But that's the exception that proves the rule. Most major label releases are produced in a studio that's got $500,000 worth of gear and an equivalent amount of studio build-out: sound proofing, acoustic treatments, isolation booths.
Most of that shit is useless. You can get equivalent-quality digital recording gear for dirt cheap these days. I know several guys who run studios or know people who do -- they have to buy a lot of overpriced hooey just to bring people in; things like expensive tube preamps for microphones with little bouncy dials on them. One guy has a set of those that he just sits up prominently in the control room, but it's only got signal going in to make the meters move. The music industry is in a tailspin because they've got too many ticks and leeches to stick to every artist's neck just to get him out into the world. Good riddance to 'em.
Except that we didn't go into Iraq to "save the Iraqis." We went after nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Even if we had gone in with that noble cause, whore, you might have noticed there are hundreds of thousands dying over in Darfur, just to name one example, much faster than Saddam was taking 'em out in Iraq. Where is the hard-on jonesing to take out the Janjaweed? Oh, I forgot, they don't have oil.
The real reason we went in, of course, was to prop up the ratings of someone who is arguably the least competent President of all American history, and to provide wads of cash for his war-profiteering buddies. And the cost of taking that dictator out in such a staggeringly incompetent slipshod fashion is something that is being foisted off on thousands of families directly, and millions of us indirectly. We were told this would be a cakewalk. We were told it had to be done, or we would be in immediate danger. These weren't misunderstandings of intelligence or confusions of an addlepated bureaucracy. They were LIES. Unvarnished steaming bullshit.
Meanwhile in many sections of Iraq, people have their first clean water, their first reliable electricity, their first real sewer system, ever. Hundreds of schools, dozens of hospitals exist where no service was available for at least 20 years.
Documentation for this, whore? Because according to people who are THERE, that money is being fucked away on nothing, and the living conditions of Iraqis have gotten markedly worse over the last three years. Again, we weren't sold on this war to improve Iraqi life. We were sold on danger, terror, fear. You can take that noble face you're trying to glue onto this misadventure and jam it up your ass. By destabilizing a dictatorial regime without any plan whatsoever for the aftermath, we may have assumed a momentarily-noble pose, but we have not done the right thing for the long term, and in the long term this clusterfuck of a war is going to cost ten times what it needed to in both money and lives.
Calling people bad names and getting angry, using abusive language just PROVES that you have no real answers.
Bb-b-b-b-boo frickety hoo! I answered correctly and you still CAN'T TAKE IT.
Astronomy is an experimental science.
I am rolling on the floor laughing. You are PATHETIC.
EVERYTHING, whether manmade or natural is subject to decay and wearing out, WITHOUT exception.
That is not precisely what's addressed by the 2nd law of THERMO dynamics, genius. Just the heat.
Furthermore, you are not intellectually up to the task of convincing myself or anyone that the situation I have described above in any way deviates from 2nd law requirements. Show me the figures. Show me any kind of rigorous demonstration that you've thought this through from soup to nuts and have an explanation within the boundaries of observed evidence that demonstrates that things had to have fallen apart faster than evolution could put them together. Or again shut your gob.
the fossil record shows a record of living things in the past, but doesn't show how they "evolved" from one group to another. The "missing links" are STILL missing.
Demonstrate, then, how those missing links can be bridged by Intelligent Design. Your task awaits you. Put up or shut up. Or at least shut up.
Honestly, no matter how many missing links are brought to your attention, you will gasp and flubber about attempting to somehow prove that reality isn't closing in on your fictitious construct.
You are willfully ignoring what is true by your BELIEF in a conjecture that is proven false every day in your life
Proven how? Evidence, please?
You can mock me, but you will find it futile to mock the truth, for it will mock you in the end, and that will be very sad.
John Malkovich on SNL: "You mock me! I will not be mocked!"
Got his "shit" done? Clinton pushed in a bill that balanced our budget way before our economy was ready, taking too much money out of our pockets sending us into a hard stagflation that resulted in one of the worst recessions we have suffered in decades.
Right away you seem to be clueless on what happened.
#1, when would our economy have been "ready" for a balanced budget? Before or after National Bankruptcy Day?
#2, what happened was a bubble brought on by new technologies, followed by a rather mild actual recession which was NOT stagflation. Did you pluck that term out of a book somewhere without actually reading it? Stag-flation was "stagnant economy" coupled with "high inflation." We didn't have "stagnant economy" back then, though it can readily be argued that we're having it now. We haven't had "high inflation" in DECADES, so I don't really know where you got that malarkey.
Bush got his "shit" done by his tax cuts and fixing all of Bill's mistakes.
I don't even know where to start with this. In WHAT MEASURABLE WAY is our economy in better shape now than it was the day Bush took office? In WHAT MEASURABLE WAY are our nation's infrastructure, financial situation, military preparedness, foreign policy, image abroad, social polity in better shape than they were on January 19, 2001? What THE FUCK are you talking about? Bush's tax cuts have been almost exclusively to people making $200,000+. I certainly haven't seen them, and I'm in spitting distance of six figures myself. Those tax cuts have BANKRUPTED our nation. We will have to STOP what we are doing right now, and completely reverse course to undo the damage.
The dishonesty of the tax cuts is breathtaking. It's well known that Bush's real intent is to "starve the beast" as prescribed by know-nothing dickwad trust-fund baby Grover Norquist. "Starve the beast" means to cut the government's financial resources while running up ruinous costs, then forcing people to decide which programs must be cut to continue. It's horribly dishonest and deceitful because absent the reckless financial irresponsibility of the Reagan and then Bush Jr. years we would not have this outrageous debt on our backs, and our social programs would be readily affordable and people would have no issue with continuing to pay for them as they provide tremendous benefit to society. If Bush or Norquist wants an honest open discussion of the validity of Social Security or Medicare they need to have the balls to stand up in front of the nation and actively begin that dialogue.
Oh wait, I forgot that Bush already tried to talk us all out of Social Security and got ROUNDLY shouted down for it.
I hope you're still standing around with your gaping mouth running about what a great guy Asshole Bush is when the bottom falls out. You might finally learn a think or two about stuff going around and then coming around.
Evantually Americans will figure the way out and in the process bring a whole new era.
I don't think the problem is really outsourcing either. I think it's pathetic, incurious, insouciant leadership. It's leadership comprised of people who have nothing to lose if they screw up. None of George Bush's friends or families will call him at home in an unofficial capacity and say "George: What The Fuck are you doing to my family?" Nobody he knows has an investment, let alone a personal stake, in the fate of Middle America or Poor America. Nobody he knows will be injured or bankrupted by his policies. Our nation has been politically seized by a very exclusive elite, and those elites are running us into the ground for their personal benefit. So the first part of the way out is to bodily eject the elite from positions of power.
In my years of IT experience, I have rarely run across a group of useless self-important hacks as the Gartner Group. Not only do they breezily predict a bunch of bullshit that isn't at all realistic (including predicting a couple of years ago that IT would die as a profession in the US) but when they talk about specific vendors I always end up wondering if that vendor is slipping them a tenner (or more) for every glowing, positive remark they make. Frankly they could be replaced by a Magic 8 Ball and no one would notice.
The phenomenon is called "onshoring." The logic works like this:
America's rural areas are full of unemployed hayseeds who have foolishly educated themselves in computer sciences and are still unemployed.
Therefore, let's hire them for a fraction of the cost of professionals in large cities, and look politically good doing it.
Disclosure: I live in Louisville, KY. It's just big enough to have a modest technology community but we are all acutely aware that if any one of the three or four biggest IT shops goes under we'll all be at each others throats for whatever jobs are left in the city. I'm hoping the onshoring phenomenon kicks in soon enough to make a difference in this area.
If you look at the mega-church complexes that have arisen, you get an even more distinct message from Christianity: We're wealthy, we like to network, and we like to show YOU how unstoppable we are.
One of the mall-churches near my house is referred to as "Six Flags Over Jesus" and is crammed in between a huge series of mega car dealerships and walmarts. It's clearly as much a commercial enterprise as any of the others, and there's none of the austerity or severity I normally associate with "church" surrounding it. It's all business. At one time I was told this Superdome of a church claimed a congregation of 30,000 -- that's in a city whose population is under half a million.
The gaping insincerity of this organization is just beyond comprehension.
I read 800 WPM. That's not speed reading, that's not skimming, that's just how fast I read sitting there reading normally. And in order to process the picture *and* read the article text, I have to slow down or actually stop the slide show. I fucking hate those things.
Take any collection of cells you wish and make a self-sustaining multi-cellular organism. A dozen or so cells will be good enough for a demo, even though real organisms have millions of cells organized into complex structures. Whenever evolutionists are asked to show by EXPERIMENT that their theory is real science they always come out with the old worn out excuse of time. Immense periods of time are needed. In every science, except the philosophy of evolution, time is always the enemy of organization. Whether manmade or natural, complex systems break down into simpler ones. This is demonstrated to you in all areas of life.
Again, faced with CLEAR and UNAMBIGUOUS evidence that does not require an experiment, you dodge to one side desperately trying to come up with an impossible requirement with which to invalidate evolution. And furthermore, the failure of such an experiment as you propose would not be any kind of falsifiable disproof -- as you have not stated what is irreducably complex. Neither do you understand by the premises of this experiment how life is to have evolved. BTW, you are WAY TOO HUNG UP on the 2nd law. Like Inigo Montoya says, "That word does not mean what you think it means."
Living things are very adaptable and in that sense, "survival of the fittest" is certainly valid. However, the urge to survive by adapting to stress in no way proves the claim of evolution from the simple to the complex.
No, I think it's the staggering mass of fossil remains that proves that claim. Why do you keep wanting to change around the rules whenever the evidence doesn't suit you? Are you really that afraid of what it says?
You state that evolution is fact, yet say that not knowing still makes a valid theory! Facts are things we know. You name me ONE other real science that is NOT based on doing experiments and measurements in the lab other than the pseudo-science of evolution.
1. Astronomy. Idiot!
It is you that has no understanding of entropy.
Oh HO HO HO! Who the fuck are you to tell me what I do and don't know? Entropy speaks specifically to the level of chaos in a system. The end result of entropy in a closed system is HEAT DEATH, the complete cessation of all movement in a system. Don't fucking point me at the Wiki. I took physics 101, and passed it with all aces, which is more, I guarantee, than you can say. Heat death occurs when all of the energy in a system which is organized (into things like stars) has been exhausted. Since the Earth is a system in concert with a STAR, the Earth system is not subject to Heat Death JUST FUCKING YET. When the SUN BURNS OUT then you will have a point. Until then, please slam your ignorant gob shut because you clearly do not understand the VERY FIRST THING about your topic.
Evolution of simple life forms into complex ones has also never been observed,
Except in the fossil record. Blind?
This process has neither been observed happening today in nature, nor has anybody MADE it happen in a lab. Show me just ONE example.
Shifting requirements . . . yawn. The only reason I'm still typing is that I've made it my personal crusade to mock you until you shut the fuck up. You are wrong. Accept it and gag on your acceptance of it.
Neither evolution's non-mind stance, nor ID theory of a Mind behind life can be experimentally verified
Evolution is again a factual process. Natural selection is the theory. Blueness of the sky, and all that. Not seeing the forest for the trees? Your intellectual cowardice is staggering. There's nothing I truly despise more than the willfully ignorant, and you are as willfully ignorant as a four-year-old child. Go change your fucking diaper.
Because by his comments the half that knows what the hell it's talking about was apparently never required for his survival. A compelling demonstration of what an amazing machine the human body is that it can manage with only half of the mass of its central nervous system.
By what criteria would you like to have it demonstrated? If you mean the large-scale evolution of microbes into mammals, I'm afraid then that there's no lab with enough time or funding to create life from scratch, given that we think it takes about 2 billion years under the most ideal conditions we know of for it to happen. The condition you are requiring for "proof" is ridiculous. I might say also that you have to create the Sun in a lab to demonstrate that fusion occurs -- but I could just invite you to a vacation on the Bikini Atoll for a smaller demonstration.
Adaptation of moths or bacteria to environmental stress is not evolution.
So, faced with an example of small-scale evolution clearly occurring, you dance to one side and and re-define the process in order to avoid accepting the unmistakable truth -- organisms change their forms in response to selective pressures from their environment. Good one! Nice to see that evidence doesn't really mean anything to you.
The origin of life itself cannot be shown experimentally. Nobody has ever taken any mixture of all 92 elements, none of which have ever been part of something alive, and created any life . ..
blah, blah, blah. Again you come up with the clearly-impossible requirements of proof, as you bloody well know we do not yet have the knowledge to reproduce biogenesis. Not knowing exactly how to make it happen doesn't mean the theory is invalid. And by attacking biogenisis you are also not really attacking evolution. You're instead moving goalposts far and wide to avoid the squarely-kicked points that you don't want to see.
Evolution tries to apply to living systems what applies nowhere else -- namely that systems left to themselves become more complex, rather than breaking down into simpler components.
Fundamental and bloody ignorant misunderstanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Try to grasp the complete implication -- left to themselves any systems of order will tend towards disorder. Our system is not left to itself, idiot! We have a gigantic ball of flaming light pouring energy into the system, which can directly be proven to drive evolution's movement. We even know how chlorophyll works in plants to make photosynthesis possible.
Evolution teaches that over large spans of time, simple cells evolved into complex animals -- even eventually humans. No experiment has ever been done to prove even the smallest link in such an amazing chain of events.
Again with the impossible requirements. What we do have is a long chain of irrefutable evidence from which the devoutly stupid avert their eyes in fear. An experiment is what science uses when the real world's evidence isn't specific enough or obtainable. You once again wildly shift goalposts across the field, because if you didn't you'd be confronted with a TEEMING MASS of indisputable evidence that didn't need to be experimentally obtained.
Evolutionists try to convince us and themselves, that complex living structures, such as brains, eyes, ears, circulatory systems all came into being without detailed instructions and knowledge of how put them all together. Hemoglobin molecules are very complex structures that have a very precise arrangements of atoms.
Funny, during the latest trial on ID, "Dr." Behe was unable to convince a jury of the theoretical underpinnings of this, and whenever confronted with any questions about it ID'ers are eerily silent on the details of at what juncture this complexity becomes irreducible. Do you have any math to back this up? That's usually what real scientists use to frame their quantitative proofs. What is the measure of complexity as expressed by a number, and at what "percent" or vector or whatever of complexity does a system become too complex to have evolved independently of intelligence? As an aside, any theoretical papers on this topic whatsoever would be o
I've read this previously, and feel free to factually rebut, but I think that most of the time the tail-end of a recession tends to coincide with a housing-market collapse. I can think of a couple of reasons why this is: people during economic good times bid up housing prices, and then during the lean years they use that equity to get by, and there's a lot of "movement" in the market because of local conditions. So when the job market recovers, people are more or less settling back down, and the value of housing in areas that are recovering isn't yet recognized.
That's my albeit unschooled reasoning on the topic, but nonetheless, I've read several times that one of the major indicators of a real recovery is a housing market collapse. I'm not particularly concerned.
If now is not the time to not only blame, but demand accountability, then when?
Might want to peruse some of my other comments. Believe me, I'm all about the accountability. The.sig is an ironic riff on the statements made during Katrina. Specifically, Jon Stewart's quip one night that those who don't want to play the "blame game" are typically the ones to blame.
Sorry, I actually program in REXX, and "ease of use" is not the first thing that comes to mind. FUCKING HEADACHE, maybe. There are a dozen languages right handy that are easier to use, and especially debug, than REXX. Whenever possible I avoid it. If I'm doing glue scripting, TCL is my language of choice these days.
I am glad you try to avoid Chinese products. That is something.
No it isn't. It's idiotic! You have to almost completely drop out of the economy to avoid Chinese products, you aren't helping the Chinese by doing so, and completely outside of all that the Chinese are busy buying up our dollars to keep our debt propped up, so you're in the game one way or another.
I will be visiting China later this year and I'm very curious about what, if any, attempt will be made to keep various things out of my sight, but one thing's for sure: economically boycotting nations (as we do with Cuba) appears to produce the opposite effect. Try taking a stand that means something, not a phony stance that just makes you feel better about yourself.
What alternative do you propose? Panic, perhaps? Socialism? Neither has been particularly impressive.
Yes, I remember well the grim years of Panic-based economics. These were of course preceded by the Vague Dread-based economic theories, which in turn supplemented the Slightly Disturbed period. All very clear examples of poor economic theory.
I wonder if yes, it's possible to travel in time, but since (employing the anthropic principle) the Universe obviously isn't a mass of mangled causality, it's only possible to travel to the past of a place you haven't ever occupied.
Or alternatively, it is possible, but we never figure it out and in 300 years the Earth is a mass grave of SUV's.
This is one of the reasons Evolution has been rejected by a lot of people. Just as ultra-right wing Christians really turn people off, this kind of statement also turns people off.
Well, it's like arguing with a toddler. After awhile, you just get tired of it. For example:
Personally, I don't believe in Evolution. That doesn't make me an idiot. I simply disagree with the theory.
Well, where shall we start? That "Evolution" is a "theory?" That there is any doubt whatsoever that life on Earth began as simple forms and gradually evolved into more complex forms isn't a theory at all. It's established fact as solid as the fact that the sky is blue and the earth is round.
That doesn't mean I don't understand it,
Actually, your statements make it perfectly clear that you don't understand it.
Just as the Theory of Gravity has some problems and needs to be understood better/differently,
What problems are these, Einstein? Fnet = m*a put men on the moon, genius!
I believe the Theory of Evolution needs to be understood better/differently -
IN WHAT WAY? I'm very curious about this, considering that you don't seem to understand what the problem is. There is NO REASONABLE DOUBT that life evolved from simple forms and into more complex forms. None whatsoever. The mechanism may be in question but that is properly deliniated as the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Which doesn't have any gross problems that you seem intellectually capable of explaining. Darwin's framework has stood for about 150 years now without any serious challenges and there have been no credible attempts at competition with it.
Don't cry about being called out -- if you don't want to participate intelligently in the discussion, you won't be treated as an intelligent participant. Plain and simple.
Irrational to me is saying God doesn't exist because we can now fathom how Bee's fly.
If you put words in people's mouths, you should not be too surprised when they spit them back out into your face. What TFA clearly states is that we now understand the mechanical reason for bee flight. It also clearly and specifically points out the ongoing intelligent design fad among creationist pseudo-intellectuals as having used our previous lack of a model for bee flight as a wedge against science.
What it doesn't say is that we can now prove that God doesn't exist, because that isn't the task of Science. The task of Science is to describe the universe in logical and mathematical terms. The test of an accurate description is an accurate prediction. God in any guise doesn't figure into these terms because he/she/it is neither a logical nor a mathematical quantity. If you have a mathematical or logical model that requires the existence of such a being you are welcome to submit it to the scientific community. But in the instance of such a submittal you will be required to prove the positive existence of God.
For that matter, given the degree to which Internet Explorer is embedded in Windows, simply replacing it with Opera would be very non-trivial
Huh! Aside from the shell extensions, there isn't a fuck of a lot of "embedding" of IE into Windows. I suppose the Windows Explorer / IE similarity seems inseparable to some, but it really isn't. Even now, when Iexplore.exe hangs up it doesn't lock the Windows Explorer shell, so they aren't really that closely linked. It's trivial to set up Firefox to be your default browser, and aside from pass-through authentication there isn't a lot IE can do that it can't. That whole embedding thing was just a red herring to keep MS out of hot water with the DOJ, and since a business-friendly Admin has been elected, it's pretty much been ignored.
Wouldn't a really powerful telescope be able to see the landing sites and the assorted stuff left behind? I would think that would be enough to convince all but the nuttiest "moon landing hoax" advocate.
No. Not one that any reasonable person could build. The aperature of a telescope large enough to spot the flag on the moon would have to be on the order of 10,000 inches, and it would further have to be situated above the Earth's atmosphere for the image to settle down enough for it to be discernable -- thus rendering many of the doubters' questions moot. Even then, the image obtained would be just one pixel high on most CCD chips.
It would be easier to spot the landers and other equipment, but if you think about their angular sizes, not a whole lot.
I don't have a link for this -- it was in an astronomy magazine I read about 12 years ago.
10,000 inches is 833 feet (254 meters for those in the modern world), give or take. The weight of a mirror that size would probably collapse itself, and grinding a perfectly-figured mirror out of rock or dirt would be an engineering marvel on par with putting a man on the moon in the first place.
Moon hoax believers are just going to have to be nuts for now. Their claims have been thoroughly debunked and only those with the patience of a saint, or the same bull-headed idiot stubbornness would want to waste time arguing with them. People have better things to do with their time.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh well.
Most of that shit is useless. You can get equivalent-quality digital recording gear for dirt cheap these days. I know several guys who run studios or know people who do -- they have to buy a lot of overpriced hooey just to bring people in; things like expensive tube preamps for microphones with little bouncy dials on them. One guy has a set of those that he just sits up prominently in the control room, but it's only got signal going in to make the meters move. The music industry is in a tailspin because they've got too many ticks and leeches to stick to every artist's neck just to get him out into the world. Good riddance to 'em.
Except that we didn't go into Iraq to "save the Iraqis." We went after nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Even if we had gone in with that noble cause, whore, you might have noticed there are hundreds of thousands dying over in Darfur, just to name one example, much faster than Saddam was taking 'em out in Iraq. Where is the hard-on jonesing to take out the Janjaweed? Oh, I forgot, they don't have oil.
The real reason we went in, of course, was to prop up the ratings of someone who is arguably the least competent President of all American history, and to provide wads of cash for his war-profiteering buddies. And the cost of taking that dictator out in such a staggeringly incompetent slipshod fashion is something that is being foisted off on thousands of families directly, and millions of us indirectly. We were told this would be a cakewalk. We were told it had to be done, or we would be in immediate danger. These weren't misunderstandings of intelligence or confusions of an addlepated bureaucracy. They were LIES. Unvarnished steaming bullshit.
Meanwhile in many sections of Iraq, people have their first clean water, their first reliable electricity, their first real sewer system, ever. Hundreds of schools, dozens of hospitals exist where no service was available for at least 20 years.
Documentation for this, whore? Because according to people who are THERE, that money is being fucked away on nothing, and the living conditions of Iraqis have gotten markedly worse over the last three years. Again, we weren't sold on this war to improve Iraqi life. We were sold on danger, terror, fear. You can take that noble face you're trying to glue onto this misadventure and jam it up your ass. By destabilizing a dictatorial regime without any plan whatsoever for the aftermath, we may have assumed a momentarily-noble pose, but we have not done the right thing for the long term, and in the long term this clusterfuck of a war is going to cost ten times what it needed to in both money and lives.
Bb-b-b-b-boo frickety hoo! I answered correctly and you still CAN'T TAKE IT.
Astronomy is an experimental science.
I am rolling on the floor laughing. You are PATHETIC.
EVERYTHING, whether manmade or natural is subject to decay and wearing out, WITHOUT exception.
That is not precisely what's addressed by the 2nd law of THERMO dynamics, genius. Just the heat.
Furthermore, you are not intellectually up to the task of convincing myself or anyone that the situation I have described above in any way deviates from 2nd law requirements. Show me the figures. Show me any kind of rigorous demonstration that you've thought this through from soup to nuts and have an explanation within the boundaries of observed evidence that demonstrates that things had to have fallen apart faster than evolution could put them together. Or again shut your gob.
the fossil record shows a record of living things in the past, but doesn't show how they "evolved" from one group to another. The "missing links" are STILL missing.
Demonstrate, then, how those missing links can be bridged by Intelligent Design. Your task awaits you. Put up or shut up. Or at least shut up.
Honestly, no matter how many missing links are brought to your attention, you will gasp and flubber about attempting to somehow prove that reality isn't closing in on your fictitious construct.
You are willfully ignoring what is true by your BELIEF in a conjecture that is proven false every day in your life
Proven how? Evidence, please?
You can mock me, but you will find it futile to mock the truth, for it will mock you in the end, and that will be very sad.
John Malkovich on SNL: "You mock me! I will not be mocked!"
I'd love to debate you in person.
Wow. Mouth full of STRAWMAN! Can you even read, fucktard?
Right away you seem to be clueless on what happened.
#1, when would our economy have been "ready" for a balanced budget? Before or after National Bankruptcy Day?
#2, what happened was a bubble brought on by new technologies, followed by a rather mild actual recession which was NOT stagflation. Did you pluck that term out of a book somewhere without actually reading it? Stag-flation was "stagnant economy" coupled with "high inflation." We didn't have "stagnant economy" back then, though it can readily be argued that we're having it now. We haven't had "high inflation" in DECADES, so I don't really know where you got that malarkey.
Bush got his "shit" done by his tax cuts and fixing all of Bill's mistakes.
I don't even know where to start with this. In WHAT MEASURABLE WAY is our economy in better shape now than it was the day Bush took office? In WHAT MEASURABLE WAY are our nation's infrastructure, financial situation, military preparedness, foreign policy, image abroad, social polity in better shape than they were on January 19, 2001? What THE FUCK are you talking about? Bush's tax cuts have been almost exclusively to people making $200,000+. I certainly haven't seen them, and I'm in spitting distance of six figures myself. Those tax cuts have BANKRUPTED our nation. We will have to STOP what we are doing right now, and completely reverse course to undo the damage.
The dishonesty of the tax cuts is breathtaking. It's well known that Bush's real intent is to "starve the beast" as prescribed by know-nothing dickwad trust-fund baby Grover Norquist. "Starve the beast" means to cut the government's financial resources while running up ruinous costs, then forcing people to decide which programs must be cut to continue. It's horribly dishonest and deceitful because absent the reckless financial irresponsibility of the Reagan and then Bush Jr. years we would not have this outrageous debt on our backs, and our social programs would be readily affordable and people would have no issue with continuing to pay for them as they provide tremendous benefit to society. If Bush or Norquist wants an honest open discussion of the validity of Social Security or Medicare they need to have the balls to stand up in front of the nation and actively begin that dialogue.
Oh wait, I forgot that Bush already tried to talk us all out of Social Security and got ROUNDLY shouted down for it.
I hope you're still standing around with your gaping mouth running about what a great guy Asshole Bush is when the bottom falls out. You might finally learn a think or two about stuff going around and then coming around.
I don't think the problem is really outsourcing either. I think it's pathetic, incurious, insouciant leadership. It's leadership comprised of people who have nothing to lose if they screw up. None of George Bush's friends or families will call him at home in an unofficial capacity and say "George: What The Fuck are you doing to my family?" Nobody he knows has an investment, let alone a personal stake, in the fate of Middle America or Poor America. Nobody he knows will be injured or bankrupted by his policies. Our nation has been politically seized by a very exclusive elite, and those elites are running us into the ground for their personal benefit. So the first part of the way out is to bodily eject the elite from positions of power.
In my years of IT experience, I have rarely run across a group of useless self-important hacks as the Gartner Group. Not only do they breezily predict a bunch of bullshit that isn't at all realistic (including predicting a couple of years ago that IT would die as a profession in the US) but when they talk about specific vendors I always end up wondering if that vendor is slipping them a tenner (or more) for every glowing, positive remark they make. Frankly they could be replaced by a Magic 8 Ball and no one would notice.
America's rural areas are full of unemployed hayseeds who have foolishly educated themselves in computer sciences and are still unemployed.
Therefore, let's hire them for a fraction of the cost of professionals in large cities, and look politically good doing it.
Disclosure: I live in Louisville, KY. It's just big enough to have a modest technology community but we are all acutely aware that if any one of the three or four biggest IT shops goes under we'll all be at each others throats for whatever jobs are left in the city. I'm hoping the onshoring phenomenon kicks in soon enough to make a difference in this area.
One of the mall-churches near my house is referred to as "Six Flags Over Jesus" and is crammed in between a huge series of mega car dealerships and walmarts. It's clearly as much a commercial enterprise as any of the others, and there's none of the austerity or severity I normally associate with "church" surrounding it. It's all business. At one time I was told this Superdome of a church claimed a congregation of 30,000 -- that's in a city whose population is under half a million.
The gaping insincerity of this organization is just beyond comprehension.
I read 800 WPM. That's not speed reading, that's not skimming, that's just how fast I read sitting there reading normally. And in order to process the picture *and* read the article text, I have to slow down or actually stop the slide show. I fucking hate those things.
Again, faced with CLEAR and UNAMBIGUOUS evidence that does not require an experiment, you dodge to one side desperately trying to come up with an impossible requirement with which to invalidate evolution. And furthermore, the failure of such an experiment as you propose would not be any kind of falsifiable disproof -- as you have not stated what is irreducably complex. Neither do you understand by the premises of this experiment how life is to have evolved. BTW, you are WAY TOO HUNG UP on the 2nd law. Like Inigo Montoya says, "That word does not mean what you think it means."
Living things are very adaptable and in that sense, "survival of the fittest" is certainly valid. However, the urge to survive by adapting to stress in no way proves the claim of evolution from the simple to the complex.
No, I think it's the staggering mass of fossil remains that proves that claim. Why do you keep wanting to change around the rules whenever the evidence doesn't suit you? Are you really that afraid of what it says?
You state that evolution is fact, yet say that not knowing still makes a valid theory! Facts are things we know. You name me ONE other real science that is NOT based on doing experiments and measurements in the lab other than the pseudo-science of evolution.
1. Astronomy. Idiot!
It is you that has no understanding of entropy.
Oh HO HO HO! Who the fuck are you to tell me what I do and don't know? Entropy speaks specifically to the level of chaos in a system. The end result of entropy in a closed system is HEAT DEATH, the complete cessation of all movement in a system. Don't fucking point me at the Wiki. I took physics 101, and passed it with all aces, which is more, I guarantee, than you can say. Heat death occurs when all of the energy in a system which is organized (into things like stars) has been exhausted. Since the Earth is a system in concert with a STAR, the Earth system is not subject to Heat Death JUST FUCKING YET. When the SUN BURNS OUT then you will have a point. Until then, please slam your ignorant gob shut because you clearly do not understand the VERY FIRST THING about your topic.
Evolution of simple life forms into complex ones has also never been observed,
Except in the fossil record. Blind?
This process has neither been observed happening today in nature, nor has anybody MADE it happen in a lab. Show me just ONE example.
Shifting requirements . . . yawn. The only reason I'm still typing is that I've made it my personal crusade to mock you until you shut the fuck up. You are wrong. Accept it and gag on your acceptance of it.
Neither evolution's non-mind stance, nor ID theory of a Mind behind life can be experimentally verified
Evolution is again a factual process. Natural selection is the theory. Blueness of the sky, and all that. Not seeing the forest for the trees? Your intellectual cowardice is staggering. There's nothing I truly despise more than the willfully ignorant, and you are as willfully ignorant as a four-year-old child. Go change your fucking diaper.
Because by his comments the half that knows what the hell it's talking about was apparently never required for his survival. A compelling demonstration of what an amazing machine the human body is that it can manage with only half of the mass of its central nervous system.
By what criteria would you like to have it demonstrated? If you mean the large-scale evolution of microbes into mammals, I'm afraid then that there's no lab with enough time or funding to create life from scratch, given that we think it takes about 2 billion years under the most ideal conditions we know of for it to happen. The condition you are requiring for "proof" is ridiculous. I might say also that you have to create the Sun in a lab to demonstrate that fusion occurs -- but I could just invite you to a vacation on the Bikini Atoll for a smaller demonstration.
Adaptation of moths or bacteria to environmental stress is not evolution.
So, faced with an example of small-scale evolution clearly occurring, you dance to one side and and re-define the process in order to avoid accepting the unmistakable truth -- organisms change their forms in response to selective pressures from their environment. Good one! Nice to see that evidence doesn't really mean anything to you.
The origin of life itself cannot be shown experimentally. Nobody has ever taken any mixture of all 92 elements, none of which have ever been part of something alive, and created any life . . .
blah, blah, blah. Again you come up with the clearly-impossible requirements of proof, as you bloody well know we do not yet have the knowledge to reproduce biogenesis. Not knowing exactly how to make it happen doesn't mean the theory is invalid. And by attacking biogenisis you are also not really attacking evolution. You're instead moving goalposts far and wide to avoid the squarely-kicked points that you don't want to see.
Evolution tries to apply to living systems what applies nowhere else -- namely that systems left to themselves become more complex, rather than breaking down into simpler components.
Fundamental and bloody ignorant misunderstanding of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Try to grasp the complete implication -- left to themselves any systems of order will tend towards disorder. Our system is not left to itself, idiot! We have a gigantic ball of flaming light pouring energy into the system, which can directly be proven to drive evolution's movement. We even know how chlorophyll works in plants to make photosynthesis possible.
Evolution teaches that over large spans of time, simple cells evolved into complex animals -- even eventually humans. No experiment has ever been done to prove even the smallest link in such an amazing chain of events.
Again with the impossible requirements. What we do have is a long chain of irrefutable evidence from which the devoutly stupid avert their eyes in fear. An experiment is what science uses when the real world's evidence isn't specific enough or obtainable. You once again wildly shift goalposts across the field, because if you didn't you'd be confronted with a TEEMING MASS of indisputable evidence that didn't need to be experimentally obtained.
Evolutionists try to convince us and themselves, that complex living structures, such as brains, eyes, ears, circulatory systems all came into being without detailed instructions and knowledge of how put them all together. Hemoglobin molecules are very complex structures that have a very precise arrangements of atoms.
Funny, during the latest trial on ID, "Dr." Behe was unable to convince a jury of the theoretical underpinnings of this, and whenever confronted with any questions about it ID'ers are eerily silent on the details of at what juncture this complexity becomes irreducible. Do you have any math to back this up? That's usually what real scientists use to frame their quantitative proofs. What is the measure of complexity as expressed by a number, and at what "percent" or vector or whatever of complexity does a system become too complex to have evolved independently of intelligence? As an aside, any theoretical papers on this topic whatsoever would be o
That's my albeit unschooled reasoning on the topic, but nonetheless, I've read several times that one of the major indicators of a real recovery is a housing market collapse. I'm not particularly concerned.
Might want to peruse some of my other comments. Believe me, I'm all about the accountability. The .sig is an ironic riff on the statements made during Katrina. Specifically, Jon Stewart's quip one night that those who don't want to play the "blame game" are typically the ones to blame.
Sorry, I actually program in REXX, and "ease of use" is not the first thing that comes to mind. FUCKING HEADACHE, maybe. There are a dozen languages right handy that are easier to use, and especially debug, than REXX. Whenever possible I avoid it. If I'm doing glue scripting, TCL is my language of choice these days.
No it isn't. It's idiotic! You have to almost completely drop out of the economy to avoid Chinese products, you aren't helping the Chinese by doing so, and completely outside of all that the Chinese are busy buying up our dollars to keep our debt propped up, so you're in the game one way or another.
I will be visiting China later this year and I'm very curious about what, if any, attempt will be made to keep various things out of my sight, but one thing's for sure: economically boycotting nations (as we do with Cuba) appears to produce the opposite effect. Try taking a stand that means something, not a phony stance that just makes you feel better about yourself.
Yes, I remember well the grim years of Panic-based economics. These were of course preceded by the Vague Dread-based economic theories, which in turn supplemented the Slightly Disturbed period. All very clear examples of poor economic theory.
Or alternatively, it is possible, but we never figure it out and in 300 years the Earth is a mass grave of SUV's.
Well, it's like arguing with a toddler. After awhile, you just get tired of it. For example:
Personally, I don't believe in Evolution. That doesn't make me an idiot. I simply disagree with the theory.
Well, where shall we start? That "Evolution" is a "theory?" That there is any doubt whatsoever that life on Earth began as simple forms and gradually evolved into more complex forms isn't a theory at all. It's established fact as solid as the fact that the sky is blue and the earth is round.
That doesn't mean I don't understand it,
Actually, your statements make it perfectly clear that you don't understand it.
Just as the Theory of Gravity has some problems and needs to be understood better/differently,
What problems are these, Einstein? Fnet = m*a put men on the moon, genius!
I believe the Theory of Evolution needs to be understood better/differently -
IN WHAT WAY? I'm very curious about this, considering that you don't seem to understand what the problem is. There is NO REASONABLE DOUBT that life evolved from simple forms and into more complex forms. None whatsoever. The mechanism may be in question but that is properly deliniated as the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Which doesn't have any gross problems that you seem intellectually capable of explaining. Darwin's framework has stood for about 150 years now without any serious challenges and there have been no credible attempts at competition with it.
Don't cry about being called out -- if you don't want to participate intelligently in the discussion, you won't be treated as an intelligent participant. Plain and simple.
If you put words in people's mouths, you should not be too surprised when they spit them back out into your face. What TFA clearly states is that we now understand the mechanical reason for bee flight. It also clearly and specifically points out the ongoing intelligent design fad among creationist pseudo-intellectuals as having used our previous lack of a model for bee flight as a wedge against science.
What it doesn't say is that we can now prove that God doesn't exist, because that isn't the task of Science. The task of Science is to describe the universe in logical and mathematical terms. The test of an accurate description is an accurate prediction. God in any guise doesn't figure into these terms because he/she/it is neither a logical nor a mathematical quantity. If you have a mathematical or logical model that requires the existence of such a being you are welcome to submit it to the scientific community. But in the instance of such a submittal you will be required to prove the positive existence of God.
Huh! Aside from the shell extensions, there isn't a fuck of a lot of "embedding" of IE into Windows. I suppose the Windows Explorer / IE similarity seems inseparable to some, but it really isn't. Even now, when Iexplore.exe hangs up it doesn't lock the Windows Explorer shell, so they aren't really that closely linked. It's trivial to set up Firefox to be your default browser, and aside from pass-through authentication there isn't a lot IE can do that it can't. That whole embedding thing was just a red herring to keep MS out of hot water with the DOJ, and since a business-friendly Admin has been elected, it's pretty much been ignored.
Uh, where do you get that? For upper-income folk tax rates are closer to 30% than 50% these days.
Wouldn't a really powerful telescope be able to see the landing sites and the assorted stuff left behind? I would think that would be enough to convince all but the nuttiest "moon landing hoax" advocate.
No. Not one that any reasonable person could build. The aperature of a telescope large enough to spot the flag on the moon would have to be on the order of 10,000 inches, and it would further have to be situated above the Earth's atmosphere for the image to settle down enough for it to be discernable -- thus rendering many of the doubters' questions moot. Even then, the image obtained would be just one pixel high on most CCD chips.
It would be easier to spot the landers and other equipment, but if you think about their angular sizes, not a whole lot.
I don't have a link for this -- it was in an astronomy magazine I read about 12 years ago.
10,000 inches is 833 feet (254 meters for those in the modern world), give or take. The weight of a mirror that size would probably collapse itself, and grinding a perfectly-figured mirror out of rock or dirt would be an engineering marvel on par with putting a man on the moon in the first place.
Moon hoax believers are just going to have to be nuts for now. Their claims have been thoroughly debunked and only those with the patience of a saint, or the same bull-headed idiot stubbornness would want to waste time arguing with them. People have better things to do with their time.