Dak

Because they're not the same thing?

which, in all likely-hood, the dog will then eat.

Ah, yes, fair enough. that'd be the main problem with desktops --------- how hard is it to build a laptop? is it pretty much the same as building a desktop?

Thats a bit of a strawman. YT wasn't suggesting removing childeren borne to gay couples; rather, not allowing them to adopt. So, by his argument maybe single parents shouldn't be allowed to adopt, but childerent borne to single parents shouldnt neccesarily be taken away.

quick piece of advice: dont get a laptop unless you actually have good reason to get a laptop. Desktops are, $ for $, better. so, if you can make do with a desktop, get desktop components, and assemble a desktop yourself. that be the cheap way.

isn't that like saying you can't get apes from peas? BUT WAIT, YOU CAN!!!!!12

w00t! Cheers

is there a way that i could ditch apple quicktime, real player, and windows media player, and just have one media player that plays all audio/visual formats and can play streamed media? for XP? I have looked, but have not found -- winamp is the closest, but doesn't support all of the formats.

Not sure if it's what your after, but openoffice comes with a built-in pdf creator, so you can easily turn text files --> pdfs. never had a problem with it, although OO isn't 100% great at parsing ms-doc format as intended.

my point was just that it's not really that big a deal if he hates jews. he's just one person. If he publically hates jews and spouts-off anti-sematic stuff then, given that he's in the public arena, that's a different story, but -- my point -- he doesn't, exept this one occasion when he's drunk. So... even if he is an anti-semite, is it really that bad, given that he keeps it to himself exept for this one occasion?

off the top of my head/links i had to hand: FIREWALL ZoneAlarm ***note -- turn off windows firewall if you just installed sp2*** --- ANTI-VIRUS either AVG or Avast. --- ANTI-SPY/ADWARE Spybot S&D (make sure to select the option to turn teatimer on) and Ad-Aware SE (Ad-aware SE and Spybot S&D tutorial), and Spywareblaster and Spyware Guard. --- SYSTEM MAINTANANCE CCleaner --- ETC http://www.openoffice.org/ <-- office suite sans annoying paperclip http://www.editpadpro.com/ <-- 'lite' version is free... it's better than the great yet humble notepad, but it depends on how much you use simple text editors http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/ <-- multi-protocol IM client. alternatively, MSN messanger without the ads.

Hey everyone, looket me!!! i'm risking other peoples lives by drink-driving. *hic* plus, i dont like jews. ZOMG, YOU DONT LIKE JEWS!!!!! YOU BASTARD!!!!!! That's a good point. Surely we're not the thought police? He is entitled to his own personal oppinions -- including hating jews -- and, no matter how repulsive they may be to us, we have no right to expect nor demand that he does not have them. Were he to try to incite anti-sematic feelings, then that might be a different matter, but -- as i understand -- he keeps these oppinions to himself, with the exeption of this one incident. And tbh, i think that risking killing someone by drink-driving is worse, by a considerable amount, than insulting jews relatively in private.

I see what your saying (and agree), but i was just talking about the resistance to the phrase, not neccesarily it's validity. I think 'islamofacists' smacks of propoganda. Given the connotations of 'facist', we may as well call them 'the baddies'... it'd be true, but it'd still sound like we're using an emotive, propogandic term in leu of logic. For me at least, the natural instinct is to resist terms like this. Again, i'm not saying this is what you're doing, but that it might account for the resistance to the label. Having said that, other than the fact that the term sounds wrong, i don't really see any reason not to use it. i'd actually go for islamonazis myself, if i knew enough about the situation to be sure that the term was fitting. I agree with your points about 'christeonazi' groups being born in bigotry and using christianity as a justification, rather than born in christianity per se, but im cynical enough to suspect that theres an element of that in islamonaziism aswell... and I suspect that you may have underestimated the significance of religion in groups such as the kkk, the nazis etc. even in britain -- where christianity certainly isn't something that one would associate with the average british skin-head -- the bnp's (litterally british nazi party) manifesto inlcudes something along the lines of reinstating christianity as britains sole official religeon. I dont remember it in detail, but i remember, when i read the bnp manifesto, that the parts conserning christianity really seemed juxtaposed next to the more standard, you-would-expect-it-of-a-british-skin-head bigotry, and, yet, they were still there -- because it was a nazi manifesto, and nazi's are christian. imo, 'islamofascists', nazis, the kkk etc are all part of the same grouping, which has the following charectoristics: 1/ we're bigoted shit-heads. 2/ also, we're religious 3/ lets kill people so, i think the comparison is apt, if not completley accurate. on an unrelated note, the kkk's website is one of the worst designed i've ever seen, and the fact that a website of evil is "best viewed with microsoft internet explorer" amused me.

I suspect that i could be persuaded otherwize, but i'm all for prioritising heterosexual couples over homosexual; but, as pangaloss pretty much said, it's not a case of 'lets give the gays kids too, to make things fair' rather than 'man, there's alot of orphans, and not enough adopters to go around'. As said, this isn't a case of doing something for the gays to make things fair, so it's not really using kids as pawns in an anti-bigotry war. As long as there's no direct detremental effect of having gay parents, i'd stand by my previous comment: disallowing gay adoption because certain people don't like it, and would make their oppinions known through bullying, is just officialising bigotry. If there's going to be a problem with bullying, efforts should be made to stop the bullying, not the gay adoption.

man, i can't wait till i'm a doctor ========== Back on topic, does anyone know anything about AGULF, or the french 'can't use a foreign word if a french one exists' law? I googled, but info was sparse, and contrary... some sources said magazines have been sued over using 'unnessesary' english words, whilst others say that usage of non-french in things like websites are protected by frances constitution (freedom of speach).

Dyslexic with a capitol 'Y' really? i might be extremely bad at spelling, but, because of this, i've made an extra effort to learn how to punctuate properly (bad punctuation on top of bad spelling would, imo, be unforgivable, espescially as there's nothing stopping me from punctuating properly). I may not be absolutely uber-great at punctuation, but i at least include full-stops, excepting at the end of a paragraph, where they are redundant, thus making determining where one sentance ends and another begins easy Other than that, for what it's worth, i do appologise to everyone if my posts are hard to read. (do i miss words out? i know i do that when speaking, but wasn't aware that i did it when typing)

I see your point, but there's something fundamentally wrong with it. I'm not sure that i can quite pin it down, but it has to do with the fact that, wer gay adoptions banned for that reason, then the govournment would be, essentially, extending and amplifying the predjudices of a large segment of the population. It really boils down to 'you cant adopt because some people don't like gays', just with the homophobia shifted: rather than 'you can't adopt because I/the_govournment is homophobic', it becomes 'you can't adopt because other people are homophobic'. The spirit is vastly different, but the effect is, unfortunately, the same. Anyway, having the piss taken out of you for arbritrary reasons is all part of being a kid. If it's not 'lol, you have gay parents', then it's 'lol, you have only one parent', or 'lol, you're fat/have stupid hair/are stupid/are intelligent/etc'. How many *real* friends would abandon you merely because they might have the piss taken out of them?

@jim: 'islamofascists' just sounds wrong, like a plea to simply accept that they're bad (cos theyre fascists) without neccesarily using logic. 'islamopaedophiles' would be in a similar vein. Not saying thats what you're doing, but it might account for resistance to it's use. It's also historically inconsistant: the kkk, the nazis etc have never (afaik) been reffered to as christiofaschists, so i guess the knee-jerk reaction might be that 'if they're not christiofaschists, why islamofaschists?' islam is what is practiced. You are aware that the bible contains some non-too-pleasant passages, right? which people tend to ignore (or not: does the 'thou shalt not lay with another man' commandment make christianity oppressive and right-wing?). i wouldn't argue that the bible and quaran are nice. but 'islam' implies all the people who follow it, not just the book, hence my objection to 'islam sucks'. OK, look at it this way: what do you think caused the christian nastyness, like the crusades, the burning of heretics etc? what do you think causes contemperary christian nastyness, like the kkk et al? what do you think causes contemporary predominantly christian countries, like italy and greece, to refrain from crusades and heretic-burning? and what do you think makes the majority of muslims in america, western europe etc to condemn the actions of the terrorists? what do you think causes middle-eastern islams to fight amongst themselves so much? I think that is far more relevent to whether or not one is 'blood-thirsty and oppressive' than their religion is. most religions have freedom of interpretation... generally, homophobes interpret whichever holy text is nearest to mean that god hates fags too, whereas non-homophobes tend to interpret those bits differently; masogonists tend to interpret the bible/quaran to mean that men are teh best, and women should stay in the kitchen, whereas non-masogonists and women tend to have different oppinions on those parts. I dont deny that putting forth the idea that 'god says this is true' can help influence others to a bad way of thinking, but, ultimately, i think the prevalience of 'blood-thursty, oppressive' incarnations of a religion is more dependant on the local society than the religion itself. the post wasn't aimed at you, so i dont see how you can infer from it that i assume anything about you.

it's not my fault i'm linguistically retarded one example i forgot: british english. we (at least those who 'write the rules') seem to have something against americanisms. which is kinda stoopid when you consider how mongalated the english language is. Bit harsh too. it's like rasism, for words. @pangloss: the flip-side is that maybe it's unreasonable, but seems OK when non-dictatorial countries do it? I can't actually see the point in artificially suppressing a languages development. eg, is the british's attempt to resist americanisms and the iraqis attempt to resist all 'foreign' words ok, but it seems bad when the iraqis do it 'cos they're iraqis... or is it bad, but seems ok when the brits do it 'cos they're brits?

japan and france have similar attetudes OK, maybe it's fairer to say that japan had a similar attetude -- it has loads of foreighn words in it now.

wow. that sounds surprisingly easy, cheers klaynos I shal have a go when i next have time and the ethernet cards.

Bascule, your last responce to my post didn't really answre my questions. Throughout history, there have existed known 'paradoxes' that are logically unsolvable. Some of these paradoxes are now solvable, due to advances in logic; however, there still exist paradoxes that are currently unsolvable, some of which are encountered in real situations. How would a logic-only AI system handle these situations?

He, sorry are you on a uni network? they often disable p2page. try port-scanning your pc to see what incomming ports (if any) are blocke by your ISP (youll have to kill all firewalls first). Also, for diagnostic reasons, it might be an idea to turn any software firewalls off, piddle about with your router settings to either put your pc outside the netword or turn the router firewall off, and then see if it works. Note that im not suggesting completely disabling firewalls as a way of getting p2p's to work... but, if they do work, at least we've pinned the problem down a bit.