But it makes no sense that God created a universe like this. It makes no sense that people like murderers and adulterers and rapists make God sad and angry... if he didn't think up these concepts and incorporate them into his universe, they wouldn't even be there.
The Biblical answer is that evil was not part of Man's nature until Eve and Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The thought of performing an evil act wouldn't have crossed their minds before this point, with the exception of eating the fruit in the first place, which was Lucifer's idea. Note that God knows about (and sometimes uses) cruelty to impose justice, as the first thing he did after he confronted Adam and Eve about their disobedience was curse them and Lucifer, and the second thing he did was expel them from Eden to prevent them from eating from the Tree of Life and becoming immortal creatures with the knowledge of good and evil (i.e., lest they become as gods).
Where did evil come from in the first place? Well, later in the Bible, Jesus essentially boiled down "good" to one simple concept: Treat other people the way you would want to be treated. When you keep that in mind, most of the Ten Commandments (and for that matter, much of Biblical law in general) are just specific examples of the Golden Rule. The things we aren't supposed to do to each other arise from this concept coupled with the physicality of our universe and the anatomy of people; if we were all energy creatures without the ability to own things or to have sex, then adultery, rape, and theft would be meaningless, but the basic difference between good and evil would still be there. So, God didn't necessarily pointfully include murder, rape, etc., in our existence, but rather, people thought them up as ways to do evil things to each other.
Other questions one might consider concerning the story of Adam and Eve: Why did God put the trees there? Why did God let Lucifer enter the world instead of holding him prisoner somewhere for all eternity? Who knows.
The other answer comes from the wisdom of Beavis and Butt-Head: How would you know what was cool if you didn't have things that suck?
Of course, the 27% non-intro interest rate doesn't matter for people who know how to handle their finances properly. But then again, these are the same people who see commercials urging them to "get the car you deserve!" and then get their car repo'ed when they can't make the payments.
Increasing the interaction between police and troublesome teenagers in a way that doesn't involve getting searched for weapons is a Good Thing. In the US, there's a huge mistrust of police* in less affluent communities, and this sort of community policing could help educate a generation of kids to be less distrustful of the police. Hopefully, that would help to break part of the parent-to-child chain of low education, criminal activity, and other negative factors which keep poor families poor.
* I realize there are bad apples among police, but most of them are just folks doing their jobs and hoping to make a positive impact on the community.
Sarbanes-Oxley would be the most likely reason for a company to do something like this, probably so that they don't have to pay for the audits. Of course, the whole reason beyond the Act was to make companies accountable to their shareholders and to the public in general, so if you invest in VU, you should (as the previous posters have said) be aware that you have one less safety net available.
Statements from large Internet presences such as this one from Google, combined with competition in the ISP arena, will ensure that stupidity such as the tiered bandwidth model will never materialize. If BellSouth starts clamping down on bandwidth for content providers who won't pay, then their competitors just have to start running ads saying that they offer service that's just as fast, just as cheap, and that gives you the full power of their service no matter what website you visit or what service you use.
In fact, the only uncertainty in this equation is whether there is sufficient broadband competition in all markets. Since the stakes for the consumer are increasing due to BellSouth's plan, one would hope that the federal legislature would take a closer look, but BellSouth also happens to be a massive political donor as well.
This gives the FSF and other copyright holders who license their work under the GPL an easy way to make claims against offenders. Let the SEC bust a company under Sarbanes-Oxley, and then when they get a conviction or a settlement, swoop in and file a claim against the company citing the criminal case for most of your evidence.
The point, of course, is that people have been doing for years the same thing that video on iTMS lets them do. Why should "piracy" of TV shows have a negative impact on viewership when downloading episodes from iTMS evidently has a positive impact?
Any company that uses this data must agree to four basic principles: the data is the property of the user, it can be moved from one service or device to another at will, it can be exchanged for something of value, and the user has the right to know who is using it and how.
And what's going to prevent companies from violating those principles? DRM?
Obviously, you're missing the point of my post (assuming you're not just trolling). Being able to view a video file outside of your web browser is important, but it's also far more difficult when the video is mired in Flash. I'm sure there are similar stream capture programs for Mac and Linux, but I use a Windows machine for most of my web surfing, so I linked to the program I have used in the past.
When the video is available from BitTorrent, it's uncoupled from the network schedule. You can send an episode to a friend (or a total stranger) as a gift. You can download one show and see whether you want any more, and the critical thing is, you can watch it anytime you want. It's a whole old ball game.
What the sibling post said, plus, the policy on Medivh and Mannoroth was the right decision, because Ahn'Qiraj will open on all the servers eventually. The folks on Medivh who worked hard to see the quest completed don't need a bunch of looky-loo rubberneckers crowding their server and making it so that nobody can see anything when the server crashes.
I'm also from near Charleston, you insensitive... oh, never mind.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to see that most posters around here are staying on-topic instead of making bad jokes about West Virginia. Yes, they've got their problems, not the least of which are a lack of good tech-related jobs and a rapidly graying population, but they really are good people who don't deserve the abuse that the pop culture wizards at Abercrombie try to pile on to them.
Part of the problem here is that Blizzard (or Square or SOE or whoever) has let the gold farming/selling problem get out of hand, and the legit players who don't buy gold are fed up with it. Blizzard, for example, puts few customer service resources into banning cheaters (people using teleport hacks and other third-party programs), meaning that people who've been reported a dozen times over for cheating are still playing the game days and even weeks later. And if they aren't putting resources into catching cheaters, then you know they aren't doing jack about gold farmers and sellers (though they do apparently suspend or ban spammer accounts since they're so easy to catch and generate so many complaints).
The thing is, the steps required to catch gold sellers aren't that difficult, and the CS benefits of lowering their standards from "unequivocal proof" to "almost certainly a gold farmer or seller" would far outweigh the the negatives from increased false positives. If the companies would step up enforcement, then the frustration level would be a lot less, and the anger expressed against foreigners (in particular, Asians) would be less as well.
Amazon currently carries about $1.5 billion in debt, down from $1.85 billion at the end of FY'04, where the decrease was achieved by redeeming some of their 6.875% bonds in Q1'05. (Warning, download is about 1 MB.)
I guess I misunderstood how the seasons of FMA work. As it turns out, Wikipedia notes that the 51-episode series ran in the space of one year on Japanese TV, which is unusual since a season of most TV shows usually has in the neighborhood of 25 episodes (and on AS, they did in fact take a break in showing new episodes after they ran the first 25 or 26 episodes). In other words, the "second season" I was describing in my other post is apparently actually the second half of the original 51-episode run. Wikipedia is devoid of any information on more episodes, though.
Sherry Lynn's voice was adorable in (for example) the Tenchi Muyo series, but hearing it come out of the Tachikomas makes me want to gouge my ears out with extra long Q-tips.
That said, the English dub is actually really well done - it sticks to the script (at least, as translated in the subtitles), which is no easy feat considering how thick the script can get; and with the exception of a few odd pauses here and there to sync up with mouth movements, it's orders of magnitude better than English anime dubs from ten or fifteen years ago. The English voice acting cast and crew for GitS:SAC also has numerous other anime releases under their belts, including Cowboy Bebop and the re-release of Akira, and at least some of them worked on the two GitS movies as well.
Cartoon Network Adult Swim is running episodes on Saturday nights at midnight and 3am Eastern currently, along with another great series running right after it: Fullmetal Alchemist.
However, both shows are currently in the middle of their second seasons in the rotation on AS. Stand Alone Complex's second season (aka "2nd GIG") has a plotline relatively unrelated to the first season, so you don't necessarily have to watch the first season first, but there are plot elements that will make more sense if you watch a particular season from the start.
Fullmetal Alchemist's two seasons are almost all arc episodes, meaning that if you plan to start watching it, you should start from the beginning of the first season (in other words, at this point you'll have to rent or buy the DVDs).
The content industry is already getting its pound of flesh, courtesy of the Audio Home Recording Act. I guess now they want to have their flesh and eat it too.
Slashdot Mirror
But it makes no sense that God created a universe like this. It makes no sense that people like murderers and adulterers and rapists make God sad and angry... if he didn't think up these concepts and incorporate them into his universe, they wouldn't even be there.
The Biblical answer is that evil was not part of Man's nature until Eve and Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The thought of performing an evil act wouldn't have crossed their minds before this point, with the exception of eating the fruit in the first place, which was Lucifer's idea. Note that God knows about (and sometimes uses) cruelty to impose justice, as the first thing he did after he confronted Adam and Eve about their disobedience was curse them and Lucifer, and the second thing he did was expel them from Eden to prevent them from eating from the Tree of Life and becoming immortal creatures with the knowledge of good and evil (i.e., lest they become as gods).
Where did evil come from in the first place? Well, later in the Bible, Jesus essentially boiled down "good" to one simple concept: Treat other people the way you would want to be treated. When you keep that in mind, most of the Ten Commandments (and for that matter, much of Biblical law in general) are just specific examples of the Golden Rule. The things we aren't supposed to do to each other arise from this concept coupled with the physicality of our universe and the anatomy of people; if we were all energy creatures without the ability to own things or to have sex, then adultery, rape, and theft would be meaningless, but the basic difference between good and evil would still be there. So, God didn't necessarily pointfully include murder, rape, etc., in our existence, but rather, people thought them up as ways to do evil things to each other.
Other questions one might consider concerning the story of Adam and Eve: Why did God put the trees there? Why did God let Lucifer enter the world instead of holding him prisoner somewhere for all eternity? Who knows.
The other answer comes from the wisdom of Beavis and Butt-Head: How would you know what was cool if you didn't have things that suck?
Of course, the 27% non-intro interest rate doesn't matter for people who know how to handle their finances properly. But then again, these are the same people who see commercials urging them to "get the car you deserve!" and then get their car repo'ed when they can't make the payments.
Organ Dealer: Z is just as good. In fact, is better. Is two more than X.
Increasing the interaction between police and troublesome teenagers in a way that doesn't involve getting searched for weapons is a Good Thing. In the US, there's a huge mistrust of police* in less affluent communities, and this sort of community policing could help educate a generation of kids to be less distrustful of the police. Hopefully, that would help to break part of the parent-to-child chain of low education, criminal activity, and other negative factors which keep poor families poor.
* I realize there are bad apples among police, but most of them are just folks doing their jobs and hoping to make a positive impact on the community.
I hear they drew four Dark Rituals in their starting hand.
Sarbanes-Oxley would be the most likely reason for a company to do something like this, probably so that they don't have to pay for the audits. Of course, the whole reason beyond the Act was to make companies accountable to their shareholders and to the public in general, so if you invest in VU, you should (as the previous posters have said) be aware that you have one less safety net available.
Statements from large Internet presences such as this one from Google, combined with competition in the ISP arena, will ensure that stupidity such as the tiered bandwidth model will never materialize. If BellSouth starts clamping down on bandwidth for content providers who won't pay, then their competitors just have to start running ads saying that they offer service that's just as fast, just as cheap, and that gives you the full power of their service no matter what website you visit or what service you use.
In fact, the only uncertainty in this equation is whether there is sufficient broadband competition in all markets. Since the stakes for the consumer are increasing due to BellSouth's plan, one would hope that the federal legislature would take a closer look, but BellSouth also happens to be a massive political donor as well.
This gives the FSF and other copyright holders who license their work under the GPL an easy way to make claims against offenders. Let the SEC bust a company under Sarbanes-Oxley, and then when they get a conviction or a settlement, swoop in and file a claim against the company citing the criminal case for most of your evidence.
The point, of course, is that people have been doing for years the same thing that video on iTMS lets them do. Why should "piracy" of TV shows have a negative impact on viewership when downloading episodes from iTMS evidently has a positive impact?
Any company that uses this data must agree to four basic principles: the data is the property of the user, it can be moved from one service or device to another at will, it can be exchanged for something of value, and the user has the right to know who is using it and how.
And what's going to prevent companies from violating those principles? DRM?
When will the bush administrations BUSLLSHIT end?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inauguration_Day
Obviously, you're missing the point of my post (assuming you're not just trolling). Being able to view a video file outside of your web browser is important, but it's also far more difficult when the video is mired in Flash. I'm sure there are similar stream capture programs for Mac and Linux, but I use a Windows machine for most of my web surfing, so I linked to the program I have used in the past.
At least with streaming WMV we have options.
When the video is available from BitTorrent, it's uncoupled from the network schedule. You can send an episode to a friend (or a total stranger) as a gift. You can download one show and see whether you want any more, and the critical thing is, you can watch it anytime you want. It's a whole old ball game.
What the sibling post said, plus, the policy on Medivh and Mannoroth was the right decision, because Ahn'Qiraj will open on all the servers eventually. The folks on Medivh who worked hard to see the quest completed don't need a bunch of looky-loo rubberneckers crowding their server and making it so that nobody can see anything when the server crashes.
Ever been to West Virginia?
No?
Didn't think so.
I'm also from near Charleston, you insensitive... oh, never mind.
Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to see that most posters around here are staying on-topic instead of making bad jokes about West Virginia. Yes, they've got their problems, not the least of which are a lack of good tech-related jobs and a rapidly graying population, but they really are good people who don't deserve the abuse that the pop culture wizards at Abercrombie try to pile on to them.
Part of the problem here is that Blizzard (or Square or SOE or whoever) has let the gold farming/selling problem get out of hand, and the legit players who don't buy gold are fed up with it. Blizzard, for example, puts few customer service resources into banning cheaters (people using teleport hacks and other third-party programs), meaning that people who've been reported a dozen times over for cheating are still playing the game days and even weeks later. And if they aren't putting resources into catching cheaters, then you know they aren't doing jack about gold farmers and sellers (though they do apparently suspend or ban spammer accounts since they're so easy to catch and generate so many complaints).
The thing is, the steps required to catch gold sellers aren't that difficult, and the CS benefits of lowering their standards from "unequivocal proof" to "almost certainly a gold farmer or seller" would far outweigh the the negatives from increased false positives. If the companies would step up enforcement, then the frustration level would be a lot less, and the anger expressed against foreigners (in particular, Asians) would be less as well.
Amazon currently carries about $1.5 billion in debt, down from $1.85 billion at the end of FY'04, where the decrease was achieved by redeeming some of their 6.875% bonds in Q1'05. (Warning, download is about 1 MB.)
The difference, of course, is that scientists (at least, good ones) are willing to accept that they might be wrong.
I guess I misunderstood how the seasons of FMA work. As it turns out, Wikipedia notes that the 51-episode series ran in the space of one year on Japanese TV, which is unusual since a season of most TV shows usually has in the neighborhood of 25 episodes (and on AS, they did in fact take a break in showing new episodes after they ran the first 25 or 26 episodes). In other words, the "second season" I was describing in my other post is apparently actually the second half of the original 51-episode run. Wikipedia is devoid of any information on more episodes, though.
:/
Sorry for any confusion
Sherry Lynn's voice was adorable in (for example) the Tenchi Muyo series, but hearing it come out of the Tachikomas makes me want to gouge my ears out with extra long Q-tips.
That said, the English dub is actually really well done - it sticks to the script (at least, as translated in the subtitles), which is no easy feat considering how thick the script can get; and with the exception of a few odd pauses here and there to sync up with mouth movements, it's orders of magnitude better than English anime dubs from ten or fifteen years ago. The English voice acting cast and crew for GitS:SAC also has numerous other anime releases under their belts, including Cowboy Bebop and the re-release of Akira, and at least some of them worked on the two GitS movies as well.
Cartoon Network Adult Swim is running episodes on Saturday nights at midnight and 3am Eastern currently, along with another great series running right after it: Fullmetal Alchemist.
However, both shows are currently in the middle of their second seasons in the rotation on AS. Stand Alone Complex's second season (aka "2nd GIG") has a plotline relatively unrelated to the first season, so you don't necessarily have to watch the first season first, but there are plot elements that will make more sense if you watch a particular season from the start.
Fullmetal Alchemist's two seasons are almost all arc episodes, meaning that if you plan to start watching it, you should start from the beginning of the first season (in other words, at this point you'll have to rent or buy the DVDs).
The content industry is already getting its pound of flesh, courtesy of the Audio Home Recording Act. I guess now they want to have their flesh and eat it too.
The passports contain biometric information such as a digital photo,
I don't think they make Gummi Bears the size of your face.