I love to patronise small businesses too, the little dears. I mean they might not be the biggest in the world but they do try ever so hard, Gravys little battlers I call them.
So you agree that the world is warming up and that Global Climate Change is now happenening you just disagree that man is wholly responsible for this ?
You will agree that greenhouse gases must contribute to the Global Climate Change you're predicting so no doubt you will have been one of the first to advocate reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
You may well believe all of the above but I prefer to keep an open mind on the subject. When I see people convicted in British Courts of being involved in "terror" plots then I'll believe that those people were involved in a terror plot for which they were convicted.
Every other story which simply talks about the growing "terror" stands a fair chance of being fabricated by some organisation affiliated with the government as the government leans on them a little to get with the program on this new "terror" thing.
For example what criteria exactly are they using to differentiate the 2 dozen "terror" investigations they are undertaking from the thousands of other investigations they must be undertaking into general crime ?
I am willing to bet it's an extremely broad definition of the word "terror" simply because from the polices point of view it must be better to classify anything as a "terror" investigation no matter how tenuous to guard against the possibility of it actually being one and them not having taken notice of this fact. "Police Bungle Terror Plot, Claim It Was Just Simple Burglary". They probably also get money for resources on anything flagged as being "terror related".
Isn't a very good metaphor really, most cars do not spontaneously explode on impact so it's not very realistic to suppose the Orchard would set on fire following a near by car accident.
More clouds = more rain, especially in deserts which will cause the desserts to bloom with all sorts of folliage So, just to get this straight, you are prediciting Global Climate Change then ?
What's the point in going to all that trouble of launching a probe into space, crashing it back in through re-entry into the arctic and then digging down into the ice when they could just as easily take a drilling rig across and simply drill down into it ?
These boffins should concentrate on solving world hunger rather than pointless pie in the sky shenanigans like this.
I agree it may well be possible for life to evolve independant of any water but the trouble is that until we see this happening, or evidence that it has happened it's purely speculation.
I know they are discovering more and more forms of bacteria which can survive in all sorts of "unlikely" places ( although I don't know whether or not they've found which don't at some point need water to have evolved )so at some point we might get some evidence that this can be the case and discover how other forms of life might form.
You can theorise about how other forms of life could evolve and this might then help you to find them but until then you cant study them or be sure that your theories are correct.
The reason the cost of living is far less in 3rd World countries is because they don't pay for the same facilities which you pay for in the 1st World. Things like free healthcare, honest impartial police forces, standards agencies, road construction, rubbish collection, planning laws, pensions, sick pay and maternity leave, social security etc etc etc.
I imagine if they had the money to afford those things then 3rd World taxes would be comparable to 1st World taxes but they don't because for a variety reasons they are much poorer.
There's nothing really stopping you going to live in the Congo or somewhere similar where you can spend your money on what you like. I bet you'd still spend a fair proportion of it on drainage, sewage treatment, security etc.
I can still remember the Great Dudley Earthquake of 2002, I don't think there would be any point in installing such a monitoring system in the UK but I did briefly consider moving the bookshelves and couple of hundred hard back books from above my head.
15 seconds is obviously maximum amount of warning this system can provide so in practice even with the system most people would get much less than this. Although in theory people can take some appropriate action in 15 seconds to mitigate the earthquakes effect on them in practice the most likely result would simply be panic. After all you may have 15seconds or you may have 3seconds to act so if you're in a building with one doorway along with dozens of other people I doubt there is going to be much in the way of orderly queuing going on.
On the other hand automated systems which can react within milliseconds will benefit enormously from this, gas can be shut off, mobile phone networks can switch to emergency modes, factories, freight terminals, power stations and other large automated systems can can switch over to safe modes. Even in the case of false alarms it will be obvious withing 30seconds anyway so normal work can be immediately resumed.
I agree people shouldn't hog the middle lane but often if you want to make progress at a reasonable speed that's where you end up since the left lane can often contain whole processions of caravans and morris minors barely managing 60mph.
Whats annoying is people who remain in the middle lane when there is a huge gap in the left lane they could use or who are only going a few mph faster than the left lane.
Whats really weird is where the lanes seems to flip over and the left lane ends up travelling faster than the right lanes, I was on the M5 down to Exeter last year and was working like that all the way from Birmingham to just past Bristol. I think is caused by moronic caravan drivers sticking to the middle lane and people who feel its an assault to their manhood to not drive in the extreme right hand lane despite the fact its so clogged with traffic that even the caravans are moving faster.
We can draw reasonable conclusions about this entity Obviously you can draw whatever conclusions you like but the chances of you being correct are so remote as to dismiss the idea immediately.
That's the difference between science and fairy stories ( aka Christianity etc ), there is no need to make up stories to explain things for which we have no evidence to back up.
You'd think that an obvious shortcoming of the ability of science by definition to comment on anything supernatural (which by definition, origins are) Having read this post of yours and your previous ones I really don't think you have much understanding about how science works.
First of all "supernatural" means things which people can't explain but where rather than searching for a scientific explanation simple make up a story about the thing instead.
Our origins will almost certainly be explained scientifically one day but in the meantime whilst we are still searching for a scientific answer the fact we can't fully explain the origin of life, the universe and everything doesn't in any way invalidate any of our scientific theories or exlpanations for anything else.
Science doesn't comment on the "supernatural" because the "supernatural" is simply a made up story with no scientific basis. You may well believe that everything was created by a man called god but thats just a story which, in all likelyhood, your parents told you it certainly doesn't mean that this is actually what happened.
The fact that science continously proves that things are not always as people have said they were in the stories they have heard; e.g. thunder being the wheels of gods chariot, giants throwing stones in the mountains, everything orbiting the earth, the earth being flat would suggest that it's extremely unlikely the story you have been told about god is going to stand up very well to the test of time and scientific proof.
You have to start out with the assumption that this God DOESN'T EXIST in order to move forward with any evolutionary conclusion! No you don't, god has absolutley nothing to do with science and the theory of Evolution is science. Whether or not there is a god or whether he exists in the manner you think he does has nothing whatsoever to do with the real world, science and scientific theories.
Sure I have So perhaps you would care to share an example with us then ? Something which you can prove was written before the events it may predict and which is not filled with ambiguities, nonsense, logical errors or discrepancies.
Your last paragraph is simply a tangential rant which entirely misses the point the grandparent poster was making.
Without god or religion it is perfectly possible to have shared moral values, create laws and enforce their observation.
Religious belief is entirely uneccessary in todays world ( any world in fact ) and is spread largely through parents forcing their children to observe the same religion as they do. This can in some cases be an insidious and evil practice if religion is taught over real world science and education.
Yes, you're exactly right. Being the religious type, the first word I taught myself at age 1 was God. It was almost a reflex of the tongue. Ever since I was 3, I knew that everything I could see was manufactured by The Holy Spirit.
When I turned 5, I realized that no God could ever understand what it's like to be a toddler and to grow up in such a demented world, and heuristically determined that God must have incarnated a human Son so that He could realize what temptation drove us to, and sacrifice this Son for our sins (the things which I inherently knew separated us from The Lord).
Obviously this is not how it works, Religion isn't typically that people realise for themselves from the moment they're born. More typically someones peers, they're parents, teachers or powerful members of the community might have a particular religious view which they then pass on to you. Usually this is accomplished by teaching religion as though it was the truth and not just a convienent self perpetuating fairy tale. This is why you normally find a predominance of Muslims in Islamic communities where it would be very unusual to find someone deciding to grow up as a Christian and vice a versa.
We have these things, which we can see, which have been "discovered" since they were created, that most anyone (except you apparently) knows about, they're called BIBLES (aka scriptures, "holy books", testaments, etc.).
You mean you have books of stories which contain nothing in the way of verifiable scientific proofs but an awful lot of speculation. These things didn't suddenly spring into existence from the loins of God but were instead written and collated by groups of people who chose which stories to include and how they were written based on political decisions determined by what message would suit their goals.
Do you suppose that the Jews would have accepted scripture which told them that the world was round and that the center of the universe is something so incomprehensible that it will be thousands of years before we can even define exactly what that is? Bearing in mind that we only have the very faintest clue today.
What's that? You don't think they'd have bought it?
Then how could God's Word have proliferated if The Bible was simply a complete specification for the universe?
This is a nonsensical argument, if the Jews or whoever else is believe in the word of God then surely they would be perfectly happy to believe that the world was round etc etc. In fact what this proves is that the Bible and all other religious texts are simply convienent stories. As soon as science successfully disproves whatever commonly held opinions which have been derived from the Bible the churches first response is to deny it and once that doesn't work they change they're mind about what they actually believe in order to prevent their credibility being totally undermined.
We can see this happening ( not very successfully ) now with Intelligent Design, the people advocating this have been forced to accept that God was wrong when he told them the world was formed 6000 years ago but are now trying to say that thats not what God told them in the first place and they are attempting to use pseudo science to lend some credibility to their belief that even if God was wrong about that he may have been correct on some other things.
which CLEARLY is nothing more than an insistent, unsubstantiated, poorly thought out assertion, which happens to be 100% false.
Well then it should be very easy for you to prove that God does exist right now then shouldn't it...
But you can't, that should tell you something.
Proving the existence of God is admittedly a tall order but you can't even explain why different people believe in different Gods and why other people believe rocks and trees are Gods or why some people believe their ancestors are gods.
Let's be honest - there are many religious people who are far more i
What is the difference between your prejudices about me and any other bigot that assumes that Mexicans are lazy, black people steal and so on?Their is a big difference between harbouring predjuices about Mexicans or black people and people with religious convictions. Mexicans cannot alter the fact that they are Mexican or black and their personal beliefs, character, intelligence etc have nothing to do with the fact they are Mexican or black.
You on the other hand choose to harbour completely irrational beliefs that you will somehow live on after you are dead, that some kind of superman created the world and watches over you. These are beliefs you have chosen to subscribe to and if I, or anyone else, decides to judge you based on a choice you have made then there is nothing wrong with that at all.
Personally I think people who choose to subscribe to a religious belief are more ignorant, less intelligent, less open minded, less charitable, more concerned with money and more likely to be a drunk than people who do not have religious beliefs. This is however purely based on people I have met, I've never met you so there's a chance you might be different.
i believe most biblical scholars lean on the side that the writer of genesis one intended for a meaning of a single revolution of the earth 'day' not an epoc 'day'I agree but I bet that wasn't the case 400 years ago when that was probably a hard fact you had to agree with.
The only reason religious types have now changed their mind about this is that Science has so convincingly proved that any such belief is pure nonsense.
Rather than simply admit that their religion is nonsense the religious types instead prefer to simply re-interpret their original hard and fast laws to something more likely to be accepted by the general population so that they can continue to exert their control over their own believers and other sympathetic members of the general population.
Some of you find pretty much anything to be proof a God, the problem is that nothing we can see, nothing we have ever discovered and nothing that we know about has ever provided the slightest reason to believe that there is such a thing as a God let alone any evidence for it.
Instead religious types start out by assuming that there is a God and that he is in some way responsible for everything.
When they start trying to explain exactly how he was responsible for a particular thing they come unstuck because shortly afterwards science will come along and explain the thing much more accurately without any reference to God.
In some cases it appears that God has just got some things plain wrong, e.g. everything orbiting the world. Once it becomes obvious that science is better at describing something than God was religious types change their mind about what it was exactly God had done - "But God never said everything orbited the Earth, that was just our misinterpretation".
What religious types fail to understand has always been a misinterpretation, no one has ever seen God, no one has ever heard God, there has never been any evidence for God it has from the start been simply an fabrication which is constantly re-interpreted to attempt to fit in with current thinking.
Totally offtopic. I accidentally went to a Country & Western festival once which had been co-opted by line dancing groups from across the west midlands.
Some of the bands were quite good but because some of our attempts at line dancing weren't very professional or pretty looking, or quite often sincere, the line dancers kept telling us to go away and stop getting in their way. Amusingly one of the bands saw this going on and said they'd rather have us in the audience because we were shouting and clapping them than the line dancers who were acting as though the bands weren't there or in any way important to their line dancing fun. That shut the miserable f#ckers up and we continued disrupting their silly dancing all afternoon with a clear concsience.
I have a about 400 albums which I've bought and maybe 10 - 15 pirated albums which I would never ever go and actually buy.
I also have probably 50 tapes left from long long ago which mostly contain music I have "pirated" off my friends and the radio when I was too young to undertstand what a crime that was.
Amongst the people I know if varies, some of them are very keen on downloading movies and tv shows but most of them don't really pirate music, unless you count burning cd's for people as pirating.
Slashdot Mirror
They are shorter versions of parambulators
I love to patronise small businesses too, the little dears. I mean they might not be the biggest in the world but they do try ever so hard, Gravys little battlers I call them.
Yeah, nice one Sherlock. So now all those terrorists know exactly where to position their bombs on planes. Good work terrorist.
So you agree that the world is warming up and that Global Climate Change is now happenening you just disagree that man is wholly responsible for this ?
You will agree that greenhouse gases must contribute to the Global Climate Change you're predicting so no doubt you will have been one of the first to advocate reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
You may well believe all of the above but I prefer to keep an open mind on the subject. When I see people convicted in British Courts of being involved in "terror" plots then I'll believe that those people were involved in a terror plot for which they were convicted.
Every other story which simply talks about the growing "terror" stands a fair chance of being fabricated by some organisation affiliated with the government as the government leans on them a little to get with the program on this new "terror" thing.
For example what criteria exactly are they using to differentiate the 2 dozen "terror" investigations they are undertaking from the thousands of other investigations they must be undertaking into general crime ?
I am willing to bet it's an extremely broad definition of the word "terror" simply because from the polices point of view it must be better to classify anything as a "terror" investigation no matter how tenuous to guard against the possibility of it actually being one and them not having taken notice of this fact. "Police Bungle Terror Plot, Claim It Was Just Simple Burglary". They probably also get money for resources on anything flagged as being "terror related".
Isn't a very good metaphor really, most cars do not spontaneously explode on impact so it's not very realistic to suppose the Orchard would set on fire following a near by car accident.
Actually if they did concentrate on pie in the sky that would solve world hunger too but maybe not so tidily as global thermonuclear war.
What's the point in going to all that trouble of launching a probe into space, crashing it back in through re-entry into the arctic and then digging down into the ice when they could just as easily take a drilling rig across and simply drill down into it ?
These boffins should concentrate on solving world hunger rather than pointless pie in the sky shenanigans like this.
I agree it may well be possible for life to evolve independant of any water but the trouble is that until we see this happening, or evidence that it has happened it's purely speculation.
I know they are discovering more and more forms of bacteria which can survive in all sorts of "unlikely" places ( although I don't know whether or not they've found which don't at some point need water to have evolved )so at some point we might get some evidence that this can be the case and discover how other forms of life might form.
You can theorise about how other forms of life could evolve and this might then help you to find them but until then you cant study them or be sure that your theories are correct.
The reason the cost of living is far less in 3rd World countries is because they don't pay for the same facilities which you pay for in the 1st World. Things like free healthcare, honest impartial police forces, standards agencies, road construction, rubbish collection, planning laws, pensions, sick pay and maternity leave, social security etc etc etc.
I imagine if they had the money to afford those things then 3rd World taxes would be comparable to 1st World taxes but they don't because for a variety reasons they are much poorer.
There's nothing really stopping you going to live in the Congo or somewhere similar where you can spend your money on what you like. I bet you'd still spend a fair proportion of it on drainage, sewage treatment, security etc.
I can still remember the Great Dudley Earthquake of 2002, I don't think there would be any point in installing such a monitoring system in the UK but I did briefly consider moving the bookshelves and couple of hundred hard back books from above my head.
15 seconds is obviously maximum amount of warning this system can provide so in practice even with the system most people would get much less than this. Although in theory people can take some appropriate action in 15 seconds to mitigate the earthquakes effect on them in practice the most likely result would simply be panic. After all you may have 15seconds or you may have 3seconds to act so if you're in a building with one doorway along with dozens of other people I doubt there is going to be much in the way of orderly queuing going on.
On the other hand automated systems which can react within milliseconds will benefit enormously from this, gas can be shut off, mobile phone networks can switch to emergency modes, factories, freight terminals, power stations and other large automated systems can can switch over to safe modes. Even in the case of false alarms it will be obvious withing 30seconds anyway so normal work can be immediately resumed.
I agree people shouldn't hog the middle lane but often if you want to make progress at a reasonable speed that's where you end up since the left lane can often contain whole processions of caravans and morris minors barely managing 60mph.
Whats annoying is people who remain in the middle lane when there is a huge gap in the left lane they could use or who are only going a few mph faster than the left lane.
Whats really weird is where the lanes seems to flip over and the left lane ends up travelling faster than the right lanes, I was on the M5 down to Exeter last year and was working like that all the way from Birmingham to just past Bristol. I think is caused by moronic caravan drivers sticking to the middle lane and people who feel its an assault to their manhood to not drive in the extreme right hand lane despite the fact its so clogged with traffic that even the caravans are moving faster.
Thats no dagger he's grasping in his sweaty palms.
That's the difference between science and fairy stories ( aka Christianity etc ), there is no need to make up stories to explain things for which we have no evidence to back up.
First of all "supernatural" means things which people can't explain but where rather than searching for a scientific explanation simple make up a story about the thing instead.
Our origins will almost certainly be explained scientifically one day but in the meantime whilst we are still searching for a scientific answer the fact we can't fully explain the origin of life, the universe and everything doesn't in any way invalidate any of our scientific theories or exlpanations for anything else.
Science doesn't comment on the "supernatural" because the "supernatural" is simply a made up story with no scientific basis. You may well believe that everything was created by a man called god but thats just a story which, in all likelyhood, your parents told you it certainly doesn't mean that this is actually what happened.
The fact that science continously proves that things are not always as people have said they were in the stories they have heard; e.g. thunder being the wheels of gods chariot, giants throwing stones in the mountains, everything orbiting the earth, the earth being flat would suggest that it's extremely unlikely the story you have been told about god is going to stand up very well to the test of time and scientific proof.
Your last paragraph is simply a tangential rant which entirely misses the point the grandparent poster was making.
Without god or religion it is perfectly possible to have shared moral values, create laws and enforce their observation.
Religious belief is entirely uneccessary in todays world ( any world in fact ) and is spread largely through parents forcing their children to observe the same religion as they do. This can in some cases be an insidious and evil practice if religion is taught over real world science and education.
Yes, you're exactly right. Being the religious type, the first word I taught myself at age 1 was God. It was almost a reflex of the tongue. Ever since I was 3, I knew that everything I could see was manufactured by The Holy Spirit.
When I turned 5, I realized that no God could ever understand what it's like to be a toddler and to grow up in such a demented world, and heuristically determined that God must have incarnated a human Son so that He could realize what temptation drove us to, and sacrifice this Son for our sins (the things which I inherently knew separated us from The Lord).
Obviously this is not how it works, Religion isn't typically that people realise for themselves from the moment they're born. More typically someones peers, they're parents, teachers or powerful members of the community might have a particular religious view which they then pass on to you. Usually this is accomplished by teaching religion as though it was the truth and not just a convienent self perpetuating fairy tale. This is why you normally find a predominance of Muslims in Islamic communities where it would be very unusual to find someone deciding to grow up as a Christian and vice a versa.
We have these things, which we can see, which have been "discovered" since they were created, that most anyone (except you apparently) knows about, they're called BIBLES (aka scriptures, "holy books", testaments, etc.).
You mean you have books of stories which contain nothing in the way of verifiable scientific proofs but an awful lot of speculation. These things didn't suddenly spring into existence from the loins of God but were instead written and collated by groups of people who chose which stories to include and how they were written based on political decisions determined by what message would suit their goals.
Do you suppose that the Jews would have accepted scripture which told them that the world was round and that the center of the universe is something so incomprehensible that it will be thousands of years before we can even define exactly what that is? Bearing in mind that we only have the very faintest clue today.
What's that? You don't think they'd have bought it?
Then how could God's Word have proliferated if The Bible was simply a complete specification for the universe?
This is a nonsensical argument, if the Jews or whoever else is believe in the word of God then surely they would be perfectly happy to believe that the world was round etc etc. In fact what this proves is that the Bible and all other religious texts are simply convienent stories. As soon as science successfully disproves whatever commonly held opinions which have been derived from the Bible the churches first response is to deny it and once that doesn't work they change they're mind about what they actually believe in order to prevent their credibility being totally undermined.
We can see this happening ( not very successfully ) now with Intelligent Design, the people advocating this have been forced to accept that God was wrong when he told them the world was formed 6000 years ago but are now trying to say that thats not what God told them in the first place and they are attempting to use pseudo science to lend some credibility to their belief that even if God was wrong about that he may have been correct on some other things.
which CLEARLY is nothing more than an insistent, unsubstantiated, poorly thought out assertion, which happens to be 100% false.
Well then it should be very easy for you to prove that God does exist right now then shouldn't it ...
But you can't, that should tell you something.
Proving the existence of God is admittedly a tall order but you can't even explain why different people believe in different Gods and why other people believe rocks and trees are Gods or why some people believe their ancestors are gods.
Let's be honest - there are many religious people who are far more i
How do you mean "take on" ? There was no doubt that you could beat the Iraqi army, the puzzle was what exactly you intended to do afterwards.
We thought you had that worked out, we thought there was a plan. Obviously there wasn't.
I'm glad to see that some people are capable of changing their minds, can I ask what made you support the war in the first place ?
What is the difference between your prejudices about me and any other bigot that assumes that Mexicans are lazy, black people steal and so on?Their is a big difference between harbouring predjuices about Mexicans or black people and people with religious convictions. Mexicans cannot alter the fact that they are Mexican or black and their personal beliefs, character, intelligence etc have nothing to do with the fact they are Mexican or black.
You on the other hand choose to harbour completely irrational beliefs that you will somehow live on after you are dead, that some kind of superman created the world and watches over you. These are beliefs you have chosen to subscribe to and if I, or anyone else, decides to judge you based on a choice you have made then there is nothing wrong with that at all.
Personally I think people who choose to subscribe to a religious belief are more ignorant, less intelligent, less open minded, less charitable, more concerned with money and more likely to be a drunk than people who do not have religious beliefs. This is however purely based on people I have met, I've never met you so there's a chance you might be different.
i believe most biblical scholars lean on the side that the writer of genesis one intended for a meaning of a single revolution of the earth 'day' not an epoc 'day'I agree but I bet that wasn't the case 400 years ago when that was probably a hard fact you had to agree with.
The only reason religious types have now changed their mind about this is that Science has so convincingly proved that any such belief is pure nonsense.
Rather than simply admit that their religion is nonsense the religious types instead prefer to simply re-interpret their original hard and fast laws to something more likely to be accepted by the general population so that they can continue to exert their control over their own believers and other sympathetic members of the general population.
Some of you find pretty much anything to be proof a God, the problem is that nothing we can see, nothing we have ever discovered and nothing that we know about has ever provided the slightest reason to believe that there is such a thing as a God let alone any evidence for it.
Instead religious types start out by assuming that there is a God and that he is in some way responsible for everything.
When they start trying to explain exactly how he was responsible for a particular thing they come unstuck because shortly afterwards science will come along and explain the thing much more accurately without any reference to God.
In some cases it appears that God has just got some things plain wrong, e.g. everything orbiting the world. Once it becomes obvious that science is better at describing something than God was religious types change their mind about what it was exactly God had done - "But God never said everything orbited the Earth, that was just our misinterpretation".
What religious types fail to understand has always been a misinterpretation, no one has ever seen God, no one has ever heard God, there has never been any evidence for God it has from the start been simply an fabrication which is constantly re-interpreted to attempt to fit in with current thinking.
Totally offtopic. I accidentally went to a Country & Western festival once which had been co-opted by line dancing groups from across the west midlands.
Some of the bands were quite good but because some of our attempts at line dancing weren't very professional or pretty looking, or quite often sincere, the line dancers kept telling us to go away and stop getting in their way. Amusingly one of the bands saw this going on and said they'd rather have us in the audience because we were shouting and clapping them than the line dancers who were acting as though the bands weren't there or in any way important to their line dancing fun. That shut the miserable f#ckers up and we continued disrupting their silly dancing all afternoon with a clear concsience.
I have a about 400 albums which I've bought and maybe 10 - 15 pirated albums which I would never ever go and actually buy.
I also have probably 50 tapes left from long long ago which mostly contain music I have "pirated" off my friends and the radio when I was too young to undertstand what a crime that was.
Amongst the people I know if varies, some of them are very keen on downloading movies and tv shows but most of them don't really pirate music, unless you count burning cd's for people as pirating.