Use challenge response - not for identity verification, just to make them burn some CPU time.
Setting aside for the moment the fact that some legitimate senders send 100k+ bulk emails (mailing lists for example), this still won't work. At all.
Haven't you heard about the MyDoom worm? It's a distributed method of sending spam. How is your scheme going to affect that? Pretty soon the spammer business model will necessarily include infecting millions of computers with worms to beat your scheme.
Golden Tee is a perfect example. You learn all the trick shots, shortcuts, methods, etc, by watching some random guy just kick the shit out of the machine. He might not know what you know and he learns from you back.
Golden tee is also a good example of what is wrong with arcades today. The Golden Tee 2003 machine has the same crappy graphics that weren't all that great five years ago, but in this day and age are completely archaic. Compare it to Tiger Woods 2004, and I really don't see how you can plunk down money for Golden Tee.
Gameplay matters too, of course, but when gameplay is roughly the same, and an arcade game has 2600 looking graphics, and your home system has state-of-the-art graphics, you just stay home.
And I know that this being/. that somebody will reply saying that Bush used the supreme court to steal his way to the presidency. However, perhaps you should read this article before replying.
Why did you have to bring that up?
Note that the article says that if the overvotes were counted (punch + write in candidate are the same), Gore would have won? Isn't the intent of the voter clear when they both punch and write in a candidate?
Look, I'm not saying Bush is the first person to steal an election, it happens all the time. I think the evidence is pretty solid that Gore won in 2000, though, and besides, he won the "popular vote", a term we wouldn't even have a need for if it weren't for the stupid electoral college. What the electoral college essentially means is that you are disenfranchised unless you live in a swing state, because if you live in a heavily democratic or heavily republican state, your presidential vote _literally_ counts for _nothing_.
The implication, therefore, that people didn't watch Firefly because they disagreed with its anti-government stance is ridiculous. It's more likely that people either didn't know about it or didn't find it compelling enough to watch.
I completely disagree that this was flamebait. It did however, miss the mark. The original poster did not say that people refused to watch it because of the anti-government stance. The OP said that fox put it on at a bad time/tried to kill it because of that stance. Now, why they paid a couple of million an episode for a show they planned to kill is something I'm not quite smart enough to figure out, but hey, those studio execs are a lot brighter than me.
you don't get it, do you?
these shows don't exist to belittle men. they do that, but it's secondary - and only done so far as is necessary to further the primary agenda.
the primary agenda is to *normalise* the behaviour of these slovenly fucks, to normalise and promote the patriarchal hierarchy within their antiquarian families. these shows teach the great unwashed masses just how their lives should be run, how they should inter-relate with each other, i.e. they illustrate the Natural Order Of Things (as decided by conservative old farts).
in short, these shows are regressive propaganda promoting an archaic and conservative agenda....and you've bought into it if your yearning for 1950s style trash is anything to go by.
Whew! Glad you were here to explain that! And here I thought it was just a crappy show, but now you tell me it is to perpetuate the paradigm of the paternal order of parenthood. Pretty pathetic really.
There is this huge disconnect with meteorologists regarding the heavens. Astronomy is not used as a factor in the calculation. As far as I know, even the sun and moon are not used as factors.
This is quite ridiculous, as one can prove that weather is affected by the sun and the moon quite trivially. Scientists know that the sun and moon affect our weather.
So why, when it comes to weather prediction, do they pretend that the earth is in some king of empty box? Perhaps because to use the sun and the moon (and possibly the other planets as well) as a factor in their meteorological model would be tantamount to astrology, and to scientists, that's the "A"-word.
You mark my words, some day scientists will use celestial data in their weather reports. They won't call it astrology, they'll call it "astronomically correlated meteorological rhythms", or something.
Just like "cataclysmic evolution". Well, the scientists were just really angry about that one. Everyone thought Velikovsky was a complete nut. He was, in some ways, but he was also right about some stuff, and cataclysmic evolution was one of the things he was right about. Now that this idea is beginning to gain acceptance, it is called "Punctuated Equilibrium", and that is the official scientific name of it, and if you ask scientists, they will still insist that Velikovsky was a nut who never talked to Einstein.
Look into it with an open scientific mind, and you'll see I'm right.
Is this the same Indymedia which consists of "stories" posted by raving lunatics
No, that would be you, and that would be "posts".
that try to pass their most rabid conspiracy theories as legitimate news items?
Everyone is giving rabies a bad name these days. You're foaming at the mouth and I didn't say anything about it. (Oops!)
If that's independent news media, give me my biased greedy coporate controlled news anyday.
Aha! Now that you admit ownership of said media, it lends credence to your charges of bias and greed. I always knew it but it sure is sporting of you to admit it. Bring back Firefly please! If you do, I'll make you the next governor of Georgia.
If you like conservatism and patriotism, and you dislike civil disobedience, then move to Communist China. They are very conservative, very patriotic, and don't tolerate civil disobedience. Your kind of people...
Kiss my patriotic ass. This stupid ultra-liberal backlash against patriotism is pissing me off. Patriotism != blindly following Dubya and his henchmen. Patriotism, as I see it, has always meant a love for the United States and the ideals set forth by the founding fathers, two of these ideals being the Constitutional rights to freedom of press and freedom of speech. By that view of patriotism, what these students are doing is clearly patriotic. No American in their right mind would argue that having our elections run by a bunch of incompetent buffoons who try to cover their massive flaws with lawsuits is a good thing.
Wow! Where to begin?
Go back and read a little bit. The original poster accused people conducting civil disobedience of being unpatriotic.
The poster you replied to said that the OP was being unpatriotic, and perhaps the OP should move to China, where they dislike public discourse and prefer prison for anyone who disagrees with the official government propoganda (e.g., tiananmen square).
Now you come along. I practically need to stretch the english language to convey how completely you misinterpreted the entire conversation, so I won't try. I'm nervous that you might interpret this reply as an endorsement of dwarf tossing or something. So this is for everyone else.
He was confused, is all. Go ahead and gawk at him for a while and then continue along with your daily activities, like you would if you saw one of those little green lizards in your yard.
I am surprised no one has mentioned the obvious: the sony portable is going to have wireless lan built in. I have a GBA and love it, but I'm probably going to get the sony portable. It's not a replacement, you can't carry it in your pocket because it's about the size of a walkman, but I expect the technology will be a bit more advanced.
Sometimes contradicting (suggesting that the methods used to obtain the evidence are flawed), but mostly disagreeing with the conclusions drawn from that evidence, and drawing new conclusions from the same evidence based on a different hypothesis. For example, the Grand Canyon is made up of many different layers of different types of rock, with a river at the bottom. Explanation #1, based on an old-earth and uniformitarian viewpoint: the rock layers built up over millions of years, then the river eroded a canyon in the middle over more millions of years. Explanation #2, based on a young-earth catastrophic viewpoint with a global flood around 2,000-4,000 BC: sediment mixed up underwater and settled out into layers by density, then once that water had drained and the rock had settled, a huge volume of more water suddenly broke through something and carved the canyon quickly. Observations of the rock support the accepted theory, but do not contradict the alternative theory.
Okay, I'm not an anonymous coward now.
Unfortunately for you, Quantum mechanics and Geology disagree with you, rather sharply. Geologists have a good idea, from actual empirical evidence, rather than a layman's feel good explanation, how quickly layers of sediment form. Furthermore, quantum physicists know precisely how fast radioactive materials decay. I challenge you to present any SCIENTIFIC evidence whatsoever that these facts are wrong, misguided, overstated, misrepresented, or otherwise incorrect. Really, I am waiting. I will personally counter any such evidence you can present. No need to accuse me of bias, I freely admit it. I am biased in favor of scientific, rather than ad-hoc reasoning. I challenge you to produce the former and avoid the latter.
It is a challenge no creationist can meet.
This book might interest you. But probably not.
You'd be surprised. It interests me in that I am personally committed to fighting ignorance and superstition in favor of science. It doesn't interest me enough to buy the book, but if you donate the book to me, I will read it and personally tear it apart and hunt down the author to argue with him about it. Is there anything that could convince me the earth is 10,000 years old? No, because it's not. No more than you could convince me the Earth is flat or that the Sun revolves around it. Each of these ideas are equally silly.
You make unscientific, unqualified, speculative statements about the time-scale of sediment formation. I invite you to point to a credible source which contradicts accepted geologic theory. Really. Go for it. For that matter, address the point in my original post about glacier rings and glacier core excavation. Conveniently, you failed to adress the scientific argument, and instead built yourself a straw man which you proceeded to tear down. Typical of pseudo-intellectual, psuedo-scientific types such as yourself.
I don't mind if you persist in your beliefs, but DON'T try to pass them off as SCIENTIFIC! Leave the science to the scientists, and we'll leave the superstitious mumbo-jumbo to you.
LZW may be a derivative work that is obvious to a practitioner, but I doubt it. I believe that some software patents are actually appropriate use of a government privelege. Unless I'm way off base here, LZW is such a case. It seems like many/.ters (note the proper spelling:) are against software patents altogether, and I don't agree with that. I just think they're handed out far too frequently by overworked, underpaid, underqualified bureaucrats.
A skillful poker player CAN win money at a casino (I'm not saying many do), because he/she is playing against other players, and the house gets a rake no matter what. Plus, the game is usually honest.
Being a programmer myself, however, I would never even consider playing video poker. God knows what the code does. I'm wary of real cards with a professional dealer, much less some bits and bytes with no accountability to anyone.
oh, i see. so anyone would have invaded *someone*, is that it? No matter who the President of the U.S. is, you assert, they would have invaded "somebody" after 9/11. I don't think that's a valid assertion. Al Gore does not have the stones to oversee a military operation of this scope. If you think he does, *you're* living in a fantasy world.
Have you forgotten already? Do you really believe that? How many people did you meet on the day of the explosion who didn't want to go to war with someone? Are you saying Gore was part of those three percent lunatic fringe who won't go to war no matter what, at the expense of his career and against the wishes of 97% of the public? How many democrats did you see argue against Afghanistan?
And what EVER gave you the idea that any President "oversees" military operations, other than pointing to a spot on a map and saying "Bomb that"? I'm exaggerating, of course, but he has generals for a reason.
Furthermore, conservatives like to forget that Gore actually fought in a war, and was decorated. And you say he doesn't have the "stones". Shame on you. Show me your medals when you want to start talking about stones. Which war did Bush have the "stones" to volunteer for, again? Remind me.
I seriously do not believe that Gore was planning to enact a law that everyone had to stop using the IC engine exactly twenty five years from passage. Your out of context quote certainly does not support this position. You are just exaggerating his stance in an overly simplistic way. From what I've heard from his interviews and debates, he favors exploring alternate energy sources and phasing out the automobile. You make it out as though he'd have a remote control that would bring down airplanes on the very second of the end of the deadline.
Your method of argument is known as the strawman defense. You ascribe motives to your opponents (build up a straw man) and then argue with that imaginary opponent of your own creation.
I see. All legitimately purchased oil is from terrorists.
You continually resort to a misrepresentation of my views. Nowhere did I say all of our oil money went to terrorists. However, a sizable percentage does.
BTW, exactly how is it that I'm responsible for what someone does with the money I've given them in legal trade?
You are responsible for your safety. If an action you commit threatens your life, no matter how convenient or pleasurable it is, continuing with that activity is suicidal. Your argument is typically American, in that it is childish, selfish, and denies facts important to your safety because you don't wish to be inconvenienced. We americans hate being inconvenienced, driving through our lives tossing money through windows and grabbing burgers on the way. God forbid you ask someone to go inside the Burger King rather than idle their car at a drive-through, for the good of the country.
Whatever happened to conserving in times of crisis? What happened to making sacrifices for the good of the country? It's an old-fashined idea that died out with manners. You can misrepresent my ideas all you want, but you can't argue with the basic truth: a significant portion of oil money funds state-supported terrorism. How inconvenient.
Not at all. I simply said that the two things can not be done *at the same time*,
Right, there's no possible way to fight terrorism and investigate alternative energy at the same time. Because they're mutually exclusive. Because, uh,.... erm.... cough.
Yeah, sure. And people that buy mexican brickweed support terrorism, too. If environmentalists really cared about fighting terrorism, they'd relax restrictions on where we can drill for oil in our own country. Oh but wait, I forgot, you can't make simple what is extremely complex. Do you really think that eliminating the internal combustion engine is a good idea? I mean, honestly? Would you not only be willing to give up, but also to force everyone who is NOT willing to give up, things like driving to work, flying overseas, shipping cargo from place to place, having police patrolling the cities....think for a minute. Al Gore did not have a magic replacement for the internal combustion engine, and neither do you. Until you do, 'infernal combustion' engines are too important to the world to be eliminated. I was contrasting the positions of the two men, although I'm not surprised you didn't catch it. Mr. Bush has been very vocal in his desire to rid the world of terrorists. Gore has been very vocal in his desire to rid the world of internal combustion engine. I was contrasting the focal point of those two people, and stating my preference. I understand that Gore is about more than just that one issue. I also understand that I can focus on just one thing if I want to, to make a point. So are you. The difference is that mine was valid.
Your post is so full of conjecture, false conclusions, and bad suggestions that I barely know where to start. But I'll give it a shot.
Yeah sure? Is that the best you can come up with? If you think our oil dollars don't fund terrorism, you're living in a dream. As far as drilling in the Alaskan reserve, even if the most optimistic estimations of oil reserves are correct, it would be a mere trickle in the world market, certainly not enough to support us in the long term.
Secondly, you seem to ignore the "twenty five years" part of Gore's statement. Even your boy bush said in the SOTU address that he wanted all new cars to be hydrogen in 16 years (paraphrase: "A child born today should have a hydrogen car as his or her first"). It's necessary for our survival in the long run, even if only because oil is a finite resource that will eventually run out. Al Gore never suggested that we should all walk to work, that was you extrapolating. Getting to work doesn't necessarily have to involve exploding carbons. Twenty five years is a very reasonable goal. We went to the moon in less than ten.
It's gonna be pretty hard to "eliminate the world of terrorists" while we're still funding them. And you still have not explained how weaning ourselves off the ICE is incompatible with kicking the crap out of terrorists, or fighting terrorism in general. I say they go hand in hand. Kick the crap out of them, and remove their funding.
I only say that his publicly espoused views on terrorism more closely mirror mine, that is, that terrorists and terrorist states should be eliminated, rather than Gore's more pacific approach. Perhaps you consider running away from bullies to be brainy, but I can tell you from experience that they don't leave you alone until you kick the crap out of them.
A) Absolutely anybody, including Gore, would have found SOMEBODY to invade after 9/11. If you think he wouldn't have you're living in a fantasy world. He'd have been shot.
B) Exactly what in your evidence shows that his views on the internal combustion engine are incompatible with kicking the crap out of terrorists? Isn't it possible to do both?
If you equate diplomacy with placating tyrants like saddam and human rights abusers like china, iran, libya, syria, most of africa, n. korea, et al then you, sir, are a spineless fuck.
Who said I did? I notice you didn't mention Saudi Arabia, who would be near the top of my list, as well. What I said was that his diplomacy is juvenile. I stand by that statement. There are ways to win the diplomacy war and the war against terrorism at the same time. Bush is all force and no tact. There is a reason the axiom "Speak softly and carry a big stick" has been around so long. Even though I (ashamedly) agree with his goals of eliminating the N Korea and Iran threats, he's a freaking idiot when it comes to swaying world opinion. And I'll take him seriously when he decides to take on Saudi Arabia, and switches sides in Bosnia (yes, you heard me right).
Media darling and Rhodes Scholar William Clinton sure didn't work any miracles with Iraq, and I thought he was supposed to be all diplomatic and shit.
Media darling? What world do you live in? In my world, he was scandalized before he even became president, and hounded into an impeachment trial that will definitely go down in history as unjustified, partisan, and possibly treasonous. In my world, when Clinton TRIED to bomb Osama Bin Laden before most people had ever heard of him, he was accused of trying to "divert attention" from the monica scandal, a treasonous accusation taken seriously by the media. In my world, he had an "independent" prosecuter who was commissioned to investigate one thing (whitewater), and constantly expanded the investigation to include anything he thought might be incriminating, a fact that was glossed over in broadcast media. In my world, he never got a moment's peace from accusations of various improprieties which he was never convicted of. Compare this to Bush, who has obvious cleat-prints on his toungue, but regularly gets the fluffy bunny treatment from your so-called "liberal media".
I can speak from experience (as a religous door knocker) that I don't give a damn if you are going to hell. You can think your all clever at the door, but I just move on and knock on the next one. No sweat.
Odd. You don't give a damn, but you spend your free time doing it?
I'm not the grandparent poster, but I will quote Al Gore, from his book Earth in the Balance, page 325:
It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.
It's from a book, so you may have missed it by relying on "something you heard on tv, or a half-remembered conversation".
Gore would have been a disaster, but then again Bush has been horrible too. Sigh. I want a better electorate.
Do you have some religious reason why we shouldn't eliminate the internal combustion engine? The original poster said that Gore would do that instead of fighting terrorism. How does your quote have any bearing on that assertion? Is there any reason he couldn't do both? Any reason Bush can't? Sure, he's gonna have everyone driving hydrogen cars in 16 years. Never mind that there are simple things he could do NOW to reduce gas consumption, like mandatory fuel consumption guidelines that the Japanese are already starting to adhere to voluntarily. I'm sure most of you don't see the connection between your SUV and terrorism, but it's right there in front of your face. If Bush really cared about fighting terrorism, he'd reduce our dependence on oil from our stated, sworn enemies.
First comes this pearl: My views may not be popular, but I've come to them through study, thought, and experience. They are not based on feelings. They are not based on half-remembered conversations.
Then this gem: Also, on a slightly different note, I for one am very glad that it was Mr. Bush, not Gore, who did end up elected. I voted Libertarian, as I usually do (though not always), but I don't think Senor Brown would have handled 9/11 very well, and I'm positive Gore would not have. I don't like Mr. Bush as much as I have liked other Presidents in history, but would you really want Gore trying to get the Middle East to give up internal combustion engines instead of terrorism?
That's a pretty popular view, Mr unconventional thinker. You sure you didn't arrive at that idea from something you heard on tv, or a "half-remembered conversation"? You must be basing this judgement on his record in the Congress. Right? Oh, and he invented the internet too, didn't he? Face it, you are a media-spewing idealogue, just like the rest of us.
And while I hate Saddam just as much as the next guy, and even supported the war to the dismay of my liberal friends, Bush is a swaggering, shoot first, ask questions later, cowboy, manure licking simpleton in the world arena. His idea of diplomacy is "We're still mad at you Russia, but at least you're not as bad as France". In answer to your question, I would take brain (Gore) over brawn (GW) as foreign policy chief any old day of the week.
The article you linked didn't say anything about dropping 30 second skip, only commercial advance, which is something different.
A trend is emerging
on
I, Spammer
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Have we seen a SINGLE article about a spammer here on Slashdot, EVER, where the spammer did not claim that they don't send pornography spam? Where the hell do I get it all from then? Santa?
Only if you count the useless miles that the shuttle takes on its circuitous route.
Well, those circuitous routes are pretty much the whole reason to be up there, so it would be kinda silly to discount them.
I'm pretty sure his point is that the risk of catastrophic failure and/or explosion whilst orbiting is practically nil. Barring a meteor, he's right. And there is pretty much nothing that can be done about small meteors at this point.
The dangerous part is going up and coming back down, and the shuttle has a pretty dismal record with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Setting aside for the moment the fact that some legitimate senders send 100k+ bulk emails (mailing lists for example), this still won't work. At all.
Haven't you heard about the MyDoom worm? It's a distributed method of sending spam. How is your scheme going to affect that? Pretty soon the spammer business model will necessarily include infecting millions of computers with worms to beat your scheme.
Try again.
Are you saying a PS2 is more expensive than the Golden Tee hardware?
The PS2 version of TWG has enormously better graphics than Golden Tee.
Golden tee is also a good example of what is wrong with arcades today. The Golden Tee 2003 machine has the same crappy graphics that weren't all that great five years ago, but in this day and age are completely archaic. Compare it to Tiger Woods 2004, and I really don't see how you can plunk down money for Golden Tee.
Gameplay matters too, of course, but when gameplay is roughly the same, and an arcade game has 2600 looking graphics, and your home system has state-of-the-art graphics, you just stay home.
Why did you have to bring that up?
Note that the article says that if the overvotes were counted (punch + write in candidate are the same), Gore would have won? Isn't the intent of the voter clear when they both punch and write in a candidate?
Look, I'm not saying Bush is the first person to steal an election, it happens all the time. I think the evidence is pretty solid that Gore won in 2000, though, and besides, he won the "popular vote", a term we wouldn't even have a need for if it weren't for the stupid electoral college. What the electoral college essentially means is that you are disenfranchised unless you live in a swing state, because if you live in a heavily democratic or heavily republican state, your presidential vote _literally_ counts for _nothing_.
I completely disagree that this was flamebait. It did however, miss the mark. The original poster did not say that people refused to watch it because of the anti-government stance. The OP said that fox put it on at a bad time/tried to kill it because of that stance. Now, why they paid a couple of million an episode for a show they planned to kill is something I'm not quite smart enough to figure out, but hey, those studio execs are a lot brighter than me.
Whew! Glad you were here to explain that! And here I thought it was just a crappy show, but now you tell me it is to perpetuate the paradigm of the paternal order of parenthood. Pretty pathetic really.
This is quite ridiculous, as one can prove that weather is affected by the sun and the moon quite trivially. Scientists know that the sun and moon affect our weather.
So why, when it comes to weather prediction, do they pretend that the earth is in some king of empty box? Perhaps because to use the sun and the moon (and possibly the other planets as well) as a factor in their meteorological model would be tantamount to astrology, and to scientists, that's the "A"-word.
You mark my words, some day scientists will use celestial data in their weather reports. They won't call it astrology, they'll call it "astronomically correlated meteorological rhythms", or something.
Just like "cataclysmic evolution". Well, the scientists were just really angry about that one. Everyone thought Velikovsky was a complete nut. He was, in some ways, but he was also right about some stuff, and cataclysmic evolution was one of the things he was right about. Now that this idea is beginning to gain acceptance, it is called "Punctuated Equilibrium", and that is the official scientific name of it, and if you ask scientists, they will still insist that Velikovsky was a nut who never talked to Einstein.
Look into it with an open scientific mind, and you'll see I'm right.
No, that would be you, and that would be "posts".
that try to pass their most rabid conspiracy theories as legitimate news items?
Everyone is giving rabies a bad name these days. You're foaming at the mouth and I didn't say anything about it. (Oops!)
If that's independent news media, give me my biased greedy coporate controlled news anyday.
Aha! Now that you admit ownership of said media, it lends credence to your charges of bias and greed. I always knew it but it sure is sporting of you to admit it. Bring back Firefly please! If you do, I'll make you the next governor of Georgia.
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Kiss my patriotic ass. This stupid ultra-liberal backlash against patriotism is pissing me off. Patriotism != blindly following Dubya and his henchmen. Patriotism, as I see it, has always meant a love for the United States and the ideals set forth by the founding fathers, two of these ideals being the Constitutional rights to freedom of press and freedom of speech. By that view of patriotism, what these students are doing is clearly patriotic. No American in their right mind would argue that having our elections run by a bunch of incompetent buffoons who try to cover their massive flaws with lawsuits is a good thing.
Wow! Where to begin?Go back and read a little bit. The original poster accused people conducting civil disobedience of being unpatriotic.
The poster you replied to said that the OP was being unpatriotic, and perhaps the OP should move to China, where they dislike public discourse and prefer prison for anyone who disagrees with the official government propoganda (e.g., tiananmen square).
Now you come along. I practically need to stretch the english language to convey how completely you misinterpreted the entire conversation, so I won't try. I'm nervous that you might interpret this reply as an endorsement of dwarf tossing or something. So this is for everyone else.
He was confused, is all. Go ahead and gawk at him for a while and then continue along with your daily activities, like you would if you saw one of those little green lizards in your yard.
Darl, is that you?
I am surprised no one has mentioned the obvious: the sony portable is going to have wireless lan built in. I have a GBA and love it, but I'm probably going to get the sony portable. It's not a replacement, you can't carry it in your pocket because it's about the size of a walkman, but I expect the technology will be a bit more advanced.
Okay, I'm not an anonymous coward now.
Unfortunately for you, Quantum mechanics and Geology disagree with you, rather sharply. Geologists have a good idea, from actual empirical evidence, rather than a layman's feel good explanation, how quickly layers of sediment form. Furthermore, quantum physicists know precisely how fast radioactive materials decay. I challenge you to present any SCIENTIFIC evidence whatsoever that these facts are wrong, misguided, overstated, misrepresented, or otherwise incorrect. Really, I am waiting. I will personally counter any such evidence you can present. No need to accuse me of bias, I freely admit it. I am biased in favor of scientific, rather than ad-hoc reasoning. I challenge you to produce the former and avoid the latter.
It is a challenge no creationist can meet.
This book might interest you. But probably not.
You'd be surprised. It interests me in that I am personally committed to fighting ignorance and superstition in favor of science. It doesn't interest me enough to buy the book, but if you donate the book to me, I will read it and personally tear it apart and hunt down the author to argue with him about it. Is there anything that could convince me the earth is 10,000 years old? No, because it's not. No more than you could convince me the Earth is flat or that the Sun revolves around it. Each of these ideas are equally silly.
You make unscientific, unqualified, speculative statements about the time-scale of sediment formation. I invite you to point to a credible source which contradicts accepted geologic theory. Really. Go for it. For that matter, address the point in my original post about glacier rings and glacier core excavation. Conveniently, you failed to adress the scientific argument, and instead built yourself a straw man which you proceeded to tear down. Typical of pseudo-intellectual, psuedo-scientific types such as yourself.
I don't mind if you persist in your beliefs, but DON'T try to pass them off as SCIENTIFIC! Leave the science to the scientists, and we'll leave the superstitious mumbo-jumbo to you.
Thank you, that is all.
Did I mention underqualified?
You know, until just now, none of my fantasies have ever involved an airlock.
Being a programmer myself, however, I would never even consider playing video poker. God knows what the code does. I'm wary of real cards with a professional dealer, much less some bits and bytes with no accountability to anyone.
Have you forgotten already? Do you really believe that? How many people did you meet on the day of the explosion who didn't want to go to war with someone? Are you saying Gore was part of those three percent lunatic fringe who won't go to war no matter what, at the expense of his career and against the wishes of 97% of the public? How many democrats did you see argue against Afghanistan?
And what EVER gave you the idea that any President "oversees" military operations, other than pointing to a spot on a map and saying "Bomb that"? I'm exaggerating, of course, but he has generals for a reason.
Furthermore, conservatives like to forget that Gore actually fought in a war, and was decorated. And you say he doesn't have the "stones". Shame on you. Show me your medals when you want to start talking about stones. Which war did Bush have the "stones" to volunteer for, again? Remind me.
I seriously do not believe that Gore was planning to enact a law that everyone had to stop using the IC engine exactly twenty five years from passage. Your out of context quote certainly does not support this position. You are just exaggerating his stance in an overly simplistic way. From what I've heard from his interviews and debates, he favors exploring alternate energy sources and phasing out the automobile. You make it out as though he'd have a remote control that would bring down airplanes on the very second of the end of the deadline.
Your method of argument is known as the strawman defense. You ascribe motives to your opponents (build up a straw man) and then argue with that imaginary opponent of your own creation.
I see. All legitimately purchased oil is from terrorists.
You continually resort to a misrepresentation of my views. Nowhere did I say all of our oil money went to terrorists. However, a sizable percentage does.
BTW, exactly how is it that I'm responsible for what someone does with the money I've given them in legal trade?
You are responsible for your safety. If an action you commit threatens your life, no matter how convenient or pleasurable it is, continuing with that activity is suicidal. Your argument is typically American, in that it is childish, selfish, and denies facts important to your safety because you don't wish to be inconvenienced. We americans hate being inconvenienced, driving through our lives tossing money through windows and grabbing burgers on the way. God forbid you ask someone to go inside the Burger King rather than idle their car at a drive-through, for the good of the country.
Whatever happened to conserving in times of crisis? What happened to making sacrifices for the good of the country? It's an old-fashined idea that died out with manners. You can misrepresent my ideas all you want, but you can't argue with the basic truth: a significant portion of oil money funds state-supported terrorism. How inconvenient.
Not at all. I simply said that the two things can not be done *at the same time*,
Right, there's no possible way to fight terrorism and investigate alternative energy at the same time. Because they're mutually exclusive. Because, uh, .... erm.... cough.
Your post is so full of conjecture, false conclusions, and bad suggestions that I barely know where to start. But I'll give it a shot.
Yeah sure? Is that the best you can come up with? If you think our oil dollars don't fund terrorism, you're living in a dream. As far as drilling in the Alaskan reserve, even if the most optimistic estimations of oil reserves are correct, it would be a mere trickle in the world market, certainly not enough to support us in the long term.
Secondly, you seem to ignore the "twenty five years" part of Gore's statement. Even your boy bush said in the SOTU address that he wanted all new cars to be hydrogen in 16 years (paraphrase: "A child born today should have a hydrogen car as his or her first"). It's necessary for our survival in the long run, even if only because oil is a finite resource that will eventually run out. Al Gore never suggested that we should all walk to work, that was you extrapolating. Getting to work doesn't necessarily have to involve exploding carbons. Twenty five years is a very reasonable goal. We went to the moon in less than ten.
It's gonna be pretty hard to "eliminate the world of terrorists" while we're still funding them. And you still have not explained how weaning ourselves off the ICE is incompatible with kicking the crap out of terrorists, or fighting terrorism in general. I say they go hand in hand. Kick the crap out of them, and remove their funding.
A) Absolutely anybody, including Gore, would have found SOMEBODY to invade after 9/11. If you think he wouldn't have you're living in a fantasy world. He'd have been shot.
B) Exactly what in your evidence shows that his views on the internal combustion engine are incompatible with kicking the crap out of terrorists? Isn't it possible to do both?
If you equate diplomacy with placating tyrants like saddam and human rights abusers like china, iran, libya, syria, most of africa, n. korea, et al then you, sir, are a spineless fuck.
Who said I did? I notice you didn't mention Saudi Arabia, who would be near the top of my list, as well. What I said was that his diplomacy is juvenile. I stand by that statement. There are ways to win the diplomacy war and the war against terrorism at the same time. Bush is all force and no tact. There is a reason the axiom "Speak softly and carry a big stick" has been around so long. Even though I (ashamedly) agree with his goals of eliminating the N Korea and Iran threats, he's a freaking idiot when it comes to swaying world opinion. And I'll take him seriously when he decides to take on Saudi Arabia, and switches sides in Bosnia (yes, you heard me right).
Media darling and Rhodes Scholar William Clinton sure didn't work any miracles with Iraq, and I thought he was supposed to be all diplomatic and shit.
Media darling? What world do you live in? In my world, he was scandalized before he even became president, and hounded into an impeachment trial that will definitely go down in history as unjustified, partisan, and possibly treasonous. In my world, when Clinton TRIED to bomb Osama Bin Laden before most people had ever heard of him, he was accused of trying to "divert attention" from the monica scandal, a treasonous accusation taken seriously by the media. In my world, he had an "independent" prosecuter who was commissioned to investigate one thing (whitewater), and constantly expanded the investigation to include anything he thought might be incriminating, a fact that was glossed over in broadcast media. In my world, he never got a moment's peace from accusations of various improprieties which he was never convicted of. Compare this to Bush, who has obvious cleat-prints on his toungue, but regularly gets the fluffy bunny treatment from your so-called "liberal media".
Odd. You don't give a damn, but you spend your free time doing it?
It ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.
It's from a book, so you may have missed it by relying on "something you heard on tv, or a half-remembered conversation".
Gore would have been a disaster, but then again Bush has been horrible too. Sigh. I want a better electorate.
Do you have some religious reason why we shouldn't eliminate the internal combustion engine? The original poster said that Gore would do that instead of fighting terrorism. How does your quote have any bearing on that assertion? Is there any reason he couldn't do both? Any reason Bush can't? Sure, he's gonna have everyone driving hydrogen cars in 16 years. Never mind that there are simple things he could do NOW to reduce gas consumption, like mandatory fuel consumption guidelines that the Japanese are already starting to adhere to voluntarily. I'm sure most of you don't see the connection between your SUV and terrorism, but it's right there in front of your face. If Bush really cared about fighting terrorism, he'd reduce our dependence on oil from our stated, sworn enemies.
My views may not be popular, but I've come to them through study, thought, and experience. They are not based on feelings. They are not based on half-remembered conversations.
Then this gem:
Also, on a slightly different note, I for one am very glad that it was Mr. Bush, not Gore, who did end up elected. I voted Libertarian, as I usually do (though not always), but I don't think Senor Brown would have handled 9/11 very well, and I'm positive Gore would not have. I don't like Mr. Bush as much as I have liked other Presidents in history, but would you really want Gore trying to get the Middle East to give up internal combustion engines instead of terrorism?
That's a pretty popular view, Mr unconventional thinker. You sure you didn't arrive at that idea from something you heard on tv, or a "half-remembered conversation"? You must be basing this judgement on his record in the Congress. Right? Oh, and he invented the internet too, didn't he? Face it, you are a media-spewing idealogue, just like the rest of us.
And while I hate Saddam just as much as the next guy, and even supported the war to the dismay of my liberal friends, Bush is a swaggering, shoot first, ask questions later, cowboy, manure licking simpleton in the world arena. His idea of diplomacy is "We're still mad at you Russia, but at least you're not as bad as France". In answer to your question, I would take brain (Gore) over brawn (GW) as foreign policy chief any old day of the week.
The article you linked didn't say anything about dropping 30 second skip, only commercial advance, which is something different.
Have we seen a SINGLE article about a spammer here on Slashdot, EVER, where the spammer did not claim that they don't send pornography spam? Where the hell do I get it all from then? Santa?
Well, those circuitous routes are pretty much the whole reason to be up there, so it would be kinda silly to discount them.
I'm pretty sure his point is that the risk of catastrophic failure and/or explosion whilst orbiting is practically nil. Barring a meteor, he's right. And there is pretty much nothing that can be done about small meteors at this point.
The dangerous part is going up and coming back down, and the shuttle has a pretty dismal record with that.