but amazon.com also helps many smaller linux and open source sites generate some revenue with their affiliate program.
Correction: Amazon.com helps Amazon.com generate some revenue with their affiliate programs. The programs are essentially advertising for Amazon. If Amazon really were altruistic, it would give money to smaller Linux and open source sites rather than pay them for advertising space.
South Park is nothing more than one big Christian-bashing jamboree. The Lord is portrayed as having a bumbling talk show called "Jesus and Friends." A piece of human excrement is used as the mascot for Christmas. Satan is portrayed as being an affable character that is liked by the townspeople. They had an Easter show where they crucified the fat kid on a cross, for crying out loud! And it goes on and on to sickening proportions.
*South Park* is another movie straight from the smoking pits of Hell.
*South Park* is an *incredibly dangerous* movie for those who do not understand or are developing an understanding of the Gospel....... INCREDIBLY dangerous.
Satan is portrayed as the homosexual lover of Saddam Hussein and is portrayed as a sensitive, loving and caring being. Hussein waves his disembodied male member around. And it was not a cardboard drawing like most other images of the movie -- it was of photographic resolution. The most foul of the foul words was clearly spoken *by the children* at least 131 times and many other times in a muffled or garbled way. The three/four letter word vocabulary was used at least 119 times. God's name in vain was used 11 times without the four letter expletive and 6 times with it. And many times the child characters were saying things like "What's the big deal" (about the foul language). "Suck my --", "Let's ([homo]sexual intercourse)", and repeated questions about a female private organ were but a very few of the vulgar expressions used by the kids.
Follow the above-provided link for the complete review...
Greetings, all. I recently wrote feedback@amazon.com to berate them for their use of overreaching software patents. Following is the response I received. (I suspect it may be a form letter -- has anyone else received the same response or was I blessed with a message from a real, live public relations agent?)
Dear Mr. ------,
Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com. I'm sorry that you don't agree the patenting of our 1-click technology.
As you know, in recognition of the original and unique nature of the 1-Click technology, the U.S. Patent Office awarded Patent No. 5,960,411 to Amazon.com on September 28, 1999.
As our founder, Jeff Bezos, has said, "The reason we have a patent system in this country is to encourage people to take these kinds of risks and make these kinds of investments for customers."
I hope you'll understand that we are unable to discuss this case any further as we are currently in litigation. Thank you for taking the time to share your views with us.
Best regards, Eryn Huckaby Happy Holidays from Amazon.com Earth's Biggest Selection http://www.amazon.com
So, following your logic, we should also ban knives, baseball bats, hammers, screwdrivers, etc. etc. A gun is merely an implement, albeit and efficient one, which is probably why it is often used. People kill, not guns.
You have just proved my point (thank you) which was to demonstrate the fallacy inherent in the original poster's statement. If people are the problem and not guns, then you're just as better off having no guns as having them. The OP stated that the reason for owning guns is to defend oneself against guns. Well, guess what -- if there are no guns, there is no need to have a gun for the purpose of defending yourself against them.
Also note that nowhere in my messages do I advocate government restriction of firearms. Though I decry the need for guns, particularly in societies where they are not prevalent to begin with, I am a staunch supporter of individual liberty. The purpose of my original message is to demonstrate that causes are never helped by proponents who demonstrate a poor understanding of the subject by making illogical, circular arguments.
If you want to debate ownership of firearms, which was not my original intention, all I can say is that I would rather live in a society whose population has voluntarily eschewed them than in the United States. I certainly would not advocate a sudden ban on firearms in the US, as this would only make a bad situation worse. While many ordinary citizens might follow the law and turn in their guns, criminals would begin hoarding them, and would soon become a much more powerful group in society as a result. It's simply a Catch-22 in the US; now that you have firearms, you can't very well get rid of them even if you wanted to.
Has anyone else seen surges this big (from 30/min to 250/min) from other sources other that/.?
Yeah, Cruel Site of the Day. My Saga of Roter Hutmann, which relates the story of a computer science nerd who falls in love with a Turing Test program, was nominated back in May. The resulting surge in hits nearly downed my ISP's server. To this day, including May in my domain's graphical statistics program introduces a spike so large that the rest of the months bottom out near 0.
The primary point of my message was not to decry the availability and use of guns in America, but to berate the original poster for his questionable logic. If the only purpose of owning guns is to defend yourself against guns, then why not just not have guns in the first place? Had firearms never been legal originally, there wouldn't be nearly as many murders. It's much easier, emotionally, to pull a trigger and injure someone from afar than it is to stick a blade in someone's gut or bludgeon them to death with a heavy object. Guns, as a mechanised means of murder, do much to divorce the assailant from the consequences of what they're doing. There's no need to argue this point; it's statistically proven that the murder rate (measured per capita) is astronomically higher in the US than in any other Western country. Thousands of people are murdered with guns each year in the States; by contrast, Canada and the UK typically count their annual gun-related murders in the single digits.
Another poster in this discussion also mentioned that banning firearms is not a deterrent to criminals. While this may be true if the ban were enacted tomorrow in the USA, it's certainly not true of the pre-existing ban in most other Western countries. Even criminals would be hard-pressed to find a handgun or semiautomatic weapon in Canada or the UK.
Clearly however, you are unaware of the fact that the presence of a gun prevents not less than 2 Million crimes (including...
Wait, let me guess...
murder,
Murder... hm... now what do murderers usually use to commit their murders? Could it be... guns?
robery, [sic]
Robbery... hm... now what do thieves usually use to commit their robberies? Could it be... guns?
rape
Rape... hm... now what do rapists often use to restrain their victims? Could it be... guns?
and assault)
Assault... hm... now what do thugs often use to injure their victims? Could it be... guns?
So what you are saying, essentially, is that you Americans need guns to prevent crimes involving other guns. Sounds perfectly logical. Good thing that constitutional amendment of yours gave you the right to bear arms or Zeus knows what the crime situation would be.
Believe it or not, in many countries of the world it is prohibited to play such games. Travellers to Saudi Arabia are advised not to take chess boards with them, as they will be confiscated upon arrival. Ditto for cards, dice, and probably computer games as well. I take it the Arabic version of Windows 98 does not include FreeCell and Solitarie...
Regards,
Re:Ummm perhaps you should read the docs
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
·
· Score: 1
OK, so I flubbed the resize animation bit... the other points still hold IMHO. I know you can change the window placement policy, but its AI still needs work if it's putting windows off the screen. As for launching xemacs with -geometry specifiers -- well, I shouldn't have to concern myself with such things in a GUI; the system should be responsible for proper window placement (specifically, it should put the window back where it was before, and failing that, use a defined placement policy).
Regards,
KDE doomed to repeat Windows's mistakes
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
·
· Score: 1
From the KDE FAQ:
KDE is not a clone. Specifically KDE is not a CDE or Windows clone. While the KDE developers have and will continue to glean the best features from all existing desktop environments KDE is a truly unique environment that has and will continue to go its own way.
It looks to me as though some of other OSes' (namely, Windows 95) worst features were also gleaned. For example:
KDE decides to put new windows in the most annoying places. Whenever I launch Xemacs, half the window is off the screen.
The above problem is aggravated further by the fact that KDE does not remember window positions. No matter how many times I drag my Xemacs window to the upper left corner, the next time I launch it, KDE will still put Xemacs back halfway off the screen where it thinks is best.
'Cute' animation abounds. No, I don't need to wait while I watch my windows maximize and minimize, thank you...
The default file dialog window size is tiny, not to mention not persistent when resized. Folks, the days of 320x200 monitors is long behind us; there's no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to see more files at once when we go to open or save a document.
While I have no doubt that the designers of KDE did not intentionally make parts of their interface bug-for-bug compatible with Windows, it is obvious that they have, at times, been trapped in the Microsoft paradigm. I can only hope that KDE 2 will have addressed these misfeatures. If not, I recommend the designers pick up a copy of Windows 9[5|8] Annoyances lest they repeat more of Microsoft's mistakes. If I were looking to "glean features" from an OS GUI, Windows 95 would not be high on my list of interfaces to emulate.
In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:
To start, I'd like to flash back to something I wrote last year. After
reviewingVoyager's first season, I wrote:
"Or, to put it in slightly different terms: "Voyager" has done a magnificent job in its first season of treading water. The problem with treading water is that eventually you need to pick a destination and make progress... or you drown."
Do the words "Davy Jones' locker" ring a bell?
That's not quite fair, I suppose. This season of "Voyager" has had glimmers of good material, so it hasn't quite drowned yet. It is, however, wandering around Davy Jones' first floor looking for the door to the basement... and that's a shame.
Let me start off by saying where the fault does not lie. If "Voyager" continues to slide and eventually becomes a total ratings failure, I anticipate that some people marketing the show would say "well, I guess the whole female captain idea doesn't work". Nothing could be further from the truth. I see nothing wrong with Janeway being a woman; most of the time she's simply been "the captain"....
I also don't think the cast is the problem. Some of the cast members--Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, and Robert Duncan McNeill in particular--have shown an astonishing facility to rise well above their material at times, and give nicely layered, or at least interesting performances, most of the time....
So what is the problem? The problem is a show that is boldly going absolutely nowhere."Voyager" is going nowhere on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start... so let's try the physical.
If "Voyager" has been in the Delta Quadrant heading for home for two years now, there should be some evidence of that. Neelix should be growing gradually less familiar with the territory. They should be meeting new races and leaving old ones behind. Kazon territory should have been left behind ages ago--and at the very least, if Kazon ships are still around they shouldn't still be the same group. Having Culluh and Seska around for over a year is absurd; I find it impossible to believe that the leader of the Kazon Nistrom sect can afford to spend a year chasing after the Flying Dutchman. Voyager isn't helping matters, though; if Culluh and Seska are that big a problem, let's have Janeway simply order the ship to zip towards home at warp 9 or so for two weeks. That should remove the problem, and free up story time for something that's actually interesting.
Also on the physical side, there's the continuing absurdity of having Voyager look like it just got out of the Utopia Planitia shipyards. On several occasions, Voyager has taken significant damage from its enemies--and on at least two of those occasions ("Alliances" and especially "Deadlock"), that damage has been so significant that it would take major time in a starbase to repair. Chakotay even says in "Alliances" that it's tough to say whether they'll ever get warp drive back--well, you could've fooled me.... The starship Voyager should be looking like hell--and since that's been ignored, the series looks like hell instead.
[This isn't even getting into the idea that "Threshold" should have been the show's ticket home. Given that "Threshold" is one of the handful of Trek episodes that I honestly think deserves to be expunged from the universe for the universe's own safety, I'm not going to get into the myriad implications of the show.]
But let's put the physical aside for a moment. Everything on board ship is going too smoothly from an emotional point of view, too. Neelix's protestations about morale notwithstanding, no one on board seems to have the slightest problem with the fact that they're trapped on a starship for 70 years.... Everyone just goes about their duties--and more alarming from a dramatic point of view, everyone just accepts every decision made by a higher-up. I count at least seven episodes this season where Janeway makes decisions that are best described as "questionable"...
Are these actions justifiable individually? Yes, perhaps--but as I said above, that's not the point. Taken as a group, these examples provide substantial grounds for major, MAJOR dissent among the crew--we're talking mutiny-level dissent, particularly among those people who weren't enchanted with Janeway before (such as Hogan, perhaps). I have no problem with Janeway taking those actions--but I have a very large problem with the lack of reaction afterwards. That lack of reaction suggests that the crew uniformly sees Janeway's actions as fine--and that suggests that we're supposed to see it that way as well. Not a chance, folks....
Effective immediately, I'm giving up on reviewing "Voyager" as a matter of course. It's a show that no one's taking the time to really examine while creating it--and as a result, it's not enjoyable to review week after week.... I've never "abandoned" a Trek series I reviewed before, and I wish my decision here could be different. However, this season of "Voyager" has, I feel, abandoned everything about the series that made it potentially interesting, and replaced it with nothing I care to see. If a massive overhaul changes the show greatly for the better, I'm sure I'll hear about it eventually--but without such a change, I expect "Voyager" to keep spiraling downhill, and I'm not planning to go down with this ship.
Actually, to circumvent some of these issues, scientists are considering creating mammoth/elephant hybrids. Sure, they'd be only half-mammoth, but it'd still be cool. Apparently, the whole thing is being financed by wealthy Japanese businessmen. For those interested in exactly how it's going to be done, check out "Cloning the Wolly Mammoth" which appears in the April 1999 issue of Discover Magazine. It was one of the most interesting biology-related articles I've read in months.
So far as I've read, one of the biggest obstacles in undertaking this whole cloning thing is that it's going to take a long time before we see any results. Assuming we are able to impregnate an elephant with a mammoth or half-mammoth zygote, the gestation period of an elephant is anywhere from 600 to 760 days(!), and it takes ten or twelve years for an elephant calf to reach sexual maturity. Even if everything goes according to plan, we won't know if we have a viable mammoth (or half-mammoth) for well over a decade after conception.
I think the success of a Turing test program is largely dependent on the intelligence of its human conversation partner. As I've witnessed on more than one occasion, people have spent literally hours talking happily to a second-rate Eliza clone, thinking it was a real person.
One particular episode that comes to mind is The Saga of Roter Hutmann, available at http://www.nothingisreal.com/saga/. This is the story of a computer science major who spent hours every day talking with Julia, a Turing test program, even going so far as to ask it out on a date, before he finally voiced to me his suspicions that she was "not human". Ironically, he then proceeded to call her a poorly-written program... Julia used to be accessible via telnet (fuzine.mt.cs.cm.edu, user "julia") but, alas, is there no more...
Anyway, check out the Saga if you've got a few minutes to spare as people keep telling me it's the funniest thing they've read for a long time...
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: Amazon.com helps Amazon.com generate some revenue with their affiliate programs. The programs are essentially advertising for Amazon. If Amazon really were altruistic, it would give money to smaller Linux and open source sites rather than pay them for advertising space.
Regards,
I know where this guy gets his material: the Christian Childcare Action Project's Review of Southpark . Here are a couple juicy tidbits:
Follow the above-provided link for the complete review...
Regards,
You forgot the best one: Grand Marquis de Sade ! ;)
Regards,
Greetings, all. I recently wrote feedback@amazon.com to berate them for their use of overreaching software patents. Following is the response I received. (I suspect it may be a form letter -- has anyone else received the same response or was I blessed with a message from a real, live public relations agent?)
Regards,
You have just proved my point (thank you) which was to demonstrate the fallacy inherent in the original poster's statement. If people are the problem and not guns, then you're just as better off having no guns as having them. The OP stated that the reason for owning guns is to defend oneself against guns. Well, guess what -- if there are no guns, there is no need to have a gun for the purpose of defending yourself against them.
Also note that nowhere in my messages do I advocate government restriction of firearms. Though I decry the need for guns, particularly in societies where they are not prevalent to begin with, I am a staunch supporter of individual liberty. The purpose of my original message is to demonstrate that causes are never helped by proponents who demonstrate a poor understanding of the subject by making illogical, circular arguments.
If you want to debate ownership of firearms, which was not my original intention, all I can say is that I would rather live in a society whose population has voluntarily eschewed them than in the United States. I certainly would not advocate a sudden ban on firearms in the US, as this would only make a bad situation worse. While many ordinary citizens might follow the law and turn in their guns, criminals would begin hoarding them, and would soon become a much more powerful group in society as a result. It's simply a Catch-22 in the US; now that you have firearms, you can't very well get rid of them even if you wanted to.
Regards,
Yeah, Cruel Site of the Day. My Saga of Roter Hutmann, which relates the story of a computer science nerd who falls in love with a Turing Test program, was nominated back in May. The resulting surge in hits nearly downed my ISP's server. To this day, including May in my domain's graphical statistics program introduces a spike so large that the rest of the months bottom out near 0.
Regards,
The primary point of my message was not to decry the availability and use of guns in America, but to berate the original poster for his questionable logic. If the only purpose of owning guns is to defend yourself against guns, then why not just not have guns in the first place? Had firearms never been legal originally, there wouldn't be nearly as many murders. It's much easier, emotionally, to pull a trigger and injure someone from afar than it is to stick a blade in someone's gut or bludgeon them to death with a heavy object. Guns, as a mechanised means of murder, do much to divorce the assailant from the consequences of what they're doing. There's no need to argue this point; it's statistically proven that the murder rate (measured per capita) is astronomically higher in the US than in any other Western country. Thousands of people are murdered with guns each year in the States; by contrast, Canada and the UK typically count their annual gun-related murders in the single digits.
Another poster in this discussion also mentioned that banning firearms is not a deterrent to criminals. While this may be true if the ban were enacted tomorrow in the USA, it's certainly not true of the pre-existing ban in most other Western countries. Even criminals would be hard-pressed to find a handgun or semiautomatic weapon in Canada or the UK.
Regards,
Wait, let me guess...
Murder... hm... now what do murderers usually use to commit their murders? Could it be... guns ?
Robbery... hm... now what do thieves usually use to commit their robberies? Could it be... guns ?
Rape... hm... now what do rapists often use to restrain their victims? Could it be... guns ?
Assault... hm... now what do thugs often use to injure their victims? Could it be... guns ?
So what you are saying, essentially, is that you Americans need guns to prevent crimes involving other guns. Sounds perfectly logical. Good thing that constitutional amendment of yours gave you the right to bear arms or Zeus knows what the crime situation would be.
Regards,
Believe it or not, in many countries of the world it is prohibited to play such games. Travellers to Saudi Arabia are advised not to take chess boards with them, as they will be confiscated upon arrival. Ditto for cards, dice, and probably computer games as well. I take it the Arabic version of Windows 98 does not include FreeCell and Solitarie...
Regards,
Regards,
From the KDE FAQ:
It looks to me as though some of other OSes' (namely, Windows 95) worst features were also gleaned. For example:
While I have no doubt that the designers of KDE did not intentionally make parts of their interface bug-for-bug compatible with Windows, it is obvious that they have, at times, been trapped in the Microsoft paradigm. I can only hope that KDE 2 will have addressed these misfeatures. If not, I recommend the designers pick up a copy of Windows 9[5|8] Annoyances lest they repeat more of Microsoft's mistakes. If I were looking to "glean features" from an OS GUI, Windows 95 would not be high on my list of interfaces to emulate.
Regards,
In my opinion, the death of Trek (at least in its television incarnation) can be largely attributed to the folleys of the fourth series, Star Trek: Voyager. This show is so bad that even the reknowned Trek reviewer Tim Lynch stopped watching the show after its second season. I think what's wrong with the show is best described by Tim himself in his review of Voyager's second season:
I've edited Tim's article considerably for length; the full text can be found at http://www.psiphi.org/voy/ep/twl-2. html#general
Regards,
So far as I've read, one of the biggest obstacles in undertaking this whole cloning thing is that it's going to take a long time before we see any results. Assuming we are able to impregnate an elephant with a mammoth or half-mammoth zygote, the gestation period of an elephant is anywhere from 600 to 760 days(!), and it takes ten or twelve years for an elephant calf to reach sexual maturity. Even if everything goes according to plan, we won't know if we have a viable mammoth (or half-mammoth) for well over a decade after conception.
Regards,
One particular episode that comes to mind is The Saga of Roter Hutmann , available at http://www.nothingisreal.com/saga/. This is the story of a computer science major who spent hours every day talking with Julia, a Turing test program, even going so far as to ask it out on a date, before he finally voiced to me his suspicions that she was "not human". Ironically, he then proceeded to call her a poorly-written program... Julia used to be accessible via telnet (fuzine.mt.cs.cm.edu, user "julia") but, alas, is there no more...
Anyway, check out the Saga if you've got a few minutes to spare as people keep telling me it's the funniest thing they've read for a long time...
Regards,