JSF could replace Struts one day, but not for a few years at the least. JSF is still in the early phases, whereas Struts has had several years to mature. I would definately keep an eye on JSF, but wouldn't recommend using it on non-experimental sites for a while.
Maybe if we trot out the ol' "Al Gore invented X" meme for a few more years it might get tired, but it sure isn't yet. Hey! I have an idea! Maybe we can even COMBINE CLICHES!
Have Al Gore invent the internet
???
Profit!
Hahahaha. I'm so clever. And let me just take a moment to make a joke about cigars and interns. And maybe even drop some comment about Vincent Foster, if I'm feeling really bona fide. MMMMMhmm.
Re:No idea what it does
on
Struts Kick Start
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Struts is an MVC-based framework for developing web apps. It helps to separate out the different layers of your application. You could use it with EJBs, if you wish, because it is mostly a means for separating out your business logic from your presentation.
Asking "should I be using it?" is difficult to answer, because it depends upon your requirements. But if you are developing a web application that requires a quick turnaround time and is easy to maintain, Struts will help you along.
It is therefore not necessarily a religious motivation under which Bush limited stem cell research. Not that it wasn't a religious motivation. But an experienced politician at the top of the game knows better than to try to legislate his religious ideas without a separate rational argument.
Here's what I want you to do: 1) Put on your propaganda-warning hat and pretend your George Orwell. Now, go back and reread the above sentences. Repeat until you realize what complete doublespeak that was. I don't think I've read anything that ironic in a long time.
If you don't want to protect human life as an embryo, why should your human life be protected now?
I don't. That's why I'm for the war in Iraq, for Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, pro-death penalty, don't have a problem with the CIA being legally able to kill US citizens, disapprove of educational or other measures which help stop the spread of AIDS, and, oh yes, perform ritualistic cannibalism. No profit is bad profit and God save the Republican Party.
You people would have a lot more credibility if you gave a fuck about life AFTER it comes tearing out of some bitches pussy. But fuuuuuck that. "We're conservative! We're pro-life! Unless, that is, you can breathe on yer own. Then, well, I don't want *my* tax dollars going to keeping you off the streets! And you can't put 'em in jail long enough to keep me happy!"
What the fuck ever man. A fetus is not a child. It's a salamander. It's got gills and a fucking tail. Do not care. Never will care. Gimme a cigarette, a pair of tongs, and a knocked up 14 year old. Let's go. "Let's take care of this baby so we can make another one. Mooohahahahaha."
I loathe this mentality. EVERYTHING exists for the bottom line, big business, small business, non profits, governments, my wallet, everything. Businesses, large or small, are in business to make money. Whoever said that was wrong? You seem to imply that it's morally wrong for a company to want to make money.
First off, you say this like it is a law of physics. This may be your interpretation of how the world works, but it most assuredly is not a hard fact. Second, under most of the time it is not wrong for a corporation or an individual to seek profit. But there are times when the right to make a profit infringes upon other rights, and the right to make a profit is outweighed by those conflicting interests.
To take an extreme example: If BigBadCo decides to increase its profits through indentured servitude of its employees it has come into conflict with individual rights of freedom and will (and should) be prevented from acting in such a manner.
Or to take a more modern example, take Enron. Enron lied to investors and regulators about its financial situation. There are laws which are set up to prevent this sort of thing, even though they increase the cost of doing business. However, these are costs that are required for a healthy marketplace.
Just because something interferes with the ability of a corporation to make a profit does not make it ipso facto a bad thing. There is more to life than profit.
The MVC model defines more communication options and knowledge between objects that Struts is able to provide. MVC is event driven, a Struts application is driven by actions (post or get).
By your definition, then, MVC is impossible to achieve over HTTP. You go on to say:
However MVC allows the model to interact with the view, and there is no way you can be sure you will be able to do so with a web page, because HTTP only supports polling and not pushing if you want to keep things browser independant.
First off I'm not sure you're comparing apples to apples here. MVC in the desktop sense has both different connotations and expectations than MVC in the web sense. Using simple session management (either through cookies or URL rewriting) you can have a de facto state-ful application over HTTP wherein the view is affected by the model.
You seem to be maintaining a rather purist definition of "MVC."
Frequently when matters of genetic manipulation make the news the media and other entities make objections based upon immorality. Ex: When cloning was more prevalent in the news, there were many people who were saying how wrong cloning a human would be, the huge implications it would have, etc.
However, after listening to their arguments I was left still wondering what exactly their objections were, apart from appeals to their moral beliefs. So: Could someone please give any actual reasons for opposing cloning?
Not a troll, it's just that usually whenever there is a moral objection to something there is at least a modicum of reason to back it up, even if it can be perceived as being somewhat specious. In the case of cloning I personally have seen none, specious or otherwise.
What a load of crap
on
Virtual Simerica
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations.
What a load of self-congratulatory bullshit. This might be hard for you to comprehend, but sometimes things that contradict reason happen. One of those is that people sometimes are more creative when they are given boundaries to work within. The Sims is a perfect case. Sure you can get all sanctimonious when you give someone GCC and ImageMagick and they don't do their own Sims, but if you give them the ability to use preexisting components and a rich universe to boot, you'd be surprised.
Well, good for you. Probably the reason Benadryl doesn't affect you is *because* you've done a lot of dope. Give the kid a break. Just because you're a stoned loser, it doesn't mean she is.
I have a master's degree, make &70,000 a year and have a 4 bedroom house on 2 acres of land. Fuck you.
The funny thing was, I was on drugs! I was on Benedryl, my allergy medication, so I was really out of it anyway. That's why my eyes were all red, because I have seasonal allergies. But no one believes me.
Mmmhmm.
Look, Ellen, I've done a lot of dope during my day. Bunch. Used to grow it, in fact. And I've taken Benadryl, too.
Not once has Benadryl made people think I'm high. Never. I've taken Benadryl, gone to work, nobody even knew. Weed makes people think I'm high. The bloodshot eyes, the lazy movements, the relaxed jaw and speaking style. Fuck, you're wearing a cotton pullover with a hood. Comfy clothes, man. Comfy clothes are all you care about wearing when you're stoned. Detective Rev. says that you were high as a fucking kite but can't admit it because you'll get in trouble.
Looking through the threads here I see two lines of thought:
Microsoft is a monopoly who has abused that status to charge unfair prices to the consumer. "Monopolies make the market inefficient."
How much profit Microsoft makes off of Windows (etc.) is irrelevant; they can (and should) charge as much as they want to for their products. "No profit is bad profit."
Those who are of the latter opinion seem immediately offended by outside influence upon corporate behavior, whether that influence comes from the legislature, the courts, or even public opinion. Companies, they seem to say, should be able to do whatever they they need in order to be profitable. In the case of Microsoft, this includes charging (arguably) much higher prices for their core products than the market would otherwise bear, or using their monopoly position to force other vendors out of business.
I, for one, reject this libertarian/apologist view of Microsoft's behavior. Markets function best when there is vigorous competition between different players, unabated by abusive monopolies. Microsoft is a monopoly; there are no other competitors for the PC OS and "Office" market, Linux be damned. Being a corporation, and therefore in reality a legal fiction, they can (and should) be made subject to laws dictating what behavior is acceptable. Their behavior has been highly unacceptable in this an many other cases.
Ant sucks. But its the least sucky option. The syntax is very inconsistent, and there's a lot of things you can't do easily (i.e. control flow). But for 90% of a build process, Ant will do what you need out of the box.
First you say "it sucks" then you say it works 90% of the time. Those seem contradictory (to me anyway.) What areas have you found Ant to be lacking in that lead you to believe it sucks?
I don't understand your previous message, specifically when you say that "evolution is the historic context of creation." Can you explain this a little further, please? It sounds interesting.
Most of the Christians in my family simply ignore anthropology, or make cynical comments about it.
Ignore it. Easiest route.
Wrap it up with some good ol' secular cynicism: "Cave men? Yeah, like these scientists. I mean, how do they think they know that? They're just making it up."
Wrap it up in the "God's testing our faith" meme that you see used to explain fossils, &c. According to this line of -- ahem -- reasoning, God put this evidence in the ground to test our faith. If you believe the evidence but don't believe the Bible, you fail the test. See also the "Carbon dating doesn't really work" meme.
Whatever the case they are extremely hesitant to take such evidence seriously enough to give it the thought that it deserves.
This has nothing to do with making money...
on
Expose on Insider Loans
·
· Score: 5, Informative
...and everything to do with unethical business practices.
Scan through that list on the first page of the article. You'll notice names like Enron, Dynegy, Tyco, WorldCom, and Adelphia. Executives are getting these loans, securing them with stock options, and when the options tank the companies have no choice but to write them off. Instead of profits going towards incrasing the skillset of their workforce, or dividends, or any other number causes that would actually benefit the company as a whole, this money is just being written off.
And these aren't small sums, either. We're talking about billions of dollars.
I wonder if you even read the article. If anything, it was somewhat favorable to Microsoft. They have had some executives who are no longer with the company but, through these insider loans, have been able to walk away with millions of dollars.
The PBS series "Frontline" did a show called "Bigger Than Enron" that has an excellent website to go along with the show. It contains interviews with many of the key players here, including former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, current chairman Arthur Pitt, and others.
It's acutally more robust than the B2.0 article, and goes into some detail about how politicians and businesspeople push for the SEC to have less power than it needs. At one point Levitt describes how the heads of different congressioinal committees were threating to pull funding entirely from the SEC if Levitt didn't quit pushing for accounting reforms, the exact reforms that turned out to be so necessary. This was in April of 2000, just before the all the shit started to hit the fan.
Coming on in conjunction with today's announcement by the Bush Administration that they don't want to give the SEC too much money, it's certainly not too much of a stretch to see a pattern develop.
Both Cactus and HttpUnit allow you to do unit tests on web components. Both are extensions of JUnit. Cactus allows you to do unit tests of servlets and JSPs, while HttpUnit allows for unit tests of the resulting HTML code. (Cactus also integrates HttpUnit to a certain degree.)
Obviously, these tools are targeted at Java development. I have less experience with HttpUnit than with Cactus, but I imagine it could be used as a general test suite.
Maybe they (we;-) ) are, but I don't recall any hardware stuff when I did my MCSE. In my work (I work as a consultant) I never deal with hardwareproblems, and I don't need to.
So, let me get this straight, because I just can't believe that I'm understanding you right. You are saying, straight-faced, that software people don't have to know about hardware issues, and don't need to? And you work on/with computers for a living?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA. Man, I've been giving MCSE's the benefit of the doubt up until now, mostly because I haven't had any direct experience with them. But you just sunk the ship, me ol' porkchop. If you can't, or worse don't want to, fix basic hardware problems, you are an employee I would not want in my organization. The memory stick wasn't plugged in all the way ferchrissakes! That's some basic, basic stuff. If you can't at least pop the top to your box and see that crap isn't plugged in like it's supposed to be, that "E" in your certification title is a complete and total misnomer.
I am beginning to believe that corruption is the Achille's heel of democracy. South American nations are getting very disenchanated with their own experiements in democracy for this very reason, and America is currently struglling with it at the highest levels of government. Money is a corrupting influence when tied in with politics, and I believe it goes against the very principles democracy is based upon.
I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM! It may not solve every problem, but strong, enforced CFR would at least help. The rich and powerful are vastly overrepresented in the legislatures, some effort at restoring balance is incredibly important. This is not about freedom, it is about the health of the democracy. I, for one, reject the notion that spending money is covered by the First Amendment. Speech is saying something. Spending money is buying something.
GOD how did Bush get elected President? I'm a Democrat, but if McCain had been on the ballot I would have voted for him in a heartbeat. Now we have a President that has spent over half of his time in office either on vacation or fund raising, or a combination thereof.
... sorry, I seem to have drifted from my original point...
I'm not being pedantic. "Cannot see" can mean "cannot prove" or "cannot experience" or "cannot find evidence for".
Pedantic, adj. - Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for formal rules
Your refusal to generalize the phrase "cannot see" to the more general case implied by the author was, indeed, pedantic.
I can't prove that Napoleon existed on the basis of a formula or scientific experiment either, yet I'd be chided by historians for presuming that Napoleon didn't exist on that basis. Sometimes math and experiment are the wrong tools for "seeing" or finding things.
Really? I beg to differ. My God man, have you never read anything about how detectives work? They use scientific methods to determine what happened in the past. Historians (certain kinds, anyway) are detectives who look further into the past. But they still seek clues, look at corresponding or contrasting evidence, and so forth. Yes, there is a foruma applied. Yes, it could be expressed mathematically. You would indeed be chided by historians, but for the exact opposite reasons for which you suppose.
Are you suggesting that Catholics from the Middle Ages hold all the same beliefs as modern day Baptists?
Fundamentally, Catholicism has changed very little over the centuries. The same can be said of most religions. Catholicism, for instance, has always believed that it is the true and holy Church spoken of in the scriptures, that priests are emissaries of god, and that the Pope is God's voice on earth. Even more fundamentally, they believe that Jesus is the son of God and that He will one day return to Earth. Things such as this have not changed and probably never will, because they are what define the religion and make it what it is.
No one is claiming that superficial changes have not occured. But core beliefs have been known to change in the realm of science, and certainly more frequently than such beliefs change in religion.
Some people think they are the only ones who are right, and all others are wrong. But this is not exclusive to religion or any other group for that matter.
Absolutely right. Everyone believes that their way is the One True Way, and that if everyone else just believed like they do then the world would be perfect. Science, done properly, recognizes this inherent desire in man and takes it into account. "You might believe it," the voice of Science says, "but you must prove using a certain set of criteria for it to be accepted in our community."
Or if you prefer your own light saber
on
An R2 Of Your Own
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Check these guys out. Came across this while searching Google. It's a fully-functional light saber. Of course, by fully functional I mean "has a glass blade" instead of a laser one, and "would break in actual combat" instead of "kicking ass." But still.
If the original poster isn't just lying or wasn't trippin' balls, I'd guess he saw a B2. I've seen B2's pass overhead at night, and they're exactly like what the article describes -- enormous black triangles that make no noise and appear to be moving very slowly (since they're frigging enormous).
Well, I was neither tripping nor am I lying. I considered the B2 as an answer, but it was flying perpindicular to the ground for about 20-30 seconds, and was not turning. As I have stated elsewhere in this thread, I believe in skepticism and appreciate yours. But what struck me as odd was a) the altitude of the craft, and b) it's slow speed. You are correct in saying that it is difficult to judge speed on something so large. It could very well have been a B2 or something similar.
Well, "disappear" may be overly dramatic. "Became too damn hard to see anymore" is more like it. It was difficult to see in the first place, and just became impossible to see after it turned and moved away from us.
Slashdot Mirror
JSF could replace Struts one day, but not for a few years at the least. JSF is still in the early phases, whereas Struts has had several years to mature. I would definately keep an eye on JSF, but wouldn't recommend using it on non-experimental sites for a while.
Maybe if we trot out the ol' "Al Gore invented X" meme for a few more years it might get tired, but it sure isn't yet. Hey! I have an idea! Maybe we can even COMBINE CLICHES!
Hahahaha. I'm so clever. And let me just take a moment to make a joke about cigars and interns. And maybe even drop some comment about Vincent Foster, if I'm feeling really bona fide. MMMMMhmm.
Struts is an MVC-based framework for developing web apps. It helps to separate out the different layers of your application. You could use it with EJBs, if you wish, because it is mostly a means for separating out your business logic from your presentation.
Asking "should I be using it?" is difficult to answer, because it depends upon your requirements. But if you are developing a web application that requires a quick turnaround time and is easy to maintain, Struts will help you along.
It is therefore not necessarily a religious motivation under which Bush limited stem cell research. Not that it wasn't a religious motivation. But an experienced politician at the top of the game knows better than to try to legislate his religious ideas without a separate rational argument.
Here's what I want you to do: 1) Put on your propaganda-warning hat and pretend your George Orwell. Now, go back and reread the above sentences. Repeat until you realize what complete doublespeak that was. I don't think I've read anything that ironic in a long time.
If you don't want to protect human life as an embryo, why should your human life be protected now?
I don't. That's why I'm for the war in Iraq, for Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, pro-death penalty, don't have a problem with the CIA being legally able to kill US citizens, disapprove of educational or other measures which help stop the spread of AIDS, and, oh yes, perform ritualistic cannibalism. No profit is bad profit and God save the Republican Party.
You people would have a lot more credibility if you gave a fuck about life AFTER it comes tearing out of some bitches pussy. But fuuuuuck that. "We're conservative! We're pro-life! Unless, that is, you can breathe on yer own. Then, well, I don't want *my* tax dollars going to keeping you off the streets! And you can't put 'em in jail long enough to keep me happy!"
What the fuck ever man. A fetus is not a child. It's a salamander. It's got gills and a fucking tail. Do not care. Never will care. Gimme a cigarette, a pair of tongs, and a knocked up 14 year old. Let's go. "Let's take care of this baby so we can make another one. Mooohahahahaha."
I loathe this mentality. EVERYTHING exists for the bottom line, big business, small business, non profits, governments, my wallet, everything. Businesses, large or small, are in business to make money. Whoever said that was wrong? You seem to imply that it's morally wrong for a company to want to make money.
First off, you say this like it is a law of physics. This may be your interpretation of how the world works, but it most assuredly is not a hard fact. Second, under most of the time it is not wrong for a corporation or an individual to seek profit. But there are times when the right to make a profit infringes upon other rights, and the right to make a profit is outweighed by those conflicting interests.
To take an extreme example: If BigBadCo decides to increase its profits through indentured servitude of its employees it has come into conflict with individual rights of freedom and will (and should) be prevented from acting in such a manner.
Or to take a more modern example, take Enron. Enron lied to investors and regulators about its financial situation. There are laws which are set up to prevent this sort of thing, even though they increase the cost of doing business. However, these are costs that are required for a healthy marketplace.
Just because something interferes with the ability of a corporation to make a profit does not make it ipso facto a bad thing. There is more to life than profit.
The MVC model defines more communication options and knowledge between objects that Struts is able to provide. MVC is event driven, a Struts application is driven by actions (post or get).
By your definition, then, MVC is impossible to achieve over HTTP. You go on to say:
However MVC allows the model to interact with the view, and there is no way you can be sure you will be able to do so with a web page, because HTTP only supports polling and not pushing if you want to keep things browser independant.
First off I'm not sure you're comparing apples to apples here. MVC in the desktop sense has both different connotations and expectations than MVC in the web sense. Using simple session management (either through cookies or URL rewriting) you can have a de facto state-ful application over HTTP wherein the view is affected by the model.
You seem to be maintaining a rather purist definition of "MVC."
Frequently when matters of genetic manipulation make the news the media and other entities make objections based upon immorality. Ex: When cloning was more prevalent in the news, there were many people who were saying how wrong cloning a human would be, the huge implications it would have, etc.
However, after listening to their arguments I was left still wondering what exactly their objections were, apart from appeals to their moral beliefs. So: Could someone please give any actual reasons for opposing cloning?
Not a troll, it's just that usually whenever there is a moral objection to something there is at least a modicum of reason to back it up, even if it can be perceived as being somewhat specious. In the case of cloning I personally have seen none, specious or otherwise.
Unlike dolls it requires less imagination and imposes more contraints. This is why adults like to play it: their imaginations are dead and they can't fathom living in a world without rules and regulations.
What a load of self-congratulatory bullshit. This might be hard for you to comprehend, but sometimes things that contradict reason happen. One of those is that people sometimes are more creative when they are given boundaries to work within. The Sims is a perfect case. Sure you can get all sanctimonious when you give someone GCC and ImageMagick and they don't do their own Sims, but if you give them the ability to use preexisting components and a rich universe to boot, you'd be surprised.
Ass. And I don't even play the game.
Well, good for you. Probably the reason Benadryl doesn't affect you is *because* you've done a lot of dope. Give the kid a break. Just because you're a stoned loser, it doesn't mean she is.
I have a master's degree, make &70,000 a year and have a 4 bedroom house on 2 acres of land. Fuck you.
The funny thing was, I was on drugs! I was on Benedryl, my allergy medication, so I was really out of it anyway. That's why my eyes were all red, because I have seasonal allergies. But no one believes me.
Mmmhmm.
Look, Ellen, I've done a lot of dope during my day. Bunch. Used to grow it, in fact. And I've taken Benadryl, too.
Not once has Benadryl made people think I'm high. Never. I've taken Benadryl, gone to work, nobody even knew. Weed makes people think I'm high. The bloodshot eyes, the lazy movements, the relaxed jaw and speaking style. Fuck, you're wearing a cotton pullover with a hood. Comfy clothes, man. Comfy clothes are all you care about wearing when you're stoned. Detective Rev. says that you were high as a fucking kite but can't admit it because you'll get in trouble.
Can't blame you, but can't believe you, either.
Looking through the threads here I see two lines of thought:
Those who are of the latter opinion seem immediately offended by outside influence upon corporate behavior, whether that influence comes from the legislature, the courts, or even public opinion. Companies, they seem to say, should be able to do whatever they they need in order to be profitable. In the case of Microsoft, this includes charging (arguably) much higher prices for their core products than the market would otherwise bear, or using their monopoly position to force other vendors out of business.
I, for one, reject this libertarian/apologist view of Microsoft's behavior. Markets function best when there is vigorous competition between different players, unabated by abusive monopolies. Microsoft is a monopoly; there are no other competitors for the PC OS and "Office" market, Linux be damned. Being a corporation, and therefore in reality a legal fiction, they can (and should) be made subject to laws dictating what behavior is acceptable. Their behavior has been highly unacceptable in this an many other cases.
Apples and oranges. He said that it is good for "90% of the build process", not that it fails 1 out of 10 times.
Ant sucks. But its the least sucky option. The syntax is very inconsistent, and there's a lot of things you can't do easily (i.e. control flow). But for 90% of a build process, Ant will do what you need out of the box.
First you say "it sucks" then you say it works 90% of the time. Those seem contradictory (to me anyway.) What areas have you found Ant to be lacking in that lead you to believe it sucks?
I don't understand your previous message, specifically when you say that "evolution is the historic context of creation." Can you explain this a little further, please? It sounds interesting.
Most of the Christians in my family simply ignore anthropology, or make cynical comments about it.
Whatever the case they are extremely hesitant to take such evidence seriously enough to give it the thought that it deserves.
...and everything to do with unethical business practices.
Scan through that list on the first page of the article. You'll notice names like Enron, Dynegy, Tyco, WorldCom, and Adelphia. Executives are getting these loans, securing them with stock options, and when the options tank the companies have no choice but to write them off. Instead of profits going towards incrasing the skillset of their workforce, or dividends, or any other number causes that would actually benefit the company as a whole, this money is just being written off.
And these aren't small sums, either. We're talking about billions of dollars.
I wonder if you even read the article. If anything, it was somewhat favorable to Microsoft. They have had some executives who are no longer with the company but, through these insider loans, have been able to walk away with millions of dollars.
The PBS series "Frontline" did a show called "Bigger Than Enron" that has an excellent website to go along with the show. It contains interviews with many of the key players here, including former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, current chairman Arthur Pitt, and others.
It's acutally more robust than the B2.0 article, and goes into some detail about how politicians and businesspeople push for the SEC to have less power than it needs. At one point Levitt describes how the heads of different congressioinal committees were threating to pull funding entirely from the SEC if Levitt didn't quit pushing for accounting reforms, the exact reforms that turned out to be so necessary. This was in April of 2000, just before the all the shit started to hit the fan.
Coming on in conjunction with today's announcement by the Bush Administration that they don't want to give the SEC too much money, it's certainly not too much of a stretch to see a pattern develop.
Both Cactus and HttpUnit allow you to do unit tests on web components. Both are extensions of JUnit. Cactus allows you to do unit tests of servlets and JSPs, while HttpUnit allows for unit tests of the resulting HTML code. (Cactus also integrates HttpUnit to a certain degree.)
Obviously, these tools are targeted at Java development. I have less experience with HttpUnit than with Cactus, but I imagine it could be used as a general test suite.
Maybe they (we ;-) ) are, but I don't recall any hardware stuff when I did my MCSE. In my work (I work as a consultant) I never deal with hardwareproblems, and I don't need to.
So, let me get this straight, because I just can't believe that I'm understanding you right. You are saying, straight-faced, that software people don't have to know about hardware issues, and don't need to? And you work on/with computers for a living?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA. Man, I've been giving MCSE's the benefit of the doubt up until now, mostly because I haven't had any direct experience with them. But you just sunk the ship, me ol' porkchop. If you can't, or worse don't want to, fix basic hardware problems, you are an employee I would not want in my organization. The memory stick wasn't plugged in all the way ferchrissakes! That's some basic, basic stuff. If you can't at least pop the top to your box and see that crap isn't plugged in like it's supposed to be, that "E" in your certification title is a complete and total misnomer.
I am beginning to believe that corruption is the Achille's heel of democracy. South American nations are getting very disenchanated with their own experiements in democracy for this very reason, and America is currently struglling with it at the highest levels of government. Money is a corrupting influence when tied in with politics, and I believe it goes against the very principles democracy is based upon.
I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM! It may not solve every problem, but strong, enforced CFR would at least help. The rich and powerful are vastly overrepresented in the legislatures, some effort at restoring balance is incredibly important. This is not about freedom, it is about the health of the democracy. I, for one, reject the notion that spending money is covered by the First Amendment. Speech is saying something. Spending money is buying something.
GOD how did Bush get elected President? I'm a Democrat, but if McCain had been on the ballot I would have voted for him in a heartbeat. Now we have a President that has spent over half of his time in office either on vacation or fund raising, or a combination thereof.
... sorry, I seem to have drifted from my original point ...
I'm not being pedantic. "Cannot see" can mean "cannot prove" or "cannot experience" or "cannot find evidence for".
Pedantic, adj. - Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for formal rules
Your refusal to generalize the phrase "cannot see" to the more general case implied by the author was, indeed, pedantic.
I can't prove that Napoleon existed on the basis of a formula or scientific experiment either, yet I'd be chided by historians for presuming that Napoleon didn't exist on that basis. Sometimes math and experiment are the wrong tools for "seeing" or finding things.
Really? I beg to differ. My God man, have you never read anything about how detectives work? They use scientific methods to determine what happened in the past. Historians (certain kinds, anyway) are detectives who look further into the past. But they still seek clues, look at corresponding or contrasting evidence, and so forth. Yes, there is a foruma applied. Yes, it could be expressed mathematically. You would indeed be chided by historians, but for the exact opposite reasons for which you suppose.
Are you suggesting that Catholics from the Middle Ages hold all the same beliefs as modern day Baptists?
Fundamentally, Catholicism has changed very little over the centuries. The same can be said of most religions. Catholicism, for instance, has always believed that it is the true and holy Church spoken of in the scriptures, that priests are emissaries of god, and that the Pope is God's voice on earth. Even more fundamentally, they believe that Jesus is the son of God and that He will one day return to Earth. Things such as this have not changed and probably never will, because they are what define the religion and make it what it is.
No one is claiming that superficial changes have not occured. But core beliefs have been known to change in the realm of science, and certainly more frequently than such beliefs change in religion.
Some people think they are the only ones who are right, and all others are wrong. But this is not exclusive to religion or any other group for that matter.
Absolutely right. Everyone believes that their way is the One True Way, and that if everyone else just believed like they do then the world would be perfect. Science, done properly, recognizes this inherent desire in man and takes it into account. "You might believe it," the voice of Science says, "but you must prove using a certain set of criteria for it to be accepted in our community."
Check these guys out. Came across this while searching Google. It's a fully-functional light saber. Of course, by fully functional I mean "has a glass blade" instead of a laser one, and "would break in actual combat" instead of "kicking ass." But still.
If the original poster isn't just lying or wasn't trippin' balls, I'd guess he saw a B2. I've seen B2's pass overhead at night, and they're exactly like what the article describes -- enormous black triangles that make no noise and appear to be moving very slowly (since they're frigging enormous).
Well, I was neither tripping nor am I lying. I considered the B2 as an answer, but it was flying perpindicular to the ground for about 20-30 seconds, and was not turning. As I have stated elsewhere in this thread, I believe in skepticism and appreciate yours. But what struck me as odd was a) the altitude of the craft, and b) it's slow speed. You are correct in saying that it is difficult to judge speed on something so large. It could very well have been a B2 or something similar.
In what manner did it dissapear?
Well, "disappear" may be overly dramatic. "Became too damn hard to see anymore" is more like it. It was difficult to see in the first place, and just became impossible to see after it turned and moved away from us.