Please be careful with the exercise you mentioned. I once gave myself a bulging disc after I was already working out and tried that machine and thought "hey, this is easy!" and did a bunch of reps (probably while jacked up on endorphins). Two days later I was in excruciating pain with psiatic nerve pain shooting down my leg. MRI said my L5S1 was nearly busted.
Turns out that your discs have 13 layers but only the last one has nerve endings in it. The gel at the center pushed through all the rest due to lifelong bad sitting posture (jut your butt out when you sit up, don't slouch in the chair like I tended to do!!). I am a fairly prototypical geek (spend a lot of time in a sedentary position) so I highly advise anyone younger than me (34, just turned today) who hasn't had back problems yet to do the bridge exercises mentioned elsewhere in the replies here, every day or evening. 10 reps of raise, hold, one leg up/down, other leg up/down, lower. They come from yoga and help me to control the back issues greatly! (that plus mild exercise). While you're at it you should also do some situps as so-called "core strength" (torso muscles) helps a lot towards fitness.
All this I learned from my physical therapist (very good) who I got for the bulging disc.
Most non-geeks who are "naturally physically active" don't have this issue as their back muscles get strengthened naturally. Me, I have to treat exercise like "brushing my teeth" and do it out of health and a bit of vanity, not so much because it's fun or because I feel like doing it. It does feel good afterwards, however.
Wasn't SQL Server largely developed within Microsoft's walls? It's a very decent database product.
Analysis Services is an excellent tool to explore multidimensional datacubes (data mining).
Flight Simulator was pretty groundbreaking at some point.
ASP? VB?.NET and C#? The COM object model? The registry?::snicker:: the Start menu?
And just so you know, this is from a Macintosh fanboy (with a lot of Windows experience), been using Macs (unfortunately not always for work- i'm a web developer) since December 1984.
I stand corrected on the word. Learn something every day.;)
I see you're still an aptly-named anonymous coward tho. Must suck to have to keep checking back to see if anyone paid any attention. Stand up for what you believe in. You know, the whole "I may not agree with what you say" thing.
A proper discussion of pornography is outside the scope of my time, but to use the best definition I can come up with:
"the sexually explicit depiction of persons, in words or images, created with the primary, proximate aim, and reasonable hope, of eliciting significant sexual arousal on the part of the consumer of such materials."
Wow, man (or woman, as it were). You were actually offended by the ol' "wardrobe malfunction". I would have to say that I found the "wardrobe malfunction" neither arousing, nor explicit. In fact I was quite disgusted by the whole publicity stunt. And therein lies the problem.
I submit again that you are probably an asexual party-pooper who was raised under extremely repressive rules. I'm guessing a Bible-belt female, never married. I am sorry that you will never be able to feel that you can fully express yourself sexually and lighten up about it all.
1) Clone vendors The clone vendors actually INCREASED total Mac market share while they were around, but 99% of the press absolutely refused over and over again to report on anything but Apple's losing share (and I was reading a lot of the press at the time). This was thus a major (and inaccurate) perception problem that was hurting the Mac market on the whole. Thus Apple's kibosh move (and believe me, I was VERY sorry to see PowerComputing, and their awesome ad campaigns, go with it).
2) Puck mouse. Wow, that's a ridiculous reason... Yeah, we all hated it immediately, but you know what? 20 bucks later and you get a microsoft 2-button wheelmouse optical that was fully-supported already in the OS. One could argue that Apple spent far too long in "2-button-mouse denial" and that a new iMac owner shouldn't have had to be subjected to this, but the fact is, I'll gladly pay the cost (as a consumer) to have Apple err too much sometimes in favor of style over substance, than have there be very little style::cough:: Dell::cough:: at all. (Recall the first iPod and how much it was panned. Sometimes, style LEADS to substance.)
You're a coward for posting anonymously, you don't know that "invidious" is not a word, you toss out "all the research" without citing anything (meanwhile there HAS been research that shows that allowing prostitution prevents rapes... numbskull), and basically, I guarantee that you are the least-fun person at any social gathering.
The reason the "porn industry" is being so successful is precisely because the prevailing culture represses overt expression of sexuality. So it must go covert, and like all repressed things, when they are released they go way over-the-top. It's denial, man.
Also, in case you bothered reading up on it, it's actually very difficult to define pornography.
You should try this thing called Windows. Every update slows down your hardware to a new crawl, while every OS X update has sped up all my machines.
I call bull. I have a G4/733, WELL over 3 years old, in fact I think it's over 5 years old or more, that is running the latest and greatest, and very USABLE. Can't say this about any Windows installation I've seen. You just need to scrape yourself together some more cash and get a used (but newer) Mac, man.
Of course..... the question boils down to "is intelligence a physical process?" Everything we know about the brain's operation says that the answer is a resounding "yes"
You are right that that is the essential question. I am a little amused at everyone's assumption that the entirety of life can be boiled down into physical processes, however. I can't explain it but in my 34 years on this earth, having been a psych major and a CS minor with a concentration in biopsych and evolution and having taken a keen interest in life in all its forms since my earliest memory of reading Ranger Ricks and National Geographics and watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, having family pets and volunteering for Zoo Crew and whatnot... even having played with things like Conway's Game of Life, read about Rodney Brooks' MIT robots with "emergent" behavior, having devoured every AI simulation and game that I can get my hands on over the years... my gut tells me that there is more, there is some kind of spark to it all, to all living things. If this very idea is turning you off, then perhaps your mind is a little too closed... But my current opinion is this:
Life... genuinely surprises, in a way that a calculated simulation... can't.
Though I do think the exercise in attempting to do this will be VERY educational. Hey, and if we pull it off... I stand corrected. But I think it is very foolish to assume "Of course".
If everything could be explained by physical processes, then we should also be able to create life in a test tube, and we have yet to pull that stunt off either... and frankly, I don't think we will, and that even a simple bacterium that is able to reproduce may remain forever out of our reach. Again, this is more a hunch than a proof... though again, I think the exercise in attempting to do so will ALSO be very educational.
I have a favorite anecdote from this really awesome book. The crew (which was on a tugboat in the middle of the ocean that became a popular seagull resting place) was attempting to figure out a way to keep seagulls from pooping all over the deck and making it dangerously slippery. One of them thought to rig an electric line around the whole boat where the seagulls perched. If too many were resting, they'd throw the switch and away the seagulls would go. They built it and it worked exactly as advertised. They were very happy with themselves for coming up with this. However, a couple of weeks later, an interesting development occurred. On an otherwise typical day, the seagulls were getting too numerous again and someone threw the switch. All of them flew away... save for one, who had lifted its leg. By lifting its leg it had broken the circuit through its body, preventing it from being shocked. They released the switch, the seagull lowered its leg. They threw the switch again, it raised its other leg... The following day, fully HALF the seagulls had learned to perform this feat (no pun intended). By the next day the crew found that they were coordinating Synchronized Seagull Foot-Lifting instead of actually shooing birds away, when they threw the power.
And this is exactly the type of "surprise" I'm referring to.;) A genuinely creative solution to a never-before-encountered problem. Again, if I'm wrong... Great. Perhaps it was just a random walk through meatspace that caused them to stumble upon this solution, realize it, store it in the wet memory banks, and communicate it to the others, per whatever punishment/reward system in their brain directed them to. But I still think you're being more presumptuous than you think.
I know this probably smacks of metaphysics, spirituality, all that gross bathwater that we dismiss with creationism (and boy, do I dismiss creationism...), or at least, it hints at one more fundamental aspect of life that we perhaps have missed. But maybe there's still a baby there. Again, just a gut feeling...
...anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know was attributed to you.
Anyone who googles my name will find out that I'm a hardcore geek. A while back I took pains to remove my last name from all my online presences but it was largely too late. This is hopefully not that bad for jobs, its impact on my dating life is something I wish I could measure however;)
First off, I appreciate your notion of love above all. I think you're attacking a straw man though. You assume that a person who could remotely fathom financials in a loving relationship clearly values wealth over the other person. I call bullshit.
My net worth is around $450,000 at 33. This is based on a lifetime of work which started in junior high school.
Of all the women I've dated, the 2 women I was in love with were in $20,000 credit card debt, and $0 savings, respectively. (And the 20 grand in the hole chick was the much more successful of the two, at least career-wise!)
Obviously I don't care about the woman's income when I go about dating, but I'd have to be smoking a serious batch of jane to ever consider marriage with these women without a prenup. Try to imagine it. Not to mention, my parents would absolutely kill me.
My sister married a great guy with a really poor family. The house is in her name. That's how we resolved it in her case;)
You and your beloved must both not have much money for you to be able to say something like that. The sentiment is sweet, though.
(That's what I believe, anyway; at a fundamental level, life is something unique that cannot entirely be modeled via biochemical process modeling. Still can't wait to see the results once this gets better...)
I have been thinking about the "dream house" ever since I read a National Geographic article about energy-efficient homes as a little kid during the 70's energy crisis. Necessity, the mother of invention and all that.
And so I'd love to have a house with most if not all of the floors underground, with sunlight piped in via mirrors or fiber optics or skylights. The surrounding earth would make a fantastic insulator/buffer in the summer and winter. Some greenery, lots of wiring and wireless, cozy furniture. A massive media server (check!). Four-poster queen-size bed. Hot tub.
Trees up top, with a swimming pool, and a big slide and diving board. A trail nearby to run or cycle down, which goes by the water. A beach nearby would be very nice. With my future catamaran moored nearby.
I just like the idea of having an unconventional home that just so happens to be more energy-efficient. I still have an old Apple poster somewhere based on the Life is Hell characters (Groening's other work) that illustrates the "ideal dorm". I loved reading about those abandoned missile silos in the midwest that were resold as semi-furnished residences.
Yeah, that's why I recommended GraphicConverter, because it has a lot of those features including some of the batch processing. It's also been around on Macs forever.
I didn't know about Xee. Thanks for the tip. Preview.app has now been relegated to "fancy PDF viewer";)
I use Vonage as my home line, and I have yet to get any telemarketer calls to that or to my cellphone. I suppose it can be seen as a side-benefit.
I've had zero problems with the Vonage service. (Then again, I pay for extra upload bandwidth from my provider, Comcast, because I'm a heavy Internet user.)
Yeah, this is a load of bullshit, forcing people to use Windows on a Thinkpad when there's a perfectly good alternate laptop to be had.
This industry was way more fucking interesting before the consensus decided that the Great Computer Wars were over and we should just topple over to Microsoft's whims.
I can't tell what it is other than some sort of media viewer (i try to remain as pc-free as possible), but you might want to look at a combination of Preview.app, VLC and GraphicConverter, a venerable Mac app.
Re:There are still games for gamers low on time
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Flashback NES
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· Score: 1
I almost exclusively play the Desert Combat Final mod for BF1942 and the people on those servers are constantly bitching about how bad BF2 is compared to the gameplay in this mod. This is what I'm basing this on. If you haven't tried the DC mod, which is what inspired BF2 in the first place, you don't really have a say.
No, really, I think I'm onto something. I actually don't see what the debate is. Here's how I have reconciled these things for myself, and I try to tell as many people as I can these ideas, to see what they think. I have been honing these arguments for some time, and if I were to die tomorrow, these are the ideas I would like to leave behind.
1) Creation, evolution, origin Sen. Buttars is offended by the idea that we are "descendants of a 'lesser' life form". Granted, it doesn't appeal to our "On High" sensibilities, does it? But I also find offensive the idea that God clumsily used physical hands (!) to shape Adam and Eve and the rest of the lifeforms on Earth. I think it is a MUCH more beautiful idea, that God created the physical laws of the Universe that allow (nay, encourage) life to eventually exist in its present form. And that God then took a day off, and let things run their course, which might include effects that look a lot like evolution. So they are in fact not incompatible, when looked at in a certain light, unless you believe in spontaneous creation, which I touch on below.
2) Fear of the "Homosexual Agenda" Ruining the Reproductive Capacity of our Children Wow, what a sticky issue. I will first shoot down the "it's unnatural" argument. First, I will refer you to the book Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl, which has a pretty solid bank of evidence that most of the species on this planet not only engage in behavior that looks quite homosexual (previously sometimes categorized as "dominance" behavior, etc.), it's a fixed percentage of the population per species, and it never seems to go over 50%. Varies from 2% to 50% or something. This book so effectively shoots down this argument that I'm sure it has been categorized as homosexual propaganda in certain circles. The best part for me was the "devastating examination in chapter 3 of bigotry in the biological sciences in over two hundred years of observations of animal homosexuality" (quote from review). So anyway, then one has to ask, how can this be? How can a behavioral trait that results in no offspring get passed down genetically? Well, the answers from Genome by Matt Ridley seem to suggest, it isn't (that book is incredibly awesome, by the way- VERY RECOMMENDED geek read!). The evidence seems to suggest overall that homosexuality (in a game theory sense) is a "biological cost" side-effect of making the HETEROSEXUAL opposite sexes more attractive to each other. So the net overall effect is that more, and more diverse, children are produced, than if the sexual dimorphism process was not as effective (and creating homosexual children as a side-effect).
Now I will shoot down the "it's disgusting" argument. Let's go back to a time, 1st grade. I started to like girls (without asking why). Yet if someone had told me about heterosexual sex, I guarantee my reaction would have been "I put what where? GROSS!!!! It's stinky down there!" * And, it is;) But fast-forward a few years, and suddenly all that stuff starts to seem appealing, and I started dreaming about the things that earlier I thought were disgusting. I didn't ask for the dreams, or the inclination- it was just there. And so this is how I think of homosexuality. No gay person decides to be gay- not subconsciously, anyway. Who wants all that extra aggravation in life? Nevertheless they're just drawn to it, as surely as I'm drawn to women, and perhaps just as powerfully. If it is gross to you, it's only because you've been biologically conditioned to think heterosexual sex is not gross. Which, when you really think about it and take away your horniness for a sec, it kinda still is. The best kind, anyway;)
Lastly, I have a partial answer for "the Bible says it's wrong" argument. Refer to
There are still games for gamers low on time
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Flashback NES
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· Score: 1
Older gamers (such as myself, 33) have other demands on their time yet still want to get a quick game in now and then.
I've gotten hooked on Desert Combat, a mod for Battlefield 1942. (I'm aware of Battlefield 2, but I'm on a Mac so this is what I get, I console myself with reports that Battlefield 2 gameplay is not so great hehe) I can hop in, play a map or 2, a couple rounds, and be out in 20-30 minutes. Extremely fun gaming for the time investment, and it naturally ends after each round, during which you have about 2 minutes during level-load/respawn time to reality-check yourself and quit, instead of playing another round.
I do love roleplaying games too (my faves ever are Angband, Fallout 2, Neverwinter and WoW) but I stay away from them lately, as you fire up an RPG and suddenly it's 15 hours later, and I can't afford to have that much time taken away from other stuff.
As I watched, my nephew (5) had the genius idea to search Google for "boobies".
That's right. Five years old. Boobies.
I know it sounds crazy in hindsight, but my exposure to pr0n as a kid was more or less "naturally" limited to whatever I could find run-over on the side of the road when I was biking around the neighborhood.
As I made a mad dash for the computer from across the room as he hit the Return key in order to try to hide the images that are, well, not just boobies, let's just put it that way, my nephew got all excited. (At both my reaction, and at whatever he could make out on-screen.)
Pandora was unleashed. I bought my sister a NetNanny from Staples...
Thank you for giving another Muslim perspective. It is very clear that MUCH more communication between the West and the Muslim world is necessary. I don't think open propaganda is going to cut it, either.
I own an OS X machine but I'm kind of a tinkerer and I'd love to install it in an emulation environment like Q (which incidentally is the first released and working Intel-on-Intel emulator for OS X, with at least some of the expected performance gain over emulating Windows on PowerPC) to try it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Please be careful with the exercise you mentioned. I once gave myself a bulging disc after I was already working out and tried that machine and thought "hey, this is easy!" and did a bunch of reps (probably while jacked up on endorphins). Two days later I was in excruciating pain with psiatic nerve pain shooting down my leg. MRI said my L5S1 was nearly busted.
Turns out that your discs have 13 layers but only the last one has nerve endings in it. The gel at the center pushed through all the rest due to lifelong bad sitting posture (jut your butt out when you sit up, don't slouch in the chair like I tended to do!!). I am a fairly prototypical geek (spend a lot of time in a sedentary position) so I highly advise anyone younger than me (34, just turned today) who hasn't had back problems yet to do the bridge exercises mentioned elsewhere in the replies here, every day or evening. 10 reps of raise, hold, one leg up/down, other leg up/down, lower. They come from yoga and help me to control the back issues greatly! (that plus mild exercise). While you're at it you should also do some situps as so-called "core strength" (torso muscles) helps a lot towards fitness.
All this I learned from my physical therapist (very good) who I got for the bulging disc.
Most non-geeks who are "naturally physically active" don't have this issue as their back muscles get strengthened naturally. Me, I have to treat exercise like "brushing my teeth" and do it out of health and a bit of vanity, not so much because it's fun or because I feel like doing it. It does feel good afterwards, however.
Describe what you mean by "future status".
Financial? Social? Intellectual? Number of happy kids? Books published?
There are examples of people who excel in one of these but not the others. And I assume you don't just mean "financial".
So what do you mean by "status" and moreover, how is it not subjective?
Wasn't SQL Server largely developed within Microsoft's walls? It's a very decent database product.
.NET and C#? The COM object model? The registry? ::snicker:: the Start menu?
Analysis Services is an excellent tool to explore multidimensional datacubes (data mining).
Flight Simulator was pretty groundbreaking at some point.
ASP? VB?
And just so you know, this is from a Macintosh fanboy (with a lot of Windows experience), been using Macs (unfortunately not always for work- i'm a web developer) since December 1984.
Gotta give em a FEW props...
I stand corrected on the word. Learn something every day. ;)
I see you're still an aptly-named anonymous coward tho. Must suck to have to keep checking back to see if anyone paid any attention. Stand up for what you believe in. You know, the whole "I may not agree with what you say" thing.
A proper discussion of pornography is outside the scope of my time, but to use the best definition I can come up with:
"the sexually explicit depiction of persons, in words or images, created with the primary, proximate aim, and reasonable hope, of eliciting significant sexual arousal on the part of the consumer of such materials."
Wow, man (or woman, as it were). You were actually offended by the ol' "wardrobe malfunction". I would have to say that I found the "wardrobe malfunction" neither arousing, nor explicit. In fact I was quite disgusted by the whole publicity stunt. And therein lies the problem.
I submit again that you are probably an asexual party-pooper who was raised under extremely repressive rules. I'm guessing a Bible-belt female, never married. I am sorry that you will never be able to feel that you can fully express yourself sexually and lighten up about it all.
1) Clone vendors
::cough:: Dell ::cough:: at all. (Recall the first iPod and how much it was panned. Sometimes, style LEADS to substance.)
The clone vendors actually INCREASED total Mac market share while they were around, but 99% of the press absolutely refused over and over again to report on anything but Apple's losing share (and I was reading a lot of the press at the time). This was thus a major (and inaccurate) perception problem that was hurting the Mac market on the whole. Thus Apple's kibosh move (and believe me, I was VERY sorry to see PowerComputing, and their awesome ad campaigns, go with it).
2) Puck mouse.
Wow, that's a ridiculous reason...
Yeah, we all hated it immediately, but you know what? 20 bucks later and you get a microsoft 2-button wheelmouse optical that was fully-supported already in the OS. One could argue that Apple spent far too long in "2-button-mouse denial" and that a new iMac owner shouldn't have had to be subjected to this, but the fact is, I'll gladly pay the cost (as a consumer) to have Apple err too much sometimes in favor of style over substance, than have there be very little style
You're a coward for posting anonymously, you don't know that "invidious" is not a word, you toss out "all the research" without citing anything (meanwhile there HAS been research that shows that allowing prostitution prevents rapes... numbskull), and basically, I guarantee that you are the least-fun person at any social gathering.
The reason the "porn industry" is being so successful is precisely because the prevailing culture represses overt expression of sexuality. So it must go covert, and like all repressed things, when they are released they go way over-the-top. It's denial, man.
Also, in case you bothered reading up on it, it's actually very difficult to define pornography.
You should try this thing called Windows. Every update slows down your hardware to a new crawl, while every OS X update has sped up all my machines.
I call bull. I have a G4/733, WELL over 3 years old, in fact I think it's over 5 years old or more, that is running the latest and greatest, and very USABLE. Can't say this about any Windows installation I've seen. You just need to scrape yourself together some more cash and get a used (but newer) Mac, man.
Of course..... the question boils down to "is intelligence a physical process?" Everything we know about the brain's operation says that the answer is a resounding "yes"
;) A genuinely creative solution to a never-before-encountered problem. Again, if I'm wrong... Great. Perhaps it was just a random walk through meatspace that caused them to stumble upon this solution, realize it, store it in the wet memory banks, and communicate it to the others, per whatever punishment/reward system in their brain directed them to. But I still think you're being more presumptuous than you think.
You are right that that is the essential question. I am a little amused at everyone's assumption that the entirety of life can be boiled down into physical processes, however. I can't explain it but in my 34 years on this earth, having been a psych major and a CS minor with a concentration in biopsych and evolution and having taken a keen interest in life in all its forms since my earliest memory of reading Ranger Ricks and National Geographics and watching Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, having family pets and volunteering for Zoo Crew and whatnot... even having played with things like Conway's Game of Life, read about Rodney Brooks' MIT robots with "emergent" behavior, having devoured every AI simulation and game that I can get my hands on over the years... my gut tells me that there is more, there is some kind of spark to it all, to all living things. If this very idea is turning you off, then perhaps your mind is a little too closed... But my current opinion is this:
Life... genuinely surprises, in a way that a calculated simulation... can't.
Though I do think the exercise in attempting to do this will be VERY educational. Hey, and if we pull it off... I stand corrected. But I think it is very foolish to assume "Of course".
If everything could be explained by physical processes, then we should also be able to create life in a test tube, and we have yet to pull that stunt off either... and frankly, I don't think we will, and that even a simple bacterium that is able to reproduce may remain forever out of our reach. Again, this is more a hunch than a proof... though again, I think the exercise in attempting to do so will ALSO be very educational.
I have a favorite anecdote from this really awesome book. The crew (which was on a tugboat in the middle of the ocean that became a popular seagull resting place) was attempting to figure out a way to keep seagulls from pooping all over the deck and making it dangerously slippery. One of them thought to rig an electric line around the whole boat where the seagulls perched. If too many were resting, they'd throw the switch and away the seagulls would go. They built it and it worked exactly as advertised. They were very happy with themselves for coming up with this. However, a couple of weeks later, an interesting development occurred. On an otherwise typical day, the seagulls were getting too numerous again and someone threw the switch. All of them flew away... save for one, who had lifted its leg. By lifting its leg it had broken the circuit through its body, preventing it from being shocked. They released the switch, the seagull lowered its leg. They threw the switch again, it raised its other leg... The following day, fully HALF the seagulls had learned to perform this feat (no pun intended). By the next day the crew found that they were coordinating Synchronized Seagull Foot-Lifting instead of actually shooing birds away, when they threw the power.
And this is exactly the type of "surprise" I'm referring to.
I know this probably smacks of metaphysics, spirituality, all that gross bathwater that we dismiss with creationism (and boy, do I dismiss creationism...), or at least, it hints at one more fundamental aspect of life that we perhaps have missed. But maybe there's still a baby there. Again, just a gut feeling...
...anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know was attributed to you.
;)
Anyone who googles my name will find out that I'm a hardcore geek. A while back I took pains to remove my last name from all my online presences but it was largely too late. This is hopefully not that bad for jobs, its impact on my dating life is something I wish I could measure however
First off, I appreciate your notion of love above all. I think you're attacking a straw man though. You assume that a person who could remotely fathom financials in a loving relationship clearly values wealth over the other person. I call bullshit.
;)
My net worth is around $450,000 at 33. This is based on a lifetime of work which started in junior high school.
Of all the women I've dated, the 2 women I was in love with were in $20,000 credit card debt, and $0 savings, respectively. (And the 20 grand in the hole chick was the much more successful of the two, at least career-wise!)
Obviously I don't care about the woman's income when I go about dating, but I'd have to be smoking a serious batch of jane to ever consider marriage with these women without a prenup. Try to imagine it. Not to mention, my parents would absolutely kill me.
My sister married a great guy with a really poor family. The house is in her name. That's how we resolved it in her case
You and your beloved must both not have much money for you to be able to say something like that. The sentiment is sweet, though.
Neverball wikipedia entry
Neverball homepage
Free fun nonviolent gender-free multiplatform marble game, not too steep requirements, has a golf mode that is pretty fun.
this one, and then this one. ;)
/flame-off
//kept pushing my host to install PHP5 for months, before I got on the train
Discuss. ;)
(That's what I believe, anyway; at a fundamental level, life is something unique that cannot entirely be modeled via biochemical process modeling. Still can't wait to see the results once this gets better...)
I have been thinking about the "dream house" ever since I read a National Geographic article about energy-efficient homes as a little kid during the 70's energy crisis. Necessity, the mother of invention and all that.
And so I'd love to have a house with most if not all of the floors underground, with sunlight piped in via mirrors or fiber optics or skylights. The surrounding earth would make a fantastic insulator/buffer in the summer and winter. Some greenery, lots of wiring and wireless, cozy furniture. A massive media server (check!). Four-poster queen-size bed. Hot tub.
Trees up top, with a swimming pool, and a big slide and diving board. A trail nearby to run or cycle down, which goes by the water. A beach nearby would be very nice. With my future catamaran moored nearby.
I just like the idea of having an unconventional home that just so happens to be more energy-efficient. I still have an old Apple poster somewhere based on the Life is Hell characters (Groening's other work) that illustrates the "ideal dorm". I loved reading about those abandoned missile silos in the midwest that were resold as semi-furnished residences.
Yeah, that's why I recommended GraphicConverter, because it has a lot of those features including some of the batch processing. It's also been around on Macs forever.
;)
I didn't know about Xee. Thanks for the tip. Preview.app has now been relegated to "fancy PDF viewer"
I use Vonage as my home line, and I have yet to get any telemarketer calls to that or to my cellphone. I suppose it can be seen as a side-benefit.
I've had zero problems with the Vonage service. (Then again, I pay for extra upload bandwidth from my provider, Comcast, because I'm a heavy Internet user.)
I just played a viciously competitive round of Desert Combat. I have nary a killing spree nerve left in me. ;)
Yeah, this is a load of bullshit, forcing people to use Windows on a Thinkpad when there's a perfectly good alternate laptop to be had.
This industry was way more fucking interesting before the consensus decided that the Great Computer Wars were over and we should just topple over to Microsoft's whims.
I can't tell what it is other than some sort of media viewer (i try to remain as pc-free as possible), but you might want to look at a combination of Preview.app, VLC and GraphicConverter, a venerable Mac app.
I almost exclusively play the Desert Combat Final mod for BF1942 and the people on those servers are constantly bitching about how bad BF2 is compared to the gameplay in this mod. This is what I'm basing this on. If you haven't tried the DC mod, which is what inspired BF2 in the first place, you don't really have a say.
No, really, I think I'm onto something. I actually don't see what the debate is. Here's how I have reconciled these things for myself, and I try to tell as many people as I can these ideas, to see what they think. I have been honing these arguments for some time, and if I were to die tomorrow, these are the ideas I would like to leave behind.
;) But fast-forward a few years, and suddenly all that stuff starts to seem appealing, and I started dreaming about the things that earlier I thought were disgusting. I didn't ask for the dreams, or the inclination- it was just there. And so this is how I think of homosexuality. No gay person decides to be gay- not subconsciously, anyway. Who wants all that extra aggravation in life? Nevertheless they're just drawn to it, as surely as I'm drawn to women, and perhaps just as powerfully. If it is gross to you, it's only because you've been biologically conditioned to think heterosexual sex is not gross. Which, when you really think about it and take away your horniness for a sec, it kinda still is. The best kind, anyway ;)
1) Creation, evolution, origin
Sen. Buttars is offended by the idea that we are "descendants of a 'lesser' life form". Granted, it doesn't appeal to our "On High" sensibilities, does it? But I also find offensive the idea that God clumsily used physical hands (!) to shape Adam and Eve and the rest of the lifeforms on Earth. I think it is a MUCH more beautiful idea, that God created the physical laws of the Universe that allow (nay, encourage) life to eventually exist in its present form. And that God then took a day off, and let things run their course, which might include effects that look a lot like evolution. So they are in fact not incompatible, when looked at in a certain light, unless you believe in spontaneous creation, which I touch on below.
2) Fear of the "Homosexual Agenda" Ruining the Reproductive Capacity of our Children
Wow, what a sticky issue.
I will first shoot down the "it's unnatural" argument. First, I will refer you to the book Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl, which has a pretty solid bank of evidence that most of the species on this planet not only engage in behavior that looks quite homosexual (previously sometimes categorized as "dominance" behavior, etc.), it's a fixed percentage of the population per species, and it never seems to go over 50%. Varies from 2% to 50% or something. This book so effectively shoots down this argument that I'm sure it has been categorized as homosexual propaganda in certain circles. The best part for me was the "devastating examination in chapter 3 of bigotry in the biological sciences in over two hundred years of observations of animal homosexuality" (quote from review). So anyway, then one has to ask, how can this be? How can a behavioral trait that results in no offspring get passed down genetically? Well, the answers from Genome by Matt Ridley seem to suggest, it isn't (that book is incredibly awesome, by the way- VERY RECOMMENDED geek read!). The evidence seems to suggest overall that homosexuality (in a game theory sense) is a "biological cost" side-effect of making the HETEROSEXUAL opposite sexes more attractive to each other. So the net overall effect is that more, and more diverse, children are produced, than if the sexual dimorphism process was not as effective (and creating homosexual children as a side-effect).
Now I will shoot down the "it's disgusting" argument. Let's go back to a time, 1st grade. I started to like girls (without asking why). Yet if someone had told me about heterosexual sex, I guarantee my reaction would have been "I put what where? GROSS!!!! It's stinky down there!" * And, it is
Lastly, I have a partial answer for "the Bible says it's wrong" argument. Refer to
Older gamers (such as myself, 33) have other demands on their time yet still want to get a quick game in now and then.
I've gotten hooked on Desert Combat, a mod for Battlefield 1942. (I'm aware of Battlefield 2, but I'm on a Mac so this is what I get, I console myself with reports that Battlefield 2 gameplay is not so great hehe) I can hop in, play a map or 2, a couple rounds, and be out in 20-30 minutes. Extremely fun gaming for the time investment, and it naturally ends after each round, during which you have about 2 minutes during level-load/respawn time to reality-check yourself and quit, instead of playing another round.
I do love roleplaying games too (my faves ever are Angband, Fallout 2, Neverwinter and WoW) but I stay away from them lately, as you fire up an RPG and suddenly it's 15 hours later, and I can't afford to have that much time taken away from other stuff.
FPS's are easy-in, easy-out.
If they have any sense, they will catch on fast.
As I watched, my nephew (5) had the genius idea to search Google for "boobies".
That's right. Five years old. Boobies.
I know it sounds crazy in hindsight, but my exposure to pr0n as a kid was more or less "naturally" limited to whatever I could find run-over on the side of the road when I was biking around the neighborhood.
As I made a mad dash for the computer from across the room as he hit the Return key in order to try to hide the images that are, well, not just boobies, let's just put it that way, my nephew got all excited. (At both my reaction, and at whatever he could make out on-screen.)
Pandora was unleashed. I bought my sister a NetNanny from Staples...
Thank you for giving another Muslim perspective. It is very clear that MUCH more communication between the West and the Muslim world is necessary. I don't think open propaganda is going to cut it, either.
I own an OS X machine but I'm kind of a tinkerer and I'd love to install it in an emulation environment like Q (which incidentally is the first released and working Intel-on-Intel emulator for OS X, with at least some of the expected performance gain over emulating Windows on PowerPC) to try it out.