I found the test to be pretty easy, having a musical ear and listening to a lot of mandarin. I think people who speak tone based languages like Mandarin and Cantonese are at an advantage for this test.
Anyway, I scored 30ms and the lowest they showed on their site was 34 for my age group. I'm curious how others did.
My friend tried it and he couldn't tell the difference between the up note and the down though so if your tone deaf the test won't work.
Yes they are but that will still require a managed wifi network. The original poster has a dream of free phone calls on a mobile via wifi and that's not going to happen the way he pictures it.
I haven't read up much on wimax but the handover will probably be provisioned on the network side which means that you can hand over from one access point to another within the same network but most of the access points are different people in different networks so its not like you can drive through the city handing off between a TMO wifi and other networks.
It's more like, say you have a large college campus, you will be able to roam within that network without ever dropping connection but you wouldn't be able to roam onto another network that seemlessly.
That's why cell providers are giving you a service, they do all the handoffs and provisioning to make their network seemless to you and your mobile, that's what your paying for.
It's true that Tmobile doesn't use the Nortel GGSN in North America (I think they went with Nokia or something) but in most of the markets the core network is Nortel, especially on the radio side.
Several carriers are using Nortel equipment to build out their GPRS and EDGE networks as well.
Most of the standards are compatible so you can have a variety of equipment on a site. But there are thousands of "core" networks in the US built on Nortel systems.
It's true that the market conditions in Europe and the US result in different focus on the network elements, but the systems are fundamentally the same.
A lot of it has to do with different regulatory requirements between the EU and the FCC.
In any case both are way behind South Korea and Japan when it comes to the latest technology and products. This is more of a cultural difference than a monetary one. People are slow to adopt new technology in the west.
In order for your calls to move around un-interrupted you need to be able to hand over to adjacent cells.
GSM has something called a VLR or Vistor Location Registry which keeps track of which radio cell you are on. And the radio equipment like the BTS, BSC, etc make constant calculations on your signal strength. As you reach the edge of a cell the system automaticly hands you over to the next cell without dropping your call. Sometimes it hands you over from one radio to another within a cell.
This has to be done because each cell is only a few square miles.
Wifi and other wireless network data services do not support handover functionality. You need a VLR and radio equipment that can handle the cell handovers and a master device like an MSC to handle and keep track of it all.
you could do like a skype WIFI type deal but you would have to manually reconnect every time you moved to a different radio, dropping your call and having to start over again.
A managed GSM network handles all of this for you in the background.
Then you have the really advanced stuff like CDMA2000 where your not only hopping radios but hopping frequencies as well. Mobile infrastructures are a lot more complicated than you might believe.
There are existing HLR/VLR profiles for a IMSI to support various data services. It sounds like they are tieing WIFI into that and using the information provided by the non Nortel vendor to coordinate priority and handover.
Not if they are being fined as well. I'm saying to fine the one who hires the spammers while ALSO fining the spammers. When they arrest a hitman they arrest the person who hired them too. The only way to cut spam is to break the money train.
We should go after the spammers but ultimately, people don't spam for fun. They spam for profit.
So why not go after the companies who are advertised in the spam? Make it un-profitable for them to use spammers for advertising by fining them. Do that enough and make the penalties steep enough and they will stop paying the spammers, and the flow of spam will stop.
If a company paid criminals money to spraypaint their advertisments on buildings and on peoples homes and cars then that company would be held as responsible as the person with the paint can (Sony PSP).
It should be the same for spammers and the people that hire them.
I was trying to think of why they would bother making a car that could steer itself, yet required your hands on the wheel every 10 seconds. And it occurred to me it's not for people to take naps at the wheel. It's for people who have trouble staying in their lanes. And who has trouble staying in their lanes? Old people, people with bad eyesight, and drunks.
So if you've tipped back one to many and have to drive yourself home, instead of weaving all over your lane and announcing to the world your drunk, you turn on the steering assist and let the car make you look good.
If your not weaving all over the road you could knock back more than your share at the local watering hole and not worry about attracing the attention of the police.
Now here is what I'm wondering. If you do manage to get pulled over and the cop smells your breath, who was driving the car? You or the computer? I can easily imagine a situation where someone fights a DUI by saying they were not driving it, the car was.
Or we could look at the flip side of that. A normal driver, who for whatever reason, has the system engaged and the lane markers are incorrect and the car causes an accident. You have all seen it, they are doing road construction on the highway and have you detour across several lanes but the painted lines keep going straight. Even a normal person has a little confusion about which lane they should be in during these abrupt detours. Imagine how it would mess with the AI of the car.
In any case am I crazy to think that these cars are going to be loved by heavy drinkers?
The problem is that people are drawn towards religious experiences. By that I mean they need to feel a part of something larger than themselves and to feel something other worldly.
You have your snake dancing, speaking in tongues, christians. You have your deep meditation new age stuff. You have you catholic communion. People subconsciously crave that kind of thing in their life and they will kid themselves to get it.
Athiesm doesn't have a lot to offer in those regards. Neither does agnosticism. But people want rituals and to feel spiritual so they have to find something to do. That is one of the reasons people can be their own hypocrites.
For instance I'm sure that somewhere out there are people who don't believe in god or heaven, but believe in ghosts. Or people who believe in karma but don't believe there is an order to the world. Once you cut out god from your life you get to cut a lot of other crap out as well.
You see it's one thing to consider the possibility that all religion could be a fraud. And it's another to feel it in your guts. And I think athiests feel it and are offended by it at some primal level.
And another thing. People ask that without religion, where do people get their morals? They have this big fearful image of the end of the world in total anarchy because people have no morals. I don't think the two go hand in hand. I know a lot of athiests who are very mormal people. And I know some christians that are assholes to everybody and prey for forgivness.
You know when your doing something wrong, you might try to kid yourself but you feel it. That's a good place to start. From there, philosophy has been asking questions like this since people could talk. And I think philosophy has a lot more knowledge and a lot less CRAP than the bible.
Now here is a real twit.
Here we have christian argument against science number 5.
The "Science has been wrong before" arugment.
You see, in religion, if one thing is wrong the entire thing falls apart. So they think the same thing about science. They think that if they can prove science was wrong about something that science must be wrong about everything.
In a world without microscopes, when most "scientists" were merely curious scholars trying to turn lead into gold, there were ideas that flies came from rotten meat. If you go back even further, back to the greeks, there were those that thought that fire was made up of sharp particles that would cut you and that was why it hurt to touch it.
They also used to think that the world was flat. And that the earth was the center of the universe.
Now here is the difference between religion and science.
People didn't accept that flies came from meat, that the world was flat and the center of the universe, on faith. They critically considered it. And when science moved forward and provided a telescope and a microscope they could finally see what was really happening. And people like Gallileo were critical of these old ideas and said that the earth was not the center of the universe. And the church labeled them a heritec because it went against the christian idea of the earth being the center of gods universe.
We also found out later that the earth was not flat. And a series of experiments proved that covered meat did not get maggots. And so the idea of spontaneous generation was found to be false. Yet every time science took a step forward, religion balked at the notion.
You see, twit, when you take things on faith alone, nothing ever progresses. Because your mind shuts down and you don't wonder about why things are. You just keep your head down and keep trying not to go to hell.
Science is constantly critical of itself. And that is why bad ideas like the earth is flat, or there is a god, get rejected because they are proven false and the work is reviewed by other scientists who try to reproduce the experiment.
This twit comes off sound like he knows so much about science. Yet the knowledge he so brazenly throws around trying to sound like he knows anything, was not won easily. It's one thing to learn about this stuff in school and think back to these absurd ideas and think about how stupid they were. But if christians had their way the only book we would be reading in school is the bible. And all of this knowledge would be lost.
In teaching ID or creationism in schools it is a step BACKWARDS for us and all of mankind. Survival of the fitest is not a 'guess'. It is a fact of life. If you don't survive, you don't reproduce. That is a LAW of nature not a theory. If you start trying to teach that everything can be explained by god, then you might as well start teaching that the earth is the center of the universe and that flies erupt from rotten meat spontaneously. Like this twit is going on about like he discovered it.
Agnostics are halfies. They have one foot in the door, one foot out the door. They are "There is a god but I don't know who it is". At least people in organized religion take a stance and say my god could kick your gods ass.
Granted, agnosticism is more open minded to the unimaginable possibilities in the universe. But to me it's just the limbo between jesus freak and athiest.
But back to the original subject, I don't think religion and science are compatible.
Science asks you to make observations on things that can be proven, and the results reproduced by independant parties. It uses logical and critical thinking to show only what can be proven, while rejecting ideas with no merit or proof.
Religion asks you to ignore logic and go on faith. It spins a story that is meant to suck you in. Yet if you criticaly consider it your branded blasphemous. Your told to take it all on faith because there is no proof that god exists. Because god doesn't interfere with mortals.
So lets do a thought experiment.
Let say that there is a room at the center of the earth. And in this room there is an alien with a machine that could control any person in the world. But this alien has been given a set of rules. He can't interfere with peoples workings. He can't reveal his presence to the world. And he can't leave the room. Lets also assume that this room was un-detectable to our current technology.
Now this alien could be down there right now, listening to all of our thoughts on it's machine. In fact you could say he's right under our noses. He has been watching us and collecting informatin on us since the beginining of time. We can't see him but he's there. We can't detect him with science, but he's there. And he won't willingly reveal himself to us. Just because it's a fantastic idea doesn't mean that it can't be true right? I mean for all we know there really is a little alien in a room at the center of the earth. But since we can't prove it we have to have faith that their either is or isn't one right?
Well if he can't affect any change in the world, and we can't detect that he's there, the big question is why does it matter? If there is a god and he's all knowing and allmighty, yet he won't interfere with us, and no where we have looked in the universe has shown him to exist, and physics itself shows that he couldn't exist, then does it really matter if you believe or not? In the greater scheme of things it doesn't matter if god exists or not, the same way it doesn't really matter if that alien exists because either way we are unchanged. But what does matter is that people use it as an excuse to act like assholes to one another, kill one another, and subjigate one another.
It matters that people would be willing to go to war to defend something that we don't know exists, that even if it existed does not interfere with us, and that is unable to co-exists with others ideas. It's almost as if religion were designed to keep us in a continuous state of war with the other people on this planet.
And it makes me so sad to see this stuff still going on. Muslims killing Hindus and Christians. Christians killing Muslims. Buddhists killing Hindus. IT's all just a bunch of people under delusions, killing each other to try to prove that their delusions are real.
I said before that intelligent people believe in god too. Well intelligent people also commit murder. And abuse others, and go to prison, and do a bunch of other things that are wrong as well. So just because someone is an intelligent christian, doesn't mean they are enlightened or right. They are still basing their moral decisions on something that doesn't exist, and that demands blood of those that don't believe. It's an abomination.
I put line breaks in while I'm typing it and slashdot takes em out. I had hoped that I would get less twits with nothing to say and a hard on for line breaks.
Religion is the wool pulled over our eyes. Some people find that comforting and I don't fault them their beliefs. But if you were to ask me if someone with wool over their eyes can see clearly I will say no they can't.
There are many brilliant people who believe in god and an afterlife. People smarter than you or I. I would not consider them to be stupid or inferior. However I would consider their belief to be illogical and irrational given the breadth of scientific knowledge and enlightenment.
Athiests look at creationists the same way as you would look at an adult who still believed in the easter bunny or believed that baby's come from storks. We usually feel a little sorry for them but we can be accomidating and let them believe what they want. However if they try to start teaching those absurd ideas in a classroom in a public school we draw issue with that. To me, trying to teach ID in a science classroom is not any different from trying to teach that babies come from storks in a health or parenting class.
I'm an athiest and I think I would have been one sooner had I not been afraid. It's like turning the breaker off in your house and then sticking a key into an electrical socket. Yes you know the power is off, but what if? Your told that there is a god when your a kid and that you will go to hell if you don't follow him. You grow up and don't see any evidence of god in the world. You can use logic to understand that there can't be a god. But that nagging "what if" makes you hesitate to be blasphemous because if your wrong your going to hell. Some people never get past this point and they either swing back to full blown religion, or else they stay halfway and become agnostic. They don't believe in any particular religion but won't deny the existence of a supreme being "just in case".
Initially being an athiest is scary. When you die your dead, no after life. There are no miracles. There is no order or meaning to the universe. When bad things happen its random and meaningless. You have nothingto fall back on. No crutch to shield your fragile person from the harsh realities of existence. But at the same time the enlightenment is completely worth it.
It's like Socrates story of a man living in a cave being too afraid to go outside where there is no roof, only the empty blackness of the sky. The entire universe of wonder could be going on outside his cave and he would never know because he is too afraid to change his world.
I find it hard to trust people under a relgious influence to make rational decisions because they sometimes do things that are irrational, but in the name of a god. Like Bush talking about his crusade or that god wanted him to go to Iraq. That scares the crap out of me. What if god told him that freedom was an illusion and that the only path to freedom lay in faith. What if he made non christians 2nd class citizens. It worries me that Texas has a constitution that says no godless person can hold political office.
Religion does not give way to logic. It is an irrational and illogical device that is used to control people. So in some ways, people who are religious or believe in god, are for lack of a better word, stupid.
Google should let the Chinese government handle their own censorship. Censoring results at their server is a tacit endorsement for censorship. period.
Google makes it's money with advertising, so they are censoring to get advertising dollars from China.
Using your argument it's not evil to obey other countries laws. So by that reasoning it's not Immoral to sell limb choppers to the middle east. And it's not immoral to provide information on uranium enrichment to Iran. And it's not immoral to provide other countries with software to optimize the processing and torture of prisoners and information systems to track people toviolate human rights.
Would it be evil for Google to flag personal IP's for illegal search words so the Chinese police can arrest people? They would just be obeying the local laws right?
I don't think your seeing the big picture here. Any kind of data filtration or modification of the information on the internet is evil. That's leading us down a road where unpopular ideas like democracy and freedom are censored across the board. That is leading us to thought crime and covert monitoring of citizens.
If companies like Microsoft and google are helping the Chinese government keep their people in the dark and censoring the information they can view then that isn't just bad news for China. that is bad news for freedom and democracy and it will come back to haunt us.
Sure. I am all for 100% pay TV. Because people won't pay for television that sucks. They can try and cram another reality show down our throats but if we have to pay to play and nobody is interested in more recycled reality crap then we don't have to put up with it, they won't make any money, and less crap will get made.
While at the same time advertisers are left without a method for getting their products to the masses. So they can develop a system for paying people to look at ads. I hate commercials, ads, banner ads, pop ups etc. I hate them enough that if I see the same commercial over and over I just turn the TV off, regardless of what I was watching. So if commercials and advertising are going to be intrusive and annoying I should get paid for having to put up with them.
The money I make from putting up with advertising bullshit will help ofset the cost of paying for television. With the added benefits that I get paid evertime I'm inconvenienced by an add, and that I won't have to be subjected to crappy television shows since I won't pay for them.
Imagine having the power to remove the traumitizing memories of bad movies. I would pay for that service.
I'd pay $5 to not remember Showgirls. Another $10 to remove the Blair Witch project forever from my cerebral cortex.
But on the flip side it might also be cool to watch Star Wars again like it was a new movie.
Microsoft has recently announced a fix to the lockup problem on the Xbox 360. The new Controler-KY will contain CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys. No software fixes are planned as the work around seems to do the job, at the cost of starting over. But it's more cost effective.
(this is a joke if you didn't already realise that)
Mike
Will the new San Francisco gun laws change show?
on
Ask The Mythbusters
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
San Francisco recently put a ban on hanguns in the city limit. People are not allowed to own, possess, manufacture or sell firearms within the city anymore.
Several episodes involve busting firearms myths. How will this new law affect the show?
Michael Scott
Plano, TX
comparing electric hydrogen production from water, to lighting a match shows how little you RTFM about physics. Your comparison has nothing to do with the article. The energy in the match already exists as potential energy. The potential energy of water is next to nothing. You can't light water on fire with a match.
The law of conservation of energy says that you will never get more energy out of a reaction than you put into it. This is a basic law of physics that prevents such bullshit as perpetual motion machines, and generators that make more power than they consume.
Look I'll spell it out real simple like
In order to create hydrogen from water they have to split the water molecules with electricity. This puts a higher load on the alternator which makes the engine burn more fuel. The hydrogen you get out of this reaction will never equal or provide more energy than the energy it took to create the hydrogen in the first place.
Secondly simply adding more fuel to an engine will not make it more powerfull or more give better gas mileage. Fuel needs air to burn. You add combustible gas to a cars intake in any meaningful amount and you have to add more air to burn it as well. Otherwise the engine will run too rich and stall. So by sending small amounts of hydrogen into the engine they are effectively richening the fuel mixture a little but there is also no gain in horsepower. Any meaningfull amounts of hydrogen would stall the motor unless they also forced air in like a forced induction kit.
This is no different than those stickers that claim to increase battery life if put on laptop batteries or those little cell phone antenna boosters. it's bogus science.
Argue all you want but it is a scientific law that you don't get more energy out of a reaction than you put into it. You don't even get close to breaking even. Nothing is 100% efficient. If it takes 15 watts of energy tocreat hydrogen then you will never get 15 watts of energy back from burning that hydrogen, you will get far less. This is a LAW of nature.
yeah, Jack Johnson ripping off A Modest Proposal makes about as much sense as Abbey Hoffman ripping off a Nixon speech.
Who would have ever thought an ambulence chaser like Thompson would try (and fail) to use yippie tactics like that.
I won't be renewing my subscription to rolling stone. Because over half of the bulk of the magazine is meaningless fashion adverts filled with frolicking teens still framed in the act of being cool.
Cigarette and car adverts, basicly everything that has nothing to do with music, which is why I buy rolling stone.
The last issue had 11 pages of ads at the begining of the magazine before you even hit the table of contents. More 2 page ads than two page articles.
I don't watch television because of the repeated advertisements over and over playing the same shit, the same annoying voice, the same 5yr olds kids reading the script written by a 50yr old who doesn't even remember being 5yrs old. I can't stomach the ads anymore. When I do watch TV like LOST I mute the ads because I find it far less distastefull to see them without the music and the sales pitch. I see them for what they are, carefully crafted bullshit.
I stopped watching the discovery channel for 5 months because of the goddamn "meet bob" commercials. They play them over and over and while many people just grin and bear it, I've had enough.
Yes I filter ads on the internet and I will continue to do so. I'll filter them at my fucking router if I have to. I will not subject myself to annoying, distracting, distatefull, ads that have nothing to do with the place serving them. So take that running monkey, catch him, win the million dollars and then shove him right up your pie hole.
I own a Lexar Jump Drive secure in both 256 and 1GB sizes and these are almost 2 different products.
The 256MB model has a very robust plastic resin case. The 1GB has a cheaper plastic and the plastic is painted. This means after 6 months on my keychain it is a featureless plastic blob with no identifying marks and faint traces of paint.
The 256MB model had an easier to use and more robust encryption program. The way it works is you execute a program that comes on the keychain (mac or PC) and it installs an easy to use, non TSR program to allow you to partition a secure partition in whatever size you want, and to access the secure partition after insertion. It is a single.exe that is run and doesn't require you to install any drivers or programs that have to run all the time. You run it, you finish, you close it. Easy.
The 1GB model has a completely different security program that requires installation and it keeps a driver running in the background at all times. Not convenient. I also gave up trying to use the software as it was so bug ridden it proved completly unuseable. It won't work through a hub for one thing, and for another I got a different error on every computer I tried to use the software on. Using it without encryption though it works fine.
The 256 is a great deal, works great, and I couldn't ask for anything more from a thumb drive. I carry all my credit card info, phone numbers, and passwords on it in a locked partition. The best part is, that since it's a hardware encryption, you can't crack it without disassembling and modifying the hardware.
New CD is purchased. Store gets their cut, recording company and artist get their cuts.
Used CD is purchased. Store gets their cut.
If you want a legal way to buy music without dumping more $$ into the greedy hands of the recording corporations then buy used music. They make an initial profit on the disk when it's new. But every time it is re-sold it's denying them a sale and dammit that feels good.
If other countries don't like the US being the role of administrator then they are welcome to start their own networks. See if the people will prefer them or the internet.
The US government created and funded darpanet and then opened the technology to universities and people all over the world in a gesture of good will. He who pays the bills calls the shots. We created the internet and we have the right to control the DNS servers.
Don't like it, make your own.
Slashdot Mirror
I found the test to be pretty easy, having a musical ear and listening to a lot of mandarin. I think people who speak tone based languages like Mandarin and Cantonese are at an advantage for this test.
Anyway, I scored 30ms and the lowest they showed on their site was 34 for my age group. I'm curious how others did.
My friend tried it and he couldn't tell the difference between the up note and the down though so if your tone deaf the test won't work.
Yes they are but that will still require a managed wifi network. The original poster has a dream of free phone calls on a mobile via wifi and that's not going to happen the way he pictures it.
I haven't read up much on wimax but the handover will probably be provisioned on the network side which means that you can hand over from one access point to another within the same network but most of the access points are different people in different networks so its not like you can drive through the city handing off between a TMO wifi and other networks.
It's more like, say you have a large college campus, you will be able to roam within that network without ever dropping connection but you wouldn't be able to roam onto another network that seemlessly.
That's why cell providers are giving you a service, they do all the handoffs and provisioning to make their network seemless to you and your mobile, that's what your paying for.
It's true that Tmobile doesn't use the Nortel GGSN in North America (I think they went with Nokia or something) but in most of the markets the core network is Nortel, especially on the radio side.
Several carriers are using Nortel equipment to build out their GPRS and EDGE networks as well.
Most of the standards are compatible so you can have a variety of equipment on a site. But there are thousands of "core" networks in the US built on Nortel systems.
It's true that the market conditions in Europe and the US result in different focus on the network elements, but the systems are fundamentally the same.
A lot of it has to do with different regulatory requirements between the EU and the FCC.
In any case both are way behind South Korea and Japan when it comes to the latest technology and products. This is more of a cultural difference than a monetary one. People are slow to adopt new technology in the west.
In order for your calls to move around un-interrupted you need to be able to hand over to adjacent cells.
GSM has something called a VLR or Vistor Location Registry which keeps track of which radio cell you are on. And the radio equipment like the BTS, BSC, etc make constant calculations on your signal strength. As you reach the edge of a cell the system automaticly hands you over to the next cell without dropping your call. Sometimes it hands you over from one radio to another within a cell.
This has to be done because each cell is only a few square miles.
Wifi and other wireless network data services do not support handover functionality. You need a VLR and radio equipment that can handle the cell handovers and a master device like an MSC to handle and keep track of it all.
you could do like a skype WIFI type deal but you would have to manually reconnect every time you moved to a different radio, dropping your call and having to start over again.
A managed GSM network handles all of this for you in the background.
Then you have the really advanced stuff like CDMA2000 where your not only hopping radios but hopping frequencies as well. Mobile infrastructures are a lot more complicated than you might believe.
I feel your pain. I'm in at $18 and I know guys who are still in at $40.
There are existing HLR/VLR profiles for a IMSI to support various data services. It sounds like they are tieing WIFI into that and using the information provided by the non Nortel vendor to coordinate priority and handover.
Pretty interesting stuff if you ask me.
Not if they are being fined as well. I'm saying to fine the one who hires the spammers while ALSO fining the spammers. When they arrest a hitman they arrest the person who hired them too. The only way to cut spam is to break the money train.
We should go after the spammers but ultimately, people don't spam for fun. They spam for profit.
So why not go after the companies who are advertised in the spam? Make it un-profitable for them to use spammers for advertising by fining them. Do that enough and make the penalties steep enough and they will stop paying the spammers, and the flow of spam will stop.
If a company paid criminals money to spraypaint their advertisments on buildings and on peoples homes and cars then that company would be held as responsible as the person with the paint can (Sony PSP).
It should be the same for spammers and the people that hire them.
I was trying to think of why they would bother making a car that could steer itself, yet required your hands on the wheel every 10 seconds. And it occurred to me it's not for people to take naps at the wheel. It's for people who have trouble staying in their lanes. And who has trouble staying in their lanes? Old people, people with bad eyesight, and drunks.
So if you've tipped back one to many and have to drive yourself home, instead of weaving all over your lane and announcing to the world your drunk, you turn on the steering assist and let the car make you look good.
If your not weaving all over the road you could knock back more than your share at the local watering hole and not worry about attracing the attention of the police.
Now here is what I'm wondering. If you do manage to get pulled over and the cop smells your breath, who was driving the car? You or the computer? I can easily imagine a situation where someone fights a DUI by saying they were not driving it, the car was.
Or we could look at the flip side of that. A normal driver, who for whatever reason, has the system engaged and the lane markers are incorrect and the car causes an accident. You have all seen it, they are doing road construction on the highway and have you detour across several lanes but the painted lines keep going straight. Even a normal person has a little confusion about which lane they should be in during these abrupt detours. Imagine how it would mess with the AI of the car.
In any case am I crazy to think that these cars are going to be loved by heavy drinkers?
The problem is that people are drawn towards religious experiences. By that I mean they need to feel a part of something larger than themselves and to feel something other worldly.
You have your snake dancing, speaking in tongues, christians. You have your deep meditation new age stuff. You have you catholic communion. People subconsciously crave that kind of thing in their life and they will kid themselves to get it.
Athiesm doesn't have a lot to offer in those regards. Neither does agnosticism. But people want rituals and to feel spiritual so they have to find something to do. That is one of the reasons people can be their own hypocrites.
For instance I'm sure that somewhere out there are people who don't believe in god or heaven, but believe in ghosts. Or people who believe in karma but don't believe there is an order to the world. Once you cut out god from your life you get to cut a lot of other crap out as well.
You see it's one thing to consider the possibility that all religion could be a fraud. And it's another to feel it in your guts. And I think athiests feel it and are offended by it at some primal level.
And another thing. People ask that without religion, where do people get their morals? They have this big fearful image of the end of the world in total anarchy because people have no morals. I don't think the two go hand in hand. I know a lot of athiests who are very mormal people. And I know some christians that are assholes to everybody and prey for forgivness.
You know when your doing something wrong, you might try to kid yourself but you feel it. That's a good place to start. From there, philosophy has been asking questions like this since people could talk. And I think philosophy has a lot more knowledge and a lot less CRAP than the bible.
Now here is a real twit. Here we have christian argument against science number 5. The "Science has been wrong before" arugment. You see, in religion, if one thing is wrong the entire thing falls apart. So they think the same thing about science. They think that if they can prove science was wrong about something that science must be wrong about everything. In a world without microscopes, when most "scientists" were merely curious scholars trying to turn lead into gold, there were ideas that flies came from rotten meat. If you go back even further, back to the greeks, there were those that thought that fire was made up of sharp particles that would cut you and that was why it hurt to touch it. They also used to think that the world was flat. And that the earth was the center of the universe. Now here is the difference between religion and science. People didn't accept that flies came from meat, that the world was flat and the center of the universe, on faith. They critically considered it. And when science moved forward and provided a telescope and a microscope they could finally see what was really happening. And people like Gallileo were critical of these old ideas and said that the earth was not the center of the universe. And the church labeled them a heritec because it went against the christian idea of the earth being the center of gods universe. We also found out later that the earth was not flat. And a series of experiments proved that covered meat did not get maggots. And so the idea of spontaneous generation was found to be false. Yet every time science took a step forward, religion balked at the notion. You see, twit, when you take things on faith alone, nothing ever progresses. Because your mind shuts down and you don't wonder about why things are. You just keep your head down and keep trying not to go to hell. Science is constantly critical of itself. And that is why bad ideas like the earth is flat, or there is a god, get rejected because they are proven false and the work is reviewed by other scientists who try to reproduce the experiment. This twit comes off sound like he knows so much about science. Yet the knowledge he so brazenly throws around trying to sound like he knows anything, was not won easily. It's one thing to learn about this stuff in school and think back to these absurd ideas and think about how stupid they were. But if christians had their way the only book we would be reading in school is the bible. And all of this knowledge would be lost. In teaching ID or creationism in schools it is a step BACKWARDS for us and all of mankind. Survival of the fitest is not a 'guess'. It is a fact of life. If you don't survive, you don't reproduce. That is a LAW of nature not a theory. If you start trying to teach that everything can be explained by god, then you might as well start teaching that the earth is the center of the universe and that flies erupt from rotten meat spontaneously. Like this twit is going on about like he discovered it.
Agnostics are halfies. They have one foot in the door, one foot out the door. They are "There is a god but I don't know who it is". At least people in organized religion take a stance and say my god could kick your gods ass.
Granted, agnosticism is more open minded to the unimaginable possibilities in the universe. But to me it's just the limbo between jesus freak and athiest.
But back to the original subject, I don't think religion and science are compatible.
Science asks you to make observations on things that can be proven, and the results reproduced by independant parties. It uses logical and critical thinking to show only what can be proven, while rejecting ideas with no merit or proof.
Religion asks you to ignore logic and go on faith. It spins a story that is meant to suck you in. Yet if you criticaly consider it your branded blasphemous. Your told to take it all on faith because there is no proof that god exists. Because god doesn't interfere with mortals.
So lets do a thought experiment.
Let say that there is a room at the center of the earth. And in this room there is an alien with a machine that could control any person in the world. But this alien has been given a set of rules. He can't interfere with peoples workings. He can't reveal his presence to the world. And he can't leave the room. Lets also assume that this room was un-detectable to our current technology.
Now this alien could be down there right now, listening to all of our thoughts on it's machine. In fact you could say he's right under our noses. He has been watching us and collecting informatin on us since the beginining of time. We can't see him but he's there. We can't detect him with science, but he's there. And he won't willingly reveal himself to us. Just because it's a fantastic idea doesn't mean that it can't be true right? I mean for all we know there really is a little alien in a room at the center of the earth. But since we can't prove it we have to have faith that their either is or isn't one right?
Well if he can't affect any change in the world, and we can't detect that he's there, the big question is why does it matter? If there is a god and he's all knowing and allmighty, yet he won't interfere with us, and no where we have looked in the universe has shown him to exist, and physics itself shows that he couldn't exist, then does it really matter if you believe or not? In the greater scheme of things it doesn't matter if god exists or not, the same way it doesn't really matter if that alien exists because either way we are unchanged. But what does matter is that people use it as an excuse to act like assholes to one another, kill one another, and subjigate one another.
It matters that people would be willing to go to war to defend something that we don't know exists, that even if it existed does not interfere with us, and that is unable to co-exists with others ideas. It's almost as if religion were designed to keep us in a continuous state of war with the other people on this planet.
And it makes me so sad to see this stuff still going on. Muslims killing Hindus and Christians. Christians killing Muslims. Buddhists killing Hindus. IT's all just a bunch of people under delusions, killing each other to try to prove that their delusions are real.
I said before that intelligent people believe in god too. Well intelligent people also commit murder. And abuse others, and go to prison, and do a bunch of other things that are wrong as well. So just because someone is an intelligent christian, doesn't mean they are enlightened or right. They are still basing their moral decisions on something that doesn't exist, and that demands blood of those that don't believe. It's an abomination.
I put line breaks in while I'm typing it and slashdot takes em out. I had hoped that I would get less twits with nothing to say and a hard on for line breaks.
Religion is the wool pulled over our eyes. Some people find that comforting and I don't fault them their beliefs. But if you were to ask me if someone with wool over their eyes can see clearly I will say no they can't. There are many brilliant people who believe in god and an afterlife. People smarter than you or I. I would not consider them to be stupid or inferior. However I would consider their belief to be illogical and irrational given the breadth of scientific knowledge and enlightenment. Athiests look at creationists the same way as you would look at an adult who still believed in the easter bunny or believed that baby's come from storks. We usually feel a little sorry for them but we can be accomidating and let them believe what they want. However if they try to start teaching those absurd ideas in a classroom in a public school we draw issue with that. To me, trying to teach ID in a science classroom is not any different from trying to teach that babies come from storks in a health or parenting class. I'm an athiest and I think I would have been one sooner had I not been afraid. It's like turning the breaker off in your house and then sticking a key into an electrical socket. Yes you know the power is off, but what if? Your told that there is a god when your a kid and that you will go to hell if you don't follow him. You grow up and don't see any evidence of god in the world. You can use logic to understand that there can't be a god. But that nagging "what if" makes you hesitate to be blasphemous because if your wrong your going to hell. Some people never get past this point and they either swing back to full blown religion, or else they stay halfway and become agnostic. They don't believe in any particular religion but won't deny the existence of a supreme being "just in case". Initially being an athiest is scary. When you die your dead, no after life. There are no miracles. There is no order or meaning to the universe. When bad things happen its random and meaningless. You have nothingto fall back on. No crutch to shield your fragile person from the harsh realities of existence. But at the same time the enlightenment is completely worth it. It's like Socrates story of a man living in a cave being too afraid to go outside where there is no roof, only the empty blackness of the sky. The entire universe of wonder could be going on outside his cave and he would never know because he is too afraid to change his world. I find it hard to trust people under a relgious influence to make rational decisions because they sometimes do things that are irrational, but in the name of a god. Like Bush talking about his crusade or that god wanted him to go to Iraq. That scares the crap out of me. What if god told him that freedom was an illusion and that the only path to freedom lay in faith. What if he made non christians 2nd class citizens. It worries me that Texas has a constitution that says no godless person can hold political office. Religion does not give way to logic. It is an irrational and illogical device that is used to control people. So in some ways, people who are religious or believe in god, are for lack of a better word, stupid.
Google should let the Chinese government handle their own censorship. Censoring results at their server is a tacit endorsement for censorship. period. Google makes it's money with advertising, so they are censoring to get advertising dollars from China. Using your argument it's not evil to obey other countries laws. So by that reasoning it's not Immoral to sell limb choppers to the middle east. And it's not immoral to provide information on uranium enrichment to Iran. And it's not immoral to provide other countries with software to optimize the processing and torture of prisoners and information systems to track people toviolate human rights. Would it be evil for Google to flag personal IP's for illegal search words so the Chinese police can arrest people? They would just be obeying the local laws right? I don't think your seeing the big picture here. Any kind of data filtration or modification of the information on the internet is evil. That's leading us down a road where unpopular ideas like democracy and freedom are censored across the board. That is leading us to thought crime and covert monitoring of citizens. If companies like Microsoft and google are helping the Chinese government keep their people in the dark and censoring the information they can view then that isn't just bad news for China. that is bad news for freedom and democracy and it will come back to haunt us.
Sure. I am all for 100% pay TV. Because people won't pay for television that sucks. They can try and cram another reality show down our throats but if we have to pay to play and nobody is interested in more recycled reality crap then we don't have to put up with it, they won't make any money, and less crap will get made. While at the same time advertisers are left without a method for getting their products to the masses. So they can develop a system for paying people to look at ads. I hate commercials, ads, banner ads, pop ups etc. I hate them enough that if I see the same commercial over and over I just turn the TV off, regardless of what I was watching. So if commercials and advertising are going to be intrusive and annoying I should get paid for having to put up with them. The money I make from putting up with advertising bullshit will help ofset the cost of paying for television. With the added benefits that I get paid evertime I'm inconvenienced by an add, and that I won't have to be subjected to crappy television shows since I won't pay for them.
Imagine having the power to remove the traumitizing memories of bad movies. I would pay for that service. I'd pay $5 to not remember Showgirls. Another $10 to remove the Blair Witch project forever from my cerebral cortex. But on the flip side it might also be cool to watch Star Wars again like it was a new movie.
Microsoft has recently announced a fix to the lockup problem on the Xbox 360. The new Controler-KY will contain CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys. No software fixes are planned as the work around seems to do the job, at the cost of starting over. But it's more cost effective. (this is a joke if you didn't already realise that) Mike
San Francisco recently put a ban on hanguns in the city limit. People are not allowed to own, possess, manufacture or sell firearms within the city anymore. Several episodes involve busting firearms myths. How will this new law affect the show? Michael Scott Plano, TX
comparing electric hydrogen production from water, to lighting a match shows how little you RTFM about physics. Your comparison has nothing to do with the article. The energy in the match already exists as potential energy. The potential energy of water is next to nothing. You can't light water on fire with a match. The law of conservation of energy says that you will never get more energy out of a reaction than you put into it. This is a basic law of physics that prevents such bullshit as perpetual motion machines, and generators that make more power than they consume. Look I'll spell it out real simple like In order to create hydrogen from water they have to split the water molecules with electricity. This puts a higher load on the alternator which makes the engine burn more fuel. The hydrogen you get out of this reaction will never equal or provide more energy than the energy it took to create the hydrogen in the first place. Secondly simply adding more fuel to an engine will not make it more powerfull or more give better gas mileage. Fuel needs air to burn. You add combustible gas to a cars intake in any meaningful amount and you have to add more air to burn it as well. Otherwise the engine will run too rich and stall. So by sending small amounts of hydrogen into the engine they are effectively richening the fuel mixture a little but there is also no gain in horsepower. Any meaningfull amounts of hydrogen would stall the motor unless they also forced air in like a forced induction kit. This is no different than those stickers that claim to increase battery life if put on laptop batteries or those little cell phone antenna boosters. it's bogus science. Argue all you want but it is a scientific law that you don't get more energy out of a reaction than you put into it. You don't even get close to breaking even. Nothing is 100% efficient. If it takes 15 watts of energy tocreat hydrogen then you will never get 15 watts of energy back from burning that hydrogen, you will get far less. This is a LAW of nature.
yeah, Jack Johnson ripping off A Modest Proposal makes about as much sense as Abbey Hoffman ripping off a Nixon speech. Who would have ever thought an ambulence chaser like Thompson would try (and fail) to use yippie tactics like that.
I won't be renewing my subscription to rolling stone. Because over half of the bulk of the magazine is meaningless fashion adverts filled with frolicking teens still framed in the act of being cool. Cigarette and car adverts, basicly everything that has nothing to do with music, which is why I buy rolling stone. The last issue had 11 pages of ads at the begining of the magazine before you even hit the table of contents. More 2 page ads than two page articles. I don't watch television because of the repeated advertisements over and over playing the same shit, the same annoying voice, the same 5yr olds kids reading the script written by a 50yr old who doesn't even remember being 5yrs old. I can't stomach the ads anymore. When I do watch TV like LOST I mute the ads because I find it far less distastefull to see them without the music and the sales pitch. I see them for what they are, carefully crafted bullshit. I stopped watching the discovery channel for 5 months because of the goddamn "meet bob" commercials. They play them over and over and while many people just grin and bear it, I've had enough. Yes I filter ads on the internet and I will continue to do so. I'll filter them at my fucking router if I have to. I will not subject myself to annoying, distracting, distatefull, ads that have nothing to do with the place serving them. So take that running monkey, catch him, win the million dollars and then shove him right up your pie hole.
I own a Lexar Jump Drive secure in both 256 and 1GB sizes and these are almost 2 different products. The 256MB model has a very robust plastic resin case. The 1GB has a cheaper plastic and the plastic is painted. This means after 6 months on my keychain it is a featureless plastic blob with no identifying marks and faint traces of paint. The 256MB model had an easier to use and more robust encryption program. The way it works is you execute a program that comes on the keychain (mac or PC) and it installs an easy to use, non TSR program to allow you to partition a secure partition in whatever size you want, and to access the secure partition after insertion. It is a single .exe that is run and doesn't require you to install any drivers or programs that have to run all the time. You run it, you finish, you close it. Easy.
The 1GB model has a completely different security program that requires installation and it keeps a driver running in the background at all times. Not convenient. I also gave up trying to use the software as it was so bug ridden it proved completly unuseable. It won't work through a hub for one thing, and for another I got a different error on every computer I tried to use the software on. Using it without encryption though it works fine.
The 256 is a great deal, works great, and I couldn't ask for anything more from a thumb drive. I carry all my credit card info, phone numbers, and passwords on it in a locked partition. The best part is, that since it's a hardware encryption, you can't crack it without disassembling and modifying the hardware.
New CD is purchased. Store gets their cut, recording company and artist get their cuts. Used CD is purchased. Store gets their cut. If you want a legal way to buy music without dumping more $$ into the greedy hands of the recording corporations then buy used music. They make an initial profit on the disk when it's new. But every time it is re-sold it's denying them a sale and dammit that feels good.
If other countries don't like the US being the role of administrator then they are welcome to start their own networks. See if the people will prefer them or the internet. The US government created and funded darpanet and then opened the technology to universities and people all over the world in a gesture of good will. He who pays the bills calls the shots. We created the internet and we have the right to control the DNS servers. Don't like it, make your own.