People who have been let go from gitmo have marks on them indicating torture. They have all said they were tortured.... blah blah blah, all hearsay.
Proof, please. A link. Anything that doesn't solely rely on the released prisoners' testimonies. Because they don't have an axe to grind, no. A link to any "Indy media" outfit who depends on George Soros for its income doesn't count. Hell, these days, Newsweek should hardly count, but I'll grudgingly accept it.
There is no proof, other than you and your ideological allies say-so. And since you believe that Bush == Hitler, your judgement is just a bit suspect.
(Just wondering--if I testify in a Canadian court that you fuck dogs for spare change, does it make it true? If so, I'm so there.)
(Shipped to Syria? Sweet Jesus, why Syria? If you're going to lie, lie better than that.)
Is that why you bombed the crap out of Iraq, so that eventually one day happy shiny Iraqis (the few that are left) will be free to buy shit they don't need from the likes of Ebay, Walmart and Amazon?
Yes. Next question, please.
Oh, that doesn't satisfy? Well, let's see: "shit they don't need"--so the main goal is to live a subsistence life? Good plan, that. It's doing so well in Tanzania and Papau New Guinea. The kids especially love it, because a lot of them die young, so their parents have a lot of kids, and that means a full baseball team EVERY SUMMER! In your own family! Sweet!
If you checked your anti-corporatism bigotry for just an inch, you'd get over yourself and stop shitting on the things that allow you to troll on Slashdot as an AC.
Yes, there were hordes of American tourists in Chile in 1973.
Of course, Chile is actually a pretty good country, considering the large number of shitholes in South America. Through and since Pinochet, they've steadily progressed towards a non-asstastic democracy. I'd even consider it one of the State Depts. victories. So, whatever AC.
I've always thought that if we dropped the embargo, Castro would get fat and rich from all the money, and nothing depresses homicidal dictator instincts like boundless materialism.
Cuba would be a de facto 51st state in less than 5 years if we dropped the embargo. Even if Castro remained in power (doubtful, but possible), in the end the country would become a democracy and Castro would eventually die and go to the flaming dung pits in Hell to hang with Mao and Stalin.
Oh yes, Castro == Bush == Hussein. Absolutely. Last time I was in D.C., I took the White House tour and vistited the rape room, and that cell where the President takes people to force them to confess at gunpoint. It owned.
Just a thought: if the US had succeeded at offing Castro, Cuba would be a vacation paradise right now and the citizens there could buy their own damn rice cookers from Wal-Mart.
From where do people get the numbers to judge Cuba's healthcare success? That's right, from the Cuban government. Russia also was tops in the world in tractor manufacturing, to hear them tell it.
I'll see your Padilla and raise you uncounted hundreds or thousands in Cuba. When you compare and contrast the total populations of the two countries and the percentage of "unjustified" detention, and the relative dangers faced by terrorism, you come off looking a bit puny with your one guy.
To put it in perspective, what you're trying to do is say that a leper and a guy with a hangnail are functionally equivalent. This is true only for suitably small values of "sick".
I think you'll find that they mean "free" as in "not encumbered by restrictions that prevent the full use of the program and its code". You'll find that to be the case because, well, that is the case. Congratulations on your beliefs, though. I recommend you live in Cuba, rather than this whacko republic of ours.
My quick estimation based on shit I have on my desk right now shows that the LifeDrive is about as thick as a tin of Altoids. So I may back off a bit on the thickness as being an issue: it's thick, but not horribly thick. The latest Palms are pretty thin as a rule, but a lot of the PocketPC devices I've seen are pretty unwieldy. By default I would keep the LifeDrive in a protective case, which potentially adds way too much thickness for it to be convenient.
If WiFi was as power-stingy as Bluetooth (which isn't really all that stingy), I'd have no issue. The few tests I've seen of WiFi on Palms shows a battery life of only a few hours--often worse for PocketPC devices. The Tungsten C seems to be one of the best performers here, but it has a 1500 mah battery and a clever WiFi implementation. I'm not saying that WiFi isn't nifty or useful, but I am saying that obsessing over the need for it in a PDA misses the point of a PDA. For email, a Palm + GPRS phone is an adequate solution: email, especially if you use IMAP, is lightweight. I've done it a few times on my IIIxe with the 14.4 Palm modem. Not something I relish doing, but adequte. Web browsing on a Palm of all flavors is best limited to emergencies only. For testing WiFi availability, a smaller, cheaper device may be more useful. Streaming music? No thanks. I don't even do that on my desktop.
I'm not opposed to having WiFi as an option, which is why I mention the Enfora. I'm looking to upgrade my Palm now, probably to the Tungsten E2, and I'll likely pick up an Enfora at some point, so I'm not a purist. But the lack of WiFi is constantly listed as a "Con". Might as well tick it for not including a laser pointer--it's useful on some level, sure, but not if it makes the device more than a couple hundred bucks. I have no doubt that I can come up with gobs of Neat Things To Do With WiFi, but the fact is I'm very unlikely to do any of them with any regularity, and I think I'm closer to the average consumer in this matter.
Well, you have me there on the iPod issue--of course, I don't own an iPod for the same reason. Perhaps I am simply a marketeer's worst nightmare.
I'm not unaware of the purpose of reviews as a vehicle for advertising, but I am really puzzled by the dearth of honest and reliable reviewers. Especially in the Internet age. I'm a bit sensitive to this as I've been searching hard for a replacement cell phone, and cell phone reviews are particularly lame and worthless.
I guess I complain mostly because I think the PalmOS is so incredibly nifty, and that Palm is shooting itself in the foot by not: a) focussing on their developers, which in the end make their platform useful; and b) forgoing the Mac and Linux/BSD/Free Unix market altogether. If anybody is going to appreciate a useful, clever device, it's Mac users. Windows users are going to default to the PocketPC devices, simply because there are so damn many of them, and they'll likely get one from Dell when they buy their new desktop. Palm would do well to satisfy these markets rather than chase after PocketPC.
This is a nice device, to be sure, but I'm not sure why I should be excited about it.
1) The main factor for making something "seem small" is to make it thin. The 15" Powerbook is actually quite large, but because it's thin it seems small. This thing is 3/4" thick.
2) Brighthand seemed to indicate that it would make a good portable storage device for your digital camera. I don't get that either. The casual photographer who might want to offload vacation pictures isn't likely to buy a $500 device to do so. You can buy a lot of huge SD cards for $500. The professional photographer, who WOULD find this device useful, all use cameras that use CompactFlash. If this USB-thing Brighthand mentions actually works, then maybe--but the idea of having a seperate device is to pull out the card, put it in the device, replace the card with another card, and keep shooting. Also less than 4GB isn't much when you're dealing with 4-7MB RAW files (which I guarantee the LifeDrive app won't be able to read, although it may be able to pull out the JPEG preview). This may be quite the swell device for a Brighthand reviewer, but that's a terribly small niche market.
3) What is the deal with WiFi on PDAs? People are obsessive about this, just as they all clamor for megapixel cameras on their cell phones. WiFi is a power hog. If I wanted to use WiFi on a Palm, I'd go for one of the Enfora portfolios where I don't have to use my Palm's battery. Battery life is king on a PDA. At some point you would do better to simply go with a 12" Powerbook or iBook, and a 3/4" thick device with WiFi but no keyboard is probably that point. (And getting a megapixel camera on your phone is stupid so long as the image is taken through a shitty, fixed focus plastic lens. You get more blurry pixels--that's a Big Win there, chief.)
4) Too expensive. I understand that in order to offer all these goodies, you have to charge for them, but if you drop this thing on the ground, or into the toilet, you've just ruined a $500 device. Everybody's tolerance is different, but for me, $200-ish dollars is that cutoff where I feel like I can replace 2 or 3 devices a year and not feel royally screwed. If I have a $500 device, I'm less likely to take it somewhere out of fear of busting it.
5) Related to 4), but unrelated to the LifeDrive; professional reviewers suck for this reason: they didn't have to buy the damn thing with their money, so they aren't interacting with the device like other people would. If a professional reviewer accidentally sits on the fucking thing, they just phone up Palm and say, "Oopsie, send me another please." They also tend to parrot specs and press release material, and are pathologically uncritical. I've hardly ever seen a review where the reviewer revisits the device after using it for a few months--mostly because after the initial review, the reviewer has moved on to using whatever the next latest-and-greatest toy is, because, you know, everybody has endless time and money to constantly upgrade. Jesus Christ, I'm still using a IIIxe because it works, it's reliable, and I'm not swimming in free time and cash. (The best reviewer in the world is probably Dan even though he does have goodies provided to him on occasion.)
I disagree that it was too expensive. The Pippen would have made a bang-up school computer lab station. It was about $600, IIRC, which at the time was in competition with $1500 and up PCs that were harder to network and more prone to virus/corruption problems.
The Pippen booted from a CD! There was no failed hard-drive issue, you couldn't get a boot sector virus, and precocious teens couldn't meaningfully hack it.
That it was marketed as a "game platform" at all was foolish. Maybe some "edutainment" type programs, but otherwise it could (should?) have been the Apple II all over again. Now might even be a good time to re-introduce the idea again, now that jillions of teenagers are accustomed to that damned "Loading..." screen from their Playstations and XBoxes.
Also, remember that the Jedi were losing their ability to use the Force. It was explained in Ep. II that this was the case.
Of course, in Ep. I, they explained that you got control over the Force through a damned virus, so what does that mean? The Jedi were being slipped penicillin in their coffee by the Sith? Who knows? It's not explained, it just is.
Re: the Yoda battle--it looked like Yoda was doing pretty good, but Dooku (Stupid Name Alert! Stupid Name Alert! Seriously, what was going through Lucus' mind when he said, "You know what's an evil-sounding name? Better than Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, Darth Vader? Count Dooku.") forced Yoda to also contend with saving the lives of the other two Jedi. Of course, the question must be asked: while Dooku (gods!) was bringing the pillar down, why didn't Yoda--the incredible flying monkey-toad--dash over and slice him in half? Come on!
That's the experiment that people trot out to prove life from non-life. Leaving aside the large leap from amino acids to a functioning cell, the acids were swimming in a sea of chemicals incompatible with life.
You've pointed to a bed of clay and said, "You can make bricks from this. Therefore a house can be constructed without the hand of Man." Speaking of education, I trust you took no logic courses.
An embryo may not be a baby, according to common usage of the term "baby", but it is most assuredly alive, which is the salient point here. Your logic is so awful that if we call a birthed baby an "advanced-stage fetus" it would be okay to drown it in a sack. We'll just call it a "post-natal abortion".
You post is riddled with non sequiturs and strawmen. You have been on Slashdot a long time!
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome. This is the heart of the ID argument. It proposes that evolution fails to show exactly that--complex, interdependant structures that show design, rather than accidental happenstance. It's not enough to invent a story that sorta-kinda explains it, you have to show biological evidence.
As yet, I don't know of any such proof.
ID is falsifiable by showing how undirected, natural means can form a complex structure. For example, rapidly generate multiple generations of unflaggellated bacteria within an environmental pressure--a current--and see if the bacteria creates flaggella for itself. I don't know of any such experiments. If you do, please share.
Finally, you should probably avoid mentioning Dawkins or Gould. Both stake (staked, in the case of Gould) their rabid atheism on the truth of evolution. They are the Jerry Falwell of the evolutionists--media-whore blowhards with suspect ulterior motives for their stridency. That evolutionists immediately turn to ad hominem attacks and loaded language--"fundies", "zealots", "flat-earthers", "you must have come from a stupid high school"--doesn't win them any logic points.
(Re: stupid high schools. Evolution pretends to be self-evident, like gravity, but it really isn't. It requires the piecing together of many disparate sciences--biology, geology, anthropology, etc.--and therefore inherent trust that the people in these disciplines to be intellectually honest. Most of the people in these disciplines already believe evolution to be fact. They're not looking to falsify the theory, but simply to prove their own personal quirk of the greater whole [and just maybe to cash in on the mad science money as Gould and Dawkins did]. To simplify, I can drop a rock on your toe and prove that gravity works. In order to prove evolution you'll have to prove to me a stack of pre-conceived notions in as many disciplines.)
Yes, and you sound very paranoid and bigoted with your:
1) Insinuation that religious conservatives engage in illegal activity on a regular basis
2) Apparent belief that religious people are out to get you for sinning
Seems very like Adolf Hitlter, don't it?
(Yes, yes, you call Godwin's Law. You are so funny and clever! I must say it was a nice troll for karma points. If you denigrate Those Crazy Conservatives and Karl Rove, that's usually good for at least a couple postitive moderations. I notice it's not working this time, perhaps because you're way down the page. Next time reply to a higher-rated comment.)
It's a fair question: we can't make observations of the past. Part of science is observation and testing, and we cannot test the past. We can observe the present, form theories about how things progressed, and then test what historical records we have to see how correct we are, but that's far from a sure thing.
For example, you notice that rocks fall from the banks of a river as the banks erode. You can count the number of rocks in the river bottom and extrapolate how long that river has existed.
Fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't account for a) rocks being washed downstream; b) rocks being washed in from upstream; c) meteors, or; d) kids chucking rocks for grins.
There are several questions that evolution has yet to demonstrate itself as a solution. Information creation, for one. To be an evolutionist, you have to believe that you can turn a starfish into a man, and the mechanism for that is woefully incomplete. Gene transcription errors? The genome seems to show a capability for repairing errors as some experiments have shown. Mutations? Mutations are rarely beneficial, and have not in recorded experiments created meaningfuly new information--at least not that I've seen.
Take bacteria. We can grow and rapidly generate bacteria generations, but we have yet to turn a non-flagellated bacteria into a flagellated one. Again, at least I have not seen such research. If you have a link, I'd be interested to see it. I've seen lots of experiments where devolution takes place--breeding the eyes out of cave fish, for example--but never where a jellyfish grows an eye.
Finally, two things: the PBS "Evolution" series had the ring of propoganda to it. The thing that struck me from the series was the portrayal of Darwin and the "representative" Christian on the HMS Beagle. It was a laughably sarcastic farce, based on largely nothing but bias. Also, the mean-spirited response of evolutionists towards Christians doesn't inspire confidence in the strength of their arguments. Nobody argues against the existence of gravity--it's provable and observable--but when evolutionists (most of whom are simply so because they were taught that it was true beyond all doubt) resort to namecalling. Well, I'll just say ad hominem attacks might work on USENET, but only there.
I want a bluetooth phone that will nicely sync with iSync, and for extra credit I want either a native imap client (not a java one, that's what I use now) or native ssh.
Let me save you some time: what you're looking for does not exist if you're a T-Mobile customer. I've done gobs of research into this, and I've come up empty. What I wanted was:
A phone with BT that I could sync with iSync, and use as a GPRS modem with my Powerbook or with a Palm (see below)
A Palm handheld with BT that I could use as a tiny computer for SSH, Web, mail while I'm away from my desktop or laptop
The Palm was easy--the new Tungsten E2 looks perfect--nice screen, long battery life (important!), not stupidly expensive so I won't cry like a girl when I drop it in the toilet, and will be supported by the Enfora WiFi portfolio soon (or the Palm WiFi SD card, if you want).
The phone has been a real pain. I'd like to be able to use the phone as an emergency SSH terminal as well, so I thought the Nokia 6822 would be perfect. But it's not a US phone. I had hopes for the Motorola A630, but unless you're willing to muck around in the Java libraries, it's locked out of ports other than 80. The Sidekick doesn't have BT. Neither does the 6800. The Motorola v600 looked decent, but they just recently removed it from their Web site, so it's obviously end-of-life.
Plus, T-Mobile has limited their t-zones to WAP only. If you want real Internet, you have to get the $20/mo Internet add-on. (A good deal, actually the best on the market, but I'm not thrilled about the price considering the speed seems to be about the same as a 28.8Kbps modem, but with 800-1000ms ping times. Hello lag!)
All the phones are either A) candy-coated pieces of crap designed to appeal to texting shitheads and Japanese girls, or; B) ungodly expensive. Hello, who gives a crap about a camera on their phone? There is no way it will be anything other than a shitty, shitty camera. I couldn't care less about being able to use a P.Diddy song as a ringtone. (God, ringtones? Eat a dick, you assholes who obsess over ringtones.) I want a camera with BUTTONS that I can ACUTALLY PRESS, that don't look like SHIT (Nokia 7610).
The phones supported by iSync are all pretty old. The Sony t610/616 and the Nokia 3650 are probably the best of the lot, but they're long ago discontinued.
Beware wishing for a law--what would actually happen is that the gov't would require that you use ADA to program your phone, based on a blue-ribbon commission of tech-ignorant Senators.
I see this term used, "Founding Fathers" quite a bit as if they were a monolithic bunch. They weren't. They were quarrelsome and scrappy, and often disagreed on a number of major and minor issues.
2) Nonsense. The administration has been full of dissenters. Quite a large number of them were proven wrong and left, then replaced with people who were right; which likely explains why the executive portions of the government looks monolithic right now. Also, the burden is on you to prove that open dissent in the executive branch--a branch that is basically defined as being a reflection of the will of a single person--is a plus.
3) You're kidding, right? Bill Clinton was slightly more unscripted to be sure, but he was also a gladhanding sack of shit. It's easy to be unscripted when you can promise the world, deliver nothing, and still have people love you to death.
4) Self-doubt may work on LiveJournal, but it fails as a foreign policy.
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Proof, please. A link. Anything that doesn't solely rely on the released prisoners' testimonies. Because they don't have an axe to grind, no. A link to any "Indy media" outfit who depends on George Soros for its income doesn't count. Hell, these days, Newsweek should hardly count, but I'll grudgingly accept it.
There is no proof, other than you and your ideological allies say-so. And since you believe that Bush == Hitler, your judgement is just a bit suspect.
(Just wondering--if I testify in a Canadian court that you fuck dogs for spare change, does it make it true? If so, I'm so there.)
(Shipped to Syria? Sweet Jesus, why Syria? If you're going to lie, lie better than that.)
Yes. Next question, please.
Oh, that doesn't satisfy? Well, let's see: "shit they don't need"--so the main goal is to live a subsistence life? Good plan, that. It's doing so well in Tanzania and Papau New Guinea. The kids especially love it, because a lot of them die young, so their parents have a lot of kids, and that means a full baseball team EVERY SUMMER! In your own family! Sweet!
If you checked your anti-corporatism bigotry for just an inch, you'd get over yourself and stop shitting on the things that allow you to troll on Slashdot as an AC.
Of course, Chile is actually a pretty good country, considering the large number of shitholes in South America. Through and since Pinochet, they've steadily progressed towards a non-asstastic democracy. I'd even consider it one of the State Depts. victories. So, whatever AC.
Cuba would be a de facto 51st state in less than 5 years if we dropped the embargo. Even if Castro remained in power (doubtful, but possible), in the end the country would become a democracy and Castro would eventually die and go to the flaming dung pits in Hell to hang with Mao and Stalin.
Just a thought: if the US had succeeded at offing Castro, Cuba would be a vacation paradise right now and the citizens there could buy their own damn rice cookers from Wal-Mart.
From where do people get the numbers to judge Cuba's healthcare success? That's right, from the Cuban government. Russia also was tops in the world in tractor manufacturing, to hear them tell it.
To put it in perspective, what you're trying to do is say that a leper and a guy with a hangnail are functionally equivalent. This is true only for suitably small values of "sick".
I think you'll find that they mean "free" as in "not encumbered by restrictions that prevent the full use of the program and its code". You'll find that to be the case because, well, that is the case. Congratulations on your beliefs, though. I recommend you live in Cuba, rather than this whacko republic of ours.
The AC is talking about the E2, not the LifeDrive.
If WiFi was as power-stingy as Bluetooth (which isn't really all that stingy), I'd have no issue. The few tests I've seen of WiFi on Palms shows a battery life of only a few hours--often worse for PocketPC devices. The Tungsten C seems to be one of the best performers here, but it has a 1500 mah battery and a clever WiFi implementation. I'm not saying that WiFi isn't nifty or useful, but I am saying that obsessing over the need for it in a PDA misses the point of a PDA. For email, a Palm + GPRS phone is an adequate solution: email, especially if you use IMAP, is lightweight. I've done it a few times on my IIIxe with the 14.4 Palm modem. Not something I relish doing, but adequte. Web browsing on a Palm of all flavors is best limited to emergencies only. For testing WiFi availability, a smaller, cheaper device may be more useful. Streaming music? No thanks. I don't even do that on my desktop.
I'm not opposed to having WiFi as an option, which is why I mention the Enfora. I'm looking to upgrade my Palm now, probably to the Tungsten E2, and I'll likely pick up an Enfora at some point, so I'm not a purist. But the lack of WiFi is constantly listed as a "Con". Might as well tick it for not including a laser pointer--it's useful on some level, sure, but not if it makes the device more than a couple hundred bucks. I have no doubt that I can come up with gobs of Neat Things To Do With WiFi, but the fact is I'm very unlikely to do any of them with any regularity, and I think I'm closer to the average consumer in this matter.
Well, you have me there on the iPod issue--of course, I don't own an iPod for the same reason. Perhaps I am simply a marketeer's worst nightmare.
I'm not unaware of the purpose of reviews as a vehicle for advertising, but I am really puzzled by the dearth of honest and reliable reviewers. Especially in the Internet age. I'm a bit sensitive to this as I've been searching hard for a replacement cell phone, and cell phone reviews are particularly lame and worthless.
I guess I complain mostly because I think the PalmOS is so incredibly nifty, and that Palm is shooting itself in the foot by not: a) focussing on their developers, which in the end make their platform useful; and b) forgoing the Mac and Linux/BSD/Free Unix market altogether. If anybody is going to appreciate a useful, clever device, it's Mac users. Windows users are going to default to the PocketPC devices, simply because there are so damn many of them, and they'll likely get one from Dell when they buy their new desktop. Palm would do well to satisfy these markets rather than chase after PocketPC.
1) The main factor for making something "seem small" is to make it thin. The 15" Powerbook is actually quite large, but because it's thin it seems small. This thing is 3/4" thick.
2) Brighthand seemed to indicate that it would make a good portable storage device for your digital camera. I don't get that either. The casual photographer who might want to offload vacation pictures isn't likely to buy a $500 device to do so. You can buy a lot of huge SD cards for $500. The professional photographer, who WOULD find this device useful, all use cameras that use CompactFlash. If this USB-thing Brighthand mentions actually works, then maybe--but the idea of having a seperate device is to pull out the card, put it in the device, replace the card with another card, and keep shooting. Also less than 4GB isn't much when you're dealing with 4-7MB RAW files (which I guarantee the LifeDrive app won't be able to read, although it may be able to pull out the JPEG preview). This may be quite the swell device for a Brighthand reviewer, but that's a terribly small niche market.
3) What is the deal with WiFi on PDAs? People are obsessive about this, just as they all clamor for megapixel cameras on their cell phones. WiFi is a power hog. If I wanted to use WiFi on a Palm, I'd go for one of the Enfora portfolios where I don't have to use my Palm's battery. Battery life is king on a PDA. At some point you would do better to simply go with a 12" Powerbook or iBook, and a 3/4" thick device with WiFi but no keyboard is probably that point. (And getting a megapixel camera on your phone is stupid so long as the image is taken through a shitty, fixed focus plastic lens. You get more blurry pixels--that's a Big Win there, chief.)
4) Too expensive. I understand that in order to offer all these goodies, you have to charge for them, but if you drop this thing on the ground, or into the toilet, you've just ruined a $500 device. Everybody's tolerance is different, but for me, $200-ish dollars is that cutoff where I feel like I can replace 2 or 3 devices a year and not feel royally screwed. If I have a $500 device, I'm less likely to take it somewhere out of fear of busting it.
5) Related to 4), but unrelated to the LifeDrive; professional reviewers suck for this reason: they didn't have to buy the damn thing with their money, so they aren't interacting with the device like other people would. If a professional reviewer accidentally sits on the fucking thing, they just phone up Palm and say, "Oopsie, send me another please." They also tend to parrot specs and press release material, and are pathologically uncritical. I've hardly ever seen a review where the reviewer revisits the device after using it for a few months--mostly because after the initial review, the reviewer has moved on to using whatever the next latest-and-greatest toy is, because, you know, everybody has endless time and money to constantly upgrade. Jesus Christ, I'm still using a IIIxe because it works, it's reliable, and I'm not swimming in free time and cash. (The best reviewer in the world is probably Dan even though he does have goodies provided to him on occasion.)
6) No poofters.
The Pippen booted from a CD! There was no failed hard-drive issue, you couldn't get a boot sector virus, and precocious teens couldn't meaningfully hack it.
That it was marketed as a "game platform" at all was foolish. Maybe some "edutainment" type programs, but otherwise it could (should?) have been the Apple II all over again. Now might even be a good time to re-introduce the idea again, now that jillions of teenagers are accustomed to that damned "Loading..." screen from their Playstations and XBoxes.
Also, remember that the Jedi were losing their ability to use the Force. It was explained in Ep. II that this was the case.
Of course, in Ep. I, they explained that you got control over the Force through a damned virus, so what does that mean? The Jedi were being slipped penicillin in their coffee by the Sith? Who knows? It's not explained, it just is.
Re: the Yoda battle--it looked like Yoda was doing pretty good, but Dooku (Stupid Name Alert! Stupid Name Alert! Seriously, what was going through Lucus' mind when he said, "You know what's an evil-sounding name? Better than Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, Darth Vader? Count Dooku.") forced Yoda to also contend with saving the lives of the other two Jedi. Of course, the question must be asked: while Dooku (gods!) was bringing the pillar down, why didn't Yoda--the incredible flying monkey-toad--dash over and slice him in half? Come on!
Righto, same here. Matrix was a good movie, complete in itself. It didn't need sequels.
You've pointed to a bed of clay and said, "You can make bricks from this. Therefore a house can be constructed without the hand of Man." Speaking of education, I trust you took no logic courses.
Oh, and let's not forget the children working in sweatshops and coal mines during the Industrial Revolution. Good times, good times.
Your mention of the Arab dominance in 1200 is interesting. You are aware that the Ottoman empire was governed under Muslim law, right?
I'm afraid all you've done is highlight your own bigotry; but good job with that, dude!
An embryo may not be a baby, according to common usage of the term "baby", but it is most assuredly alive, which is the salient point here. Your logic is so awful that if we call a birthed baby an "advanced-stage fetus" it would be okay to drown it in a sack. We'll just call it a "post-natal abortion".
You post is riddled with non sequiturs and strawmen. You have been on Slashdot a long time!
As yet, I don't know of any such proof.
ID is falsifiable by showing how undirected, natural means can form a complex structure. For example, rapidly generate multiple generations of unflaggellated bacteria within an environmental pressure--a current--and see if the bacteria creates flaggella for itself. I don't know of any such experiments. If you do, please share.
Finally, you should probably avoid mentioning Dawkins or Gould. Both stake (staked, in the case of Gould) their rabid atheism on the truth of evolution. They are the Jerry Falwell of the evolutionists--media-whore blowhards with suspect ulterior motives for their stridency. That evolutionists immediately turn to ad hominem attacks and loaded language--"fundies", "zealots", "flat-earthers", "you must have come from a stupid high school"--doesn't win them any logic points.
(Re: stupid high schools. Evolution pretends to be self-evident, like gravity, but it really isn't. It requires the piecing together of many disparate sciences--biology, geology, anthropology, etc.--and therefore inherent trust that the people in these disciplines to be intellectually honest. Most of the people in these disciplines already believe evolution to be fact. They're not looking to falsify the theory, but simply to prove their own personal quirk of the greater whole [and just maybe to cash in on the mad science money as Gould and Dawkins did]. To simplify, I can drop a rock on your toe and prove that gravity works. In order to prove evolution you'll have to prove to me a stack of pre-conceived notions in as many disciplines.)
Seems very like Adolf Hitlter, don't it?
(Yes, yes, you call Godwin's Law. You are so funny and clever! I must say it was a nice troll for karma points. If you denigrate Those Crazy Conservatives and Karl Rove, that's usually good for at least a couple postitive moderations. I notice it's not working this time, perhaps because you're way down the page. Next time reply to a higher-rated comment.)
For example, you notice that rocks fall from the banks of a river as the banks erode. You can count the number of rocks in the river bottom and extrapolate how long that river has existed.
Fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't account for a) rocks being washed downstream; b) rocks being washed in from upstream; c) meteors, or; d) kids chucking rocks for grins.
There are several questions that evolution has yet to demonstrate itself as a solution. Information creation, for one. To be an evolutionist, you have to believe that you can turn a starfish into a man, and the mechanism for that is woefully incomplete. Gene transcription errors? The genome seems to show a capability for repairing errors as some experiments have shown. Mutations? Mutations are rarely beneficial, and have not in recorded experiments created meaningfuly new information--at least not that I've seen.
Take bacteria. We can grow and rapidly generate bacteria generations, but we have yet to turn a non-flagellated bacteria into a flagellated one. Again, at least I have not seen such research. If you have a link, I'd be interested to see it. I've seen lots of experiments where devolution takes place--breeding the eyes out of cave fish, for example--but never where a jellyfish grows an eye.
Finally, two things: the PBS "Evolution" series had the ring of propoganda to it. The thing that struck me from the series was the portrayal of Darwin and the "representative" Christian on the HMS Beagle. It was a laughably sarcastic farce, based on largely nothing but bias. Also, the mean-spirited response of evolutionists towards Christians doesn't inspire confidence in the strength of their arguments. Nobody argues against the existence of gravity--it's provable and observable--but when evolutionists (most of whom are simply so because they were taught that it was true beyond all doubt) resort to namecalling. Well, I'll just say ad hominem attacks might work on USENET, but only there.
I'd like to see some links that prove macro evolution. I've never seen such proof myself, and it would be very eduational.
Let me save you some time: what you're looking for does not exist if you're a T-Mobile customer. I've done gobs of research into this, and I've come up empty. What I wanted was:
The Palm was easy--the new Tungsten E2 looks perfect--nice screen, long battery life (important!), not stupidly expensive so I won't cry like a girl when I drop it in the toilet, and will be supported by the Enfora WiFi portfolio soon (or the Palm WiFi SD card, if you want).
The phone has been a real pain. I'd like to be able to use the phone as an emergency SSH terminal as well, so I thought the Nokia 6822 would be perfect. But it's not a US phone. I had hopes for the Motorola A630, but unless you're willing to muck around in the Java libraries, it's locked out of ports other than 80. The Sidekick doesn't have BT. Neither does the 6800. The Motorola v600 looked decent, but they just recently removed it from their Web site, so it's obviously end-of-life.
Plus, T-Mobile has limited their t-zones to WAP only. If you want real Internet, you have to get the $20/mo Internet add-on. (A good deal, actually the best on the market, but I'm not thrilled about the price considering the speed seems to be about the same as a 28.8Kbps modem, but with 800-1000ms ping times. Hello lag!)
All the phones are either A) candy-coated pieces of crap designed to appeal to texting shitheads and Japanese girls, or; B) ungodly expensive. Hello, who gives a crap about a camera on their phone? There is no way it will be anything other than a shitty, shitty camera. I couldn't care less about being able to use a P.Diddy song as a ringtone. (God, ringtones? Eat a dick, you assholes who obsess over ringtones.) I want a camera with BUTTONS that I can ACUTALLY PRESS, that don't look like SHIT (Nokia 7610).
The phones supported by iSync are all pretty old. The Sony t610/616 and the Nokia 3650 are probably the best of the lot, but they're long ago discontinued.
The situation is pretty bleak.
Beware wishing for a law--what would actually happen is that the gov't would require that you use ADA to program your phone, based on a blue-ribbon commission of tech-ignorant Senators.
I see this term used, "Founding Fathers" quite a bit as if they were a monolithic bunch. They weren't. They were quarrelsome and scrappy, and often disagreed on a number of major and minor issues.
2) Nonsense. The administration has been full of dissenters. Quite a large number of them were proven wrong and left, then replaced with people who were right; which likely explains why the executive portions of the government looks monolithic right now. Also, the burden is on you to prove that open dissent in the executive branch--a branch that is basically defined as being a reflection of the will of a single person--is a plus.
3) You're kidding, right? Bill Clinton was slightly more unscripted to be sure, but he was also a gladhanding sack of shit. It's easy to be unscripted when you can promise the world, deliver nothing, and still have people love you to death.
4) Self-doubt may work on LiveJournal, but it fails as a foreign policy.