Dak

i kinda see what you're saying. I'm the same with metal and rock. i genuinely like the music, and i also like the spirit, because I allready feel that way. I guess, with the demeaning women and violence (puts armchair psychology hat on) it might just be something about 'being a man' and feeling the need to assert ones dominance, by screwing hoes and fighting off competing males; hence, it appeals to the animalistic side of people. if you grew up on metal, then you must have experienced something vaguely similar in the mosh pit -- i've allways been a pasafist, but i also allways enjoyed the violence and aggression in a mosh pit, as a release for the inclination towards violence that i feel (but usually control) as a human/man. maybe all the posing, ponsing, 'hoes are for shagging', and violence in rap is another (possibly less controlled) outlet for this? mind, i'm making assumptions about rap here; i don't know enough to actually be sure of the level of violence and demeaning of women in rap (just the apparent level)

there's one in the mods room keep em comming, even if it's only to agree with what someone else has allready said. also, anything you particularly like and keeps you comming back for more is just as useful to know as the stuff that pisses you off and makes you consider leaving.

this seems to sum part of the ideological divide up quite nicely. conservatives: if it aint broke, dont fix it. liberals: if it aint perfect, it's broke.

so? nothing you described there (stupid attire, stupid locomotion, and crap musical taste) are actually bad. are these middle-class white kids also going around 'raping hos' or 'shooting pigs', or whatever the music is about? rebelling, being different, and not adhering to what are percieved as arbritrary rules of society is part of being a kid. wether that expresses itself by listening to rock (with it's 'sex and drugs are cool' **** the system overtures) or rap (with it's... well, 'sex and drugs are cool' **** the system overtures) is pretty irrelevent. actually, even as an adult, i'd have to agree that sex and drugs are cool (as in fun), and the system can **** off imo. maybe, tho, rap is somewhat questionable because it superficially seems to promote bigoted views -- 'us v them' black/white mentality, and derogatory views of da hoes. metal seems to accept illegality and violence; rap seems to encourage it. take ye olde punk for another example. whilst i like the music, the actual scene seems repulsive to me, due to the whole 'we're nazis just to piss you off' themes. so maybe rap is offensive not just because of the good old-fashioned disreguard for the law and swearage, but because of the percieved genuinely obnoxious bigotry? (another example: goth is more objectionable than rock/metal, due to it's percieved satanism)

yet another way of saying it would be that molecular biologists start at the top and work down (studying biology, and then the chemical interactions that go on in life-forms), whereas biochemists start at the bottom and work up (studying chemistry, and then how chemicals interact to drive life). I'm not sure what a majour is, but bear in mind that what you want to do might play a role in determining you're choice. eg, if you want to be a genetisist, then molecular biology is a better choice than biochem. otoh, my degree had lots of what i'd call biochemistry (lots of stuff about entropy, free energy, activation energy, linking reactions via ATP, creb's cycle from a chemical POV, electric potential gradients, and stuff on basic formation of poly-peptides and sugars/polysaccharides) along with the molecular biology stuff (all the enzymes involved in DNA replication/maintanance/regulation, the DNA macromolecule itself, transmitting signals through receptor/ligand(?) interactions, etc), so there's no reason why you can't study biology and chemistry, and then try to get a handle on both biochem and molecular biology (molecular biochemistry?). of course, not forgetting it after you've learnt it is another issue. i think i'm gonna go revise some

I'd guess (and it's a complete guess) that the kind of thinking that liberals generally hate -- 'they're different, so what they're doing shoudln't be allowed' -- is percieved as a result of being too stupid to see that different people are different, and that that's ok. hmm... maybe it's like this: if an individual doesn't bother thinking, theres a chance that he'll end up being racist, homophobic, or bigoted in some other way, simply due to lack of understanding. so, if our societies don't promote intelectualism, could that be percieved as 'not bothering thinking', and risking that we'll be a bigoted society simply through lack of thought/understanding?

pretty astute summary, imo. the only thing i'm not sure i agree with is the intelectual bit. i don't think liberals value intelectualism over other traits, but they do seem to tend to value it more than other political groupings tend to.

more-or-less. a couple 'see also's away: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_community_network you could probably get a meaty one going in a student hall...

crazy idea... Imagine 3 houses next to each other. say the each have a wireless router connected to a different ISP, and each house has 2 computers with wifi cards. house B is in range of houses A and C, which are both out of range of each other. would it be possible/advantageous (i'm talking theory, not current tech) to set the three networks up to co-operate, and form a small 'internetwork'? So, for example, if house A is d/ling something and maxing out their connection, and house B is currently not using their connection, house B's router could supply one of the computers in house A with internet connection, whilst the other computer in house A could use house A's router? If house A want's to IM with house C, it could be bounced off of the router, or an idle PC (using it's wifi card) in house B, rather than going through the internet? If house B's internet went down, it could leech the spare bandwidth in house's A and C? maybe even (not sure wether the same information would follow different paths if sent simultaniously from house A and B, as they're on different ISPs or wether they'd still go through the same servers initially) if you're trying to establish a secure connection from house A to somewhere, you could send one half of a secret word out through the internet, and ask house B's router to send the other half out, thus avoiding a 'man in the middle' attack in one of the first servers your connection goes through? in certain cities, i'd wager you could set up a huge internetwork spanning alot of the city like this. it'd be slow, but maybe useful on a local level? also, you wouldn't have to pay to access the local wireless internetwork, so could probably email someone a couple of blocks away whilst disconnected from the internet. tho there'd obviously be security conserns. so, yeah. feasable?

correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't the very idea of 'replacing the internet' somewhat daft? I mean, the internet is a connection of many different networks. if you want to improve the 'underlying archetecture' (assuming they mean the whole server/packet-switching/gateway/blah-de-blah stuff), surely all you have to do is update the individual networks that constitute the internet? this doesn't have to be anything radicle: just update one, leave it connected to the other networks, and, if it works well, the other networks will eventually come around to the design innovations and upgrade their hardware as well. or if they're talking about the way that networks inter-connetc, i still don't see why that'd have to be done in one go? I mean, different networks allready use different inter-connection techniques (i think)... I mean, the internet is inherently upgradable and modifyable... why you ever have to specifically re-build the internet, rather than just your part of it? having said that, it's allways confused me that other networks (TV, teletext, phones, text messages, etc) aren't more hooked up to the internet. i know there are more-or-less 'gateways' that allow you to access, say, teletext from the internet, and iirc C4 are switching their teletext services to XML to accomodate internet gatage, but i don't see why all data networks aren't all interconnected in a groovy, non-lame way, so that you can access them all from one-another (eg, SFN from the tv's teletext via a gateway, if neccesary, or the C4 teletext pages more eloquently from the net)

ok, i was going to winge about how little content the latest labour BBC party political broadcast has, and go off on a sarcastic tangent about democracy ideally having more (or indeed any) emphasis on what the party's actually going to be doing with the local constituencys, and why we should actually vote for labour, and less focus on what was basically an advert. I mean, "irrelevent bollox BUY COKE" might be ok for products, but i'd preffer to not have my current govournment reduced to "irrelevent bollox VOTE LABOUR". there was absolutely not ONE single mention of any policies, and instead just a highly artificial bandying-about of the labour product name to raise market awareness. Anyway, i'm not going to mention any of that, 'cos whilst looking for the party broadcast i found out that the labour party have their own youtube channel and thought that would be more interesting:

well, iirc, if xp boots and it's page file is unnacessable (eg, if you've put the page file on a USB drive and then removed it) it'll just make do without a page file. but if you pull it out whilst the computer is on, all the info in the swap will be unaccessable, which would probably result in a blue screen of death. someone else who understands swap files better will probably be able to say for sure. (basically, when you run out of space in your RAM, some of it is put temporarily in the page file. so, if you remove the page file, loads of data about your running programs will be lost. which i'd strongly assume would casue a crash next time the computer tries to take them back out of the page file and put them back into ram.)

E3 doesn't just showcase games, it also showcases computer game technology. i haven't followed it since i was a kid, but i remember several E3s ago, starfox was showcased, not just as a game, but as a 'new' technique in 3D graphics. i scare-marked 'new' because it basically used several shaded polygons to create a 3d image, which is something ye olde computer game 'elite' did (which came out for PC before NESs were made), but starfox actually included some hardware (superFX chip in the game cart) that was designed to handle shaded polygons, and advances in the programming techniques (iirc, the techniqes were designed for NASA, for space-ship simulation). so, computer science is showcased in places like E3. automative engeneering is probably showcased in car's equivelent of E3, whatever that may be. basicaly, there isn't really a 'science E3', but individual branches of science usually have their own expo where innovations can be found. i cant remember the name, but i think there's a 'gadget expo' that showcases stuff like phones, ipods, etc, for example.

what about wind power? if we had enough wind generators, could we essentially make enough 'drag' on the air that average wind speed started dropping? im not actually sure where wind comes from (apart from beans)... is it just differently-heated air that causes wind? [edit]umm...how did that happen? YT and klaynos seem to be posting from the future? [/edit]

well, like pangloss said (and i've seen this said elsewhere) they can actually be faster for frequent short bursts of info. it depends what you use your computer for, and what else you have going thru the usb hub (i think). if you want to try it out, i would assume you just plug your USB drive in, follow these instructions: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1679935,00.asp select the USB drive to have the page file, set the size to take up all the free space on the drive, and reboot. note that you'll have to leave the USB drive in at all times. i don't think you can hot-(un)plug your swap drive

no-one?

hehe. i assumed that 'proprietry techniques' meant 'asking', which is why i didn't see any potential dpa breach. if they're just asking for removal of publically viewable info, then it's not illegal, is it? ---- somewhat off topic, but theres a related and perfectly valid niche related to this i think. if you know the right google search, it's disturbing how many people have had their personal details put on line by either themselves in a moment of stupidity, or a crappy company that they applied for (i just spent 5 minutes and found one -- name, address, phone, social security number, the works). in that case, i could see the benifit of a company that, say, knows that you'll have to ask the internet archive to delete their copy, etc. so, removing personal details would be groovy. i guess this isn't really the same, tho.

the dutch looks like a mixture of english and german... weird. as for eleven and twelve; after my question to atheist about base-10, i looked it up on the internet; apparently, base-12 has much going for it. no idea if this contributed to unique numbers up to 12? maybe the germanic countries used to use a base 12 counting system?

heh. i still remember proclaiming that i was 'going outside for a fag' in the US hmm... good point. I'm still curious as to why you know quite a bit of maths? do you know if there's any actual superiority of base-10 over other bases (like base-20)? I kinda allways assumed there's a reason we use base-10... this is why i love different countries... they really show-up your assumptions about the most basic things. hmm... well, i know that in england we used to count similarly. "five-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie" and so on. even untill quite recently: my nan always used to say 'five-and-twenty to twelve', for example. that's odd... i don't really know enough about german to tell for shure, but your recent spelling changes seemed rather... unuseful, tbh. kinda like worsenings, rather than inprovements. seems strange that the number reform wouldn't go through but the spelling one did?

well, yeah. but i'd point out that you can more-or-less whitey on alcohol, too, and for the same reason: too much. basically, the kind of drinking that leads to nausia, spinning rooms, vomiting, and feelings of wretchedness, if you smoke like that (i.e., take an 'i am invisible and can imbibe infinite amounts' attetude) you'll end up nausious, wretched, white or green, and sometimes paranoid. vomiting and passing out are also possible. so it's a common problem if you have a slightly reckless attetude towards it, but not too common if you just have a little, tho iirc you can randomly whitey off of small amounts occasionally for no good reason? i thought the whole 'you can turn green when feeling sick' was a myth till i saw someone greenying... [edit] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_%28drugs%29 aparently, stuff like dehydration/low blood-sugar + cannabis can = whitey I wish i'd known that when i smoked [/edit]

yeah, definately would have thought that would be in violation of some kind of rights... johnf's comment reminds me of the brass eye special, with the solution to NIMBY of sending sex-offenders to the moon. thing is, if i hadn't been told, i wouldn't have guessed this whole thing was from RL, rather than a parody. bizzare...

i wouldn't really hold it against, say, the french or germans for differing from english. but it is somewhat odd that american english and british english are different in such a confusing way. still, it's also somewhat odd that i could say 'pants' to you and you'd think 'trousers', whilst i'd think 'underpants'. not really species-loathing-inducing, imo

isn't that getting too close to 'cruel and unusual punishment'... i mean, the guy asked to go back to jail... are there any temp-shelters under the bridge, or is it littereally sleaping-bags under the bridge?

hmm... i never thought of that. why do you guys say five-and-twenty instead of 25? why is every country daft with reguards to numbers

smoking too much, and getting sick and turning visably pale/white. not to be confused with the rarer 'greenying', which is the same, but where you go green. I stopped smoking 'cos i smoked too much and couldn't control my intake (other than by stopping), then when i tried to restart about a year later in moderation, i found my tolerance level so shot that a few tokes would get me stoned, and then 15 hilarious minutes later, i'd whitey. so i don't smoke any more. which i personally think sucks.