The dissociative, hallucinogenic, and other interesting effects of Salvia d. are very useful in their own right, in that they bring your mind quickly to a "selfless" state (which otherwise may take years of meditation practice) but the experience is extremely disconcerting, to say the least.
That initial bit where you feel like you're merging with your surroundings as they spiral into the vortical carnivorous plant of eternity can be a little frightening.
The "old hag" part of the experience, where you sense the presence of one or more dark figures just over your left shoulder is also rather eerie. I console myself with the thought that it's merely the watchful "familiars" of the plant keeping their vigil, and no doubt an archetypal reflection of some deeper element of the psyche.
Nice thing is, if you get weirded out at this point you can actually shake off the effects of the salvia, go have a piece of fruit, and reassert your conventional existence. Try that with LSD!
The part where you forget completely who you are, where you are, and that you have a body is just dandy, maybe the best part. That's when the really interesting things can happen, such as deep insights and inter-dimensional adventures. As often occurs with DMT people can have some pretty radical "experiences." My sense of this phase is that the brain is just doing its best to derive a narrative, context, and meaning from a completely dissociative state, and much of what people describe as being their "experience" at the time is actually formulated retrospectively, taking the form of sensory associations.
That final part where you remember who you are can be rather sobering after you've been the entire universe - or a shag carpet - for a few minutes. Little by little you remember you're Joe Smith from Topeka and you're in your house, and you have bills to pay and a job to work and a wife who expects you to pick up eggs... it can be a minor letdown.
But then the real fun begins. After all that jarring existential crisis is over you're left with a feeling of greater possibility and a sense of well-being. This general feeling of well-being can last for a day or two, or even longer.
Although the smoked enhanced leaf is fabulous for all the cool things it does - as recounted above - rebooting your brain is not always the most desirable or enjoyable way to promote a general sense of well-being. Fortunately the concentrated extract of Salvia d. is much milder in its effects and acts simply as a mood enhancer, no merging with the infinite required. It can be taken daily in tiny doses as an anti-depressant and it seems to have no undesirable side-effects whatsoever. The only downside is that keeping the alcohol-based extract in your mouth tends to hurt after a few minutes, and Salvia is rather bitter and some find the taste unpleasant.
I encourage - no urge - all SlashDotters interested in self-nature to order some Salvia and give it a try today!
Not only are you the only poster who points out here the bane of the universe that Windows truly is, you're the only person on the planet besides myself who seems to think it's time to hold Microsoft accountable for the sheer crapitude of their software design. Microsoft may have been passably competent before the intertubes came along, (bringing the Russian mafia to our doorstep) but at this point they're criminally negligent.
The main reason these holes exist in Windows is because Microsoft put profit and market dominance ahead of the interests of their customers.
There must be blood paid for this criminal negligence!
...go to the areas with the fewest signs. Away from the urban areas and into the countryside, that's where you find very few - indeed none of these signs. I think it works. I always feel healthier when I avoid those densely-signed areas.
All Bush had to do was dismantle and stall anti-terrorism intelligence work, and he knew *something* would happen, and soon. He perhaps didn't expect the WTC to be hit, but the incompetence aimed at allowing it to happen was pretty systematic. Once it did occur, it took only a matter of days before it was cynically being spun to sell weapons and make bank for those who profit from disaster. It was a boon for all the institutions of the day, and big media who are wholly owned subsidiaries of the war industry. Perhaps nobody really allowed themselves to admit how they were using it to profit, but everyone did. Iraq was rolled out over the not-yet-cold bodies of 9-11 without anyone blinking an eye, while leveler heads were roundly ridiculed and marginalized.
None of these incompetent fuckers are innocent.
And who most likely told George Bush to lay low and do nothing? Probably, he was sold on the idea in a late night phone conference with Henry Kissinger: "Mister President, perhaps a little trip to Florida is just the thing you need to bolster your plunging numbers..."
In fact, this will be dramatized in my upcoming made-for-tv film "Homeland Insecurity" which will be released on the day Tom Skerritt apologizes for his role in NBC's racist, jingo-fest made-for-tv movie "Homeland Security" (now available on DVD!)
The carbon neutral aspect of livestock is an interesting consideration. But as I understand it, if people throughout the world reduced their consumption of meat it would still have a far greater impact on CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere - especially as methane - than if everyone stopped driving cars.
I seem to recall that much of the nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides we now use are petroleum-derived.
In any case, reducing meat consumption is overall a good thing. People consume way too much meat and dairy, causing obesity type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, for which all of society must bear the cost. In fact it causes more suffering and death every day than global warming has so far, so it's a much more imminent crisis.
I'll do my best to revise my thinking, though, with consideration for the carbon-neutral aspect you point out.
There is something far more egregious than Al Gore's mischaracterization of solar cell technology. For all the years he's been out there giving his presentation on global warming, he never talks about the damage done by animal agriculture. According to the United Nations FAO report, the best thing we can do to reduce global warming, to reduce the costs associated with type 2 diabetes and obesity, and to preempt the diseases of affluence is to reduce our consumption of meat and dairy products.
Why doesn't Al Gore talk about methane, which is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2? Not only does methane hang around for longer than CO2, when it degrades, it breaks down into CO2.
Personally, I'm doing my part. I no longer eat any meat or dairy, and I get all my vegetables from local farmers' markets. When appropriate, I try to encourage others to cut down on meat and dairy as well, as I've become too aware of the damage to health and the environment that it causes. Heart disease killed my father at 54, and his father at 55. Both were avid meat eaters. I cross my fingers that I will live more than just another 14 years.
Apart from the 400 liters of methane produced by each cow every day, there's the water pollution and disease caused by pig farming, the waste of agricultural land producing soy to feed cattle, and the suffering of the animals themselves, which I find impossible to ignore.
I just found this story through Google, which gives a few more statistics in relation to some protestors urging Al Gore to talk about these things.
I realize that the media and popular culture are finding it more and more acceptable to ostracize people like myself, who are expressing concern about this problem. Whatever the majority of people do - in this case, eating meat without much thought about it - the media feels it can be the enabler. And people sure do like to be told that what they're doing is just fine, and that whoever disagrees is some kind of nut.
Meanwhile, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes are exploding all over the world. And as affluence grows, these problems are increasing. All these problems cost the society, in medical expenses especially, whereas a little prevention could do so much more. But the food and pharmaceutical industries like it! Which is kind of sick. One would hope that the health and well-being of people would be the first priority, and that corporations existed to benefit the society - or at least not to dumb it down and harm it. But instead they suppress and distort information, demonize vegetarians and animal advocates, and tell young people that milk (not yucky broccoli) does a body good.
Recently I've been looking at sites like "Consumer Freedom" (an industry thinktank) and sites targeted at farmers and the animal industry. It's a little embarrassing to see how far these groups stoop, and how they tacitly expect people to agree with their ideas. They call anyone who threatens their bottom-line "kooks" and "radicals," and their readers feel empowered and enabled to think of concerned people that way. And the mainstream press is leaning towards the same kind of demonization, which makes it possible for countries like Austria to jail advocates without reason and without evidence.
In fact, people who advocate for animals, regardless of how peacefully, are roundly called "terrorists" now, and it's even been enshrined in laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. It demeans the good will of so many people, and enables the mainstream to discount anything that relates to animal advocacy.
Thing is, nobody likes the facts, which is understandable. People like their cheeseburgers! But the thing is, we can't just live at the level of children who eat what we like because we like it and it feels good in the moment. I mean, fine, do what you want, but with awareness! Eating meat at the level we do require
The problem with a tight beam is that although you may get further, you only get one narrow beam that's unlikely to be crossed. A radiant energy is far more likely to be detected if it emanates in all directions.
So, combine your tight beam with continuous oscillation in all directions, and then you've got something.
As a moral Atheist, I take particular offense to this. Believing in a personified God figure who watches and judges may be really useful for the sort of people who need it, but some of us happen to feel a natural impulse to do good, which I feel is instilled in our nature.
The key is to see people as your brothers, sisters, children, parents... everyone part of your family, and to learn to love them despite differences.
You don't have to feel imposed upon by a Daddy God to be a good person, and in fact I would argue that a person who requires Daddy God to keep them in line is probably not very in touch with themselves.
You may have noticed that most species are wholly moral, they don't live hedonistic lives, and they love and care for their young and other members of their social group without need of intellection about imaginary Daddies. This should convince you that there is something innate in all animals, including Humans, that makes it possible - perhaps even imperative - to be moral beings.
The media is actually reporting things right this time. It's just that people infer what they want to believe.
If they were reporting things right, they would address the inference and refute it.
But that's just me, I have high standards.
At least there was some coverage of last month's final report on the exaggerations and lies leading up to the invasion of Iraq. But NBC, ABC, and CBS actually ignored it, while MSNBC dedicated only 90 seconds to the story.
You'd think this would be big news.
But then, only a tiny handful of US news outlets reported on Colin Powell's use of a plagiarized and largely outdated 10-year-old term paper (written by a California college student) in his presentation of WMD "evidence" to the UN.
The US media likes wars and all this Nationalist fervor because not only does it sell papers, but the parent companies of our media outlets profit mightily as well. So, alas, truth-telling presents a major conflict of interest for the media here.
Whether these items are WMD or not, these items were known about, they were not under dispute, inspections were ongoing, and Iraq was looking pretty much squeaky clean.
The Bush Administration seized the moment to invade a country it knew posed no imminent threat, knowingly using fudged intelligence, exaggeration, and hyperbole to sell its case to the American people.
The People of the US didn't really bite until Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had long-range nuclear weapons targeted at New York, and if we waited too long our first sign of trouble would be a mushroom cloud. At that time they also began using the name "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and stating the aim was to bring Democracyâ to Iraq, which created sympathy for the Iraqi people, whom you may recall were suffering terribly under our severe sanctions - sanctions that were killing children by the millions.
I suggest we had things under control, and Iraq was not an imminent threat. If we wanted to prosecute Saddam Hussein for war crimes in International Criminal Court, that might have been an option open to us. However, since the ICC has also charged several officials of the United States - including George Bush Sr. - with war crimes, joining the ICC has not been a popular option.
The true aim of all our efforts has been purely to secure control of the region and its oil. All the hullaballoo about WMD's and Democracyâ and the rest is just a bunch of noise to create the illusion of a humanitarian mission. Given what we now know you'd have to be pretty inured to the Superior American Way of Life to keep blabbing about WMDs any more.
The Atari computers used white text on a blue background, and the colors were really great on the eyes, especially considering that back in 1984 you couldn't even use a "CRT" but only a TV.
CRTs in general have never been kind to me. Before LCDs came along, even with a monitor set at a high refresh rate, I found myself keeping my eyes down most of the time, only glancing up a little at a time to read the page. Of course we're talking about a fellow who liked to code for really long stretches, like 18 hours at a time.
With LCDs I think the issue is almost negligible. As long as the LCD is bright enough and there's enough contrast, almost any color scheme will do.
Plus, code editors now colorize everything, so your main text may be one color, but then you have to choose a raft of colors - often 8 or more - that are distinguishable from one another.
Personally, I use a white background with black text, and - most importantly - a readable sans-serif font suitable for coding. In my case, it's 12pt "Andale Mono" (Monaco isn't so bad either.) I feel you should have a font that's very readable at small point sizes, so you can see as much of the code structure on the page as possible, and distinguish easily between O and 0, 1, l, and |, between , and . characters, etc.
Funny, though, these articles always get me to mess around with a black background, I guess since coding on a black background makes you look cool, and people can tell you're doing something geeky on your laptop from 100 feet away.... But then I always end up going back to a white page.
Final thought: coding at night messes up your internal clock. In fact, staring into a light at night can mess you up in all kinds of ways. For this reason, I'm actually stopping myself from doing (much) coding after dark, and trying to make better use of the (warning! warning!) morning hours. I know, I know, it's a geek heresy. Maybe it's just a symptom of my mid-life crisis, but I actually miss mornings!
Well... if you're one of those sophisticated Christians who understands that the biblical Jesus was simply an enlightened teacher, and the teachings are the essential thing, you might have your reason intact. After all, Jesus in his admonishments to the Pharisees essentially said "your old testament is not meant to be used the way you idiots use it, it's outdated, tribal, and violent, and you guys are deluding yourselves and everyone else with your literal interpretation and basing your arbitrary Sabbath laws on it."
A Christian who really groks and values the spirit of their teacher could conceivably have a clue and be a reasonable person. But, yeah, chances are they would not be any kind of traditional Christian, and most likely would be more inspired by Buddhism or Hinduism, which are certainly better elucidations of the psychological principles Jesus was promoting.
TFA is about parts like RAM, hard drives, and other add-on components, and not all of them have such an egregious markup. RAM is probably the worst example, but Apple has always had high standards for RAM used in their machines, and on a couple of occasions - 8 years ago, mind you - I bought less expensive RAM that my Mac didn't like. So, at least if you buy RAM from Apple you're guaranteed a high level of quality. OF course, now I just go to Kingston and buy the generic RAM... but check out Kingston's site some time. The RAM they sell specifically for Macs is in fact more expensive than similar RAM without the Apple brand.
So this thread is just silly. The Mac laptops and desktops are very competitively priced, so there's no issue of Apple taking advantage of customers wrt their primary hardware line.
And, as Apple has no monopoly on the parts it sells for upgrades, this is a total non-issue. I mean who knows? Maybe they're using the markup on 3rd-party upgrade parts to subsidize the free shipping on their computers. Or maybe they're padding their cash reserves so they can buy Microsoft when they tank in 10 years.
I'm not sure what you're trying to point out with your link. Existing Qt 32-bit applications continue to work, and either Apple will provide 64-bit Carbon in an update or they'll fix the HIView dependent Qt libraries when they transition away from Carbon. This issue has a negligible impact, and has nothing to do with "stuff suddenly disappearing" as you imply.
I've been developing, publishing, supporting, and updating my Mac shareware program for 12 years - since Mac OS 7.5. Originally written to the Mac OS classic toolbox, I adapted it to CarbonLib in 1999 with some effort, to get ready for Mac OS 9, and I ported it to Carbon OS X in 2001, making it much better in the process. And I'll be porting it to Cocoa later this year, and taking it an entirely new level through the use of the latest Mac OS X APIs for compositing and animation.
All along the way Apple has been great, and always getting better, especially since they released XCode. The tools are free, very usable, and every bit of API documentation is right there in XCode. And now they've released Cocoa 2, which is just a clear and wonderful programming API.
Apple may have made a lot of changes over the last 12 years, but the changes have been constant improvements, and have had minimal impact on legacy applications. I am grateful for the quality of the work they do to save me time and make the work easier. And as a guy who started programming as a young hobbyist, I'm especially happy to see Apple giving away their development tools for free. It means kids can stumble into programming just like I did way back in 1977.
These people don't represent a challenge to science by a broader view, they are advocates specifically of just one quaint interventionist monotheistic theory, and they want to get that and that alone into the classroom. And if you ask me, the particular topics they cite make them look like shills for developers and political interests.
The thing is, science is already the application of integrity tests to theories. It also has an integrity test for all people and ideas that purport to bring new data, or which bring new scientific theories to the table which interpret existing data in new ways.
Reading the headline of this story, I was struck that the adults in the legislature weren't falling over themselves laughing at how transparent and ridiculous it is on its face. They're not proposing to critique science itself, but rather some of its theories. But that's already what it's for... science critiques theories!!
I mean, there's no big institution out there called "science." It's an abstraction that refers to the activities of people who spend their lives and make their careers by critiquing scientific theories. And the way they critique them is through the support of other established theories, by demonstrating flaws in the results or the interpretation of the results. Often many alternative theories are available.
Science is a discipline, and a big part of that discipline is to keep your faith alive even when no answers seem to be coming. You have to trust that through continuing to apply pure science, you will begin to see through the fog.
Science being what it is, you can't introduce a far-out theory like "an intelligent being intervened" without bringing along huge piles of evidence specifically supporting that conclusion. Merely refuting other theories is not enough. Indeed, if the evidence existed for suspicious anomalies in human DNA, it would be a worldwide scientific effort to try to explain it. So far, it's consistent with evolution and shows we have a close kinship with all mammals.
Good science refutes the narrow interpretation of the Bible as literal, and it refutes the calculation of the age of the earth (by a literal genealogical reckoning from adam to david) by a factor of a hundred million. That's a problem for some people, but not for those who have a mature grasp on the universal nature of spirituality. It is hoped that the people in charge would be of the more mature variety, but alas they are apes.
As for a curriculum that critiques the application of "pure reason" with respect to the bigger world picture, we already have that as well. It's called philosophy, and some of the more popular philosophies are called religions. Modern philosophy has set aside all the assumptions handed to it by religion and tries to establish theses on the basis of knowledge and experience, both as it is discovered by observation (science) and as it is experienced. Religion emphasizes transcendent experience and an intelligence behind the universe.
Especially now in the internet age, all the disciplines and interests that relate to science, technology, art, and religion are free to bring their vision to students. Why deprive them of all the world has to offer?
I agree with Dan Dennett's idea that comparative religion classes should be a mandatory part of the school curriculum for all children. In addition, there should be more emphasis on philosophy, literature, arts, and history as it all relates to our capabilities, our morality, and our prospects as beings on this planet. All these subjects lend context and meaning to the data which science accumulates, and serve to augment a strong scientific understanding of the world.
The goal of the school board should be to keep science pure, so kids can understand and appreciate how it enhances vision and imagination, and helps us to make sense of the world as we find it. Science education is already pretty poor, and it needs help from people who really appreciate and value the instit
Slashdot Mirror
The dissociative, hallucinogenic, and other interesting effects of Salvia d. are very useful in their own right, in that they bring your mind quickly to a "selfless" state (which otherwise may take years of meditation practice) but the experience is extremely disconcerting, to say the least.
That initial bit where you feel like you're merging with your surroundings as they spiral into the vortical carnivorous plant of eternity can be a little frightening.
The "old hag" part of the experience, where you sense the presence of one or more dark figures just over your left shoulder is also rather eerie. I console myself with the thought that it's merely the watchful "familiars" of the plant keeping their vigil, and no doubt an archetypal reflection of some deeper element of the psyche.
Nice thing is, if you get weirded out at this point you can actually shake off the effects of the salvia, go have a piece of fruit, and reassert your conventional existence. Try that with LSD!
The part where you forget completely who you are, where you are, and that you have a body is just dandy, maybe the best part. That's when the really interesting things can happen, such as deep insights and inter-dimensional adventures. As often occurs with DMT people can have some pretty radical "experiences." My sense of this phase is that the brain is just doing its best to derive a narrative, context, and meaning from a completely dissociative state, and much of what people describe as being their "experience" at the time is actually formulated retrospectively, taking the form of sensory associations.
That final part where you remember who you are can be rather sobering after you've been the entire universe - or a shag carpet - for a few minutes. Little by little you remember you're Joe Smith from Topeka and you're in your house, and you have bills to pay and a job to work and a wife who expects you to pick up eggs... it can be a minor letdown.
But then the real fun begins. After all that jarring existential crisis is over you're left with a feeling of greater possibility and a sense of well-being. This general feeling of well-being can last for a day or two, or even longer.
Although the smoked enhanced leaf is fabulous for all the cool things it does - as recounted above - rebooting your brain is not always the most desirable or enjoyable way to promote a general sense of well-being. Fortunately the concentrated extract of Salvia d. is much milder in its effects and acts simply as a mood enhancer, no merging with the infinite required. It can be taken daily in tiny doses as an anti-depressant and it seems to have no undesirable side-effects whatsoever. The only downside is that keeping the alcohol-based extract in your mouth tends to hurt after a few minutes, and Salvia is rather bitter and some find the taste unpleasant.
I encourage - no urge - all SlashDotters interested in self-nature to order some Salvia and give it a try today!
nobody in the mainstream press ever calls them on it
You must be new here... on Earth.
Not only are you the only poster who points out here the bane of the universe that Windows truly is, you're the only person on the planet besides myself who seems to think it's time to hold Microsoft accountable for the sheer crapitude of their software design. Microsoft may have been passably competent before the intertubes came along, (bringing the Russian mafia to our doorstep) but at this point they're criminally negligent.
The main reason these holes exist in Windows is because Microsoft put profit and market dominance ahead of the interests of their customers.
There must be blood paid for this criminal negligence!
Never! Never! To the death!! England should have bombed Ireland back to the Stone Age. ... It's obvious I'm kidding, right?
...go to the areas with the fewest signs. Away from the urban areas and into the countryside, that's where you find very few - indeed none of these signs. I think it works. I always feel healthier when I avoid those densely-signed areas.
All Bush had to do was dismantle and stall anti-terrorism intelligence work, and he knew *something* would happen, and soon. He perhaps didn't expect the WTC to be hit, but the incompetence aimed at allowing it to happen was pretty systematic. Once it did occur, it took only a matter of days before it was cynically being spun to sell weapons and make bank for those who profit from disaster. It was a boon for all the institutions of the day, and big media who are wholly owned subsidiaries of the war industry. Perhaps nobody really allowed themselves to admit how they were using it to profit, but everyone did. Iraq was rolled out over the not-yet-cold bodies of 9-11 without anyone blinking an eye, while leveler heads were roundly ridiculed and marginalized.
None of these incompetent fuckers are innocent.
And who most likely told George Bush to lay low and do nothing? Probably, he was sold on the idea in a late night phone conference with Henry Kissinger: "Mister President, perhaps a little trip to Florida is just the thing you need to bolster your plunging numbers..."
In fact, this will be dramatized in my upcoming made-for-tv film "Homeland Insecurity" which will be released on the day Tom Skerritt apologizes for his role in NBC's racist, jingo-fest made-for-tv movie "Homeland Security" (now available on DVD!)
Welcome to the pretendocracy, people!
...you must be one of them.
The carbon neutral aspect of livestock is an interesting consideration. But as I understand it, if people throughout the world reduced their consumption of meat it would still have a far greater impact on CO2 being emitted into the atmosphere - especially as methane - than if everyone stopped driving cars.
I seem to recall that much of the nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides we now use are petroleum-derived.
In any case, reducing meat consumption is overall a good thing. People consume way too much meat and dairy, causing obesity type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, for which all of society must bear the cost. In fact it causes more suffering and death every day than global warming has so far, so it's a much more imminent crisis.
I'll do my best to revise my thinking, though, with consideration for the carbon-neutral aspect you point out.
There is something far more egregious than Al Gore's mischaracterization of solar cell technology. For all the years he's been out there giving his presentation on global warming, he never talks about the damage done by animal agriculture. According to the United Nations FAO report, the best thing we can do to reduce global warming, to reduce the costs associated with type 2 diabetes and obesity, and to preempt the diseases of affluence is to reduce our consumption of meat and dairy products.
Why doesn't Al Gore talk about methane, which is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2? Not only does methane hang around for longer than CO2, when it degrades, it breaks down into CO2.
Personally, I'm doing my part. I no longer eat any meat or dairy, and I get all my vegetables from local farmers' markets. When appropriate, I try to encourage others to cut down on meat and dairy as well, as I've become too aware of the damage to health and the environment that it causes. Heart disease killed my father at 54, and his father at 55. Both were avid meat eaters. I cross my fingers that I will live more than just another 14 years.
Apart from the 400 liters of methane produced by each cow every day, there's the water pollution and disease caused by pig farming, the waste of agricultural land producing soy to feed cattle, and the suffering of the animals themselves, which I find impossible to ignore.
I just found this story through Google, which gives a few more statistics in relation to some protestors urging Al Gore to talk about these things.
http://www.vivavegie.org/pr/algore/AlGoreDemo/index.htm
I realize that the media and popular culture are finding it more and more acceptable to ostracize people like myself, who are expressing concern about this problem. Whatever the majority of people do - in this case, eating meat without much thought about it - the media feels it can be the enabler. And people sure do like to be told that what they're doing is just fine, and that whoever disagrees is some kind of nut.
Meanwhile, obesity, heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes are exploding all over the world. And as affluence grows, these problems are increasing. All these problems cost the society, in medical expenses especially, whereas a little prevention could do so much more. But the food and pharmaceutical industries like it! Which is kind of sick. One would hope that the health and well-being of people would be the first priority, and that corporations existed to benefit the society - or at least not to dumb it down and harm it. But instead they suppress and distort information, demonize vegetarians and animal advocates, and tell young people that milk (not yucky broccoli) does a body good.
Recently I've been looking at sites like "Consumer Freedom" (an industry thinktank) and sites targeted at farmers and the animal industry. It's a little embarrassing to see how far these groups stoop, and how they tacitly expect people to agree with their ideas. They call anyone who threatens their bottom-line "kooks" and "radicals," and their readers feel empowered and enabled to think of concerned people that way. And the mainstream press is leaning towards the same kind of demonization, which makes it possible for countries like Austria to jail advocates without reason and without evidence.
In fact, people who advocate for animals, regardless of how peacefully, are roundly called "terrorists" now, and it's even been enshrined in laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act. It demeans the good will of so many people, and enables the mainstream to discount anything that relates to animal advocacy.
Thing is, nobody likes the facts, which is understandable. People like their cheeseburgers! But the thing is, we can't just live at the level of children who eat what we like because we like it and it feels good in the moment. I mean, fine, do what you want, but with awareness! Eating meat at the level we do require
The problem with a tight beam is that although you may get further, you only get one narrow beam that's unlikely to be crossed. A radiant energy is far more likely to be detected if it emanates in all directions.
So, combine your tight beam with continuous oscillation in all directions, and then you've got something.
...In Soviet Russia!
As a moral Atheist, I take particular offense to this. Believing in a personified God figure who watches and judges may be really useful for the sort of people who need it, but some of us happen to feel a natural impulse to do good, which I feel is instilled in our nature.
The key is to see people as your brothers, sisters, children, parents... everyone part of your family, and to learn to love them despite differences.
You don't have to feel imposed upon by a Daddy God to be a good person, and in fact I would argue that a person who requires Daddy God to keep them in line is probably not very in touch with themselves.
You may have noticed that most species are wholly moral, they don't live hedonistic lives, and they love and care for their young and other members of their social group without need of intellection about imaginary Daddies. This should convince you that there is something innate in all animals, including Humans, that makes it possible - perhaps even imperative - to be moral beings.
Perhaps it's time we combine Wiki with coding. I could see this growing into something pretty cool, Ã la Google Docs.
Yes, and appropriately enough, his outbox.
Tongue contact with cold collider parts can result in serious injury.
I slam, you slam, we all slam for Islam!
The media is actually reporting things right this time. It's just that people infer what they want to believe.
If they were reporting things right, they would address the inference and refute it.
But that's just me, I have high standards.
At least there was some coverage of last month's final report on the exaggerations and lies leading up to the invasion of Iraq. But NBC, ABC, and CBS actually ignored it, while MSNBC dedicated only 90 seconds to the story.
You'd think this would be big news.
But then, only a tiny handful of US news outlets reported on Colin Powell's use of a plagiarized and largely outdated 10-year-old term paper (written by a California college student) in his presentation of WMD "evidence" to the UN.
The US media likes wars and all this Nationalist fervor because not only does it sell papers, but the parent companies of our media outlets profit mightily as well. So, alas, truth-telling presents a major conflict of interest for the media here.
For the raw facts, there's really only a few sources left.
Whether these items are WMD or not, these items were known about, they were not under dispute, inspections were ongoing, and Iraq was looking pretty much squeaky clean.
The Bush Administration seized the moment to invade a country it knew posed no imminent threat, knowingly using fudged intelligence, exaggeration, and hyperbole to sell its case to the American people.
The People of the US didn't really bite until Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had long-range nuclear weapons targeted at New York, and if we waited too long our first sign of trouble would be a mushroom cloud. At that time they also began using the name "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and stating the aim was to bring Democracyâ to Iraq, which created sympathy for the Iraqi people, whom you may recall were suffering terribly under our severe sanctions - sanctions that were killing children by the millions.
I suggest we had things under control, and Iraq was not an imminent threat. If we wanted to prosecute Saddam Hussein for war crimes in International Criminal Court, that might have been an option open to us. However, since the ICC has also charged several officials of the United States - including George Bush Sr. - with war crimes, joining the ICC has not been a popular option.
The true aim of all our efforts has been purely to secure control of the region and its oil. All the hullaballoo about WMD's and Democracyâ and the rest is just a bunch of noise to create the illusion of a humanitarian mission. Given what we now know you'd have to be pretty inured to the Superior American Way of Life to keep blabbing about WMDs any more.
The Atari computers used white text on a blue background, and the colors were really great on the eyes, especially considering that back in 1984 you couldn't even use a "CRT" but only a TV.
CRTs in general have never been kind to me. Before LCDs came along, even with a monitor set at a high refresh rate, I found myself keeping my eyes down most of the time, only glancing up a little at a time to read the page. Of course we're talking about a fellow who liked to code for really long stretches, like 18 hours at a time.
With LCDs I think the issue is almost negligible. As long as the LCD is bright enough and there's enough contrast, almost any color scheme will do.
Plus, code editors now colorize everything, so your main text may be one color, but then you have to choose a raft of colors - often 8 or more - that are distinguishable from one another.
Personally, I use a white background with black text, and - most importantly - a readable sans-serif font suitable for coding. In my case, it's 12pt "Andale Mono" (Monaco isn't so bad either.) I feel you should have a font that's very readable at small point sizes, so you can see as much of the code structure on the page as possible, and distinguish easily between O and 0, 1, l, and |, between , and . characters, etc.
Funny, though, these articles always get me to mess around with a black background, I guess since coding on a black background makes you look cool, and people can tell you're doing something geeky on your laptop from 100 feet away. ... But then I always end up going back to a white page.
Final thought: coding at night messes up your internal clock. In fact, staring into a light at night can mess you up in all kinds of ways. For this reason, I'm actually stopping myself from doing (much) coding after dark, and trying to make better use of the (warning! warning!) morning hours. I know, I know, it's a geek heresy. Maybe it's just a symptom of my mid-life crisis, but I actually miss mornings!
Well... if you're one of those sophisticated Christians who understands that the biblical Jesus was simply an enlightened teacher, and the teachings are the essential thing, you might have your reason intact. After all, Jesus in his admonishments to the Pharisees essentially said "your old testament is not meant to be used the way you idiots use it, it's outdated, tribal, and violent, and you guys are deluding yourselves and everyone else with your literal interpretation and basing your arbitrary Sabbath laws on it."
A Christian who really groks and values the spirit of their teacher could conceivably have a clue and be a reasonable person. But, yeah, chances are they would not be any kind of traditional Christian, and most likely would be more inspired by Buddhism or Hinduism, which are certainly better elucidations of the psychological principles Jesus was promoting.
On the other hand, there may be some hope yet for the Christians.
TFA is about parts like RAM, hard drives, and other add-on components, and not all of them have such an egregious markup. RAM is probably the worst example, but Apple has always had high standards for RAM used in their machines, and on a couple of occasions - 8 years ago, mind you - I bought less expensive RAM that my Mac didn't like. So, at least if you buy RAM from Apple you're guaranteed a high level of quality. OF course, now I just go to Kingston and buy the generic RAM... but check out Kingston's site some time. The RAM they sell specifically for Macs is in fact more expensive than similar RAM without the Apple brand.
So this thread is just silly. The Mac laptops and desktops are very competitively priced, so there's no issue of Apple taking advantage of customers wrt their primary hardware line.
And, as Apple has no monopoly on the parts it sells for upgrades, this is a total non-issue. I mean who knows? Maybe they're using the markup on 3rd-party upgrade parts to subsidize the free shipping on their computers. Or maybe they're padding their cash reserves so they can buy Microsoft when they tank in 10 years.
I'm not sure what you're trying to point out with your link. Existing Qt 32-bit applications continue to work, and either Apple will provide 64-bit Carbon in an update or they'll fix the HIView dependent Qt libraries when they transition away from Carbon. This issue has a negligible impact, and has nothing to do with "stuff suddenly disappearing" as you imply.
I've been developing, publishing, supporting, and updating my Mac shareware program for 12 years - since Mac OS 7.5. Originally written to the Mac OS classic toolbox, I adapted it to CarbonLib in 1999 with some effort, to get ready for Mac OS 9, and I ported it to Carbon OS X in 2001, making it much better in the process. And I'll be porting it to Cocoa later this year, and taking it an entirely new level through the use of the latest Mac OS X APIs for compositing and animation.
All along the way Apple has been great, and always getting better, especially since they released XCode. The tools are free, very usable, and every bit of API documentation is right there in XCode. And now they've released Cocoa 2, which is just a clear and wonderful programming API.
Apple may have made a lot of changes over the last 12 years, but the changes have been constant improvements, and have had minimal impact on legacy applications. I am grateful for the quality of the work they do to save me time and make the work easier. And as a guy who started programming as a young hobbyist, I'm especially happy to see Apple giving away their development tools for free. It means kids can stumble into programming just like I did way back in 1977.
Really, I fail to see what any of this has to do with gum.
These people don't represent a challenge to science by a broader view, they are advocates specifically of just one quaint interventionist monotheistic theory, and they want to get that and that alone into the classroom. And if you ask me, the particular topics they cite make them look like shills for developers and political interests.
The thing is, science is already the application of integrity tests to theories. It also has an integrity test for all people and ideas that purport to bring new data, or which bring new scientific theories to the table which interpret existing data in new ways.
Reading the headline of this story, I was struck that the adults in the legislature weren't falling over themselves laughing at how transparent and ridiculous it is on its face. They're not proposing to critique science itself, but rather some of its theories. But that's already what it's for... science critiques theories!!
I mean, there's no big institution out there called "science." It's an abstraction that refers to the activities of people who spend their lives and make their careers by critiquing scientific theories. And the way they critique them is through the support of other established theories, by demonstrating flaws in the results or the interpretation of the results. Often many alternative theories are available.
Science is a discipline, and a big part of that discipline is to keep your faith alive even when no answers seem to be coming. You have to trust that through continuing to apply pure science, you will begin to see through the fog.
Science being what it is, you can't introduce a far-out theory like "an intelligent being intervened" without bringing along huge piles of evidence specifically supporting that conclusion. Merely refuting other theories is not enough. Indeed, if the evidence existed for suspicious anomalies in human DNA, it would be a worldwide scientific effort to try to explain it. So far, it's consistent with evolution and shows we have a close kinship with all mammals.
Good science refutes the narrow interpretation of the Bible as literal, and it refutes the calculation of the age of the earth (by a literal genealogical reckoning from adam to david) by a factor of a hundred million. That's a problem for some people, but not for those who have a mature grasp on the universal nature of spirituality. It is hoped that the people in charge would be of the more mature variety, but alas they are apes.
As for a curriculum that critiques the application of "pure reason" with respect to the bigger world picture, we already have that as well. It's called philosophy, and some of the more popular philosophies are called religions. Modern philosophy has set aside all the assumptions handed to it by religion and tries to establish theses on the basis of knowledge and experience, both as it is discovered by observation (science) and as it is experienced. Religion emphasizes transcendent experience and an intelligence behind the universe.
Especially now in the internet age, all the disciplines and interests that relate to science, technology, art, and religion are free to bring their vision to students. Why deprive them of all the world has to offer?
I agree with Dan Dennett's idea that comparative religion classes should be a mandatory part of the school curriculum for all children. In addition, there should be more emphasis on philosophy, literature, arts, and history as it all relates to our capabilities, our morality, and our prospects as beings on this planet. All these subjects lend context and meaning to the data which science accumulates, and serve to augment a strong scientific understanding of the world.
The goal of the school board should be to keep science pure, so kids can understand and appreciate how it enhances vision and imagination, and helps us to make sense of the world as we find it. Science education is already pretty poor, and it needs help from people who really appreciate and value the instit
Well, if it's just a question of cost, I suppose we'll soon see
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