Ok, I take back a little what I said, if you are generally representative of Morons. In a reply you state that Mormons don't take the bible literally; that's a very good start in my eyes. It's the folks that say being gay is a sin because of the over-interpretation of a certain line of text that appears differently in each book that really get me down. You can't analyise a 2000 year old, 20th edition lossy copy of a book to that level.
Most of the "moronic" beliefs that I have heard being attributed to Mormons are actually not true.
I gotta admit, most of my "knowledge" of the Mormon faith is from an episode of South Park that you are likely familiar with. From it I got the impression that Mormons believe that the biblical events all took place in North America, and that Native Americans look the way they do as a punishment. I of course took this at face value (I am critical of most information "fed" to me), but I figured that as the episode was contraversial, it would be as acurate as possible, lest it be easilly torn appart by critics.
And, yes, "Ra" (as I understand it, anyway) is representative of God. God has been represented in many different ways by many different religions and many different cultures
Many preach that other ones are false gods and that theirs is the only real one. The worst guy I ever spoke to believed that there would never be peace on earth until everyone was Christian. Of course, he was willing to fight to make that happen. Ironic, don't you think?
You've just chosen to place your faith in the belief that there is no "higher power."
No, I didn't say that. They may be a god. I certainally think there are likely beings out there in the universe that we might consider "god".
However, believing that god created man in his own image is clearly backwards. We created god. Why do you think he is always represented a white male? Because he was created by white males. Of course, the fact that everyone in biblical times would have been black doesn't seem present on the stained-glass windows at my local church.
The bible is wrong on many key fundamental concepts. Normally when you read something and realise that the author is wrong, you put it down and move on. With the bible, people seem to come up with crazy ideas that might make it all fit in about what is known about the history of this planet. Where did the dinosaurs fit in exactly? They weren't known about when the bible was written, though if they had been they would have been a part of the story.
As a devout Mormon and a follower of Science (and no that isn't an oxymoron), I find your closed minded hatred of something you don't understand to be deeply disturbing.
Oh, I do understand, that's the problem. Sorry to point this out to you, but Jesus has never visited North America, nor is he ever likely to. I doubt the saviour would choose the land of corruption and intolerance as the place for the second coming. Unless he plans to have his work cut out for him! And the Native American thing? Sorry, they have Oriental heritage, it's obvious to anyone!!
Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against Mormons, I despise most religions equally.
Not that I'm saying there isn't a god. That would be naive! But not as naive as believing the words (word for word) in a book that are clearly wrong on so many levels. Sure, you can talk about how the 7 days wasn't seven Earth days, but the fact of the matter is that you are just trying to mould your dogma into reality. These books were created by man, written by man, edited by man and reproduced by man. Anyone that bases their whole religion around a clearly fallible book is an idiot, sorry but that's the way I see it. On the other hand, studying all of the relevant texts and making up your own mind is much better. However, The Church is the entirely opposite thing; the we are right, everyone else is wrong approach. You could not be any more closed-minded. If there is a god, these people are going to burn, just as GWB will for starting a war for profit. Irony, gotta love it!
There are some sticky issues involved with regulation of behavior in a networked world, which need to be resolved in order to have the internet continue as a viable medium for communication and commerce.
But they can't be solved, that's the problem. It's hard enough to pass laws in one country, let alone the planet. Countries that embrace freedom, such as most European ones would not accept another country telling them what they can and cannot look at! The only alternative would be to switch of the internet and replace it with "Internet 2.0". However, many have drawn parallels to this with AOL 1.0, where you could not email non AOL members and you could not access non AOL webpages. See this speach. If you want to kill freedom and inovation on the net, feel free to create your own, but most of us won't follow you.
Yeah, I agree that tools should be available to allow parents control. However, this is not the right way to do it technologically speaking. It's weak, does very little to solve the problem, and more importantly provides false security, which is the worst kind. It's like the idiots that called for ID cards post-911. It wouldn't have made a bit of difference, if anything security might have been even lower due to the false confidence in the system.
there's no way, short of monitoring every moment of a child's internet usage (which isn't truly practical) to ensure they don't end up going there.
This technology doesn't do jack to help that though. Ever heard of pr0n? Used to get around filters. This isn't even a filter, it's a static list. If you think you compile a list of all pornography in the internet, you are in the wrong job. YahooBoobies would love to talk to you!
All this will do is provide false security and therefore be counter productive. If you don't want your kids seeing porn on the net, keep an eye on them. If you don't want them seeing porn in a bookstore, keep an eye on them. If you don't want them walking down the wrong street at night and being abducted, act like a fucking parent and do your job. TV, the internet or 200,000V of mains electricty and a bathtub might seem like a good way to occupy your child and keep them out of your hair for a few hours, but they aren't going to come out of it for the better!
You know, you don't need to make fun of people's religion.
Screw you! I reserve the right to make fun of any religion. Especically one as moronic as the Mormons, do you have any concept of how crazy their beliefs are?
On the other hand, everyone else has the right to believe what they want, and try to peacefully persuade others to follow. Welcome to a free society.
Why don't you just go put on a white sheet and paint a twisted cross on it?
Because we are insulting their backwards belief structure, not lynching people. There is a huge difference!
Can I go on record as saying I have near-zero respect for anyone who believes in creationism in any of the classical ways. "Inteligent design" folks are at least trying to justify their beliefs, but creationists creating the Earth before the Sun? Do you expect me to take you seriously on anything else when you are that naive/stupid/gullible?
I find it absolutely hilarious to hear a Christian talk about Egypt and other older belief stuctures without joining the dots and realising that Ra is God and the whole thing just stems from mans inability to handle the fact that we don't understand the universe (it's alright, because daddy knows) and death (your little bunny rabbit is in heaven, honey).
You can take the cheap ones back just like the expensive ones, 12.9 is too far out, it's defective.
Yeah, it was a while before I noticed it and it's not worth the hastle to be honest given it's value. The box sounds like an aircraft taking off, so a silent one holds potential. However, there are also GFX and CPU fans to consider, plus drive noise, so I can see myself going down an expensive route!
blue LED fans
Apparently that colour of blue is very acceptible to men for some reason, studies have shown this. HiFi makers have been using that trick for years. Here in the UK it was popular to put an LED on your car bonnet/hood where the washer-sprayer nonzles should go. Looks ridiculous!
Sure, $100 is silly, but $15 is also too low. My cheap-ass PSU is running at 12.9V acording to the software diag tool. You want one that has good regulation and is stable. I'm thinking of replacing it and I'd was going to spend about $30 on it, or maybe go for one that has been designed to be quiet for up to $50-60.
I second that. Heat is a huge killer of electronics and dropping the temp by 5 degrees can make some hardware last much longer than it might have. Especially drives, they always seem to be the first to go, moving parts are also much more prone to failure. When manufacturers want to give their manufactured PCs a good test, they put them in headed cupboards and monitor the temperatures while giving the system a workout. Only a very small sample of the devices manufactured get tested this way though, it's very time consuming and labour intensive.
The rotational assembley that spins the platters (the speed of which is constant) is by far the biggest failure mechanism.
Not that you can do anything about that anyway. On any OS, there are enough services and daemons to make sure that the drive NEVER powers down. I haven't seen a drive do that on anything other than a laptop in years, don't know why I bother enabling it on desktops.
Besides, the best reason IMHO to have two drives for the OS is fragmentation, or lack of.
One thing I have wondered, and perhaps someone can answer me; what effects does the data placement have? Say you have a 10G drive, 1G swap, 1G/tmp and the rest as root. (this works for windows as well). Would having things in different places e.g. root | tmp | swap be any different from say swap | root | tmp?
I'd always thought that the seek time was the bottleneck in any armature based data storage. However, with multiplatters I'm not so sure if this matters so much. That depends how the data is striped onto the platters, and if the arms move indepentantly. I know nothing about working drives, having only disassembled a dead one! I'd pay for a clear one just to see how the little bugger worked!
Fair point. The interactive cable thingy has paid-for things as well, e.g. 50c for a music video. I think $1 an episode of a soap would be a bit steep to be honest. These soaps are on four times a week, thats $4 per week, almost $20 per month! For one program that you currently get for free? I'd say about 10-20c is fair, you'd need to do the maths though to compare to regular cable subscriptions, an average person should work out about even otherwise we will be getting ripped off. Plus, the BBC is a special case altogether, while Corrie is on a commercial station.
You can watch EastEnders for free on interactive cable already. They have the last week or so available. Not that you'd want to, it's just another damn depressing soap. They also have "Top Gear", which is what "Fifth Gear" is ripping on (TG was canned, one of the presenters defected, then TG started again).
Cool, thanks for the reply, interesting. I haven't had time to repond properly lately, nor do I now but I feel I should say something! Yeah, I think we are mostly agreeing here. The whole habit forming field, from substance to behavioural, is different for everyone, even different for them at different points in their life. The present situation of having some of the most dangerous of them manged and "regulated" by criminals doesn't help, as they often have contact with people at their lowest points.
Pretty much all of the (short-term) smoking impact is artificial though. It's pretty sad when you look at it that way, the anti-smoking lobby has made millions miserable just to encourage them to do something that is remarkably difficult at the best of times! A little counter-productive really, and it reeks of the "get you hooked, jackup the price" warnings taught to make kids aware of the dangers of drugs. You should see the prices here in the UK, it's nearing 5 UKP a pack! Again, this annoys me a little, as there seems to be a bias with smokers generally coming from lower-income backgrounds. Sure they they should maybe give up to add another 10 years onto their lifes, but why should they be forced to? If they choose to continue smoking, they will continue to be financially punished. And smokers don't cost health services more, that's a short-sighted myth. You are going to get ill and die. Smokers do it earlier, with more understood and routine (cheaper) ways of popping it, and before collecting 10 extra years of state benefits! It's the McDonald-eating, zero exercise, drive to the shops, "non-smokers" that make me laugh the most!
Sure. Google for "Peak Oil", or see this wiki page. A lot of experts believe the problems will begin around 2008. Everyone in the oil industry admits that the resource is finite. The problem is that as the remaining oil gets harder to pump out, prices will rise, which will badly affect the economy.
With Iraq, the worlds second largest remaining oil field, now under control of US approved puppets, the USA is in a much stronger position when this inevitable crisis unfolds.
lead to the USA eventually falling beind in key sciences, and, as a consquence, losing its edge in the world of technology.
What edge? Seriously! The US doesn't have any edge on technology, except for military technologies. It's behind on most other things, with IT being a small exception, but again, the internet started off in the military and most inovations on it are illegal in America.
It is however very good at giving the impression that it is ahead, so most of it's citizens are unaware of just how far behind the US has fallen.
How is "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" not different from having a law against murder yet having capital punishment?
Because Witches don't, and never have existed? That's enough in my mind to ignore the argument. Would you believe a law maker that cited dragons and trolls as reason for changing a law? I don't think so...
And no, you won't find a (reasonable) islamic minister that cheers at the sight of gruesome civilian deaths either, but it's the unreasonable ones that make it into the news.
Meanwhile, the unreasonable Christians make it into the Whitehouse...
It's such a joke when people constantly try to say that we went to Iraq for the oil.... Are we getting oil from Iraq? If so how much?
It has nothing to do with accessing it now. Pre-war, the oil simply wasn't available to the US market due to sanctions. Now it is. Oil is running out and what is left is getting harder and more expensive to pump out. Iraq is a mid-term investment. It also gives the US a lot more power over OPEC.
There is a difference between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism.
The only difference are in the means available to them. Islamic fundamentalists rely on LOW BUDGET weapons like fake bombs and box-cutters, while the Christians and Jews get the nice shiny F15s.
All sides are a bunch of murdering fucks tho. I really want to start my own non-religion, to band all the sensible people together so that we can mobilize and destroy this scurge before it destroys our planet.
No legitimate historian will deny that Jesus Christ was a real person that was crucified by the Roman empire.
Wrong, only a moron would think that he did exist! The bible is a book of fables and tales, passed down through generations. Assuming that Christ did exist, the first gospel was written 40 YEARS later by someone WHO HAD NEVER MET anyone who had even met Jesus. The second gospel is blatanly an embelishment/reinterpretation of the first, with several more layers of Chinese Whispers. Go do some research on WHERE the versions bible came from.
The bible as it stands today has been translated through 3/4 different lanagues. Did you know that the whole Virgin Mary thing was actually a translation error? The original Hebrew text said "without child", nothing about having sex. So, basically, one of the key cornerstones of the Christian religions is a typo!!
What else...well, when the King James edition was penned, they essentially had an editorial technique, where they decided what was in and what was out. Politics and social standards of the time dictated what sections of a book stayed and which got removed and now these are debated over by people who treat is as though it were a legal contract. They based THIS body of work using sources that had been through the same process centuries before! You can't analysis the bible; at best it is a set of guidelines for a good life. Anyone who believes that it is the work of god should not be allowed to breed, and they certainally should not be in charge of nuclear weapons!
What we really need to come up with is a version control tree of the bible. A chart, produced like the ones in CVS, except that it shows the origins of each of the branches of the bibles, all the various versions, and where the merges took place. Slap some sense into these Morans.
I bought a friend an LCD and it had a single pixel fault - bright green always on right in the middle. Made the display unusable. Manufacturer pointed to their returns policy of 5 deal pixels and would not accept it back.
That shouldn't have been the end of your story. I don't know where you live, so this may not be relevant, but in most countries there are consumer laws that give you rights to expect certain standards of quality. Here in the UK, guarantees/warranties always state "your statatory rights are not affected". Under these rights (if you are aware of them!) you can get compensation/repairs outside of the warranty period if you are willing to complain loudly enough. Anything sold must be "fit for purpose" as well, and you could easilly argue that a dead display element in a display device was not acceptible.
I'd recommend finding out who does your countries consumer affairs (usually a local government/council dept.) and speak to them to see if you have a case. Here, the Trading Standards people do all the work for you, all it takes is a phone call or two to them!:-)
I would hate the manufacturers to create a second tier of CPUs at a lower price point - the ways these chips could cause my s/w to fail would be vexing.
Ditto RAM. I had a bad module that was the upper (unused) memory area. The fault only blue-screened the box after something important had used that bit of memory, which was a toughie to root-cause. It only happened when the machine was over-worked, which could have been caused by lots of different things.
I don't get how they can claim that stuff like spider venom can be diluted in water to the point where the sample likely doesnt contain a single molecule of spider venom... but that it left an "imprint" on the water, whatever the hell that is.
Now, I agree that homepathy is most likely a crock of shit. However, in the article, there are many other unknowns listed. Such as dark matter, which they estimate is 90% of the universe.
My point is that it would be incredibly arrogant to not allow a small premise when we don't understand the fundamentals of particle physics. I'm making this up, but say for example molecular phyics "drove" the underlying fabric of space that we do not understand. It is possible that this "imprint" idea is valid.
Lots of other things have been taken as crackpot ideas over the years. Evolution. Earth revolves around Sun. Each consequative generation feels that they have it all figured out.
Irvine Welsh wrote a humorous short story about the argument between two pilosiphers arguing over the difference between magic and "undiscovered science" that this debate brings to mind.
People with addictions can certainly live and at times be successful in what they do. Nonetheless, that hardly means "normal."
What is "normal"? Seems today to be "work 9 til 5, eat, watch TV, sleep". Fuck that! Seriously! I'll take the Hunter S Thomson style parties anyday over that depressing life. "Normal"? Are they the ones snapping up all the anti-depressants spat out by the drug industries?
You specifically say their life is not normal. What aspects of their life aren't normal? I'm genuinely interested in what you have to say, if you are actually in the mental health field.
Remember also that you are seeing a biased sample. They people you interact with need your help. Would it be safe to assume that a certain percentage of adicts are below your radar because they are weathy, successful and otherwise healthy? An addition need not be life impacting. Smokers don't seem to have a problem, and the vast majority of them are addicts. If the drug does not affect your ablilty to function, then it's not a problem. Take weed for example (not addictive but very habit forming), I could turn up to my IT job completely baked and do a full days work. I'd get the sack tho, so basically it's very low key for me. Ditto for those who like their cocaine, in fact the media industry is fueled by it. They do throw good parties tho...;-) As someone who's been around those environments, I can watch TV and make educated guesses what the presenters are on.:-)
The whole underlying essence of an addiction is extreme distress in the abscence of the addicted to substance or behavior.
Agreed. However, if you can function in society, hold down a job, have an active social life (moreso that your average/.'er I might add!), then it's not a problem. If you are living on the breadline, then addiction is a serious problem, as your life will revolve around satifying the addiction. If that "satifying" was a phone call and a 10 minute delivery time, then no biggie.
It's a meta-analysis? Ignore it then. A meta study can be summed up with the phrase "after throwing out all evidence to the contary, I conclude...". Sure, in theory you could trust a meta study. But to do that, you would need to check the funding of the study, the researchers bias and pre-conditioning, religious beliefs, lifestyle. You would need to basically trust them, or conduct your own research for contary positions to their conclusions.
As a (topical) example, "evidence" of WMD in Iraq was essentially a meta-study. They went over the inteligence, kept what supported them, and binned what didn't. We saw where that took us...
Cuba is in the top 5 for MOST of the mortality-rate categories, including many things that you'd never die of in the USA, Japan or Europe
So? Take a look at the page for the USA. There are FAR more entries than Cuba has in a top ten. Granted, a lot are possive things, but scroll down to the mortality section...there are about 4 or 5 pages worth! Cuba had a handfull...
One thing the USA will never be top for is charity, or economic aid is it's properly known. Another delusional bubble burst...
They're also hold multiple top positions for refugees...
Who's fault is that, cough cough economic/medical/imigration sanctions? All because the US funded Bay Of Pigs terrorist attacks failed to top Castro.
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Most of the "moronic" beliefs that I have heard being attributed to Mormons are actually not true.
I gotta admit, most of my "knowledge" of the Mormon faith is from an episode of South Park that you are likely familiar with. From it I got the impression that Mormons believe that the biblical events all took place in North America, and that Native Americans look the way they do as a punishment. I of course took this at face value (I am critical of most information "fed" to me), but I figured that as the episode was contraversial, it would be as acurate as possible, lest it be easilly torn appart by critics.
And, yes, "Ra" (as I understand it, anyway) is representative of God. God has been represented in many different ways by many different religions and many different cultures
Many preach that other ones are false gods and that theirs is the only real one. The worst guy I ever spoke to believed that there would never be peace on earth until everyone was Christian. Of course, he was willing to fight to make that happen. Ironic, don't you think?
No, I didn't say that. They may be a god. I certainally think there are likely beings out there in the universe that we might consider "god".
However, believing that god created man in his own image is clearly backwards. We created god. Why do you think he is always represented a white male? Because he was created by white males. Of course, the fact that everyone in biblical times would have been black doesn't seem present on the stained-glass windows at my local church.
The bible is wrong on many key fundamental concepts. Normally when you read something and realise that the author is wrong, you put it down and move on. With the bible, people seem to come up with crazy ideas that might make it all fit in about what is known about the history of this planet. Where did the dinosaurs fit in exactly? They weren't known about when the bible was written, though if they had been they would have been a part of the story.
Oh, I do understand, that's the problem. Sorry to point this out to you, but Jesus has never visited North America, nor is he ever likely to. I doubt the saviour would choose the land of corruption and intolerance as the place for the second coming. Unless he plans to have his work cut out for him! And the Native American thing? Sorry, they have Oriental heritage, it's obvious to anyone!!
Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against Mormons, I despise most religions equally.
Not that I'm saying there isn't a god. That would be naive! But not as naive as believing the words (word for word) in a book that are clearly wrong on so many levels. Sure, you can talk about how the 7 days wasn't seven Earth days, but the fact of the matter is that you are just trying to mould your dogma into reality. These books were created by man, written by man, edited by man and reproduced by man. Anyone that bases their whole religion around a clearly fallible book is an idiot, sorry but that's the way I see it. On the other hand, studying all of the relevant texts and making up your own mind is much better. However, The Church is the entirely opposite thing; the we are right, everyone else is wrong approach. You could not be any more closed-minded. If there is a god, these people are going to burn, just as GWB will for starting a war for profit. Irony, gotta love it!
There are some sticky issues involved with regulation of behavior in a networked world, which need to be resolved in order to have the internet continue as a viable medium for communication and commerce.
But they can't be solved, that's the problem. It's hard enough to pass laws in one country, let alone the planet. Countries that embrace freedom, such as most European ones would not accept another country telling them what they can and cannot look at! The only alternative would be to switch of the internet and replace it with "Internet 2.0". However, many have drawn parallels to this with AOL 1.0, where you could not email non AOL members and you could not access non AOL webpages. See this speach. If you want to kill freedom and inovation on the net, feel free to create your own, but most of us won't follow you.
Yeah, I agree that tools should be available to allow parents control. However, this is not the right way to do it technologically speaking. It's weak, does very little to solve the problem, and more importantly provides false security, which is the worst kind. It's like the idiots that called for ID cards post-911. It wouldn't have made a bit of difference, if anything security might have been even lower due to the false confidence in the system.
This technology doesn't do jack to help that though. Ever heard of pr0n? Used to get around filters. This isn't even a filter, it's a static list. If you think you compile a list of all pornography in the internet, you are in the wrong job. YahooBoobies would love to talk to you!
All this will do is provide false security and therefore be counter productive. If you don't want your kids seeing porn on the net, keep an eye on them. If you don't want them seeing porn in a bookstore, keep an eye on them. If you don't want them walking down the wrong street at night and being abducted, act like a fucking parent and do your job. TV, the internet or 200,000V of mains electricty and a bathtub might seem like a good way to occupy your child and keep them out of your hair for a few hours, but they aren't going to come out of it for the better!
Screw you! I reserve the right to make fun of any religion. Especically one as moronic as the Mormons, do you have any concept of how crazy their beliefs are?
On the other hand, everyone else has the right to believe what they want, and try to peacefully persuade others to follow. Welcome to a free society.
Why don't you just go put on a white sheet and paint a twisted cross on it?
Because we are insulting their backwards belief structure, not lynching people. There is a huge difference!
Can I go on record as saying I have near-zero respect for anyone who believes in creationism in any of the classical ways. "Inteligent design" folks are at least trying to justify their beliefs, but creationists creating the Earth before the Sun? Do you expect me to take you seriously on anything else when you are that naive/stupid/gullible?
I find it absolutely hilarious to hear a Christian talk about Egypt and other older belief stuctures without joining the dots and realising that Ra is God and the whole thing just stems from mans inability to handle the fact that we don't understand the universe (it's alright, because daddy knows) and death (your little bunny rabbit is in heaven, honey).
Yeah, it was a while before I noticed it and it's not worth the hastle to be honest given it's value. The box sounds like an aircraft taking off, so a silent one holds potential. However, there are also GFX and CPU fans to consider, plus drive noise, so I can see myself going down an expensive route!
blue LED fans
Apparently that colour of blue is very acceptible to men for some reason, studies have shown this. HiFi makers have been using that trick for years. Here in the UK it was popular to put an LED on your car bonnet/hood where the washer-sprayer nonzles should go. Looks ridiculous!
Sure, $100 is silly, but $15 is also too low. My cheap-ass PSU is running at 12.9V acording to the software diag tool. You want one that has good regulation and is stable. I'm thinking of replacing it and I'd was going to spend about $30 on it, or maybe go for one that has been designed to be quiet for up to $50-60.
I second that. Heat is a huge killer of electronics and dropping the temp by 5 degrees can make some hardware last much longer than it might have. Especially drives, they always seem to be the first to go, moving parts are also much more prone to failure. When manufacturers want to give their manufactured PCs a good test, they put them in headed cupboards and monitor the temperatures while giving the system a workout. Only a very small sample of the devices manufactured get tested this way though, it's very time consuming and labour intensive.
Not that you can do anything about that anyway. On any OS, there are enough services and daemons to make sure that the drive NEVER powers down. I haven't seen a drive do that on anything other than a laptop in years, don't know why I bother enabling it on desktops.
Besides, the best reason IMHO to have two drives for the OS is fragmentation, or lack of.
One thing I have wondered, and perhaps someone can answer me; what effects does the data placement have? Say you have a 10G drive, 1G swap, 1G /tmp and the rest as root. (this works for windows as well). Would having things in different places e.g. root | tmp | swap be any different from say swap | root | tmp?
I'd always thought that the seek time was the bottleneck in any armature based data storage. However, with multiplatters I'm not so sure if this matters so much. That depends how the data is striped onto the platters, and if the arms move indepentantly. I know nothing about working drives, having only disassembled a dead one! I'd pay for a clear one just to see how the little bugger worked!
Fair point. The interactive cable thingy has paid-for things as well, e.g. 50c for a music video. I think $1 an episode of a soap would be a bit steep to be honest. These soaps are on four times a week, thats $4 per week, almost $20 per month! For one program that you currently get for free? I'd say about 10-20c is fair, you'd need to do the maths though to compare to regular cable subscriptions, an average person should work out about even otherwise we will be getting ripped off. Plus, the BBC is a special case altogether, while Corrie is on a commercial station.
You can watch EastEnders for free on interactive cable already. They have the last week or so available. Not that you'd want to, it's just another damn depressing soap. They also have "Top Gear", which is what "Fifth Gear" is ripping on (TG was canned, one of the presenters defected, then TG started again).
Pretty much all of the (short-term) smoking impact is artificial though. It's pretty sad when you look at it that way, the anti-smoking lobby has made millions miserable just to encourage them to do something that is remarkably difficult at the best of times! A little counter-productive really, and it reeks of the "get you hooked, jackup the price" warnings taught to make kids aware of the dangers of drugs. You should see the prices here in the UK, it's nearing 5 UKP a pack! Again, this annoys me a little, as there seems to be a bias with smokers generally coming from lower-income backgrounds. Sure they they should maybe give up to add another 10 years onto their lifes, but why should they be forced to? If they choose to continue smoking, they will continue to be financially punished. And smokers don't cost health services more, that's a short-sighted myth. You are going to get ill and die. Smokers do it earlier, with more understood and routine (cheaper) ways of popping it, and before collecting 10 extra years of state benefits! It's the McDonald-eating, zero exercise, drive to the shops, "non-smokers" that make me laugh the most!
Until recently I would have said yes, but my newest one is 2009, that's a full four years.
With Iraq, the worlds second largest remaining oil field, now under control of US approved puppets, the USA is in a much stronger position when this inevitable crisis unfolds.
What edge? Seriously! The US doesn't have any edge on technology, except for military technologies. It's behind on most other things, with IT being a small exception, but again, the internet started off in the military and most inovations on it are illegal in America.
It is however very good at giving the impression that it is ahead, so most of it's citizens are unaware of just how far behind the US has fallen.
Because Witches don't, and never have existed? That's enough in my mind to ignore the argument. Would you believe a law maker that cited dragons and trolls as reason for changing a law? I don't think so...
Meanwhile, the unreasonable Christians make it into the Whitehouse...
It has nothing to do with accessing it now. Pre-war, the oil simply wasn't available to the US market due to sanctions. Now it is. Oil is running out and what is left is getting harder and more expensive to pump out. Iraq is a mid-term investment. It also gives the US a lot more power over OPEC.
The only difference are in the means available to them. Islamic fundamentalists rely on LOW BUDGET weapons like fake bombs and box-cutters, while the Christians and Jews get the nice shiny F15s.
All sides are a bunch of murdering fucks tho. I really want to start my own non-religion, to band all the sensible people together so that we can mobilize and destroy this scurge before it destroys our planet.
Wrong, only a moron would think that he did exist! The bible is a book of fables and tales, passed down through generations. Assuming that Christ did exist, the first gospel was written 40 YEARS later by someone WHO HAD NEVER MET anyone who had even met Jesus. The second gospel is blatanly an embelishment/reinterpretation of the first, with several more layers of Chinese Whispers. Go do some research on WHERE the versions bible came from.
The bible as it stands today has been translated through 3/4 different lanagues. Did you know that the whole Virgin Mary thing was actually a translation error? The original Hebrew text said "without child", nothing about having sex. So, basically, one of the key cornerstones of the Christian religions is a typo!!
What else...well, when the King James edition was penned, they essentially had an editorial technique, where they decided what was in and what was out. Politics and social standards of the time dictated what sections of a book stayed and which got removed and now these are debated over by people who treat is as though it were a legal contract. They based THIS body of work using sources that had been through the same process centuries before! You can't analysis the bible; at best it is a set of guidelines for a good life. Anyone who believes that it is the work of god should not be allowed to breed, and they certainally should not be in charge of nuclear weapons!
What we really need to come up with is a version control tree of the bible. A chart, produced like the ones in CVS, except that it shows the origins of each of the branches of the bibles, all the various versions, and where the merges took place. Slap some sense into these Morans.
That shouldn't have been the end of your story. I don't know where you live, so this may not be relevant, but in most countries there are consumer laws that give you rights to expect certain standards of quality. Here in the UK, guarantees/warranties always state "your statatory rights are not affected". Under these rights (if you are aware of them!) you can get compensation/repairs outside of the warranty period if you are willing to complain loudly enough. Anything sold must be "fit for purpose" as well, and you could easilly argue that a dead display element in a display device was not acceptible.
I'd recommend finding out who does your countries consumer affairs (usually a local government/council dept.) and speak to them to see if you have a case. Here, the Trading Standards people do all the work for you, all it takes is a phone call or two to them! :-)
I would hate the manufacturers to create a second tier of CPUs at a lower price point - the ways these chips could cause my s/w to fail would be vexing.
Ditto RAM. I had a bad module that was the upper (unused) memory area. The fault only blue-screened the box after something important had used that bit of memory, which was a toughie to root-cause. It only happened when the machine was over-worked, which could have been caused by lots of different things.
Now, I agree that homepathy is most likely a crock of shit. However, in the article, there are many other unknowns listed. Such as dark matter, which they estimate is 90% of the universe.
My point is that it would be incredibly arrogant to not allow a small premise when we don't understand the fundamentals of particle physics. I'm making this up, but say for example molecular phyics "drove" the underlying fabric of space that we do not understand. It is possible that this "imprint" idea is valid.
Lots of other things have been taken as crackpot ideas over the years. Evolution. Earth revolves around Sun. Each consequative generation feels that they have it all figured out.
Irvine Welsh wrote a humorous short story about the argument between two pilosiphers arguing over the difference between magic and "undiscovered science" that this debate brings to mind.
What is "normal"? Seems today to be "work 9 til 5, eat, watch TV, sleep". Fuck that! Seriously! I'll take the Hunter S Thomson style parties anyday over that depressing life. "Normal"? Are they the ones snapping up all the anti-depressants spat out by the drug industries?
You specifically say their life is not normal. What aspects of their life aren't normal? I'm genuinely interested in what you have to say, if you are actually in the mental health field.
Remember also that you are seeing a biased sample. They people you interact with need your help. Would it be safe to assume that a certain percentage of adicts are below your radar because they are weathy, successful and otherwise healthy? An addition need not be life impacting. Smokers don't seem to have a problem, and the vast majority of them are addicts. If the drug does not affect your ablilty to function, then it's not a problem. Take weed for example (not addictive but very habit forming), I could turn up to my IT job completely baked and do a full days work. I'd get the sack tho, so basically it's very low key for me. Ditto for those who like their cocaine, in fact the media industry is fueled by it. They do throw good parties tho... ;-) As someone who's been around those environments, I can watch TV and make educated guesses what the presenters are on. :-)
The whole underlying essence of an addiction is extreme distress in the abscence of the addicted to substance or behavior.
Agreed. However, if you can function in society, hold down a job, have an active social life (moreso that your average /.'er I might add!), then it's not a problem. If you are living on the breadline, then addiction is a serious problem, as your life will revolve around satifying the addiction. If that "satifying" was a phone call and a 10 minute delivery time, then no biggie.
It's a meta-analysis? Ignore it then. A meta study can be summed up with the phrase "after throwing out all evidence to the contary, I conclude...". Sure, in theory you could trust a meta study. But to do that, you would need to check the funding of the study, the researchers bias and pre-conditioning, religious beliefs, lifestyle. You would need to basically trust them, or conduct your own research for contary positions to their conclusions.
As a (topical) example, "evidence" of WMD in Iraq was essentially a meta-study. They went over the inteligence, kept what supported them, and binned what didn't. We saw where that took us...
So? Take a look at the page for the USA. There are FAR more entries than Cuba has in a top ten. Granted, a lot are possive things, but scroll down to the mortality section...there are about 4 or 5 pages worth! Cuba had a handfull...
One thing the USA will never be top for is charity, or economic aid is it's properly known. Another delusional bubble burst...
They're also hold multiple top positions for refugees...
Who's fault is that, cough cough economic/medical/imigration sanctions? All because the US funded Bay Of Pigs terrorist attacks failed to top Castro.