o put it back at least partially on topic, though, remember that D&D, along with heavy metal music, was the cause of many right wing republicrat types and fundamentalist christians committing suicide during the 1980's!
Car size is very much related to gas prices. That's why GM, being the money grubbing scum-fucks that they are, tried to get away with putting those horrendous Diesels in their full sized cars in the early 80's, engines that were basically 350 gas motors with cheap Diesel heads on them. Didn't work worth a damn, and Diesel in North America still suffers from the bad image that these engines produced.
How about the ten LOWEST tech cars?
on
10 Techno-Cool Cars
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· Score: 3, Interesting
What I'd like to see is a list of the ten lowest tech cars...easy to fix, cheap to run and repair, something i could get seriously dirty and take a hose to the inside. Why does just about every car these days come pre-yuppie-fied? I'd prefer to ditch things like ABS, any sort of airbag, auto-door locks, auto-trans, auto-dome lights...you get the idea. This is all shit that has done nothing more than add to the price of a new car, and a good deal of it is totally unnecessary. Just give me four wheels, a reliable engine with adequate power, a body that won't rust out in less than a decade, canvas seats, and a decent manual transmission. Do any cars like these exist at all, or am I condemned to fork out extra for power windows and heated seats on even the lowest end econobox?
The two things I mention that are safety related, namely ABS and airbags, can be replaced by a far more effective five point harness and good driver trtaining. Ever see a race car with either ABS or airbags?
Fsking theists! Everybody's just fodder to be converted to you half-wits! You just can't accept that there are people out there that neither want nor need a belief in the supernatural to get them through their daily lives. Your attitude is alway slong the lines of "he's religious, but won't admit it." It's 'tards like you that have done a great deal to turn me off anything to do with religion!
I believe in myself and in the forces of nature and science, not an imaginary superfriend who farts the universe and everything in it out of his ass one cloudy morning. If there are things we can't explain, it's because we haven't yet acquired the knowledge with which to do so...see A. C. Clarke...and I don't need to invent fantastic tales to explain it in the meantime. I do not follow a book of rules, visit a temple, dress a certain way, follow a certain diet, or depend on a central agency to tell me how to think and act.
And I'm not going to debate religion...or atheism...with a theist.
No, you don't see Americans doing shit like that...you're quite right.
What you also don't see is what really goes on...all the cloak and dagger stuff that goes on behind the scenes, such as American financing and training of such wonderful, friendly people as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Noriega, Pinochet, Batista...shall I go on?
The point is, that, instead of overtly terrorizing the population, you're fucking with the government behind the scenes, and doing shit that the citizens of that country don't agree with, and for some reason, every time you do this it backfires, and your government JUST PLAIN DOESN'T LEARN!
Can you imagine what it would be like for you to learn that it has been the government of, say, Kenya had been pulling all the strings in DC? I don't think you'd be too pleased about it. Yet the US government does this ROUTINELY to other countries when it's in the US' interests, but every time, it comes back to haunt them!
This is what bugs the hell out of me when it comes to American foreign policy, especially when it doesn't work and shit happens...it's always somebody else's fault! Perhaps you assholes need to take a bit of responsibility yourselves, and accept that 9/11 didn't happen out of the blue, and was, in fact, retribution for shit your own government has been doing to others. I don't condone it, but all the facts point to that.
Oh, and BTW, attack Iraq, and you can accept more of the same, becasue all you're going to be doing is stirring up a really big hive of killer bees. hink about working the problem, instead of exacerbating it!
...and there's another Red Herring. Bush and the US media tried oh-so-hard to get across the idea that somehow Canadian customs agents were to blame for the 9/11 terrorists getting to the States in the first place, and completely ignoring the fact that, wherever they entered the US, they still had to get past US Customs!
I prefer to think about much happier futures, say, something like Clarke's vision of what 2001 was to be like. (Funny how this actual year passed without the same sort of attention that Orwell got in '84...seems like such a long time ago...) It was a very positive view of what the world could be, not unlike the Utopia of the Star Trek universe. UNlike Orwell, however, the forces of greed and power will ensure that these universes will never happen, and it's the Orwellian universe that will ultimately take hold, such that the people trying to keep us down remain where they are. It's damn sad, really, because if we didn't have the greed factor to constantly deal with, so much could be done towards the common good, with prosperity for everybody.
For now, anyway. The way things have been going lately, I don't think it will be too long before such discussion forums like/. are monitored by all sorts of Secret Squirrel nasties. As well, there are a number of groups here in Canada that get persecuted one way or another for what they believe or practise.
In Russia, it's totally acceptable to walk around on the grounds of the Kremlin sipping a beer. Could you imagine doing that on Capitol Hill?
I don't think most Americans really have any idea what freedom really is?
I don't think most Americans really have any idea just how much of their beloved "freedom" they have lost in the War on Terrorism...or the War on Drugs, for that matter.
Don't you think there's something a little wrong with being made to pee in a jar just to keep your job? omething about innocence over guilt, and the burden of proof? This has been all but forgotten in the drug war, and will be even more so with all the extra security and paranoia put into place post 9/11.
If you hop on a westbound train at the Yonge station, front car, it's possible to catch a glimpse of Lower Bay just as the train forks right to go to the upper platform. The platform is well lit, and clearly there.
Gimli was an old RCAF training base, and had parallel runways. One of these is used as a drag strip, but the other one is still very much an active runway. It's difficult to tell which is which from the air without having some prior knowledge of the airfield. The 767 crew, having lined up on the inactive runway, found themselves in a position where they couldn't have made the correction, so landed anyway. Due to the high speed of the landing, the nosewheel collapsed, but the plane and passengers were quite safe. That Air Canada 767 still flies today.
That wasn't the only high profile incident of a Canadian plane doing a dead stick. Two weeks before 9/11, the big story was an Air Transat plane out of Montreal headed across the atlantic that lost all of its fuel due to a malfunctioning emergency dump valve, and landed safely in the Azores. That one could have been a real nasty!
Atheism is NOT a religion, I'm not insecure, and I DON'T have to hide behind the sort of imaginary superfriends that you seem to need to keep your false sense of security.
Here's all it boils down to, you fscking christian supremacist!
Atheism is not and cannot be a religion. We do not need to hold assembly together. We do not need to be governed by a central body. We do not need to follow a leader, fictitious or real. We do not need to have a text, oral tradition or whatever that dictates a set of "divine" or other laws or rules.
Do you realize that political parties have more in common with religion than do atheists?
So stop lumping us in with the rest of you religious types that obviously can't think for yourselves, and need all these to maintain your slim grasp on reality!
If you can't live with that, that's your tough shit!
>> Every time I hear an atheist claim that atheism isn't a religion, they're looking for special rights.
Absolute horseshit! Where the fuck do you get off on saying that?
>> As far as the government, the legal system, every business in the world, every scientific institution, and just about every other secular aspect of society is concerned, Atheism IS a religion, and should be treated as one among equals. Doing otherwise gives them special treatment. (If an atheist scientist says "there is definitly no God", he should be as ridiculed as if a Christian Scientist says "God is proven to exist.")
I don;t think I've ever heard this before. I think that's some sort of popular myth. Again, I don't see where you get off on saying this. Most, if not all, of these institutions really couldn't care less.
>> As for Gays and Lesbians: I'm all for government setting up a strucutre where two persons (or, heck, more than two persons) can bind their legal personage together for medical, legal, and tax purposes. The church doesn't have to let them come, regonize their union, or even treat them as human if it doesn't want to. But the agnostic government sure as heck should.
Agreed, but if a given couple or orther group want to be unified according to whatever they happen to believe in, independant of any government requirements or benefits, nobody should stand in their way.
>> Plus, atheism/major religions and gay rights/legislated morality are two very differnet things. You don't see homosexuals saying "marriage is a myth", and you don't see atheists just wanting the right to get together and talk about how there is no god.
That wasn't really the point. I was trying to point out that people think both of these groups are after some sort of "special" right, something that you, as a religious person or myself as a straight person already enjoys. What they're really after, rightly so, is the freedom to enjoy the same rights that the rest of society enjoys, and to do so free from discrimination.
>>> What bugs me is the idea that "freedom of religion" never seems to include freedom FROM religion.
>> What do you mean?
What I mean is the idea that I shouldn't have to have religion forced down my throat whether I like it or not. Because I'm forced to live in a Christian society, it's rammed down my throat every day...from Christian based "morality" right on down to when I get certain days off. If I were stateside, I'd even have to put up with the G word on my money, (which wasn't added until McCarthy, BTW).
>> Should we withhold government money from groups that happen to be religious--despite that they serve the same purpose as non religious groups?
>> Should we ban speaking about religion in schools-- but allow speaking against it?
I have to put up with not only a public school system but a catholic one as well. This, IMHO, is unnecessary duplication at it's finest, and the one thing that didn't seem to get axed on the same altar of budget cuts that everything else, from hospitals to roads was. They ripped the SHIT out of education proper, but they didn't touch this one glaring thing. Problem is, by doing it for one special group, they may very well find themselves in a position where they have to do it for all the others...so we'll have Jewish schools, Muslim schools and so on. The smart thing to do is to pool all the resources, and have a truly public system in which everybody's treated the same, and do all the religious education on your own time, not teaching your kids at the expense of my kids.
>> Should you be able to tell everyone who wants to prostleytize you to go away--why, sure we should, but only as much as you can tell someone who wants to sell you something to go away....and I do...trust me! But some of them get downright belligerent. I have a Pagan friend who was lounging around his house one afternoon, when a knock at the door revealed a couple of Jehovah's Witlesses. He allowed them to do their spiel, and told them at the end, in a very deadpan voice, "No thank you, we worship the devil here." Later on that night, he and the friends he had visiting heard strange noises outside his house. Outside was a busload of JWs all over his front lawn, candles in hand, singing hymns. He called the cops.
>> Atheism is a religion, in every practical and objective measurement of what "a religion" is. Getting into specifics such as rejection of deities is a religious argument, just as if we Christians were to say "Hinduism isn't a religion because they don't worship God."
To me, there's a difference between a faith and a religion. A faith is a set of beliefs or thought processes that is unique to one person. These unique beliefs have the ablility to adapt and evolve based on that person's life experience. When a group of people with what they think are similar beliefs get together and carve things in stone or paper, that process of adaptation ceases, because all of a sudden, there's a defined set of rules, usually somebody else's rules, and what they thought were common beliefs is now a religion, with all the thought control and politics that goes with it, (and people who think that politics doesn't exist within a given religion is seriously deluding themselves)! Is Hinduism a religion? I don't know enough about it to judge, but it does seem to have it's own form of cleric, i.e. those that enforce the doctrine. I suppose that's the biggest difference between a religion and a group of people that share a common philosophy...there's no central agency that controls what is believed or thought about.
>> A religion is what you believe is "out there". If you believe that nothing is out there, you're an atheist and you have a positive belief in nothing. (If you _don't know_ what's out there, either by not being sure of your beliefs or being sure that you "can't know", your're agnostic, not atheist.)
Out where? You imply that, because atheists do not have a belief in some sort of supernatural being, we don't believe in anything. I believe in myself, and in the power of nature. Both, as far as I can tell, are pretty real. Bump your head into the next tree branch if you think it's not.
>> When it comes down to it: Atheists allready have all of the special rights that anyone who belongs to a minority religion (like satanism or wicca) allready enjoys, and the "rights" that come with the majority religions are a reflection of numbers, and the government has litte right to interfere with that kind of thing.
Ahh...so it's something that's voted on! I wasn't aware that your religion or my atheism was a democracy. That's a pretty fucking lame hypothesis. I have no intention of putting my own personal philosophy to any sort of vote, just as you wouldn't either. What you're saying is that, unless you're part of the majority religion, or at least a Republicrat, you're less equal than those that are. Show me where it says that in either your consitution or mine.
And take your christian blinders off, and realize that not everybody needs that imaginary superfriends as a crutch for reality.
I don't think atheists are looking for any sort of "special rights" any more than gays and lesbians are...just the same rights that you and I already enjoy.
What bugs me is the idea that "freedom of religion" never seems to include freedom FROM religion.
But what about all the other people who have had nasty accidents leaving them paralyzed? Does this make them heroes as well? At least Rick Hansen did something heroic...his Man in Motion trek around the world by wheelchair was something. But there's others as well...have many people have even heard of Jocelyn Lovell? Would Reeve have done anything with this if he hadn't the obvious vested interest?
I recall about ten years ago, possibly/probably more, Pat Bedard wrote a column in Car and Driver in which he extolled the virtues of a new commuter vehicle. It was to be fuel efficient, cheap and easy to manufacture, maintain and repair, easy to drive , even though it's top speed was only about 45 miles per hour, (it was pointed out that most commutes average far less than this), and would have been the ultimate city vehicle. He finished up by telling the reader that the vehicle did, in fact, exist, and 17 million of them had been produced between 1908 and 1927, (surpassed only by the venerable VW Beetle...no, not that new thing).
So, while nobody's expecting the C1 to become the new Model T of computers, it certainly does fill a niche!
Slashdot Mirror
"I think the metric system is the tool of the Devil! My car gets 40 rodsto the hogshead, and that's the way I liked it!"--Abraham J. Simpson
Short course is 25m, a typical community pool length. Olympic course is 50m.
Butter, back, breast, free.
o put it back at least partially on topic, though, remember that D&D, along with heavy metal music, was the cause of many right wing republicrat types and fundamentalist christians committing suicide during the 1980's!
Maybe those days aren't so far off! The way the Internet is getting more restrictive and more expensive, the old Fidonet may prove useful once again!
>> ...charging a laptop or something without the need on an inverter.
And just what the hell do you think is at the other end of that 110VAC wire?
Car size is very much related to gas prices. That's why GM, being the money grubbing scum-fucks that they are, tried to get away with putting those horrendous Diesels in their full sized cars in the early 80's, engines that were basically 350 gas motors with cheap Diesel heads on them. Didn't work worth a damn, and Diesel in North America still suffers from the bad image that these engines produced.
What I'd like to see is a list of the ten lowest tech cars...easy to fix, cheap to run and repair, something i could get seriously dirty and take a hose to the inside. Why does just about every car these days come pre-yuppie-fied? I'd prefer to ditch things like ABS, any sort of airbag, auto-door locks, auto-trans, auto-dome lights...you get the idea. This is all shit that has done nothing more than add to the price of a new car, and a good deal of it is totally unnecessary. Just give me four wheels, a reliable engine with adequate power, a body that won't rust out in less than a decade, canvas seats, and a decent manual transmission. Do any cars like these exist at all, or am I condemned to fork out extra for power windows and heated seats on even the lowest end econobox?
The two things I mention that are safety related, namely ABS and airbags, can be replaced by a far more effective five point harness and good driver trtaining. Ever see a race car with either ABS or airbags?
Fsking theists! Everybody's just fodder to be converted to you half-wits! You just can't accept that there are people out there that neither want nor need a belief in the supernatural to get them through their daily lives. Your attitude is alway slong the lines of "he's religious, but won't admit it." It's 'tards like you that have done a great deal to turn me off anything to do with religion!
I believe in myself and in the forces of nature and science, not an imaginary superfriend who farts the universe and everything in it out of his ass one cloudy morning. If there are things we can't explain, it's because we haven't yet acquired the knowledge with which to do so...see A. C. Clarke...and I don't need to invent fantastic tales to explain it in the meantime. I do not follow a book of rules, visit a temple, dress a certain way, follow a certain diet, or depend on a central agency to tell me how to think and act.
And I'm not going to debate religion...or atheism...with a theist.
Aren't you Americans glad you live in such a free country? Aren't you glad your beloved constitution actually MEANS something?
...and don't worry...OUR fun loving Canadian government will follow right along in due course.
Welcome to the NEW New World Order.
No, you don't see Americans doing shit like that...you're quite right.
What you also don't see is what really goes on...all the cloak and dagger stuff that goes on behind the scenes, such as American financing and training of such wonderful, friendly people as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Noriega, Pinochet, Batista...shall I go on?
The point is, that, instead of overtly terrorizing the population, you're fucking with the government behind the scenes, and doing shit that the citizens of that country don't agree with, and for some reason, every time you do this it backfires, and your government JUST PLAIN DOESN'T LEARN!
Can you imagine what it would be like for you to learn that it has been the government of, say, Kenya had been pulling all the strings in DC? I don't think you'd be too pleased about it. Yet the US government does this ROUTINELY to other countries when it's in the US' interests, but every time, it comes back to haunt them!
This is what bugs the hell out of me when it comes to American foreign policy, especially when it doesn't work and shit happens...it's always somebody else's fault! Perhaps you assholes need to take a bit of responsibility yourselves, and accept that 9/11 didn't happen out of the blue, and was, in fact, retribution for shit your own government has been doing to others. I don't condone it, but all the facts point to that.
Oh, and BTW, attack Iraq, and you can accept more of the same, becasue all you're going to be doing is stirring up a really big hive of killer bees. hink about working the problem, instead of exacerbating it!
...and there's another Red Herring. Bush and the US media tried oh-so-hard to get across the idea that somehow Canadian customs agents were to blame for the 9/11 terrorists getting to the States in the first place, and completely ignoring the fact that, wherever they entered the US, they still had to get past US Customs!
I prefer to think about much happier futures, say, something like Clarke's vision of what 2001 was to be like. (Funny how this actual year passed without the same sort of attention that Orwell got in '84...seems like such a long time ago...) It was a very positive view of what the world could be, not unlike the Utopia of the Star Trek universe. UNlike Orwell, however, the forces of greed and power will ensure that these universes will never happen, and it's the Orwellian universe that will ultimately take hold, such that the people trying to keep us down remain where they are. It's damn sad, really, because if we didn't have the greed factor to constantly deal with, so much could be done towards the common good, with prosperity for everybody.
For now, anyway. The way things have been going lately, I don't think it will be too long before such discussion forums like /. are monitored by all sorts of Secret Squirrel nasties. As well, there are a number of groups here in Canada that get persecuted one way or another for what they believe or practise.
I guess "freedom" isn't what it used to be.
I can smoke a Cuban cigar. Can YOU?
I can even GO to Cuba. Can YOU?
In Russia, it's totally acceptable to walk around on the grounds of the Kremlin sipping a beer. Could you imagine doing that on Capitol Hill?
I don't think most Americans really have any idea what freedom really is?
I don't think most Americans really have any idea just how much of their beloved "freedom" they have lost in the War on Terrorism...or the War on Drugs, for that matter.
Don't you think there's something a little wrong with being made to pee in a jar just to keep your job? omething about innocence over guilt, and the burden of proof? This has been all but forgotten in the drug war, and will be even more so with all the extra security and paranoia put into place post 9/11.
If you hop on a westbound train at the Yonge station, front car, it's possible to catch a glimpse of Lower Bay just as the train forks right to go to the upper platform. The platform is well lit, and clearly there.
No, they didn't exactly fall short of it...
Gimli was an old RCAF training base, and had parallel runways. One of these is used as a drag strip, but the other one is still very much an active runway. It's difficult to tell which is which from the air without having some prior knowledge of the airfield. The 767 crew, having lined up on the inactive runway, found themselves in a position where they couldn't have made the correction, so landed anyway. Due to the high speed of the landing, the nosewheel collapsed, but the plane and passengers were quite safe. That Air Canada 767 still flies today.
That wasn't the only high profile incident of a Canadian plane doing a dead stick. Two weeks before 9/11, the big story was an Air Transat plane out of Montreal headed across the atlantic that lost all of its fuel due to a malfunctioning emergency dump valve, and landed safely in the Azores. That one could have been a real nasty!
Atheism is NOT a religion, I'm not insecure, and I DON'T have to hide behind the sort of imaginary superfriends that you seem to need to keep your false sense of security.
I should have known better than to continue this.
Talking to a christian supremacist about religion is like talking to a racist about black people...or talking to a brick wall.
Here's all it boils down to, you fscking christian supremacist!
Atheism is not and cannot be a religion. We do not need to hold assembly together. We do not need to be governed by a central body. We do not need to follow a leader, fictitious or real. We do not need to have a text, oral tradition or whatever that dictates a set of "divine" or other laws or rules.
Do you realize that political parties have more in common with religion than do atheists?
So stop lumping us in with the rest of you religious types that obviously can't think for yourselves, and need all these to maintain your slim grasp on reality!
If you can't live with that, that's your tough shit!
>> Every time I hear an atheist claim that atheism isn't a religion, they're looking for special rights.
...and I do...trust me! But some of them get downright belligerent. I have a Pagan friend who was lounging around his house one afternoon, when a knock at the door revealed a couple of Jehovah's Witlesses. He allowed them to do their spiel, and told them at the end, in a very deadpan voice, "No thank you, we worship the devil here." Later on that night, he and the friends he had visiting heard strange noises outside his house. Outside was a busload of JWs all over his front lawn, candles in hand, singing hymns. He called the cops.
Absolute horseshit! Where the fuck do you get off on saying that?
>> As far as the government, the legal system, every business in the world, every scientific institution, and just about every other secular aspect of society is concerned, Atheism IS a religion, and should be treated as one among equals. Doing otherwise gives them special treatment. (If an atheist scientist says "there is definitly no God", he should be as ridiculed as if a Christian Scientist says "God is proven to exist.")
I don;t think I've ever heard this before. I think that's some sort of popular myth. Again, I don't see where you get off on saying this. Most, if not all, of these institutions really couldn't care less.
>> As for Gays and Lesbians: I'm all for government setting up a strucutre where two persons (or, heck, more than two persons) can bind their legal personage together for medical, legal, and tax purposes. The church doesn't have to let them come, regonize their union, or even treat them as human if it doesn't want to. But the agnostic government sure as heck should.
Agreed, but if a given couple or orther group want to be unified according to whatever they happen to believe in, independant of any government requirements or benefits, nobody should stand in their way.
>> Plus, atheism/major religions and gay rights/legislated morality are two very differnet things. You don't see homosexuals saying "marriage is a myth", and you don't see atheists just wanting the right to get together and talk about how there is no god.
That wasn't really the point. I was trying to point out that people think both of these groups are after some sort of "special" right, something that you, as a religious person or myself as a straight person already enjoys. What they're really after, rightly so, is the freedom to enjoy the same rights that the rest of society enjoys, and to do so free from discrimination.
>>> What bugs me is the idea that "freedom of religion" never seems to include freedom FROM religion.
>> What do you mean?
What I mean is the idea that I shouldn't have to have religion forced down my throat whether I like it or not. Because I'm forced to live in a Christian society, it's rammed down my throat every day...from Christian based "morality" right on down to when I get certain days off. If I were stateside, I'd even have to put up with the G word on my money, (which wasn't added until McCarthy, BTW).
>> Should we withhold government money from groups that happen to be religious--despite that they serve the same purpose as non religious groups?
>> Should we ban speaking about religion in schools-- but allow speaking against it?
I have to put up with not only a public school system but a catholic one as well. This, IMHO, is unnecessary duplication at it's finest, and the one thing that didn't seem to get axed on the same altar of budget cuts that everything else, from hospitals to roads was. They ripped the SHIT out of education proper, but they didn't touch this one glaring thing. Problem is, by doing it for one special group, they may very well find themselves in a position where they have to do it for all the others...so we'll have Jewish schools, Muslim schools and so on. The smart thing to do is to pool all the resources, and have a truly public system in which everybody's treated the same, and do all the religious education on your own time, not teaching your kids at the expense of my kids.
>> Should you be able to tell everyone who wants to prostleytize you to go away--why, sure we should, but only as much as you can tell someone who wants to sell you something to go away.
>> Atheism is a religion, in every practical and objective measurement of what "a religion" is. Getting into specifics such as rejection of deities is a religious argument, just as if we Christians were to say "Hinduism isn't a religion because they don't worship God."
To me, there's a difference between a faith and a religion. A faith is a set of beliefs or thought processes that is unique to one person. These unique beliefs have the ablility to adapt and evolve based on that person's life experience. When a group of people with what they think are similar beliefs get together and carve things in stone or paper, that process of adaptation ceases, because all of a sudden, there's a defined set of rules, usually somebody else's rules, and what they thought were common beliefs is now a religion, with all the thought control and politics that goes with it, (and people who think that politics doesn't exist within a given religion is seriously deluding themselves)! Is Hinduism a religion? I don't know enough about it to judge, but it does seem to have it's own form of cleric, i.e. those that enforce the doctrine. I suppose that's the biggest difference between a religion and a group of people that share a common philosophy...there's no central agency that controls what is believed or thought about.
>> A religion is what you believe is "out there". If you believe that nothing is out there, you're an atheist and you have a positive belief in nothing. (If you _don't know_ what's out there, either by not being sure of your beliefs or being sure that you "can't know", your're agnostic, not atheist.)
Out where? You imply that, because atheists do not have a belief in some sort of supernatural being, we don't believe in anything. I believe in myself, and in the power of nature. Both, as far as I can tell, are pretty real. Bump your head into the next tree branch if you think it's not.
>> When it comes down to it: Atheists allready have all of the special rights that anyone who belongs to a minority religion (like satanism or wicca) allready enjoys, and the "rights" that come with the majority religions are a reflection of numbers, and the government has litte right to interfere with that kind of thing.
Ahh...so it's something that's voted on! I wasn't aware that your religion or my atheism was a democracy. That's a pretty fucking lame hypothesis. I have no intention of putting my own personal philosophy to any sort of vote, just as you wouldn't either. What you're saying is that, unless you're part of the majority religion, or at least a Republicrat, you're less equal than those that are. Show me where it says that in either your consitution or mine.
And take your christian blinders off, and realize that not everybody needs that imaginary superfriends as a crutch for reality.
I don't think atheists are looking for any sort of "special rights" any more than gays and lesbians are...just the same rights that you and I already enjoy.
What bugs me is the idea that "freedom of religion" never seems to include freedom FROM religion.
But what about all the other people who have had nasty accidents leaving them paralyzed? Does this make them heroes as well? At least Rick Hansen did something heroic...his Man in Motion trek around the world by wheelchair was something. But there's others as well...have many people have even heard of Jocelyn Lovell? Would Reeve have done anything with this if he hadn't the obvious vested interest?
I recall about ten years ago, possibly/probably more, Pat Bedard wrote a column in Car and Driver in which he extolled the virtues of a new commuter vehicle. It was to be fuel efficient, cheap and easy to manufacture, maintain and repair, easy to drive , even though it's top speed was only about 45 miles per hour, (it was pointed out that most commutes average far less than this), and would have been the ultimate city vehicle. He finished up by telling the reader that the vehicle did, in fact, exist, and 17 million of them had been produced between 1908 and 1927, (surpassed only by the venerable VW Beetle...no, not that new thing).
So, while nobody's expecting the C1 to become the new Model T of computers, it certainly does fill a niche!
The idea here wasn't to rebuild the 64, but to totally redesign and update the technology. Did you even look at the specs?