Sure, it seems great while you're playing it, but deep down you know you're over it, you know it's repetitive, mindless, and really dumbed-down yet you still play it.
If this is you, just quit. trust me you'll thank me later, and probably your real-life friends will too.
noone should be forced by any school or university to submit work in.doc format unless the school or university is willing to pay for licenses of MS word for all students.
openoffice is free, and outputs documents using the.odf format, which is now an international (ISO) standard.
do NOT accept the 'must be in Word.doc' argument -- write a letter/email/phone the relevant people and do not accept this bullshit.
In other words, you need everything spelled out for you (pardon the pun)?
Cryptonomicon has an excellent ending, it's obvious... adding anything further to what's there just for sentimental feel goods is what makes good books/films great, instead of adhering to the super-obvious sentimental "happy ever after" ending shite that hollywood generally sticks to.
> Each of these life forms you mention are DISTINCT. Butterflies are forever butterflies, they never 'evolve' into moths.
wrong, they do. you are just using bad examples, because these species *already exist*, that is, they have already speciated from a common ancestor. speciation is extremely well supported by observable evidence today, by DNA comparisons. in another 100, 500, or 1000 years, i guarantee there will new species all over the place. you're getting hung up on purely visual distinctions, visual comparisons we know are not terribly reliable or accurate. new species are dying out and emerging constantly, even within the scope of our lifetimes, it's not so hard to understand. new derivative species will bear many of the visual qualities of their parent species to begin with, but as time goes on, visual differences accumulate until you have something like butterflies and moths. we know enough now to create our own species, eg: crops that can grow in salt marshes.
regarding the loss of species interbreeding, it can be caused by simple mutations in surface coat glycoproteins of animal oocytes (eggs) that make spermatazoa of closely related species X unable to fertilise closely species Y, even though the 2 species are perfectly able to bear cross-species offspring when the sperm & eggs of species X & Y are manually fertilised.
the whole macroevolution/species distinction line of argument that you creationists like to cling to, is a total myth, brought about by your ignorance of well-established scientific facts (that is, testable & observable today) you don't understand or even know about.
btw, copernicus has EVIDENCE, which is why his theory slowly gained acceptance. creationists have ZERO evidence, big difference. you fail to mention that copernicus and his theories were persecuted primarily by clueless religious idiots who claimed they couldn't be wrong because "the bible is always right". it's the same religion-mandated ignorance of the breadth and depth of testable facts that you yourself are demostrating today.
> Indeed so, but these properties depend on the fundamental properties of space itself.
wrong, atomic decay is a property of matter itself, space has nothing to do with it.
> Space is not an empty nothing, but has measurable electric and magnetic properties....which come from all the matter floating around.
> Those scientists who see the many shortcomings of the theory of evolutions are often agnostics, rather than religious.
in 15 years of working & socialising in science circle internationally i have never met nor heard of a single dissenting scientist, ever. i have read some of the rhetoric of the purported 'scientists' from pro-intelligent design websites, and without fail, they all a) demonstrate fundamental lack of understanding of basic science principles, b) express opinions without backing them up with facts, c) straight out distort facts, or d) give an example of 1 piece of evidence and ignore all the related evidence that contradicts their view, or some combination of one or more of the above....which is why, every science organisation under the sun has wholesale dismissed ID as science.
it's a bit different; this is a national government with a pretty herrendous record in just about all aspects of office, including baldface lying and distortions of facts directly to the people over Iraq WMDs, saddam having anything to do with al qaeda, chemical weapons factories, etc etc.
For the record I do have all my emails archived dating back to before 2000... on a $1 CDROM. "Losing" emails right around the period when the administration were busy lying their pants off about Iraq is pretty damn suspicious.
> carbon dating...is but one of roughly 200 different kinds of dating methods that have been used. guess what, my religious but sadly ignorant friend, all the dating methods agree with one another. not to mention that atomic decay is a fundamental property of atoms, and anyone familiar with atomic physics will tell you that a change in the rate of decay would be like lead spontaneously transmuting into gold.
it is true that in science, we can rarely prove anything in the mathematical sense, but we have a lot more evidence for evolution than we have for the theory of gravity but i don't see mobs of well-intentioned but ultimately ignorant religious folks trying to discredit gravity because a bunch of long dead jewish guys wrote a fictitious story to try to control people and start wars.
ps: science never ever resorts to faith, and you will see overstretched arguments brought by even the most respected scientists shot down by their own fellows if they even hint at conclusions that are not supported by the facts. we're not idiots you know.
> Interpretation and assumption are just scientific jargon for belief, faith.
no serious scientist who is familiar with - literally - the tonnes of evidence of evolution questions it. given the almost 150 years of data we have, which includes the work of tens of thousands of scientists and hundreds of thousands of documented, peer-reviewed and peer-reproduced studies, anyone who questions evolution without introducing some seriously hard-core ground-breaking and verifiable data just looks ignorant or downright stupid. it's why science institutions everywhere have slammed ID for the crock of shit that it is. they don't "re-interpret the evidence", if they actually discovered or contributed something novel and validateable then those articles would get published, but guess what, they don't, or they publish their crap in religious/ID "journals" that are not peer-reviewed or recognised by any science institution. in short, they are phoneys, and they are lying to you, and to themselves as well.
> An ID believer would simply assert that the virus was designed that way.
how about antibiotic resistance? we've only had antibiotics for 60-odd years, but thanks to overuse, bacteria have evolved resistance mechanisms to them. and not just that, they've evolved a wholly new genetic mechanism by which they can *share* resistance genes between themselves. also, a little more about viruses - there's strong genetic evidence that the whole virus v organisms thing has been a molecular arms race for a long, long time. viruses reproduce very rapidly, which allows them to evolve very quickly, hence wholly new 'species' of viruses are seen every so often.
> Nobody has ever demonstrated a transition from one kind of organism to a fundamentally different kind.
one of the greatest misunderstandings/distortions... it's all in the word 'kind'. by 'kind' you mean 'something that looks noticeably different', eg: humans and chimpanzees, despite having 97.4% of our 9 billion or so nucleotides of DNA in common. it's difficult to observe the 'visual' evolution of organisms with long generations, eg: us, at least in our lifetimes, but with more rapidly reproducing species, eg: butterflies, there have been new species that have evolved, eg: the new butterfly species that evolved to live in the london underground for instance. we make new species of bacteria, yeast, fungi, insects, plants, and mice on a daily basis all around the world for research purposes/models as well as for human consumption, you just don't hear/know about them. if it were able to be approved ethically, we could make new species of any animal you liked, just by shifting genes around.
in conclusion, i implore you for your own intellectual good -- read some basic stuff eg: http://wikipedia.org/Evolution and at least find out some more about what we really do know, rather than reading the distortions/propaganda/outright
As a PhD-qualified and practising scientist, allow me to correct your suppositions
1) "Evolution is the attempt to answer the age old question: How did we and everything else get here. Evolution attempts to deal with the question of origins."
it's more than that, evolution is observable today, and will continue to exert its effect for as long as there is life, anywhere.
2) "Because evolution is very much in effect today...... Only in the sense of adaptation and change"
adaptation occurs at the level of individuals. evolution operates at the level of populations, otherwise they are essentially the same thing. the selective selection/succession of some individuals in response to environmental pressures as a result of continuous, spontaneous genetic mutation.
3) "What is happening today tells us nothing about how things were ages ago"
very wrong. the steady atomic decay of C14 to C13 discovered in recent times is what allowed us to develop the ability to estimate the age of fossils through carbon dating. mutation of non-coding DNA is a steady enough process that we can use statistic/maths as a backup method of dating. the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria is something that has occurred only in the last 50 or so years. this is just a tiny sample of observable data we are using today to discover more about our past.
4) "Why can we not just study the virus, the immune system and learn how it all works TODAY?"
case in point: the influenza virus evolved the ability to alter the chemical landscape of its outermost surface, allowing it to continually evade our immune systems.
there are some other things but in short, evolution provides the framework through which we interpret modern biology; it's not just something that 'just happened' and is useful merely for posterity. almost every modern scientific discovery reinforces evolution and derives from it. we are only where we are today scientifically because of the recognition of the process of evolution.
[quote] Care to name a protest that he's broken up? [/quote]
Does pre-invasion Iraq count?
Seriously though, the problem with Bush is not on his democratic credentials as it were, it's how fast and loose he is prepared to play with the truth, and trying to shape the beliefs of the American people through sustained FUD instead of representing them.
Looks at the Iraq invasion, look at how widely it was opposed, but they went ahead with it anyway, and now look, there were no WMDs, and it all appears very likely it was all a deliberate & premeditated lie.
Is that really democracy? Or put another way, what is the point of democracy if democratically-elected leaders just go ahead and do what they want anyway?
>>> I will support any defensive efforts my Government makes to negate any Iranian missile threat aimed at the United States.
Wanting to install american bases and/or missile defence systems more than 10000km away from any US state or territory is not defence, it's aggression.
Just look at how the US responded in the Cuban missile crisis. It's typical American double standards all over again.
how can this patent be granted when there is plenty of prior art on the use of breakpoints in debugging? it's in the public domain, and therefore not patentable.
Slashdot Mirror
How can any society claim to be "free" when the state can go through your private, often commercially sensitive, informations every time you cross a border in the US? How can any society make a claim to be "free" when many states do not permit women to have control over their own bodies?
The US these days has less freedom than Russia.
For one thing GOA have a website that requires Flash in order to work, breaking the first rule of the web: accessiblity.
To my fellow website implementors: if you must have Flash on your website, for zod's sake don't make it obligatory; make sure you have a pure-HTML version as well or you will be losing my (and others') business :-)
Maybe you should check out the 6 videos, > 600 screenshots, and > 250 A4 pages of developer journals that have been released, not to mention a signed publisher and a 2008 release date. It's obvious to any reasonable person that the game is very real.
As for WAR, they just axed a huge chunk of their game after horrid beta reviews and successive release date pushbacks. that's aside from the fact that WAR is another generic WOW-style copycat game with outdated graphics and un-innovative gameplay.
WAR will be nothing compared to Darkfall.
give them an editor that has boobs in it.
All the more reason to wait on Darkfall, the only MMO worth the wait.
well, fat people are still a burden - adjustments to seats and seating to accomodate ginormous flabby arses, the environmental cost of feeding the fat fuckers and transporting them around cause they're too lazy to walk/cycle, etc etc.
the overall cost to the community is higher if you're a lardarse, than if you eat reasonably well and occasionally exert yourself physically.
Note that genes only predispose individuals to becoming fat - they do not *make* you fat. The vast majority of individuals who are fat are fat because they eat too much, eat the wrong foods, and are lazy lardasses.
No, it's a biochemical fact that if you consume less than you burn in daily activities that you will lose weight.
Stop making excuses fatty.
Even though you may be eating healthily, you are eating too much, or not telling the full truth about what you eat or drink (alcohol is a huge source of kilojoules).
At the physiological level, it's very simple:
net difference = kilojoules consumed - kilojoules burnt in daily activities. if the net difference is positive, you gain weight, if it is negative, you lose weight.
You sir, are either eating/drinking too much, exercising too little, or lying about something - your genes have nothing to do with it.
You can't help your genes, but you *can* help being a fat, lazy lardass. There's a big difference.
Studies show that less than 1% of fat lardasses are due to genetic abnormalities.
Well, for starters, allergy refers specifically to a hypersensitivity of the immune system to a chemical irritant. you can't be allergic to radio waves, sorry.
The only MMOG that comes close to offering the features i want is Darkfall, due for release this year.
WoW is a horrible game. Sure, it seems great while you're playing it, but deep down you know you're over it, you know it's repetitive, mindless, and really dumbed-down yet you still play it.
If this is you, just quit. trust me you'll thank me later, and probably your real-life friends will too.
noone should be forced by any school or university to submit work in .doc format unless the school or university is willing to pay for licenses of MS word for all students.
.odf format, which is now an international (ISO) standard.
.doc' argument -- write a letter/email/phone the relevant people and do not accept this bullshit.
openoffice is free, and outputs documents using the
do NOT accept the 'must be in Word
In other words, you need everything spelled out for you (pardon the pun)?
Cryptonomicon has an excellent ending, it's obvious... adding anything further to what's there just for sentimental feel goods is what makes good books/films great, instead of adhering to the super-obvious sentimental "happy ever after" ending shite that hollywood generally sticks to.
poppy seeds are a source of opiates, not cocaine. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy#False_positive_drug_tests
> Each of these life forms you mention are DISTINCT. Butterflies are forever butterflies, they never 'evolve' into moths.
...which come from all the matter floating around.
...which is why, every science organisation under the sun has wholesale dismissed ID as science.
wrong, they do. you are just using bad examples, because these species *already exist*, that is, they have already speciated from a common ancestor. speciation is extremely well supported by observable evidence today, by DNA comparisons. in another 100, 500, or 1000 years, i guarantee there will new species all over the place. you're getting hung up on purely visual distinctions, visual comparisons we know are not terribly reliable or accurate. new species are dying out and emerging constantly, even within the scope of our lifetimes, it's not so hard to understand. new derivative species will bear many of the visual qualities of their parent species to begin with, but as time goes on, visual differences accumulate until you have something like butterflies and moths. we know enough now to create our own species, eg: crops that can grow in salt marshes.
regarding the loss of species interbreeding, it can be caused by simple mutations in surface coat glycoproteins of animal oocytes (eggs) that make spermatazoa of closely related species X unable to fertilise closely species Y, even though the 2 species are perfectly able to bear cross-species offspring when the sperm & eggs of species X & Y are manually fertilised.
the whole macroevolution/species distinction line of argument that you creationists like to cling to, is a total myth, brought about by your ignorance of well-established scientific facts (that is, testable & observable today) you don't understand or even know about.
btw, copernicus has EVIDENCE, which is why his theory slowly gained acceptance. creationists have ZERO evidence, big difference. you fail to mention that copernicus and his theories were persecuted primarily by clueless religious idiots who claimed they couldn't be wrong because "the bible is always right". it's the same religion-mandated ignorance of the breadth and depth of testable facts that you yourself are demostrating today.
> Indeed so, but these properties depend on the fundamental properties of space itself.
wrong, atomic decay is a property of matter itself, space has nothing to do with it.
> Space is not an empty nothing, but has measurable electric and magnetic properties.
> Those scientists who see the many shortcomings of the theory of evolutions are often agnostics, rather than religious.
in 15 years of working & socialising in science circle internationally i have never met nor heard of a single dissenting scientist, ever. i have read some of the rhetoric of the purported 'scientists' from pro-intelligent design websites, and without fail, they all a) demonstrate fundamental lack of understanding of basic science principles, b) express opinions without backing them up with facts, c) straight out distort facts, or d) give an example of 1 piece of evidence and ignore all the related evidence that contradicts their view, or some combination of one or more of the above.
it's a bit different; this is a national government with a pretty herrendous record in just about all aspects of office, including baldface lying and distortions of facts directly to the people over Iraq WMDs, saddam having anything to do with al qaeda, chemical weapons factories, etc etc.
For the record I do have all my emails archived dating back to before 2000... on a $1 CDROM. "Losing" emails right around the period when the administration were busy lying their pants off about Iraq is pretty damn suspicious.
> carbon dating ...is but one of roughly 200 different kinds of dating methods that have been used. guess what, my religious but sadly ignorant friend, all the dating methods agree with one another. not to mention that atomic decay is a fundamental property of atoms, and anyone familiar with atomic physics will tell you that a change in the rate of decay would be like lead spontaneously transmuting into gold.
it is true that in science, we can rarely prove anything in the mathematical sense, but we have a lot more evidence for evolution than we have for the theory of gravity but i don't see mobs of well-intentioned but ultimately ignorant religious folks trying to discredit gravity because a bunch of long dead jewish guys wrote a fictitious story to try to control people and start wars.
ps: science never ever resorts to faith, and you will see overstretched arguments brought by even the most respected scientists shot down by their own fellows if they even hint at conclusions that are not supported by the facts. we're not idiots you know.
> Interpretation and assumption are just scientific jargon for belief, faith.
no serious scientist who is familiar with - literally - the tonnes of evidence of evolution questions it. given the almost 150 years of data we have, which includes the work of tens of thousands of scientists and hundreds of thousands of documented, peer-reviewed and peer-reproduced studies, anyone who questions evolution without introducing some seriously hard-core ground-breaking and verifiable data just looks ignorant or downright stupid. it's why science institutions everywhere have slammed ID for the crock of shit that it is. they don't "re-interpret the evidence", if they actually discovered or contributed something novel and validateable then those articles would get published, but guess what, they don't, or they publish their crap in religious/ID "journals" that are not peer-reviewed or recognised by any science institution. in short, they are phoneys, and they are lying to you, and to themselves as well.
> An ID believer would simply assert that the virus was designed that way.
how about antibiotic resistance? we've only had antibiotics for 60-odd years, but thanks to overuse, bacteria have evolved resistance mechanisms to them. and not just that, they've evolved a wholly new genetic mechanism by which they can *share* resistance genes between themselves. also, a little more about viruses - there's strong genetic evidence that the whole virus v organisms thing has been a molecular arms race for a long, long time. viruses reproduce very rapidly, which allows them to evolve very quickly, hence wholly new 'species' of viruses are seen every so often.
> Nobody has ever demonstrated a transition from one kind of organism to a fundamentally different kind.
one of the greatest misunderstandings/distortions... it's all in the word 'kind'. by 'kind' you mean 'something that looks noticeably different', eg: humans and chimpanzees, despite having 97.4% of our 9 billion or so nucleotides of DNA in common. it's difficult to observe the 'visual' evolution of organisms with long generations, eg: us, at least in our lifetimes, but with more rapidly reproducing species, eg: butterflies, there have been new species that have evolved, eg: the new butterfly species that evolved to live in the london underground for instance. we make new species of bacteria, yeast, fungi, insects, plants, and mice on a daily basis all around the world for research purposes/models as well as for human consumption, you just don't hear/know about them. if it were able to be approved ethically, we could make new species of any animal you liked, just by shifting genes around.
in conclusion, i implore you for your own intellectual good -- read some basic stuff eg: http://wikipedia.org/Evolution and at least find out some more about what we really do know, rather than reading the distortions/propaganda/outright
As a PhD-qualified and practising scientist, allow me to correct your suppositions
1) "Evolution is the attempt to answer the age old question: How did we and everything else get here. Evolution attempts to deal with the question of origins."
it's more than that, evolution is observable today, and will continue to exert its effect for as long as there is life, anywhere.
2) "Because evolution is very much in effect today...... Only in the sense of adaptation and change"
adaptation occurs at the level of individuals. evolution operates at the level of populations, otherwise they are essentially the same thing. the selective selection/succession of some individuals in response to environmental pressures as a result of continuous, spontaneous genetic mutation.
3) "What is happening today tells us nothing about how things were ages ago"
very wrong. the steady atomic decay of C14 to C13 discovered in recent times is what allowed us to develop the ability to estimate the age of fossils through carbon dating. mutation of non-coding DNA is a steady enough process that we can use statistic/maths as a backup method of dating. the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria is something that has occurred only in the last 50 or so years. this is just a tiny sample of observable data we are using today to discover more about our past.
4) "Why can we not just study the virus, the immune system and learn how it all works TODAY?"
case in point: the influenza virus evolved the ability to alter the chemical landscape of its outermost surface, allowing it to continually evade our immune systems.
there are some other things but in short, evolution provides the framework through which we interpret modern biology; it's not just something that 'just happened' and is useful merely for posterity. almost every modern scientific discovery reinforces evolution and derives from it. we are only where we are today scientifically because of the recognition of the process of evolution.
[quote]
Care to name a protest that he's broken up?
[/quote]
Does pre-invasion Iraq count?
Seriously though, the problem with Bush is not on his democratic credentials as it were, it's how fast and loose he is prepared to play with the truth, and trying to shape the beliefs of the American people through sustained FUD instead of representing them.
Looks at the Iraq invasion, look at how widely it was opposed, but they went ahead with it anyway, and now look, there were no WMDs, and it all appears very likely it was all a deliberate & premeditated lie.
Is that really democracy? Or put another way, what is the point of democracy if democratically-elected leaders just go ahead and do what they want anyway?
What a fantastic way to make sure I don't even try let alone buy their game.
>>>
I will support any defensive efforts my Government makes to negate any Iranian missile threat aimed at the United States.
Wanting to install american bases and/or missile defence systems more than 10000km away from any US state or territory is not defence, it's aggression.
Just look at how the US responded in the Cuban missile crisis. It's typical American double standards all over again.
how can this patent be granted when there is plenty of prior art on the use of breakpoints in debugging? it's in the public domain, and therefore not patentable.