We had a sort of similar case... Our credit card info was stolen. We called the credit card company and the companies through which merchandise was ordered. We got the IP address that things were ordered through. The IP address matched up between various merchants. We then whois'd that IP address and it was for a hotel in the Bahamas. Well, we told the secret service (who are the ones responsible for wire fraud) and they said 'well, thanks but we won't do anything about it because it just isn't enough damage.' Thanks a million! Our tax dollars at work. I know it was the Bahamas but isn't that technically part of the US?
Ummm... Enough of the liberal propeganda. Everyone believed that Iraq had those WMD and in fact DID have them last we knew. They seem to have disappeared but there isn't a valid paper trail for that disappearance. They could be in some other sand laden country even as we speak. They could be buried in the desert, still within Iraq. We just don't know. Lying entails knowing what you say is false.
The only ignorant attitude here is yours. We always pay for our own messes and eventually for everyone else's refers to monetary payment. Even kids on the short bus get that one.
Yes, some soldiers from other countries have died in wars started by us. Not very many of them, mind you, but even one death is sad. Still, there was reason to believe that Saddam Hussein was a threat (and reason to believe that he might still have had weapons. Remember, they were unaccounted for and so we had no idea what might have happened to them.) Granted, the whole reason Saddam was in power was because of the US so there definately needs to be some foreign policy changes.
Americans aren't hated overseas because of nitpicky crap like this and you know it. That's just a lie people tell themselves because they are envious of the US's immense power and influence. Yes, the US has done a LOT of stupid things. But so do all countries. Nationalist pride blinds everyone, even in countries other than the USA. Maybe everyone should stop looking at us and worry about their own country.
For what it's worth I dont think your reply was offtopic (I would not have modded it down) and I appreciate your reply.
You are correct, the Bible could also be used to justify killing people. My understanding is that such things (killing infidels) are directly mentioned in the Quran. Am I wrong?
Tell that to the indesirables that got a nice acid bath or a luxurious trip to the woodchipper. Or how about the people that got chemical weapons used on them? The worst that happens to insurgents now is getting forced to be in prank photos or being lead to believe they might be electrocuted (even though they really were not). Personally I think those people deserved a bullet in the head not a Koran, a hot meal, and a place to stay. For crying out loud, the last thing we should be giving religious extremists is a Koran. It out and out tells them to kill the infidels (that'd be us.)
Though, this being slashdot, I'm sure most of the other leftist anti-American trolls on this site will agree with you.
If only I had mod points and hadn't already posted in this discussion... I would have modded you up for sure. You hit the nail on the head on both accounts: People need to live responsibly and CEO's and other bigwigs need to have performance based salaries and be able to be canned as easy as anyone else (with NO severance package!)
Care to back up the remark about people making over 100,000 paying only 11% of their income in taxes? I pay more than that and I make a lot less than 100,000. And there IS a graduated tax system and the top end is 35% now. So how do they magically go from 35% to 11%?
I think a great idea would actually be to allow customers to buy a device or have a location where they could go to check up on the smartcard accesses. If you see a much of accesses to the card and you know you didnt use it at that time then it's a big indication that something is wrong. It might be a bit cumbersome to have to manually check though... If it were possible then having the smartcard vibrate when it is accessed would be ideal. Unfortunately I'm sure RF signals can induce nowhere near enough amperage to do something like that. Having a watch battery for the vibrator would work though. Then if you keychain vibrates when you walk by a suspicious guy w/ a laptop then you know whats up.;-)
Nice use of buzzwords! Do you even know what a quaternion is or did you just hear about them on the Discovery Channel or something? Quaternions take a lot more calculation to deal with. Their main draw is that they don't suffer from Gimbal lock and so are used in rotation calculations. Get a clue...
I'm sure someone will try to correct you. I certainly won't. But, you must remember, this is/. after all and 9/10ths of everyone on here is a tree hugging liberal. So, while you are preaching to the right audience, they'll never listen.
Chances are, the ozone hole above the north pole is indeed natural. The weather up there is far from favorable and ozone is replenished by lightning. I'm fairly sure there isn't much lightning at the sub-sub zero north pole. It tends to be too cold to even snow there. I'm not sure if anyone has bothered to take the environment of the north pole into account.
Of course, what you are talking about is modifying a cell to be something it was not intended to be. A liver cell by itself you can mess up all you want. It's your liver. However, once that liver cell has been frankenstein'd into a new being that is growing then it has transcended being a liver cell.
The problem with what you said is that a skin graft or bag of blood will not grow into a person. A fetus will (given nutrition.) Not only will it grow into a person, it will grow into a different person than who it came from. The important parts of a person are not YET there which is a point worth mentioning. Even a newborn baby is not yet formed how it is going to end up. It may have all of it's parts but they are not yet formed into their final configuration. The brain will still develop and mature, bones will fuse, teeth will form, etc. In my opinion, it is an error to attempt to marginalize any portion of the lifecycle of a human being merely to make yourself feel better about killing it.
Another potential problem w/ abortion is that even when the important parts of a person are there it is still legal to have an abortion. In fact it's still legal to have an abortion even at the point where a baby could feasibly be delivered and live.
So, yes, it is a serious matter and not too many people take it lightly. I would never suggest that you or anyone else has. I'm merely suggesting that you choose to see a baby as a lump of tissue not yet a person so that you don't feel so bad when one is killed for being unwanted.
Yes, I suppose I could see it's use in such a case. Granted I would still hold the woman in higher regard if she had the strength to still carry the baby to term (and probably give it up for adoption) but you really could not fault a woman for getting an abortion after she's been raped. In the case of incest... Well, if it were rape incest then the same thing as above applies. If not... well, I'm not so sure. Our society has a big stigma on incest but really the genetic problems don't pop up so bad until it's happened more than once in the family tree and reasonably recent. If it happens once than the incidence of side effects is fairly low. If it happens three generations in a row you get Bubba.
What does it prove then? One law says that a fetus is a person and one does not. Either one is correct or the other is. Such a legal inconsistency really needs to be resolved one way or the other. As it stands now I almost wonder whether a doctor could be charged w/ murdering a fetus if the mother changes her mind after the fact. The doctor did in fact commit the deed.
Enlighten me then, if the pro-choice movement largely does not count birth as making a baby a person then when do they feel that such a thing takes place and what is the justification for then ending the life of a person?
Your argument is no different than mine. You have merely attempted to use the old trick of framing my argument as a strawman argument w/o backing up yours. How about you convince people that a fertilized egg is NOT a person. Such a thing goes both ways. At conception the fetus has all of the needed DNA to produce a full grown person. As such, where do you draw the line? Not to start a slippery slope argument but children have their adult DNA too and just haven't quite matured yet. That does not mean they are inherently not of the same worth as an adult. A fetus is the first stop along a lifelong journey of maturation. As far as I know at no other point in the cycle is anyone saying that there is an unalienable right to terminate someone's life at whim.
I'm one of those people that wants to outlaw abortion entirely. Abortion has not got anything to do w/ a woman's right to choose and never has. That's just a smokescreen that the left has set up to deflect the real issue. The issue is that terminating someone's life on whim should not be allowed. Before you get all up in arms and claim that a fetus isn't a person please consider this:
Let's say you are married and your wife is pregnant. I come up on the street one day, whip a sawed off shotgun out, point it right at her belly, and blow the baby and half of her internal organs out her backside. Now, I'd get arrested and charged with murder and an illegal abortion of a fetus right? Right??! NO. I would get charged with a double murder for killing two people. You can't get charged w/ a double murder if you did not murder TWO people.
Why should a baby be considered a worthless piece of trash, able to be tossed aside at a woman's whim if she wants an abortion and yet be considered a valuable person if someone else murders it? Where is the logic in that? Further, where is the logic in letting an 8 months pregnant mother abort her baby but yet charge her with a crime if she smothers it as soon as it's born? The answer (as far as I'm concerned) is that there is no logic in it at all but bleeding heart liberals need to court the female vote so they rally behind an obviously illogical position.
To blow off the Administrations possible ambitions for Iraqi oil (Cheney's task force had maps of Iraqi oil fields before the invasion) by using the results of their piss poor planning as an excuse is crazy.
Woah... slow down... the next thing you know you're going to tell me that Burger King keeps tabs on cattle ranches! Of course Haliburton had maps of Iraqi oil fields. They, after all, are in the business of such things. And possible ambitions does not equal fact.
Let's do some math. From my original link I see that the US imports about 13.12 million barrels of oil a day. Thats 4.789 billion barrels a year. Now, assuming we only get a quarter of Saudi Arabia's oil before it's gone we'll still be going strong for 13.7 years. If we get half of the oil it's 27.4 years. If you add up all of the other countries and take only half we are probably looking at something like 50-60 years at least before we run out of oil. I realize that that doesn't take into account the 'Peak' theory and such. As such it doesn't account for the increasing difficulty of getting the said oil. It does seem somewhat scary that the oil supply might only hold out another 40-70 years though...
Still, it would appear that we were not in a huge need to get yet more oil fields esp when sanctions on Iraqi oil were only in effect from 1991-1996. We've been able to get oil from them since then. In fact, we HAVE been getting oil from them since then.
Still, the fact remains, there doesn't seem to be much of an oil crisis at this point. Alternative energy sources are being perfected (which is a great thing!) and I doubt we'll still be that reliant on oil in 60 years.
Care to back up those assertions with some actual proof? My link showed that the US is not very reliant on Middle Eastern oil (despite what a lot of people try to assert.) So, care to back up your assertion that we somehow need oil from Iraq or that it would even in the least bit make oil cheaper for us?
It's such a joke when people constantly try to say that we went to Iraq for the oil.... Are we getting oil from Iraq? If so how much? How about we try to find out?
http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html
Their research seems to suggest that in 2003 we got a whopping 4% of our oil from Iraq. 'Money Maker' is written all over that! We get more oil from Nigeria than Iraq! If we wanted to invade a country to get oil why not Nigeria? Why not pressure Canada or Mexico? It would be very stupid to invade a distant country for their oil when we get can plenty of oil (and currently do) from our side of the world. Iraq's oil contribution to us is a drop in the bucket.
That's quite rich... Let's see, he was torturing his own people and supporting terrorists. Thats not minding your own business. We know he HAD those WMD and he's got no explanation as to where they seem to have gone. That dones not mean he didn't have them as we know he did. So where are they? Obviously he's got some secrets. See above, he did fund some terrorists, maybe even some involved in 9/11. This is indeed a shakey link though.
Indirectly he was a threat as he most certainly did have WMD and may still know where they're hid. He was funding terrorists.
Personally I think we would have been better served invading Syria or Palestine but thats a different story. I think that Bush Jr. was trying to combat terror while also cleaning up his father's mess (Bush Sr should have finished the job while he was there but he messed it up and left.) Really the US support of Saddam goes back even farther than Bush Sr. The US needs to learn not to support one dictator to deal with another.
Ok, maybe not all teachers make a whole lot... Around where I live (in Michigan) teachers in general make plenty of money and still complain. I do personally know a teacher and she makes around 45k a year as an elementary school teacher. She's only around 25 years old. In all fairness, I do believe she has a master's degree. However schools do normally cover the cost of teacher's classes. All I can say is that your sister is getting majorly hosed... that however is not my fault and is is not necessarily the standard case for teachers (as I outlined above, a summer break, good pay, great benefits, and paid college classes are the norm at least where I live.)
BTW, there are plenty of people who work very hard and not all of them make a lot of money. In the grand scheme of things teachers, on average, make more more w/ more benefits than most people and they get at least a little summer break (I know most all of them work both before and after the school year for a while so their break isn't as long as the kids' break.) In an economy where people are losing their jobs left and right the teachers around me are still complaining and unwilling to make any concessions. However, I'll grant you that laptops are not necessary and it would be better to try to save the money to be able to pay teachers and buy other supplies.
The foundation of an educated society is the willingness to learn and experiment. Teachers certainly facilitate that. But learning is quite possible even w/o teachers. In science classes even in elementary school there were many times when I knew more about science than the teachers. Why is that? Because I used to read encyclopedias and books about science. I certainly wasn't influenced to do that by the 1/2 assed science teachers I had... The answer to the foundation of learning: The desire to learn.
Teachers make enough money as it is. I am so sick of psople bitching about how little teachers make or that they should make more. Maybe, just maybe they should be thankful that they have a good steady job w/ great benefits. Teachers that are 'burning out' because of money are not the ones you want teaching. If you can't be happy w/ your choice of careers at a decent salary and need an obscene salary to stay happy then YOU ARE IN THE FREAKING WRONG CAREER.
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We had a sort of similar case... Our credit card info was stolen. We called the credit card company and the companies through which merchandise was ordered. We got the IP address that things were ordered through. The IP address matched up between various merchants. We then whois'd that IP address and it was for a hotel in the Bahamas. Well, we told the secret service (who are the ones responsible for wire fraud) and they said 'well, thanks but we won't do anything about it because it just isn't enough damage.' Thanks a million! Our tax dollars at work. I know it was the Bahamas but isn't that technically part of the US?
Ummm... Enough of the liberal propeganda. Everyone believed that Iraq had those WMD and in fact DID have them last we knew. They seem to have disappeared but there isn't a valid paper trail for that disappearance. They could be in some other sand laden country even as we speak. They could be buried in the desert, still within Iraq. We just don't know. Lying entails knowing what you say is false.
The only ignorant attitude here is yours. We always pay for our own messes and eventually for everyone else's refers to monetary payment. Even kids on the short bus get that one.
Yes, some soldiers from other countries have died in wars started by us. Not very many of them, mind you, but even one death is sad. Still, there was reason to believe that Saddam Hussein was a threat (and reason to believe that he might still have had weapons. Remember, they were unaccounted for and so we had no idea what might have happened to them.) Granted, the whole reason Saddam was in power was because of the US so there definately needs to be some foreign policy changes.
Americans aren't hated overseas because of nitpicky crap like this and you know it. That's just a lie people tell themselves because they are envious of the US's immense power and influence. Yes, the US has done a LOT of stupid things. But so do all countries. Nationalist pride blinds everyone, even in countries other than the USA. Maybe everyone should stop looking at us and worry about their own country.
For what it's worth I dont think your reply was offtopic (I would not have modded it down) and I appreciate your reply.
You are correct, the Bible could also be used to justify killing people. My understanding is that such things (killing infidels) are directly mentioned in the Quran. Am I wrong?
Tell that to the indesirables that got a nice acid bath or a luxurious trip to the woodchipper. Or how about the people that got chemical weapons used on them? The worst that happens to insurgents now is getting forced to be in prank photos or being lead to believe they might be electrocuted (even though they really were not). Personally I think those people deserved a bullet in the head not a Koran, a hot meal, and a place to stay. For crying out loud, the last thing we should be giving religious extremists is a Koran. It out and out tells them to kill the infidels (that'd be us.)
Though, this being slashdot, I'm sure most of the other leftist anti-American trolls on this site will agree with you.
If only I had mod points and hadn't already posted in this discussion... I would have modded you up for sure. You hit the nail on the head on both accounts: People need to live responsibly and CEO's and other bigwigs need to have performance based salaries and be able to be canned as easy as anyone else (with NO severance package!)
Care to back up the remark about people making over 100,000 paying only 11% of their income in taxes? I pay more than that and I make a lot less than 100,000. And there IS a graduated tax system and the top end is 35% now. So how do they magically go from 35% to 11%?
I think a great idea would actually be to allow customers to buy a device or have a location where they could go to check up on the smartcard accesses. If you see a much of accesses to the card and you know you didnt use it at that time then it's a big indication that something is wrong. It might be a bit cumbersome to have to manually check though... If it were possible then having the smartcard vibrate when it is accessed would be ideal. Unfortunately I'm sure RF signals can induce nowhere near enough amperage to do something like that. Having a watch battery for the vibrator would work though. Then if you keychain vibrates when you walk by a suspicious guy w/ a laptop then you know whats up. ;-)
Nice use of buzzwords! Do you even know what a quaternion is or did you just hear about them on the Discovery Channel or something? Quaternions take a lot more calculation to deal with. Their main draw is that they don't suffer from Gimbal lock and so are used in rotation calculations. Get a clue...
I'm sure someone will try to correct you. I certainly won't. But, you must remember, this is /. after all and 9/10ths of everyone on here is a tree hugging liberal. So, while you are preaching to the right audience, they'll never listen.
Chances are, the ozone hole above the north pole is indeed natural. The weather up there is far from favorable and ozone is replenished by lightning. I'm fairly sure there isn't much lightning at the sub-sub zero north pole. It tends to be too cold to even snow there. I'm not sure if anyone has bothered to take the environment of the north pole into account.
Of course, what you are talking about is modifying a cell to be something it was not intended to be. A liver cell by itself you can mess up all you want. It's your liver. However, once that liver cell has been frankenstein'd into a new being that is growing then it has transcended being a liver cell.
The problem with what you said is that a skin graft or bag of blood will not grow into a person. A fetus will (given nutrition.) Not only will it grow into a person, it will grow into a different person than who it came from. The important parts of a person are not YET there which is a point worth mentioning. Even a newborn baby is not yet formed how it is going to end up. It may have all of it's parts but they are not yet formed into their final configuration. The brain will still develop and mature, bones will fuse, teeth will form, etc. In my opinion, it is an error to attempt to marginalize any portion of the lifecycle of a human being merely to make yourself feel better about killing it.
Another potential problem w/ abortion is that even when the important parts of a person are there it is still legal to have an abortion. In fact it's still legal to have an abortion even at the point where a baby could feasibly be delivered and live.
So, yes, it is a serious matter and not too many people take it lightly. I would never suggest that you or anyone else has. I'm merely suggesting that you choose to see a baby as a lump of tissue not yet a person so that you don't feel so bad when one is killed for being unwanted.
Yes, I suppose I could see it's use in such a case. Granted I would still hold the woman in higher regard if she had the strength to still carry the baby to term (and probably give it up for adoption) but you really could not fault a woman for getting an abortion after she's been raped. In the case of incest... Well, if it were rape incest then the same thing as above applies. If not... well, I'm not so sure. Our society has a big stigma on incest but really the genetic problems don't pop up so bad until it's happened more than once in the family tree and reasonably recent. If it happens once than the incidence of side effects is fairly low. If it happens three generations in a row you get Bubba.
What does it prove then? One law says that a fetus is a person and one does not. Either one is correct or the other is. Such a legal inconsistency really needs to be resolved one way or the other. As it stands now I almost wonder whether a doctor could be charged w/ murdering a fetus if the mother changes her mind after the fact. The doctor did in fact commit the deed.
Enlighten me then, if the pro-choice movement largely does not count birth as making a baby a person then when do they feel that such a thing takes place and what is the justification for then ending the life of a person?
Your argument is no different than mine. You have merely attempted to use the old trick of framing my argument as a strawman argument w/o backing up yours. How about you convince people that a fertilized egg is NOT a person. Such a thing goes both ways. At conception the fetus has all of the needed DNA to produce a full grown person. As such, where do you draw the line? Not to start a slippery slope argument but children have their adult DNA too and just haven't quite matured yet. That does not mean they are inherently not of the same worth as an adult. A fetus is the first stop along a lifelong journey of maturation. As far as I know at no other point in the cycle is anyone saying that there is an unalienable right to terminate someone's life at whim.
I'm one of those people that wants to outlaw abortion entirely. Abortion has not got anything to do w/ a woman's right to choose and never has. That's just a smokescreen that the left has set up to deflect the real issue. The issue is that terminating someone's life on whim should not be allowed. Before you get all up in arms and claim that a fetus isn't a person please consider this:
Let's say you are married and your wife is pregnant. I come up on the street one day, whip a sawed off shotgun out, point it right at her belly, and blow the baby and half of her internal organs out her backside. Now, I'd get arrested and charged with murder and an illegal abortion of a fetus right? Right??! NO. I would get charged with a double murder for killing two people. You can't get charged w/ a double murder if you did not murder TWO people.
Why should a baby be considered a worthless piece of trash, able to be tossed aside at a woman's whim if she wants an abortion and yet be considered a valuable person if someone else murders it? Where is the logic in that? Further, where is the logic in letting an 8 months pregnant mother abort her baby but yet charge her with a crime if she smothers it as soon as it's born? The answer (as far as I'm concerned) is that there is no logic in it at all but bleeding heart liberals need to court the female vote so they rally behind an obviously illogical position.
Woah... slow down... the next thing you know you're going to tell me that Burger King keeps tabs on cattle ranches! Of course Haliburton had maps of Iraqi oil fields. They, after all, are in the business of such things. And possible ambitions does not equal fact.
Let's do some math. From my original link I see that the US imports about 13.12 million barrels of oil a day. Thats 4.789 billion barrels a year. Now, assuming we only get a quarter of Saudi Arabia's oil before it's gone we'll still be going strong for 13.7 years. If we get half of the oil it's 27.4 years. If you add up all of the other countries and take only half we are probably looking at something like 50-60 years at least before we run out of oil. I realize that that doesn't take into account the 'Peak' theory and such. As such it doesn't account for the increasing difficulty of getting the said oil. It does seem somewhat scary that the oil supply might only hold out another 40-70 years though...
Still, it would appear that we were not in a huge need to get yet more oil fields esp when sanctions on Iraqi oil were only in effect from 1991-1996. We've been able to get oil from them since then. In fact, we HAVE been getting oil from them since then.
Still, the fact remains, there doesn't seem to be much of an oil crisis at this point. Alternative energy sources are being perfected (which is a great thing!) and I doubt we'll still be that reliant on oil in 60 years.
Care to back up those assertions with some actual proof? My link showed that the US is not very reliant on Middle Eastern oil (despite what a lot of people try to assert.) So, care to back up your assertion that we somehow need oil from Iraq or that it would even in the least bit make oil cheaper for us?
It's such a joke when people constantly try to say that we went to Iraq for the oil.... Are we getting oil from Iraq? If so how much? How about we try to find out? http://www.gravmag.com/oil.html Their research seems to suggest that in 2003 we got a whopping 4% of our oil from Iraq. 'Money Maker' is written all over that! We get more oil from Nigeria than Iraq! If we wanted to invade a country to get oil why not Nigeria? Why not pressure Canada or Mexico? It would be very stupid to invade a distant country for their oil when we get can plenty of oil (and currently do) from our side of the world. Iraq's oil contribution to us is a drop in the bucket.
That's quite rich... Let's see, he was torturing his own people and supporting terrorists. Thats not minding your own business. We know he HAD those WMD and he's got no explanation as to where they seem to have gone. That dones not mean he didn't have them as we know he did. So where are they? Obviously he's got some secrets. See above, he did fund some terrorists, maybe even some involved in 9/11. This is indeed a shakey link though. Indirectly he was a threat as he most certainly did have WMD and may still know where they're hid. He was funding terrorists. Personally I think we would have been better served invading Syria or Palestine but thats a different story. I think that Bush Jr. was trying to combat terror while also cleaning up his father's mess (Bush Sr should have finished the job while he was there but he messed it up and left.) Really the US support of Saddam goes back even farther than Bush Sr. The US needs to learn not to support one dictator to deal with another.
Ok, maybe not all teachers make a whole lot... Around where I live (in Michigan) teachers in general make plenty of money and still complain. I do personally know a teacher and she makes around 45k a year as an elementary school teacher. She's only around 25 years old. In all fairness, I do believe she has a master's degree. However schools do normally cover the cost of teacher's classes. All I can say is that your sister is getting majorly hosed... that however is not my fault and is is not necessarily the standard case for teachers (as I outlined above, a summer break, good pay, great benefits, and paid college classes are the norm at least where I live.) BTW, there are plenty of people who work very hard and not all of them make a lot of money. In the grand scheme of things teachers, on average, make more more w/ more benefits than most people and they get at least a little summer break (I know most all of them work both before and after the school year for a while so their break isn't as long as the kids' break.) In an economy where people are losing their jobs left and right the teachers around me are still complaining and unwilling to make any concessions. However, I'll grant you that laptops are not necessary and it would be better to try to save the money to be able to pay teachers and buy other supplies. The foundation of an educated society is the willingness to learn and experiment. Teachers certainly facilitate that. But learning is quite possible even w/o teachers. In science classes even in elementary school there were many times when I knew more about science than the teachers. Why is that? Because I used to read encyclopedias and books about science. I certainly wasn't influenced to do that by the 1/2 assed science teachers I had... The answer to the foundation of learning: The desire to learn.
Teachers make enough money as it is. I am so sick of psople bitching about how little teachers make or that they should make more. Maybe, just maybe they should be thankful that they have a good steady job w/ great benefits. Teachers that are 'burning out' because of money are not the ones you want teaching. If you can't be happy w/ your choice of careers at a decent salary and need an obscene salary to stay happy then YOU ARE IN THE FREAKING WRONG CAREER.