Study in TFA isn't specific to Christianity, it just talks about faith in general; to what extent they've tried to have a representative sample of faith groups is unknown.
In the case of Christianity however, I find the attitude of clinging onto life like that to be a little bizarre. All you have to do to get to heaven according to the New Testament is to honestly and totally believe that Jesus Christ is your personal saviour and that he died for your sins. Hitler gets to heaven, Ghandi doesn't.
Of course, it's entirely possible that this study was constructed such that a third of the people of faith were Bhuddist! Don't they believe that all life is suffering anyway?
I'm going to stop before I rudely and ignorantly libel another religion. Like those Muslims, they'd probably bom^H^H^H^H...
That's my stance too, although I was being a bit cheeky really.
All people are irrational, even those of us who flatter ourselves otherwise. In fact even what we regard as rational is somewhat questionable because our capacity to be rational simply arises as a consequence of the physical structure of our brains.
Of course it's pointless to try to speculate or reason beyond our capacity to do so but it is worth keeping in mind that our notions of logic and reason aren't necessarily universal or able to lead us to fundamental truths about the actually existing real world that's out there beyond our senses.
Was that on the latest patch? I can't recall doing much sniping tbh, I had the most fun by creeping through the jungle to get close to the enemy and then picking up something like a cutting lathe and throwing it through the wall of a shack with KPA inside. Cue much screaming and gunfire:)
In fact thinking about it the version I pirated (see other post below for reason) before I eventually bought it a year later was a lot buggier. I remember that the helicopters had x-ray vision which was fixed by the latest patch.
The TFA reveals the study is about aggressive, end-of-life cancer care. We're talking about people who have metastatic cancer and are on their death beds, people who have zero percent chance of survival.
This study is saying that religious people are more likely to insist on non-palliative chemotherapy and mechanical respiration even though there's no chance of it succeeding. The study found these people were the least likely to have filled in a "do not resuscitate" order.
This could be a fear of death thing or it could just be a hope for a miracle. If it's the latter then surely it'd just be better to place your complete faith in God at that stage of the game?
I suppose you can't expect religious people to act rationally about these things though.
Crysis is definitely worth playing. It's just a glorified corridor shooter designed to sell the CryEngine but the corridors are wide bits of jungle that give you a reasonable degree of freedom. Except the alien bits, they suck. Try to pretend everything after meeting the aliens isn't really happening.
That the AI does a reasonable job of responding to how you're playing the game without the use of supernatural powers is what makes it fun. I originally pirated it after its release just to see if would run at acceptable settings on the gfx card I was using at the time (Hint to Crytek - I think most people who torrented and didn't buy were doing the same). I reached a certain point (the beach-head mission where you have to destroy the AA guns) and it slowed down to a crawl.
I bought both Crysis & Warhead on Steam shortly after upgrading my card and was surprised that enemies really did act differently on different playthroughs. In my first play I was trying to avoid combat (mainly due to frame-rate) but on my second I went in more gung-ho. This increased the number of enemy patrols I encountered further down the line; the KPA were clearly on a higher state of alert.
I pretty much agree with those criticism of FC2. I didn't think the checkpoints were quite that bad however - The most fun thing in FC2 is navigating across the map whilst avoiding checkpoints. The best way to do it is to use the rivers and just hurtle past the checkpoints. By the time they start shooting you're already well away!
Really? I found that enemies tended to spray their fire more wildly when I disappeared into the bushes, then I would just turn on stealth and dash across open ground to alternative cover. From there it was generally a case of watching them circle in on empty ground and tossing in a grenade when they were all bunched up in my previous position! I rate it as the best AI I've seen in any FPS.
They had scarily accurate aim even across long distances but I didn't find that too unrealistic: the enemies were all trained soldiers. Except the aliens. Crysis would've been far better without aliens.
FC2 was notorious for the enemies ability to see you through anything, they clearly didn't even attempt to solve the perfect aim / x-ray vision problem.
The best shooter in this regard is Crysis. The enemy AI can only see you over long distances if they happen to look in your direction through either binoculars or a scope and if you can't see them they can't see you, even through bushes.
I think most man in the UK can remember finding a porn mag in a wooded area as a teenager, it's a fairly standard right of passage. I remember there were some in some trees near a friends house and I recall that they sometimes appeared in the trees at the back of our school playing field. We used sticks to turn the pages, obviously.
It probably doesn't happen as much any more as kids send porn they've downloaded to each other via bluetooth on their phones - sometimes even to random strangers on the bus (personal experience).
here are plenty of women who are larger than plenty of men.
A common complaint I hear is that things like the bar-type seats you get for half sitting / leaning against at many bus stops are designed so they're positioned at the height of male bums. Women often find them uncomfortable unless they are taller than average.
If at some point in the future a man is medically manipulated to have a uterus, and he carries a baby to term and gives birth, then he is the proper target of the legislation.
In such a future then all gender distinctions would be truly meaningless.
And you're correct, the point I was making wrt maternity leave is that because a women physically has to give birth she should be entitled to extra time off to deal with the medical consequences of that.
I take your point that it would be ideal to write legislation in as gender-neutral a fashion as possible but I think my point still stands - men and women are in general physically different and the law should be framed in such a manner as to achieve equality of outcome despite those differences.
I don't think it's too constructive to try and anticipate a future where those differences are eliminated. It's always possible to get it wrong in unhelpful ways. As long as equality as is an issue in people's minds and the law reflects reality then it should be OK.
I can't tell if you're trolling because not only am I like that IRL, this is the internet. Anyway:
Separate but equal didn't work in the 1960s. We had a civil war over the idea of "treating people differently".
I gave an example of a man in a wheelchair. The point I was making is that when you're dealing with actually existing physical differences you should take account of those actually existing physical differences when making laws. If you don't you're not representing reality and then discrimination will occur.
Jim Crow wasn't about treating people differently in order to achieve equality, it was about treating people separately. A segregation approach to expectant mothers or people with certain disabilities would be saying that rather than having a lift to go upstairs they should have to work downstairs, but those facilities downstairs would be equal to the facilities upstairs.
What I'm saying is that people unable to use stairs should have a lift so they can go to the top floor. Everyone else can use the stairs because lifts cost money to use and maintain, also it's not like your waist will get smaller by itself!
See? Different but equal. Everybody gets to go upstairs.
You misunderstand, I'm not opposed to everyone paying, I'm opposed to insurance companies. Insurance is just a respectable form of gambling: you're betting that something bad will happen and the house is betting it'll all be OK. The house generally wins.
The fact that it's often very hard to prove what happened in an accident is the point I was trying to make regarding insurance companies taking people knock for knock.
I was arguing for a national insurance scheme for motorists; thinking about it some more the money raised could be used to offset things like road tax and fund other road improvements. It has the potential to be a massive cash cow for the state whilst reducing the overall financial burden on good motorists.
alt.binaries.porn? I haven't been on USEnet in years but in my day it was alt.binaries.pictures.erotica that had all the good stuff. I suppose those groups aren't really suited for films but I do recall some cross-posting of short, low resolution MPEGs and QuickTimes around the time Pentium's started to become popular.
I had a hardware (and hard-wearing!) MPEG decoder back in the day and so would occasionally sample those, over a 33.6kbps modem no less! That was all my local PoP supported, it was ages until I had 56k access.
Insurance is a massively inefficient means of solving this problem though. The issue is that good drivers shouldn't have to pay for bad drivers. If you have insurance and the other guy doesn't then you end up paying in the long run because that guy simply doesn't have what it takes to pay your insurance company. The insurance companies factor this into their prices and so in the long run the honest guys subsidise the dishonest ones; it gets worse.
Suppose the other guy does have insurance. Unless the incident was clearly their fault then your insurance companies are going to try to take you both knock for knock meaning you both lose your no claims bonus; you can still be honest and a good driver and lose out.
Insurance is basically a scam. Maybe the state should run it instead? It's a form of gambling after all. They could keep all the money they collect in a big pot and pay out claims from the interest, they could even treat it like a bond so payouts could come from bond repayments - it'd work if the money was being used in fiscally sound schemes that add value to the economy (I know!).
They could even give you some of your money back in the event that you get so old you're not safe to drive any more without actually causing an accident. It'd be a big incentive to get potentially dangerous old drivers off the road and give them the money they no doubt need for care.
OK, I see your point. Of course network providers can see what phone you're using so they offer an artificially low price for an "unlimited" data service on an iPhone because they know you can't possibly be using it as a modem.
In fact, given how the iPhone is locked down they probably could enable or disable the feature in software and thereby tie it to your price plan. Lame.
and have no Internet controls on any of our systems, which are mostly Linux based.
The girl probably uses a Windows PC. Most of the sites I've seen my younger relatives hanging out on use all sorts of random crap that's specific to Windows.
He's just looking for an ad filter, he's clearly stated that he doesn't want to censor the internet.
Good for him too, I started online at the age of twelve in 94' (NCSA Mosiac FTW!) and eventually figured out how to setup a USEnet client. Abpe.* and all its life lessons (women do that with horses??) followed. I made a bit of money by selling those lessons on floppy disk at school too, it was a step above the random porn mags that seem to litter all the woods in this country!
I never, ever see porn ads because I've got Adblock Plus installed in FF. If she prefers IE for some weird reason then just put an ad-filtering web-proxy on your network like Junkbuster.
Redirect all outbound connection attempts on port 80 through your router to that proxy and you'll be good to go. That way she won't have porn ads splashed in her face but she'll still be able to Google for hot guys with SafeSearch turned off:).
Galactica is having its best ever season for women, over half of the people watching are women.
One of my sisters who is older than me in her mid-30s recently told me that a friend of hers had shown her the first episode of Galactica and she found it gripping. I've been raving about the new BSG for ages but she just thought it was typical SF fluff when in fact its a dark, character and ideas driven story with strong female characters - just the sort of stuff a lot of women love.
Hopefully this is the direction they're going, more stuff like BSG, less of the other crud.
Caprica might be good, it might even be a sign of what they're trying to achieve - character driven science fiction stories rather than a lot of traditional scifi where the characters are just ciphers whose role is to just service the plot.
That dumb name doesn't leave me much hope though...
When it does, I imagine that turning it on will cost you $50/mo.
How though? How can your network control what features on your phone are turned on and turned off? Do they have a backdoor that lets them do that? Is that normal for phones in the USA?
As far as my network is concerned I'm just using my 3G / GPRS connection, they can't tell if it's me using an application on my phone or if I'm using my phone as a modem. My phone is opaque to them.
Actually the current form of radical individualism that's wrecking the global psyche has it's roots in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud's ideas, and those descended from them, have been used by all those either in or hoping to gain power in the Western world in order to manipulate and appeal to our irrational, subconscious desires so that we might buy their product or vote for them.
TL;DR: If this looks too long I doubt you can be bothered with 4hrs of archive footage and voice-over:) . If you're still interested, I highly recommend you download this and watch it - All of Curtis' documentaries are easily available on torrent sites and they're put out by the BBC who don't mind people downloading.
This eventually lead to focus groups where people were encouraged to freely express their irrational thoughts about products and ideas - psychoanalytical discussion groups about products instead of neurosis! Product development then shifted wholly over to this model and the psychoanalysts involved in this process thought they were doing good because they thought that a safer, more stable society would result.
This use of psychoanalysis as a means of control was eventually rejected by analysts who believed that attempts to control the self were immoral and that the inner self should be encouraged to express itself at all times. These ideas fed into the counter-culture of the 60s and perverted the revolutionary message of the classic left, changing the personal into the political. The idea spread that if people changed themselves then it would inevitably lead to a new form of society - of course this isn't true.
The collapse of the counter-culture turned the hippies of the 60s into the selfish me generation of the 80s. They grew up in a society that conditioned them to believe that self-fulfilment should be the ultimate aim of everyone and so of course they conditioned their kids to behave in the same way. Ironically this made people easier to control than ever as now damn near everyone in the UK, USA and other western countries is told from birth that there should be no guilt associated with getting whatever you want.
It's quite a compelling thesis and again, I highly recommend you watch it if you're interested in this topic. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a history of ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Study in TFA isn't specific to Christianity, it just talks about faith in general; to what extent they've tried to have a representative sample of faith groups is unknown.
In the case of Christianity however, I find the attitude of clinging onto life like that to be a little bizarre. All you have to do to get to heaven according to the New Testament is to honestly and totally believe that Jesus Christ is your personal saviour and that he died for your sins. Hitler gets to heaven, Ghandi doesn't.
Of course, it's entirely possible that this study was constructed such that a third of the people of faith were Bhuddist! Don't they believe that all life is suffering anyway?
I'm going to stop before I rudely and ignorantly libel another religion. Like those Muslims, they'd probably bom^H^H^H^H...
That's my stance too, although I was being a bit cheeky really.
All people are irrational, even those of us who flatter ourselves otherwise. In fact even what we regard as rational is somewhat questionable because our capacity to be rational simply arises as a consequence of the physical structure of our brains.
Of course it's pointless to try to speculate or reason beyond our capacity to do so but it is worth keeping in mind that our notions of logic and reason aren't necessarily universal or able to lead us to fundamental truths about the actually existing real world that's out there beyond our senses.
You know, after I hit submit and went to make dinner I realised my error. I can't believe it took someone over two hours to point out my mistake :)
Was that on the latest patch? I can't recall doing much sniping tbh, I had the most fun by creeping through the jungle to get close to the enemy and then picking up something like a cutting lathe and throwing it through the wall of a shack with KPA inside. Cue much screaming and gunfire :)
In fact thinking about it the version I pirated (see other post below for reason) before I eventually bought it a year later was a lot buggier. I remember that the helicopters had x-ray vision which was fixed by the latest patch.
The TFA reveals the study is about aggressive, end-of-life cancer care. We're talking about people who have metastatic cancer and are on their death beds, people who have zero percent chance of survival.
This study is saying that religious people are more likely to insist on non-palliative chemotherapy and mechanical respiration even though there's no chance of it succeeding. The study found these people were the least likely to have filled in a "do not resuscitate" order.
This could be a fear of death thing or it could just be a hope for a miracle. If it's the latter then surely it'd just be better to place your complete faith in God at that stage of the game?
I suppose you can't expect religious people to act rationally about these things though.
Crysis is definitely worth playing. It's just a glorified corridor shooter designed to sell the CryEngine but the corridors are wide bits of jungle that give you a reasonable degree of freedom. Except the alien bits, they suck. Try to pretend everything after meeting the aliens isn't really happening.
That the AI does a reasonable job of responding to how you're playing the game without the use of supernatural powers is what makes it fun. I originally pirated it after its release just to see if would run at acceptable settings on the gfx card I was using at the time (Hint to Crytek - I think most people who torrented and didn't buy were doing the same). I reached a certain point (the beach-head mission where you have to destroy the AA guns) and it slowed down to a crawl.
I bought both Crysis & Warhead on Steam shortly after upgrading my card and was surprised that enemies really did act differently on different playthroughs. In my first play I was trying to avoid combat (mainly due to frame-rate) but on my second I went in more gung-ho. This increased the number of enemy patrols I encountered further down the line; the KPA were clearly on a higher state of alert.
I pretty much agree with those criticism of FC2. I didn't think the checkpoints were quite that bad however - The most fun thing in FC2 is navigating across the map whilst avoiding checkpoints. The best way to do it is to use the rivers and just hurtle past the checkpoints. By the time they start shooting you're already well away!
Really? I found that enemies tended to spray their fire more wildly when I disappeared into the bushes, then I would just turn on stealth and dash across open ground to alternative cover. From there it was generally a case of watching them circle in on empty ground and tossing in a grenade when they were all bunched up in my previous position! I rate it as the best AI I've seen in any FPS.
They had scarily accurate aim even across long distances but I didn't find that too unrealistic: the enemies were all trained soldiers. Except the aliens. Crysis would've been far better without aliens.
FC2 was notorious for the enemies ability to see you through anything, they clearly didn't even attempt to solve the perfect aim / x-ray vision problem.
The best shooter in this regard is Crysis. The enemy AI can only see you over long distances if they happen to look in your direction through either binoculars or a scope and if you can't see them they can't see you, even through bushes.
I think most man in the UK can remember finding a porn mag in a wooded area as a teenager, it's a fairly standard right of passage. I remember there were some in some trees near a friends house and I recall that they sometimes appeared in the trees at the back of our school playing field. We used sticks to turn the pages, obviously.
It probably doesn't happen as much any more as kids send porn they've downloaded to each other via bluetooth on their phones - sometimes even to random strangers on the bus (personal experience).
here are plenty of women who are larger than plenty of men.
A common complaint I hear is that things like the bar-type seats you get for half sitting / leaning against at many bus stops are designed so they're positioned at the height of male bums. Women often find them uncomfortable unless they are taller than average.
If at some point in the future a man is medically manipulated to have a uterus, and he carries a baby to term and gives birth, then he is the proper target of the legislation.
In such a future then all gender distinctions would be truly meaningless.
And you're correct, the point I was making wrt maternity leave is that because a women physically has to give birth she should be entitled to extra time off to deal with the medical consequences of that.
I take your point that it would be ideal to write legislation in as gender-neutral a fashion as possible but I think my point still stands - men and women are in general physically different and the law should be framed in such a manner as to achieve equality of outcome despite those differences.
I don't think it's too constructive to try and anticipate a future where those differences are eliminated. It's always possible to get it wrong in unhelpful ways. As long as equality as is an issue in people's minds and the law reflects reality then it should be OK.
I can't tell if you're trolling because not only am I like that IRL, this is the internet. Anyway:
Separate but equal didn't work in the 1960s. We had a civil war over the idea of "treating people differently".
I gave an example of a man in a wheelchair. The point I was making is that when you're dealing with actually existing physical differences you should take account of those actually existing physical differences when making laws. If you don't you're not representing reality and then discrimination will occur.
Jim Crow wasn't about treating people differently in order to achieve equality, it was about treating people separately. A segregation approach to expectant mothers or people with certain disabilities would be saying that rather than having a lift to go upstairs they should have to work downstairs, but those facilities downstairs would be equal to the facilities upstairs.
What I'm saying is that people unable to use stairs should have a lift so they can go to the top floor. Everyone else can use the stairs because lifts cost money to use and maintain, also it's not like your waist will get smaller by itself!
See? Different but equal. Everybody gets to go upstairs.
You misunderstand, I'm not opposed to everyone paying, I'm opposed to insurance companies. Insurance is just a respectable form of gambling: you're betting that something bad will happen and the house is betting it'll all be OK. The house generally wins.
The fact that it's often very hard to prove what happened in an accident is the point I was trying to make regarding insurance companies taking people knock for knock.
I was arguing for a national insurance scheme for motorists; thinking about it some more the money raised could be used to offset things like road tax and fund other road improvements. It has the potential to be a massive cash cow for the state whilst reducing the overall financial burden on good motorists.
alt.binaries.porn? I haven't been on USEnet in years but in my day it was alt.binaries.pictures.erotica that had all the good stuff. I suppose those groups aren't really suited for films but I do recall some cross-posting of short, low resolution MPEGs and QuickTimes around the time Pentium's started to become popular.
I had a hardware (and hard-wearing!) MPEG decoder back in the day and so would occasionally sample those, over a 33.6kbps modem no less! That was all my local PoP supported, it was ages until I had 56k access.
Insurance is a massively inefficient means of solving this problem though. The issue is that good drivers shouldn't have to pay for bad drivers. If you have insurance and the other guy doesn't then you end up paying in the long run because that guy simply doesn't have what it takes to pay your insurance company. The insurance companies factor this into their prices and so in the long run the honest guys subsidise the dishonest ones; it gets worse.
Suppose the other guy does have insurance. Unless the incident was clearly their fault then your insurance companies are going to try to take you both knock for knock meaning you both lose your no claims bonus; you can still be honest and a good driver and lose out.
Insurance is basically a scam. Maybe the state should run it instead? It's a form of gambling after all. They could keep all the money they collect in a big pot and pay out claims from the interest, they could even treat it like a bond so payouts could come from bond repayments - it'd work if the money was being used in fiscally sound schemes that add value to the economy (I know!).
They could even give you some of your money back in the event that you get so old you're not safe to drive any more without actually causing an accident. It'd be a big incentive to get potentially dangerous old drivers off the road and give them the money they no doubt need for care.
OK, I see your point. Of course network providers can see what phone you're using so they offer an artificially low price for an "unlimited" data service on an iPhone because they know you can't possibly be using it as a modem.
In fact, given how the iPhone is locked down they probably could enable or disable the feature in software and thereby tie it to your price plan. Lame.
I like SciFi fluff, they have their own ghettos - everyone does!
RTFS:
and have no Internet controls on any of our systems, which are mostly Linux based.
The girl probably uses a Windows PC. Most of the sites I've seen my younger relatives hanging out on use all sorts of random crap that's specific to Windows.
Yea, I'm not a parent but when I am I'll only want my daughters looking at the highest quality pancakes.
He's just looking for an ad filter, he's clearly stated that he doesn't want to censor the internet.
Good for him too, I started online at the age of twelve in 94' (NCSA Mosiac FTW!) and eventually figured out how to setup a USEnet client. Abpe.* and all its life lessons (women do that with horses??) followed. I made a bit of money by selling those lessons on floppy disk at school too, it was a step above the random porn mags that seem to litter all the woods in this country!
I never, ever see porn ads because I've got Adblock Plus installed in FF. If she prefers IE for some weird reason then just put an ad-filtering web-proxy on your network like Junkbuster.
Redirect all outbound connection attempts on port 80 through your router to that proxy and you'll be good to go. That way she won't have porn ads splashed in her face but she'll still be able to Google for hot guys with SafeSearch turned off :).
Galactica is having its best ever season for women, over half of the people watching are women.
One of my sisters who is older than me in her mid-30s recently told me that a friend of hers had shown her the first episode of Galactica and she found it gripping. I've been raving about the new BSG for ages but she just thought it was typical SF fluff when in fact its a dark, character and ideas driven story with strong female characters - just the sort of stuff a lot of women love.
Hopefully this is the direction they're going, more stuff like BSG, less of the other crud.
Caprica might be good, it might even be a sign of what they're trying to achieve - character driven science fiction stories rather than a lot of traditional scifi where the characters are just ciphers whose role is to just service the plot.
That dumb name doesn't leave me much hope though...
When it does, I imagine that turning it on will cost you $50/mo.
How though? How can your network control what features on your phone are turned on and turned off? Do they have a backdoor that lets them do that? Is that normal for phones in the USA?
As far as my network is concerned I'm just using my 3G / GPRS connection, they can't tell if it's me using an application on my phone or if I'm using my phone as a modem. My phone is opaque to them.
Wha? How can a provider charge extra for using your phone as a modem? How on earth would they know?
I'm on a UK T-Mobile PAYG plan and I use my N95 as a modem all the time.
Actually the current form of radical individualism that's wrecking the global psyche has it's roots in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud's ideas, and those descended from them, have been used by all those either in or hoping to gain power in the Western world in order to manipulate and appeal to our irrational, subconscious desires so that we might buy their product or vote for them.
This argument was presented by Adam Curtis in his BBC documentary series The Century of the Self .
TL;DR: If this looks too long I doubt you can be bothered with 4hrs of archive footage and voice-over :) . If you're still interested, I highly recommend you download this and watch it - All of Curtis' documentaries are easily available on torrent sites and they're put out by the BBC who don't mind people downloading.
Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, used his uncle's ideas in order to sell things. He was responsible for, amongst other things, convincing women to start smoking by selling them cigarettes as symbols of feminine empowerment. The cliché that cars are advertised as penis extensions for men is also due to Bernays' advertising techniques, this was what he had in mind when advertising cars.
This eventually lead to focus groups where people were encouraged to freely express their irrational thoughts about products and ideas - psychoanalytical discussion groups about products instead of neurosis! Product development then shifted wholly over to this model and the psychoanalysts involved in this process thought they were doing good because they thought that a safer, more stable society would result.
This use of psychoanalysis as a means of control was eventually rejected by analysts who believed that attempts to control the self were immoral and that the inner self should be encouraged to express itself at all times. These ideas fed into the counter-culture of the 60s and perverted the revolutionary message of the classic left, changing the personal into the political. The idea spread that if people changed themselves then it would inevitably lead to a new form of society - of course this isn't true.
The collapse of the counter-culture turned the hippies of the 60s into the selfish me generation of the 80s. They grew up in a society that conditioned them to believe that self-fulfilment should be the ultimate aim of everyone and so of course they conditioned their kids to behave in the same way. Ironically this made people easier to control than ever as now damn near everyone in the UK, USA and other western countries is told from birth that there should be no guilt associated with getting whatever you want.
It's quite a compelling thesis and again, I highly recommend you watch it if you're interested in this topic. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a history of ideas.