Overseas-posted State Dept IT work is boring beyond belief. 95% of it is just MS Windows tech support and server coddling, strictly regimented and with zero room for trying anything new. And embassy staff live in a closed little world, completely insulated from the country they're actually in. People used to think I was crazy just for getting on a bike and riding around outside the compound.
I have used gkg.net for many years, for a number of domains. Between various clients and associates the domains would number in the hundreds. Never had any problems of any sort.
I have found kids want a way to explain the world as much as adults and a God can be useful in that way.
Useful to shut them up so they'll stop asking you difficult questions, but not useful if you want to help those children grow up with critical thinking skills.
Exploits and manipulates its members with mind control techniques
Commitment is encouraged during recruitment process
Criticism is met with threats of legal action
Leader and follower consider leader to be above reproach
Questioning the leader, or basic tenets, is not allowed
There have been times when the Catholic Church has been guilty of all of these at once, and a persuasive argument could be made that some of them still apply today. Were or are they a cult?
Cult vs religion to me seems like a hair-splitting game that doesn't really advance understanding much. It's like trying to identify the difference between a criminal and a crook. Rather than worrying about labels, why not go after specific bad behaviours regardless of how the perpetrator is labeled?
Why is belief in something without, or often in spite of any or all evidence, a virtue.
Those with the power and the voice to set the agenda have a vested interest in promoting the notion that this is a virtue. That's because their power often directly depends on having masses of people believe things that are patently untrue.
It's true that you've struck on an interesting semantic conundrum, though. The fact of the matter is that, as part of his scheme, LRH and his compatriots did have to construct a religion, and the fact of the matter is that anything can be a religion as long as people actually believe it.
But that's what's great about Scientology, and why I hope to see it flourish.
The fact that something which was started in our lifetimes as a get-rick-quick scheme, could become considered a "legitimate religion" on legal par with Christianity and Islam and all the rest, is the most striking demonstration to date of why religion is a crock and in fact deserves no special legal recognition whatsoever.
Now, as for "toast". Don't you think your taking this just a *leeddle* bit too seriously?
Nope, I firmly believe that the moment he restates the argument, there will be a sudden *poof*, and your chair will hold nothing but a slightly burnt slice of wholewheat bread. Let us all pray he never revisits this thread.
Tex/Latex does not meet that requirement? Is that what you are saying?
Whatever it is that he's saying, he just has to amend his argument to include a requirement that people actually be able to view it with commonly available software, and you're toast.
I work with LaTeX but I sure wouldn't expect a random member of the public to be able to read a document I'd produced until I converted it to PS or PDF.
Remember these documents are part of a legal case and the important thing is that everyone be able to view them identically without undue impediments.
Normally you can slide your card through and enter your PIN while the cashier is still ringing up your items; when it's done you just hit the "Ok" button and grab your bags. It may not technically be "faster" than cash, but the processes can occur in parallel, so you're certainly done sooner.
And in other news, people who pay with checks when there is anyone else behind them in the queue should be shot.
Of course now that I'm a little older, I can see how big business could use this to slightly gouge the consumer. Transactions that include lots of small items, like grocery shopping, might see the total bill go up by as much as several dollars.
For some reason I've lived in three different countries during the times they abolished their 1/100 coins (the penny in the US). In each case it worked the same way: large shops, such as supermarkets, continued to price individual items as before (e.g., 3.74), but then they rounded the total purchase to the nearest 5/100. This way, the total amount payable, no matter how much you bought, never varied by more than 2/100 from before. And the average amount you paid over multiple transactions remained the same.
As long as it's handled sensibly, I don't see any reason to believe it would lead to gouging. I guess some shops might just round all their prices up to the nearest 5/100, but customers would probably make an issue of that.
Where I live now, the smallest coin is worth US$0.0028 (about a fourth of a cent) and it's totally annoying. They're lying everywhere in the streets because nobody wants them. Small shops mostly refuse to deal in them, but supermarkets and other big businesses insist on loading you down with 3 or 4 of them every time you make a purchase.
Apparently you are unable to defend your position because a) you still do nothing but make assumptions and bandy about terms like "typical" and (more importantly) b) you resort to ad hominem attacks, which quite objectively demonstrates the level of your debating skills.
An ad hominem argument is "you're wrong because you're an idiot".
In this case, I am saying the opposite. You're an idiot because you're so totally wrong. It's not an ad hominem argument, it's just an insult. The question of my debating skills is moot as they're not called for in this situation. You've already been beaten to the floor (largely of your own doing), now I'm just kicking you for fun.
The longer you try to find hairs to split about whether or not "typical" people's garages are closer to their bedrooms than the train stations are, the stupider you'll look. But go ahead, try to support your ridiculous assertion. How can you demonstrate that most people park their cars farther away from their homes every night than where the train station is? Or shut up.
How easy what was? For you to claim that most people live closer to a train station than to their own garage?
Some things are so obvious they don't need evidence. But you can do the math: Count the number of train stations in a typical city and the number of garages attached to houses in that same city. Assume that 99% of people park their cars in their own garage and not in someone else's. Take the area of the city and its population, and work out the average distance someone has to walk to get to a train. Then divide that number by the final distance in Zeno's Paradox, which is the length people have to travel outside to get to the garage in their own damn house, and the resulting quotient will be the factor by which your idiocy outshines your debating skill.
Australia doesn't have it too bad, at least compared to NZ, so that argument doesn't hold all that well.
Australia has a huge fat cable to comparatively nearby Singapore, where bandwidth is so plentiful that you can get unlimited, un-metered 20 megabit home broadband for what a 15-minute taxi ride costs in Sydney.
Why else does Internet in, say, New Zealand suck so horribly?
Because it costs a gazillion dollars to lay a cable all the way across the Pacific to a woebegone little sheep farming outpost floating on the arse end of the world. The real question is, why didn't they lay a bigger cable while they were already out there in the water anyway?
Are you sure living in the heart of a city saves you money? A car is definitely a large expense, but so is the rent I've seen in any city that had quality downtown living. Every such city also has a higher cost of living than a sprawled city like my own of St. Louis. Bread and milk cost more, and it all adds up.
No, I'm not really sure it saves money to live in the heart of the city. I more meant that if you are going to live in a city, then doing it without a car is cheaper.
From my perspective, living anywhere but the heart of a world-class city isn't much better than being dead, so I haven't considered the cost situation for the alternatives in great detail.
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Overseas-posted State Dept IT work is boring beyond belief. 95% of it is just MS Windows tech support and server coddling, strictly regimented and with zero room for trying anything new. And embassy staff live in a closed little world, completely insulated from the country they're actually in. People used to think I was crazy just for getting on a bike and riding around outside the compound.
They're good enough that I never have problems in the first place; I prefer that to having problems and getting them solved.
Did you read the interview? These are security bugs in the interpreter itself, not bugs in poorly-written PHP applications.
What the fuck are you talking about? There is no such thing as unnecessary swearing.
I have used gkg.net for many years, for a number of domains. Between various clients and associates the domains would number in the hundreds. Never had any problems of any sort.
They do if they're treated the same. That's why real surgeons pay dues to the AMA: to make sure that doesn't happen.
Useful to shut them up so they'll stop asking you difficult questions, but not useful if you want to help those children grow up with critical thinking skills.
There have been times when the Catholic Church has been guilty of all of these at once, and a persuasive argument could be made that some of them still apply today. Were or are they a cult?
Cult vs religion to me seems like a hair-splitting game that doesn't really advance understanding much. It's like trying to identify the difference between a criminal and a crook. Rather than worrying about labels, why not go after specific bad behaviours regardless of how the perpetrator is labeled?
Those with the power and the voice to set the agenda have a vested interest in promoting the notion that this is a virtue. That's because their power often directly depends on having masses of people believe things that are patently untrue.
But that's what's great about Scientology, and why I hope to see it flourish.
The fact that something which was started in our lifetimes as a get-rick-quick scheme, could become considered a "legitimate religion" on legal par with Christianity and Islam and all the rest, is the most striking demonstration to date of why religion is a crock and in fact deserves no special legal recognition whatsoever.
Nope, I firmly believe that the moment he restates the argument, there will be a sudden *poof*, and your chair will hold nothing but a slightly burnt slice of wholewheat bread. Let us all pray he never revisits this thread.
Whatever it is that he's saying, he just has to amend his argument to include a requirement that people actually be able to view it with commonly available software, and you're toast.
I work with LaTeX but I sure wouldn't expect a random member of the public to be able to read a document I'd produced until I converted it to PS or PDF.
Remember these documents are part of a legal case and the important thing is that everyone be able to view them identically without undue impediments.
Well, that's your problem, isn't it? I have a very vague sound card at home (it's just called "E?").
That's not the same at all. You might as well get mad at them because you'd been using '.info' on the 192.168 network in your basement.
When was that? Next week? You're older than MAXINT?
Better than Australia where mobile phone calls charges are advertised in half-minute increments. What kind of bullshit is that?
Normally you can slide your card through and enter your PIN while the cashier is still ringing up your items; when it's done you just hit the "Ok" button and grab your bags. It may not technically be "faster" than cash, but the processes can occur in parallel, so you're certainly done sooner.
And in other news, people who pay with checks when there is anyone else behind them in the queue should be shot.
Normally they refuse to deal in foreign coins.
For some reason I've lived in three different countries during the times they abolished their 1/100 coins (the penny in the US). In each case it worked the same way: large shops, such as supermarkets, continued to price individual items as before (e.g., 3.74), but then they rounded the total purchase to the nearest 5/100. This way, the total amount payable, no matter how much you bought, never varied by more than 2/100 from before. And the average amount you paid over multiple transactions remained the same.
As long as it's handled sensibly, I don't see any reason to believe it would lead to gouging. I guess some shops might just round all their prices up to the nearest 5/100, but customers would probably make an issue of that.
Where I live now, the smallest coin is worth US$0.0028 (about a fourth of a cent) and it's totally annoying. They're lying everywhere in the streets because nobody wants them. Small shops mostly refuse to deal in them, but supermarkets and other big businesses insist on loading you down with 3 or 4 of them every time you make a purchase.
An ad hominem argument is "you're wrong because you're an idiot".
In this case, I am saying the opposite. You're an idiot because you're so totally wrong. It's not an ad hominem argument, it's just an insult. The question of my debating skills is moot as they're not called for in this situation. You've already been beaten to the floor (largely of your own doing), now I'm just kicking you for fun.
The longer you try to find hairs to split about whether or not "typical" people's garages are closer to their bedrooms than the train stations are, the stupider you'll look. But go ahead, try to support your ridiculous assertion. How can you demonstrate that most people park their cars farther away from their homes every night than where the train station is? Or shut up.
How easy what was? For you to claim that most people live closer to a train station than to their own garage?
Some things are so obvious they don't need evidence. But you can do the math: Count the number of train stations in a typical city and the number of garages attached to houses in that same city. Assume that 99% of people park their cars in their own garage and not in someone else's. Take the area of the city and its population, and work out the average distance someone has to walk to get to a train. Then divide that number by the final distance in Zeno's Paradox, which is the length people have to travel outside to get to the garage in their own damn house, and the resulting quotient will be the factor by which your idiocy outshines your debating skill.
Australia has a huge fat cable to comparatively nearby Singapore, where bandwidth is so plentiful that you can get unlimited, un-metered 20 megabit home broadband for what a 15-minute taxi ride costs in Sydney.
New Zealand does not.
Because it costs a gazillion dollars to lay a cable all the way across the Pacific to a woebegone little sheep farming outpost floating on the arse end of the world. The real question is, why didn't they lay a bigger cable while they were already out there in the water anyway?
No, I'm not really sure it saves money to live in the heart of the city. I more meant that if you are going to live in a city, then doing it without a car is cheaper.
From my perspective, living anywhere but the heart of a world-class city isn't much better than being dead, so I haven't considered the cost situation for the alternatives in great detail.
They do once their sentence is up (or they get parole).
Everyone else can choose, they just don't feel it's worth their while.