1) I don't care whether the origins of the tree is a Christian icon or not, the fact of the matter is that it is now. I don't know of anyone who calls them Pagan trees and there still may be Pagans who use the trees in their rituals although I have a feeling they wouldn't include an angel at the top or ornaments that say "Merry Christmas".
2) A holiday party is meaningless. Why not have a holiday party for every holiday to satisfy those people who are offended by fireworks (Independence Day) instead of a July 4th BBQ, or who don't celebrate dead people (Halloween) because they would be offended by a Halloween party. I don't see anyone bending over backwards to not offend anyone any other time of the year except during the Christmas season. Why is that? Do people only get offended when it is Christmastime? What a coincidence.
You also seem to forget that a holiday is a holy day and you can't get away from the fact that Hanukkah and Christmas are religious holidays (that's redundant but you seem to have forgotten that fact so I had to state it that way). If you don't like celebrating one of them or don't celebrate for one reason or another then don't attend. I find a "holiday party" offensive to my religion and so when Lockheed Martin (I'm a subcontractor to them) hosted one a couple weeks ago I did not attend; I had that choice and I let people know why I wasn't going. It can work the same way too if you just opened your eyes a little. Why should I (a member of the majority who celebrates Christmas) have to make a decision to not attend a party because they don't even recognize Christmas' existence? It should be the 5 people who celebrate Diwali that should have to decide whether they still want to go to a Christmas party. Companies don't want to offend those who don't celebrate Christmas but don't mind offending those who do. If you don't want to offend people who don't celebrate Christmas then have a holiday party, but don't take away from those who do celebrate it (majority of population, even if they don't celebrate it for the right reason) so also provide a Christmas party for those people.
3) As I stated in my first sentence, I don't care what the origin is of the various Christmas symbols. The point is they are Christmas symbols right now and to not call them that but to still use them for Christmas is inconsistent and therefore it makes the organization doing that look stupid. They don't ever have a set of candles (for Hanukkah) but even if they did I have to wonder whether they would be referred to as just candles instead of a Menorrah to appease those who may be offended (even though they wouldn't care about it anyway because it's not an icon for them). Why should someone celebrating Kwanzaa care about a tree being a part of the decorations? They don't use a tree so they wouldn't even care if it is called a Christmas tree. I use that as an example because Lockheed Martin called our Christmas tree a holiday tree last year. If we want to be neutral then we shouldn't use a renamed Christmas tree as a decoration but instead use a rock or something that has no meaning.
It sounds like you took my reply to your original post as a sign that I was jealous of your situation. I'm not. I wouldn't want to work for a company who price gouges the general population to make record profit measured in the billions of dollars. The oil companies raise gasoline prices in anticipation of a coming hurricane despite the fact the hurricane won't instantaneously affect supply to the consumer, not to mention raising prices in anticipation of extended holiday weekends and summertime trips. They raise prices anytime they want w/o ever lowering them back to the pre-storm/pre-weekend/pre-season prices, and they manipulate prices like that in the hopes that no one will notice. The problem is we aren't dumb but we really don't have any recourse and Big Oil knows that.
It's nice to know the extra money I paid this summer for gasoline to get to my own job paid for your Christmas bonus. You forgot to thank me and everyone else for paying you. My company is a small US gov't contractor who pays out Christmas bonuses out of their profits (supposedly) for the year so at least I can say that the money you put towards your federal taxes didn't actually pay for my bonus. My bonus wasn't as great as last year but it was about 5% of my salary; it's better than other companies so I'm not bitter at all and will put the money towards paying off bills.
to avoiding Christmas scrooges is whether or not you work for a company who is so PC-oriented (political correctness) that their idea of diversity is to suppress all religious celebration this time of year into something called a holiday party. To top it off they still have a tree (called a holiday tree) which is a Christmas icon but they neglect to recognize that fact. Where the menorah is I have yet to figure out, despite the diversity excuse the corporations always tout (I guess the Jewish people get to look at a holiday tree whether they like it or not). That behavior turns an attempt at political correctness into an inconsistent show of how stupid, ignorant, and insensitive corporations can be. If we can get past all that then I say anything that corporations do beyond that is just something to be thankful for because next year they may not even recognize Christmas at all (most don't recognize it now but instead recognize something called "the holidays" using a pine tree but even that may go away) so the original post could be last of its kind (except for the dupes of course).
They are outsourced but to domestic contractors so the contracts are outsourced from the perspective of the dept, not the country. The gov't doesn't have its own set of consultants, engineers, designers, and architects. The DOJ outsources IT contracts to Lockheed Martin, Northrup-Grumman, SAIC, CSC, Raytheon, and a bunch of others. Both the DOJ and DOD require clearances to do most contract work and they won't trust foreigners to do the work unless that clearance is passed (sometimes not even then), but the amount of work it would take to do a background check on multiple Indian-based employees would probably be too much to make it worthwhile to have an Indian-based contractor perform work for the US gov't. Basic clearance can take upwards of 8 months or so to complete for one individual who hasn't live in too many areas. I doubt many, if any, foreign-based companies get contract work due to the fact that the gov't doesn't even like using products from foreigners unless the country of business is an ally or the company has resellers in allied-countries.
If you want to send pictures with annotations but not use HTML then do what I've seen ignorant people do a few years ago which was to put all pictures in a Word document because they thought that is how you stored pictures, then they would send the Word doc in an email. At that point my jaw would drop as I asked them why didn't they just send the picture itself.
Or, combined with license plate recognition, could see the wanted/stolen status of cars.
This is already possible and some police departments in the US already use this technology on a daily basis in their cruisers to nab stolen vehicles. The UK used it first and I think Chicago and departments in California are using it in the US. There was an article in Wired a year ago approximately that talked about it but i'm too lazy to look up the Wired URL for you, sorry.
Applying what I've seen in movies (which means this info comes with a bag of salt) to answering your question I'd have to say that the display is transparent but the text and graphics are not. Of course if the background is black and your font is black you may run into some issues. Even if this has no practical application there are tons of things that CS people do just for the fun of it, if only for a few minutes to find out it wasn't as useful as they hoped and is more annoying than anything else. We have to at least try it.
So for the most part everything I said still applies except for the "wait an hour" part. I assume you didn't have an issue with the rest of my statement thereby agreeing with it and helping me make my point. A standard user isn't going to know what a kernel compile is or why it is required in order to get a piece of hardware working.
The human mind is the product of millions of years of evolution designed to think in a Newtonian way.
Don't put "evolution" and "designed" in the same sentence because you will contradict yourself otherwise. We are the result of one or the other. Design implies purpose and forethought however it seems evolution hinges on a long series of accidents.
You are hardwired to think Newtonian.
And why is that? Why not Euclidean or Einsteinian? Why did the universe turn out the way it did? Why do we even have the ability to understand it (at least most of it) when no other species does? Why should we exist at all if we are just an accident? What benefit do we get by understanding the rules of the universe (other species march along just fine without the knowledge)?
This is an an ancient way of thinking that goes back well before we were primates, much less full blown humans.
Really? Care to cite evidence that bacteria, or even fish, understand gravity?
For as much as you imply evolution provided us (e.g. fact that we can even begin to contemplate the laws of the universe) it seems a little fishy it could even have the power to do any of that. Then again there is no logical explanation that evolutionists can give other than the meager circular logic of the anthropic principle which states the universe, and everything in it including us, is the way it is because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here to witness it. It's the most useless principle that I know of.
If I want to make it really snappy, I can do some re-compiling and just install only the stuff I use. I doubt that most MS users can say that.
You say something in that sentence that causes many people to look away from Linux: compiling. With that said, you are right that most MS users can't say that because a Windows user doesn't have to compile anything in the first place. He can install something and begin running it immediately without having to wait an hour for it to compile (assuming no errors with the configure script or the compilation itself, he has all the libraries he needs, etc.).
And that's why we end up with games like this. Even if most individual Christians bear no responsibility, it is Christianity's fault...
Don't displace the responsibility onto something/someone else. A specific group of developers created this game and had it published. Don't blame the religion for the game just like you don't blame Islam on terrorist attacks. Those who feel a need to kill make a conscious decision to do so and whether the excuse is "God told me to" or something else, the point is man's law states it is wrong to kill (God's laws say this too of course) and therefore you shouldn't kill anyone (forget the fact that the Bible may or may not contradict this). It's also not right to hate anyone but that doesn't stop some Slashdotters from hating people who don't agree with their views. They make a conscious decision to do so. I don't blame any particular group for that behavior though. It's a personal decision (albeit a bad and close-minded one).
Although some people think nonliving objects can all of a sudden evolve into living objects it wouldn't work out too well to go the other way and make a satellite out of muscles and bones. Just think of the gooey mess when you change the batteries. By the way, astronauts are still vulnerable. Ever hear of radiation poisoning? Why else would the astronauts have been told to go into the safest part of the ISS during the storm?
Because you have other people who subscribe to the political correctness magazine that says that pedophiles shouldn't have to spend more time than is needed in prison. They need to have a chance to live their lives in freedom even after doing something wrong. It is cheaper however to release them and then try to compensate for that by doing things like this so a defense for those who want this list may say that its cheaper than keeping them in prison longer. Maybe if people like this were taught differently growing up the prison systems wouldn't be overcrowded and we wouldn't be forced to save money by putting the criminals back out on the streets.
You must not have any RAID or "extra" devices in your machine. But the reason is the same whether you have a bunch of hardware or not: the hardware has to be initialized and the OS has to initalize various data structures and so on. Also the more software you have (services and taskbar icons) the longer it will take for you to be able to do things unhindered after a boot. Obviously the faster the CPU and more RAM you have the faster the boot up sequence but this can be offset with additional hardware and software. RAID controllers slow the boot up sequence because the controller will probe to make sure all the drives that should be there are actually there. Spyware will also slow a PC down. Be thankful its only 30 seconds. A typical HP SuperDome (~$1.2 million) partition consisting of 2 cells (8 CPUS, 16 gigs of RAM, and a few RAID controllers) takes about 10 min to boot to a prompt (the cabinet as a whole can hold 32 CPUs). I'd say that 6 min of that is waiting for the hardware to be initialized and 4 min for the kernel to initalize and system services to startup. You can speed up the boot sequence a little by turning off device detection in XP (it does that every boot so turning it off will shave off a couple seconds).
Kids do it even more when you endorse their behavior by giving them something to protect them from the consequences of doing it. Why shouldn't they have sex if they can be aided by you to prevent them from ever having to suffer the consequences? You think they will do it anyway so you endorse the behavior which then makes them want to do it even more so you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don't aid their behavior, condone it instead. Make sure you get your cause and effect correct before you spout off too.
None of us actually have our own house. We only have to protect the basement. Our parents are the ones who have to worry about the rest of the house. Solution: Just don't leave the basement at the same time your parents leave the rest of the house.
Better Make that DVD scratch proof. Wouldn't one tiny scratch or piece of gunk and blot out a few megs of stuff? Or maybe they'll put it in a plastic casing (like a cartridge)..
That would be called a caddy unless you mean something else.
Well there has to be a beginning, it's an almost certainty. The stars and galaxies that exist almost had to start from something since we can observe changes now. The fact that the universe's expansion can be traced to a single point also implies (I refrain from saying "proves" since I'm more humble than evolutionsists who claim they interpet everything correctly) there was a central location where everything originated. Even if the objects still existed in the beginning and just in a different shape or whatever still means there was an initial state for all objects in the universe. Something set them in motion (for our solar system the motion seems to be pretty exact in order for life to be sustained on Earth).
Secularists don't care about the origin of the word "holiday" or they choose to ignore it. It is used liberally throughout the calendar for any day that the gov't and banks close on whether the day's celebration is religious based or not. I guess at the least its preferred over "Christmas" which, (gasp!), actually as "Christ" in the name.
You mean Christmas is all about the money (no other holiday generates as much revenue). That is why people (seculars) call it by its name of "holiday" and want the money it generates but don't want to hear all the religious crap that comes with it. That is despite the fact that if it wasn't for the religious reason for its existence no one would be making money off it but they conveniently ignore that fact. Next year we will be "celebrating" the "holiday" which isn't to be confused with the other 100 or so holidays throughout the year that are part of the double standard and are thus referenced by their actual name. The Christmas spirit died off long ago and that's the way seculars want it.
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1) I don't care whether the origins of the tree is a Christian icon or not, the fact of the matter is that it is now. I don't know of anyone who calls them Pagan trees and there still may be Pagans who use the trees in their rituals although I have a feeling they wouldn't include an angel at the top or ornaments that say "Merry Christmas".
2) A holiday party is meaningless. Why not have a holiday party for every holiday to satisfy those people who are offended by fireworks (Independence Day) instead of a July 4th BBQ, or who don't celebrate dead people (Halloween) because they would be offended by a Halloween party. I don't see anyone bending over backwards to not offend anyone any other time of the year except during the Christmas season. Why is that? Do people only get offended when it is Christmastime? What a coincidence.
You also seem to forget that a holiday is a holy day and you can't get away from the fact that Hanukkah and Christmas are religious holidays (that's redundant but you seem to have forgotten that fact so I had to state it that way). If you don't like celebrating one of them or don't celebrate for one reason or another then don't attend. I find a "holiday party" offensive to my religion and so when Lockheed Martin (I'm a subcontractor to them) hosted one a couple weeks ago I did not attend; I had that choice and I let people know why I wasn't going. It can work the same way too if you just opened your eyes a little. Why should I (a member of the majority who celebrates Christmas) have to make a decision to not attend a party because they don't even recognize Christmas' existence? It should be the 5 people who celebrate Diwali that should have to decide whether they still want to go to a Christmas party. Companies don't want to offend those who don't celebrate Christmas but don't mind offending those who do. If you don't want to offend people who don't celebrate Christmas then have a holiday party, but don't take away from those who do celebrate it (majority of population, even if they don't celebrate it for the right reason) so also provide a Christmas party for those people.
3) As I stated in my first sentence, I don't care what the origin is of the various Christmas symbols. The point is they are Christmas symbols right now and to not call them that but to still use them for Christmas is inconsistent and therefore it makes the organization doing that look stupid. They don't ever have a set of candles (for Hanukkah) but even if they did I have to wonder whether they would be referred to as just candles instead of a Menorrah to appease those who may be offended (even though they wouldn't care about it anyway because it's not an icon for them). Why should someone celebrating Kwanzaa care about a tree being a part of the decorations? They don't use a tree so they wouldn't even care if it is called a Christmas tree. I use that as an example because Lockheed Martin called our Christmas tree a holiday tree last year. If we want to be neutral then we shouldn't use a renamed Christmas tree as a decoration but instead use a rock or something that has no meaning.
It sounds like you took my reply to your original post as a sign that I was jealous of your situation. I'm not. I wouldn't want to work for a company who price gouges the general population to make record profit measured in the billions of dollars. The oil companies raise gasoline prices in anticipation of a coming hurricane despite the fact the hurricane won't instantaneously affect supply to the consumer, not to mention raising prices in anticipation of extended holiday weekends and summertime trips. They raise prices anytime they want w/o ever lowering them back to the pre-storm/pre-weekend/pre-season prices, and they manipulate prices like that in the hopes that no one will notice. The problem is we aren't dumb but we really don't have any recourse and Big Oil knows that.
It's nice to know the extra money I paid this summer for gasoline to get to my own job paid for your Christmas bonus. You forgot to thank me and everyone else for paying you. My company is a small US gov't contractor who pays out Christmas bonuses out of their profits (supposedly) for the year so at least I can say that the money you put towards your federal taxes didn't actually pay for my bonus. My bonus wasn't as great as last year but it was about 5% of my salary; it's better than other companies so I'm not bitter at all and will put the money towards paying off bills.
to avoiding Christmas scrooges is whether or not you work for a company who is so PC-oriented (political correctness) that their idea of diversity is to suppress all religious celebration this time of year into something called a holiday party. To top it off they still have a tree (called a holiday tree) which is a Christmas icon but they neglect to recognize that fact. Where the menorah is I have yet to figure out, despite the diversity excuse the corporations always tout (I guess the Jewish people get to look at a holiday tree whether they like it or not). That behavior turns an attempt at political correctness into an inconsistent show of how stupid, ignorant, and insensitive corporations can be. If we can get past all that then I say anything that corporations do beyond that is just something to be thankful for because next year they may not even recognize Christmas at all (most don't recognize it now but instead recognize something called "the holidays" using a pine tree but even that may go away) so the original post could be last of its kind (except for the dupes of course).
They are outsourced but to domestic contractors so the contracts are outsourced from the perspective of the dept, not the country. The gov't doesn't have its own set of consultants, engineers, designers, and architects. The DOJ outsources IT contracts to Lockheed Martin, Northrup-Grumman, SAIC, CSC, Raytheon, and a bunch of others. Both the DOJ and DOD require clearances to do most contract work and they won't trust foreigners to do the work unless that clearance is passed (sometimes not even then), but the amount of work it would take to do a background check on multiple Indian-based employees would probably be too much to make it worthwhile to have an Indian-based contractor perform work for the US gov't. Basic clearance can take upwards of 8 months or so to complete for one individual who hasn't live in too many areas. I doubt many, if any, foreign-based companies get contract work due to the fact that the gov't doesn't even like using products from foreigners unless the country of business is an ally or the company has resellers in allied-countries.
If you want to send pictures with annotations but not use HTML then do what I've seen ignorant people do a few years ago which was to put all pictures in a Word document because they thought that is how you stored pictures, then they would send the Word doc in an email. At that point my jaw would drop as I asked them why didn't they just send the picture itself.
Or, combined with license plate recognition, could see the wanted/stolen status of cars.
This is already possible and some police departments in the US already use this technology on a daily basis in their cruisers to nab stolen vehicles. The UK used it first and I think Chicago and departments in California are using it in the US. There was an article in Wired a year ago approximately that talked about it but i'm too lazy to look up the Wired URL for you, sorry.
Applying what I've seen in movies (which means this info comes with a bag of salt) to answering your question I'd have to say that the display is transparent but the text and graphics are not. Of course if the background is black and your font is black you may run into some issues. Even if this has no practical application there are tons of things that CS people do just for the fun of it, if only for a few minutes to find out it wasn't as useful as they hoped and is more annoying than anything else. We have to at least try it.
So for the most part everything I said still applies except for the "wait an hour" part. I assume you didn't have an issue with the rest of my statement thereby agreeing with it and helping me make my point. A standard user isn't going to know what a kernel compile is or why it is required in order to get a piece of hardware working.
The human mind is the product of millions of years of evolution designed to think in a Newtonian way.
Don't put "evolution" and "designed" in the same sentence because you will contradict yourself otherwise. We are the result of one or the other. Design implies purpose and forethought however it seems evolution hinges on a long series of accidents.
You are hardwired to think Newtonian.
And why is that? Why not Euclidean or Einsteinian? Why did the universe turn out the way it did? Why do we even have the ability to understand it (at least most of it) when no other species does? Why should we exist at all if we are just an accident? What benefit do we get by understanding the rules of the universe (other species march along just fine without the knowledge)?
This is an an ancient way of thinking that goes back well before we were primates, much less full blown humans.
Really? Care to cite evidence that bacteria, or even fish, understand gravity?
For as much as you imply evolution provided us (e.g. fact that we can even begin to contemplate the laws of the universe) it seems a little fishy it could even have the power to do any of that. Then again there is no logical explanation that evolutionists can give other than the meager circular logic of the anthropic principle which states the universe, and everything in it including us, is the way it is because if it wasn't we wouldn't be here to witness it. It's the most useless principle that I know of.
If I want to make it really snappy, I can do some re-compiling and just install only the stuff I use. I doubt that most MS users can say that.
You say something in that sentence that causes many people to look away from Linux: compiling. With that said, you are right that most MS users can't say that because a Windows user doesn't have to compile anything in the first place. He can install something and begin running it immediately without having to wait an hour for it to compile (assuming no errors with the configure script or the compilation itself, he has all the libraries he needs, etc.).
It's SQL Server 2005 Express which is the desktop version of SQL Server (previously MSDE).
Nobody wants kids to exercise common sence, they are asking parents to supervise their own fucking children.
The same can be said for spelling and grammar.
And that's why we end up with games like this. Even if most individual Christians bear no responsibility, it is Christianity's fault...
Don't displace the responsibility onto something/someone else. A specific group of developers created this game and had it published. Don't blame the religion for the game just like you don't blame Islam on terrorist attacks. Those who feel a need to kill make a conscious decision to do so and whether the excuse is "God told me to" or something else, the point is man's law states it is wrong to kill (God's laws say this too of course) and therefore you shouldn't kill anyone (forget the fact that the Bible may or may not contradict this). It's also not right to hate anyone but that doesn't stop some Slashdotters from hating people who don't agree with their views. They make a conscious decision to do so. I don't blame any particular group for that behavior though. It's a personal decision (albeit a bad and close-minded one).
Although some people think nonliving objects can all of a sudden evolve into living objects it wouldn't work out too well to go the other way and make a satellite out of muscles and bones. Just think of the gooey mess when you change the batteries. By the way, astronauts are still vulnerable. Ever hear of radiation poisoning? Why else would the astronauts have been told to go into the safest part of the ISS during the storm?
What's with "Investiage" in the article heading? Is that a new Bushism? I guess we don't have editors, only submitters.
Because you have other people who subscribe to the political correctness magazine that says that pedophiles shouldn't have to spend more time than is needed in prison. They need to have a chance to live their lives in freedom even after doing something wrong. It is cheaper however to release them and then try to compensate for that by doing things like this so a defense for those who want this list may say that its cheaper than keeping them in prison longer. Maybe if people like this were taught differently growing up the prison systems wouldn't be overcrowded and we wouldn't be forced to save money by putting the criminals back out on the streets.
You must not have any RAID or "extra" devices in your machine. But the reason is the same whether you have a bunch of hardware or not: the hardware has to be initialized and the OS has to initalize various data structures and so on. Also the more software you have (services and taskbar icons) the longer it will take for you to be able to do things unhindered after a boot. Obviously the faster the CPU and more RAM you have the faster the boot up sequence but this can be offset with additional hardware and software. RAID controllers slow the boot up sequence because the controller will probe to make sure all the drives that should be there are actually there. Spyware will also slow a PC down. Be thankful its only 30 seconds. A typical HP SuperDome (~$1.2 million) partition consisting of 2 cells (8 CPUS, 16 gigs of RAM, and a few RAID controllers) takes about 10 min to boot to a prompt (the cabinet as a whole can hold 32 CPUs). I'd say that 6 min of that is waiting for the hardware to be initialized and 4 min for the kernel to initalize and system services to startup. You can speed up the boot sequence a little by turning off device detection in XP (it does that every boot so turning it off will shave off a couple seconds).
Kids do it even more when you endorse their behavior by giving them something to protect them from the consequences of doing it. Why shouldn't they have sex if they can be aided by you to prevent them from ever having to suffer the consequences? You think they will do it anyway so you endorse the behavior which then makes them want to do it even more so you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. Don't aid their behavior, condone it instead. Make sure you get your cause and effect correct before you spout off too.
If y2k didn't get rid of them then y2k38 (2038) will.
None of us actually have our own house. We only have to protect the basement. Our parents are the ones who have to worry about the rest of the house. Solution: Just don't leave the basement at the same time your parents leave the rest of the house.
Better Make that DVD scratch proof. Wouldn't one tiny scratch or piece of gunk and blot out a few megs of stuff? Or maybe they'll put it in a plastic casing (like a cartridge)..
That would be called a caddy unless you mean something else.
Well there has to be a beginning, it's an almost certainty. The stars and galaxies that exist almost had to start from something since we can observe changes now. The fact that the universe's expansion can be traced to a single point also implies (I refrain from saying "proves" since I'm more humble than evolutionsists who claim they interpet everything correctly) there was a central location where everything originated. Even if the objects still existed in the beginning and just in a different shape or whatever still means there was an initial state for all objects in the universe. Something set them in motion (for our solar system the motion seems to be pretty exact in order for life to be sustained on Earth).
Secularists don't care about the origin of the word "holiday" or they choose to ignore it. It is used liberally throughout the calendar for any day that the gov't and banks close on whether the day's celebration is religious based or not. I guess at the least its preferred over "Christmas" which, (gasp!), actually as "Christ" in the name.
You mean Christmas is all about the money (no other holiday generates as much revenue). That is why people (seculars) call it by its name of "holiday" and want the money it generates but don't want to hear all the religious crap that comes with it. That is despite the fact that if it wasn't for the religious reason for its existence no one would be making money off it but they conveniently ignore that fact. Next year we will be "celebrating" the "holiday" which isn't to be confused with the other 100 or so holidays throughout the year that are part of the double standard and are thus referenced by their actual name. The Christmas spirit died off long ago and that's the way seculars want it.