(As opposed to wasting time ranting about people who rant?)
I posted a comment in a discussion group. If you call that "ranting", and equate that to producing a website denouncing what I commented about, well, that's your issue to deal with. Most people would recognize a difference.
What sort of Ottawa-based issues do you think that the Ottawa Skeptics should be spending time on instead, OOI?
I really don't care what they rant about, I'm just pointing out the stupidity and waste of time demonstrated by their active opposition to something so meaningless in the long run. If they want to look stupid by using a shotgun approach to a mosquito, well, that's fine with me. They can make all the mountains out of molehills they want, as long as they accept the resulting impression they leave on bystanders.
If Scientology isn't a religion, then what is it? This is a simple question. If you claim it is a cult, not a religion, then we run into the problem that there isn't really a good definition for either that excludes the other.
The problem you have is that you are still trying to lump all religion into the same basket. You are saying that all Christianity is a cult because some cults claim to be versions of Christianity. Here, let me quote you doing this:
If we claim it is a "for profit scam" we still have to include some very popular Christian sects in America (think TV evangelism, and mega churches), not to mention the pre-reformation Catholic church.
The fact that some cults are offshoots of Christianity doesn't make all Christians cultists. I used a very reasonable definition of how to detect a cult in my posting. If you have a "secret handshake" -- information that only the insiders know and levels of "salvation" that take money to achieve -- you're a cult.
You painting "mega churches" and "TV evangelists" as cults is a mistake, since they are not, by definition, cults. Just because a church is large isn't a sign it has any properties of a cult. Just because a guy is on TV doesn't make him a cult, either. You seem to think that "large" and "for profit" are synonyms, or "asks for donations" and "for profit", ditto. "For profit" is not a defining property of cults; many Christian bookstores exist solely to make a profit, but they are not shilling cult material just because they do so.
If you want a realistic definition of what a cult is, refer to "Kingdom of the Cults", an excellent book on the matter. Yes, Scientology is a cult, along with many groups that call themselves Christian. But once again, just because a cult group calls itself Christian is neither proof they are nor proof that real Christians are cultists.
So how is Christianity not a scam? Does the leader live in his own Castle/City/State while preaching modesty?
I know where the "leader" of my church lives. Normal house. Four kids. Not a castle, and not his own "city".
Do you know of a single Cardinal/Bishop/whatever
Were you asking about Christianity or Catholicism? Please pick one. I know all of the elders of my church, and no, they also don't live in their own castles in their own cities. All of them are smaller than a "mansion". I've never bothered to ask about their cars, they are free to buy whatever they want with the salary they make at their day jobs. It's none of my business. Why do you imagine it is any business of yours?
Or not. What if I assume all my senses work and that everyone else's work the same as mine? Doesn't that take care of most of the existential crap?
You should have a bit more skepticism over your assumptions, then.
Not everyone's senses work the same way yours do. There are people who "see" sounds as color. Some people don't sense colors the same way you do. There are people who hear sounds all the time. Some people don't hear anything at all. How about people with cochlear implants? Are they hearing the same things you do?
Even if you assume the hardware is all the same, you cannot assume that the result is. How do you KNOW that what you see as "blue" is the same as what someone else sees for "blue"? You've learned to associate that name with a certain stimulus; is the stimulus the same for someone sitting next to you? How would you know if what the other person calls "blue" isn't actually triggering the neurons for "red" in his brain, but he's learned to call it "blue"?
And really, do you exist? All I have is the result of my senses, and I could be hallucinating y'all. After all, "hell is other people".
After looking through the site, it's pretty clearly just a marketing ploy to engage with people who believe it to be true.
It's not even that. It's a way to break the ice with people who would be bored to tears with "facts" about blood. It's meant for fun, not education, other than educating people that giving blood is a good thing.
It's not the Canadian Blood Service's job to teach every person on the planet every fact about blood nor are they required to UNteach every superstition.
As for the "skeptics", they need to get a life or borrow a sense of humor. And get some honesty . The disclaimer they say you'll miss if you blink was quite visible to this reader, even while blinking.
It's a shame that organizations who claim to have such high purposes waste their time and image by ranting about such stupid meaningless things.
You don't like Scientology, but you like your religion of choice, therefore Scientology is not a religion, in spite of sharing many similar characteristics.
It would be easy to respond to such a statement in kind. You don't like any kind of religion, so you fail to discern the differences in your attempt at lumping them all together as worthless and meaningless.
Yes, scientology and any real religion share "certain characteristics". They are made up of people. That's the main one. They believe in things you can't prove (but then, doesn't everyone?) They get together to meet with like-minded believers. All very damning similarities, I know.
This does not mean that others cannot make the discernment. For example, cults which have "secret handshakes" or require payments to achieve various levels of "salvation", versus religions that don't.
Go to a tent meeting sometime and ask the people there what their religion is about. You'll walk away having been told just about everything you need to know, and what you weren't told you can ask and find out. (I didn't say you'd believe it or understand it yourself, but the information will be made freely available.) Try the same thing at a Scientology meeting. Apples and rutabagas.
Floating rocks? Planet? Luxury! All we had was hydrogen nuclei and electrons. We couldn't shuffle across the room and touch a doorknob without shocking ourselves silly with the static electricity.
Besides, the idea of point cooling may be obvious, but what they patented is the system of 'air wands' (whatever those are) to accomplish it.
You mean like the rubber hose I used in a system five years ago to force incoming cool air to pass directly over the CPU first and then get sucked out of the box by negative pressure? Wow, didn't know that was patentable. It seemed so... obvious.
Helium 3 is chemically indistinguishable from helium.
However, the effect on the vocal cords is not chemical, it is physical. Because He is less dense than air, the vocal cords can vibrate faster in it than in air.
Since He3 is less dense than He4, the effect will be slightly increased.
What do you suppose the ratios of diameter to circumference were before there were observers?
Before the existance of an observer who could theorize a perfect circle, the "ratios of diameter to circumference" were approximately pi, because there was no "perfect circle" for the ratio to be "exactly pi always." ("Approximately pi" includes the possibility of an imperfect circle actually having pi as the ratio, but the class known as "circles" didn't all have that ratio.)
Putting a number to it didn't change anything;
The point is you couldn't put A number to it until you had IT. You could put various numbers to the members of the class "circle" as exist in nature, but not A number.
Re: flat space, it's true that the locally measured value changes with the curvature of space, but even in the absence of flat space, with access to only a few points of curvature, it would become obvious what the value in an undisturbed medium would be.
Really? The "perfect circle" and "pi" came about a very long time before the concept of curved space-time, so how obvious would it have been to those working on circles back then that they were dependent upon our being in a relatively flat section of space? They would have been as certain that "2" was the ratio and somehow magic had they been in a highly curved space as we are that pi is the ratio and is somehow magic today.
Math is simply the observation of what is already there, and what has always been there.
Oh, so there really are universes that you have observed (or someone has observed) where all lines are parallel and other universes where no lines are parallel? Sorry, Reiman is one of those two geometries but I forget which one and the name of the other one. They are parts of "maths" where one of Euclid's basic assumptions is replaced with a different one.
And someone actually has observed the other 7 dimensions of our theoretical 11-dimensional universe? And strings?
Ok, how about something as simple as a mathematical line? Someone has actually observed this theoretical construct?
I guess that's the long way of saying that no, math is not simply the observation of what is there. It is a description of things that may or may not have yet been seen.
No one 'invented' pi -- it's just and simply the measuring of a value that's been there all along...
Where has it been, since nature and even man cannot create a physical representation of a perfect circle? It has been in the mind of man, since "perfect circle", and even "prime", is a concept born there.
No perfect circle = no circle = no approximate circles (what is a circle?).
Au contraire, mon frere. Nature can produce approximate circles and does so quite happily. The cross section through a bubble is a very good approximation to a perfect circle, and most people not into arguing philosophy would simply CALL it a circle. This is all without knowing the definition of circle that mathematicians have come up with. Nature, however, does not care what pi is.
The remark about irrational numbers is irrelevant to the point about exponential decay,
The OP decided there must be come relevance, else he would not have included it in a paragraph talking about radioactive decay. I was the one pointing out the irrelevance. One need not know anything about 'e' to know exponential decay. The fact that 'e' came along relatively recently doesn't say anything about the origin of math.
...but for this reason pi has always been a universal constant.
I am unclear what antecedant to "this" you are using. What reason? And IS pi a "universal constant? It is only in flat space (like ours appears to be) that the ratio of circumference to diameter in a circle involves pi. In curved space, (the surface of a sphere, e.g.), the ratio will be different. Does the universe consist only of flat space? We are far enough from our sun that the effects are minimal but non-zero. Would living in a region of space in the region of an object more massive than the earth yeild beings who think the circumference of a circle is 3*diameter, and that this "3" is a universal constant? Or would they say "3 if facing east, 4 if facing north?"
I would claim that the ratio of a circle to its diameter is independent of being observed, or indeed there being an observer. I would also claim that the laws of geometry, probability and topology are universal and also do not depend on the existence of observers, let alone their ability to perform maths.
Since the existance of a perfect circle depends on the thoughts of an observer, the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of such an object must depend on there being an observer. Nature can produce approximate circles, but not perfect ones.
Radioactive decay follows an exponential decay curve. It will have done so long before anyone could add, let alone handle irrational numbers like e.
"Exponential decay curve" and "irrational numbers" are two different concepts. (1/2)^N is an exponential decay curve -- which defines the half-life of a radioactive substance. For no integer value of N is the result "irrational".
This puts me firmly in the category of maths being discovered, not invented.
It's clear this guy isn't interested in going to court, if he's admitting that his recourse would be to commit fraud against a retailer who sells MS products just to get back at MS.
I don't know why he thinks cheating a dealer out of $X of retail product is going to hurt MS in any way at all... either the dealer is going to eat the loss or his insurance will cover it and his rates will go up. Or maybe he thinks the dealer he buys stuff from is responsible for MS Live's decisions and should eat the cost on their behalf...
So you're saying that because he won't take extraneous measures to circumvent these problems, that HE is the problem.
No, I'm saying that because he keeps piling on more and more limitations on what he will accept, he is the problem.
His first statement was that he would pay for and watch movies if they were available on his TV instead of the theaters. I told him "they are" and give him two different means of getting them there. Then we found out that six months old was too old, that looking in the on-demand menu was too hard, that he didn't want to watch anything that people weren't talking about. Then some rules about the material being available in every room of the house and being fed by wireless and using AppleTV. Then he didn't way to pay for the DVD ($15!) anyway, he wanted cartoons like he gets for free on broadcast TV. Except the cartoons he's demanding aren't free and aren't on broadcast TV, they're on Nickelodeon -- a cable channel he has to pay to get.
As his demands start getting down to creating an audience of one, he's losing out because he's tied his own hands, not because the provider doesn't want to sell him the product. Mass markets work because of mass.
I'm sick of the same crap and I don't think I *need* to go to all that extra effort (let alone have a computer for ripping/editing all that media) to be a satisfied customer.
If you think that "put DVD into computer drive, run mplayer" is "all that extra effort", then there is no answer that will satisfy you. Please feel free to boycott whatever providers you wish; your missing trade will hardly be noticed. Meanwhile, I'll be watching movies when and where I want on what I want because I'm not skeered of the magic media fairies.
Yes, the GP could plop down some cash on a windows license...
Nobody said anything about plopping down cash on a windows license, nimrod. Which part of the word "free" did you not understand?
... but regardless of the solution they would be violating DMCA by circumventing the DVDs encryption.
Show me the last person convicted of DMCA violation for playing a DVD they bought in their own DVD player, even if that DVD player was connected to a computer.
There is nothing stopping this guy from buying a surplus computer for $100, installing almost any flavor of Linux and mplayer, and plopping his kid down in front of the system to watch Dora. No 15 minutes of ads, no menus, no crap. No microwave makes the baby cry. But no, he claims he'd "pay and watch" and then piles on more conditions until he's a customer base of 1, and then whines how the content providers aren't making him personally happy.
Those movies are at least 6 month and often 6 year old...
Ok, another unstated rule about paying and watching, you won't pay and watch anything older than 6 months. I'm not sure why 6 months makes a movie unviewable, but it's your rule.
I can not watch the movie when people are actually talking about...
Ok, another rule is you won't watch anything that other people aren't currently talking about.
and there is rarely a motivation to proactively scan iTunes store or Comcast On-Demand months later on an off chance that it is available for rent at that exact time.
And another rule that says you won't watch anything that is "too hard" to find in the on-demand menu.
It seems that most of these rules are yours and not based on DRM or Comcast.
Each DVD sets you back $15.
You said that you would pay and watch on your home TV. Now you don't want to pay. Your rules get more restrictive by the minute. By the way, that $15 gets you unlimited viewing for as many people as you can pack into your living room. Compare that to $6 matinee or $9 or more evening shows at the movie theater, one viewing, per person.
Now that you ripped the DVD, just how do you make it accessible in every room of the house?
I don't need to because I'm seldom IN every room in the house at the same time. I didn't know that this was yet another rule you apply to what you will pay for and watch.
Wireless-enabled H264 players are not cheap...
I don't need wireless, and I can get a used PC from the local surplus for $100. Problem solved.
Even after all that, suppose I started Dora in the nursery to eat my dinner in peace. Now if I want to heat up some more food in microwave, Apple TV is going to promptly lose its wireless connection...
Wow. Layer after layer of rules about what you won't do. You don't need wireless to play a file you've ripped off a DVD, and I have no idea what "Apple TV" is or why you need it to watch that file. All so you can park the baby somewhere and ignore it for awhile.
On the other hand if I go with original DVD, I need to wait in the room for 15 minutes listening to protests about "Doda" not playing...
So now we're back at blaming the production house for the poor design of DVD players, and ignoring the fact that the computer you have in the room to play DVDs doesn't care about ads nor does it take 15 minutes to start playing. (Maybe a minute as it deals with deCSS on a disk it has never seen before, but not much longer.) And guess what? This "region" coding that people whine about -- completely ignored by the ripping software. FREE software.
I suspect that the only reason that babykins complains about "Doda" not playing is because Papakins is standing in the room complaining about how Doda isn't playing. If Papakins started the DVD and then said "let's read a book" and spent 15 minutes reading a book with Babykins, I bet Babykins wouldn't even notice the lack of DVD. I dunno, maybe you've miswired Babykins too badly at this point.
I suppose there are some ways to eventually hack around all this without spending hundreds of dollars just to be able to play cartoons which are free on broadcast TV.
The only good cartoons on broadcast TV are much older than 6 months. You can't watch them. Nobody with a vocabulary of more than 20 words talks about them, so they fail the "talk about" test, too. As for finding them to play "at that exact time", that's even harder than looking in the on-demand menu. Eight PM and there are few, if any, broadcast TV cartoons that are "age appropriate" for babies used to Dora.
I just can't imagine that the idiots are so resistant to making money.
I suspect that even were the "idiots" to do everything your way, you'd find some other rule that would prevent you from paying for their content. "It's letterbox and I want full screen"?
Oh, consumers are willing to change all right. We are willing to stop consuming - legally or otherwise - expensive music and movies ridden with restrictions that do not work for our lifestyles.
Apparently, not enough of you are stopping.
I saw like 2 movies in the theater in the two years after our first child was born...
The last theater I went to was for Serenity. I don't remember the last one before that. Theaters don't seem to have noticed my absence.
Had they offered the movies on our home TV, we would have payed and watched.
The do. Comcast has a large number of on-demand movies for your home TV. How many of those have you watched? The production houses often release DVDs of their movies for you to watch on your home TV. How many of those have you payed for and watched? I suspect your statement about paying and watching is less than accurate.
Similarly, I bought a few DVDs for my daughter, but they show 15 minutes worth of unskippable, not age appropriate ads and then get stuck on the menu rather than automatically playing the content.
Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I say "WTF?" I buy DVDs and I'm never troubled by ads or menus. The first stop for a DVD after the store is my computer, where the content is ripped and stored digitally. I once made the mistake of trying to watch a recent DVD on my $29 DVD player, and yes, ads and menus. Ick.
That makes me think you are angry at the wrong people. Why do you blame the DVD authors? Why do you put up with DVD players that you cannot control? Aren't they the real problem?
I think I will just teach her to play with other toys or watch free cartoons from broadcast TV rather then going through the hassle of trying to burn a fixed copy with complicated tools...
You could teach her how to run a computer with a DVD player. It's not hard.
Part of it is that we look around and see silly things like roads, so apparently some of the money is being spent on the things they say it is being spent on.
The existence of a road doesn't mean the road was built using taxes collected to build roads.
In our fair city, our roads are (were) falling apart. One main bit of road was mis-constructed twenty years ago and the joints in the concrete were now misaligned. This wasn't dangerous or harmful, but it resulted in "thump thump" noises as you drove over it.
Instead of using gas tax revenue to fix the roads, which is the alleged purpose for gas taxes, our city government created a "transportation maintenance fee" which was added to city-run water bills. The over-intelligent city bean counters came up with some numbers saying that each household was making X number of trips using the roads and so should be paying some tax^H^H^Hfee for that use. X is something like 7 or 8. (I go to work. I go home. Sometimes I go to the store before going home. Some days I go nowhere. Seven trips a day? My ass.)
Anyway, this fee has been in place for several years now. It was two or three years before they even touched the road that they created this fee to fix, and then they only fixed a few hundred feet of it. It was another year before they did more. It is now finally all fixed. We're still paying the fee. But it's really a tax on drinking water.
In the meantime, I might add, the part of the road that runs next to a major retail development and was damaged by that retail construction was repaired by that construction company. The main intersection on that road was rebuilt because it changed from three-way to four-way to handle a new residential development. In other words, major parts of the problem road were rebuilt using SOMEONE ELSE'S MONEY ANYWAY.
Here's the short version: tax money that is intended to repair roads (gas tax) often goes into the general fund and pays for anything the government feels like doing (like painting murals on privately owned businesses or providing a mobile stage used at privately run festivals), and taxes created in their place to pay for repairing roads STILL don't go to repair roads and don't end when the roads are fixed.
...but he didn't sell them with the express purpose that people use them to do something illegal.
That's a matter of fact that the jury will decide. All I'm saying is that the argument "there are legal uses for" isn't very good.
It isn't illegal to modify hardware I bought from you whether you want me to modify it or not.
That's not the issue here. The issue is whether I modify hardware and then sell it to you. I can't buy a ham radio (legal), modify it for out of band (legal), and then sell it as a land mobile radio (illegal). And I can't commercially sell them as modified out of band, since they no longer meet their certification, which is required for commercial sales.
As for the cards.. the same product mix at HEB without a card is less expensive than Krogers and Randalls (which both have cards).
So yes, they are higher.
You are comparing apples and oranges. I asked if the prices at the store WITH the card are lower than they would be WITHOUT the card, not if one store's prices are higher than another's. If the prices are lower with the card, then the card is saving you money. Not as much money as you'd save by shopping elsewhere, but still.
As for the rest.. it's all like hollywood accounting. at the base, they are charging us and the advertisers both. the advertisers could pay for the distribution too (and it could be a lot cheaper than it is) like they used to.
Different advertisers. Local avails are sold to local companies to advertise local things. Those slots are made available for local ads as a means to offset the cost to the cable company of buying the program service. They couldn't possibly charge enough to pay for distribution, as well. No local company would see enough benefit from local avails to merit paying the full cost of you getting every channel for free.
Despite your example, where advertisers still weren't paying for distribution (you were), advertisers don't pay for cable distribution. Saying "like they used to" is false. You were paying for distribution and program fees, just not as much as today, and probably because there weren't as many channels on your cable as there are today. I'm guessing you had 12 channels, max. Pre-MTV timeframe, 12 channels was common. Thirty six if you had the local stations too. Your cable company only had to pay for 12 program services, and could use really cheap hardware and cable. I'm also guessing there was no box, just the tuner on your TV, since you say you "switched" back and forth. You're confusing the low cost with who was paying.
It doesn't make sense the way it used to. 42 minute shows instead of 52 minute shows- and you pay for them and you have commercials.
The cable companies have nothing to do with the number of commercials in the programs carried on the programming services they distribute. The increase in those ads is solely due to costs of production, not distribution via cable. And I'll say this again because it didn't get through last time: you aren't paying the cable companies to produce programs, you are paying for the distribution of the programming services. The ads pay for the production, not the distribution. TANSTAAFL. If you wanted to pay $10/month for CBS alone, instead of a dollar or less, yes, you could be paying for production, similar to how you pay extra for HBO or TMC. Most people don't want to do that.
Since telcos where buying it, its a legitimate product,...
That claim is weak. If someone hacks a device I sell in order to use it to commit a crime, I very well may buy some of the hacked versions to determine what the hack is and how to prevent it in the future. That doesn't make the criminal use magically legal, it only means that I bought some of the hacked product.
I have no doubt that the telcos bought some of the hacked modems just to see how they were hacked and work to prevent it.
... as long as he believed it was legit and can prove legit reasons exist.
That argument will fail, too. People have legit reason for having a truckload of ammonium nitrate, and people have legit reasons for having a barrel of diesel fuel. If you are caught busy mixing the two in the back of a U-Haul, don't hold your breath waiting for the "legit reasons exist" defense to get you out of prison. It's what YOU are doing with them that counts, not what other people might use the two for.
Slashdot Mirror
I posted a comment in a discussion group. If you call that "ranting", and equate that to producing a website denouncing what I commented about, well, that's your issue to deal with. Most people would recognize a difference.
What sort of Ottawa-based issues do you think that the Ottawa Skeptics should be spending time on instead, OOI?
I really don't care what they rant about, I'm just pointing out the stupidity and waste of time demonstrated by their active opposition to something so meaningless in the long run. If they want to look stupid by using a shotgun approach to a mosquito, well, that's fine with me. They can make all the mountains out of molehills they want, as long as they accept the resulting impression they leave on bystanders.
The problem you have is that you are still trying to lump all religion into the same basket. You are saying that all Christianity is a cult because some cults claim to be versions of Christianity. Here, let me quote you doing this:
If we claim it is a "for profit scam" we still have to include some very popular Christian sects in America (think TV evangelism, and mega churches), not to mention the pre-reformation Catholic church.
The fact that some cults are offshoots of Christianity doesn't make all Christians cultists. I used a very reasonable definition of how to detect a cult in my posting. If you have a "secret handshake" -- information that only the insiders know and levels of "salvation" that take money to achieve -- you're a cult.
You painting "mega churches" and "TV evangelists" as cults is a mistake, since they are not, by definition, cults. Just because a church is large isn't a sign it has any properties of a cult. Just because a guy is on TV doesn't make him a cult, either. You seem to think that "large" and "for profit" are synonyms, or "asks for donations" and "for profit", ditto. "For profit" is not a defining property of cults; many Christian bookstores exist solely to make a profit, but they are not shilling cult material just because they do so.
If you want a realistic definition of what a cult is, refer to "Kingdom of the Cults", an excellent book on the matter. Yes, Scientology is a cult, along with many groups that call themselves Christian. But once again, just because a cult group calls itself Christian is neither proof they are nor proof that real Christians are cultists.
I know where the "leader" of my church lives. Normal house. Four kids. Not a castle, and not his own "city".
Do you know of a single Cardinal/Bishop/whatever
Were you asking about Christianity or Catholicism? Please pick one. I know all of the elders of my church, and no, they also don't live in their own castles in their own cities. All of them are smaller than a "mansion". I've never bothered to ask about their cars, they are free to buy whatever they want with the salary they make at their day jobs. It's none of my business. Why do you imagine it is any business of yours?
You should have a bit more skepticism over your assumptions, then.
Not everyone's senses work the same way yours do. There are people who "see" sounds as color. Some people don't sense colors the same way you do. There are people who hear sounds all the time. Some people don't hear anything at all. How about people with cochlear implants? Are they hearing the same things you do?
Even if you assume the hardware is all the same, you cannot assume that the result is. How do you KNOW that what you see as "blue" is the same as what someone else sees for "blue"? You've learned to associate that name with a certain stimulus; is the stimulus the same for someone sitting next to you? How would you know if what the other person calls "blue" isn't actually triggering the neurons for "red" in his brain, but he's learned to call it "blue"?
And really, do you exist? All I have is the result of my senses, and I could be hallucinating y'all. After all, "hell is other people".
It's not even that. It's a way to break the ice with people who would be bored to tears with "facts" about blood. It's meant for fun, not education, other than educating people that giving blood is a good thing.
It's not the Canadian Blood Service's job to teach every person on the planet every fact about blood nor are they required to UNteach every superstition.
As for the "skeptics", they need to get a life or borrow a sense of humor. And get some honesty . The disclaimer they say you'll miss if you blink was quite visible to this reader, even while blinking.
It's a shame that organizations who claim to have such high purposes waste their time and image by ranting about such stupid meaningless things.
It would be easy to respond to such a statement in kind. You don't like any kind of religion, so you fail to discern the differences in your attempt at lumping them all together as worthless and meaningless.
Yes, scientology and any real religion share "certain characteristics". They are made up of people. That's the main one. They believe in things you can't prove (but then, doesn't everyone?) They get together to meet with like-minded believers. All very damning similarities, I know.
This does not mean that others cannot make the discernment. For example, cults which have "secret handshakes" or require payments to achieve various levels of "salvation", versus religions that don't.
Go to a tent meeting sometime and ask the people there what their religion is about. You'll walk away having been told just about everything you need to know, and what you weren't told you can ask and find out. (I didn't say you'd believe it or understand it yourself, but the information will be made freely available.) Try the same thing at a Scientology meeting. Apples and rutabagas.
Slashdot is already patented, isn't it?
Floating rocks? Planet? Luxury! All we had was hydrogen nuclei and electrons. We couldn't shuffle across the room and touch a doorknob without shocking ourselves silly with the static electricity.
You mean like the rubber hose I used in a system five years ago to force incoming cool air to pass directly over the CPU first and then get sucked out of the box by negative pressure? Wow, didn't know that was patentable. It seemed so ... obvious.
However, the effect on the vocal cords is not chemical, it is physical. Because He is less dense than air, the vocal cords can vibrate faster in it than in air.
Since He3 is less dense than He4, the effect will be slightly increased.
Before the existance of an observer who could theorize a perfect circle, the "ratios of diameter to circumference" were approximately pi, because there was no "perfect circle" for the ratio to be "exactly pi always." ("Approximately pi" includes the possibility of an imperfect circle actually having pi as the ratio, but the class known as "circles" didn't all have that ratio.)
Putting a number to it didn't change anything;
The point is you couldn't put A number to it until you had IT. You could put various numbers to the members of the class "circle" as exist in nature, but not A number.
Re: flat space, it's true that the locally measured value changes with the curvature of space, but even in the absence of flat space, with access to only a few points of curvature, it would become obvious what the value in an undisturbed medium would be.
Really? The "perfect circle" and "pi" came about a very long time before the concept of curved space-time, so how obvious would it have been to those working on circles back then that they were dependent upon our being in a relatively flat section of space? They would have been as certain that "2" was the ratio and somehow magic had they been in a highly curved space as we are that pi is the ratio and is somehow magic today.
Math is simply the observation of what is already there, and what has always been there.
Oh, so there really are universes that you have observed (or someone has observed) where all lines are parallel and other universes where no lines are parallel? Sorry, Reiman is one of those two geometries but I forget which one and the name of the other one. They are parts of "maths" where one of Euclid's basic assumptions is replaced with a different one.
And someone actually has observed the other 7 dimensions of our theoretical 11-dimensional universe? And strings?
Ok, how about something as simple as a mathematical line? Someone has actually observed this theoretical construct?
I guess that's the long way of saying that no, math is not simply the observation of what is there. It is a description of things that may or may not have yet been seen.
No one 'invented' pi -- it's just and simply the measuring of a value that's been there all along...
Where has it been, since nature and even man cannot create a physical representation of a perfect circle? It has been in the mind of man, since "perfect circle", and even "prime", is a concept born there.
Does the term "radioactive half life" mean anything to you?
Au contraire, mon frere. Nature can produce approximate circles and does so quite happily. The cross section through a bubble is a very good approximation to a perfect circle, and most people not into arguing philosophy would simply CALL it a circle. This is all without knowing the definition of circle that mathematicians have come up with. Nature, however, does not care what pi is.
The remark about irrational numbers is irrelevant to the point about exponential decay,
The OP decided there must be come relevance, else he would not have included it in a paragraph talking about radioactive decay. I was the one pointing out the irrelevance. One need not know anything about 'e' to know exponential decay. The fact that 'e' came along relatively recently doesn't say anything about the origin of math.
I am unclear what antecedant to "this" you are using. What reason? And IS pi a "universal constant? It is only in flat space (like ours appears to be) that the ratio of circumference to diameter in a circle involves pi. In curved space, (the surface of a sphere, e.g.), the ratio will be different. Does the universe consist only of flat space? We are far enough from our sun that the effects are minimal but non-zero. Would living in a region of space in the region of an object more massive than the earth yeild beings who think the circumference of a circle is 3*diameter, and that this "3" is a universal constant? Or would they say "3 if facing east, 4 if facing north?"
Since the existance of a perfect circle depends on the thoughts of an observer, the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of such an object must depend on there being an observer. Nature can produce approximate circles, but not perfect ones.
Radioactive decay follows an exponential decay curve. It will have done so long before anyone could add, let alone handle irrational numbers like e.
"Exponential decay curve" and "irrational numbers" are two different concepts. (1/2)^N is an exponential decay curve -- which defines the half-life of a radioactive substance. For no integer value of N is the result "irrational".
This puts me firmly in the category of maths being discovered, not invented.
Right destination, wrong reason.
But she doesn't even know you exist, so you're stuck with mastication.
It's clear this guy isn't interested in going to court, if he's admitting that his recourse would be to commit fraud against a retailer who sells MS products just to get back at MS.
I don't know why he thinks cheating a dealer out of $X of retail product is going to hurt MS in any way at all ... either the dealer is going to eat the loss or his insurance will cover it and his rates will go up. Or maybe he thinks the dealer he buys stuff from is responsible for MS Live's decisions and should eat the cost on their behalf...
No, I'm saying that because he keeps piling on more and more limitations on what he will accept, he is the problem.
His first statement was that he would pay for and watch movies if they were available on his TV instead of the theaters. I told him "they are" and give him two different means of getting them there. Then we found out that six months old was too old, that looking in the on-demand menu was too hard, that he didn't want to watch anything that people weren't talking about. Then some rules about the material being available in every room of the house and being fed by wireless and using AppleTV. Then he didn't way to pay for the DVD ($15!) anyway, he wanted cartoons like he gets for free on broadcast TV. Except the cartoons he's demanding aren't free and aren't on broadcast TV, they're on Nickelodeon -- a cable channel he has to pay to get.
As his demands start getting down to creating an audience of one, he's losing out because he's tied his own hands, not because the provider doesn't want to sell him the product. Mass markets work because of mass.
I'm sick of the same crap and I don't think I *need* to go to all that extra effort (let alone have a computer for ripping/editing all that media) to be a satisfied customer.
If you think that "put DVD into computer drive, run mplayer" is "all that extra effort", then there is no answer that will satisfy you. Please feel free to boycott whatever providers you wish; your missing trade will hardly be noticed. Meanwhile, I'll be watching movies when and where I want on what I want because I'm not skeered of the magic media fairies.
Nobody said anything about plopping down cash on a windows license, nimrod. Which part of the word "free" did you not understand?
Show me the last person convicted of DMCA violation for playing a DVD they bought in their own DVD player, even if that DVD player was connected to a computer.
There is nothing stopping this guy from buying a surplus computer for $100, installing almost any flavor of Linux and mplayer, and plopping his kid down in front of the system to watch Dora. No 15 minutes of ads, no menus, no crap. No microwave makes the baby cry. But no, he claims he'd "pay and watch" and then piles on more conditions until he's a customer base of 1, and then whines how the content providers aren't making him personally happy.
Yet another Rule: Must run on a Mac.
You are binding your own hands and then complaining about the content producers making the bonds too tight, sir.
Ok, another unstated rule about paying and watching, you won't pay and watch anything older than 6 months. I'm not sure why 6 months makes a movie unviewable, but it's your rule.
I can not watch the movie when people are actually talking about ...
Ok, another rule is you won't watch anything that other people aren't currently talking about.
and there is rarely a motivation to proactively scan iTunes store or Comcast On-Demand months later on an off chance that it is available for rent at that exact time.
And another rule that says you won't watch anything that is "too hard" to find in the on-demand menu.
It seems that most of these rules are yours and not based on DRM or Comcast.
Each DVD sets you back $15.
You said that you would pay and watch on your home TV. Now you don't want to pay. Your rules get more restrictive by the minute. By the way, that $15 gets you unlimited viewing for as many people as you can pack into your living room. Compare that to $6 matinee or $9 or more evening shows at the movie theater, one viewing, per person.
Now that you ripped the DVD, just how do you make it accessible in every room of the house?
I don't need to because I'm seldom IN every room in the house at the same time. I didn't know that this was yet another rule you apply to what you will pay for and watch.
Wireless-enabled H264 players are not cheap...
I don't need wireless, and I can get a used PC from the local surplus for $100. Problem solved.
Even after all that, suppose I started Dora in the nursery to eat my dinner in peace. Now if I want to heat up some more food in microwave, Apple TV is going to promptly lose its wireless connection...
Wow. Layer after layer of rules about what you won't do. You don't need wireless to play a file you've ripped off a DVD, and I have no idea what "Apple TV" is or why you need it to watch that file. All so you can park the baby somewhere and ignore it for awhile.
On the other hand if I go with original DVD, I need to wait in the room for 15 minutes listening to protests about "Doda" not playing...
So now we're back at blaming the production house for the poor design of DVD players, and ignoring the fact that the computer you have in the room to play DVDs doesn't care about ads nor does it take 15 minutes to start playing. (Maybe a minute as it deals with deCSS on a disk it has never seen before, but not much longer.) And guess what? This "region" coding that people whine about -- completely ignored by the ripping software. FREE software.
I suspect that the only reason that babykins complains about "Doda" not playing is because Papakins is standing in the room complaining about how Doda isn't playing. If Papakins started the DVD and then said "let's read a book" and spent 15 minutes reading a book with Babykins, I bet Babykins wouldn't even notice the lack of DVD. I dunno, maybe you've miswired Babykins too badly at this point.
I suppose there are some ways to eventually hack around all this without spending hundreds of dollars just to be able to play cartoons which are free on broadcast TV.
The only good cartoons on broadcast TV are much older than 6 months. You can't watch them. Nobody with a vocabulary of more than 20 words talks about them, so they fail the "talk about" test, too. As for finding them to play "at that exact time", that's even harder than looking in the on-demand menu. Eight PM and there are few, if any, broadcast TV cartoons that are "age appropriate" for babies used to Dora.
I just can't imagine that the idiots are so resistant to making money.
I suspect that even were the "idiots" to do everything your way, you'd find some other rule that would prevent you from paying for their content. "It's letterbox and I want full screen"?
Apparently, not enough of you are stopping.
I saw like 2 movies in the theater in the two years after our first child was born ...
The last theater I went to was for Serenity. I don't remember the last one before that. Theaters don't seem to have noticed my absence.
Had they offered the movies on our home TV, we would have payed and watched.
The do. Comcast has a large number of on-demand movies for your home TV. How many of those have you watched? The production houses often release DVDs of their movies for you to watch on your home TV. How many of those have you payed for and watched? I suspect your statement about paying and watching is less than accurate.
Similarly, I bought a few DVDs for my daughter, but they show 15 minutes worth of unskippable, not age appropriate ads and then get stuck on the menu rather than automatically playing the content.
Whenever I hear someone say something like this, I say "WTF?" I buy DVDs and I'm never troubled by ads or menus. The first stop for a DVD after the store is my computer, where the content is ripped and stored digitally. I once made the mistake of trying to watch a recent DVD on my $29 DVD player, and yes, ads and menus. Ick.
That makes me think you are angry at the wrong people. Why do you blame the DVD authors? Why do you put up with DVD players that you cannot control? Aren't they the real problem?
I think I will just teach her to play with other toys or watch free cartoons from broadcast TV rather then going through the hassle of trying to burn a fixed copy with complicated tools...
You could teach her how to run a computer with a DVD player. It's not hard.
The existence of a road doesn't mean the road was built using taxes collected to build roads.
In our fair city, our roads are (were) falling apart. One main bit of road was mis-constructed twenty years ago and the joints in the concrete were now misaligned. This wasn't dangerous or harmful, but it resulted in "thump thump" noises as you drove over it.
Instead of using gas tax revenue to fix the roads, which is the alleged purpose for gas taxes, our city government created a "transportation maintenance fee" which was added to city-run water bills. The over-intelligent city bean counters came up with some numbers saying that each household was making X number of trips using the roads and so should be paying some tax^H^H^Hfee for that use. X is something like 7 or 8. (I go to work. I go home. Sometimes I go to the store before going home. Some days I go nowhere. Seven trips a day? My ass.)
Anyway, this fee has been in place for several years now. It was two or three years before they even touched the road that they created this fee to fix, and then they only fixed a few hundred feet of it. It was another year before they did more. It is now finally all fixed. We're still paying the fee. But it's really a tax on drinking water.
In the meantime, I might add, the part of the road that runs next to a major retail development and was damaged by that retail construction was repaired by that construction company. The main intersection on that road was rebuilt because it changed from three-way to four-way to handle a new residential development. In other words, major parts of the problem road were rebuilt using SOMEONE ELSE'S MONEY ANYWAY.
Here's the short version: tax money that is intended to repair roads (gas tax) often goes into the general fund and pays for anything the government feels like doing (like painting murals on privately owned businesses or providing a mobile stage used at privately run festivals), and taxes created in their place to pay for repairing roads STILL don't go to repair roads and don't end when the roads are fixed.
That's a matter of fact that the jury will decide. All I'm saying is that the argument "there are legal uses for" isn't very good.
It isn't illegal to modify hardware I bought from you whether you want me to modify it or not.
That's not the issue here. The issue is whether I modify hardware and then sell it to you. I can't buy a ham radio (legal), modify it for out of band (legal), and then sell it as a land mobile radio (illegal). And I can't commercially sell them as modified out of band, since they no longer meet their certification, which is required for commercial sales.
You are comparing apples and oranges. I asked if the prices at the store WITH the card are lower than they would be WITHOUT the card, not if one store's prices are higher than another's. If the prices are lower with the card, then the card is saving you money. Not as much money as you'd save by shopping elsewhere, but still.
As for the rest.. it's all like hollywood accounting. at the base, they are charging us and the advertisers both. the advertisers could pay for the distribution too (and it could be a lot cheaper than it is) like they used to.
Different advertisers. Local avails are sold to local companies to advertise local things. Those slots are made available for local ads as a means to offset the cost to the cable company of buying the program service. They couldn't possibly charge enough to pay for distribution, as well. No local company would see enough benefit from local avails to merit paying the full cost of you getting every channel for free.
Despite your example, where advertisers still weren't paying for distribution (you were), advertisers don't pay for cable distribution. Saying "like they used to" is false. You were paying for distribution and program fees, just not as much as today, and probably because there weren't as many channels on your cable as there are today. I'm guessing you had 12 channels, max. Pre-MTV timeframe, 12 channels was common. Thirty six if you had the local stations too. Your cable company only had to pay for 12 program services, and could use really cheap hardware and cable. I'm also guessing there was no box, just the tuner on your TV, since you say you "switched" back and forth. You're confusing the low cost with who was paying.
It doesn't make sense the way it used to. 42 minute shows instead of 52 minute shows- and you pay for them and you have commercials.
The cable companies have nothing to do with the number of commercials in the programs carried on the programming services they distribute. The increase in those ads is solely due to costs of production, not distribution via cable. And I'll say this again because it didn't get through last time: you aren't paying the cable companies to produce programs, you are paying for the distribution of the programming services. The ads pay for the production, not the distribution. TANSTAAFL. If you wanted to pay $10/month for CBS alone, instead of a dollar or less, yes, you could be paying for production, similar to how you pay extra for HBO or TMC. Most people don't want to do that.
That claim is weak. If someone hacks a device I sell in order to use it to commit a crime, I very well may buy some of the hacked versions to determine what the hack is and how to prevent it in the future. That doesn't make the criminal use magically legal, it only means that I bought some of the hacked product.
I have no doubt that the telcos bought some of the hacked modems just to see how they were hacked and work to prevent it.
That argument will fail, too. People have legit reason for having a truckload of ammonium nitrate, and people have legit reasons for having a barrel of diesel fuel. If you are caught busy mixing the two in the back of a U-Haul, don't hold your breath waiting for the "legit reasons exist" defense to get you out of prison. It's what YOU are doing with them that counts, not what other people might use the two for.