Stop blaming people for the modern problems this "modern" world has created for them to cope with.
Oh, bollocks. If you feel you have too much crap on your plate, prioritize!
Out of your list, I actively pay attention to politics/government, computers, religion, games and news reports. When I need to, I look up regulations, laws, etc. The rest of that list doesn't matter, and what I've listed is well within my bounds to keep up with.
Just because ten Libraries of Congress wash by your eyeballs every day doesn't mean you need to waste your time paying attention to them. And blaming ADD and other mental illnesses on that? Pure poppycock.
But why talk about anything "rational", when such an "irrational" reaction like yours is acceptable? After all, EVERY day is bash-a-christian day.
As a Pagan, I sit on the other side of the fence, so to speak. I don't think Christians realize how good they have it in the United States. You get to pray wherever you want, however you want; you pray in public, and everyone in government bends over backwards to accommodate you. Don't believe me? Look at how big a deal it was when Keith Ellison took his oath of office on the Qu'ran instead of the Bible!
But that's not good enough for some Christians. I'm not trying to tar you with this brush, but your brethren have some shit to answer for: trying to assert that the United States is a "Christian nation" when it is not; trying to inject the Christian God into government and the public square at every opportunity, in the face of Jesus' own words to pray in private and to keep God separate from government; asserting that the Christian God is bigger than the Muslim God (which is a plain stupid remark, by the way, if you know anything at all about Islam).
So is every day really "bash-a-Christian day"? Or are you witnessing the backlash of everyone who doesn't want to live under the tyranny of a Christian theocracy?
I don't expect you to subscribe to Catholic beliefs, but this idea the the church should "change with the times" is silly, at best.
Is it really?
In nature, an organism either grows or it dies. You can have an equilibrium where an organism is dying as fast as it's growing -- but at some point it will do one or the other. But it's my experience that man-made entities such as governments and religions don't have nature's finesse at maintaining that equilibrium.
So you grow or you die. If the Catholic Church doesn't "change with the times," as you put it, it will become irrelevant, and it will atrophy until it is gone from the Earth. That's already happening, if you think about it: look at the scandals surrounding the priesthood in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Look at how irrelevant the papacy has become since the death of Pope John Paul -- someone who, I submit, understood that the Catholic Church had to change if it wanted to stay alive in any meaningful way.
But then, maybe a little death would be good for the Church at this point -- because it's spent 1,500 years growing in the wrong direction, striving to control people's lives rather than genuinely bringing them closer to God. Martin Luther recognized that, but even his successors missed the mark. Worse, the Church has so focused people on worshipping the Messenger that the Message itself is lost; the Church more resembles the Pharises that Jesus decried than the teachings that Jesus himself shared.
Let me offer one: No one's proven God. Therefore the need to disprove God does not exist, because there's no conclusive proof that God does exist.
Science can control people just as easily.
Is there conclusive proof of the claims such products make? If not, then by definition it isn't science. Science isn't the product -- it's the methodology. It's making observations, forming an opinion based on those observations, and then making more observations to assert one's opinion. At some point, it meets a requisite amount of proof and gets accepted as part of the way that the Universe works. Contrast that to the holy books of the major religions, which don't have (and arguably don't need) any sort of substantiation by fact. They don't have it because it's myth... and they don't need it because, again, it's myth.
The danger is that, in the case of the Bible and the Qu'ran, far too many people accept mythology as literal truth. It'd be a bit like taking Aesop's fables as literal truth and then having to explain why crows and foxes don't talk today when they did 3,000 years ago. No worldview built with such a shaky foundation can hold, so people who hold such a worldview get increasingly irrational when the flaws in that foundation are presented to them.
You know that little box that you can check on your tax form that lets you assign $3 of your taxes to fund the next presidential campaign?
I'd change that a bit, and add a few more options. Here's what Congress wants to spend your money on, I'd say... do you want to fund it? For example: Congress wants to spend $300 million ($1 of your taxes) on a bridge in Alaska. How much do you want to contribute?
Give the "power of the purse" to the people, I say. Let them decide what's worth their money and what isn't. I would like to think that the American public is a bit harder to bribe than Congress, simply because there are so many more of us.
Now, I'm all for people driving the speed limit, maybe a little more. But legally, the speed limit is an upper limit, not a lower limit. And people who drive like the speed limit is just a guideline tend, in my experience, to be more prone to road rage than those who actually obey it.
This whole thread is pissing me off.... I hate people.
Maybe you should consider a class in anger management. Or take a deep breath and put on some jazz music when you get in heavy traffic.
Seriously people, I'm all for civil liberties, but theres nothing wrong with have a solid method of making sure people are who they say they are and verifying they are allowed to get the identification they are allowed to get.
Only, don't we have that already with drivers licenses and state IDs? Why do we need this program, other than it's a federal government solution looking for a problem?
Call his ISP and report him -- because at the point you notified him and he did nothing about it, he became an accomplice to whatever's being done on his computer.
Isn't your bank the only institution able to transfer money out of your account? Don't you have to show your ID? Don't you have to sign some documents???
The short answer is, no. Someone at our base lost about $600 to a scam like this -- only it was worse for him, because someone managed to randomly generate his routing and account numbers. About the only way you can prevent something like this is by being OCD about your day-to-day bank transactions.
Anybody that converts real world assets to virtual ones deserves what they get. Seriously, what's on your mind when you convert your hard earned cold cash into bits [emphasis mine] in some virtual world ?
Exactly what do you think is in your real-world bank account?
If you don't want your precious piece of information to be used by others, then just don't put it available to the public. Period.
How asinine. I'm glad artists and writers and photographers and musicians don't actually feel this way, because it would make the U.S. a pretty damned depressing place to live. There's also the small matter of how you'd get your news stories, which are also protected by copyright.
Schools will buy Apple to run Microsoft Office (and possibly Adobe). Graphics and multimedia businesses will buy Apple to run Adobe products. Given a choice between a MacBook and a laptop running Windows Vista, I'd probably go with Apple, too -- which is saying something when you consider I've spent the last 16 years building my own desktop PCs and Apple's relative lack of upgradeability.
So in other words, it will be standards compliant but at the same time render all the old crap that wasn't even close to standards compliant??? So what's the point?!! If people can still write crap code, they will. You may as well write IE in 1995 Visual Basic if you are going to be that wishy washy.
Wow, talk about moving the goalposts. It's reasonable to expect a Web browser to adhere to standards -- so when IE finally does, the new reason to hate MS is because IE also supports the pages that are on the Web today?
Making IE8 render pages the way IE7 does is the smart way to go for Microsoft. If people woke up one morning and none of their sites looked right, they'd be rightfully pissed off. IE8 will give people the time to make their "crap code" standards-compliant... though if they haven't done it by IE9, they might be shit out of luck.
Oh, and BTW -- as long as people are coding, there will always be crap code. Standards will not make crap code go away.
In either case, I get more news off the Internet now, and from non-established sources (e.g. not CNN, not Fox, not the NYT)... I suspect that more of my fellow humans do as well - more than any media corp would ever be willing to admit, even to themselves.
Maybe so. But the rest of the masses will be reading print versions of the drek that appears on Fox News -- or alternately, the drek that is Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs on CNN. People who want real news will have to seek out the print version of "The Daily Show."
Except maybe why public schools are having such a hard time of it in the first place. A reasonable teacher might have said, "Interesting -- tell me more about it after class, but for now, stick with the other browser." This teacher, in contrast, played a power game and probably did more to undermine his authority in the classroom than reinforce it.
Slashdot Mirror
There, fixed that for ya.
Oh, bollocks. If you feel you have too much crap on your plate, prioritize!
Out of your list, I actively pay attention to politics/government, computers, religion, games and news reports. When I need to, I look up regulations, laws, etc. The rest of that list doesn't matter, and what I've listed is well within my bounds to keep up with.
Just because ten Libraries of Congress wash by your eyeballs every day doesn't mean you need to waste your time paying attention to them. And blaming ADD and other mental illnesses on that? Pure poppycock.
As a Pagan, I sit on the other side of the fence, so to speak. I don't think Christians realize how good they have it in the United States. You get to pray wherever you want, however you want; you pray in public, and everyone in government bends over backwards to accommodate you. Don't believe me? Look at how big a deal it was when Keith Ellison took his oath of office on the Qu'ran instead of the Bible!
But that's not good enough for some Christians. I'm not trying to tar you with this brush, but your brethren have some shit to answer for: trying to assert that the United States is a "Christian nation" when it is not ; trying to inject the Christian God into government and the public square at every opportunity, in the face of Jesus' own words to pray in private and to keep God separate from government; asserting that the Christian God is bigger than the Muslim God (which is a plain stupid remark, by the way, if you know anything at all about Islam).
So is every day really "bash-a-Christian day"? Or are you witnessing the backlash of everyone who doesn't want to live under the tyranny of a Christian theocracy?
Is it really?
In nature, an organism either grows or it dies. You can have an equilibrium where an organism is dying as fast as it's growing -- but at some point it will do one or the other. But it's my experience that man-made entities such as governments and religions don't have nature's finesse at maintaining that equilibrium.
So you grow or you die. If the Catholic Church doesn't "change with the times," as you put it, it will become irrelevant, and it will atrophy until it is gone from the Earth. That's already happening, if you think about it: look at the scandals surrounding the priesthood in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Look at how irrelevant the papacy has become since the death of Pope John Paul -- someone who, I submit, understood that the Catholic Church had to change if it wanted to stay alive in any meaningful way.
But then, maybe a little death would be good for the Church at this point -- because it's spent 1,500 years growing in the wrong direction, striving to control people's lives rather than genuinely bringing them closer to God. Martin Luther recognized that, but even his successors missed the mark. Worse, the Church has so focused people on worshipping the Messenger that the Message itself is lost; the Church more resembles the Pharises that Jesus decried than the teachings that Jesus himself shared.
Let me offer one: No one's proven God. Therefore the need to disprove God does not exist, because there's no conclusive proof that God does exist.
Is there conclusive proof of the claims such products make? If not, then by definition it isn't science. Science isn't the product -- it's the methodology. It's making observations, forming an opinion based on those observations, and then making more observations to assert one's opinion. At some point, it meets a requisite amount of proof and gets accepted as part of the way that the Universe works. Contrast that to the holy books of the major religions, which don't have (and arguably don't need) any sort of substantiation by fact. They don't have it because it's myth ... and they don't need it because, again, it's myth.
The danger is that, in the case of the Bible and the Qu'ran, far too many people accept mythology as literal truth. It'd be a bit like taking Aesop's fables as literal truth and then having to explain why crows and foxes don't talk today when they did 3,000 years ago. No worldview built with such a shaky foundation can hold, so people who hold such a worldview get increasingly irrational when the flaws in that foundation are presented to them.
You know that little box that you can check on your tax form that lets you assign $3 of your taxes to fund the next presidential campaign? I'd change that a bit, and add a few more options. Here's what Congress wants to spend your money on, I'd say ... do you want to fund it? For example: Congress wants to spend $300 million ($1 of your taxes) on a bridge in Alaska. How much do you want to contribute?
Give the "power of the purse" to the people, I say. Let them decide what's worth their money and what isn't. I would like to think that the American public is a bit harder to bribe than Congress, simply because there are so many more of us.
Now, I'm all for people driving the speed limit, maybe a little more. But legally, the speed limit is an upper limit, not a lower limit. And people who drive like the speed limit is just a guideline tend, in my experience, to be more prone to road rage than those who actually obey it.
Maybe you should consider a class in anger management. Or take a deep breath and put on some jazz music when you get in heavy traffic.
The short answer is, no. Someone at our base lost about $600 to a scam like this -- only it was worse for him, because someone managed to randomly generate his routing and account numbers. About the only way you can prevent something like this is by being OCD about your day-to-day bank transactions.
Here's the original story if you're interested.
Is an Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid. It's guaranteed to get rid of any unauthorized bombs, and as a side bonus, dentists will love it.
Exactly what do you think is in your real-world bank account?
How asinine. I'm glad artists and writers and photographers and musicians don't actually feel this way, because it would make the U.S. a pretty damned depressing place to live. There's also the small matter of how you'd get your news stories, which are also protected by copyright.
I can't imagine they'd need any more light on Mercury, what with the sun just 36 million miles off and all.
Nice alliteration, btw.
Schools will buy Apple to run Microsoft Office (and possibly Adobe). Graphics and multimedia businesses will buy Apple to run Adobe products. Given a choice between a MacBook and a laptop running Windows Vista, I'd probably go with Apple, too -- which is saying something when you consider I've spent the last 16 years building my own desktop PCs and Apple's relative lack of upgradeability.
Get off my land, you Peacekeeping sonofa ...
Wow, talk about moving the goalposts. It's reasonable to expect a Web browser to adhere to standards -- so when IE finally does, the new reason to hate MS is because IE also supports the pages that are on the Web today?
Making IE8 render pages the way IE7 does is the smart way to go for Microsoft. If people woke up one morning and none of their sites looked right, they'd be rightfully pissed off. IE8 will give people the time to make their "crap code" standards-compliant ... though if they haven't done it by IE9, they might be shit out of luck.
Oh, and BTW -- as long as people are coding, there will always be crap code. Standards will not make crap code go away.
Yes, because you got caught. :)
Maybe so. But the rest of the masses will be reading print versions of the drek that appears on Fox News -- or alternately, the drek that is Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs on CNN. People who want real news will have to seek out the print version of "The Daily Show."
What, no Natalie Portman? No hot grits? No insensitive clods?!
Boy, do I feel old.
Except maybe why public schools are having such a hard time of it in the first place. A reasonable teacher might have said, "Interesting -- tell me more about it after class, but for now, stick with the other browser." This teacher, in contrast, played a power game and probably did more to undermine his authority in the classroom than reinforce it.