There is a wide variety of documented evidence that fits in a larger web of evidence.
If you can't read the record and accept documented evidence then I couldn't prove the ocean was made of water by throwing you in it.
In the area of artwork: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_art The oldest surviving art forms include small sculptures and paintings on rocks and in caves. There are very few known examples of art that date earlier than 40,000 years ago,
Weapons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon Some of the earliest evidence for arrows are from ca. 20,000 BC in the Levant (the so-called 'Geometric Kebaran' period), made with several very small sharp pieces of stone embedded in an arrowshaft.
Buildings: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/662794.stm "It does sound important," says Chris Stringer, head of the human origins group at London's Natural History Museum. "If this is correctly dated and correctly interpreted, it is the first good evidence from 500,000 years ago of a hut structure made by these people."
Before the discovery, the oldest remains of a structure were those at Terra Amata in France, from around 200,000 to 400,000 years ago.
Genetics: DNA analysis traced human ancestry back to an African "Eve," setting off debate about how modern humans evolved. While there was general agreement that Homo erectus dispersed from Africa across Asia between 1 and 2 million years ago, what happened next remained a question. The "out-of-Africa" hypothesis contended that modern humans developed in Africa and migrated from there recently, driving H. erectus into extinction. Proponents of a "multiregional" hypothesis held that H. erectus populations evolved into modern humans in many regions, and that these groups later bred with each other and with groups that emigrated from Africa. The Eve study examined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed only by mothers to their offspring. The researchers, Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and the late Allan Wilson, estimated that the ancestor of all surviving mt DNA types lived between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago. When did the migrations from Africa take place? They dated the oldest cluster of mtDNA types with no modern African representation to between 90,000 and 180,000 years ago. These populations might have left Africa at about that time, but the mtDNA data could not determine exactly when.
Tools: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/01 14_040114_siberianhumans.html Russian researchers have found a wealth of hunting tools, which date back 31,000 years, along central Siberia's Yana River. The artifacts include hundreds of stone tools and flakes, as well as spear foreshafts made of rhinoceros horn and mammoth tusk.
Each of these pieces of evidence taken individually falsifies the assertion that it is true that man has only existed for 10,000 years. There are hundreds, thousands, likely tens of thousands (more!) of pieces of evidence like this.
---
Either god is evil or twisted and wants us to ignore the actual evidence we see and believe some old books in preference over hard evidence or god is going to accept that we don't believe old books that are clearly wrong or there is no god anyway.
I'm well familiar with Ben Franklin- I wrote a major paper on him.
I don't think you are considering how much the world and ground rules have changed since the constitution was written.
In Franklin's day, it was *very* small. It was really hard to move around. The law might not know your identity, but they knew who you were except in perhaps three or four major cities. If they didn't like you, you'd get run out of town or worse. It was very hard to commit a really big crime and it was very easy for people to know who did what to whom. Movement was slow- roughly 20 miles a day. If you committed a crime, records were terrible and it was fairly easy to start over by leaving the general area.
I know the government is the biggest threat to our security and that the 2nd amendment is there to protect us from the government. I know governments almost always descend into tyranny.
I think you are trying to hold our government to 1700's rules while dealing with 21st century terrorists. I think your path leads to a place where it is *more* likely that we will slam into fascism.
I recognize that the US does bad things. You don't seem to recognize that on the scale of badness there are many people in this world that make them look like boy scouts. That *most* governments in the last 300 years have done many repugnant acts. That's not why we have suicide bombers. Suicide bombers are some new meme that involves brainwashing 4 year olds to be living bombs when they grow up. Unless we address that basic teaching we could be the nicest people in the world and they would still walk in and kill us.
In this world of computers, secret communications, knowledge of how to kill thousands of people easily, and the ability to move hundreds of miles in a few hours, I feel we are unreasonably tying their hands. I recognize the downsides of correct id's. It's really hard to start over if you ever make a mistake. Social rules haven't caught up yet. We are coming to realize that *most* people commit some kind of crime and *most* witnesses don't have a very good memory of crimes they observed and *many* prosecution attorney's are willing to convict people they know to be innocent. We have to make a more reasonable system to fit our new record keeping abilities.
But preventing the government from being able to perform basic law enforcement duties is not the correct path. We need to focus them to be more accurate and we need our society to be more forgiving of people who commit stupid crimes.
And a small group of people but still numbering in the millions wants to kill us- mainly because we make them feel bad because they are so backwards but partially because they are educated from birth that we are "monkeys" and not human. At 4 years old they are pledging to commit suicide killing us. At 5 years old almost a decade ago, they were cheering in the streets when we died.
Unfortunately, it is increasingly easy for even 1 or 2 loonies to kill hundreds of people and it won't be very long before they could easily kill thousands or even more.
Now we can get realistic and get a good grip on who is here and keep random people from walking in any border or we can wait until they hurt us badly (say goodbye to say 10 to 20 thousand -- heck even a hundred thousand citizens) and at that point we are going to repeat dresden, hiroshima and worse and kill every one of them in the country- become extremely fascist for another 20 to 30 years and give new meaning to the term genocide in other countries around the world.
If a person has a burned hand then there will clearly be alternate methods of identifying who they are. Dental records, footprints and ultimately dna samples. Again- the problem is that in an age where even a 16 year old can kill 10 to 20 people, you really don't want people sworn to killing you so they will go to heaven wandering around unsupervised.
The best thing we can do is to get off of oil asap and stop giving them money to buy things to kill us with and stop giving them money to buy things to keep suppressing their own people and pushing murderous religions.
They are *teaching* their children things that makes a war to the death pretty much inevitable.
Yes, I'm all aware of minor anti-immigrant problems in the past- but the chinese and the irish were not sneaking in with both the knowledge and a desire to kill as many americans as they possibly could.
I think your attitude is extremely ignorant and I bet when we do have the next 9/11 you are going to be of the first idiots shouting for bloody vengence. Best to build a good fence now so we don't get pushed into behavior that we will regret in 50 to 60 years.
As a well respected follower of the copernican of the universe, I KNOW that the earth is the center of the universe and everything else rotates around it. That's the way god created it.
I simply ask that you respect my ability to believe as I choose and not present all of these astronomy "theories" as facts in astronomy classes since they contradict the facts of my belief.
I know we are not that common today but at one point, most christians believed this way so I'm sure eventually they'll see through the lies of all these "scientists" who claim to have evidence to the contrary.
No. Evolutionists do not believe it started randomly.
They have seen evidence of natural selection.
They have fossil records that coordinate with geologic and other records showing a lack of human fossils fairly recently in history. Predictions made based on plate theory and other models of historical geology have been tested successfully.
The fossil record shows various waves of complex creatures but once you get back far enough, the creatures become simpler and more primitive.
Natural selection provides a reasonable explanation for how creatures can change from a mouse type creature to an elephant type creature in only about 10,000 years. We have observed new species to come into existence in our life time. We have strong evidence from dna that humans had severe pinch points in the very recent past and that we only existed as a species for a couple million years at most.
However-- evolution theory says NOTHING about the start. Basically it only says that creatures who reproduce more have more children and so their children eventually become the population. Given random mutations which have no affect in reproductive fitness, the random mutations will be carried. Given random mutations that lower reproductive fitness, they will disappear (at a speed relative to how harmful they are). Given beneficial mutations that increase reproductive fitness, those creatures with those mutations will rapidly come to dominate a population.
Looking at the record the best you can say is "it's likely that creatures were very simple before the earliest hard records.
However- it directly confronts religious text since it pretty much says man did not exist and "near men" did exist in pre-religious times. Just like a religion that says the earth is the center of the universe is provably WRONG, any religion that seriously says man only existed for under the last 10,000 years is provably wrong.
Now, with regard to your points.
* Microsoft was among the first major, mainstream software publishers to charge paying customers for technical support on legally-owned Microsoft products. At best they could only afford to offer support for a limited time. If they are selling you an OS for $90 and you take more than three hours of tech support *ever* you just wiped out their GROSS profits- much less their net profits. I do not mind paying for technical support because a) I know what it costs and b) as a paying customer, the one time I called for support and agreed to pay the $35 extra charge for extended service they literally spent 5 hours and ended up with about 7 people on the line and they IDENTIFIED the problem-- all over the phone. (My Sonyx? sound card didn't have a current driver.. and never would again -> so I went to creative live)
* Microsoft was one of the first major, mainstream software companies to increase upgrade fees from what was a standard 20% of the original software price to what is now 50%, if you are allowed to upgrade at all. I can sort of see your beef here. OTH, software doesn't write it self. Human beings who need to eat do. However, given their immense warchest, I think I agree with you that it was greedy abuse of their now captive audience. OTH, I can get both the OS and the major applications for under $50 ($20 for office) since I work for a major customer.
* Microsoft was the first major, mainstream software company to deny upgrades to customers who don't pre-pay the 50% upgrade fee up-front when the original software purchase is made, with no refund if an upgrade isn't released within two years. That was really cheesy on their part. Good point.
* Microsoft bemoans the cost of software piracy, but each time Microsoft has implemented technology to reduce piracy, it has doubled the price of the better protected software. Well, yes and no. I can buy a nice computer for $299 that has windows XP home on it. It would cost me about $275 to scratchbuild so that's about $24 for the OS. I can buy a nice computer for about $399 that I can upgrade inexpensively to a smokin hot game machine. The case, memory, hard drive, monitor, etc would cost me about $330 so that's $69 for the OS max. (Side point: These price structures reveal that Microsoft hates scratch builders but gives OEM builders a very sweet deal).
* Microsoft adds features to its software that puts competitors out of business, then removes those features and sells them as add-ons or upgraded versions. Very true. They also then ignore those features and let them go stale.
* Microsoft talks reduced enterprise TCO benefits on the one hand while making each new release significantly more difficult to deploy, maintain and support. I think you could save time and just say "Microsoft lies... a lot.. every chance they get. they prevaricate, they stretch the truth, they tell little white fibs, heck big black fibs, LIARS! BIG NASTY LIARS"
* Microsoft claims that it's not predatory or monopolistic, while using its overwhelmingly dominant position in the OS market to drive out competitors to its application and development tools marketplaces. See prior point above. Microsoft LIES. A LOT. EVERY CHANCE THEY GET. They ENJOY the look on everyone's face when everyone just realizes that once again microsoft got some STUPID company to sign a technology sharing agreement with them and then they stole every thing from the company and left it to rot.
* And yes, Embrace, Extend and Exterminate. Yes... if they didn't invent this- they mastered it.
Hell right now we could get most of that with your SSN, a picture of you, and a thumbprint stored centrally that had to be verified against.
The problem is not the id card. The problem is that soon after it comes in, it will be used for a lot of uses we never thought of. Ministers will be provably caught with gay or straight hookers, We'll know Ms Straight and Narrow down the corner buys leather whips and cuffs, We'll know john has a drug problem and that suzy buys a lot of booze.
As long as we have cash or some way to anonymize our credit (Xrost, etc) it's not such a big issue.
But they will be able to track where you are/go/etc.
HOWEVER
Weighed against that is the fact that we will never be able to secure our borders unless we have a national ID. And the risks of having non-citizens here are growing. When the likelyhood strangers will kill a couple million of us grows high enough-- we'll either give up the kinky sex or just say "to hell with it- I like kinky sex".
As MOST of us give up our secret's we will either become a straightlaced nation of prudes or we will become fairly jaded. But at least the illusions and lies will be reduced.
My god man-- think of any product in the world that you could make a 100% profit on-- people would be lining up until that dropped to a more reasonable 7 to 10% profit experienced by real businesses.
It's a completely artificial market. It should be trivial to buy those same products here, ship them there for 12 bucks via fedex, and then sell them at a huge profit.
Why should the europeans pay *double* the price for the same thing when they have to compete against us to sell airplanes?
Right now businesses are taking advantage of cheap labor but part of the reason expensive labor is costly is a cost of living based on artificially high prices.
A fair value is probably somewhere under 40 cents.
They sell these same songs and movies in other countries (on CD and DVD) for a lot less. You are competing for work with people who are paying $2 for a CD and $2.50 for a DVD. Why should they get a cheaper prices than you? Why should you pay higher prices than them?
These are artificial prices. In a real capitalistic environment, whatever the lowest price in the world is- that's what you should pay.
I think he's saying that he feels that morally he has paid the entertainment industry tax and so he feels justified in obtaining the shows by any method even if those methods are illegal.
We had that in texas back in the 80's. it was nasty. lots of folks just walked away.
Let me warn them-- eventually those 70k mortgage that got forgiven is counted as INCOME and you owe TAXES on it. And you can't escape the taxes via bankruptcy.
So walking away is no longer an option- you need to officially file bankruptcy. With these 200k (300k?) mortgages you are talking about 60 to 100k in taxes worst case.
After seeing thousands (10's of thousands?) of private parts in every imaginable configuration- the only ones I'm interested are real ones of people interested in me.
I think the bush/gore and other elections point to a 51/49 split, not a 60/40 split as you suppose.
The republicans pulled out all the stops they could pull and there was huge turnout from their base and they still were only able to pull out a 50/50 squeeker over Al Gore- a man I really held my nose to vote for (I was voting against Bush- not for Gore).
I would say 10% scary right, 5% far right, 25% right, 20% center, 25% left, 5% far left and 10% scary left.
The 10% on both extremes are not electable but currently are required to win.
Most people who were going to buy itunes and fill an ipod have done so. Now they are at replacement levels of new customers filling ipods only.
Also- people do get better at finding cheaper ways to do things- I'm sure after initial itunes purchases, folks found ways to rip CD's, allofmp3, free musico offers, recording off xm or fm radio and other options.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a wide variety of documented evidence that fits in a larger web of evidence.
t at/
1 14_040114_siberianhumans.html
If you can't read the record and accept documented evidence then I couldn't prove the ocean was made of water by throwing you in it.
In the area of artwork:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_art
The oldest surviving art forms include small sculptures and paintings on rocks and in caves. There are very few known examples of art that date earlier than 40,000 years ago,
Weapons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon
Some of the earliest evidence for arrows are from ca. 20,000 BC in the Levant (the so-called 'Geometric Kebaran' period), made with several very small sharp pieces of stone embedded in an arrowshaft.
Buildings:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/662794.stm
"It does sound important," says Chris Stringer, head of the human origins group at London's Natural History Museum. "If this is correctly dated and correctly interpreted, it is the first good evidence from 500,000 years ago of a hut structure made by these people."
Before the discovery, the oldest remains of a structure were those at Terra Amata in France, from around 200,000 to 400,000 years ago.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/habi
Genetics:
DNA analysis traced human ancestry back to an African "Eve," setting off debate about how modern humans evolved. While there was general agreement that Homo erectus dispersed from Africa across Asia between 1 and 2 million years ago, what happened next remained a question. The "out-of-Africa" hypothesis contended that modern humans developed in Africa and migrated from there recently, driving H. erectus into extinction. Proponents of a "multiregional" hypothesis held that H. erectus populations evolved into modern humans in many regions, and that these groups later bred with each other and with groups that emigrated from Africa. The Eve study examined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed only by mothers to their offspring. The researchers, Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and the late Allan Wilson, estimated that the ancestor of all surviving mt DNA types lived between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago. When did the migrations from Africa take place? They dated the oldest cluster of mtDNA types with no modern African representation to between 90,000 and 180,000 years ago. These populations might have left Africa at about that time, but the mtDNA data could not determine exactly when.
Tools:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0
Russian researchers have found a wealth of hunting tools, which date back 31,000 years, along central Siberia's Yana River. The artifacts include hundreds of stone tools and flakes, as well as spear foreshafts made of rhinoceros horn and mammoth tusk.
Each of these pieces of evidence taken individually falsifies the assertion that it is true that man has only existed for 10,000 years.
There are hundreds, thousands, likely tens of thousands (more!) of pieces of evidence like this.
---
Either god is evil or twisted and wants us to ignore the actual evidence we see and believe some old books in preference over hard evidence or god is going to accept that we don't believe old books that are clearly wrong or there is no god anyway.
Yea I also have a touch of cherokee (like 1/32).
I'm well familiar with Ben Franklin- I wrote a major paper on him.
I don't think you are considering how much the world and ground rules have changed since the constitution was written.
In Franklin's day, it was *very* small. It was really hard to move around. The law might not know your identity, but they knew who you were except in perhaps three or four major cities. If they didn't like you, you'd get run out of town or worse. It was very hard to commit a really big crime and it was very easy for people to know who did what to whom. Movement was slow- roughly 20 miles a day. If you committed a crime, records were terrible and it was fairly easy to start over by leaving the general area.
I know the government is the biggest threat to our security and that the 2nd amendment is there to protect us from the government. I know governments almost always descend into tyranny.
I think you are trying to hold our government to 1700's rules while dealing with 21st century terrorists. I think your path leads to a place where it is *more* likely that we will slam into fascism.
I recognize that the US does bad things. You don't seem to recognize that on the scale of badness there are many people in this world that make them look like boy scouts. That *most* governments in the last 300 years have done many repugnant acts. That's not why we have suicide bombers. Suicide bombers are some new meme that involves brainwashing 4 year olds to be living bombs when they grow up. Unless we address that basic teaching we could be the nicest people in the world and they would still walk in and kill us.
In this world of computers, secret communications, knowledge of how to kill thousands of people easily, and the ability to move hundreds of miles in a few hours, I feel we are unreasonably tying their hands. I recognize the downsides of correct id's. It's really hard to start over if you ever make a mistake. Social rules haven't caught up yet. We are coming to realize that *most* people commit some kind of crime and *most* witnesses don't have a very good memory of crimes they observed and *many* prosecution attorney's are willing to convict people they know to be innocent. We have to make a more reasonable system to fit our new record keeping abilities.
But preventing the government from being able to perform basic law enforcement duties is not the correct path. We need to focus them to be more accurate and we need our society to be more forgiving of people who commit stupid crimes.
For my last cars there were choices of about 6 rims (basic and 5 kinds of neat variations) and 2 kinds of tires (basic and sport).
Well, it's not exactly a car analogy but close enough!
Now we just need the little guy with the mustache to be done.
The choctaw.
But we lost. This is america now.
And a small group of people but still numbering in the millions wants to kill us- mainly because we make them feel bad because they are so backwards but partially because they are educated from birth that we are "monkeys" and not human. At 4 years old they are pledging to commit suicide killing us. At 5 years old almost a decade ago, they were cheering in the streets when we died.
Unfortunately, it is increasingly easy for even 1 or 2 loonies to kill hundreds of people and it won't be very long before they could easily kill thousands or even more.
Now we can get realistic and get a good grip on who is here and keep random people from walking in any border or we can wait until they hurt us badly (say goodbye to say 10 to 20 thousand -- heck even a hundred thousand citizens) and at that point we are going to repeat dresden, hiroshima and worse and kill every one of them in the country- become extremely fascist for another 20 to 30 years and give new meaning to the term genocide in other countries around the world.
If a person has a burned hand then there will clearly be alternate methods of identifying who they are. Dental records, footprints and ultimately dna samples. Again- the problem is that in an age where even a 16 year old can kill 10 to 20 people, you really don't want people sworn to killing you so they will go to heaven wandering around unsupervised.
The best thing we can do is to get off of oil asap and stop giving them money to buy things to kill us with and stop giving them money to buy things to keep suppressing their own people and pushing murderous religions.
They are *teaching* their children things that makes a war to the death pretty much inevitable.
Yes, I'm all aware of minor anti-immigrant problems in the past- but the chinese and the irish were not sneaking in with both the knowledge and a desire to kill as many americans as they possibly could.
I think your attitude is extremely ignorant and I bet when we do have the next 9/11 you are going to be of the first idiots shouting for bloody vengence. Best to build a good fence now so we don't get pushed into behavior that we will regret in 50 to 60 years.
As a well respected follower of the copernican of the universe, I KNOW that the earth is the center of the universe and everything else rotates around it. That's the way god created it.
I simply ask that you respect my ability to believe as I choose and not present all of these astronomy "theories" as facts in astronomy classes since they contradict the facts of my belief.
I know we are not that common today but at one point, most christians believed this way so I'm sure eventually they'll see through the lies of all these "scientists" who claim to have evidence to the contrary.
Technically... they don't fall down. They are just attracted to each other.
No.
Evolutionists do not believe it started randomly.
They have seen evidence of natural selection.
They have fossil records that coordinate with geologic and other records showing a lack of human fossils fairly recently in history. Predictions made based on plate theory and other models of historical geology have been tested successfully.
The fossil record shows various waves of complex creatures but once you get back far enough, the creatures become simpler and more primitive.
Natural selection provides a reasonable explanation for how creatures can change from a mouse type creature to an elephant type creature in only about 10,000 years. We have observed new species to come into existence in our life time. We have strong evidence from dna that humans had severe pinch points in the very recent past and that we only existed as a species for a couple million years at most.
However-- evolution theory says NOTHING about the start.
Basically it only says that creatures who reproduce more have more children and so their children eventually become the population.
Given random mutations which have no affect in reproductive fitness, the random mutations will be carried.
Given random mutations that lower reproductive fitness, they will disappear (at a speed relative to how harmful they are).
Given beneficial mutations that increase reproductive fitness, those creatures with those mutations will rapidly come to dominate a population.
Looking at the record the best you can say is "it's likely that creatures were very simple before the earliest hard records.
However- it directly confronts religious text since it pretty much says man did not exist and "near men" did exist in pre-religious times. Just like a religion that says the earth is the center of the universe is provably WRONG, any religion that seriously says man only existed for under the last 10,000 years is provably wrong.
1st. I hate microsoft.
Now, with regard to your points.
* Microsoft was among the first major, mainstream software publishers to charge paying customers for technical support on legally-owned Microsoft products.
At best they could only afford to offer support for a limited time. If they are selling you an OS for $90 and you take more than three hours of tech support *ever* you just wiped out their GROSS profits- much less their net profits. I do not mind paying for technical support because a) I know what it costs and b) as a paying customer, the one time I called for support and agreed to pay the $35 extra charge for extended service they literally spent 5 hours and ended up with about 7 people on the line and they IDENTIFIED the problem-- all over the phone. (My Sonyx? sound card didn't have a current driver.. and never would again -> so I went to creative live)
* Microsoft was one of the first major, mainstream software companies to increase upgrade fees from what was a standard 20% of the original software price to what is now 50%, if you are allowed to upgrade at all.
I can sort of see your beef here. OTH, software doesn't write it self. Human beings who need to eat do. However, given their immense warchest, I think I agree with you that it was greedy abuse of their now captive audience. OTH, I can get both the OS and the major applications for under $50 ($20 for office) since I work for a major customer.
* Microsoft was the first major, mainstream software company to deny upgrades to customers who don't pre-pay the 50% upgrade fee up-front when the original software purchase is made, with no refund if an upgrade isn't released within two years.
That was really cheesy on their part. Good point.
* Microsoft bemoans the cost of software piracy, but each time Microsoft has implemented technology to reduce piracy, it has doubled the price of the better protected software.
Well, yes and no. I can buy a nice computer for $299 that has windows XP home on it. It would cost me about $275 to scratchbuild so that's about $24 for the OS. I can buy a nice computer for about $399 that I can upgrade inexpensively to a smokin hot game machine. The case, memory, hard drive, monitor, etc would cost me about $330 so that's $69 for the OS max. (Side point: These price structures reveal that Microsoft hates scratch builders but gives OEM builders a very sweet deal).
* Microsoft adds features to its software that puts competitors out of business, then removes those features and sells them as add-ons or upgraded versions.
Very true. They also then ignore those features and let them go stale.
* Microsoft talks reduced enterprise TCO benefits on the one hand while making each new release significantly more difficult to deploy, maintain and support.
I think you could save time and just say "Microsoft lies... a lot.. every chance they get. they prevaricate, they stretch the truth, they tell little white fibs, heck big black fibs, LIARS! BIG NASTY LIARS"
* Microsoft claims that it's not predatory or monopolistic, while using its overwhelmingly dominant position in the OS market to drive out competitors to its application and development tools marketplaces.
See prior point above. Microsoft LIES. A LOT. EVERY CHANCE THEY GET. They ENJOY the look on everyone's face when everyone just realizes that once again microsoft got some STUPID company to sign a technology sharing agreement with them and then they stole every thing from the company and left it to rot.
* And yes, Embrace, Extend and Exterminate.
Yes... if they didn't invent this- they mastered it.
Cheaters and scumbags from way back.
Drove a lot of good people out of business.
Their work was actually fairly shoddy compared to other products they drove out of business or bought up.
Unethical as hell but they won the short term battle.
I think long term they are toast tho.
Biometrics stored in a secure national database.
Hell right now we could get most of that with your SSN, a picture of you, and a thumbprint stored centrally that had to be verified against.
The problem is not the id card. The problem is that soon after it comes in, it will be used for a lot of uses we never thought of. Ministers will be provably caught with gay or straight hookers, We'll know Ms Straight and Narrow down the corner buys leather whips and cuffs, We'll know john has a drug problem and that suzy buys a lot of booze.
As long as we have cash or some way to anonymize our credit (Xrost, etc) it's not such a big issue.
But they will be able to track where you are/go/etc.
HOWEVER
Weighed against that is the fact that we will never be able to secure our borders unless we have a national ID. And the risks of having non-citizens here are growing. When the likelyhood strangers will kill a couple million of us grows high enough-- we'll either give up the kinky sex or just say "to hell with it- I like kinky sex".
As MOST of us give up our secret's we will either become a straightlaced nation of prudes or we will become fairly jaded. But at least the illusions and lies will be reduced.
I had secure passwords until I had to change them so much.
Now they are not that secure and written on sticky pads.
That's really cool. You always have someone to go to the movies with.
He's actually a bit of a polymath.
The music video is one of many clever and insightful pieces he has made.
He had a nice idea but music is like 5% of his output.
Very creative guy.
Okay..
WHY are they DOUBLE there?
My god man-- think of any product in the world that you could make a 100% profit on-- people would be lining up until that dropped to a more reasonable 7 to 10% profit experienced by real businesses.
It's a completely artificial market. It should be trivial to buy those same products here, ship them there for 12 bucks via fedex, and then sell them at a huge profit.
Why should the europeans pay *double* the price for the same thing when they have to compete against us to sell airplanes?
Right now businesses are taking advantage of cheap labor but part of the reason expensive labor is costly is a cost of living based on artificially high prices.
WB legally sells the same movies we pay $20 dollars for for $2.49 in china.
It was widely reported in the media last year.
The chinese can't afford $20 for a DVD so they will just pirate them was the logic.
Okay.. so why do I have to compete with a chinese for a job when they get a discount on products?
I'm not saying whether it occurs or not. I'm saying numbers.
It could be that we have seen everyone abused plus some fakers or we could have seen only 1% of those abused.
We just don't know.
10% of the population could be gay or it could be 2%. We just don't know.
50% of women could be raped or it could really be 8%. We just don't know.
So to state as a fact that it would be some arbitrarily high number is just pulling the number out of thin air.
Yes but .99 cents for a song is WAY too high.
A fair value is probably somewhere under 40 cents.
They sell these same songs and movies in other countries (on CD and DVD) for a lot less. You are competing for work with people who are paying $2 for a CD and $2.50 for a DVD. Why should they get a cheaper prices than you? Why should you pay higher prices than them?
These are artificial prices. In a real capitalistic environment, whatever the lowest price in the world is- that's what you should pay.
I think he's saying that he feels that morally he has paid the entertainment industry tax and so he feels justified in obtaining the shows by any method even if those methods are illegal.
We had that in texas back in the 80's. it was nasty. lots of folks just walked away.
Let me warn them-- eventually those 70k mortgage that got forgiven is counted as INCOME and you owe TAXES on it. And you can't escape the taxes via bankruptcy.
So walking away is no longer an option- you need to officially file bankruptcy. With these 200k (300k?) mortgages you are talking about 60 to 100k in taxes worst case.
Well a boy down in texas was just sentenced to 90 years for raping another boy with a pipe.
Excuse me but doesn't "Sex offenses tend to go unreported." really mean someone is pulling numbers out of their ass?
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"Hey! They're just making this up as they go along!"
After seeing thousands (10's of thousands?) of private parts in every imaginable configuration- the only ones I'm interested are real ones of people interested in me.
I think the bush/gore and other elections point to a 51/49 split, not a 60/40 split as you suppose.
The republicans pulled out all the stops they could pull and there was huge turnout from their base and they still were only able to pull out a 50/50 squeeker over Al Gore- a man I really held my nose to vote for (I was voting against Bush- not for Gore).
I would say 10% scary right, 5% far right, 25% right, 20% center, 25% left, 5% far left and 10% scary left.
The 10% on both extremes are not electable but currently are required to win.
Most people who were going to buy itunes and fill an ipod have done so.
Now they are at replacement levels of new customers filling ipods only.
Also- people do get better at finding cheaper ways to do things- I'm sure after initial itunes purchases, folks found ways to rip CD's, allofmp3, free musico offers, recording off xm or fm radio and other options.