The purpose of the classic "God" is to save your ass so you can live forever in some form of Paradise.
The goal of Buddhism is to attain enlightenment to the point of nirvana and _become_ god-like by ending the cycle of suffering and rebirth.
The classic God is held to be above his followers, whom he threatens incessantly and has no qualms about throwing into eternal suffering for the most minor of things. The Buddha is held to be a role model, someone they admire and want to, and can, be like some day.
It's less like thanking Kim Jong Il for not killing your ass while he makes his fifth daily hole-in-one and more like going to a Van Halen concert and cheering for Eddie because you aspire to play guitar with his level of skill some day.
They're basically praying to themselves, if you think about it.
Regarding children, I should have clarified that I'm referring to attempts to dictate what you do with your "baby making parts". Declaring premarital sex, birth control, masturbation, homosexuality, etc. to be evil, for example.
As for child rearing tips, solid moral principle isn't exclusive to any religion. That stuff about humans being evil as baseline is FUD to initiate insecurity or justify destructive behavior ("The devil made me do it!").
All principle can be reduced to one line: "Life's short. Don't be a dick."
So people who provide services based on that faith should never get paid to do it? Hmmm.
How does one practice one's faith that includes charity to the poor without cost?
Faith without cost is meaningless faith. Something about "putting ones money where one's mouth is" comes to mind.
Right, they should never get paid. It's charity to do it for free after all. That's why you do your voluntary Sunday gig on Sunday and work like everyone else at a real job during the week.
Charity doesn't have to appear in the form of dollar signs, either. Any real "hungry hobo" will agree with me there.
Not only are you confusing "atheist" with "rabid, radical anti-theist", by your own admission you're also a poser, wanting to be grouped with Christians without actually walking the walk. Sad.
And Bible quotes when you're supposed to be non-religious? Really?
Penn Jillette said it best:
If God told you to kill your child, would you do it? If your answer is "no." you're an atheist. If you're answer is yes, you're dangerous and need to be locked up.
This is like hunt and peck for your mouse. Memory and touch is the rule with typing and you still have those home row locator bits on the top of the keys to let you know where you are. I don't see any locators on a shiny Apple mouse. "It would ruin the look."
...and I'm sure the "ironic" KIxTTY calls are all taken anyway.
Don't group Electronics and Radio mags together. Arduinos and hacked Roombas are a shitload more popular than crankstart Heathkits and QRP Altoids boxes.
It's fun if all you want to talk about is what rig you're running and the weather in your location. Shit, on 2 meter, with a max range of about sixty miles, talking about the weather was even moot. The only guy I ever heard shaking things up by getting into deep stuff, the late Dave McDaniel, KC7DIU (before his call was changed later), was bitched at and slapped by the FCC when too many Geritol fogies got offended by free speech.
It wouldn't be a dying hobby if people stuck with it. It seems all I met, aside from guys my own age, were the kind of seasoned veteran ham (more like outdated men using outdated technology to solve outdated problems whilst nursing among them the collective delusion that they're somehow elite) who answer you like this:
Q: "I'm looking to get into radio and I want a good dual-band handheld. What would you recommend?" A: "HTs won't get you far. You should get a Heathkit tube-driven HF screamer you have to crank-start and take an oscilloscope to and resurrect every week. Ah, memories..."
Q: "I want to put an antenna on my roof. A good 2M omni. What would you recommend?" A: "Can't talk to Burkina Faso on 2M. What you need is a 100ft Rohn tower in your yard and a few hundred feet of eyesore wire strung between the tower in your yard and the towers you install in two neighbors' yards. Ah, memories..."
Q: "I want a solid VHF/UHF mobile rig for my offroad truck. What would you recommend?" A: "Military all the way... like back in the war. (flashback omitted) Get yourself a Chevy Pedovan *young Ham is heard choking, a guffaw of laughter and a gasp of shock having become lodged in his windpipe*, twenty foot vertical whip, screaming tube amp, four more alternators to power it. Ah, memories..." Q: "Why not just a good IC-706MkII and one of those active antenna tuners and maybe a deep cycle battery like the only other 20-something guy in the club?" A: "Damn kids don't listen! It's kids like you who got the morse code requirement taken away! It was a punkass kid filter, dammit! Is nothing sacred?!" he shrieked, swollen catheter bag swaying rhythmically--perfectly acceptable as he blends right in.
Q: "Wow! It's amazing how much power solid state amplifiers can crank out for their small size and efficiency. Less prone to earthquake damage than tubes, wouldn't you say?" A: "Transistor heresy won't survive a nuclear blast! You're one EMP from that newfangled toy being a useless brick! Who'll be laughing then, eh? They called us fools! We will have our vindication!" Q: "Nuclear? It's been over 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War ended forever ago. Why make your gear revolve around something so unlikely?" A: "Because I don't want all my work to be for nothing and want to finally shriek 'I told you so!' to the cockroaches who survive! *presses mysterious red button, sixy miles away a city is vaporized... and then the hallucination ends as the creepy ham has had yet another heart attack and the paramedics alerted via young Ham's cellphone are saving his life... again*
Traded my radio for a TV and took up video gaming. Women who are close friends synchronize their menstrual cycles. I felt my blood pressure and tin-foil-hat-ness synchronizing with those of my Ham peers after just one meeting.
I run my ten node cluster in a tuffshed out back. Ambient temp reached 109F when the AC unit failed while I was away with the family and I came back expecting the worst... no. CPU temps 122F +-2F. I'm sure it's because the low-wattage CPUs and hefty copper heatsinks (built for passive flow, but I added fans) proved to be a killer combo.
2011 will see a swamp cooler replacing the AC unit. Where I live, we don't try to get rid of humidity. We try to add it!
It will upgrade. You just have to install and activate it first if you're going to use the Win7 Upgrade edition. There's a file the Win7 activation checks from XP before it will activate you Win7 install.
I learned this the hard way. Twice.
Installed 7 Pro 64 and waited the month trial to iron the bugs out with my oddball IBM machine failing to start and corrupted the hard disk when a USB flash or HDD drive was attached. Cleared it up and went to activate. No dice. The Win7 install told me nothing about XP being wiped from the disk and being unavailable for Win7 activation. Live and learn.
GPM as in Gallons per Month, that is. Attaching a media-friendly buzzlabel to it is unnecessary.
I drive a powerful car with a large-displacement V6. On average, I get about 17MPG and this fact is shown in bright orange letters on my dashboard computer. A friend commented on my this horrible mileage, and he's right, on the surface. Fact is, I drive about ten miles a day on average and live 2 miles from where I work. He drives fifty miles round trip just for work. This is in a car that averages 25MPG (GM 3800 V6). When I used to do that kind of driving, I averaged 28MPG (GM 3800 SeriesII V6, newer engine).
Our cars weigh about the same and it's generally the weight of the vehicle that determines city gas mileage.
Each day, we burn: Him: 50mi @ 25MPG = 2 gallons of fuel (I'm sure the drive for work is the largest part of his travels) Me: 10mi @ 17MPG = 2.35 quarts of fuel (I count my total since work is just 4 miles of it)
Granted, my wife still drives fifty miles a day at 25MPG, but we're working on that. With the economy improving and jobs opening up, that commute will be reduced as well.
The future is going to require shorter commutes, which is going to require people to live closer to where they work. While that will surely cause problems in large cities back East, the Western states like Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado have a lot of dead space between cities and that's going to become some very important real estate.
I remember less than a decade ago, there was some teenage kid who had one of those "great game ideas" and wanted a big name company to take him in as Director, pay him all kinds of money, give him a team of full-on professionals to do the real work and this game was guaranteed to make everyone rich. And if it didn't, this kid was willing to, wait for it, run naked through CES as punishment for losing millions of dollars and wasting everyone's time.
As I recall, he couldn't believe id and EA and whomever wouldn't take him up on his shit-for-brains offer and got all butt-hurt about it. He's probably still grousing about it today, but I really hope he pulled his head out of his ass. The world needs fewer middle-managers, not more.
With great power comes great responsibility, but only if you're over 18 since you can't enter into a binding contract at a younger age. Anyone who would trust a kid to get the job done when so much is at stake is a braver soul than I and will probably end up screwed anyway.
When the 360 and the PS3 came out with half a gig each, shared between the GPU and CPU, who truly thought that would be enough?
If new consoles were made today, we'd see 2GB minimum. Maybe 4. That's about what it takes to avoid cutting corners.
Backward compatibility would be a lot easier to come by, though. Just have the PS3 hardware in the PS4 as a physics unit and the XBox 360 hardware in the XBox WTF serving the same purpose.
I have a laptop like that still. I did a battery retrofit with NiMH AA cells in a radio shack battery case to run it when I got nostalgic. Had better charge life than the original heavy pack, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with what you say. But then I remember Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64, and now I really don't know what Nintendo's image is supposed to be.
Bad Fur Day was done by Rare, not Nintendo itself. Rare also did Donkey Kong Country for the SNES, but Conker isn't a Nintendo character.
The purpose of the classic "God" is to save your ass so you can live forever in some form of Paradise.
The goal of Buddhism is to attain enlightenment to the point of nirvana and _become_ god-like by ending the cycle of suffering and rebirth.
The classic God is held to be above his followers, whom he threatens incessantly and has no qualms about throwing into eternal suffering for the most minor of things. The Buddha is held to be a role model, someone they admire and want to, and can, be like some day.
It's less like thanking Kim Jong Il for not killing your ass while he makes his fifth daily hole-in-one and more like going to a Van Halen concert and cheering for Eddie because you aspire to play guitar with his level of skill some day.
They're basically praying to themselves, if you think about it.
Regarding donations, I'm talking about tithing.
Regarding children, I should have clarified that I'm referring to attempts to dictate what you do with your "baby making parts". Declaring premarital sex, birth control, masturbation, homosexuality, etc. to be evil, for example.
As for child rearing tips, solid moral principle isn't exclusive to any religion. That stuff about humans being evil as baseline is FUD to initiate insecurity or justify destructive behavior ("The devil made me do it!").
All principle can be reduced to one line:
"Life's short. Don't be a dick."
You know the Holy Bible in its current form was actually put together by the Catholics, right?
Last I checked, Catholics and Protestants are reading from the exact same book. Odd.
The only Christians deviating from using the Catholic Bible are the Mormons. Though not really. They use it _in addition_ to three others.
So people who provide services based on that faith should never get paid to do it? Hmmm.
How does one practice one's faith that includes charity to the poor without cost?
Faith without cost is meaningless faith. Something about "putting ones money where one's mouth is" comes to mind.
Right, they should never get paid. It's charity to do it for free after all. That's why you do your voluntary Sunday gig on Sunday and work like everyone else at a real job during the week.
Charity doesn't have to appear in the form of dollar signs, either. Any real "hungry hobo" will agree with me there.
Not only are you confusing "atheist" with "rabid, radical anti-theist", by your own admission you're also a poser, wanting to be grouped with Christians without actually walking the walk. Sad.
And Bible quotes when you're supposed to be non-religious? Really?
Penn Jillette said it best:
If God told you to kill your child, would you do it?
If your answer is "no." you're an atheist.
If you're answer is yes, you're dangerous and need to be locked up.
Any faith which requires money be paid to anyone, bar none, is corrupt. Faith should never cost nor earn a paycheck for anyone.
Likewise faith should never dictate anything regarding offspring.
Buddhism is not a religion, but thanks for playing all the same.
This is like hunt and peck for your mouse. Memory and touch is the rule with typing and you still have those home row locator bits on the top of the keys to let you know where you are. I don't see any locators on a shiny Apple mouse. "It would ruin the look."
...and I'm sure the "ironic" KIxTTY calls are all taken anyway.
Don't group Electronics and Radio mags together. Arduinos and hacked Roombas are a shitload more popular than crankstart Heathkits and QRP Altoids boxes.
Same wavelength as me, minus the humorous hyperbole. Well put.
Echolink is the shiznit. As are vanity callsigns. Best I ever heard was KB1TCH.
It's fun if all you want to talk about is what rig you're running and the weather in your location. Shit, on 2 meter, with a max range of about sixty miles, talking about the weather was even moot. The only guy I ever heard shaking things up by getting into deep stuff, the late Dave McDaniel, KC7DIU (before his call was changed later), was bitched at and slapped by the FCC when too many Geritol fogies got offended by free speech.
God I miss Dave.
73s
The difference is a computer does more than one thing and can even make you money... that's illegal on Ham Radio.
It wouldn't be a dying hobby if people stuck with it. It seems all I met, aside from guys my own age, were the kind of seasoned veteran ham (more like outdated men using outdated technology to solve outdated problems whilst nursing among them the collective delusion that they're somehow elite) who answer you like this:
Q: "I'm looking to get into radio and I want a good dual-band handheld. What would you recommend?"
A: "HTs won't get you far. You should get a Heathkit tube-driven HF screamer you have to crank-start and take an oscilloscope to and resurrect every week. Ah, memories..."
Q: "I want to put an antenna on my roof. A good 2M omni. What would you recommend?"
A: "Can't talk to Burkina Faso on 2M. What you need is a 100ft Rohn tower in your yard and a few hundred feet of eyesore wire strung between the tower in your yard and the towers you install in two neighbors' yards. Ah, memories..."
Q: "I want a solid VHF/UHF mobile rig for my offroad truck. What would you recommend?"
A: "Military all the way... like back in the war. (flashback omitted) Get yourself a Chevy Pedovan *young Ham is heard choking, a guffaw of laughter and a gasp of shock having become lodged in his windpipe*, twenty foot vertical whip, screaming tube amp, four more alternators to power it. Ah, memories..."
Q: "Why not just a good IC-706MkII and one of those active antenna tuners and maybe a deep cycle battery like the only other 20-something guy in the club?"
A: "Damn kids don't listen! It's kids like you who got the morse code requirement taken away! It was a punkass kid filter, dammit! Is nothing sacred?!" he shrieked, swollen catheter bag swaying rhythmically--perfectly acceptable as he blends right in.
Q: "Wow! It's amazing how much power solid state amplifiers can crank out for their small size and efficiency. Less prone to earthquake damage than tubes, wouldn't you say?"
A: "Transistor heresy won't survive a nuclear blast! You're one EMP from that newfangled toy being a useless brick! Who'll be laughing then, eh? They called us fools! We will have our vindication!"
Q: "Nuclear? It's been over 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War ended forever ago. Why make your gear revolve around something so unlikely?"
A: "Because I don't want all my work to be for nothing and want to finally shriek 'I told you so!' to the cockroaches who survive! *presses mysterious red button, sixy miles away a city is vaporized... and then the hallucination ends as the creepy ham has had yet another heart attack and the paramedics alerted via young Ham's cellphone are saving his life... again*
Traded my radio for a TV and took up video gaming. Women who are close friends synchronize their menstrual cycles. I felt my blood pressure and tin-foil-hat-ness synchronizing with those of my Ham peers after just one meeting.
I run my ten node cluster in a tuffshed out back. Ambient temp reached 109F when the AC unit failed while I was away with the family and I came back expecting the worst... no. CPU temps 122F +-2F. I'm sure it's because the low-wattage CPUs and hefty copper heatsinks (built for passive flow, but I added fans) proved to be a killer combo.
2011 will see a swamp cooler replacing the AC unit. Where I live, we don't try to get rid of humidity. We try to add it!
It will upgrade. You just have to install and activate it first if you're going to use the Win7 Upgrade edition. There's a file the Win7 activation checks from XP before it will activate you Win7 install.
I learned this the hard way. Twice.
Installed 7 Pro 64 and waited the month trial to iron the bugs out with my oddball IBM machine failing to start and corrupted the hard disk when a USB flash or HDD drive was attached. Cleared it up and went to activate. No dice. The Win7 install told me nothing about XP being wiped from the disk and being unavailable for Win7 activation. Live and learn.
Diesels are popular at high altitudes since, unlike non-boosted gasoline engines, they don't lose power output until 8000ft above sea level.
GPM as in Gallons per Month, that is. Attaching a media-friendly buzzlabel to it is unnecessary.
I drive a powerful car with a large-displacement V6. On average, I get about 17MPG and this fact is shown in bright orange letters on my dashboard computer. A friend commented on my this horrible mileage, and he's right, on the surface. Fact is, I drive about ten miles a day on average and live 2 miles from where I work. He drives fifty miles round trip just for work. This is in a car that averages 25MPG (GM 3800 V6). When I used to do that kind of driving, I averaged 28MPG (GM 3800 SeriesII V6, newer engine).
Our cars weigh about the same and it's generally the weight of the vehicle that determines city gas mileage.
Each day, we burn:
Him: 50mi @ 25MPG = 2 gallons of fuel (I'm sure the drive for work is the largest part of his travels)
Me: 10mi @ 17MPG = 2.35 quarts of fuel (I count my total since work is just 4 miles of it)
Granted, my wife still drives fifty miles a day at 25MPG, but we're working on that. With the economy improving and jobs opening up, that commute will be reduced as well.
The future is going to require shorter commutes, which is going to require people to live closer to where they work. While that will surely cause problems in large cities back East, the Western states like Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado have a lot of dead space between cities and that's going to become some very important real estate.
Nevermind the bollocks.
Steorn?
I remember less than a decade ago, there was some teenage kid who had one of those "great game ideas" and wanted a big name company to take him in as Director, pay him all kinds of money, give him a team of full-on professionals to do the real work and this game was guaranteed to make everyone rich. And if it didn't, this kid was willing to, wait for it, run naked through CES as punishment for losing millions of dollars and wasting everyone's time.
As I recall, he couldn't believe id and EA and whomever wouldn't take him up on his shit-for-brains offer and got all butt-hurt about it. He's probably still grousing about it today, but I really hope he pulled his head out of his ass. The world needs fewer middle-managers, not more.
With great power comes great responsibility, but only if you're over 18 since you can't enter into a binding contract at a younger age. Anyone who would trust a kid to get the job done when so much is at stake is a braver soul than I and will probably end up screwed anyway.
When the 360 and the PS3 came out with half a gig each, shared between the GPU and CPU, who truly thought that would be enough?
If new consoles were made today, we'd see 2GB minimum. Maybe 4. That's about what it takes to avoid cutting corners.
Backward compatibility would be a lot easier to come by, though. Just have the PS3 hardware in the PS4 as a physics unit and the XBox 360 hardware in the XBox WTF serving the same purpose.
And that would be why I mentioned the chemistry of the cells I used.
Mod parent up for truth.
I have a laptop like that still. I did a battery retrofit with NiMH AA cells in a radio shack battery case to run it when I got nostalgic. Had better charge life than the original heavy pack, actually.