Dak

the uk situation with northern rock is a bit different (afaict) from the US one. the uk gov' didn't bail-out the company -- it nationalised the company in order to bail out the customers. the company would undoubtably have fallen without it, leaving all the customers with their savings and pensions evaperated. whereas i still don't understand why the US banks need bailing out atall? (as an aside, i think that normal 'bail-outs' are high-interest loans from the bank of england, so that companies get bailed out, the gov' make money, and the companies learn not to rely on free hand-outs from the gov').

silly question: what was actually wrong with this pastor's comments?

the point of a society should, imo, be that we all look out for one-another; if loads of people, through no fault of their own, would have lost their pensions etc then i think it's right that everyone help them out with their tax money. it'll probably be them paying a little extra in tax, but it could be them being saved, so it's more-or-less a national insurance scheme. also, as i understand it, stabalising the bank stabalised the economy, and the economy taking a beating would have been bad for us all.

1 thread per thing, please. i've deleted your other one. off the top of my head, if you only want a rough estimate couldn't you tie a hair to a newtometer and incrimentally attach weights till the hair breaks?

if the average skill level of female ski-jumpers is still way below that of male ski-jumpers, maybe they're worried that there'll be a death?

in a city where you're within, say, 5 mins of a police station, you don't really need a gun; however, out in the sticks where the police response time is half an hour you kinda need weapons to look out for yourself. So that's how/why I, personally, think it should be localized. Actually, i'd be inclined to suspect that guaranteeing civillians in the sticks, who need to be able to defend themselves, the right to bear arms and form a militia was the intent of the 2nd amendment.

oops, sorry (both for the lazyness in not linking and the mistake). The bank isn't being bailed out per se (it used to be a private bank, now it's owned by the govournment along with it's debts), but yeah the gov' came under fire for it a bit. I'm not entirely sure why tbh... the bank would have collapesd, evaporating peoples savings and mortguages, but the gov' stopped that from happening

Why do the banks need bailing out? If someone can't pay their mortguage repayments, don't the banks reposess the house and then sell it to cover the outstanding debt? If anything, the banks should get a quicker return on their interests when the debtors can't keep up payments Northern Rock recently collapsed, at least partially because of the american housing slump IIRC.

so? it's not as if anyone else has joined in against pangloss either. the argument went: sisypus: oil panglos: (rather cautiously) no evidence of that bascule: haliburton profited from war panglos: so? [abridged version] I really don't see anything wrong with that argument, nor the fact that no-one else joined in. yes, but, at the end of the day people will only argue against what they want to argue against, and that's generally oppinions that are counter to their own. here, the oppinion that blacks are superior is the opposite of mine and your oppinion, so we'd argue against that. If we're just talking crap logic, i'd be quite happy to simply ignore it and have the outnumbered side do the same, or quickly rebuke it with a refference to the fallicy.

stuff on political correctness split to here

2 is just a natural repercussion of 1: pretty much as you said, most people on this board tend to agree in certain areas; hence, if you post a 'dissenting' opinion, you will have a higher number of people argue against you; conversly, if you post something inline with the majority opinion, you will have less people bother to argue against you, even if your logic is shady. it's not "side A's" job to rebuke the arguments of other members of "side A", it's "side B's", even when "side A" outnumbers "side B" heavily. that's not political correctness in as much as it's not 'politically incorrect' to take a dissenting opinion, it's just uncommon, with all the natural repercussions that entails, vis: less people will be on your side.

It's nothing to do with 'political correctness'. Any way, the important thing is that it does get challenged, not who/how many by. To sort-of continue with that angle: if the war cost the US $1trillion in direct costs, then what was the direct (financial) income from the war? who profited, and by how much? e.g., iirc oil companies changed ownership from iraqi to US companies... If nothing else, if the profit through tax is < $1trillion, it kinda rebukes the 'for the oil' argument (the simple 'so that the US government would financially profit from stealing the oil companies' version at least).

yeah... i hate spiders, but i usually leave the web-making ones alone 'cos they catch flies. hrm... their numbers seem to be going down... weird but i'm not complaining. I guess i'll keep killing them and hope they're all gone in a few days (vaccume cleaners make a good anti-fly weapon btw). better get used to sleeping on the couch in the interim i hate flies

so, i've found about 20ish flies in my room today :-/ my current theories are: 1/ the recent really stormy weather woke the buggers up from hybernation and they're currently taking shelter in my room as i have an unclosable vent leading directly outside that they can get in through, or 2/ some rat or mouse has done me the favour of dying under my floorboards, and it's now haemorraging flies. i usually have my window open and i smoke in my room, so i guess i wouldn't neccessarily recognise any wierd smell... anyone know about flies? would they behave like that in a storm, or am i going to have to tear my floor-boards up and look for corpses? also: any tips on killing of them? i've been going for hair-spray and a rolled-up newspaper, although i've now just hung fly-paper up and made a tacticle withdraw downstairs, where i'll be sleeping till they're gone (hate flies... yuk!)

not to mention smokers (mutagenic carcinogens in tobacco iirc) umm... god? didn't he leave the 'pope' as his liason atwix earth and heaven? only applicable if you're catholic, of course, but iirc it's there in the bible that the pope is god's representative on earth, to whom he speaks? anyhoo, the 7 deadly sins aren't actually in the bible iirc... they're just set down by the holy C (along with the 7 lesser sins iirc, but my memory's hazy on this tbh), so i don't see the problem with 7 new sins.

iirc, they generally take cargo (stuff like airmail) when they're running under-passengered, so they possably saved another plane making the same journey anyhow.

at a guess, if we fuse two of ape's chromosomes together so that their karyotype is the same as humans, they may be able to breed with humans to produce offspring. as for evolving into humans, given enough time apes could in theory do that without any artificial tinkering (allready done it once, sort of); the difference in chromosome number between humans and apes is, as far as i know, a coincidental result, not a cause of the differences between the two species.

north bridge. that probably shouldn't over heat, but doesn't usually need it's own fan afaik. mind, pangloss' suggestion should cover that. for future refference, AVG anti-spyware is free for scanning/removal and one of the best.

I was about to say, 1+2+4 seem quite unrelated from 3. Some malware squats as a 'protocol handler' (i.e., anything that uses https could be going to a malitious protocol hijacker, whilst http goes to the normal http handler) and malware isn't known for being 100% reliable; hence (possibly) the non-functional https and the random restarts.

umm... it's a retro-virus, so it reverse-transcribes in the cytoplasm and the DNA transcript integrates into the host genome. this is pointed out in at least one of your sources

I wonder why they don't just irradiate the blood? HIV and white-blood-cells would be denatured (by DNA degredation), but all you're after is the red-blood-cells, which lack DNA and thus should survive certain wavelengths of irradiation, i'd have thought? ---- Are gay men actually still high-risk for HIV? I didn't think they were anymore.

you should, at least, be able to spot simple html/css that trys to exploit browser vulnerabilities. as for encrypting, the decrypter generally has to be included in the package and unencrypted, and afaik very few viruses exist that have truly polymorphic decrypters (i.e., that would be able to bypass router-AV-scanning consistantly).

it could scan for and recognise (and refuse to relay) unencrypted viruses and certain exploits, i'd assume.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coitus_interruptus according to wiki, it would seem that the answre is 'it can do'.

sounds like a weasel or a ferret maybe, did it have a relatively long and agile kneck?